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0, and many of the number still at UK universities were appointed more than three decades ago. Only one in seven universities now provide practical courses for trainee botanists in looking at plant disease. Plant disease is a wider problem than the ash dieback disease, serious though that is. Farmers are battling with new and variant diseases, and globalisation has meant a huge increase in the risk of new plant diseases, affecting everything from crops to people's herbaceous borders. As some herbicides have lost their edge, the number of diseases spread by weeds has also increased. The UK's forests are under "unprecedented threat" from foreign pests and diseases, the Forestry Commission said last week. Prof James Brown, president of the British Society of Plant Pathology, said the job losses in plant science were "severe". He said: "Britain is not producing graduates with the expertise needed to identify and control plant diseases in our farms and woodlands." A plant nursery forced to destroy 50,000 ash trees said today it was suing the government for failing to block imports of the tree sooner. A ban on imports of live ash trees was imposed on 29 October. Paterson is holding twice daily meetings on the threat of ash dieback disease, and is focused on the future rather than criticising any previous government failure, the prime minister's spokesman added. He refused to be drawn into responding threats of claims for compensation over past failure of government policy, saying: "If people are going to demand compensation that is something that will be decided in the courts." But he pointed out that other countries across Europe have struggled to prevent the spread of the disease.ST. PETERSBURG — A real estate investor who planned to turn a crime-ridden motel into a hip food hall says the project was doomed by the city's "inability to think outside the box.'' Jonathan Daou said Tuesday that he reluctantly scrapped his plans after city officials told him he would have to meet current parking codes — a requirement that would have left him with just four parking spaces unless he went through a lengthy hearing process with no guarantee of the outcome. "The history is that there was an untold amount of criminal activity and yet they never closed that motel down because of parking,'' Daou said. "Yet here comes a development with a huge reception to it and now they have a problem with the parking.'' In 2014, Daou paid $825,000 for the Monticello, an aging, run-down motel at 1700 Fourth St. N. Last fall, to great acclaim, he announced plans to renovate it into an attractive food hall in which chefs and independent contractors working out of the 18 rooms would prepare meals for take-out or to be eaten in a covered courtyard. "There are a lot of motels in disrepair so the idea was, hey, if this can be done, we could be a model for what to do with these beat-up old motels,'' said Daou, who has found new uses for other buildings in St. Petersburg and New York. Daou had an initial meeting with city officials that he says went well. They seemed amenable to letting him use the existing parking spaces at the motel. At a subsequent meeting, Daou says, he was told that the nine spaces on the 18th Avenue N side of the 64-year-old motel were smaller than legally allowed under current city codes. "I said to (city officials), 'In all this time you couldn't shut down a place that was exploiting people?' " Daou recalled. "There was prostitution, drug activity, one person told me he found a dead body. In all this time you couldn't say 'your parking is (too small).' Instead they chose to keep the hotel functioning.'' Complying with city codes would have shrunk the parking on the north side to just four spaces. Moreover, the 10 spaces on the motel's south side, on 17th Avenue, extended onto city-owned of right-of-way. To use those, Daou would have had to go through a time-consuming process and face the possible opposition of residents around nearby Crescent Lake. Rather than risk that, Daou decided to pull the plug on his food motel. "I would get zero spaces on 17th until I had a hearing and four parallel spaces on 18th; that's all they could guarantee me and that's why I never submitted plans,'' he said. "I finally succumbed to the idea that you can't really work with them on projects like this.'' Asked to respond to Daou's remarks, city zoning official Elizabeth Abernethy said, "No comment,'' but added: "We determined there was a way for them to proceed and we outlined the process they would need to go through and that would have included a hearing. It's a matter of can it meet code or can it not meet code.'' Daou is now selling the vacant motel, which remains a fenced-in mess with ripped tar paper flapping on the roof. The listing agent said it is under contract for close to the $1.2 million asking price, which would give Daou a profit on his investment even after spending more than $30,000 on plans and a permit to demolish an extra building on the site. He says, however, that he would have preferred to bring the project to fruition. "I had hours of meetings with vendors, so many promised to be in there. It's very sad.'' Architect Carl Young, who worked on the plans and attended the city meetings with Daou, is in agreement. "What a great concept,'' he said. "There were a lot of people really excited about it.'' Contact Susan Taylor Martin at [email protected] or (727) 893-8642. Follow @susanskate.A non-profit organization dedicated to fostering a stronger honey bee population in the city of Rochester and El Sauce, Guatemala. Educating and empowering communities with new economic and social capital, ​we advocate for and promote policies that work to fight against climate change and for immigration justice. The mission is achieved through: Promoting urban beekeeping as it has numerous benefits for both honey bees and the community. Caring for rooftop hives are an unobtrusive way to increase pollination of local flora within the city, and keep the honey bee populations further away from harmful pesticides. Using honey bee hives as a tool for learning, as having hands-on experience with honey bees is a unique and informative way to see nature in action Using our facilities as an economic resources for local beekeepers. Providing a bike-powered honey extractor as an outlet to those who keep hives, but have no way to process the honey. Hosting the Rochester Beekeepers' Association, where enthusiasts gather and exchange ideas. Assisting students and local community gardens in starting and managing their own hives, which provides valuable job skills while helping the environment and providing needed pollination. Advocating for and promoting policies that fight against the largest threat of our time: climate change Believing in the importance of science and teaching/learning whenever possibleBreaking Bad’s creator Vince Gilligan has said that while he wants to believe that there is a heaven, he cannot believe there is no hell. The characters in Breaking Bad surely sin and suffer, and God is not silent. But there is more to the God of Breaking Bad than judgment. He also offers grace to characters who, like those in Flannery O’Connor’s stories, ignore or misinterpret it time and again. Walt’s partner Jesse has fallen in love with a recovering heroin addict named Jane and both are now using heroin. Walt goes to talk to Jesse and finds him passed out alongside Jane, both unconscious from a heroin binge. When Walt tries to shake Jesse awake, Jane rolls onto her back and begins to vomit. Walt chooses to let her choke to death on her own vomit and leaves Jesse to find her dead the next day. Walt will be judged for this in later episodes, but first he is offered the opportunity of grace. The whole episode preceding this moment presents Walt with reasons to save Jane rather than let her die. The episode repeatedly shows the depths of Walt’s love for his newborn baby Holly. He shows the baby the cash he has made in the drug business (hidden in a wall) and tells her “daddy did that for you.” Walt hears his wife Skyler singing a lullaby to the baby and it is all Walt can do to stop from sobbing as Skyler’s last words are “Daddy loves you and so do I.” Later that night, Walt goes to a bar (something Walt in not usually inclined to do) and strikes up a conversation with a total stranger. They bond over both having daughters. The stranger’s daughter is in her twenties. Walt asks the stranger if he has any advice. The stranger tells Walt “Just love them” and that you “Can’t give up on them. Ever. What else is there?” The stranger’s comment inspires Walt to talk to Jesse one last time, leading to the tragic event of Jane’s death. What it also suggests”but what Walt fails to grasp”is that every woman is another man’s daughter. In the Flannery O’Connor short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, Tom Shiftlet has agreed to marry the mute and (probably) mentally disabled Lucynell in return for a car, new clothes, and enough money for a honeymoon. Shiftlet stops at a diner and Lucynell falls asleep while they order. Shiftlet plans to leave her in the diner and escape with the car, the money and his freedom. He would be leaving Lucynell lost and mute in a town where no one knows her. Just before Shiftlet is ready to leave, the boy who works at the counter looks at Lucynell and says “She looks like an angel of Gawd.” That was a moment of grace. It was a man Shiftlet did not know telling him that Lucynell mattered and that Shiftlet should treat her as if she mattered. The entire episode in which Jane dies can be seen as forty-five minute version of that moment of grace. The circumstances of Holly’s birth, Skyler singing to the baby, the meeting with that stranger who was also a father, these events were trying to teach Walt that Jane was just as important as Holly, and that Walt should treat Jane as if she mattered”that Walt should not abandon her. Yet Shiftlet left Lucybell in the diner, and Walt let Jane choke to death. Both chose against grace. A storm follows Shiftlet after he leaves Lucybell. Fire and ash (and a girl’s burned stuffed animal) rain on Walt as a result of his letting Jane die. In a later episode, Walt muses about his life. Skyler had left Walt when she learned about his drug dealing. Walt is convinced that putting the right words in the right order would get Skyler to see that Walt had been right all along. Walt also tells Jesse that he met Jane’s father on the night she died (though he does not tell Jesse that he was there when Jane was choking). Walt says science tells us that the universe is just particles in aimless movement, but Walt is haunted by the astronomical odds of choosing to do something so out of character as going to a bar and then striking up a conversation with Jane’s father. Walt asks “How can it be random?”, but Walt can’t or won’t draw a conclusion. Both of Walt’s attitudes are ways of evading the moral order. Sometimes Walt chooses to believe that his intelligence (the right words in the right order) can reshape the universe to turn evil into good. Sometimes Walt takes refuge in the belief (which he can’t quite fully believe) that the universe is random. In the end, Walt refuses to see that grace was offered to him and rejected. It would mean that there was a standard of right that existed independent of Walt’s will and it would mean facing not only that he made a wrong choice, but also that he had thrown away a precious gift. Pete Spiliakos writes for the First Things website. His previous “On the Square” columns can be found here. Become a fan of First Things on Facebook, subscribe to First Things via RSS, and follow First Things on Twitter.American Prospect reporter Jamelle Bouie received a toxic email from a typical Tea Party conservative reacting to an article Bouie wrote about the fatigue associated with systemic racism. Bouie's troll cited statistics about how the welfare state had forced Jamelle's "people" into more illegitimate births and posed false comparisons to prove white supremacy. Among other things, the writer asked this: You are surprised that GOP conservatives don't turn toward your viewpoint, yet can you say your own people are not neck deep in family and academic failure over the past few decades? Bouie decided to go beyond a bit of Twitter mockery and try to have a real conversation with the guy. He got his telephone number from the email address on the email, and called him. What ensued was about 30 minutes of the guy talking at him instead of with him, but it seems to have been enlightening. In this segment, he discusses the episode with Chris Hayes. I'm not sure anything especially productive came out of the conversation, but it is an interesting look at a different way of dealing with Internet trolls, at least.ChexSystems is used as a repository by banks and credit unions to understand the profile of someone who may be trying to open a new account at their institution. If you have a history of bounced checks or overdrafts the bank or credit union may deny your application for a new account based on this ChexSystems report. ChexSystems was considered a credit reporting agency in 1999, and is now regulated under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. As a result consumers are now allowed one free ChexSystems report. This report will let you see what the banks and credit unions are seeing, and give you the ability to see if the items on the report are fair. If there are items on the report that are wrong then you can file a dispute letter with ChexSystems. If the report is truthful and you have a poor banking history (meaning bounced checks and overdrafts) than all you can do is wait. The negative items take five years to clear on your ChexSystems report. In the meantime there are banks and credit unions that will not deny you based on negative items in your ChexSystems report, to find them go to this link (http://chexsys.tripod.com/goodbanks.html). The important thing to remember is that how you bank does leave a history, and that history can hurt your ability to open new accounts at a later date, especially if you have bounced checks and overdrafted your accounts. The best thing to do is to always remember to keep enough of a buffer (if you can) in your account so that you are protected from overdrafts and bounced checks.Tell Me You Are Wonderful Chris Title interviews Juliet Patterson Editor's note: I recently asked poet Chris Title if he would like to interview Juliet Patterson for Sleet. What came about is something I never could have envisioned — a handwritten correspondence between the two poets that spanned a few seasons! This in-depth "interview" is so much more than an interview; it is personal, it is both journal and journey, and it is MFA-level instructive. "Tell Me You are Wonderful" is truly an insight into the minds of two poets for the price of one via letters and postcards - something pretty special in the 21st century. By way of introduction, Juliet Patterson is a teaching artist and community activist. She teaches through Hamline University, St. Olaf College, Chatham University's MFA program, and The Loft. Patterson is the author of The Truant Lover, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous magazines, including 26, American Letters & Commentary, Arts & Letters, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Knockout, New Orleans Review, Pebble Lake Review, Rain Taxi, Redivider, Swerve, Water~Stone Review, and Verse. Her most recent project, a memoir in progress entitled Sinkhole, covers the history of a suicide and has been supported through a 2012 Minnesota Emerging Writers grant and 2012 Minnesota State Arts Board grant. And, her new chapbook Dirge was recently published by Albion Books.(Note: GeoCurrents is still technically on summer vacation, allowing me time to catch up with other obligations that I have neglected. My recent essays on eco-modernism, written for the Breakthrough Institute, can be found here and here. I am interrupting this GeoCurrents hiatus, however, to address a highly disturbing and significant development. This post also violates the GeoCurrents policy on political editorializing. In general, this website strives to be as politically neutral as possible, but exceptions are made. One reason for my reluctance to express opinion is the fact that many of my views are somewhat extreme, although they come from the unusual position of radical centrism, one based on an equal distaste for the right and the left.) It is increasingly clear that the situation faced by the Yezidis of the Sinjar region in northern Iraq can only be described as genocidal. Thousands have been slaughtered and tens of thousands are facing death from starvation and thirst, if not from the bullets of the so-called Islamic State (or ISIS, as it conventionally designated), as they hide in remote reaches of Sinjar Mountain. Christians and members of other religious minorities are also at a heightened risk of extermination in the expanding ISIS-controlled territory. Thus far, the government of the United States has conducted a few humanitarian air-drops for the Yezidis, although reports are now circulating that that has begun or is at least considering military strikes against ISIS, actions that the Pentagon currently denies. But more to the point, by having previously thwarted the ability of the Kurdish Peshmerga to defend its territory and fight the militants, the government of the United States bears some responsibility for these horrific developments. Such U.S. actions and inactions stem largely from its vain insistence on trying to revive the moribund Iraqi state, which in turn is rooted in the discredited ideal of intrinsic nation-state integrity. Most reports on the Yezidis mention the unusual nature of their religion, but often do so in a misleading manner. The Yezidi faith is typically described as a blend of beliefs and practices stemming from ancient Persian Zoroastrianism and other distant sources. Such an assessment may be reasonable, but one could just as easily depict Christianity as mere mélange of Jewish, Zoroastrian, and neo-Platonic ideas. In actuality, Yezidism is very much its own faith, although it does have close affinities with other belief systems, such as that of the Shabak people. The specific nature of the Yezidi religion, more importantly, makes its practitioners especially vulnerable to extremist interpretations of Islamic law. The Yezidis follow what is sometimes called a “cult of angels.” To them, God is a remote entity who has entrusted creation to seven spiritual being, the most important of whom is Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel. Melek Taus, however, is often identified with the fallen angel of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, Satan (or Shaytan), leading to pejorative descriptions of Yezidis as “devil worshipers.” In actuality, Yezidism has nothing to do with Satanism in any form; to followers of the faith, Melek Taus is a benevolent being who repented his refusal to submit to Adam and was hence restored to his rightful place. Yezidism is in actuality a profoundly non-dualistic and generally peaceful faith. Yezidis do not proselytize or accept converts, and they largely keep to themselves. One of the more intriguing aspects of the faith is its spiritual abhorrence of lettuce. I showcase the Yezidis when I lecture on religion in the Middle East for two reasons. First, the existence of this faith, like that of many others, demonstrates the historically deep level of religious diversity found in the area that is often called the Fertile Crescent and is sometimes deemed the Heterodox Zone. Second, it shows that the realm of Islam was in general historical terms more religiously tolerant than Christendom. I cannot imagine a group like the Yezidis having survived in late medieval or early modern Europe: crusaders and inquisitors, such as the grotesquely misnamed Pope Innocent III, would not have allowed it. But as the rampages of ISIS and related groups thoroughly demonstrate, the situation has changed drastically. Today, this same region is marked by the world’s most extreme level of religious intolerance and persecution. Some reports claim that ISIS leaders have given the Yezidis the same three-fold ultimatum thrown at the Christians of Mosul: either immediate conversion to Islam, or acceptance of subordinate dhimmi status and payment of the jizya tax, or face death. The middle option, however, is hardly assured: hyper-fundamentalist interpretations of Islamic law demand dhimmi status for the “peoples of the book” (Jews, Christians, and few others), but those regarded as full-fledged idolaters, much less “devil worshippers,” are not necessarily accorded the same “respect.” But even when it comes to Christians, ISIS demands for the acceptance of dhimmi status appear to be largely pro forma, as the goal is apparently the complete cleansing from their would-be state of everyone who is not a Sunni fundamentalist. After suffering for years, the Yezidis are at long last getting some attention. But mainstream media outlets still tend to downplay their plight, devoting vastly more attention to other far more familiar and less newsworthy matters. Other deeply persecuted Iraqi religious minorities, such as the Mandaeans who have suffered at the hands of Shia militias, receive even less attention. The destruction of Assyrian and other Christian communities gets a little more press, but it too has failed to spark widespread public outrage. I have some difficulty understanding why such horrors are so widely disregarded. Ignorance is surely at play, but so too is partisan politics. I suspect that in the United States, many Republicans prefer to look away because the situation reflects poorly on the Bush administration’s Iraq policies, just as many Democrats do the same because it reflects equally poorly on the Obama administration. Other observers wrongly and spinelessly conclude that genocide in this region is simply none of our business. In regard to the Assyrians, several pundits have argued that they are “too Christian” for the left to care about and “too foreign” to concern the right. When it comes to the Yezidis, several sources have stressed the “tiny” size of the group, as if scant numbers somehow make persecution less objectionable. Yet in actuality the Yezidis are a substantial group, with roughly the same number of adherents as the population of Boston, Massachusetts (some 600,000-700,000). Can one imagine the dismissal of Boston on the grounds that its population is “tiny,” not even amounting to a million souls? Unfortunately, American actions have hindered the ability of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) to protect the beleaguered minorities of northern Iraq, and the KRG is the only organization that can offer any effective protection. In the tussle between the impotent “national” Iraqi government and the Kurds, Washington has sided firmly with Baghdad, unwilling to do anything that could potentially undermine the fictional integrity of Iraq. The American government has even tried to prevent the Kurds from selling their oil on the open market, as this goes against the wishes of Nouri al-Maliki and company. Deeply strapped for money, the KRG has been unable to provision its troops defending such places as Sinjar, thus forcing it to pull back, placing hundreds of thousands of people at the risk of mass murder. The more recent rapprochement between the KRG and the Iraqi state is indeed a hopeful development, but for tens of thousands of Yezidis it is too late and too little. In defending the territorial integrity of Iraq, the United States is trying to prop up a corpse, as the country so depicted on our maps no longer exists. As a nation, it never did. As is well known, Iraq was imposed by British colonial authorities, and the state that they created never enjoyed genuine emotional resonance with the majority of its inhabitants. Iraqi national identity has always been superficial at best, thus requiring brutal dictatorial force to ensure state coherence. When that force was removed with the ouster of Saddam Hussein and free elections were eventually held, the disintegration of the country accelerated. The notion that diplomacy, patient nation-building, another regime change, or any other imaginable political process could somehow heal the wounds and allow the reconstitution of Iraq as a functioning nation-state is little more than fantasy. Basing American policy on such wishful thinking indicates an appalling abnegation of both intellectual and moral responsibility. American policy in Iraq does not merely threaten major populations with genocide, but also works directly against the national interest of the United States. It is no secret that the current leaders of the Baghdad government are more closely aligned with Iran than they are with the United States, or that most people of Iraq are deeply suspicious of—if not actively hostile toward—American power. But both the Kurdish Regional Government and the people of Iraqi Kurdistan remain relatively pro-American, despite the shabby treatment that they have received from Washington. It almost seems as if the U.S. administration has decided that this situation is intolerable and that a few acts of betrayal are necessary to prevent the solidification of a regime that is genuinely friendly toward the United States. It sometimes appears as if the U.S. foreign policy establishment is more comfortable with “frenemies,” such as those in power in Baghdad and Riyadh, than it is with actual friends. Meanwhile, ISIS steadily gains power, innocents are slaughtered wholesale, and the rest of the world sits by. (France, however, has called for an emergency U.N. meeting to address the crisis and has pledged aid for those fighting against ISIS.) Such self-destructive behavior on the part of the U.S. government has all the indications of lunacy. But such madness is seldom recognized, as it is far too deeply entrenched to attract attention. The same policies, after all, have been followed by all recent Republican and Democratic administrations, just as they are relentlessly pursued by virtually every national government the world over. The world’s sovereign states form a club and hence act in a stereotypically clubbish manner. Carcass states such as Iraq and Somalia remain members in good standing despite their abject failure, while highly functional non-members, such as Iraqi Kurdistan and Somaliland, do not belong and are therefore shunned, treated as if they do not exist. In a brilliant book, Stanford political scientist Stephen Krasner refers to the resulting international system of mutually recognized sovereignty as “organized hypocrisy.” To the extent that it propels such events as the genocide of the Yezidis, it might be better described as organized psychosis. The international diplomatic system shows symptoms of insanity because it is based on a figment of the imagination: the nation-state. A few sovereign countries do indeed approach the nation-state ideal, in which a self-conscious political community strongly identifies with a particular state across its entire territorial extent, but—as GeoCurrents has noted on numerous occasions—most fall far short of this model. Yet the fundamental premise of the international system is the permanent reality of this mere ideal across the world. To be sure, it is widely recognized that many countries have been artificially created and thus had no preexisting national integrity, but they are all supposed to have seamlessly “constructed” national solidarity through education, economic development, and political inclusion. In actuality, many never have, and quite a few never will. The fallacy of the nation-state provides a powerful explanation for the debacle of the U.S.-led campaigns to reformulate and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s. It was widely assumed by many leading experts that Afghanistan and especially Iraq would present easy wars followed by undemanding and self-financing processes of democratic reconstruction. Both countries were assumed to be coherent nation-states that merely needed a change of regime and a little nation-building assistance to emerge as stable, self-determining U.S. allies. Although the initial battles were far less challenging than the anti-war movement had anticipated, the subsequent occupations proved vastly more difficult than what the neo-conservative war-supporters had imagined. Nation-building was doomed to fail in these cases because neither country has ever approached nation-state status. The obsession with preserving the existing international order of ostensible nation-states derives from a concern for geopolitical stability. Abandoning the idea of the intrinsic unity of a country such as Iraq or Somalia by acknowledging instead the reality of Iraqi Kurdistan or Somaliland, such reasoning has it, would potentially destabilize the global world order. It would do so by encouraging other disgruntled ethnic, religious, or regional groups to seek their own independence, thus fostering secession, rebellion, and warfare. This argument, however, fails from the onset by assuming a degree of international stability that simply does not exist. In actuality, Iraqi Kurdistan and Somaliland are islands of relative order in seas of chaos. More fundamentally, the unwillingness to deal with such unrecognized states in deference to the established (dis)order invokes a “slippery slope” argument that can be used to justify any aspect of the status quo, regardless of how non-functional or maladaptive it has become. Iraqi Kurdistan and Somaliland deserve to be dealt with as actual states not merely because of their leaders’ desires, but rather because they have created relatively stable and reasonably representative governments with acceptable levels of human freedom out of the fractured territories of internationally recognized states that are in reality hyper-unstable and deeply repressive. As the same cannot be said for the vast majority of the world’s myriad separatist movements, no dangerous precedent would thereby be set. Yet in actuality, just such a dangerous precedent has indeed been set by the same international community in regard to South Sudan. South Sudan was allowed to emerge as a recognized sovereign state not because its leaders had built effective institutions and demonstrated a sustained capacity for self-rule, but rather because they had waged a interminable war of independence against the Khartoum government that finally exhausted the patience of many world leaders. At the time, I fully supported the independence of South Sudan, owing largely to the atrocities that had been committed against its people by the government of Sudan. But the hideous civil war that has subsequently undermined “the world’s youngest country” calls into question the wisdom of this maneuver. Successfully fighting against a common enemy by no means ensures the ability to construct a viable state once that war dies down. Significantly, Iraqi Kurdistan could have gone the way of South Sudan. Tensions between its Kurmanji- and Sorani-speaking areas (by linguistic criteria, Kurdish is a not a language but a group of languages) have been pronounced, contributing to a brief armed struggle between the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party in the 1990s. But although friction remains, the Kurdish people have been able to surmount their problems and construct an effective state. Yet now the United States insists that they scale back their ambitions and instead accept subordination within the decaying geobody of Iraq. No amount of successful nation- and state-building will ever do, they are effectively told by the U.S. government, and as such they will never be granted a state of their own on such a basis. If, on the other hand, they were to reject such efforts and instead focus their attention on actively making war against the Baghdad regime, then perhaps they may follow South Sudan and eventually be awarded their own recognized state. I do not see how such a policy can be regarded as anything but delusional. The Clinton Administration was widely accused of complicity in genocide for its lack of action as the Tutsis of Rwanda were massacred in the 1990s. Preventing this instance of genocide, however, would have been very difficult. Preventing the slaughter of the Yezidis, however, would have been very easy, as all that would have been necessary was the provisioning of a little military assistance to the Kurdish Peshmerga, a force that, quite unlike Iraq’s “national” army, is willing and eager to defend the people of the region. The Obama administration’s refusal to do so in obeisance to the illusion of Iraqi national unity is a disgrace, indicating both moral cowardice and abject unwillingness to see the world as it actually is. What really leads me to despair, however, are my doubts that any other American administration would have acted any differently, as the paralyzing delusion of the nation-state is too deeply embedded to be dislodged by mere reality, no matter how blood-drenched that reality turns out to be.GLENDALE, AZ - JANUARY 03: Quarterback Russell Wilson #3 of the Seattle Seahawks makes a pass kin the first half during the NFL game against the Arizona Cardinals at the University of Phoenix Stadium on January 3, 2016 in Glendale, Arizona. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images) By Joseph Gunther The Minnesota Vikings knew a week ago that they were going to make the playoffs. What they didn’t know is what seed they would be, who they would play, and where they would play it. They didn’t find out the answer to all three questions until they beat the Green Bay Packers in the final game of the regular season. Once Xavier Rhodes and Anthony Barr broke up the Packers Hail Mary attempt at the buzzer, the Vikings knew they were entering the playoffs as the NFC North champion, the No. 3 seed and hosting the Seattle Seahawks in the first round of the NFL playoffs. The Vikings and Seahawks played in Week 13 at TCF Bank Stadium. It wasn’t close with the Seahawks blowing out the Vikings 38-7 on Dec. 6. Season Record The Seahawks finished the season with a 10-6 record, three games behind NFC West Division champion Arizona Cardinals. They finished the season winning six of their last seven and eight of their last 10, including five straight wins on the road. They have outscored their opponents 224-98 over their last six. Seahawks on Offense Statistically, the Seahawks are a much stronger rushing offense than passing. They rank third in the league with 141.8 rushing yards per game and 20th in passing yards per game with 236.9. The Seahawks racked up 433 total yards of offense in the last meeting between the two teams. They tallied 260 passing yards and 173 yards on the ground. Seahawks on Defense The Seahawks have been known for their defense, most notably the Legion of Boom secondary. They boast the league’s second ranked defense with 291.8 yards allowed per game. They are second in passing yards allowed with 210.3 per game and first in rushing yards allowed per game with 81.5. The Vikings couldn’t get anything going offensively in the first meeting with the Seahawks. They had 94 passing yards and 31 rushing yards. Seahawks Players to Watch Quarterback Russell Wilson completed 21 of 27 passes for 274 yards and three touchdowns while posting a 96.2 QBR and 146 rating. He does not possess the size scouts look for in a quarterback, but he is an accurate thrower and has the mobility to escape the pocket. The key to stopping him is to keep him in the pocket and take away his ability to see downfield. Defensively, Michael Bennett gave the Vikings fits. The defensive end got two hits on Teddy Bridgewater, sacked him once, and made three tackles for a loss. He is an active lineman that can make plays anywhere along the defensive line. The Vikings need to get a push with their offensive line and it starts with knowing where Bennett is lined up. Outlook The Seahawks dominated the first meeting and the general public believes it will happen again. They are considered the hottest team in the league and a favorite to make another run at the Super Bowl. However, the likelihood of another blow out is unlikely. The Vikings have a different feeling surrounding the team. There is more confidence after beating a rival to win the division and they are expected to be a lot healthier on defense. In the first meeting, the Vikings started the game without starters defensive tackle Linval Joseph and safety Andrew Sendejo and then lost starters linebacker Anthony Barr and safety Harrison Smith very early in the game. The game should be a much closer game than the previous meeting and will likely come down to a few plays in the fourth quarter. Joseph Gunther is an avid fan of Minnesota sports, including football, hockey and baseball. He covered a wide variety of sports while attending Hastings College in Hastings, Neb. While at Hastings College, he was a part of the first collegiate media group to broadcast a national tournament via television, radio, internet and newspaper at the 2004 NAIA Division II Women’s Basketball Tournament. He grew up in the Twin Cities playing three years of varsity football in high school. Joseph is a freelance writer covering all things NFL. His work can be found on Examiner.com.Greg Williams Originally published in the June 2009 issue Greg Williams Megan Fox won't kick her horse. Greg Williams She's just sort of tapping it, using her Ugg-booted right foot to give it a nudge with her heel. But to Bandit (that's the horse), this is more of a suggestion, and what this horse needs right now is a command, a firm whack on the undercarriage with both heels that says "Stop screwing off!" — and this Fox is either unwilling or unable to give. Greg Williams So we're gonna pause here for a minute or two, just a few hundred feet up the Topanga Canyon horse trail we're ascending, until Bandit can behave. Greg Williams It's sunny but still mild for L. A., so Fox is wearing an open yellow cardigan over her black tank top. Her jeans, waist-baring low-riders, were rolled up just beyond her calves until Michael (our serene and tan guide for the day) mentioned she might want to roll them back down to avoid "chafing" — the kind of advice you don't ignore. Greg Williams She's got a self-professed weakness for eye makeup, but she's not wearing much now, just a little mascara. Today's look is all-natural — though liberal cleavage and the "Brian" hip tattoo that occasionally peeks out above the waistband of her black underwear prevent it from being remotely wholesome. Greg Williams "If you're a real wimp with him," Michael is explaining, "he's gonna keep taking advantage of you." Dominance over horses is established in the first ten minutes of the ride, which means Fox has about one minute left to show Bandit who's boss. "Don't worry, there's no way you're gonna hurt him," Michael says. Definitely not with the little love kicks she keeps delivering. Greg Williams It's hard to hold this unwillingness to kick Bandit against her, because it is, after all, kicking an animal, but also because she's clearly freaked out — "terrified" is how she puts it — being in the saddle for the first time. "I have a healthy fear of
, I'll be usingfor everything, unless otherwise noted.By the way,will be used unless otherwise noted too, because points are a mixture between net votes and true votes (TV). Mixing them together makes the data not orthogonal anymore, and separating the effects of both parts is not easily.To conclude:1. Poll results follow a exponential distribution of net votes versus rank2. Stop looking at absolute vote count and rank! Only the relative part matters.1. Distribution characteristicsReminder: We'll be looking at this upon this point:With our wavelength set correctly, we can proceed to look for the obvious things that we can see from the distribution.The first obvious observation is the common sudden drop at the 60% rank percentile:Jumped the shark, I guessIn fact, for all previous polls there are also a drop from the beginning, then a bump at around 30-60% rank percentile, until around this 60% spot where a sudden drop occurs, and everything becomes normal. With the linear scale we were using before, these two features are hard to see (the absolute difference is only significant for the first 20 places after all).Things really get interesting when it's plotted in a different way:Votes drift. Higher ranked characters are brighter. Also, you're not supposed to predict future ranks from there(Note that I've also put the Niconico poll results in. This means that it's definitely not a accounting bug on the thwiki side, since both operates independently.)There are three important segments, which I've marked in red, orange and yellow:Theregion is the place where votes between different ranks are suddenly concentrated, and competition is fierce. In technical term, it has a very high. This part accounts for the bending point from the mean distribution, i.e the bump.(Incidentally, Meiling has always been roughly the top of this messy part. So the fandom notion "Meiling wall" isn't baseless at all.)Theregion only opened after the 8th poll, with Yorihime sitting in the middle. It's sitting somewhere between a genuine feature and a fake one, so I'll leave it as that;Theregion (at roughly 60% percentile), however, is really intriguing. It's a massive gap where votes can drop over 30% in just a few places. It's a big chasm which only a few have surpassed: Tokiko, Star Sapphire, Gengetsu and Toyohime, and despite all of this, has remained intact and in place. And see that one jiggling between the middle? For all things that can be there,To be more rigorous, tough, it'd be good if we can actually compute the character density, instead of eyeballing and pointing on every minor detail that seems suspicious, like that gap just under the red region on the 11th vote. As the Wikipedia article for rank-size distribution have mentioned, such distributions are actually quantile functions. So we can sample the average density of points over a exponentially spaced interval (this comes from the previous conclusion!) over previous polls, take a moving average to smooth out noise, and get our density:The reconstructed distribution.Plotting on the original graph. Turn your head 90 degrees CW when reading the density, Seija saidSo, how does the 60% percentile drop come from, and why did the drop move forward in the 11th poll? I suspect it's actually the boundary between Windows characters, and (most of) PC-98 characters and everything else.Basically, it's like this:Every poll introduces new Windows characters. However, we have official comics which has lots of non-human minor characters, who're also introduced into the poll for the sake of completeness. This is how you have a youkai fortune teller whose rank even surpassed Unzan.Since ZUN roughly releases a new work every year after MoF, and the votes are done in the same pace, every time 6-8 characters are thrown above this 60% percentile. Meanwhile, two things happen to the lower side: first one is that new minor characters are introduced; and the second, which was dominant in the earlier polls, was that. Back in the 4th/5th poll, quite some PC-98 characters suffered from being out of the final ranking.The two sides roughly balance to give a 6:4 ratio of this boundary.However, at the 11th poll, LoLK is not ready yet so no new Windows shump characters for us; ULiL gives us only 1 character on top (Sumireko) while introducing all the urban legends which will become minor characters; Meanwhile, the official comics (WaHH and FS) are contributing full force to the latter. As a result, the boundary is imbalanced, and shifted from 60% to 57%.In conclusion, we established in this part that:1. There is a clear boundary between god tier and top tier characters (which is well-known),2. And a even clearer boundary between the middle tier and bottom tier (which isn't well-known).2. True votes (TV) characteristics and choice ranks distributionTo begin with, it makes sense only in considering the TV rates. Absolute number does not make sense (it gets affected by total votes).The overall average TV rates, of course, depends on how many characters you can choose. Despite that some people only vote for their first choice and skip everything else, the actual ratio between the total amount of TV and voters has been around 4.8 to 4.9 throughout the years, so for most purposes assuming an average TV rates of 20% is good enough, leaving you an absolute error of 0.4-0.8% which is not a big deal.(By the way, normalising true votes by any other method is most likely to be wrong. If a character isn't being voted by someone, it's not going to appear in the first choice either.)TV rates has no apparent trend. It's as if people are very indecisive on the 1st slot:Plotted for all characters appeared between 1th to 100th place in the 11th vote. Brighter color = higher rank.Even the TV rates rate stability varies from character to character. This would mean that TV rates rate prediction is essentially unpredictable.There are two ways one can model the voting process:- Consider everyone's 1st choice only, then 2nd choice only, then 3rd choice only, etc...- Consider one voter's choices, then another voter's choices, then yet another, etc...The second one is way harder than the first because character choices are not independent - if you put Koishi as your 1st choice, big chances are that you're also putting Satori somewhere close to her.Modeling the poll this way requires knowledge on the relationships between two characters, and (unfortunately) the official results only reveal the 6 most significant rates for this (and none in the past), so this is practically impossible.The first one, however, is much easier, once you also assume that the choice ranks immutable, so they're independent of each other, and by limiting the amount of choices we're only cutting out the first n items.There are arguments against this notion (e.g My true love is A, but if I can choose 7 I'll choose ABCDEFG, and since G is the newest one I'll put my TV on G) but I'd argue that these are not generalisable, so at the end they'd be insignificant anyway.Moreover, in actual Touhou popularity votes, the number of choices one can make is arbitrary. The rules may say that you can only choose only 1 character as your only vote, or the rules get too generous and let you choose 10 at maximum. So modeling the voting process in the first way helps us coping with this change.In this regard, if there is anything I like about the Niconico poll in particular, it's that it separates the 2nd/3rd choice from 4th/5th choice.I shall present the TV rates rank versus net votes ranks first, because there's something I've never seen anyone pointed out before:11th vote: A main diagonalThis is shocking because it has a correlation coefficient of 0.58 (!). What this tells is that for most of those character on top, they're also getting more TV rates as well, despite a common belief that they should not be related, or they should beinstead because the less popular character are (supposed) mostly voted by people who really likes them. (Well, maybe except Rinnosuke and Wriggle.)Plotting with actual TV rates instead:Quadratic fit. We're plotting from 1th to 100th place because TV rates errors are too big for characters with inadequate votes.Correlation coefficient: -0.57It's even more clear that the top characters are getting more TV rates percentages than others.What about choice rank below the 1st place? As I've mentioned, Niconico poll gives us good data on this:The correlation to ranks are: 0.69(1st), -0.40(2nd/3rd), -0.45(4th/5th)This gives us another result: The TV rates only balance at choice ranks around 2nd and 3rd (a bit closer to 3rd), all while choice ranks below there are the opposite to TVs: top characters actually get less of them.And we can safely assume that it only gets magnified as we go down the choice ranks.In conclusion, we established in this part that:1. TV rates, as a whole, is unlikely to have any big trends, except maybe for a few outliers.2. However, people put higher-ranked characters on top more frequently than lower-ranked character. This trend becomes opposite after the 3rd choice rankThis has a profounding implication to the increase of character slots in the new 12th poll: By opening up the 6th and 7th choice ranks, we're adding up new choice rank distributions which benefit lower ranked characters more than the higher ones, and also benefits outliers which have insanely low TV rates, e.g Kokoro (ranked 14th while having TV rates as low as 10%).Moreover, despite being just a speculation, the turning point of TV rates at around 25th place may probably be related to the boundary between god-tier and top-tier discussed above. I can't think of a way to prove this with currently publicly available data, however.3. Sorted poll results according to work and stageFrom this point things get less interesting (i.e specific), so I'll skim over most of this part.Net votes sorted by work and stage, 11th only.It's not exactly a news that SDM has particular high total votes, while recent works gets less votes the more recent they are.SA is high up there because, well, Koishi and Satori.Though, I should mention that stage actually has relevance on net vote counts.(EX/PH > 5,6 > 3 > 4 > 2 > 1)Actual net votes for stage 4 should be higher because there are 3 Prismriver sister and 2 Tsukumo sisters, which all performed quite poorly.Rank sorted by work and stage, 11th only.It's also not a big news that SDM has a very high average rank than every other work.As of their variance, SA is the biggest, then PBC.Net votes time series, sorted by work and stage. Darker dots are more recent. Accounted for deflation.Net vote percentages deflates over time as more characters are thrown into the killing field which they compete for critical resources i.e votes. To account for this deflation, the percentages have to be normalised so that the total net vote percentages for the works that appeared polls ago is the same as this poll.TV rates sorted by work and stage, 11th only.Apart from outliers (Wriggle), I guess the only interesting thing is how the TV rates for UFO are so close together.Also, TV rates are unaffected by stages.TV rates time series, sorted by work and stage. Darker dots are more recent It's, again, not exactly unknown that overall TV rates for recent works rise back as time goes, but it might be useful to somebody, who knows? Even things like this are actually very valuable now.Also, TV rates are unaffected by stages.I don't think there are conclusions to be drawn there, except we verified that:1. Overall TV rates for recent works is lower, but rises back as time goes2. Different stage bosses have different average net votes. In general, everything from stage 5 is privileged4. MiscTrivia stuff, which might worth a one-liner mention.- Correlation coefficient of TV rates and stage for all Windows characters is, surprisingly, 0.03. You'd expect that only to happen by stage and work (for obvious reasons).- TD has a crazily high female vote percentages. Except Kyouko. Otherwise every other work is quite close to the average.-I've looked at the Chinese popularity polls and Reddit /r/touhou pouplarity polls too. I didn't talk about them because both polls' voter size is too small to infer useful things from it. As a rule of thumb, if you have a lot of people having less than 20 votes or something, the bad resolution and random fluctuation in people's minds will render the calculation useless. A voter size of 50000 should be good enough.5. SummaryThis post shows a few characteristics of the Touhou popularity poll:1. Touhou popularity poll results follow a exponential distribution. For roughly every 10% percentile of rank, net votes halves2. There is a clear boundary between god tier and top tier characters (which is kind of well-known), and a even clearer boundary between the middle tier and bottom tier (which is not)3. People put higher-ranked characters on top (as top vote) more frequently than lower-ranked character. This becomes opposite for everything after the 3rd choice. The turning point is around 25th place3.5. Because of the above, lower ranked characters should get buffed quite a bit in the new 12th popularity poll, since the character slots had increased from 5 to 74. Top vote rates differs from character to character in terms of amount and stability, and is not correlated to stages (but later works do receive less top vote rates until several years later), so perhaps people are being indecisive over this precious slotAnd that's all, have fun waiting for/predicting the results!"It's a list of bathrooms to fuck in, not Homer's Odyssey. Don't go overthinking it." My girlfriend hurled this sage wisdom at me earlier this week as I planned my trek to nearly two dozen bars I visited to compile this list. If nothing else, I am sure the Greek poet would respect my legwork. This list was built by polling service-industry veterans, bar patrons and a slutty-looking girl I saw sitting out front of Boondocks (her emphatic answer was "Fuck off!" by the way; I couldn't find that bar on Yelp, however). We rated bars and their washrooms on ambience, ease of entry and egress, feasibility -- sorry, Grand Prize, but one person can't fit in your stalls alone, much less two -- and overall sex appeal. Continue Reading Our list of the ten best bathrooms to have a shag in is as follows: 10. BRC BRC was the first Houston bar we remember seeing in the new unisex bathroom trend. Separated from the dining room almost completely, the layout features separate stalls off the main washroom with what one woman knowingly described as "plenty of room." 9. Fitzgerald's Women's Restroom (Upstairs) This one goes out to all the scene kids and hipsters in the audience. Being equipped with what my mom tells me is formally known as "a peepee," I have yet to see this bathroom. But while I was researching this article, no less than three women offered the upstairs bathroom at the legendary music venue as a viable hookup closet. "Would you even want to fuck in there?" I asked a particularly fussy female friend. "The whole idea is about being as dirty as possible," she responded, "and you literally can't get much dirtier than that, so I guess it might be hot." And I guess it could be worse; it could be Lola's. 8. Reef Though it's certainly quieted down since its early buzz days, Reef's dining room is busy most nights, even if the "3rd Bar" is not. The well-appointed bathrooms are off a back hallway, making access for you and your boink buddy easier than a pair of crotchless panties. Bonus points if you pick up some strange at Proof Bar upstairs and bring them down to seal the deal. 7. Secret Bathroom at Petrol Station Not so much a secret anymore, Petrol Station's extra bathroom finally has a solid lock on the door -- so no need for performance anxiety whilst wondering who is about to bust in on your washroom tryst. Gentlemen, you probably want to bring a date if you plan on checking this one off your list, as single ladies at Petrol Station are almost as scarce as Bud Light. Conversely, ladies, everyone knows beer nerds are better lovers, or so I've been told. 6. The Dirt Bar Dirt Bar was created so people had a place to have a drink before they go off and bang in the bathroom. It's just that kind of bar. The vibe in this place-- the closest thing Houston has to a heavy metal bar -- can range from calm-yet-never-quiet to "Holy shit, is this The Apocalypse?" If you want to bed a rock star, one of your very best shots is at a Dirt after party held for shows at House of Blues just across the street. 5. Mongoose Versus Cobra Mongoose was one of the early inspirations for this article. I saw two girls hooking up in MvsC's cozy unisex bathroom before soft opening was even over. If you ever find the wait for a drink interminable, camp out near the bathroom and catch the show. 4. 13 Celsius 13 comes in high on the list after scoring well in both the talent and ambience categories. Whether you favor your anonymous hookup flavor in well-suited business professional, married yuppie on the prowl or the scruffy hipster variety, this perpetually hip wine bar has pretty people from all walks of life. Besides, if you need help encouraging your significant other to join you for a quickie, a bottle of wine is excellent lubrication, social and otherwise. 3. Boheme If the sultry vibe, provocative art on the walls and endless supply of red wine at Boheme don't get you going, then maybe the leather couch in the private men's room will. Of all the washrooms on this list, this is the only one we found with furniture. All three of the restrooms (including the unmarked unisex room in the middle) are private, so feel free to explore. Bonus points if you figure out how to use the high-tech Japanese toilets. 2. Anvil Every single service-industry vet polled mentioned "the middle bathroom at Anvil," quite specifically. Some even offered stories of having to eject patrons found sneaking a quickie in the single-occupancy bathroom. "Swingers, man. They used to come in all the time," offered one former bartender. "You'd look up and two of them are gone and sure enough...in the bathroom." 1. The Pass & Provisions One of my favorite pastimes is sitting at the bar at Provisions and watching patrons discover the small unisex bathroom for the first time. "There's a condom machine in there!" a preppy brunette in a sleek Brooks Brothers dress giggles as she straightens her pearls. "Oh, no way!" her friend retorts, visibly blushing. When it flusters the girls from The Young Republicans Waco Chapter, you know it's a swank bathroom. "I'd do it in the other bathroom, too," quipped a friend of the bathrooms in the main dining room. "Who doesn't want to get it on to Julia Child?" (Audio of the late celebrity chef's cooking show is piped into these bathrooms. That voice.) The large main bathroom looks like BRC's unisex locker room got sent to finishing school. Complete with five private stall-rooms, this is the Maserati of washrooms; it's just that sexy. In addition to having damn sexy bathrooms, a good portion of this list also functions as a damn fine place to have a drink as well. Admittedly, the Galleria area, Washington Avenue and Upper Kirby bars are absent here but I couldn't find anyone who actually drinks there and I myself haven't been to a Washington Avenue bar since I was dragged to Addix by a certain assistant music editor who shall remain nameless. Got any bathrooms Eating...Our Words may have missed? Follow Eating Our Words on Facebook and on Twitter @EatingOurWords(Jason Reed/Reuters) According to the, President Obama is going to propose cuts of "several hundred billion dollars from Medicare and Medicaid," when he presents his proposal for deficit reduction next Monday. The FT reports that the proposal is expected to include the "grand bargain" policies the White House put on the table in the debt ceiling negotiations with Speaker John Boehner: "$150bn extracted from Medicare providers such as doctors and hospitals, $150bn coming from Medicare beneficiaries, and $125bn coming out of reforms to Medicaid," including "an increase in the eligibility age for Medicare." Additionally, the administration could propose more flexibility in negotiating drug prices and access to cheaper generic drugs. While the administration has downplayed Social Security changes, and in fact Obama left Social Security out of his jobs speech while asserting that Medicare and Medicaid cuts had to happen, the chained CPI could be part of this proposal. The Medicaid cuts, among the least discussed of the "reforms," would be cuts to federal payments to states in the form of a "blended rate" formula for reimbursements. The New York Time's Robert Pear writes about the political hurdles for Obama with these proposals. Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, Democrat of Missouri and chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said: “Ninety-eight percent of the president’s speech was excellent. The Democratic caucus and the black caucus are fired up. But you will find that we have some differences with the president’s plan as it relates to Medicare and Medicaid. We would rather see some kind of increase in revenue as opposed to cutting these programs.” By offering such proposals, Mr. Cleaver said, the president “cancels out any bludgeoning that Democrats might give the Republicans over Medicare and Medicaid.” Health policy experts and lobbyists see the situation in a similar way. Julius W. Hobson Jr., a lobbyist who used to work at the American Medical Association, said he viewed the savings to be proposed by Mr. Obama as "an opening bid, the floor, the foundation for the kind of cuts Republicans want to make." "Republicans will give a political answer: the president's plan is not enough," Mr. Hobson said. "It may not be enough in their eyes, but they will take it and build on it." Republicans will settle for little less than privatizing Medicare and Social Security and block-granting Medicaid. As Hobson said, he's to start the negotiations from a position of already slashing the programs in a way that provides small benefit for the amount of very real economic hurt they could create for individuals. These are proposals that might make the federal books look a little better, but which cost far more than they save, and place the burden of those costs on those who can least afford it. If this is just another trial balloon from the administration, it's been a really long-lived one, since they've been floating these proposals for months. Maybe the president's friends in the Democratic caucus on Capitol Hill can persuade him to pop it. There's ongoing discussion in slinkerwink's diary.Don't watch this if you haven't beaten the game yet! DON'T look at this until after you've beaten BioShock Infinite. Seriously, come back after you have. For the rest of you that have cleared the game, you're about to have your minds blown. I beat BioShock Infinite yesterday and after picking my jaw off the floor, I did what presumably the rest of you did and went to the Internet in order to process everything. NeoGAF has answers to a lot of your questions, and even digs into something I can't believe anyone was able to pickup on short of reading Ken Levine's mind. Booker, Elizabeth, and the Songbird will all end up back in Rapture towards the end of the game. Booker and Elizabeth are safely inside one of the buildings of Rapture, while the Songbird is left outside underwater. The Songbird wasn't built to take pressure like one would face deep under the ocean, and you'll witness the creature get crushed all while screaming out in agony. So okay, cool, you're back in Rapture. Nice little nod, and a great surprise. Now, what if I told you that you actually heard the Songbird screaming while playing the original BioShock? At around the 0:52 second mark you can hear the Songbird's cries. When Elizabeth transport the group, they end up at the point in the original BioShock when players were stuck taking pictures for Sander Cohen, and it's right before Fitzpatrick dies that you hear the Songbird. You can hear the Songbird scream more clearly at the 0:14 mark in the IGN video, and it almost matches up with the Songbird death cries in Infinite. Sure, it's not exactly the same in the game. I imagine Irrational wanted to shorten the screams of pain and make the death quicker once they actually got around to making the scene. In any case, it all lines up and it's one hell of a nod. You are logged out. Login | Sign upImage copyright AFP Image caption Joyce Banda is doing her best to get donor funding restored to Malawi President Joyce Banda has said she wants Malawi to overturn its ban on homosexual acts - the first African country to do so since 1994. Two Malawian men were sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2010 after saying they were getting married. Some Western leaders have suggested they could cut aid to countries which did not recognise gay rights. Mrs Banda took power last month after her predecessor, Bingu wa Mutharika, died of a heart attack. She has since reversed several of his policies, including devaluing the currency, in a bid to get donor funding restored. Many donors cut aid under Mr Mutharika, accusing him of economic mismanagement and political repression. In her first state of the nation address to parliament, Mrs Banda said: "Some laws which were duly passed by the august house... will be repealed as a matter of urgency... these include the provisions regarding indecent practices and unnatural acts." The BBC's Raphael Tenthani in the main city, Blantyre, says the president has the support of a majority of MPs and so should be able to get parliament to overturn the law. However, he says it will be an unpopular move with many church leaders, as well as the wider population in this conservative country. After a storm of international condemnation, Mr Mutharika did pardon the two Malawian men on "humanitarian grounds only" but said they had "committed a crime against our culture, against our religion, and against our laws". Homosexual acts are illegal in most African countries. In Uganda, an MP recently introduced a bill which stipulated the death penalty could be imposed for some homosexual offences, although he has since said he now wants this changed to life in prison. South Africa is the only African country where same-sex marriages are legal - discrimination based on sexual orientation was banned after a new constitution was introduced when white minority rule ended in 1994. 'Attempted coup' Earlier this month, Mrs Banda said she did not want Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir to attend an African Union summit Malawi is hosting in July. She said she feared the "economic implications" if Mr Bashir visited the country in defiance of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges over the conflict in Darfur. Relations with donors have already improved under Mrs Banda and the UK, which had been extremely critical of Mr Mutharika, is now urging other donors to restore funding as soon as possible. Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world and aid used to make up a large proportion of the national budget. Mrs Banda was elected vice-president as Mr Mutharika's running mate in 2009 but the pair had since fallen out. When the president died, there were reports that Mr Mutharika's allies attempted to sidestep the constitution to prevent her succeeding him. Mrs Banda also announced that an official inquiry would be opened into this "attempted coup" and the circumstances of Mr Mutharika's death.TACOMA -- A state appeals court decision this week supported the Navy's efforts to block a pit-to-pier project and other structures it believes are incompatible with its mission in Hood Canal. The Navy operates a ballistic missile submarine base and testing ranges there. Hood Canal Sand and Gravel owns waterfront where it planned to build a 1,000-foot pier where barges would be loaded. The Navy claimed the pier would disturb acoustic and magnetic testing. It purchased a 50-year easement in July 2014 from the Department of Natural Resources for 4,804 acres of bedlands on the west side of the canal that prevents the building of wharves, piers and docks. The gravel company needed a lease from DNR to construct a pier from its property. The company sued in Jefferson County Superior Court in August 2014, claiming, among other things, that the state didn't have the authority to grant the easement to the Navy and didn't get market value for it. DNR filed a cross motion to dismiss all of Hood Canal Sand and Gravel's claims, which the court did. The company appealed to the state appeals court, which ruled Tuesday that the superior court acted properly. Hood Canal Sand and Gravel has 30 days to petition the state Supreme Court to take the case, spokesman Dan Baskins said. It has other avenues he didn't disclose. "I'm not at liberty to speak about it," he said. "We'll take our time to review our options and move forward. We have a month or two to determine what we're going to do next." The establishment of market value for the easement aroused suspicions. An initial appraisal valued it at $1.7 million. The Navy told DNR it wasn't authorized to acquire land costing more than $750,000 under the program it was using. The Navy recalculated a value of $720,000, which it paid. Court documents explain what occurred. In arriving at the higher figure, the appraiser estimated the easement would reduce the bedlands' value by 70 percent, the midpoint of six case studies. The Navy would have to pay the state for the lost value. The Navy determined the most similar case study was one that resulted in a 30 percent decrease in value, which pencils out to a much lower cost to the Navy. It said the bedlands are best used for geoduck harvesting and other low-intensity uses, not the types of development that the easement would prohibit. Bedlands are the area from 18 feet below the average low tide to 70 feet down. Hood Canal Sand and Gravel argued that as a waterfront property owner, it should have priority rights to lease the bedlands. The three-person appeals panel determined that the Legislature has granted DNR the authority to grant easements to lease the bedlands and that the gravel company was eligible for a lease but not for preferential treatment. State law "permits DNR to lease bedlands to the abutting owners, but it does not require DNR to do so," the decision states. A federal lawsuit challenging the easement was dismissed in September. The Navy in August 2013 applied for a similar restricted easement on the east side of Hood Canal, from the floating bridge south to about Holly. It suspended the application until the lawsuit about the west side was settled.Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) has defeated his Tea Party challenger, winning a high-priced proxy war between establishment and conservative groups. The Associated Press has called the race for Simpson, who was leading attorney Bryan Smith (R) by 63 percent to 37 percent with 25 percent of precincts reporting. ADVERTISEMENT Simpson, a close ally of House Speaker John Boehner John Andrew BoehnerEx-GOP lawmaker joins marijuana trade group Crowley, Shuster moving to K Street On unilateral executive action, Mitch McConnell was right — in 2014 MORE (R-Ohio), was a top target of the fiscally conservative Club for Growth. The organization spent more than a half-million dollars seeking to topple him, and helped bundle hundreds of thousands more to Smith. But Simpson took his challenge seriously, raising huge sums of his own and benefitting from more than $2.5 million in outside spending. He went on air early to attack Smith as an amoral "trial lawyer" and debt collector, effectively damaging him as a messenger before Smith had the campaign funds to fire back. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Rifle Association, Defending Main Street Super PAC, the National Association of Realtors, the American Dental Association were the heaviest hitters on Simpson's behalf. A Chamber ad featuring former presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who's very popular in the heavily Mormon district, helped boost Simpson, and the NRA's seal of approval helped shore up his standing with conservatives. Smith and the Club attacked Simpson for supporting the Wall Street bailout and and backing earmarks, and in the final days Smith accused him of supporting "amnesty' immigration legislation. But the Club for Growth admitted defeat a few weeks ago, shifting resources out of Idaho at the end of April to focus on other races.The night before Super Bowl XLIX, the NFL will salute its best players and plays from the 2014 season with "NFL Honors," a star-studded football and entertainment event hosted by Seth Meyers from Symphony Hall at the Phoenix Convention Center. Here's the broadcasting information for Saturday night's festivities: » 8 p.m. ET on NFL Network: Red carpet coverage » 9 p.m. ET on NBC: 4th Annual NFL Honors One of the awards that will be presented on Saturday: Defensive Rookie of the Year. Who gets your vote? Bucky Brooks @BuckyBrooks @BuckyBrooks Aaron Donald simply wreaked havoc up front, allowing the Rams' defense to round into form Aaron Donald should be the Defensive Rookie of the Year. Despite failing to crack the starting lineup until the second month of the season, he went on to put up Pro Bowl numbers for St. Louis as an inside pass rusher. Most importantly, he helped the Rams find their groove on defense when he was inserted into the lineup as a 3-technique. With Donald creating chaos on the interior against the run and pass, Gregg Williams was able to expand his blitz package to harass opponents at the point of attack. This helped the Rams become a tough out despite their shaky QB situation. Brian Billick @CoachBillick @CoachBillick C.J. Mosley looks like Ray Lewis 2.0 Forget his 16 starts and 133 total tackles -- Ravens LB C.J. Mosley gets my vote because he has taken over for an NFL legend (Ray Lewis) without a significant drop-off in on-field production. Elliot Harrison @HarrisonNFL @HarrisonNFL Khalil Mack lived up to the hype -- and then some This award has to go to Khalil Mack. Jason Verrett was someone I was watching, but unfortunately the Chargers CB got hurt. And while some people point to C.J. Mosley for this award, he allowed quarterbacks to complete close to 80 percent of the throws they sent his way. Don't get me wrong, Mosley was still an outstanding rookie, but not like Mack. I just wish I could've watched the Raiders phenom play more. Mack came into the league highly touted as the No. 5 overall pick, and he lived up to the billing with over 30 quarterback knockdowns/hurries. Analytics hub ProFootballFocus.com had him as the highest-rated outside linebacker in the game this year. That is pretty lofty praise. Adam Schein @AdamSchein @AdamSchein Mosley was a core piece on a postseason participant This was a tough one, with Khalil Mack and Aaron Donald deserving consideration. But C.J. Mosley was incredible at a position of leadership for a playoff team. Kevin Patra @KPatra @KPatra Nobody else affected the opposition's game plan like Donald While several candidates are deserving, Aaron Donald made more game-wrecking plays than any of them. The rookie Pro Bowler's nine sacks were 20th in the NFL and tops among first-year players. By the end of the season, teams were scheming to slow down Donald; on a defensive line with multiple Pro Bowl players, that says all you need to know about Donald's effect on a game. Gregg Rosenthal @GreggRosenthal @GreggRosenthal Mack has the all-around talent of a perennial Pro Bowler This one is a lot harder to figure out than Offensive Rookie of the Year. Aaron Donald had the most splash plays and the jaw-dropping athleticism. But I'm going to give the slight edge to Khalil Mack for making a difference from the first week of the season to the last. He's a player that you have to watch a lot to appreciate, because his huge impact didn't show up in the stat sheet for a while. He can stop the run, set the edge, shed blockers and get to the quarterback. He'll be a Pro Bowler for years to come. Charley Casserly @CharleyCasserly @CharleyCasserly Mosley provides the full package in Baltimore C.J. Mosley played well the entire year. This is truly a complete linebacker. While Mosley ranked seventh in the NFL with 133 tackles, he was also productive against the aerial attack, posting eight passes defensed and two interceptions. Mosley was not only one of the best rookies, but he quickly made his mark as one of the up-and-coming ILBs in the NFL. Conor Orr @ConorTOrr @ConorTOrr Donald edges out Mack due to unique skill set Such a difficult choice between Khalil Mack and Aaron Donald, but I like the Rams' rookie defensive tackle, merely because his pressure numbers were fantastic and he plays a more difficult position from which to log such numbers. Our friends at ProFootballFocus.com liked him better than Gerald McCoy or Ndamukong Suh this season. Daniel Jeremiah @MoveTheSticks @MoveTheSticks I like Mosley, but Donald and Mack also merit recognition C.J. Mosley was outstanding this season -- consistent from Week 1 through Week 16. I'd give him the award, although Aaron Donald and Khalil Mack are also worthy candidates.
a willingness to cast a wider net through the maturity of its writing. A lot of this stems from the 90s, with its envelope-pushing oddities (Invader Zim, Courage the Cowardly Dog), influx of anime (all the way up to today, when Space Dandy aired in America before Japan), and the burgeoning heyday of explicitly teen and adult oriented cartoons (Daria, the birth of Adult Swim). And as those who came of age in the late 80s and 90s come to creative positions of power, the realization starts to assert itself that the appeal of animation isn’t down to an age demographic. The exploration of what that might mean is what we’re in the midst of now, and so we come back to that miniseries. Over the Garden Wall is an experiment with one foot in history and one in the now, trying its hardest to act as a fairytale for the millennial generation. Now, OtGW has its hand in quite a few pots as far as thematic exploration, so we’re going to break it down subheading style. And because this show is well worth watching, and richer for going in without prior knowledge, I will now warn for copious spoilers. The Old Façade of New Heroes, and Vice Versa At first glance, there’s quite a muddy aesthetic going on in OtGW: both Wirt and Greg are wearing 19th century Germanic clothing, speaking like modern Americans but without any of the accompanying technology (which later still we find is only as current as cassette tapes and house phones—fitting enough, since the millennial generation begins in the 80s), and Wirt lays himself down for a couch therapy session like a regular Woody Allen (though perhaps that reference can now be better filled by Hannah or any of the myriad mumblecore protagonists of the modern age). But it’s not so much carelessness as a deliberate attempt to put us in the mindset of what it means to be of the “millennial” generation, both glutted with more technological and communicative advancement than any other time period and caught up in the trappings of the past—from the aesthetics of the hipster generation (it would be unkind if not unfair to crush this gem beneath the label of “twee,” but there certainly are a number of well-waxed moustaches) to the resurging echoes of the civil rights era. Which leads us to consider Wirt, a young man caught between child and adult, as a protagonist. Wirt’s very design is misleading—whether because of his round face and anachronistic clothes or simply a solid reference point, it’s something of a shock to hear that Wirt’s in high school. In fact, the narrative almost goes out of its way to obscure this with the “young lover” scene in the tavern (which ends on the lyric “when little boys get married”). On the one hand, it’s something of a nudge at the precocious crushes that litter the TV landscape, where writers find themselves hamstrung between marketable tween protagonists and that sweet, sweet romantic trope box-checking (the problem being less that real kids that age aren’t wrestling with romantic and possibly sexual feelings and more that their TV counterparts are written with an aggressive unwillingness to acknowledge those frustrations in the name of molding tiny adults). On the other hand, it forces us to divorce age from the concept of maturity. It’s a common lowball lobbed at millennials that they don’t become adults but rather taller children. And Wirt is immature: that couch introspection I mentioned lacks any actual introspecting, indulging in how rejected he feels rather than, say, his self-isolating tendencies or general passivity. In the “real” world, he’s so fixated on painting himself as the “nice guy” who had the girl swept away from him that he turns blinders on to Sara’s fairly evident (for teenagers) desire to get closer. Wirt isn’t a bad person, but he’s self-focused without being self-aware, wanting to shape a narrative around himself but unwilling to make the necessarily proactive movements (and speaking of inventing narratives, there’s a whole other essay to be written about Wirt, Beatrice, and those scissors). But at the same time, the story isn’t about Wirt Growing Up … at least, not in the way one would expect. After all, the adults have troubles of their own. The Landscape of the Unknown I’ve been somewhat beaten to the punch on the basics here: this post gives a good rundown of the Unknown as a semi-real, purgatorial kind of landscape that both exists in its own right and also reflects the brothers’ oscillation between life and death: the half-full moon, the autumnal season shifting into winter, and so on. It’s very explicitly a stage of transition, wandering and wanting. All the characters Wirt and Greg meet are missing something, be it a memory, an item, or another being. And at the same time, each place that the brothers visit is a potential “final” resting place that they reject in their quest to return home. While there’s very little on the nose depiction (indeed, I’d wager to say at least some of it is unintentional but no less applicable), each place draws from varies afterlife mythos or religious traditions. Pottsfield, led by the rumbling patriarchal voice of Enoch, evokes Judaism—our heroes’ punishment is temporary (as there’s not really an “eternal damnation” in Jewish belief), and the skeletal bodies of Pottsfield’s residents lay waiting in the ground until their leader enlists someone to resurrect them. The schoolhouse has echoes of Buddhism, with its attempts to spread enlightenment through knowledge, its patron shedding great wealth after having been so impressed by the realization of this enlightenment, and the rejection of pleasure of the worldly (simple mashed potatoes). The tavern has traces of Egyptian mythology, wherein visitors are measured by their actions (hence the enormous pressure to choose a “role” that defines oneself) and the danger of being consumed by a Beast if one is rejected. Endicott’s mansion is the earthly stasis of ghosts, unaware of oneself, others, or even the facts of one’s own existence—still surrounded, in theory, by one’s desires but simultaneously trapped by them. The ferry quite strongly evokes the passage across the river Styx from Greek mythology, which also required payment or trickery to get from one side to the other in one piece. Adelaide’s house is the Atheist conception of death—the complete expunging of the soul or self upon arrival, while one’s body becomes a fuel for those still living. Auntie Whispers’ house harkens to the Puritanical sects, which were all about expunging evil through constant labor and sacrifice. And, of course, Greg takes a trip to the fluffy cloud Christian Heaven that serves as such a popular conception for … well, for children. And most frightening of all is the living death of the Beast’s offer, who stands watch not so much as a Satan figure as the terror of a life unlived. The woods, surrounding each of these end points and becoming most threatening when a wanderer loses hope (through internal or external means), make an apt metaphor for the aimlessness that comes with young adulthood, and the serious impacts of depression. Who Are You? Much is made of roles and desires, explicitly and implicitly, throughout the story. The highlight, of course, is the tavern scene: the regulars are insistent that Wirt have a title for himself (Greg, being young, is exempt from this pressure), are immediately distrustful of him when he doesn’t have one, and go so far as to ascribe him a name in the end. They don’t even stop there—with the name comes a whole narrative of what they know that name to mean, and how it dictates the future of Wirt’s life. And it’s not even malicious in intent, since that is what worked for their own pasts. They’re trying to pass down what they believe to be the wisdom of their generation without realizing that it doesn’t fit the “now” of Wirt’s situation, and they nearly leave him the worse off for it. The adults of OtGW are complicated things. Coming of age stories are often content to pit the old generation against the new one, giving the latter the opportunity to teach the former about how they’ll change things for the better. And there are elements of that here, in both the tavern and the Woodsman’s story. But it’s all tangled up in good intentions and glimmers of truly good advice. We’ve learned long before the end of the series that the lantern IS the Beast, that the woods are a dangerous place, and that there’s something dangerous about Lorna. These are true, helpful bits of advice … but they’re tangled up in obfuscation, unmentioned details, and the fears of the teller. A lack of communication on both sides is often the cause of danger and complication—the adults refuse to explain things to our protagonists, choosing to scare them instead (often because they’re trying to hide their own fear or shame of past actions). At the same time, Wirt’s first instinct is scorn or distrust of the adults they come across, even the ones who aren’t actively malicious, leading him to wholly reject both the good and the bad of their statements. Neither side is presented as wholly right, and it’s most often a combination of the two—the adults’ lived experience and Wirt and Greg’s idealistic, fresh approach to old problems that leads to a solution. But that leaves the question posed before, of who Wirt (and thus, a millennial) might be. It’s not that he gains the confidence to Win the Girl, though in the hospital he finally seems ready to meet her halfway. But that’s not what it’s about—Wirt’s tale is about action versus inaction, and failing to repeat the sins of the past. The Woodsman is pushed by grief and fear into doing evil things (though his conversation with the Beast about the edelwood hints that he would indeed have been willing to knowingly benefit from others’ suffering to protect himself and his “daughter”). The Woodsman isn’t evil, but he is blind to suffering outside his own, unable to break the cycle himself. It’s crucial, then, that Wirt be offered the same fear and the same choice, so that we can observe the present generation—the millennials who’ve been called aimless and self-centered and childish—intuit what must change. Wirt’s realization is of his responsibility to others, and it has two stages. The first is his protectiveness of Greg, and his willingness to disregard his own wants to save a loved one. But that’s not enough—the Woodsman already did that. Wirt must also reject the lantern and its representation of the continued crushing and exploiting of others, strangers or no, to maintain his own position. It’s not that he rejects Greg, but that he sees through to the falseness of the choice. It isn’t “feed the lantern or lose Greg,” it’s “feed the lantern or this corrosive system (revealed as a mass of screaming, horrified faces) cannot survive.” And Wirt is able to throw that hierarchy of humanity away, or recognize that he should—and thus finds his way out of that aimless wandering. He’s not suddenly a perfect human being, but he’s stumbled on a truth that can not only shape the future but inform the past—the Woodsman’s final act (not including the epilogue) is to blow out the lantern himself, tearing down the cycle he hated but couldn’t see a way out of before. And so we come back around to the question of “who am I,” in an uncertain time and generation. To the mocking of SJWs and Twitter activism and the teeming of protests on the streets in untold numbers. There is much yet that millennials don’t know about themselves, but we’re coming to know what we can do and say—that it’s not about shaping roles for ourselves or walking in comparison to old footsteps but about caring for the wellbeing of others, for seeing through established systems of violence and oppression and taking the first steps to finding a new way forward. Imperfectly, uncertainly, but with admirable passion and new insight. Want to share this on Tumblr? There’s a post for that! Vrai is a queer author and pop culture blogger; there is a hole in their physical media collection yearning for a Blu-Ray release of this series. You can read more essays and find out about their fiction at Fashionable Tinfoil Accessories, support their work via Patreon or PayPal, or remind them of the existence of Tweets. —Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.— Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?Publisher: DVG Status: In development 45 – 60 minutes / ages 10+ / solitaire The Battle of Castle Itter was fought near the Austrian village of Itter on 5 May 1945, in the last days of the War in Europe during World War II. US soldiers joined forces with Wehrmacht infantrymen, an SS officer, an Austrian resistance fighter, and recently freed French prisoners of war to defend the castle against an attacking force from the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division. Object of the Game During a game of Castle Itter, you take the role of the force that defended the castle from on 5 May 1945. The goal of the game is to last until the SS deck is depleted, without allowing SS Counters to reach the castle. You score points for each Defender that survives the assault and lose points for each SS Counter remaining on the board at the end of the game – the higher your score, the better. Awards: 2015-16 Wargame Print and Play ContestJim B. Article One Cruz was very good bringing attention to the problems of ObamaCare. But since he has been silent on it's unconstitutional passing. At one tim ehe was willing to shut down government. But after giving the Republican Establishment a donatoin of $240,000 from his PAC and taking a position as joint Chairman of the NRSC, he complains about the law, but brings no attention to the subversion of the process. Few recall how Harry Reid changed Senate rules to bypass the Scott Brown election that kept the Democrats from obtaining the 60 votes needed to pass ObamaCare outright. They changed the rules to only require a simple majority, and we've never heard a filibuster or lawsuit from Cruz since. Pelosi's unconstitutional adoption of a Senate military housing bill to make a'revenue' ObamaCare bill is in violation of the Constitution which clearly defines that revenue bills must originate in the House. Reid and company used political procedures to override both the law and intent of the Constitution. Cruz has used similar tactics including in the passing of ObamaTrade. Ted Cruz authored the Senate bill for ObamaTrade (or TPP/TPA). He took to the airwaves with Rand Paul to speak vigorously for it. What does the Trans-Pacific Trade treaty do? It subverts the US Constitution by placing the authority of US interests and companies under the power of the World Bank and foreign countries that represent over 40% of the world GDP. Jeff Sessions said at the time: ....companies and investors would be empowered to challenge regulations, rules, government actions and court rulings — federal, state or local — before tribunals organized under the World Bank or the United Nations... critics, including many Democrats in Congress, argue that the planned deal widens the opening for multinationals to sue in the United States and elsewhere, giving greater priority to protecting corporate interests than promoting free trade and competition that benefits consumers.12 And it's far worse. Foreign investors could sue the Federal, State, County and City entities for any US investment they made that went bad - even if it had nothing to do with those government entities involved. One foreign government could bankrupt a state under the jurisdiction of foreign powers. The Huffington Post restated one provision this way: "(International companies and investors) can collect not just for lost property or seized assets; they can collect if laws or regulations interfere with these giant companies' ability to collect what they claim are "expected future profits."16 Again, Ted Cruz AUTHORED this bill. Many Cruz followers repeat his assertion that he had second thoughts and voted against it. Many recall the MSM soundbite from Cruz that "Mitch McConnell lied." This had nothing to do with the TPP bill itself, but with an amendment that funded the Import/Export Bank. Ted continued to support ObamaTrade, and even engineered the Senate confirmation in a way that his individual vote would not be recorded. Furthermore Cruz affirmed this this past November by voting AGAINST a provision (Senate Amendment 1251) that stated: "To require the approval of Congress before additional countries may join the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement”… Look up the vote yourself. In other words, Senator Cruz did not want congress to be consulted before other countries, including China, could join TPP and put us directly under international law and foreign powers. If that isn't bad enough, it also would flood the United States with foreign workers, and remove MANY protections already in law. Via Breitbart: Even if the migrant foreign workers (coming from foreign companies and governments as part of the TPP allowance) are paid American wage-levels, the huge influx of foreign workers will flood the U.S. market and drive down wages paid to American technicians and professionals. “It is pure supply-and-demand,” she said. For example, “if you increase the supply of legal services, you increase the number of law firms, you reduce the wages of [American] lawyers...” On this measure, the TPP is written so foreign powers could literally force us to rewrite our immigration laws. Forget Gang of Eight. Any Constitutional - well, almost any Constitutional scholar, can see that this subverts the entire intent of Article I powers. Ted Cruz claimed he would "talk until he couldn't stand" at the ObamaCare filibuster although according to Harry Reid's Communication Director, not only would Cruz have to abandon the floor for a per-scheduled vote, Cruz had negotiated the PR ploy with Reid in the first place. Most conservatives like myself are happy for the attention it brought, but it shows that Cruz is not the "purist" he sells himself to be. In fact the very filibuster itself is believed to be unconstitutional. It most certainly is abused and Cruz was part of that. But on aspects of Iran, the ObamaCare funding budget and other GOP establishment rubber stamps for Obama, Cruz no longer attempts the use of this tool he said was so critical to our Constitution. Article Two and Three " " Citizenship by naturalization can only be acquired *180 by naturalization under the authority and in the forms of law. But citizenship by birth is established by the mere fact of birth under the circumstances defined in the constitution. Every person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, becomes at once a citizen of the United States, and needs no naturalization. A person born out of the jurisdiction of the United States can only become a citizen by being naturalized, "Citizenship" in 1789 SPECIFICALLY outlines that it is to be defined as a child born on US soil to TWO parents who are United States citizens. The The very first Congress defined citizens born abroad as natural born citizens." As shown at the list link above, historian and Founding Father Dave Ramsey, who literally wrote the bookSPECIFICALLY outlines that it is to be defined as a. The Founders spent quite a bit of effort on this provision wanting protections that a President would have loyalty to our country from the aspects of birth and the upbringing. A "native Texan" is one who was born in Texas. If you came when you were 5, you are not a native. Throughout the Founder's writings they use "native" to be equal to born on US soil. In the 1875 Supreme Court decision Minor vs Happersett the court specifically mentions that the definition of "natural born citizen" is not in the Constitution but "it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parent s who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners" However, Cruz and his apologists often cite the Immigration Act of 1790 labeling foreign born children of US parents "as" natural born citizens. Not only doesn't it say "are natural born citizens," but the Act was completely repealed in 1795 and the language replacing it removed the "natural born" association altogether. We have the House Committee notes (link above) that explains one reason the Act was repealed and replaced, rather than amended it, was in part due to the potential confusion of future generations to unconstitutionally apply the poorly worded language. As a "Constitutional scholar" shouldn't Cruz know this? Another Senator does. Is Ted Cruz a US Citizen and Eligible to be a US Senator? “one of the very best advocates ever,” who exemplified “how to try to carry out our craft with the highest level of skill and integrity.” “As an individual, John Roberts is undoubtedly a principled conservative, as is the president who appointed him,” Article Four US Constitution, Article 4, Section 4: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion;” James Madison: “When we are considering the advantages that may result from an easy mode of naturalization, we ought also to consider the cautions necessary to guard against abuses … aliens might acquire the right of citizenship, and return to the country from which they came, and evade the laws intended to encourage the commerce and industry of the real citizens and inhabitants of America, enjoying at the same time all the advantages of citizens…” Through her years of research, Corcoran found that Muslim immigration is a form of jihad through colonization called hijra, which she reports dates back to the time of Mohammad. According to Corcoran, the Muslim Brotherhood pursues the hijra strategy. Corcoran’s sources detail that the migration is actually a religious obligation, in which Muslims are required to spread Islam. “If you don’t help counter the hijra, we are in my opinion, doomed,” warned Corcoran. She notes Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, who said Europe wouldn’t be conquered by guns and swords, but instead by Muslim immigration. The constitutional argument is that the federal government, without the permission of these 12 Wilson-Fish states, has “commandeered” state funds by placing refugees in their states, thereby obligating states to pay Medicaid expenses for the refugees, in violation of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In effect, the federal government is imposing an unfunded federal mandate by regulatory fiat, rather than statutory authority, on these 12 “Wilson-Fish alternative program” states. Article Six ...no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. Amendment I Amendment IV Amendment VIII Michael Wayne Haley The case reveals something interesting about Cruz’s character. Ted Cruz is now running strongly among evangelical voters, especially in Iowa. But in his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace. Cruz’s behavior in the Haley case is almost the dictionary definition of pharisaism: an overzealous application of the letter of the law in a way that violates the spirit of the law, as well as fairness and mercy. Amendment X Ted Cruz believes that Americans have the right to buy a gun, but not to read a food label informing them of toxic dangers. Apparently GMOs are far more dangerous than guns in the mind of Ted Cruz, because GMOs must be hidden from the public even as guns are readily accessible. The only way to get GMOs labeled is to get it done state by state, and these 71 U.S. Senators have now thrown down the gauntlet, stating they believe states have no right to mandate GMO labeling at the local level! Keep that in mind the next time Rand Paul or Ted Cruz talks about "liberty and justice" Where was their justice on the issue of GMO labeling? How does keeping people in the dark on what they're eating create a more free society? For God's sake, what does it take to get somebody in Washington D.C. to consistently and unswervingly vote on the side of liberty and freedom every single time? Amendment VIV "...how could anyone — even a not-very-bright person — imagine that granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens is actually in our Constitution? I know the country was exuberant after the war, but I really don’t think our plate was so clear that Americans were consumed with passing a constitutional amendment to make illegal aliens’ kids citizens. Put differently: Give me a scenario — just one scenario — where guaranteeing the citizenship of children born to illegals would be important to Americans in 1868. You can make it up. It doesn’t have to be a true scenario. Any scenario! You know what’s really bothering me? If someone comes into the country illegally and has a kid, that kid should be an American citizen! Damn straight they should! We’ve got to codify that. YOU MEAN IT’S NOT ALREADY IN THE CONSTITUTION? No, it isn’t, but that amendment will pass like wildfire! It’s like being accused of robbing a homeless person. (1) I didn’t; (2) WHY WOULD I DO THAT? “Luckily,” as FNC’s Shannon Bream put it Monday night, Fox had an “expert” to explain the details: Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox’s senior judicial analyst. Napolitano at least got the century right. He mentioned the Civil War — and then went on to inform Bream that the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to — I quote — “make certain that the former slaves and the native Americans would be recognized as American citizens no matter what kind of prejudice there might be against them.” Huh. In 1884, 16 years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, John Elk, who — as you may have surmised by his name — was an Indian, had to go to the Supreme Court to argue that he was an American citizen because he was born in the United States. He lost. In Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not grant Indians citizenship. Amendment XVI Summary G M T Detect language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Catalan Cebuano Chichewa Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hausa Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Khmer Korean Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maltese Maori Marathi Mongolian Myanmar (Burmese) Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Sesotho Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Sundanese Swahili Swedish Tajik Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish Yoruba Zulu Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Catalan Cebuano Chichewa Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hausa Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Khmer Korean Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maltese Maori Marathi Mongolian Myanmar (Burmese) Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Sesotho Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Sundanese Swahili Swedish Tajik Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish Yoruba Zulu Text-to-speech function is limited to 100 characters Options : History : Help : FeedbackClose Posted in:A CAMPAIGN to name a flyover in honour of murdered journalist Veronica Guerin looks set to be defeated - after being met with strong opposition by Sinn Féin, the Irish Independent has learned. A CAMPAIGN to name a flyover in honour of murdered journalist Veronica Guerin looks set to be defeated - after being met with strong opposition by Sinn Féin, the Irish Independent has learned. Sinn Féin representatives on South Dublin County Council have objected to the proposal, with one party councillor warning that the move would "create a hierarchy of victims" of gangland crime. There had been hopes that the new N7 flyover at Newlands Cross would be named after the murdered mother-of-one in time for her 20-year anniversary on June 26 next year. The proposal to honour Ms Guerin, a Sunday Independent journalist, was tabled by Labour TD for Dublin Mid West Robert Dowds after he secured the permission of her family. Mr Dowds and several other local politicians believe the move would be a fitting tribute to Ms Guerin, who was murdered in cold blood just yards from the flyover in West Dublin. Transport Minister Paschal Donohoe is also in favour of naming the flyover after Ms Guerin. She is one of two journalists from the Independent group who were shot dead in retaliation for exposing the activities of gangland criminals. The other was Martin O'Hagan from Co Armagh. But it's emerged that the proposal by the Labour Party politician is being strongly opposed by Sinn Féin, the largest political grouping on South Dublin County Council. Speaking to the Irish Independent, Sinn Féin councillor Jonathan Graham said naming the crossover in honour of Ms Guerin would be "inappropriate". "This has got nothing to do with Veronica as a person or a journalist," Mr Graham, who is one of the country's youngest councillors, said last night. "But we should not be creating a hierarchy of victims. There are a number of other families who have been affected by criminality in this area. If you take the criminal John Gilligan - many people have been affected by his actions. However, we can't name every street and footpath after that," he added. Mr Graham said that there is "no precedent" for a flyover to be named in memory of a gangland victim and that he and his Sinn Féin colleagues are opposed to the Labour proposal. A spokeswoman for South Dublin County Council said that the issue of naming the flyover after Ms Guerin would be discussed at the council's Land Use Planning and Transportation Committee next week. The matter is also due to go out for public consultation. But given that Sinn Féin is the largest voting bloc on the council, its opposition is likely to cause the proposal to fall. Ms Guerin's name resurfaced in the media in recent weeks after Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams openly joked about placing a gun to the head of the editor of the Irish Independent during an after-dinner speech in New York. The remarks by the Louth TD sparked outrage both at home and abroad and led to accusations that he was making a veiled threat to press freedom. Mr Adams's attack on the Irish Independent was subsequently defended by his deputy leader, Mary Lou McDonald. Irish IndependentIn this tutorial we will learn how to estimate the pose of a human head in a photo using OpenCV and Dlib. In many applications, we need to know how the head is tilted with respect to a camera. In a virtual reality application, for example, one can use the pose of the head to render the right view of the scene. In a driver assistance system, a camera looking at a driver’s face in a vehicle can use head pose estimation to see if the driver is paying attention to the road. And of course one can use head pose based gestures to control a hands-free application / game. For example, yawing your head left to right can signify a NO. But if you are from southern India, it can signify a YES! To understand the full repertoire of head pose based gestures used by my fellow Indians, please partake in the hilarious video below. My point is that estimating the head pose is useful. Sometimes. code section. To access code in all the tutorials in this blog, please subscribe to our newsletter. If you want to quickly jump into code go to the the. To access code in all the tutorials in this blog, pleaseto our newsletter. Before proceeding with the tutorial, I want to point out that this post belongs to a series I have written on face processing. Some of the articles below are useful in understanding this post and others complement it. What is pose estimation? In computer vision the pose of an object refers to its relative orientation and position with respect to a camera. You can change the pose by either moving the object with respect to the camera, or the camera with respect to the object. The pose estimation problem described in this tutorial is often referred to as Perspective-n-Point problem or PNP in computer vision jargon. As we shall see in the following sections in more detail, in this problem the goal is to find the pose of an object when we have a calibrated camera, and we know the locations of n 3D points on the object and the corresponding 2D projections in the image. How to mathematically represent camera motion? A 3D rigid object has only two kinds of motions with respect to a camera. Translation : Moving the camera from its current 3D location to a new 3D location is called translation. As you can see translation has 3 degrees of freedom — you can move in the X, Y or Z direction. Translation is represented by a vector which is equal to. Rotation : You can also rotate the camera about the, and axes. A rotation, therefore, also has three degrees of freedom. There are many ways of representing rotation. You can represent it using Euler angles ( roll, pitch and yaw ), a rotation matrix, or a direction of rotation (i.e. axis ) and angle. So, estimating the pose of a 3D object means finding 6 numbers — three for translation and three for rotation. What do you need for pose estimation? To calculate the 3D pose of an object in an image you need the following information 2D coordinates of a few points : You need the 2D (x,y) locations of a few points in the image. In the case of a face, you could choose the corners of the eyes, the tip of the nose, corners of the mouth etc. Dlib’s facial landmark detector provides us with many points to choose from. In this tutorial, we will use the tip of the nose, the chin, the left corner of the left eye, the right corner of the right eye, the left corner of the mouth, and the right corner of the mouth. 3D locations of the same points : You also need the 3D location of the 2D feature points. You might be thinking that you need a 3D model of the person in the photo to get the 3D locations. Ideally yes, but in practice, you don’t. A generic 3D model will suffice. Where do you get a 3D model of a head from? Well, you really don’t need a full 3D model. You just need the 3D locations of a few points in some arbitrary reference frame. In this tutorial, we are going to use the following 3D points. Tip of the nose : ( 0.0, 0.0, 0.0) Chin : ( 0.0, -330.0, -65.0) Left corner of the left eye : (-225.0f, 170.0f, -135.0) Right corner of the right eye : ( 225.0, 170.0, -135.0) Left corner of the mouth : (-150.0, -150.0, -125.0) Right corner of the mouth : (150.0, -150.0, -125.0) Note that the above points are in some arbitrary reference frame / coordinate system. This is called the World Coordinates ( a.k.a Model Coordinates in OpenCV docs ). Intrinsic parameters of the camera. As mentioned before, in this problem the camera is assumed to be calibrated. In other words, you need to know the focal length of the camera, the optical center in the image and the radial distortion parameters. So you need to calibrate your camera. Of course, for the lazy dudes and dudettes among us, this is too much work. Can I supply a hack? Of course, I can! We are already in approximation land by not using an accurate 3D model. We can approximate the optical center by the center of the image, approximate the focal length by the width of the image in pixels and assume that radial distortion does not exist. Boom! you did not even have to get up from your couch! How do pose estimation algorithms work? There are several algorithms for pose estimation. The first known algorithm dates back to 1841. It is beyond the scope of this post to explain the details of these algorithms but here is a general idea. There are three coordinate systems in play here. The 3D coordinates of the various facial features shown above are in world coordinates. If we knew the rotation and translation ( i.e. pose ), we could transform the 3D points in world coordinates to 3D points in camera coordinates. The 3D points in camera coordinates can be projected onto the image plane ( i.e. image coordinate system ) using the intrinsic parameters of the camera ( focal length, optical center etc. ). Let’s dive into the image formation equation to understand how these above coordinate systems work. In the figure above, is the center of the camera and plane shown in the figure is the image plane. We are interested in finding out what equations govern the projection of the 3D point onto the image plane. Let’s assume we know the location of a 3D point in World Coordinates. If we know the rotation ( a 3×3 matrix ) and translation ( a 3×1 vector ), of the world coordinates with respect to the camera coordinates, we can calculate the location of the point in the camera coordinate system using the following equation. (1) In expanded form, the above equation looks like this (2) If you have ever taken a Linear Algebra class, you will recognize that if we knew sufficient number of point correspondences ( i.e. and ), the above is a linear system of equations where the and are unknowns and you can trivially solve for the unknowns. As you will see in the next section, we know only up to an unknown scale, and so we do not have a simple linear system. Direct Linear Transform We do know many points on the 3D model ( i.e. ), but we do not know. We only know the location of the 2D points ( i.e. ). In the absence of radial distortion
drug cartel violence for a decade. "This is an issue that has directly or indirectly affected the lives of millions of Mexicans," Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said at the start of the first debate, which was broadcast online. "Such a delicate issue cannot be left to improvisation," he said in the Caribbean resort city of Cancun, where experts were invited to debate the drug's effects on public health and addiction. Legalization supporters argue that decriminalizing marijuana would strip drug cartels of a major source of revenue and reduce violence that has killed tens of thousands of people. Pena Nieto has rejected such arguments, but he indicated that his government would be open to changing the laws, depending on the outcome of the debate. Osorio Chong strongly hinted that the administration was open to the medical use of marijuana, noting that there is a "majority (of public) opinion" in favor of such uses. The government, he said, "is completely open to measures that improve the quality of life" of its citizens. Roberto Campa, a deputy interior minister for human rights, said that international conventions do not prohibit the medical use of marijuana. "There is much more space to find agreements in this sense," Campa told reporters. A senator from Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party has introduced legislation that would authorize medical marijuana. Opinion polls show that most Mexicans oppose the legalization of marijuana but that they back its medical use. An eight-year-old epileptic girl named Grace became the symbol of efforts to legalize medical marijuana in Mexico when her parents won a court case last year that allowed them to import a cannabis-based oil to treat her. Since then, other families with epileptic children have urged policymakers to loosen the laws. - Growing regional debate - The government will host four more debates in other parts of the country between January and April ahead of a United Nations conference on drug policy. The Cancun debate included experts from Harvard University and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, with split opinions on the benefits of legalizing pot. "Not all consumption is problematic. It depends a lot on the dose, the frequency (of drug use) and the age," said Deni Alvarez Icaza, a Mexican psychiatrist and co-author of the book "Marijuana and Health." A Mexican health ministry study found that 17.2 percent of middle and high school children consume drugs, with most of those using marijuana. The forums in Mexico are part of a growing debate in the region on legalizing marijuana. In December, the president of Colombia, another country beset by drug violence, signed a decree legalizing medical marijuana. Uruguay has created a regulated market for pot, while Chile's Congress is considering a bill to legalize the drug. In the United States -- the biggest consumer of drugs from Mexico -- 23 states have legalized medical marijuana use while four states plus the US capital city have legalized its recreational use.Howlings Welcome to the Voice of Rage and Ruin: Werewolf Fiction that Goes for the Throat! Horror writers, here’s your chance to howl! We’ll be showcasing werewolf fiction in all its gory, er, glory, on each full moon for the next 13 months, starting on December 10, 2011. We’re looking for werewolf tales that bite back, stalking prey under the glow of the full moon. Share your stories with us! Original fiction of all shapes and sizes is welcome – flash fiction, short stories, novel excerpts, even haiku! Authors are encouraged to include with their submission a short bio and links to their website or publications as a way of networking and connecting within the horror commuinty. Submitting is simple: please include your name, 2-3 sentence bio, and story in the body of an email, and send it to lycantails@gmail.com. If you would like to include a link to where a full version of your story is located or available for purchase, please feel free to include it as well. Alternatively, while we will be updating this page monthly with stories submitted via email, you are also welcome to post your story directly to this page in the comments section, particularly for our inaugural launch on December 10. Just remember to share your name and a little bit about you so that others may find and discover your work elsewhere online. Each month, we’ll be giving away fun and unique prizes by random drawing to contributors of stories within the following word count categories: 5-10 words, 11–30 words, 31-50 words, 51-100 words, and 101-300+ words. Leave your wolfsbane and silver bullets behind, and we’ll meet you here beneath the next full moon with some hair-raising lycan tales! December 10, 2011: Howlings Good Night, Full Moon by Kaiser Sicking All right, good night, little buddy. Papa, You called me a little buddy. I am not a little buddy because I am so big. Oh my gosh. I called you little! Can’t you sing me ‘The Magic House’ song? No, buddy, We already sang a song. We read a book and now it’s time for you to go to bed. But I need a big hug and a big kiss! Well, of course! But Papa, can’t I have a little drink of water? Of course you can. There’s your bowl. Now go to sleep. I’ll see you in three days. About Kaiser Sicking: Kaiser Sicking is the author of An American Warlock in R’lyeh, a perfectly sane tale of ancient, unknowable madness. He can be found on his blog at: http://qxface.wordpress.com/nanowrimo-2011/ or on twitter: @QXFace. Some Blood on the Moon by Emily Smith-Miller What kind of music do werewolves listen to? I think a lot of people would say death metal, Satan rock. I mean, I can see that, but that’s lame vampire shit. Go slit your wrists and bleed on someone, Dracula, give me a fucking break. I get down with a little Goth rock now and again, some Type O Negative and what not, but mostly I’m an alternative punk rock kind of girl, er, werewolf, she-wolf? But tonight I’ve got on Ozzy. Yeah, bark at the moon, baby. Tonight I have an agenda. Now you may say that ‘Bark at the Moon’ is some clichéd shit for a werewolf to listen to. Well, you know what? I also like Warren Zevon’s ‘Werewolves of London’ and loads of other transformation-inspired songs. I like to listen to them on nights like this, when I know I’m going to tear someone’s throat out, when I know I’m going to become the big bad wolf they talk about in horror stories. So it’s me and Ozzy at the wheel of my piece of shit car, covered in Misfit stickers, and the questioning song title ‘Mommy Can I Go Out & Kill Tonight?’ flashes in my head. I switch CDs to Walk Among Us — thank you, Glenn Danzig. He deserves it. I know he does, because I’m one of his beautiful victims. Usually I wouldn’t waste my time with a fucker like this, but he has to be stopped. The girl he’s with is smiling stupidly and I know it’s because she doesn’t know any better, but also because she’s probably a dumb fuck. I don’t want to hurt her, and I won’t, but I’ll probably scare the shit out of her. My large paws flex and my hind legs shiver with anticipation, I suppress a growl. I don’t want to ruin the surprise. I had changed in the alley by Sushi Lounge, so I could stalk him from there and not be seen, what with all the unlit connecting back streets. If someone saw me they would call animal control for fucking sure. I was a large gray and black wolf. Bigger than an average wolf, with bright gold eyes. It would be best not to be seen right now; I didn’t want any more fatalities, just this one. He was petting her suggestively, sending a wave of hatred down my spine. I’m glad he’s so predictable. I usually reserve my kills for really evil people; I wouldn’t have typically considered him an ideal candidate for my tearing treatment, but he’d proven himself time and again. I didn’t trust average justice for the ones I killed; they were repeat offenders who always got off. This guy was a different breed of murderer. He spread his disease to girls, like this one, whose skirt he’s lifting up right now, delicately fingering her scarce panties. He sold his drugs to kids, like the one who died last week. He was a parasitic virus, and now he was going to learn a lesson. I crept behind parked cars, this spot of downtown was free of people and onlookers. It was dark and sickly, like the man who was moving in for his own brand of killing. It only took one forward leap to take him down. The stunned girl waited a pleasant moment before screaming her lungs out. I turned and showed her my finest smile and deepest, echoing growl. That put the fear of god in her and she fell back, like an idiot. Giant wolf beast, propped up on your boyfriend! RUN, BITCH! Finally she got it through her skull and sprinted down the street. I only had moments now; she would bring police, that is if they listened to her incoherent ramblings. But, I didn’t want to hurry things. I wanted to relish this. Because, it had gotten personal. I force my hot breath and dripping saliva in his face. I run my teeth against his skin, my fangs caressing his cheek, and I make him look into my eyes, which change from gold to my own human green, and I know he recognizes them. I was waiting for that moment of recognition, because that’s when the real terror seeped in. Up until this point I was a mad dog, and he might be able to get away if he played dead, but now it was different. He knew I was vengeance, he knew I’d come for him and he knew I was going to fucking eat him alive. With a finite snarl and what I imagine would have been a smile in human form, I place my jaws, my steel trap jaws, around his neck. I feel his heart pounding like a kick drum: Do not have a heart attack before I get my kill, I think. I bite down and take his whole throat with me — esophagus, jugular, windpipe, everything. He is now an almost severed head. Blood soaking on my muzzle, I bound away into the night, satiated, in more than one way. About Emily Smith-Miller: Emily Smith-Miller is the editor and founder of the horror website The Carnage Conservatory, www.carnageconservatory.wordpress.com. She lives in Austin, Texas, likes being covered in fake blood, watching Vincent Price movies, and listening to Abba. She thinks about the zombie apocalypse way too much. Octagon by Joshua Haven When I opened my eyes, all I could see was the bloated harvest moon looming above me, almost close enough to touch. Slowly I became aware of other things: the coppery tang of blood, and the sharp aroma of fear and sweat. The noise of a boisterous crowd, the rattling of chains, the snap of a leather whip on an even more leathery hide, and a short, sharp howl of pain-fueled rage. I sensed, rather than felt, the silver collar and cuffs that bound my neck, wrists, and ankles. I could smell offal and excrement. It was a dark, textured scent of death. I fought against my restraints for a better view, but I already knew what I would see. I was in a holding pen, one of several ringing the octagon. Most of the cages were empty. Dogfighting was illegal, but that did nothing to reduce its popularity. I clenched my fists and drew crescents of blood in my palms from fingernails that were transitioning into talons. As the full moon rose higher into the night sky, I felt the transformation take hold. My breathing had become harsh, ragged, more shallow. My heart pounded within my chest, feeling as if it would explode. I struggled to see through the reddish tint that clouded my vision, no longer understanding that my retinas were optimizing for night vision. My muscles cramped uncontrollably, and I felt a burning sensation along my spinal column as it lengthened, then deepened into a sharp curve. My nose, chin, and jaws elongated, gums leaking blood and aching as razor-sharp teeth erupted from their resting place just below the surface. Around me the crowd noise was deafening. A key turned in a padlock, and the door to my cage creaked open. I listened intently, associating the sound on some visceral level with the possibility of escape. “Your turn, dog,” a man’s voice shouted roughly from a position just behind my head. I could smell him; he didn’t know it, but he wore fear like a cloak below his gruff façade. Fearful or not, he wielded a whip, and I felt its sharp sting across my muzzle. It drew blood, and I howled, low and long. He laughed, and snapped the whip again, this time across my haunches. I scrambled to my feet, only to feel the pinch of a noose around my neck from a capture pole. The man forced my head down, muzzle into the ground. I growled and snapped ineffectively into the dirt. The octagon was lit up with bright floodlights that banished the shadows and illuminated the dark red blood stains in the sand pit. On the far side of the ring, I could see another cage door swinging open. “Move, bitch, fight or die,” the man ordered as he released my shackles. I felt the catch pole loosen in his grasp, and that was all it took. With a snarl, I whipped my head around and sprung at him, reaching for his exposed neck with claws and teeth. He lost his grip on the pole and flung a hand up to defend his face. His other hand still held the whip, but in his panic, it hung useless and forgotten in his fingers. The skin of his throat was as thin as tissue. A wet warmth and an overwhelming aroma of copper filled the air as blood spurted from the gaping wound in his neck. He stood there, staring at me for several seconds, then slowly collapsed to his knees. I licked my lips and howled, then lunged again. My paws slammed into his chest and he fell backwards onto the ground. I savaged his face, ripped into his chest cavity – circling his body and feeding with a savage ferocity, leaving bloody paw prints on the cold concrete floor of the cage. A sudden short, sharp report and then the scent of spent gunpowder. I felt an inferno of silvered pain in my stomach. I lay on my side, bleeding out, whimpering, gazing up at a pair of handlers standing over me. “Finish putting her down,” one of them shouted, voice gruff, enraged. “I had a lot of money riding on this one tonight, godammit.” Another gunshot, then darkness. About Joshua Haven: I’m just a guy who likes to write. I am working on my second novel, and I’m also editing a collection of short stories to be released in early 2012. I write horror; sometimes dark, twisted, and malicious – other times with a humorous edge. In addition to writing, I like to snowboard, hike, eat ridiculous amounts of pizza, watch movies, and read. My cooking sucks, even my dog doesn’t like it. When I grow up, I want to be someone who made a difference. Follow me on Twitter: @JHaven_Horror. The Wicked Moon by Hope Sullivan McMickle The girl reeks of panic. The full moon taunts me as I feel the sudden red-hot shift. Once bi-pedal, now on all fours. Howl. Pursue. Want. She races through the woods as I growl and snap at her heels. Up the embankment. Across the road. Impact. Predator, now roadkill. About Hope Sullivan McMickle: Hope Sullivan-McMickle is a writer and musician who has been a fan of horror since she was old enough to read and a creator of dark works since she was old enough to be trusted with a pencil. She resides in Franklin, Indiana. Tweet her @BlackAlchemy, or browse her blog at https://blackalchemy.wordpress.com/. Advertisements'I was nervous, and I don't even get nervous about nothing,' B tells MTV News about recording 'Grove St. Party' with Weezy. Lil Wayne dropped his highly anticipated and aptly titled Sorry 4 the Wait mixtape on Wednesday, further cementing his knack for jacking beats. One surprise on the project was Weezy's take on Waka Flocka Flame's "Grove St. Party," which included a feature from the Based God himself, Lil B. B was photographed with the YMCB family this past June, and he even tweeted about recording a track with Wayne. Now that the track has finally come to fruition, MTV News caught up with the Based God to chat about the experience and his gratitude to Mack Maine for setting it up. "He put us two together, me and Wayne, because he knew I had dumb-ass respect and major love for Wayne," Lil B told us. "A lot of people say that I'm like him, and I take that as a compliment. It was crazy to see how Wayne embraced me, how he really respect my music [as] an artist. "I was nervous, and I don't even get nervous about nothing, but I was nervous with that boy Wayne in that mother----er," he added about their session. "It was a good nervous, because it was like, 'Man, I really made it.' It was a bunch of people in the studio, but Wayne had it for me and him to get on this song, and it was just a real honor." Lil B said the experience was like an NBA rookie getting a chance to play one-on-one against Kobe or Jordan, adding that Wayne was a fan of his music — the copious amounts of it — and a supporter of what he was doing. "He really liked the song 'Free Wayne' that I did," Lil B said. "He knows what's up. Wayne is hip. He knows about the cooking dance and everything. We was out there cooking at the Curren$y show, going nuts. Everybody at Cash Money, I just want them to have a long life, be safe, healthy and have fun and be happy." Have you checked out Wayne's "Grove St. Party"? Share your reviews in the comments!Firewatch, "a mystery set in the Wyoming wilderness, where your only emotional lifeline is the person on the other end of a handheld radio," is the first game from Campo Santo, according to the game's official site. Players will assume the role of Henry, a man who retired to spend his time atop a mountain looking for smoke that would signal a wildfire. Set during what the website describes as an "especially hot and dry summer," Henry's supervisor, Delilah, is his distant companion. Firewatch puts "something strange" in Henry's path, and the choices he makes during his wilderness excursion can foster or endanger his only relationship. The game is being developed in Unity and is headed to Linux, Mac and Windows with an estimated 2015 release window, but the developer is "actively exploring" a release on consoles, according to an FAQ on the official Firewatch site. The FAQ also reveals that there are a limited number of prints available with the artwork shown above in the company store for $50 each. "And from this point on, we're going to capitalize on our tenuous grasp on the notion of confidentiality," reads a post on the company's blog. "Here on the studio blog, we'll be posting bits and pieces from the development of Firewatch, as well as general Campo Santo office shenanigans." Campo Santo was announced last year as a collaboration between ex-Telltale Games creative director and designer Jake Rodkin, designer and writer Sean Vanaman, Mark of the Ninja lead designer Nels Anderson from Klei Entertainment as well as graphic designer Olly Moss. The studio was founded in partnership with Panic, the iOS and Mac developer based in Portland producing the game. In February 2014, video game composer, designer and Double Fine Productions community manager Chris Remo announced that he'd joined Campo Santo. The Firewatch FAQ also references environment artist Jane Ng, who served in that role on Double Fine's The Cave. Be sure to read our interview with Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser to learn how and why the developer made its way into video games.'Fingertip touch' clue to human ancestors exploiting treetop environments Ancestral humans lost the long fingers and toes that tree-dwelling great apes, including orangutans, have retained. Research by scientists at the University of Birmingham suggests that ancestral humans may have been more adept at negotiating unstable arboreal environment than previously thought. A study published in Nature Scientific Reports shows that by using light fingertip touch, participants were able to improve their balance in a simulated forest canopy environment by up to 30%. The findings lend new weight to the theory that our early ancestors continued to exploit the forest canopy for resources even as they evolved to walk on two legs. During the study, participants were shown video footage of swaying branches whilst attempting to balance on a branch-like bouncy springboard. Without support, viewing the footage destabilised the participants as much wearing a blindfold. However, when participants were allowed to use light fingertip touch on an adjacent support, their balance significantly improved and the effort required by their thigh muscles was reduced by nearly a third. Lead researcher on the study, Dr Susannah Thorpe from the University of Birmingham, says: ‘Most modern apes are able to move around the tree canopy by hanging with their arms or gripping with long, prehensile toes. It has long been thought that the relatively short fingers and toes of our human ancestors, which evolved to allow them to use tools and to walk upright, would have prevented them from foraging in the trees. ‘Our research shows that our early ancestors may have been able to overcome the arboreal limitations of their evolving bodies by using a ‘light touch strategy’ to avoid falls and reduce energy expenditure when negotiating the unstable treetop environment.’ Ends For more information, please contact Liz Bell, Communications Manager for Science and Technology at the University of Birmingham on +44 (0) 121 414 5134. For out-of-hours enquiries please call +44 (0) 7789 921 165. Notes to editorsPacifiCorp Energy, a subsidiary of PacifiCorp, based in Portland, Oregon, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Wyoming today to violating the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) in connection with the deaths of protected birds, including golden eagles, at two of the company’s wind projects in Wyoming. Under a plea agreement with the government, the company was sentenced to pay fines, restitution and community service totaling $2.5 million and was placed on probation for five years, during which it must implement an environmental compliance plan aimed at preventing bird deaths at the company’s four commercial wind projects in the state. The company is also required to apply for Eagle Take Permits which, if granted, will provide a framework for minimizing and mitigating the deaths of golden eagles at the wind projects. The charges stem from the discovery of the carcasses of 38 golden eagles and 336 other protected birds, including hawks, blackbirds, larks, wrens and sparrows by the company at its “Seven Mile Hill” and “Glenrock/Rolling Hills” wind projects in Carbon and Converse Counties between 2009 and the present. The two wind projects are comprised of 237 large wind turbines sited on private and company-owned land. “PacifiCorp Energy built two of its Wyoming wind projects in a manner it knew would likely result in the deaths of eagles and other protected birds,” said Sam Hirsch, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “PacifiCorp has taken steps to minimize the hazard, and with this plea agreement has committed to a comprehensive plan to continue such efforts in partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to seek eagle take permits for each project, and to work to prevent future eagle deaths.” In documents presented in court, the government alleged that PacifiCorp Energy failed to make all reasonable efforts to build the projects in a way that would avoid the risk of avian deaths by collision with turbine blades, despite prior guidance from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). However, the company cooperated with the FWS investigation and has already implemented measures aimed at minimizing avian deaths at the sites. “Improperly sited and operated wind energy facilities can kill significant numbers of federally protected birds and other species,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe, urging developers to follow the Service’s Land-based Wind Energy Guidelines. “That’s why it’s imperative that wind energy developers work with the Fish and Wildlife Service to minimize these impacts at every stage in the process.” More than 1,000 species of birds, including bald and golden eagles, are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). The MBTA, enacted in 1918, implements this country’s commitments under avian protection treaties with Great Britain (for Canada), Mexico, Japan and Russia. The MBTA provides a misdemeanor criminal sanction for the unpermitted taking of a listed species by any means and in any manner, regardless of fault. The maximum penalty for an unpermitted corporate taking under the MBTA is $15,000 or twice the gross gain or loss resulting from the offense, and five years’ probation. Commercial wind power projects can cause the deaths of federally protected birds in four primary ways: collision with wind turbines, collision with associated meteorological towers, collision with, or electrocution by, associated electrical power facilities, and nest abandonment or behavior avoidance from habitat modification. Collision and electrocution risks from power lines (collisions and electrocutions) and guyed structures (collision) have been known to the utility and communication industries for decades, and specific methods of minimizing and avoiding the risks have been developed, in conjunction with the FWS. The FWS issued its first interim guidance about how wind project developers could avoid impacts to wildlife from wind turbines in 2003, and replaced these with a “tiered” approach outlined in the Land-Based Wind Energy Guidelines (2012 LBWEGs), developed with the wind industry starting in 2007 and released in final form by the USFWS on March 23, 2012. The Service also released Eagle Conservation Plan Guidance in April 2013 and strongly recommends that companies planning or operating wind power facilities in areas where eagles occur work with the agency to implement that guidance completely. For wind projects, due diligence during the pre-construction stage—as described in the 2003 Interim Guidance and tiers I through III in the 2012 LBWEGs— requires surveying the wildlife present in the proposed project area, consulting with agency professionals, determining whether the risk to wildlife is too high to justify proceeding and, if not, carefully siting turbines so as to avoid and minimize the risk as much as possible. This is critically important because no post-construction remedies, known as “advanced conservation practices” have been developed that can “render safe” a wind turbine placed in a location of high avian collision risk. Other experimental measures such as prey reduction, and devices that detect and deter avian proximity to turbines are being tested. In the western United States, golden eagles may be particularly susceptible to wind turbine blade collision by wind power facilities constructed in areas of high eagle use. The $400,000 fine imposed in the case will be directed to the federally-administered North American Wetlands Conservation Fund. The company will also pay $200,000 in restitution to the State of Wyoming, and perform community service by making a $1.9 million payment to the congressionally-chartered National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, designated for projects aimed at preserving golden eagles and increasing the understanding of ways to minimize and monitor interactions between eagles and commercial wind power facilities, as well as enhance eagle rehabilitation and conservation efforts in Wyoming. The company must implement a migratory bird compliance plan containing specific measures to avoid and minimize golden eagle and other avian wildlife mortalities at the company’s four commercial wind projects in Wyoming. According to papers filed with the court, PacifiCorp will spend approximately $600,000 per year implementing the compliance plan. The company must also apply to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for a Programmatic Eagle Take Permit at each of the four wind projects cited in the case. The case was investigated by Special Agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and prosecuted by Senior Counsel Robert S. Anderson of the Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section of the Environment and Natural Resources Division and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Conder of the District of Wyoming.Kristen Wiig’s Last Man on Earth role has been shrouded in secrecy — until now. In the following exclusive featurette, Wiig is reunited with former Saturday Night Live co-star Will Forte, and together they divulge one tiny spoiler about her midseason debut (airing Sunday, March 5 at 9:30/8:30c). As revealed in the clip below, Wiig plays a character by the name of Pamela Brinton, whose introduction factors into a “part of the show’s history in a very fun and interesting way,” according to Forte. Per Fox’s official synopsis, “Got Milk?” will harken back to the beginning of the deadly virus outbreak, with details revealed through a “special lens.” The regular Last Man cast appears to be MIA in the episode, signaling that we may not see Phil, Carol and the rest of the survivors — or learn poor Gail’s fate — until the following episode. As you’ll recall, Last Man‘s second midseason premiere also jettisoned the ensemble, and only featured guest stars Jason Sudeikis, Mark Boone Junior and Jacob Tremblay. Press PLAY on the video below to get the 411 on Wiig’s arrival.A native plant has been nurtured back from the brink of extinction after a chance discovery of seeds. Photo: SUPPLIED / Scion Research It has taken four years for Crown research institute Scion to successfully grow the white-flowered ngutukākā from a gift of seeds from a wild seed collector's estate. The shrub is a rare variant of the well-known red-flowered species also known as the kākābeak. Ngutukākā were last seen in the wild in the 1950s at the Tiniroto cliffs near Wairoa in Hawke's Bay, on the east coast of the North Island. The bag of seeds that led the plant's recovery were found by chance in a garden shed, Scion forest science general manager Brian Richardson said. The institute has been been working with iwi, the Department of Conservation, Landcare Research and the Ngutukākā Recovery Group to ensure the variant's survival. Kiwa Hammond of Ngāti Kohatu and Ngāti Hinehika said, even though the white-flowered ngutukākā had not been seen for decades, its patterns were strong features in their carvings and ta moko. Karen Te Kani led the project at Scion's nursery. She said, from a starting point of 60 seeds, the team was able to grow four flowering plants - which in turn provided seeds and cuttings to grow the 300 shrubs they have today. Genetic testing has been used to trace the plants' origins back to the Wairoa region, and the majority of the plants will be returned to Ngāti Kohatu and Ngāti Hinehika in a special ceremony today. The ngutukākā is New Zealand's most widely recognised endangered plant. The Department of Conservation formalised a recovery plan for it in 1993. Rabbits, goats, deer and snails all pose risks but the plant's biggest enemies are introduced invasive plant species such as buddleia and gorse, which compete in the same forest environment. One hundred white-flowered ngutukākā plants will be planted on protected land surrounding Te Reinga Marae in Wairoa.In response to NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s recent protests about police abusing their power, the Santa Clara police union over the weekend threatened to stop providing security at the stadium where Kaepernick’s San Francisco 49ers play. In a letter sent to the 49ers management Friday, the Santa Clara Police Officers’ Association acknowledged that Kaepernick “exercise[d] his right of free expression” when he refused to stand for the national anthem to bring attention to racial disparities in police shootings. But the union added that it has a “duty to protect its members and work to make all of their working environments free of harassing behavior,” then threatened to stop offering security at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. Police officers voluntarily agree to work at Levi’s Stadium. If enough officers don’t sign up for the event, the local police chief can assign officers to a game at the stadium. In a statement to USA Today, Santa Clara Police Chief Michael Sellers rebuked the letter: “I will urge the [Santa Clara Police Officers' Association] leadership to put the safety of our citizens first. I will work with both sides to find a solution. In the meantime, I will ensure we continue to provide a safe environment at Levi’s Stadium.” “Many of us in the law enforcement community have been saddened and angered by Kaepernick's words and actions,” Sellers said. “His blanket statements disparaging the law enforcement profession are hurtful and do not help bring the country together. As distasteful as his actions are, these actions are protected by the Constitution. Police officers are here to protect the rights of every person, even if we disagree with their position.” Kaepernick grabbed headlines over the past several weeks after he refused to stand for the national anthem before preseason games and later wore socks with cartoon pigs in police outfits. He’s said that “there is police brutality. People of color have been targeted by police.” He specifically called out the San Francisco Police Department, arguing, “We have cops in the SFPD that are blatantly racist and those issues need to be addressed.” (The SFPD has been mired by scandals involving racist text messages over the past couple of years, including several “jokes” that repeatedly use the n-word.) The police union’s boycott threats essentially prove Kaepernick’s argument. As Adam Stites pointed out at SB Nation, “Kaepernick’s message boils down to police being selective about who they choose to serve and protect. Officers threatening to pull their services from 49ers games because of his comments essentially validates them.” What’s more, there really are racial disparities in police forces — even though police unions across the country have repeatedly protested such claims from the Black Lives Matter movement over the past several years. There are big racial disparities in how police use force It is obviously true, as the police union points out in its letter, that not all cops are bad or racist. But the problem is not whether some individual police officers can do a good job. The key issue here is whether there are systemic racial disparities in how police use force. The data certainly shows there are very big disparities. An analysis of the available FBI data by Vox’s Dara Lind shows that US police kill black people at disproportionate rates: They accounted for 31 percent of police killing victims in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population. A 2015 study by researcher Cody Ross that looked at police shooting data also found, “There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.” There are many systemic issues at play here: how police are disproportionately deployed in minority neighborhoods, how cops are encouraged to make as many arrests and issue as many tickets as possible, how they — like much of the public — hold subconscious biases against black people. Some police officers have acknowledged these issues. Some New York City officers said that they actively target minority communities, for example, to meet informal quotas for stops and arrests effectively set in place by higher-ups. “When you put any type of numbers on a police officer to perform, we are going to go to the most vulnerable,” Adhyl Polanco, a New York City police officer, told New York’s WNBC. “We’re going to [the] LGBT community, we’re going to the black community, we’re going to go to those people that have no boat, that have no power.” This is what Kaepernick is protesting: not individual police officers but a system that pushes even good cops to do the wrong thing and potentially act in racist ways. Police unions are often the most ardent defenders of police While Kaepernick’s protest is relatively new, the attitude behind the police union’s letter is not — time and time again, police unions have been some of the biggest, most outspoken defenders of police. For example, in 2014, Cleveland Browns player Andrew Hawkins wore a shirt calling for “Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford,” both of whom police in Ohio shot and killed after reportedly mistaking toy guns they were holding for real firearms. Then–Cleveland Police Patrolman Union president Jeff Follmer quickly fired back in a statement to local news station NewsNet5, calling Hawkins's actions “pretty pathetic” and demanding an apology from the Browns. When Hawkins refused to apologize, Follmer told MSNBC's Ari Melber that the Rice shooting — in which a 12-year-old boy died after a police officer shot him within two seconds of getting out of his squad car — was “justified.” Follmer also suggested Rice’s death was his own fault. “If you’re wrong, you’re wrong. If you’re right, then the courts will figure it out.” “I think the nation needs to realize that when we tell you to do something, do it,” he said. “If you’re wrong, you’re wrong. If you’re right, then the courts will figure it out.” To some degree, this is police unions merely filling their roles: Unions are required under the “duty of fair representation” covered by the National Labor Relations Act and state laws to give the best possible protections — including legal aid and support in job negotiations — to all their members. But they’re not legally required to use inflammatory rhetoric, like effectively blaming a 12-year-old for his own death, or to get into public fights with NFL players and their teams. The
(Jason Steele in the show) to create a fake General Lee and trick the Dukes into driving it, at which point he promptly orders their arrest for auto theft. The fake car was easily identified because its doors opened). This was not at first planned but while filming the first chase (where Bo and Luke are chasing Cooter in Rosco's car) the passenger's door handle was damaged (when it hit the mailboxes) and could not be opened from the outside, so Tom Wopat (Luke) climbed though the window and the director loved the move so much he had John Schneider (Bo) climb in too, this is why only LEE 1 and 2 had full roll cages and all other General Lees only had a roll bar (this made it easier for the actors to get in and out).[citation needed] In the movie, the car has been repaired after being trashed, but the doors could not be fixed fast enough. The driver and passenger must slide in the window (as in NASCAR). For a running entry, Bo and Luke also slide over the hood rather than walk around the front of the car. However, in the prequel The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning, the left door was welded shut while the right one was not. Exhaust systems [ edit ] Exhaust systems were basic: some had glasspack mufflers, but most had standard exhausts with the pipe cut just before the rear end. The exhaust sound that can be heard on most of the California-era episode General Lees is from a Thrush brand glasspack. The sounds came from the exhaust systems fitted to the "close-up" cars; the parts used were Blackjack brand headers, dual exhausts, and the aforementioned Thrush mufflers. However, the sounds were dubbed in after the scene was filmed. Tires [ edit ] Tires used on the General Lee varied, but the best known make and model was the B.F. Goodrich Radial T/A. The most common size was P235/70R14; P235/70R15 was also used. Winston Winners were also used.Al Gore Optimistic About Future: “Civilization Could End in Next 100 Years” by Rabbit / Earth First! Newswire “Big money has perverted our democracy—hacked it, taken it over, and twisted it to serve the purposes of special interests.” Al Gore is famous for being behind the curve, but is he finally waking up? Maybe, but he’s still a bit groggy. In a recent interview with Motherboard, the former Vice President stated explicitly that saving civilization from climate change will take a lot of work. His first proposed tactic for solving the current environmental catastrophe is igniting an internet revolution. Gore believes that internet activism has the potential to overthrow the grip of special interests. “I think we need an Occupy democracy movement, if you will.” Gore compares the internet to the printing press, in that it allows individuals to spread their political message without going through the corporate gatekeepers of, say, television. And since the printing press was successful in stopping the industrial revolution in its tracks—a revolution which many at the time predicted would lead us to the shadowy land of corporate rule and dying ecosystems we live in today—he might be on to something. But Al’s most optimistic message came when he was asked how bad it could get if we fail to fix the democratic system, to lower carbon emissions, to protect topsoil, etc. Gore replied, “What’s at risk if we did not take action truly is the survival of civilization as we know it.” You heard it here folks—Al Gore says do nothing, and civilization will crumble on its own. Yes, that’s right, the very civilization that’s poisoning the water, blowing up the mountains, clearcutting the forests, damming the rivers, sending hundreds of species to extinction a day and threatening the very existence of the human species. If we leave it alone, Gore says, it will die, freeing the prisoners, the land, the old-growths, the animals in labs and factory farms, the families trapped behind artificial borders, and even the media from its corporate stranglehold. The former Vice President seems to be espousing a sort of post-punk, nihilistic brand of green anarchism. We at the EF! Journal Collective think it may also take a lot of help from caring individuals to bring down the Leviathan. And the sooner it falls, the more mountains, lakes, rivers, cultures, languages and species will still be around to watch the crash. So I say, despite the pot of gold Al Gore sees at the end of the rainbow, we should still do everything we can to give it that last little push over the edge. After all, if a civilization falls in the middle of the desert, and there’s no one around to hear it, does it even make a sound? Share this: Google Reddit Twitter Facebook Print Email More LinkedIn Pinterest Pocket TumblrCarter and Rachel Popoff have always been voracious readers. As kids, the now teen siblings from Brampton loved snuggling up on the couch with their parents and a good book. They would spend summers raising thousands of dollars for their school library through lemonade stands and would never refuse a trip to Chapters to expand their home collection. So last year, when their mother took the hundreds of tales they amassed through their childhood and turned them into a little free library on the quiet, sidewalk-free Byng St. side of their corner-lot house on Mill St. South, the pair adored watching families stroll up to the nook to take or return books. Kimberley Popoff, left, talks with neighbour Ashely Goodfellow-Craig about the decision to let the mini library stand. The Popoff family won a reprieve Tuesday from the City of Brampton when the municipality reversed a bylaw officer's order to take it down. ( Rick Madonik / Toronto Star ) Rachel, 13, Carter, 15, Kimberley and Michael Popoff, with their mini library. Kids' books from the younger Popoffs' collection form the nucleus of the little library, which lets neighbours borrow freely. ( Rick Madonik / Toronto Star ) But on Monday, they received an order from a city bylaw officer demanding they “immediately” remove the library from the public property on which it stands. The order cited a bylaw deeming the library “an obstruction” and warning that failure to remove it would result in legal action. Following questions from the Star and other media, the city backtracked Tuesday afternoon, apologizing for “the concern and any inconvenience this may have caused.” Spokesperson Megan Ball told the Star in an email, “Staff will be working with the homeowner to come to a reasonable solution related to the location of the community library box.” Article Continued Below The whole ordeal, said Rachel and Carter’s mother, Kimberley, shocked the family. “We didn’t think the city would care because we are fostering community spirit and reading,” she told the Star. “It is a quiet street with barely anyone driving there… Families would stop at it all the time, and neighbours would walk by and smile. Some people would even take photos with it.” Kimberley, a project manager at a technology company, said the Popoffs were originally given five days to tear down the library that her husband Michael crafted from a spare stained-glass window and some wood. It can’t be described as an eyesore; the colour scheme and Tudor style even match their home. Readers are treated to a stock of books for children and adults, rotated on a bi-weekly basis, with usually 30 available at a time. The 200 or so spares fill the family’s garden shed. The library doesn’t impede pedestrians, Kimberley pointed out, noting that there are dozens of other little free libraries across the GTA. Article Continued Below Moving the Popoff iteration to her backyard, as some have suggested, could be problematic, she said, because of the family dog and the foot traffic it would draw. The Popoffs said they decided not to pull it down right away, in hopes that a city councillor who visited Tuesday morning would convince staff to let the library stay. When they heard back from the city Tuesday afternoon, they were told they could keep the library but to expect some further paperwork. Ball said the issue hadn’t come to the city’s attention through complaints. Instead, it was a city staff member who noticed the encroachment and acted on it. As a result, she said, “senior staff have contacted the owner and apologized for failing to contact the home owner prior to the issuance of the order.” A post Kimberley circulated on Facebook about the library’s impending removal amassed dozens of messages from locals calling the city’s action “a shame,” “hard to believe” and “so disappointing.” Read more about:The LHC's proton collisions, which have now successfully nailed down the existence of the Higgs boson, get most of the attention, both in the media and at CERN itself. But, for a few weeks each year, the collider is switched over to smashing lead ions. Heavy ion collisions, in fact, are considered to provide such distinct information that the US has kept open the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which is dedicated to smashing heavy ions, even as it shut down the Tevatron, its dedicated proton/antiproton collider. Right on the heels of the Higgs announcement, Science is running a review of heavy ion collisions, which nicely explains why they tell us something completely different from what's revealed by proton colliders. Plus it provides a nice picture of how the LHC will provide new data, and the upgrades that have taken place at the RHIC to help keep it relevant. The matter we see around us is comprised mainly of protons and neutrons. These, in turn, are composed of quarks and gluons, which mediate the strong force that binds them together. Because the potency of the strong force increases with distance, breaking up a nucleon (proton or neutron) typically requires high levels of energy that basically blast the nucleon in part. That's precisely the sort of thing that happens during the proton collisions that take place at the LHC. Heavy ion collisions—lead at the LHC, gold at RHIC—involve huge numbers of nucleons, on the order of 400. That creates a very different environment. The quarks and gluons that spill out of a proton collision tend to have nothing but empty space around them. In a heavy ion collision, the large number of nucleons that are broken apart at once means that, instead of flying into empty space, a given quark or gluon will have the opportunity to interact with those pouring out of nearby nucleons. As a result, for a brief instant, the collisions don't look much like an explosion; instead, it looks more like the boundaries between nucleons melting, leaving behind a sea of quarks and gluons that are interacting. The resulting material, called a quark-gluon plasma, isn't just interesting on theoretical grounds. In the first moments of the Universe's existence, the energy density was so high that all normal matter was in this state. It took about a second to cool down enough for protons to condense out of the QGP. But, before that second was up, the Universe had gone through its entire inflationary period, sowing the seeds for the large-scale structures we see today. What actually goes on as the QGP forms? The review divides things up into three stages. In the first portion of things, the newly liberated gluons form a dense mesh of interactions. This sets the stage for phase 2, where the quarks, while under the influence of the fields generated by the gluons, form the actual QGP. This soup of particles quickly "thermalizes," meaning energy becomes evenly distributed among its components. As this happens, the QGP starts to expand. Despite its extremely high density, the QGP shows a shear viscosity that's tiny, making the QGP one of the closest things we've seen to an ideal quantum liquid. Somewhat surprisingly, its behavior is nicely described by equations used in string theory—to describe a five-dimensional black hole. The correspondence does have limitations, though, and the review suggests that finding ways to extend the comparison might give the experimentalists more things to look for. In any case, as the QGP expands, its energy density drops, and it eventually reaches the point where it drops below what's necessary to maintain the plasma. At this stage, various particles "freeze out," including nucleons and other more exotic particles. How do you study this process? One of the simplest ways is to simply track all the particles that freeze out, and trace them back to where they came from. This lets researchers reconstruct the shape of the QGP as particles condense out of it. The collisions also create some highly energetic particles that start outside the plasma, but with a momentum that carries them into it. If these particles are quarks, they can participate in interactions with the QGP. In the case of light quarks, that will slow them down considerably. But heavier quarks will simply radiate off some energy (in the form of gluons) and pass through without losing much momentum, providing a sensitive probe for conditions within the QGP. This is where the LHC's higher energy could come in handy. The lead ion collisions there are high enough energy that they can produce Z bosons, the carriers of the weak force. These should be able to cross the QGP, and provide a very different probe of the conditions inside it, since it won't interact in the same ways quarks do. So far, the information generated at the LHC has largely extended the findings of RHIC into higher energy domains. Meanwhile, RHIC isn't standing still. In additions to upgrades to its detectors, the accelerator chain has been modified to provide the ability to collide many different ions. The review's authors, for example, are excited about the prospect of colliding uranium ions. The nucleus of these atoms is asymmetric, so some of the collisions should provide QGPs with distinct shapes, which will vary the transit time that particles take across the plasma. The asymmetric collisions may also provide a glimpse into the earliest steps of forming gluon interaction networks, which remain poorly understood. In any case, although these collisions aren't going to result in the discovery of new particles, continued work at RHIC and the LHC should provide a clearer picture of the formation and behavior of the quark-gluon plasma and, in the process, give us a better understanding of the Universe's first moments. Science, 2012. DOI: 10.1126/science.1215901 (About DOIs).Sarah Palin's missed opportunity By Ezra Klein Your Browser DoesNot Support IFrames. I'll stand with Jon Chait and, oddly enough, Sarah Palin on this one: Palin is right to feel aggrieved. As Chait says, many have blamed her for a killing rampage that she had nothing to do with. A lot of Palin's rhetoric is over the top, and her gun metaphors ("RELOAD!") and her target sights looked unsettling in light of subsequent events, but those subsequent events were not her fault. Too many were too quick to imply she had a significant role in them. Moreover, I just don't care if Palin thought "blood libel" was a vivid way of saying "nasty smear" instead of a description of the once-common anti-Semitic trope that Jews murder Christian children because their blood is needed to bake matzoh. I'm Jewish, so I know the term well. But I imagine the history of it is more obscure to those who didn't attend Hebrew school. This is not worth the headlines it's been getting. What is remarkable to me, however, is Palin's ability to never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Palin didn't ask to be part of this story. But she did choose how to respond to it. Imagine if Palin had come out and said, "My initial response was to defend the fact that I had never condoned such violence, and never would. But the fact is, if I in any way contributed to an unhealthy political climate, I have to be more careful and deliberate in my public language rather than merely sharpen my defenses." That would've been leadership: It would have made her critics look small, and it would've made her look big. Those who doubted whether Palin could rise to an occasion that called for more than sharp partisanship would've been silenced. Of course, Palin didn't say that. Al Sharpton did (or at least he said something very close). Palin accused her opponents of propagating a "blood libel." Rather than admitting that we all sometimes go too far, and that we must constantly work to see the humanity in others and tamp down on the dangerous certainty we have in ourselves, she lashed out at her critics, mocked the idea that political rhetoric was ever "less heated" and noted that there was a time when politicians settled disputes through duels. So that's Palin's substantive response: Politics has never been reliably civil, her critics are unfair to her and at least she's not shot anybody. All that is true. But you won't find "stop bothering me, this tragedy isn't my fault" in the chapter headings of any books on leadership. Palin could've taken this opportunity to look very big, and instead she now looks very small. And that's not the fault of her detractors or her map. It's her fault, and her fault alone.Image caption Lennox was impounded by Belfast City Council's dog wardens in 2010 Lennox, an illegal pit-bull terrier type dog, has been put down, Belfast City Council has confirmed. The dog, which was put down on Wednesday after the expiry of a midnight deadline for legal appeals, attracted a global campaign of support. Campaigners claimed to have 200,000 signatures supporting a reprieve and emotions were running high. Staff at Belfast City Council were targeted for intimidation by some supporters. One Belfast councillor has received a death threat over Lennox's proposed destruction and workers in Belfast City Council have become the target of a fresh series of intimidating and threatening messages. Some Northern Ireland vets said they had been inundated with emails from campaigners. One leading Northern Ireland veterinary surgeon said the emails being sent to individual vets and practices were causing problems. "No doubt those campaigners feel this is justified as a means of advancing their aims," the vet said. "However, I have now heard of two practices where test results for critically-ill animals failed to reach the vet as their mailbox was full of Lennox letters. "I am sure that disrupting the treatment of other animals was not the intention of the campaigners, but I am afraid that is what is happening." Lennox was impounded by Belfast City Council's dog wardens in 2010. In June, Northern Ireland's most senior judges rejected Caroline Barnes' legal bid to overturn an order for the destruction of her pet. Ms Barnes, who is disabled, and her family, insisted that Lennox was not dangerous. While it was not clear exactly what breed he was, pit bulls and dogs like them are illegal in Northern Ireland and in the rest of the UK. 'Danger to public' Two lower courts had already ruled that the dog should be put down. The dog was seized by Belfast City Council dog wardens in May 2010. He was assessed to be a danger to the public and subsequently ordered to be put down. Image caption Belfast City Council has confirmed that Lennox was put down on Wednesday A former Metropolitan Police dog handler claimed the dog represented a danger due to his unpredictability. Ms Barnes, 35, had accepted her pet was a pit-bull type, but claimed there had been a failure to properly consider a possible exemption scheme. Her battle for Lennox became an international campaign to save his life. It went "viral" on social media websites and attracted tens of thousands of well-wishers. Well-known people including boxer Lennox Lewis and Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson were among those who used Twitter to call for the dog to be spared. Some of the dog's followers took the campaign to extremes and Belfast council workers became the focus of intimidation and abuse. Last year, threatening letters, one drenched in petrol, were put through the letter-boxes of two female dog wardens. Another staff member had her car tyres slashed outside her home. 'Unpredictable' In a statement on Wednesday, the council said: "Whilst there is an exemption scheme to which dogs of this type (pit-bull terrier type) may be admitted as an alternative to destruction, there were no such measures that could be applied in this case that would address the concerns relating to public safety. "The council's expert described the dog as one of the most unpredictable and dangerous dogs he had come across." Belfast City Councillor Pat McCarthy said several council staff had been intimidated. "We've had dog wardens who had to leave their homes. We've had petrol poured through letter boxes, we've had people named on the web," he said. "There have been attempts to demonize our staff for doing their job. The dog has now been put to sleep. It was deemed a dangerous dog. "There was a court order for the dog's destruction and we had to carry it out. "The people looking after Lennox for the past two years said that one minute the dog was placid and friendly and the next he would try to get through the fence to get at you. "Now do we release that dog into society? We have a duty of care to people." Television dog training expert Victoria Stillwell had offered to have Lennox re-homed in America where he would not be in contact with the public. She said she was "absolutely devastated" that Lennox had been put down. "I hoped Belfast City Council would realise that there were alternatives that provided a sanctuary for Lennox in the USA where he would be safe but they did not listen," she said. "We asked the council that the family be allowed to see the dog before it was put down - they ignored that. They won't even allow the family to see the dog's body." The two largest Northern Ireland veterinary associations said they believed the current legislation should change. "We feel that dogs should be assessed on their deeds rather than their breed and this is the root of the problem. "Our associations have continually made our views known to government on the Dangerous Dogs Legislation, however, it is also important that the public is adequately protected from genuinely dangerous dogs."Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here. On Thursday, November 12th, Steven Alan — the master of Brooklyn prep — is inviting customers into its Tribeca showroom for its latest sample sale with up to 80% off retail prices on men's, women's, and kids' apparel and accessories. Expect to see discounted Steven Alan pieces among clothing, shoes, purses, and more from APC, Filson, Clare Vivier, Acne Studios, and Demy Lee, among others. Last year, we were pleasantly surprised by the amount of merchandise in stock. finding Wren, Mollusk Surf Shop, and No. 6 items starting at just $50. If you decide to check out the sale, start downstairs — that's where the real steals were last time, and you were able to score up to an additional 30% off your purchase if you spent a certain amount. Check out the Dealfeed below for the sale's dates and times.Rhys Roser has been jailed for seven years and eight months for his attack on a 19-year-old woman A rapist has been jailed for more than seven years after unwittingly confessing to the sex attack as his victim recorded him on her mobile phone. Amateur boxer and rock climber Rhys Roser, 24, denied the allegations when he was arrested, but went on the run when he heard the damning recording, eventually pleading guilty at trial. He was jailed for seven years and eight months for a rape in the early hours of September 14, 2015 of a 19-year-old. 'He had not heard the recording until earlier this year and that must have come as a shock to him, the clear evidence of it,' his lawyer Miss Marie Spenwyn told Harrow Crown Court. 'We now have a man hanging his head in shame over his behaviour.' Roser, of Maida Vale, north west London, pleaded guilty to one count of rape, attempted rape, sexual assault and assault by penetration at a north-west London address nearly two years ago. The tree surgeon raped the teen in the flat's shower after the victim fled to the bathroom because she was suffering a panic attack brought on by Roser's unwanted advances. 'He made it plain he wanted to have sex and she didn't,' said prosecutor Mr. Peter Clement. 'The defendant became more demanding and somewhat bullying of her. 'He grabbed her by the arm, torso and neck and the more aggressive he became the more aroused he got.' Roser, an amateur boxer, told the victim he had a free pass to sleep with her. The tree surgeon was recorded on the victim's phone and he pleaded guilty THE 'FREE PASS' PHONE RECORDING He told her he had a 'free pass' to sleep with her. After the crime, he said: 'I was wrong in every way. I shouldn't have done that, I don't know what came over me. 'Don't tell anyone please. You don't want to do the whole court thing. You're not going to stand up in court and tell everyone you were raped, way too embarrassing. 'You were kinda (sic) sexy because you had wetness on your face. 'That's the one thing that's going to ruin my life. Don't f***ing tell anyone, it's real simple.' They were still in the bedroom when she grabbed her phone and began the audio recording, which later proved she was pleading: 'Leave me alone.' 'He said he had a "free pass" to have sex with her and by this time she was in tears, asking him to shut up and leave her alone,' added Mr. Clement. 'She locked herself in the bathroom, but Roser pushed his way in. He locked the bathroom door and pushed her into the shower. 'He pulled her head back and bent her left arm behind her back.' The teenager was then raped. They returned to the bedroom, where the phone recorded Roser saying: 'I was wrong in every way. I shouldn't have done that, I don't know what came over me. 'Don't tell anyone please. You don't want to do the whole court thing. You're not going to stand up in court and tell everyone you were raped, way too embarrassing. 'You were kinda (sic) sexy because you had wetness on your face. 'That's the one thing that's going to ruin my life. Don't f***ing tell anyone, it's real simple.' In an impact statement fifteen months after the attack the victim said the attack had 'a staggering effect' on her explaining she had suffered depression, anxiety, insomnia, flashbacks and night terror. The victim said the attack had led her to suffer anxiety and insomnia. The recording included Roser apologising for what 'came over him' Recorder Matthew Lowe told Roser: 'Your subsequent conversations were recorded on that telephone. 'You were heard saying you had gone mad and were wrong in every way and went onto plead with her not to report what happened and put pressure on her. 'She describes it as emotional blackmail. What you did to her that night has had significant psychological and emotional effects.'You are calling FIDEL CASTRO an exceptional man? That’s it. I’m done. Listen, you fucking mug. Fidel Castro was a dictator. He was responsible for the torture of political prisoners, the oppression of an entire fucking nation, and a shitload of racism and homophobia. Fidel Castro has multiple humans rights violations under his belt. You KNOW that he commited all of those crimes and what do you say? “but I suppose his example shows most conclusive that one man, even the most truly exceptional, cannot run a society.“ NO, you fucking mug. Ever hear of Josip Broz Tito? Mustafa Kemal Atatürk? Lee Kuan Yew? All of them ran a country on their own, and did a pretty acceptable job of it. If you have multiple humans rights violations under your belt, that isn’t because you can’t rule on your own - it’s because you are a fucking sociopath. The reason why so many autocrats are sociopaths is because that kind of rule would attract them. Absolute power is something that most good people would be too careful to try, that’s why we have only three widely-known benevolent dictators in history. There are still many people living who had actually endured the torture of Fidel Castro. Ever been to Florida? There was a large wave of escapees from Cuba in the early eighties, all of which have been harmed, directly or indirectly by Fidel Castro. They’ve literally been throwing a party over this and I CAN NOT blame them. So, when a sociopath dies and many people are celebrating the death of their former torturer… You celebrate the man. You fucking celebrate the man who kept political prisoners and oppressed an entire nation. Fuck your Sempai Castro, fuck your militant batshit beliefs, and fuck the crazies who agree with you.Wow my santa sent me a huge box all the way from Portland on the West Coast of the US to Toronto, Canada! The box looked like it went through a bit of a rough time during its trip but thankfully everything arrive intact. Since I obsessively track my packages, I saw that it had attempted to be delivered while I was at work, so I went to pick it up later that night from the post office! I opened up the box and found a box filled to the brim with a ton of different snacks! My santa tailored the selections perfectly to the things I said I love (e.g. spicy, chips, black liquorice, coffee), and also managed to send me things that I've never tried before (I mentioned that I'd love to try anything that is unique/local to my santa)! I was thinking that I would try everything first before writing the gallery post but then I realized that I would have to consume a lot of snacks to do that in a timely manner. So while I’ve dug in to a few things, there’s still lots more I have left to try! My santa also sent me a nice written note with details about all of the snacks! Here’s a summary of everything I got! CHIPS My santa sent me 6 big bags of chips! Half of them were from the Cheetos family. There’s Cheetos Flamin’ Hot + Doritos Dinamita (Cheetos mixed with rolled Doritos), Cheetos XXtra Flamin’ Hot (can’t get these in Canada, they have quite a good kick and also turn your fingers red), and Cheetos Sweetos Cinnamon Sugar Puffs (I love cinnamon and sugar, and these are delicious!). They also sent me their favourite chips, Hawaiian Kettle-style Luau BBQ Chips. I haven’t tried these yet but am very excited to try them! I love BBQ and also love kettle chips so I’m sure I’ll love them too. There’s also a bag of “Cihicharritos” con chile, which I’m not 100% sure what it is but it seems to be a Mexican snack, and probably has some spice to it. And finally rounding out the chips is an interesting flavour of Lays: Beer ’n Brats Flavored Chips. My santa hasn’t tried them before but thought they would be an interesting addition (as we don’t get that flavour in Canada)! I’ll have to report back with a verdict once I try them. COOKIES I got 3 different kinds of Girl Scouts cookies: Tagalongs, Thin Mints, and Samoas. I’ve actually never had these before as in Canada we have Girl Guide cookies. They’re sold in a similar way to raise money, but different kinds of cookies. My santa’s fave is the Tagalongs, which are peanut butter cookies. I liked them too (I love peanut butter)! CANDY There was a nice selection of candy, mainly Mexican and Asian themed! I love the candy from Mexico as it reminds me of my trip there many years ago! First of all there was Chile Mango Gummy Lollipops, which were very delicious and spicy! Next up is some Tamarind-flavoured candy: Pulparindo & Pelon. I haven’t tried these yet! And then rounding out the Mexican selection was some Japanese-Mexican peanuts, which I also haven’t tried yet. My santa also included a popular Chinese snack and childhood favourite: Matcha Flavoured White Rabbit Candy. I opened one of these and there was a paper wrapping the candy that kinda crumbled away and I couldn’t get it off—then I read the note again and realized that they wrote that it was a rice paper covering the candy and totally edible! These were delicious! I love matcha and these candies have a great matcha flavour and are also very creamy! LOCAL GOODIES The last section is all the local goodies my santa sent. I always love to try local products as that is part of the fun of doing exchanges! There’s some South American Coffee Beans from Hood River Coffee Roasters, as my santa noticed that I love coffee so included this with the snacks! I'll be grinding these up soon. There is also a jar of Marionberry Jam. This is apparently a berry that is well known and loved in Oregon. I haven’t heard of it before so I’m excited to try this. And my santa figured out that I am a black liquorice fan and included some salt water taffy style Salty Black Liquorice from a local company, Jacobsen Salt Co. These are delicious! And finally there were 2 chocolate bars from “Moonstruck”: Dark Chocolate Espresso Bean & Milk Chocolate Sea-Salt Toffee. I love both of these flavours! I am a huge coffee fan and I also love toffee! Thank you so much to my santa for the wonderful gifts! There was such an amazing and generous selection of snacks, tailored to my tastes but at the same time all new things! I look forward to trying everything and I’m sure these snacks will last me for a long time!"Nordish" redirects here. For the English cricketer, see Thomas Nordish The Nordic race was one of the putative sub-races into which some late-19th to mid-20th-century anthropologists divided the Caucasian race. People of the Nordic type were mostly found in Scandinavia, Northwestern Europe,[1][2][3][4] and countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, such as Germans and Finnic peoples.[5][6] The psychological traits of Nordics were described as truthful, equitable, competitive, naïve, reserved, and individualistic.[7] Other supposed sub-races were the Alpine race, Dinaric race, East Baltic race, and the Mediterranean race. Nordicism is an ideology of racial separatism which views Nordics as an endangered and superior racial group, most notably outlined in Madison Grant's book The Passing of the Great Race, Arthur de Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. This ideology was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Northwestern, Central, and Northern European countries as well as in North America and Australia. The idea of the Nordic phenotype being superior to others was originally embraced as "Teutonicism" in Germany, "Anglo-Saxonism" in England and the United States, and "Gallicism" in France.[8][9][10] The notion of the superiority of the "Nordic race" and the Northwestern European nations associated with this supposed race influenced the United States' Immigration Act of 1924 (which effectively banned or severely limited the immigration of Italians, Jews, and other Southern and Eastern Europeans) and the later Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952[11] and was present in other countries outside of Northwestern Europe such as Australia, Canada, and South Africa.[12][13] By the 1930s, the Nazis claimed that the Nordic race was the most superior of the "Aryan race" and constituted a master race (Herrenvolk).[14] Background [ edit ] In the mid-19th century, scientific racism developed the theory of Aryanism, holding that Europeans ("Aryans") were an innately superior branch of humanity[citation needed], responsible for most of its greatest achievements. Aryanism was derived from the idea that the original speakers of the Indo-European languages constituted a distinctive race or subrace of the larger Caucasian race[citation needed]. Its principal proponent was Arthur de Gobineau in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1855)[citation needed]. Though Gobineau did not equate Nordic peoples with Aryans, he argued that Germanic people were the best modern representatives of the Aryan race. Adapting the comments of Tacitus and other Roman writers, he argued that "pure" Northerners regenerated Europe after the Roman Empire declined due to racial "dilution" of its leadership[citation needed]. By the 1880s a number of linguists and anthropologists argued that the Aryans themselves had originated somewhere in northern Europe[citation needed]. Theodor Poesche proposed that the Aryans originated in the vast Rokitno, or Pinsk Marshes, then in the Russian Empire, now covering much of the southern part of Belarus and the north-west of the Ukraine, but it was Karl Penka who popularised the idea that the Aryans had emerged in Scandinavia and could be identified by the distinctive Nordic characteristics of blond hair and blue eyes[citation needed]. The biologist Thomas Henry Huxley agreed with him, coining the term Xanthochroi to refer to fair-skinned Europeans, as opposed to darker Mediterranean peoples, whom Huxley called Melanochroi.[15][16] It was Huxley who also concluded that the Melanochroi (Peoples of the Mediterranean race), who he described as "dark whites", are of a mixture of the Xanthochroi and Australioids.[17] This distinction was repeated by Charles Morris in his book The Aryan Race (1888), which argued that the original Aryans could be identified by their blond hair and other Nordic features, such as dolichocephaly (long skull). The argument was given extra impetus by the French anthropologist Vacher de Lapouge in his book L’Aryen, in which he argued that the "dolichocephalic-blond" peoples were natural leaders, destined to rule over more brachycephalic (short-skulled) peoples.[18] The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also referred in his writings to "blond beasts": amoral adventurers who were supposed to be the progenitors of creative cultures.[19] In On
said if a company doesn’t fulfill its job-creation obligation, the government claws back funding or at least part of it. Often the money rolls out over time, so a company wouldn’t get the money unless it does the hiring. In ARC’s case, Duguid said the money may not be returned and added it’s impossible to control the fate of a single company in the global marketplace. “It all depends on the original arrangement,” Duguid said. “If it’s a five-year arrangement, that’s expired now. You can’t hold a company on the hook forever. It’s a global economy.” But PC Economic Development Critic Monte McNaughton denounced the province’s response. “I think taxpayers deserve to know exactly what commitments and obligations the company was supposed to have with the government,” he said. “How many jobs were they supposed to create and did this company actually meet those obligations set up by the Liberal government?” McNaughton said he was also concerned about the process by which Queen’s Park picked “winners and losers.” He pointed to last year’s auditor general’s report which found the bulk of companies receiving taxpayer money had been invited to apply. ARC said its lender will be in court Thursday to arrange for Deloitte Restructuring Inc. to take possession of the business. The company also said it’s working to pay outstanding wages, while it referred employees to the federal government’s Wage Earner Protection Program. The studio has done the animation for popular kids show Thomas & Friends, some Marvel and Lego specials and the upcoming Netflix series Tarzan and Jane.More than 11.5 million documents were hacked from Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca. Credit:AP The papers have had more of an impact on the actions of individual world leaders than the OECD has had over the five years that it has been working on its Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project aimed at stopping the likes of Google, Microsoft and Apple from using tax havens. Thanks to the Panama leaks, Iceland's prime minister resigned. And other European leaders including David Cameron, George Osborne, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn have succumbed to public pressure and released personal tax information. The Panama Papers have also resulted in action closer to home: The Australian Taxation Office is investigating more than 800 wealthy clients of Mossack Fonseca. It has handed information relating to these taxpayers to AUSTRAC. As this investigation happens behind closed doors, another is taking place publicly. Labor has called for parliamentary hearings this week into tax avoidance and foreign bribery. British Prime Minister David Cameron released his private tax information following the Panama Papers revelations. Credit:Getty Images Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan will give evidence at the Senate Economics References Committee later this week. The committee will also be hearing from regulatory agencies and experts on foreign bribery activities allegedly involving Australian firms. The Turnbull government's anti-avoidance laws are limited in scope. They apply to multinationals with a global income of $1 billion or more. This not only leaves out a number of big corporations, but also does not address tax evasion strategies used by wealthy individuals. Australia has also committed to information sharing via the OECD already country-by-country reporting plan. This aims to give tax authorities a clearer picture of taxes paid by companies, but there are two main problems with the plan. First, as we learnt when the G20 met in Washington last week, it requires governments to sign up and implement it. Panama is yet to sign, although it has promised it will. What's worse is the world's number one tax haven, the United States, isn't a signatory. Clark Gascoigne, who works for Washington's FACT Coalition, said: "With all the attention on Panama, it's important to not miss the connections to the US, where Mossack Fonseca has affiliated offices engaged in similar business." Even assuming all countries do sign up to the OECD plan, the second problem looms: The tax information collected will be kept secret. The official line from the OECD is that making this information public would be misleading. But the true reason it's not going public: it was too hard to get governments to agree when big business lobbyists were arguing against such a move. The decision is costing them dearly. According to a recent report from Oxfam, Apple and General Electric routed nearly $US1.4 trillion in offshore tax havens between 2008 and 2014. US corporations avoid an estimated $US1.45 billion ($2.06b) of tax in Australia each year. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have warned tax avoidance has a "tremendously negative effect on our mission to end poverty". Global Financial Integrity research estimates that tax haven secrecy, anonymous companies, trade-based money laundering and poor financial crime enforcement, drains at least $US1.1 trillion per year out of developing and emerging economies. To crack down on what the OECD dubs the "professional enablers" – the high-paid lawyers, accountants and financial institutions that hide behind the veil of secrecy – the best solution is transparency. The private information governments collect through the OECD's country-by-country plan, must be made public. There needs to be a public register of beneficial owners of companies, as suggested by Transparency International, in order to identify the names of company and trust owners. Finance ministers of the so-called Group of 5, from Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain, agreed in a G20 meeting in Washington this month to exchange information on beneficial ownership registration. But as Carl Dolan, director of Transparency International EU, said, while this "initiative is being touted as a hammer blow" it is "more like a fly swat" because the register is being kept secret. There must also be greater transparency involving deals between tax authorities and companies. The ATO settled on about $3 billion worth of cases with big companies in 2013-14.An aphorism commonly attributed to Voltaire "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without." Confucius, attrib.[1] This natural diamond crystal contains flaws and the flawless diamonds called paragons are rare. Perfect is the enemy of good, or more literally the best is the enemy of the good, is an aphorism which is commonly attributed to Voltaire, who quoted an Italian proverb in his Dictionnaire philosophique in 1770: "Le meglio è l'inimico del bene".[2] It subsequently appeared in his moral poem, La Bégueule, which starts[3] Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien Dit que le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. (In his writings, a wise Italian says that the best is the enemy of the good) Aristotle, Confucius, and other classical philosophers propounded the principle of the golden mean which counsels against extremism in general.[4] The Pareto principle or 80–20 rule explains this numerically. For example, it commonly takes 20% of the full time to complete 80% of a task while to complete the last 20% of a task takes 80% of the effort.[5] Achieving absolute perfection may be impossible and so, as increasing effort results in diminishing returns, further activity becomes increasingly inefficient. Robert Watson-Watt, who developed early warning radar in Britain to counter the rapid growth of the Luftwaffe, propounded a "cult of the imperfect", which he stated as "Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes."[6] Economist George Stigler says that "If you never miss a plane, you're spending too much time at the airport."[7][8] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ]As we all know, every single car company out there has its very unique history, mostly related to the way it managed to emerge from a tiny entity into a huge conglomerate that sells hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of vehicles a year. And some of these stories are indeed fascinating and captivating and each of us is invited to find them out once the dealers hands us the keys.Basically, the cars' logos are the introduction to the companies' tales, most of them showing symbols or signs that remind us of the thrilling experiences the automaker had to go through to stay alive. Today, we're inviting you to a journey through some of the most important car logos, so keep reading to find the tales hidden behind the emblems we see every time we get behind the wheel.Abarth, which currently serves as Fiat's sport division, saw daylight in 1949 and was founded by Karl Abarth. Its logo comprises several elements, including the company's name just on top of all the others. The overall shape of the emblem represents a shield and denotes strength and power, thus demonstrating Abarth's capacity to resist over time and become a top player in the automotive world.The three colors underneath the company's name, green, white and red, symbolize Italy's flag, as the company was brought to life in Turin. The scorpion is Karl Abarth's astrological sign – he was born on November 15, 1908 – and is complemented by the two dominating colors, yellow and red, which are indicating the brand's appeal for motor racing.Alfa Romeo, also owned by Fiat but still considered an Italian symbol, is one of the companies whose logo changed a lot over time, but retained the main elements that remind us of the way the brand was brought to life. Alfa Romeo, initially known as Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili (Lombard Automobile Factory, Public Company), got its first logo in 1910, when Romano Cattaneo created a rounded badge consisting of a grass snake with a man in its jaw. Inspired from the House of Visconti flag, the so-called "biscione" (the Italian term for grass snake) actually represents one's ability to stand against opponents and face competition.Additionally, Cattaneo added the red cross seen in the Milan flag, plus the Alfa Romeo designation separated by two Savoia dynasty knots. Over time, the knots were eliminated from the logo, with each symbol comprising the logo receiving minor "redesigns".The "brand with the four rings" as Audi is often called is currently one of the world's top automakers and surely a leadingGerman brand. Its logo, seen on millions of cars sold worldwide, is believed to have multiple meanings.First of all, the emblem is seen as a symbol of the merger that took place in 1932 and included four large manufacturers of that time: Audi, DKW, Horch and Wanderer.On the other hand, some people believe that Audi's logo is a bit older and has a strong connection with the Olympic games.Either of the two meanings are actually true, the Audi logo underwent a minor makeover in 2009 when the badge got a new font plus a restyled 3D design of the four rings.Bayerische Motoren Werke or Bavarian Motor Company – BMW as most of us know the brand – is, once again, one of the largestcarmakers in the whole world. Its roots can be traced back in 1913, with the first activities strongly related to the aviation industry.The company's logo is obviously based on these facts, but there are again multiple interpretations available.One of them claims that the blue and white colors, which are actually the traditional colors of Bavaria, BMW's natal region, are also representing a white propeller on a blue sky, a hint to BMW's aero history.On the other hand, some people believe that the two colors are only used because they also appear on the Bavarian flag and BMW just wanted to honor the area that hosted its headquarters for years.Buick, an American symbol as some people name it, was founded in 1903 by David Dunbar Buick. Its history, often connected to General Motors, includes several logo changes that occurred as the company grew bigger. The first logos were actually variations of the Buick designation, but were replaced during the '60s by three shields representing the three models rolled out until that point: LeSabre, Invicta, and Electra.1975 brought a new change of logo at Buick, with the American icon now adopting a hawk emblem, known at that time as "Happy", that was expected to mark the beginning of a new design era in Buick's history. The moment was celebrated with the introduction of the Skyhawk series. However, the range was discontinued during the '80s, when Buick re-adopted its three-shield badge.Both the name and the logo used by Cadillac were based on the aristocrat the company was named after, Antoine de La Mothe, Seigneur de Cadillac, but the badge suffered several modifications, especially under GM's ownership. The auto manufacturing business received the Cadillac designation in 1902 but during the '90s General Motors brought a few changes as part of an effort to refresh the company's image. The logo thus dropped the six birds (codenamed merlettes), as well as the crown and the La Mothe family crest, but adopted simpler elements that are still being used nowadays.There's nothing fancy or too complicated in Citroen's logo which remained practically unchanged over the time. The two inverted Vs are actually reminding of André Citroen's first area of expertise: mass production of double helically-cut gear teeth.In case you're wondering where does the Chevrolet "plus" symbol comes from, there are several suppositions behind it. First of all, some people are saying that William C. Durant actually designed the logo after a wallpaper he saw in a French hotel. On the other hand, others are claiming that this badge was first seen in a newspaper and Durant's wife proposed it to be used as Chevrolet's logo.Almost every car enthusiast out there knows the "Prancing Horse", especially thanks to the great achievements the Italian carmaker recorded in the past. But the story of its logo is once again related to multiple theories. First of all, it is believed that the black prancing horse on yellow background was first used by Count Francesco Baracca, the Italian airforce that made a name for itself in World War I. Another theory claims the symbol was actually seen on a German pilot's plane that crashed during the war - the horse is actually the symbol of Stuttgart, which might raise some eyebrows because Porsche uses the same element as source of inspiration for its very own badge.Last but not least, the Ferrari logo might have a different story. It appears that Ferrari founder's family owned lots of horses so the new company adopted the prancing horse as a symbol of power. However, one thing is 100 percent sure: the three colors appearing on Ferrari's logo represent Italy's flag, the company's natal country.Fiat, currently the largest Italian automaker and one of the new names in the American auto sector, changed its logo several times, especially following the growth the company recorded during the 1900s. The first emblem created by Fiat's designers was only showcasing the company's full name: Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (Italian Automobile Factory of Turin). As the time passed by however, Fiat modified the logo several times, with the latest change getting into effect in 2006 when the company turned to the red background instead of the blue one.Ford is surely one of the most powerful automakers in the whole world and the fact that it managed to survive the 2009 crisis without government help comes to confirm this. And the origins of its logo are at least as interesting as the company's past: Harold Wills, often considered Henry Ford's main help within the company, had his very own business card printing company before working for Ford. When Henry Ford decided to choose a badge for the company, Wills designed the first sketch of the logo using his printing equipment and a font he used on business cards.The Hyundai logo is just a regular badge at the first sight. However, there are multiple meanings of the "H" letter you're seeing on every Hyundai out there.First of all, the oval that surrounds the H letter is actually representing Hyundai's continuous expansion that now goes beyond the Asian continent. And the H is indeed coming from Hyundai but, in addition, it also represents two people shaking hands, probably in an attempt to show Hyundai's appreciation for consumers buying its models.The meaning of the Jaguar logo is quite simple and one could understand it in a second, especially after driving a Jag. Just as we learned in our first school years, the Jaguar is a quick and agile feline, so placing such a badge on a car is actually an effort to underline its vehicles' ability to develop very high performance.The South-Korean brand Kia owns quite a simplistic logo that does nothing than to show the company's name on a (usually) red background. However, if you split the word into two separate parts, the term Kia also has a different meaning. In Korean, KI (the first two letters of the name) stands for "arise" while the A is believed to represent Asia, Kia's natal continent. In this context, the name translates into "arise from Asia", hence matching the company's slogan "The power to surprise".The logo seen on all the Lambos out there (burning or not) isn't surprising at all. The bull logo actually stands for the founder's, Ferruccio Lamborghini, zodiacal sign (Taurus), and is obviously accompanied by the company's name, Lamborghini. Contrary to other "patriot" Italian carmakers, Lamborghini does not use the Italy's colors on its logo.Based in Hiroshima, Japan, Mazda is becoming more powerful in most markets, especially in Europe where its models are getting more powerful thanks to the company's efforts in the fuel consumption and emission areas. Its logo, which suffered several modifications as time passed by, has multiple interpretations. The company's name, which is inspired by the ancient Iranian prophet Zoroaster, seems to serve as source of inspiration for the badge as well: the restyled "M" (which looks like two spanned wings) is believed to represent the company's flight to the future.Mercedes-Benz, an iconic premium and luxury, has been around for a long time but the brand "Mercedes" was only registered in September 1902. The three-pointed start logo however saw daylight in 1909 on a Daimler vehicle and represented the company's domination of land, sea and air. Just as expected, the badge got several "facelifts" as the company grew bigger, but the first interpretation is believed to date back to early 1900 when Gottlieb Daimler drew a star on a picture, adding the following text: "this star would one day shine over own factory to symbolize prosperity."The Japanese carmaker Mitsubishi is the subject of several theories when it comes to its logo and although several people are talking about them, there's no official information supposed to put things straight in this matter. According to some sources, the Mitsubishi designation is actually a combination of the words "mitsu" (three) and "hishi" (water chestnut, which could be translated into "diamond"). In other words, the term Mitsubishi could mean "three diamonds", hence the logo of the company.However, there are two interpretations of the logo. Some people consider that the three-diamond logo stands for a mix of the Iwasaki family (who established the business) crest, three stacked diamonds, and the three-leaf crest of the Tosa Clan. On the other hand, the three diamonds could represent the three main attributes describing the company: responsibility, ethics and communication. Last but not least, the logo could actually represent a ship propeller, reminding us of the beginning of the Mitsubishi business.As we said when talking about Ferrari, Porsche uses as a logo Stuttgart's symbol, which is also accompanied by the antlers and red and black stripes that are all parts of the arms of the Kingdom of Wurttemberg.From the point of view of its logo, Peugeot surely has one of the most captivating stories. The French lion was officially created in 1847 by Justin Blazer who worked as jeweler and engraver and was based on the Region France-Comte flag. However, the logo appeared on Peugeot cars only years later, receiving a lot of modifications over the years. The last modifications occurred in 1998 and 2002 when the company reworked the look of the lion in an effort to better underline the "message" of the logo: it denotes power and balance, while the blue is believed to represent the company's view of the future.Renault, now involved in one of the world's biggest alliances with Nissan, changed its logos for over 10 times since it was founded. The French carmaker used an entirely different badge, showing the initials of the three Renault brothers (Louis, Ferdinand and Marcek) drawn on a medallion. The diamond badge was only adopted in 1925, while the 3D perspective was added in 1972 by Victor Vaserely. The last "facelift" of the logo was rolled out in 2007 when the company placed the Renault designation just underneath the diamond, on a yellow background - which is believed to stand for quality.The Czech manufacturer which now exists under VW Group's ownership got its first logo when the company only produced bicycles using the Slavia designation. The badge was thus comprising the Slavia term plus the names of the two owners, Laurin & Klement. The first logo under the Skoda brand came out in 1926 and obviously included the Skoda name surrounded by an oval decorated with laurels. The popular “winged arrow” design was brought to life in the late '20s and was used for a long time, until 1990. It was believed to be the creation of commercial director of Skoda Plzen, T. Maglic.The current logo was adopted during the '90s and comprises the same winged arrow, now painted in green with black surroundings. The two colors are supposed to represent the company's interest for environment protection and its 100-year history, respectively.Subaru's name is actually the Japanese translation of the Pleiades star cluster, which also means "to gather together". The six star logo represents the five companies that joined forces (Fuji Kogyo, Fuji Jidosha Kogyo, Omiya Fuji Kogyo, Utsunomiya Sharyo and Tokyo Fuji Sangyo) to form Fuji Heavy Industries (the biggest star in the logo).SAAB, the Swedish carmaker now owned by the Dutch company Spyker, uses as a logo the coat of arms of the Count von Skane which also served as symbol for Skane, the Swedish province where Saab was initially based in. As you can see for yourselves, the badge shows a some kind of mythological bird that has the body of a lion but the head and wings of an eagle. It was actually based on Vadis-Scania's logo, the truck manufacturer that joined forces with Saab's parent manufacturer involved in the airplane manufacturing business.Although some of you would expect it, Toyota's logo has absolutely no connection to the stuck accelerator pedals affecting the Japanese company's models (no pun intended). The company's badge is actually made of three different ovals, two of which are said to stand for Toyota's relation with its customers. Furthermore, these two are also creating a symbolic "T" letter that comes from the brand's name.A symbol for safety and passenger protection, Volvo's name is inspired from the Latin word "volvere" which translates into "to roll". The badge however is the old symbol of iron but, according to some people, it also tries to transmit Volvo's "attraction" for safety technologies, which are often described to be as durable as iron.Volkswagen, one of the top players in Germany and in the whole world, has probably one of the most popular logos out there, seen on millions of cars sold in almost every corner of the Globe. There are multiple theories related to the the origins of Volkswagen's logo: one of them claims that it was designed by one of Hitler's friends during World War II while another suggests that it was the result of a design competition won by Franz Xavier Reimspiess, an employee of Porsche.The president may have swapped isolationism for interventionism, but it is still unclear whether he’s acting on instinct or shaping a cohesive policy “I don’t want to be the president of the world,” Donald Trump declared in Washington on 4 April. “I’m the president of the United States. And from now on, it’s going to be America first.” A week later, he stood alongside the secretary-general of Nato and told reporters at the White House: “Right now, the world is a mess. But I think by the time we finish, I think it’s going to be a lot better place to live... because right now it’s nasty.” It has been a brazen reversal in both word and deed. In the past 10 days, Trump has launched 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian government airbase, dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat on eastern Afghanistan and deployed a naval strike group to waters near North Korea. For good measure, having lambasted China and lauded Russia during the election campaign, Trump now lauds China and lambasts Russia while saying of Nato: “I said it was obsolete. It’s no longer obsolete.” The screeching U-turn has thrilled establishment Republicans and foreign policy hawks while mortifying the isolationist backers of “America first”, a phrase denounced by the Anti-Defamation League for its links to 1940s Nazi sympathisers, who helped him snatch the election while branding Hillary Clinton a warmonger. Senator Lindsey Graham, one of his defeated opponents, tweeted: “I hope America’s adversaries are watching & now understand there’s a new sheriff in town.” Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist known to be on Trump’s radar, wrote in the Washington Post: “The traditionalists are in the saddle. US policy has been normalised. The world is on notice: eight years of sleepwalking is over. America is back.” And the political website Axios noted: “In less than a week, Trump has morphed into a guy who could almost be mistaken for a conventional Republican president. Trump appeared in the White House’s East Room yesterday and gave remarks that could’ve come from the mouth of George H W Bush.” But it remains uncertain whether the president, whose past statements have been known to contain three different policies in a single paragraph, is merely acting on instinct or now shaping a clear foreign policy doctrine – and indeed whether such a doctrine is either possible or desirable. Identifying Donald Trump's foreign policy – a quiz with no right answers | Lawrence Douglas Read more No student of history, Trump may or may not have been aware that his attack on Syria coincided with the 100th anniversary of America’s entry into the first world war. That had been spurred by a speech in which Woodrow Wilson threw down the gauntlet to Congress: “The world must be made safe for democracy.” These have since been described as the eight most important words in US foreign policy history: a mission statement for the world’s policeman. From the second world war to Vietnam through two Iraq wars, it has provided the philosophical underpinning for interventionism. But George W Bush’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003 in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction cast a long shadow over Barack Obama, arguably influencing his decision not to strike Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime but rather make a deal with Russia to remove his chemical weapon stockpile. The attack on a town in Syria’s northern Idlib province that killed dozens of people implies that Obama’s 2013 policy was less successful than billed. Secretary of state John Kerry had declared: “With respect to Syria, we struck a deal where we got 100% of the chemical weapons out.” But Antony Blinken, a former deputy secretary of state, admitted in the New York Times last week: “We always knew we had not gotten everything, that the Syrians had not been fully forthcoming in their declaration.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest President Wilson delivers a speech to Congress on 2 April 1917, days before it passed a resolution declaring war on Germany. His assertion that ‘the world must be made safe for democracy’ has since provided the philosophical underpinning for interventionism. Photograph: AP At the time, Trump urged Obama against military intervention in Syria. But Trump was for the Iraq war before he was against it. During the election campaign he offered a creed of isolationism while promising, almost in the same breath, to “bomb the hell out of Isis”, increase military spending, as well as speaking admiringly of General George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman for having the “guts” to drop a nuclear bomb. He has a history of foreign policy flip-flops, and in this he is hardly alone. His shifts of the past two weeks have multiple causes. A president long addicted to cable news has said several times how he was moved by the primetime images of poisoned children and “beautiful babies” in Syria. His daughter Ivanka, herself a mother, was among those who weighed in on the horror of what Assad had done. Steve Bannon: is Trump's right-hand man falling from grace? Read more Shifting fortunes in the West Wing are a factor too. Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, are said to be increasingly influential on Trump as they worry about his negative headlines. His national security adviser, HR McMaster, is also exerting his authority, removing chief strategist Steve Bannon from the national security council. Bannon, former head of Breitbart News and principal flag waver for the hardline “anti-globalists”, finds himself increasingly marginalised, with Trump describing him in the Wall Street Journal as “a guy who works for me”. Then there is the simple reality check that faces any new president. In the wake of Trump’s election victory, Obama told reporters: “Regardless of what experience or assumptions he brought to the office, this office has a way of waking you up. And those aspects of his positions or predispositions that don’t match up with reality he will find shaken up pretty quick, because reality has a way of asserting itself.” There was a vivid example of this when Trump expressed his hopes to Chinese president Xi Jinping that Beijing’s pressure could steer North Korea away from its nuclear efforts. “After listening for 10 minutes, I realised it’s not so easy,” he told the Journal. “I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power” over North Korea, “but it’s not what you would think.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump with China’s president Xi Jinping. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters There has also been a willingness to heed advice that torture does not work. But as his scattergun tweets demonstrate, Trump is profoundly capricious and unpredictable, driven by a desire to “win” above all. A man who has ranged across the political spectrum from Democrat to far-right conservative may change his mind or reverse gear again, especially under pressure from a nationalist base accusing him of betrayal. Rightwinger Ann Coulter, author of In Trump We Trust, wrote this week: “Was America strengthened by the Iraq war? The apparently never-ending Afghanistan war? Vietnam? This is how great powers die, which is exactly what the left wants.” She added: “We want the ‘president of America’ back – not ‘the president of the world’. Tossed by events, doctrines are hard to define in meaningful detail. Whereas Wilson called for the world to be “made safe” for democracy, Obama’s mantra was reportedly: “Don’t do stupid shit.” To date, Trump’s appears to be: “I do change and I am flexible, and I’m proud of that flexibility.”The Red Alert, developed by the mod team of C&C Labs (makes of The Forgotten and C&C All Stars, undertakes one of the most ambitious tasks in C&C modding: to recreate and improve upon an original game. The mod, in development for Red Alert 3, is based off the original Red Alert's art and game play. Not aiming to model realism, it instead endeavors to bring the addictive heart-pounding game play of the classic to a world-class 3D engine, to bring back all of the classic units, including those from Aftermath, and to recreate the very "feel" of its art style. With The Red Alert, epic tank battles, MiG attack runs, and Cruiser strikes will be more than just fond memories — they will all be weapons in your arsenal once again! It was released on September 21, 2011 and was ranked the number one mod on Moddb.Leftwing activists are constantly talking about how oil development in the Arctic will destroy the environment as well as the lives of the native tribes who reside there. That's why it might come as a surprise to progressives that on Thursday, Kaktovik village tribal administrator Matthew Rexford went before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources to ask them to allow oil development plans to go forward for the sake of his tribe's future. Rexford shot down the left's ideal plan of turning his tribal lands into a national park. “We do not approve of efforts to turn our homeland into one giant national park, which literally guarantees us a fate with no economy, no jobs, reduced subsistence and no hope for the future of our people,” Rexford said. “We are already being impacted by restrictions of access to the federal lands for subsistence purposes – this is really disturbing to us since we have lived here long before there ever was a refuge designated.” “Attempts to permanently block development in the 1002 – an area intentionally not designated as wilderness because of its oil and gas potential – is a slap in the face to our region and its people,” Rexford said, referring to the land he resides on. “It’s exactly the same as saying, ‘it’s okay for everyone else in this country to have a thriving economy, but you can’t have one at all.'” Leftists love to idealize native communities and see them as people who want their tribal lands to stay completely untouched. However, the reality is that members of the Native American community are living in the 21st century just like the rest of us are, and they want jobs and a thriving economy, just as most people do. As Rexford said, making his tribe's land a national park won't do the people who reside there any good, as that won't create nearly as many jobs as the oil industry can provide. Before progressives fight back against oil drilling for the sake of the communities they claim to champion, they might want to do some research on how individual tribes really feel about oil development. In order to survive in the modern world, the Native American community needs jobs far more than they need to virtue signal about saving the environment. If the left really cares about the future of these communities, they will allow oil drilling in the arctic to move forward. What do you think about this? Sound off in the comments section below!THE DIRECTOR of the FBI, James B. Comey, did the right thing in announcing the results of the bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email in early July. Realizing that the case was hyper-sensitive in the middle of a presidential campaign, Mr. Comey spoke up when ordinarily he would have simply forwarded his recommendation to prosecutors. He said the investigation determined that she was “extremely careless” in using a home-brew server while secretary of state, but that Ms. Clinton’s actions did not warrant prosecution. It was important for the apolitical FBI director to say one way or the other whether there was criminal behavior so voters could make up their own minds. But now Mr. Comey has taken a misstep. The FBI has provided to Congress portions of the investigative files from the year-long probe. Although it is not known precisely which portions, some of the materials include interviews conducted by the FBI. On Capitol Hill, the FBI has deposited the material in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, a room with restricted access. According to the Associated Press, the documents were transmitted to Congress with written warnings not to leak them. “These materials are nonpublic and contain classified and other sensitive material,” FBI Acting Assistant Director Jason Herring wrote. “For that reason, these materials may not be further disseminated or disclosed, in part or in full, without obtaining the FBI’s concurrence.” Access to the documents is restricted to members of the judiciary, intelligence and government affairs committees. Republicans in Congress are unlikely to heed the warnings. Are these members of the GOP, who have enthusiastically exploited the Benghazi and email stories for partisan advantage, whose convention delegates chanted “lock her up,” really going to read the FBI files and stay mum? The temptation here for mischief — partial leaks — is enormous. It is extremely rare for the FBI to turn over to Congress internal case files from a criminal investigation that did not lead to a prosecution. In some cases in the past — counterintelligence probes, for example — the FBI has orally briefed Congress or, in the case of nominations, brought the raw interview notes to senators to read but not keep. In this case, it seems a bad precedent to put the Clinton investigative materials before Congress. Will lawmakers demand more such sensitive documents in the future? If informants know their cooperation with the FBI might eventually be shared with members of Congress, will it have a chilling effect? At this point, the best course of action, and the most transparent, would be to put the documents through a suitable declassification process and then release them for all to see. But it shouldn’t have come to that.There is something about human beings compacted in a cylindrical tube, hurtling between cities at a high speed, unable to maneuver in any other manner than to, say, grab a beer from the cafe car or visit the rest room. It is lost time. And when you’ve made all your cell calls, and answered the last of your email, and you are still only in Wilmington and another forty minutes from home, the last distractions are the people sitting around you. This fellow was at the four-top table immediately behind me. I clocked him as we left New York, but as he is a busy man, and as most of our previous encounters have been a little edgy, I told myself to let well enough alone. I answered a few more emails, looked at some casting tapes on the laptop, checked the headlines. And still, with all of that done, we were only just south of Philadelphia. I texted my son: “On the southbound Acela. Marty O’Malley sitting just behind me,” then joking, “Do I set it off?” A moment later, a 20-year-old diplomatic prodigy fired back a reply: “Buy him a beer.” I waited until just after Wilmington, for fear that the Governor of Maryland and I would not be able to endure the requisite formalities of forced proximity for much longer than that. Then I stood up, noticed that Mr. O’Malley was sipping a Corona, and I walked to the cafe car to get another just like it. I came back, put it on the table next to its mate, and said, simply, “You’ve had a tough week.” My reference, of course, was to the governor’s dustup with the White House over the housing of juvenile immigrants in Maryland, which became something of a spitting contest by midweek. Mr. O’Malley smiled, said thanks, and I went back to my seat to inform
domanda di ampliamento di un Esselunga originario, che occupava soltanto 1.003 metri quadri. I lavori erano partiti nel 2006 e dovevano terminare il 14 aprile 2010, quando era prevista la riapertura al pubblico. Pochi giorni prima della scadenza, il 23 marzo, la prima sorpresa. L’azienda chiede la proroga di un anno per terminare i lavori di ristrutturazione; qualche mese più tardi, il 24 giugno, presenta poi «un’istanza di ridistribuzione della superficie di vendita già autorizzata con ampliamento da 1.003 a 1.500 metri quadri». Infine, l’autunno successivo, chiede l’aumento a 4.884 metri quadri di un ulteriore parametro, la «superficie lorda di pavimentazione», che in teoria non riguarda l’area dove piazzare gli scaffali con le merci. A quel punto il nuovo supermercato è pressoché finito e tutti, dai concorrenti ai consiglieri comunali, si rendono conto delle vere dimensioni. Vengono effettuate interrogazioni e ricorsi ma la risposta delle istituzioni è sempre la stessa: tutto regolare. Scrive Caprotti nel suo appunto dell’11 febbraio 2011: «Diamo con gioia il benvenuto a questo nuovo nato, che ci darà molte soddisfazioni; non senza dire grazie a tutti coloro che ci hanno messo tanto di sé, tanta intelligenza, tanta discrezione».Come possa un’amministrazione comunale non rendersi conto di quel che cresce sul proprio territorio, nonostante tutta la discrezione e l’intelligenza del caso, è una domanda interessante. Ma quel che colpisce di più è il poco che, a cose fatte, basta per sanare progetti in grado di cambiare la geografia di interi quartieri. È stato questo l’argomento della riunione nel Palazzo Lombardia del 30 maggio, relativa all’area di via Pellegrino Rossi.Anche in questo caso Esselunga ha costruito l’intero edificio sulla base di una licenza commerciale precedente, prima di 1.500 metri quadri, poi salita a 2.500. Il Comune non ha avviato una specifica pratica di autorizzazione in quanto il progetto prevedeva che nella nuova struttura non ci fosse solo il supermercato, ma anche due negozi di merci che, in gergo tecnico, vengono definite “ingombri non immediatamente amovibili”. E cioè, una concessionaria d’auto e un’esposizione di arredamenti. Di queste due attività, nello spazio vuoto che separa l’ingresso dalle casse, a quattro anni dall’apertura non c’è traccia. Anzi, nella procedura avviata pochi mesi fa per portare la superficie di vendita a 3.821 metri quadri, Esselunga ha già prodotto l’impegno di entrambi i titolari a venderle i rispettivi spazi.Più che una vertenza fra parti con interessi diversi, la conferenza dei servizi del 30 maggio - a cui L’Espresso ha potuto partecipare - si è così trasformata in un coro di benestare. L’ampliamento «non comporta consumo di nuovo suolo» e «non verranno costruite nuove cubature», è stato detto dai tecnici di Comune e Regione, senza sottolineare il fatto che l’edificio non dev’essere toccato perché è stato costruito di dimensioni eccedenti la licenza commerciale già in partenza. E ancora: «In fondo si tratta solo di un accorpamento di autorizzazioni già rilasciate», nonostante la concessionaria d’auto e l’esposizione di mobili esistano solo sulla carta.Come detto, quello che colpisce maggiormente è però l’elenco delle compensazioni che l’azienda propone per sanare tutto. Ci sono contributi per 642 mila euro per opere di urbanizzazione. Ma le voci più sorprendenti sono altre.. L’impegno a spendere 25 mila euro in due anni mediante accordi con artigiani e commercianti locali per «promuovere il territorio». La «disponibilità» a fornire ai clienti la spesa on line, il pagamento dei bollettini postali, le casse automatiche, la prenotazione di «pesce fresco già pulito». L’immancabile promozione di prodotti tipici lombardi.Perché queste voci ricadano sotto i costi che dovrebbe sostenere Esselunga per farsi regalare la licenza, e non sotto i vantaggi che le permetteranno di mettere in ginocchio i negozi vicini, è uno dei segreti che solo la burocrazia comunale sembra poter custodire.Why An Immigration Deal Won't Solve The Farmworker Shortage Enlarge this image toggle caption Kirk Siegler Kirk Siegler The Salinas Valley in Northern California grows about 80 percent of the country's lettuce, and it takes a lot of people to pick and pack it. In a field owned by Duda Farm Fresh Foods, a dozen lechugueros, or lettuce pickers, are bent at the waist, cutting heads of iceberg lettuce. They work frantically to stay in front of a line of 12 more packers, who seal them with tape and toss them onto a conveyor belt. "There's a lot more going on here than meets the eye," says Sammy Duda, the company's vice president. "The way the lettuce is trimmed is much more difficult to do if you don't trim it properly." Duda hires 1,000 or more field workers every harvest, paying them about $12 an hour. Many don't have papers, but Duda says he has no other choice. Hardly any Americans apply for these jobs, he says, and most who do, don't stay. "This has always been an immigrant job, whether it's, like I say, back from the Dust Bowl group," Duda says. "This is not a new phenomenon." Labor shortages aren't a new phenomenon, either, in this valley made famous by John Steinbeck. But things have gotten worse lately. A lot of the migrant workers who came from rural Mexico are getting too old for this back-breaking work, and their kids don't want to do it at all. "It's hard, because I've been working in the fields for like 12 years now," says 29-year-old Marco Lara. He says many of his extended family and friends back in his native Mexican state of Michoacan don't want to cross the border right now. Hiring a "coyote" costs a lot more than it once did, and the border is a lot more dangerous. Enlarge this image toggle caption Kirk Siegler Kirk Siegler "There's people that just don't want to risk coming here," Lara says. "I [lost] two friends on the border three years ago." Duda says the proposed immigration overhaul bill might solve some of these problems. For one, it would give thousands of workers a path to legal residency and make it easier for others to enter the U.S. But he says those things are probably just stopgap fixes. "It'll help us in the short term. The long term? Remains to be seen," Duda says. Since the late 1990s, there has been a slow but steady decline in the number of rural Mexicans migrating north. Agriculture economist Ed Taylor at the University of California, Davis, says that decline has little to do with U.S. immigration policy. Taylor's research suggests that declining birth rates in rural Mexico, where the economy has also improved in recent years, is the reason why fewer migrants are coming to the U.S. And since farms in Mexico have also expanded to meet the year-round produce demands north of the border, why risk going north? "Many [American] farmers also have this sense that, if Washington can just get its house in order and pass immigration reform, their problems will be over, and that isn't what our research is showing," Taylor says. Farms here are going to have to learn how to do more with less immigrant labor, Taylor says. That means switching to less labor-intensive crops, or mechanization. In the Salinas Valley town of Gonzales, Frank Maconachy with the company Ramsay Highlander may have an answer for farmers worried about big labor shortages. "The labor resource is dwindling, so we needed to develop a machine that could mechanically cut... efficiently, effectively, safely and get the crop to market competitively," he says. That machine is an automatic spinach harvester. His company custom builds them to suit individual farmers' needs — different blades and equipment to pick celery, for example. But the main point is it reduces the need for workers. "One operator can now harvest 12- to 15,000 pounds of spinach or baby leaf in an hour, where typically a crew of 30 people would be on their hands and knees cutting this with knives and would do half of that volume at best," Maconachy says. But efficiency comes with a price: $250,000 for one of these machines. Sammy Duda isn't quite ready to make that kind of investment. Machines can't do everything, he says. "It's very difficult to duplicate the eyes and the feel of a worker when it comes to maturity and quality of the crop." Even as he focuses on the current immigration bill and whether it will help him get enough workers to get through these next few years, he knows his business is going to have to change. Technology once radically changed this valley when refrigeration allowed iceberg lettuce to be shipped all over the country. "This particular valley was founded on innovation," he says. "There's a lot of bright people that have their radar going, and so as labor issues change, we adapt or we die."Safari has been given a big revamp in OS X Yosemite, and it’s one of my favorite new updates to the operating system as a whole. The team working on Safari took a lot of the elements that makes Safari on iOS a success, and incorporated those into the OS X Yosemite version. The result is a much-improved favorite interface, simplified toolbar, and better tab navigation. Safari for OS X Yosemite is a win all the way around. Have a look at our video walkthrough showcasing these new features inside… The toolbar in Safari has been redesigned with a simpler look and streamlined controls. It’s a lot less intrusive in OS X Yosemite, yet it still maintains the important functionality that you need to browse the web efficiently. Safari favorites can now be accessed and managed via a dedicated box, which is accessible by simply clicking in Safari’s search bar. The interface is similar to the interface in iOS 8, which is great news for Safari users in OS X Yosemite. When it comes to tabs, again the name of the game seems to be iOS-adoptability. This time, Safari takes cues from its iPad counterpart, ushering in a brand new tab view. The tab view makes it extremely easy to access, identify, and switch to different browser tabs in just two clicks. It’ll even group tabs from the same website together. I’m extremely excited to see Safari turn out so well in OS X Yosemite. On previous versions of OS X, I simply avoided it due to its lackluster favorite capabilities and ineffective tab browsing. I also really appreciate the facelift that the browser has been given overall. It’s just a better looking and better functioning experience altogether. What do you think? This post is an excerpt from iDB’s Yosemite Interactive Starter Guide. To learn about some of OS X Yosemite’s most outstanding new features, and to support iDB, you can download it on the iBooks Store for $0.99. View all of the OS X Yosemite Interactive Stater Guide topics:Update: USAA, US Bank and Navy Federal have just confirmed Apple Pay support starting today. In addition, MasterCard confirmed a roll out for Barclaycard, USAA and Navy Federal Credit Union, while readers report cards from PNC, and M&T Bank also working in Apple Pay. Ahead of a previously announced Nov. 7 launch for Apple Pay support, a number of users today report being able to load USAA issued cards into the new payment service. We’ve received tips from readers regarding support for USAA Debit MasterCards and a long list of other customers online report support for other card types through the bank. Apple has yet to update its support document detailing supported banks and card types. Currently the list includes American Express, Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, Citi, J.P Morgan, Merrill Lynch, U.S. Trust and Wells Fargo. A long list of other supported banks and cards are scheduled to arrive in the coming weeks and months, however. Apple previously said it had signed up approximately 500 banks for Apple Pay in the US. The best 4K & 5K displays for Mac If you have a card and bank supported by Apple Pay and haven’t set it up on your iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air 2, or iPad mini 3, you can check out our video tutorial for a step-by-step guide. We’ve reached out to USAA to confirm that Apple Pay support is officially available but did not immediately hear back. https://twitter.com/mrgr33ncl0ud/status/529267311518429185We live out our lives amid a world of language, in which we use words to do things. Ordinarily we don’t notice this; we just get on with it. But the way we use language affects how we live and who we can be. We are as if bewitched by the practices of saying that constitute our ways of going on in the world. If we want to change how things are, then we need to change the way we use words. But can language-games set us free? It was the maverick philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who coined the term ‘language-game’. He contended that words acquire meaning by their use, and wanted to see how their use was tied up with the social practices of which they are a part. So he used ‘language-game’ to draw attention not only to language itself, but to the actions into which it is woven. Consider the exclamations ‘Help!’ ‘Fire!’ ‘No!’ These do something with words: soliciting, warning, forbidding. But Wittgenstein wanted to expose how ‘words are deeds’, that we do something every time we use a word. Moreover, what we do, we do in a world with others. This was not facile word-nerdery. Wittgenstein was intent on bringing out how ‘the “speaking” of language is part of an activity, or form of life’. In Philosophical Investigations (1953), he used the example of two builders. A brickie calls ‘Slab!’ and his helper brings it. What’s going on here? The helper who responds is not like a dog reacting to an order. We are humans, the ones who live together in language in the particular way that we do, a way that involves distinctive social practices. With this spotlight on language-games, Wittgenstein asks readers to try to see what they are doing. But if we are entranced by our linguistic practices, can we even see what we’re doing? Wittgenstein’s attempts to see met with the charge that he was stopping us from seeing anything else, from perceiving new possibilities: his linguistic obsessions were a distraction from real politics. The chief accuser was Herbert Marcuse, who in his blockbuster One-Dimensional Man (1964) declared that Wittgenstein’s work was reductive and limiting. It could not be liberatory, for the close focus on how we use words misses what’s really going on. These objections are serious. But do they succeed? Marcuse claims that Wittgenstein is reductive, seeing only language, and poorly at that. Wittgenstein strives to bring language-games to light: Marcuse says this is stupid. Well, is it? Yes and no. In Culture and Value (1977), Wittgenstein admits: ‘How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes.’ All too often, he says, we miss the obvious. That which is close is the most difficult to see for what it is. When we use words, we partake of everyday understandings and carryings-on. Wittgenstein looks to these everyday usages, and remarks upon them. One remark that Marcuse ridicules is Wittgenstein’s example, ‘My broom is in the corner…’ Marcuse is super-snarky about this, and denounces ‘the almost masochistic reduction of speech to the humble and common’. But, amid the bluster, Marcuse misses the point. The mundane example is apt given the everyday practices at issue. Moreover, if you look closely, even a statement so banal is not quite what it seems. There are numerous other examples of Wittgenstein’s that Marcuse ignores, for example on reading or the aroma of coffee. This all-too-human stupidity is deep-seated. Wittgenstein is calling attention to the ways in which, by our everyday language-games, we entrap ourselves. So he looks closely at what he is doing and saying. He sees work in philosophy as therapeutic, in the sense of ‘a work on oneself’. And there is an intense self-scrutiny in Philosophical Investigations. It is quite remarkable, questioning the ways we use language to do mundane things such as telling the time, doing sums, or hoping that someone will come. This is not something to which we are accustomed. We can be resistant, not wanting to see things for what they are. Is this ‘masochistic’? It is a subjection of oneself to self-scrutiny, but surely only painful or humiliating for those who stand to lose from finding that they are not so clever after all. So, if we are to change, we must first face up to an imperative to ‘be stupid’, and to know ourselves to be. Marcuse could have welcomed this, for he gets that it is in everyday practices that we are unwittingly subjected: ‘magic, witchcraft, and ecstatic surrender are practised in the daily routine of the home, the shop, and the office’. In short, the lady doth protest too much. Does Marcuse’s second objection fare any better? This is the claim that Wittgenstein is confining, ensnaring us only further within language. Marcuse says that Wittgenstein’s take on language is one-dimensional. But this is not borne out by a reading of Wittgenstein’s book, where we find a view of language as irreducibly multi-dimensional. Wittgenstein painstakingly shows how the basis for what we use as language is provided by shifting patterns of communal activity. Language is contingent and provisional, so language-games can’t but be open to change, in numerous ways. One arises from recognising that we can choose to see something as this, or as that. One of Wittgenstein’s most famous passages involves this picture-puzzle: Look at the picture, and you can see it as a duck. Look again, and you can see it as a rabbit. Because language-games are played by humans, we can notice what is going on when we see things as this, or as that. A contemporary example is the controversy over all-male speaker events. You can look at the line-up and say ‘a panel of experts’, or you can say ‘manel’. But is it only a manel if you choose to see it that way? These examples invite us to question what we take to be given in everyday uses of language. But Marcuse doesn’t mention the duck-rabbit, or discuss its implications. So language usage admits contestation and change, in virtue of what it is. Marcuse, on the other hand, denies this, and even says that societal processes close the universe of discourse. We don’t get from him anything like Wittgenstein’s suggestion that there is in language usage itself something recalcitrant to fixity. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s position is rather more radical than Marcuse cares to notice. He says ‘something new (spontaneous, “specific”) is always a language-game’. This cryptic remark might suggest that we need to play language-games differently if we are to change anything. What of this prospect? Notably, on Wittgenstein’s account, we don’t play language-games solo. They arise through communal uses of language. One game is polari, the secret language used among gay men in Wittgenstein’s time. Language-games, with their beguiling snares, raise a collective action problem. We can’t extricate ourselves from them if acting alone. But this raises a further question, given how profoundly we are ensnared. It is one that Wittgenstein anticipates: [T]his language grew up as it did because human beings had – and have – the tendency to think in this way. So you can only succeed in extricating people who live in an instinctive rebellion against language; you cannot help those whose entire instinct is to live in the herd which has created this language as its own proper mode of expression. The rebels live in a state of dissatisfaction with language. They feel their alienation, cut off from others and themselves within language. But the contented are untroubled, and humans are inclined to think that way. Reading Wittgenstein brings us to such questions. So Marcuse’s objections are unfounded. He fails to show that Wittgenstein’s astonishing scrutiny of language-games is either pointlessly stupid or enslaving. In fact, his efforts only heighten regard for Wittgenstein’s relevance in the darkness of these times. Using language is an integral part of the human condition. We live within language, yet our way of life is something we find hard to see. Wittgenstein is not peddling ready answers to this predicament. Indeed as long as there is language it will bewitch us, we will face the temptation to misunderstand. And there is no vantage point outside it. There is no escape from language-games then, but we can forge a kind of freedom from within them. We might first need to ‘be stupid’ if we are to see this.The U.S. Department of Education’s new open licensing rule has gone into effect. The U.S. Department of Education’s new open licensing rule has gone into effect. Starting in FY 2018, education resources created with Department of Education discretionary competitive grants ($4.2 billion in FY 2016) must be openly licensed and shared with the public. Creative Commons (CC) congratulates the U.S. Department of Education for ensuring the public has access to the education resources it funds. This announcement comes after years of work by Department of Education staff, multiple civil society organizations, and individual open education leaders. CC’s involvement began in October 2015, when we joined the Department in calling for a new rule to require publicly funded education resources be openly licensed by default. A few months later, CC and other open education leaders submitted comments supporting the proposed rule. When the implementation of the rule was delayed, a coalition of open education organizations submitted additional comments in support of implementing the change. This new Department of Education open licensing rule follows the example set by the Department of Labor agency-wide CC BY open licensing policy, the Department of State’s open licensing playbook for federal agencies, and multiple other open education licensing policies from around the world. While the rule does not specify the use of a CC license by name, it provides guidance on what attributes the open license needs to contain (see below). Here is the text of the final rule published in the Federal Register and in the Government Publishing Office Code of Federal Regulations. The key points in the new rule (summarized): Grantees must openly license to the public any grant deliverable that is created wholly or in part with Department competitive grant funds. Grantees must grant to the public a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable license to access, reproduce, prepare derivative works, publicly perform, publicly display, and distribute the copyrightable work provided that attribution is given to the copyright holder. The open license also must contain a symbol or device that readily communicates to users the permissions granted concerning the use of the copyrightable work; machine-readable code for digital resources; readily accessed legal terms; and the statement of attribution. Grantees may select any open licenses that comply with the requirements of this section, including, at the grantee’s discretion, a license that limits use to noncommercial purposes. A grantee that is awarded competitive grant funds must have a plan to disseminate the openly licensed copyrightable works created with grant funds. The rule does not apply to: funding for general operating expenses; support to individuals (e.g., scholarships, fellowships); grant deliverables that are jointly funded by the Department and another Federal agency if the other Federal agency does not require open licensing; copyrightable works not created with Department grant funds; peer-reviewed scholarly publications funded by the Department; grantees under the Ready To Learn Television Program; or a grantee that has received an exception from the Secretary of Education. We celebrate this step forward and look forward to helping the Department implement this commitment to openness!The changes in Riyadh’s reserves were revealed by the World Gold Council, the industry-backed body which regularly tracks official bullion holdings. According to the WGC, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, the central bank, has gold reserves of 322.9 tones, more than double the 143 tones it had previously reported. The central bank said in a footnote of its latest quarterly report that “gold data have been modified from first quarter 2008 as a result of the adjustment of the Sama’s gold accounts”. Sama did not respond on Sunday to calls seeking further comment. Analysts said the rise in official gold holdings probably represented an accounting shift rather than fresh purchases. One possibility is that a large fraction of the country’s gold was not considered until now part of the official reserves. But without an official explanation, analysts were keeping options open. At current prices, the extra gold in Saudi Arabia’s official reserves amounts to $7 billion. The revelation could fuel gold’s rally as it is a further sign that central banks are keen on gold, after two decades of selling their bullion. Gold prices hit a nominal record high above $1,260 a troy ounce on Friday. Adjusted for inflation, however, bullion is still a long way from its all-time high of more than $2,300 in 1980. The WGC revelation about Riyadh’s gold holdings comes just a year after China surprised the bullion market when it revealed its gold holdings were more than 1,000 tones, almost double what it had reported for years. Analysts believe that central banks could be net buyers of gold this year for the first time in nearly two decades. India bought 200 tones of gold from the International Monetary Fund earlier this year, while Russia and others are purchasing bullion from domestic miners on a regular basis, official data show. European central banks, after more than a decade of hefty disposals, have all but stopped selling. Riyadh is now the 16th largest gold holder, ahead of countries such as the UK and Spain. The US is the world’s largest bullion holder with 8,133.5 tones. - Additional reporting by Abeer Allam in RiyadhCongressional Democrats proposed legislation today to require gun owners to purchase insurance of face a $10,000 fine. FOX News reported: A New York Democratic lawmaker is behind a national push that would force gun owners to buy liability insurance or face a $10,000 fine. The Firearm Risk Protection Act, pushed by Rep. Carolyn Maloney and seven co-sponsors, follows efforts at the state level to create the controversial new kind of insurance for gun owners. “For too long, gun victims and society at large have borne the brunt of the costs of gun violence,” Maloney said in a written statement. “My bill would change that by shifting some of that cost back onto those who own the weapons.” The likelihood, though, of Maloney’s bill gaining any traction is slim. Republicans control the House, and even states where Democrats have sizeable majorities have not approved the insurance idea. Six states — California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania — have all introduced gun liability insurance legislation over the past few months. None has produced any results. In Illinois, the House rejected a measure 34-74 that would require people carrying concealed weapons to also carry $1 million in liability insurance.DES MOINES, IA - JUNE 12: Democratic Presidential Nominee Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) speaks at a campaign event at Drake University on June 12, 2015 in Des Moines, Iowa. Sanders, an advocate of porviding free college education to all Americans, was greeted by a standing-room-only crowd at the event. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) WASHINGTON -- Three of the candidates in the 2016 presidential race have pledged to shun campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry. Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley and Green Party candidate Jill Stein have agreed to a pledge from The Nation magazine that states: "In the name of protecting our country and the world from the growing dangers of climate change, I will neither solicit nor accept campaign contributions from any oil, gas, or coal company." The Nation called on candidates to sign the pledge in an op-ed Monday, asking them to "cut their financial ties with fossil-fuel companies" in acknowledgement of the serious threat posed by climate change. The group 350 Action, the political arm of 350.org, has been helping rally support for the pledge, in addition to its work in pushing colleges and universities to divest from fossil fuels. "This is a major moment -- and it shows the fossil fuel industry's image is quickly becoming as toxic as their product," May Boeve, executive director of 350 Action, said in a statement. "Today shows that work is breaking through in the highest levels of our society, as more and more churches, universities, and even candidates for our country's highest office declare they want nothing to do with the likes of Exxon and Shell." The magazine notes that the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and the 14 Republican candidates they contacted have not responded to the pledge. It also mentioned that Lincoln Chafee, the former Republican senator now running as a Democrat, expressed support for "strong climate action" but did not sign on to the pledge.Jack Hatch, left, and Terry Branstad shake hands Thursday in Des Moines. (Photo: Bryon Houlgrave / The DES MOINES Register) The leading candidates to be Iowa's next governor mixed stiff jabs at one another with policy proposals for Iowans in their first face-to-face meeting of the campaign on Thursday. From a hay-bale strewn stage in the cattle barn at the Iowa State Fair, Democratic challenger Jack Hatch lobbed charges of scandal and mismanagement. Republican incumbent Terry Branstad batted the claims aside as "wild accusations." "There's stale leadership in the Statehouse," Hatch said of Branstad's current term in office, adding, "We've had an administration that has created on his own the most scandal-ridden administration in the history of this state." Controversies over settlements with terminated employees, reclassification of merit employees and issues at the Iowa Veterans Home and Iowa Juvenile Home, among others, are central to Hatch's argument that Branstad has fallen out of touch and been in office too long. The governor hit back at his next opportunity, defending his response to those controversies and belittling the Des Moines senator's connection to the rest of the state. "These are just crazy accusations made by somebody who has never really represented the whole state of Iowa, he just represents a safe Democratic district here in the largest city of the state," Branstad said. Branstad gave as good as he got, repeatedly linking Hatch's service in the Legislature to the administration of Chet Culver, the one-term Democratic governor whom he defeated in 2010. "The first thing we had to do was straighten out the financial mess that my opponent and his friend Gov. Culver got the state in," Branstad said, referring to across-the-board budget cuts that Culver enacted late in his term and bonding projects initiated to spur infrastructure development. Hatch defended Culver's record, calling the budget cuts a necessary step in light of the Great Recession, and the borrowing as the best option for aiding communities decimated by flooding in 2008. Branstad, he said, is perpetuating "myths" about budget deficits and financial mismanagement during the Culver years. "He's making up these stories," Hatch said. Jeff Link, a leading Democratic consultant in the state unaffiliated with the race, credited Hatch with putting Branstad "on the defensive." The biggest victory, though, was simply the visual. "Hatch benefited from the fact that he was sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with the incumbent governor," Link said. "That's a win for Jack Hatch given the advantage Branstad has with incumbency and his financial edge. For that hour, they were equals." But Steve Grubbs, a Republican politico, said the night belonged to Branstad — if only because he avoided unforced errors. "The governor won because he made no mistakes," Grubbs said. "When you are ahead in the polls, ahead financially, you win a debate when you don't make any mistakes." Amid the salvos, the candidates also offered their positions and prescriptions on a series of issues, rolling out new ideas and challenging each other's plans. Branstad opened the debate by announcing a new "Connect Every Acre" initiative — an expansion of his "Connect Every Iowan" broadband internet expansion plan that faltered earlier this year in the Legislature. At the prodding of the debate moderators, Branstad dispelled rumors that if re-elected for a sixth term he might step aside early to allow Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds to succeed him. "I have the energy and the enthusiasm to serve the state…" he said. "I'm committed to serve the entire term and do everything I can. We've only just begun." Hatch, meanwhile, led off his policy proposals with an increase in the minimum wage. His administration would pursue an increase to $10.10 per hour, the amount that Democrats at state and federal levels have been promoting and pursuing legislatively for many months. "By bringing up the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, we can create thousands of new opportunities for people, and they no longer have to depend on the public assistance they depended on before," Hatch said. To reporters after the debate, Branstad summed up Hatch's plans on the minimum wage, an increased gas tax and the like as "more debt, higher taxes." "That's typical Democrat approach. That's why I came back as governor because Culver had put us into debt and he was putting us on the line for higher taxes. We've taken a new direction. It's working. The Iowa economy's growing." Jason Noble is a reporter for The Des Moines Register and can be reached at jnoble2@dmreg.com. Read or Share this story: http://icp-c.com/VqGa2o(Reuters) - (Story corrects paragraph 4 to show a Minnesota county municipal finance official did not immediately respond to a request for comment and a state municipal finance official could not immediately be located for comment, not that an official in Minnesota’s finance department did not return a call for comment.) A sign for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is pictured in the foyer of the Fort Worth Regional Office in Fort Worth, Texas June 28, 2012. REUTERS/Mike Stone The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has charged 71 municipal bond issuers, including the states of Hawaii and Minnesota, as well as related entities, for using offering documents that misled investors, the agency said on Wednesday. The actions, brought under an SEC initiative that encouraged municipal bond issuers to self-report certain violations, involved conduct that occurred between 2011 and 2014, the SEC said. The initiative offered favorable settlement terms in exchange for self-reporting, the SEC said. All of the entities involved settled with the SEC without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings, the agency said. A county municipal finance official in Minnesota did not immediately return a call requesting comment. A state municipal official could not immediately be located for comment. A Hawaii finance department spokesman could not be reached for comment. The action covers a wide range of other issuers and entities, including the Ohio State University, the city of Memphis, the town of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, and the Delaware Transportation Authority, according to the SEC. The SEC said that issuers in the case sold municipal bonds using offering documents that contained materially false statements or omissions about their compliance with continuing disclosure obligations. Continuing disclosure provides municipal bond investors with important information, such as annual financial reports, on an ongoing basis. Failure to comply with continuing disclosure mandates is a “major challenge for investors seeking information about their municipal bond holdings,” the SEC said. Settlements in the cases require the parties to reform their policies, procedures and staff training related to continuing disclosure obligations and to update past filings, among other things, the SEC said. The cases raised hackles at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), a trade group, which on Wednesday called for broad changes in regulation and practices, given the widespread nature of the enforcement actions by the SEC, first against dealers and now against issuers. SIFMA supports a “robust disclosure regime” in the municipal market, but has “serious concerns” about how the SEC carried out the self-reporting initiative for municipal bond issuers, SIFMA said in a statement."I had this notion," says comic book pioneer Dan Clowes, "of not editing myself, just putting whatever sick thoughts I had down on paper, and if I had something that seemed really uncomfortable or unpleasant, my goal was to always go in that direction…" Clowes is remembering surrealist masterpiece Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. The story ran in his ground-breaking comic Eightball, unravelling over 10 weird chapters that jittered between snuff porn, lunatic conspiracy theories, horny half-fish girls, and a secret map tattooed on the back of a dog with no face. It was Twin Peaks before
orbit. Once the systems are in space, users on the ground will need to upgrade to new GPS receivers that can use the new signals. That means your current smartphone isn’t going to support L2C, L1C, or L5, nor are your handheld GPS or the satellite navigation system in your car. You’ll have to buy new kit. The new GPS signals can’t be particularly effective until they’re available on at least 18 GPS satellites. Support for the L2C signal has been included in every Block IIR-M satellite that’s been launched since 2005: As of right now, L2C is supported by about 10 GPS satellites, and by 2016, that should be about two dozen. So L2C will get out the door first, improving GPS reception and accuracy. The first satellites with L5 signal capability were launched in 2010, and L5 is currently deployed for testing on two GPS satellites. Unfortunately, the GPS III rollout doesn’t have the L5 signal getting out to 24 satellites until about 2019. Finally, the L1C signal (which works with Galileo and other positioning systems) won’t start launching until 2013 with the GPS IIIA satellites. Current estimates put L1C on 24 GPS satellites around 2020 or 2021. So yes: by the time GPS III is fully operational, it’ll probably seem as dated to us as Windows 95 and first-generation Pentium processors do now. But, it’s still better than MS-DOS!Seattle Public Schools has warned of a potential $74 million budget gap because of underfunding from the state and the so-called “levy cliff,” both explained here. At a special School Board meeting tomorrow, a long list of ways to make up that gap will be discussed, including larger classes and smaller staffs. It’s now available online – here’s the slide deck: (You can also see it on the district website here.) The presentation also includes a list of schools are ranked through an equity list the district could use to protect some of the highest-need schools from some of the cuts. Among West Seattle schools, Denny International Middle School ranks highest there. The board will not be taking final votes on any of these proposed budget cuts tomorrow – it’s a work session, starting at 4:30 pm at district HQ (3rd Avenue S. and S. Lander). The meeting is open for public observation but not spoken comments, so if you have comments for them, you can e-mail schoolboard@seattleschools.org. P.S. While board work sessions aren’t usually streamed, the agenda says this one will be.Scientists at the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine have pioneered an approach to replace damaged cartilage, combining two low-cost techniques. That's right. We have the ability to 3-D print human cartilage. The research team's breakthrough mixes electrospinning, a method of creating synthetic, polymer-based nanoscale-fibrous materials used for implants and wound dressing, with medical inkjet printing, also called bioprinting, currently used to create tissues and organs. Each method is a viable medical process, but with shortcomings: Electrospun materials typically don't have the ability to promote cellular growth, nor do they have the flexibility needed for cartilage replacement. And inkjet printed materials lacks the structure and strength needed to support the loads that cartilage carries. As detailed in the medical journal Biofabrication, the Wake Forest researchers theorized that merging the two systems together could solve these problems. Their hybrid approach alternates microscopic layers of electrospun fiber and printed, living cartilage cells cultivated from rabbit ears, generating an artificial cartilage pad that is suitable for implanting. An eight-week study in mice showed that the implanted pads developed cellular structure similar to natural cartilage, while separate mechanical strength tests demonstrated that it was equivalent to natural cartilage. The development has a lot of potential for the medical field. Injured natural cartilage is slow and difficult to heal, and has almost no ability to regrow itself. Currently, surgeons treat cartilage damage caused from injury or disease with techniques that remove small pieces of torn tissue or create microscopic grafts (such as arthroscopic and microfracture surgeries), in hopes to minimize the pain and restriction. But as of yet, they have been unable to fully regenerate the cushioning, lubricating tissue that keeps joints moving freely and bones from wearing against each other. As a result, degenerative cartilage conditions can eventually result in joint replacement surgery. This new procedure may effectively eradicate these invasive procedures and spell relief for countless people who suffer from cartilage conditions. The researchers even suggest the ability to use MRI scans as precise guides for printing implants tailored to the patient's body. Research is still in early stages, but if the initial results continue to be demonstrated, a faster, cheaper solution to joint injuries could be coming to human subjects soon.The cavoodle puppies were advertised on the Trading Post online classifieds. A consumer group is warning people to be vigilant against puppy breeder scams, after a Perth woman was conned out of almost $6,000. Consumer Protection WA spokeswoman Lanie Chopping told 720 ABC Perth that when the weather starts to turn warm, people start to search for a puppy to motivate them to get more active outdoors. Ms Chopping said unfortunately scammers are aware of this seasonal trend, and fake puppy ads and websites appear. "Spring comes around, people think 'lets get fit, lets get to the park, lets get a puppy to motivate us'," Ms Chopping said. "Unfortunately scammers come out at the same time to take money off people. "What we see with these scams is that they are usually based around whatever breeds are popular at the moment." Sarah Vardy lost $5,900 after she tried to buy a puppy from a classified website. Ms Vardy wanted a cavoodle, which is a King Charles cavalier crossed with a poodle, for her daughter's 16th birthday. She wanted this particular breed as it was a smaller non-shedding dog, better for people with allergies. "It was a spur of the moment purchase, and with hindsight I should have researched more," she said. Ms Vardy said she contacted what she thought was a breeder on the website Trading Post who was selling cavoodle puppies. "It should have been my first red flag, when a different person from the name on trading post ad emailed me back," she said. "She said she only wanted the dog to go to a good home, and asked questions about me as well... and that in itself was very convincing. " "I sent money through a bank account - $1,100 for the puppy and transport to Perth as the 'breeder' was based interstate." Ms Vardy said she then got a call from the shipping company, saying we needed more money for immunisation for the puppy and insurance, totalling more than $1,800. She was then asked for another $3,000 for a climate-controlled crate for the dog to go on the plane, that needed to be paid urgently, or she would not get the puppy. "By then I thought 'hang on a moment, so I rang them up and said 'look, can you guarantee I'm going to get the puppy?'; they assured me I would get the puppy and the money back. As soon as I transferred the money for the crate, I knew I had been scammed." "It's so easy to do, and you feel like, 'how could I be so silly?'. "There never was a puppy, even though they sent photos of cavoodles through, and they sent me an ABN, because that is what I asked for, which turned out to be a false ABN, of a company that had nothing to do with it at all. "They did everything right to convince me it wasn't a scam." Ms Chopping said scammers used emotional manipulation techniques to convince potential buyers. "There are so many ways they weasel their way into your heart, they put Sarah on the back foot straight away, by making it seem like she might not be the best home for the puppy to go to," she said. "It's an emotional manipulation, you forget about your concerns, and instead you focus on convincing people you are a worthy owner. "And then once you are told you can have the puppy, you feel like you've won something and get an endorsement." Puppy scam red flags Ms Chopping said the key indicators it might be a puppy scam are: usually a popular breed advertised on classified websites complications soon arise scammers often use free email servers, which are harder to trace than those with an ISP email account Ms Chopping said the bank transferring Ms Vardy's money had frozen the accounts of the scammer, so she might get some or all of her money back. She said people looking to buy a puppy should contact the relevant breeder association in their state.From the Inside May 29, 2013 9 AM On March 10, a building in the privately owned Lake Erie Correctional Institution (LECI) was flooded with toxic fumes after a fresh air supply fan broke, causing most inmates in the building to complain of headaches and nausea. After hearing the complaints from approximately 75 percent of inmates in the building, the prison’s staff evacuated the building and fixed the fan, but not before several inmates had to be taken out to the prison’s medical wing on stretchers and treated for their illnesses. Within days, CityBeat heard of the incident from two prisoners who were inside at the time. They called it evidence of staff incompetence. One even claimed, “Definitely probably gonna hit the news.” But the incident, much like the many other reports gathered by CityBeat from state officials and the two prisoners, did not hit the news. In the past few months, CityBeat has obtained letters and emails from two prisoners and their families confirming fights, lockdowns and unsanitary conditions at the Lake Erie prison in northeastern Ohio, which became the first state prison to be sold to a private company when Gov. John Kasich’s administration sold the prison to Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in 2011. “CCA does not know how to run a state prison,” a prisoner wrote to CityBeat. “Not only have I been told this by a few correctional officers, I have also noticed it myself. Just this week I have been told by a number of the (special response team members) who came in to help in shaking this place down for contraband.” CityBeat reported on concerns over the private prison and the for-profit prison model as a whole last year (“Liberty for Sale,” issue of Sept. 19, 2012). Since that time, audits and inspections from the Correctional Institution Inspection Committee (CIIC), Ohio’s independent prison watchdog, and the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC) have detailed poor conditions and a rise in criminal and violent activity at the CCA-owned facility — the fruition of warnings that were clearly articulated by sources in CityBeat’s first report. Today, critics such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio have seized on the reports as moments of vindication. In September, Mike Brickner, research director at the ACLU, told CityBeat that it was only a matter of time before conditions worsened and the state was forced to retract its commitment to privatizing public prisons. “Unfortunately, what we have to wait for the tide to turn is another round of safety issues at these facilities,” Brickner said back then. Based on the prisoners’ accounts and independent reports, that tide may be turning now. But CCA has vigorously defended its commitment to LECI. In an email to CityBeat, CCA spokesperson Steve Owen highlighted positive findings in recent reports, including a reduction in gang activity, while glossing over the problems. “We will continue to work with the ODRC and CIIC to meet any inspection-related goals that are slated for completion, and we remain committed to providing the best service possible for our government partners and the taxpayers they serve,” Owen wrote. Critics like Brickner are not buying it. As the bad news continues to trickle out of LECI, they’re demanding the state government clean up the mess before the situation gets even more out of hand. “Eventually, it is going to hit this tipping point, where something really, truly awful is going to happen, and then people will rush to try fix things,” Brickner says. “But it will be too late at that point.” Privatizing violence In February, CityBeat began receiving unsolicited letters and emails from a LECI prisoner and his fiancée, detailing what they labeled as “riots” and general chaos at the minimum- and medium-security prison. “In my opinion, a lot of inmates and correctional officers too, the CCA needs to either learn to control a prison real, real fast or sell it back to the state, so the safety of the inmates isn’t being put at risk anymore,” the prisoner wrote. “This place is severely dangerous.” The prisoner and his fiancée spoke to CityBeat on the condition of anonymity. CityBeat confirmed the prisoner’s full name, his prisoner ID number, what he was convicted for and the length of his sentence. That information is not disclosed in this story to protect the prisoner’s and his fiancée’s anonymity. Shortly after receiving the letters and emails, multiple official sources confirmed the reports of violence at LECI. On Feb. 22, the CIIC released a report detailing findings from a surprise inspection on Jan. 22, confirming a sharp rise in violence at the prison. Official incident reports later acquired by CityBeat from ODRC confirmed the specific fights to which the prisoner referred. ODRC specifically referred to the incidents as “fights,” not “riots,” as the prisoner called them. The prisoner pinned the rise in violence on inadequate staff, much like the CIIC report that came out a couple weeks after CityBeat received the emails and letters. He also suggested the prison might be trying to save money by keeping staff low. “This place is overpopulated so they can collect more money, as well as understaffed,” the prisoner wrote. “How can two correctional officers who sit at a desk outside of our dorms on the other side of locked gates control 400 inmates?” He added, “Not only that, the Correctional Officers that do work here are either A: still college kids or B: overweight and out of shape. I do not feel safe with any of them if it comes down to needing them for help.” The prisoner’s letter went on to detail two Jan. 25 fights, which he again labeled “riots,” and an ensuing lockdown. The prisoner complained that inmates weren’t being told what LECI staff planned to do to prevent future incidents. In one of the two incidents, corrections officers broke up a fight between approximately 10 to 15 inmates with the use of pepper spray. Following the fight, an officer attempted to escort one of the inmates involved back to segregation, and the situation quickly escalated as other inmates perceived the officer’s actions as too physical. In his letter, the prisoner told CityBeat the corrections officer “was being way, way too rough” with the inmate, which caused the violence to escalate as other inmates “reacted on impulse.” The official Jan. 27 incident report, acquired from ODRC in April, claimed the inmate was being loud and incited the other inmates into action. The other inmates reacted by rushing toward a side gate and beating on a dayroom window, according to the report. “Inmate (redacted) picked up a locked box and threw it through a dayroom window breaking the glass,” the report read. The officers responded by shooting approximately 15 rounds of pepper spray capsules from a pepper ball gun, causing the inmates to disperse and return to their bed areas. In the other Jan. 25 incident reported by the prisoner, six to eight inmates were observed “throwing chairs at each other and striking each other with closed fists,” according to the official Jan. 27 incident report. In the middle of the fight, “one inmate was observed striking another with a mop handle,” the report read. Officers first reacted with verbal orders to stop, which the inmates ignored, according to the report. After multiple verbal orders were ignored, the officers used pepper spray and the inmates dispersed. During both incidents, the prisoner claimed the corrections officers were slow to react because they didn’t have enough security to stop such large, disruptive brawls. Commenting on the first incident, the prisoner wrote, “With the correctional officers who just close the gate and let it happen because A: they can, I’ve seen it multiple times, B: not enough security to stop it, what do they expect?” The incidents led to a lockdown that lasted multiple weeks, from late January to mid-February. In his letter, the prisoner claimed the punishment was unfair: “We’re locked down and being punished for what we didn’t do.” He added, “In our dorm we’ve had no problems, no fights, no issues so we can get back to being able to call our loved ones, get our paperwork we need done from our case manager, go outside for rec (and) chow real meals again, but that’s not enough, we’re still being punished when it was not even our fault.” A couple months later, the prisoner’s fiancée contacted CityBeat claiming the prisoner told her there was another round of fights on April 7. Following the fights, the CCA facility was placed on “modified movement,” which is less restrictive than a lockdown. The official April 8 incident report for the fight, which involved one inmate attacking another with a weapon, pinned the cause on race-based tensions: “The information from the interviews points to tension in the unit between Hispanic inmates and black inmates at this time.” In response, CCA moved several Hispanic inmates to another section of the prison, and other restrictions were invoked: “(I)nmates remain restricted in their bunk areas. They are being permitted five inmates out at a time to use the microwave and to get ice. This will stay in place until we reassess the inmate climate.” Shortly after CityBeat received the first letters from the prisoner, the CIIC released a report that confirmed much of what the prisoner had to say about a rise in violence and inadequate staffing at the CCA facility. In January, the CIIC inspected LECI and looked at the prison’s data for 2010, 2011 and 2012, which includes some data from before CCA took over the facility in September 2011. The report found inmate-on-inmate violence had increased by 188 percent between 2010 and 2012, leading to a much higher rate of inmate-on-inmate violence than comparative prisons and right below the ODRC average for all state prisons, which includes Ohio’s maximum-security prisons. Meanwhile, inmate-on-staff violence increased by more than 300 percent in the same time span, leading to much higher rates than both comparative prisons and the ODRC average. Fight convictions were also up 40 percent since 2010, but the findings weren’t higher than comparative prisons or the ODRC average. The report also found “a high presence of gang activity and illegal substance use.” Access to illegal substances even led to a death at the CCA facility: “During the previous six months of drug screens, 6.7 percent of the inmates tested positive, which is higher than the DRC average. In the most recent monthly drug test, 13 percent were positive. An inmate recently died from a suspected overdose of illegal substances (heroin).” Other categories were similarly found in need of improvement: fair treatment, fiscal accountability and rehabilitation and re-entry. The CIIC report concluded that “personal safety is at risk” in the CCA facility. The report found the prison’s staff were making matters worse with improper use of force and sanctions: “Incident reports indicate that staff hesitate to use force even when appropriate and at times fail to deploy chemical agents prior to physical force, risking greater injury to both inmates and staff. Staff also do not appropriately sanction inmates for serious misconduct. At the time of the inspection, the facility had no options for sanctions other than the segregation unit, which was full.” But the report didn’t pin all the blame on staff, which CIIC said was poorly trained, overworked and lacked experience. “The above issues are compounded by high staff turnover and low morale,” the report read. “New staff generally do not have the experience or training to be able to make quick judgments regarding the appropriate application of force or how to handle inmate confrontations. Staff also reported that they are often required to work an extra 12 hours per week, which may impact their response.” The report left dozens of recommendations for the CCA facility, including a thorough review of staff policy and guidelines, stronger cooperation between staff, holding staff and inmates more accountable and the completion of required state audits and evaluations. For some, prisoners clubbing each other with mop handles and other criminal activity may appear as typical signs of dangerous prison life, but Brickner and the ACLU insist prisons are not supposed to be held to such a low standard. “I will not say that prisons are some sort of paradise or utopia — every prison has problems, whether they’re publicly owned or privately owned — but the things that we’re seeing at the Lake Erie facility indicate that there are major systemic problems happening at that prison,” Brickner says. “It isn’t common for somebody to die of a drug overdose. It isn’t common for gang fights to break out regularly.” He adds, “It’s clear that something very wrong is happening right now at the Lake Erie facility.” The rise in criminal activity is also affecting the nearby town of Conneaut, Ohio. In January, Conneaut Councilman Neil LaRusch complained about a rise in smuggling activity around the prison, claiming it was causing the town to spend more money on police enforcement than it could afford. He sent a letter to state officials asking the Ohio State Highway Patrol to help stop the smuggling activity. Col. John Born, superintendent of the State Highway Patrol, responded to LaRusch’s letter acknowledging that drug smuggling had gone up between 2011 and 2012, but his letter claimed recorded drug crimes had gone down in the CCA facility. Whether that’s because of looser enforcement or an actual drop in crime remains unclear, considering the CIIC report singled out illegal substance use as a key point of concern. Indeed, 911 calls directing local police to the prison, whether it’s someone witnessing smuggling activity or just suspicious behavior, have gone up in the past year — suggesting that there has been more criminal activity around the prison. In 2012, there were 229 calls for LECI. Between 2007 and 2011, there were only 64 total. But that may not matter much because, as Born explains in his letter, the State Highway Patrol does not have the authority to increase enforcement: “It is important to point out the Ohio State Highway Patrol’s legal authority and corresponding duties prior to the sale of the prison and after the sale remain largely unchanged. Ohio troopers did not have original jurisdiction on private property off institution grounds while under state operations nor do they today.” The rise in crime and violence provides a real life example of what private prison critics warned of prior to LECI’s sale. A 2011 report from the ACLU of Ohio cited two studies that found higher rates of violence at private prisons: A study from George Washington University found private prisons have 50 percent higher inmate-on-staff assault and 66 percent higher inmate-on-inmate assault than publicly owned and managed prisons. Another study from the Federal Probation Journal in 2004 found private prisons have a 50 percent higher rate of inmate-on-staff and inmate-on-inmate assault. “This confirms everything that we know about private prisons,” says Brickner, who co-authored the ACLU report. “They just come with a lot of these problems. Because of the profit motive, they tend to skip on medical care, training and all sorts of things, and that leads to the types of problems that we’ve seen at the Lake Erie facility.” He adds, “Where I was surprised is, I really thought that CCA was so fixated on making sure that this would work that they wouldn’t allow the facility to go as downhill as it has so quickly.” Prison health For the two prisoners CityBeat corresponded with, the incident involving toxic fumes represented broader problems at the prison regarding health and sanitation — problems first picked up by an ODRC audit. CityBeat first heard from the second prisoner’s mother shortly after the toxic fume incident. The mother, who was concerned her son’s life was in danger, asked CityBeat in an email for information regarding transferring her son and attached a letter from her son detailing the event. “Last night some crazy shit happened,” the prisoner wrote. “A lot of people in our building started getting sick, so they evacuated to the rec hall. Couple people were stretched over to medical and whatnot. They say it was carbon monoxide I think. They really didn’t tell us. They didn’t even call the fire department.” The second prisoner and his mother spoke to CityBeat on the condition of anonymity. Once again, CityBeat confirmed the prisoner’s full name, his prisoner ID number, what he was convicted for and the length of his sentence, but that information is being withheld to protect the prisoner’s and his mother’s anonymity. The official March 11 incident report, acquired from ODRC in April, stated that the problem stemmed from a malfunctioning fresh air supply fan, which maintenance later repaired, but only after approximately 75 percent of inmates in the Ontario building complained of headaches and feeling nauseated. The report said most inmates were returned to their dorms within three hours, while others remained in the medical wing to be treated for their illnesses. For the prisoner’s mother, the toxic fume incident was representative of larger problems at the CCA facility that caused her to worry about her about her son’s life and safety. Throughout an extensive email exchange with CityBeat, the prisoner’s mother discussed trying to get her son transferred to another prison, struggling to reach her son’s case manager and general frustrations with trying to get answers about her son’s safety and the ongoing situation at the private prison. Some of those concerns were initially justified by an ODRC audit. In September, ODRC conducted an audit of the CCA facility, finding that the private prison only met two-thirds of Ohio’s prison standards. In total, there were 47 violations at the prison, with problems ranging from inadequate staff training to poor food quality. “It was apparent throughout certain departments that DRC policy and procedure is not being followed,” the audit read. “Staff was interviewed and some stated they are not sure what to do because of the confusion between CCA policy and DRC policy. Some staff expressed safety concerns due to low staffing numbers and not having enough coverage. Other staff stated that there is increased confusion due to all the staffing transitions.” In September emails acquired by CityBeat, an ODRC monitor detailed unsanitary conditions to Barry Goodrich, warden of LECI at the time, following a walkthrough at the CCA facility. “On September 4, 2012 DRC Contract Monitor conducted a walk through Segregation at (LECI) and found unacceptable living conditions of inmates being housed inside recreation areas, with no immediate access to running water for hydration, showers and the use of a toilet,” the monitor wrote. “There was evidence of urine in plastic containers inside the recreation area and inmates using plastic bags for defecation. This must cease immediately!” A follow-up ODRC audit in November found notable progress at the CCA facility in most categories, with prison staff conveying “confidence” instead of “frantic/panic,” according to the November report. How much of the November audit remains true is uncertain, considering the CIIC report detailed scathing findings in January. In February, the first prisoner CityBeat corresponded with also complained about poor access to bathrooms. “The bunk areas just had more bunks put in so they are over limit of what is supposed to be here and as if that’s not enough each dorm has a back day room, which now has been turned into another bunk area,” the prisoner wrote. “This alone is illegal to have inmates in a dorm, they must have access to showers, sinks and toilets, which they do not. They are being let in and out of the regular dorms to use facilities.” At the same time, the only positive findings from the CIIC inspection in January were in health and well-being. In those categories, CIIC noted unit conditions, mental health services and food services were all good, and medical services and recreation were acceptable. The follow-up audit from ODRC in November also found “much improved, high sanitation levels within the entire facility.” Still, health concerns are ongoing for some prisoners and their families, especially because they see the incidents as signs of inadequate staff. Private protectors In the face of so much scrutiny, CCA has not backed down from its investment at LECI. “We are proud of the quality corrections and rehabilitation services we provide at (LECI),” CCA spokesperson Owen wrote in an email to CityBeat. “We will continue to be a good neighbor and corporate citizen in Conneaut, all while providing great value for the taxpayers of Ohio.” Owen also said the prison is taking some measures to improve security: “Since assuming ownership and management of the facility, CCA has made significant security upgrades to (LECI) at the company’s expense. These enhancements, which are ongoing, include adding and upgrading security cameras throughout the facility and adding or upgrading security fencing.” But Owen did not directly address specific concerns raised by the CIIC report or incidents detailed by the prisoners, instead pointing CityBeat to the incident reports for more information on the fights. Owen wrote the CCA facility is undergoing a “thorough plan of action,” which was approved by ODRC officials. But when asked whether CCA is planning on hiring more security officers and changing how they’re trained, Owen wrote, “(S)taffing levels are determined by ODRC requirements and existing contract terms.” No further explanation was given. Instead, Owen points to a January audit from the American Correctional Association (ACA), which earned the prison a 99.06 percent score. That audit looked at hundreds of standards, including incidents, rehabilitation programs and access to education. But the report came before the CIIC report’s release, so it’s unclear how many of its findings stand today. Brickner says ACA accreditation “doesn’t mean much.” Getting an audit requires CCA to pay ACA, posing what Brickner calls a potential conflict of interest. CCA is also told when ACA officials are going to inspect the prison, giving prison officials enough time to make everything look great for the audit, according to Brickner. Meanwhile, the CIIC holds surprise inspections, and there’s no motive to decide one way or the other because there’s no money coming from CCA to support the inspection, according to Brickner. “It almost borders on the ridiculous,” says Brickner, citing the three-week timespan between the wildly contradicting reports from the CIIC and ACA. At the very least, CCA seems to acknowledge some changes are necessary. In March, CCA moved Goodrich, the former warden of LECI, to the Bent County Correctional Facility, a medium-security facility in Colorado that CCA has owned since 1996. Brigham Sloan, the warden from the Colorado facility, was moved to LECI to replace Goodrich. Given the management change and new plan of action, it’s clear something is changing at LECI — although the details are still murky on how much and what CCA plans to do. Broken system So far, the state government has not shown any signs of taking back the private prison, but state officials have pulled back on previous commitments to privatize state prisons. On the same day the original ODRC audit was officially delivered to ODRC Director Gary Mohr, the director announced that the state would not pursue more prison privatization and would instead focus on efforts to reduce prison re-entry. The news came a week after CityBeat’s original story on the CCA facility, which reported that Mohr had previously worked for CCA before becoming director of ODRC. Kasich spokesperson Rob Nichols told CityBeat that the governor’s stance on privatizing prisons has not changed, and he called the LECI sale “the right decision.” But he did point out that the governor’s latest budget proposal did not pursue further privatization. The state has taken some actions against CCA. In the past year, the state penalized CCA by docking nearly $500,000 in payments. ODRC spokesperson JoEllen Smith explained the deductions weren’t directly linked to the audits but were instead a result of staff vacancies and contract violations related to “an extended vacancy in education” and “unacceptable conditions in segregation.” The state also threatened further penalties if CCA didn’t fix problems raised by the ODRC audits and CIIC inspection. But Brickner says the state needs to go further. In the short term, he says the state should do more to hold CCA accountable, including making LECI susceptible to public records requests like state-owned prisons. In the long term, he says the state should consider its options for taking over LECI if conditions deteriorate further. Ohio isn’t the only state struggling with prison privatization. In 2011, Pennsylvania Judge Mark Ciavarella was sentenced to 28 years in prison and ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution for acting as the figurehead in a conspiracy that unjustly sentenced more than 5,000 children in a scheme now dubbed “kids for cash.” Since 2003, Ciavarella took millions of dollars in bribes for maximizing children’s prison sentences, which, for the private prisons in Pennsylvania, meant higher occupancy rates and, therefore, higher profits. For critics of private prisons, the case was a clear example of the conflict of interest between private prisons and state governments. For a private prison company, it’s best to maximize the amount of people in prison for higher profits. For the state, it’s best to minimize the amount of people in prison to save taxpayer money and rehabilitate criminals to make them functioning members of society. “It really typifies the problem with private prisons,” Brickner says. “When you allow a profit motive to come in and to play any kind of part in the criminal justice system, that’s when these types of problems begin to crop up.” ©As thousands of Greenpeace supporters have piled the pressure on Coca-Cola, the mega brand is starting to take notice – but Coke’s answers aren’t yet good enough. When we launched our report showing how Coke is failing to take responsibility for the damage its plastic bottles are causing in the ocean, the company said it was “disappointed” by our findings. What’s really disappointing is that in the past decade, Coca-Cola has actually increased the proportion of single-use plastic bottles across its global packaging mix. But when we delivered a 2.5 ton monument to ocean plastic pollution to Coca-Cola’s London HQ, a spokesperson simply stuck to the line that they were “disappointed”. Since April, over 88,000 of you have written to Coke’s CEO in Europe, calling on the world’s largest soft drinks company to ditch throwaway plastic to protect our oceans from plastic pollution. Hundreds of you called Coca-Cola’s switchboard in a single afternoon, and have been sharing spoof videos and gifs on social media showing the devastating impact Coke’s single-use plastic bottles are having on marine wildlife. This kind of pressure is impossible for a company to ignore – even one as large as Coca-Cola. Many of you have shown us the much longer replies you’re now receiving from Coca-Cola, on social media and through emails or letters. But getting a response isn’t the same as the right response. Coca-Cola still aren’t facing up to the scale of the problem, or their ability to help end the flow of plastic into the ocean. Just take a look at their common lines – and our comebacks: Coke say: Why us? We’ve made statements caring about the planet We say: Given the size of Coca-Cola’s plastic footprint, producing over 100 billion single-use plastic bottles every year, it’s clear that Coca-Cola has a particular responsibility for the plastic crisis facing our oceans. Billions of these bottles are ending up on our beaches, in landfill or in the ocean. We’ve even found Coke bottles on some of Scotland’s most remote beaches as part of our Beluga ship expedition. If Coca-Cola was to commit to ditch throwaway plastic bottles, and instead embrace reusable packaging and 100% recycled content, this would make a huge difference to the amount of plastic bottles ending up in our oceans. Coca-Cola also has the means and influence to shift the soft drinks sector and companies in Coke’s supply chain away from single-use plastic – that’s what real leadership on this issue looks like. Coke say: All of our bottles are 100% recyclable We say: Plastic drinks bottles made from a type of plastic called ‘PET’ are 100% recyclable, so it’s no great achievement by Coca-Cola. Several of their major competitors also make 100% recyclable bottles. But crucially, 100% recyclable bottles means they can be recycled after use – not that they are. In fact, just under half the plastic bottles we use every day in the UK aren’t being recycled. That means 16 million plastic bottles every day are being dumped in our environment rather than being recycled in Britain alone. Coca-Cola can do something about this. Used Coke bottles should be re-used as new bottles – rather than ending up in our oceans. Coke has plenty of room to increase the amount of recycled plastic it uses to make its bottles – right now, Coca-Cola averages a pitiful 7% recycled content globally in its plastic bottles. Worse still, the company now has no further global targets to boost this across their entire product range (Coca-Cola’s 2020 target is limited to Europe) – let alone a clear timeline for achieving 100% recycled content in Coke bottles. Coke say: we’ve reduced our plastic use by making lighter, thinner bottles We say: This ‘lightweighting’ process does reduce Coke’s costs, plastic use and carbon emissions. But lightweighting does not prevent Coca-Cola’s plastic bottles from entering the ocean, breaking down and continuing to threaten marine life. Lightweighting is also happening in the context of the rapid expansion of plastic bottle production – which is set to keep on growing. To truly combat marine plastic pollution, Coca-Cola must innovate beyond single-use plastic bottles. Reusable bottles are also the least carbon-intensive bottles, releasing fewer emissions than a lighter single-use bottle. Lightweighting can’t hide the fact that Coca-Cola has no commitment, target or timeline to reduce the number of single-use plastic bottles it manufactures.Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman with supporters in Hartford during the 2006 campaign. (Reuters photo: Brian Snyder) The coming wave of progressive primary challengers is good news for Republicans. ‘Democratic politicians in red states who fail to fight strongly against Trump and seize the mantle of economic populism won’t inspire people to vote — and they will lose the general election in 2018,” warned Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in a recent press release. <!– Advertisement Advertisement //–> If Green and his ilk have their way, Democrats who fail to heed the populism of the moment will be in for a rude surprise next
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In effect, we advise you to pay attention to the introduction presented. For example, the Aliens machine is amazing. In some cases, we will come to believe that we are watching a movie. Similarly, it will put goose bumps with terrifying machines like Creature from the Black Lagoon. Purchase productive licenses In NetEnt, business strategy has paid off. Indeed, the editor began by buying a group of movie licenses such as Scarface, Jack Hammer, South Park, Aliens and many others, and adapt them to their slots. Because now you can meet your favorite movies as a slot machine. Furthermore, in the slot machine, NetEnt not content to play him, but also envelops you in a story that you must complete to beat bonds and other mini games. Experience “slot machine” becomes more attractive and motivates the player to play and continue to play until the end. Where to find the NetEnt games To find the NetEnt machines you find on our website, but in real mode, you can go to many online casinos such as Tropezia Palace 7Red or. Of course, Tropezia Palace is what we recommend for all the reasons you probably already know: an attractive playroom, fast and secure payments, customer service quality. Have fun in the latest NetEnt slot machines and discover the taste of a game that is completely redefined. NextGen Gaming Slots NextGen Gaming is specialized in editing casino games founded in 1999. Then, put about a hundred gambling accounts for international clients and partners society. NextGen Gaming wants to distinguish itself from its rivals thanks to a truly unique offering and an exceptional performance software, which should ensure the longevity of this company which has a hard time noting nonetheless. However, NextGen Gaming has all the qualities to become a major player iGaming scene, especially since this editor does not work only A platform with an impressive content The platform independent content NextGen Gaming is impressive in terms of quality. Reflects the vision of the studio founded in 1999 and now runs Hamish Brown: The constant need to revolutionize market standards, the need to develop a new model more responsive to the needs of the players márquetin and, like many other developers, the need to always innovate. It is a very mature company with a long-term vision and wants to go down in history. Besides their games are “lasting” in the sense that it can be adapted to all the generations of players and address issues that never go out of style. Games that celebrate our history And you will realize that the games produced by NextGen Gaming released distinguished by graphics that respond to a very wise artistic style (after all, each editor has its own style), but not only that. Indeed, it is in your content where NextGen Gaming gets from the competition. The developer, who is pleased to conceive of video slot machines, is able to sign agreements with large international groups, achieving legendary licenses. That is the case of Andre the Giant ™ slot machine, which is the figure of an immortal WWE wrestler, or Green Lantern ™, Wonder Woman and The Flash ™ ™, all characters imagined by DC Comics. NextGen Gaming therefore addresses issues that are loved by all, especially from a literary and cinematic view, which represents an undeniable success for the company. Where are the NextGen Gaming slot machines? Almost all online casinos listed on our Top 10 support technology and games editor NextGen Gaming. 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I must say they have reason, since Playtech is primarily a serious developer of casino games almost all they are games, especially games that have live dealers, which makes the game more attractive to the player, lottery games, poker games, but the highlight is its slots. To say that your personal information Playtech develops more than 50 games a year, which makes almost weekly one. It is a very significant pace and many would like to achieve. But what makes Playtech’s strong purchasing licenses, especially in cinema to translate the movies slots. Many publishers have realized that this works very well. Of course, we must have the means and Playtech have them. The company no doubt buy licenses to MGM, HBO, NBC Universal and Marvel and the latter is what gives it its current success to Playtech. The Marvel licenses Indeed, when the first Marvel games at online casinos out, formed a good one. The slots are simply excellent and resume the stories we read in the comics or seen in movies. 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Which we like at the moment is of course, Scary Rich 3, the last episode of the saga Scary Rich has had tremendous success since its release and that most of the casinos that use Rival software have online. What we believe is that Rival be put in front of everyone at the scene of slot machines with huge production, but will have to do it quickly so as not to distance themselves too much from the competition and lose part of their clientele. Where to find NetEnt slot machines Rival The problem is that in the consciousness of the players there is a de facto association between online casinos unwise and somewhat dishonest and Rival company. Unfortunately for the publisher, it’s something. Nevertheless, today we find some very good online casinos that use Rival Gaming services such as Play2Win, a facility that we recommend. So do not confuse the editor bad casinos, since they have nothing to do. Rival has always been a publisher of quality and there is no reason for this to change from night to morning. Slot machines Saucify Since 2009, Saucify serves thirty online casinos and other gaming platforms. This editor, who started from scratch, has been learning progressively success and has become a place in the market of iGaming and all with great merit. It is normal that today offer precursors discover Saucify titles, after a few months, was renamed East Saucify. Here are a collection of free slot machines developed by Saucify. A truly unique philosophy and vision of the game Saucify, that does not have many resources compared to some of the leaders of the industry, has managed to uncheck the other thanks to a philosophy and a very personal vision of the game. Indeed, modernization and technology are at the heart of the strategy Saucify, preferring to devote his time to developing truly innovative games before betting on advertising and márquetin. The work of this developer is work that is respected and you should not give to anyone, this is the ideology of this developer directly accusing the work of some of its competitors “archaic” (obviously we do not go into this controversy). Although resources are limited, Saucify able to realize very beautiful slot machines. And that’s what we want. Pina Nevada, Worlds at War or Alpha Squad are some of the titles Saucify to be missed under any circumstances: input will show to what extent this developer overflowing imagination, and then have a very distinctive design. Finally, Saucify games are usually accompanied by great bonuses. Video slot machines: the specialty of Saucify Although Saucify develops some classic slot machines, video are models which represent their main livelihood. Saucify excels in effect, in this exercise and get to combine fluid animations and decorated with a fun and attractive gameplay. If other editors can do better, do not forget to put things in context. In this sense, it is a promising Saucify editor and insurance continue gaining popularity thanks to the support of the Genesys group. Either way will you know Saucify react in the face of the new challenges of today? Edit studies have not mentioned as yet no HD distribution. So sooner or later, the editors must be passed to 3D if they hope to survive in the global arena of virtual gambling. Where to find Saucify slot machines? On our site, you will find a number of online casinos that support Saucify software technology and their games. We recommend Tropezia Palace, you will not be disappointed, but also The Mandarin Palace, offering a very confusing environment. Saucify games are usually offered in Flash version but there may be some online casinos to develop a downloadable version. Whichever version you choose, know you will not regret. Indeed, they are equivalent from the qualitative point of view. Top Game Slots Top Game, turned into Top Game Technology Dynamics not long ago, it is a casino game developer that needs no introduction. If you already have some experience in this medium, you will have heard of them. Top Game was created in 2008 and then its development has been exemplary, its reputation among gambling establishments is very good and all this from the beginning, been allowed to grow considerably and gain a number of employees to 800 today. The success of Top Game is easy to explain Indeed, when we look a little closer at Top Game offering, especially at the level of slot machines because it is what interests us at the moment, it is clear that online casinos that use it are happy. The machines are modern, address issues that have not been addressed before such as the Bee Land, which leads us right into the fantastic world of bees. Animations are also one of the strengths of Top Game, that is indisputable. 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The same can be said for the online casinos where slot machines have really evolved since they were created. We took a look at the types of slots that exist and how to get your progressive jackpots, and enter our exclusive guide on how to win on slot machines and online slots tournaments.Forget your new draftees, recruits and free agents, the important question for your AFL team this off-season is, “What will they be wearing in 2017?” Collingwood, Essendon, Geelong, St Kilda and the Western Bulldogs will start 2017 with a new apparel manufacturer and therefore will have some subtle changes to their gear. Hawthorn, Brisbane, Melbourne, St Kilda and West Coast will add new clash guernseys (yep, no more Hawthorn Power Rangers). The Roos have switched their home and away jumpers and Geelong have a new pre-season… shirt? So what will your team be running out in next year? Brisbane Lions New clash guernsey Collingwood Added 125th anniversary logo, new manufacturer (ISC) Essendon Return to curved sash, new manufacturer (ISC) We’re getting back to our roots, thanks to our new friends at ISC. More to come …. #curvedsash pic.twitter.com/EriI0fUe8S — Xavier Campbell (@XCampbell79) November 7, 2016 Geelong New pre-season, err, shirt? New manufacturer (COAR – Cotton On) MAKE IT STOP? RT @afl_ball: Geelong’s new NAB Challenge guernsey…??? pic.twitter.com/QxkZeXJWji — Commander in Chief (@iamshaunbailey) October 5, 2016 Hawthorn New clash guernsey Melbourne New clash guernsey. North Melbourne Home and away jumpers switch, predominantly blue jumper now home Welcome to Arden Street, Marley Williams and Nathan Hrovat. Looking good in the North colours! #NMFC pic.twitter.com/GHcUuDYF4V — North Melbourne (@NMFCOfficial) November 3, 2016 Port Adelaide White number panel on back St Kilda New clash guernsey (TBA), new manufacturer (BLK) West Coast Eagles New, throwback gold clash guernsey Western Bulldogs New manufacturer (Asics), gold premiership AFL logo The 2017 Western Bulldogs guernsey features a gold Premiers AFL logo, to commemorate the @westernbulldogs historic 2016 grand final win. pic.twitter.com/aAoMWMIWwS — ASICS Australia (@ASICSaustralia) November 10, 2016 Discuss all the changes to the 2017 AFL guernseys here.DEVELOPING: Turkey's government has decided to close down dozens of media outlets, including 45 newspapers and 16 television stations in the wake of a failed military coup, the country's state-run news agency reported Wednesday. CNN Turk reported that 130 media organizations had been shuttered in a widening crackdown by Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government. The list also inlcuded 23 radio stations, three news agencies and 15 magazines. Many of those targeted were regional media outlets as well as several organizations that had already been seized by the state over alleged links to Fethullah Gulen, the U.S.-based cleric accused of being behind the failed uprising. The state-run Anadolu Agency also reported that close to 1,700 military officers have been formally discharged. In all, nearly 16,000 people have been detained for questioning over suspected links to the coup attempt, and about half have been arrested to face trial, Interior Minister Efkan Ala said Wednesday. Earlier this week, the Ankara government issued detention warrants for 47 former executives or senior journalists of Turkey's Zaman newspaper for alleged links to Gulen, who denies any involvement in the coup attempt. Such detentions have raised concerns that people could be targeted simply for criticizing the government. The failed uprising by a faction within the military led to some 290 deaths on July 15. The media watchdog Reporters Without Borders condemned Turkey's purges of journalists, saying they have assumed "increasingly alarming proportions." "Criticizing the government and working for media outlets that support the Gulen Movement do not constitute evidence of involvement in the failed coup," said Johann Bihr, who heads the organization's Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk. Turkey's Justice Ministry denied an Amnesty International report alleging that some of those detained were tortured. Correct arrest and custody procedures were being applied under a three-month state of emergency announced last week, it said. The Associated Press contributed to this report.Walmart has been the subject of an ongoing campaign by those opposed to its treatment of employees. Lucy Nicholson/Reuters The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a complaint against Walmart on Wednesday, alleging the world's largest retailer violated labor laws in 14 states through actions it took against striking workers. A complaint issued by the NLRB's general counsel's office said Walmart representatives appeared on national news broadcasts and threatened to retaliate against workers if they went on strike. It also alleged they disciplined and fired workers for engaging in legally protected protest activity. According to the NLRB complaint, 19 employees were discharged “allegedly as a result of their participation in activities protected by the National Labor Relations Act.” More than 60 Walmart supervisors and one corporate officer are named in the filing. Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for Walmart, said, "We believe that our actions were valid. We take our obligations very seriously. We look forward to sharing our side of the facts in these cases with a judge."When you deploy, there's a great opportunity for a grand entrance to the battlefield by squashing enemies like the Wicked Witch of the East. Choose your surf board. Whether you're a Light Assault or Max Trooper, PlanetSide 2 will give you plenty to shoot at. I had some amazing runs of killing off enemy intruders in our base with the Heavy Assault and I predict him becoming my go-to defender class. Fly free in PlanetSide 2 without worrying you'll be squashed by paying opponents. Higby acknowledges PlanetSide 2 can't work unless it attracts an audience by being playable and fun for free. I was a little surprised to hear Higby boast that PlanetSide 2 had graphical settings built in that can bring any modern PC to its knees. Upon getting into PlanetSide 2, I signed up with the energy-weapon-happy Vanu Sovereignty faction and joined a beta server running one of its three 64-square-kilometer maps. There, between murders and base captures I promptly did the following stupid stuff:The one-man Lightning ATV is the speediest method of zipping around the huge map on the ground. But, in a manner similar to one of the classic Battlefield 1942's most famously unrealistic features, a second player can jump aboard and ride along like a heavily armed, physics-defying hood ornament. It looks absurd, but it's also absurdly entertaining. I was also able to ride along on top of other land vehicles, such as the tanks and trucks, so I'll be surprised if the same isn't true for air vehicles (I didn't get to try that). I'm looking forward to some spectacular stunt videos of aerial acrobatics as players ride the wings of planes.Getting killed by one of my three foes -- the other two factions and gravity -- meant respawning. Usually that happens at any base under my team's control, but every few minutes I was allowed to deploy directly to my squadmates' positions via a drop pod from orbit. And, as it turns out, when a car-sized pod drops on someone's head from 10,000 feet up, it leaves a mark. Control over the 10-second rapid descent is limited, but if a teammate is close enough to an enemy (particularly something large, like a tank) when you deploy, there's a great opportunity for a grand entrance to the battlefield by squashing them like the Wicked Witch of the East.Since this server "only" had 80 players, the vast majority of the territory was unoccupied, so I took a speedy Scythe plane and flew from one end to the other to check it out. This map is mostly desert, but it's full of interesting features like canyons, mountains, and bases. And as the sun set and dusk fell (showing off PlanetSide 2's full day/night cycle and impressive lighting) it got downright pretty, to the point where I crash landed because I wasn't paying attention to where I was going. Making the hike back to base on foot could've taken ages -- a fate worse than death -- so I resorted to the /suicide command so I could respawn where the action was.I also played as most of the classes:For my (lack of) money, theclass really seems to be the way to go. Why? One simple reason: he's the only one with jetpack privileges. That doesn't just make him the most mobile of any class, letting him quickly fly up to the highest points of the very vertically designed bases or hop over obstacles, but also making him an ideal pilot due to his unique ability to survive ejecting from any height.I had a few good runs as the, some by using his stealth to hit and run enemies as they attempted to capture one of my team's bases, and some by picking off targets with the sniper rifle from on high after drop-pod deploying to the top of a building.aren't really my thing -- they're extremely slow and tough to get around on foot, which led to a couple of situations where I'd spend a few minutes trudging toward the enemy base only to be intercepted and blasted by a tank. But I can picture them as devastating if a half dozen of them are deployed in the midst of an enemy base from a large transport at once, and they're fierce defenders.As anI rode along in the machine gun turret of a Magrider hovertank, picking off fools and hopping out after every big fight to patch up the armor a bit. He, like the Medic, didn't have a lot of surprises for me other than his deployable turret, but they both serve essential roles in team-based combat, so I'm glad they're here.Finally, my winningest class: the. I love how he's armed with both a standard-issue Vanu assault rifle and a homing-missile launcher that tracks both land and air vehicles, he's capable of taking out all kinds of threats -- and even defend himself with a temporary shield. (After I fell off a building and died, one of the SOE guys told me I could've used the shield to cushion my fall.) I had some amazing runs of killing off enemy intruders in our base with the HA and I predict him becoming my go-to defender class.All of that was done with a free account. Far too many free-to-play games are in the rude habit of making gamers feel like freeloading mooches for trying to get more than a couple of hours of enjoyable play out of them. PlanetSide 2, however, has the right idea: according to Creative Director Matt Higby, not only can you competitively play PlanetSide 2 for free, but just by showing up for one of its massive 64-square-kilometer, 2,000-player wars, you'll be doing Sony Online Entertainment a favor. "Lots of MMOs spend tons and tons of money building content. You have to populate a dungeon with lots of monsters and put loot on them and f***ing make dragons s**t. We don't have to do that, because playersour content. So all those dudes who are coming in and playing for free are helping us make the game better for the dudes who do decide they want to pay money." Damn straight.That doesn't necessarily mean free players will be easy-to-kill fodder who live only to be hunted for sport by the monied elite. Higby, who acknowledges PlanetSide 2 can't work unless it attracts an audience by being playable and fun for free, pledges no more than a 20% power difference between the highest-level player and the lowliest, and what power-enhancing upgrades there are must be earned, not bought -- and that we won't have to grind to do it. "I've played Tribes: Ascend too. I see a lot of the complaints that people have about the amount of time it takes to unlock things as a free player as opposed to a paid player. Essentially the only real way to get stuff is to pay for it. We're absolutely not trying to do that
terrazzo floors, white ceilings articulated with geometrically shaped skylights, and white walls which contrast dramatically with the colorful storefronts. Access among the three retail levels is provided by stairs, ramps, escalators, and twin elevators flanking the ACT station. These, together with seven carefully placed entrances and exits, permit ready movement between levels and minimize the amount of 'dead' space. Everything possible was done to make the store locations attractive to potential tenants. One way was to angle the mall facades to create a high frontage-to-depth ratio, thereby heightening the visual impact of individual stores.The resulting pedestrian streetscape consists of irregular storefronts, each unique but coordinated within a design and operational framework established by the developer. Some tenants have preferred an open and casual facade, while others have chose a closed, formal appearance, depending on the tenants merchandising philosophy and anticipated pedestrian traffic. This mix of store facades appears to be characteristic of most recent centers, and there is no apparent marketing advantage in either approach, other considerations being equal.The mall areas are lighted by an unusual system which uses the skylights as the primary light source during the daytime and lighting fixtures in the evening hours. Illumination requirements for the mall area are weighted in such a way that a large percentage of light is emitted from stores and storefronts. It is thought that this system has reduced lighting system demands at Fairlane Town Center to one of the lowest levels ever achieved in a regional center. Natural daylight reduces energy requirements in the daytime and makes the displays of merchandise more attractive."Mall history: 1976 - presentDeveloper: A. Alfred Taubman Current website: here Current aerial view Info from Wikipedia Previous entries: 1Progressives are once again gnashing their teeth over the dog-whistle politics of Republican Newt Gingrich. In Iowa, the former House Speaker hammered away on poor kids, food-stamp recipients and other red-meat issues, and the Tea Party faithful, ever attuned to the misery of the undeserving, appeared to respond. He did it again in South Carolina on Martin Luther King Jr. Day when he told Juan Williams, black journalist, that Barack Obama was a terrific "food stamp president." Cue the delight of the audience. Yet Newt's apparent race-baiting hasn't much improved his standing in the polls. According to the latest Rasmussen survey (which leans rightward), Mitt Romney remains the runaway favorite among primary voters at 35 per cent. Gingrich is second at 21 per cent. Rick Santorum and Ron Paul each have 16 per cent for third. With so many Americans jobless, debt-ridden or out of their minds with worry over the health insurance companies fighting over every nickel, it's stunning that voters are reacting to Newt's brand of plantation politics. Gingrich had no practical solutions. He thinks he can jumpstart the economy by changing the Federal Reserve's monetary policy from being partly focused on inflation to being entirely focused on it. Forget about full employment. Let the market decide that. What's striking about Gingrich's strategy in South Carolina hasn't been the race-baiting. Pot-shots like those come cheap. What's striking is that an astonishing $5m is being used to portray the quarter-billionaire Romney as a capitalist robber-baron straight out of the Gilded Age. Gingrich's well-heeled supporters could have used that $5m, which goes a long, long way in South Carolina, to assail Romney's Mormonism, his record as governor of a blue state, "Romneycare," his Yankee pedigree or his bionic mien. There's so much material here that it could make even Romney regret a corporation's cash-flush right to freedom of speech. Instead, his supporters chose to depict Romney, the former head of Bain Capital, as a Wall Street tycoon responsible for sending jobs overseas, closing down factories and destroying lives. The short film focusing on Bain echoes charges made by the Occupy Movement: that market fundamentalism, which pledges allegiance to low taxes and deregulation, is not the solution but the very source of everyone's problems. With this attack on "vulture capitalism," Gingrich is still aiming to stir up resentment among white middle-class voters over 50. But it's not just resentment steeped in racism (and as Gingrich's attack of poor blacks illustrates, racial resentments are obviously a part of his larger mode of politicking). It's a resentment that the political left has been trying to build a coalition around since forever -- the resentment of class. It seems that Gingrich is obliquely conceding that the American class system isn't a figment of a liberal's imagination. His attacks also suggest that Republicans are aware of the fallacy of their own worn-out ideology. I don't mean the ideology of low taxes and deregulation, though these are never far from their minds. I mean that the GOP uniformly believes that one's world view determines one's material conditions. A good outlook, they would say, equals a good paycheck. Failure, then, is a discrete and personal problem. Individuals need reforming, not social systems. Anyone who has traded his labour for money knows this is false. A superlative attitude isn't going to magically generate upward mobility. Failure, then, is structural. Social systems need reforming, not individuals. Progressives have long dreamed of building a coalition that cuts across racial divides to unite workers in common cause. Republicans typically don't. Yet they have no answers to pressing economic issues. The only way they can win is to divide and conquer using the deep entrenchments of race, and they have been doing that successfully for 30 years. Gingrich parlayed racial resentment into a Republican takeover of the House in 1994. But it should come as no surprise that he was able to do that at the dawn of the most rapid expansion of the economy in US history. When the economy was good, voters could afford racism. But that might not work now, no matter how hard he tries to invoke Nixon's Silent Majority. The economy has languished too long. The Cold War has faded; civil rights are integrated, if not fully honoured. "Socialism" now isn't even a bad word for a majority of young Americans. Progressives, including Democrats, have called Gingrich's suicide-bombing of Romney's campaign a sign of the GOP's ideological end times. That may be true. More importantly, it may signal a shift in our national social conscious. The culture war was always illusory. It is supremely ironic that an old culture warrior like Gingrich may end up removing the veil from voters' eyes to see what truly oppresses them: those, like Mitt Romney and Wall Street firms like Bain Capital, who control the means of production. Thanks to Gingrich, NBC's Matt Lauer asked Romney if envy fueled the debate over income inequality -- and Romney said yes! President Obama got a great gift that day. Let's hope he makes the best of it. John Stoehr is a lecturer in English at Yale University.According to the mainstream media, Canola oil is “heart healthy” and a good source of monounsaturated fats similar to olive oil. Unfortunately, much of what you hear in the mainstream media has been influenced by the heavy-handed marketing tactics of big food companies. Canola oil is cheap to produce, so they’ve spent a lot of money trying to convince you to think Canola is a “health oil” so that consumers, restaurants, institutions, etc. will buy it up as their main oil of choice. Here is the inconvenient truth about Canola oil. A Brief History of Canola Canola oil is made from the seeds of a plant called rape, which is in the turnip family. Since the Industrial Revolution, rapeseed oil has been an important component of lubricants for ships and steam engines, because unlike most oils, it sticks to wet metal. During World War II, the U.S. built a lot of ships, and so needed lots of rapeseed oil, but couldn’t get it from traditional suppliers in Europe and Asia. The Canadian rapeseed industry, which had been relatively small, exploded to fill the gap, and played an important role in the allied naval effort, becoming rich and powerful in the process. But rapeseed oil demand plummeted when the war was over, and so began an intensive program to breed a rapeseed edible to humans. Traditional rapeseed oil contains almost 60 percent monounsaturated fatty acids (compared to about 70 percent in olive oil). Unfortunately, about two-thirds of the monounsaturated fatty acids in rapeseed oil are erucic acid, a 22-carbon monounsaturated fatty acid that had been associated with Keshan’s disease, which causes fibrotic lesions on the heart. But, in 1978, the word “Canola” was invented to describe a new type of oilseed that was selectively bred from the original rapeseed to have significantly less erucic acid. This new oil was first developed in Canada, and the name Canola actually comes from the term, Canadian oil, low acid. In nature, there is actually no such thing as a “Canola plant” that produces “Canola oil.” Canola oil is simply a trade name for low-erucic acid rapeseed oil. The more interesting part of the history of Canola oil is how such an industrial oil became the most popular cooking oil used today… In collusion with the American Heart Association, numerous government agencies and departments of nutrition at major universities, the food oil industry had been promoting polyunsaturated oils as a heart-healthy alternative to “artery-clogging” saturated fats. But by the late 1970s, the cooking oil industry in North America realized it had a problem: It had become increasingly clear that consumption of industrial, polyunsaturated oils—particularly corn oil and soybean oil—was strongly associated with numerous inflammatory health problems, including heart disease and cancer. The industry was in a bind. It could not continue using large amounts of liquid polyunsaturated oils and make health claims about them in the face of mounting evidence of their dangers. Nor could manufacturers return to using traditional healthy saturated fats—butter, lard, tallow, palm oil and coconut oil—without causing an uproar. Besides, these fats cost far too much for the huge profit margins in the industry. According to “The Great Con-ola,” the solution was to embrace the use of monounsaturated oils, such as olive oil. Studies had shown that olive oil has a “better” effect than polyunsaturated oils on cholesterol levels and other blood parameters. Besides, Ancel Keys and other promoters of the now-debunked lipid hypothesis had popularized the notion that the Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil protected against heart disease and ensured a long and healthy life. But, olives require special growing conditions that make it impossible for olive oil to be used widely, plus olive oil is costly, especially for commercial products like margarine, biscuits, salad dressings, etc. In the 1980s, Canola oil came to market in the United States. For that to happen, it had to be granted GRAS (generally regarded as safe) status by the Food and Drug Administration. GRAS status is typically awarded to foods and herbal products that have been traditionally used, for hundreds or even thousands of years, without known adverse effects. Canola oil, however, was a new product without any track record. And it was developed from a banned product known to have toxic effects. So how did it obtain GRAS status? No one knows for sure, but it has been rumored that the Canadian government spent US$50 million to get it approved. Genetic Engineering and Canola While the original Canola was created through basic laboratory breeding and selection techniques, a major modification in 1995 introduced Canola that was genetically engineered to contain bacterial DNA to make it resistant to the toxic herbicide, glyphosate (RoundUp). Genetically modified crops are made in the lab from combining the DNA of two or more different species that cannot naturally reproduce together (like tuna and tomatoes). Such Franken-food could never occur in nature, even by random mutation. In fact, most Canola oil today comes from genetically engineered seed so far deviated from natural rapeseed that it can be patented. Related: The Difference Between Open Pollinated Seeds, Hybrid and GMOs Today, about 90 percent of the world’s Canola crop is genetically engineered to resist Roundup. The Roundup-Ready Canola seed is patented by Monsanto, and farmers can be sued for saving the seed or for having “unauthorized” Canola plants on their fields. Since canola is wind pollenated, and pollen drift is impossible to stop, it is almost impossible for organic Canola farmers to keep these patented contaminants out of their crops. It is also next to impossible for farmers (organic or otherwise) to combat the Superweeds that are evolving in response to constant, massive doses of Roundup. There are numerous concerns about genetically engineered (GM) crops that should make anyone cautious (at best) about their consumption. But the simple fact that Roundup-Ready Canola is doused repeatedly throughout the season with a carcinogenic herbicide that is known to harm both people and planet, is reason enough to stay far away from it. Bogus Health Claims for Canola It is true that Canola oil is high in monounsaturates, but Canola oil is anything but “healthy.” Canola oil typically ranges between 55-65% monounsaturated fat and between 28-35% polyunsaturated fat, with just a small amount of saturated fat. While we’ve been led to believe that high monounsaturated fat oils are good for us (which they are in the case of extra virgin olive oil or from unprocessed nuts or seeds), the fact is that Canola oil has more detriments than it does benefits. One of the biggest problems with highly processed, industrial oils like corn, soybean, sunflower, and Canola, is that the polyunsaturated component of the oil is highly unstable under heat, light, and pressure, which heavily oxidize the polyunsaturates, increasing free radicals in your body. The end result of all of this refining and processing are oils that are highly inflammatory in your body when you ingest them, potentially contributing to heart disease, stroke, cancer, weight gain, and other degenerative diseases. Related: The Skinny on Fat, Part 1: Dangers of Polyunsaturated Oils The reason that extra virgin olive oil is good for you is that it is usually cold pressed without the use of heat and solvents to aid extraction. Canola oil, on the other hand, is typically extracted and refined using high heat, pressure, and toxic petroleum solvents such as hexane, which is known to cause nerve damage in humans. Almost all Canola oil undergoes a process of caustic refining, degumming, bleaching, and deodorization, all using high heat and questionable chemicals. (If your food requires hexane, degumming solvents, bleaching and chemical deodorization, should you be eating it?) Even worse, all of the high-heat, high-pressure processing with solvents actually forces some of the omega-3 content of Canola oil to be transformed into trans fats! According to Dr. Mary Enig, Nutritional Biochemist, “Although the Canadian government lists the trans fat content of Canola at a minimal 0.2 percent, research at the University of Florida at Gainesville, found trans fat levels as high as 4.6 percent in commercial liquid Canola oil.“ And this is the crap that they are marketing to you as a “heart-healthy” oil! Possibly the greatest danger of Canola oil is that even though it now has Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status, no long-term studies on humans have ever been done. Animal studies on Low Erucic Acid Rapeseed oil were performed when the oil was first developed and have continued to the present. The results challenge not only the health claims made for Canola oil, but also the theoretical underpinnings of the lipid hypothesis. In 1996, Japanese scientists announced a study wherein a special Canola oil diet had actually killed laboratory animals. Reacting to this unpublished, but verified and startling information, a duplicate study was conducted by Canadian scientists, using piglets and a Canola oil-based milk-replacer diet. In this second study, published in Nutrition Research, 1997, the researchers verified that Canola oil somehow depleted the piglets of vitamin E to a dangerously low level. And another study confirmed this as well. Any “food” substance that depletes vitamin E rapidly is extremely dangerous. Vitamin E is absolutely essential to human health. It is critically necessary in the body when processed fats are eaten because Vitamin E controls the lipid peroxidation that results in dangerous free-radical activity, which in turn causes lesions in your arteries and other problems. Canola oil has been shown to be a heavy abuser of Vitamin E, with the potential for rapidly depleting the body of this important vitamin. Research also shows that canola oil causes detrimental changes to blood platelets, and it shortens the life span in rats that are prone to stroke if it is the only oil in the diet. The Bottom Line The bottom line is that Canola is an inflammatory oil in your body that contains foreign, genetically engineered DNA, trans fats, and toxic chemical residues, including glyphosate. Industrial Canola is also an environmental scourge and a threat to organic farming, and it should be avoided at all costs. The dangers of canola oil make its use unjustifiable. Healthier, traditional alternatives include: Extra virgin olive oil – for low temperature cooking or as a healthy salad dressing oil. Do not heat extra virgin olive oil! (My favorite olive oil.) – for low temperature cooking or as a healthy salad dressing oil. Do not heat extra virgin olive oil! (My favorite olive oil.) Avocado oil – great for all everything from salads and mayonnaise to frying due to its high smoke point. Mellow, buttery flavor. (I use this brand avocado oil.) – great for all everything from salads and mayonnaise to frying due to its high smoke point. Mellow, buttery flavor. (I use this brand avocado oil.) Virgin coconut oil – great for all temperatures of cooking due to it’s high stability under heat. A great source of healthy saturated fats in the form of medium chain triglycerides (MCTs), one of which is Lauric Acid, which helps support the immune system and is lacking in most western diets. Virgin coconut oil tastes like coconut, so it’s great for baking and dishes where the flavor of coconut will enhance the dish. (My favorite coconut oil.) – great for all temperatures of cooking due to it’s high stability under heat. A great source of healthy saturated fats in the form of medium chain triglycerides (MCTs), one of which is Lauric Acid, which helps support the immune system and is lacking in most western diets. Virgin coconut oil tastes like coconut, so it’s great for baking and dishes where the flavor of coconut will enhance the dish. (My favorite coconut oil.) Organic grass-fed butter or ghee – a great source of Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA), which has even been shown in studies to help prevent cancer, and help muscle building and fat burning. Ghee is better at high temperatures than even coconut oil. (This ghee is made in the U.S.) – a great source of Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA), which has even been shown in studies to help prevent cancer, and help muscle building and fat burning. Ghee is better at high temperatures than even coconut oil. (This ghee is made in the U.S.) Lard, tallow and other animal fats from grass-fed, pasture-raised animals – also a source of CLA, Vitamin D, and saturated fats that help with hormone balance, brain function and vitamin absorption.By Nick Dorrington Divide et impera. Divide and conquer. The strategy implemented by many a great leader over the centuries, from Caesar to Napolean to Stalin, is now being put to work in the competitive world of Mexican television rights by Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man and owner of the telecommunications giants Telmex and América Móvil. Earlier this month, América Móvil purchased a 30% stake in Grupo Pachuca, whose holdings include the Mexican top flight clubs C.F. Pachuca and Club León. The purchase was met with enthusiasm from supporters expecting Slim to lavish similar fortunes to those a myriad of less-wealthy Russian Oligarchs, Arab Sheikhs and Asian businessman have on other teams across the globe. But such expectations were unrealistic. Slim’s sporting loves are baseball, boxing and motor racing. His investment into these clubs was not an act of vainglory, a pursuit of celebrity or praise. No, Slim’s motives were purely business orientated, the purchase his latest attempt to shake up the Mexican television market’s dominant axis of Televisa and TV Azteca. Telmex has been seeking a domestic television broadcast license since 2006, but its attempts to do so have been thwarted by hostility from Televisa and TV Azteca, both wary of opening up the market to such a well-funded competitor. In retaliation, Slim withdrew advertising from both networks in early 2011. The loss in earnings for Televisa alone was estimated at $75 million. Days after Slim’s investment into Grupo Pachuca was announced, he landed a second blow in his attempts to disrupt the television market. Each Mexican club owns and licenses the television rights for its home matches. Until this season, all 18 top flight clubs licensed rights to either Televisa or TV Azteca. There existed a gentleman’s agreement between the clubs to do so, perhaps facilitated by both companies having holdings in Mexican teams. Televisa has owned Club América since 1959 and also owns second division side Necaxa. It owned San Luis too, until earlier this year. TV Azteca, through parent company Grupo Salinas, owns the Morelia club Monarcas and holds a large stake in Jaguares of Chiapas. Club León, newly promoted from the second division, had been negotiating with TV Azteca, but were unhappy with the terms being offered, which were the same the television company had been paying Estudiantes Tecos, the team whose place in the top flight León had taken. Slim’s investment was almost immediately followed by an announcement that León’s rights for the remainder of the 2012/13 season had instead been sold to Fox Sports. Not only were Fox Sports reportedly offering significantly more than TV Azteca for the rights, but selling to them also allowed Slim to take a swipe at both TV Azteca and Televisa, breaking their long-standing stranglehold over domestic football television rights. Pachuca’s rights are also up for negotiation next year and the smart money would be on it following León to Fox Sports. With the hegemony now broken, there is a strong possibility that other clubs could follow León’s lead when next negotiating television contracts. Atlante, Chivas and Monterrey have all previously considered alternative options and should León and Pachuca gain a financial advantage from licensing rights to Fox Sports, other clubs will surely follow suit. In that situation, Televisa and TV Azteca could well find themselves bidding against one another for the rights to the remaining teams. Televisa and TV Azteca’s parent company, Grupo Salinas, have maintained close ties in attempting to overturn Telmex’s domination of the Mexican fixed line, mobile phone and broadband markets. They even drew a competition watchdog review earlier this year when Televisa looked to purchase 50% of lusacell, owned by Grupo Salinas. By sparking a bidding war over football television rights, Slim could well be trying to strike a wedge between the two that will benefit all his business interests. More likely is that in the absence of his own television network, Slim is trying to scatter teams across the various existing networks, opening the way for his streaming website UnoTV to step forward and become the de-facto distributor of Mexican football content. Slim angered his two rivals by providing free streaming coverage of the 2011 Pan American Games on the portal, which will now broadcast Club León’s home matches. Pachuca’s will surely follow next year as could those of other teams if attractive terms are offered. You do not get to be as rich as Slim is without taking this kind of ruthless approach to business, but even though sporting reasons are unlikely to be the primary drive behind his investment, supporters of Club León and Pachuca can rest relatively easily. Both clubs are worth far more to Slim as successful operations - only truly dedicated fans will pay to watch teams that perpetually lose - and therefore, although his investment into the clubs is unlikely to be huge it will be sufficient to ensure they are both in playoff contention on a regular basis. But for Slim, beating the likes of Club América or Monarcas is little more than a pleasant side effect as the success or failure of his investment will be determined far away from the football pitch. The die has been cast. There is little left to do but sit back and take in the fallout. Nick is an itinerant freelance football writer for hire, specialising in South American and Mexican football. He can be contacted on twitter @chewingthecoca. Comments below please. See if you can earn a fraction of Slim’s wealth over at Ladbrokes on their football slot games Shoot and Soccer Safari. They are both available to play here and when you sign up you will recieve some great bonuses to help you on your way.The Argentine scored in the Copa del Rey final win against Barcelona and was the best player on the pitch in Lisbon when Madrid won La Decima A year before his Champions League final heroics, doctors gave Di Maria and his wife's baby a 30 per cent chance of survival after she was born Angel Di Maria attributes his successes with Real Madrid to his daughter Mia's survival after being born three months premature The versatile midfielder was one of Real Madrid's stars last season and was named man-of-the-match in the Champions League final win over Atletico When Sir Alex Ferguson gave Angel Di Maria his man-of-the-match award at the end of last season’s Champions League final it was for 120 minutes of incredible football. But for the Argentine winger the real ‘game of his life’ had been played out in the previous 14 months amid the turmoil of a career under threat at Real Madrid and a baby daughter born three months premature. As emotional as the events of winning the club’s 10th European Cup in Lisbon were, nothing Di Maria achieves in football will rank alongside the story of his daughter Mia. Scroll down for video Family values: Di Maria with his wife Jorgelina Cardoso and their daughter Mia, who was born prematurely Winner: The Argentine had a sensational year for Real Madrid and helped them win the Champions League A year before that extra-time run and assist for Gareth Bale to score the decisive goal in a 4-1 victory over Atletico Madrid, Di Maria’s wife Jorgelina Cardoso had suffered pregnancy complications and doctors had given the couple’s baby a 30 per cent chance of survival if the birth was not induced. Mia was born three months premature on April 22, 2013, the night before Real Madrid faced Borussia Dortmund in a Champions League semi-final. Di Maria missed the game to be with his wife and the couple agonised for the next two months as their daughter stayed in intensive care before finally being allowed to go home. With Mia safe and sound Di Maria was able to turn his full attention back to playing football but Real Madrid had signed Bale in his place and he appeared to be facing up to a season on the bench. Dedicating his goal: Di Maria looks up to his family after scoring Argentina's winner against Switzerland Angel's No 1 fan: Baby Mia wears an Argentina top with 'Papa 7' on the back in tribute to her famous father ‘My daughter taught me that everything that appears to be really difficult can end up being easy if you put the effort in and wait for the rewards,’ he said. ‘She transmitted so much energy to me and it helped me to have the spectacular year that I had.’ Di Maria was the top goal provider in the Spanish league last season with 22 assists, he scored in the Copa del Rey triumph over Barcelona and outplayed everyone in Lisbon as Real lifted the Champions League trophy. Former Real manager Jose Mourinho had requested his signing four years earlier, with his agent Jorge Mendes helping to bring the wiry winger to the Spanish capital after two years in Portugal with Benfica. The transfer fee was big at £20million but the wages were low and the fact that they never increased as his value to the side grew remains the main reason why he is now a Manchester United player. La Decima: Di Maria was named man-of-the-match in the Champions League final against Atletico Madrid Showboat: Di Maria enjoys performing 'rabona' crosses, where he flicks one leg behind the other Real boss Carlo Ancelotti said this week that ‘the club did everything it could to keep him’, but that is not the case. He also said after Real lost the Super Cup to Atletico without 26-year-old Di Maria: ‘We didn’t need him today.’ Ancelotti was told in the summer that James Rodriguez would be arriving and that Di Maria would be the sacrifice. The coach’s long career working for Silvio Berlusconi at AC Milan means he is well-schooled in the art of accepting every command that drops down from on high, no matter how ill-advised. Real’s reluctance to put Di Maria on anything like pay parity with Bale and new signing Rodriguez owes much to image. Madrid’s business model is built on footballer pin-ups. Di Maria does not fit the poster-boy brigade. Nicknamed El Fideo (the noodle) for that long streaky physique, he is more hall of mirrors than hall of fame but there is an admirable durability to both his character and his constitution. Before he accepted the man-of-the-match award in Lisbon last May from former United manager Ferguson he had other important business to attend to. On the final whistle he went looking for his father Miguel and when they found each other pitchside it was a case of a dad hugging the son who had just lived his dream for him. Unstoppable: Atletico Madrid right-back Juanfran tries to stop Di Maria during the Super Cup on August 19 Familiar foe: The 26-year-old is set to complete a move to Manchester United for £59.7million from Real Madrid Angel’s father had made it to River Plate’s first team as a player but had his progress cut short by a knee injury that would not be career-ending today. He quit football and took a job delivering coal in Rosario, regularly taking Angel along to help him and occasionally — when his delivery route allowed — stopping off to see his son train at Rosario Central, the club that signed him when he was only seven. Angel made it to those training sessions thanks to the commitment of his mother Diana, who used to take the boy on her bicycle. Each trip was a 50-minute test of endurance with Angel on the back of the bike and his three-year-old sister on the handlebars. Stamina runs in the family. Daughter Mia celebrated her first birthday last April and the Di Marias invited all the parents and babies who had 12 months earlier shared the agony of the incubator unit of Madrid’s Monteprincipe Hospital. All the babies born prematurely with Mia had, like her, survived. A part of Di Maria will always remain in Madrid because of the medical staff that gave Mia the round-the-clock care she needed to pull through. It will also not be easy to swap the No 22 for the No 7 at Old Trafford, no matter what the historic significance of the latter — 22 is, after all, the number he picked out when he arrived at Madrid in 2010 and ended up being the date of birth of his little girl.FOR both Israelis and Palestinians, the third war between Israel and Gaza in six years may prove to be the most gruelling yet. Since the war started on July 8th over 500 people have been killed, all but 20 of them Palestinians. In a ground offensive, which started on July 17th, Israeli forces are focusing on four border areas along a strip 40km (25 miles) long, seemingly to destroy tunnels used by Hamas to launch attacks in Israel and to fortify its border against Israeli incursions. But most of the victims have been Palestinian civilians, including many children. In the worst violence to date on July 20th Israel attacked Shujaiya, a tightly packed residential suburb five minutes’ drive east of Gaza City that has long been a stronghold for an array of militants. The shelling killed 66 Palestinians in one day; 13 elite Israeli soldiers died in the fighting of an ensuing ground offensive. Footage from the scene showed bodies of Palestinians, many of them women and children, strewn across the streets. Gazans have limited options as to where to flee: more than 80,000 people have sought shelter in UN schools. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. On July 21st Israel’s defence minister, Moshe Yaalon, said the mission to destroy tunnels should be over in two to three days. But Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has warned that the offensive will continue until Israel has achieved its aims. These are said to include the destruction of rocket-launchers and command centres. But many of these lie concealed among and below civilian infrastructure in the heart of Gaza City and the mission looks set to draw Israel ever deeper into the heart of Gaza's teeming population centre. Despite being besieged and the rising death toll, Hamas and fellow Islamists show no sign of changing course. They continue to launch over 100 rockets at Israel every day, targeting towns and cities from south to north. Hamas has launched drones for the first time and militants have repeatedly infiltrated Israel by sea and tunnel, sometimes to deadly effect. Over the weekend of July 19th-20th Hamas killed 18 Israeli soldiers, almost double Israel’s toll during the three weeks of Operation Cast Lead, hithero the biggest Israeli assault on Hamas in Gaza, in 2008-2009. In contrast to the resistance Israel’s forces encountered then, Israeli soldiers speak of fighting a force ambushing them with anti-tank missiles from fortified underground bunkers. Diplomats are struggling to make their calls for a political solution heard. Before an emergency session of the UN Security Council on July 20th, Ban Ki-moon, the UN’s secretary-general, described the deaths of Palestinians by shelling as an “atrocious action”. President Barack Obama has repeatedly called for an immediate ceasefire. And despite supporting Israel’s right to defend itself in public, John Kerry let slip his frustration when he was caught on camera remarking sarcastically to one of his aides that Israel was conducting “a hell of a pinpoint operation”. Mr Kerry is due to travel on July 21st to Cairo and Jerusalem in an attempt to broker a ceasefire. Hamas leaders have refused to accept a "quiet-for-quiet" deal, but say they are open to discussing a settlement that lifts Israel’s seven-year siege on Gaza that has blocked the movement of all but a tiny number of Gaza's people, imports including an array of basics including paper and construction materials and all exports. Israeli officials bridle at those terms. In public statements an increasing number of ministers lean towards expanding the operation in Gaza. And attempts to broker a deal are hampered by the refusal of Egypt, which is taking the initiative, and Western powers to engage with Hamas. Since Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, then as head of the army, seized power from the Muslim Brotherhood in July 2013, Egypt has banned Hamas, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, from carrying out activities and shut the border crossing with Gaza. It has so far stopped short of inviting Hamas leaders from Gaza for talks. Meanwhile, Palestinian officials are meeting in Qatar's capital, Doha, where Hamas’s head, Khaled Meshal, resides. The longer the fighting continues, the more unrest is likely to flare violently among Palestinians in the West Bank. Demonstrations are getting bigger. Israeli forces opened fire on crowds in Hebron, the largest West Bank city, on July 20th. And the more damage Israel causes to infrastructure in Gaza, the more it sows the seeds of future strife. Electricity has collapsed to two hours a day in Gaza and in some parts water has slowed to a trickle after Israel struck the water mains. Banks briefly opened during a brief UN-negotiated humanitarian respite on July 17th to allow some employees to draw their salaries, but those working for Hamas’s administration could not do so because Israel had bombed two branches of Hamas’ Islamic National Bank. The less Gaza has to lose, the more its people will back Hamas's use of military means—including those rockets.Last week, news broke that Seattle police were reviewing the case of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain's death. Part of the review included developing 35mm film that had been sitting in a police station vault for 20 years, and although it was reported that photos of Cobain dead would not be released, the Seattle police have reportedly published nine new pictures of Cobain's death scene. The 20th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death (April 5, 2014) is fast approaching, and according to Detective Mike Ciesynski, Cobain's case review was in anticipation of the milestone. "I was requested to look at the case because I’m a cold case detective because it is 20 years later and it’s a high media case,” Detective Ciesynski told KIRO 7. “And there were always these conspiracy theorists out there and so I was asked to look at the case and review it.” 20 years after Cobain's death, 35mm film of the death scene, which was originally deemed unnecessary to develop, has been made public. The new photos were not supposed to see the light of day, but Seattle police have released nine new images. See the new photos of Kurt Cobain's death scene below.If you're setting your Week 2 Fantasy Football lineups, thinking about trades or searching the waiver wire, you need to see what SportsLine's advanced computer model has to say. When it comes to ranking players, their model outperformed human experts last season by 25 percent when there was a big difference in ranking -- four spots for a QB, seven for a RB and nine for a WR. Over the course of a season, that can be the difference between missing the playoffs and winning your entire league. One player the model loves this week: Saints wide receiver Ted Ginn (projected WR18). He's owned in 82 percent of CBS Sports leagues - so he might be available on your waiver wire - and is coming off a 4-53 clunker against the Vikings. This week, Ginn and the Saints host the Patriots, who gave up four touchdowns to Alex Smith in Week 1. Put Ginn in your lineups with confidence in the game with the highest Over-Under of
4-5-0. AdvertisementsOver the past few months, the Chicago Bears have transformed their receiving corps from one of the NFL's shortest to arguably the tallest. They've reunited the key players from the Denver Broncos' dynamic 2008 offense and they've fended off questions -- including some from their quarterback -- about their offensive line. But to me, the most intriguing thing happening in Chicago at the moment is the development of a mysterious package of plays for receiver/kick returner Devin Hester, the latest in a long line of attempts to harness Hester's Hall of Fame speed and skills for their offense. General manager Phil Emery hinted at the new approach shortly after the draft. Offensive coordinator Mike Tice and receivers coach Darryl Drake offered some morsels to reporters during last weekend's rookie minicamp, and all that's left now is to see if it actually works. Part of me wants to roll my eyes and cringe, as we did recently on the blog, as the Bears once again refuse to accept what Hester is and isn't -- at least what he hasn't been yet. They remain unsatisfied with him simply being the best kick returner in NFL history. And another part thinks this attempt could prove to be the most productive balance the Bears have tried yet. Drake might have best explained the plan last weekend by suggesting the "Hester Package" will limit snaps but elevate targets to make more efficient use of Hester's time on offense. "The talent has always been there," Drake told reporters. "It's just a matter of not having him play 70 plays and throw to him twice. Play him 15 [plays], let him touch it 13 [times.] In order for him to be effective, we don't need to have him out there playing that many plays. If he's out there, put the ball in his hands. We need to have that package, and Mike Tice -- I promise you -- he's going to do it." On the surface, it makes sense. Hester's combination of speed and open-field running ability is rare and awfully tempting to expand on. And when you look at the chart, you see what happens when a team doesn't have or utilize the speed to stretch a defense vertically. The 2011 Bears, for instance, had one of the least efficient short passing games in the NFL last season. But running a full game's worth of pass routes probably takes the edge off Hester's energy in the return game. There is reason to think he could have a similar impact in 15 plays designed to involve him than he could in 70 plays that spread the ball around the field. That appears to be the starting point for a tweak that appears to have emanated from, or at least endorsed by, Emery himself. "I want to make sure that we have a special plan for Devin," Emery said last month. "We have the 'Devin Package' -- packages of plays as a receiver. You never know where he's going to line up. I don't want to get too far ahead of that in terms of letting other people know what we're going to do with him, but he will have a package of plays that we feel can bring out his dynamic ability to the forefront and if not only as carrying or catching the ball, but sometimes that's a decoy. "Devin's speed vertically is something that has to be accounted for. So if that pulls people from coverage, to handle that vertical ball, you've got other people; we've got some awfully big targets to hit." On the other hand, of course, it's not as easy as it sounds. You better believe that opposing defenses will notice when Hester is on the field, especially now that the Bears have announced they want to get him the ball often in the relatively brief period of time he plays offense. I don't think it will make teams leave, say, Brandon Marshall wide open to account for Hester, but his appearance isn't going to surprise anyone, either. The "Hester Package" has already conjured comparisons to the "Randy Ratio" that Tice used after taking over the Minnesota Vikings' head coaching job in 2002. As you might recall, a study of the Vikings' 2001 season showed they won every game they targeted receiver Randy Moss on at least 40 percent of their throws. Tice announced he would make that goal a centerpiece of his offense. The "Randy Ratio" wasn't a schematic adjustment as much as it was Tice's attempt to cajole the notoriously anti-authoritarian receiver to buy in as a team leader. It backfired on a number of fronts, and Tice himself acknowledged over the weekend that it "came back to bite me in the [rear end]." Turning serious, Tice said: "Devin is going to be on the field. If he's not on the field, then they should fire me." That final line speaks to the extent the Bears have prioritized Hester's potential contribution. You know the old saying: If at first you don't succeed, try try again.Latest News from Daily Intelligencer 6:29 p.m. America Has Spent Nearly $5 on Wars Since 9/11 And we may be less safe now than before we made that investment. 6:22 p.m. What Are the Republicans Endorsing Clinton Expecting in Return? It’s not clear how much they’re helping her, or what promises have been made. 5:51 p.m. LinkNYC Is Turning Off Web Browsing on Its Wi-Fi Kiosks After Complaints They’ll still provide Wi-Fi and other features. 4:46 p.m. America Gives Israel a $38 Billion Gift Certificate for Weapons The Obama administration gives Israel the largest security aid package it has ever received. 4:21 p.m. Colin Powell’s Personal Emails Are Like a D.C. Burn Book The former secretary of State was hacked, and now everyone knows he hates them. 2:51 p.m. Big Beer Takes on Little Weed at the Ballot Box The alcohol industry is bankrolling efforts to defeat this fall’s ballot initiatives on marijuana legalization. 1:45 p.m. 4 Paralympians Ran the 1,500-Meter Final Faster Than Anyone at Rio This Summer Clearly, this is the class to beat. 1:30 p.m. Donald Trump Makes Surprise Reveal of His Physical Results on Dr. Oz His campaign had previously said he wouldn’t. 1:28 p.m. That Democratic Senate Looking Dicier The odds are dropping along with the standing of several key candidates — especially Evan Bayh. 1:20 p.m. White House Looks to Resettle the Most Refugees Since 1995 More than any year since 1995. 12:55 p.m. If Clinton Needs to Close Her Foundation, Trump Needs to Dissolve His Company Trump’s company has financial ties with a long list of our government’s allies and enemies. Those conflicts of interest can’t be escaped. 12:26 p.m. Dead Man Wins Primary Election in Upstate New York Republican Bill Nojay committed suicide Friday, too late to be taken off the ballot. 11:43 a.m. Trump’s Path to Victory Is Starting to Look Very Real It’s no longer far-fetched to imagine Trump winning the presidency — if he can just put Pennsylvania into play. 11:11 a.m. Curt Schilling Is a Lot Less Popular Than Elizabeth Warren A new poll suggests he faces (very) long odds in his dream of unseating the Massachusetts senator. 8:13 a.m. Donald Trump Is Becoming a Regular Republican Hawk on Foreign Policy Days after threatening to bomb Iran over rude “gestures,” Trump names a man who pushed for regime change in Iraq — in 1998 — as a senior adviser. 7:00 a.m. Why a Clinton Win Would Be a Boon to the GOP If Trump loses, GOP insiders resume power in a party that’s in a good position to win the next two critical elections. If he wins, all bets are off. 5:34 a.m. Why Trump’s Foundation Should Be a Bigger Scandal Than Clinton’s For years, Trump used his nonprofit to benefit himself, and now it’s under investigation. 1:25 a.m. Army Agrees to Gender-Transition Surgery for Chelsea Manning “This is all that I wanted,” said Chelsea. “For them to let me be me.” 1:23 a.m. 69-Year-Old Woman Punched in the Face at Violent Trump Rally in North Carolina Five people were arrested. Yesterday at 11:52 p.m. Suspected Russian Hackers Hit the Democratic Party Again DNC interim chair Donna Brazile suggested Russia is trying to help out Donald Trump.Ban on the run One way or another, the courts are going to get out of the way of President Donald Trump’s travel ban, predicted Stephen Miller, a primary author of the executive order that went off the rails in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week. The senior White House policy adviser, who decried the “judicial usurpation of power” during interviews on four Sunday morning shows, said, “We are considering and pursuing all options.” Those included seeking an emergency stay in the Supreme Court, further proceedings within the Court of Appeals, going to trial on the case or new presidential “executive actions.” “The president’s powers here are beyond question,” Miller said of Trump’s plan to halt U.S. entry from seven Muslim-majority nations. “As we begin to take further actions,” Miller said, it will be shown in the end “that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” Brands on the run Sears Holdings and its subsidiary Kmart are dropping online sales of Trump Home items. Sign up for the Power on Trial newsletter Get our insider's look and analysis of the key moments in the Manganos' retrial. By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy. The move is part of a “streamlining” to “focus on our most profitable items,” a Sears spokesman told Reuters. Last week, Trump complained on Twitter that Nordstrom treated his daughter Ivanka “unfairly” by deciding to stop selling her fashion line. Nordstrom cited declining sales. Trudeau-Trump tête-à-tête Justin Trudeau, the liberal prime minister of Canada, was slated to visit Trump on Monday at the White House. Judicial branch meets chain saw Legal experts across the political spectrum worry that Trump’s attacks on judges are “corrosive” to the constitutional system of checks and balances and could have a long-term impact on respect for the rule of law, reports Newsday’s Yancey Roy. Trump’s comments rarely focus on the law or judicial reasoning, but instead question a judge’s legitimacy or motives. Rule against Trump University? Trump says it’s because the judge is Mexican. Question his travel ban? Trump says the judge is threatening Americans’ safety. The take-away: Follow the orders Aside from the travel ban, Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders setting big goals with little detail, writes Newsday’s Dan Janison. On law enforcement, he demanded agencies create task forces to probe and fight crime, anti-police violence and international drug cartels. It’s up to them to figure out how. During the campaign, Trump said he had a plan to defeat ISIS. Once in office, he directed the Defense Department to come up with one. Flynn twisting in wind? The White House punted Sunday when asked if Trump still has confidence in national security adviser Michael Flynn amid reports he discussed U.S. sanctions with a Russian ambassador before Trump’s inauguration — and then misled Vice President Mike Pence about the conversation. Miller, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said the administration did not give him “anything to say” about the situation. He called it a “sensitive matter,” report Newsday’s Emily Ngo and David M. Schwartz. “The knives are out for Flynn,” said one administration official in a Washington Post story Sunday night, while a New York Times report described National Security Council operations as erratic and politicized since Trump took office, alarming career staff. It’s Miller time Miller also repeated, vehemently and fact-free-ly, Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that voter fraud — busloads of people from Massachusetts — tipped the Election Day results in New Hampshire against him. Challenged repeatedly by ABC “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos for evidence, Miller gave none. Veteran New Hampshire Republican operative Tom Rath tweeted: “Allegations of voter fraud in NH are baseless, without any merit. It’s shameful to spread these fantasies.” Miller’s tour of the shows — a role filled on prior Sundays by White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus — won praise from the boss, who tweeted: “Congratulations Stephen Miller on representing me this morning.... Great job!” For more on the 31-year-old hard-right ideologue playing a powerful role in the Trump White House, see these in-depth profiles of Miller from The Washington Post and The New York Times. The hospitality business Trump’s golf-and-diplomacy weekend with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe meant more exposure for Trump’s Palm Beach resort properties. Unethical? No, son Eric Trump told The New York Times, comparing Mar-a-Lago to the Crawford, Texas, ranch where former President George W. Bush hosted foreign leaders. The analogy fails in that Bush’s hideaway wasn’t also looking for paying customers. Eric and Donald Trump Jr. also said their plans to boldly expand the Trump Organization will pose no conflicts of interest. What else is happeningIn an ironic bid to save its image, Facebook is buying up ads on Google as damage control for its role in Russian election interference. Type in any search with “Russia” and “Facebook” and the result at the top of Google will be an ad from the social network. The link, with the headline, “We Take Trust Seriously,” directs you to Facebook’s Community Page on what it’s doing to protect people from election interference. The nine points listed on the site follow those outlined by Mark Zuckerberg in a Sept. 21 live stream. The CEO spoke directly to his 2 billion users, vowing to take action against election interference and the spread of misinformation. Zuckerberg said he shared 3,000 ads with Congress that appeared to have come from the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency. He also promised to hire 1,000 more people to the ad monitoring team. “We recently announced a nine-point plan to protect our community from election interference around the world and promote authentic civic engagement on Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. “Over the past couple of weeks, we placed advertisements in several newspapers and online news publications, as well as search, outlining this plan. We take the trust of the Facebook community seriously and want to be clear that we’re taking immediate action.” Motherboard points out that Facebook also purchased full-page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post to win back its users. The company hosting Facebook’s ads is caught up in its own advertising controversy after a Washington Post report on Monday alleged that Russian agents spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on Google’s platforms—YouTube, Gmail, and search—to spread propaganda. Facebook has faced strong criticism since revealing it sold $100,000 in ads to Russian “troll farms” who used them to cause political unrest and drive a wedge between Americans during the 2016 presidential election. The brunt of people’s outrage has been directed toward Zuckerberg, who previously dismissed accusations that his platform could be used by Russia to influence an election, calling it “pretty crazy.” He later apologized. “Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive.” Facebook and rival Twitter have agreed to testify publicly in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Nov 1. Google was also invited but hasn’t announced its plans. H/T MotherboardA hard-fought first leg of the Amway Canadian Championship saw Ottawa Fury FC and FC Edmonton battle to a scoreless draw in front of a loud — albeit chilly — crowd of more than 2,400 at Keith Harris Stadium Wednesday night. But despite the lack of scoring, the match proved an entertaining one as both teams had even possession in a contest that was a physical battle from the first kick-off. The up-tempo match was expected, as the aggregate winner of both legs between the two teams goes on to play MLS side Montreal Impact in the next round of the championship. Fury head coach Marc Dos Santos said he was impressed with the way his team came out to open the match and, despite some issues for the first part of the second half, thought it was a good fight. "Especially in the first 25 minutes, we came in very well and created opportunities early," he said. "We created situations, they created situations." Ottawa goalkeeper Devala Gorrick saved the game late for the Fury, stretching out to make an outstanding stop in the waning seconds of stoppage time. "It’s one of the those saves that I live for," said Gorrick, who seemed to see any ball that came near him Wednesday night. Other than a few breakdowns in the second half, Gorrick liked what he saw from his squad. "What I see a lot is that each game we’re showing more and more and building as a team," he said. "(Wednesday) we had so many chances. We get one of those goals and the game is different. I’m excited to see what happens next." As expected, the game showed plenty of physicality. Tempers boiled over in the 70th minute after Ottawa forward Carl Haworth got shoved while on the ground in the Edmonton penalty box. Teammate Philippe Davies was shown a yellow card in the fracas after coming to Haworth’s defence and several players began pushing and shoving. The melee followed a great chance for Ottawa to take the lead after Fury defender Mason Trafford sent a strike just high of the Edmonton goal. The Fury had another chance to take the lead in the 79th minute, but Davies had his shot blocked on a great tackle from Edmonton’s Michael Nonni. That was followed by a great defensive play from Drew Beckie in the 85th minute on a dangerous attack by Edmonton’s Frank Jonke at the top of the Ottawa penalty box. The first half was just as entertaining as Davies — a native of Longueuil, Que. — led the offensive charge for his squad. While Davies couldn’t find the back of the net in the first half, he easily had the most scoring opportunities after heading the ball inches over the FC Edmonton cross bar and two other shots that went either just high or just wide. The possession game was about as even as it could get, with Ottawa controlling the ball 49% of the time to Edmonton’s 51%. Edmonton, as expected, was a fan of the long pass across the middle third to start its attacks. Even with 6-foot-5 central defender Omar Jarun out with an eye injury suffered last week’s match against Minnesota, Beckie shifted seamlessly into Jarun’s role next to Trafford. The duo continued the strong defensive play that made Beckie Ottawa’s man of the match against Minnesota and Trafford getting the honours for the season-opener against Fort Lauderdale in Florida. Beckie, originally drafted by MLS side New York Red Bulls, but never played for the team, received great praise from his coach following the match. "He could get back in MLS if he continues like that," Dos Santos said. "He was drafted by Columbus for a reason. It wasn’t by fluke or luck." ​In addition to a cheering section that was apparently 30 people strong, Ottawa native-turned FC Edmonton right back Eddie Edward turned in a strong match for the opposition, obviously fired up to play in his hometown after coming up through the Fury youth system. Edward said there were a few butterflies before the kick off. "I was a little bit nervous," he said. "But once you get out there and the ball starts rolling you forget about that." There were a few concerning moments for the injury ravaged Fury. Captain Richie Ryan stayed down on the pitch for a while after being landed on by an Edmonton opponent, while Pierre-Rudolph Mayard was shaken up after getting clipped by Edward, earning the defender a yellow card. Beckie was also shown a yellow card late in the first half for a rough tackle off a free kick, while Ottawa striker Vini Dantas was also shown a yellow for an ill-timed tackle attempt to start the second half. He was subbed out of the game shortly after and replaced by forward Carl Haworth. Ottawa’s Zakaria Messoudi, on loan from the Montreal Impact, made his competitive debut in the second half when he replaced Oliver on the pitch. Ryan was named man of the match in turning another solid game in the midfield. Ottawa plays the second leg of the Canadian Championship next Wednesday in Edmonton. ​ chris.hofley@sunmedia.ca Twitter: @chrishofleyAbdul-Rehman Malik, journalist and broadcaster I can’t lie to you Sara – it’s been a funny few days. The week after a bank holiday is always a bit of challenge. I wake up on Tuesday thinking it’s a Monday and by the time Friday rolls around, I realize that the week has evaporated and there’s too many items on my “to do” list that remain decidedly undone. It can be maddening. I wish I could be as determined and energetic as Ross Poldark, whom Aidan so hunkily portrays on television. I also wish I could be as fit, but sadly I fall short on that count too. I am admittedly more cheesecake than beefcake. I think we all go through moments where we’re overwhelmed and unprepared for what life throws at us. We get lost in deadlines and duties. And when things don’t go to plan, we get frustrated. Sometimes we get angry – and anger has a bad habit of spilling over on to others. Watching the video of Jeremy Vine’s encounter with an infuriated driver whilst biking along a busy London street this week, I was horrified by how the driver became. I’d like to think most of us are good people who sometimes have really bad days, so I wonder what that person must have been going through to act the way she did? The Persian mystic Hafiz had something to say about anger. Since we all come from the same Divine source, he argued, our anger towards others is ultimately directed at ourselves. “I have come into this world” he wrote, “to see this: the sword drop from men’s hands even at the height of their arc of rage because we have finally realized there is just one flesh we can wound.” It’s a hopeful sentiment. Sometimes we need a Demelza to get us there. Eleanor’s compelling character, tries to help her husband become a better version of himself when difficulty strikes and resentment grows. We can certainly be Demelzas for each other. Now, if the mystic Hafiz had watched Poldark, he might have suggested taking up scything as a character building activity. It’d surely blow off a bit of steam. I’d give it a go, especially if it made me look a bit more like Aidan in the process. With that thought, my day’s looking brighter already.MPAA Starts Backing Away, Slowly, From Bogus Piracy Stats (But New Bogus Stats Are On Their Way) from the about-time dept But the MPAA is focusing elsewhere, and no longer citing the earlier studies, after an internal review that followed the SOPA debate, MPAA spokesman Howard Gantman said. “At the current time we do not actively cite the figures directly relating to movie piracy, as the landscape has changed significantly since these studies were conducted both regarding the growth of broadband and the development of streaming technology, as well as the introduction of hundreds of new sites world-wide for viewing legal online content,” Gantman said. We've been among the many, many people who have highlighted the MPAA's penchant for using totally bogus "piracy" numbers in arguing for why it needs ever stronger copyright laws and enforcement. Others have stepped in with thorough debunkings as well, including its favorite "$58 billion" in losses that was bandied about regularly during the SOPA fight. The Government Accountability Office famously mocked the MPAA's piracy claims as totally unsubstantiated, in part because the MPAA wouldn't even explain the basis for the numbers it used.It appears that so many people now realize that the MPAA's claims on "losses" from piracy are so ridiculous that even the MPAA has decided not to use those numbers any more. Buried in a longer Wall Street Journal piece by Carl Bialik is this tidbit:That's not to say that the MPAA has suddenly become. The rest of that article highlights other, highly questionable, attempts by the MPAA to justify its maximalist agenda, including new research, some of which seems to rely on similarly questionable methodology. But, at the very least, it appears that the "old" bogus numbers have been so discredited that even the MPAA won't use them any more. Filed Under: piracy, stats Companies: mpaaDan Pearson European Editor Friday 17th April 2015 Share this article Share Companies in this article Lift London, Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft has officially confirmed that Phil Harrison is no longer with the company, revealing that he chose to leave in order to seek out a fresh challenge. GamesIndustry.biz reported that Harrison was leaving Microsoft in March, after several sources confirmed rumours of his departure. Head of Xbox Phil Spencer issued a statement exclusively to GamesIndustry.biz regarding Harrison leaving, wishing the executive all the best as he pursues those new interests. "Following a successful tenure as Corporate Vice President in Xbox in Europe, Phil Harrison has chosen to pursue business interests outside of Microsoft," Spencer's statement reads. "Phil has been a distinguished leader for our European Xbox team - overseeing production at our award-winning European studios and making a substantial contribution to the Xbox business globally. I want to thank Phil for his creativity and leadership over the past three years. Phil is a great friend of mine and I wish him the very best with his future endeavours." Harrison also spoke with us, issuing a statement on his departure which praises the work of the studios he oversaw during his three-year tenure at the company. "I have enjoyed the last three years at Microsoft enormously and it has been a privilege to lead and work along side the incredible talent within Microsoft Studios in Europe, including Rare, Lionhead, Lift, Soho and Press Play. I wish them and my many friends throughout the Xbox world every continued success and know that games will continue to prosper across Microsoft under Phil Spencer's leadership," he said. In addition to this statement, GamesIndustry.biz spoke at length to Harrison about his new venture, his time at Microsoft and his plans for the near future. That exclusive interview will appear here on Monday.Four Aggravated Robbery offenses have occurred at White Rock Lake Park in the past two weeks. On July 22, 2016, at about 1:05 a.m., three black male suspects robbed a victim at gunpoint as he sat in his car in the 600 block of East Lawther Drive. On July 22, 2016, at about 1:30 a.m., two black male suspects robbed 4 victims at gunpoint as they played PokemonGo in the 2900 block of White Rock Road. On July 26, 2016, at about 1:00 a.m., three black male suspects robbed two individuals at gunpoint as they walked in the 4800 block of West Lawther Drive. On August 2, 2016, at about 2:30 a.m., three black male suspects and a black female suspect robbed two individuals at gunpoint as they played Pokemon Go in the 4700 block of West Lawther Drive. While two of these robberies involved individuals playing PokemonGo, there is no indication that they were lured to the location through the app. However, we do believe that they were distracted by the game. The suspects are described as three black males, 17-20 years of age, weighing 145-160 pounds. During the offenses they were wearing black T-shirts and white T-shirts. The black female suspect was the driver of the suspect vehicle, a white 4-door sedan. Anyone with information on these robberies is asked to call Detective C. Cardenas at (214) 671-3658. If you wish to remain anonymous, you may call Crime Stoppers at (214) 373-TIPS (8477).In the second year the Super Bowl has been streamed online, viewership has grown sharply — even if it's still barely a blip compared to traditional TV viewership. According to CBS, its stream of Super Bowl XLVII garnered 3 million unique viewers, compared to the 2.1 million that NBC reported last year. Unsurprisingly, CBS says this is the largest audience the CBS Sports site has ever seen, and it's a significant number for any single streamed event. The Olympics, one of the biggest live viewing opportunities, had 31.5 unique computer-based online viewers in the first week of its events — with the most popular individual events garnering around a million (non-unique) streams apiece — but it's difficult to directly compare it to other streams, both because it's a protracted global competition and since most events were limited to cable or satellite subscribers. What is clear, however, is that Super Bowl viewership is still overwhelmingly offline. 164.1 million people overall (another Super Bowl record) watched all or part of the game, according to CBS' estimates.Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are the creators of “Tim & Eric,” a surrealist comedy show on Adult Swim. (Mark Davis/Getty Images for YouTube) In a sepia-toned portrait that looks like a dark relic of the Soviet era, five figures stand frowning in profile: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and finally a computer-generated hot dog wearing green headphones. The image, created by Twitter user @SadTimesDrunk, appeared on Twitter in mid-July, where it circulated among various casual users before finding its way to my feed. The wiener is not a socialist icon; in fact, he is a breakdancing sausage from a Snapchat filter. His inclusion in a lineup of the U.S.S.R.’s patron saints doesn’t mean anything. Maybe nothing does. I am not a nihilist, but a mood of grim, jolly absurdism comes over me often, as it seems to come over many of my young peers. To visit millennial comedy, advertising and memes is to spend time in a dream world where ideas twist and suddenly vanish; where loops of self-referential quips warp and distort with each iteration, tweaked by another user embellishing on someone else’s joke, until nothing coherent is left; where beloved children’s character Winnie the Pooh is depicted in a fan-made comic strip as a 9/11 truther, and grown men in a parody ad dance to shrill synth beats while eating Totino’s pizza rolls out of a tiny pink backpack. In this weird world of the surreal and bizarre, horror mingles with humor, and young people have space to play with emotions that seem more and more to proceed from ordinary life — the creeping suspicion that the world just doesn’t make sense. [The top 25 memes of the Web’s first 25 years] When it comes to doubting the essential meaningfulness of the world, millennials have their reasons. Studies show that traditional sources of meaning, such as religion and family formation, are less relevant to the lives of young people than they were to our parents. The moral structure they produced has been vastly loosened and replaced with a soft, untheorized tendency toward niceness — smarminess, really, as journalist Tom Scocca put it in 2013. Long-lasting careers seem out of reach; millennials are told to go to college so they can make money, but mostly they just amass debt and then job-hop in hopes of paying it off. In the meantime, they put off getting married, having kids, buying houses and so on. And waiting feels like — well, waiting. Millennials are not engaged at work (71 percent confessed this to Gallup), they have lost faith in our political system (only 19 percent say a military takeover is unacceptable), and many are lonely (57 percent reported such in a recent Match.com survey). Millennials aren’t strictly pessimistic by any means, but the occasional tussle with feelings of emptiness and despair seems de rigueur for my generation. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post) Yet the world is full of noise: Information is both more accessible (and perhaps more oppressively omnipresent) than ever and also less reliable; people select their own facts, and business-funded think tanks produce reports indistinguishable from hard data, except that they are not remotely true. Brands pose as friends on social media, especially to millennials, and if the line between real and artificial isn’t obliterated, it certainly seems to matter less than it once did. Amid these trends, a particular style of expression has spread among young people. Rather than trying to restore meaning and sense where they’ve gone missing, the style aims to play with the moods and emotions of an illegible world. In a way, it’s a digital update to the surreal and absurd genres of art and literature that characterized the tumultuous early 20th century. [That time when “that time when” took over the Internet] Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are a pair of comedians whose work exists in the zone of the weird and grotesque, veering wildly between horror and humor. They made their debut on Adult Swim, basic cable’s top programming among 18-to-34-year-olds, back in 2006 and are due to release a new season of their series “Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories ” this fall. Their skits run the gamut from slightly to extremely surreal, with low-fi, retro graphics; distorted audio; and disjointed editing adding to the eerie feel. In one sketch, Tim and Eric compete in an increasingly deranged commercial to sell prices — fine European prices, premium prices, American-made prices, extremely small prices — no products, just prices. “It feels interesting to live in that surreal moment versus the horror of reality sometimes,” Wareheim told me, citing the prolonged, agonizingly uncomfortable shots and freakish close-ups in their show. There’s a sense of dull dread running through Heidecker and Wareheim’s work, but there’s also relief, an invitation to laugh at the awkward and absurd. “It’s an expression of that fear and anxiety,” Wareheim said, referring to one of their many skits focused on the tension of daily life. “But I just feel like it’s fun to watch our show, and you are transported to another dimension of similar things, but it’s not real, so you’re just like ‘ahh’... it’s a pleasant surreal world.” Other shows, such as Adult Swim’s “Rick and Morty ” and Netflix’s “BoJack Horseman, ” follow in this vein, imagining, as New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum put it, “bleakness and joy” in a “teeming, surreal alternative universe.” Advertising aimed at young people, too, exhibits the trend. Consider a 2012 candy ad in which two teenagers stand nervously under the bleachers; one picks “Skittles pox” off the other’s pasty skin, then pops them in her mouth. Unlike the subcultural stoner comedy of yesteryear or the giddily absurd humor of classics like Monty Python, this breed of millennial surrealism is both mainstream and tangibly dark — it aims for wide swaths of young people, leaning in to feelings of worry, failure and dread. [Someone is wrong on the Internet. That’s where I come in.] Meanwhile, online culture allows more people to get in on the action, producing their own contributions to the meaningless, loopy, sometimes-sinister whirling gyre of the moment in the form of memes. In the simplest terms, memes are any pieces of cultural information that spread among groups by imitation, changing bit by bit along the way. In other words, distortion is a key attribute of this form, a warping effect that occurs as each instance of a meme grows more distant from its origin, sometimes losing any meaning whatsoever. Gallows humor about the late Cincinnati Zoo gorilla Harambe, for instance, has transformed into a whole genre of jokes only tenuously related to the original ape. For millennials, memes form the backdrop of life. Adam Downer is a 26-year-old associate staff editor at Know Your Meme, an online encyclopedia of the form where the oldest staffer tops out at about age 32, Downer told me. He spends his days scouring the Net for memes, documenting their origins and, when possible, explaining to readers what they mean. Since 2008, Know Your Meme’s staff has indexed some 11,228 memes and adds new entries to its database every day. The strangest meme he ever worked on, Downer says, was a bizarre mind-virus called “Hey Beter.” The meme consists of four panels, the first including the phrase “Hey Beter,” a riff on “Hey Peter,” referring to the main character of the comedy cartoon series “Family Guy.” What comes next seems to make even less sense: In one iteration, the Sesame Street character Elmo (wearing a “suck my a--” T-shirt) calls out to Peter, then asks him to spell “whomst’ve,” then blasts him with blue lasers. In the final panel, readers are advised to “follow for a free iphone 5.” (There is no prize.) “That one was inexplicably popular,” Downer told me. “I think it got popular because it was this giant emptiness of meaning. It was this giant race to the bottom of irony.” Surrealism and its anarchic cousin dadaism are nothing new; neither is absurdism or weirdness in art. “The absurd,” Albert Camus wrote in 1942, “is born of this confrontation between the human need [for happiness and reason] and the unreasonable silence of the world.” Absurdity is the compulsion to go looking for meaning that simply isn’t there. Today’s surrealism draws aspects of all of these threads together with humor, creating an aesthetic world where (in common Internet parlance) “lol, nothing matters,” but things may turn out all right anyway. [Stop shaming people on the Internet for grammar mistakes. It’s not there fault.] After all, the weird — even the exceedingly weird — doesn’t have to be purely distressing. Consider the long-running Old Spice deodorant commercials in which a handsome hunk on a boat presents “ladies” with an oyster containing “two tickets to that thing you love,” which quickly become diamonds as he teleports onto a horse. (“I’m on a horse,” he coolly informs the 54 million people who have watched the clip on YouTube.) In his book “The Weird and the Eerie,” author Mark Fisher points out that, in most cases, “the response to the appar
with Dragons is the fifth volume out of a planned seven, and in many ways it's the best. Martin was marking time a little bit in Feast for Crows, pushing his pawns up the board but leaving his big pieces alone. Now the camera has swung back to the main characters: Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister, the brilliant, black-witted dwarf whose family has had the firmest grip on power for much of the series, though that's not saying much. Tyrion is another good example of what separates Tolkien and Martin. Tyrion isn't a hearty, ax-wielding, gold-mining member of a noble dwarven race. He's not Gimli. Tyrion is an actual dwarf, achondroplastic and stubby-limbed, a joke to passersby and an embarrassment to his family. (The rest of the Lannisters are stunted too, but on the inside.) Tyrion is on the run because at the end of A Storm of Swords he fatally shot his father Lord Tywin in the groin with a crossbow bolt as Tywin sat on the toilet. We catch up with Tyrion at the beginning of A Dance with Dragons crossing the Narrow Sea in a state of shock at his own actions. (See A Dance with Dragons in the 2011 Summer Entertainment Preview.) A long-expected meeting is approaching. Tyrion is vectoring toward the exiled Daenerys Targaryen, who has been isolated from most of the rest of the players in the series until now. As the daughter of Aerys Targaryen, the last (mostly) uncontested king of Westeros, Daenerys has one of the better claims to the throne. She's been running wild in the exotic lands to the east of Westeros in the company of three feral dragons, beasts not seen in that world for at least a century. She rules the city of Meereen. (She is guarded by, among others, Ser Barristan Selmy, an aging, immensely dignified knight of Westeros who wonders how duty has led him so far from home — and into such strange company. He and Tyrion are Martin's finest creations.) Two of the great narrative arcs of the series are bending toward each other, and when they meet, current will flow. But this being Martin, there are a lot more than two arcs in play. Jon Snow is sitting uneasily astride the great Wall in the north; Theon Greyjoy is languishing in the sadistic hands of the Boltons; prim, stilted Stannis Baratheon — he's the Al Gore of Westeros — is pursuing his claim to the throne; Arya Stark is training as an assassin and plotting revenge; a dorky Dornish prince is trying to find and marry Daenerys. The soil of Westeros is rich in story the way some countries are rich in uranium. There is no such thing as a stock character or a cardboard village there: every person, every wood and stream and street corner has its own tale. After five volumes Martin is, if anything, a better writer than when he started. If you're watching A Game of Thrones on HBO, you're forgoing the great pleasure of Martin's deft prose. Like Wagner, he gives each of his characters leitmotifs that recur and recur in their streams of thought. "You know nothing, Jon Snow"; Daenerys' theme is "If I look back I am lost"; Tyrion is haunted by his father's last words, "Wherever whores go." These phrases are like dragons' eggs: the characters keep them close, in the hopes that one day, if they think them enough times, the words will hatch forth the wisdom they desperately need. (See Part II of James Poniewozik's interview with George R.R. Martin.) But the real power of Martin's work arises from his extraordinary skill as a plotter. A Dance with Dragons follows, by my count, 11 major story lines, as well as assorted minor ones, each with its own rhythm, written in its own voice, and each playing off all the others. Martin will never win a Pulitzer or a National Book Award, but his skill as a crafter of narrative exceeds that of almost any literary novelist writing today. Throughout the book I was reminded of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (which did win a Pulitzer), as well as Anthony Powell's (similarly floridly titled) A Dance to the Music of Time. But even Powell can't twist a plot like Martin. A Dance with Dragons is a big book, topping out at 1,016 pages, but it turns on a dime. Reading a novel is a little like commanding a battle: you're always reconnoitering, trying to guess where the author will go next, what's a feint and where the action is really heading. I don't know when I have ever been as comprehensively and pleasurably outgeneraled as I am when I read Martin. He raises and raises the stakes, long past when any other writer would have walked away from the table, and just when you think he's done, he goes all in. There is, apparently, no piece he will not sacrifice, no character that you (and one suspects, he) love so much that he will not orchestrate that character's doom. The complexity of Martin's design ensures that we experience the struggle for Westeros from all sides at once. It's as if he's trying to show us that every fight is both triumph and tragedy, depending on where you see it from, and everybody is both hero and villain at the same time. Or maybe not even that. "There are no heroes, only whores," says Theon. On the strength of A Dance with Dragons, it's hard to prove him wrong. See what the authors are reading in TIME's summer reading list.Source: Press Release Adult Swim, basic cable’s #1 network in Total Day with adults 18-24, 18-34, and 18-49, announced today the return of the hit animated adult comedy series Mike Tyson Mysteries, which premieres on Sunday, November 1st at 12:15 a.m. ET/PT. This original series from Warner Bros. Animation was a hit in its first season, with 2015 premieres of Mike Tyson Mysteries regularly claiming their Sunday time slot versus all cable among key adults 18-24/34/49 and men 18-24. A top destination for comedy programming, Adult Swim had a white-hot ratings summer with double-digit growth over last year led by animated originals Rick and Morty and Aqua Teen Hunger Force Forever. These innovative original programs are continuing to lift the network’s ratings and in addition to being #1 in Total Day with key adult demos, the network was also #1 in Prime with adults 18-24, and 18-34. This summer, Adult Swim consistently beat competitive networks by double and triple digits. In season two of Mike Tyson Mysteries, the Mike Tyson Mystery Team is back for another season of mystery solving. Mike Tyson, once the “baddest man on the planet,” remains hell-bent on becoming the “goodest man on the planet”…one mystery at a time! But he can’t do it alone. Well, he could, but then we wouldn’t have the best mystery-solving team in the business. First there’s Yung Hee, Mike’s adopted Korean daughter and all-around buzzkill; Pigeon, a filthy disgusting man trapped in the body of a filthy disgusting bird; and Marquess, the ghost whose sole mission is to keep Mike on the path to redemption. His other sole mission: finding a Pinot Grigio that’s bold, but has a crisp finish! The season two mysteries are even more hilariously banal than season one, as the team tackles tough cases like these: “What really goes on inside a house when it’s being tented for termites?” “Who gave the team a bad review online?” And “Can Mike find a sleeveless/shorts version of tracksuit for the summer?” Mike Tyson Mysteries stars Mike Tyson, Norm Macdonald (Saturday Night Live), Rachel Ramras (MAD) and Oscar® winner Jim Rash (The Way Way Back, Community), and is produced by Warner Bros. Animation. Sam Register (Teen Titans Go!, The Looney Tunes Show) serves as executive producer with Hugh Davidson (MAD, The Looney Tunes Show) as producer.WHAT IS MASSIVE? The word “Massive” is so ubiquitous in Crew culture that its rampant usage can be baffling to new fans and outsiders. Likewise, its origins can be overlooked by those who were not around to see the term’s organic growth from a humorous, self-deprecating joke within the fan culture, to a definition of pride and defiance and unwavering faith, and then to a de facto encapsulation of all things Columbus Crew. Actually, those aren’t so much evolutionary advancements as they are additional layers. Massive is all of those things. *** LAYER 1: SELF-DEPRECATION The term started out as a self-deprecating joke. Former Crew supporter culture kingpin Zak Bernardo watched with great amusement in 2003 when Manchester City signed Kevin Keegan to be its manager, and then threw the term “massive club” around willy-nilly to describe the (at the time) success-starved club that lives in the shadow of Manchester United’s colossal trophy case. If ever there was a gag to be appropriated for Columbus and the Crew, the “massive” angle was it. At the time, Columbus was by far the smallest market in MLS, a league that openly talked about needing championship-level teams in New York and Los Angeles. (Obvious inference: “Certainly not in Columbus!”) Columbus has also long been the “third city” in Ohio behind the long-established population, economic, and media centers at either end of the state—Cleveland and Cincinnati. To this day, newspapers around the country make sure to append “OH” to Columbus so that readers don’t mistake it for any other Columbus, despite the fact that our Columbus metro area is six times the size of all of America’s other Columbuses combined. In 2000, a newspaper reporter from England, while covering Newcastle United’s trip to America, wrote that the club would be departing Washington, D.C., for Columbus, which he presumptively described as “an all together less fashionable part of the United States.” And then there’s the matter of how a segment of the American population and media holds a hostile disrespect for the sport of soccer, the fact that the Crew (like everything else) is dwarfed locally by the dominant goliath that is Ohio State football, and the various other off-field insults (real or perceived) that accompanied a history of on-field disappointments. “Massive” was born of a disrespected team playing a disrespected sport in a disrespected city. When the Crew bottomed out in the middle of the 2000s, Massive was the perfect joke at the perfect time. Just like Kevin Keegan, Crew fans built an alternate reality where the Columbus Crew was a “massive club.” On soccer message boards, Crew fans would insert Columbus into any wild European transfer rumors. Ultimately, the superstar in question would decide that he was not ready for the pressure of playing for such a massive club, so he would chicken out and sign with Manchester United or Real Madrid or some other lesser, un-Massive entity. There were frequent mentions of “CrewTV,” a global television network designed to feed the insatiable worldwide demand for all things Columbus Crew. My buddy Flick would occasionally post TV listings from CrewTV, and all of the shows were invariably inside jokes about some letdown or disappointment in Crew history. So that’s how Massive came to be. *** LAYER 2: CREW PRIDE In 2008, with the creation of the Nordecke and with a team that suddenly appeared capable of competing for a championship, Massive became a term of Crew pride. It still had that us-against-the-world spirit of its origins, but it morphed from self-deprecating mockery to all-out belief that this club could overcome all of its baggage (real or imagined) and finally stick it to the rest of the world. Massive described the talent of players like Guillermo Barros Schelotto and Chad Marshall. Massive described the heart and indomitable spirit of a team that frequently rallied from deficits—including twice in the playoffs— that would have caused prior Crew teams to crumble. Massive described the symbiotic connection between the players and the supporters. Team captain Frankie Hejduk spent a one-game suspension, not sitting up in a suite somewhere, but chugging beers with fans at a pre-game tailgate. What could be more Massive than that? (Well, other than coming back to beat the loathsome Chicago Fire in the Eastern Conference Final, and then defeating the all-important-big-market-product-placement-vehicle New York Red Bulls, 3-1, to win MLS Cup. That was the equivalent of planting a Crew flag on the peak of Mt. Massive.) Fans in the Nordecke frequently chanted, “We are! Mass-ive!” The word appeared on banners within the section, the most famous of which is a Rick Thomas creation that shows Bruce Lee urging everyone, “Be Massive, my friend.” Photo by Sam Fahmi The term Massive started picking-up steam. Crew broadcaster Dwight Burgess worked it into telecasts, usually describing the Crew’s distinctive all-yellow uniforms as “the Massive banana kit.” The word appeared on the cover of Columbus Alive, which featured a cover story about the Crew. Columbus Dispatch columnist Michael Arace played a huge role in taking the term mainstream by frequently using it in his newspaper columns. He recognized that something special was happening on and off the field, and that Massive was the us-against-the-world rallying cry as the Crew looked to bring a championship to Columbus. When the Crew won MLS Cup, the front page of the Dispatch sports section used a one word headline: Photo by Steve Sirk And when I wrote a book about the championship season, there was only one adjective that could do it justice: Photo by Daniel Bidmead, who is so Massive he follows the Crew from England. Massive became the very definition of Crew pride. We don’t care what anyone else says or thinks. We love our sport. We love our club. We love our city. All of them are Massive. And so are we. *** LAYER 3: ALL-ENCOMPASSING CREW-NESS Massive is now used in so many ways that it is a term of all-encompassing Crew-ness. Fans have designed t-shirts imploring the city to be Massive: Being Massive can be an exhortation to win, such as my admittedly feeble attempt to inspire the Crew with this white board message prior to the 2010 Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup Final in Seattle. Photo by Steve Sirk The club did a much better job of executing that idea when renovating the team’s Crew Stadium locker room prior to the 2011 season. Photo by Steve Sirk As evidenced by this artwork by Justin Bell, being Massive can be an appeal to the better angels of our nature. Artwork by Justin Bell / MassiveCityFFC Massive is now the image that we project to the world, even to those who once viewed Columbus as “all together less fashionable.” Photo by John Clem. Commemorative scarf designed by Justin Bell and distributed by Crew Supporters Union as part of a pre-game party with Newcastle supporters. By September of 2011, Massive had become so synonymous with Crew culture that the club built a season ticket marketing campaign around the term, daring the rest of Columbus to be Massive. Photo by Skyler Schmitt And there are times when Massive means so much that it will break your heart into little pieces. Photo by Greg Bartram Photo by Steve Sirk. Banner by RickThomas. *** So Massive can be many things, but it’s not any one thing. It can be used as a self-deprecating joke, but it’s not just a joke. It can be used as an expression of pride, but it’s not just a boast. It can be used to entice the public to become part of a special community by buying season tickets, but it’s not a marketing term. Massive is much too massive for that. In all its permutations, Massive is how the fans came to define our sport, our club and our city. We are Massive. Questions? Comments? Know if I set a world record for use of the word “massive” in a single 1,400-word article? Feel free to write at sirk65@yahoo.com or via twitter @stevesirkMelvin "Pete" Mark Jr., a prominent Portland real estate executive, collector and philanthropist, has died. He was 91. Mark was chairman of the Melvin Mark Cos., a commercial real estate firm that manages more than 3.1 million square feet of office space. He was a tireless booster of his adopted city, and helped revitalize downtown Portland in the 1980s and 1990s. Mark became managing partner of the company in 1965 when his father, Melvin Mark Sr., died. In 1971, the company developed its first major downtown property, the 11-story Crown Plaza building at the corner of the Southwest First Avenue and Clay Street. The 222,871-square-foot structure, now home to The Oregonian/OregonLive, is still owned by the Melvin Mark Cos. In subsequent years, the company built the KPTV headquarters in inner Southeast Portland and developed office parks in suburban Washington County. In 1999, Mark became chairman of the company, passing the torch to his son, Jim Mark. Last decade, the company redeveloped the old Greyhound Bus Station — an eyesore in the center of downtown — into a new Hilton Executive Tower and parking garage. In 2013, it bought the former Yamhill Marketplace building downtown for $4.5 million and launched a $10 million renovation, converting it to "creative" office space. Mark helped lead the effort that transformed an anonymous parking lot into Pioneer Courthouse Square. Mark "shaped our community with grace, good humor and a belief that Portland could be a world-class city, defined not just by a beautiful skyline but by its public spaces and wonderful people," said Dan Lavey, chair of the Pioneer Courthouse Square board of trustees. The company's Portland holdings also include a 10-story structure that had to be evacuated last month when cracks emerged in its façade. The Fifth Avenue Building houses eBay and Oregon Health & Science University offices, as well as a 24-Hour Fitness and Kindercare Day Care Center. Mark moved to Portland in 1951, the same year he married Mary Kridel. The couple raised three children and enjoyed 57 years of marriage before her death in 2008. He was a lifelong student of history. He was raised in New York City and Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence was signed, and he attended the University of Virginia, established by Thomas Jefferson. His father collected first-edition books. "I was always surrounded by it," he told The Oregonian in 2013. For his birthday in 1962, his mother-in-law gave him a letter written by President Theodore Roosevelt. It cost $32, but sparked what turned into a decades-long quest for presidential treasures. "I pick colorful presidents," Mark said in the 2013 interview. "Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, JFK, Truman -- those who had exciting administrations." Many of his pieces have been displayed at the Oregon Historical Society, including as part of the current exhibit, "High Hopes: The Journey of John F. Kennedy." Mark was known for his sunny outlook. He once advised his son, Jim, to lighten up. "He told me, 'You're not smiling enough. You don't look like you're enjoying yourself.' "I got to work with my Dad and be a partner all these years, it was such a privilege. The guy was just never pessimistic." "Although not native Oregonians, Pete and Mary Mark fell in love with our state from the time they moved here," said friend Gerry Frank, a longtime columnist for The Oregonian/OregonLive. "They were both very generous with their time and resources in making our state a great place for residents and visitors, especially with the Portland Art Museum and the Oregon History Center." The Marks played an instrumental role in the art museum's turnaround after difficult financial times. Mark served on the art museum board for years and assisted the museum's purchase and renovation of the former Masonic Lodge located just north of the museum. The building is now named in the couple's honor. Bob Ames, a former bank president in Portland turned real estate investor, said he met Mark nearly 50 years ago, when he was a young manager at First National Bank. "I regard Pete Mark as being one of the true gentlemen of the Portland business world," he said. "He was one of the last great independent real estate investors truly committed to Portland." Survivors include his son, Jim Mark, of Portland; daughters, Linda Andrews of Portland and Cindy Murphy of Bend; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. -- Jeff Manning<-- Previous playlist | Back to Radio Boredcast playlists | Next playlist --> March 17, 2012: In Remembrance of Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson - Programmed by Andrew Lahman (part 1) IN REMEMBRANCE OF PETER “SLEAZY” CHRISTOPHERSON – PROGRAMMED BY ANDREW LAHMAN Introduced by Andrew Lahman, selecting music from Sleazy's hard drive. Visiting my friend David Cabaret in the year 2000 I had my first glimpse at the next 12 years of my life. Sprawled across his sewing table were plans and drawings for great fluffy costumes, the page headed with one word 'Coil'. Excitement and confusion erupted inside me, who was 'Geff' and who was 'Sleazy'? Names I was unfamiliar with when talking all things Coil. As it panned out they were the fantastic costumes Coil used for their first proper gig at the Royal Festival Hall later that year and it was my first meeting with the mighty group Coil. Pure bliss (and thank you David :-) Geff (aka Jhonn Balance) and I soon became good friends right up to his untimely and devastating death in 2004. Relaxing with raw Broccoli and a glass of wine after the funeral service, Sleazy looked me in the eye with such sadness and trust, thus began what was to become one of the best friendships I've had the honour to be a part of. Sleazy's music has always fascinated me from the time I first heard Horse Rotorvator back in New Zealand 1987, literally worlds away. His techniques and production qualities have never ceased to amaze me. If there is one thing I wish for more of, and that is to have been able to hear where the vocals for Threshold HouseBoys Choir would have gone… now lost forever more. I last saw Sleazy at his home in Thailand just before he flew to England to perform the now last ever show with TG and X-TG shows. He was so busy constructing new and wild instruments for the show and was positively brimming over with eagerness at the future. Who was to know what was about to happen… Andrew Lahman - February 2012 (Reload this page to update the song info.) Listen to this show:Big House Fireworks The University of Michigan Athletic Department has proposed fireworks for two 2014 home games at Michigan Stadium. (File Photos | The Ann Arbor News) Explosive plays might be accompanied by explosive pyrotechnics at Michigan Stadium this fall. The Athletic Department has proposed the use of close proximity fireworks during the Sept. 13 Miami University, and Oct. 11 Penn State home games. The Penn State game has a 7 p.m. kickoff time, while the Miami start time has yet to be announced. If the regents approve, fireworks will light up the sky over Michigan Stadium twice this fall. (Joel Bissell | MLive.com) "To further enhance the fan experience for these important games, the department proposes to hold close proximity fireworks displays as part of the production," the proposal read. The displays would be performed from the field and from the rooftops of the east and west towers of the stadium. ACE Pyro has been selected to produce the shows, and has provided the university's fire marshal, athletic department, Office of Risk Management, and Department of Public Safety and Security with information about the operator, including the person's experience, the number and types of fireworks and its applicable insurance coverage. The company has also provided the production plan including the schedule, security, safety and fire protection. The Board of Regents will vote on the proposal at its Thursday, July 17, meeting. No cost estimate was provided.via Vine After the first round of the NFL draft, commissioner Roger Goodell usually allows special guests to announce draft picks. Those guests usually have some connection to the team they are announcing, but this year, there were a couple of fans who seemed a bit out of place at the podium. Oddly enough, both head-scratchers happened to be Buffalo Bills fans. The first fan, Jordan Schwartz, was set to announce which player the Bills selected at No. 41, but Buffalo traded out of that spot. Tough luck. Schwartz had the privilege of telling the world which player the St. Louis Rams took with that selection instead: There appeared to be some miscommunication for another Buffalo fan, Marisa Scime. Here was the original plan: As you can see in the Vine above, she wound up announcing the San Diego Chargers' second-round pick. To make matters worse, she was identified as a Chargers fan. Scime took to Twitter to cle: What a bizarre night. [Vine, Twitter; h/t The Buffalo News and The Big Lead]Sam Savage’s new book Flaw of Averages has a brilliantly simple explanation of why volatility in the housing market caused such problems for banks recently. When housing prices drop, more people default on their mortgages and obviously that hurts banks. But banks are also in trouble when the housing market is volatile, even if on average house prices are good. Suppose there’s no change in the housing market on average. Prices go up in some areas and down in other areas. As long as the ups and downs average out, there should be no change in bank profits, right? Wrong! When the housing market goes up a little bit, mortgage defaults drop a little bit and bank profits go up a little bit. But when the market goes down a little bit, defaults go up more than just a little bit, and bank profits go down more than a little bit. There is much more down-side potential than up-side potential. Say 95% of homeowners pay their mortgages. Then a good housing market can only improve repayments by 5%. But a bad housing market could decrease repayments by much more. In mathematical terminology, the bank profits are a concave function of house prices. Jensen’s inequality says that if f() is a concave function (say bank profits) and X is a random variable (say, house prices) then the average of f(X) is less than f(average of X). Average profit is less than the profit from the average. Related posts:Jonathan Foley is the director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of the Minnesota, where he holds a McKnight Presidential Chair in global environmental sustainability. Droughts happen. They have happened in the past, and they will happen in the future. Whether the odds of extreme droughts are changing is still an open question, but signs point to shifting patterns of climate. No matter the cause, droughts have a heavy impact on agriculture. This year, American corn and soybean crops are being crippled by high temperatures and low rainfall. Only a lucky few farmers will have a decent harvest. Sadly, much of America’s commodity agriculture is especially vulnerable to climatic extremes – whether droughts, floods, heat waves or cold snaps. In particular, it is hard to imagine a system more susceptible to bad weather than the American corn and soybean belt. It is hard to imagine a system more susceptible to bad weather than the American corn and soybean belt. Why are these farms so vulnerable to climatic extremes? First, they are vast monocultures. You can drive from one end of the Midwest to the other and see almost nothing but corn and soybeans. If either crop fails (in terms of production or price), farmers are doomed. (Imagine a mutual fund that only invested in two companies. Wouldn’t that be incredibly risky?) Diversification – from two crops to dozens – would help guarantee at least some production and income each year. Second, corn and soybeans are annuals with shallow roots, bred for rapid summertime growth. They cannot withstand a bad season. Shifting to other farming systems, with more perennial crops, deep-rooted grasses and trees, could increase resilience to extreme weather. Third, decades of industrial farming have depleted the natural organic matter (and “tilth”) of many Midwestern soils, reducing their ability to absorb and store moisture. Fortunately, no-till agriculture and organic farming practices can restore the health of the soil, and greatly improve the resilience of crops to extreme weather. Finally, commodity agriculture suffers many built-in inefficiencies. American corn and soybeans are mainly used to feed animals (where cattle require 30 pounds of grain to add one pound of boneless beef) and produce ethanol rather than feed people directly. A system that replaces some of the corn-soybean belt with grains, fruits and vegetables that go directly into the human diet and with grasslands to feed animals and create cellulosic biofuels would feed more people, and be far more resilient to climatic extremes. Extreme drought will happen again, guaranteed. Will American agriculture take a cue from this summer and prepare for it?British Phonetic Alphabets 1904-1926 Note: The increasing use of radio-telephones and the concurrent likelihood of misunderstanding what the other person was trying to yell over poor instruments, especially during combat, led to the common practice of substituting a word for each letter of the alphabet. As usual with much military technology, navies often saw the advantages of this sort of system before their landlubber compatriots. I've only been able to find the British phonetic alphabets for the Great War. If anyone has a US, French, or German list, I'd appreciate it if you'd pass it on to me. Letter 1904 1914 Royal Navy Great War A ACK ACK APPLES B BEER BEER BUTTER C C C CHARLIE D D DON DUFF E E E EDWARD F F F FREDDY G G G GEORGE H H H HARRY I I I INK J J J JOHNNIE K K K KING L L L LONDON M EMMA EMMA MONKEY N N N NUTS O O O ORANGE P PIP PIP PUDDING Q Q Q QUEENIE R R R ROBERT S ESSES ESSES SUGAR T TOC TOC TOMMY U U U UNCLE V VIC VIC VINEGAR W W W WILLIAM X X X XERXES Y Y Y YELLOW Z Z* Z* ZEBRA *pronounced "zed" by British Dominion, "zee" by Yanks. Great War GlossaryA new meta-analysis found that an increased risk for migraine is caused by both being underweight and obesity. The research team evaluated all studies available on migraine and body mass index (BMI). Lee Peterlin, DO, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the study author and a member of the American Academy of Neurology noted that it is vital that doctors and people that suffer from migraine be aware of these risk factors, as being underweight and obesity are both potentially modifiable. She did however add that more research is required to determine whether the risk for migraine would be lowered by efforts to help people gain or lose weight. The meta-analysis looked at 12 studies, which included 288,981 participants. The researchers defined underweight as people with a BMI of less than 18.5, and obesity as people with a BMI of 30 or higher. They compiled the results and adjusted for sex and age. The results showed that people with obesity were 27% more likely to have migraines than people of normal weight were and that underweight people had a 13% bigger risk than people of normal weight did. Ischemic heart disease is a condition of recurring discomfort or chest pain because part of the heart does not receive enough blood. Peterlin noted that the link between ischemic heart disease and migraine was moderate and similar in size to the link between migraine and bipolar disorders. The team found that the same was true for the link between obesity and migraine. Peterlin also explained that sex and age were important variables in the relationship between body mass index and migraine because the risk caused by obesity and the risk of migraine is different in men and women, and in older and younger people. Both the occurrence of migraine and obesity disease risk is more common in younger people and in women. She also noted that there was not yet clarity as to how body composition affects migraine. Fatty tissue discharges numerous molecule types that might play a role in triggering or developing migraine. Other factors such as medications, changes in physical activity, or other conditions such as depression could also possibly play a role in the relationship between body composition and migraine. The meta-analysis was limited in that for more than half of the studies, people self-reported their body mass index, while people self-reported that they had migraines for half of the studies.Birds & Birding “The land was defended and won by age-old ceremonies and fierce battle…. Their conflicts with each other and their neighbors, their luck with their wives and devotion to their babies… the fortunes of their sons and daughters, grandchildren and great grandchildren—all these were watched season in and season out until tragedy overtook them.” Surprisingly, this passage is not referring to Game of Thrones. It instead describes the lives of song sparrows! Renowned ornithologist Margaret Morse Nice (1883-1974) wrote this in the opening pages of her book The Watcher at the Nest (1939), which recounts her experiences studying song sparrows in her Ohio backyard in the 1930s. She conducted these groundbreaking studies at home while raising a family of five children. The techniques that she established for monitoring a nesting bird population became the template for all subsequent studies and are still in widespread use today. Nice’s key innovation was to track the lives of a population of individual song sparrows over many years – a longitudinal study. Nice lamented that ornithological knowledge at the time was incomplete and occasionally false. As she began her song sparrow investigations, she assessed the sketchy details reported for song sparrow as “meager enough information and all of it wrong”. The literature was rife with error. For example, through some sleuthing she discovered that much of the reported (and inaccurate) incubation times for American birds had been carried forward from author to author over the decades without critique. She ultimately discovered that the originating author estimated these times not from observation but by inferring them from the observations and speculations of Greek philosopher Aristotle! In 1929, when Nice’s song sparrow work began, ornithology was emerging from an era dominated by collection of specimens. Nineteenth and early 20th century ornithologists focused on species inventory, taxonomy and distribution. Behavior and ecology were not yet receiving much attention. The idea of territoriality in birds was a new concept and Nice set out to study it. She quickly learned that it was war out there in the rose hedge. And having uniquely identifiable birds allowed her to make sense of the melees. The unique identities were made possible by the use of color bands that allowed her to mark each bird with a unique combination of bands. Celluloid color bands were already in use to mark chickens on poultry farms, but only a few halting efforts has been made to use the technique to study wild birds. After reading a scientific article that reported on an experiment that used colored bands to individually mark chickadees and nuthatches, Nice immediately applied the technique to her backyard song sparrows. The chickadee paper listed several commercial suppliers of celluloid, but noted that material “of the proper thickness can also be obtained from baby-rattles and other toys purchased at ten-cent stores.” Nice followed this advice and made her color bands from “brightly colored children’s toys.” Nice began with intensive study of two neighboring pairs of birds. Over the next seven years, she expanded to working with dozens of pairs across a 60 acre area adjoining her home in Columbus, Ohio. The song sparrows in her backyard were engaged in a constant struggle to establish and maintain territories, while keeping a close eye on competitors and predators. Nice documented nearly every aspect of song sparrow life, from migration and survival to nesting biology. It’s not so much that she made a particularly dramatic discovery as much as she demonstrated how to thoroughly document the life history of an animal by collecting a large amount of data across many study subjects. This approach is standard today but was revolutionary at the time. A reviewer of her crowning achievement Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow (1941) stated that the work presented “more information than we have ever had about any single species, more thoroughly analyzed and more completely integrated with current knowledge and modern concepts” than anything previously published. How did Nice find herself at the top of the research world while staying at home raising a family? She was initially on an ambitious trajectory in science, completing a master’s degree on diet of bobwhite quail as one of only two woman graduate students at Clark University in Massachusetts. Although she wanted to keep going for a PhD, family pressures and marriage led her toward a role at home raising kids while her husband pursued an academic career. Nice was determined to continue conducting scientific research. Initially, she studied her own young children and published papers on child development and language acquisition. She eventually returned to bird study, first by completing The Birds of Oklahoma (1924) in collaboration with her husband (and with her kids, who joined them on camping trips to do field work). She balanced her time between research and responsibilities at home by being ruthlessly efficient in executing household chores. Establishing her song sparrow study site right outside her back door maximized her available research time. Margaret Morse Nice rejected the narrative that she was housewife first and a scientist second, and that her standing as a scientist should be placed in that context. In his obituary of Nice, colleague Milton Trautman quoted Nice as saying more than once, “I am not a housewife; I am a trained zoologist.” While she was an outsider in the sense that she did not have a formal professional position and lacked funding to pursue her studies, Nice participated very actively in ornithological societies and meetings, was a power networker, and authored a regular feature in an ornithology journal that reviewed current literature. Over her career, she published at least
and Tamil Nadu treats them as such. Tamil Nadu has always been better at detecting ecosystem changes that widen the opportunity gap between people in different socioeconomic strata. It applies affirmative action to (a) push students to the next level, (b) make them more competitive at a national level, and (c) neutralise the effect of coaching centres (see below; axes same as from previous chart). First, the state searches for an inflection point beyond where exam or syllabi rigour have marginal returns. Tamil Nadu has consciously made its syllabus and learning methodology consistent with what it believes to be good enough to prepare students to adapt to the next level. It has made clearing the 10th and 12th board exams easy. Finally, it has consciously allowed teachers to award 100% marks to students, including awarding high marks subjects like mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. While this has been criticised as the state inflating the performance of its students, it is in truth a form of affirmative action. Given that some other state and central engineering and arts institutions rely on the class 12 marks for admissions, Tamil Nadu has strategised to give its students the best chance everywhere. So it has had great success in exposing students to a college education. Quality of education To invoke the analogy of the e-commerce website – the states has also increased its own server capacity, in terms of the number of colleges within Tamil Nadu, to ensure better infrastructural support (e.g., it has the highest number of medical colleges in the country). However, does this mean students from Tamil Nadu are of a lower academic quality than their peers from the other states? Policymaking is not one-dimensional. And as with any policies, long-term returns are important, ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’ and, of course, success is measured differently. It is not important for Tamil Nadu that 92% on a paper graded using the state syllabus be comparable to a 92% from another state. It is also less important for Tamil Nadu that the number of students with successful professional careers, as a fraction of all of the state’s graduates, be comparable to that of other states. These are not meaningful metrics because they compare Tamil Nadu’s performance against the supply of graduates it has worked hard to create – and not against the demand of graduates that it has managed to fill up. For example, if the US has 1 million players in its national tennis association and if US players fill up 50 out of the top 100 men’s ranks, the quality of US players is measured by the fact that it filled up 50% of the top slots, not by the fact that only 0.0005% made it to the top 100. However, it is important that Tamil Nadu’s students succeeding in their careers as a proportion of the total number of people (from all of India’s states) succeeding in their careers be high. In this context, Tamil Nadu inflating an 80% to a 96% must be evaluated against whether the candidate goes on to have a better career than a person who got 99% from another state. As many people who have a decade of experience in any professional sphere will assure you, beyond a particular threshold, academic excellence is only a partially relevant factor. Your boss could have had a lower GPA than you secured, while being younger than you and better at your job than you will ever be! In the case of medical education, anecdotal reports in the press can be countered with empirical evidence. The quality of the state’s education is such that education is equitable and there is a societal pursuit towards education across successive generations. Tamil Nadu has created a state where almost all people have college degrees and most have professional degrees. It is common knowledge that it is easier to look for alternative careers with a college degree than with a certificate claiming you’ve flunked the class 10 board exam. The state has also created a generation of highly valuable “graduate educated” parents to children just beginning primary school. And overall, Tamil Nadu has taken all castes along in this journey. Everybody has prospered. No one has been left behind. In a toss-up between ‘Should I pass a person who is only semi-likely to succeed’ and ‘Should I fail a person who is semi-likely to succeed’, Tamil Nadu has reduced false negatives and increased false positives. It is a morally and ethically right strategy from a social justice point of view. It is okay for other states or institutions to not understand and/or agree with Tamil Nadu’s far-reaching strategy. Institutions outside of the state are free to adopt a examination system to regulate admissions to their institutions – but for the Centre to dictate a single syllabus and an examination system that Tamil Nadu should also adopt is an assault on state federalism. It stops a highly competent and successful state from determining its own destiny and pulls it down to the level of the lowest common denominator. This is why NEET is poison. It lets short-sightedness block visionary policymaking.As drones of all flavors become increasingly ubiquitous, it was only a matter of time before countermeasures began to pop up—and they have in spades, across a spectrum of prices and tactics. These range from the high-tech (lasers and RF interference) to something as basic as a handheld "net gun." Still, as we reported earlier this year, a shotgun can also be a particularly effective way of downing a drone. "While kinetic counter-measures are good for battlefields, they are less than ideal for domestic scenarios," Arthur Holland Michel, the co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, told Ars by e-mail. "If you use a laser to burn a hole through a quadcopter hovering over a city, you will now have a heavy flammable object falling from the sky, which is extremely dangerous," he said. "Some are turning to electronic countermeasures as a way of keeping drones away without having to shoot them down. One option for countering small drones is to use jamming systems. The Secret Service is experimenting with jamming systems that would interfere with the communication system of any small drone within a given area (say, the White House). Jamming systems are an appealing option, but they have their drawbacks: they can interfere with Wi-Fi and radio frequencies." He also specifically mentioned a new startup company, called Drone Shield, which was deployed during this year's Boston Marathon. In an e-mail, Brian Hearing of Drone Shield told us that the company has sold about 300 of its audio detectors. (The company first began as a much smaller-scale open source project, which Ars reported on in 2013.) So, who's buying? "Mostly our private security providing partners, and right now Japan is our hottest market (since the prime minister's house drone incident)," he wrote in an e-mail. "We have sold some directly to some foreign government customers as well." And where exactly are they being deployed? "First, we don't know directly since we don't ask our resellers and security providers where they are used—we learned long ago they don't like giving out that information," Hearing said. "From the designs we've been providing it looks mostly like government- and corporate-type buildings, such as headquarters, prisons, and some VIP residences. We have done many designs for airports but the acquisition cycle there is slow. Same with nuclear installations." Above are a few ways to take down drones that we found. Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments. Listing image by Liteye SystemsCourses in women’s studies and gender studies within US contexts have long prioritized content that critically examines the social construction of bodies and sexualities, consciousness-raising about how social identities interface with disciplinary and institutional practices, and the notion that ‘the personal is political.’ This article examines the social and pedagogical implications of an extra-credit assignment where I asked women to grow out their body hair and men to remove their body hair for 10 weeks in several upper-division women’s studies courses. Students’ response papers and weekly logs from 87 students over four semesters highlighted the social policing of gender and sexual identity, pervasive disgust and misinformation about body hair, raced and classed dimensions of students’ experiences, configurations of masculinity as agentic and powerful, and postexperiential reflections on challenging social norms. This assignment showed how temporary excursions into rebelling against body norms can generate sociopolitical awareness, particularly for living as Other (e.g. queerness, fatness, disability). I also consider implications for ‘ripple effect pedagogy’ and ‘peer generated pedagogy,’ along with pedagogical reflections about using the assignment as a consciousness-raising tool in feminist classrooms. Adams C (1991) Who decided women should shave their legs and underarms? Available at: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/625/who-decided-women-should-shave-their-legs-and-underarms. Google Scholar Anderson, K ( 2008 ). From metrosexual to retrosexual: The importance of shifting male gender roles to feminism. Thinking Gender Papers 1: 1 – 10. Google Scholar Basow, SA ( 1991 ). The hairless ideal: Women and their body hair. Psychology of Women Quarterly 15: 83 – 96. Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI Basow, SA, Braman, AC ( 1998 ). Women and body hair: Social perceptions and attitudes. Psychology of Women Quarterly 22(4): 637 – 645. Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI Basow, SA, Willis, J ( 2001 ). Perceptions of body hair on white women: Effects of labeling. Psychological Reports 89(3): 571 – 576. Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI Boroughs, M, Cafri, G, Thompson, JK ( 2005 ). Male body depilation: Prevalence and associated features of body hair removal. Sex Roles 52: 637 – 644. Google Scholar Crossref | ISI Bryant, AN ( 2003 ). Changes in attitudes toward women’s roles: Predicting gender role traditionalism among college students. Sex Roles 28: 131 – 142. 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Washington, DC. American Psychological Association. Google Scholar Crossref Fahs B (forthcoming) Shaving it all off: Examining social norms of body hair among college men in a women’s studies course. Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Google Scholar Fahs, B ( 2011 ). Dreaded ‘otherness’: Heternormative patrolling in women’s body hair rebellions. Gender & Society 25(4): 451 – 472. Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI Filiault, SM, Drummond, JN ( 2007 ). The hegemonic aesthetic. Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review 3(3): 175 – 184. Google Scholar Fahs, B, Delgado, D( 2011 ). The specter of excess: Race, class, and gender in women’s body hair narratives. In: Bobel, C, Kwan, S (ed.) Embodied Resistance: Breaking the Rules, Challenging the Norms. Nashville, TN. Vanderbilt University Press, pp. 13 – 25. Google Scholar Foucault, M ( 1978 ). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. New York. Vintage. Google Scholar Golden, C ( 2002 ). Consciousness-raising revisited: From living room to classroom. Psychology of Women Quarterly 26(3): 262 – 265. Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI Harris, KL, Melaas, K, Rodacker, E ( 1999 ). The impact of women’s studies courses on college students of the 1990s. Sex Roles 40: 969 – 977. Google Scholar Crossref | ISI Hartung, B ( 1990 ). Selective rejection: How students perceive women’s studies teachers. NWSA Journal 2: 254 – 263. Google Scholar Henderson-King, D, Stewart, AJ ( 1999 ). Educational experiences and shifts in group consciousness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25: 390 – 399. Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI Herbenick, D, Schick, V, Reece, M, Sanders, S, Fortenberry, D ( 2010 ). Pubic hair removal among women in the United States: Prevalence, methods, and characteristics. The Journal of Sexual Medicine 7(10): 3322 – 3330. Google Scholar Crossref | Medline | ISI Hope, C ( 1982 ). Caucasian female body hair and American culture. 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Teachers College Record 101(1): 35 – 59. Google Scholar Crossref | ISI Martins, Y, Tiggemann, M, Churchett, L ( 2008 ). The shape of things to come: Gay men’s satisfaction with specific body parts. Psychology of Men and Masculinity 9: 248 – 256. Google Scholar Crossref | ISI Sowards, SK, Renegar, VR ( 2004 ). The rhetorical functions of consciousness-raising in third wave feminism. Communication Studies 55(4): 535 – 553. Google Scholar Crossref Stake, JE ( 2007 ). Predictors of change in feminist activism through women’s and gender studies classes. Sex Roles 57: 43 – 54. Google Scholar Crossref | ISI Stake, J, Hoffmann, F ( 2000 ). Putting feminist pedagogy to the test: The experience of women’s studies from student and teacher perspectives. Psychology of Women Quarterly 24: 30 – 38. Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI Stake, JE, Roades, L, Rose, S, Ellis, L, West, C ( 1994 ). The women’s studies experience: Impetus for feminist activism. Psychology of Women Quarterly 18(1): 17 – 24. Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI Synnott, A ( 1987 ). Shame and glory: A sociology of hair. The British Journal of Sociology 38(3): 381 – 413. Google Scholar Crossref | ISI Thomsen, CJ, Basu, AM, Reinitz, MT ( 1995 ). Effects of women’s studies courses on gender-related attitudes of women and men. Psychology of Women Quarterly 19: 419 – 426. Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI Tiggemann, M, Hodgson, S ( 2008 ). The hairless norm extended: Reasons for and predictors of women’s body hair removal at different body sites. Sex Roles 59: 889 – 897. Google Scholar Crossref | ISI Tiggemann, M, Kenyon, SJ ( 1998 ). The hairlessness norm: The removal of body hair in women. Sex Roles 39: 873 – 885. Google Scholar Crossref | ISI Tiggemann, M, Lewis, C ( 2004 ). Attitudes toward women’s body hair: Relationship with disgust sensitivity. Psychology of Women Quarterly 28(4): 381 – 387. Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI Tiggemann, M, Martins, Y, Churchett, L ( 2008 ). Beyond muscles: Unexplored parts of men’s body image. Journal of Health Psychology 13: 1163 – 1172. Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI Toerien, M, Wilkinson, S ( 2003 ). Gender and body hair: Constructing the feminine woman. Women’s Studies International Forum 26(4): 333 – 344. Google Scholar Crossref | ISI Toerien, M, Wilkinson, S ( 2004 ). Exploring the depilation norm: A qualitative questionnaire study of women’s body hair removal. Qualitative Research in Psychology 1(1): 69 – 92. Google Scholar Toerien, M, Wilkinson, S, Choi, PYL ( 2005 ). Body hair removal: The ‘mundane’ production of normative femininity. Sex Roles 52: 399 – 406. Google Scholar Crossref | ISI Trethewey, A ( 2004 ). Sexuality, eros, and pedagogy: Desiring laughter in the classroom. Women & Language 27(1): 34 – 40. Google Scholar Webber, M ( 2005 ). ‘Don’t be so feminist’: Exploring student resistance to feminist approaches in a Canadian university. Women’s Studies International Forum 28: 181 – 194. Google Scholar Crossref | ISIMany of the U.S. state-level shark fin bans which make it illegal to buy, sell, or possess shark fins include exemptions for smooth and spiny dogfish, i.e. by far the most common species of sharks caught by U.S. fishermen. Some of these fisheries have significant conservation concerns associated with them. Much of this fishing is not currently subject to catch limits or other basic management You would never know that most locally caught sharks are not affected at all by fin bans by reading most of the action alerts that some conservation organizations send out to encourage ocean lovers to support these laws, by following most of the media coverage of these laws, or by reading most people’s excited posts after these laws pass. Many of these inaccurately say that shark fin bans “protect all sharks.” I have a request to make to the conservation organizations supporting these laws, journalists covering them, and the shark and ocean lovers celebrating when they pass. If you want to support laws with an exemption for dogfish sharks, that’s fine, but let’s have an open and honest discussion about why you are doing this instead of just acting like it isn’t happening. First of all, please don’t say that state-level shark fin bans “protect all sharks” when really they affect “all sharks except for the ones that are by far the most common species of sharks caught by U.S. fishermen”. Also, the actual protection that they offer is extremely limited (they only affect what you can do with already-dead sharks, not how many sharks are killed,) but that’s a discussion for another time. Are you supporting these exemptions because U.S. shark fisheries are better managed than many international shark fisheries, and therefore we don’t need to be as concerned about them? That may be true in general, but some of these dogfish fisheries are subject to some of the weakest shark finning bans in the world, and some don’t yet have quotas regulating them. And if that is your motivation, will future exemptions be made for other sustainable U.S. shark fisheries, such as, for example, Gulf of Mexico blacktip sharks? Are you supporting these exemptions because the laws wouldn’t otherwise pass due to political strength of local fishing lobbies, arguing that protecting some but not all sharks is better than no protection? Or are you supporting it because you don’t want to cause economic disruption to U.S. fisheries? If so, then why not change the exemptions so they exempt any sharks caught by U.S. fishermen instead of making them species-focused? Are you supporting these exemptions because you personally care more about the conservation status of larger, more charismatic species of sharks? If your primary concern is the cruelty associated with the shark fin trade, then is cruelty to smaller sharks somehow not as bad as cruelty to larger sharks? Along these lines, everyone knows that skates and rays face similar, and in many cases worse, conservation threats than sharks, including skate “winging,” right? Are you supporting a law with an exemption for dogfish because you assume that a later law will fix this problem and protect dogfish? If so, you should note that this has yet to happen for any U.S. state-level shark fin ban with dogfish exceptions, and that over the four years since the federal Shark Conservation Act exempted Atlantic smooth dogfish, state finning rules for this species got incrementally weaker, with no correction in sight. I’m not opposed to conservation policies that protect some species but not others in the name of realpolitik, and targeting species and fisheries of greater conservation concern for extra protection makes sense if these criteria are properly selected. What I am opposed to is incorrectly claiming that a law does a lot more than it really does, because this creates the false impression that a serious problem has been solved. Remember, #DogfishRSharks2!It is said that inflammation is the root of many illness and disease; leading to minor issues like gingivitis or major concerns like heart disease, stroke and death. This is why Julie Daniluk’s crusade couldn’t be more perfectly timed. You may know Julie as the resident nutritionist on The Healthy Gourmet, which airs on the OWN Network; but Julie is also a very acclaimed writer and owner of the Big Carrot Natural Food Market, one of the largest of its kind in Canada. Recently Julie released a literary tome “Meal That Heal Inflammation” that serves as a textbook for those who desire to heal their bodies with the food they eat; the book offers practical information paired with down to earth recipes that are not only flavorful but healing as well. I bought the book and I was floored by the amount of information Julie managed to inject within the pages- it really is an amazing book! I was so pleased when Julie took a few moments away from her Canadian book tour and television appearances to participate in the experts series; thank you Julie! So to end the expert’s series, the lovely Julie Daniluk on Inflammation! *********** You are well known for your meals that heal; but if you could narrow it down to five essential items, what are the most important ingredients to have in a healthy kitchen? 1) Kale: This form of cabbage is rated one of the highest nutrient-density food. With only 31 calories a cup, it is packed with nutrients. 2) Arctic char: This fish resembles a salmon but is genetically more closely linked to a trout. It is a rich source of omega-3 fatty acids, a powerful anti-inflammatory. 3) Berries: Eating berries daily can significantly reduce inflammation, according to a 2007 study in Journal of Nutrition. Blueberries, one of my all-time favourites, are low on the glycemic index, which means it does not spike your blood sugar. They are also high in fiber, packed with antioxidants and also reduce cortisol, a stress hormone. 4) Maca Powder: This nutrient dense root vegetable is used to increase vitality and stamina, regulate glandular function and promote hormone balance in men and women. I love using it in smoothies. For more information you can check out this link, http://www.pno.ca/preferred-nutrition-products/item/brad-king/macapunch-powder.html 5) Hemp Seeds: Also known has hemp hearts, these seeds are a powerhouse of protein, EFA, GLA and iron. I put hemp on salads, in smoothies and include them in many other recipes on my website juliedaniluk.com. For more information you can check out this link, http://manitobaharvest.com/index.php In your opinion what is the most important thing to remember when trying to heal ourselves and why? Be loving and patient with yourself. Give healing time. It often takes years to develop a health problem, so it is reasonable to say it will take time to reverse it. I ask people to commit to the MTHI plan for at least 8 weeks but many will start to feel the results before that time. In my book Meals That Heal Inflammation, I tell the readers that Chapter 2 “Emotional Pain: Let’s Talk” is the most important chapter in the book. I really mean this! It is vital to engage in positive self-talk and drop the negative. Negative self-talk such as “I’ll never lose weight” or “I’ll always be in pain”, become a tape loop in your mind that will not help you reach your goals. Reword these messages and rewrite the story line to include your goals. Many people, who are struggling with weight and pain issues, are also struggling with emotional difficulties. Mental health is key to physical health and having someone such as a therapist to guide you through this journey can help you make lasting changes. What is one thing that you do every day that contributes to your health? I practice Yoga every morning. This includes stretching (asanas), chanting and deep breathing (pranayama). These practices keep me grounded and centered for the day’s activities. I also have dinner for breakfast, meaning I start each day with a good quality protein meal to keep my blood sugar balanced for the day. Organically yours,THE Uighurs have never been particularly comfortable in China. Xinjiang, the region where these Turkic Muslims once formed the vast majority, came unwillingly into the Chinese empire. Rebels in parts of it even set up independent republics; a short-lived one was snuffed out by the Communist Party in 1949. Since then the regime in Beijing, 1,000 miles (1,600km) to the east, has sought to keep Xinjiang quiet. The policy is not working. The presidency of Xi Jinping risks sinking into a quagmire of ethnic strife. This could be China’s Chechnya. Over the past few decades the party has used several tactics to assert control. First it encouraged massive migration of Han Chinese into Xinjiang from other parts of China. Later it poured money into infrastructure and beefing up industry; the jobs thus created have gone overwhelmingly to Hans, who now make up more than 40% of the province’s 22m people. In tandem the party has adopted a hard line towards the merest hint of dissatisfaction on the part of the Uighurs. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. Discontent is spilling into the open, nonetheless. The past few days have been the bloodiest in Xinjiang since clashes in the provincial capital, Urumqi, left around 200 dead in 2009. It appears that nearly 100 people died in the violence. The dead include 59 alleged terrorists gunned down by police near Kashgar, the main city in southern Xinjiang, where the Uighurs are concentrated (and where the economy is weakest). These Uighurs had apparently attacked police stations and Han Chinese. Two days later a pro-government imam was stabbed to death outside the city’s main mosque (see article). Whenever violence flares up, the government’s rhetoric is uncompromising and usually focused on the dangers of jihadism. In May, following a spate of attacks by Uighurs on government and civilian targets in Xinjiang and in other parts of China, Mr Xi demanded “walls made of copper and steel” and “nets spread from the earth to the sky” to catch the “terrorists”. The party blames such attacks on Islamist militancy seeping across the border from Central and South Asia—notably from Afghanistan and Pakistan. It likes to claim that Uighurs live in harmony with the Han Chinese (“tightly bound together like the seeds of a pomegranate”, as Mr Xi puts it). The tragedy is that the government could end up proving itself right—by making jihadism the core of the Uighurs’ militancy. For now the violence is fuelled principally by a welter of home-grown grievances and is strikingly amateurish: rarely are the perpetrators armed with anything more than knives. But in recent months the violence has been morphing, spreading beyond the region itself and taking on some of the hues of jihadism elsewhere—through suicide-attacks and indiscriminate killing of civilians. Such acts are unspeakable. But there is evidence that China’s heavy-handed approach in Xinjiang is radicalising a once-tolerant culture. Uighur activists abroad say the latest violence near Kashgar had nothing to do with terrorism, for instance; instead it was sparked by police efforts to enforce government bans against fasting during Ramadan. From Sudan to the West Bank, the evidence is clear: once religion enters any conflict, it becomes harder to settle. The parallel with Chechnya should scare Mr Xi. What started out as a nationalist uprising in Russia’s north Caucasus region in the 1990s was met by a brutal clampdown, which in turn spawned a violent Islamist movement. Since then Chechnya has been both a jihadist breeding-ground and a running sore for Russia. About turn There are hints that Mr Xi understands the problem. In May he convened a rare meeting of party bosses to discuss Xinjiang. That gathering recognised the need to boost employment among Uighurs, especially in southern Xinjiang. After the meeting state-owned enterprises in Xinjiang were told they had to hire at least a quarter of all staff from Uighur and other minorities. Education for Uighurs is another priority: work has just begun on Kashgar’s first full-scale university. Such steps are necessary, but still not enough. Uighurs’ religious traditions should be respected, so that all Muslims are allowed to visit Mecca, not just those approved by the government. Education in the Uighur language could also be encouraged, as well as its use in workplaces. Mr Xi should disband the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which runs a vast network of Han-dominated settlements. And China should give up persecuting moderate Uighurs, who hardly embrace jihadism but are still angry about the government’s repressive measures. Amid the carnage of the past few days, the authorities announced they had formally charged a prominent Uighur economist, Ilham Tohti, with separatism. “Fewer and fewer people dare to speak out” about ethnic policies in Xinjiang, Mr Tohti has lamented. If Xinjiang’s Uighurs are not to fall prey to extremists, Mr Xi must allow people like Mr Tohti to speak out, not lock them away.Continue Reading Greenberg didn't know anybody who wrote Westerns, and Williams didn't look like someone who did. He was short and dapper, with a neat beard and "a face like a five-day rain," she recalls. He invariably wore a white shirt, a blazer, an ascot instead of a tie — and sometimes a red cummerbund. Other than spies and diplomats, who wore a red cummerbund? Yet that deeply lined face had seen things. After the two appeared on a couple of panels together, it became obvious to Greenberg that John Williams was a serious man — serious about his work and literature in general. When she learned that he had a new novel coming out, she decided to pick up a copy. The book was Stoner. Sitting in a car in a parking lot, Greenberg opened her purchase with some trepidation. What if it was awful? It wasn't a Western. It was the story of an obscure university professor, a teacher whose life and career are steeped in disappointment and failure. Greenberg slipped into the first couple of paragraphs — and was quickly in the deep end. "By the fourth sentence, I knew I was in good hands," she says now. "I was just sitting there, getting blown away." Stoner's colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past... As she was drawn into the oddly compelling work, Greenberg realized that this was how she wanted to write — clear as a mountain creek, without gimmicks or glitz, almost without words. It was the kind of seemingly effortless performance that requires tremendous skill and profound reserves of discipline and love. "He wrote like a Shaker would ski, without a wasted motion," she says. "It was without ego. But that doesn't mean without personality." The next time she saw Williams, Greenberg raved about Stoner. The book is terrific, she said. "I think so, too," Williams replied — and then, with typical modesty, began to chat about other things. Williams published three masterful works of fiction in a twelve-year span, all misleadingly labeled as "historical novels" but vastly different from one another. Each one was greeted with wretched sales and was soon out of print — even though the last one, Augustus, won the National Book Award for fiction, the only work by a Colorado author ever to do so. People sometimes confuse Williams with the African-American writer John A. Williams, or even with the composer of Star Wars. Yet every few years some astute and influential critic rediscovers Denver's John Williams, with the same shock of recognition Greenberg experienced sitting in her car back in 1965. "Why isn't this book famous?" C.P. Snow asked, writing about Stoner in 1973, after it finally found a publisher in Great Britain. "John is almost famous for not being famous," Williams compadre Dan Wakefield complained in 1986. "This is Hemingway without bluster, Fitzgerald without fashion, Faulkner stripped of pomp." Writing in the New York Times in 2007, Morris Dickstein called Stoner "something rarer than a great novel — it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away." Other Williams enthusiasts have heaped praise on Butcher's Crossing — described as the finest Western ever written and as the first anti-Western — and on Augustus, an astonishing journey through the rise of imperial Rome. Sixteen years after his death from emphysema at the age of 71, Williams has developed a cult following on college campuses, promulgated in part by generations of his former creative-writing students, now teaching in other MFA programs. And his work seems poised on the brink of much wider recognition. In recent years, all three of his major novels have been reissued in handsome paperbacks. Stoner showed up in Time earlier this year on a short list of "recommended reading" from Tom Hanks. And Focus Features has announced that a movie version of Butcher's Crossing is now in development with director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Jarhead) and screenwriter Joe Penhall (The Road). The man behind the work remains an enigma, though. Williams didn't like to talk about himself. People who considered him a dear friend heard scarcely a word about his experiences in World War II, for example, which haunted him for years, or his domestic upheavals (including four marriages). He never whined about the writing "process," loathed questions about where writers get their ideas, and rarely spoke of the sprawling novel about war and fine art he began working on shortly after Augustus, a project that remained unfinished when he died twenty years later. "He had a private side that he kept plenty private," says Robert Richardson, the acclaimed Thoreau biographer who taught beside Williams at DU for nearly three decades, "without it affecting his friendliness or availability. He did not spend any time feeling sorry for himself, even when he was carrying around an oxygen tank. He was okay with who he was and where he was." Yet a novelist of Williams's stature doesn't cut a swath through Denver without leaving some trace behind. Unlike Professor Stoner, he made a vivid impact on colleagues, friends and students, who credit him with shaping DU's writing program into one of the finest in the country. They remember a charming, irascible, hard-drinking and driven artist who cared far more about his own exacting standards than public expectations. A meticulous craftsman, he also left a revealing collection of personal correspondence, notes and drafts, all lovingly collected in a university library — although, curiously, not the university where he taught for thirty years. The memories and papers tell a Williams kind of story — tough and unexpected and utterly without apology. `"He was a plain guy," says Nancy Williams, his fourth and final wife, who was with him for close to 35 years. "He hated sentimentality or sugarcoating. He looked at writing as a job of work. He used to say that if he hadn't been a writer, he might have been a plumber." But one hell of a plumber. ****** Whenever Williams discovered a novel he admired, he would announce that the writer was a "pro" — his most lavish literary laurel. But he had an even higher accolade for someone he found to be sincere and unaffected. Such a person "has no side," he said. Williams grew up among people who had no side. He was born in 1922 in
excavating elaborate tunnels equipped with trolleys on rails and ventilation systems. This past April, federal authorities seized the longest Mexico-California underground smuggling tunnel discovered so far. The half-mile passage led from a closet inside a private home in Tijuana to a large metal dumpster in a parking lot 500 yards into U.S. territory. Agents discovered a 10-foot-deep hole leading into the tunnel underneath the drug-filled dumpster, and subsequently recovered seven tons of marijuana, and more than 2,200 pounds of cocaine—the largest drug bust associated with a Southern California tunnel to date. But, again, tunneling is something of a tradition. If you walk to Colonia Federal past the many dentists offices catering to uninsured gringos, you start to see colorful murals dedicated to the exploding population of deportees, dumped back across the border too far from their homes to go back, and still too close to the U.S. to give up. Here, in 2004, a now-famous tunnel was discovered. It began just a few paces from the corrugated border fence and stretched more than 150 feet underground and ended under a manhole cover in a Duty Free parking lot in the U.S., where a false-bottomed van would park on top so people could climb in from below, simultaneously loading kilos of drugs. The owner of the house on this side, Gabriel Lozano, was cleared of all charges. He claimed to have been renting out the house at the time, and the “Casa del Tunel,” the tunnel house now serves as an experimental art gallery. RELATED: Donald Trump to Mexico’s Enrique Peña Nieto: What Wall? Whether by air, sea, land, or subterranean routes, smugglers have devised both tech-savvy and laughably do-it-yourself ways to thwart our nation’s physical barriers—including handmade catapults and hairspray-propelled spud guns. They have even attached cheap GPS devices and drug packages to the vehicles of so-called “blind mules” and just crossed their fingers in waiting. On one occasion smugglers attempted to drive a Jeep up a makeshift ramp and over the 14-foot border fence into Yuma, Arizona. Border authorities retrieved the vehicle, but its passengers escaped into Mexico along with its contents—presumably drugs or humans. Last year, a 28-year-old Honduran drug mule decked out in scuba gear was discovered, along with almost $2 million worth of cocaine—55 pounds, distributed among 25 weighted down parcels—at the end of a 150-foot partially underwater tunnel leading from Mexicali into the All-American Canal, an aqueduct near Yuma, Arizona. More elaborately, almost $194 million worth of cocaine was discovered aboard a so-called narco-submarine in March off the Pacific coast. The vessel took on water and sank before the drugs could be recovered by authorities. But according to the U.S. Foreign Military Studies Office, this method of drug trafficking, as of mid-2012, accounted for up 80 percent of the illicit drugs travelling from the Andean states toward mid-way points, like Mexico, before the drugs eventually reach their final destination, the U.S. It remains the world’s largest cocaine market, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. However, sometimes smugglers, traffickers, and hopeful aliens need not try such complicated machinations. It’s easier just to find allies among corruptible law enforcement officials. No wall is going to take care of that. Last year, a Los Angeles police officer was indicted by federal authorities for human smuggling after border patrol agents discovered a 26-year-old Mexican man hiding in the spare tire compartment of his vehicle. Trump hopes to hire 5,000 fresh new Customs and Border Protection agents, but there’s a sorry record of some of those already on duty caught serving the interests of cartels and criminals. In February, 38-year-old former CBP officer Johnny Acosta was sentenced to eight years in federal prison for his role in conspiring to import more than 1,000 kilos of marijuana into Arizona, and accepting bribes. The previous month, in Texas, officer Julio Trujillo was arrested over allegations he accepted bribes in exchange for extending and facilitating visas. Only a few days ago, 50-year-old CBP officer Jose Luis Cota was arrested for receiving sexual favors and large sums of cash, after repeatedly allowing illegal aliens to enter the country through his lane at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. The following day, 20-year veteran CBP officer Lawrence Madrid was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for immigrant smuggling and accepting bribes. The corruption scandals within Homeland Security ranks are constant and ongoing. The CBP staff of roughly 60,000 employees has nearly doubled over the past decade, yet there continues to be little oversight for the agency, whose operating budget is now a staggering $12 billion. “The true levels of corruption within CBP are not known,” according to a 2015 Homeland Security report on CBP integrity. “There is data indicating that arrests for corruption of CBP personnel far exceed, on a per capita basis, such arrests at other federal law enforcement agencies.” Trump’s claim that the government can easily and cost-effectively achieve border security using “above and below ground sensors, towers, aerial surveillance, and manpower to supplement the wall, find and dislocate tunnels, and keep out criminal cartels,” is just not supported by empirical evidence. A 2015 report from the Department of Homeland Security called Customs and Border Protection’s own drone patrol system a “dubious achiever.” “After spending eight years and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, U.S. CBP has yet to prove the value of its Unmanned Aircraft System (drone) program while drastically understating the costs,” the report reads (PDF), recommending that the CBP “abandon plans to spend $443 million more on additional aircraft and put those funds to better use.” An audit of the drone program found that the estimated cost of operating each drone in the program had ballooned from $2,468 an hour in theory, to a whopping $12,255 in practice—once factoring in the cost of salaries, equipment, and overhead. Inspector General John Roth concluded that there is “no evidence that the drones contribute to a more secure border.” And in fact, the audit also found that unmanned aircraft even failed to meet the promised number of airborne hours, spending 88 percent of the time grounded due, primarily, to weather restrictions. An expanded Inspector General report found that ground sensors failed to produce a significant increase in border apprehensions, and in many cases failed to detect human or vehicular traffic, while often reacting to false triggers like animals and weather changes (PDF). And then there is Trump’s claim that a wall would deter the flow of guns—but in what direction? Guns, which are for the most part illegal in Mexico, aren’t entering the U.S. through the southern border—they are coming in here from the U.S., where they are often purchased legally (repeat, legally). This is a major factor contributing to the violence here, which displaces migrants who have been forced to flee their homes due to the cartel violence plaguing their towns. When the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) tried an innovative approach, “letting guns walk” in the now infamous “Operation Fast and Furious,” from 2009 to 2011, the results were disastrous. About 2,000 guns acquired by straw purchasers in the U.S., which were supposedly being tracked by the agency, were subsequently allowed to leave for Mexico. Dozens of these weapons have since reappeared at crime scenes in Mexico, and several have been linked to high-profile murders, including the scene of the 2011 death of CBP agent Brian Terry, and an AK-47 linked to the murder of Mexican beauty queen María Susana Flores Gámez in 2012. Another weapon recovered from the gruesome scene of the Flores Gámez murder—after cartel members used her as a human shield in an hours-long shootout with Mexican authorities—was, inexplicably, one personally purchased by an ATF agent at a gun store in Phoenix, using the address of the ATF field office. The agent, George Gillett, has since retired, but at the time he served as second-in-command at the Phoenix division, and was responsible for overseeing the failed program during its most catastrophic months. When it comes to deterring cartel violence, the ATF program was directly responsible for contributing to the strength of the bloodthirsty Sinaloa cartel—40 of these weapons were discovered in the Juarez safe house of José Antonio Torres Marrufo, a.k.a. “the Jaguar,” who led an armed wing of the Sinaloa cartel. Unbelievably, one of the ATF’s missing.50-caliber semi-automatic rifles was found at the safe house used by drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, who escaped from prison through one of his trademark underground tunnels last year only to be rearrested on Jan. 8. As a direct result of the U.S. government’s disastrous program, dozens more of these weapons have been found across Mexico, in the hands of other sanguinary cartels, including Michoacan’s La Familia cartel, the Gulf cartel, and the Beltrán Leyva cartel. Trump is right when he looks at all this and says “our country is a mess.” But a wall is not going to solve any of the problems. Instead of looking toward Mexico as an “enemy,” perhaps he could address other pressing issues, such as the United States’ export of weaponry and its insatiable consumption of drugs. The crime wars these have created and fueled have displaced thousands of Latin Americans, whose best bet for survival is to risk their lives and liberty in an attempt to flee the violence, poverty, and lack of opportunity. Back in 1979 Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters posed a series of questions that are all too appropriate today: “Mother should I build the wall? Mother should I run for president? Mother should I trust the government?” The answer to all is, probably, “No.” Please, no.INDIANAPOLIS, IN - FEBRUARY 25: John Moffitt of Wisconsin answers questions during a media session at the 2011 NFL Scouting Combine at Lucas Oil Stadium on February 25, 2011 in Indianapolis, Indiana. (Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images) It's often said that "money can't buy happiness" and one NFL player appears to have found that the adage still holds true. John Moffitt seemed to have it all. In August of his third year of an NFL career, he was acquired by the Denver Broncos from the Seattle Seahawks and had already made just shy of $2 million dollars as a professional athlete. He was famous and playing on arguably the biggest stage in sports. And then just last Tuesday on Twitter, Moffitt did something that some of his teammates, or even fans, will probably never understand. He quit: Football was fun but my head hurts-haha kidding roger goodell. I'm on to new things, thanks to everyone along the way!!! — John Moffitt (@Moffitt74) November 5, 2013 His tweet came a little more than 30 minutes after the Denver Broncos announced his placement on the Broncos reserve list via Twitter: The #Broncos have activated JD Walton & placed John Moffitt on reserve/left squad list: http://t.co/25bGIlxvkt pic.twitter.com/iRdnT2Jh1p — Denver Broncos (@Broncos) November 5, 2013 With about $1 million on the table, Moffitt walked away. Because he just wants to be happy. "I just really thought about it and decided I'm not happy. I'm not happy at all," Moffitt told The Associated Press. "I just want to be happy." Moffitt says he's not bitter. He's not leaving the NFL because he wasn't a bigger star, was recently put on the Broncos reserve list, didn't play enough minutes or make enough money. He's said that he's grateful for his time playing football in the NFL and in college. "I look back and I'm thankful for the whole experience. That's enough for me," he said. But how did the third-year-guard get here? Some reflective readings of Noam Chomsky and the Dalai Lama which really altered his world view, Moffitt told the AP. Moffitt began asking the questions that many have asked of themselves before like just how much money does a person need to be happy? What do you really want out of your life? And for him, the answer to both of those questions was: "I don’t really need to be a millionaire," he said. Football is a dangerous sport. And Moffitt understood that the punishment his body was taking and would take over the course of a 6 to 12 year span that an average player spends in professional football could cost him more than he was willing to sacrifice. "It’s really madness to risk your body, risk your well-being and risk your happiness for money," he said. The Dalai Lama would very likely agree with Moffitt's feelings about risking physical health for happiness. When asked what surprised him most about humanity, the Dalai Lama famously said: Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived. In his book "The Art of Happiness", the Dalai Lama also wrote: “So let us reflect on what is truly of value in life, what gives meaning to our lives, and set our priorities on the basis of that. The purpose of our life needs to be positive. We weren't born with the purpose of causing trouble, harming others. For our life to be of value, I think we must develop basic good human qualities-warmth, kindness, compassion. Then our life becomes meaningful and more peaceful -- happier.” And although Moffitt expressed concern that his fans and fellow professional football players wouldn't understand his questioning of his purpose, quitting pro sports and doing something else with his life, Noam Chomsky probably would. "I was never aware of any other option but to question everything," Chomsky said to The Guardian in 2003.Halo: S.I.T.C Chapter 5 PigAteMyPie Jun 23rd, 2014 288 Never 288Never Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features! rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 4.49 KB ----------------H-A-L-O-:-S.I.T.C---------------- Chapter 5: "I know you're standing right in front of me, but I think I misheard you. Could you please repeat that?" "Why doesn't the suspect stay at my house?" "It could, but-" "Sir, it's a he. The Sangheili have genders, you know" "Fine -HE could, but I'd have to have a guard assigned to your house if that were to happen" "I can take care of him on my own, IF, he were to. Which he most likely won't" The older human un-clips his weapons sheath from his belt and hands it to the female, Sam. "Just keep a weapon at hand. Oh, and no offence to you, uh, what's your name, son?" "Voro" "Voro, please don't take offence to anything we just talked about. Probably should have asked that beforehand, but we have to take precautions for this type of thing. 4 and a half years isn't enough time for us to relax after a treaty" Sam sighs, un-cuffs me and attach the cuffs to her belt. "Alright, time to show you around" After a 10 minute walk of awkward stares with people in the street and trying to avoid eye contact with everyone possible, we arrive at her house. Or as what is says outside, "Apartment 27B". We walk inside and she closes the door behind her, taking her coat off and key-belt. It's almost 7pm, and I'm suffering from hunger pain and a sore head. "Do you know how to cook?" "Pardon?" "Do you know how to cook food? Stuff to eat?" "No, We always had our food made for us. Always in a packet, for before bed or during battle" "Shame. How about I teach you?" "Depends on the size of the things I'll be using to cook. You humans have such little hands" "You Sangheili have enormous hands" I look at her hands, and look at mine. I guess it's different from someone else's point of view. I follow her into the kitchen, which is rather big, considering the size of the house. "Can you read English?" "Yes, just a little" "Close enough. Here's a list of ingredients we need, you can find them in that cupboard over there" I read the list, recognising most of the words, and start looking. I manage to get 4 of the 7 things she needed, most being dry, frozen products. After 30 minutes of watching how she makes the food, I finally see what she was cooking: Some kind of meat delicacy. She cuts it up into two equal serving, and then sits us down at a table. "Go ahead and try it" She says, while chewing. I grab a piece and roll it around on my teeth, licking all the flavour off with my tongue: I've never tasted it before, but it feels... nostalgic. Suddenly something in my head clicks, and I hear- wait... no. Not hear, see? See a voice: "HUNGRY.. THIS..". What? What do you mean? "Voro? What do YOU mean?" Oops. must of spoken out loud. "Sorry, just doze off" Taking another piece and chewing it, Sam gives me a strange look. "I.. don't think so.." "Um, just... never mind" I eat a few more pieces of this meal, savouring each piece slowly. The voice, or thing, or whatever it is, doesn't talk after that, but it's happy with this meal. Snack, would be a better word for it. It's not a very big meal. After finishing our dinner, we talk for at-least what seemed like an hour. It must have been more though, because after looking at her watch she was surprised. "Wow, it's 10 o'clock already? I'd probably go to bed now. You can, um... sleep.. on the floor if you want to, just don't take too long falling asleep, because I have to go to a meeting tomorrow, okay?" "Okay" "Okay. Oh, and you can use some cushions from the couch if you want, just put them back when you wake up. Goodnight" Sam leaves the room, turning off the light as she leaves. She walks down the hall to her room, closes the door behind her and goes to bed. I feel like I haven't slept in years, and yet it's still really hard to go to sleep. The voices speaks again: "Soft, comfy". Oh, well at-least this one made sense. It wants me to sleep on a cushion, even though I never slept on a real bed before. I grab a cushion and lay my head on it: The voice wasn't kidding, this thing helps... strangely. And it only takes one second, and I start sleeping. I dream. Not of the battlefield, but of home. Not home home, but, where my home is. Was. Sangheilios. I remember. A gathering. A court. I was the centre of attention here. For one day only. I see snippets of it happening. Or, what happened. I couldn't see what was happening directly, as it was blurry, but I could make something out: I was being exiled. But for what? Why? RAW Paste Data ----------------H-A-L-O-:-S.I.T.C---------------- Chapter 5: "I know you're standing right in front of me, but I think I misheard you. Could you please repeat that?" "Why doesn't the suspect stay at my house?" "It could, but-" "Sir, it's a he. The Sangheili have genders, you know" "Fine -HE could, but I'd have to have a guard assigned to your house if that were to happen" "I can take care of him on my own, IF, he were to. Which he most likely won't" The older human un-clips his weapons sheath from his belt and hands it to the female, Sam. "Just keep a weapon at hand. Oh, and no offence to you, uh, what's your name, son?" "Voro" "Voro, please don't take offence to anything we just talked about. Probably should have asked that beforehand, but we have to take precautions for this type of thing. 4 and a half years isn't enough time for us to relax after a treaty" Sam sighs, un-cuffs me and attach the cuffs to her belt. "Alright, time to show you around" After a 10 minute walk of awkward stares with people in the street and trying to avoid eye contact with everyone possible, we arrive at her house. Or as what is says outside, "Apartment 27B". We walk inside and she closes the door behind her, taking her coat off and key-belt. It's almost 7pm, and I'm suffering from hunger pain and a sore head. "Do you know how to cook?" "Pardon?" "Do you know how to cook food? Stuff to eat?" "No, We always had our food made for us. Always in a packet, for before bed or during battle" "Shame. How about I teach you?" "Depends on the size of the things I'll be using to cook. You humans have such little hands" "You Sangheili have enormous hands" I look at her hands, and look at mine. I guess it's different from someone else's point of view. I follow her into the kitchen, which is rather big, considering the size of the house. "Can you read English?" "Yes, just a little" "Close enough. Here's a list of ingredients we need, you can find them in that cupboard over there" I read the list, recognising most of the words, and start looking. I manage to get 4 of the 7 things she needed, most being dry, frozen products. After 30 minutes of watching how she makes the food, I finally see what she was cooking: Some kind of meat delicacy. She cuts it up into two equal serving, and then sits us down at a table. "Go ahead and try it" She says, while chewing. I grab a piece and roll it around on my teeth, licking all the flavour off with my tongue: I've never tasted it before, but it feels... nostalgic. Suddenly something in my head clicks, and I hear- wait... no. Not hear, see? See a voice: "HUNGRY.. THIS..". What? What do you mean? "Voro? What do YOU mean?" Oops. must of spoken out loud. "Sorry, just doze off" Taking another piece and chewing it, Sam gives me a strange look. "I.. don't think so.." "Um, just... never mind" I eat a few more pieces of this meal, savouring each piece slowly. The voice, or thing, or whatever it is, doesn't talk after that, but it's happy with this meal. Snack, would be a better word for it. It's not a very big meal. After finishing our dinner, we talk for at-least what seemed like an hour. It must have been more though, because after looking at her watch she was surprised. "Wow, it's 10 o'clock already? I'd probably go to bed now. You can, um... sleep.. on the floor if you want to, just don't take too long falling asleep, because I have to go to a meeting tomorrow, okay?" "Okay" "Okay. Oh, and you can use some cushions from the couch if you want, just put them back when you wake up. Goodnight" Sam leaves the room, turning off the light as she leaves. She walks down the hall to her room, closes the door behind her and goes to bed. I feel like I haven't slept in years, and yet it's still really hard to go to sleep. The voices speaks again: "Soft, comfy". Oh, well at-least this one made sense. It wants me to sleep on a cushion, even though I never slept on a real bed before. I grab a cushion and lay my head on it: The voice wasn't kidding, this thing helps... strangely. And it only takes one second, and I start sleeping. I dream. Not of the battlefield, but of home. Not home home, but, where my home is. Was. Sangheilios. I remember. A gathering. A court. I was the centre of attention here. For one day only. I see snippets of it happening. Or, what happened. I couldn't see what was happening directly, as it was blurry, but I could make something out: I was being exiled. But for what? Why?Just In Time Apart from making balloons float and making you sound like a chipmunk, helium is essential to the superconductor industry, and is a crucial ingredient in MRI scans as well as other medical applications. Numerous other applications also require helium, such as quantum mechanics and space technology. In recent years, experts have been worried about helium reserves being depleted. Ironically, it is the second most abundant element in space. Since helium is a lot lighter than air, a lot of the Earth’s helium supply quickly seeps out into space. While this means we can never really run out of helium in the universe, harvesting it would become increasingly costly. The world relies on the US for 75% of its helium supply, and based on estimates, the American reserve can only produce enough to last until 2018, 2020 at best. But fear not: a large helium reserve has just been found in Tanzania. Scientists from Durham and Oxford University, in collaboration with Helium One, used seismic imaging and geochemical sampling to find the new reserve, on the postulation that volcanic activity is critical in the production of helium. Durham University graduate student Diveena Danabalan presented the team’s findings at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Japan.St. Louis, MO-based Monsanto -- the world's largest seed company best known for its genetically modified crops and companion pesticide, the glyphosate-based Roundup -- was once again the victim of hacker group Anonymous. This time, the attack comes from Anonymous' alter ego, going by the name "AntiSec," publishing information from a company database. The recent hack, while admittedly causes the company little harm, serves more as a warning from Anonymous and AntiSec, as did the July 2011 attack by Anonymous that interrupted the company's website and released data on approximately 2,500 individuals connected with Monsanto, including former and present employees. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website Preceding the data dump on Pastebin's website, AntiSec posted the following message, which they say comes as a result of Monsanto's lawsuit against organic dairy farmers. The message from AntiSec: Monsanto: Your continued attack on the world's food supply, as well as the health of those who eat it, has earned you our full attention. Your crimes against humanity are too many to name on one page, you have put over 9,000 small-time farmers out of business by using your enourmous legal team to bury them with your malicious patent lawsuits. You have continually introduced harmful, even deadly products into our food supply without warning, without care, all for your own profit. We are aware that posting this outdated database will do little to harm you. Rest assured, we will continue to dox your employees and executives, continue to knock down your websites, continue to fry your mail servers, continue to be in your systems, and continue to expose your bullshit. Expect Us ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger Image: Newtown grafittiQuote Hey folks, As Keith mentioned in the roadmap, we want to start the process of having weekly discussion threads here on the forums. Let's get this started with our first topic, Class changes starting with Game Update 5.3. Let us know what you think of the list! Are these the Disciplines you expected to see? Are any missing and if so which ones and why? The following is each Class/Discipline we are currently looking into changing. By Friday, we will begin posting in-depth threads on exactly what is happening to each Discipline. This will include whether they are being buffed or nerfed and why, along with the specific planned changes. These threads will get posted over a few weeks. Here is the current summer list: Sorc and Sage Madness/Balance Corruption/Seer PT and Vanguard Pyrotech/Plasmatech Assassin and Shadow Hatred/Serenity Sniper and Gunslinger Virulence/Dirty Fighting Engineering/Saboteur Merc and Commando Innovative Ordnance/Assault Specialist Arsenal/Gunnery You will obviously have a number of questions, but here’s a few that may be on your mind: Why are these Disciplines being looked at for changes? Between data and player feedback, these are the Disciplines that appear to be most in need of change. Whether that is that they are too good, or not good enough, these Disciplines need attention first. What about the missing Classes/Disciplines? If a Class or Discipline is missing from this list it doesn't mean they won't be receiving changes at all, it is just that they are not receiving changes in the near future. In most cases this means that those Classes and/or Disciplines are in an ok place. It doesn't mean they don't need changes (both buff and nerf) but that other Disciplines need them sooner. When will we receive a detailed breakdown of the changes? I will be working with the team on getting the exact changes out to you as soon as they are ready. Based on what I know today, we will start posting those threads (which will be posted by Discipline) this week and throughout June. Thanks everyone! -eric Eric Musco | Community Manager Follow us on Twitter @SWTOR | Like us on Facebook [Contact Us] [Rules of Conduct] [F.A.Q.]"In Seattle, we have a provisional social license to build in the urban core.” — Gene Duvernoy This statement, made by the director of Forterra, a regional advocacy organization in the Puget Sound, neatly sums up a striking difference in culture and policy between Seattle and San Francisco. There is no such license in the Bay Area. Here, the public antipathy (anxiety? angst?) toward growth — and its codification in our policies and processes — is so pervasive that we scarcely notice it. But in Seattle, not only is infill development happening at a remarkable pace, it is happening with a great deal less opposition, anxiety, conflict and delay. Seattle looks a lot like San Francisco. It’s a diverse, hot-market city with abundant jobs, progressive values and a beautiful natural context. Rents are rising. Traffic is worsening. But the response has been drastically different. With more than 20 percent fewer residents, Seattle has consistently produced about double the amount of housing as San Francisco in recent decades. San Franciscans pay twice as much rent and, more revealing, 60 percent more of their incomes on rent. Duvernoy’s statement is carefully qualified: People in Seattle are not uncritical enthusiasts for shiny new buildings. They are, like San Franciscans, watchful and engaged citizens. Conflict abounds, as do familiar concerns about what is being lost as the city grapples with social, economic and physical change. Rents are rising, and debates about housing policy are ongoing. But with that said, there seems to be a broad recognition that accommodating growth in the right places is far preferable to the alternative. If San Francisco and Seattle have such similar challenges and values, what accounts for the difference in approach? For one, development approvals are much more streamlined. Washington State’s environmental review process does not allow for the open-ended appeals and litigation that are used to kill or delay projects in California, and projects rarely go before elected officials or to the ballot. Even more significantly, Washington State’s 1990 Growth Management Act requires that local zoning and comprehensive plans accommodate each municipality’s share of regional growth, so local planning processes don’t tend to pit local homeowner interests against regional needs. But the policy mechanics are also a reflection of a different cultural attitude about growth, sprawl, urbanism and conservation.In the civic culture and public consciousness of the Puget Sound region, growth in the urban core has long been associated with the preservation of the region’s beloved open space and agricultural land. The state’s Growth Management Act emerged from a broad bipartisan movement to limit sprawl and conserve open space, which it tackles as two sides of the same coin. Forterra’s influential 2005 Cascade Agenda further reinforced this connection, developing a broad regional vision that addressed wild and rural conservation, the fate of small communities and ambitious growth in the urban centers. It praised developers and city officials who are promoting infill, saying, “As conservationists, we will do our part to help them succeed." In the Bay Area, our considerable achievements in open space and agricultural conservation have not been linked — in policy or in culture — with accommodating growth in the core. In the Bay Area’s discourse on growth, this allows people to oppose new urban housing on “environmental” grounds with a straight face. The results are self-reinforcing. Because new urban development is relatively easy in Seattle, a lot has been built. The benefits of density — walkable neighborhoods with abundant amenities — have been accruing, reinforcing the consensus that the city can change for the better.Meanwhile, observers in Seattle routinely cite San Francisco as a cautionary tale. One Seattle council member memorably referred to the “San Francisco death spiral” to describe how high housing costs feed a cycle of anxieties about growth, demands for fees, exactions and regulations on new development, and in turn further cost increases. People in Seattle feel good about their region and how it’s growing. A recent Forterra survey showed that residents of the Puget Sound region found an optimistic outlook on the region’s identity and direction by three to one, and strong commitment to planning and preparing for growth. Meanwhile, a widely cited Bay Area Council survey found that only 42 percent of Bay Area residents think the region is on the right track, and 40 percent are considering leaving in the next few years. We should not gloss over the challenges Seattle faces — they look a lot like our own, and we have a lot to learn from one another. But Seattle provides a revealing example of a progressive, hot-market city that largely embraces growth and connects it to conservation at a regional scale. So what is that license again? And how do we get one?Previously, on Elucidations: Episode 110: Chike Jeffers discusses the social and political philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 109: Bonus episode on morality and politics with Matt Teichman and Toby Buckle Episode 108: Mariam Thalos discusses freedom hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 107: Linda Martín Alcoff discusses identity and history hosted by Matt Teichman and Emily Dupree Episode 106: R.A. Briggs discusses gender hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 105: R.A. Briggs discusses epistemic decision theory hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 104: Seth Yalcin discusses the question-sensitivity of belief hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 103: Brian Leiter explains why we should think about Marx hosted by Matt Teichman and Lawrence Dallman Episode 102: Josh Knobe discusses the true self hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 101: Miranda Fricker discusses blame and forgiveness hosted by Matt Teichman and Emily Dupree Episode 100: Agnes Callard discusses aspiration hosted by Matt Teichman and Ben Callard Episode 99: Steven Nadler discusses Spinoza on freedom hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 98: Jennifer Lackey discusses credibility hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 97: Meghan Sullivan discusses time biases hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 96: Nic Koziolek discusses the role of belief in reasoning hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 95: Zed Adams discusses the genealogy of color hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 94: Zsofia Zvolenszky discusses fictional names hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 93: Barry Lam discusses obligations after death hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 92: Kristie Dotson discusses epistemic oppression hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 91: Paolo Santorio discusses counterfactuals hosted by Matt Teichman and Dhananjay Jagannathan Episode 90: Ásta Sveinsdóttir discusses social construction hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 89: John Collins discusses language universals hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 88: Kent Bach discusses jumping to conclusions hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 87: Susanna Schellenberg discusses perceptual particularity hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 86: Daniel Smyth discusses photographs and their vicissitudes hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 85: Bryce Huebner discusses race and cognitive science hosted by Matt Teichman and Francey Russell Episode 84: Amanda Greene discusses the legitimacy of democracy hosted by Matt Teichman and Emily Dupree Episode 83: Bob Simpson disusses genealogical anxiety hosted by Matt Teichman and Nethanel Lipshitz Episode 82: Robert May discusses Frege and the problem of identity hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 81: Cathy Legg discusses what Peirce’s categories can do for you hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 80: Mark Hopwood discusses love and moral value hosted by Matt Teichman and Daniel Smyth Episode 79: Anthony S. Gillies discusses conditionals hosted by Matt Teichman Episode 78
22nd floor had been blown out from fires or explosions in the elevator shafts. Even if a highly disproportionate quantity of jet fuel from the aircraft had somehow caused these fires and the related damage, there certainly would not have have been any left to reach the lobby. All of this ignores the questions of how unburned jet fuel could make its way around the elevator cabs in the shafts, how it could re-accumulate at the lower level, and how the supposed fuel/air mix could become optimum and then ignite. It also ignores how much jet fuel would be required to produce the explosive energy needed to destroy so much of the lobby, including the huge windows and the massive granite wall coverings, and kill people in that area. The jet fuel bolus hypothesis also ignores the eyewitness testimonies of massive explosions within the lobby. If NIST had done a minimal amount of physical testing to support its weak fuel bolus suggestion, the hypothesis would have been easily disproven. But that would have left people to wonder what actually did cause these incendiary fires and the ones in the basement levels. The answers to those questions would almost certainly add to the other, extensive evidence for the presence of energetic, incendiary materials at the WTC.Optimo z Mailinglist | Source Code tab">Mouse Gestures tab">Tweaks $first = true; function addNav($page, $desc) { global $first, $SUBPROJECT; if ($first == false) { echo " | "; } else { $first = false; } echo "<a href=\"http://optimoz.mozdev.org/".$SUBPROJECT."/".$page."\" ".$desc.""; } if ($SUBPROJECT == "gestures") { addNav("installation.html", "Installation"); addNav("faqs.html", "FAQs"); addNav("bugs.html", "Bugs"); addNav("screenshots.html", "Screenshots"); //addNav("wishlist.html", "Wishlist"); } else if ($SUBPROJECT == "tweaks") { addNav("installation.html", "Installation"); addNav("bugs.html", "Bugs"); } else { echo " choose sub-project above "; }?> Mouse Gestures ";?> What are mouse gestures? Mouse Gestures are a fast way to execute commands without using the keyboard, menus or toolbars. Instead, the user holds down a mouse button (usually the right one), moves the mouse in a certain way to form a gesture, then releases the mouse button. In web browsers like Mozilla Firefox or the Mozilla Suite, gestures are used to go back or forward a page, switch between tabs, open multiple links at once, control text or image size, and numerous other functions. However, gestures are in no way limited to browsers: the Mouse Gestures extension also supports Mozilla Thunderbird, Mail and News (Mozilla's built-in email client) and Chatzilla. Mouse Gesture examples Below is a selection of the wide range of gesture functions. All screen shots were taken with the optional feature "mouse trails" enabled, to illustrate how the mouse was moved. To see a list of other default gestures, visit our Supported Gestures page.Like learning to use chopsticks, roller skating takes patience, dedication, and a particularly dexterous set of toes. Marvel at flexible feet with today’s deal: for $15, you get two general-admission tickets to a Hammer City Roller Girls roller-derby doubleheader at the J.L. Grightmire Market Street Arena in Dundas on Saturday, August 13 (up to a $30 value). One bout features the Hammer City Harlots versus Belles of the Brawl from Brantford, and the other features the Hammer City Eh! Team versus the Killamazoo Derby Darlins from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Doors open at 5 p.m., and seating is first-come first-served, so derby fans are encouraged to arrive as close to 5 p.m. as possible. The first bout starts at 6 p.m., and the second begins at 8 p.m. Admission is $5 for kids ages 6–12 and free for children ages 5 and younger. Hamilton’s Hammer City Roller Girls thrill fans and razz enemies with full-contact skating showdowns and bombastic monikers, earning a short feature on CBC’s Sports Day in Canada program. Today’s deal kicks open the gates to an evening doubleheader showcasing both Hammer City teams, who jam their way toward points, prestige, and tourniquet-endorsement deals. Guests can even choose to bring their own folding chairs or inflatable fainting couches to sit on in the coveted trackside seating section, where hordes of spinning wheels and fierce hip whips collide just feet away. As audience jaws permanently slacken, veterans such as Bitchslap Barbie and Judge Jodie rocket past the competition, sending opponents into tailspins with swift strides, nimble crossovers, and strategic midbout Lego-castle construction. With five years of cruising-and-bruising experience, the Hammer City Roller Girls are one of Canada’s oldest leagues and one of the first non-U.S. members of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association. Three-dozen skaters and a sled dog on wheels compete on the interleague Eh! Team and the regional Harlots squad, chasing the dream of taking derby to the Olympics.A picture released on Sept. 27, 2013 by the official website of Iran's Revolutionary Guards shows a newly Iranian-made drone, "Shahed 129" (Witness 129) being shown in Tehran. (Photo11: HO, AFP/Getty Images) Iran flew a surveillance drone over a U.S. aircraft carrier and took photographs of it as part of a naval drill, Iranian state TV reported Friday. The report, which did not name the vessel, said the incident happened on the third day of Iranian naval exercises. The channel's website and the semi-official Fars news agency published footage said to be of the drone’s flight. Fars said an Iranian submarine was also deployed near the U.S. vessel to gather intelligence and capture video of its movements. "The Iranian submarine managed to take clear pictures of the aircraft carrier without catching the attention of the staff on board," the news agency reported. Cmdr. Kevin Stephens, a spokesman for the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet based in Bahrain, said an unarmed Iranian drone flew near the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle and directly over the USS Harry S. Truman on Jan. 12 in international waters in the Persian Gulf. He couldn’t confirm whether it was the same incident. He said the aircraft “posed no danger to the ship,” but was "abnormal and unprofessional.” Adm. Habibollah Sayyari, the commander of Iran’s navy, told state TV the drone's flight was “a sign of bravery" which “allowed our men to go so close to the warship and shoot such a beautiful and accurate footage of the combat units of the foreign forces.” Iranian state TV also said Iran’s navy successfully fired surface-to-surface Noor cruise missiles during the drill. The reported drone flight is the latest incident between Iran and the U.S. in the Persian Gulf. Last month, the U.S. accused Iran of carrying out rocket tests near American warships and commercial traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. In January, Iran captured and briefly held 10 U.S. Navy sailors who entered Iranian waters. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani arrived back in Tehran on Friday from a five-day visit to Europe where billions of dollars worth of trade deals were signed between Iran and Italian and French companies. It followed the lifting of many international economic sanctions on Jan. 16 after a landmark deal with the United States and five other world powers in July to curb Iran's nuclear program in return for an end to sanctions. On Jan. 17, the U.S implemented sanctions against 11 people and companies involved in Iran's ballistic missile program, just one day after President Obama lifted sanctions based on the nuclear program. Contributing: Associated Press Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1WR9SIqThe sun emitted an unusual solar flare, a small radiation storm and a spectacular coronal mass ejection (CME) from a sunspot complex on the solar surface, on Tuesday. The flare peaked at 1:41 a.m. ET, according to NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The US National Weather Service (NWS) said in a statement that the solar flare released radiation not witnessed since 2006, with the present one measured by NASA as M-2 or medium sized solar flare that carries a substantial coronal mass ejection (CME)... and is visually spectacular. At most, the NWS said that the eruption will likely bring minor (G1) to moderate (G2) levels of geomagnetic storm activities, which could disturb Earth's power grids and global positioning systems that heavily rely on satellite communications. The Sun released a moderate-classed solar flare (M2) and an S1-class (minor) radiation storm that will likely lead to moderate geomagnetic storm activity by Wednesday, which could disrupt communications and grids in some locations. This flare was a different kind because it started out slow, then the sun blasted it off like a volcanic eruption. According to NASA models, the CME is moving at 1400 km/s. This radiation storm did not squarely blow to Earth, but it should deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field during the late hours of June 8th or June 9th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for Auroras or Aurora Borealis, also known as Northern lights, which are created as a result of some natural mechanism between solar wind, ions flow, Earth's magnetic field and collisions between ions and atmospheric atoms and molecules that cause energy releases in the form of colorful lights. The aurora borealis (Northern Lights) and aurora australis (Southern Lights) will likely be visible in the late hours of June 8 or 9. “We don't expect it to be any kind of a real severe one but it could be kind of a moderate level storm. The event is expected to cause G1 (minor) to G2 (moderate) levels of geomagnetic storm activity Wednesday, June 8, beginning around 1800 GMT.” Said the Space Weather Prediction Center, reported AFP. SDO's images show a very large eruption of cool gas. It is somewhat unique as at many places in the eruption there seems to be even cooler material -- at temperatures less than 80,000 degrees Kelvin. Earlier Earth experienced category G1 (Minor) and G2 (Moderate) geomagnetic storms on May 28 to 29 due to a coronal hole high-speed solar wind stream. Bright auroras at high latitudes were visible at both poles of the Earth, including Tasmania, New Zealand, Antarctica, Wisconsin and Minnesota. While a strong solar flare increases the chance of a spectacular light show, the electromagnetic pulse can also disrupt satellite communications, power grids and radio traffic when it passes the Earth. Some industries that are usually affected by solar flares include electrical power grid companies, airlines, GPS, military and ocean shipping routes. The strongest solar storm on record is called the “Carrington Event”, which is named after Richard Carrington who viewed and reported on the solar flare of September 1st. It occurred in late August and early September of 1859. From August 28th through September 4th, aurorae of unusual brilliance were observed throughout the globe.The Georgetown University Hoyas men’s basketball team’s trip to China gained international attention as video of the unfortunate fight between the Hoyas and the Bayi Rockets went viral around the world. There have since been a plethora of stories written about the incident, many with factual errors and misinterpretations. I offer an account of the events as someone who travelled with the team throughout the trip to Beijing and Shanghai, including the fateful game with the Bayi Rockets. The purpose of the trip was to build upon Georgetown’s growing academic linkages with China by showcasing the University’s best-known brand, the Hoyas basketball team, in a series of exhibition games in Beijing and Shanghai. After being mobbed for pictures with Chinese young people as they visited the Great Wall and Forbidden City, the Hoyas played a sedate and friendly game against the Shanxi Brave Dragons. US Vice President Joe Biden, traveling to China for meetings with the future leader of China Xi Jinping, dropped by the game on his arrival in the country, and amiably engaged the Chinese audience at the stadium, exchanging jokes and high fives. The evening was nothing short of ideal. By contrast, the mood at the game the following evening with the Bayi Rockets, a professional basketball team sponsored by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), was tense, and the game was very physical from the start. The PLA sent a spectator section of soldiers who chanted loud, disciplined cheers every time the Rockets scored. There was some scuffling among players during the game, prompting several technical fouls, and a bizarre moment when one of the Bayi players approached and started yelling at Georgetown Coach John Thompson III for some unknown reason (Thompson ignored it, but Georgetown players became very upset at this). The foul count was imbalanced (at one point 28 against Georgetown and 11 against Bayi), but other NCAA teams playing in China like Duke experienced similar problems. Unfortunately, that’s what you get when you play in China. The Rockets, former Chinese Basketball Association champions, played to win, and though this was billed as a ‘friendship match,’ competitive juices got flowing, emotions got high, and things got out of hand. At the start of the fourth quarter, a sequence of foul-plagued plays involving mad scrambles for loose balls led to the fracas. The decision was made to pull the Georgetown players off the court and alumni out of the stands onto awaiting buses for safety reasons once the crowd started throwing debris onto the court in the direction of the players. Despite the widespread play of the video clips in the United States, things calmed down considerably after the event. No one was seriously hurt. The coaches and player representatives from the two teams were immediately in contact after the incident to express sincere regrets and worked together through the night to find a proper way of reconciling. Senior levels of the Chinese government offered to help the team in any way possible. The Bayi coach and two players the following morning met Coach Thompson and two of the upperclassmen on the team. It was a very friendly meeting and they talked about future events where Chinese young people might come to participate in summer basketball clinics in the United States. The two groups exchanged gifts at the end of the meeting and there were no hard feelings on either side.Ravi Gupta is standing with both hands resting on the lip of a lucite podium. Some 600 audience members, including his mother, are staring intently back at him. Few of them have ever worked in politics before, but they're all here to hear the former Obama administration staffer tell them how they can help save the progressive cause. He just has one problem: He forgot his laptop at the airport. Instead of prepared remarks, all he's got is a well-worn legal pad and a book (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Israeli futurist Yuval Noah Harari). His stripped-down preparations are an apt if unintentional metaphor for going back to basics. "What I’m about to share with you is just two days of absolute bitter focus with my notepad and an incredible book," Gupta says, laughing. 'It’ll take time to get out of the Silicon Valley mindset that you can innovate and move metrics instantly.' Tracy Chou Gupta was starting from scratch, just as Democrats across the country are now doing. The party has lost access to the essential tools it’s used to force political change in the face of obstruction—the presidency, the Senate, the veto, the filibuster. So, what do you do when the political levers you’ve always pulled suddenly vanish and you find yourself alone with your ideals? That's what he and this rapt crowd had come together in this unremarkable hotel ballroom in Raleigh, North Carolina, to figure out. Gupta dreamed up the Arena Summit shortly after election night, a moment in history he and others in the room talk about the way some people talk about the day JFK was shot—everyone has a story. He saw it as the chance to start incubating new ideas to promote a progressive agenda, because clearly the old ideas weren't working. Techie types have gravitated toward this opportunity to innovate on political idealism. Organizers include co-founder Swati Mylavarapu, a former Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist, and Tracy Chou, a former Pinterest engineer who sits on the Arena’s advisory board. And the affinity makes a certain kind of sense: The industry as a whole skews left, and technologists fancy themselves natural-born fixers of broken things. Yet when it comes to fixing the thing that is government, progressive techies are finding that progress is never just a click away. No one has built an app for righting the course of history. Technology has radically changed political movements, but they still require footwork and paperwork and the kind of slow and steady incremental gains foreign to people accustomed to moving fast and breaking things. “There’s a little bit of tunnel vision in the tech industry, and it’ll take time to get out of the Silicon Valley mindset that you can innovate and move metrics instantly,” Chou, who had planned to work for Hillary Clinton’s presidential transition team, told me. And so, she and other technologists have come together with activists in Raleigh to figure out how to adapt their sensibility to the old-fashioned work of organizing. Building a billion-dollar company starts to look easy by comparison. Lincoln Pennington The New Wave The presidential election jolted many progressives out of complacency and inspired a wave of creativity and activism, at least at the outset. As many a novelty t-shirt explains, protest has become the new brunch. But Gupta believes all this activity is only as good as its organizational wherewithal. Harnessed properly, it could become a powerful force of resistance. Managed incorrectly, it could further fracture an already broken party. With the Arena, Gupta hopes to manage what could be chaos by creating some kind of infrastructural backbone. “There are a lot of people doing the same things, but for various reasons people aren’t working together or even aware of each other yet,” Gupta told me on a visit to WIRED’s New York office before the summit in Raleigh in March. “There’s tons of new activity. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s something we need to unwind to be successful.” Think of the Arena Summit as equal parts spring training, group therapy, summer camp, and speed dating for progressives. The first took place in Nashville, the second in Raleigh, and Gupta has a third planned for Detroit in June. The goal: to train a field team of inexperienced candidates, face hard truths about the past, forge lasting bonds between local communities, and help disparate organizations find their perfect match. These meetings are chock full of people who are trying something new. Walking the halls, you bump into Matt Traldi, who co-wrote the Indivisible Guide, a Google Doc that went viral and has become a kind of blueprint for angry liberals looking to make themselves heard at local town hall meetings. In the lunch line, you might stand behind Catherine Vaughan, whose site Flippable aggregates donations from people across the country for competitive local races. Look closely, and you might be able to make out the message on Kyle Keyser’s t-shirt: “VoteYourOssoff.com,” a crowdfunding campaign Keyser, a documentarian by trade, created for Georgia congressional candidate Jon Ossoff. Gupta views these grassroots efforts as Democrats’ fundamental advantage. Where Republicans have the Koch Network—a coterie of conservative billionaire donors organized by Charles and David Koch—Democrats have an eclectic array of activists and causes in their camp. “We’re college students, union folks, Silicon Valley people, communities of color. You put that all together, and there’s strength to that,” he says. “We’ve got to be comfortable with the messiness of that coalition for a while and do the best we can to bring a little efficiency to it.” In some cases, efficiency means money. Already, the Arena has launched an incubator program for promising organizations that need a financial boost. Flippable was the first so-called Arena Fellow. In other cases, efficiency just means getting people who are working on the same problems in the same regions in the same room together. “We need to create a space for people to come together and unify around a common vision of the future, collaborate, and in some cases merge together to fight the battles ahead,” Gupta told me. Let’s Do Some Shit For Scott Goodstein, whose firm Revolution Messaging led digital efforts for Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign, attending the Arena Summit felt like the first productive step he was able to take since the election. "I was sick of the DC depression and all the blame-gaming and second-day quarterbacking," Goodstein tells me as we sit in the lobby of the Raleigh hotel. Upstairs, a roster of the left’s rising stars are telling their stories on stage: progressive Virginia gubernatorial candidate Tom Periello; Bob Bland, one of the co-chairs of the Women’s March; and Jon Berkon, a lawyer who’s fighting gerrymandering in North Carolina, among others. The way Goodstein sees it, there are three buckets within the Democratic party right now. The first two are the institutions refusing to take blame for a multitude of mistakes and the people still arguing about whether Sanders or Clinton represents the soul of the party. He believes bucket three includes all of those people on stage—and most of the people in the audience. “Bucket three is people who said, ‘Let’s go do some shit,’” Goodstein says, palming a stack of business cards he’s collected around the conference. One belongs to a former Burt’s Bees employee who decided after the election to run for office in Durham, North Carolina. “I wouldn’t have necessarily known about that guy, sitting in my office in DC,” Goodstein says. “But now, I’m like yeah I’ll contribute $100 to that.” At 43, Goodstein is an elder statesman of sorts in this crowd that’s mainly comprised of millennials just dipping their toes into the political pool for the first time. He sees himself in a lot of them. Back in 2003, Goodstein was working as a punk rock promoter when the Iraq War was starting. Frustrated and feeling helpless, he left his day job in the music industry at the age of 29 and launched the groups Punkvoter and Rock Against Bush. “That’s the same thing these folks are thinking about,” Goodstein says, gesturing to the business cards in his hand. “It’s, 'Holy shit I have to do something.'” Goodstein also remembers what happened after he and all those other young Democrats took up the fight: They lost badly. George W. Bush was re-elected. Another five years would pass before Goodstein could use what he’d learned and apply it to President Obama’s winning 2008 campaign. The people entering the proverbial arena today will face the same setbacks, he predicts, and they’ll need to be ready to keep this sense of urgency alive. “This is still in its infancy level,” Goodstein says. Scotty Crowe Move Slow and Make Google Docs For the many tech industry activists at the summit, that kind of plodding progress isn’t exactly second nature. Zach Sims, for one, started his online coding school Codecademy as a 21-year-old entrepreneur in 2011. By the end of the year, Codecademy had more than one million users. When I ran into Sims at the summit, he worried that this weekend that was supposed to be all about action wasn't actually getting anyone anywhere. It didn't offer much, he said, for "people who are used to doing things faster"—people like him. Sims has a point. Time has always been the key obstacle to successful movements. Getting energized is a lot easier than staying energized, and it only becomes harder the more you lose. Patience may not pay in an industry driven by exponential growth and lightning-fast returns. But in politics, it's the norm. At the summit, for instance, you had heartfelt group discussions and motivational main stage speeches from Democratic leaders. You had a rousing chorus of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” led by former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm. But you also had the mundane messiness of getting so many people with different backgrounds and agendas to work together. One small group session of attendees from North Carolina started with announcements about who was planning to run for what office but devolved into a lengthy conversation about the best way to set up the group's next meeting. A conference call? A video chat? Who would set up the Google Doc with everyone's availability? Could they use a calendar? What would they talk about? And how would it be any different from the multitude of cause-based meetings so many of them were already attending? On its face, the slow-moving minutiae of getting organized couldn't be farther from the moonshot-worthy work the tech industry craves. But it's no less crucial. If anyone can understand both the power and complexities of creating something for millions of people in hopes of changing the world, technologists should. The main difference: Unlike building a billion-dollar startup, political organizing sometimes has a timeline you can't speed up. After all, presidential elections only happen once every four years. Back on stage, Gupta wanted to talk about the book sitting on his podium. It explores how civilizations and governments rise and fall, and most importantly, who reaps the spoils when they do. The one common idea? Mass cooperation. Time and again, when regimes fail, he tells the crowd, "The most organized group is the group that always takes power." That will take time. For now, there's Google Docs.Australian Prudential Regulation Authority will increase average risk weighting for home loans to at least 25% from 1 July 2016 Australia’s biggest banks will need to hold billions of dollars in extra capital against their home loans after the banking regulator moved to strengthen the financial system. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (Apra) says it will increase the average risk weighting for home loans from about 16% to at least 25% from 1 July 2016. The housing boom's not over, but there's good news for hopeful buyers | Greg Jericho Read more In a statement, Apra said the move would require the banks to lift their capital reserves by about 80 basis points on average. That would go some way towards the extra 200 basis points of capital Apra wants to banks to hold so their reserves rank among the top quartile of global banks, which was a recommendation of the government’s financial system inquiry. The move will apply to the big four banks – ANZ, the Commonwealth, National Australia Bank and Westpac – as well as Macquarie Group. Until now, they have been able to set their own risk weighting for mortgages. The exposure of Australia’s banks to the property market has been a mounting concern for the regulators. The Reserve Bank of Australia has cut interest rates twice in 2015 but has promised to join forces with other regulators “to assess and contain risks that may arise from the housing market”. RBA warns against household debt amid concerns over house price bubble Read more Smaller banks already have a risk weighting of 35% and have argued the status quo amounted to a competitive advantage for the major lenders. ANZ said its current risk weight for mortgage lending was about 15% and it would need to add another $2.3bn to its mortgage lending book to meet the Apra requirement. Westpac said that if the Apra move was imposed today, its common equity tier one ratio would fall to about 8.5%, and it would need to allocate another $3bn to lift it towards the top end of its preferred 8.75% to 9.25% range. National Australia said it was well placed to process the lift in risk weights after raising $5.5bn from investors in May. The Commonwealth said it had been working on options to lift its capital levels, and Macquarie Group said it would fund any extra requirements through retained earnings and its existing capital surplus.Denny Medley-USA TODAY Sports Jamaal Charles fumbled away the Kansas City Chiefs' chances of beating the Denver Broncos Thursday night, but one thing that stood out was the impressive play from the Kansas City defense. While it's true Denver scored 31 points in a hostile environment at Arrowhead Stadium, very little of this was the fault of the defense. Seven points came from Charles' fumble in the final minute that was returned for a touchdown by Bradley Roby. Another touchdown from the first half came after an Alex Smith interception on his own 15-yard line. Even the field goal allowed only came after a 22-yard drive. In the end, the Chiefs defense only allowed two extended drives, both of which traveled 80 yards on 10 plays. Although the game-tying touchdown with 36 seconds left was a disappointment, you would normally accept just two negative drives all game against Peyton Manning and the Broncos offense. Denver was held in check for most of the night thanks to an excellent performance by all levels of the Chiefs defense. After C.J. Anderson ran wild against this unit last season (168 rushing yards on 32 carries), the front seven stepped up and shut down the rushing attack on Thursday. Anderson and Ronnie Hillman struggled to find any running room, and the Broncos were held to an average of just 2.8 yards on 22 carries. Peter Aiken/Getty Images "I'll tell you, their defense is so much better than last year," Manning said after the game, via Dave Skretta of the Associated Press. "They're so stout against the run. They just make it hard all night. We just kept plugging." This strong play forced head coach Gary Kubiak to rely more on the pass than originally intended, but this wasn't too much easier. The big men once again set the tone with an excellent pass rush that continued throughout the game. Kansas City finished with seven quarterback hits and three sacks, including two by Justin Houston. Last year's NFL sack leader was a force all game long and remains one of the most consistent defensive players in the league, via ESPN's Field Yates: Whether he was able to bring down the quarterback or simply hurry a bad throw, Houston make a huge impact on seemingly every play. Of course, the real star of the game was rookie cornerback Marcus Peters. The first-round draft pick came through with an interception returned 55 yards for a touchdown, but this was only the tip of the iceberg in this game. Peters was all over the field, covering both Demaryius Thomas and Emmanuel Sanders and consistently taking them out of plays. When he was targeted, he came through with an impressive four passes defended and the interception. Brian Billick of NFL Network had high praise for the former Washington star: When you have a defensive line that can stop the run, linebackers who can rush the passer and cornerbacks who can make these types of plays on the ball, you have a recipe for an elite defense. As Bleacher Report's Ty Schalter noted, it should only get better from here on out: Eric Berry made his first start since being diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma and received a loud, well-deserved ovation upon his return. Sean Smith should return from his three-game suspension in Week 4. While these are two very different situations, the fact remains Kansas City can expect an even better secondary later in the year. If this defense can play to its ability, there is no question the Chiefs should be headed to the playoffs. They just need the offense to stay out of the way. Turnovers were the big story from the Week 2 loss, and that undermined the effort of the defense. Kansas City coughed it up a total of five times in the loss, effectively handing Denver the win. On the plus side, this isn't something that should be a major concern going forward. The Chiefs gave the ball away just 17 times last season, with only the New England Patriots, Green Bay Packers and Seattle Seahawks faring better in this category. Based on last year's results, this is pretty good company. Alex Smith has his faults, but he is usually good at taking care of the football, finishing top three in the league in interception percentage in each of the past two seasons. Meanwhile, Charles has averaged fewer than two lost fumbles a season throughout his seven-year career. It's tough to imagine this two-fumble game becoming a trend. With this in mind, the Chiefs have to be hopeful despite what was clearly a disappointing loss. The defense did its job and has the talent to keep it up throughout the year. The only question now is whether the squad can turn these close losses into wins going forward. Follow Rob Goldberg on Twitter for more year-round sports analysis.Long before Sarah Palin started calling for President Obama’s impeachment, conservative activist Alan Keyes had been consistently urging Republicans jump on the impeachment wagon, even suggesting that Jesus Christ favors impeaching the president. According to Keyes, impeaching Obama would be the first step toward restoring God’s blessing on America by showing that we are repenting for the country’s sin of electing Obama, who defeated Keyes in the 2004 Illinois U.S. Senate race. “Do this as a prayer to the Creator God whose authority over justice those principles acknowledge,” he writes today in WorldNetDaily. “Do this so that once again our nation may deserve to enjoy the blessings of that God-endowed liberty which has been, and by our faithfulness may yet continue to be, our common hope; our common life; our common good.” THE COMMENT: Hello, Dr. Keyes. Even if the House were to impeach … you’d never get the Senate to convict. … What’s the point when the corruption extends into both parties and into both houses? Perhaps the following should be our main goal; we as a people MUST return to a loving relationship with God … we as a people MUST return to virtue. Is this not far more important than “the impeachment field – ripe for the harvest”? MY REPLY: In everything I write and everything I do my aim is to encourage people of faith to act like it when it comes to their vocation as citizens. This is why I have constantly emphasized that our first order of business as American citizens is to remember and apply the principles on which our nation is founded, starting with the self-evident truth that we “are created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.” However, achieving this goal cannot be a matter of lip-service to faith. From the first, Christ preached repentance. If we talk about the need to return to God and yet refuse to turn to Him, even in the hour of our greatest need, we are not repentant. Indeed, we act like an obese person who talks about losing weight but who will not turn away from overeating and idleness and back to the standard of healthy living in order to do so. Repentance is a work of God’s grace, by which His Spirit renews within us the activity of life, much as it did when it mingled with the man of dust in order that he should become a living soul. By this renewal of life God calls us to return to Him, through the way of truth and life that He has prepared and offered us for our salvation. We signify our acceptance of His offer when we walk in this way, not when we talk about the need to do so and then let the deceitful cavils of fear paralyze our goodwill. … I urge you to visit the Pledge to Impeach website. I urge you conscientiously to ponder the cogent facts and reasoning you will find there. I urge you to commit yourself to the Pledge to impeach mobilization effort. I urge you thereafter to encourage all the like-minded people you know and can influence to do the same. Do this as an act of good faith, predicated upon the principles of America’s independence as a nation. Do this as a prayer to the Creator God whose authority over justice those principles acknowledge. Do this so that once again our nation may deserve to enjoy the blessings of that God-endowed liberty which has been, and by our faithfulness may yet continue to be, our common hope; our common life; our common good.0 Sony has been struggling for years to adapt Uncharted. They clearly have no idea what to do with it, which is a little sad when you consider that it’s basically just Indiana Jones: The Video Game. Protagonist Nathan Drake is a roguish treasure hunter with incredible dexterity who goes to various locales around the world seeking a fabled artifact. He’s close with his mentor Victor “Sully” Sullivan and journalist Elena Fisher. This is not some impossible, convoluted text. It’s a video game, and yet we’ve been reporting on various iterations of it since 2010. When we last reported on Uncharted, Joe Carnahan (The Grey) was writing a screenplay for Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) to direct. But now Deadline reports that the studio is taking things in a radically different direction. Sony head Tom Rothman is apparently so enamored with the latest cut of Spider-Man: Homecoming that they want to build the Uncharted franchise around Tom Holland. That means hiring a new screenwriter to pen a script that will follow a young Nathan Drake. The movie will “take its inspiration from a sequence in the third iteration of the video game that focused on the young thief Drake, and his first encounter with the professional rogue, Sullivan.” It seems like Sony is betting big on Holland’s power to draw an audience and yet completely ignorant of the fact that stars don’t create hits anymore. IP does, and fans of those properties demand particular things. I’m not sure how you win over a single Uncharted fan by saying, “Hey, you know that character you love and have followed throughout four games? Well we’re going to make a movie about him as a teenager.” It’s also saying to non-fans of the games, “Hey, here’s a character you don’t know and don’t care about, but here’s a movie about him as a teenager.” So you’ve got a movie that alienates the fans of the game while hoping that people like Spider-Man: Homecoming enough that they’ll see Holland in whatever he does next, which seems like a serious miscalculation when people won’t even see Brad Pitt in whatever he does next. Do you think this is a good direction for the Uncharted franchise, or does this sound like another false start? Sound off in the comments section.Tolbachik is a volcanic complex on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the far east of Russia. It consists of two volcanoes, Plosky (flat) Tolbachik (3,085 m) and Ostry (sharp) Tolbachik (3,682 m), which as the names suggest are respectively a flat-topped shield volcano and a peaked stratovolcano. As Ostry is the mountain’s highest point, the entire mountain is often referred to as “Ostry Tolbachik”, not to be
about smoking's health risks, if the labels made them think about quitting and if they actively tried to avoid looking at the warnings. The researchers then asked if they were considering quitting and, at the one-year follow-up, if they had attempted to quit. They collected other demographic information, such as gender, age and education level. The sample came from the International Tobacco Control Four-Country Survey, a longitudinal study assessing the impact of tobacco control policies around the world. For this study, 43 percent of participants were men and the number of participants was about equally divided among the four countries. Participants smoked an average of 17 cigarettes a day and 37 percent reported trying to quit at least once at the one-year follow-up. Because noticing the warnings may be the first step toward getting smokers to think about and attempt to quit, the authors suggested policymakers require that warnings be larger and more graphic on cigarette packages and that they are supplemented with mass media campaigns with similar health warnings.Nearly two dozen Saline County businesses received permit approvals for alcohol sales on Wednesday. According to the Alcoholic Beverage Control Division of the state Department of Finance and Administration, 23 businesses were approved for varying types of permits in Saline County. The majority of these include beer off premises and retail small farm wine permits. Restaurant beer and wine permits also were approved. Businesses receiving these may pick up their permits Thursday morning, but they can’t take alcohol deliveries until the state-issued permit is in hand. A wet county — the designation voters chose for Saline County in the November general election — allows liquor stores and retail establishments to sell beer, wine and liquor in the county. This does not address liquor permits in the county, a process that will likely begin around March with the first permits approved in the summer, according to ABC officials. There is no limit on how many businesses can sell beer and wine in the county and there are no distance requirements (from churches or schools) for those businesses that are selling only beer and wine. ABC began taking applications for permits for beer and wine on Nov. 17. Included in those approved are: Walmart stores in Benton and Bryant, two Kum & Go locations, Edwards Food Giant and Riverside Grocery. Some businesses like Mo’ Betta Gumbo in Benton were approved for alcohol sales but only if they met certain conditions. In Mo’ Betta Gumbo’s case, it must permanently seal off living quarters from proposed business with re-inspection by ABC enforcement. Other businesses that have to meet certain conditions include the Tobacco Mart in Benton, which has posted a sign on its drive-through window stating: “No Alcohol To Be Sold Through Window” on interior and exterior of window with re-inspection. The Mabelvale Corner Store on Chicot Road has been approved upon the condition it completes its remodel, receipt of state Health Department approval, installation of kitchen facilities and restrooms, lighted fire exit signs and a telephone with re-inspection by ABC Enforcement. The M&R Food Mart in Mabelvale has been approved upon the condition that all non-compliance gaming machines on premises have been removed. Businesses Approved: Walmart Stores in Benton & Bryant Riverside Grocery Haskell Hilltop Edwards Food Giant Bryant Exxon Icehouse Grill Metro One Jimmy’s Superstop Haskell Food Mart Mapco in Bryant Lance's Convenience Store Mabelvale Corner Store M & R Food Mart Raymond McGill Post, VFW Kum & Go in Benton and Bryant C & S Super Stop in Bryant Extra Stop 5 in Benton Mo’ Betta Gumbo Tobacco Mart 2 in Benton Mac’s Minnows and More Luigi’s Pizza in BryantSpace provides affordable rental for startups to test and develop products and services The Federation of Brunei Malay Entrepreneurs (PPPMB) will soon launch a cubicle incubation site for micro enterprises at the Beribi Industrial Complex, after signing a tenancy agreement with Darussalam Enterprise (DARe) today. The incubation site will house 12 cubicles, each 3m by 2m, and will be offered to entrepreneurs below 40 years of age who are members of PPMB, for $90 a month. PPPMB will commence renovation upon signing of the tenancy agreement and allow entreprenuers to start operations soon. PPPMB’s President, Dr Hj Abdul Latif Hj Chuchu (2nd R) said the initiative gives local entrepreneurs – who are still in the early stages of their business development – an opportunity to test and further develop their products and services. “Providing affordable incubation allows our local entrepreneurs to get started easily before they are ready to scale up and grow their businesses into much larger operations,” said Dr Hj Abdul Latif, who added that the startups would also be offered mentorship and benefit from being able to cross-collaborate with each other. “We also express our junjung kasih (gratitude) to His Majesty the Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam for through his government and DARe we are able to have the site for this facility.” Dr Hj Abdul Latif signed the tenancy agreement on behalf of PPPMB at the Design and Technology building in Anggerek Desa, while DARe was represented by its Chief Executive Officer Javed Ahmad (main picture L). Witnessing the ceremony was the Minister of Energy and Industry at the Prime Minister’s Office and Chairman of DARe Yang Berhormat Pehin Datu Singamanteri Colonel (Rtd) Dato Seri Setia (Dr) Awg. Hj Mohd Yasmin Hj Umar, who encourage other associations and companies to follow suit and develop Brunei’s industrial sites into thriving centres of economic activity. “PPPMB has taken a good initiative on their own to develop the complex unit,” said the minister. “DARe will work alongside PPPMB to support the entrepreneurs housed there by providing the right training, financing and support so that in a few years time they are able to grow and expand into bigger businesses.” The incubation facilities, located at Unit 5, Block C of the Beribi Industrial Complex next to PPMB’s office, would also be equipped with air-conditioning as well as facilities for food-based businesses. Those looking to become a member of PPPMB can get in touch at +6737146845 or register directly at their site at Unit 4, Block C, Beribi Industrial Complex. DARe manages 30 industrial sites and complexes throughout the country to support the growth of MSMEs. Further information on the available facilities and application process are available online at www.dare.gov.bn.This is a response to Hector Valenzuela’s community voice, entitled: “The Science Behind Hawaii Island Bill 113”. I disagree with Hector on this topic but I suspect we otherwise have much in common. However, he is arguing that we should fear GM food, and some of his statements need to be disputed. He incorrectly says: “No scientific consensus exists about the safety of GM crops.” Here is a graphic illustrating scientific consensus. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest (more than 125,000 members) and most prestigious scientific society, issued the following statement: “The science is quite clear: crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe. The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion: consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.” While no one should claim anything is absolutely safe, scientists overwhelmingly agree that transgenic plants are as safe as their nontransgenic counterparts, and the AAAS statement above is clearly one of consensus. Hector is correct to point out dissent, but the dissenting scientists don’t hold the consensus. The AAAS statement on labeling GM foods reiterates their statement on safety, and refutes the studies that claim harm by GM foods. His statement that no consensus exists is followed by a link to a letter (from the European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility) which in turn links to references that for the most part cannot be followed. Of the links that can be followed, most claim that GMO foods are safe, like this one. Their statement also disqualifies most of the scientific literature on this topic because they claim it is supported by industry funding, yet the widely disputed Seralini and Carman studies are cited. While those papers cannot be accessed through that letter, I am familiar with those publications. The Seralini study used far too small a sample size for the rats used, and the Carman study differentiated moderate and severe inflammation in a way that favored a provocative conclusion. His statement that “many of the cited studies actually show harm” is likewise provocative, and should have included references. He states: “The claim that no one has been harmed from consuming GM crops, repeatedly made by industry and by support academics, is false, ludicrous and irresponsible—as NO epidemiological studies have been conducted on humans …” He seems to be claiming someone has been harmed. He got my attention, but when I clicked through the link, it was a video of him talking. As epidemiological studies generally analyze disease in populations, the lack of a study may be because nobody has linked a disease to GM food. I find it implausible that nobody, especially the GM skeptics, has looked for such a link. Hector incorrectly says that, “Claims that new GM varieties are necessary in Hawaii to ‘save’ a crop from future pests are unfounded and undocumented.” The transgenic Rainbow papaya saved the papaya industry on the Big Island. Undocumented? That phenomenon was the subject of the award-winning PBS documentary “Harvest of Fear” in 2004. The papaya industry is still important on the Big Island, but Bill 113 is hurting it. Finally, I am probably in general agreement with Hector that we need to decrease the use of herbicide-tolerant crops, but that is a separate issue from transgenic papaya, Bt corn and Bill 113. I look forward to having that conversation someday. About the author: Michael Shintaku is a professor of Plant Pathology at the UH-Hilo College of Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Management. (He is expressing his own opinions, not his employer’s.) Community Voices aims to encourage broad discussion on many topics of community interest. It’s kind of a cross between Letters to the Editor and op-eds. This is your space to talk about important issues or interesting people who are making a difference in our world. Columns generally run about 800 words (yes, they can be shorter or longer) and we need a photo of the author and a bio. We welcome video commentary and other multimedia formats. Send to news@civilbeat.com.SYRIAN troops using tanks and helicopters have massacred more than 150 people in the central province of Hama, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says. A rebel leader put the toll at more than 200. Government troops bombarded a village for about 10 hours using tanks and helicopters, according to the Observatory, which earlier put the death toll at more than 100. Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP by telephone that the bodies of 30 villagers had been identified following the attack, which brought the day's total death toll in the conflict-torn nation to more than 200. Rebel leader Abu Mohamad, chief of a group based further to the north, told AFP early on Friday that the attack using helicopters, tanks and multiple rocket-launchers had killed more than 200 people in the village. Abu Mohamad said he had been in phone contact with a resident of Treimsa who told him that government forces were on hills a few kilometres outside the town. The army and the Shabiha, pro-regime militia who are said to accompany troops to make sure they do not desert, started to bombard Treimsa on "Thursday around 11am (6pm AEST)," Abu Mohamad said. Hama-based activist who identified himself as Abu Ghazi told AFP via Skype that the bombardment was "followed by clashes with the (rebel) Free Syrian Army, but the FSA does not have a big presence in Treimsa and could not fight long." media_camera In this citizen journalism image provided by Shaam News Network, a Syrian boy holds a poster with Arabic that reads, "and what happens after press conferences, even more press conferences!" in Homs, Syria. "The number of martyrs is very high partly because the army shelled a mosque where scores of people had taken shelter, to treat the wounded and hide from the bombs," Abu Ghazi said. "But it is obvious that the regime knows no limits. The mosque was shelled, it collapsed, and that killed the people in it." The village, which had a population of 7000, "is empty now. Everyone is dead or has run away," he said. The state-run SANA news agency said there had been clashes between the army and an armed "terrorist" group in the village but made no mention of a massacre and gave no overall death toll. "There were heavy losses among the ranks of the terrorists," said the report, adding that three government soldiers were killed. media_camera Syrian children chanting slogans and hold a poster with Arabic that reads, "patience is good, and God is the one who helps, Mr Annan, Hass", in Idlib province, Syria. The head of the opposition Syrian National Council, Abdel Basset Sayda, voiced outrage about the latest killings and called for a tough UN resolution that allows for military intervention against the Damascus regime. "This was a massacre perpetrated by the Syrian regime," he said, speaking to Al Jazeera TV. "It is a shame for the UN Security Council and the Arab League." "What we want is a clear and straightforward resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter which puts all the options on the table, including the use of force. This Syrian regime only understands the language of force." Abu Ghazi said that with Idlib in the northwest, Homs in the centre and much of the countryside of Aleppo in the north "out of control, the regime is trying to keep Hama on its side." "Hama is in the centre of Syria, and is a link in a chain of provinces where anti-regime feeling is strong; the regime will do anything to keep it controlled." The Observatory said more than 17,000 people have been killed since the uprising erupted in mid-March last year. It is not possible to independently verify death tolls. The United Nations stopped compiling such figures at the end of 2011. Originally published as Syria massacres up to 200 in HamaA tired-looking Hillary Clinton briefly spoke to reporters aboard her campaign plane after the final debate on Wednesday and lamented that she won’t be able to take any more naps. “It’s been a year and now we’ve finished our last debate and I’m feeling relieved and very grateful,” Clinton said. “But I just wanted to come back and say hello. Some of you have been on the trail the whole time. No more debates. “No more naps,” she said as her face cringed. After taking a couple questions, she was asked about the Project Veritas videos appearing to show Democratic National Committee operatives bragging about triggering violence at Donald Trump rallies. “I know nothing about this. I can’t deal with every one of his conspiracy theories but I hope you all have something to eat, something to drink on the way back to New York!” she told the reporters. Three minutes after her Q & A started, it was over.Java allows casting to an intersection of types, e.g. (Number & Comparable)5. When combined with default methods on interfaces, it provides a way to combine behaviour from multiple types into a single type, without a named class or interface to combine them. Let’s say we have two interfaces that provide behaviour for Quack and Waddle. interface Quacks { default void quack ( ) { System. out. println ( "Quack" ) ; } } interface Waddles { default void waddle ( ) { System. out. println ( "Waddle" ) ; } } interface Quacks { default void quack() { System.out.println("Quack"); } } interface Waddles { default void waddle() { System.out.println("Waddle"); } } If we wanted something that did both we’d normally declare a Duck type that combines them, something like interface Duck extends Quacks, Waddles { } interface Duck extends Quacks, Waddles {} However, casting to an intersection of types we can do something like with ( ( Anon & Quacks & Waddles ) i -> i, ducklike -> { ducklike. quack ( ) ; ducklike. waddle ( ) ; } ) ; with((Anon & Quacks & Waddles)i->i, ducklike -> { ducklike.quack(); ducklike.waddle(); }); What’s going on here? Anon is a functional interface compatible with the identity lambda, so we can safely cast the identity lambda i->i to Anon. interface Anon { Object f ( Object o ) ; } interface Anon { Object f(Object o); } Since Quacks and Waddles are both interfaces with no abstract methods, we can also cast to those and there’s still only a single abstract method, which is compatible with our lambda expression. So the cast to (Anon & Quacks & Waddles) creates an anonymous type that can both quack() and waddle(). The with() method is just a helper that also accepts a consumer of our anonymous type and makes it possible to use it. static < T extends Anon > void with ( T t, Consumer < T > consumer ) { consumer. accept ( t ) ; } static <T extends Anon> void with(T t, Consumer<T> consumer) { consumer.accept(t); } This also works when calling a method that accepts an intersection type. We might have a method that accepts anything that quacks and waddles. public static < Ducklike extends Quacks & Waddles > void doDucklikeThings ( Ducklike ducklike ) { ducklike. quack ( ) ; ducklike. waddle ( ) ; } public static <Ducklike extends Quacks & Waddles> void doDucklikeThings(Ducklike ducklike) { ducklike.quack(); ducklike.waddle(); } We can now invoke the above method with an intersection cast doDucklikeThings ( ( Anon & Quacks & Waddles ) i -> i ) ; doDucklikeThings((Anon & Quacks & Waddles)i->i); Source code You can find complete examples on github Enhancing existing objects Some have asked whether one can use this to add functionality to existing objects. This trick only works with lambdas, but we can make use of a delegating lambda, for common types like List that we might want to enhance. Let’s say we are fed up of having to call list.stream().map(f).collect(toList()) and wish List had a map() method on it directly. We could do the following List < String > stringList = asList ( "alpha", "bravo" ) ; with ( ( ForwardingList < String > & Mappable < String > ) ( ) -> stringList, list -> { List < String > strings = list. map ( String :: toUpperCase ) ; strings. forEach ( System. out :: println ) ; } ) ; List<String> stringList = asList("alpha","bravo"); with((ForwardingList<String> & Mappable<String>)() -> stringList, list -> { List<String> strings = list.map(String::toUpperCase); strings.forEach(System.out::println); }); Where Mappable declares our new method interface Mappable < T > extends DelegatesTo < List < T >> { default < R > List < R > map ( Function < T,R > mapper ) { return delegate ( ). stream ( ). map ( mapper ). collect ( Collectors. toList ( ) ) ; } } interface Mappable<T> extends DelegatesTo<List<T>> { default <R> List<R> map(Function<T,R> mapper) { return delegate().stream().map(mapper).collect(Collectors.toList()); } } And DelegatesTo is a common ancestor with our ForwardingList interface DelegatesTo < T > { T delegate ( ) ; } interface ForwardingList < T > extends DelegatesTo < List < T >>, List < T > { default int size ( ) { return delegate ( ). size ( ) ; } //... and so on } interface DelegatesTo<T> { T delegate(); } interface ForwardingList<T> extends DelegatesTo<List<T>>, List<T> { default int size() { return delegate().size(); } //... and so on } Here’s a full exampleon • THE GUERRILLA ANGEL REPORT — [I wrote this for Wipe Out Transphobia] During 2012, I’ve written twenty articles on the deaths of twenty different sisters killed during the course of this period. I also know that a year from today, 20 more articles will be written. It’s one thing to know of the statistics of transgender deaths, but it’s another thing to keep tabs on it, week after week. On top of it all, 20 is a mere fraction of the number of trans people killed each year. So some have asked me why a weekly accounting when TDOR once a year serves the same purpose? My answers: 1) Education and awareness. Every trans person needs to be reminded frequently of the danger they face, almost from the minute they wake up in the morning because many are killed, seemingly safe in their own homes. 2) Every death matters. Each victim leaves friends, families and colleagues behind. Even the simple mention of the victim’s correct name in print is something the survivors can grasp in immediate aftermath. Time and time again, survivors note their appreciation of their loved one’s name being kept alive, even months after their passing. These two things are the least I can do until Transgender Day of Remembrance, which then brings permanence to each victim’s name and memory. via 14th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance – Wipe Out Transphobia. ———- You’re welcome to share this entire article! Follow this topic on Lexie Cannes’ Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/lexiecannes Support this site, get the transgender-themed feature film “Lexie Cannes“ DVD here: http://www.lexiecannes.com/id13.html Associated with Wipe Out Transphobia: http://www.wipeouttransphobia.com/ Share this: Twitter Facebook Reddit LinkedIn Tumblr Google Print Pocket Email Pinterest Like this: Like Loading... Categories: Deaths, Murder, Transgender, Transsexual, TransA CAR has smashed through glass windows at Australia Fair shopping centre this morning, sending people leaping for their lives. A 87-year-old female driver was treated at the scene by paramedics following the crash at the Marine Parade entrance of the Southport centre just before 11am. CCTV footage shows the car ploughing through a car park entrance before travelling about 10m through a shopping centre corridor forcing shoppers to run as it bounced off walls. The silver Volkswagen crashed through a bollard and the entrance from the underground car park, travelled through the lobby and came to rest when the car hit glass doors leading out to Marine Parade. FOOTPATH BRAWLS, TOW TRUCK AMBUSHES PARKING RAGE SOARS ON THE GOLD COAST Queensland ambulance’s Patrick Berry said CCTV footage showed up to six people had to jump for their lives as the car crashed through the entrance. media_camera The scene at the Australia Fair entrance. Photo: Nicholas McElroy Miraculously no major injuries have been reported. But the ‘shaken’ female the driver was taken to Gold Coast University Hospital with minor injuries. Witness Jackie Bothe said a woman was straightening into a car park when the car accelerated into the medical centre. “It looked like she kept speeding up,” she said. “She flattened a metal bollard in front of the building.” media_camera The damaged car at the scene. Photo: Scott Fletcher “The sound of the screeching and the glass smashing was terrible.” Leon Smith was also in the centre at the time of the crash and said he ‘heard a loud bang and the building certainly shuddered’. “By the time I turned around security and first responders were rushing past,” he wrote on the Gold Coast Bulletin Facebook page. The cause of the crash has not been determined as yet. Police are investigating the crash now. media_camera The woman crashed through the entrance from the underground car park, travelled through the lobby and came to rest when the car hit glass doors leading out to Marine Parade. Picture by Scott FletcherCNN's Jake Tapper cited an anonymous source in a Wednesday report regarding President Donald Trump's Tuesday termination of James Comey from the FBI's directorship. Source to @jaketapper: 2 reasons Comey was fired 1. Comey never provided Trump w assurance of loyalty 2. FBI's Russia probe was accelerating pic.twitter.com/vG5bmTCPeg — The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) May 10, 2017 During The Lead, Tapper described his source as "close" to Comey, framing the information as partly a reflection of the former FBI director's perspective of his recent firing. Tapper, and CNN more broadly, regularly frame the 2016 presidential election as having been compromised by "election hacking," suggesting that Trump is either a co-conspirator with the Russian government in an operation of political subversion or somehow compromised by or beholden to Russian state influence. Trump's presidency and administration, by extension, are cast as illegitimate. This is the second of two stories broken by CNN in less than twenty-four hours since Trump's firing of Comey. Minutes after news broke of Comey's dismissal, CNN reported on grand jury issuances of subpoenas to "associates" of Michael Flynn. Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.The Fiscal Advisory Council says the Government should not seek to include proposed new fiscal rules in the Constitution. The body was established last year to determine whether the Government is meeting its own economic targets. In a review of proposals to strengthen Ireland's budget making and control systems, the council says fiscal rules should be set in domestic legislation. The new Fiscal Compact Treaty, to be finalised by EU leaders in Brussels next week, gives member states a choice on whether to incorporate debt reduction mechanisms in their national constitutions or in national legislation. Enda Kenny has said he hoped the text of the new treaty would be completed at political level at an EU leaders' summit on Monday. The Taoiseach said progress had been made on issues of concern to Ireland in the drafting process. Last March, the Department of Finance published a paper on proposals for stronger budgetary rules, which included a rule on the pace of corrections when general government deficits exceed 3% of GDP or the general government debt exceeds 60% of GDP. A second rule, called the prudent budget rule, would apply when the debt and deficit limits are being met, but when the medium-term objective will be missed. This would require a minimum adjustment of 0.5% of GDP to bring budgets back in line with the medium-term objective. A sustainable expenditure growth rule would limit growth in government spending to the underlying nominal rate of economic growth unless there is a corresponding increase in taxes. The FAC says the rules as drafted lack flexibility, which could lead to unsound policies and damage their credibility. The council suggests that an enhanced role for an independent fiscal advisory council would help to improve the credibility-flexibility trade off, and strengthen the overall framework. It recommends that the principles of sound public finances be set out in national legislation.You can choose among multiple artificial intelligence (AI) frameworks to develop AI algorithms. You also have a choice of a wide range of hardware to train and deploy AI models. The diversity of frameworks and hardware is crucial to maintaining the health of the AI ecosystem. This diversity, however, also introduces several challenges to AI developers. This post briefly addresses these challenges and introduces a compiler solution that can help solve them. Let’s review the challenges first, introduce you to the UW and AWS research teams, and then walk you through how the compiler works. Three challenges First, it is nontrivial to switch from one AI framework to another because of differences among the frontend interfaces and the backend implementations. In addition, algorithm developers might use more than one framework as part of the development and delivery pipeline. At AWS we have customers who want to deploy their Caffe model on MXNet to enjoy the accelerated performance on Amazon EC2. According to Joaquin Candela’s recent blog, users might use PyTorch to develop quickly and then deploy on Caffe2. Second, framework developers need to maintain multiple backends to guarantee performance on hardware ranging from smartphone chips to data center GPUs. Take MXNet as an example. It has a portable C++ implementation built from scratch. It also ships with target dependent backend support like cuDNN for Nvidia GPU and MKLML for Intel CPUs. Guaranteeing that these different backends deliver consistent numerical results to users is challenging. Last, chip vendors need to support multiple AI frameworks for every new chip they build. The workloads in each framework are represented and executed in unique ways, so even a single operation such as Convolution might need to be defined in different ways. Supporting multiple frameworks requires enormous engineering efforts. Introducing the research team from UW and AWS Diverse AI frameworks and hardware bring huge benefits to users, but it is very challenging to AI developers to deliver consistent results to end users. Luckily, we are not the first to face this kind of problems. Computer science has a long history of running various programming languages on different hardware. One key technology to solve this problem is the compiler. Motivated by the compiler technology, a group of researchers including Tianqi Chen, Thierry Moreau, Haichen Shen, Luis Ceze, Carlos Guestrin, and Arvind Krishnamurthy from Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, together with Ziheng Jiang from the AWS AI team, introduced the TVM stack to simplify this problem. Today, AWS is excited to announce, together with the research team from UW, an end-to-end compiler based on the TVM stack that compiles workloads directly from various deep learning frontends into optimized machine codes. Let’s take a look at the architecture. Architecture We observed that a typical AI framework can be roughly partitioned into three parts: The frontend exposed an easy-to-use interface to users. The workloads received from the frontend are often presented as computation graphs, which consist of data variables (a, b, and c) and operators (* and +). The operators, ranging from basic arithmetic operations to neural network layers, are implemented and optimized for multiple hardware. The new compiler, called the NNVM compiler, is based on two components in the TVM stack: NNVM (Neural Network Virtual Machine) for computation graphs and TVM (Tensor Virtual Machine) for tensor operators. NNVM – Computation graph intermediate representation (IR) stack The goal of NNVM is to represent workloads from different frameworks into standardized computation graphs and then translate these high-level graphs into execution graphs. The computation graph, which is presented in a framework-agnostic format, is inspired from the layer definition in Keras and tensor operators from numpy. NNVM also ships with routines, called Pass by following the LLVM convention, to manipulate these graphs. These routines either add new attributes into the graph to execute them or modify graphs to improve efficiency. TVM – Tensor IR stack TVM, which originates from Halide, implements the operators used in computation graphs and optimizes them for target backend hardware. Unlike NNVM, it provides a hardware-independent, domain-specific language to simplify the operator implementation in the tensor index level. TVM also offers scheduling primitives, such as multi-threading, tiling, and caching, to optimize the computation to fully utilize the hardware resources. These schedules are hardware-dependent and can either be hand-coded or it is possible to search optimized schema automatically. Supported frontend frameworks and backend hardware The supported frontends and backends are illustrated in the following figure. MXNet is supported by converting its computation graphs into NNVM graphs directly. Keras, still under development, is supported in a similar way. NNVM compiler can also take in model formats, such as CoreML. Therefore any framework that is able to use these formats can use this compiling stack as well. TVM currently ships with multiple code generators to support various backend hardware. For example, it generates LLVM IR for CPUs such as X86 and ARM. It is able to output CUDA, OpenCL and Metal kernels for various GPUs. Adding new support is straightforward. For a new frontend, we only need to transform its workloads into NNVM that defines both the computation graph and operator specification. To add new hardware, we can reuse the operator implementations with TVM and only need to specify how to schedule them efficiently. Performance results We show the NNVM compiler performance with MXNet as the frontend on two typical hardware configurations: ARM CPU on Raspberry PI and Nvidia GPU on AWS. Despite the radical architecture difference between these two chips, the only code difference is on the scheduling part. Nvidia GPUs The schedules for GPU are mostly written by Leyuan Wang (AWS) and Yuwei Hu (TuSimple) during their internship. We compared the NNVM compiler against MXNet with cuDNN as the backend on Nvidia K80. Operators such as depthwise convolution that are not efficiently supported in cuDNN are implemented by manually optimized CUDA kernels. As can be seen, NNVM compiler is slightly better (1.2x faster) than the cuDNN backend on both ResNet18 and MobileNet. Raspberry PI 3b The optimal schedules are picked through an auto tuner. In particular, we find the best schedule for each operator given the input shape by benchmarking its performance on a Raspberry Pi. We compared NNVM compiler against MXNet. The MXNet is built with OpenBLAS and NNPACK enabled, and we manually turned on winograd convolution in NNPACK to get the best performance. As can be seen, the NNVM compiler is 2.2x times faster on Resnet18. There is also an 11.5 times difference on MobileNet. This is mainly due to the fact that depthwise convolution is not optimized in MXNet (because of the lack of such operator in dnn libraries), while NNVM compiler takes benefit of the direct generation of efficient code for it. Conclusion We introduce the NNVM compiler, which compiles a high-level computation graph into optimized machine codes. This compiler is based on two components in the TVM stack: NNVM provides a specification of the computation graph and operator with graph optimization routines, and operators are implemented and optimized for target hardware by using TVM. We demonstrated that with minimal effort this compiler can match and even outperform state-of-the-art performance on two radically different hardware: ARM CPU and Nvidia GPUs. We hope the NNVM compiler can greatly simplify the design of new AI frontend frameworks and backend hardware, and help provide consistent results across various frontends and backends to users. Additional Resources About the Author Mu Li is a Principal Scientist for AWS AI. He works with scientists and engineers to help our customers on deep learning projects, helping them shorten their time and cost when using AWS. In his spare time, he is a very busy new father.For some unfathomable reason, conservatives always seem to get excited when a moderately articulate post-puberty pundit comes along and parrots some simulacrum of conservative doctrine – except it almost always ends up like when my retriever-corgi mix tries to walk on her stubby back legs and we gasp in delight, “Look, Bitey thinks she’s people!” This is not a criticism of young people; it’s a criticism of us grown-ups, and a recognition of reality that keeps biting us on the Jeb. We need to dispense with the cute kid conservative novelty acts and understand that our ideology – unlike liberalism – is not based on feelings and preferences but is instead drawn from a wisdom and understanding of human nature that comes only from hard-won life experience. That’s not to say young people should sit down and shut up – far from it. They have valuable insights we need to hear, especially from worlds they uniquely inhabit, like colleges or the company-level military. Sometimes they have done in-depth study and reporting on specific issues, including writing books. That’s earned expertise, not some mere knack for viral ranting, and that’s not what we are talking about here. It’s our own fault for letting them represent us to the world – maybe we do it because they flatter us by offering a dim reflection of what we believe. But when they recite conservative chapter and verse for us, that’s all they’re doing – reciting. It’s not ingrained, it’s not seared into them through study and experience. It’s a stunt, a parlor trick. One of several reasons we conservatives need to stop putting them out there is because most conservatives have a youthful liberal phase and the kid who delights us today by mimicking our views will likely take a misguided off-ramp or two along the road to adulthood. Remember 13-year old Jonathan Krohn, who wowed the 2009 CPAC with a collection of clichés that would have been utterly unremarkable had it come from someone not wearing Superman Underoos? Someone even published his book, Defining Conservatism; the adolescent’s three star-rated definition of conservatism is currently lurking at about Number 2,605,952 on Amazon. He’s liberal now, if you care. Then there was C.J. Pearson. He was the teen sensation who liked conservatism, then hated conservatism because of racism, then decided that he liked Trump. It’s been a few months, so he’s probably morphed into something else. I’ll be looking for him in the background at the next #TheResistance rally, wearing a genital beanie and screaming about patriarchy. The latest is Tomi Lahren, whose media profile, social and otherwise, has exploded thanks in large part to her popular video rants. Lots of people listen to her say unremarkably conservative stuff in a fairly aggressive way, but the fact that she is on camera all over the place obscures the fact that she has yet to mature as a conservative thinker. Lahren recently decided to reveal, on The View, that she is now pro-choice. But don’t worry – she assured America that she is still “a constitutional, y’know.” Phew. That’s a relief. She got suspended from her gig after calling her audience “hypocrites,” which some life experience might have taught her was a poor idea. Here’s another thing she tweeted – oh, and is it ever the kind of sentiment perfectly suited for a venue as fundamentally unserious as Twitter: “I speak my truth. If you don't like it, tough. I will always be honest and stand in my truth.” Wow. Here’s “my truth.”
would be a better name, but I won't. Thats just insensitive. edit: (seriously though, have fun!) You already did. You already did. s.price · Joined Dec 2010 · Points: 1,346 Jun 6, 2013 · Pagosa Springs encoding='utf-8'? This is awesome. Strong, confident women are great to climb with. My wife Holly has been my main partner for over 20 years on the rock. She continues to inspire. I've had my hair caught in a rappel device. Not fun. Kelly FIelds · Joined Oct 2012 · Points: 55 Jun 7, 2013 · Unknown Hometown encoding='utf-8'? Woodchuck ATC wrote: Is this an off shoot of the CWP ice group, or somebody totally different behind this effort? This is a different group-- we are a much smaller business that works solely out of Seneca Rocks,WV (for the time being!) organized by die hard dirt bags...err I mean rock climbers. Chicks with Nuts was just too great a name to pass up!! Thanks for the support everyone! This is a different group-- we are a much smaller business that works solely out of Seneca Rocks,WV (for the time being!) organized by die hard dirt bags...err I mean rock climbers. Chicks with Nuts was just too great a name to pass up!!Thanks for the support everyone! Nganha · Joined Dec 2012 · Points: 15 Jun 7, 2013 · Unknown Hometown encoding='utf-8'? Won't make it this year but you can totally count me in for 2014. You ladies have a blast! sherb · Joined Dec 2012 · Points: 60 Jun 7, 2013 · Unknown Hometown encoding='utf-8'? Kelly FIelds wrote: Chicks with Nuts was just too great a name to pass up!! Nuts won't do me any good... what I really want is one of those OTHER things, so I can pee standing up! What would that be, Chicks with Pitons? Nuts won't do me any good... what I really want is one of those OTHER things, so I can pee standing up!What would that be, Chicks with Pitons? Savanna · Joined Dec 2012 · Points: 55 Jun 19, 2013 · Monterey, CA encoding='utf-8'? Caprinae monkey wrote: Nuts won't do me any good... what I really want is one of those OTHER things, so I can pee standing up! What would that be, Chicks with Pitons? www.go-girl.com I can't recommend this highly enough. Never take your harness off again! www.go-girl.comI can't recommend this highly enough. Never take your harness off again! sherb · Joined Dec 2012 · Points: 60 Jun 20, 2013 · Unknown Hometown encoding='utf-8'? Savanna wrote: go-girl.com I can't recommend this highly enough. Never take your harness off again! hahha good point! I'm glad someone else uses/recommends these things, my parents freaked out when I used it and was afraid someone would think I was a tranny. I got the Freshette and love it (except feels kinda gross to store after use, pour water thru before storage?) I still take off the harness when I wear leggings b/c there isn't a zip, I guess I could pull it down a bit....Other than the cumbersome harness aspect, I'm afraid I might be squatting over poison ivy or a spider/snake jumping up and biting my bum, and escape is slow and awkward when your pants are around your ankles. Yes, recommend! hahha good point! I'm glad someone else uses/recommends these things, my parents freaked out when I used it and was afraid someone would think I was a tranny. I got the Freshette and love it (except feels kinda gross to store after use, pour water thru before storage?) I still take off the harness when I wear leggings b/c there isn't a zip, I guess I could pull it down a bit....Other than the cumbersome harness aspect, I'm afraid I might be squatting over poison ivy or a spider/snake jumping up and biting my bum, and escape is slow and awkward when your pants are around your ankles.Yes, recommend!The Sony Xperia XZ1 has been officially launched at IFA 2017 in Berlin, and it is Sony’s latest flagship smartphone targeted at a more mainstream audience than the pricier, 4K-toting XZ Premium. It arrived alongside the smaller Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact which packs the same power, camera, OS and battery into a one-handed-use friendly form factor. Read more: Sony Xperia XZ2 review We’ve got everything you need to know about Sony’s new flagship duo below, but make sure you check out our hands on reviews of both phones for the full rundown of what they’re like to use and how they perform. Cut to the chase What is it? Sony’s new flagship smartphone Sony’s new flagship smartphone When is it out? Pre order: August 31, On sale: September Pre order: August 31, On sale: September What will it cost? A lot, similar to Galaxy S8/LG G6/HTC U11 Check out our hands on Sony Xperia XZ1 video below to see the new flagship phone in action Announced: August 31, 2017 Pre order: August 31 (UK) On sale: September 2017 Price: TBC Sony took the covers off the Xperia XZ1 (and the smaller Xperia XZ1 Compact) on August 31 at the IFA 2017 show in Berlin. It's been confirmed that the Sony Xperia XZ1 release date will be sometime in September, but we're still waiting for a specific date. We also don’t have a XZ1 price yet, but you can expect it to set you back a similar amount as the Samsung Galaxy S8, LG G6 and HTC U11. We do know that it will be available in both the US and UK, with pre-orders going live in Britain from August 31 at Carphone Warehouse. The Xperia XZ1 is Sony's new flagship smartphone Sony Xperia XZ1 design Xperia XZ1: premium metal unibody, 7.4mm thick XZ1 Compact: glass fiber woven plastic The Sony Xperia XZ1 is crafted from a single piece of aluminum for a premium metal unibody design. Each side of the phone is rounded, with three antenna breakouts on the side allowing for better network connection no matter how you hold the phone. Meanwhile the boxier, chunkier Xperia XZ1 Compact boasts a glass fiber woven plastic construction which is both strong and lightweight. You’ll find a centralized power/lock key below a volume rocker and above a dedicated camera shutter button on the right side of each handset, and the former key also houses a fingerprint scanner (unless you’re in the US, where the biometric function has been removed). Both handsets are IP65/68 rated, meaning they’re fully dust and water resistant as well as being able to survive a dunk into water for up to 30 minutes. The Xperia XZ1 Compact has flagship power in a smaller package Sony Xperia XZ1 display Xperia XZ1: 5.2-inch full HD, HDR display XZ1 Compact: 4.6-inch 720p display The Sony Xperia XZ1 comes with a 5.2-inch full HD display which makes it smaller and lower resolution than its main flagship rivals - however it does have a trick up its sleeve. There’s HDR support also built into the screen, allowing you to enjoy the selection of HDR programming on Amazon Prime Video and Netflix. The display isn’t quite as dazzling on the XZ1 Compact, as its 4.6-inch panel has a 720p, HD resolution and no HDR support. However, for a handset that you can use easily with one hand, the screen is still bright and clear. Sony Xperia XZ1 camera Both: 19MP rear camera with 960fps super slow mo Xperia XZ1: 13MP front camera XZ1 Compact: 8MP super wide-angle front camera Both the Sony Xperia XZ1 and XZ1 Compact have the same 19MP rear-facing camera which brings with it all the features seen on the Xperia XZ Premium. That means you'll be able to shoot in super slow motion at 960fps and take advantage of the raft of modes and features Sony's packed into the camera. However, there are a couple of new features - or, more accurately, two improved features. First up, burst mode can now stay focused on a moving subject thanks to Sony’s predictive phase detection, allowing you to take up to 100 snaps in just 10 seconds with every shot in focus. The second camera improvement sees Predictive Capture given a boost. Smile detection will see the phone snap three shots before you hit the shutter key, so even if you miss a person’s smile the XZ1 will have captured it anyway. On the front the two handsets differ. The Xperia XZ1 boasts a straightforward 13MP lens, while the Xperia XZ Compact comes with a super wide-angle 8MP snapper with a 120 degree field of view - allowing you to cram more people into your selfies. Both new XZ1 handsets have the same 19MP rear camera Sony Xperia XZ1 battery Both phones have a 2,700mAh battery You’ll find the same 2,700mAh battery in both the Xperia XZ1 and Xperia XZ1 Compact. While that’s good news as far as the smaller handset goes, it’s a little more concerning for the larger device. It means the Xperia XZ1 has a 200mAh smaller battery than its predecessor (the Xperia XZ), which raises questions about its potential battery life. Keep an eye out for our full review in the coming weeks to see how it performs. Sony Xperia XZ1 power and OS Both: Snapdragon 835, 4GB of RAM, Android Oreo, microSD Xperia XZ1: 64GB of internal storage XZ1 Compact: 32GB of internal storage There’s no doubting the flagship credentials of the Sony Xperia XZ1 when you take a look at the power it’s packing under the hood. You get the top of the range Snapdragon 835 chipset - the same one found in the HTC U11 and OnePlus 5 - along with 4GB of RAM, which should give you plenty of grunt. There’s also 64GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot, giving you loads of space for your games, videos, apps and photos. Not to be outdone, the XZ1 Compact has the same Snapdragon 835 chipset and 4GB of RAM, with only the internal storage taking a hit. You get 32GB here, plus a microSD slot. Both phones also run the very latest version of Google's mobile software out the box, with Android Oreo installed on both, albeit with Sony's interface on top. Sony Xperia XZ1 audio Dual front-facing speakers S-Force Surround gives 50% more sound pressure Sony's Hi-Res audio support continues on the Xperia XZ1 and XZ1 Compact, with both handsets able to handle higher bitrate audio files as well as upscaling MP3 files for improved quality. It's not just improvements via the 3.5mm headphone jack though, as Sony has also done some work on the front-facing dual speakers of each phone, applying its S-Force Surround technology, which has improved sound pressure by 50% from that of their predecessors. That means louder, cleaner music from the speakers. The dual front-facing speakers have been given a boost Sony Xperia XZ1 colors Xperia XZ1: Black, Warm Silver, Moonlit Blue and Venus Pink XZ1 Compact: Black, White Silver, Horizon Blue and Twilight Pink There are four color options for the Sony Xperia XZ1, and Sony’s calling them Black, Warm Silver, Moonlit Blue and Venus Pink. The XZ1 Compact is also available in four shades, which are very similar to its bigger brother, but with slightly different names and hues; Black, White Silver, Horizon Blue and Twilight Pink. IFA 2017 is Europe's biggest tech show. The TechRadar team is in Berlin to bring you all the breaking news and hands-on first impressions of new phones, watches and other tech as they're announced.What starts as your typical art nerd independent skateboard film turns into something a bit more unique. Besides, anyone that takes a skate video logo and adds a bunch of funny dick drawings to it is good in my book. Our advice: drop the artsy emo intro and run straight to the raw shit at 1:25. The skating is great, the second song fits well and with a name like Fully Flaccid – gotta give them a gold star. Q & A with the filmmaker Jake Todd Do you guys have any advice for someone who is always fully flaccid? Keep that shit movin, get that heart rate up. Extenze. How did you come up with the title of the video? Well actually Matt Militano would always make fun of that Bear Grylls parody video on Youtube. It’s funny cause I’ve never seen it but he would always make fun of it where the guy in it talks about something going to fully flaccid. And we also thought I’d be funny to make fun of Fully Flared. Why do you hate Lakai and Fully Flared so much? I don’t hate Lakai or Fully Flared at all dude. Fully Flared was just so cheesy. Just came off as Ty Evans just tried too hard to make it seem epic and slow mo-everything. But the skating in that video is fucking crazy can’t deny that. What would you do if the Lakai team sent you a letter and was angry with your movie title? Lighten up, its not that serious haha, and would also be proving my point that skate videos are starting to get too serious. That’d be mad funny if that actually happened though. What does your mom or dad think of the video? My mom doesn’t know what flaccid means, I think. She saw the promo and everything and no reaction, and usually she calls me out on shit like that. And my dad couldn’t give two shits. Is your mom illiterate? Flaccid isn’t that uncommon a word… or is it? I dunno I feel like kids in the 70’s n 80’s weren’t talking about flaccid dicks, I could be wrong… Why should someone that lives in NY or Venus or Mars care about your independent film? I just hope people like the change up from the cookie cutter independent videos these days. I dunno like Buster O’shea is tight his videos are so sick, same with Mulhern and Jackson Casey. But I feel like every other independent video is like, new hip indie song, artsy b roll and super slow mo. Now I’m not saying I don’t do any of that stuff, I’d by lying if I did. But I don’t over use that shit and make it my whole video. My whole purpose of the two songs in my promo were the first song is the epic slow mo get hype bullshit and the second song was shred, party, girls making out, eat shit, fuck it, raw type deal. Anyways I just hope people get something different out of my video then they do with other videos. I wanna show skating before, during, and after the session if that makes sense. Isn’t that exactly how your video starts? With a, “new hip indie song, artsy b roll, super slow mo”.. Yeah, haha, I said I’d be lying if I said i didn’t do that shit, but I don’t try and base my whole video off that. Too cliche, cheesy, and boring. Gotta switch it up. I try to do shit that people will like and I wont hate my self for doing later if that makes sense. Have you ever had sex and been fully flaccid the whole time? Haha not yet, but hopefully by the premiere night that’ll changeCraig McMurtrie reported this story on Monday, October 17, 2011 12:26:00 ELEANOR HALL: The chairwoman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee is warning today that Iran and the United States are on a "collision course". Senator Dianne Feinstein says she was sceptical about the Obama administration's claims that the Iranian government was behind a plot to assassinate a Saudi diplomat on US soil. But she says she's now seen evidence to change her mind and she is calling for tougher action against Iran. From Washington, Craig McMurtrie reports. CRAIG MCMURTRIE: She's the chairwoman of the powerful US Senate Intelligence Committee. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: The case is dead bang, I think. CRAIG MCMURTRIE: And Dianne Feinstein says she took some convincing that the plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the US was real. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I think some of the signals intelligence candidly, is the most compelling and secondly, Arbabsiar himself … QUESTIONER: This is the Iranian used car salesman? DIANNE FEINSTEIN: That's right. In answers to his questions, essentially fessed up, essentially admitted it was real. CRAIG MCMURTRIE: A former Texas car salesman, Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar has been accused of approaching someone he thought was working for a Mexican drug cartel to arrange the killing of the Saudi diplomat. Senator Dianne Feinstein says the evidence points to the commander of the elite Iranian Quds Force knew of the plot. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: He is known as a very careful manager, he is reported to be very close to the supreme leader. There is no evidence that it reached the supreme leader. This is an unusual thing. Iran reaches out around Iran but to cross to the other side of the world and try an attack in this country is an escalation and that's what concerns us. CRAIG MCMURTRIE: Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei says US allegations of a plot are absurd, while the president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has hit out at what he calls US propaganda saying, "They accuse the Iranian nation of terrorism. Terror and terrorism are the acts of nations who do not have any culture." The Iranian authorities have also warned against any US led reprisals but Dianne Feinstein is calling for much tougher sanctions targeting Iran's central bank. Republican 2012 contender Newt Gingrich wants the Obama administration to go even further. NEWT GINGRICH: I think our goal should be the replacement of the Iranian dictatorship with a maximum amount of effort to arouse students, to arouse young people, to arouse ethnic dissent, to finance every possible element of opposition, to build a radio and television free Iran and to apply every possible economic sanction. CRAIG MCMURTRIE: There's no shortage of advice, with Senator John McCain urging the US president to get tough with China and Russia at the same time, over their refusal to cut economic ties with Tehran. JOHN MCCAIN: The president should seek severe sanctions against the Iranians. I think we should get tough with the Chinese and the Russians who have clearly blocked meaningful measures. CRAIG MCMURTRIE: After revealing details of the alleged plot last week, US officials gave briefings to Security Council members at the UN, to try and win more international support for tougher sanctions. While stopping short of calling for a military response, Senator Feinstein warns that Iran is increasingly hostile. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: Iran is escalating I believe its nuclear development. Iran is increasingly hostile. They have not ceased Hezbollah or Hamas or, it is a very dangerous situation and my hope is that there can be some kind of discussion that can be convincing for the Iranians to change course. Absent that, at one time or another, if you project out a number of years, we're on a collision course. CRAIG MCMURTRIE: For his part Iran's supreme leader says his country will face off any attempt to retaliate with all its might. This is Craig McMurtrie for The World Today.From Zodiac Ciphers Zodiac, the serial killer who terrorized Northern California in the late 1960s, sent four ciphers to local newspapers. The first cipher was separated into three different parts and each part was sent to Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Examiner. The combination of all three parts formed a 408-letter cipher, which was decrypted one week after it was received. Zodiac also sent a 340-letter cipher, mailed on a card on November 8 1969, that remains unsolved to this day. Articles and information about the 340 cipher High-resolution scan of the 340-character cipher Cipher as it appeared in the SF Chronicle on Nov 13, 1969 (Credit: Deborah Silva, who posts as Seagull on the Zodiac forums) Homophone sequences The "Pivots" Transpositions and other possible variations Is the 340 cipher unsolved because it is not a simple homophonic substitution cipher like the 408 cipher? I began an attempt to rule out specific encipherment schemes here: Hypothesis Testing Here is an older collection of considered possibilities: Halloween CardPreviously: No. 100-81 No. 80-61 No. 60-41 No. 40-21 20. Alex Poythress, SO, F, Kentucky This is one that people might take issue with, and that's completely understandable. Last season Poythress was the most inconsistent Wildcat on a team that became defined by that very characteristic. Still, his next-level talent was apparent to anyone and everyone on a handful of occasions, and he's the type of player who will thrive with an influx of talent around him. Not everyone "gets it" in one year, even in the basketball crazy world of Lexington, where that has become the expectation instead of the hope. 19. Montrezl Harrell, SO, F, Louisville Some were calling Harrell Louisville's best NBA prospect last year, when he was averaging just 16.2 minutes for a Cardinal team that went on to win the national championship. He scored 226 points last season, and somewhere around 2/5 of that total came via the slam dunk. Rick Pitino will need the 6'8, 235-pound Harrell to be a bit more well-rounded in his sophomore season. He'll also need him to shoulder even more of the load inside now that Chane Behanan has been suspended indefinitely. 18. Andrew Harrison, FR, G, Kentucky John Calipari probbaly doesn't have to have an elite point guard to have success, but history shows that it definitely helps. With NC State transfer Ryan Harrow struggling to run the show last season, the Wildcats went from the preseason No. 3 team in the country to one that didn't win a game in the NIT. Harrow bolted after just one season in Lexington and left the reigns to the highly-touted Harrison, the consensus No. 1 point guard in the class of 2013. He and twin Aaron will called upon to produce, and lead, from day one. 17. P.J. Hairston, JR, G, North Carolina There's no question he can play - Hairston led UNC in scoring last season at 14.6 ppg - but there's significant question surrounding whether or not he will play. Hairston has been suspended indefinitely following a series of offseason incidents which included citations for speeding and reckless driving, an arrest for possession of marijuana and driving without a license, and reports of a link to convicted felon Haydn "Fats" Thomas. Though he remains suspended, Hairston is still practicing with the team. 16. Rodney Hood, SO, F, Duke While Jabari Parker is the Duke newcomer likely to grab the majority of preseason headlines, it's Hood who might prove to be the most important. The Mississippi State transfer averaged 10.3 points and 4.3 rebounds in his only season as a Bulldog, and possesses a combination of size and athleticism that the Blue Devils desperately needed during the second half of their Elite 8 loss to Louisville last season. It's worth noting that in 33 years at Duke, Mike Krzyzewski has only taken on four Division-I transfers. The previous three - Roshown McCleod, Dahntay Jones and Seth Curry - all worked out pretty well. 15. Glenn Robinson III, SO, F, Michigan No one questions his athleticism or his status as an NBA prospect, but the challenge for GR III this season will be stepping up as a leader now that Trey Burke has moved on. If he can do that, and adjust to a likely move from power forward to small forward, then the Wolverines have a shot to make consecutive Final Fours for the first time since the Fab Five era. 14. James Michael McAdoo, JR, F, North Carolina Lofty, if not unfair, preseason expectations made McAdoo's sophomore season look far worse than it actually was. All the 6'9 forward did was get better as the year went along, and wind up being UNC's leading rebounder (7.3 rpg) and second-leading scorer (14.4 ppg). He ended the season by scoring in double figures in 11 straight games, although he was just 5-of-19 from the field in the Tar Heels' round of 32 loss to Kansas. 13. C.J. Fair, SR, F, Syracuse Perhaps the most consistent player in the country, Fair led last season's Final Four squad in scoring (14.5 ppg) and rebounding (7.0 rpg). Though he's known mostly for his work around the rim, the forward also drilled nearly 47 percent (30-of-64) his three-point attempts. With Brandon Triche, Michael Carter-Williams and James Southerland all being paid to play the game, Fair enters his senior season as Syracuse's unquestioned "go-to-guy" for the first time in his career. 12. Jahii Carson, SO, G, Arizona State Head coach Herb Sendek has already said that this will be the final season in Tempe for Carson, who averaged 18.5 points, 5.1 assists, 3.7 rebounds and 1.2 steals last year as a freshman. He's currently dealing with what Sendek described as a "stress reaction" in his right tibia, which has limited his ability to practice. Still, Carson is expected to be good to go when the Sun Devils open the season on Nov. 8. 11. Shabazz Napier, SR, G, Connecticut Despite playing on a team that began the year knowing it was banned from any type of postseason play, Napier was a star for first-year head coach Kevin Ollie. He ranked in the Big East's top 10 in scoring (17.1 ppg), assists (4.6 apg) and steals (2.0 spg), and earned first team all-conference honors. He was also the only player in the league to average at least 15 points, four rebounds and four assists. 10. Gary Harris, SO, G, Michigan State Expectations for Harris were so high in East Lansing that a season which saw him earn Big 10 Freshman of the Year honors was viewed as a disappointment by some. It ended on a particularly sour note, however, as Harris missed nine of 11 field goal attempts and was lit up by Seth Curry during Michigan State's Sweet 16 loss to Duke. If he can avoid the injury bug that has followed him fairly relentlessly over the past 12 months, then it's hard to envision a more confident and aggressive Harris not having a monster sophomore campaign. 9. Aaron Gordon, FR, F, Arizona The most-recent MVP of the McDonald's All-American Game was also the leading scorer and rebounder for the U-19 USA squad at last summer's FIBA World Championship. Folks in Serbia are already quite familiar with what Gordon brings to the table. 8. Aaron Craft, SR, G, Ohio State Craft is sure to be the butt of about a trillion awful "when is this guy going to graduate?" jokes during his senior season, but that's only because of how solid he's been since donning a Buckeye jersey for the first time three years ago. The only phrase you'll hear hurled in his direction more often is "best on-ball defender in college basketball," a distinction he's proven himself worthy of time and time again. Craft's recent engagement also resulted in an unofficial day of mourning in Columbus. 7. Jabari Parker, FR, F, Duke It's ironic that Andrew Wiggins was commonly referenced as "the best high school basketball player since LeBron James" since it was Parker who appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated along with that exact description. A nagging foot injury forced him to relinquish his stranglehold on both that title and the No. 1 ranking in the class of 2013. The injury has also left a number of folks wondering what expectations for Parker should be in what will likely be his only season as a Blue Devil. 6. Adreian Payne, SR, F, Michigan State Payne finally had the breakthrough pro scouts had been waiting to see during the second half of last season, notching double-doubles in six of Michigan State's last 11 games. The elevation in his game left plenty of people surprised to see Payne elect not to take it to the NBA, a group which included head coach Tom Izzo. The big man's explanation for the decision was pretty straightforward. "I like doing things the right way," he said. "With me graduating, I'm able to set a standard and be a role model for kids to look up to so I can give hope to another child that may have the same situation as me to let them know that it's possible." Payne and classmate Keith Appling will now try to avoid the dubious distinction of becoming the first Spartans to play four years under Tom Izzo and not make it to a Final Four. 5. Doug McDermott, SR, F, Creighton The Meryl Streep of the top five, McDermott will almost certainly be a first team preseason AP All-American for the second year in a row when the honorees are announced later this month. He was also a postseason first-teamer in both 2012 and 2013. You can Google the stats, awards and stories about him walking on as a senior for yourself, but McDermott's 2013-14 season is basically about one thing: getting Creighton out of the NCAA Tournament's opening weekend for the first time in four decades. Watch DraftExpress' Preseason Scouting Report of Doug McDermott 4. Julius Randle, FR, F, Kentucky If there's a player in the country capable of displacing Andrew Wiggins as the top pick in next summer's NBA Draft, it's Randle. He has a body that would terrify the biggest guy at your gym, and the world class athleticism to consolidate it. Expect to hear his name and "victimized" in the same sentence more than a few times between November and March. 3. Russ Smith, SR, G, Louisville Critics are quick to point out his questionable decision-making and spotty jump-shot, but the fact remains that Smith averaged 18.7 points per game for a team that was the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament and went on to win the national championship. The last player to average more points for a national champion and decide to come back to school was Duke's Jason Williams, who averaged 21.3 ppg in 2000-01 before electing to play one more year in Durham. If that wasn't enough to sway you on Smith as the third-best player in the country, then there's also the fact that he's likely going to leave Louisville as the school's all-time steals leader. 2. Marcus Smart, SO, G, Oklahoma State Smart may have well been the No. 1 overall pick in last June's NBA Draft had he elected to turn pro, which makes his decision to return to Stillwater - and compete with a much deeper draft class in 2014 - one of the most surprising in recent memory. His potential financial loss is Oklahoma State's gain, as the unanimous Big 12 Player and Freshman of the Year will be looking to lead the Cowboys into the second round of the big dance for the first time since 2005. 1. Andrew Wiggins, FR, F, Kansas We've seen a handful of freshmen rack up national awards in recent years, just never before the season. The accolades should be expected when you're referred to as the "biggest can't-miss NBA prospect since Kevin Durant" as often as Wiggins has been. Though Bill Self has tried to temper expectations in recent weeks, the 18-year-old Wiggins' decision to become a Jayhawk will make every nationally televised Kansas game a must-watch occasion for college and pro fans alike.He was inducted into Miami Gulliver Prep’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 2008, and less than a year later, honored again as Gulliver named its football field Sean Taylor Memorial Field. He was inducted into the Washington Redskins’ Ring of Fame in 2008, becoming the 43rd Redskin to receive the distinction for distinguished contributions. Sean Taylor’s next great honor will come at Jungle Island on Thursday night, when he is inducted posthumously with another impressive University of Miami Sports Hall of Fame class. The hard-hitting safety died of massive blood loss at age 24 after being shot by an intruder in his Palmetto Bay home in November 2007. He would have turned 32 on April 1. Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to the Miami Herald “Just to hear that his college has recognized him is awesome,’’ said Pedro “Pete” Taylor, Sean’s father, who serves as the police chief of Florida City and will receive the award for his son. “Sean would have been elated. When the University of Miami opened their doors to him, they let a young kid with big dreams become part of their family. “I’m truly grateful, and he would have been, too.’’ Taylor (2000-03 letterman), who won a national title with the Canes in 2001, was selected fifth overall by the Redskins in the 2004 NFL Draft and led the NFL with five interceptions at the time of his death. At UM, he led the nation with 10 interceptions in 2003 on his way to becoming a consensus All-American and Jim Thorpe Award finalist. He joins a star-studded class that includes his UM teammate, linebacker great Jonathan Vilma (2000-03); and one of the most respected former Miami offensive coordinators (after winning two national titles as a player), current Indianapolis Colts associate head coach Rob Chudzinski (1996-2003 coaching). Fellow football greats Kevin Patrick (1990-93) and Rusty Medearis (1990-92, 94), both defensive ends; and linebacker Winston Moss (1983-86), who played defensive end during his early career, will be inducted, joining baseball star Alex Fernandez (1989), Kym Hope (basketball) and Chris Mantilla (diving). Not to be outdone, Olympic great Lauryn Williams, one of the Hurricanes’ most decorated athletes of all time, will be enshrined Thursday. Williams (2001-04), a nine-time All-American, won the 100-meter NCAA national title in 2004 and left UM with seven school records. She went on to win the Olympic silver in the 100 meters at Athens in 2004, the Olympic gold in the 400-meter relay in London and the silver in the two-woman bobsled last year in Sochi – becoming the first American woman to capture medals in both the summer and winter Olympics. “The U is where it all started for me,’’ said Williams, who lives in Addison, Texas and has retired from competition. “I’m so grateful to the university for my whole career. It has been a very important part of me becoming who I am and grooming me to become this, I think, wonderful young lady – if I do say so myself.’’ Williams attended UM with Taylor, and said that one semester the two grabbed lunch weekly, usually at Dadeland Mall before their workouts. “Sean was pretty goofy, but definitely not the flamboyant type,’’ she said. “More quiet than anything. We were teenagers, but we’d talk like old people who were so wise.’’ Former Canes running back Clinton Portis, who was inducted into the UM Hall last year, played with Taylor at Miami and Washington. He was thrilled when he learned Taylor would be inducted. “Sean definitely deserves to be there,’’ Portis said. “He always wanted to be the best and that’s the way he played. It’s a huge honor for UM and his family.’’ Portis described Taylor as “humble and quiet,’’ and said if Taylor were alive, his induction speech would be brief. “A short ‘Thank you’ and ‘Glad you guys highlighted my career,’ would be about what you’d get,’’ Portis said. “Me? I was like, ‘Let it be known!’ before it even happened.’’ ▪ Individual tickets to the induction ceremony are sold out, but a small number of corporate tables ($1,000) that seat 10 guests are available. Call 305-284-2775.The Daily Caller will be giving away one gun per week until Election Day: November 6, 2012. The FMK 9C1 is an American-made high capacity 9mm designed by Jim Pontillo and manufactured in California. Each gun is engraved with the Bill of Rights and comes in one of three colors. To enter this week’s contest, simply sign up below to receive updates from The Daily Caller. Our “DC Morning” emails are an informative and amusing way to keep up with the latest news. To enter the giveaway you must complete the form below agreeing to all terms and conditions associated with the contest. This page was for the first week of the giveaway, you will be automatically redirected to the appropriate page in a few seconds, if you are not automatically redirected please click here.Day Two of the Disney fan explosion known as D23 2015 and the sneak peek at the company’s upcoming money making machines continued this morning with a long – sometimes a little too long
The intersection of North La Cañada Drive and West Esperanza Boulevard, Green Valley. Click here for the Facebook event. Bisbee Details: 10 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 21. Grassy Park in front of the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum, No. 5 Copper Queen Plaza, according to the official Women's March on Washington Arizona page. Ajo There will be a march along State Route 85 and speakers, food, vendors, music, folklorico dancing and more in Ajo Plaza. Details: 1-5 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 21. Ajo Plaza, 15 Plaza, Ajo. Click here for the Facebook event. Yuma Planning for this even began later than for the others, so it will be held Sunday, Feb. 5. Organizers are still finalizing plans for speakers, but ask that participants meet at ramada No. 26 in the northwest middle of Kennedy Memorial Park. Details: 4-6 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 5. Kennedy Memorial Park, 2374 S. Kennedy Lane, Yuma. Click here for the Facebook event. RSVP at actionnetwork.org/events/womens-march-yuma-az. Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/2k2XcorWe're happy for Ezekiel Elliott, his personal style and his firm commitment to displaying his six-pack abs. The world no doubt appreciates seeing his Dallas Cowboys uniform tailored to match his fashion ethos. But Elliott's distinct look at the NFLPA Rookie Premiere, documented in the tweet below, isn't likely to be seen again. The NFL's long list of game-day uniform rules makes clear that the former Ohio State Buckeyes running back is going to have to wear regulation jerseys just like all the other schmoes in the league. Here's what Rule 5, Section 4, Article 3, Item 2 of the NFL's 2015 rulebook says about jersey-related style statements. The relevant part is in bold for those of you who want to minimize your gobbledygook consumption this weekend. Ezekiel Elliott arrives at this morning's NFLPA Rookie Premiere, trying on the full Cowboys uniform for the first pic.twitter.com/kCEf4l9sfD — Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) May 21, 2016 "Jersey must cover all pads and other protective equipment worn on the torso and upper arms, and must be appropriately tailored to remain tucked into the uniform pants throughout the game. Tear-away jerseys are prohibited. Mesh jerseys with large fishnet material (commonly referred to as 'bullet-hole' or 'port-hole' mesh) are also prohibited. Surnames of players in letters a minimum of 2½ inches high must be affixed to the exterior of jerseys across the upper back above the numerals; nicknames are prohibited. All jerseys must carry a small NFL Shield logo at the middle of the yoke of the neck on the front of the garment. All fabrics must be approved by the League office prior to production." Sorry, Zeke. It was fun while it lasted. But if you're like the rest of us, you would have been less interested in showing off those abs as you got older, anyway.From the ‘frozen primordial soup’ of organics on the comet to new pictures, the discoveries made during the Philae lander’s first days have been published The Philae lander may have spoken its final words, but with the data beamed back to its mothership, Rosetta, scientists have painted the fullest picture yet of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Born from the detritus of the primordial solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago, the icy comet has a fluffy coating over a hard-grained surface pocked with gas-spewing sinkholes. Yet it is more nothing than something: its interior is at least 75% empty space. The body is rich in organic molecules, which if delivered to a hospitable enough planet, might play a leading role in the process that turns simple chemicals into replicating molecules and ultimately rudimentary life. Researchers on the European Space Agency mission published seven papers on Thursday in the journal Science that bring together the discoveries made in the lander’s first three days on the comet, before its batteries faded. Philae lander has fallen silent, Rosetta scientists say Read more Stephan Ulamec, Philae’s project manager at the German Aerospace Centre in Cologne, told the Guardian that despite the lander bouncing off the comet when its harpoons and retrorocket failed to fire, the probe had a lucky encounter. The moment the lander touched down, its feet sank into a fluffy layer about 20cm deep, and bounced sideways for more than a kilometre. Mid-leap, it clipped the side of a giant crater, which changed its course towards the hard, rough terrain that became its final resting place. “It was good we hit the crater rim. If we had carried on, we would have fallen into the dark side of the comet, into an area that wasn’t even on the map in those days,” Ulamec said. “That would have been really bad. It would have been a fair chance to lose it and certainly not get any images.” From its more illuminated spot, the probe’s seven cameras captured panoramic views of the fractured surface marked with reflective rock structures and dust grains. There is evidence of erosion, with boulders surrounded by dips in the surface that look similar to tail wind depressions caused by wind on Earth. Facebook Twitter Pinterest The data has revealed the exact trajectory and timing of the lander’s descent, the stages of which are shown here (excluding the final hop, which scientists believe was just a few metres). Photograph: ESA/Rosetta/Navcam/Sonc/DLR Serendipity played a role in the mission’s success. When Philae touched down for the first time, it knocked up a cloud of cometary material. Some got lodged in the exhaust pipe of an instrument called COSAC and warmed up enough to vaporise. As the Philae lander reached the height of its bounce, 150 metres above the surface, COSAC sniffed the vapours from the comet grains and found water, carbon monoxide and a rich brew of 14 organic chemicals. Four of them, methyl isocyanate, acetone, propionaldehyde and acetamide, had not been seen on comets before. “It was not planned like that. We wanted to drill samples from the consolidated soil with all the organics nicely frozen in place,” said Fred Goesmann, the lead scientist on COSAC at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen. Researchers at the Open University in Milton Keynes found material from the same cloud had fallen into their Ptolemy instrument. The found evidence for polyoxymethylene, a polymer that is formed with the help of radiation. Ian Wright, the lead scientist on the Ptolemy instrument, describes the organics found on the comet as a “frozen primordial soup”, but concedes some colleagues might not agree. “Potentially, that is what we are talking about, but I’ll get pilloried for saying so,” he added. “If you were to put these materials on the surface of a primitive body like Earth, and give them the right amount of heat and whatever else is required, conceivably, you could form life,” he said. Measurements taken from the surface of the comet show that daytime temperatures vary from a chilly -143C (-225F) to an even chillier -183C (-297F). The orbiting Rosetta spacecraft dropped Philae onto the comet’s surface in November 2014, marking the first time a spacecraft had touched down on a comet. Philae bounced twice before coming to rest on its side near a cliff on the rim of a crater. The lander went to work for three days before its batteries ran out. Mission scientists have not heard from Philae since 9 July, dampening spirits at the European Space Agency which were riding high after the craft awoke from a 7 month slumber in June. The lander called home after its solar panels captured enough sunlight to provide power to its systems. It is unclear why it fell silent again, but the probe may have been pushed into an awkward position by gas and dust now billowing from the comet’s surface. Philae is not in good shape. One of its two receivers is dead, and one of its two transmitters is on the blink. Scientists on the mission are unsure if they will ever hear from the lander again. Goesmann confessed that he lost a five Euro bet that Philae would never wake up after its batteries ran out. “I’m very bad as a prophet, but I hope we hear more,” he said. If Philae had landed where mission scientists had intended, it would have died from overheating months ago. Rosetta has swept around onto a different orbit to survey the southen hemisphere of the comet, which had been in darkness until recently. That will reveal more about the comet, but makes it harder to re-establish links with Philae. “At the moment Rosetta is on the southern hemisphere, which leads to bad opportunities for lander communications, but after 8 August the situation should be better again,” he said. “Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”The Pioneer, before it became the Franklin, in a early script buried in the sand. A different design here somewhat...... There would be panels missing here, but they wanted it to appear airtight and preserved, almost mummy like. Franklin when it was called the Pioneer, in an early script where it had to lift off vertically. Note at that time the engines and arms were flipped down....... production artist Sean Hargreaves is responsible for many of the most eye-catching designs from the film, and has been sharing some of his work from the production. Continue below for a look at the the USS Franklin, and how it became the ship we now know.These first few renderings show the more or less final form of the ship as we see her in the film, including what has become quite a familiar image; the first piece of concept art that introduced us to the design months ago.Here are some nice elevations, giving us a good sense of the ship's form:But perhaps most interestingly some images from earlier in the design process, when the nacelles used to be under-slung and the ship was known as the USS Pioneer. As you can see, early on the ship has quite a different saucer shape, and apparently it's quite coincidental that the final form ended up looking a bit like the NX class, with the similar shapes happening to line up once the nacelles were flipped.Here are some bridge concepts (I like the reflection of the saucer hull shape in the bridge floor area).And here's a later iteration of the bridge, which by this time had input from other designers, Hargreaves stakes a claim to about a third of the final design.This is the transporer room, as rendered, but not designed by Hargreaves:And finally the engineering room:I will be posting more of Sean's work in the coming days, looking at the design of the stunning Starbase Yorktown, and the... ship that appears right at the end of the film (who am I kidding, like anyone reading this needs to avoid spoilers by now!)To keep track of all the latest information on the film, including other behind the scenes coverage, visit my Star Trek Beyond guide page. And of course, make sure to visit Sean Hargreaves' website ; he doesn't have hiswork up there yet, but you will find interesting production art from many other projects.In 1974, Dr. Spencer Silver and Arthur Fry came up with an idea. What if they used the “low-tack” adhesive created by Dr. Silver and applied it to pieces of paper? They would be sticky enough to stay in place, but the bond would be weak enough that the paper could be un-stuck and re-stuck many times over. That flash of inspiration became one of the most ubiquitous products in all of business: The Post-it note. This single product alone continues to generate $1 billion in revenue per year for the company, 3M. The most amazing part? Silver and Fry came up with this idea on their own, without direction from the C-suite or management. They developed it in their off-time, what is known at 3M as “permitted bootlegging” time, where employees are encouraged to spend 10-15% of their work hours pursuing new and personally interesting products. Much like Google’s now-famous 20% rule, this time was allocated for employees to explore new projects, come up with new ideas, and try innovative tools and techniques. With the freedom and encouragement to do this, many employees at the company have come up with major advances to current offerings or entirely new products altogether (see: Gmail). These big advancements all started with the same two ingredients: time and an idea. Where Ideas Come From If Silver and Fry didn’t have the time and opportunity to come up with this idea and then pursue it, Post-it notes may never have become a commercial product. Or they almost certainly wouldn’t have been created by 3M. The point is this: Ideas matter. Quick flashes of inspiration and ideas about how the world should look are often the basis for many of the most successful products and services in existence. But, companies are rarely set up in a way to foster a culture of ideas. They’re often set up to treat work like an assembly line, with each person playing their small role in building a finished product. The problem with that kind of mentality is that with an understanding of the broader scope of the work that’s being done, it is difficult–or impossible–for people to develop ways to innovate or come up with new ideas for new products or improvements for the existing business. This puts all of the burden on management to not only steer the ship, but to also come up with every new solution or novel idea. That’s a huge waste of potential. Your company can unlock more creativity, problem solving, and collaboration by building a culture that’s conducive to generating more ideas and acting on them. How to Foster Creativity in Your Team There have been many studies of how to generate the maximum amount of creativity and motivation within a team. Brilliant ideas often come from a combination of the right circumstances, the right people, and the right timing. In this case, you can create a workplace environment that’s ripe for creativity and new ideas by understanding how motivation and problem solving are related. Reward good work, don’t try to incentivize it One of the major misconceptions about motivation and creativity is that if you offer an incentive to people, they will work harder, faster, and smarter–that they’ll produce better results. It turns out that this is the opposite of reality. While offering an incentive to factory workers may motivate them to work faster and produce more widgets per hour, this kind of pay-for-performance model doesn’t work when it comes to creative jobs that focus on problem solving. In studies on motivation, when people are tasked with performing a creative task and offered an incentive for performing it faster, they actually perform worse than those not offered an incentive. On the flipside, those who are given a reward (without prior notice) for having performed well will find more value in the recognition. They will tend to want to perform better, despite a formal incentive for them to do so. Carve out “idea” time There’s one common thread among some of the most inventive and innovative workplaces, including 3M, Google, and many others. They have policies in place that afford (or even require) their employees to dedicate 10-20% of their working hours toward side projects, personal growth, or idea exploration. This can be a huge investment for your company, but it can also pay off big time. Start by implementing the time slowly–a few hours every week or month–and then see what results you generate. If your team is able to come up with great ideas for new products, services, or strategies, then the time can quickly pay for itself and even become a profit center for your business. Alternatively, you may try a “hack day” or similar regularly scheduled events that live outside of your normal work schedule and give your staff a chance to discuss, explore, and test out new ideas. Create comfort We’ve written before on the idea of “psychological safety”, which is basically just a fancy way of saying that software developers–and other members of the team–need to feel comfortable enough with each other in order to advance their ideas. Put more simply, ideas are just ideas until they’re acted upon. And in order for your team to have the confidence to act on those ideas. In order to build the next Post-it note, Gmail, or another great innovation, your team members all need to feel that they have enough autonomy and support to pitch them and follow through. This feeling of safety comes from creating a culture and system that champions collective teamwork while still recognizing the effect of individuals. Avoid forced competition In a similar vein, many companies think that creating some “friendly competition” between teams and coworkers will light a fire and help them perform better based on their own desire to best their colleagues. Again, we find that this is often backward. Recent studies on workplace competition have shown that competition can lead to corruption, cheating, and unethical behavior. It may also put women at a disadvantage and stifle their creativity when pitted against male coworkers. The takeaway is simple: Don’t expect to use competition as a way to boost performance. It may undermine that performance of your entire team or make some members feel undervalued or alienated, which is the antithesis for cultivating creative problem solving. Instead, focus on positive reinforcement for creative endeavors. Give your team the ability, time, and freedom to explore different ideas. If you do this, you’ll find that people almost always meet–and probably exceed–any expectations you had for them.By Stephen Lendman February 19, 2012 In November 2006, Washington Post writer Juliet Eilperin headlined, ” World’s Fish Supply Running Out, Researchers Warn,” saying International ecologists and economists believe “the world will run out of seafood by 2048” if current fishing rates continue. A journal Science study “conclude(d) that overfishing, pollution and other environmental factors are wiping out important species” globally. They’re also impeding world oceans’ ability to produce seafood, filter nutrients, and resist disease. Marine biologist Boris Worm warned, “We really see the end of the line now. It’s within our lifetime. Our children will see a world without seafood if we don’t change things.” Researchers studied fish populations, catch records, and ocean ecosystems for four years. By 2003, 29% of all species collapsed. It means they’re at least “90% below their historic maximum catch levels.” In recent years, collapse rates accelerated. In 1980, 13.5% of 1,736 fish species collapsed. Today, 7,784 species are harvested. According to Worm, “It’s like hitting the gas pedal and holding it down at a constant level. The rate accelerates over time.” Oregon State University marine biologist Jane Lubchenco said the study shows fish stocks are in trouble. “I think people don’t get it,” she said. “If there is a problem with the oceans, how come the case in my grocery store is so full? There is a disconnect.” National Environmental Trust vice president Gerald Leape said, “This should be a wake-up call to our leaders, both internationally and domestically, that they need to protect our fish stocks. Otherwise they will go away.” Researchers conducted dozens of controlled experiments. They also examined UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) worldwide catch data since 1950 and ecosystem records. They include sediment cores and archival data going back a 1,000 years. They said losing so many species is eroding marine ecosystem viability and their ability to resist environmental stresses. “In 12 marine ecosystems surveyed, they found that a decline in biodiversity of 50 percent or more cut the number of viable fisheries by 33 percent, reduced nursery habitats by 69 percent and cut the ocean’s capacity to filter and detoxify contaminants by 63 percent.” For example, Chesapeake Bay oyster fishing collapsed. The whole ecosystem was affected. In 1980, oyster supplies filtered bay water in three days. In 1988, remaining supplies took over a year. Marine Ecology Professor Hunter Lenihan said mass dredging oysters over the past century transformed the ecosystem. As supplies declined, water got more cloudy, and sea grass beds dependent on light died off. Phytoplankton replaced them. It doesn’t support the same range of species. “When you remove the oysters through overfishing, that’s when you begin to see a rapid decline in water quality,” said Lenihan. “What it’s done is change the entire production of the bay.” Worm believes it’s not too late to change things, provided measures are taken soon. So far, however, overfishing continues. On September 7, 2011, Field and Stream writer Chad Love headlined, “Scientists: Industrial-Scale Deep-Sea Fishing Depleting Oceans,” saying: A Marine Policy scientific journal paper says deep sea industrial fishing should be banned. Productive areas were targeted sequentially. As a result, fish species were depleted and deep-sea corals destroyed. Then new areas are targeted. As a result, the ocean’s now “a watery desert.” Popular species were overfished, “only to crash in a matter of years.” Marine Conservation Institute president Elliot Norse said deep-sea fishing flourished “out of desperation,” not realizing stocks there take much longer to recover. Vessels use Global Positioning Systems and trawlers. They scrape large metal plates across sea bottom areas. From 1960 – 2004, catches increased seven-fold, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Mean depth fishing more than tripled since the 1950s from 492 feet to 1,706 in 2004, according to University of the Azores Department of Oceanography and Fisheries’ Telmo Morato. Fishing subsidies sustain the practice. Annually, high-seas trawlers get about $162 million. It’s about one-fourth of catch value at taxpayer expense. On September 7, 2011, Science Daily headlined, “Deep Sea Fish in Deep Trouble: Scientists Find Nearly All Deep-Sea Fisheries Unsustainable,” saying: Leading marine scientists recommend ending most deep sea commercial fishing. With rare exceptions, “deep-sea fisheries are unsustainable….When bottom trawlers rip life from the depths, animals adapted to life (there) can’t repopulate on human time scales. Powerful fishing technologies are overwhelming them.” As coastal fisheries got over-exploited, commercial fleets moved further offshore into deep waters. The effects on local species are devastating. Globally, deep-sea fishes are collapsing, including sharks and orange roughy. Fishing outside 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zones prevent effective government control. Oceana Report Oceana is the largest international ocean conservation and advocacy organization. It works to protect and restore world oceans. In 2008, it published a report titled, “Too Few Fish: A Regional Assessment of the World’s Fisheries,” saying: Decades of overfishing depleted ocean food sources. Hidden reserves are disappearing. Scientists warn “of impending collapses in fish populations within decades.” New environmental stresses hasten the outcome. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says: “The maximum long-term potential of the world marine capture fisheries has been reached.” It’s all downhill ahead. FAO assessed 584 fish stocks and species globally. More than three-fourths are fully exploited, over-exploited, depleted or recovering. As a result, expanded commercial fishing can’t be sustained. Only 17% of world fisheries have potential for higher catches. In six FAO regions, accounting for half the global catch in 2005, “at least 85% of stocks are already fully fished or overfished.” Moreover, in Western Central Atlantic, Northeast Atlantic, Eastern Central Atlantic, and Western Indian Ocean, “more than 95% of fish stocks cannot sustain any further expansion of fishing.” Nonetheless, governments keep subsidizing biologically unsustainable practices. Doing so adversely impacts ecosystems, food security and economic development. Oceana said depleting fish stocks “violates the basic conservation requirement of the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea as well as every tenet of sustainable development.” Doing so also ignores 1995 FAO Code of Responsible Fisheries principles and management provisions. Stopping this plunder is essential. Evidence shows maximum potential was reached. In 2005, 83.7 million metric tons (MT) were caught, 1.7 million MT lower than 2004 and down 4% from 2000 levels. Declines were greatest in the Northeast Atlantic, Western Central Atlantic, and Southwest Atlantic. They ranged from 13 – 20%. Nine of the top 10 marine capture species can’t withstand further exploitation. They account for 30% of total world fishing. They include Peruvian anchoveta, Alaska pollack, Japanese anchovy, blue whiting, capelin and Atlantic herring, and yellowfin tuna. Other troubled species include the largehead hairtail and skipjack tuna. Notably, industrial fishing removed 90% of large predatory fish populations, including sharks, tuna and marlin. In the past 30 years, North Atlantic stocks of bull, dusky, and smooth hammerhead sharks declined up to 99%. Other predator fish losses, including groundfish, altered the composition of remaining catches. Declines in Northwest Atlantic bottom dwelling fishes increased mollusk and crustacean catches. In 1989, yields peaked at about 90 million tons annually. Since then, they declined or stagnated. Valued species like bluefin tuna, orange roughy and Chilean sea bass collapsed. Overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction, and acidification produced systemic ecological destruction. As a result, world oceans and valuable food stocks hang in the balance. Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.Alabama KKK member speaks to BBC (screen grab) A BBC documentary crew who filmed members of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama were shocked after a member of the racist organization claimed that the Holocaust concentration camps were actually “summer camps” for Jewish people. Following the murders of nine people by a white supremacist at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, BBC negotiated with a KKK chapter in Alabama to get a closer look at racist hate groups in the U.S. BBC Three’s documentary “KKK: The Fight for White Supremacy,” which aired on Monday, follows members of the Klan as they prepare for what they say will be a race war. As Klan members assemble 3,000 flyers to deliver to a predominantly black neighborhood, the BBC interviewer notices a photograph of Adolf Hitler on the wall. “Adolf Hitler, he was one of the smartest men there ever was,” a Klan member explains. “The so-called concentration camps like Auschwitz and so forth, they say they were death camps. But these death camps, they gave the so-called people that were being killed cigarettes, there was coffee, there was a movie theater, a library, even a swimming pool in Auschwitz.” “And if you’re going to sit there and kill all these people then how come all these things would be in there?” he continues. “It’s more like a summer camp.” “Sorry,” the stunned interviewer interrupts. “You’re telling me Auschwitz was like a summer camp?” “Well, they had a swimming pool, a movie theater and everything else,” the Klan member insists. “You know, you don’t see in prisons today any kind of swimming pool being in the middle of the prison hall.” “So what do you think the Jews were doing in Auschwitz?” the interviewer asks. “Swimming,” the white supremacist replies. “And working. Because they didn’t want to do any work, and what Hitler was trying to do was he was trying to teach them to work, trying to rehabilitate them, if you will.” “Where did you hear this?” the dumbfounded interviewer wonders. “It’s all history,” the Klan member says. Although the BBC interviewer continues to press, Klan members eventually tire of the subject and head out to distribute their fliers. “In Britain, inciting racial hatred carries a possible sentence of seven years in prison,” the narrator explains to the British audience. “Here in the U.S., the First Amendment guarantees free speech. Even for blatant racism.” “More than a million prisoners died at Auschwitz,” the narrator adds. “The vast majority of them were Jewish.” The follow video clip from BBC Three contains uncensored racial slurs. Watch a trailer for the documentary below. (h/t: Arutz Sheva)Hillary Clinton greets supporters during a primary night event on June 7 in Brooklyn. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images A new Reuters/Ipsos poll paints a particularly depressing picture of the U.S. electorate’s opinions on race. The main takeaways from the survey, which was released late Tuesday: A significant slice of Americans expressed racist views against blacks, and those who identify as Donald Trump supporters are more likely to fall into that group, though Hillary Clinton supporters are definitely there too. Pollsters interviewed 16,000 Americans and asked them to grade whites and blacks on a series of personal traits, ranging from their intelligence to lawfulness. “In nearly every case,” the outlet notes, “Trump supporters were more likely to rate whites higher than blacks when their responses were compared with responses from Clinton supporters.” To wit: Roughly one-third of Trump supporters described blacks as less “intelligent” than whites, compared with about one-fifth of Clinton supporters who did the same. Among all respondents, 22.5 percent suggested whites were smarter than blacks. 40 percent of Trump supporters described blacks as more “lazy” than whites, compared with one-quarter of Clinton supporters who did the same. Among all respondents, 26.8 percent suggested whites were harder working than blacks. 44 percent of Trump supporters described blacks as more “rude” than whites, compared with 30 percent of Clinton supporters who did the same. Among all respondents, 31.3 percent said whites were more well mannered than blacks. Nearly half of all Trump supporters described blacks as more “violent” than whites, compared with nearly one-third of Clinton supporters who did the same. Among all respondents, 32.8 percent said whites were less violent than blacks. Nearly half of all Trump supporters described blacks as more “criminal” than whites, compared with nearly one-third of Clinton supporters who did the same. Among all respondents, 33.2 percent said whites were more lawful than blacks. Trump backers on average rated blacks more negatively than whites on all six character traits Reuters provided than did supporters for any of the other candidates listed (Trump, Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich), which shouldn’t come as a shock given the ethno-nationalist worldview the celebrity strongman has built his campaign around. (The trend was consistent even when pollsters filtered the results to include only white respondents to account for the reality that Democrats tend to attract far more nonwhite voters than their Republican counterparts.) Still, it’s worth taking a long hard look at the non-Trump results, too. Racism—that is, the belief that one race is superior to another, which is exactly the view being expressed in these numbers—is not hard to find among those backing the presumptive GOP nominee. But this survey makes clear that it’s also not all that much harder to find it among the general population, including those who want to see Clinton in the White House: all you have to do is ask. Read more of Slate’s coverage of the 2016 campaign.Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing. “Do you have a solve for this problem?” “Let’s all focus on the build.” “That’s the take-away from today’s seminar.” Or, to quote a song that was recently a No. 1 hit in Britain, “Would you let me see beneath your beautiful?” If you find these sentences annoying, you are not alone. Each contains an example of nominalization: a word we are used to encountering as a verb or adjective that has been transmuted into a noun. Many of us dislike reading or hearing clusters of such nouns, and associate them with legalese, bureaucracy, corporate jive, advertising or the more hollow kinds of academic prose. Writing packed with nominalizations is commonly regarded as slovenly, obfuscatory, pretentious or merely ugly. There are two types of nominalization. Type A involves a morphological change, namely suffixation: the verb “to investigate” produces the noun “investigation,” and “to nominalize” yields “nominalization.” Type B is known as “zero derivation” — or, more straightforwardly, “conversion.” This is what has taken place in my opening illustrations: a word has been switched from verb into noun (or, in the last two cases, from adjective into noun), without the addition of a suffix. Plenty of teachers discourage heavy use of the first type of nominalization. Students are urged to turn nouns of this kind back into verbs, as if undoing a conjurer’s temporary hoax. On this principle, “The violence was Ted’s retaliation for years of abuse” is better rendered as “Ted retaliated violently after years of abuse.” The argument for doing this is that the first version is weaker: dynamic writing makes use of “stronger” verbs. Yet in practice there are times when we may want to phrase a matter in a way that is not so dynamic. Perhaps we feel the need to be tactful or cautious, to avoid emotiveness or the most naked kind of assertion. Type A nominalization can afford us flexibility as we try to structure what we say. It can also help us accentuate the main point we want to get across. Sure, it can be clunky, but sometimes it can be trenchant. On the whole, it is Type B nominalization that really grates. “How can anybody use ‘sequester’ as a noun?” asks a friend. “The word is ‘sequestration,’ and if you say anything else you should be defenestrated.” “I’ll look forward to the defenestrate,” I say, and he calls me something I’d sooner not repeat. Photo Even in the face of such opprobrium, people continue to redeploy verbs as nouns. I am less interested in demonizing this than in thinking about the psychology behind what they are doing. Why say “solve” rather than “solution”? One answer is that it gives an impression of freshness, by avoiding an everyday word. To some, “I have a solve” will sound jauntier and more pragmatic than “I have a solution.” It’s also more concise and less obviously Latinate (though the root of “solve” is the Latin solvere). These aren’t necessarily virtues, but they can be. If I speak of “the magician’s reveal” rather than of “the magician’s moment of revelation,” I am evoking the thrill of this sudden unveiling or disclosure. The more traditional version is less immediate. Using a Type B nominalization may also seem humorous and vivid. Thus, compare “that was an epic fail” (Type B nominalization), “that was an epic failure” (Type A nominalization) and “they failed to an epic degree” (neither). There are other reasons for favoring nominalizations. They can have a distancing effect. “What is the ask?” is less personal than “What are they asking?” This form of words may improve our chances of eliciting a more objective response. It can also turn something amorphous into a discrete conceptual unit, of a kind that is easier to grasp or sounds more specific. Whatever I think of “what is the ask?” it focuses me on what’s at stake. Some regard unwieldy nominalizations as alarming evidence of the depraved zeitgeist. But the phenomenon itself is hardly new. For instance, “solve” as a noun is found in the 18th century, and the noun “fail” is older than “failure” (which effectively supplanted it). “Reveal” has been used as a noun since the 16th century. Even in its narrow broadcasting context, as a term for the final revelation at the end of a show, it has been around since the 1950s. “Ask” has been used as a noun for a thousand years — though the way we most often encounter it today, with a modifier (“a big ask”), is a 1980s development. Related in Draft Helen Sword: Zombie Nouns It is easy to decry nominalization. I don’t feel that a writer is doing me any favors when he expresses himself thus: “The successful implementation of the scheme was a validation of the exertions involved in its conception.” There are crisper ways to say this. And yes, while we’re about it, I don’t actually care for “Do you have a solve?” Still, it is simplistic to have a blanket policy of avoiding and condemning nominalizations. Even when critics couch their antipathy in a language of clinical reasonableness, they are expressing an aesthetic judgment. Aesthetics will always play a part in the decisions we make about how to express ourselves — and in our assessment of other people’s expression — but sometimes we need to do things that are aesthetically unpleasant in order to achieve other effects, be they polemical or diplomatic. Henry Hitchings is the author of three books exploring language and history, including, most recently, “The Language Wars.”A Tesla Model S on display in downtown Los Angeles. (Photo: Richard Vogel / AP) Will your next car talk to traffic lights, apply breaks to help avoid a collision or emit zero tailpipe emissions? Automobiles are undergoing a big transition — increasingly better, smarter and cleaner. Especially exciting is the expanded portfolio of low and zero emissions vehicles (ZEVs) that help protect air quality, increase our nation’s energy security, and reduce our reliance on foreign oil — a win for the U.S. economy all-around. Automakers at Detroit’s 2017 North American International Auto Show should be applauded for their leadership in introducing consumer-friendly, innovative, and advanced technology fuel cell vehicle (FCV) and battery electric vehicle (BEV) models. Though critics initially scoffed at these vehicles, they represent a small but growing percentage of total vehicle sales in the U.S. Increased consumer adoption shows there is strong interest in the cars and their new technologies. Additionally, there is growing state-level support for ZEVs. California and seven other states are committed to adding 3.3 million ZEVs, both FCVs and BEVs, to their vehicle mix by 2025. Some may argue that current reliance on fossil
, as socializing and communal experiences are another way its ideals is re-enforced. Time Square is an immense sluice of entertainment and commerce but also of humanity. The crowds that flock there illustrate our love of public spaces and people watching. And although this crowd consists mainly of strangers, depending on the day or event it becomes a kind of community. At the Metropolitan Opera Simulcasts, it is a community of opera enthusiasts and at the Jersey Shore premiere it consists of Jersey Shore fans. Like Charle’s Moore’s discusses in ‘You Have to Pay for Public Life’, nobody believes that Disneyland’s mountain is real just like nobody believes the giant plastic M&M in Time’s Square is filled with chocolate, yet the experience of being in the space is a real and immensly exciting one.[1] Photography is an integral part of how people experience Times Square. Almost everyone is snapping away on their camera or iPhone and most likely posting them to social networking sites to say, “I was here. I took part.” I watched in amazement as hoards of people, young and old, stood in the middle of the street taking photos of themselves on the Forever21 billboard. The billboard sits above a pedestrianized part of Broadway and features a virtual model, dressed in what I assume is a Forever21 dress, who interacts with the people below. The model takes a Polaroid photo of the crowd and brandishes it in front of her showing a close-up image. At times, she appears to pluck someone out of the crowd, kisses them or drops them in her bag. And although the billboard can be seen as some kind of strange commercialized surveillance camera, it also illustrates our own increasing obsession with documenting and sharing every part of our lives. People love to see themselves in Times Square and the billboard acts as a huge mirror. One can’t help but be reminded of Andy Warhol’s prediction that “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” however in this case most people only get 15 seconds. Although obviously concerned with promoting Forever21 it doesn’t directly coax you into that store. In fact, it does the opposite. The interaction extends how long someone looks at the billboard and encourages them to stay on the street. It is as if companies have property in Time’s Square to promote their brand and selling their products is not necessarily a main priority. Having your image projected in Times Square relates is another way that Time Square attempts to make you feel like a celebrity. If someone goes into the Forever21 store, there are sensors that detect them causing the flash bulbs surrounding the threshold to go off, simulating dozens of paparazzi. Similarly, the TKTS booth 27 ruby-red steps rising 16 feet above the sidewalk are everyone’s personal red carpet to literally rise above everything to see and be seen. The TKTS booth has more than doubled the amount of pedestrian space in the area. TV premieres are screened in the open air where the TKTS steps are transformed into a giant communal sofa where people gather to share in the collective excitement. These communal media experiences give Time Square a purpose and re-affirm it as real, social space. William Whyte refers to these kinds of events as ‘triangualtion’, external stimuli which provide linkage between strangers to talk to eachother as though they are not.[2] Eating and drinking are expected and encouraged as TV dinners are replaced by McDonalds takeout. You can look down on the lowbrow nature of Times Square all you want, but for many people it is a true and meaningful experience to. So, let them eat cake. Or fries. Or whatever they want. [2] Whyte, William, ‘The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces’, Project for Public Spaces Inc, 2001 [1] Moore, Charles, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life: Selected Essays of Charles W’. Moore, MIT Press, 2001 AdvertisementsA couple weeks back I updated my list of the Leafs top five prospects (you can read it here) and it was crazy how much interaction it prompted between myself and the people who read it. Between the comments section here, Twitter and Facebook, none of my other articles have ever inspired so much conversation. So, taking the reasoning from many of the people who discussed the placement of the top five with me and combining it with my research, opinion and projections, here is the next half of that list. 6. Connor Brown After leading the OHL in scoring two years ago, Brown followed it up by leading the Marlies in scoring last year and winning the AHL rookie scoring title with 20 goals and 61 points in 76 games. Brown has a high upside but has been doubted seemingly his whole career so far. But he’s got talent and there is no reason to doubt him any longer. Will he be a 30 goal scorer in the NHL? It’s hard to say, I mean, that’s a pretty tough thing to do, but of all the Leafs prospects, outside of Marner and Nylander, the highest potential ceiling may belong to Brown. Check out this sweet Brown highlight video 7. Andreas Johnson If you didn’t know better, you’d never believe that Johnson was only a seventh-round pick, based on they hype that has surrounded him lately. Since being drafted, Johnson has won the Swedish Hockey League’s rookie of the year award and this year was that league’s highest scoring player under 21. This is important because the SHL is filled with former NHL players and a lot of draft picks ranked higher than Johnson. An excellent skater with a great shot, being 5’10” seems to be the only thing holding Johnson back. He may or may not be an NHL star – although the track record of successful young players in the SHL is good – but he definitely has a high ceiling. Will he reach it? In a league that is starting to covet skill over size, the timing for a player such as Johnson could be fortunate. Check out the videos posted here, which is also where I got all this information about his performance in Sweden. 8. Travis Dermott In a weird way, I think Dermott may been ranked as a second-rounder because he was on a team with Strome and McDavid. There certainly seemed to be a lot of people offering up the “anyone in his position would succeed” excuse, but I don’t buy it. Sure, being on a stacked team helps, but when I read the reports on Dermott, I hear the kind of things that I think you should be on the look out for in a defenseman: mobile, good transition and intelligent. It is the same kind of things people were saying about Duncan Keith before he was drafted. I don’t want to Lonny-Bohonos the kid here and overrate him like crazy, but even just a mild comparison to Keith is enough to excite me. 9. Frederik Gauthier In a lot of ways, Gauthier is the opposite of Brown: the high-end ceiling isn’t there, but the likelihood that he ends up an NHL regular seems to be much higher. With the way the NHL is now, with teams paying attention to analytics and expecting offensive production from everyone in the lineup, Gauthier has long had his doubters. That being said, a lot of people ripped me for not having him in the top five, and apparently he has his fans. If he can indeed be a two-way centre then maybe his ranking is low, so far, however, he appears to just be a defense-only centre. He did miss a lot of time last season due to injury, but his offense in the Q was fairly constant over his three years there. I hope he can score enough to make the NHL because he is big and defensively sound, but at this point I’d need to see more before I can get more excited about him. 10. Scott Harrington Acquired in the Phil Kessel trade, Harrington, along with Stuart Percy, may be the closest prospect the Leafs have to being NHL ready. He already has two AHL seasons and ten NHL games to his credit. Harrington is a big defenseman who can move the puck and while he isn’t likely to be a high-end scorer, he looks to be a potential top-four defenseman with some good up-side, and, at worst, a decent bottom pairing defenseman. Though bottom-pairing defenseman aren’t exactly exciting, they are necessary and having good ones can give you an edge over many teams in the league.Republican gubernatorial candidate Jeff Johnson, right, speaks at a campaign appearance at the Ulmer Cafe in New Ulm, Minn., on Wednesday, while, below, Democratic-Farm-Labor candidates Gov. Mark Dayton and U.S. Sen. Al Franken attend a rally at the state Capitol before leaving with other DFL leaders on a bus tour around Minnesota. Minnesota Democratic Congressman Collin Peterson has paid more than $259,000 to his son from campaign funds since 2007. On the other side of the aisle, 8th District Republican candidate Stewart Mills has paid his family’s company more than $6,800 for office space. Overall, Minnesota’s congressional delegation and their opponents in the November election have paid more than $373,000 in campaign money to family members since 2007. The practice is legal. Some question whether it’s proper to mix personal and campaign finances. “Elected officials and candidates shouldn’t use their positions to enrich themselves and their families,” Adam Rappaport, senior legal counsel for the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in an email. His group is a nonprofit, nonpartisan government-watchdog organization in Washington, D.C. Viewing the rules that allow such payments as a “loophole,” the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington supports legislation to end the practice of using campaign money to pay candidates’ family members. Candidates and members of Congress can use campaign money to pay themselves, their family, their family’s companies and even their own companies, provided actual work is being performed and at a fair market rate, according to the Federal Election Commission. What members of Congress are barred from doing is paying their family members with congressional office dollars — or, in other words, taxpayer money. A few limited exceptions apply. Family members, though, often work long hours in support of a candidate, said Larry Jacobs, professor at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Money going to some of them “happens all the time. … It’s not illegal and, frankly, you might have pity on the candidates,” he said. And of all the issues around campaign finance, money going to family members is “not at the top of the list,” Jacobs said. “It’s not even close.” PETERSON, MILLS CASES A review of campaign records for Minnesota’s congressional delegation seeking re-election and their challengers found candidates from both sides of the aisle have made such payments. Peterson, who is seeking his 13th term as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor congressman in Minnesota’s 7th District, pays his son with campaign funds. Since January 2007, Peterson’s campaign has paid Elliott Peterson more than $259,000 in salary and other expenses. Elliott Peterson’s wife also received $6,390 from the campaign over a two-month span last winter. Collin Peterson said it’s cheaper to hire his son, who is a music director for a church in Tennessee, than somebody from Washington to do the campaign work. “Well, he’s actually saving the campaign money,” Peterson said. He went on to say, “If I didn’t have him doing this, I’d have one of these Washington compliance firms doing it.” Since October 2013, Mills’ campaign has paid $6,830 for rent and related expenses to his family’s business, Mills Fleet Farm, according to expenditure statements from the FEC. No preferential treatment or breaks were given and the expenditures are fully compliant with the law, the Mills camp said. Mills is on a leave of absence from the company while campaigning. “Because Fleet Farm is a family business owned by several members of the Mills family, the campaign and business operations have been separate,” Mills’ campaign communications director, Chloe Rockow, said in an email. “When they do intersect, the campaign fully pays the business at market rates for rent or services used. Ultimately, all matters pertaining to campaign finance have been conducted with the advice and guidance of the FEC and campaign lawyers.” WIVES PAID, TOO Democratic U.S. Rep. Tim Walz’s wife, Gwen, has been reimbursed mileage and travel costs by his campaign fund. While it’s unclear how much she’s actually received because she’s listed jointly on reimbursements with her husband, those payments have totaled more than $51,000 since 2007. Walz is running for a fifth term in the state’s 1st Congressional District. “Like many spouses of candidates, Gwen is very actively involved in campaign activities with Tim and on Tim’s behalf,” Walz campaign spokesman Evan Peterson wrote in an email. “Her expenses for these activities are reimbursed, but she is not compensated for her time.” Republican U.S. Rep. Erik Paulsen, who’s running for a fourth term in Minnesota’s 3rd Congressional District, paid his wife more than $9,000 in salary in 2008. It appears she no longer works for the campaign because disbursement statements filed with the FEC don’t show recent payments. The only response received from Paulsen’s camp was an email with links to other stories highlighting the issue. U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, a Democrat running for re-election in Minnesota’s 5th District, also paid family members with campaign money. Two of his sons were paid $11,332 and $25,948 in salary in previous election cycles. Ellison’s now-ex-wife received almost $4,000 for travel and other expenses several years ago. Ellison said in a statement: “If a family member is doing legitimate campaign work and is fairly compensated compared to others in a similar position, I don’t have a problem with family members being hired on a campaign.” No Ellison family members appear on recent campaign-spending statements. When asked why, the campaign said in an email, “They did not apply to work for his campaign this cycle.” Ellison, Paulsen, Peterson and Walz were all mentioned in a 2012 report by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington that highlighted campaign spending on family members for the House of Representatives. Members of Congress are paid $174,000 annually. Patrick Rehkamp is a freelance reporter. He can be reached at pat.rehkamp@gmail.com. CAMPAIGN FUND CONNECTIONS — Collin Peterson has paid his son more than $259,000 since 2007 and his daughter-in-law $6,390 last winter with campaign funds. — Stewart Mills has paid his family’s company $6,830 with campaign funds since October 2013. — Erik Paulsen paid his wife more than $9,000 with campaign funds in 2008. — Tim Walz has paid himself and his wife more than $51,000 with campaign funds for mileage and travel costs since 2007. — Keith Ellison’s sons were paid $11,332 (2009 to 2011) and $25,948 (2011 and 2012) in salary with campaign funds. Ellison’s now-ex-wife received almost $4,000 for travel expenses from 2007 to 2010. — Sharon Sund, the Democratic candidate in the state’s 3rd District, paid her husband $1,500 in June 2014, according to campaign records. Sund said it was a paperwork error and actually a donation from her husband, not a campaign expenditure.When it began to dawn on Marjan Vayghan that her uncle Ali had been detained by customs enforcement at the Los Angeles International Airport, she hadn’t even heard about President Trump’s Muslim ban. On the evening of January 27, the same day Trump signed the executive order, Ali Vayeghan (he and his niece spell their names differently), an Iranian national with an American green card, was scheduled to arrive at LAX on a 7 p.m. flight. It wasn’t until 2 a.m. that a customs official confirmed to Marjan’s distraught family what they already suspected: that Ali was being held prisoner at the airport. Marjan didn’t get any sleep until 7 that morning. Before she crawled into bed, she put up a post on Facebook, describing to her friends what had happened to her uncle. When she woke up at noon and checked her newsfeed, Marjan told me, “My friends had just gone crazy.” Her post had caught fire. Her friends were livid about the travel ban, which Marjan now learned was what was behind her uncle’s predicament. Her father called and told her that all her friends were there at the airport already. “The angry feminist friends from your art shows who don’t wear makeup are hugging your mom,” he told her. A few hours later, while she was on her way to LAX, her father called again. “It’s not just your friends anymore,” he said. By now, protesters had begun to arrive at the airport to show their solidarity with the detained travelers and their opposition to the executive order. By the time Marjan left LAX late that night, the crowd had grown to hundreds. By the following day, it would be thousands. After 20 hours in detention, with no provision of food or sleeping accommodations, during which time Customs and Border Protection tried to get him to sign away his residency (he refused), Ali was put on a plane to Dubai, where he was expected to connect to a flight back to Tehran, and to somehow get through customs in both countries with “REVOKED” written across his visa with a red sharpie. Peter Bibring, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, had rushed to file a request for an injunction when he heard about Ali’s deportation order. But by the time the court received it, there was no time for a ruling before Ali’s flight took off. The plane left Los Angeles to Dubai with Ali on it. On the afternoon of February 2, Ali Vayeghan, apparently the first person to be deported out of LAX under Trump’s executive order, became the first person to be brought back into the country under a court ruling that rejected the legal and constitutional basis of Trump’s ban. The ACLU hadn’t been able to prevent Ali’s removal from the United States, but it had managed to secure his return. Ali stepped off the plane and into the embrace of his niece. The mayor was there to shake his hand. So was a giant, frenzied scrum of reporters (myself among them), holding their cameras and their phones aloft to get even a passing shot of the family’s reunion. Protesters were there, too, holding up signs welcoming Ali Vayeghan to the United States of America. “He is now a lawful permanent resident of the United States,” Bibring told me. “We’re hopeful that the government will respect that.”Photo In the topsy-turvy world of private equity math, what at first glance looks like a multibillion-dollar loss can in fact be a huge gain. Such is the case with the Blackstone Group’s investment in the Hilton hotel group, which on Thursday returned to the public stock markets. When Blackstone took Hilton private in 2007, paying a headline-grabbing price of $26 billion, it appeared to have been badly mistimed. One of the biggest deals during the last buyout boom, it came just months before financial markets seized up and travel — and hotel bookings — fell into a prolonged slump. And when Hilton Worldwide Holdings’ stock began trading again on Thursday, the company had a market capitalization of just $20 billion. Doing the back-of-the-envelope math, that would suggest a loss in value of $6 billion. But in fact, Blackstone has increased the value of its investment by nearly $10 billion through a combination of lucky timing, smart financial engineering and disciplined management. “They paid a premium price at the peak of the market,” said Robert M. La Forgia, the chief financial officer of Hilton at the time of its sale, who now runs Apertor, a hospitality consultant firm. “But they were able to ride out the downturn, a significant real estate crisis and a financial crisis, and still come back and have a successful I.P.O.” In buying Hilton, Blackstone contributed about $5.5 billion of cash to the deal, and borrowed about $20.5 billion from big banks. It is an arrangement not unlike that of individuals who pay for homes with a down payment in cash coupled with a large mortgage. “When they bought Hilton for $26 billion, it was like buying a very big house,” said Steven Kaplan, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “And they financed it like a house, taking on debt.” Over the next couple of years, Blackstone used profits from Hilton to pay down that debt. Often, private equity firms will take profits and borrow additional money to pay themselves special dividends, resulting in an early windfall that hedges their risk. But by opting against dividends, and instead paying down debt, Blackstone was slowly but surely increasing the value of its equity in the company. Then the financial crisis hit. Hotel visits plunged, banks got nervous and Blackstone wrote down the value of its investment by more than half. This caused the value of the banks’ debt to plummet. In 2009, it looked as if the Hilton deal could be a disaster for the ages. But in 2010, Blackstone approached its lenders and offered to restructure the deal. Led by its global head of real estate, Jonathan Gray, Blackstone offered to buy back some of the bank debt at a discount. Some lenders received just 35 cents on the dollar. Other lenders converted their debt into preferred equity, receiving shares to sell in an eventual I.P.O. As part of the deal, Blackstone agreed to inject more capital into the business, bringing its total equity investment to around $6.5 billion. “It was like refinancing your mortgage when interest rates were low,” Mr. Kaplan said. “They basically paid off their debt when it was very cheap to do so, because everybody was frightened and the price of their debt went very low.” Since then, Blackstone has continued to pay off Hilton’s lenders with profits from the business. It has also cut costs from Hilton, expanded its international strategy and focused on the more profitable franchise model. Through the I.P.O. on Thursday, Hilton raised about $2.4 billion. Some proceeds from the I.P.O. will go toward paying down the debt further, while some of it will go to the debt investors who converted their shares into preferred equity during the restructuring in 2010. Blackstone is not selling any of its shares. Hilton today is larger and more profitable than it was when Blackstone bought it out, and the outlook for the hotel industry is good. The company is also in sound financial shape. Between its regular debt servicing, the restructuring in 2010 and proceeds from the I.P.O. that will be used to pay lenders, Hilton will have about $12 billion in debt, down from $20.5 billion at the time of the buyout. “They’ve accomplished a lot through leverage,” Mr. La Forgia said. “They almost lost the company, and might have without the debt restructuring.” On Thursday, Hilton’s first day of trading, shares were up 7.5 percent to $21.50, giving the company a market capitalization of $21.2 billion. Adding the remaining $12 billion of debt gives it an enterprise value of about $33 billion. In other words, the overall value of the business actually increased by about 27 percent. But by aggressively paying down its debt and renegotiating with the banks at an opportune time, Blackstone’s gains have been much more substantial. With 76 percent of the equity, Blackstone’s stake in Hilton is worth $16.1 billion. That is a profit, on paper at least, of more than $9.5 billion. That sounds like a lot of money, but on Wall Street, everything is relative. Mr. Kaplan of the University of Chicago said that compared to an investment in the public markets, Blackstone’s investment in Hilton has been good but not great. Since the start of 2007, the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index is up 25 percent. Blackstone more than doubled its money. “This is a good deal if you’re measuring it relative to the public market,” Mr. Kaplan said. “But it’s not a home run.” Other alternative investments and asset classes have performed better over the last six years. Even against Blackstone’s internal expectations, the Hilton deal, while an enormous winner, may not tick every box. Most private equity firms aim for an annual internal rate of return of about 18 to 20 percent. Spread over six years, the investment in Hilton looks to have yielded about 16 percent for Blackstone. “If you look at it against target returns, it’s not amazing,” Mr. Kaplan said. But with its commanding stake in a newly public Hilton, Blackstone has nonetheless engineered one of the most successful deals in the firm’s history. “In dollars, a $10 billion profit is a lot of money,” Mr. Kaplan said. “Even to them.”House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says the circumstances surrounding President Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey are "distressing" and “really weird.” Speaking specifically about Trump saying that Comey assured him three times that he's not under investigation, Pelosi said she thought it was strange that was included in reports on Comey's dismissal. “We’re talking weird,” she said Monday during a CNN town hall. “Weird means, what? Highly unusual, inappropriate for that. And why is he doing this?" Pelosi additionally criticized Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo that the White House initially cited as the reason for Comey’s dismissal last week. ADVERTISEMENT “The president asked him [to] make a case against Comey, and that’s what he did,” she said. “But he did it in a way that was not prosecutorial. “It was like, ‘I think I’ll do an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.’ It’s like, what? This is not professional.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse to push back at Trump on border Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Overnight Energy: Climate protesters storm McConnell’s office | Center-right group says Green New Deal could cost trillion | Dire warnings from new climate studies MORE (R-Ky.) announced Monday that Rosenstein will brief all 100 senators on Comey’s ouster this Thursday. The Senate previously invited Comey to testify at a closed session about his firing, but he declined, noting he would testify publicly instead. The White House announced last week that Trump had sacked Comey on the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions Jefferson (Jeff) Beauregard SessionsTrump says he hasn't spoken to Barr about Mueller report Ex-Trump aide: Can’t imagine Mueller not giving House a ‘roadmap’ to impeachment Rosenstein: My time at DOJ is 'coming to an end' MORE and Rosenstein. Trump has since hinted that investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election played into his decision to fire Comey. “Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey,” he told host Lester Holt on “NBC Nightly News.” “And, in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, ‘You know, this whole Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.’ ” Comey announced in March that the FBI was probing Russian meddling in the 2016 race, including possible ties between Russia and Trump’s campaign.1990s' favourite youth TV show 'Hip Hip Hurray' is all set to make a comeback to the small screens, albeit with new actors. The show that was considered to be a cult show of its time will try to recreate the same magic. According to a report in an English daily, young actors have already been roped in to play a part in the show. In this new season, issues like relationship between parents and children, love, sexuality, peer pressure and more will be reportedly portrayed. Anshuman Malhotra, who played the role of young Shahid Kapoor in Haider, will be seen in an important role on the show. Image Courtesy: Anshuman Malhotra Twitter Page The show was produced by Ronnie Screwvala alongwith Zarina Mehta and Deven Khote. Nilanjana Sharma played an important character on the show. Shveta Salve, Peeya Rai Chowdhary, Vishal Malhotra, Shabbir Ahluwalia, Nauheed Cyrusi, Rushad Rana, Zafar Karachiwala rose to fame after they were seen on this show. Kishwer Merchantt, who is currently seen in Bigg Boss 9, was also a part of Hip Hip Hurray. Vinay Pathak and Suchitra Pillai plated the roles of their teachers.In 1995, David Bowie was probably at his most anti-commercial. For Outside, his 19th studio album, he decided to tackle the fictional diary of a government official whose duty it was to determine if murder could be considered art. If you guessed that this was too much of a WTF endeavor even for a man once known as Ziggy Stardust, then you are correct. Unexpectedly, it led to one of the most unique pieces of memorabilia for the Thin White Duke. Years later, Bowie himself stated that he thought the album was dead on its legs before it hit stores, due to the concept and massive length of the record (75 minutes on a single CD). But at the time, he and his label had to stand behind it and make it attractive for the record-buying public. At the Mexican offices of BMG, his label at the time, record exec and future reality TV judge Arturo López Gavito brainstormed a way to give fans an incentive to buy the album. He thought a comic book would better explain the story within Outside. He contacted Mauricio Hammer, editor of the long-running Círculo Mixup magazine, and recruited him to produce the comic book. Hammer, for his part, assigned the execution to a young graphic designer called Victor “Pico” Covarrubias, who was entrusted with the task of illustrating the short story Bowie wrote in the liner notes of Outside. With help from fellow illustrator Jotabe, he penciled and inked the whole thing, with Mauricio printing the short run. The comic, titled Art Crime, was given to shoppers buying the CD. It is unknown how many copies were made, but judging by the amount of information available, we can assume it was an extremely limited pressing. Gavito and BMG were very pleased with Pico’s work on Art Crime, so they hired him to design the label’s future releases, launching his career in the process. His illustrations appear on albums by Zoé, Ely Guerra, Moenia, Alejandra Guzmán, and many others. His most infamous and controversial work, however, came just a few short years after this comic book, in the form of the cover for Molotov’s debut album ¿Dónde Jugarán Las Niñas? As for Bowie, word came that he was delighted with the end result. In return, he gifted the people responsible for the comic book with signed posters. Special thanks to Mauricio Hammer for additional reporting.Roy Jones Jr. I'm Running for Mayor!!! Roy Jones Jr. -- I'm Running for Mayor!!! EXCLUSIVE Boxing legend's career isn't over -- in fact, he tells TMZ Sports, he's officially taking a shot at a brand new title... MAYOR.45-year-old Jones -- the first former middleweight champion to win a heavyweight title in 106 years back in 2003 -- tells us, he plans to run for Mayor of his hometown Pensacola, Florida at the next election.And he's serious too -- the HBO analyst says he's already prepared all the necessary paperwork... and got TEN TIMES the required number of signatures to make himself eligible (nearly 5,000 to be exact).As for his policies -- Jones says he wants to focus on children, telling us, "A lot of kids don't have proper leadership at home. I'm willing to try and be that person for them."He adds, "I tell the kids, don't fight in the streets. Go into MMA, go into boxing. Do something that someone can be proud of you for."Jones is confident he can win too -- "I've been opposed my whole life, and I've always won."Can't argue with that.Police are searching for a man who entered a Bushwick apartment Saturday night and raped a 24-year-old woman who was asleep in her bed. No arrests have been made in connection with the incident, which took place inside a residential building near the intersection of Halsey Street and Central Avenue around 10:30 a.m. on October 14th. The woman, whose name was not released, "was asleep in her bed when an unknown individual did enter her apartment and sexually assaulted her," according to a release from the NYPD. She managed to push the man off, and he subsequently fled. She was later transported to Woodhull Hospital, where she was subsequently treated and released. An NYPD spokeswoman told Gothamist the victim did not know the suspect; a police source told DNAinfo the man entered through an unlocked front door. Police released surveillance video of the suspect on Wednesday, who was last seen wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and black jeans. Anyone with information regarding this incident is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477). The public can also submit tips by logging onto the Crime Stoppers website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM or by texting their tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then enter TIP577. An earlier version of this story said the incident took place at 10:30 p.m. It actually took place at 10:30 a.m. according to police.Let me start by saying that I usually avoid dialogue with young-earth creationists, for a few reasons, but mostly because I’m not a scientist. I accept evolution the same way that I accept gravity, or the laws of physics, or how I can operate a car even if I don’t know the intricate workings like a mechanic does. That said, it is simply not my role to educate people on scientific theories. Today though, someone retweeted Ken Ham’s blog into my time-line, and I just could not pass up the opportunity to get my feet wet with a response post. Titled “It’s Really the Message They Object To”, our favorite non-celebrity attempts to ward off naysayers regarding his infamous Ark Encounter project. He begins: Nearly every time I post an update on the exciting Ark Encounter project, there seem to be those habitual complainers who claim the money should be spent on the poor instead and not be “wasted” this way. Yeah. We are talking millions of dollars for a for-profit theme park celebrating genocide. A quick Google will give you an estimated cost of $150 million for this project. That could help a LOT of poor people, Ken. His response? First, he tries to accuse his opponents of hypocrisy for not criticizing the money that Disney World, Louisiana State University or Hillary Clinton’s campaign spend on their own projects. Oh, Ken. Not off to a good start, are we? Your logical fallacy is… (drumroll, please!) Besides just trying to shift the focus here, there is a huge difference between non-religious businesses or programs and a religious institution that claims to follow Jesus but actually just wants to make a shit-ton of money. He goes on to list some of the charity that Answers in Genesis has contributed to. That’s great, Ken. Glad to hear it. It doesn’t excuse the ridiculousness of the Ark Encounter. If God wanted you to build this display so badly, why doesn’t he send his rock monster angels or whatever to help you? How come there’s no magic forest popping up out of nowhere? Oh, that was just the movie version of Noah? “Not scriptural”, you say. Huh. Sorry, I guess I got “rock monster angel thingies” mixed up with “demons that had sex with humans to produce giants”. You’re right; that’s much more realistic. Damn Hollywood, always getting it wrong. Ken then tries to disparage his opponents some more, by comparing them to Judas in one of my favorite Bible stories: Six days before the Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. So they gave a dinner for him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at table. Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it. Jesus said, “Leave her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of my burial. For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.” (John 12:1–8) (Emphasis mine.) This statement, to me, is one that highlights a Jesus we don’t often see – one who is callous and unfeeling toward the poor he supposedly loves so much. One of my first doubts regarding my Catholic faith had to do with the huge churches, statues and gold chalices. Because Catholics believe the Eucharist actually turns into the body and blood of Jesus, the cardboard-like “host” and bottom-shelf wine can only be held in containers made of precious metals. Dude was born in a stable, I would think to myself, there’s no way he would demand such a thing. According to the verse Ken Ham cites, though, I’d be wrong. I wonder why he doesn’t quote the story of the rich man, though? The one whom Jesus told to sell all his possessions and give his money to the poor? Hm. I guess that doesn’t apply to projects that amount to preaching like the Ark Encounter. Another way he tries to justify his silly project is by stating it’s more important to feed people’s spiritual needs: At Answers in Genesis, our mission is to “proclaim the absolute truth and authority of the Bible with boldness, relate the relevance of a literal Genesis to the church and world today, and obey God’s call to deliver the message of the gospel.” So while it is important to help the poor and needy meet their physical needs (which we do), it is even more important to help meet their spiritual need—the need to come to know Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world—because lives—and eternity—hang in the balance. The Ark Encounter will help us do that in a powerful, non-threatening way by simply sharing the
Founded with the purpose of finding the world’s greatest putter, to promote Putt-Putt Golf Courses of America and its franchised locations. 2019 PPA National Championship in Kingsport, TN The 60th annual PPA National Championship will be played the week of September 16-20, 2019 in Kingsport, TN. The success of the 2018 TPC in Kingsport, the overwhelming positive reaction from those players who participated and the hospitality provided by facility owner Dan Estes and his staff are some of reasons members of the PPA committee selected Kingsport to host the 60th annual event. Rainey Statum will be on hand to defend his national championship title. “There will be 5 days of events and celebrations as we celebrate this momentous occasion”, PPA Commissioner Joe Aboid said. Estes looks forward to hosting this year’s event. “We loved having the TPC in Kingsport last year," Estes said. "We are glad that the players who played in 2018 had such a good time and enjoyed the course, and that we were selected to host the PPA’s most prestigious event. This is a tremendous honor, one we do not take lightly." "We know how to host large events, having been host to many events in Kingsport that have more than 1,200 participants," Estes said. "We know the PPA players will enjoy our facility and enjoy the southern hospitality. I look forward to seeing the players again and welcoming them back”. The week of the nationals will be as follows: September 16-20, 2019 Tournament Players Championship Monday 4 rounds $150 entry Doubles National Championship Tuesday $50 entry Seniors National Championship Wednesday and Thursday $50 PPA National Championship Wednesday thru Friday 12 rounds $300 2018 PPA National Championship Week Players from around the country converged on Webster, Texas for the 59th PPA National Championship week September 10-14, 2018. Rainey Statum was crowned the 2018 PPA National Champion. Brice Bergesen is the Seniors National Champion. Wade Sahmel and Jeffrey Smith won the crown of Team National Champions. Joey Graybeal is the 2018 Western Open winner. John Petrie is the 2018 APA National Champion. Alan Sahmel is the winner of the APA Seniors National Championship. Trevor Lewin and Steve Yancey were crowned Team National Champions in APA. Jason Sheffield is the 2018 APA Western Open winner. Full results are available on 2018 PPA National Championship. The Sahmels Three National Championships During the National Championship week in Webster, KTRK-TV of Houston, TX did a nice video and story about Alan, Adam, and Wade. Video below with the full story available at: https://abc13.com/sports/putt-putt-championship-comes-to-webster/4235828/.Had it been stated that way, the assertion about Alzheimer’s would have stirred little if any debate. Still, the issue is important for anyone — including candidates for office — because of the difficulty of distinguishing the initial symptoms of Alzheimer’s from, say, simple forgetfulness. The disease occurs most frequently after 70, but it can strike younger people. Dr. Alois Alzheimer, a German psychiatrist, diagnosed the first case in a 51-year-old woman. It is now recognized as one of a number of types of dementia. And diagnosing it with certainty requires a brain biopsy, rarely done while a patient is still alive. Mr. Reagan’s mental state was an issue even before he became the oldest man elected president, at 69, in 1980. Adversaries were fond of attributing his penchant for contradictory statements, forgetting names and general absent-mindedness to Alzheimer’s. I reported on Mr. Reagan’s health, and he told me that his mother, Nelle, had died of senility — and that if he were to develop it in office he would resign. Photo As a follow-up to questions about Alzheimer’s, my extensive interviews with his White House doctors, key aides and others, I found no evidence that Mr. Reagan exhibited signs of dementia as president. The interviews did not include family members. Moreover, until Ron Reagan’s memoir appeared, no other family member — and not Edmund Morris, the official biographer who spent seven years with Mr. Reagan in the White House — publicly hinted that he showed evidence of Alzheimer’s as president. “My Father at 100” (Viking) is an affectionate, often lighthearted account of a son’s attempt to uncover his father’s character by going back to his early days. It is generally well written, except for portions of the closing chapter about Alzheimer’s — which Ron Reagan acknowledged were flawed because he “relied on memory” without checking facts about when and where the suspicion of his father’s Alzheimer’s was first raised. Advertisement Continue reading the main story He writes, for example, that after the former president fell from a bucking horse in Mexico in 1989, his doctors detected probable signs of Alzheimer’s in removing a blood clot that formed between his skull and brain. But such a procedure does not involve a brain biopsy that doctors would need to diagnose dementia. Moreover, Mr. Reagan was flown to a military hospital near Tucson — not taken to San Diego, as his son writes — and the blood clot, a subdural hematoma, was removed weeks later at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. In the interviews, Ron Reagan genially acknowledged the errors and said that if he had anticipated the controversy he created, he “would have done more due diligence in terms of pinning down dates.” 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. When his father was president, Mr. Reagan, then a professional dancer with the Joffrey Ballet, visited him two or three times a year. Now 52, the younger Reagan has been a radio and television talk show host, commentator and magazine writer. In the book, he writes that he did not want his father to run for a second term, partly because of political differences (Ron has long been liberal) and partly because of his concern about Mr. Reagan’s health — not the possibility of Alzheimer’s, but the near-fatal gunshot wound he sustained in a 1981 assassination attempt. Understandably, the son’s memories about his father’s Alzheimer’s focused on when it first produced symptoms. The anecdotes that he cites are either well known or lack convincing evidence for Alzheimer’s. For example, he recounts the 1984 re-election campaign, when his father performed dismally as he floundered through his responses and was lost for words in his first debate with his opponent, Walter F. Mondale. But Mr. Reagan performed well in the second debate, 11 days later. While spending a day in the Oval Office in 1987, the younger Reagan noticed that aides were providing his father with scripted index cards — a technique he often used when giving speeches — for phone calls lasting five minutes at most, implying signs of a failing memory. But in an interview, Mr. Reagan said it was “hard to know what to make of that” — and laughed as he said he was using similar notes in our conversation. Photo The son noted little things that he could not explain and to which he did not attach a name at the time. Based on knowing his father’s demeanor and cognition over a lifetime, the observations created an impression “that something was amiss.” But, he wrote, he did not want to leave an impression that his “father was catatonic or mumbling incoherently” at any period in the White House. Asked if he had compared notes at the time with his mother, Nancy, Mr. Reagan said in an interview that they had — and “she did not see anything that set her antennae to vibrating.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story Nor did he see evidence that his father, his siblings or anyone else was aware of impending Alzheimer’s while President Reagan was in office. He did not discuss his observations with White House doctors. Considering resignation was never an issue: “We’re not talking anything that approaches the level of dementia,” he told me. “Not to a level where something needed to be done.” Recognizing that doctors have learned that the physiological and neurological changes linked to Alzheimer’s can be seen in the brain years, even decades, before identifiable symptoms arise, Mr. Reagan wrote, somewhat ambiguously, “The question, then, of whether my father suffered from the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s while in office more or less answers itself.” It was in 1990, the year after the horse accident, that the former president began taking annual mental-status tests. But they did not begin to show evidence of the disease until the summer of 1993, his White House doctor told me. In 1994, the former president wrote his poignant open letter to the American public disclosing the ailment. Alzheimer’s spared him many of its typical indignities, like unaccountable rages and fits of paranoia, and the family is grateful that “he never gave his caretakers or anyone a hard time,” Ron Reagan told me. The disease’s course undulated as it progressed. Speech impairment, or aphasia, was an early cognitive deficit. “It became very difficult for him to string sentences together and eventually just words together,” the son said. Soon after the diagnosis, Mr. Reagan was told to give up horseback riding, one of his favorite hobbies. A strong swimmer in his youth — credited with 77 rescues as a lifeguard in Illinois — he now had to wear water wings while a nurse and security agent propped him up in the shallow end of a pool at home. He picked up magnolia leaves that fell from an overhanging tree or that a security agent tossed his way. As the fog of Alzheimer’s thickened, the father no longer recognized the son. In his last months, Mr. Reagan held court from a hospital bed in his den, uncomplaining and gently agreeable. By this time he looked younger; his face had lost many of its worry lines and wrinkles. But as he stopped eating and drinking and his kidneys failed, Mr. Reagan lost the decade-long battle with Alzheimer’s and died on June 5, 2004. Alzheimer’s hereditary patterns are not precisely known. Ron Reagan said he is aware that he is at risk for the disease. But he has not had genetic tests for it, and has not been asked or volunteered to take part in any study of the family history of Alzheimer’s.Dwarfism is NOT a Pain In the Ass: Costco Shopping at 4′ With Kids Normally, I just fly through my life not thinking of my size. Afterall, my size does not define me. I am a mother, sister, cousin, niece, friend, artist, advisor, parent, activist, meddler, peddler, dishwasher, taxi driver, peace maker, marketer, public servant, etc. All the things that define you, define me. Your size, color, ethnicity does not define you. It is a part of you as it is for me. And there are moments when I’m flying through my days to get things done when I think of other people. Today it was the Parents of Little People. I thought, “Look! I do all this at my size.” But, then I thought, do I really need to point out some boring trip to Costco? Well, someone just put the stakes on the table when they said dwarfism is a pain in the ass. Uh, have you ever had kids, a spouse, and a household to run? Yeah, don’t tell me about dwarfism being a pain in the ass. It’s friggin’ 96 degrees and I’m running through Costco with kids and not complaining about my life. I’m just doing it because I ran out of Mexican Shredded Cheese and kids need quesadillas!!! Here’s the cool thing about life: someone is always going to be there to help you or you’re going to figure it out for yourself. On my to-do list for today: go get mini-fridge from hubby to return to Costco, then get the Costco list done— with kids in 96 degree weather. Yup, totally do able. How did you get that mini-fridge that ain’t so mini to an LP into your van by yourself? Hubby just asked his co-worker to put it into the van. The cool thing about being a nice person is that nice people will do something simple like that for you. And that’s how relationships start. It also helps that I knew I would find a Costco employee gathering shopping carts in the front to get a flat cart and bring the mini-fridge to customer service. Why? Because they get paid to do that. Ask anyone. Shopping at Costco with a full list and two kids is like: I’d rather stay at home and wait for the husband to help. Well, not me. I am a mama on the go and I gotta get my list done. So, with two kids in tow, fighting every 10 minutes and stopping every 15 minutes I get my list done. I’m pulling my cart from the front because it’s easier to see and I don’t run over my kids who are walking ever so slowly because they’re fighting and trying to eat samples. I climb on edges of shelving or refrigerated areas and just grab my stuff and go. My cart is filled to the max with huge packages of toilet paper and paper towels with perishibles sweating, waiting to get home. It’s almost dinnertime and it dawns on me. CRAP! I need to feed the family. I start thinking in my Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, mode. Every mom does. I ran out of the yummy chicken I made in the crock-pot last night. Darn, Plan A out the window. Plan B: I have left over brown rice and some pasta I made. BINGO! Costco rotisserie chicken is not the best thing in the world, but my Plan C was to feed them Costco hotdogs and pizza. At least, I’m not feeding them frosting, right? I get my chicken, cart, and children to the cashier and go. They even had someone bring the cart to the exit to hand off to another cart guy to bring my stuff to the car and load it in. Cha-ching! Morals of the story: Be nice and people will be nice to you. Be attentive and think ahead. Always have a plan or four. Last, and this is key: Shop at places with awesome customer service and accessibility like Costco. It’s no wonder they are one of the Top 25 Companies To Work For. And when I got home, all four of us, kids included, helped unload and put away the groceries. That is what you call teamwork and family. The only dwarf moment: I sat in my son’s Ikea armchair and realized even with my achon butt, I can fit into it quite nicely without my legs dangling. I just hope it doesn’t break. 😀On In-Camera VFX, Building the Tesseract, and What a Black Hole Really Looks Like On Sunday, Interstellar won the BAFTA award for best visual effects, an award presented — fittingly as it turned out — by Dr. Stephen Hawking. Hawking’s longtime friend Dr. Kip Thorne, a renowned astrophysicist famous for his work on black holes and wormholes, was an executive producer on Interstellar, and worked with the team at Double Negative to create the scientifically accurate images in the film. The BAFTA winners, who also have received Oscar nominations for best visual effects, include overall VFX supervisor Paul J. Franklin who helped found Double Negative in 1998; Andrew Lockley, visual effects supervisor at Double Negative, Ian Hunter, a co-founder of New Deal Studios, which provided miniatures for the film; and special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher. Written and directed by Chris Nolan, the Paramount Pictures production has five Oscar nominations in all. It received the AFI Movie of the Year award and has earned $664 million at the worldwide box office. In Interstellar, a scientist named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) leaves our galaxy by traveling through a wormhole to find an inhabitable planet for people on the dying earth. The exploration takes him onto planets with extreme weather, near a black hole, and, in the film’s climax, into a four-dimensional tesseract, a time-space continuum, to communicate across, well, time and space. “The visuals alone are worth it,” writes film critic Christopher Orr in The Atlantic. The violent whirling of a dust-hurricane on Earth; the crash of a mile-high tidal wave on a distant world; the quiet, deep-space beauty of a black hole ringed by a glowing accretion disc.” We spoke with Paul Franklin about the film, the fifth film on which he has collaborated with Nolan during the past 12 years. The collaboration has resulted in two BAFTA awards (Interstellar, Inception), five BAFTA nominations, one Oscar (Inception), and three Oscar nominations for best visual effects. StudioDaily: Why do you think your peers voted last month for an Oscar nomination for Interstellar? Paul J. Franklin: I hope they responded to the quality of the work and the way it supports the story. One thing that stands out is our use of physical miniatures, which is part of our philosophy to get as much as possible in front of the camera. Our original expectation was that we’d have more on the digital side for space travel, but in the end, 95 percent of the space shots used New Deal’s miniatures. If you’re going to make a science fiction film with space travel, miniatures are a great way to go. The other thing that stands out is the work we did to create the black hole. We collaborated with Kip Thorne, our scientific adviser, who became an adviser throughout the film. Our philosophy for every aspect of the film was that it was all based on or inspired by scientific theory. Kip was our guardian of scientific truth. He would vet all the ideas in the script. Did DNeg do all the digital visual effects? Yes. As with Inception, Chris [Nolan] asked me to be overall supervisor. He was keen to keep all the work in one place. He likes to have one person directly responsible for the work to simplify the process. He brings DNeg departments inside the production itself. He says it’s like the past when visual effects artists worked for the production rather than independently. He likes that close collaboration. Inception worked out really well, so we’ve continued that since then. How many visual effects shots were there? We completed 700 digital post-produced finals for the film. Of those, 620 were fully IMAX, the rest anamorphic. We used a resolution of 5600 x 4000 lines. We also created in-camera visual effects work for another 150 shots. So, 850 shots. I think New Deal had about 150 shots with miniatures. What do you mean by “in-camera visual effects?” We used in-camera projection; we re-invented the front projection process. When you see something outside the spaceship, it was on stage. We created the images up front and projected them with digital projectors. The actors could see the images. We wrapped a big screen, 30 feet by 300 feet, around the main set of the Endurance [spacecraft], which we built on stage 30 at Sony in Culver City. It had windows on one side. We could project an image anywhere on the screen within reason. We also had two small spacecraft with wrap-around screens; three sets. The sets had more in common with flight simulators than greenscreen sets. The people at DNeg in London created libraries of images, and rendered images of the black hole overnight, that we’d download first thing in the morning [in California]. The content creation process ran around the clock for about three months — Chris [Nolan] pushed me pretty hard to get the imagery. Andy [Lockley] and I had workstations on the stage and created new content during the day. We would adjust the images sometimes only moments before filming. Our key reference was the video Commander Chris Hadfield made onboard the International Space Station to David Bowie’s "Space Oddity." He’s against the observation window and you see the Earth outside. It’s blown out. We wanted that look. The company Background Images set up Barco projectors designed for live performances like rock concerts because they were robust enough to move around. We projected the images on an axis along the same line as the camera. We built a custom cage for the projectors and moved them with a forklift truck that had a 100-foot reach. Because we needed high luminance in the imagery to make it feel like available light photography, we converged two images to increase the exposure. The guys from Background Images told me it usually takes two to three days to set up the projectors. I explained this to Chris. He said, “I’ll give you a maximum of 20 minutes between set-ups.” And they did it. We got between 150 and 170 shots that needed no additional post-production. And the actors had stuff to look at. Tell us about creating the black hole imagery. It was an eye opener. In the beginning of pre-production, we thought we’d look at scientific ideas, talk to Kip, make concept paintings, and the visual effects crew would make images. Instead we approached it from the viewpoint of how could we put physics and math into it and make it real. The gravity of the black hole is so intense it warps the space around it so a light ray passing through this region of space gets bent. The physics for how it warps space is well understood because Kip and Stephen Hawking worked it out in the 60’s and 70’s. Kip gave us formulaic versions of Einstein’s equation to produce light traveling around the black hole. Our simulation of the black hole revealed extraordinary detail that Kip tells us has never been seen before. No one has needed to do this before – to fly a spacecraft toward a black hole. Scientists had been doing very specific simulations of limited aspect. The demands of the story gave us a different viewpoint, and we revealed things in the light travelling past the gravitational lens around a black hole that had never been seen before. Obviously, it’s a visual effect. We designed colors and exposure. But what we see is what physics tells us we should. Kip worked with our team to implement a renderer that met the demands of IMAX images. It took a long time to create that gravitational renderer, the DNGR, and we continued refining it. What does DNGR stand for? Double Negative General Relativity. We’re about to publish a paper with Kip Thorne for the Journal of Classical and Quantum Gravity. [“Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the movie Interstellar” by Oliver James, Eugénie von Tunzelmann, Paul Franklin and Kip Thorne; provisionally scheduled for February 2015. See a sample at DNeg's website.] What is the idea behind the tesseract in Murph’s bedroom? Chris Nolan said we needed to create a space where Cooper could navigate up and down the timelines of history and find specific moments of time. A brilliant concept. But we didn’t know what that looked like. We spent months of research and experimentation with the visual effects team. It’s the embodiment of the theory that every piece of matter in the universe leaves a trail of matter behind it in time. It comes from the idea of the world line in physics. The tesseract is a visualization of all the world lines, all the objects in Murph’s bedroom in an infinite lattice. Where they intersect there is a 3D image. Each of these separate versions of the room represents successive moments in time. Cooper could insert a message into the past by pushing on the world lines. When we showed this to Chris, he said it would be really great if we could build it partly as a physical set, so that added a level of challenge. How did you create the tesseract? When you look at the sequence, you see rooms connected by timelines. We built one section of the tesseract approximately 60 by 100 feet long by 60 feet high. If you look one way, you see the bookshelf. The other way is a wall with a window. The timelines were extruded objects – objects in the room stretched out into long tubes. The books streaming up and down from the shelves were a solid object. By the time they shot the tesseract, we were confident of the projection process. We carefully lined up 16 projectors that ran simultaneously to project onto one part of the physical set. When Cooper looks out the window he sees horizontal trails, blurs of texture. We created those images and projected them on set. We also wanted to show information along the world lines that connect different moments, to show stuff moving along these things like film strips in and out of the room. We built the timelines out of wood, medium-density fibreboard and plaster. They had a surface color and CG textures pasted onto them. We gave the art department images that we’d created and printed to make streaked timelines. Then we projected animated images on top of these long thin surfaces. We also projected images onto the bookshelf wall, too, but mostly just onto the timelines. Matthew [McConaughey] was on a wire rig floating around in front of the projectors. The grips did a brilliant job moving him off the images. Obviously, we had to paint out his wire rig later. We didn’t do the complete tesseract with projections, only part of the set. But it gave us the basis in photographic reality. There were moments that were entirely CG, but it all takes its lead from photography. Any other visual effects you want to highlight? The ocean wave. I had an amazing level of control that allowed me to design and create specific forms, to create 4000-foot waves in specific ways, yet that looked compellingly real. We hit a sweet spot in animation techniques and have a detailed, amazing simulation of a water surface that swept the spacecraft away. What did you learn from working on this film? With the right people and the right approach, you can make extraordinary things. I’ve always felt there was no limit to the imagery we can create. This film refined my approach to making visual effects, which is always to think about what is the value of the image, what is the story you’re trying to tell, and then to find a way to make the image. With front projection, it was possible to design the visual effect simultaneously with the production of the film rather than pushing it off into post-production. It’s virtual production that doesn’t ignore what we’ve learned over the past 100 years of filmmaking, all that physical reality developed over the last century. We brought the visual effects world, which has developed separately from the physical, onto the set and had it be part of the filmmaking process. By bringing visual effects forward during the production cycle, the creative collaboration has a direct impact on the film. And we made design decisions by what was shot on the set, so it was one completely integrated whole. Does the film push the state of the art of visual effects? Every year what impresses me most is not the advances in technology, it’s the advancements in technique. The skills of the artists get better and better every year. When you look at the work in Interstellar, the integrity of compositing, the design of shots — everything has gone much further than in the past. In terms of technology, DNGR is a major achievement to visualize black holes and wormholes in extraordinary detail and produce something visually compelling. At the premiere of the film in London, Kip Thorne brought Stephen Hawking along as his date, so we all got to meet him. That typifies the relationship between art and science, which is at the heart of the visual effects work on Interstellar. Tell us about the other nominees. Andrew Lockley is one of my longest standing collaborators. He was a compositor on my first credit. My background is 3D CG. He brings a fantastic in-depth understanding of compositing. Ian Hunter, who was in charge of our miniatures, has been working with Chris Nolan since The Dark Knight, and our relationship goes back to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and before that, to DNeg’s first project in 1998, Pitch Black. And of course Ian has a regular team we’ve been working with for 15 years. Scott Fisher, our special effects supervisor, is another long-standing member of the Chris Nolan team. He was on Dark Knight Rises and Inception. He brought a fantastic in-depth understanding of mechanical engineering to the big gimbaled sets and the two robots. The robots were, for the most part, cleverly engineered physical devices puppeteered by Bill Irwin. The dialog between Matthew and TARS [the robot] was adlibbed and recorded on set; production sound. It wouldn’t have happened without TARS on set. We only used a bit of CG when the robot turns into a pinwheel and splashes through the water. It’s interesting that the same group has worked together on many Chris Nolan films. It’s my fifth film with Chris Nolan [and] my 12th year working with him. It’s the defining creative relationship of my career. He is the most extraordinarily surprising individual. He’s constantly thinking of new ideas. Chris pushes us, never lets us rest on our laurels, never lets us get away with unsupported assumptions. Do you have another Nolan film in your future? I have no idea. He never shares that with us. When we finished The Dark Knight Rises [in 2012], Chris mentioned that he was thinking about a new film. The farthest thing from my mind was black holes and visualizing time. Right now, I’m helping out on some other DNeg shows. I was away from home for over a year making Interstellar.Toronto homebuyers should not expect the frantic pace and blistering prices of the housing market to continue, warns the head of the Bank of Canada. “Prospective homebuyers and their lenders should not extrapolate recent real estate performance into the future when contemplating a transaction,” Stephen Poloz said Thursday with the release of the bank’s semi-annual financial system review. The Bank of Canada is warning that the possibility of a sharp correction in real estate prices has increased in rapidly growing markets like Vancouver and Toronto ( Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star ) It was a caution to consumers not to get caught up in the frenzied market conditions that see many GTA homebuyers bidding tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, over list prices as demand continues to outstrip the supply of housing, particularly detached and semi-detached homes. Poloz’s authority adds to a growing chorus of concern from banks and housing experts about the sustainability of the country’s two hottest housing markets in Toronto and Vancouver. The caution came a day after Finance Minister Bill Morneau said Ottawa was conducting an in-depth examination of the country’s real estate markets to determine whether further safeguards are needed to ensure Canadians can still afford housing in the event of an interest rate rise or other economic changes. Article Continued Below There’s a growing risk of a sharp correction in Vancouver and Toronto, while many households are facing other financial stresses, including climbing debt, said the central bank’s report. The document said Vancouver house prices in May were 30 per cent higher than a year ago. In Toronto, May prices were 15 per cent higher than a year ago. Some of that is due to foreign real estate buyers who see Canadian real estate is as a relatively safe investment. Morneau didn’t specify the kinds of measures the government might consider to cool down over-heated markets like Toronto and he didn’t say when Ottawa might act. But he promised a “deep dive” into those areas to determine whether steps such as more changes to the mortgage and amortization rules are warranted. That’s the right approach, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association. “Having evidence-based policies and policy measures is the way to go,” said Gregory Klump, the association’s chief economist. “There are lots of anecdotes out there but if they were drops of water we’d all be drowning in them at this point,” he said. Article Continued Below While foreign investment hasn’t driven Toronto housing prices to the same degree as Vancouver, nobody really knows how big a factor off-shore buyers are in either city. “With the government’s efforts to get to the bottom of that we’ll have some better information on that toward the end of the year we hope,” said Klump. Ottawa has already shown some creativity in changing the mortgage regulations, he said. The most recent change in February raised the minimum down payment on homes over $500,000 from 5 per cent to 10 per cent on new mortgages for a CMHC-insured loan. But that had little impact on rising prices. Before that the government cut amortization rates on insured mortgages twice: from 35 years to 30 in 2011 and then from 30 to 25 in 2012. But changing the mortgage rules is a broad measure, said Klump. “When they’re targeting Vancouver and Toronto they recognize it may result in collateral damage in other markets where they don’t need cooling, such as Calgary. They’re already seeing some challenging conditions,” he said. The last set of changes didn’t tamp down prices because many of the affected buyers were move-up homeowners in the $500,000 to $1 million range, said BMO senior economist Robert Kavcic. Most had equity from a previous home. “Even then, if somebody was forced to add a few percentage points to their down payment, in a lot of cases, it wasn’t too hard to find alternate sources of financing just to jump that hurdle,” he said. In the end, it’s the monthly housing payment that influences buying decisions so there was a more significant impact when the government cut amortization periods for uninsured mortgages, said Kavcic. “It had a noticeable shifting around of sales before and after the rule change which is a pretty good indicator that it was having an impact on the market,” said Kavcic. Move-up buyers with 20 per cent or more down can still get a 30-year amortization. “If they were to remove that 30-year (amortization) altogether that’s something that would probably have a bigger impact than that small change in down payment rules,” he said. The Toronto Real Estate Board has suggested that the Toronto land transfer tax has discouraged some homeowners from listing their properties for sale. But the provincial growth targets that have discouraged new home building in the GTA is probably a bigger factor, said Kavcic. “We’ve seen next to no new single detached construction. It’s all been condos. Last year we saw the smallest number of single, detached (home) completions in 20 or 30 years.” - with files from Canadian Press Read more about:There was a time—long, long ago—when the Republican Party was afraid of Donald Trump, but it truly loathed Ted Cruz. They hated him. They couldn’t stand him. They might have thought Trump was a huckster, they might have thought he didn’t have any idea what he was doing, and they might have thought he was a bigot, but at least he wasn’t as insufferable as Ted Cruz, the man who had gone out of his way to wreck the party’s plans in Congress, and had called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar. Forced to choose, party elders tended to shudder and lean Trump. Lindsey Graham was particularly piquant in his criticism. He was very clear he didn’t like Cruz, who he said was no better than Trump and whom he accused of McCarthyism. He cracked, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.” A lot can change in a couple weeks. Graham made his joke about murdering Cruz way back on February 26, which makes it all the more surprising to hear from the South Carolina senator these days. “I can work with Ted Cruz,” Graham said. “I know what I’m getting with Ted Cruz.” That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it’s something. Graham may be the most prominent Republican coming around on Cruz, but he’s not the only one. One implication of the “#NeverTrump” movement is that anyone is more acceptable—especially Cruz, who is at least a Republican. On Tuesday night, on the eve of his state’s primary, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant announced his endorsement of Cruz. It’s telling that at this late stage in the campaign Cruz still hasn’t received the blessing of a single sitting member of the body in which he serves. The shift, however tentative and awkward and pained, by Republican officeholders toward Cruz is something to behold, nearly as surprising as Trump’s own collection of a few establishment backers.Last summer Google gathered a bunch of leet security researchers as its Project Zero team and instructed them to find unusual zero-day flaws. They've had plenty of success on the software front – but on Monday announced a hardware hack that's a real doozy. The technique, dubbed "rowhammer", rapidly writes and rewrites memory to force capacitor errors in DRAM, which can be exploited to gain control of the system. By repeatedly recharging one line of RAM cells, bits in an adjacent line can be altered, thus corrupting the data stored. This corruption can lead to the wrong instructions being executed, or control structures that govern how memory is assigned to programs being altered – the latter case can be used by a normal program to gain kernel-level privileges. The Project Zero team has now built two working exploits that successfully hijack control of many x86 computers running Linux, and say they could do the same with other operating systems. The proof-of-concept exploit code flips bits in RAM to alter the page tables for a process, allowing an attacker to gain access to all physical RAM including the kernel's. From this point, memory protection mechanisms and other security measures can be bypassed, and structures within the operating system tampered with to take over the machine. "One exploit uses rowhammer-induced bit flips to gain kernel privileges on x86-64 Linux when run as an unprivileged userland process," the team reports. "When run on a machine vulnerable to the rowhammer problem, the process was able to induce bit flips in page table entries (PTEs). It was able to use this to gain write access to its own page table, and hence gain read-write access to all of physical memory." The team tested the exploit on 29 x86 laptops built between 2010 and 2014 and using DDR3 DRAM. In 15 cases the team could successfully subvert the systems in minutes, and found DRAM made by a variety of memory manufacturers
the possibility they might be people of goodwill. In this instance, we are depending on the kindness of a known adversary, and that requires a special kind of steely determination and constructive skepticism that only a bipartisan U.S. foreign-policy initiative can really bring to bear. When the likes of Cotton and Boehner willfully abrogate their responsibilities in that regard, they may think they are striking out at the president, but in reality they are putting their country at ever greater risk. ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty ImagesKawasaki just released information on a few of its 2013 models including the ZX-10R ABS/ZX-10R, new Ninja 650 ABS, Ninja 650, KLR650 and KLX250S. Not much has changed on these models, but a couple of key updates are worth mentioning. Ninja 650 ABS/Ninja 650 The popular Ninja 650 ($7599), which was just freshened up last year, gets anti-lock brakes as a $500 option for 2013. The ABS works on the same pair of 300mm petal-shaped rotors pinched by twin-piston calipers up front and a 220mm disc/single-piston caliper out back. Beyond the ABS option, however, the 649cc parallel-Twin-powered middleweight sportbike is identical to the 2012 model. Available colors include Pearl Stardust White, Candy Thunder Blue and Metallic Flat Spark Black. Ninja ZX-10R ABS/Ninja ZX-10R Kawasaki was the first of the Japanese Big Four to embrace the electronic rider-aid revolution with its S-KTRC traction-control system on the ZX-10R in 2011, so it’s no surprise that the company has further enhanced its flagship superbike with additional electronic features. For 2013, the 10R is fitted with an Öhlins electronic steering damper controlled by a dedicated ECU. This electronic control unit reacts to the rate of acceleration, deceleration and rear-wheel speed to alter damping force in the twin-tube unit, providing light steering response at low speeds and well-damped stability at high speeds. As before, the 10R is available with ABS ($15,299) or without (for $1000 less) in either Lime Green/Metallic Spark Black or the new Pearl Flat White/Metallic Spark Black paint schemes. Also returning for ’13 are the KLR650 ($6499) and KLX250S ($5099) dual-purpose machines, both of which remain unchanged.The Delhi gang-rape case provoked national outrage and led to massive protests across India in December last year. (File pic) Four men have been given the death sentence for the fatal gang-rape of a young medical student on a moving Delhi bus, an attack that shocked India and ignited weeks of protests demanding better safety for women and swift justice for the 23-year-old who was killed.One of the men, Vinay Sharma, broke down in tears as the sentence was announced. Along with Akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta and Mukesh Singh, he was sentenced to death by hanging at a fast-track court in Delhi today. ( The four men who have been given the death sentence Judge Yogesh Khanna said the student was "tortured till the very end" and that the case fell into the "rarest of rare category", which justified capital punishment.The student's parents have repeatedly demanded the death sentence for those who killed their daughter. "We are very happy. Justice has been delivered," said the father of the student after the verdict was announced today. "They did not spare her. Why should they be shown any mercy?" he had said after the men were convicted on Wednesday. " ( Delhi gang-rape: 4 convicts get death; we are happy, says girl's father ) Defence lawyer AP Singh dramatically wiped tears away as he told reporters that the verdict has been influenced by public and political pressure.The woman and her male friend were lured onto a bus on December 16 after they left a mall where they had watched a film.As the bus drove through South Delhi, passing through three police check points, the men hit the student's friend with iron rods before using them to violate her. 45 minutes later, the couple was thrown naked and semi-conscious on the road.The young woman died in hospital in Singapore two weeks after the attack.For days, thousands of demonstrators marched in different cities, forcing the government to introduce tougher laws to punish sexual offences; special courts to try rape cases quickly were also sanctioned. Of the six men who were arrested, the alleged ring leader was found hanging in his prison cell in March. Another, who was 17 at the time of the attack, was convicted by a juvenile court last month and sentenced to three years in a reform centre.People have been asking me to comment about Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account being hacked. I've already written about the security problems with "secret questions" back in 2005: The point of all these questions is the same: a backup password. If you forget your password, the secret question can verify your identity so you can choose another password or have the site e-mail your current password to you. It's a great idea from a customer service perspective -- a user is less likely to forget his first pet's name than some random password -- but terrible for security. The answer to the secret question is much easier to guess than a good password, and the information is much more public. (I'll bet the name of my family's first pet is in some database somewhere.) And even worse, everybody seems to use the same series of secret questions. The result is the normal security protocol (passwords) falls back to a much less secure protocol (secret questions). And the security of the entire system suffers.ABOVE: A local musician will find out how some social assistance recipients try to live only on welfare income. Tanya Beja has the story. VANCOUVER — Bif Naked is taking on the Raise the Rates’ Third Annual Food Challenge. The event aims to highlight the inadequacies of welfare rates in the province, according to its website. A single person in B.C. receives $610 a month, a rate which has remained stagnant for the past seven years. “I’m getting tired of telling people the same message,” said Fraser, a man who has lived on welfare for the past three years. “Living on basic welfare…is practically impossible. You’re made to feel degraded. You’re light-headed. Your health is an issue.” Bif Naked is attempting to live on $3 a day, she says, which is the money left over once rent and other living expenses are deducted from the monthly payments. Raise the Rates – the organization behind the challenge – provides the following chart which describes where the sum of $21 a week for food comes from: Why $21 for a Week’s food Total welfare $610 Rent (realistic rent for an SRO)* $450 Room damage deposit $20 Book of 10 bus tickets (to look for work) $21 Cell phone (to look for work) $25 Personal hygiene/laundry $10 Total of all non-food expenditures $526 What’s left for food $84 “We cannot possibly understand or really comprehend how difficult it is and how disempowering it would be, or how disillusioned a person might get, if they really had to eat on $3 a day,” Bif Naked said at a press conference today. “$21 a week – that’s a reality. It’s not a joke.” The challenge – for those not on welfare – starts on October 16, World Food Day. All British Columbians are invited to eat only what they can purchase with the money welfare recipients receive for one week. WATCH: Bif Naked tells BC1 why she is participating in the 3rd Annual Welfare Food ChallengeTogether Again With Together Again, Jesse Hassenger looks at actors and directors who have worked together on at least three films, analyzing the nature of their collaborations. About 80 percent of the way through the 2006 Martin Scorsese picture The Departed, Leonardo DiCaprio’s William Costigan, the ostensible hero of the film who’s gone under deep, secretive cover in the Boston mob, gets abruptly shot in the head. He dies without glory and before he has a chance to take down his bad-guy reflection (Matt Damon), the mob associate who has infiltrated the Boston State Police. In the world of the movie, full of tightening screws and ruthless violence, this makes sense. In the world of movies in general, however, it feels all wrong. DiCaprio is one of the biggest movie stars to emerge in the past 25 years, and his exit from The Departed is not a movie-star death. In fact, other recent stars of DiCaprio’s magnitude rarely die on screen at all; if Will Smith or Tom Cruise is going to buy it on screen, their deaths will be noble, sacrificial, or nobly sacrificial. (Even more likely, though, they’ll be saved at the last minute; Cruise in particular has gained notoriety for rarely dying on screen.) None of them will be unceremoniously shot in the head by a minor character. In The Departed, Scorsese takes advantage of this jarring wrongness, and the sense that the biggest star in the movie will play someone who will be safe from the cruelest twists of fate. He uses an enormous movie star to make a gangster thriller—one that is for much of its time intense but also a lot of fun—feel dangerous, even ruthless. Advertisement In some ways, the role of William Costigan, though very much an adult, plays into DiCaprio’s notorious boyishness—that is, the face that allows him to sometimes play a full decade or more below his actual age. By most standards, Damon’s character is the more “adult” of the two. He’s the one with a nice apartment, a girlfriend, and a more pronounced ability to keep his cool—part and parcel with his clean-cut smarm. The Departed may not principally concern itself with visions of modern-day masculinity, but it certainly provides ample argument against the oft-romanticized idea of traditional masculine authority; it’s the more boyish, frazzled man who garners greater sympathy and rooting interest. While the movie may feel less personal or less thematically rich than some of Scorsese’s other gangster pictures, DiCaprio’s rawness helps make it more than a fun genre exercise. Scorsese, in turn, makes DiCaprio movies a lot more fun than some of the serious-minded stuff he does with less talented directors. (Body Of Lies and Blood Diamond don’t reward the actor’s effort with the same electricity.) DiCaprio’s willingness to plug his movie-star wattage into that electricity and still cap the role with an unceremonious death explains why he’s made such an excellent match as a late-career collaborator for the legendary director some three decades his senior. If the recently announced adaptation of The Devil In The White City comes to pass, with Scorsese directing and DiCaprio producing and starring, it will mark their sixth movie together, putting them in spitting distance of Scorsese’s eight-film run with Robert De Niro (which ended, at least for the time being, with the now 20-year-old Casino). Advertisement Though uniformly successful at the box office, the run of Gangs Of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006), Shutter Island (2010), and The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013) has yet to attain the same mythic cachet in its time as Scorsese’s collaboration with his previous and similarly named muse, Robert De Niro. The Scorsese/De Niro partnership galvanized audiences with the physical and psychological transformations of movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull; it’s safe to say that Scorsese/DiCaprio movies, while usually in receipt of good critical notices, are not quite so well-regarded. Despite his working-actor patterns over the last 25 years, De Niro is a living legend. DiCaprio and other members of his generation aren’t as flinty, steely, or rough-hewn as their ’70s cinema counterparts (a sentiment most recently echoed by Anne Hathaway, playing the mouthpiece of Nancy Meyers in The Intern, also starring De Niro). DiCaprio in particular has the kind of youthful good looks that can contribute to a sense that the star who has helped Scorsese become a more bankable director is a sort of pretender to De Niro’s throne—the kid who slipped in while the real star was out using the restroom and/or making dopey comedies, and now refuses to leave the table despite not having a character as indelible as Travis Bickle up his sleeve. A rivalry probably doesn’t exist between the actors themselves; De Niro actually introduced Scorsese to his This Boy’s Life co-star, and the three even made a short film together, in which the two actors apparently jockey for the same role for the director. Nonetheless, it’s easy to imagine Scorsese’s peer De Niro doubling as his id up there on screen; less so with the younger, softer DiCaprio. Yet the DiCaprio/Scorsese relationship has become enormously productive for both artists, helping to define both of their careers for over a decade and, as such, becoming a vital part of Scorsese’s development as an artist. Though it would be easy to read their frequent reteaming as an ongoing mentorship, they’re actually mutually beneficial: DiCaprio expands Scorsese’s palette, while Scorsese applies his personal signature to the kinds of big, serious, adult-minded movies DiCaprio actively pursues. This may sound suspiciously like compromise, especially when movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull feel torn straight from the filmmaker’s soul, regardless of their actual origins. (Bull, for example, being a project De Niro brought to his friend and collaborator during a particularly dark period in Scorsese’s life, just as DiCaprio has approached Scorsese in less tumultuous times.) But Scorsese’s late-period breaks from dream projects have represented some of his best and most varied work; none of his recent films are as spectacularly misguided as, say, New York, New York, a fascinating and worthwhile Scorsese/De Niro folly that’s nonetheless kind of unpleasant to actually watch. Advertisement Scorsese and DiCaprio came closest to this kind of fever-dream madness in their first film together, 2002’s Gangs Of New York, in which a late-20s DiCaprio (then returning to movie screens after a nearly three-year absence, with films by Scorsese and Spielberg in near-simultaneous release) was soundly and roundly overshadowed by Daniel Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis made an even more dramatic return (five years gone) with a far showier part; he plays Bill The Butcher, the nativist gang leader who murdered the father of Amsterdam Vallon (DiCaprio). Much of the 1860s-set movie, nominally about Vallon seeking revenge, often finds the younger actor standing off to the side, observing and seething as Day-Lewis does his thing, which here involves wearing a top hat and speaking with a transfixing early mid-Atlantic accent. Day-Lewis isn’t the only element of Gangs Of New York that overwhelms DiCaprio’s scrappy, slightly outmatched performance. The whole movie is a glorious sprawl, a breathless history of 1860s New York City that rolls together Tammany Hall corruption, pulpy clashes, bloody racial divisions, and the resulting Civil War draft riots that eventually overtake the final showdown between Vallon and Bill. DiCaprio’s way into the movie’s vast ambition turns out to be the possibly Harvey Weinstein-mandated narration that lays out the specifics and relationships of the movie’s setting. In the annals of Scorsese narration tracks, DiCaprio does a more workmanlike job than, say, Ray Liotta in Goodfellas; the color comes from the content of what he’s explaining (which is often fascinating) more than his delivery of that explanation. In keeping with the rest of his performance, he serves the movie steadily, without Day-Lewis’s crucial flourishes. Advertisement In retrospect, this reticence is an odd quality for DiCaprio, because he has a reputation for telegraphing his hardest work—for sweating out demonstrative performances that lack the effortlessness of the all-time greats. But it’s not always bad to see an actor sweat a little, and Scorsese has harnessed that striving quality in DiCaprio better than almost any other director and physicalized it, too. His transformations aren’t as impressive as the ol’ De Niro weight gain in Raging Bull, but Scorsese’s intensity has a way of fraying at DiCaprio’s default seriousness, rendering it both more vivid and more vulnerable. In The Departed, DiCaprio plays his ragged, ever-increasing paranoia to the hilt, with the kind of hair-trigger desperation usually associated with actual underworld types, not a good guy pretending to be bad. He’s very much a “rat in a maze,” a description later applied to his character in Shutter Island, which also puts him through the wringer with a Boston accent. Scenes in the second half of The Departed between DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson’s kingpin have both characters playing more paranoid and vulnerable than they appear early on, and Scorsese uses Nicholson’s unhinged persona masterfully opposite his younger, more workmanlike costar. In these passages, Nicholson plays a cracked reflection of what life under constant scrutiny of cops and crooks might look like, while DiCaprio stays rooted in the moment, holding the center (if only sometimes by his fingernails) in a way he doesn’t opposite Day-Lewis. Even seconds before his final fate is decided in that heartbreaking death scene, his Costigan never appears beyond help. Advertisement The Departed comes closer than any of the pair’s other films to one of Scorsese’s past gangster classics, though it’s markedly different from the far more similar Goodfellas and Casino (and great as those are, none of the DiCaprio films are as similar to each other as those two). Their other crime movies go further afield: Gangs Of New York views crime through a historical lens, while in The Wolf Of Wall Street, the gangsters aren’t technically underworld types at all. Nonetheless, DiCaprio shows the strains of swagger maintenance on financial hustler Jordan Belfort, who’s not pretending to be bad (he just is) but can’t stop selling himself and his ridiculous lifestyle. As the movie goes on, Belfort seems to run on fumes at times, but never quite runs out of them; his smooth talk itself is less impressive than its relentlessness. Again DiCaprio echoes Liotta in Goodfellas, except instead of engagingly explaining how this criminal enterprise works—several times he interrupts his own analysis—he goes straight to the cocaine bender. In one of the best moments of DiCaprio’s career, Belfort sets out to deliver a farewell address to his firm of Stratton Oakmont, in order to lay low and avoid possible jail time… before working himself into a defiant froth, deciding in the moment that he will not step down. The interplay between DiCaprio’s movie-star charisma, his sweaty effort, and Scorsese’s restless camera (panning across Belfort’s adoring audience) gives the scene its charge. Unlike Liotta, DiCaprio has the aura of a man who could will himself to succeed. This quality is also distinct from De Niro, who often plays characters who, if anything, will themselves to fail—whose success, when it happens, prompts questions of whether it’s some kind of hallucination or cosmic joke (as with Taxi Driver and its companion, The King Of Comedy). Advertisement There’s a source for DiCaprio’s swagger; Titanic turned him into a major movie star at a young age. The movies he made immediately after Titanic, while often shepherded by strong directors, played on his youthful charm: the excitable backpacker of Danny Boyle’s The Beach and the self-satirizing enfant terrible of Woody Allen’s Celebrity. He’s good in both of them, but better assays those qualities when Scorsese capitalizes on his energy in The Aviator, the Howard Hughes biopic that worked so successfully as Oscar bait (Scorsese didn’t win, but Cate Blanchett did, along with the editing, cinematography, costumes, and art direction) that it’s easy to overlook how damn good it is. Among many lovely technical touches, Scorsese pays homage to its period’s filmmaking with an imitation of early color techniques that leaves the first half of the movie bathed in rich blues (and, secondarily, reds). Though it’s meant principally to reflect the time period and ambitions of Hughes, the color scheme also fits with the movie’s star; much of the first half of the film looks like it’s taking place inside DiCaprio’s blue eyes. He’s doing his best to imitate Hughes, but the character comes out plenty Leo, with his jabby hand gestures and lanky posture—he lends Hughes some of his contemporary star power, and that accompanying will to succeed. Advertisement This probably isn’t a role that De Niro could have played for Scorsese, even in his youth; hell, it’s not even a movie Scorsese would have likely made at all without DiCaprio, who brought him aboard to replace Michael Mann. This is not an uncommon setup to their post-Gangs work together, positioning Scorsese as more of a talent for hire than he had appeared in the past. The Aviator’s evocations of Old Hollywood glamour are reflected, in a way, by the star-packed cops-and-robbers thrills of The Departed and especially the genre-heavy Shutter Island, which filters older horror movies and film noir through Scorsese’s immediacy. Speculation about filmmakers’ motivations can be a fool’s game, but sometimes it seems that if left to his own devices, Scorsese would spend even more of his time struggling to make passion projects like The Last Temptation Of Christ or the upcoming Silence. DiCaprio, then, steers Scorsese into the kind of adult-targeted mainstream studio filmmaking that supposedly doesn’t happen much anymore. These newer Scorsese movies aren’t as hard-edged as his De Niro pictures, it’s true, but they often allow Scorsese to indulge a cinematic lushness worthy of the star so often at the center. Here’s a dirty secret about the ’70s movie brats: Having established their voices, they’ve often proven capable of terrific for-hire work. If DiCaprio is goading Scorsese into mainstream filmmaking, it’s because he goes after legacy movies with impressive consistency. He isn’t alone in these pursuits; a moment of appreciation, please, for the superstars like DiCaprio, his Departed co-star Matt Damon, and their Departed producer Brad Pitt, who steadfastly work with strong directors and rarely do sequels not directed by Steven Soderbergh. Some of these guys also get to share a certain sort of nostalgic ire; though the former teen idol tends to get it worse, there have been countless essays and quasi-think pieces over the years about a contemporary dearth of real leading men. Sometimes this is framed as a national import/export crisis (why are all of the superheroes played by Brits?); sometimes it is framed as a generational shortfall (DiCaprio, Damon, and Ben Affleck don’t look weathered enough from all their soft, pampered living!); and sometimes it’s looked at from a business perspective (Will Smith was the last real movie star and now he’s done). What these arguments have in common is their inherent conservatism—their implication that, for whatever various reasons, things aren’t the way they used to be, and that is cause for concern, or at least a backward-looking lament. Advertisement It’s more than a little absurd. Today’s leading men look more boyish in part because people live longer and (on average) subject themselves to fewer direct poisons than they did 40 or 50 years ago. They also reflect a culture at least somewhat less in the thrall of masculinity, perhaps the inevitable comedown of the cartoonish apex on-screen masculinity reached with pumped-up ’80s action heroes like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. There may be a certain vanity in the way Tom Cruise’s forever-young vibe has become aspirational, and DiCaprio feeds into that by playing so much younger in Wolf Of Wall Street, where he has several scenes as a twentysomething, filmed when he was closing in on 40. But he has no trouble roughing himself up, subjecting himself to Scorsese’s various wringers. (Even his winning Howard Hughes succumbs to mental illness by the end.) DiCaprio has time for plenty more wringers; if current trends are any indication, he’ll probably act well into old age. The likes of Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart were semi-retired for the last two decades of their respective lives, while current seventysomething stars like Al Pacino and De Niro show no signs of easing up their schedules (and are often rewarded for their diligence with complaints about how they’re somehow not electrifying audiences the way they used to). All of this is to suggest that yes, someday Leonardo DiCaprio will probably, finally play an old man. By that point, hopefully he’ll have built up an undeniable body of work, and younger actors will be compared to him. But it shouldn’t take that long. The films of Scorsese and DiCaprio aren’t sell-out time killers on Scorsese’s way to making another gangster movie, another De Niro movie, or even another movie where he can use “Gimme Shelter” (although at least one of those will probably come to pass before his career ends). They’re the boyish, excited face of what big-studio filmmaking ought to look like. Next time: Two of Hollywood’s biggest names bring out each other’s squareness.There is trouble in Taipei. With a defense budget less than 10 percent of China’s, Taiwan has a great challenge in maintaining credible deterrence. This has fed a perception in the United States — Taiwan’s most important guarantor of security — that Taipei is insufficiently committed to its own security. Yet a portion of Taiwan’s citizenry increasingly sees defense spending as an existential sunk cost. Taiwan’s defense policy decisions must therefore be made in the context of this tricky trinity: military threat from China, pressure from the United States to do more, and calls at home to spend less. This situation demands that decision-makers in Taipei and Washington must reexamine their strategy for deterring China and evaluate how — if deterrence fails — Taiwan will defend itself. Given Taiwan’s international position, its defense strategy options must be analyzed not just in terms of efficacy but also with concern for their financial and political costs. Taiwan’s January 16 presidential election will likely bring the historically pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) candidate, Tsai Ing-Wen, to power. Twelve blue papers present the likely incoming DPP government’s defense plans, continuing current programs, strengthening legislative oversight and interagency coordination, joint dialogue with the United States, and expanding in areas like cyber and expansion of indigenous defense industries. Taiwan’s current and outgoing Kuomintang (KMT) president, Ma Ying-Jiu, has presided over a period of unprecedented economic and cultural rapprochement with China. This culminated in a recent meeting between Ma and Chinese President Xi Jinping. China may have undertaken this meeting as part of a burst of public diplomacy initiatives in Asia, but it also serves as a baseline, consolidating progress made by Ma’s government. In the future, Xi can ruefully point to this moment in time when calling the incoming administration to task for any damage to the relationship caused by its intransigence. Officially called the Republic of China (ROC), Taiwan island functions as a de facto independent country, but the People’s Republic of China (PRC) still considers it a de jure province. Recent polls in Taiwan show favor for an indefinite continuation of the status quo. Worries over how China will react to a DPP government and Xi’s recent statements that the Taiwan “issues cannot be passed on from generation to generation” make Taiwan’s defense situation more urgent. Taiwan’s defense is often framed in terms of raising costs for China and enduring assault until rescue (not so much to accommodate mobilization times, but the U.S. political decision cycle). Even if the United States is willing to use extreme strategies like blockading China, a Chinese takeover of Taiwan will likely be a fait accompli if the People’s Liberation Army achieves its objective quickly with decapitation strike, bombardment, or invasion. Beyond forestalling such an outcome, strong defense could also give Taiwan a stronger position to bargain for terms in any reunification dialogue. Under the broad umbrella terms of “credible deterrence” and “resolute defense” several distinct strategic concepts emerge. With maintaining the cross-Strait status quo as the goal, the following strategies cover both military and other elements of national power that Taiwan can use to enhance its security. Engage to Forestall This strategy supports the notion that the best defense against China is friendly cross-Strait ties. Ma’s strategy of engagement prioritized economic engagement with China and all but precluded major increases in defense spending. Ma defined Taiwan’s security in terms of three pillars: good cross-Strait relations, increased participation in the international community, and defense as the third, and some would say neglected, priority. Experts who called for a strategy that includes both engagement and an increase and reallocation of defense spending focusing on China’s weaknesses felt that defense was neglected in the Ma era. Ma’s presidency has largely pleased the People’s Republic of China, and led to an easing of cross-Strait tensions, but China’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea and obvious Taiwan-scenario military exercises serve as a reminder of its growing military strength and continued focus on Taiwan. To the extent that the people of Taiwan feel that Ma has brought them too close to China without adequate democratic process and neglected defense, the DPP provides an attractive alternative. U.S. officials initially praised Ma’s efforts to strengthen ties, but were dismayed that defense spending never reached the pledged level of 3 percent of GDP. In DPP’s blue papers Tsai has advocated increasing the defense budget to 3 percent, and castigates the KMT for misunderstanding the strategic situation. Just because Taiwan’s external environment improves, she contends, does not mean it can risk spending less on defense. The question is how China will react to her presidency. In an important speech in the United States, Tsai promised to honor the Ma administration’s agreements with China, a promise which implicitly includes the “1992 Consensus“ agreement that there is only one China. On this basis, Tsai plans to continue engagement, even while diversifying Taiwan’s economy to reduce economic dependence on China. Porcupine This strategy assumes the best defense is to prevent China from reaching Taiwan. As explained in a paper by retired U.S. Navy Commander William Murray, the porcupine strategy argues for hardening key facilities and using mobile short-range defensive weapons to deny airspace, repel an invasion, and defy a blockade. This deterrence strategy is attractive for those who aim to keep the fight for a decisive battle off-shore, as it would make Taiwan a less attractive military target. Some assume that Taipei is like Paris in 1940, in that if China successfully lands a sizeable force on Taiwan, the fight will be over because Taipei will succumb. To prevent a landing and make Taiwan into a porcupine, some defense officials in Taiwan think its armed forces should develop anti-access/area denial (A2AD) capabilities. However, with those systems under Taipei’s control, some U.S. experts fear losing control over escalation in a cross-Strait conflict. Despite these concerns, this strategy makes military sense. A missile-based defense is a particularly attractive asymmetric option, given budget constraints and the high costs of a layered defense strategy. The area 48 kilometers out, from anchorage to the beach, is the most lethal range. But, particularly when it includes long-range counter-strike missiles, something pursued by Chen Shui Bian but discontinued by Ma Jing Jiu, versions of the porcupine strategy run the risk of being more provocative to the PRC. As such, they are politically challenging to fund in Taiwan and to support in the United States. “Hard ROC” This strategy assumes the best defense for Taiwan involves showing that invasion would result in a costly, protracted struggle. With a focus on sea denial, air defense, and layered ground defense with irregular ground forces, the hard ROC strategy aims to raise the costs for China of a potential invasion. Lately the favored strategy of the outgoing Ma administration, the hard ROC strategy accepts the possibility that the decisive battle for Taiwan’s fate may take place on land, once PLA forces have hit the beaches. It eschews some offensive platforms such as long-range counter-strike missiles (which is received more favorably in Beijing) in favor of a layered defense and hardening of key facilities. Pursuing this strategy could include expanding reserve forces, which could have long-term benefits for Taiwan’s civil-military relations and support for defense spending. But, as a more army-centric strategy, this strategy could have political backlash with the navy and air force. It may be difficult to implement in a defense bureaucracy that typically favors the home service of the defense minister and favorite projects of the individual services. Soft Power Under this strategy, the best defense is seen in Taiwan’s non-military capabilities. Advocates for this strategy argue for an organization of Taiwan’s military capabilities along humanitarian assistance/disaster relief (HADR) lines. Expanding regional HADR efforts would help to increase Taiwan’s prestige and international role. It is also the least threatening strategy to the PRC. Additionally, emergency management infrastructure and C4ISR (command, control, communication, computer, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) capabilities can dual purpose for both security and environmental threats. This could help Taiwan to innocuously expand spending and minimize resistance for defense spending from both the domestic and foreign audience. Taiwan has a soft power advantage as one of the strongest democracies in Asia. It can increase its support among democracies that would oppose any change in its status by force by promoting democracy and liberal economic policy in Asia. U.S. experts may look favorably on Tsai’s platform of “New Asian Value” as a counter to Beijing’s authoritarian system, which could make Taiwan attractive as a partner for the United States to promote stability and democratic norms. Asymmetric, Innovative, and Mobile This strategy would seek to defend Taiwan with mobile, cheap, lethal technologies. The words “asymmetric” and “innovative” are very familiar to Taiwanese defense planners. They have been emphasized over the past decade by U.S. advisors who want Taiwan to invest more resources in defense platforms that address realistic defense scenarios and place less emphasis on U.S. capabilities. Because of its size, Taiwan cannot compete against the defense industries of major countries. But, advocates of this strategy argue, it can compete on the basis of its competitive advantage in areas like cyber. Defense budget increases for developing weapons indigenously are politically attractive when presented as a way to strengthen economy and trade through weapons sales. Submarine development, with U.S. and Japanese technical assistance would not only enhance deterrence but be a point of national pride as Taiwan works to close the qualitative military capability gap with China. As a senior Taiwan defense expert explained to me in an interview, “we need something offensive as tools to tango to convince our cousins not to move.” Stealth platforms like small ships and planes, submarines, and guided missiles are needed to make a statement. He continued, “I hate fire and forget systems. These are not policy tools because you can’t use them.” Asymmetric options like subs allow for counter-blockade and limited response to Chinese provocation. The Big Brother Strategy Or is Taiwan’s best defense a strong, committed United States, after all? There is a school of thought that labelling any of the island defense concepts laid out above “strategic’ is a misnomer. The above strategies, in this line of thought, are in fact tactical, designed to delay and raise costs only. The only real defense strategy involves the United States. Publicly demonstrating a strong alliance for deterrence purposes, and ensuring good communication and discussion to prepare for contingencies is Taiwan’s best strategic posture. As such, announcements of large weapons purchases are good defense tools. But other indicators also contribute to the Big Brother effect: Technology assistance, defense cooperation, even economic policies (such as including Taiwan in TPP) also send a signal of U.S. support to China, and may have the same deterrence value as an aircraft carrier or a number of fighter jets. Which Strategy Will It Be? America’s commitment to assist Taiwan with its defense is enshrined in the Taiwan Relations Act. The U.S. interest is in a peaceful resolution of the cross-Strait issue without unilateral action by either side. Taiwan’s future defense strategy will undoubtedly include U.S. support in some capacity. U.S. policymakers who advocate withdrawing from the security commitment should bear in mind that a Taiwan under threat could potentially restart its nuclear program, raising the danger of a future conflict. So far, Tsai Ing-Wen has acted in a way that calms U.S. experts who fear a return to the volatile pro-independence rhetoric of the first DPP president, Chen Shui-Bian who served from 2000 to 2008. Tsai can use ambiguity to avoid explicitly accepting the 1992 Consensus since doing so would alienate her supporters and could cause her to take a more DPP-traditional pro-independence stance. This could increase support for defense spending, but endanger relations with the United States as it seeks a stable cross-Strait situation to avoid disturbing its relationship with China. If Tsai is elected on the 16th, she will begin to implement the DPP’s defense plans, which have been designed with U.S. suggestions in mind to invest in defense and focus on platforms that are asymmetric and innovative. In addition to hard power, Taiwan will do much to attract U.S. support by using its soft power to support economic and political freedom in Asia, a democratic ally to balance against China’s influence. Defense issues were relatively neglected during the Ma era. Tsai has an opportunity to push through reforms to reverse this trend, and secure U.S. commitment and regional prestige by continuing Ma’s soft power initiatives and HADR efforts. The key unanswered question is how China will respond to the next DPP government. Tsai would do well to sustain Ma’s economic successes and strengthen Taiwan’s defense posture. There are a number of ways to succeed. Suggestions that Taiwan should develop its own A2AD capability could fall under several of the above strategies that can be pursued in combination to achieve a credible defense posture under political and economic constraints. If
more energy efficient and less expensive to produce. In the near future, the Cockrell School researchers believe their nanomotors could provide a new approach to controlled biochemical drug delivery to live cells. To test its ability to release drugs, the researchers coated the nanomotor’s surface with biochemicals and initiated spinning. They found that the faster the nanomotor rotated, the faster it released the drugs. “We were able to establish and control the molecule release rate by mechanical rotation, which means our nanomotor is the first of its kind for controlling the release of drugs from the surface of nanoparticles,” Fan said. “We believe it will help advance the study of drug delivery and cell-to-cell communications.” The researchers address two major issues for nanomotors so far: assembly and controls. The team built and operated the nanomotor using a patent-pending technique that Fan invented while studying at Johns Hopkins University. The technique relies on AC and DC electric fields to assemble the nanomotor’s parts one by one. In experiments, the researchers used the technique to turn the nanomotors on and off and propel the rotation either clockwise or counterclockwise. The researchers found that they could position the nanomotors in a pattern and move them in a synchronized fashion, which makes them more powerful and gives them more flexibility. Fan and her team plan to develop new mechanical controls and chemical sensing that can be integrated into nanoelectromechanical devices. But first they plan to test their nanomotors near a live cell, which will allow Fan to measure how they deliver molecules in a controlled fashion. Cockrell School graduate students Kwanoh Kim, Xiaobin Xu and Jianhe Guo co-authored the study. The National Science Foundation Career Award, the Welch Foundation and startup funds from the Cockrell School supported the study.CALGARY — Curtis Glencross spent last Thursday at the ranch of Calgary Flames president Ken King, in the picturesque foothills of the Rocky Mountains. “Ken had four horses saddled up when we got there,” Glencross recalled. “We went for a ride on two horses. Came back. Went for a ride on another two horses.” On the first ride, Glencross, a pending unrestricted free agent, and King chatted mainly about horses, cows and life in rural Alberta. On the second trip, they talked business: Dollars. Cents. Security. “I wasn’t sure we were going to get this done,” King said Monday at a news conference in Calgary. “There are lots of different ways you engage people, but if you can talk to them in an environment they’re more comfortable with. “He rode my best horse, so he was pretty comfortable.” Two days later, Glencross and his agent approached the Flames and said they would accept the team’s offer of a $10.2-million US, four-year contract extension — under one condition: a no-movement clause. “The no-move clause was a determining factor,” Glencross, 28, said Monday. “I was going to take the money they gave me as long as they gave me a no-move clause. “If I didn’t get a no-move clause, I was going to wait to July 1.” The no-movement clause made the Flames swallow hard. After all, they already led the NHL in that category with 10 such deals. But the Flames agreed. The contract was done. “I feel very strongly we need to be judicious when we give these clauses,” said Flames general manager Jay Feaster. “At the same time, we asked the player to make a commitment to us. The player was willing to do it in a deal that I think is very fair to us and very fair to him.” So, did Glencross take a hometown discount? “We don’t know what that number is that he gave up,” Feaster said. “But we do know he was willing to do it to stay here. That’s what mattered to him.” To Glencross, it all came down to family. His wife Tanya gave birth to the couple’s first child, daughter Karter, in March. His parents live in Red Deer, Alta. Tanya’s parents live in Penhold, Alta. “I could have went somewhere else and got a bigger contract,” Glencross said. “If I wanted to hit a home run, I would have gone elsewhere. I’m not looking to hit home run. I’m looking for some stability for my family and I. “Obviously, we love Calgary. We love the city.” Streaky at times, Glencross scored a career highs in goals (24) and points (43) last season and proved an invaluable member of the penalty-killing unit. With new contract in hand, the Kindersley, Sask., product has no intention of resting on his laurels. “I still hope to get to the 30-goal mark,” he said, “and I still think I’m capable of getting to the 30-goal mark. But at the same time, I’m still a defensive player. I’m a penalty-kill guy. A lot of the big, big money guys don’t do the penalty kill. They don’t play against the other team’s top lines. That’s part of my job as well. “I take just as much pride in that as I do in the goal scoring department.” With Glencross signed, the Flames still have a lengthy list of pending unrestricted free agents headlined by left-winger Alex Tanguay and goalie Henrik Karlsson. Feaster said he is confident he can get both of them signed. Centre Brendan Morrison is recovering from knee surgery and also had work done to fix a problem with his wrist. He is not expected to be ready come training camp, so Feaster said there is no rush to negotiate with the savvy 35-year-old veteran. But for a moment Monday, King and Feaster took satisfaction in knowing they got one of their main men locked up in Glencross. “He’s a nice poster child,” King said, “for a good western kid who did really well.” Calgary Herald vhall@calgaryherald.comGovernor of Florida, Rick Scott Madison Ruppert, Contributor Activist Post Florida has become the first state in the America to allow public employees to be randomly tested for a wide variety of drugs, thanks to the Florida legislature and Florida’s Republican governor, Rick Scott. The glaring problem with this legislation – which was promoted by Governor Scott who actually co-founded Solantic, a company that runs a chain of some 32 urgent care centers, which we will get into later in this article – is that all elected officials are exempt from the law. When similar legislation aimed at forcing the drug testing of welfare recipients (something Governor Scott also pushed for in Florida) was proposed in Indiana, some astute legislators amended the bill to include elected officials as well. Unsurprisingly, the bill was thrown out post haste. Therefore, if you want to do mounds of cocaine and hold a taxpayer-funded job, you’d better get elected to some government position; otherwise you’re liable to get your urine tested. I must point out, however, that the law does not require that state agencies drug test employees, it merely allows such activities. It allows state agencies to randomly test up to 10% of their employees every three months for illicit drugs, prescription drugs and even alcohol, according to Noel Brinkerhoff with AllGov. However, how they will test for alcohol is unclear to me, as most tests require the subject to have consumed alcohol recently, meaning it would likely only catch people who were actually drinking on the job. On the other hand, some illegal substances like cannabis can remain in the system for quite a while, but other illegal drugs like methamphetamine and others pass relatively quickly. Unfortunately, the people of Florida have not been very vocal on this issue, especially the fact that such tests will usually catch people who smoke marijuana, but not others who use much more dangerous drugs which rapidly pass through the system. Personally, I couldn’t care less if my mailman or the person at my local Department of Motor Vehicles smoke some cannabis. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d be a bit more concerned if these people were smoking crack, methamphetamine, or PCP. Thankfully some civil libertarians are speaking out publicly against this move, which hopefully will not spread like a cancer to other states. “People are always in favor of locking up miscreants, and, despite our constitutional legal traditions, there’s always a lot to be reaped from the argument that if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about,” Colin Gordon, a labor historian at the University of Iowa, told The Christian Science Monitor. Gordon is correct, and this fallacious logic is applied to just about everything our tyrannical government does these days. Notably, this is evoked when issues surrounding the complete lack of internet privacy and privacy in general, come up. The law goes into effect July 1, but it does not include funding for the drug testing. This means that the agencies that choose to test their employees will have to make budget cuts somewhere in order to free up the funds. So, why has Governor Scott been pushing for so long to get drug tested implemented in his state? It started with the testing of applications for the Federal Needy Families Program and now has grown to include state employees as well. This question is easily answered when one considers the fact that Governor Scott had a large stake ($62 million large) in a company called Solantic. In order to deflect the accusations of malfeasance and conflicts of interest, Governor Scott put his investment into a trust under his wife’s name. This allowed him to claim that he is no longer involved in the company, even though that is obviously a laughable assertion. Governor Scott has not only pushed for drug testing state workers and welfare recipients, he has also pursued policies which would move Medicaid patients to private HMOs along with cutting public health clinic funding. Obviously every single one of these policies Governor Scott has been pursuing would directly benefit his $62 million investment, yet he still claims this is not a conflict of interest. Unfortunately, under Florida state law, he might be correct in saying it is not a legal conflict. Just days before Governor Scott took office, he shifted his shares over to the Francis Annette Scott Revocable Trust which now holds enough stock to control Solantic. Back in 2001, Scott co-founded Solantic Corporation, which now has walk-in clinics throughout Florida and the east coast, which handle a wide-range of medical procedures. These clinics operate in a truly commercial style, with charges for various procedures listed in a manner reminiscent of glowing fast food menus. Solantic also has partnerships with hospitals in numerous markets and much of Governor Scott’s policies serve to directly benefit this corporation. When asked why he didn’t sell his shares in Solantic in April of last year, he simply said, “As I’ve told you, I’m not involved in that company.” According to Mark Herron, a Tallahassee-based lawyer who is identified as an expert on ethics laws in Florida by the Tampa Bay Times, unless Solantic directly conducts business with the office of the governor, there are technically no conflicts. However, most of the other states and the federal government allegedly forbid the kind of tactics used by Scott, although I think we all know that this isn’t enforced as much as it should be. Indeed in Florida, there is absolutely nothing stopping Governor Scott from pushing policies that could directly benefit a company which his family derives financial benefit from. Insane, is it not? Just a few examples Scott’s questionable activities are: Scott has expressed support for shuffling almost 3 million recipients of Medicaid into private managed care plans. Since Solantic only accepts traditional Medicaid at one of their locations while maintaining relationships with various private Medicaid providers, this could drastically increase the patient base available to the corporation. In the past, Scott pushed for legislation which would require that some 58,000 adult welfare recipients would get drug tested on their own dime. Solantic’s chief executive Karen Bowling claims that they would not bid on the job as long as Scott’s shares remained. However, since the shares are not technically Scott’s anymore, there is nothing legally preventing them from doing so. Scott’s anymore, there is nothing legally preventing them from doing so. Governor Scott’s budget cuts public health department funding, which used to handle the checkups, travel shots and other immunizations and other minor procedures for people who did not have private physicians. Solantic could pick up some of this business and as of last year they were charging $50 for a basic physical, in addition to immunizations, including shots for international travel. In response, Bowling claimed that physicals and shots are a very small portion of Solantic’s overall revenue. Bowling also claimed that more than half of their business occurs during nights, weekends and holidays when health departments and many other healthcare providers are closed. As governor, Scott is able to appoint the heads of the Agency for Health care Administration and the Department of Health. These agencies license, inspect and investigate public complaints against healthcare providers, including Solantic. This, too, is technically legal in Florida according to Herron. Solantic claims that Medicaid payments only make up 3.1 percent of all patient visits, yet they declined to reveal revenues. Download Your First Issue Free! Do You Want to Learn How to Become Financially Independent, Make a Living Without a Traditional Job & Finally Live Free? Download Your Free Copy of Counter Markets They claim that state agency payments are mostly from the health department for determining disability, something which Solantic receives $14 per patient for as of last year. Bowling claims that this work is actually subcontracted out to a company which deals primarily in workers compensation cases. Bowling claimed that Solantic billed $110,657 in state agencies in 2010 and $20,061 in just the first three to four months of 2011 alone. However, Bowling’s claims are dubious at best given her history with Scott. Bowling and Scott worked together back when Scott was the chief executive of the Columbia/HCA chain of hospitals. At the time, Bowling was a marketing executive with the chain. Scott was pushed out of the company in 1997 due to a federal investigation into billing fraud. The investigation resulted in Columbia/HCA paying out a whopping $1.7 billion penalty fine, yet Scott left with a staggering $10 million in severance pay, not to mention $300 million in stocks and options. Unsurprisingly, Scott was never charged with any wrongdoing in the investigation and thanks to the massive wealth accrued through the company, he was able to start up Solantic with Bowling in 2001. Scott maintained an active role in Solantic as well as a board member until January of 2010, which is when he began his campaign for governor. The connections go even deeper with a former HCA executive who worked with Scott at the time, Charles Evans, now handling Scott’s wife’s trust which holds the controlling shares of Solantic. Evans also just happens to be the chairman of the board at Solantic. “I have not discussed Solantic with Gov. Scott or his wife since he became governor,” Bowling claimed last year. But wait! There’s more! It gets even worse when we consider that Scott has outright refused to release the depositions taken in a lawsuit which involved Solantic and the fact that Scott’s lawyers actually informally consulted with representatives of the Florida Commission on Ethics a whopping three separate times. His lawyers asked about how past public officials have dealt with their investments, according to the Florida Commission on Ethics. The executive director and general counsel of the commission, Philip Claypool, claimed that the meetings were nothing more than “attorney-to-attorney discussions” which resulted in no public record. Scott’s lawyers took quite a tricky approach, and instead of requesting a formal advisory opinion which would have sparked a full-scale vetting of his potential conflicts of interest and ultimately resulted in a binding recommendation, they opted for the informal route which only resulted in “suggestions” from Claypool and his staff. American Natural Superfood - Free Sample According to Kenneth Gross, a Washington lawyer and expert on ethics laws, points out that Florida is among just a few states who consider the investments of a spouse to not be a conflict of interest with a public official. “It’s an area that’s crying out for attention,” Gross said. “I think in this situation, he has to make sure he either gets rid of the asset completely or that he conducts affairs as governor in such a fashion that it doesn’t create conflict of interest with that business.” “He may not be in on the day-to-day running of the company and that’s nice,” Gross pointed out. “But if he has ownership interest by virtue of a revocable trust, he maintains an interest in the welfare of the company.” These conclusions are quite obvious, in my opinion, yet the people of Florida don’t seem to care all too much about this. In defending Scott’s holdings, his spokesman Brian Burgess claimed it’s not as easy as selling publicly traded stock, “It’s not like going onto E-trade and pushing a button.” However, it is as easy as making a call or two, but Burgess, of course, ignored that fact. I believe that any thinking person would see the relationship between Scott, Solantic and Bowling to be questionable at best. It is quite unfortunate that Florida allows this type of activity to go on, and I would highly encourage the people of Florida to push back against this painfully blatant corruption. If Floridians allow this to go on without protest, they can only expect the future to bring more in-your-face corporatism and the exploitation of the taxpayer. The entire notion of testing public employees while not testing elected officials is outright laughable, in my humble opinion. I believe that if anyone who receives a cent of government money is going to be drug tested, then every single person who receives a cent of government money should be drug tested. This includes every bank that received bailout funds, every elected official across the nation including those on Capitol Hill, the president, all cabinet members, every single person at the Pentagon, and so forth. That being said, I think that would be ludicrously costly and unfeasible, so I think the much more logical conclusion would be to refrain from drug testing anyone, especially with the corruption and conflicts of interest which would inevitably be involved. Did I miss anything or would you like to submit some of your own original writing or perhaps send a story tip or some other information my way? Email me at [email protected] Please support our work and help us start to pay contributors by doing your shopping through our Amazon link or check out some must-have products at our store. This article first appeared at End the Lie. Madison Ruppert is the Editor and Owner-Operator of the alternative news and analysis database End The Lie and has no affiliation with any NGO, political party, economic school, or other organization/cause. He is available for podcast and radio interviews. Madison also now has his own radio show on Orion Talk Radio from 8 pm — 10 pm Pacific, which you can find HERE. If you have questions, comments, or corrections feel free to contact him at [email protected] var linkwithin_site_id = 557381; linkwithin_text=’Related Articles:’According to the New York Observer, which is owned by Donald Trump's son-in-law, Chappelle questioned the Access Hollywood tape showing the GOP nominee making lewd comments about women. ADVERTISEMENT “Sexual assault? It wasn’t. He said, ‘And when you’re a star, they let you do it.’ That phrase implies consent. I just don’t like the way the media twisted that whole thing. Nobody questioned it," said Chappelle, according to the Observer. The comedian, who is slated to host the "Saturday Night Live" episode following Election Day, praised Trump for his performance in the second presidential debate. "And here’s how you know Trump is the most gangsta candidate ever. They asked him how he knows the system is rigged and he said, ‘Because I take advantage of it.’ He may as well have flashed his membership card for the Illuminati right then," he said. Chappelle told the crowd he did cast an early ballot for Clinton, despite his issues with her candidacy, according to the report.The twitter account “Emergency Kittens” (@EmrgencyKittens) boasts 1.85 million followers on the social media platform and it pretty much exactly what you would expect: a dizzying array of cat gifs, photos, videos, links, and memes. Even a lot of people in political media follow the @EmrgencyKittens account according to a quick search, like The Atlantic‘s Molly Ball, Charles Cooke of the National Review, and Greta Van Susteren herself. However, the account came under renewed scrutiny late Sunday night when a keen observer noticed that the account — which yesterday Tweeted out the sentence, “you win life if you cat cuddles with you” (not a typo) — earned a new follower: Donald J. Trump, the billionaire magnate turned Republican nominee and soon to be 45th President of the United States of America. “Critiquing the cutest cats online!” says the account, and Trump’s follow was a big deal considering the man himself notoriously follows a very small number of other accounts. Mostly, the list comprises various family members and unsurprisingly a large number of accounts that feature the “Trump” name: golf courses, hotel properties, etc. Over the course of the past year and a half, the number of total Twitter accounts that Trump has followed has rarely, if ever, exceeded 50. After people noticed however, it looks like the Donald suddenly decided that he had enough of the kitties and quickly unfollowed the account. You can see that the Google search trends for “emergency kittens” spiked Sunday night as well, with phrases linking “Trump” topping the list of search items. It would appear that this morning even the Emergency Kittens team themselves had a little fun with the newfound attention in the form of a screenshotted direct message they were prepared to send to the President-elect. It’s a Meowntain. But he unfollowed before the punchline. pic.twitter.com/emcQanPx4Y — Emergency Kittens (@EmrgencyKittens) January 2, 2017 “[H]e unfollowed before the punchline,” the account disappointedly reports. It’s oddly refreshing to discuss Trump’s Twitter account and have be for something other than an a misguided message of his. What was behind the impulse to follow Emergency Kittens to begin with? The world may never know. Then again, maybe this is what he meant on that Access Hollywood bus all along. — J.D. Durkin (@jivedurkey) is an editorial producer and columnist at Mediaite. Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comDragenhold Adventurers In a land full of rain, corruption and pork the guys from Roasted Yeti Entertainment made a whole bunch of character archetypes! Barbarian Primal Path: Iron Soul Path of The Iron Soul Some Warriors train their mind just as well as their bodies. These fierce warriors bring the strength and ferocity, while keeping their head cool and having the oversight of a commander watching from afar. Protecting their mind through sheer willpower they are capable of withstanding mental trauma that would leave others as stumbling flesh. Calm Storm Starting at 3rd level when you choose this archetype, you have undergone training to harden your mind as well as your skin. Through your hardened mind, you can stay calm even when your body fights with extreme ferocity. While raging you can add your wisdom modifier to your damage rolls. Additionally if you fail an ability check or saving throw, you can end your rage to reroll it. You must use the new roll. Mind Fortress Starting at 6th level, your mental walls safeguard your mind hindering you from becoming affected by many of the dangers around you. You gain resitance to psychic damage and you become immune to the frightened condition. At 14th level you gain immunity to psychic damage. Iron Mind At 10th level your mind has become a haven of peace and calm. You gain proficiency in Wisdom saving throws. Additionally your thoughts can’t be read by telepathy or other means unless you allow it. Indomitable soul At 14th level, your mind has been trained to withstand even the most violent attacks. You gain advantage on all Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma saving throws. Bard College: College of Laughter The College of Laughter Bards from the College of Laughter come from a more metaphorical college than most bards. Usually learning from their mistakes as they practice in front of small crowds. Their skills lie in telling an entertaining and funny story using only their voices and gestures. Through that they have gained useful social skills allowing them to easily lead people to do what they want and make sure they come out on top. This is normally only used on stage, but when the local goblins attack, they are sure to come and crack some jokes. Charmful Distractions Starting at 3rd level when you choose this archetype, you have refined the art of controlling the crowd, when you are not in combat the target of your enchantment spells have disadvantage on their saving throws. And in combat you can use your bardic inspiration to direct your allies. Instead of giving an ally the inspiration die you put it on the enemy, and any friendly creature attacking them can expend it to add it to their attack roll. Tumbling Jester Beginning at 6th level, sometimes a failure is a success in disguise. You can expend an inspiration die as a free action to add it to your own saving throw. A Fool’s Hidden Grace At 14th level, you have learned to use your foes force against them. When you are targeted by a melee weapon attack, but before you know the outcome you can use your reaction to contest your attackers roll against a Charisma (Performance) check, if your attacker succeeds or it is tied you manage to turn their attack into a sweeping blow, targeting both you and an adjacent creature of your choice and you take half damage each, if there is no available second target you take the full damage. If your attacker fails the contest your defensive flourish forces their attack to target another creature or object within 30 feet of you, all weapons are treated as if they have the thrown property for attacks affected by this ability. Cleric Divine Domain: Chaos Chaos Domain Sometimes the minds of the insane becomes touched by a god that is neither kind nor evil. A god that does not see right or wrong. A god of unstoppable and ever changing chaos. Followers of the gods are mostly people that have been scarred for life or individuals and creatures who despise law and order, seeking freedom in anarchy. Chaos Domain Spells Cleric Level Spells 1st Chaos Bolt, Thunderwave 3rd Blur, Crown of Madness 5th Bestow Curse, Fear 7th Confusion, Hallucinatory Terrain 9th Dream, Geas Bonus Proficiencies At 1st level, you gain proficiency with martial weapons. Unstable Blessing From 1st level, your god can influence an unlucky strike with its divine powers. When you miss with an attack roll, you can roll a d20, on an even roll you hit the target anyway, on an odd roll you hit yourself. Once you use this feature you cannot do so again until you finish a short or long rest. Channel Divinity: Controllable Chaos Starting at 2nd level, you can use your channel divinity to cause incomprehensible chaos around you. Whenever you see a spell cast within 60 feet of you, including your own spells, you can use your reaction to present your holy symbol and evoke the unstable chaos of your god. The DM then rolls a d100 on the wild magic surge table and applies the effect that happens. Channel Divinity: Aura of Chaos At 6th level, you can use an action to present your holy symbol to target a number of creatures, that you can see within 60 feet of you, up to your Wisdom modifier (minimum of 1). Roll a d10 on the Aura of Chaos Table to see what effect you and the targets suffer. Divine Strike At 8th level, you gain the ability to infuse your weapon strikes with Divine Chaos. Once on each of your turns when you hit a creature with a weapon attack, you can cause the attack to deal an 1d8 damage to the target, roll a d6 on the Divine Strike Table to see what damage type the damage deals. When you reach level 14th, the extra damage increases to 2d8. Subjective Chaos At 17th level you gain the power to have a limited ability to control over the chaos you unleash. Whenever you roll on a random table from the Cleric Chaos domain (and wild magic surge table) you may roll twice and choose freely between the rolls. Aura of Chaos Table d10 Effect 1 All targets are blinded for 1 minute. 2 All targets are deafened for 1 hour. 3 All targets are frightened for 1 minute. 4 All targets are grappled, this can be ended by an athletics or acrobatics check against your Spell Save DC. 5 All targets are affected by the invisibility spell. 6 All targets are paralyzed until the end of their next turn. 7 All targets are poisoned for 1 minute. 8 All targets are knocked prone. 9 All targets are restrained, this can be ended by an athletics or acrobatics check against your Spell Save DC. 00 All targets are stunned until the end of their next turn. Divine Strike Table d6 Damage Type 1 Poison 2 Necrotic 3 Acid 4 Radiant 5 Fire 6 Cold Druid Circle: Shaman Circle of the Shaman Throughout the land some tribal societies worship the spirits of nature. These shamans use the raw and unrefined power of animal spirits to enhance their own body for short periods of time. Wise and calm leaders, a Shaman does not turn down a fight, they are more often than not just as skilled with weapons as the tribes warriors. If not more. Extra Proficiency: Starting at 2nd level when you choose this archetype you gain proficiency in martial weapons. Primal Form Starting at 2nd level when you choose this archetype you you can use a bonus action to magically gain aspects of a beast that you have seen before. You can spend a charge of your Wild Shape feature to use Primal form. Your druid level determines the beasts that you can gain aspects from, as shown in the Beast Shapes table from the Wild Shape feature. You can stay in primal form for a number of hours equal to half your druid level (rounded down). While under the effects of Primal Form the following rules apply: You gain the beasts hit points as temporary hit points. You also gain 1 feature, 1 ability score or a movement speed of your choice from the chosen beast. Additionally you also gain 1 of the beasts actions. You can make a single attack as a bonus action on each of your turns. Feral Instinct By 6th level, your instincts are so honed that you have advantage on initiative rolls. Additionally, if you are surprised at the beginning of combat and aren’t incapacitated, you can act normally on your first turn, but only if you use Primal form before doing anything else on that turn. Warding Spirits Starting at 10th level, spirits begin to guard you. You gain advantage on all Charisma saving throws as the spirits protect your soul. Additionally they help you look for danger, you gain proficiency in the Perception skill, if you already have this proficiency your proficiency bonus is doubled for this skill. Your passive perception doesn’t suffer penalty from you being asleep. Primal Attunement At 14th level, your primal bond with nature lets you further enhance yourself when you enter your primal form. When you use your Primal form feature you can now gain two features or ability scores at the same time while using the feature. The features you choose must come from the same beast. Fighter Martial Archetype: Legionnaire Legionnaire While some warriors excel at raw power, others choose to hone their speed and nimbleness. Legionnaires comes in different size and shapes, using their agility to evade enemies and using their speed to deal deadlier blows, making legionnaires a feared combatant on the battlefield. Mobile Attacker Starting at 3rd level, when you choose this archetype your training in speed over brute force have given you the following abilities: -You can take the disengage action as a bonus action -Your base walking speed increases by 5 feet -You can treat all weapons without the heavy property as a finesse weapon You cannot gain these benefits, if you are wearing medium or heavy armor. You can still use a shield. Dashing strike Starting at 7th level you can use your speed to outmaneuver enemies as well as using the speed for deadlier strikes. If you have expended all your movement on your turn, your melee weapon attacks deal an extra damage die. In addition whenever an attacker that you can see hits you with an attack, you can use your reaction halve the attack’s damage against you. At 10th level, through your speed and swift reaction you dance around obstacles in your path with grace and precision. Opportunity attacks against you are made with disadvantage. Additionally you can use a bonus action to take the dash action, while doing so you ignore difficult terrain. You cannot gain these benefits, if you are wearing medium or heavy armor. You can still use a shield. Evasion Beginning at 15th level, you can nimbly dodge out of the way of certain area of effects, such as a red dragon’s fiery breath or an ice storm spell. When you are subjected to make a dexterity saving throw to take only half damage, you instead take no damage if you succeed on the saving throw, and only half damage if you fail. In addition your base walking speed increases by 5 feet. Wardancers Grace At 18th level, when you push yourself to the maximum, you inherent speed and grace that does not tax your energy. Whenever you use your action surge feature, you automatically gain the benefits of the dash, disengage and dash actions for that round. Monk Monastic Tradition: Inked Soul Way of The Inked Soul Way of the Inked soul In secret and distant monasteries far from civilization, a select few monk orders infuse their bodies with magical ink. Undergoing many rituals and tasks to enhance their body with these tattoos. They are the protectors of a lost magic. Even though this magic that they protect has been long forgotten, they are still capable of using the most basic and unrefined techniques. Monks utilising the way of the inked soul are furious warriors using their tattoos to focus their ki. They are capable fighters as well as masters of illusions, using the ink to disturb and confuse their adversaries. Ki Empowered ink Starting at 3rd level when you choose this archetype you learn magic disciplines that amplify your ki through your tattoos. You know two Ink Disciplines of your choice, which are detailed in the Ink Disciplines section below. You learn one additional Ink Discipline of your choice at 6th, 11th and 17th level. Whenever you learn a new Ink Discipline you can also replace one Ink Discipline that you already know with a different Discipline. In addition to this, you can choose whether your unarmed attacks deals bludgeoning or necrotic damage. Living Ink At 6th level, you learn to empower your ink with magic making it an extension of your own body. As an action a tattoo of your choice can detach itself from your body acting as a familiar. This tatoo turns into an Ink Ooze, as detailed in the statblock on this page. Protective Ink Beginning at 11th level, your ink grows harder protecting your body and enhancing your fists. Any critical hits against you becomes a normal hit. - Additionally, once per turn when you roll for damage with an attack that deals necrotic damage, you can reroll the damage. You must use the new roll. Consuming form At 17th level, the power of your tattoos allow you to engulf yourself and everything around you in ink. Once per long rest you can as an action unleash the power of a sacred tattoo turning you into an all consuming mass of ink, this transformation lasts one minute or until you dismiss it. Your size increases to huge(15x15 square), your base walking speed is 20 and you gain the ability to move into other creatures space, when a creature enters your body they have to succeed on a Dexterity saving throw against your spell save DC or be consumed by the ink. While consumed by the ink the creature takes 4d6 necrotic damage at the start of their turn and are restrained. A creature can spend an action to make a Strength (athletics) or Dexterity (acrobatics) check against your spell save DC. While a creature is restrained within you they move with you. Ink Ooze Tiny Ooze, unaligned Armor Class 8 8 Hit Points 5(1d4 + 3) 5(1d4 + 3) Speed 20ft., climb 20ft. STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA 1 (+1) 6 (-2) 16 (+3) 1 (-5) 6 (-2) 2 (-4) Condition Immunities blinded, charmed, deafened, exhuastion, frigtened, prone blinded, charmed, deafened, exhuastion, frigtened, prone Senses blindsight 60 ft. (blind beyond this radius), passive Perception 8 blindsight 60 ft. (blind beyond this radius), passive Perception 8 Languages ─ ─ Challenge 1/4 (50 XP) Amorphous. The ooze can move through a space as narrow as 1 inch wide without squeezing. Spider Climb. The ooze can climb difficult surfaces, including upside down on ceilings, without needing to make an ability check. Actions The ooze has no effective attacks, and can therefore only take the Dash, Dodge, Disengage & Help actions. Ink Disciplines If an ink discipline has a prerequisites, you must meet them to gain it. You can gain the ink discipline at the same time that you meet the its prerequisites. Boulders fortitude: Whenever you take damage, you can use your reaction to spend 3 ki points to gain resistance to a damage type until the start of your next turn. Brain Snail Prerequisite: 11th level You can as an action spend 6 ki points to the cast Dominate Person spell Bursting Wrath Prerequisite: 6th level You can as a bonus action spend 5 ki to deal 2d10 Necrotic damage to all creatures within 10 feet of you. Creatures hit by this effect must make a dexterity saving throw, if they fail they take full damage and half damage on a success. Cat paws You can spend 1 ki points as an action to give yourself advantage on your next dexterity (Stealth) check. Then you take the hide action. Chameleon Hide You can as an action spend 2 ki points to cast the Disguise Self spell on yourself, people who touch you will feel as if they were touching muck. Cleansing Palm You can as an action spend 4 ki points to cast the remove curse
of both instruments. Compounding the confusion, yet another Dutchman, Jacob Metius, applied for a patent for a telescope a few weeks after Lippershey. The government of the Netherlands eventually turned down both applications because of the counterclaims. Also, officials said, the device was easy to reproduce, making it difficult to patent. In the end, Metius got a small reward, but the government paid Lippershey a handsome fee to make copies of his telescope. A 1754 painting by H.J. Detouche shows Galileo Galilei displaying his telescope to Leonardo Donato and the Venetian Senate. (Image: © Public domain) Enter Galileo In 1609, Galileo Galilei heard about the "Dutch perspective glasses" and within days had designed one of his own — without ever seeing one. He made some improvements — his could magnify objects 20 times — and presented his device to the Venetian Senate. The Senate, in turn, set him up for life as a lecturer at the University of Padua and doubled his salary, according to Stillman Drake in his book "Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography" (Courier Dover Publications, 2003). Galileo's ink renderings of the moon: the first telescopic observations of a celestial object. (Image: © NASA) Galileo was the first to point a telescope skyward. He was able to make out mountains and craters on the moon, as well as a ribbon of diffuse light arching across the sky — the Milky Way. He also discovered the rings of Saturn, sunspots and four of Jupiter's moons. Thomas Harriot, a British ethnographer and mathematician, also used a spyglass to observe the moon. Harriot became famous for his travels to the early settlements in Virginia to detail resources there. His August 1609 drawings of the moon predate Galileo's, but were never published. The more Galileo looked, the more he was convinced of the sun-centered Copernican model of the planets. Galileo wrote a book "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican" and dedicated it to the Pope Urban VIII. But his ideas were considered heretical, and Galileo was called to appear before the inquisition in Rome in 1633. He struck a plea bargain and was sentenced to house arrest, where he continued to work and write until his death in 1642. Elsewhere in Europe, scientists began improving the telescope. Johannes Kepler studied the optics and designed a telescope with two convex lenses, which made the images appear upside down. Working from Kepler's writings, Isaac Newton reasoned it was better to make a telescope out of mirrors rather than lenses and built a reflecting telescope in 1668. Centuries later the reflecting telescope would dominate astronomy. Exploring the cosmos The largest refracting telescope (one that use lenses to gather and focus light) opened at Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, in 1897. But the 40-inch (1 meter) glass lens at Yerkes was soon made obsolete by larger mirrors. The Hooker 100-inch (2.5 m) reflecting telescope opened in 1917 at Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, Calif. It was there that the astronomer Edwin Hubble determined that the Andromeda Nebula was indeed (as some astronomers had argued) a galaxy far, far away (2.5 million light-years) from the Milky Way. With the development of the radio, scientists could start to study not just light, but other electromagnetic radiation in space. An American engineer named Karl Jansky was the first to detect radio radiation from space in 1931. He found a source of radio interference from the center of the Milky Way. Radio telescopes have since mapped the shape of galaxies and the existence of background microwave radiation that confirmed a prediction in the Big Bang Theory. Famous telescopes Here are some of the more famous telescopes: Hubble Space Telescope This telescope launched in 1990. Some of Hubble's major contributions include determining the age of the universe with more precision, finding more moons near Pluto, doing observations of galaxies in the young universe, monitoring space weather on the outer planets, and even observing exoplanets — a situation not anticipated for the telescope as the first major exoplanet discoveries didn't happen until the mid-1990s. A flaw in its mirror was fixed with an upgrade from a space shuttle crew in 1993. Hubble underwent five servicing missions by shuttle crews, with the last one being in 2009. It remains in good health to this day and is expected to overlap some observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (Hubble is part of a set of four "great observatories" launched by NASA in the 1990s and 2000s. The other members included the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which made many discoveries of their own.) James Webb Space Telescope This is the successor to Hubble, and its launch date has been delayed several times over the years, with the latest estimate now for 2020. Unlike Hubble, this telescope will be parked far from Earth and out of reach of repair crews. Its science will look at four major themes: the universe's first light, how the first galaxies were formed, how stars are formed, and looking at the origins of life (including exoplanets). Kepler telescope This planet-hunting machine has found more than 4,000 potential planets since first launching in 2009. Initially, it focused on a section of the Cygnus constellation, but in 2013 problems with pointing consistently created a new mission in which Kepler moves between different regions of the sky. One of Kepler's major contributions is finding more super-Earths and rocky planets, which are harder to spot near bright stars. Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) This telescope in Chile has 66 receivers and its specialty is looking through the dust in young planetary systems (or through dusty stars and galaxies) to see how cosmic objects are formed. It was fully operational as of 2013. ALMA is unique in its sensitivity because it has so many receivers available. Some of its results include the clearest-ever image of the star Betelgeuse, and precise measurements of black hole masses. Arecibo Observatory This observatory has been operating since 1963, and is famous for many radio astronomy studies. The Puerto Rican telescope is also know for a message called the Arecibo Message that was directed at the globular cluster M13 in 1974. The observatory was damaged during a 2017 hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico. In popular culture, Arecibo was also the location of the climax of the 1995 James Bond film "Goldeneye", and it appeared in the 1997 movie "Contact." Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array This is a set of 27 telescopes located in the New Mexico desert. Construction began on the VLA in 1973. Some of the VLA's major discoveries include finding ice on Mercury, peering into the dusty center of the Milky Way, and looking at the formation of black holes. The telescope array also was prominently featured in the 1997 movie "Contact" as the site where a purported extraterrestrial signal arrived. W.M. Keck Observatory The twin telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii are the largest optical and infrared telescopes available. The telescopes started their work in 1993 and 1996. Some of their major discoveries including finding the first exoplanet "transiting" across its parent star, and learning about star movements in the nearby Andromeda Galaxy. Palomar Observatory The Palomar Observatory, located in San Diego County, Calif., began work in 1949. The telescope is best known for discovering the small worlds Quaoar, Sedna and Eris in the Kuiper Belt, but its work also includes discovering supernovas (star explosions), tracking asteroids and looking at gamma-ray bursts. Additional reporting by Elizabeth Howell, Space.com contributor Additional resources:Insurance fraud spikes whenever a new technology upgrade, such as the release of a new iPhone, occurs, says Dave Ashton, head of the Insurance Council's Insurance Claims Register. Speaking at the council's annual conference this week, Ashton said when new technology was released, many people want to upgrade their model and therefore claimed their older models had been stolen, lost, or accidentally damaged. The ensuing insurance pay-out funded the new upgrade. Although fraud was often the "elephant in the room" for insurers who don't want to accuse their policyholders of being dishonest, public attitudes are changing, Ashton said. There has been an upsurge in anonymous public tip-offs online because people are angry that family members and friends are contributing to a rise in premiums for their insurance through lying about claims, he said. Advertisement READ MORE: • Bill for June weather bomb blows up to more than $50m • Apartment's value slashed after fish tank overflows • Property Report: Thousands of Kiwi homes under-insured He cited a recent case where someone tipped the council off to a man selling his Rolex watch on Trade Me, having previously claimed on insurance for it being lost. Ashton said when the tip-off was investigated by the man's insurer, his defence was that he had later found the watch after the claim was paid out and was selling it because he had already bought a new one with the proceeds. "Yet he no longer owned that watch," Ashton said. Ashton said it was hard to estimate the level of insurance fraud in New Zealand but internationally it's estimated to be between 10 and 20 percent of gross written premiums, which were $5.2 billion across the industry in New Zealand last year. Total claims paid out were $2.4 billion. Two years ago, the industry estimated the average New Zealander was paying $120 more in insurance every year because a small percentage lied to their insurer. The highest levels of fraud by consumers are for travel and motor insurance while for businesses it is for commercial material damage, such as intentionally setting fire to their work premises or flooding stock on the shelves. Ashton said there was always a spike in this type of fraud by business owners in an economic downturn. Fraud falls under three main categories - organised crime such as body shop collusions on motor cars, repeat offenders who have made serial claims, sometimes for the same item, and those insured with more than one company who double-dip by making claims for the same incident with both without realising that is illegal. The Insurance Council of New Zealand was one of the first in the world to introduce an Insurance Claims Register 15 years ago and it now keeps data on 90 percent of the country's policy applications and insurance claims. Only authorised personnel from participating companies have access to the information. Around 8,000 claims are now flagged as being potentially fraudulent, Ashton said, but it was up to the insurance companies' fraud teams to decide whether to investigate them. The council this week launched upgraded technology on the register which allows more 'big data' analysis, including hotspots such as the number of burglary claims in a particular neighbourhood. It can also provide predictive analysis around likely claims for things like weather events based on the collective claims history.In recent weeks, as much of the Pakistani media remained fixated on the internecine squabbles of the country’s ruling elites, authorities in Sindh have been brutally cracking down on sections of workers and farmers in the province who’ve had the temerity to defend their rights and fight for improved living standards and working conditions. On December 25, primary, secondary and high school teachers in Karachi held a defiant protest against the Sindh government due to its refusal to provide them with permanent jobs despite having agreed to do so in 2014. The provincial government is refusing to honor its agreement even after forcing teachers to pass a rigorous examination conducted by the National Testing Service and the University of Sindh. Teachers from all over the province took part in the demonstration, including teachers from Hyderabad, some of whom marched the entire 140km distance to Karachi in order to participate. The teachers were attacked by the police when they tried to march toward the Chief Minister’s House. The police used water cannons, batons and tear gas against the protesting teachers and scores were arrested. On Tuesday, the Sindh authorities claimed that two dozen teachers were detained and that all have since been released. However, according to officials of the All Sindh Primary Teachers Association, more than 150 teachers were arrested and many others were injured by the heavy-handed tactics of the police. Despite the violent response of the police, the teachers have refused to back down until their demands are met, with negotiations between teachers’ representatives and the Sindh government ending in a stalemate on Friday. Monday’s police attack against demonstrators in Karachi was one of several such assaults on teachers in Sindh in recent weeks. While the tactics deployed against teachers have been brutal, the sheer ruthlessness with which the Sindh government recently cracked down on protesting farmers was nothing less than shocking. On December 11, scores of increasingly impoverished sugar cane growers from all over the Sindh staged a protest in Karachi against local sugar mill owners as well as the provincial government. The sugar cane growers have been asking the government to fix the price of sugar cane at Rs185 per 40kgs, but sugar mill owners in the province have been paying the farmers as little as Rs130 per 40kgs, even though the government has officially set the price at Rs182 per 40kgs. During the protest, farmers denounced government corruption and slammed provincial officials for colluding with sugar mill owners at the expense of poor farmers. The sugar mill owners are refusing to pay the correct price despite the fact that they have received billions of rupees in subsidies from both the federal and provincial governments. The peaceful protest, in which many women and children participated, was baton-charged by police only 30 minutes after it began. When this failed to have the desired effect, tear gas and water cannons were used against the farmers, with many falling unconscious. According to farmers’ representatives, many sugar cane growers were injured and around 80 were arrested. While Sindh authorities were able to crush the protest in Karachi, the sugar cane growers have only grown more incensed and are unlikely to give up their struggle. On Thursday, a sugar cane grower set himself on fire during a farmers’ demonstration in Mirpurkhas that called for mill owners to pay the sugar cane price fixed by the government. Far from a problem unique to Sindh, police brutality is par for the course in Pakistan, where a tiny clique of capitalists, landlords and military elites have lorded over and exploited the working class and rural poor since the country’s establishment. The police in Punjab are notoriously corrupt and usually the first to resort to violence. On more than one occasion, police in Punjab have even used violent tactics against blind workers protesting for more job opportunities and the implementation of disabled-friendly policies in the province. Meanwhile, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, doctors and nurses have repeatedly been attacked by police when organizing protests to demand better working conditions. The response of the state to protests and movements of workers, the rural poor and other oppressed groups contrasts sharply with its strategy of appeasement and accommodation when dealing fascistic Muslim clerics and other reactionaries when such forces hold protests and launch movements. Throughout the month of November, Islamic extremists were allowed to wreak havoc in the capital city of Islamabad for 3 weeks, complicating daily life for thousands of ordinary people. As usual, no meaningful action was taken against the religious right, despite violent behavior by the protestors. The Punjab Rangers chief as even caught on video distributing cash to the demonstrators and allowing them to take selfies with him. Eventually, the federal government caved in to the clerics’ key demands, further empowering the clergy and emboldening extremist elements. Indeed, while Pakistan’s ruling elites won’t hesitate to use brutal force against the poor and marginalized, they are unwilling to take any action against the Muslim clergy. The clergy benefit from the enduring legacy of the Partition, which incorporated communal divisions in the state structure of South Asia, elevating the status of the clerics in Pakistan and giving them tremendous sway over the country’s political life. Ali Mohsin is an independent writer. He can be reached at alimohsin1917@gmail.com.Today, researchers at the law schools of New York University and Stanford University published an important and comprehensively documented report about the human and strategic costs of the United States’ drone program in Pakistan. The report marshals research based on interviews of victims, witnesses, medical experts, and journalists in Pakistan, and a review of thousands of pages of documents and media reports, to arrive at its chief conclusions: Far more civilians have been killed by American drone strikes in Pakistan than U.S. officials have been willing to acknowledge; The government’s use of drones is a source of daily, incessant emotional and psychological terror to Pakistani civilians; and The drone program has been “damaging and counterproductive” to the United States’ national security by turning the Pakistani public against U.S. policy. The report, titled “Living Under Drones,” refutes the government’s ongoing attempt to tell a one-sided story to the public about its use of unmanned drones in Pakistan and elsewhere. As the report explains, U.S. officials publicly describe the drone program “in terms of its unprecedented ability to ‘distinguish... effectively between an al Qaeda terrorist and innocent civilians,’” and have sought to establish a narrative according to which drones are “capable of conducting strikes with ‘astonishing’ and ‘surgical’ precision.” In the words of the report, and as we have argued and sought to expose, “[t]his narrative is false.” The report rejects the U. S. government’s claims to the public that there have been few or even “zero collateral deaths” as a result of American drone strikes in Pakistan. (Based on data compiled by the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the report estimates that there have been 474 to 884 civilian deaths as a result of drone strikes since 2004, including 176 children.) And equally important, it details many of the unseen and often-unreported costs of the government’s use of drones: “Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities.” (Watch a video about the creation of the report, and some of its findings, below.) The report comes a week after the government refused, in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the ACLU, to confirm or deny that the CIA’s drone killing program even exists. Last week, we argued to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that the CIA’s secrecy claim is untenable given statements by senior government officials discussing details of the program. As Judge Merrick Garland put it at the oral argument, the government is insisting that “the emperor has clothes, even when the emperor’s boss” has repeatedly acknowledged otherwise. Both today’s report and our lawsuit make clear that the gap between what the government wants to tell the public about drones and what independent academics, journalists, and researchers have documented has now become a chasm. Learn more about targeted killing: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.Campus deaths are not something that we like to think about. Having someone die at college is not something families wonder about on tours or that parents consider when they are saying goodbye as they drop their children off at the start of a semester. It isn’t something that the people who work on college campuses like to think about, either. I don’t. I’d much rather write how-to guides and what-to-do-when pieces when I write about college life and how to do it (and save money). We look at our vibrant, talented, and sometimes mischievous students and see bright futures, hope, and potential. But there are campus deaths. Faculty and staff sometimes pass, and students do die while they are in college, and when they do, it impacts everyone on campus, whether we knew the student or not. Last Monday night, I attended a memorial for a college student. He, too, was vibrant and warm and funny and much-loved. A son, a friend, a student, a part of the fabric that is this community. I watched from the back row as the students wept and held hands. And I thought that there will never be another start of a semester or school year where he is not remembered for any of them. And probably any of us. These things hit hard, and while we move forward, we don’t forget. As the speaker said, we don’t get into this field to do this. Before the service started, I was lost in my own world, thinking about the week before Thanksgiving in 1987. Brian Dunleavy, a friend to so many, a stellar scholar and athlete, a funny, handsome boy whom everyone liked, had died ice climbing at Dartmouth. We were juniors in college. We’d scattered to the four winds from our cozy Main Line prep schools, but most of us had stayed on the East Coast. There was no email or no texts or even cell phones back then. Word spread quickly as we called one another on our respective campuses. I was at home; I had mononucleosis, and I was trying to gather my strength to finish the semester. I remember standing in the unseasonably frigid rain the Friday after Thanksgiving, after a mass that was a blur, watching them lower a coffin into the ground. We stood huddled together, the first time we’d all reunited as a group since senior week after graduation in June two years earlier. None of us knew what to say or what to do. We gathered together in shock and grief and felt the fragility of our faith being tested. We didn’t know it then, but that event changed all of us in different ways. Our mortality was a stunning revelation to our 19 and 20-year-old selves. There has not been one Thanksgiving since that we have not remembered Brian or the shock and pain of losing him so young. Years later, while I was working on another campus not long after finishing grad school, a student died of a drug overdose. It was the end of the semester right before final exams, and the president of the college, a former corporate CEO, made the decision not to acknowledge it. I wondered about the “let’s pretend this didn’t happen” approach and whether it was the right choice for a small, residential campus. It wasn’t. A cloud hung over the campus as the grieving, confused students took their final exams and went home, graduation was an exercise in formalized misery and many students didn’t return that next fall. I left in June; it was too cold in too many ways, both literal and figurative, for me there. Five years later I was an assistant dean at an elite, private college, rotating “on” weekends and “off” weekends with colleagues. It was late on a January Saturday night when the call came that students were reporting not being able to reach a senior living in the dorms. Campus security didn’t want to respond without a staff member, and it was my weekend. Nothing could have prepared any of us for his suicide. The senior staff, all of whom lived within 10 minutes of the college, raced to campus as I held the students who had followed us into the room and seen what none will ever forget in a small common area and the paramedics and police entered the dorm. In the aftermath, the dean told us that our first and only responsibility was caring for the students. An academic whose true passion was working with late adolescents and who knew their psyches better than most experts, he predicted the possibility of a potential suicide cluster long before such things became part of our vernacular and happened at places like the University of Pennsylvania. We wondered if there had been signs we’d missed even as we watched events play out at MIT over Elizabeth Shin, whom they had known was in danger but had not contacted the family because of FERPA. We were told that if we ended up using the billion dollar endowment to fight a FERPA suit that saved a life, it would be money well spent and to err on the side of humanity and caution. He knew, too, that the late adolescent brain is not fully developed, that the pieces that assessed risk were the last to take hold, and that the onset of serious mental illnesses often coincides with the time that kids are in college. His was the firm hand on the tiller at all times; he always knew what to do for them. So we came to work early and stayed late and spent some of our weekends in our offices. The faculty kept a closer watch over moods and attendance. We made eye contact with the students, asked them questions that required long answers and couldn’t be shrugged off with yes or no in passing and started joining them for meals in the dining halls. He told all of us with dogs to bring them to work, and his Springer Spaniel joined my Aussie and my “5-pounds of pure puppy evil” Japanese Chin and others’ Labs and Goldens and mutts every day. And every night, I’d have to go look to see where they’d ended up, and some nights I’d just let them hang out in the dorms, and someone would bring them back to my office in the morning. I got used to watching them play endless, glorious fetch on the lawn outside my windows, and seeing my mercurial little Chin’s head popping out of book bags as she was carried around campus by the brawny members of the men’s rugby team in whom she’d found a bunch of unlikely friends. We helped the students take comfort in one another, we took care of them and we watched the ways they were coping, or not. We were watching for ripple effects. And I know they remember because I’m still in touch with many of them, so many years later. Other students have died there, both accidentally and from suicide, in the decade since I left, and I wonder how they’ve been met without Bob’s leadership and with the more corporate attitude that’s taken hold. That was a sobering lesson on the impact that of death on college campuses. It’s always a shock, and as much as faculty and administrators are older and wiser and expected to know what to do, we feel the emotional impact just as much. As a parent now, I cannot help but think of the student’s mother who is faced with the unimaginable task of burying her child, and my heart breaks for her. I know that everyone will be watching our charges with more vigilance now, making sure that they are not using coping techniques that will do more harm than good in the long term. Every administrator at every college, especially the high stakes, top notch schools, worries about suicide clusters when confronted with campus deaths and wants to help students heal, and now I know that every parent feels like we’ve somehow let that student’s parents down, whether it’s true or not. Later in the week, a group of faculty and staff members asked me if I knew of any research that would support using dogs as support animals on campuses. I’d already drafted this by then, but I’ve been thinking about how similar our approach had been 15 years ago given what they were thinking. I doubt Bob would have bothered to publish anything. He was always more of a knower and a doer than a publisher. There is published research now, though. And lots of it does support allowing animals to bring comfort during times of stress and grief. Bob knew so much then that still serves me well and informs my approach to academics and higher education in so many ways. He was always teaching — if not the students, then the staff. I often say that I did my doctoral work in higher ed there, under him. Many of us feel that way. When I got home, Murph had made me dinner. I’d been debating whether to go to the service. I was tired after a sleepless night, a day at work, eclipse-mania, a trip to get school supplies and groceries and dropping him at home. Even he said that it was important for me to go. “Someone died. Someone’s sad. You have to help them; it’s the right thing to do.” True enough, kiddo. And then on Friday, another student died on another campus and another shock. He’d died suddenly and still inexplicably. I know that mom; I knew that boy; I know that president, and I know that dean. My heart broke all over again as my Facebook page turned to why and how and memorials. I don’t do death on social media pages like that. I called my friend, the dean. I sent a note to my friend, the president. I sent a mass card to his family. I couldn’t arrange to fly north for the service; I can’t miss time here, and Murph’s just started school. But still. Another campus grieving, another family dealing with a staggering loss and the pervasive “why” that we still ask, even though we know there aren’t any answers. Like this: Like Loading...Results of a 20-country, USAID-Funded PREDICT study combine fieldwork and viral testing to discover viruses with potential to spark a pandemic like SARS or MERS Results of a five-year study in 20 countries on three continents have found that bats harbor a large diversity of coronaviruses (CoV), the family of viruses that cause Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS). Findings from the study—led by scientists in the USAID-funded PREDICT project at the Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and the University of California, Davis’ One Health Institute in the School of Veterinary Medicine—are published in the journal Virus Evolution. PREDICT is a globally coordinated effort to detect and discover viruses of pandemic potential and reduce risk for future epidemics. With the cooperation of local governments, researchers sampled and tested 19,192 bats, rodents, non-human primates, and humans in areas where the risk of animal-to-human transmission is greatest, including sites of deforestation, ecotourism, and animal sanctuaries. The researchers identified 100 different CoVs and found that more than 98 percent of the animals harboring these viruses were bats, representing 282 bat species from 12 taxonomic families. Extrapolating to all 1,200 bat species, they estimate a total of 3,204 CoV are carried by bats worldwide, most of which have yet to be detected and described. They also found that CoV diversity correlated with bat diversity with high numbers of CoVs concentrated in areas where there are the most bat species, suggesting CoVs coevolved with or adapted to preferred families of bats. “This study fills in a huge gap in what we know about the diversity of coronaviruses in animal hosts,” says first author Simon Anthony, assistant professor of Epidemiology in CII. “Charting the geographic and genetic diversity of coronaviruses in animals is a critical first step towards understanding and anticipating which specific viruses could pose a threat to human health.” The First Step to Identifying Suspect Viruses The researchers used consensus PCR, a cost-effective technique that targets a small section of the viral genome—sufficient to locate the position of each virus in the family tree of all CoVs. To go a step further, researchers are using more powerful genome-wide sequencing to take a detailed look at those viruses that resemble known threats to humans. In a study published in April, they reported that a MERS CoV-like virus did not have the genetic prerequisites to jump to humans—a sign that MERS-CoV had evolved to become more capable of transmission. A similar effort is now underway to sequence viruses similar to SARS-CoV. Regional Variation in Risk of Virus “Jumping” Outside Its Genus Researchers report preliminary evidence that CoVs in bats in Latin America were less likely than CoVs in Africa and Asia to “jump” outside their genus or family, potentially a sign of relatively lower risk of bat-to-human transmission on that continent. However, the authors caution that these regional differences may reflect variation in the ecology of bats in the various areas, and more work needs to be done to understand this. Bats Play an Important Role The researchers say their findings should not be interpreted as a call to cull bats. Bats play an important role in the ecosystem, and most of the coronaviruses they carry are harmless to humans. Additionally, culling may have unintended consequences: destabilizing host ecology can actually increase risk for disease transmission, as seen in studies of Marburg and rabies viruses. “Our goal is to shed light on the ecology of virus-host interactions to better understand and address the conditions that give rise to outbreaks like SARS and MERS,” says senior author Tracey Goldstein, associate professor at the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis. The study was supported by USAID through the Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT project. Additional co-authors include W. Ian Lipkin, Sarah Kramer, Xiaoyu Che, Heather Wells, Allison L. Hicks, and Stephen S. Morse at the Mailman School of Public Health; Christine K. Johnson, Denise J. Grieg, and Jonna A. K. Mazet (PI and project director) at the University of California Davis; Damien O. Joly and Nathan D. Wolfe at Metabiota, Inc.; Peter Daszak and William Karesh at EcoHealth Alliance; and the PREDICT Consortium. The authors declare no conflicts. About PREDICT PREDICT is enabling global surveillance for viruses that may spillover from animal hosts to people by building capacities to detect and discover viruses of pandemic potential. The project is part of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats program and is led by the UC Davis One Health Institute. The core partners are USAID, EcoHealth Alliance, Metabiota, Wildlife Conservation Society, and Smithsonian Institution. Scientists work in 30 countries in Africa and Asia testing for five viral families—coronaviruses (e.g. SARS/MERS), filoviruses (e.g. Ebola), paramyxoviruses (e.g. Nipah / Hendra), influenza viruses (e.g. H1N1, H5N1, H7N9) and flaviviruses (e.g. Zika)—in wildlife, livestock, and humans, to understand the risk of spillover. As part of this effort, lab scientists around the world are trained to perform viral testing—a vital skill in case an outbreak should emerge. Field researchers are trained to safely handle and sample animals by capture and release.Updated: Tuesday, 9.50 pm A ROMANIAN DOCTOR who was serving as a Senior House Officer (SHO) in Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital Crumlin has been convicted on several counts of “poor professional performance.” Doctor Mihai Anton had been described as “the worst” physician a colleague has worked with, before the verdict of the Medical Council earlier today. In a fitness to practise inquiry, he had been charged with 14 counts of professional misconduct. He worked at the hospital for 10 days in January 2013 before a complaint was made and he was suspended. The committee hearing his case heard that he had difficulty with tasks such as scrubbing in for operations, putting on gowns and gloves and prescribing paracetamol. It is alleged that Anton was unable to dictate or write notes on patients’ charts and that he did not take notes at all for some patients. One allegation is that Anton failed to understand the nature of many tests and the inquiry heard that he had sought parental consent for the wrong type of hernia operation. When challenged by his superiors on this, Anton said that in Romania the same term is used for both operations. A HR manager at the hospital testified that Anton had been given the job after a phone interview. This was done to “accommodate” Anton, but the practcice has since been changed, she said. The inquiry heard that Anton told colleagues he was a consultant in Romania for six years, but was willing to step down two levels to gain experience in a foreign country. On one occassion, Anton contaminated a senior colleague in a surgery by touching them with non-sterile hands. When he was admonished for this, he touched two other colleagues. He is also accused of putting a patient and their family in a room clearly marked as needing to be cleaned and failed to get a name or date of birth from one patient. He also left work early, took long breaks and was late, the allegations say. Dr Suzanne McMahon, who worked with Anton in Crumlin, said that he was “the worst” SHO she has ever worked with. Additional reporting by Dan Mac Guill Originally published: Monday, 2.04 pmAN EMPLOYEE of the 123 Car Wash, 3635 N. Kedzie Ave., reported that he was shot and robbed at about 6:55 a.m. Monday, Jan. 26, according to 17th (Albany Park) District police. The 44-year-old man reported that a former employee asked him for jobs for him for a friend who was waiting outside the business, according to police. The man said that the second man entered the business with a handgun and demanded money and that the other man urged the man to shoot him, police said. The employee reported that as he was giving money to the men, the man fired his weapon three times, striking him in the chest and the left knee, according to police. He said that during a struggle he knocked the weapon out of the man’s hands, picked up the weapon and pointed it at the men as they fled, police said. The man was admitted to Illinois Masonic Hospital in serious condition, police said. A MAN REPORTED that his car was struck by a bullet at in the 4600 block of North Monticello Avenue at about 7:15 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 28, according to 17th (Albany Park) District police. The 20-year-old man reported that after he dropped off a passenger he heard three gunshots and that one of the bullets hit the rear side window of his car, according to police. A TEENAGER was arrested after she allegedly stabbed a woman at about 11:15 p.m. Monday, Jan. 26, in the 4600 block of North Kimball Avenue, according to 17th (Albany Park) District police. A 21-year-old woman reported that during an argument, the teen pulled out a knife and stabbed her in the arm, according to police. As officers apprehended the suspect, they discovered two bags of marijuana and a pair of brass knuckles in her possession, police said. The age of the suspect was not available. A MAN REPORTED that a vehicle struck his car at about 11:15 p.m., Monday, Jan. 26, while it was parked in the 4600 block of North Kimball Avenue, according to 17th (Albany Park) District police. The 22-year-old man reported that he was sitting inside of his car with a passenger and that a vehicle containing two
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A rigorous inquiry — not content to merely point fingers at external forces — takes an unflinching look at what occurred. Bringing to light the preventable problems is central to making significant improvements for the future. With such an approach, we can and must learn from electoral tragedy by evaluating the policies, actions and priorities of the Democratic Party. In the wake of the November 2016 election, the Democratic National Committee chose not to do a public “autopsy.” Overall, the party’s national leadership has shown scant interest in addressing many of the key factors that led to electoral disaster. Instead, the main emphasis has been on matters that the Democratic Party and its presidential nominee had little or no control over — an approach that largely obscures the party’s role in its own defeat. Rather than addressing topics beyond the control of the Democratic Party (whether FBI Director Comey, Russia, misogyny of some voters, etc.), this Autopsy focuses on some key factors that have been significantly under the party’s control. While in no way attempting or claiming to be comprehensive, this report focuses on some of our party’s most crucial flaws, fissures and opportunities. During the 2016 general election, the party experienced a falloff of voter turnout and support among people of color, the young and the working class. Much of our report concentrates on assessing the Democratic Party’s approach to those demographic groups. This independent report aims to serve as a nationwide discussion paper and stimulus for transformational action. The goal is clarity for the challenges ahead to end Republican rule and gain lasting momentum for progressive change. The task force of political organizers and research analysts who conducted this Autopsy was coordinated by longtime Democratic activist Karen Bernal, who chairs one of the largest caucuses in the California Democratic Party, the Progressive Caucus, and by RootsAction.org co-founder Norman Solomon, a Democratic National Convention delegate in 2008 and 2016 who was the national coordinator of the independent Bernie Delegates Network. Next -> Executive Summary Go to Full AutopsyGetty Images As expected, Geno Smith is now a member of Roc Nation, but he insists it’s not a sign of looking for the biggest splash. The Jets rookie quarterback said Tuesday he hired the firm headed by rap mogul Jay-Z. Agent Kim Miale, who represents two inactive players who have never played an NFL game, will handle his contract negotiations. Smith said the presence of Jay-Z played “not that big of a role,” in his decision, and he’ll have to pardon us since exactly no one in the world believes that. “I think it’s just his agency,” Smith said, via Manish Mehta of the New York Daily News. “When you talk about being in New York from a standpoint of what they can do in the city, the connections that they have, I think it’s a good move. My mother and my family were comfortable with it. I’m comfortable with it.... “I’m just going to move on from there. It’s not going to be a big deal and just remain humble and keep focusing on football.” It would seem that he might have gone with one of the agents who has actually negotiated an NFL contract if that was his goal, but that didn’t happen. Smith insisted, as he’s had to since being ripped throughout the pre- and post-draft process, that his image was “not that important to me honestly.” “The only thing that’s important to be is the image that is perceived around this locker room, the guy that I am to my teammates, to my coaches and the work that I put in on the football field,” Smith said. “I’m all about football. I’m all about getting better and that’s the one thing that I’m focused on: Better myself daily and prepare myself to be there when the time comes.... “I don’t worry about the outside world’s perception. I’m comfortable with who I am, strong in my faith. I know that this isn’t because of an image thing or trying to market myself. It’s just being comfortable with the guys who’s going to represent me. That’s ultimately why I made that decision.” The move is going to cause howling within the agent community, considering the appearance that Jay Z is effectively his own runner. Then again, the agent community howls a lot anyway.In the end, scrupulosity is the condition of not trusting in the Mercy of Christ. It's a plaguing sense of being "bad" or "guilty" or "unforgiven." It's a sort of obssessive-compulsive disorder that causes people to doubt the efficacy of the Sacrament of Confession or think they didn't receive the Sacrament properly, perhaps that they forgot to tell the priest something and that this will damn them or some such. Suffering from a case of the scruples can be excruciating. And such suffering is so uneceesary. Below is a guide for folks who have this condition. It was written first by a Redemptorist priest, Father Don Miller, some thirty years ago, and has been amended by Father Thomas Santa. I hope it helps you if you're torturing yourself with thoughts rooted in scrupulosity. 1. You shall not repeat a sin in confession when it has been confessed in a previous confession, even when there is a doubt that it was confessed or a doubt that it was confessed in a sufficiently adequate and complete way. Almost every scrupulous person experiences anxiety and doubt about past sins. Older people have a natural tendency to reflect back on their younger years, and in doing so, often remember something that triggers a doubt. More often than not, such a doubt has to do with impure thoughts, desires, or actions. As a result of the combination of remembering and doubting, it is not unusual that the scrupulous person then experiences great anxiety and is robbed of a sense of peace. This is why this first commandment is so very important: Do not go back over past sins and do not repeat the confession of them! Such an exercise is not at all helpful and must be resisted. 2. You shall not confess doubtful sins in confession, but only sins that are clear and certain. Of all of the correspondence that I receive, I would say that this issue is the one that occurs most often. "What does a person do if they are not sure that they committed a sin?" For this reason, this is a very important commandment to remember because it clearly states the truth: Doubtful sins don't count! There is no need to confess something that does not clearly and certainly exist. In fact, it is harmful to one's self to confess that which is doubtful. Again, such a practice is not at all helpful and must be resisted. Now I can almost hear some of you saying, "I am not sure if I doubt that I sinned or if I am just trying to fool myself to believe that I am doubting that I sinned." This thought in itself demonstrates that you are in fact doubting and so, therefore, the commandment comes into play: You shall not confess doubtful sins. 3. You shall not repeat your penance after confession or any of the words of your penance because you feel or think that you had distractions or may not have said the words properly. The temptation to repeat prayers is a constant one for the scrupulous. You may feel that you need to repeat them, again and again, until you "get them right." Unfortunately, such perfectionism is never satisfied, and so you will remain in a constant state of anxiety and fear. This situation becomes all the more distressing because many times the scrupulous person will argue that, because they feel anxious or fearful, that must be a sign that they did not correctly perform their penance. "If I did it right I would be peaceful." This commandment is, therefore, very important because it is the only solution to the dilemma in which you find yourself. Father Miller is right: Do not repeat your penance. 4. You shall not worry about breaking your fast before receiving communion, unless you actually put food and drink in your mouth and swallow it in the same way that a person does when eating a meal. Much of the anxiety that is present in reference to breaking your fast before communion centers around extraneous matters. It is helpful to remember that lipstick is not food. Snowflakes are not food. You cannot break your fast unless you deliberately choose to eat in the same way that you would choose to eat a meal or a snack. The commandment clearly suggests that no hesitations are allowed regarding accidental swallowing of things that are not considered food. 5. You shall not hesitate to look at any crucifix or at any statue in church or at home or anywhere else because you may get bad thoughts in your mind and imagination. If such thoughts occur, they carry no sin whatever. Although this commandment deals with a situation that is not necessarily a problem for all scrupulous persons, it is nevertheless a real burden for some. If you try to avoid the problem by not looking, the problem will tend to become more severe. It is a much better choice to meet the problem head on. Thoughts and imaginations that occur in this situation are simply not sinful. One should try and confront fear, not give in to it. 6. You shall not consider yourself guilty of bad thoughts, desires, or feelings, unless you can honestly swear before the all-truthful God that you remember clearly and certainly consenting to them. This is a very important commandment. The whole area of impure thoughts and desires causes scrupulous people much anxiety. Unfortunately, scrupulous persons often believe that the very appearance of thoughts or desires in their thoughts or imagination means that they have committed a sin. This is most certainly not the case. In fact, it is humanly impossible for us to have absolute control over our interior faculties. Such thoughts and images are going to happen, whether we like them or not. Because we simply do not have absolute control over our interior faculties, the emphasis of the commandment is on clear and certain consent. Only a free consent, that is clear and certain, constitutes a sin. You can not accidentally or involuntarily be guilty of sin. 7. You shall not disobey your confessor when he tells you never to make another general confession of past sins already confessed. It is not unusual for the scrupulous person to desire to make "just one more general confession." The desire to do so is prompted by a wish for inner peace and calm. However, the exact opposite is more often than not a result. The anxiety generated by the process of examination and preparation, the actual confession, and then the review of the confession, produces no inner peace or calm. There always has to be "just one more." The wisdom of this commandment is found in two simple words: No more! If the scrupulous person will follow the advice of their confessor on this matter, they will have a chance of finding peace. Otherwise, there is only turmoil, anxiety, and stress. 8. You shall believe and act accordingly, so that whenever you are in doubt as to whether or not you are obliged to do or not to do something, you can take it for certain that you are not obligated. This commandment underlines the basic moral principle that doubtful laws or obligations do not bind the scrupulous conscience. The great saint, and our patron, Saint Alphonsus Liguori teaches: "When there exists in a scrupulous person the habitual will not to offend God, it is certain that he or she acts in doubt and there is no sin...." I find it very reassuring to read the words of Saint Alphonsus in reference to this matter. It is good to know that the teaching of our very wise patron and model, a saint whom you might recall also suffered greatly from scrupulosity, is so clear and straightforward. "There is no sin," are the words we need to hear and recall as often as necessary. 9. If, before you perform or omit an act, you are doubtful whether or not it is sinful for you, you shall assume as certain that it is not sinful and shall proceed to act without any dread of sin whatever. This commandment is also supported by Saint Alphonsus. In his advice to confessors he says, "Scrupulous persons tend to fear that everything they do is sinful. The confessor should command them to act without restraint and overcome their anxiety. He should tell them that their first obligation is to conquer their scruples. They should act against their groundless fears. The confessor may command the scrupulous to conquer their anxiety and disregard it by freely doing whatever it tells them not to do. The confessor may assure the penitent the he or she need never confess such a thing." 10. You shall put your total trust in Jesus Christ, knowing that he loves you as only God can love, and that he will never allow you to lose your soul. We often reflected in the pages of SA [Ed. Scrupulous Anonymous] that the scrupulous person, for one reason or another, has a negative image of God. A negative image of God does not inspire trust but rather fear and dread. In Jesus Christ we are able to glimpse the true image of God: a God who loves and heals and saves. It is in that God, the God revealed to us by Jesus, that we can and should place all of our trust. It may very well be helpful to review some scripture passages which may help you change your image of God from a negative to a positive image. May I suggest that you spend some time reviewing the prophet Isaiah, chapter 43, verses 1-4. In this passage you will hear the words of the Lord speaking to you and reminding you "that you are precious in my eyes." You might follow up Isaiah with a reading from Paul's letter to the Romans, chapter 8, verses 26-39. In this reading we are assured that the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. You might finally end your reflection by reading from the first letter of the Apostle John, chapter 4, verses 7-19. In this reading John reminds us that love consists in knowing, "not that we have loved God but that God has loved us." I hope that this familiar review of the Ten Commandments for the Scrupulous has proven helpful. I might suggest that you keep these commandments close by, especially as a point of reference when you feel anxious or distressed. It is very helpful at such moments to have the calm voice of reason speaking to us. The Liguori Publications website whence this guide came: http://mission.liguori.org/index.htmKarl Oliver, a Republican state representative in Mississippi, last week said leaders in Louisiana who have removed Confederate statues and monuments from public property should be “lynched.” “If the, and I use this term extremely loosely, 'leadership' of Louisiana wishes to, in a Nazi-ish fashion, burn books or destroy historical monuments of OUR HISTORY, they should be LYNCHED! Let it be known, I will do all in my power to prevent this from happening in our State,” Oliver wrote in a Saturday Facebook post. ADVERTISEMENT New Orleans last week removed the last of four Confederate statues the city decided earlier this year to bring down. The final statue was of Robert E. Lee, the general who lead the Confederate Army. Confederate flags and statues have received fresh criticism following the racially motivated 2015 shooting at an African-American church in Charleston, S.C., that killed nine churchgoers. Oliver called the monuments’ removal “heinous and horrific.” “The destruction of these monuments, erected in the loving memory of our family and fellow Southern Americans, is both heinous and horrific."Emirates Flight Training Academy, developed by Emirates airline to address its growing need for pilots, has signed an agreement with Cirrus Aircraft and Embraer to order 27 new aircraft. The order includes 22 single-piston engine Cirrus SR22’s and 5 twin-jet Embraer Phenom 100E, which are valued at more than $39 million (Dh143 million) at list prices. The aircraft, which will be delivered starting in 2017, will be used by cadet pilots as they train to become fully-qualified commercial pilots for Emirates. This order will allow Emirates Flight Training Academy cadet pilots to receive, for the first time, 100% of their training in Dubai. Previously, cadet pilots underwent a majority of their training at a variety of locations overseas. In addition to consolidating education into one location in the Middle East, the new aircraft order also ensures cadets will have access to the youngest training fleet in the world. Adel Al Redha, Emirates Executive Vice President and Chief Operations Officer, said: “Industry forecasts show growth in the need of pilots particularly over the next few years. The Middle East and the Gulf region will have the highest demand for pilots to support its expansion and introduction of new aircraft. The Emirates Flight Training Academy is our investment and response to this pressing need. “The academy will offer training programmes using the latest available technology and advanced aircraft. Our decision to purchase these new aircraft for training underscores our commitment to equip the Academy, as well as the aviation industry with the infrastructure needed to produce a highly-skilled pilot workforce. While the biggest beneficiary of this programme is Emirates, it’s our plan to offer the programme to external candidates around the world.” The Emirates Flight Training Academy will initially focus on Emirates’ existing cadet pilot programme for UAE nationals, with the aim to expand intake to other candidates in the future. Once accepted into the cadet programme, students will be provided on campus accommodation and will undergo rigorous ground training. After completing this component of their education, they will begin their in-flight training on the Cirrus SR22 aircraft to learn basic commercial piloting skills. Cadets will then advance to the Embraer Phenom 100E aircraft to obtain their twin engine jet rating and their Commercial Pilot License on a multi-engine aircraft with Instrument Rating, and frozen Airline Transport Pilot’s License. In traditional cadet programmes, students move from single-engine piston aircraft to twin-engine piston aircraft before transitioning to jet airplanes. With the Emirates Flight Training Academy, students move from the single-engine piston Cirrus SR22 directly to the jet-powered Embraer Phenom 100E. This eliminates an extra step in becoming a commercial pilot and gives cadet pilots an enhanced curriculum during single engine training, as well as more experience flying jet aircraft before being trained as an official Emirates pilot. Overall, the programme including ground school, flying and simulator training lasts three and a half years. source: Emirates 24/7End Of 'Wet-Foot, Dry-Foot' Means Cubans Can Join Ranks Of 'Undocumented' Enlarge this image toggle caption Ezequiel Becerra/AFP/Getty Images Ezequiel Becerra/AFP/Getty Images There's a popular saying in Spanish — O todos en la cama, o todos en el suelo. It conveys a selfless commitment to equal treatment, and translates roughly like this: Either we all get the bed, or we all get the floor. Among many immigrants in the U.S., there's been a feeling that when it comes to the spoils of U.S. immigration policy, the government has given Cubans the bed all to themselves, while it has relegated others — Mexicans, Haitians, Central Americans — to the floor. This is because of the so-called wet-foot, dry-foot policy, which since 1995 has granted Cubans who touch American soil a privilege not afforded other immigrants who come without a visa: the right to stay and get on a fast track to citizenship. This special treatment ended this week when, in the final days of his administration, President Obama announced an abrupt end to the policy, a capstone to his two-year-old effort to re-establish relations with Cuba. Effective immediately, Cubans arriving on U.S. soil without a visa will be treated just like any other immigrant. They will be turned away. This does not mean Cubans will stop coming. "What it means," said Florida International University political scientist Eduardo Gamarra, "is that for the first time, we're going to have undocumented Cubans. And how the Cuban community responds to that is going to be very interesting." Obama wet foot Obama To End Policy Granting Residency To Cubans Arriving In U.S. Obama To End Policy Granting Residency To Cubans Arriving In U.S. Listen · 3:39 3:39 For decades, Cubans have occupied a rarefied station, particularly among the Latino population of the United States. Because those arriving in the U.S. after Fidel Castro's ascension in 1959 were seen as fleeing political persecution, the U.S. generally allowed them to stay. In 1966, Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allowed Cubans to get green cards after being in the U.S. for two years, later reduced to a single year. Though the Cuban government opposed these policies, they were the status quo until 1994, when the U.S. agreed to amend the rules. Wet-foot, dry-foot allowed only those Cubans who made it to U.S. soil to stay. Those caught at sea were to be turned away. The stated hope was that the threat of getting repelled would discourage Cubans from risking their lives on rickety boats. But they kept coming, and once here, a green card was pretty much ensured. Leaving their country has always carried risk for Cubans, as it has for other immigrants. But unlike for their counterparts, the specter of illegality and all its repercussions (see: the 2016 presidential election) has not applied to Cubans. They have never really had to worry, for example, about deportation once they've made it to the U.S. This privilege has affected in fundamental ways the identity that Cuban-Americans have forged both in terms of their place in American society and in relation to other Latino groups. "Cubans have never been, and have never seen themselves, as 'illegals,' or even, particularly, as a minority group," said Guillermo Grenier, a sociologist at FIU who is Cuban-American. "They have never seen themselves as anything other than added value to this country. It's part of the Cuban exceptionalism narrative that is just as strong as the American exceptionalism narrative." The dynamics here are complex. That stems in part from the fact that most of the Cubans who fled Castro's regime soon after the 1959 revolution were political exiles, not economic migrants. They were of the largely white middle class whose property and businesses Castro seized and nationalized. Beginning in the '60s, these exiles used their entrepreneurial drive to turn Miami into a vibrant frontier city. That's always been a schism impeding solidarity between Cubans and other Latino groups. Over the decades, this set Cubans apart from many other Latinos in the U.S., who aside from tending to be economic migrants also lacked the legal status that would have allowed them to achieve their full potential. Even as the makeup of the Cuban influx began to change in the '80s and '90s — with more Cubans coming for economic reasons — wet-foot, dry-foot allowed them a unique confidence in their place in the United States. "That's always been a schism impeding solidarity between Cubans and other Latino groups," Grenier said. Though it has rarely led to full-blown tension, it has been more evident at times, as it was last year when large groups of Haitians and Central-Americans seeking asylum found themselves stuck at the U.S.-Mexico border while long lines of Cubans got through. "The policy has clearly contributed to that," Grenier said. The fact that Cuban-Americans, unlike other Latinos, have traditionally been a reliable conservative voting block has also contributed to this schism. And even as the Cuban-American political center has shifted to the left in recent years, Grenier said, there is a built-in distance when it comes to issues like immigration between the young Cubans marching for immigrant rights and the Mexicans, Guatemalans and Colombians with whom they're linking arms. "It's a feeling of solidarity with other Latinos and their plight," Grenier said. "You see young Cubans fighting for the other guy." wet foot reax Cuban-Americans React To Obama Ending Longstanding 'Wet Foot, Dry Foot' Policy Cuban-Americans React To Obama Ending Long-Standing 'Wet Foot, Dry Foot' Policy Listen · 4:03 4:03 Grenier said he expects the end of wet-foot, dry-foot to gradually change notions of Cuban-American identity as newer migrants become subject to the construct of "illegality" that drives so much of the policy and rhetoric around immigration in the United States. While before, young Cubans were fighting for the other guy, "now you're going to be fighting for yourself," Grenier said. "You're going to have a horse in the race." Gamarra said Cubans in the U.S. are going to find their community stratifying in ways familiar to other Latino groups. "You're going to have privileged and nonprivileged Cubans," he said. "You're going to find the phenomenon of people trying to demonstrate that they were here before yesterday. You're going to find mad rushes to find ways to become documented." At the same time, Gamarra says the end of wet-foot, dry-foot will not necessarily usher in a level playing field. Obama kept in place a policy that grants roughly 20,000 visas to Cubans annually, a relatively large number for an island of 11 million people. Nonetheless, Gamarra said the policy's end may strengthen solidarity between Cubans and other Latinos, "because we aren't all going to be on the bed together," he said. "We're all going to be on the floor."Dragon's Dogma is a game soundtracked by screaming guitars and a hyperactive orchestra; a game whose story is told with showboating faux-Shakespearean flourish; a game set within acres of countryside scrawled with boastful castles; a game fronted by a hero whose heart has been plucked from his chest by a dragon's fingernails. Despite all of this, it is also a game that understands the value of understatement. For years, video games have aped cinema's love of the action set-piece, with critical fights telegraphed to viewers with grim ceremony. Warriors exchange worried glances as the string section falls silent; a tumbleweed tumbles as the party stands frozen in fight/flight uncertainty; an inhale of calm before the storm. But Dragon's Dogma's set-piece battles have none of this. They occur brutally unannounced - truer to life perhaps, if life consisted of wandering through a dense forest patrolled by a two-ton Chimera. Midway through a routine battle with a band of goblins, a red wyrm might crash awkwardly through the tree canopy, breaking trunks like twigs as it tries to stow its wings while breathing fire. This sense that any monster could arrive on the scene at any moment lends the game a fraught tension. Peel back the spectacle to look at the underlying rules and you'll see that, while these monsters have their allotted areas (and will often respawn there some time after defeat), encounters are otherwise dynamic and unscripted. There's a feeling that not even the designers know quite what's going to happen, and this sense of randomness gives the adventuring in Dragon' Dogma its exciting intensity. Not that the game isn't familiar. It's constructed from a hotchpotch of borrowed ideas, both thematic and systemic. Tolkien's fingerprints are pressed firmly into Gransys' hills, castles and lore, while monsters and tics of terminology are taken from a range of contemporary Western fantasy and ancient Greek myth. You climb onto the backs of your larger foes as in Shadow of the Colossus, nicking at their necks and tails as you seek to bring them down. Missions are received from Fable-style NPCs (minus the humour and character), while quests are handled in a similar way to the Elder Scrolls series, where selecting a new primary goal will shift your mission marker around the map. The opportunity to carry out guild sub-quests and hunt down rare and dangerous beasts is reminiscent of Final Fantasy 12. Meanwhile, the game aims for Dark Souls' difficulty, punishing the ill-prepared adventurer or aimless wanderer in the strictest possible terms. There are shades of Miyazaki's classic too in the curious multiplayer, which prevents players from questing together but provides a remote opportunity to help one another out by sending characters across the network. These are more than mere inspirations; Dragon's Dogma is a curious hybrid, made of stitched-together designs. It gains diversity from this approach, but at the expense of purity of vision and, often, its own identity. Even so, at its best, Dragon's Dogma comes close to the greats it apes. Amongst the game's successes, combat is key. There are three basic classes to pick for your hero - Warrior, Mage or Ranger - each one drastically altering the experience in battle. These can be developed into advanced versions, with three hybrid classes to assume when you reach a high enough level. The development team's Devil May Cry heritage can be felt in the simple combos you are free to create, with launchers, ground strikes and button-mash attacks that can be strung together. Combat doesn't have the weight or grace of Dark Souls' approach, and the lack of a lock-on button ensures you'll be wrestling with the camera just as often as you try to hang on the back of a writhing giant. But Capcom's action game expertise elevates the fighting above many of its straight RPG peers. Dragon's Dogma also makes up for its deeper shortcomings in its team dynamic. Your character is supported by three 'pawns', computer-controlled characters that fight alongside you. One of these is your primary pawn, a character that is yours to nurture, develop, equip and care for as if he or she were the protagonist. The other two are hired hands, either on loan from other players in Dragon' Dogma's networked multiverse or employed at one of the game's towns or guilds. These two don't earn experience and won't level up, forcing frequent hiring and firing rounds as you seek to complement your core duo with support of a similar level. You are able to switch character classes for all of your fighters and select their specific special moves and magical abilities. The responsibility for your team's harmony is wholly yours, and creating a well-balanced team is paramount to success. Taking
.[142][143] In March 2013, Bloomberg reported from inside sources that Surface sales were behind expectations, particularly of the ARM-based Surface model. Microsoft had originally projected sales of 2 million Surface units during the final quarter of 2012, a total of 1.5 million Surface devices had been sold since launch with Surface Pro accounting for 400,000 of these sales. The more expensive Surface Pro, with its Intel CPU that makes it a full-fledged Windows laptop PC, despite its compromises, was successful compared to other OEMs' first-generation Windows 8 Ultrabook hybrids which were larger and/or more expensive. In July 2013, Steve Ballmer revealed that the Surface hasn't sold as well as he hoped.[144] He reported that Microsoft had made a loss of US$900,000,000 due to the lackluster Surface sales. Concurrently, Microsoft cut the price of first-gen Surface RT worldwide by 30%, with its U.S. price falling to US$350.[145][146][147][148] This was followed by a further price cut in August after it was revealed that even the marketing costs had exceed the sales.[149] On August 4, 2013, the cost of Surface Pro was cut by $100 giving it an entry price of $799. Several law firms sued Microsoft, accusing the company of misleading shareholders about sales of the first-gen ARM based Surface tablet, calling it an "unmitigated disaster".[150] In the first two years of sales, Microsoft lost almost two billion dollars.[151] The poor sales of the ARM-based Surface tablet had been credited to the continuing market dominance of Microsoft's competitors in the tablet market. Particularly, Apple's iPad retained its dominance due its App store offering the most tablet-optimized applications. Most OEMs opted to produce tablets running Google Android, which came in a wide variety of sizes and prices (albeit with mixed success among most OEMs), and Google Play had the second-largest selection of tablet applications. By contrast there was a limited amount of software designed specifically for Surface's operating system, Windows RT, the selection which was even weaker than Windows Phone.[152] Indeed, OEMs reported that most customers felt Intel-based tablets were more appropriate for use in business environments, as they were compatible with the much more widely available x86 programs while Windows RT was not. Microsoft's subsequent efforts have been focused upon refining the Surface Pro and making it a viable competitor in the premium ultra-mobile PC category, against other Ultrabooks and the MacBook Air, while discontinuing development of ARM-powered Surface devices as the Surface 3 (non-Pro) had an Intel x86 CPU (albeit with lower performance than the Surface Pro 3).[152][153] Surface Pro 3 promotion in front of a Microsoft Store The resultant Surface Pro 3 succeeded in garnering a great interest in the Surface line, making Surface business profitable for the first time in fiscal year Q1 2015.[154] Later in Q2, the Surface division's sales topped $1 billion.[155] Surface division scored $888 million for Q4 2015 despite an overall loss of $2.1 billion for Microsoft, a 117% year-over-year growth thanks to the steady commercial performance of Surface Pro 3 and the launch of mainstream model Surface 3.[156] In the first quarter of fiscal year 2018 the Surface division posted its best earnings performance to date.[157] Reported issues [ edit ] Users on Microsoft's support forum reported that some Touch Covers were splitting at the seam where it connects to the tablet, exposing its wiring. A Microsoft spokesperson stated that the company was aware of the issue, and would offer free replacements for those who have been affected by the defect.[158][159] Other users reported issues with audio randomly stuttering or muting on the Surface tablet while in use.[160] Wi-Fi connectivity issues were also reported. Firmware updates that attempted to fix the problem were released, but some users still reported problems like blue screen errors while watching video and crash of display driver.[161][162][163] Microsoft has acknowledged a bug in the Windows key that does not always work, but has promised a fix.[164] The latest update, which promised to fix the issue, was not able to fix it.[165] With the original Surface Pro, Microsoft acknowledged issues encountered by some users with its stylus pen, including intermittent pen failures, and with older applications that do not have complete pen support due to the different APIs used by Surface Pro's stylus drivers. In the latter case, Microsoft has indicated that it is working with software vendors to ensure better compatibility.[166][167] As for later models beginning with the Surface Pro 3, the N-Trig digital pen digitizer system has attained high pen compatibility with older applications thanks to a regularly updated, optional WinTab driver.[168] Issues had also been experienced with slow Wi-Fi connectivity, and the device not properly returning from standby.[169][170] iFixit has awarded the Surface Pro its worst ever repairability rating, but CEO Kyle Wiens claims that it is due to incompetence rather than deliberate design choices.[171] Timeline [ edit ] See also [ edit ]With Halloween behind us, it's officially the holiday season in Toronto. Stores are already filled with tinsel, trees and festive displays and red Starbucks cups are littered about. Despite this Christmas cheer, the city will be feeling quite balmy over the next few days. You can put away your fall jacket for now because temperatures will soar to nearly 20 C this week. Environment Canada is forecasting sunny skies and a high of 17 C for Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursday, it's supposed to be sunny and 19 C. While it may rain on Friday, the expected high is still 16 C. It's doubtful that we'll break any records, but this is very likely the last reprieve from the cold that we'll get before it's snow time. Pout. Enjoy this warm weather while it lasts because by the weekend it'll be back to seasonal fall temperatures. How will you take advantage of this November heat wave? Let us know in the comments. Photo by Michael Monastyrskyj in the blogTO Flickr pool.About This Game Penguins Arena is a thrilling and innovativewithand where the magic of reincarnation, combined with the supernatural ability to return to the game as a ghost, ensures that your character has every chance to change your tribe's fate, even in the afterlife.Save the Penguins, Save the World!- Quick rounds and furious gameplay- 5 different weapons and bonuses- 4 unique game modes- 15 different Iceberg battlefields- Player interaction, even after death- Multiplayer game (LAN and Internet)- Penguin customization- Fight the good fight and unlock 10 Achievements!*It all begins when a penguin legend comes to life in the form of Sedna, the ancient Penguin Goddess. Global warming, melting ice caps, pollution... penguin tribes are endangered. Sedna tells them that there is room for but one tribe. And so the purging begins.Now it's your turn to join the snowball battle and drive the other tribes into the sea.* in-game achievements only. For Steam achievements please read the following thread http://steamcommunity.com/app/11280/discussions/0/617336568080930532/A return date has been set for the return of Anthony Tupou, with the Sharks backrower hoping to be available and on the field by round 21. Ironically the estimated time of Tupou’s comeback coincides with his teams return bout with the New Zealand Warriors, with his broken jaw occurring when playing that same team in a round nine match at Remondis Stadium back in early May. Tupou’s potential return would certainly add further depth to the Sharks forward ranks, with his explosive running set to be a huge bonus during the run in to the finals. In other injury news Blake Ayshford has been pencilled in to play for the Newtown Jets in a NSW Cup match on Saturday. Ayshford has recovered from a lower back injury and could have played last weekend if required. The other well-publicised injury affecting the Sharks involves Paul Gallen, however it appears he will take his place in the NSW team for the State of Origin decider tonight. Gallen has been missing from the Sharks side since suffering the injury in Origin 2 and coach Shane Flanagan will be sweating on the game tonight and hoping his skipper comes through unscathed and is available to take on the Dragons on Sunday in the local derby match at Remondis. Similarly, Flanagan will also be keeping a keen eye on Michael Ennis should he play tonight in place of Robbie Farah. Ennis has been in camp with the Blues in the lead up to the game and while a decision on Farah hasn’t yet been revealed, many are expecting the Sharks hooker to run out with the Blues at Suncorp this evening. As for as the long-term injured are concerned, out of Fa’amanu Brown (knee), Jacob Gagan (Achilles) and Kyle Stanley (knee) only Brown is a chance of returning to the field at some stage during 2015. Brown’s rehab program is well and truly in full swing, however his status and return date has yet to be determined. Go to the Sharks injury update page for more information – CLICK HERE - http://www.sharks.com.au/info/injury-update.html Sunday's match against the St George Illawarra Dragons is proudly brought to you by match day sponsor Southern Radiology.The Kastner train consisted of 35 cattle trucks that left Budapest on 30 June 1944, during the German occupation of Hungary, carrying over 1,600 Jews to safety in Switzerland. The train was named after Rudolf Kastner, a Jewish-Hungarian lawyer and journalist, who was a founding member of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, a group that smuggled Jews out of occupied Europe during the Holocaust. Kastner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann, the German SS officer in charge of deporting Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland, to allow over 1,600 Jews to escape in exchange for gold, diamonds and cash.[2] The train was organized during the deportations to Auschwitz in May–July 1944 of 437,000 Hungarian Jews, three-quarters of whom were sent to the gas chambers.[3] Its passengers were chosen from a wide range of social classes and included around 273 children, many of them orphaned.[4] The wealthiest 150 passengers paid $1,500 each to cover their own and the others' escape.[5] After a journey of several weeks, including a diversion to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, 1,670 surviving passengers reached Switzerland in August and December 1944. Kastner emigrated to Israel in 1947. He was a spokesman for the Minister of Trade and Industry when his negotiations with Eichmann became the subject of controversy. Kastner had been told in April or May 1944 of the mass murder that was taking place inside Auschwitz. Allegations spread after the war that he had done nothing to warn the wider community, but had focused instead on trying to save a smaller number. The inclusion on the train of his family, as well as 388 people from the ghetto in his home town of Kolozsvár, reinforced the view of his critics that his actions had been self-serving.[6] The allegations culminated in Kastner being accused in a newsletter of having been a Nazi collaborator. The government sued for libel on his behalf, and the defendant's lawyer turned the trial into an indictment of the Mapai (Labour) leadership and its alleged failure to help Europe's Jews. The judge found against the government, ruling that Kastner had "sold his soul to the devil" by negotiating with Eichmann and selecting some Jews to be saved while failing to alert others.[7] Kastner was assassinated in Tel Aviv in March 1957.[8] Nine months later the Supreme Court of Israel overturned most of the lower court's ruling, stating in a 4–1 decision that the judge had "erred seriously."[9] Organizer [ edit ] Rudolf Kastner (1906–1957), also known as Israel Rezső Kasztner, was born in Kolozsvár, Austria-Hungary.[10] Kastner attended law school, then worked as a journalist for Új Kelet as a sports reporter and political commentator.[11] He also became an assistant to Dr. József Fischer, a member of the Romanian parliament and leading member of the National Jewish Party, and in 1934 married Fischer's daughter, Erzsébet.[12] Kastner gained a reputation as a political fixer and joined the Ihud party, later known as Mapai, a left-wing Zionist party.[11] He also helped to set up the Aid and Rescue Committee, along with Joel and Hansi Brand, Samuel Springmann, Ottó Komoly, a Budapest engineer, Ernő Szilágyi from the Hashomer Hatzair, and several others.[13] According to Joel Brand, the group helped 22,000–25,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe reach the relative safety of Hungary between 1941 and March 1944, before the German invasion of that country on 19 March that year.[14] Passengers [ edit ] A page from the passenger list, showing the entry for Ladislaus Löb, 11 years old at the time, who became a professor of German at the University of Sussex The passengers were chosen by a committee that included Kastner, Ottó Komoly, and Hansi Brand from the Aid and Rescue Committee, as well as Zsigmond Leb, a former president of the Orthodox community in Cluj.[5] Israeli legal scholar Asher Maoz writes that Kastner told the Zionist Congress after the war, in a report he wrote about the actions of the Aid and Rescue Committee, that he saw the train as a "Noah's ark," because it contained a cross-section of the Jewish community, and in particular people who had worked in public service.[3] According to Jeno Kölb, a passenger who kept a diary, there were 972 female and 712 male passengers in all; the oldest was 82, the youngest was but a few days old.[15] Ladislaus Löb, another passenger (see right), writes that the exact number on board when the train left Budapest remains uncertain, because in the early stages of the journey several passengers disembarked, fearing that the train would end up in Auschwitz, while others took their places. Several women threw their young children on board at the last minute.[16] What is known is that 1,684 passengers were registered when the train (unexpectedly) reached the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Hannover on 9 July.[17] According to Löb, the passengers included 199 Zionists from Transylvania and 230 from Budapest, and 126 Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews, among them 40 rabbis; one of the rabbis was Joel Teitelbaum, the Satmar rebbe. There were scholars, artists, housewives, peasants, farmers, industrialists and bankers, journalists, teachers and nurses.[4] The writer Béla Zsolt was on board, as was the psychiatrist Léopold Szondi, the opera singer Dezső Ernster, the artist István Irsai, and Peter Munk, who became a businessman in Canada.[18] There were also 388 people from Kastner's home town of Cluj, including family members.[19] His mother, Helen Kastner, was given a place, as was his brother Ernő, his pregnant wife Bogyó (she gave birth to a daughter, Zsuzsi, in Switzerland in December 1944), along with her father József Fischer, and Bogyó's other relatives. Erno Szilagyi of the Aid and Rescue Committee was on board, as were Joel Brand's mother, sister, and niece Margit, and the daughters of Ottó Komoly and Samuel Stern.[20] Porter writes that each passenger was allowed to bring two changes of clothing, six sets of underwear, and food for 10 days.[20] Three suitcases of cash, jewels, gold, and shares of stock, amounting to about $1000 per person, were paid to SS officer Kurt Becher in ransom.[17] Journey [ edit ] Linz, Austria [ edit ] According to Bauer, the train was stopped at the Hungarian-Austrian border, where it could head west, or east to Auschwitz. The passengers started panicking; he writes that Joel Teitelbaum and his party sent off messages asking people to save them, and only them. Hershel Friedman in his book "Mei'Afeiloo Loir Goodel" (מאפילה לאור גדול) about Teitelbaum shows documentation that Teitelbaum tried, together with Chiem Roth, to save the whole train. Eichmann decided, for reasons that remain unclear, to divert the train to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northwest Germany, near Hannover.[21] The train passed through Linz in Austria, where passengers disembarked and were sent to a military delousing station for medical inspections and showers. They were forced to strip and stand naked for hours waiting to see medical personnel or go into the showers; the women were subjected to intimate examinations by the doctors, supposedly in a search for lice. They also had their heads and pubic regions shaved.[22] Several passengers believed the showers would turn out to be gas chambers, something that Löb writes one of the SS guards confirmed with a grin.[22] Bauer cites this fear as evidence that the Hungarian-Jewish community was well aware of the information about the gas chambers inside Auschwitz.[21] Between August 1943 and May 1944, Rudolf Vrba and three other Auschwitz escapees had passed information about the gas chambers to Jewish and other officials; it was this information that Vrba believed Kastner had access to but did not distribute widely enough.[23] Bergen-Belsen, Germany [ edit ] The concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen in north Germany, where the passengers arrived on 9 July When the train reached Bergen-Belsen on Sunday, 9 July, the passengers were taken to a special section, what would be known as the Ungarnlager (Hungarian camp), where they were held for weeks, and in some cases months. Löb writes that their daily diet consisted of 330 grams of a grey, dense bread, 15 grams of margarine, 25 grams of jam, 1 litre of vegetable (mostly turnip) soup, 1.5 litres of coffee substitute, and sometimes cheese or sausage, with milk and extra rations for children under 14.[24] The group was allowed to organize itself and its activities. As they settled in, the men elected Józef Fischer to be president, and run daily activities.[25] With so many intellectuals among the passengers, there were regular poetry readings, and lectures in history, philosophy and religious education.[26] The living arrangements were primitive, with 130–160 people crammed into each room. Ladislaus Löb describes a typical night, based on a diary kept by Szidonia Devecseri, another passenger: The rabbi's wife tries in vain to stop her children, aged four and eight, fighting in her bunk. Her neighbours, kept awake by the din, swear at them. A woman screams because a mouse has run over her face. Bedbugs drop from the higher bunks onto the lower. Another woman screams because the little boy in the bunk above her has spilled the jam jar he uses as a chamber pot all over her. Somebody has whooping cough. Another little boy begs his mother not to beat him because in his sleep he wet the bunk he shares with her. She does and he squeals. A former night-club dancer tells dirty stories about her ex-colleagues to the refined Orthodox language teacher, who does not know whether to block her ears or to laugh. A spoilt rich wife has hung her clothes on all available nails, leaving no room for anybody else. The passage ends with: "In 24 out of 24 hours there is never a minute's silence..."[27] Switzerland [ edit ] Arrival in Switzerland The first batch of 318 passengers arrived in Switzerland on the 18th August 1944, and the rest in December. It is reported that approximately 1350 passengers arrived in Switzerland in December 1944.[28] There were several births and deaths, and about 17 continued to be detained in Bergen-Belsen on various pretexts. For example, some of the original passengers who had declared themselves Romanian upon arriving at Bergen Belsen were forced to stay after King Michael overthrew the pro-Axis government of Ion Antonescu in Romania, aligning the nation with the Allies.[29] The total saved was about 1,670.[30] The group was housed in the Swiss village of Caux, near Montreux, in requisitioned former luxury hotels. The Orthodox Jews were housed in the Regina (formerly the Grand Hotel), and the others in the Hotel Esplanade (formerly Caux Palace).[31] Kastner trial [ edit ] The transport played a major role in the Kastner trial in Israel in 1954, in which the government of Israel sued Malchiel Gruenwald, a political pamphleteer, for libel after he self-published a pamphlet charging Kastner, by then an Israeli government spokesman, with collaboration. A major detail of Gruenwald's allegations was that Kastner had agreed to the rescue in return for remaining silent about the fate of the mass of Hungarian Jews. This accusation was accepted by the court, leading Judge Benjamin Halevi to declare that Kastner had "sold his soul to the devil."[7] In 1958, most of the ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court of Israel. The Court upheld Judge Halevi's verdict on the manner in which Kastner offered testimony after the war on behalf of SS officer Kurt Becher.[32] Kastner was assassinated outside his home in Tel Aviv in March 1957 as a result of the decision and the subsequent publicity. See also [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] References [ edit ]California piled on 19,300 jobs in March and its unemployment rate dropped to 4.9%, according to figures released Friday by the state’s Employment Development Department. That’s the first time since December 2006 that the jobless rate has fallen below 5%. It was another month of solid but not breathtaking job gains in a state that has slowed a bit after years of unbridled growth. Still, California grew faster than the rest of the country in March, expanding at a rate of 2.1% year over year, compared with 1.5% nationwide. Californians were still slightly more likely to be unemployed; the U.S. jobless rate hit 4.5% in March. The standout sector in March was construction, which increased payrolls by 18,900. The information sector — which includes tech businesses in Silicon Valley and moviemakers in Hollywood — faltered last month, cutting head count by 9,400. Los Angeles County gained a net 16,000 jobs in March. The county's unemployment rate fell to 4.6%, down from a revised 4.8% in February. Here are some key insights into the latest labor-market report from the world’s sixth-largest economy. » Inland Empire had some of the biggest job gains in the U.S. recently California powered the nation In March, California produced about 20% of the job growth in the entire country, which added 98,000 jobs last month. The state is huge, but it only accounts for about 11.5% of the country’s employees, which means that it is punching above its weight. “We get beaten up for being a high-cost and high-tax state … but we have been outperforming many states,” said Robert Kleinhenz, an economist at Beacon Economics, a Los Angeles consulting firm. California alone was responsible for 16% of the country’s growth from 2014 to 2016, according to Kleinhenz’s analysis. Actors cross Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles during the filming of "Ocean's Eight" in March. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) Blame Hollywood, not Silicon Valley The information sector can be hard to analyze, because the state defines it as a mash-up of businesses involved in entertainment, news, data and software. The seasonally adjusted figures show the industry lost jobs last month, but has performed well in general over the last 12 months, adding 8,700 jobs since last March. But that good news is mostly a function of an unstoppable tech industry. Software publishers, data processing companies and other information service providers added a combined 16,100 jobs year over year. The movie business hasn't been as good to job seekers; motion picture and sound recording industries have cut payrolls by 6,000 people since last March. (Those figures are not adjusted for seasonality.) Farmers are caught in a labor shortage California usually has a higher share of people unemployed than the rest of the country. Now the state’s jobless rate is just four-tenths of a percentage point higher than the nation's, and Los Angeles is only one-tenth of a percentage point above. What gives? Chalk it up to strapped farmers. In California’s large, seasonal agriculture economy, farmworkers may be left without work at various points throughout the year. But the farm-labor market in California has been tightening, as fewer and fewer people cross the southern border, thanks to Obama’s strict border enforcement and Trump’s promise to ratchet it up even more. Growers are giving their laborers huge raises, and their farmworkers are finding it easier to stay employed throughout the year. In 2014, people who cultivate crops worked 205 days in the year, up from 178 days in 1990. Border Patrol agents patrol the US-Mexico border in San Ysidro, California on April 16, 2017. (Sandy Huffaker / AFP/Getty Images) Get ready for more tepid growth California and the rest of the country have reached the point where it isn’t possible to heap on tons of new jobs because there aren’t tons of people left who want to be hired. The labor force — meaning everyone who has a job or is looking for one — is growing more slowly than it has in recent years. Joblessness is near historic lows. The only way to continue to grow, assuming demand for workers stays high, is to widen the pool of people who can work. Trump’s promise to kick out everyone living here illegally and seal the border will do the opposite, experts say. “Here in California people aren’t coming over the border, and that’s the Trump effect; the rhetoric has caused people to shy away from making that dangerous trek,” said Chris Thornberg, the founding partner of consulting firm Beacon Economics. “Our ability to grow faster than the nation is going to depend on our ability to attract people to move here.” But California can’t get people to cross state lines. Housing is too scarce and expensive to get Arizonans or Texans to relocate, Thornberg said. The upshot is that workers become more valuable and should be able to command higher wages. Pay has been rising more quickly across the state. Over the last 12 months, hourly pay went up by $1 in California, about 4%, according to federal data. Over the previous 12-month period, it only rose by 45 cents, or nearly 2%. Support our journalism Already a subscriber? Thank you for your support. If you are not, please consider subscribing today. Get full access to our signature journalism for just 99 cents for the first four weeks. Natalie.Kitroeff@latimes.com Follow me @NatalieKitro on Twitter ALSO Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don’t want the job Immigrants flooded California construction. Worker pay sank. Here’s why Inland Empire had some of the biggest job gains in the U.S. recently UPDATES: 4:30 p.m. This article was updated with additional analysis and details on industry sectors. 9:25 a.m.: This article was updated with figures for Los Angeles County. This article was originally published at 9:10 a.m.Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window) Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window) Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Islamic State executes three of its own jihadis for escaping Raqqa battlefront ARA News The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), with their Syrian Arab Coalition fighters, launched a multi-pronged offensive behind enemy lines on Wednesday to liberate the Tabqah Dam in Syria from ISIS. Apache helicopters, U.S. Marine artillery and special operation troops were part of this operation to drop SDF fighters near Tabqa. “The Coalition supported this offensive with air movement and logistical support, precision airstrikes, Apache helicopters in close air support, Marine artillery, and special operations advice and assistance to SDF leadership,” the US-led coalition said in a statement. “Over the last four months, the Coalition has conducted more than 300 airstrikes around Tabqah and near Raqqa that have killed hundreds of enemy fighters, destroyed more than 200 fortifications, and more than 50 ISIS vehicles,” the coalition added. “It takes a special breed of warrior to pull off an airborne operation or air assault behind enemy lines,” said Col. Joe Scirocco of the coalition against ISIS. “There is nothing easy about this – it takes audacity and courage. And the SDF has that in spades.” Seizing Tabqah Dam will isolate Raqqa from three sides and give the SDF the strategic advantage and launching point needed for the liberation of the city. The area is critical to ISIS’s ability to import and harbor foreign fighters, export terror, and is ISIS’s last link to territory west of the Euphrates. Tabqah Dam has been used as an ISIS headquarters, a prison for high-profile hostages, a training location, and for external terror plotting since ISIS took control of the location in 2013. “The SDF and their local Syrian Arab Coalition fighters, have proven to be the most effective ground force against ISIS in Syria – and they are proving that once again with this daring operation,” said Scrocca. Tabqah Dam is a key element of northern Syria’s economy, agriculture and way of life, and its destruction by ISIS could lead to a severe humanitarian crisis. The US-led coalition said it will take every precaution to ensure the dam’s integrity. “It is the SDF on the ground, putting their lives at risk, and violently engaging the enemy,” said Scrocca. “And it is the SDF, like the Iraqi Security Forces, who are making the sacrifice so that other Coalition nations do not continue to suffer the threat of ISIS terrorism inside our own borders.” “This operation demonstrates the close relationship between the US military and SDF fighters,” Washington-based analyst Nicholas A. Heras, Bacevich Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), told ARA News. “A special operation, the air drop would not have even been attempted by the US military if the Americans did not have complete trust in the capabilities of the SDF.” “Further, by supporting the SDF to seize Tabqa Dam, one of the most important and strategic infrastructure projects in all of Syria, the US military is sending a signal that through the SDF the United States intends to increase and maximize its leverage on all actors, local and foreign, in the conflict. Contrary to Turkey’s preference, the U.S. is stating that there is no future settlement in Syria without the SDF,” Heras concluded. Reporting by: Wladimir van Wilgenburg | Source: ARA News For the latest news follow us on Twitter Join our Weekly Newsletter<img class="styles__noscript__2rw2y" src="https://dsx.weather.com//util/image/w/wise0855_0.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273&api=7db9fe61-7414-47b5-9871-e17d87b8b6a0" srcset="https://dsx.weather.com//util/image/w/wise0855_0.jpg?v=at&w=485&h=273&api=7db9fe61-7414-47b5-9871-e17d87b8b6a0 400w, https://dsx.weather.com//util/image/w/wise0855_0.jpg?v=ap&w=980&h=551&api=7db9fe61-7414-47b5-9871-e17d87b8b6a0 800w" > Artist's illustration of how the nearby brown dwarf WISE 0855 might appear if viewed close-up in infrared light. (Joy Pollard, Gemini Observatory/AURA) (Joy Pollard, Gemini Observatory/AURA) At a Glance Scientists discover compelling evidence of a gas giant outside our solar system. Brown dwarf WISE 0855 shares many similarities with Jupiter. Coldest known body outside the solar system. Astronomers have found the first strong evidence of water clouds on a heavenly body outside our solar system. Scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement that recent observations of a frigid brown dwarf called WISE 0855, which lies 7.2 light-years from Earth, suggest that the "failed star," another name for a dwarf planet, has clouds of water, or water ice, in its atmosphere. "We would expect an object that cold to have water clouds, and this is the best evidence that it does," study lead author Andrew Skemer, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in the statement. Similar to Jupiter The coldest known object outside of our solar system, the brown dwarf is similar to Jupiter in many respects. While its mass is roughly five times that of the largest planet in the solar system, its temperature is about 250 Kelvin, or minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit, making it nearly as cold as Jupiter, which is 130 Kelvin. "WISE 0855 is our first opportunity to study an extrasolar planetary-mass object that is nearly as cold as our own gas giants," Skemer said. (More: Jupiter-Sized Planet Discovered by 15-Year-Old Intern ) Noting that observations of the brown dwarf published in 2014 provided tentative indications of water clouds based on very limited photometric data, Skemer said obtaining a spectrum, which separates the light from an object into its component wavelengths, is the only way to detect an object's molecular composition. Using the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii over 13 nights for a total of about 14 hours, the researchers were able to obtain an infrared spectrum of WISE 0855, which provided the first details of the object's composition and chemistry. "It's five times fainter than any other object detected with ground-based spectroscopy at this wavelength," Skemer said. "Now that we have a spectrum, we can really start thinking about what's going on in this object. Our spectrum shows that WISE 0855 is dominated by water vapor and clouds, with an overall appearance that is strikingly similar to Jupiter." MORE ON WEATHER.COM: Jupiter Encounter: 10 Things You Need to Know About the Juno MissionThe owners of a family-run sports apparel store say they’re being “pushed out” of White Oaks Mall. After 25 years in business at the south London mall, Logo Sports management says mall management is replacing the store with a franchise offering the same products. Logo sells sports clothing, hats and other athletic souvenirs. In December, the store learned mall management wouldn’t renew its lease that expires March 31, said Pat Smith, who runs Logo with her husband, Peter. When Smith asked management if there was any other vacant space available, she said she was told there was only room for one sports apparel shop in the mall. “Definitely, we’re being pushed out. We don’t want to leave after 25 years of loyalty,” Smith said. White Oaks manager Jeff Wilson confirmed Logo’s lease isn’t being renewed but wouldn’t go into detail. Citing a confidentiality agreement, Wilson wouldn’t say whether a competing franchise is replacing Logo. “There is a tenant lined up for the space, but we wait for them to make their announcement on things. “We look to get the best stores. So some of the best stores are independent, some of the best stores are chains.” News of Logo’s pending closing has come as a shock to its legion of loyal customers, many of whom come from outside London, Smith said. “They are as shocked as we are... and are interested to know if we’re reopening.” The store’s future remains up in the air. Masonville Place is full and Westmount Shopping Centre doesn’t have enough traffic, Smith said. Six employees will be out of work when Logo closes March 30. The store is selling off its stockpile of merchandise. dale.carruthers@sunmedia.ca twitter.com/DaleatLFPressNEW DELHI: BJP is actively considering doing to Congress what Congress has done to it – pit a star against the rival’s star. From Rae Bareli and Amethi, Sonia Gandhi’s and Rahul Gandhi’s constituencies, BJP is weighing the option of fielding, respectively, firebrand leader Uma Bharti and combative Smriti Irani. Though a final decision has not been taken, talks are at an advanced stage in BJP, senior party leaders who did not wish to be identified told ET.Congress has fielded Rahul Gandhi aide Madhusudhan Mistry against Narendra Modi in Vadodara and has said it will nominate a heavyweight in Modi’s other constituency, Varanasi. Digvijaya Singh has said he’s willing to be Congress candidate in Varanasi. Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday said Congress will soon announce its Varanasi nominee Ex-Punjab chief minister Amrinder Singh is Congress candidate against BJP heavyweight Arun Jaitley in Amritsar.ET has learnt the proposal to field party stars against Sonia and Rahul Gandhi was discussed at the central election committee meeting that dealt with Uttar Pradesh seats.A senior leader said Irani’s name was proposed at the meeting by some CEC members and it was suggested that as she’s a Rajya Sabha member already, she has “nothing to lose” in the event she fails to defeat Rahul Gandhi in Amethi. Irani did not respond to ET’s queries. This leader said a BJP heavyweight for Rae Bareli was also a proposal but at that meeting Bharti’s name wasn’t proposed since
’s like World War III." She claims that Sharifi told her he's going to bring in a new operator for the space. Sharifi vigorously denies Powell's allegations. "The only reason we locked her out was non-payment of rent," he tells CultureMap. When he saw the e-blast that Powell was closing Simone for the rest of the year but still hadn't paid her December rent, he decided to act. "I had no other option legally but to lock her out," he says. Sharifi vigorously denies Powell's allegations. "The only reason we locked her out was non-payment of rent," he tells CultureMap. The landlord declined to comment about the nature of his conversations with Powell or any dispute involving her partners. "At the end of the day, she has not paid her rent, and we have locked her out," Sharifi states. Despite alleging that Sharifi violated the lease's default provisions by not waiting until the rent was 15 days late to lock her out, Powell says she hasn't made a decision about pursuing legal action to retake control of Simone. She admits that she has paid her rent late but said she says always paid the full rent and late fee. Regardless of what happens with the space, she's convinced her future lies elsewhere and has started to look for a new location. "I've got some feelers out. I'm not going to talk about it until I get a lease in hand," she says. "I doubt I’ll be outside the loop. That’s like stamping a passport. That is just a whole different territory out there." Although her involvement with Simone appears to have ended, Powell says she's proud of what she accomplished. "I opened at 27 years old. I knew nothing about the industry. It was a beautiful learning experience." For patrons who are missing their favorite watering hole, Powell hopes to open her new place soon. "I am very sad that the bar has closed.... Hopefully I’ll get something open and built quickly to provide another beautiful bar for Houston."With themes that range from love to fear to humanity itself, the best sci-fi movies of the 21st century all share distinctly original visions. 5.“Upstream Color” erpb We won’t pretend to be smart enough to completely understand Shane Carruth’s examination of the science of love. Even with the proper philosophical, literary, and scientific background to grasp all the references, it might still be impossible to fully appreciate the film’s layers. Yet what is amazing about this groundbreaking work is that because it perfectly fits together in Carruth’s big engineering-trained brain – and he’s using the formal language of cinema to express himself – there’s an internal logic that keeps an open-minded audience engaged. Made for $50,000 – which seems virtually impossible considering the film’s elegance – Carruth is the embodiment of an independent filmmaker. Not only is he free from working with Hollywood’s sense of story and film language, he also found a path to self distribute this film and build a devoted audience. In a film world where everybody is explaining how they are doing something new and groundbreaking, Shane Carruth is one of the very few walking the walk. — CO 4. “The Host” Most creature films would be a better fit for a horror list, but the story origins of Bong Joon Ho’s “The Host,” which was inspired by the deformed fish in the filmmaker’s beloved Han River, makes this one of the more interesting genre films to incorporate environmental science into its genre thrills. Joon Ho is not a politically subtle filmmaker, but the joy he takes in creating his symphony of not-so-bright characters is one of modern cinema’s delicacies. Thankfully, “The Host” became the biggest box-office hit in South Korean history and led to Joon Ho being able to uncompromisingly paint on a bigger international canvas with “Snowpiercer” and now Netflix’s “Okja.” -CO READ MORE: Bong Joon-ho’s ‘The Host’ Is The Defining Monster Movie Of The 21st Century 3. “Under The Skin” A24 What does it mean to be human? It’s an ambitious question at the heart of many of the best science-fiction films, but few answer it with the kind of evocative beauty and abstract intrigue of “Under the Skin.” Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 masterpiece studies humanity through the eyes of a seductive alien, played by a never-better Scarlett Johansson. The more humanity begins to take hold of her subconscious, the more her sense of self is rattled. This is not didactic filmmaking; it’s a full-bodied experience. The shock and discovery of something new settles in as the alien roams Glasgow, the camera studying her from afar like a stranger in a strange land. Then, Glazer expertly realizes the unexplainable sensation that overcomes her as humanity seeps in. He creates a visual and aural understanding of what it means to discover humanity, and how warm and dangerous that can be. Glazer depicts this awakening with his own transfixing cinematic language: bursts of kaleidoscopic colors, a percussive score, and set design more akin to an art installation than traditional cinema. He forces you to confront what humanity is, and whether it’s a sin or a blessing. The ultimate discovery is cinema at its most singular and essential. It’s science-fiction at its puzzling and thought-provoking best. — ZS 2. “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind” Focus Features There’s an ephemeral quality to the visual poetry of Michel Gondry that captures both the beauty and sadness of being alive. It’s Gondry’s nature as an artist not to stay grounded in reality or in the confines of narrative, which can result in films that are brilliant but not fully realized. That’s why Charlie Kaufman’s metaphysical time travel script for “Spotless” is such a gift for Gondry, and subsequently us. In the story of two lovers — a never-better Jim Carrey and the always-great Kate Winslet — who chose to forget each other, the sci-fi device melts away and the film becomes a visual meditation on the memories that can’t be erased. — CO 1. “Children of Men” Universal Pictures Deciding what would be number one was the easiest part of assembling this list. The virtuoso long-take filmmaking of director Alfonso Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki is the filmmaking equivalent of Mozart. It’s so jaw dropping in certain sequences that it feels like flexing, but that uninterrupted camera draws us into the film’s tensest scenes in a way that makes Clive Owens’ noble struggle against this dystopian nightmare uniquely immersive. This authoritarian London, where women have stopped giving birth, feels all too real. Interior spaces are almost like characters themselves, which makes its bleakness so palpable, so relatable – and this film projected our current refugee crisis eight years early. The pebble of hope, and the film’s narrative drive, comes in the form of the Kee, played with remarkable grace by Clare-Hope Ashitey, a young pregnant refugee. For two hours we are right there with Owens in believing nothing else in the world matters but getting her to safety. Quite simply one of the true masterpieces of 21st century. — CO Honorable Mention: “2046,” “Timecrimes,” “Europa Report,” “Godzilla,” “Monsters,” “The Fountain,” “Solaris,” “Interstellar,” “A.I,” “Beyond The Black Rainbow,” and “The Clone Returns Home.” Honestly, at one point all of these films were on early drafts of this list. It’s really hair splitting to determine the difference between #16 and #26. Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.This guy needs his clothes! (arvindgrover on Flickr) would stop offering baggage check at the ING NYC Marathon, to "ease finish-line congestion." Unsurprisingly, runners are up in arms: One commented on the NYRR Facebook page, "So you now expect runners to carry: cash, Metro card, phone, keys while they run? Will you be supplying a race belt for this since I NEVER run with one???And you will also be supplying warm clothes at the end, right? Since I always immediately change out of my wet clothes." Well, the NYRR will now offer a "Marathon Finish Line Poncho, a water-repellent, hooded, and fleece-lined garment to be handed out to every finisher" and they will establish "NYRR 'Call Home' stations at the start and post-finish so runners can communicate with friends and family" and a "new and improved Family Reunion area near the runner exit," as well as increase "the number of wave starts from three to four to reduce runner density along the course and at the finish line." Previously, runners would pack up their belongings in Staten Island, where the race begins, and then, thanks to barcodes, their bags traveled to Manhattan via a caravan of UPS trucks to be dropped off along Central Park West for pick-up. The group claims that, based on feedback, post-race congestion has been a problem, so the policy "was developed over several years to provide a better and safer post-finish experience," in consultation with other NYC agencies. The NY Road Runners offered a FAQ about the decision, including these answers: This has never been done at a major marathon before. How do you know it will work? We have put a great deal of thought and planning into the No-Baggage Policy and its execution from an operational standpoint. We have worked closely with City agencies and the Mayor's Office and together have developed this plan. Will UPS still be involved with the marathon? UPS is a valued partner of NYRR and has been a sponsor of the Marathon for more than 15 years. This year is no different. NYRR has been very fortunate to have UPS as a partner. In the past, UPS has provided more than 70 trucks and 300 volunteers to help transport baggage from the start to the finish. With the change to our policy, we are not able to utilize UPS trucks. However, UPS employees will continue to be key members of our team, including a partner of our clothing donation effort at the start. Why was information about the No-Baggage Policy not available when I applied to run? It has taken a great deal of planning to determine the best execution of the No-Baggage Policy. The plans have just recently been finalized and approved by our New York City partners and major stakeholders and are now ready to share with you. Is NYRR saving money by implementing the No-Baggage Policy? We are implementing the No-Baggage Policy to ensure the best and safest runner experience at the marathon. There is no cost savings to NYRR; in fact, we are making a significant investment, including the cost of the Marathon Finish Line Poncho. Still some runners aren't convinced: One posted, "The problem I found was not at the pick-up baggage area, rather right after the finish getting my medal, the cover-up and then waiting for the picture. That was where the most congestion was. By having the UPS trucks, it 'forced' me to walk about 20 blocks which you should do anyway after running 26.2 miles. Don't agree at all with this decision." Another opined, "This is horrible! Who was complaining? I loved the long walk after running 26.2 and my legs need it. Last year I had my iPhone in start village so I could take pictures, chat with friends, share the experience, etc. Now I can't document any of it! Also, you're going to have 50k runners at the finish...now you're opening it up to friends & family so they can bring in our dry gear - it will be even more massive congestion! And I can't imagine being in that crowd without my phone. I can't imagine the phones you provide will be readily accessible - how many people will be in line for those? I am so disappointed & disgusted." The decision seems to most affect people who might be coming to run from out of town or might not have friends or family to meet them. As one runner posted, "Is nyrr going to pay for my hotel room instead? It takes me 2 hours to get back home to Brooklyn...with only a poncho?!?! My friends are also running so I don't have anyone to hand me stuff at the finish. What about keys, cell phone, money, metrocards? I think having a fast track option for those who don't want to check a bag is a better solution. Please rethink!"Reuters An Iraqi Christian soldier guards the church of Saint Barbara after it was recaptured from Islamic State in Qaraqosh Just over a week since Qaraqosh was liberated from Islamic State, and the Christian-majority town is not safe enough for civilians to return home, Christian Today has been told. Speaking from Alqosh, an Assyrian Christian town about 50km north of Mosul, a spokesperson and soldier for Christian militia the Nineveh Plain Protection Units (NPU) said that there are still a number of ISIS militants operating in Qaraqosh, who move around the town via a complex series of tunnels. The NPU, along with the Iraqi special forces and Iraqi military, liberated Qaraqosh – also known by its Assyrian name Baghdeda – about nine days ago. It was first overrun by Islamic State militants in August 2014, forcing tens of thousands of people, many of them Christians, to flee. Now that the majority of ISIS militants have been forced out or killed, however, the people of Qaraqosh are still not able to return. "The town is not 100 per cent cleared from IEDs [improvised explosive devices], or from bombs, so it is still not safe for the civilians," NPU spokesman Athra Kado said. But the town's priests arrived on the first day of liberation, and although it's not safe for them to stay overnight, Kado added, they have returned every single day. They have rescued ancient church documents, thankfully untouched by jihadists, and yesterday held Mass for the first time in two years at the Church of the Immaculate Conception. Reuters Iraqi priests hold the first Sunday mass at the Church of the Immaculate Conception. Qaraqosh was once home to Iraq's largest Christian community. It's a significant moment for Assyrians in the region, who are part of an ancient branch of Christianity with roots dating back to the 1st century AD. The NPU is one of a number of Christian militias operating in Iraq, but it is the only one to be official recognised and supported by the Iraqi government. "After ISIS, it became one of my life goals to reach our towns, because it's like we lost with each Assyrian town [taken by ISIS] a part of our body," Kado said. But when troops liberated Qaraqosh and other Christian towns and villages in the region, they were met with devastation. "It was like a disaster," Kado says of Qaraqosh. "The buildings were crushed, most of the houses burned, the church was – and is – still in a very bad way. But of these two sides, happiness and sadness, it was more like happiness. We can rebuild. It's the work of hundreds of years, and ISIS came in two years and broke everything, but we can rebuild." As towns have been liberated, images have emerged of crosses, pulled down and broken by ISIS, being raised again upon church roofs by soldiers. Kado says this has been incredibly symbolic of the Assyrian fight for freedom, and for him it's representative of "Jesus bringing life back by the cross". "He [Jesus] gave us freedom and freedom from sin on the cross... We are almost doing the same thing with that cross when we put it on the roof. ISIS is the sin, and the cross is stopping that sin." It will be several months before the region is secure and Christians can return home, Kado said, but his fellow soldiers are desperate to take back their towns from ISIS. "It [the Nineveh Plain, before ISIS] felt like the only place in the word that we were safe, but even that place was taken from us," he says. "Now, we're trying to get it back."The museum always encouraged visitors to ask, ‘What comes next?’ For Sydney, the answer is depressingly consistent When the Powerhouse Museum is torn down, a vital part of Sydney's history goes with it It was 1961 when the Ultimo Power Station turned off its lights for the final time. Once a symbol of Sydney’s power and progress, it was left lifeless for more than two decades. When it was finally reborn as the Powerhouse Museum in 1988, it took on a very different role in the city: a hub of science, design, culture and history, and one of the few learning centres that children actually wanted to go to. From then until now, one feature of the Powerhouse has stayed the same: it has remained a beacon connecting Sydney to the rest of the world, and helping guide the city forward. The Goods Line: it's no High Line, but a welcome green corridor for Sydney Read more But upheaval is on its way to the site once again. On Monday the NSW premier, Mike Baird, finally unveiled his plans to move the Powerhouse Museum to Parramatta. In a plan which was foreshadowed in 2015, the old site in the heart of Sydney will be sold to developers, who will turn it into high density apartments. The museum may live on in the city’s west, but its importance – and legacy – is tied to Ultimo, and many believe that’s where it should stay. In February, 10,000 people, among them actor Cate Blanchett and her playwright husband Andrew Upton, signed an open letter against the move: “Nowhere else in the world are governments moving major museums away from the heart of their cities,” they wrote. “The Powerhouse has the collections with which to create an original, exciting new museum for western Sydney without abandoning its historic home.” The Power Station: the heart of the city The original Power Station was commissioned in 1899 to help power Sydney’s small but growing tram networks. Soon it became a bustling lifeline, facilitating the city’s expansion. Workers used the trams to access all corners of the city, turning Sydney into a world class commercial hub. By 1923, the tram network spanned 291km across greater Sydney, from Loftus to Wollomolloo, and by 1930 Sydney trams were carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers each day. The Ultimo Power Station – the pulse of the tram network – had become the beating heart of the city itself. But Sydney continued to grow, its occupants flooding into the tramlines, which soon became critically overcrowded. The city’s underground corridors became active, and soon heavy rail was the public transport of choice. From the 1940s trams declined in popularity, until finally the last tram stopped in 1961. The power station, now obsolete, was shut down. Facebook Twitter Pinterest The original power station, which became the Powerhouse Museum in 1988 Photograph: Supplied In the decades that followed, the city underwent remarkable change. Seeking new ways to reinvent itself, Sydney looked to renew its forgotten urban spaces. The former Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences – which housed a growing collection centred around innovation, and Sydney’s history – was reaching a critical size, and in 1979 Neville Wran’s Labor government announced it would move to the site of the old power station. In 1988, the reborn museum was opened to the public. The Powerhouse Museum retained its facade – the railway shed and power station – while housing some of the original tram lines and cars, in homage to the city’s history. The wonder of the Powerhouse Most children who grew up in Sydney have walked through the vast collections of the Powerhouse Museum, running through old train carriages, and climbing into model space ships. Most museums take us back in time, to remember past worlds. The Powerhouse does that, but it does something different too. Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Most museums take us back in time... The Powerhouse does that, but it does something different too.’ Photograph: Supplied Walking through its halls you can see the first locomotive in NSW, as well as combine engines, electric cars and spaceships. Its ever changing exhibits connect Sydney to the wider world, whether through a touring Star Wars exhibition, a retrospective of the 1980s, or an exploration of the tombs of ancient Egypt. It also connects us with our country’s past, whether through the stories of Indigenous women in Australia or Australia’s forgotten female pilots, or the history of HIV and Aids in Australia. The Powerhouse is about progress as much as it’s about the past; it’s about charting a course, from what was to what will be. And for the hundreds of thousands of school children who have visited its halls, it led us to ask a very simple question: What comes next? For Sydney, the answer to that question seems to be depressingly consistent: high density housing. The plans for Ultimo will see the site relegated to a perpetuation of the creeping inequality that has overcome the city, forcing more and more people into its fringes. To sell off the land to developers is to sell off one of Sydney’s vital organs, like a cheap trafficker looking to make a buck. DC Comics in Lego: Batman, Robin and Superman hit Bondi – in pictures Read more There is an important counterpoint: the move to Parramatta will undoubtedly enrich Sydney’s west. In a statement released on Monday, Baird said the new museum, which will have a 40% larger collection than the Powerhouse, will “serve as an anchor for a new arts and cultural precinct” in western Sydney. That’s a worthy goal, and overdue. But it shouldn’t come at the expense of one of the city’s greatest historical sites. It remains unclear why a new museum entirely couldn’t be constructed in Parramatta, while saving the old Powerhouse site. The sheer cost of moving the exhibits themselves will be staggering; some estimates have it at over $500 million, more than double what the sale itself is expected to bring in. So Sydney is once again left with a question about the future of a historic site. Like the tram power station before it, the museum that has occupied the same space for almost 30 years looks set to finally close its doors. This time though, the way forward looks very different – and far more bland.University of Michigan Hosts 'Non-Partisan' Event: 'The Republican War On Women' U-M policies say school cannot advertise partisan event; panel features all left-wing speakers and moderator The University of Michigan violated its own policies by using school resources to advertise a partisan event it called, “The Republican War on Women,” says a candidate for the U-M Regents. Dr. Robert Steele, a Republican candidate, said it was partisan because the “Republican War on Women” was listed as a factual statement for the event and U-M used its email system to advertise the event, which takes place Monday. The event includes a moderator who has made campaign contributions to President Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee and a panel of three women journalists who have been strong critics of the GOP and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. One panelist tweeted during a presidential debate that she needed Obama to win. A second panelist wrote in article she was “ashamed” any woman could vote for Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan. The third panelist wrote in an article that the GOP wanted to build a time machine and rebuild 1950s-type social barriers. After questions arose about the event, images on the university's website promoting it changed to add a question mark to the title. To see the original promotional material for the event, click here. "The question mark came on only after people started complaining," Dr. Steele said. "Because they are so liberal in their mindset, it never occurs to them that they violate their own rules." U-M Professor Susan Douglas, the department chair for communication studies, is serving as moderator. Douglas wrote a Jan. 22 article about the presidential election titled, "It's the Stupid Republicans, Stupid." According to campaign finance documents at OpenSecrets.org, Douglas donated $1,000 to Obama in 2012 and has a history of donating to the Democratic Party and related causes. Douglas did not respond to a request for comment. "It's a campaign event and should not be done at a taxpayer-funded college," said Tina Dupont, a member of the Tea Party of West Michigan. "That's certainly a misuse of our dollars. Without having both sides represented, to me it comes across as a campaign event. I don't appreciate my money being used like that. I don't think there is a war on women in the Republican Party." On Saturday, University of Michigan Spokesman Rick Fitzgerald said he didn't have additional details on the event and wouldn't comment. However, on Sunday, Kelly Cunningham, another university spokesperson, said the event was the second in a two-part symposium exploring the role of gender in the election. "Monday's forum is not about election politics," she said. "It's about how the media is involved in politics. Regarding the title, I understand from the organizers that there are 183,000,000 uses of the phrase, "The Republican War on Women" in Google. The panelists will explore the climate in which such assertions as a 'war on women' get made in the media. They will also look historically at how women's issues were presented in the 2008 election compared to the present election," Cunningham said. Cunningham said the Institute for Research on Women and Gender added the question mark to the title "to avoid any misunderstanding about the purpose of the event. They want to make clear that a 'Republican War on Women' is not being assumed nor is the purpose of the forum an examination of whether there is ‘Republican War on Women.’ Of course, the views expressed will be those of the individual panelists." The first event was held Oct. 11 and was titled, "Democrats, Republicans, and the politics of gender." One of the panelists for Monday's panel, Katha Pollitt, is a writer for The Nation, and wrote: "After all the weird, heartless, misogynistic, ignorant things Republican men have said about women and pregnancy and rape over the past month, I'm ashamed for my sex that any woman is still planning to vote for Romney and Ryan." Another panelist, Anna Holmes of the Washington Post, had a string of criticisms of Romney on her Twitter account during the Oct. 16 debate, including tweets that said: "What I need tonight: 1) Obama win. 2) Yankees loss," and "Someone make an ad. MT @anildash: Romney body language # condescending tone towards women (incl moderator) shows mindset of sexist policies." The third panelist, Rebecca Traister of Salon.com, wrote a Sept. 1 article titled, "Republicans want to build a time machine, But don't be fooled: Republicans aren't just nostalgic for 1950s-style social barriers. They want to rebuild them." What the right wants, and what they tried to build for themselves in Tampa, was a time machine. Republicans are panting for a tricked-out DeLorean that can take them back! Back in time! To a period when the power structure was fixed and comfortable, when there were no black first ladies or black camerawomen, when loud Jewish ladies were not in charge of national political parties, back to a time when only a select few — the white, the male, the straight, the Protestant — could reasonably expect to exert political or financial or social or sexual power. Dr. Steele said he was troubled the email and promotional images also included a red target as a graphic. "And it has the target, the whole thing they complained about with Sarah Palin," Dr. Steele said. Many critics of former vice presidential candidate Palin questioned whether putting a target on her website highlighting important elections, including that of Arizona Democrat Gabrielle Gifford, played a role in the shooting of Gifford months later. Many on the left have been calling for a "return to civility." (Editor's note: The University of Michigan responded with additional comments on Sunday, which have been added to the story.) ~~~~~ See also: University of Michigan: More Staff, Higher Revenue, Higher Pay... Wants More Money From TaxpayersFrom Russia’s point of view, the turmoil swirling around the Trump administration and its contacts with Russian officials is a “witch hunt” fueled by “fake news” instigated by leading Democrats looking to distract attention from their election defeat and carried out by their lap dogs in the U.S. media. In other words, Moscow’s reaction pretty much mirrors that of President Trump after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from any investigation into alleged Russian interference in the presidential election. Sessions made the move after The Washington Post revealed that he twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak last year, while still serving as a senator, but did not disclose that during his Senate confirmation hearing in January. Sessions was an early backer of Trump’s bid for the presidency and served as an adviser and surrogate for his campaign. [Sessions will recuse himself from any probe related to presidential campaign] Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Friday that “all this is very much reminiscent of a witch hunt and the McCarthyism era, which we all thought was long gone.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, commenting on reports that Trump’s son-in-law met with Kislyak in December, backed Trump’s use of the phrase “witch hunt,” saying, “We have nothing to add to President Trump’s exhaustive definition.” (The Washington Post) But despite that convergence, Trump and the Kremlin are speaking out of vastly different contexts. In the United States, the suggestion that Sessions was not forthcoming at his Senate hearing was enough to force him to step aside from potential probes, regardless of what he and Kislyak discussed. Moscow’s reaction, meanwhile, has deeper roots than the controversy over Trump’s ties to Russia. When Russian officialdom speaks, its comments reflect 25 years of growing frustration with the United States. Moscow has never admitted to interfering in the election, as the U.S. intelligence community accuses it of doing, and sees any and all questions about Trump’s ties to Russia as symptoms of what it considers rampant Russophobia in the United States’ political and military establishment. Two prominent daily newspapers, Moskovsky Komsomolets and Nezavisimaya Gazeta, have featured commentary citing anti-Russian hysteria in the United States as a primary driver of efforts to oust national security adviser Mike Flynn, who resigned last month, and force Sessions to recuse himself. In Washington, Trump’s warm words for Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, his half-joking call for Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails and the revelation that Flynn discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with Kislyak before Trump took office have raised concerns that something more sinister is going on. Trump and his administration, though, have resisted accepting the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia was attempting to help him win the election. Sessions, in an interview Thursday on Fox News, declined to acknowledge that Russia favored Trump over Clinton. [U.S. officials look at possible ties between Russia, Trump associates] In Moscow, suggestions that Trump colluded with Russian officials on the election or that the Kremlin is blackmailing him into cozying up to Putin are regarded as hangovers from the Obama administration. Officials here mostly saw the Obama White House as trying to relegate Russia to a powerless, servile position, while some on the fringes of Russia’s establishment saw the relationship more darkly, suggesting the election of Clinton, President Barack Obama’s former secretary of state, to the presidency would lead to nuclear war. (Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post) Lavrov expressed umbrage that “our ambassador is accused of meeting with the U.S. politicians who opposed the Obama administration,” suggesting that U.S. diplomats do the same with Putin’s political opponents. “If we applied the same principle to [U.S.] Ambassador to Russia [John] Tefft, this would be real fun,” Lavrov added. Moscow also objects to suggestions that Kislyak is anything but a diplomat. Some media outlets have reported that U.S. intelligence officials think the ambassador is a top Russian spy, accusations that Peskov dismissed as “baseless fake-news stories.” Peskov, borrowing from Trump’s broadsides against leaks, advised reporters to rely “only on official statements by genuine officials.” [Moscow’s man in Washington is at the center of the political moment] Russian officialdom and the White House also converge in their view of the U.S. media. Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry, characterized stories about Trump this way: “Is this rock bottom? Or can they go even lower?” Read more: Inside Trump’s financial ties to Russia and his unusual flattery of Vladimir Putin What your views on Russia and Islam say about your politics Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign newsWASHINGTON – People who have served in the military smoke and drink more and sleep less than the general population, according to a report released Thursday by the United Health Foundation. The study, based off a survey of approximately 60,000 veterans and servicemembers annually from 2011 through 2014, also found higher rates of coronary heart disease, heart attack and cancer. Researchers said they’ll deliver the results to the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs and other health care providers in the hopes that it will help with treatment. “We owe it to these people to see if anything can be done, if we could identify opportunities to improve,” said Richard Migliori, senior adviser to the United Health Foundation, an offspring of insurer United Health Group. “I think we found some meaningful things here.” The findings show 25.2 percent of servicemembers and veterans who are 18 to 39 years old smoke, compared to 20.7 percent of the general population of the same age range. Approximately 20 percent of servicemembers and veterans drink excessively, while 18.1 percent of others do. Drinking excessively was defined by the report as either binge drinking, having five or more drinks in one sitting, or heavy drinking, which means having more than two drinks each day. Servicememebers and veterans are 39 percent more likely than others not to sleep enough. “Since we found issues with sleep, smoking and alcohol use, we know we may be dealing with an area of stress – these are all stress related,” Migliori said. “The good things about those findings, those are things that can be immediately worked on. Physicians should be focusing on those particular behavious as they engage their patients.” Smoking and drinking could be a direct cause of the higher rates of coronary heart disease and cancer in people with military service, Migliori said. Servicemembers and veterans are 62 percent more likely to have coronary heart disease and 67 percent more likely to have a heart attack, the study found. Nearly 50 percent of veterans older than 80 years of age have been diagnosed with cancer, compared to about 34 percent of others older than 80. The types of cancers most frequently diagnosed by the VA are prostate, lung and colorectal cancer, the report states. Previous studies have linked military service to increased risk for different types of cancer, such as the herbicide Agent Orange causing non-Hodgkin lymphoma in some veterans of the Vietnam War. Rene Campos, a retired commander in the Navy and leader with the Military Officers Association of America, a nonprofit group that collaborated on the report, said she wanted to “dig into” the cancer statistics, as well as a finding that female servicemembers and veterans experience depression at higher rates. About 25.5 percent of them reported they were told by a health care provider they had a depressive disorder, while 22 percent of other females did. Though they’re at more risk for various health issues, veterans and servicemembers are less likely to tell their doctors about them. “This data suggests those who have served will understate their illness or burden,” he said. “Because I know these individuals who have served are less likely to complain about something, physicians should be advised to follow their instincts and maybe lower your threshold for ordering tests and making diagnoses.” There were some positive findings, too. People with military service are more likely to be physically active and have health insurance. More servicemembers and veterans also see their doctors for cancer screenings, and more get flu vaccines and have regular dental visits. Campos said the information could help drive policy changes. “There’s a very big topic of discussion on how the VA provides care to veterans,” Campos said. “This paints a comparative portrait of those who have served against the civilian population. I think it gives that baseline view of who this population is and gives us data to work from.” Wentling.nikki@stripes.com Twitter: @nikkiwentlingOur latest podcast guest is Brendon Marotta, director of the feature-length documentary American Circumcision. (You’ll never guess what it’s about.) Marotta is an award-winning filmmaker based out of Austin, Texas. He graduated from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts Film School, to work as a professional film editor. American Circumcision is his first film. You can donate to his Kickstarter right here. We spoke about why male circumcision is problematic, the dubious health benefits of getting circumcized, and whether there’s any chance of passing laws to prevent the procedure (at least without consent of the patient). We’d love to hear your thoughts on the podcast. If you have any suggestions for people we should chat with, please leave them in the comments, too. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Google Play, stream all the episodes on SoundCloud or Stitcher, or just listen to the whole thing below. Our RSS feed is here And if you like what you’re hearing, please consider supporting this site on Patreon and leaving us a positive rating!Carlos “More Money than God” Slim, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet are three extremely notable wealthy guys of today. However, this does not mean that they are already some of the richest people to have ever lived. So, who are the wealthiest people to have lived in the history of mankind? This is the question that will fortunately be answered here, after compiling the list of the 10 richest people who have ever lived. The list takes into consideration the inflation rates throughout history. Read on if you want to know who these people are and what they did to become so rich. Continue scrolling to keep reading Click the button below to start this article in quick view 231 Shares Share Tweet Email Copy Link Copied 10 Cornelius Vanderbilt – $185 Billion Cornelius Vanderbilt, also known as Commodore, was an American-born philanthropist and industrialist. He was the Vanderbilt family’s patriarch,
. When women won’t date men, men also assume the problem is with women. That’s not generally the case. So guys, maybe, just maybe, if you’re frustrated by the fact that women aren’t dating you, rather than writing a revenge piece blaming them for our current political climate, consider some skills you could cultivate that would improve a woman’s life. What would make people see you as a more desirable mate? You could cook. Or enhance your abs. Or do anything rather than just standing there screaming, “you are obligated to date me or I will make you miserable.” Because the main person that approach will make miserable, is you.Belfast rioter jailed after tagging himself at scene of Woodvale disorder on social media BelfastTelegraph.co.uk A Belfast man who was arrested for rioting after tagging himself as being at the trouble on social media was handed a two-year sentence after appearing in court. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/belfast-rioter-jailed-after-tagging-himself-at-scene-of-woodvale-disorder-on-social-media-34607617.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/incoming/article30892373.ece/da3eb/AUTOCROP/h342/alan%20erwin%201.jpg Email A Belfast man who was arrested for rioting after tagging himself as being at the trouble on social media was handed a two-year sentence after appearing in court. Robert Darragh, from Hopewell Crescent in the Shankill area of the city, was arrested by police after tagging himself twice as being present during serious street disorder which broke out in the Woodvale/Twaddell area last July. He will spend half his sentence in prison, with the remainder of the sentence served on licence when he is released from custody. Trouble flared in the area following a Parade Commission's determination not to allow a loyalist flute band to pass by the nationalist Ardoyne shop fronts area on July 13. A total of 29 police officers were injured during last year's rioting after police lines were pelted with masonry, bricks, bottles and other items, with one officer almost losing an ear. Crown prosecutor Simon Jenkins told Belfast Crown Court that 21-year old Darragh was captured on CCTV in the area for around an hour and a half that evening. The prosecutor said Darragh was observed "on numerous occasions" throwing various items at police lines. He was also seen on CCTV footage throwing around 11 items from an overturned wheelie bin at officers. The court heard that during the riot, Darragh covered his face and had his hood up in a bid to disguise his appearance. However, he was pictured sitting on a wall with his face uncovered prior to involving himself in the riot. Mr Jenkins said that following the riot, police trawled through social media and discovered that Darragh had tagged himself as the man sitting on the wall, and had again tagged himself as one of the males rioting on the Woodvale Road. When he was arrested and interviewed, Darragh said he had been drinking heavily and whilst he admitted he was in the area, he said he couldn't remember throwing anything at police. At that stage, Darragh also admitted being the man sitting on the wall and "didn't admit" being the man rioting - despite the two images showing a man wearing identical clothes. He subsequently admitted a single charge of rioting. Defence barrister Michael Boyd said that most of the large crowd that gathered in the area that evening were "completely passive" but accepted that his client was "one of a handful of individuals in front of that crowd involved in throwing missiles at police lines from a short distance." Mr Boyd added there was "nothing to suggest any police officer was injured as a result of anything" Darragh did. The barrister said that when questioned by police about his involvement, Darragh made the case that he couldn't remember as he had been on a three-day binge. He also expressed shame for his actions during police interview, with Mr Boyd revealing that Darragh's family were "appalled and disgusted by his actions." Mr Boyd concluded by saying Darragh "does not have a sectarian bone in his body" but rather last July he "allowed himself to get caught up with a group of people he knew" which resulted in him acting in an "outrageous way." Passing sentence, Judge Gordon Kerr QC said Northern Ireland has been "plagued" by riots which result in both police officers sustaining injuries and those responsible being sent to jail. Belfast Telegraph DigitalWATCH ABOVE: Moon begins to weep as he tries to explain his ordeal. TORONTO – An Ohio man in the process of turning his dad’s old house into a community centre focused on stopping violence claims to have been brutally attacked after confronting people who broke into the facility. Ronald Moon, Jr. says that he’s currently converting the house his father purchased 25 years ago at 1853 Kinney Ave. in the Evanston neighbourhood of Cincinnati. He claims to have left his job two months ago to fully dedicate himself to the project. But on Wednesday, he ran into a group of five people who he alleges tried to break into the home and beat him. “This is the first video message I’ve ever made,” he began in a YouTube video posted the same day. “This is probably the hardest one I’ll ever make.” According to Moon, he recorded the video approximately 30 minutes after the attack detailing what happened and how he felt. It has since gone viral and has been watched over 600,000 times at this writing. “Today I came across the people that’s been breaking in there. This is what they did to me,” he said as he showed the camera injuries to his face, elbow and back. He soon began to weep. “I’m tired of struggling — sick of it. I’m just trying to do the best that I can for my people.” Moon has since gone on to set up GoFundMe and Indiegogo fundraising accounts for the community centre. The GoFundMe page, in particular, stated a goal of $5000 (all figures U.S.) but that has been easily eclipsed. As of this writing, nearly $43,000 has been raised. He says his intent is to “file as a 501c3 (nonprofit organization) to sustain this resource for years to come.” “The goal I have is to offer this place as a space where ideas, skills, and resources can be shared among this neighborhood and with surrounding neighborhoods in Cincinnati. – regular open discussions – story telling – poetry and creative writing – yoga and meditation – dance – craft and jewelry making – carpentry – tailoring – gardening – plumbing – recording and music engineering – cultural education – computing *If someone can teach it and another can learn it, it is precisely what this place would be interested in housing.” WATCH THE FULL VIDEO Despite the treatment he allegedly received — he says he’s not giving up. And he also has a message. “What you see other black people tell you, don’t doubt it because it’s real. The pain we feel is real. The hurt we feel is real. “But I still love all my people. I love everyone. I love you.”The Hitman video game franchise goes back to 2000 and with two different film adaptions, so the odds are at least even that you’ve heard of it. If not, it’s a game about Agent 47 (or just “47”), an elite hitman who’s been cloned from the enhanced DNA of five master criminals. The comic will be Christopher (Hellraiser, Injustice: Ground Zero, Green Lantern/Space Ghost) Sebela and drawn by Jonathan (Bionic Man, Battlestar Galactica) Lau. And it will be an origin story of sorts for Agent 47 and his handler, Diana Burnwood. 47 and his handler, Diana Burnwood, are a team responsible for some of the most ruthless, efficient and untraceable assassinations across the globe. But before they were operatives of the shadowy International Contracts Association, 47 and Burnwood were on their own separate paths in life – streets lined with blood, bullets and revenge. As 14-year-old Diana begins a mission to track down the people who killed her parents, 47 is struggling to free himself and his friend, 6, from the mysterious Institute which has bred them as killers since they were kids. With a story that stretches from the heartland of America to the Berlin Wall, Lone Wolves will trace the birth of the legendary Hitman and the secret past of the woman behind him who pulls the string and knows just how hard taking a life truly is. Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman is scheduled to hit shelves in October. Official PR follows, and then some covers: Dynamite Entertainment is thrilled to announce that writer Christopher Sebela (Hellraiser,Injustice: Ground Zero, Green Lantern/Space Ghost), and artist Jonathan Lau (Bionic Man, Battlestar Galactica) are set to team up to bring the world of the popular video game franchise Hitman to the pages of comics, thanks to a new partnership with transmedia outfit Gunpowder Studios, in conjunction with video game developer IO Interactive. Dynamite’s new series, entitled in Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman is set to launch October 11, 2017, and will delve into the origin of one of gaming’s most infamous characters, Agent 47! 47 and his handler, Diana Burnwood, are a team responsible for some of the most ruthless, efficient and untraceable assassinations across the globe. But before they were operatives of the shadowy International Contracts Association, 47 and Burnwood were on their own separate paths in life – streets lined with blood, bullets and revenge. As 14-year-old Diana begins a mission to track down the people who killed her parents, 47 is struggling to free himself and his friend, 6, from the mysterious Institute which has bred them as killers since they were kids. With a story that stretches from the heartland of America to the Berlin Wall, Lone Wolves will trace the birth of the legendary Hitman and the secret past of the woman behind him who pulls the string and knows just how hard taking a life truly is. Writer Chris Sebela said, “I’ve always loved murder stories, so when Dynamite asked if I had any ideas about a Hitman book, all my gears started to race right off their spindles. Of course, I did. But as much as I love the assassination playground setup of the games, what lured me in was figuring out how someone becomes an apex predator and how, with each new acquired skill, something more vital gets lost or sacrificed along the way. Not just for Agent 47, but also with his handler – the woman who chooses their jobs and points him at a target. Every job and life 47 takes can potentially swing the tides of history on a whim, and seeing how it all intertwines through a history we thought we knew was the final magical element that I needed to get to work and I’m really excited to get it out there.” Christopher Sebela is a two-time Eisner-Award nominated writer forever hard at work in Portland, Oregon. He’s the co-creator of Heartthrob, High Crimes, We(l)come Back, Dead Letters and Short Order Crooks as well as having written things like Kiss/Vampirella, Detective Comics, Escape from New York, Captain Marvel, Injustice: Ground Zero and Demonic. He is a fan of dogs, coffee, horror movies and writing about himself in the third person. Artist Jonathan Lau said, “I played the games and watched the movies so I was a fan from the get go, so choosing Hitman was a pretty obvious choice for me from among the many other properties from DE. I was protective at the outset in the sense that I love the character so much I wouldn’t want other artists who are unfamiliar with Agent 47 to handle him. His persona of being robotic, very calculating, apathetic, emotionless, and always wearing a dead-pan face, has engrossed me ever since. In one sense he’s easy to draw, but on the other hand, the environment is the most tedious and time-consuming part to work on, as it feels alive and ever-changing. As a fan, I’m enjoying creating this world from a fan’s point of view. If I get thrilled at every turn of the page, and if that suspense holds for fans, then I know I’ve accurately depicted the world of Hitman as it truly deserves to be.” Jonathan Lau has been an exclusive artist with Dynamite since the inception of his career. Beginning with Battlestar Galactica, Lau then joined the creative teams on The Green Hornet, and Bionic Man based on undeveloped screenplays from director Kevin Smith. Lau also contributed to a number of mini-series including Peter Canon Thunderbolt, Miss Fury, Solar Man of the Atom and Pathfinder, as well doing alternate covers for many of Dynamite’s titles. His artist strength lies in his pulse-pounding action scenes, and states his biggest influences come from Manhwa or Kung Fu comics. Dynamite Editor Anthony Marques said, “I am incredibly excited to be working with Chris and Jonathan on this. The creative team for Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman couldn’t be more well suited for this title and is sure to deliver all of the action and thrills of the Hitman universe that fans have come to know and love from the games. The story will shed a light on the mysterious Agent 47 and bring readers into his world in a completely new and exciting way.” Rune Bendixen from Gunpowder Studios, a transmedia outfit, said that “the world of Hitman is immense and rich. We had to give the millions of fans a chance to learn more about this character.” “We will be exploring 47’s legendary past, but rest assured that it is also one full of surprises,” said fellow transmedia producer Jean Pierre Magro. “IO Interactive is truly excited about this collaboration. The ‘world of assassination’ is a vast, sprawling place and there are many important events and unique exciting story lines, which are perfect for the comic book format. Agent 47 will be directly connected to the overarching story in the ongoing Hitman game and the comic book is instrumental in our continued goal to expand and reimagine the Hitman universe, ” said Michael Vogt, Lead writer on Hitman. “It’s been an honor to work with everyone involved in this project,” said Nick Barrucchi, CEO and Publisher of Dynamite. “IO Interactive has long been a leader in cutting-edge game development, which is a perfect match for the cutting-edge style that Chris Sebela and Jonathan Lau bring to all of their work. We’re excited to bring one of the most popular game franchises in history to the pages of comics, and to provide fans of the game with an entirely new experience set within the world they’ve come to know and love!” Hitman, developed by Danish company IO Interactive, was initially released in 2000 to rave reviews and has received several follow-up installments since. Revolving around Agent 47, the stealth video game series follows the cloned assassin-for-hire as he is hired by wealth and elite clients thanks to his flawless record. The cross-platform game franchise also features two novels, Hitman: Enemy Within and Hitman: Damnation, both written by William C. Dietz. The series also saw the loosely based film adaption, Hitman, in 2007, and again in 2015 with Hitman: Agent 47. Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman #1 will be solicited in Diamond Comic Distributors’ August 2017 Previews catalog, the premier source of merchandise for the comic book specialty market, and slated for release in October. Comic book fans are encouraged to reserve copies of Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman #1 with their local comic book retailers. Agent 47: Birth of the Hitman #1 will also be available for individual customer purchase through digital platforms courtesy of Comixology, Kindle, iBooks, Google Play, Dynamite Digital, iVerse, Madefire, and Dark Horse Digital. About Dynamite Entertainment: Dynamite was founded in 2004 and is home to several best-selling comic book titles and properties, including The Boys, The Shadow, Red Sonja, Warlord of Mars, Bionic Man, A Game of Thrones, and more. Dynamite owns and controls an extensive library with over 3,000 characters (which includes the Harris Comics and Chaos Comics properties), such as Vampirella, Pantha, Evil Ernie, Smiley the Psychotic Button, Chastity, and Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt. In addition to their critically-acclaimed titles and bestselling comics, Dynamite works with some of the most high-profile creators in comics and entertainment, including Kevin Smith, Alex Ross, Neil Gaiman, Andy Diggle, John Cassaday, Garth Ennis, Jae Lee, Marc Guggenheim, Mike Carey, Jim Krueger, Greg Pak, Brett Matthews, Matt Wagner, Gail Simone, Steve Niles, James Robinson, and a host of up-and-coming new talent. Dynamite is consistently ranked in the upper tiers of comic book publishers and several of their titles – including Alex Ross and Jim Krueger’s Project Superpowers – have debuted in the Top Ten lists produced by Diamond Comics Distributors. In 2005, Diamond awarded the company a GEM award for Best New Publisher and another GEM in 2006 for Comics Publisher of the Year (under 5%) and again in 2011. The company has also been nominated for and won several industry awards, including the prestigious Harvey and Eisner Awards. About Gunpowder Studios: Gunpowder Studio is an independent production house based in Europe determined to produce properties that inspire, move and entertain. Their mission is to build rich immersive worlds, nurture stories and weave powerful narratives that resonate with audiences all over the world. Producers Jean Pierre Magro and Rune Bendixen have developed transmedia outlets for Disney, LEGO, Audi, SONY, Warner, Mærsk, Universal, Carlsberg, Toyota, BMG, Vestas and Red Cross. About IO Interactive: IO-Interactive is the creative force behind some of the most talked-about multiplatform videogames to emerge in the last two decades. Starting with the praised and ground-breaking Hitman series, IO-Interactive has since developed the cult classic Freedom Fighters, the controversial Kane & Lynch series and the adorable Mini Ninjas. Dedication to creating original IP and unforgettable characters and experiences are the hallmarks of IO-Interactive.You guys know Pop!s, right? They’re the adorable little figures that are any collector’s nightmare (because they're everywhere and there are so many of them). Typically you see them around, celebrating characters from movies, TV shows, comics - and sometimes sports, but never the NHL. Until now. Finally, we are going to have NHL Pop! figures - and it just so happens that one of the very first ones is Henrik Lundqvist. And look at him! He’s adorable, as are all Pop!s. He looks so ready and determined to stop all pucks that come his way. He’s got fantastic hair. And he actually, you know, looks a fair bit like Lundqvist, even if his pads aren't quite exact. This has got to be a must-have for pretty much any Rangers fan. Anyone who collects stuff, anyone who likes cute stuff, anyone who’s a fan of the king - so basically, everybody.Podcasts, Hosts, and Encoding Matt Basta Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 15, 2017 For a long time now, I’ve been wanting to write an article about how to properly encode an MP3 file for use in a podcast. Something so fundamental to the medium is a very difficult task: most easy-to-use tools are expensive, and free tools are overcomplicated and confusing to set up. Recently I got a Pinecast support ticket from a customer with quite large MP3 files. The files were larger than his plan would allow, and he was out of surge. When I made some suggestions about his encoding settings, I discovered that the tool he was using didn’t even have those options! Beyond my surprise that a paid piece of software lacked these features, I was astounded that there are no good, free pieces of software that made this process simple. The software that I did find wasn’t cross-platform, and couldn’t be used by my customer anyway. I set out to create a tool to do this work for you, now released in beta as the Pinecoder, but I needed to know how exactly we should be crafting these MP3s. I wanted to have data to back up my choices for what a properly encoded MP3 looks like. To do that, I crawled the list of top podcasts on iTunes (or Apple Podcasts, depending on who you ask) and did a bit of an analysis. Getting Data to Analyze First, I scraped the iTunes charts with a simple bit of JavaScript in my devtools console: Array.from($('[target=itunes]')).map(a => a.href) This yielded the URLs of each show’s iTunes page. I copied the resulting JSON to a text file. An iTunes podcast URL looks like this: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/sworn/id1243525941?mt=2 The important part here is the id... bit towards the end. That’s the Id of the show in iTunes, and allows us to get the feed URL by passing it to this endpoint: https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=1243525941&entity=podcast Notice the Id from above in the id query string parameter. This endpoint returns a JSON blob containing the URL of the podcast’s feed. Next, I simply extracted the URL, MIME type, and content length of the first <enclosure> tag in each feed. From here, it’s simple to cURL each file. import json import re from urllib.request import urlopen import requests from defusedxml.minidom import parseString as parseXMLString # RegExp to extract IDs from iTunes URLs id_extractor = re.compile(r'(?:/id)(\w+)\b') # top100.json is the JSON from itunescharts.com top100 = json.load(open('top100.json')) for itunes_url in top100: itunes_id = id_extractor.search(itunes_url).group(1) lookup_url = 'https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=%s&entity=podcast' % itunes_id output = requests.get(lookup_url).json() feed_url = output['results'][0]['feedUrl'] print('feed:', feed_url) feed = requests.get(feed_url, headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X)'}).text try: parsed_feed = parseXMLString(feed) except Exception as e: print(feed_url) print(e) break enclosure = parsed_feed.getElementsByTagName('enclosure')[0] audio_url = enclosure.getAttribute('url') print('audio:', audio_url) Interesting Metadata The output of the script above looks something like this: Using a combination of grep, awk, and wc, I did all of the counting shown below. The first interesting tidbit is that one of the feeds failed to download because I was accessing it using Python Requests’ default user agent string. This is probably a bad practice on the part of the website owner (feeds are cheap to generate, and banning programmatic access to them is unwise). It was simple to update the script to pass a custom user agent string. Next, out of the 100 podcasts I crawled, 44 of them are using Podtrac. Podtrac offers podcast analytics, though it’s unclear how exactly they do a better job than other analytics platforms. In my own experience, the numbers behind Podtrac are useful because they’re trusted by advertisers, though perhaps not because of technical merit. Almost a quarter of the podcasts were hosted on Libsyn. 15 of the 100 are hosted by NPR. Three of the 100 are using SoundCloud (I honestly expected more). Only one podcast of the bunch uses Podbean. These number might be higher because of feed proxies like Feedburner, though I did not investigate further. 22 of the 100 podcasts were behind Feedburner. This is very curious, as Feedburner provides little value when used with most modern hosting services. Feedburner prevents hosts from measuring subscribers in any meaningful way, since it proxies the feed. At Pinecast, we recommend that users do not use Feedburner in conjunction with our service or any other podcast hosting service. From a technical perspective, Feedburner is an old Google acquisition (2007) that has fallen by the wayside — little has gone into its upkeep, and given Google’s track record with minor services, it could go away at any time. Analyzing the Audio I went about investigating the encoding of the audio files. To do this, I used the Python library ffprobe3, which conveniently wraps the ffmpeg tool ffprobe. Running ffprobe on a file produces output like this: > ffprobe audio/246.mp3 -hide_banner -show_streams Input #0, mp3, from 'audio/246.mp3': Metadata: title : #246: My Pen Pal artist : This American Life album_artist : Chicago Public Media TS2 : Chicago Public Media genre : Podcast comment : © 1995-2017 Ira Glass TSP : This American Life date : 2017 Duration: 01:00:16.55, start: 0.025056, bitrate: 64 kb/s Stream #0:0: Audio: mp3, 44100 Hz, mono, s16p, 64 kb/s Metadata: encoder : LAME3.99r Side data: replaygain: track gain - -3.300000, track peak - unknown, album gain - unknown, album peak - unknown, Stream #0:1: Video: png, rgb24(pc), 3000x3000, 90k tbr, 90k tbn, 90k tbc Metadata: comment : Other [STREAM] index=0 codec_name=mp3 codec_long_name=MP3 (MPEG audio layer 3) profile=unknown codec_type=audio codec_time_base=1/44100 codec_tag_string=[0][0][0][0] codec_tag=0x0000 sample_fmt=s16p sample_rate=44100 channels=1 channel_layout=mono bits_per_sample=0 id=N/A r_frame_rate=0/0 avg_frame_rate=0/0 time_base=1/14112000 start_pts=353600 start_time=0.025057 duration_ts=51036733440 duration=3616.548571 bit_rate=64000 max_bit_rate=N/A bits_per_raw_sample=N/A nb_frames=N/A nb_read_frames=N/A nb_read_packets=N/A TAG:encoder=LAME3.99r [SIDE_DATA] side_data_type=Replay Gain [/SIDE_DATA] [/STREAM] ... One initial problem that I encountered is ffprobe3 being unable to parse the [SIDE_DATA] blocks at the end of the above snippet. I don’t really care about them for the purposes of this article, so I monkey-patched ffprobe3 to ignore them: import ffprobe3 orig = ffprobe3.ffprobe.FFStream.__init__ def replacement(self, data_lines): data_lines = [x for x in data_lines if not x.startswith('[')] return orig(self, data_lines) ffprobe3.ffprobe.FFStream.__init__ = replacement Simple enough. I also used exiftool, a common file analysis tool, to get more information about the audio files. Ffprobe doesn’t report information about constant versus variable bitrate or the channel mode used by a file, so exiftool was necessary. I simply used subprocess.Popen to invoke exiftool and scrape relevant information from stdout. I used Python’s collections.Counter to tally up the bitrates, max bitrates, and codecs of each of the audio files. I also used csv.Writer to output a CSV for use in a spreadsheet. Codecs First, I wanted to look at the most basic information: which codec the files used. I wasn’t sure what to expect here. On one hand, I fully expected 100% of the audio files encoded as MP3. MP3 is overwhelmingly dominant in podcasting. On the other hand, I expected to see some unusual entries, like AAC. The result was whelming. 99 of the 100 files were MP3. The last, as it turns out, was an M4V file containing H.264 video and AAC audio. It contained a recording of the Apple WWDC event, unsurprisingly from the Apple Keynotes feed. It was a bit surprising to see a video podcast coming from iTunes. Support for video in podcasts is dodgy at best, but I suppose if you’re Apple and you only list it in Apple Podcasts, you can be fairly sure it’s going to play on your users’ devices. For the sake of sanity, I excluded the video file from the rest of the analysis. Conclusion: Use MP3 to encode your podcasts. Avoid AAC. CBR vs. VBR The next thing I was interested in is the type of encoding used for those MP3 files. There are two options: Constant Bitrate (CBR) Variable Bitrate (VBR) The difference is simple: with CBR encoding, one second of audio will always take the same amount of data, regardless of where in the audio file you find it. For example, a 128kbps audio file will take 128 kilobits to store one second of audio. Want to find the start of the audio at 00:00:05? Skip to the 5 × 128 kilobits (640 kilobits) mark and you’ll find it. VBR, on the other hand, allows the encoder to turn the bitrate up and down depending on what the audio contains. A second of silence might be encoded at low quality while music immediately after it would be bumped up to a higher quality. Adjusting the bitrate dynamically allows the files to be smaller by only increasing quality for audio that needs it. With a CBR file, skipping forward or backward is easy because you can calculate exactly where to jump to. With VBR, skipping ahead ten seconds might mean skipping up to 1280 kilobits — but that might be too much if the quality is lowered within those ten seconds. This also means that the duration of the audio file can’t be determined by looking at the file size. With CBR, you simply divide the file size by the bitrate: that’s the number of seconds long the audio is. With VBR, the same calculation will overestimate the audio’s length substantially. Instead, VBR-encoded files need to list their duration in the file’s metadata, though this can be complicated and difficult to do with most encoding tools. I used exiftool to extract this information, and it was done very simply: it will only output the string “VBR” if the MP3 is encoded with VBR: from subprocess import Popen, PIPE # Run the tool proc = Popen('exiftool "%s"' % path, stdout=PIPE, shell=True) # Check for VBR in the stdout stdout_lines = iter(proc.stdout.readline, b'') is_vbr = any(': VBR' in a.decode('UTF-8') for a in stdout_lines) # Close the output proc.stdout.close() 98 of the 99 audio files were CBR-encoded. Only one was VBR-encoded. Update: Due to a bug in the analysis script, this post originally claimed that fifteen podcasts used VBR encoding. After correcting the code, only one was found to be VBR-encoded. In my own experience, VBR can provide dramatic savings over CBR. VBR is well-documented as a good practice. If you don’t believe me, take Jeff Atwood’s word for it. Update: This is a controversial viewpoint. You should read my followup post about VBR. Conclusion: Consider using VBR if the trade-offs aren’t offensive to you. Channels Within an audio file, a channel is something akin to an “audio feed.” Each channel produces sound. A mono audio file has a single channel, while a stereo audio file has two (one for each ear). I have always suggested that podcasters encode their content as mono rather than stereo. The reasoning is simple: most listeners just won’t be able to tell, you probably aren’t mixing your audio for two channels, and increasing the channel count requires more bits to achieve the same quality. Even still, three quarters of the files were encoded with two channels. How the number of channels affects file size is a bit complicated. A two-channel audio file encoded at 128kbps consumes the same amount of space as a one-channel audio file encoded at 128kbps. Each channel in the two-channel stereo file, though, effectively gets half of the bitrate — the result is lower quality audio. The rules are a bit fuzzy here: besides stereo (where each ear’s audio is a channel) and mono (where there is a single channel for both ears’ audio) there is a channel mode called “joint stereo.” Joint stereo generally stores the sum of the left and right channels and the difference between the two. Since the left and right channels are likely very similar, more bits can be spent on the sum and fewer bits can be spent on the difference. The result is — usually — higher quality audio at the same bitrate as “vanilla” stereo encoding. At the end of the day, channels are a complicated matter. Minimizing the number of channels is ultimately best, but how do we know for sure? There are a few scenarios for how an MP3’s channels can be put together: One Channel: This is simplest, and easiest to get right. This is simplest, and easiest to get right. Two Distinct Channels: This is simple, but bad for podcasts. A stereo track requires twice the space to achieve the same quality as the equivalent mono audio. This is simple, but bad for podcasts. A stereo track requires twice the space to achieve the same quality as the equivalent mono audio. Two Identical Channels (Faux-Stereo): This is almost certainly the result of a mistake. Faux-stereo is when a single audio channel is duplicated as the left and right channels of a stereo MP3. A faux-stereo audio file is audibly indistinguishable from a mono audio file, but is encoded as two channels instead of one. Let’s figure out what’s going on with all of these two-channel audio files and see whether there are any obvious errors. Testing for Faux-Stereo It turns out that there are exactly zero tools for checking whether a two-channel MP3 file is faux-stereo. One such tool exists for WAV files, though: zrtstr from indiscipline on Github. For this experiment, the plan is to convert MP3 to WAV, then use zrtstr to compare the two channels for faux stereo. The first step is getting zrtstr to run. Since I’m not on Windows, there is no binary. I installed the Rust compiler, but the compilation failed with an error in one of the dependencies. After some investigation, I found that the offending code had been rewritten in a newer version of the package. Bumping the version and deleting the Cargo.lock file made the compilation process succeed. Once I got the decoding and analysis process automated with another Python script, I was surprised at the results. Of the 99 audio files, 5 of them were indeed faux stereo as reported by zrtstr. The first file was a 128kbps stereo MP3. To my surprise, the file sounded fine and was not an unreasonable size. The trick here is that the file used joint stereo: when a faux-stereo file is encoded as joint stereo, the sum of the left and right channels is numerically double that of a mono channel, and the difference channel is just a bunch of zeroes. That second channel is essentially silence, which is easily compressed to almost nothing. In the end, there is a minor amount of overhead from encoding the second joint stereo channel, but not enough to matter too much. The producers could probably increase the quality of the audio marginally by simply encoding as mono instead, or encode as mono and decrease the bitrate slightly. The second, third, and fourth files were the same. The fifth, though, exhibited the exact characteristics of faux-stereo. It uses the “vanilla” stereo channel mode with identical left and right channels. The file is small, clocking in at around 20MB at 256kbps, but this is because the audio itself was only a few minutes long. Encoded at half the bitrate with a single channel, it would easily fit in 10MB instead. Conclusion: Never use vanilla stereo as your channel mode. Joint stereo will produce better quality audio and save heartache if you make a mistake. Mono will never do you wrong. Almost-Faux-Stereo It seemed unlikely to me that any podcasts in the iTunes charts would make such a mistake, but seeing that at least one did, I’m inclined to think that there are others. Looking at the other two-channel audio files, many looked like this going into zrtstr: 857053 / 85705344 [=>---------------------] 1.00 % 65071217067.80/s 0s File is not double mono, channels are different! zrtstr takes chunk of each channel of the file (in blobs of 1% of the file’s duration) and does a comparison. If it finds any substantial differences, it’ll bail at that point, like in the example above. Consider examples like this, though: 16763124 / 79824431 [======>-----------------------] 21.00 % 30667033.39/s 2s File is not double mono, channels are different! In that instance, we got through 21% of the file (16 megabytes) before we found any differences between the channels! This could mean a few things: Glitches in the audio, or corruption in the file caused a difference between channels. Ads injected by the hosting platform are stereo, while the rest of the episode is mono. Certain clips of background music or other imported audio is stereo, while the rest of the episode is mono. Numeric rounding during the MP3 to WAV conversion led to just enough difference between the channels to cause zrtstr to detect a difference. zrtstr has a function which allows you to specify the amount of tolerance in amplitude difference that’s allowed when comparing channels. I increased the tolerance by 10x and some files progressed further, but the tool found no additional faux-stereo files. Because some of the files progressed further, it’s not impossible that the stereo component to the two-channel files is background audio. I attempted to note the start and end of background audio to
days, who can we turn to to make sure that our emails make it to the inbox? Word on the street is that Laura is the industry’s email deliverability expert. She’s also the founder of Word to the Wise, an email consulting firm specializing in email deliverability and program management. Laura is serious about email deliverability and her Twitter feed serves up tips and strategies for marketers who want to make sure their messages get delivered. Why you should follow her: Because you want your emails to get delivered. The Word to the Wise blog is a great resource for staying in the know about changes and updates that could affect your deliverability. Deliverability begins at the point of address collection. — Laura Atkins (@wise_laura) January 26, 2017 Email deliverability is no joke. Make sure you’re following email marketing best practices to make sure your emails get to their destination. 10. Ben Settle Email Marketing Specialist and Author, BenSettle.com Twitter: @BenSettle Ben is a great resource for marketers who want to amp up their email copywriting to convert more customers and make money with email marketing. People call him their “email marketing mentor” and he’s even been referred to as “the King of Email.” Pretty impressive, huh? Not only does he specialize in email copywriting, but he teaches others how to do the same on his blog, which is a great resource for those who want to understand how buyer psychology plays a role in the marketing funnel. Why you should follow him: Sign up for his daily Email Players newsletter to see for yourself just how effective his copywriting is. You’ll also get a copy of his 24-Point Email Marketing Cheat Sheet, filled with subject lines, email openings and more profitable email tactics. Try out a few of his email marketing hacks and see how they work for you. 11. John Corcoran John teaches aspiring entrepreneurs how to build profitable business relationships and expand their networks. He knows the power of investing in email marketing firsthand — his list is the driving force behind monetizing his blog and business. His expertise has been featured in Forbes, The Huffington Post and Newsweek (to name a few) and his content is aimed at helping business owners market themselves for maximum profitability. Why you should follow him: John knows his audience. His marketing approach is smart, straight-forward and offers valuable incentives to get the right people on his list. Try creating offers with your audience in mind (like the one above) to convert more subscribers and grow your list in no time. What’s next While we’ve added links to Twitter, we highly recommend connecting with these incredible marketers through their other platforms. Check out their websites and blogs, and sign up for their emails to see firsthand why we chose them for our list. And follow us on Twitter for the latest email marketing strategies, tactics and news. Are we missing anyone from this list? Let us know in the comments!This article is about the 2005 lawsuit involving AMD and Intel. For the 2004 United States Supreme Court case, see Intel Corp. v. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. AMD launched the lawsuit against its rival Intel, the world's leading microprocessor manufacturer. AMD has claimed that Intel engaged in unfair competition by offering rebates to Japanese PC manufacturers who agreed to eliminate or limit purchases of microprocessors made by AMD or a smaller manufacturer, Transmeta.[1] The complaint was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware in June 2005. In 2005, the Japan Fair Trade Commission issued Intel a cease and desist order.[2] The court date, originally scheduled for April 2009, was pushed back to February 2010. On June 4, 2008, Korea Fair Trade Commission fined Intel US$25.4 million for giving Samsung rebates to not use AMD processors.[3] Some of the manufacturers involved in the case were Dell, HP, Gateway, Acer, Fujitsu, Sony, Toshiba, and Hitachi.[4][5] In July 2007, U.S. District Judge Joseph James Farnan Jr. largely denied Intel's motion to dismiss.[6] In February 2009 it was reported that Intel had spent at least $116 million to date on legal representation on the antitrust suit. This was inferred from a $50 million lawsuit filed by Intel against one of its insurers; the lawsuit disclosed that Intel had already exhausted $66 million in coverage from two other insurers while fighting the antitrust lawsuit.[7] In May 2009, the European Commissioner for Competition, Neelie Kroes, fined Intel a record $1.45 billion and ordered it to end its customer rebate program.[8][9] Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras blocked an inquiry into the matter until her departure in March 2008.[10] In June 2008, new FTC Chairman William Kovacic opened an investigation.[11] This is not the first time AMD has accused Intel Corp. of abusing their power as the leading manufacturer for x86 processors. In 1991, AMD filed an antitrust lawsuit against Intel claiming that they were trying to secure and maintain a monopoly,[citation needed] and one year later, a court ruled against Intel, awarding AMD $10 million "plus a royalty-free license to any Intel patents used in AMD's own x86-style processor".[12]SPORTS + SEXY View The Episodes Real Women’s Wrestling with an ongoing storyline. Where will the story go? We don’t know! It is entirely dependent on who wins the match or loses the match in each Episode. View The Extras Real Women’s Wrestling where the ladies are (generally) not in character and not part of a storyline. These are used to get new ladies introduced and to get ladies more matches before they appear on the Episodes. View The Mixed Wrestling Real Women’s Wrestling where our ladies take on MEN in competitive wrestling action. The majority of the time our ladies WIN. These are not in story form and the ladies (generally) are not in character. However, a story in itself seems to be developing here in regards to women being considered weaker than men! Also, on the Mixed Wrestling page linked below will find information on MEET AND GREETS with our ladies. Another option is having the ladies put you in our wrestling holds to see if they can pin or tap you. That’s not all. You can also schedule to have one of the ladies take you on in an OFFENSE/DEFENSE match where they are on offense and you are on defense. Or, if you are a Lifetime Legacy Member you may qualify to take on our ladies in a FAN SERIES video where you make 50 percent of the lifetime proceeds from the sales of the video! View The Photosets Like to see the women as they are in everyday life OR in pictures dominating the other ladies in simulated wrestling action? View The Women Who Wrestle Women who wrestle for REAL are a very, very unique bunch of women. Sponsor and support them as much as you can when they are ACTIVE, because you never know when they will come or go! SEE THE WRESTLING RULES. A Company Built For The Fans By A Fan Johnny Ringo has been a fan of the competitive women’s wrestling industry for a while and is here to introduce you to the exciting and unique experience that a real women’s wrestling match has to offer by watching it on video OR in person. There are many ways you can do business with us. You can buy downloads on this website. You can buy a membership so you don’t have to purchase as many downloads. You may qualify to wrestle or meet our ladies in person. You can also pay to video or phone chat with select ladies who offer it. We also have mechanisms for those of you who are looking to make money off real women’s wrestling. You can also SPONSOR MATCHES AND MAKE MONEY IN RETURN LIFETIME! Unlike other companies, we actually give you a lifetime proceed of the sales made when someone buys your sponsored content for the rest of your life. COME SEE ALL THE WAYS YOU CAN SUPPORT REAL WOMEN’S WRESTLING AT THE FEMALE WRESTLING CHANNELHP V242h 24" LED Backlit Monitor Bundle This Bundle Includes: HP V242h 24" LED Backlit Monitor - K6X12A6#ABA A large-screen, budget-friendly every day business display. Get an extra-large screen and quality presentation features at a price point designed to fit your budget. This sleek LED monitor offers a 24-inch diagonal screen, 1920 x 1080 Full HD resolution, and VGA HDMI and DVI inputs—all at an unbelievably low price point. Enjoy business-class brightness, contrast, and image clarity in a design that's easy on the wallet. This HP V242h 24" LED Backlit Monitor comes loaded with features and offers an exceptional value. Perfect for student life, gamers, or business. Offering the flexibility to be utilized in multiple settings for any occassion. Don't fall behind on technology. Optimize your workstation with the HP V242h 24" LED Backlit Monitor today! What It Is and Why You Need It: This sleek LED monitor offers a 24" diagonal screen, 1920 x 1080 Full HD resolution. Get easy device connectivity from the VGA, HDMI and DVI-D inputs. The slim LED footprint and internal power supply help keep your workspace tidy. Perfect for students, gamers, or business Versitile connectivity options for various applications Whether you're a student working on a disseration, a gamer wrapped up in an RPG game, or an entrepeneur running reports to monitor yours business's growth. The various connections offer you the flexibility to do more. Slim Design Operating is a small space? Fret not. The HP V242h 24" LCD Backlit Monitor is designed with space-saving hardware to eliminate bulk and wasted space. Furthermore, VESA mount compatibility provides you with an alternate solution. Full HD 1080p resolution paired with an ideal 24" LED backlit display, provides life-like visuals on all media. Kick back and watch a Full HD YouTube video or surf through hi-res images for a pleasant viewing experience, the option is yours. Fend off the latest threats and enjoy a safer experience online with McAfee Multi Access. Optimize your PC, avoid risky websites, prevent dangerous downloads and manage all of your user names and passwords across multiple devices. Includes bonus ad-free utilities to optimize your PC, search and download knowing you're safe from viruses, malware, ransomware, spyware, unwanted programs and more. Features:0 Between Fedor Emelianenko’s abrupt quarterfinals exit, the UFC’s purchase of Strikeforce and the excessively long gap between opening round matchups, it’s tough to say anything in MMA has lost as much momentum as Strikeforce’s Heavyweight Grand Prix. Regardless, “Strikeforce: Overeem vs. Werdum” still goes down June 18th inside American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas. Alistair Overeem faces Fabricio Werdum in the card’s featured attraction. The heavyweights will meet in the opening round of Strikeforce’s tourney. Former UFC champion Josh Barnett will meet Brett Rogers in another quarterfinals matchup. Speaking of long overdue, Gina Carano will also make her eagerly anticipated return to the hexagon next month. The female face of MMA fights Sarah D’Alelio. Furthermore, Strikeforce announced Sunday they signed UFC veteran Jeff Monson to meet Daniel Cormier in a heavyweight showdown. Showtime will broadcast the main bouts beginning at 10PM ET/PT. Here are the athletes expected to appear in the star-studded card: Individual Bouts: Valentijn Overeem vs. Chad Griggs Jorge Masvidal vs. K.J. Noons Daniel Cormier vs. Jeff Monson JZ Cavalcante vs. Justin Wilcox Sarah D’Alelio vs. Gina Carano Heavyweight Grand Prix (Quarterfinals): Josh Barnett vs. Brett Rogers Alistair Overeem vs. Fabricio WerdumCallista Images/SPL Having a thicker outer layer of the brain is linked to an increased likelihood of having autism. The cerebral cortex is the wrinkled outer layer of the brain that is responsible for many of our most human traits, including thought, language and consciousness. This layer is typically thicker in men than in women, and its structure has been linked to differences in personality. Now brain scans have shown that women who have a more male-like brain structure are three times more likely to have been diagnosed with autism. Advertisement The study compared the brains of 98 men and women with high functioning autism with those of 98 people who don’t have autism. These findings provide new insights into the brain’s role in sex differences in autism, according to the team that did the study. Autism is thought to be two to five times more common in men than in women, and some think the condition is caused by having an “extreme male brain”. Journal reference: JAMA Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2016.3990 Read more: How many girls mask autism spectrum disorder, like me?Five wild lionesses in the Moremi Game Reserve of Botswana have grown big, beautiful manes, and now they’re even starting to act like males. According to recent observations, at least one of these maned lionesses has been roaring frequently, and she’s been trying to mate with the other females. She’s even killed two lion cubs - a behaviour that’s usually reserved to males. A team of biologists has been following these five'masculinised' lionesses since 2014, and have now published the first scientific paper documenting the development of manes and male behaviour in wild females. Of the five, they chose one lioness to focus on, called SaF05. While three of the maned lionesses were observed courting male lions, SaF05 appears to be targeting both males and females with her affections. When the team, led by biologist Geoffrey D. Gilfillan from the University of Sussex in the UK, looked back at eight years of data on SaF05, they found that she had displayed sexual mounting behaviour with three females within her own pride on seven separate occasions. According to the report, none of the maneless females had initiated such behaviour with her, and all homosexual mating attempts were either ignored or met with aggression. Jessica Vitale "While SaF05 is mostly female in her behaviour - staying with the pride, mating males - she also has some male behaviours, such as increased scent-marking and roaring, as well as mounting other females," Gilfillan told Karl Gruber at New Scientist. "Although females do roar and scent-mark like males, they usually do so less frequently," he adds. "SaF05, however, was much more male-like in her behaviour, regularly scent-marking and roaring." At this stage, no one’s entirely sure why this handful of Botswana lionesses have not only developed male physical characteristics, but male behaviours too. But the leading hypothesis right now is that these females have been developing heightened levels of testosterone. As Gruber explains, when male lions are castrated, they lose their ability to produce testosterone, and as a consequence, often end up losing their mane. Something similar appears to happen in females, although a lot less frequently. As we reported back in 2014, a few years ago, a 13-year-old lioness named Emma at the National Zoological Gardens of South Africa started to grow an incredible, honey-coloured mane. With concerns that Emma's hormones were out of whack, the zoo had her ovaries removed and conducted a biopsy - and while her biopsy showed that she had normal female XX chromosomes, her ovaries revealed something very different. "Surprisingly, the 'ovaries' that were removed only contained cells normally seen in the testicles of males. This was obviously where the testosterone was being produced," said the zoo’s clinical veterinarian, Adrian Tordiffe, at the time. "After her ovaries were removed, Emma gradually lost her mane hair and returned to her normal female good looks." It’s not clear why some female lions have higher levels of testosterone than others, but it could be that their development was somehow compromised at the point of conception, or while they were forming in the womb. "If the former case, the genetic contribution of the sperm - which determines the sex of the foetus in most mammals - was probably aberrant, giving rise to a female with some male characteristics," Luke Hunter, president of conservation group Panthera, who wasn't involved in the current study, told Christine Dell’Amore at National Geographic. "Alternatively, and perhaps more likely, the problem may have occurred during gestation if the foetus was exposed to increased levels of androgens - male hormones - such as testosterone." The hypothesis is supported by the fact that, so far, all the evidence points to these five masculinised lionesses as being infertile. According to the report, from the eight years of data recorded for SaF05, she has never once been found to be pregnant, and has never given birth. While this isn't exactly good news for the longevity of the lionesses' pride, the researchers are confident that they're carrying an extremely rare genetic mutation, and the fact that they appear to be infertile means there's zero chance that it will be spread by these particular individuals. And there is an upside to being a manly lioness - they don't appear to be held back by behaviours that typical females display. Instead, they get the best of both worlds, which means showing neighbouring prides who's boss - lion-style. "A neighbouring pride stole the zebra from SaF05, but in return SaF05 killed two of their cubs," Gilfillan told New Scientist. The report has been published in the African Journal of Ecology.How an obscure amendment to the state’s property tax code helps corporations leave counties—and citizens—stretched thin. Sometime in 2007, David Swinford, then a Republican state representative from the Panhandle town of Dumas, decided he’d had enough. For five years running, the largest taxpayer in his district, Valero Energy Corp., had refused to pay all the property tax due on its McKee Refinery, which it acquired from Diamond Shamrock in 2003. Each year Valero sued the Moore County Appraisal District, claiming that the refinery’s appraised value—close to $300 million by 2007—was too high. As court proceedings dragged on, the company paid taxes to the Dumas school district, hospital district, county and other local entities based on the undisputed portion of its valuation—about half what Valero owed. Now the unpaid bills added up to $11 million, and the school board had raised taxes to cover the school district’s portion of the shortfall. “The reality was, [Valero was] paying partial payment, the next year they would file again and it just kept running,” said Swinford, who chaired the House State Affairs Committee at the time. “At some point it’s got to end and settle up.” At the time, Valero had filed hundreds of similar lawsuits all across Texas, seeking to lower the taxable value of billions of dollars’ worth of property—from pipelines to convenience stores to huge refineries. The potential loss of tax money would be felt by public schools, hospitals, community colleges and local governments in the refinery belt of Southeast Texas, where student enrollment is heavily minority and economically disadvantaged. And it would be felt in little Moore County, population 22,000, a featureless rectangle on the High Plains that was once nearly wiped out by a grasshopper plague. “The reality was, [Valero was] paying partial payment, the next year they would file again and it just kept running. At some point it’s got to end and settle up.” Though deeply conservative, Swinford had an independent streak and was not afraid to rock boats. He thought other big companies might take a page from Valero’s book unless someone stepped in, so he went to Tom Craddick, then speaker of the Texas House. “Y’all may think this is a Moore County problem, but it’s a statewide issue,” Swinford told him. Besides, he said, it wasn’t fair. Swinford owned a grain elevator, and he made sure his taxes were paid up every year. “Why does everybody else have to pay their taxes and not them?” he asked. Swinford wanted to confront Valero, and Craddick let him do it. As chairman of the State Affairs Committee, Swinford invoked a little-known rule that gave him power to compel Valero officials to testify under oath and produce any financial records the committee requested. Any of them. There would be no judge to complain to about trade secrets. The House parliamentarian drew up a subpoena, and Swinford called a hearing. “Their president came,” he recalled. So did Valero’s lawyers. Refining is a close-mouthed business, and San Antonio-based Valero has successfully fought appraisal districts that sought its financial records in court. Its refusal to reveal income information in Moore County had stalled negotiations with the refinery for years. “They kept bringing up the judicial system. I said, ‘This is not a court, this is the Legislature.’ There wasn’t going to be a jury—just me. Long story short, I said I would take any measure I need to take” to get Valero to settle up, said Swinford. He never used the subpoena, but it had the intended effect. In 2008, Valero agreed to a settlement, brokered by Swinford, that returned $7.5 million in back taxes to the Dumas school district and other Moore County public entities. (Company spokesman Bill Day declined to comment on the settlement.) It may have been the last dispute with a Texas appraisal district in which Valero wrote the checks instead of getting money back. Swinford retired from the Legislature after the 2009 session, and in 2010 Valero sued the Moore County Appraisal District again. This time the settlement dropped the refinery’s $410 million assessment by almost one-third, lowering Valero’s annual tax bill by $1.8 million and making the Dumas school district refund $1.2 million to the company. That pales in comparison to the $5 million the Texas City school district has paid Valero to settle its lawsuits, or the $32 million that Port Arthur schools are still paying back. But those places are crammed with refineries, while Moore County has only one. Valero’s property, which includes the refinery and an asphalt plant, currently makes up 17 percent of the county tax roll. No one has built a new refinery in Texas since 1975; instead they refit older ones, as Valero did with McKee. McKee has been one of the company’s most profitable refineries, well positioned to capitalize on the glut of cheap light crude oil pouring out of West Texas—“a huge competitive advantage” for the company, Valero’s chief executive, Bill Klesse, told analysts in 2014, a year in which Valero tripled its third-quarter earnings to $1 billion. Although property tax is not an income tax, refineries are bought and sold based largely on the income they’re expected to generate. Valero doesn’t say how much money McKee makes. But it’s now on the county tax roll for $285 million—$124 million less than the company agreed to in 2008. The people of Moore County know the tradeoffs that come with oil refining. In 1956 a tank at McKee exploded in a giant fireball that rained burning fuel a mile away, killing 19 workers and volunteer firemen. In 2007 McKee caught fire again, critically injuring several workers and releasing toxic chlorine gas. The temporary shutdown did not slow Valero’s accelerating profit margins. Though the nearby Swift meatpacking plant hires more people, the refinery pays a lot better. It’s the second-largest local employer, with about 480 steady jobs, and Dumas is beholden. Swinford understands all that. “By and large I never said anything negative about Valero—they’re a very good company and they’ve been good for this community,” he said. “But when a big company like that does not pay their taxes, somebody else has to.” What Is a Refinery Worth? At the heart of Valero’s lawsuits in Moore County was a complicated question: What is a refinery worth? For that matter, what is any property worth? Since most litigation against appraisal districts settles out of court, juries rarely get to answer that question. But that’s what a Galveston jury did in 2013 when it lowered the tax value of Valero’s Texas City refinery from $527 million to $337 million, though Valero had agreed to the higher number only two years before. A local jury, in a town far from rich, sided with the world’s largest independent refiner in its perennial quest to drastically cut the taxes it owes to public schools and local governments. Appraisal district officials across Texas were flabbergasted. Refineries are a complicated, opaque business, and the technical testimony took a whole mind-numbing week—“a battle of experts,” said Ken Wright, the chief appraiser for the Galveston Central Appraisal District. Yet members of the jury took only four hours to decide in Valero’s favor. It proved what every trial lawyer knows, that the battle is almost always won by the side that not only tells its story best, but has the simplest story to tell. “It’s taken me many years to figure this out,” said a rueful Wright, who is retiring this year. The story, Valero’s whole case, depended on a one-sentence amendment to the property tax code that whisked through the Legislature in 1997. The details of how that happened are hazy—the legislator who introduced the amendment died years ago—but the man who wrote it is a respected Austin tax attorney, Jim Popp. His firm, Popp Hutcheson, has represented some of the most prominent plaintiffs in lawsuits against appraisal districts, among them Western Refining, the JW Marriott hotels, H-E-B, Walgreens, the Formula 1 racetrack in Austin and Valero. “With the equal and uniform statute being interpreted the way it is, it’s hard to win. It’s a boxing match without any ropes.” There are basically two ways to challenge a tax appraisal—on value and on unequal appraisal. The first claims that a property has been appraised above market value. The second claims that while a property may be appraised at market value, others like it are appraised for much less. Before 1997, an unequal appraisal claim required an expensive property analysis called a ratio study, and it was seldom used. Popp’s amendment created an easier, cheaper way to claim unequal appraisal and gain an automatic reduction in value—so easy that it is now routinely used in tax protests and dominates big-ticket litigation. You simply select a “reasonable” number of “comparable” properties (available on the appraisal district’s website), adjust their values up or down (your house has a swimming pool, mine doesn’t) and find the median—the middle number on the list. What’s reasonable or comparable isn’t spelled out. Market value is beside the point. If your valuation is higher than the median, it gets lowered to that number. The amendment is now called the equity statute, or simply “equal and uniform,” echoing the Texas Constitution’s dictum that taxation be “equal and uniform.” David Hugin, a Popp Hutcheson lawyer, argued the case in Galveston. Fairness was the theme: The appraisal district had wronged Valero by overvaluing its refinery, and the law showed the jury exactly how to set things right. It produced a breathtakingly simple answer to the vexing question of worth. All the jury had to do was look at the comparables, the other two refineries in Galveston County—Marathon’s little 84,000-barrel-per-day plant, which processes only light sweet crude oil, and BP’s 451,000-barrel-per-day behemoth (now also owned by Marathon), which runs all kinds of crude oil, sprawls over 1,200 acres and is one of the largest, most complex refineries in the U.S. It had been appraised for $800 million more than the smaller refinery. “They are massively different,” said Wright. “Like comparing a corner grocery to a Kroger’s.” There are 27 refineries in Texas, more than any other state, and no two are alike. Some convert tar to gas, some need a higher grade of crude, some make asphalt, some have more secondary conversion capacity. Under the rubric of fairness, the unequal statute flattens the differences between sophisticated industrial facilities, with the result that tax liability shrinks. “I can see equity being an appropriate concept where you have a large number of similar properties, but (refineries) are not cookie cutters,” said Gregg Davis, executive vice president of Capitol Appraisal Group, an Austin firm. “The only similarity is, the final product is gasoline. Everything else is going to be different.” Yet the two other Galveston County refineries would determine the value of Valero’s 245,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Texas City. Since there were only two plants, there was no median, so the jury simply took Valero’s adjustments for innumerable differences between the two refineries, added the two final values, and divided the sum in half. That was the basis for the new appraised value of the Texas City refinery. Thus $189 million in taxable value fell away, and the Texas City school district and other local entities, which had already paid $5 million in a previous settlement with Valero, started scraping up another $5 million in tax refunds they now owed the company. “With the equal and uniform statute being interpreted the way it is, it’s hard to win,” said Todd Stewart, an attorney with the Houston law firm Olson & Olson, which represents local government entities. “It’s a boxing match without any ropes.” Discouraged by the Galveston verdict, the El Paso Central Appraisal District quickly agreed to a settlement with Western Refining that dropped its refinery’s appraised value from $745 million to $305 million, sending $11 million in property tax refunds back to the company and incensing some elected officials, who blamed the appraisal district. The lawsuits had gone on for years, and Western Refining warned it would use the equity statute just as Valero had if they went to trial, said chief appraiser Dinah Kilgore. “We just ran out of money,” she said. In Big Spring, the Howard County Appraisal District shaved about $50 million off the appraisal notice it was going to send the Alon refinery—another Popp Hutcheson client. “When we settled in 2013, the reason was what happened in El Paso,” said chief appraiser Ronny Babcock. “That is the most agonizing thing as a chief appraiser you can fight your way through. When you’re an ant and they’re Goliath. It’s shocking, really.” “That is the most agonizing thing as a chief appraiser you can fight your way through. When you’re an ant and they’re Goliath. It’s shocking, really.” Two years earlier his board had spent $900,000 fighting Alon, before both parties agreed to a court judgment that cost the refinery $3 million. But it cost Howard County too. The county had to raise taxes to pay for the litigation and “my board had to borrow money to get through the year. They’re not eager to do that again,” said Babcock. The market value of non-residential property is already difficult to get a handle on in Texas, one of only five states that does not require real estate sales prices to be disclosed. Companies jealously guard their financial information. Arguments over comparables are a blur of capitalization rates and intangibles and margins and triple net leases, comprehensible only to the attorneys and experts. But no matter how complex or inscrutable the business, the law now allows value to be determined with a sixth-grade math exercise: Find the median. The 1997 equity statute and subsequent legislation that broadened its reach have effectively redefined what unequal appraisal means. No longer is it about relationships between property and market value, but between one property and another. It’s a radical departure from standard appraisal methodology, one that no other state has taken. “What this has morphed into is, just let me find examples of a few of my competitors and make my numbers look like theirs,” said Sands Stiefer, chief appraiser in Harris County. For Wright, who has been with the Galveston Central Appraisal District since it was first formed in the early 1980s, the Valero trial was an eye-opener. In the courtroom he saw how everything—who got put on the jury, which experts made the best salesmen—came together for the side that told the most convincing story, in his words, “regardless of the facts.” How would he do the telling? Wright pointed to the arithmetic that erased the expert appraisal the district had paid for and penciled in a new taxable value for the Texas City refinery, based on two wildly dissimilar refineries. “My story is and will be, when you look at those two comparable properties—is that possible?” “Equal and Uniform” Almost nobody anticipated the impact of the equity amendment back in 1997, except for Jim Popp and maybe a few other tax lawyers. Probably even they didn’t foresee the scale on which it would be used to lower taxes on some of the most valuable and profitable property in Texas, while ordinary taxpayers have watched the appraised value of their homes grow and grow. “I’m not sure they knew how brilliant they were,” said Stiefer. They were dogged as well. Popp had tinkered with the tax code for years, partly to make it easier for property owners to protest and win their cases. Though never a paid lobbyist or a legislator, he has been a familiar figure at the Capitol since working for the short-lived State Property Tax Board in the early 1980s. These days, now that most of the old bulls in the Legislature who truly understood the convoluted workings of the property tax system are gone, lawmakers often rely on Popp to educate them, and he relies on them to sponsor the bills he drafts. By his own count, he has written hundreds of proposed amendments to the tax code. No matter how complex or inscrutable the business, the law now allows value to be determined by a sixth-grade math exercise: Find the median. Popp remains the ablest defender of the equity statute, affable but relentlessly on message. The message is that there is no problem with the law because it promotes fairer treatment for everybody. The idea that commercial property is undervalued, he says, is “a media sound bite” and news stories have confused the real issue that’s bothering taxpayers. “It’s not the system they don’t like. They don’t like paying property taxes,” said Popp. Popp is particular about words, and it’s instructive to pay attention to his. By calling the equity statute simply “equal and uniform,” he purposefully invokes the Texas Constitution’s wording. By referring to the law as a “remedy,” he conveys the idea that property owners were not really protected from unequal appraisal until the equity statute came along, and undoing it now would imperil a constitutional right. It’s a powerful message, if not exactly plausible, since the only constitutional right that appears to be in jeopardy now is the one requiring property to be assessed in proportion to its market value. However, thanks to a pivotal Houston case—argued and won by Popp—Texas courts have held that when the two constitutional principles conflict, equal and uniform prevails. Although homeowners can and do challenge their valuations on the basis of unequal appraisal, the greatest beneficiaries have been the owners of large commercial and industrial properties, many of whom are Popp Hutcheson’s clients. From 2011 to 2013, equity protests and litigation peeled more than $57 billion in taxable commercial and industrial value from Bexar, Dallas, Houston and Travis counties—about $1.35 billion in potential tax revenue their localities never received. That’s just in those four counties. Across the state, Valero has filed the most lawsuits, but the law has also helped lower tax bills for hotels, shopping malls, apartment complexes, office buildings, banks, drugstore chains, Costco, Target, H-E-B, AutoZone, 7-Eleven—the list is long and growing longer. Sometimes the lawsuits leave local schools in the lurch. A year after the brand new Sandy Creek coal-fired power plant started up in McLennan County in 2013, its owners sued to lower its $885 million valuation by 70 percent. That punched a $1 million hole in the Riesel school district’s budget and leaves it holding the bag on a $25 million bond issue that Sandy Creek’s taxes were supposed to cover. When the Jefferson County Appraisal District settled two more Valero lawsuits last year, it brought to $32 million the tab owed to Valero by the Port Arthur school district, which has been too strapped for cash to replace its wheezing old bus fleet. State funding—that is, the taxpayers of Texas—reimbursed about $12 million, but $20 million is coming out of the school district’s own pocket. Numbers such as those, say chief appraisers, are evidence of a steady erosion in the tax base, brought about by a formula for winning appeals that pushes median values down in a never-ending spiral. Advocates for business owners—a lineup of most of the state’s most powerful interest groups—say that the markdowns are merely evidence of greater fairness in taxation. To show how little the reductions matter, they cite the state comptroller’s annual property value study, which shows little change over the past decade in the apportionment of the statewide tax base among single-family residential, multifamily residential, commercial and industrial property. It’s proof, Popp said, that there’s been no shift in the tax burden to homeowners, and that any reductions in value are “not significant in the big picture.” Yet it’s also true that the tax base is so large, approaching $2 trillion, that a few billion lost here and there won’t show up. “When you take everything to the state aggregate level everything disappears,” said Houston attorney Robert Mott, who has represented local governments in revenue collection matters for decades. And on the local level a shift is occurring, said Dallas County chief appraiser Ken Nolan, and it tells a different story about fairness in taxation: Commercial and industrial owners are getting a substantially bigger break from equity appeals than homeowners. The numbers he gathered from four of the state’s largest counties show that appeals from 2011 to 2013 reduced commercial and industrial property values by a greater percentage than for single family residential property. In Dallas and Harris counties, it was two and a half times greater. “The Most Unpopular People in Town” During the coffee break at a Texas A&M workshop on property tax law in San Antonio last August, it was easy to tell the
extension services have been dismantled, largely at the behest of structural adjustment programmes, and farmers have been left to fend for themselves. To increase productivity and introduce agroecology techniques in places such as sub Saharan Africa requires institutions that can disseminate knowledge into remote rural areas. This is no easy task. Finally, de Schutter has one other urgent recommendation. The G20 in May will be considering measures to manage food-price volatility and he believes that food reserves are an essential tool. "My view is that food reserves could be used to support the income of farmers, buying at a good price and then make food affordable during times of rising prices. If a food reserve is well managed and transparent, it could limit volatility and secure incomes," he says. He points out that China now has huge food reserves in wheat, maize and rice that can shield the population from price spikes. There are ongoing negotiations to arrange regional collaboration across south-east Asia and to mutualise national food reserves. Similar discussions took place last December in West Africa. The G20 must put greater impetus behind such regional co-operation.This is giving me some vibes from the first and last time i traded a toy. So, we were at my school, around… second grade? And i was SO fucking obsessed with bakugans, these little balls from the Bakugan anime which activate when they touch something magnetic, i had hundreds of them and i was watching the anime every single time it was on. Anyway, i was the “non sociable weird one who talks with nobody” kid in my class, but there was that one kid who i saw playing with bakugans, his name was Alex, however i brought some to play with him, Then he said how he trades toys with his friends, and i hadn’t had any friends by that time so i had no idea what he meant, but he explained and we traded some bakugans. When i got home my mom was a little mad that i traded my bakugans because she bought them and she said i shouldn’t give my toys to people, so i stopped trading. Just a little story which you will absolutely never need to know, but still. Is Steven seriously going to commentate on everything Onion does this whole day? Also, what’s with Onion? Why is he so “mysterious”? “I am back. Did you manage to get me that cocaine i ordered?” “Look, i know you are the new guy here, but i am tired of this. I don’t care how big of a criminal boss you are. Get out of here, we have found a new man.” “…” “Do you want me to remind you how i killed thirty people with these bare hands, you little shit?” “N-no! I’m sorry! Here, this is y-your order!”The media event was located near the NASCAR Hall of Fame, but streets were open with NASCAR racecars parked curbside. Not closing the streets was probably a mistake, because a Caution Flag had to be thrown when a SUV came down the street and hit one of the Toyota Camry NASCAR racecars as it attempted to exit it's parking spot. When racing comes to your city no matter the form, promoters like to showcase race vehicles for the visiting city and the local media and NASCAR is no different. This week NASCAR visited downtown Charlotte, North Carolina to promote the upcoming Bank of America 500 race which will be NASCAR's first road course playoff race in the 14 year history of playoffs. The NASCAR Camry was an apparent pace car-show car, so someone was channeling their inner Cole Trickle. Harry Hogge: All right. While we're still under a caution, I want you to go back out on that track and hit the pace car. Cole Trickle: Hit the pace car? Harry Hogge: Hit the pace car. Cole Trickle: What for? Harry Hogge: Because you've hit every other goddamned thing out there, I want you to be perfect. The SUV caught some air from the hit and received most of the damage while the NASCAR Camry appears to only have a damaged fender which buckled the hood. You have to wonder the insurance issues with hitting a NASCAR car. While the accident occurred, NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski was being interviewed by a local news crew. "We just saw a car wreck!" said Keselowski.Yuri Kochiyama painting by Sahra Vang Nguyen. One of my favorite stories about Yuri is also about Tupac. In an event curated by the late Fred Ho in celebration of Diane Fujino’s 2005 book release of the biography Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama, Laura Whitehorn spoke of the activist harbor that was the Kochiyama house. Dubbed “Grand Central Station” or the “Revolutionary Salon,” this Harlem apartment and Kochiyama family residence was a hub for activists, artists, students and other community members for much of the last four decades of the 20th century. Whitehorn recalled a then 9-year-old Tupac Shakur speaking eloquently and passionately about the need to free political prisoners at a meeting in Yuri’s house. This 9-year-old Tupac was, of course, not just talking about abstract historical figures, but members of his own family -- his stepfather Mutulu Shakur, his godfather Geronimo Pratt, Sundiata Acoli, Sekou Odinga, and others. That image of Pac as a child speaking about the struggle to free his politically imprisoned family members at Yuri’s house was something very moving to me. It spoke of the insurmountable courage of Pac’s childhood, and it spoke of the prodigious compassion of Yuri and the Kochiyamas to continually share their space. It also embodied the interconnectedness of our struggles. Because if a Japanese American woman such as Yuri and Malcolm X were a hard pairing for people to imagine, then undoubtedly in public imagination Yuri and THUG LIFE are too; and what people don’t understand about Yuri reveals exactly how much we don’t understand about social movements. Yuri and Pac’s families were profound friends, comrades in intense post-Malcolm struggles for Black and Third World Liberation. Trace the lineages, and one can see how the legacies of both families and their communities catalyzed movements that transformed the nation and world twice over. Whitehorn’s snapshot of Yuri and Pac was like listening to “Free the Land” by Chris Iijima, Nobuko Miyamoto, and Charlie Chin on the A Grain of Sand album. Pac’s stepfather Mutulu Shakur is literally singing there with them on that record, and they are collectively singing the ethos of Malcolm’s call for the self-determination of all oppressed people. Whitehorn’s brief story here also illustrated how these are struggles political and personal. Pac often talked about how Movement radicalism left women like his own mother raising families on their own while the men in the family were incarcerated, assassinated or absent. Pac’s politicization as a child was parallel to the immense trauma and loss he must have felt as a child of war under siege by the FBI’s COINTELPRO. This is not unlike Yuri’s own experiences during World War II, how just prior to her family’s forced removal to a concentration camp, her own father, a leader in the Japanese American community in San Pedro, CA, was illegally detained, interrogated and denied medical care by the FBI for six weeks and died the day after he was released. Yuri and Pac both turned their pain into power. Through the usage of informants and anonymous letters, COINTELPRO FBI agents created friction in the Movement through fiction. Yuri, however, never wavered. She was “the person,” as Angela Davis described in tribute, “who can really change the world.” “This is the person we all need to emulate. We need to emulate her because she knows that the most important work is in the details, in the small things, in the letters, in the words exchanged between us, in the smiles, in the love.” Yuri combated polarization with inclusiveness. She was the safe space. Yuri’s ability to sustain positive relationships amongst Movement activists across generations must be seen as resistance against oppression in the highest of forms. Indeed, she was her own rose that grew from concrete -- or concentration camp. And best of all, she planted and helped blossom many, many more. As we continue to memorialize Yuri, it is vital to not see her as a flash in the pan, but water in a neverending river for justice. For the next generations especially, to connect the dots between Kendrick Lamar, Pac, Malcolm and Yuri. She herself would have made the transnational political connections occurring in today’s world from Gaza to Ferguson, generationally between Emmett Till to Mike Brown, Vincent Chin to Renisha McBride; Mumia to Snowden; White supremacy and imperialism to neoliberalism. The spirit of Yuri is in our interconnectedness. Yuri Kochiyama, eternally, presente. UPCOMING MEMORIALS FOR YURI KOCHIYAMA: LOS ANGELES August 31, 2014 (Sunday) 2:00 - 4:30 pm Aratani/ Japan America Theatre 244 South San Pedro Street (bet. 2nd & 3rd Sts.) Los Angeles, CA 90012 NEW YORK September 27, 2014 (Saturday) 5:00 - 7:30 pm First Corinthian Baptist Church 1912 Adam C. Powell Boulevard New York, NY 10026 *** Taiyo Na is musician, writer, and educator from New York City. When he was an awkward 19-year-old, Yuri generously remarked with a smile how his poetry was “firebrand.”Kirby Delauter might need to rethink his strategy for keeping his name out of print. The Frederick County, Maryland, councilman's name was published Tuesday in newspapers, websites, news and opinion blogs and seemingly every corner of the Internet after he threatened to sue his local newspaper if it dared to publish his name without his permission. "Use my name again unauthorized and you'll be paying for an attorney," the Republican official told a Frederick News-Post reporter in a Facebook post. The paper responded by ridiculing his demand. "I just don't know how to respond to a request that stupid," Terry Headlee, managing editor of the 33,000 daily circulation newspaper, told The Associated Press on Tuesday in a telephone interview. The News-Post did respond by posting an advance look at its Sunday editorial on the newspaper's website. It pointed out that Delauter's demand ignores, among other things, the First Amendment right of a free press. But the newspaper could not resist mining the rich opportunities for sarcasm that Delauter's demand offered. There was the editorial's headline: "Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter." And the body of the editorial, describing the laughter that his demand provoked and exploring the ways The News-Post might henceforth refer to Delauter without using his name. Perhaps "K---- D-------." Or "Councilman (Unauthorized)." Capping it off, the first letter of each paragraph spelled out: K-I-R-B-Y-D-E-L-A-U-T-E-R. Mocking messages filled Twitter with the hashtag #kirbydelauter, which was trending among the top 10 most popular subjects in the U.S. on Tuesday evening. A Google search for the name Kirby Delauter on Tuesday evening turned up more than 37,000 results. Delauter, a general contractor, didn't respond to telephone and email messages from The Associated Press. News-Post county government reporter Bethany Rodgers — the subject of Delauter's ire — tweeted that the councilman didn't mention his sudden notoriety during opening comments at a council meeting Tuesday. Delauter had objected to a recent story by Rodgers that said Delauter shared another councilman's concern about a shortage of reserved parking spaces for councilmembers at the county office building. Delauter wrote in his Facebook post that he had refused to be interviewed for the story because Rodgers had misrepresented his comments in the past. This isn't the first time Delauter's quick temper and belligerent style have brought him unflattering attention during his four years as a county official. He stormed out of a board meeting in 2012 after telling a county staff member, "I'm not going to sit here and be talked to like some punk because I'm asking questions." Rodgers reported last year that Delauter called another board member a "moron" for disagreeing with him on an issue. Headlee said it's the newspaper's job to hold elected officials accountable by name for their words and deeds. "If he doesn't want to be held accountable, he needs to seriously consider whether he's cut out to serve the public," Headlee said. Even if Delauter does sue, a lawsuit wouldn't likely go far. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy Washington Post blogger Eugene Volokh, who teaches free speech law at the University of California in Los Angeles, wrote online Tuesday: "In our country, newspapers are actually allowed to write about elected officials (and others) without their permission." Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Paul Buchheit, the original lead developer of GMail, notes that the success of GMail was a long time in coming: We starting working on Gmail in August 2001. For a long time, almost everyone disliked it. Some people used it anyway because of the search, but they had endless complaints. Quite a few people thought that we should kill the project, or perhaps "reboot" it as an enterprise product with native client software, not this crazy Javascript stuff. Even when we got to the point of launching it on April 1, 2004 -- two and a half years after starting work on it -- many people inside of Google were predicting doom. The product was too weird, and nobody wants to change email services. I was told that we would never get a million users. Once we launched, the response was surprisingly positive, except from the people who hated it for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, it was frequently described as "niche", and "not used by real people outside of silicon valley". Now, almost 7 1/2 years after we started working on Gmail, I see [an article describing how Gmail grew 40% last year, compared to 2% for Yahoo and -7% for Hotmail]. Paul has since left Google and now works at his own startup, FriendFeed. Many industry insiders have not been kind to FriendFeed. Stowe Boyd even went so far as to call FriendFeed a failure. Paul takes this criticism in stride: Creating an important new product generally takes time. FriendFeed needs to continue changing and improving, just as Gmail did six years ago. FriendFeed shows a lot of promise, but it's still a "work in progress". My expectation is that big success takes years, and there aren't many counter-examples (other than YouTube, and they didn't actually get to the point of making piles of money just yet). Facebook grew very fast, but it's almost 5 years old at this point. Larry and Sergey started working on Google in 1996 -- when I started there in 1999, few people had heard of it yet. This notion of overnight success is very misleading, and rather harmful. If you're starting something new, expect a long journey. That's no excuse to move slow though. To the contrary, you must move very fast, otherwise you will never arrive, because it's a long journey! This is also why it's important to be frugal -- you don't want to starve to death halfway up the mountain. Stowe Boyd illustrated his point about FriendFeed with a graph comparing Twitter and FriendFeed traffic. Allow me to update Mr. Boyd's graph with another data point of my own. I find Paul's attitude refreshing, because I take the same attitude toward our startup, Stack Overflow. I have zero expectation or even desire for overnight success. What I am planning is several years of grinding through constant, steady improvement. This business plan isn't much different from my career development plan: success takes years. And when I say years, I really mean it! Not as some cliched regurgitation of "work smarter, not harder." I'm talking actual calendar years. You know, of the 12 months, 365 days variety. You will literally have to spend multiple years of your life grinding away at this stuff, waking up every day and doing it over and over, practicing and gathering feedback each day to continually get better. It might be unpleasant at times and even downright un-fun occasionally, but it's necessary. This is hardly unique or interesting advice. Peter Norvig's classic Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years already covered this topic far better than I. Researchers have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. The Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Honestly, I look forward to waking up someday two or three years from now and doing the exact same thing I did today: working on the Stack Overflow code, eking out yet another tiny improvement or useful feature. Obviously we want to succeed. But on some level, success is irrelevant, because the process is inherently satisfying. Waking up every day and doing something you love -- even better, surrounded by a community who loves it too -- is its own reward. Despite being a metric ton of work. The blog is no different. I often give aspiring bloggers this key piece of advice: if you're starting a blog, don't expect anyone to read it for six months. If you do, I can guarantee you will be sorely disappointed. However, if you can stick to a posting schedule and produce one or two quality posts every week for an entire calendar year... then, and only then, can you expect to see a trickle of readership. I started this blog in 2004, and it took a solid three years of writing 3 to 5 times per week before it achieved anything resembling popularity within the software development community. I fully expect to be writing on this blog, in one form or another, for the rest of my life. It is a part of who I am. And with that bit of drama out of the way, I have no illusions: ultimately, I'm just the guy on the internet who writes that blog. That's perfectly fine by me. I never said I was clever. Whether you ultimately achieve readers, or pageviews, or whatever high score table it is we're measuring this week, try to remember it's worth doing because, well -- it's worth doing. And if you keep doing it long enough, who knows? You might very well wake up one day and find out you're an overnight success.There’s been much speculation about the recent closures of Walmart stores around the country. Walmart claims the closing of their stores, almost simultaneously in different cities, is a result of plumbing issues. But many employees and customers suspect that something else is going on, though no one, including store managers, has any idea what that might be. Several theories have popped up, with some claiming that it is an economic issue and Walmart may have shut those stores down because of lackluster sales, but they don’t want to announce falling retail sales so as to avoid a hit to their stock price. The outcome is that “while WMT (or MCD or GAP or Target) boosts the living standards of its employees by the smallest of fractions, it cripples the cost and wage structure of the entire ecosystem of vendors that feed into it, and what takes place is a veritable avalanche effect where a few cent increase for the lowest paid megacorp employees results in a tidal wave of layoffs for said megacorp’s vendors.” TRENDING ON DC CLOTHESLINE: The Recycling Scam: Liberal U.S. cities now just burning recyclables because no one wants to accept the raw material How the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact might unleash a violent civil war following the 2020 election If that doesn’t turn out to be enough in the face of an economy which isn’t really recovering and in which low-income shoppers are constrained by lackluster (and by that we mean nonexistent) wage growth, some sacrifices may have to be made. The problem is that laying people off and shuttering stores two months after a celebrated wage hike initiative doesn’t inspire much confidence and could turn into a PR issue, but one thing you could do is get creative, and while we’re not plumbers, we do find it curious that five geographically distinct WalMart stores have been closed in the past week for “ongoing plumbing issues that will require extensive repairs.” Source: Zero Hedge Others have suggested that the closings may have something to do with upcoming military exercises and the possibility that the massive stores could be used as detention centers for American citizens. In a report published in July 2014 on Intellihub.com, Shepard Ambellas outlined a plan by the Department of Defense and FEMA to use, “abandoned or unused department stores, shopping malls and warehouses as camps to accommodate the mass human influx from South America.” … Although FEMA has used a massive influx of immigrants as the reason for needing detention centers, their power to control the entire country in the event of a martial law scenario could easily lead them to use the centers for American citizens. Source: Intellihub via The Daily Sheeple But a new theory brought forth by researcher and Youtube commentator Daboo777 suggests that Walmart might be working directly with the Department of Homeland Security and the so-called plumbing issues give them the pretext to bring in heavy machinery without having to explain the specific reasons for doing so with an overly curious public. But what would this heavy machinery be for? According to one theory, Walmart is working in conjunction with DHS to expand the government’s underground tunneling system and is integrating it with a larger national emergency response network designed to move supplies and people during a crisis: In this information…in digging… we come to find out that there have been projects in different areas… not specifically tied to the exact Walmarts that have been closed down at the moment… but they can very well be going through a process connecting them to an underground network. This is a very real situation… this was brought up years ago.. they were getting the funding and passing this… Homeland Security, in order to secure the safety of citizens in case of a nuclear, biological, chemical or other attack… this was a joint venture by the NSA, DoD, DHS… These tunnels were to serve as conduits from specific places to rapidly move supplies or whatever they need between these locations. … Are there certain Walmarts out there that have underground connections? I wouldn’t doubt it one bit, especially now that we know DHS over the past decade has had this deal with not only Walmart, but other big sports stadiums and businesses. ***Visit our new FREE SPEECH community built exclusively for our readers. Click to Join The Deplorables Network Today!*** (Video via Steve Quayle) While it may seem like a stretch of the imagination, is it possible that these abrupt closures have something to do with the Department of Homeland Security and the integration of private businesses with broader government emergency response plans? Courtesy of SHTFplan.comEntomologists have described two new species of the nemesiid spider genus Chaco from Rocha Province, Uruguay. The new species, scientifically named Chaco castanea and Chaco costai, are middle sized spiders that range between 1 and 2 cm in body size. These spiders have elongated body and robust legs with black-brownish coloration. Chaco castanea and Chaco costai are typically found in sandy soils of oceanic and river coastal areas associated with psammophyte, or sand-dwelling, vegetation. This is where these peculiar spiders build their silk-lined burrow where they spend great deal of their lives. The burrows are also protected by a flap-like door that makes them particularly hard to find. “Due to a number of life history characteristics, these spiders are difficult to collect and consequently little is known about their biology,” said Dr Laura Montes de Oca from the Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas Clemente Estable, Uruguay, who is a first author of the paper published in the open-access journal ZooKeys. “Observations in natural conditions let us to know that they are mostly active during night. This knowledge is key to finding the spiders in order to perform the necessary studies, both on field and in laboratory. Remaining in the burrow most of their lives, makes these animals vulnerable to habitat perturbations. In Uruguay the psammophyte vegetation is critically decreasing, so it is very important to study and conserve the species” Experiments in laboratory environment reveal some of the secrets that the secluded burrow life of these spiders hide. Chaco costai was observed during hunting, when the spiders lift the entrance of the burrow with their front legs. “The flap-like door of the spider den provides a perfect cover to ambush and catch the unsuspecting victim. The spiders return to their burrow after catching the prey. Another occasion when the spiders go in the open is during copulation when both the male and the female leave their hiding places. However, they return to the burrows straight after that.” ______ Bibliographic information: Montes de Oca L, Pérez-Miles F. 2013. Two new species of Chaco Tullgren from the Atlantic coast of Uruguay (Araneae, Mygalomorphae, Nemesiidae). ZooKeys 337: 73–87; doi: 10.3897/zookeys.337.5779One of Paris' most famous adopted sons Karl Lagerfeld has decried the French capital saying it is a different world to the city he began to call home in the 1950s. Having been heavily targeted by terrorists in the last 18 months, notably in November when 130 people were slaughtered by ISIS, Paris has gained a feeling of danger, said the fashion legend. 'Paris by night is a nightmare now. It is not a cliché anymore,' the 82-year-old at the helm of Chanel said. 'Paris by night is a nightmare now. It is not a cliché anymore,' the 82-year-old at the helm of Chanel Karl Lagerfeld said The German-born designer moved to Paris in 1950 to take up his first job in the capital under French fashion giant Pierre Balmain. When he first set eyes on the city, he told CNN the scene was idyllic, and that it looked like an old French movie. Fast-forward more than half a century and what Lagerfeld sees is very different. He condemned the weather, demonstrations and strikes, saying the Paris of today is like another world. 'There was no feeling of danger, and not even a boy of 16 years old could walk in the street,' he said. 'This is not the most glamorous moment in Paris. 'Paris by night is a nightmare now. It is not a cliché anymore. 'I must say, in my whole life I never saw Paris that gloomy.' Comparing the Paris he fell in love with and the French capital today, he said: 'Things are changing, but I have the feeling I lived in a world that no longer exists. 'Paris has to make an effort to become Paris again' Lagerfeld has been the chief of Chanel's fashion house as head designer and creative director since 1983. Last year, Paris was rocked when ISIS terrorists swarmed the city, slaughtering 130 people on the evening of November 13. As well as setting off car bombs near the Stade de France and opening fire on a row of restaurants and bars, 89 revelers were murdered when four extremists began to fire into the crowd of an Eagles of Death Metal concern at the Bataclan theatre. The horrific attacks followed another terrorist siege at the headquarters of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January of last year. Two Islamist gunmen Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi forced their way into the building and killed 12 people in reaction to the publication of a cartoon depicting the prophet Mohammed. Catwalk icon Legerfeld was talking ahead of Chanel's Autumn-Winter 2016 haute couture show in Paris.Holding a banner reading "We won't stop—There's too much at stake," demonstrators shut down morning traffic at an office park outside Pittsburgh on Monday, in protest of the harmful effects 15 energy companies in the complex have on the environment. Seas are rising they telling me. Seas rising & so are we. So rise up! Rise up! Rise up like the sea. #WeWontStop pic.twitter.com/98evfNeCsM — Rising Tide NA (@RisingTideNA) November 20, 2017 The protesters set up two tripod structures in the middle fn a main intersection leading to Southpointe, a 589-acre property in suburban Washington County, Pennsylvania—home to companies including Halliburton, Chesapeake Energy, and Range Resources, all of which participate in fracking and mining. Two community members climbed onto the tripods while three others sat between them with their arms in lockboxes for about four hours before police broke up the demonstration, according to Rising Tide North America, a grassroots environmental group. A woman who was seated between the structures said the companies that operate at Southpointe are "impacting our lives every day in our communities. I've been run off the road twice because of truck traffic. I have to wonder about the health of my daughter every day living within a half mile of gas wells." She added that "the coal operator here is also destroying our only state park," referring to the efforts of Consol Energy, another company at Southpointe, to obtain a mining permit for Ryerson Station State Park. A community member named Patrick Young said that the disruption of traffic into the office park can't be compared to the damage being done by the companies. Patrick talks about the effects of fracking in PA and the local area. #southpointe #wewontstop pic.twitter.com/0AJedo9UtL — Rising Tide NA (@RisingTideNA) November 20, 2017 SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Help Keep Common Dreams Alive Our progressive news model only survives if those informed and inspired by this work support our efforts Energy companies have flocked to Southpointe in recent years as the gas and oil industries have sought to capitalize on the Marcellus shale, the sprawling rock formation underneath western New York and Pennsylvania, over which thousands of wells have been set up for fracking and mining. Last year, Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection found more than 250 cases of contamination and other negative impacts of fracking in private water supplies in the state. Environmental activist Ruth Breech described the scene as the protest successfully stopped traffic and police arrived to break up the protest. The grassroots organization Rising Tide tweeted at about 10:00am that police had begun arresting the protesters, linking to a legal defense fund for the community members.Many questioned whether the defending Central Division Champions would have the same tenacity on the ice as they did last season, and if the last four games are any indication, I’d say yes. In their home opener, they faced their mighty rivals, the Detroit Red Wings, and gave them a beating that no amount of lucky octopi could prevent. The Blues controlled the entire game, allowing Detroit only 14 shots on goal, and plopping six big ones in the back of the net, themselves. Tarasenko, the hyped-up Russian phenom, tallied two goals and an assist in his first ever NHL game. That boy can play. In the Halak got an easy shutout with a 6-0 victory. Two nights later, the Note headed to Nashville. It was a back and forth game with the score 2-2 at the end of the first. A goal I the 2nd by Patric Hornqvist put the Preds up by 1, and a beauty from Alex Pietrangelo tied it back up with 8 minutes to go. Oshie and Steen sealed the victory in the shootout. The next night, they traveled up to the Windy City. Both Chicago and St. Louis were 2-0 at this point, so someone had to give. The Blues faced more opposition in this game, allowing a 3 on 0 scenario (which led to a goal) letting the Hawks get an early lead. The score was 3-0 before they cleaned up their game in the 3rd period. With two minutes to go, Coach Ken Hitchcock pulled Brian Elliott. The Blues piled on the pressure with the man advantage, but Hawk’s goalie, Corey Crawford, was playing his guts out. In the end, the Blues lost 2-3. After a night off to recuperate, they headed back down to Nashville. Learning from their mistakes at Chicago, the Blues took a little of that leftover spark from the Detroit game, and let it loose. The Preds were dominated for most of the game, allowing Halak to make all 13 saves (some beauties, by the way), giving him another shut-out with a 3-0 victory. Minus the first half of the Blackhawks game, the Blues have been phenomenal. Both goalies look good, the defense is tight, and the offense is producing. Just take a look at these numbers: Tomorrow night, the Blues face the Dallas Stars, who are slightly above average at the moment (with only 4 games played, what does that really matter, right?). Their PK isn’t too hot, so if the Blues can draw some penalties, the game might be over before it ends. It’s a solid start for the team so far – let’s see if they can keep it up. — Scott is a contributing author for HockeyTracker.net. You can also find him at www.gigapunch.com, www.scottcharboneau.com, and on Twitter @scottcharboneauNews of a North Korean soldier’s survival after he suffered multiple gunshot wounds during his defection at the DMZ is being blasted into North Korea by way of high-decibel loudspeakers, according to South Korean media. 24-year-old surnamed Oh made a desperate escape into South Korea last week, first in a jeep and then on foot, his comrades right on his heels. Although he was shot five or six times, he made it into the South before collapsing in a pile of leaves. He was rescued by U.S. and South Korean troops, airlifted to Ajou University Hospital, and treated by renowned medical personnel. After multiple surgeries, complicated by parasites, diseases, and infection, the young man is awake and recovering. The broadcasts at the DMZ describe the latest defection, as well as the defector’s poor initial medical condition, in great detail. The broadcasts are part of a South Korean psyops campaign that absolutely infuriates the North Koreans, who fear the broadcasts will lead troops to defect. The “Voice of Freedom” broadcasts, as they are called, are played using a collection of four dozen speakers able to project sound about 12 miles into North Korea. South Korea resumed these provocative broadcasts after North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test in January of last year. The two North Korean soldiers who defected at the DMZ in June reportedly did so because they were influenced by the “Voice of Freedom” broadcasts at the border. The loudspeaker campaign, which is regularly used to send news into North Korea but often focuses on the blaring of Korean pop music, is believed to be quite effective, but there is still more that can be done to get information into the reclusive regime. “We don’t capitalize on our great weapon, which is information. That’s something they worry about a lot. Their reaction to the loudspeakers being activated along the DMZ or the dropping of leaflets by NGOs over North Korea, they go to nuts when that happens. So that is a great vulnerability I don’t think we’ve exploited,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in 2016. Follow Ryan on Twitter Send tips to ryan@ dailycallernewsfoundation.org. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.The Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee asked U.S. spy agencies late last year to reveal the names of U.S. individuals or organizations contained in classified intelligence on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, engaging in the same practice that President Trump has accused the Obama administration of abusing, current and former officials said. The chairman of the committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), has since cast the practice of “unmasking” of U.S. individuals and organizations mentioned in classified reports as an abuse of surveillance powers by the outgoing Obama administration. Trump has argued that investigators should focus their attention on former officials leaking names from intelligence reports, rather than whether the Kremlin coordinated its activities with the Trump campaign, an allegation he has denied. “The big story is the ‘unmasking and surveillance’ of people that took place during the Obama administration,” Trump tweeted Thursday. According to a tally by U.S. spy agencies, the House Intelligence Committee requested five to six unmaskings of U.S. organizations or individuals related to Trump or Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton between June 2016 and January 2017. Officials familiar with the matter said that the committee’s requests focused on the identities of U.S. organizations that had been hacked by the Russians in 2016. Officials declined to say how many of the requests came from Democrats vs. Republicans. The chairman of the committee wields enormous control over the actions of its members and requests for more information from intelligence agencies. Officials said that committee rules require the chairman to sign off on the requests, even ones that are not his own. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post) A spokesman for Republicans on Nunes’s committee declined to comment on whether the panel made any requests for unmasking. He added, “It is standard operating procedure for the House Intelligence Committee to forward all committee members’ questions from both parties to the appropriate agencies, whether or not they are answered. I refer you to committee Democrats for further questions on this subject.” Every day, U.S. intelligence agencies sweep up vast quantities of foreign communications. Sometimes, they pick up communications involving U.S
why it's also important to increase security at airports and other smuggling centers to "choke off poachers' profits, so people start looking elsewhere for another line of work." Ashe recently traveled to Africa to reinforce that point. Pending legislation would go further by stiffening the penalties for convicted wildlife traffickers, which conservationists say are currently too light. It would also improve information sharing between various agencies and step up enforcement resources. "We need to go after the people who are reaping the financial rewards of this poaching epidemic," Ashe added, in addition to the low-level poachers who actually pull the triggers. Those people include corrupt officials who look the other way, he said, and leaders of international crime syndicates. Learn more about the ivory crisis in the upcoming September cover story of National Geographic magazine by Bryan Christy.A person who went missing after the April 2011 tornado in Tuscaloosa has been found safe in Florida, police announced today. Release from the Tuscaloosa Police Department: "After the April 27, 2011 tornado struck Tuscaloosa, there were multiple people reported missing. Tuscaloosa Police investigators have worked many cases involving these missing people, and most were located. On November 19, 2015, investigators with the Tuscaloosa Police Department received information that one of the missing persons, Laurie Anne Macconnell, had been located in Florida. Investigators, working with other agencies such as the Broward County Sheriff's Office and the US Customs and Border Protection, made contact with Ms. Macconnell. An investigator with the Tuscaloosa Police Department was able to speak to Ms. Macconnell over the phone and verify that she was the person listed as missing, and she was in good health. There are still 3 other persons listed as missing in conjunction with the tornado. They are Latoya Brown, Teresa Marioquen (mother), and Teresa Marioquen (daughter). If anyone has any information on any of these missing persons, please contact the Tuscaloosa Police Department. "RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The N.C. Department of Transportation has come is bowing to the old-school motorist who prefers unfolding a large piece of paper to tapping on a cell phone. The agency has released the 2017-18 North Carolina State Transportation map. Maps are offered for free at welcome centers, rest areas and NCDOT offices across the state. They can also be ordered online or by phone. NCDOT says more than 1.75 million copies of the latest map have been printed. The map details more than 106,000 miles of public roadway that span the state. A news release from NCDOT notes that once the map is stored in a glove box or center console, or even used as a bookmark, it can be accessed regardless of the strength of a WiFi or cellular signal.A recently published study by Hunter College’s Center for HIV Educational Studies and Training (CHEST) found that 10% of men on Grindr have never gotten tested for HIV, though nearly a third of them still claim they’re negative. “When we first began looking at the data, we were surprised to find that 1 in 10 men on Grindr in NYC had never received an HIV test and we quickly realized we needed to look further into the issue,” said Jon Rendina, lead author of Patterns of Lifetime and Recent HIV Testing Among Men Who Have Sex with Men in New York City, which first appeared in this August’s online issue of AIDS and Behavior. According to the research, the proportion of older men getting tested for HIV was notably higher than that of younger men, with 1 in 5 young men who have sex with men (MSM) between the ages of 18-24 having never received an HIV test. Compared to the overall MSM population of NYC, a higher proportion of men on Grindr had never been tested for the disease — 10% of Grindr users versus 2.6% of all NYC MSM. Additional analyses revealed that one-third of those men who had never received an HIV test reported their HIV status as negative, which as Rendina points out, “may mean that men are sharing potentially inaccurate HIV status information with their partners on Grindr.” Furthermore, nearly one-third of the men who had never been tested also reported engaging in anal sex without a condom in the past three months. On the brighter side of things, half of all surveyed Grindr users had received an HIV test in the past six months, with over 70% of them having been tested in the past year. Only 52% of all MSM in NYC reported receiving an HIV-test in the past year. The data suggests that men who engage in risky sexual behavior have an awareness of increased risk for HIV infection and get tested more recently than men who practice safer sex. A higher proportion of younger men of color reported getting tested compared to other men in the sample, a product, Rendina says, of the effectiveness of community-based efforts to provide HIV testing to a population particularly susceptible to infection. The study concludes that social networking apps like Grindr can be used to promote the importance of HIV testing, thus aiding in future prevention efforts. “These findings suggest that some prevention messages — specifically that MSM that engage in unprotected sex should have more frequent HIV testing — are reaching the intended audience,” Rendina said. “It’s our hope that these data highlight the importance of embedding HIV testing and other prevention campaigns where men who have sex with men network, socialize, and express their sexuality, such as Grindr.”Do you believe some unexplained technology once roamed the Earth? Moreover, humanity lost this ancient knowledge by pointing to the pyramids in Egypt or glyphs engraved on the side of a mountain? On the other hand, perhaps this knowledge is hidden for a reason with only a few elites in the world aware of its potential. Keeping this sacred knowledge from humanity, fearful that the mass population will destroy themselves. Alternatively, more likely to prevent humanity from surpassing “them.” One truth is this we still are unable to build the Great Pyramid with our modern technology. Furthermore, an important concept to understand is technology prevents humanity from grasping ancient knowledge. Technology covers up knowledge until it is completely forgotten. Hidden proof that we must strip technology from our present understanding if we ever want to discover ancient knowledge. Most people would like to know what we lost. Well, humanity is in for a treat! Fringe Truth will begin to expose this sacred knowledge. How will anyone believe such nonsense? Honestly, we do not expect people to believe it. The reason we do not imagine anyone will believe it is simple; most people are conditioned not to believe it. Humanity must undergo a strategic change to come to grips with the physical and spiritual realms as co-operators. FAIR WARNING Fair warning to those who want to continue, we will test the very foundation of humanities belief system. It is time to choose a pill! Go back and delete the link or continue forward and be stunned. People will not look at the world the same! Cool, a free will choice to open to other possibilities. Let us begin with what appears to be a very simple topic like time. Something humanity takes for an established truth. Humanities’ current understanding of time is deterministic that is one causality event leads to another causality event. Like dominos falling one right after another. We measure these events regarding a second noting that we measure a subdivision of the second in tenths of a second. For example, the nanosecond is one billionth of a second. The larger values of the second are multiply by 60 for minutes, 60 again for an hour, 24 hours for a day, and so on. Therefore, we can perceive a second as a fragment of the rotation cycle of Earth. In 1956 the latter-day second was redefined regarding a year. The reason for this is Earth’s daily rotation is not constant. It speeds up and slows down. The Earth wobbles thru space and skips like a stone skipping on a water. Therefore a more desirable definition is useful. Consequently, the period of the Earth’s revolution around the Sun is more advantageous. We can calculate a uniform standard by the observed positions of the celestial bodies along with Newtonian dynamical theories of their motion. For that reason, the 1960 SI scientific second definition appears. Using the above-revealed method, we define a second as the fraction 1/31,556,925.9747 of a tropical year for 1900 at 12 hours ephemeris time. Noting that how people think a second as a fraction of a day is no longer valid. Merely the scientific term for the second is not a fraction of a day’s rotation but a calculated fraction of a year’s revolution. Do not freak out! The second did not change much, think of as the relative accuracy of the second became better. Instead of 1.000 +/-.001 of a second, we have an improved relative accuracy to 1.0000000 +/-. 00000001 of a second. The clock still measures time accurate enough not to be late for work. The scientific definition of the second takes another turn in the 1960’s. The definition of the second based on cesium microwave atomic clock, rather than the periodic revolution of the Earth around the Sun. After many years of analysis in 1967 the definition became as follows: The standard international (SI) definition of a second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atoms. Later in 1997, the definition refers to cesium at rest at a temperature of 0 K. The definition of the second become a fancy description for an atomic clock. The atomic clock is a technological advancement that eases the understanding that the second. The reason for the improvement is it more accessible to duplicate and calibrate sensitive equipment. It is important to note that the second does not change in duration, but each advancement in technology defines the second in relative accuracy. We are now looking at 1.000000000 +/-.0000000001 of a second. During the 1970’s space program it was realized that gravitational time dilation caused the second produced by each atomic clock to differ depending on its altitude. The uniform second define in a relativistic term as proper time produced by correcting the output of each atomic clock to the mean sea level. The result is the lengthening of second by about 1×10−10 or.0000000001 for things moving in space. Notice the Earthbound relationship at mean sea level. To improve our scientific knowledge, we develop the understanding that centers around Earth then project that understanding outward. Back to what brought us here Earth Knowledge versus Ancient Knowledge. Everything we know about the latter-day second depends on the relative position of Earth. There is nothing ancient or universal about the modern definition of the second. Time as humanity knows it is centered and bound to Earth. What is important is that all countries, disciplines of science, business, technology, and academia use the second to determine a predictable result of causality. Humanities’ comprehension of the second is subject to all viable knowledge. Time to burst your bubble. Consider the following! The latter-day second defines all of our knowledge. Pause to think! Everything!. Creation and evolution use measurement of time to determine when Earth began. When we peer into deep space, calculating the distances of the stars, galaxies, comets, all based on the latter-day second. Moreover, when we peer in the microscopic particles like germs, cell, atoms, and so on. All our human knowledge is dependent on the latter-day second. How far has humanity come, when we once believed that the sun rotated around the planet Earth? Joking to ourselves, how foolish we were then, believing everything is space rotates around us. Ignorant of the fact that science still holds the very same belief that is planet Earth is the center of all knowledge. Not realizing the paradoxical limits, we place on ourselves to improve understanding. It is simpler to accept alien intervention in the building of the pyramids than to admit the definition of the time is in error. HOW FAR DOES THE RABBIT HOLE GO? If you do not believe the Earth second is the center of all knowledge consider the definition of a meter or metre. In 1983 the modern meter is defined, as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second, notice the denominator is the speed of light. Does humanity not find it odd that the current modern definition of a meter is a fraction of the speed of light in seconds? The meter once defined as a subdivision of the polar circumference of Earth having a relative uncertainty of +/-.0001 meters. Now is a fraction of the speed of light having a relative uncertainty of /-.0000000001 meters. What are the odds that the speed of light just so happens to be a fraction of the circumference of Earth? Can anyone foresee the self-fulfilling fine-tuning approach that all knowledge derives from the rotation of the planet Earth? Moreover, any slight change eliminates the ability to have the life. If all knowledge centered around Earth then, of course, all life must thrive by the parameters set by Earth. The Goldilocks Zone is an excellent example of a rigged system. What projects as a habitable zone mirrors Earth fundamental knowledge, that Earth is the center of understanding? Like a self-fulfilling prophecy! Consider the brief history of the meter. As of 1983, the definition of the meter or meter is 1/299,792,458 of a second or 1/c of a second, where the denominator is known as the speed of light c, perplexing that the speed of light defines the meter moreover the meter as a fraction of time. The first attempt to define the meter began in 1668, where Wilkins proposed using Christopher Wren’s suggestion of defining the meter using a pendulum with a length which produced a half-period of one second, known as a ‘seconds pendulum.’ Christian Huygens had observed that length to be 38 Rijnland inches or 39.26 English inches. The equivalent of what is now known to be 997 mm (1000 mm defines a meter). Nonetheless, the point of interest is the understanding of the pendulum defines both time and length according to Earth’s gravitational force. The first accepted definition of the meter is a measurement of the Earth’s meridian. The first apparent attempt to define the meter took place in 1793 by Delambre and Méchain where they surveyed a one-half of the earth’s meridian that is a quarter of the earth’s circumference around the poles. What is perplexing is why divide by ten million kilometers and where did ten million kilometers originate. What is very important to note is that that ten million kilometers represent “physical” fractions of the planet Earth’s pole-to-pole circumference. Note that each improvement to the standard meter improves the relative uncertainty. The surveyed resulted in a +/-.0001 meters. The first prototype platinum bar has +/-.00001 relative uncertainty. Likewise in 1960, an effort to use the hyperfine atomic transition to measure the length of a meter corresponds to 1650763.73 wavelengths of light from a specified transition in Krypton-86 with a relative uncertainty of +/-.000000004 meters. Today we use the laser light to calibrate with a relative uncertainty of +/-.0000000001 meters. Amazing that the second and the meter both are bound to Earth, even more, noteworthy is the interrelationship between time and length over their development. Furthermore, most, if not all the physical constants and fundamental equations derived in science use the second and meter. Then these exact values are projected from Earth to all reaches of science. Here is the shocking truth. Earth is not the center of all knowledge. As a result, humanity needs to break away from traditional thinking; moreover, to solve ancient or universal knowledge problems, we must remove ourselves from Earth knowledge. We have learned that humanity is stuck using a static definition of the second and length to define all knowledge; as a consequence, humanity defines Earth is the center of all the knowledge and ignores true ancient and universal knowledge. Therefore, the first step to understanding the hidden knowledge is to redefine our concept of time and length moreover the second and meter. The ancient knowledge released in this blog is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. WHERE TO BEGIN? The most logical place to start is away from Earth. However, first, we need to understand the relationship between time and space. In other words the second and the meter. A “wiggle” in space and time is called a wave. Everything wiggles! Some things have infinitesimal wiggle; others have a very large wiggle but everything wiggles. People are wiggling now! The hidden truth is that there is no such thing as a straight line. We see straight lines all the time. It just appears straight to people because we are wiggling at the same rate the line is, so we see the illusion of a straight line. The Earth wiggles thru space – does it not? Yes! Therefore, Earth moves thru space, and we move along with it. Likewise, if a person is in a moving car everything inside of the car does not appear to move. The bag of grocery sits nicely – not moving unless we change direction or come to a sudden stop. If the Earth came to a sudden stop, people would discover that we are moving just like we ran into a wall. People would launch like a projectile. The concept is that everything is wiggling just because we do not see or feel it does not mean it is not happening. When people think of the word wiggle people in general think of rapid vibrations, this too is another illusion not all wiggles are rapid vibrations. Some wiggles are hundreds of kilometers in length, so large that if we were to travel along the wave, we would never notice the vibrations. When mass wiggles it is what we call energy. The energy of mass is multiplied by length multiplied by length again all divide by time multiplied by time again. Notice length (meter) and time (second) are required to define energy. Since everything wiggles, everything is energy! If it has mass, it wiggles in some ways and as a consequence defines energy. The point is this Earthly Knowledge defines all humanities understanding of energy. The energy that is outside of Earthly Knowledge is considered pseudoscience. The pseudo-science energy cannot exist because it falls outside the Earthly definition of the meter and second. Moreover, time and length do exist. It is that science does not acknowledge other forms of wiggles other than those of an Earthly nature. Are there other things that wiggle that we know we do not understand. YES! Gravity! Science knows it is there but have no clue where it comes from, how it works. All science knows it yup – gravity is there and here is how to Earthly measure it. Name another example – God! Science understands neither gravity or God. Universal Knowledge understands that both the physical and spiritual truths are cooperators! Since Earth is the center of all humanities knowledge neither can be fully understood, love radiates that is wiggles from a person, love is not defined in Earthly terms. Science considers this form of wiggling pseudoscience. Just as gravity science knows love exists but can not measure it, the reason is pure science is bound only to an Earthly understanding. Love is universal. One interesting note is that the Ancient Egyptians co-mingled religion and science. Moreover, they build the Great Pyramid. Something humanity is still unable to do to this day. What we are getting at is the current standard of measures for time and length are bound to Earth. Furthermore, we purpose there exist a universal standard of measures hidden from humanity. We show that the current standard of time and length are strictly bound to the natural formation of planet Earth. Meaning if Earth was larger or smaller the standard measure of a meter would be larger or smaller, the revolution of the Earth around the Sun was shorter or longer the definition of the second would be shorter or longer, merely the meter and time would scale differently. We would still call them the meter and second; however, at the atomic scale each would have a different value. For example, if the meter was longer meaning the earth’s diameter was slightly bigger. The 1960 definition of the meter would be something like the hyperfine atomic transition; 18600001.01 wavelengths of light instead of the current 1650763.73 from a specified transition in Krypton-86. Earthly Knowledge would still state the length as one meter. From another point of view, we can think of regarding a yard and meter. Both measure length, however, the meter is a measure of a fraction of the speed of light in seconds. Consider the origins of the yard. The yard expands on the physical characters of a human body, and it falls short to describe all of science. Now consider the origins of the meter it is based on the physical characters of the planet. Nonetheless, the meter falls short to describe the theory of everything, but it does move humanity forward. The second and meter nicely describe science as the Earth being the center of all knowledge. However, the difficulties humanity currently have restricts universal knowledge as we know. Humanity projects this knowledge in all directions from deep space, to the microscopic objects, from living and nonliving mass. We have a mission before us; how to define universal time and length. Therefore let us step into the unknown. Where to begin? The best place to start is on a different planet. Asking the question how would time and length be defined if it did not know of Earth’s second and meter. Consider if human life began on Mars instead of Earth. What would the standard length and time become? Let us mimic the same methods we used to discover the second and meter on Earth. In an attempt to understand universal measures. We begin with time. Earth’s sidereal day is 23h 56m and 4.0916s and the solar day is 24h 00m and 00.002s. Using Earthly Knowledge the Martian sidereal day is 24h 27m and 22.993s and the solar day is 24h 40m and 35.244s. SETTING UP THE PROBLEM What would the solar day be if Martian Knowledge was the center of all knowledge? We need to ask where did Earth’s solar day come from and why 24 hours. Then use the same method to solve for Martian day in hours. We see that solar day on Mars is close to the solar day on Earth. The most logical thing to do is split the Martian day into 24 hours. However, before we can do this, we must understand why Earth has 24 hours per day. Where did we come to an understanding that 24 hours per day is the correct dissimilation of an Earth day? If we know how we got 24 hours in a day, we could use the same principle to define how many hours in a day on Mars. Well, humanity would be surprised to find out that no one knows. Nothing experimentally in science dictates a 24 hour day. It is a “guess – by golly it worked” approach to time. Nothing concrete determines that an Earth day must be 24 hours. Nothing! We must go back – farther! Let us explain. Before the Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Sumerians time was an abstract concept. The belief was time did not exist! We cannot grab a hand full of time and show it to someone. Moreover, it was considered magic; nevertheless, if we contemplate the Ancient Egyptian perception of time as a divine element. Think about fire as an element and the process of discovery. Fire is something we can see. Time is invisible! Many movies show primate man freaking out over the concept of fire. Imagine how people thought of time. Moreover, the concept of time represented is a mystical concept deeply embedded in Ancient Egyptian spiritual beliefs, unlike today where science and religion are at odds. Today time controls most of our human activities, work, play, rest, and never-ending schedules dictate how we behave. One of those red pills or blue pill moments! Cutting to the chase, the 24 hour day is a derivative of Egyptian astrology. Decans appear to have provided the basis for the division of the day into 24 hours. What transpires is the Ancient Egyptians fused science, magic, and religion into an integrated spiritual beliefs system where geometry, astronomy, and philosophical orderliness motivated the need for a measure of time. Each system is having the direct influence on the acceptance of a 24 hour day. Therefore to develop a working clock for Mars, we will need to know the star maps that orbit the planet. Yes! When we use the 24 hour day, we practice astrology. Like we mentioned before technology masks the origin of knowledge. Briefly, the Ancient Egyptians integrated two systems: a daytime system consisting of a sundial for 10 hours of daylight, one hour for dusk another hour for dawn. Also, night time system consisting of astrology movement of stars called Decans which is a sidereal star clock. Neither system had equal length of time. Some hours where long and others short but advancements in technology like the water clock refined the hours to measure the same. The Ancient text the “Book of Nut” goes in detail the workings of the Decans, planets, moon, and stars. Decans became the measure of time, and Egyptian astrology became the foundation of a 24 hour day. Upsetting as it may be, the 24 hour day foundation stands on both science and religion as co-operators. OVERVIEW What we have learned thus far is that humanity at first based length on the structure of the human body; for example, the modern-day yard as its length. Then a standard leading-edge definition of the meter, where we use the planet as the foundation to measure length. Nonetheless, neither yard or meter is universal. In our pursuit of knowledge, we found that the 24 hour day; hence the definition of the second is founded in astrology. Technology masks the true origins of both the meter and second. In all cases, scientific knowledge is Earthly bound. What we need to ask ourselves now is what if Earth had a 20 hour day, 10 hour day, or 60 hour day? The reason is there a better system to measure time? A better system to measure wiggles? We must find a better system to measure energy. The odds are there is a better system but what is it? Alternatively, perhaps, find the stars maps for Mars to determine how many hours in a day would make sense. Then calculate and compare fundamental constants! Perhaps a scaling law that determines a planetary clock can be found. This blog page is an ongoing post and will be back with more details. All the Glory goes to God, in Jesus, the Christ nameFormerly owned by Jeff Stork Puff is arguably the finest surving and most celebrated Chevette Sandpiper in existance. He is an ultra rare Sandpiper edition, one of only about 2,000 produced. The Sandpiper featured a unique Cream Gold exterior color (the exact same color as 1977 Cadillac Naples Yellow) with a totally unique yellow interior featuring tri-toned reef cloth seats of yellow, cream and gold. The entire interior is color matched in yellow, including headliner, carpets, door trim, and even seatbelts. It's a wild explosion of 70's color. Puff has led a charmed life. He was purchased new at Lange and Runkel Chevrolet of Redlands, CA on 10/15/76 by Mrs. Lillian Paul of Yucaipa. She loved Puff and kept him garaged with his seats wrapped in plastic. When she stopped driving, her daughter Arlene Hudson of Yosemite took the car because she liked it so much. He remained garaged and low mileage. Jeff acquired the car from Mrs. Hudson in the summer of 2000 with just over 48,000 miles. He gave him a thorough detailing and new whitewall radials and did brakes and exhaust work. He is head and shoulders above any other Chevette Jeff had ever seen. Ed aquired the car from Jeff in 2004. Puff is a lordly little car. He is in superior original condition and draws tons of attention. He never fails to win an award whenever he is shown. In addition, he and Jeff have been on CNN together discussing the phenomenon of the Nerd Car. The proudest moment was Good Friday, 2002, when they were featured on the Lifestyle section of USA Today. The Nerd Car is hot, and Puff is the Class President. He's also extrememly loaded, even for a Chevette. Sandpiper Decor, Custom Exterior, Bumper Rub Strips, Body Side Moldings, Swing Out Windows, 1.6 Liter, Air Conditioning, Automatic, AM/FM Radio, Rear Seat Speaker, Deluxe Belts, and Whitewall Radials with Trim Rings. And he's 100% stock and untouched. Original manuals and warranty. "Puff" was Jeff's second Sandpiper having owned one for his first car(photo below).Story highlights Eleven people still in custody in the UK regarding the investigation Police have seized a car they believe could be a vital clue (CNN) Police arrested a 24-year-old man Friday night in southern Manchester, part of the investigation into last week's suicide bombing that killed 22 people at a Ariana Grande concert in the northern English city. The man was taken into custody on "suspicion of (offenses) contrary to the terrorism act," the Greater Manchester Police said Saturday on Twitter. Latest update pic.twitter.com/YNZPv98aDH — G M Police (@gmpolice) June 3, 2017 Police said 17 people have been arrested in connection with the investigation. Six people, including two cousins of attacker Salman Abedi, have been released without charge. Eleven men remain in custody for questioning. JUST WATCHED Manchester bomber's cousins want answers Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Manchester bomber's cousins want answers 01:54 On Friday police located a white Nissan Micra in a car park of a block of apartments in the Rusholme area of Manchester that they believe could point to Abedi's whereabouts between May 18 and 22 in the lead-up to the bombing at the pop concert. "This is potentially a significant development in the investigation," Detective Chief Superintendent Russ Jackson said in a statement.A new state-of-the-art headband is being developed by Tufts University scientists that could help facilitate communication between the human brain and computers. The new technology – currently being crafted at the university’s Human Computer Interaction Lab – would be capable of scanning an individual’s brain activity, determining whether the person is mentally aware enough to handle the task at hand, fatigued, or even bored with what they’re doing. According to the Boston Globe, this brain-scanning technology could potentially help humans perform a number of tasks, ranging from simple processes such as recommending movies based on individual reaction to important jobs in air traffic control. As the newspaper noted, the computer could learn “the precise moment an air traffic controller approaches mental overload, and [automatically] reassign some of his responsibilities to a fresher colleague.” The headband does this by utilizing technology called functional infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which scans the amount of light being absorbed by the brain. In this way, the headband doesn’t exactly read thoughts, but since the amount of light absorbed by the brain is linked to the amount of brainpower it’s using, the device can gauge fatigue levels effectively through this measurement. During a test run by Tufts researchers, one graduate student could manage between four and seven airplanes during a simulation, with the headband ensuring his mind wasn’t overexerted at any point in time. If ultimately successful, computer scientist Robert Jacob and biomedical engineer Sergio Fantini hope to embed the tech in wearable products, such as Google Glass, and pave the way towards a future in which humans communicate with computers through thoughts and not tactile commands. “Computers have gotten phenomenally better in the last 50 years — faster, more powerful — and humans haven’t,” Jacob told the Globe. “The bottleneck is now with the human, not the computer. So it’s important to put resources into communicating better with computers.” “We’re basic researchers,” he added. “It would be delightful if these things do filter into the world, but I’d like to believe that’s not our mission. Our mission is to invent new scientific ideas and spread them, and hope they are useful to someone.” Jacob’s team isn’t the only group looking into brain scanning technology, though. As RT reported last year, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announce it will invest $70 million to develop a new implant capable of tracking and responding to brain signals in real time. The project, called "Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies” (SUBNETS), is aimed at treating and analyzing mental disorders as they flare up in the mind. By creating an implant that can record the effectiveness of medical treatments as they’re administered, the implant could open up new avenues of treatment for patients.Suzan Fraser, The Associated Press ANKARA, Turkey -- Nearly simultaneous explosions targeted a Turkish peace rally Saturday in Ankara, killing at least 95 people and wounding hundreds in Turkey's deadliest attack in years -- one that threatens to inflame the nation's ethnic tensions. There was no immediate claim of responsibility but Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said there were "strong signs" that the two explosions -- which struck 50 metres (yards) apart just after 10 a.m. -- were suicide bombings. He suggested that Kurdish rebels or Islamic State group militants were to blame. The two explosions occurred seconds apart outside the capital's main train station as hundreds of opposition supporters and Kurdish activists gathered for the peace rally organized by Turkey's public workers' union and other groups. The protesters planned to call for increased democracy in Turkey and an end to the renewed violence between Kurdish rebels and Turkish security forces. The attacks Saturday came at a tense time for Turkey, a NATO member that borders war-torn Syria, hosts more refugees than any other nation in the world and has seen renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels that has left hundreds dead in the last few months. Many people at the rally had been anticipating that the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, would declare a temporary cease-fire -- which it did hours after the bombing -- to ensure that Turkey's Nov. 1 election would be held in a safe environment. Television footage from Turkey's Dogan news agency showed a line of protesters Saturday near Ankara's train station, chanting and performing a traditional dance with their hands locked when a large explosion went off behind them. An Associated Press photographer saw several bodies covered with bloodied flags and banners that demonstrators had brought for the rally. "There was a massacre in the middle of Ankara," said Lami Ozgen, head of the Confederation of Public Sector Trade Unions, or KESK. The state-run Anadolu Agency said the attacks were carried out with TNT explosives fortified with metal ball-bearings. Turkey's government late Saturday raised the death toll in the twin bomb blasts to 95 people killed, 248 wounded. It said 48 of the wounded were in serious condition. Selcuk Atalay of the Turkish Medical Association's Ankara branch put the death toll at at least 97 and feared the toll could rise even higher, since several of the wounded were in serious condition with burns. "This massacre targeting a pro-Kurdish but mostly Turkish crowd could flame ethnic tensions in Turkey," said Soner Cagaptay, an analyst at the Washington Institute. Cagaptay said the attack could be the work of groups "hoping to induce the PKK, or its more radical youth elements, to continue fighting Turkey," adding that the Islamic State group would benefit most from the full-blown Turkey-PKK conflict. "(That) development could make ISIS a secondary concern in the eyes of many Turks to the PKK," Cagaptay said in emailed comments, using another acronym for IS militants. Small anti-government protests broke out at the scene of the explosions and outside Ankara hospitals as Interior Minister Selami Altinok visited the wounded. Some demonstrators chanted "Murderer Erdogan!" -- referring to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom many accuse of increasing tensions with Kurds to profit at the ballot box in November. Erdogan denies the accusations. Later Saturday, thousands gathered near Istanbul's main square denouncing the attacks and also holding the government responsible. The Turkish government imposed a temporary news blackout covering images that showed the moment of the blasts, gruesome or bloody pictures or "images that create a feeling of panic." A spokesman warned media organizations they could face a "full blackout" if they did not comply. Many people reported being unable to access Twitter and other social media websites for several hours after the blasts. It was not clear if authorities had blocked access to the websites, but Turkey often does impose blackouts following attacks. At a news conference, Davutoglu declared a three-day official mourning period for the blast victims and said Turkey had been warned about groups aiming to destabilize the country. "For some time, we have been receiving intelligence information based from some (Kurdish rebel) and Daesh statements that certain suicide attackers would be sent to Turkey... and that through these attackers chaos would be created in Turkey," Davutoglu told reporters, using the IS group's Arabic acronym. "The (Kurdish rebels) or Daesh could emerge (as culprits) of today's terror event," Davutoglu said, promising that those behind the attacks would be caught and punished. Davutoglu said authorities had detained at least two suspected would-be suicide bombers in the past three days in Ankara and Istanbul. Authorities had been on alert after Turkey agreed to take a more active role in the U.S.-led battle against the Islamic State group. Turkey opened up its bases to U.S. aircraft to launch air raids on the extremist group in Syria and carried out a limited number of strikes on the group itself. Russia has also entered the fray on behalf of the Syrian government recently, bombing sites in Syria and reportedly violating Turkish airspace a few times in the past week. On a separate front, the fighting between Turkish forces and Kurdish rebels flared anew in July, killing at least 150 police and soldiers and hundreds of PKK rebels since then. Turkish jets have also carried out numerous deadly airstrikes on Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq. Erdogan condemned Saturday's attacks, which he said targeted the country's unity, called for solidarity and cancelled a planned visit Monday to Turkmenistan. "The greatest and most meaningful response to this attack is the solidarity and determination we will show against it," Erdogan said. President Barack Obama offered condolences to Erdogan in a phone call Saturday. The White House said in a statement that Obama affirmed that the U.S. will stand with Turkey in the fight against terrorism. Critics have accused Erdogan of re-igniting the fighting with the Kurds to seek electoral gains -- hoping that the turmoil would rally voters back to the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP. Electoral gains by the country's pro-Kurdish party caused the AKP, founded by Erdogan, to lose its parliamentary majority in a June election after a decade of single-party rule.
, the practice wherein brewing companies or virtual breweries rent space from larger facilities to make their beer. Given the constraints of the 800 words I was alotted, there was much I did not have time to dig in on and so the final piece was something of an overview of the practice, with some brief discussion of why it might be growing in popularity–especially in Ontario–with some insight from a business owner, Shehan De Silva of Lost Craft Beer, who has had success with this model, and from a bricks and mortar brewery owner, Jason Fisher of the Indie Ale House, who is generally opposed to this model for what he feels it brings (or doesn’t) to the industry as a whole. The article was intentionally targeted at the Globe and Mail’s “general audience” and so much of the beer geekery I might have dug in on was omitted. Accordingly the responses from beer industry folks on twitter, Facebook, and my email were passionate and varied. Interestingly, the article seemed to simply confirm everyone’s beliefs no matter which side of the argument you might be on. Both virtual brewers and bricks and mortar brewers have reached out to me in the interim to say I had represented their side well (Not to toot my own horn, but beep fucking beep). Also of interest, one owner of a contract brewing facility says he was subsequently inundated with calls from interested new brewing companies. Er, sorry / you’re welcome, Ontario? Anyway, here are some mostly random tidbits I had hoped to include but couldn’t. 1. Consumers don’t care Up and coming beer writer Stephen Beaumont used my piece as an occasion to raise one of the points I was hoping might come up when he wrote something for TAPS on Friday posing the question “Who cares about contract brewing?” (spoiler alert: Probably just brewers). One of the points I had hoped to make by talking about how much contract brewing is growing in Ontario was that, while the stout sniffing cognoscenti and the people who own breweries make much ado about where their beer is made, it is mostly irreleveant to the people who actually buy the damn beer. Which is not to dismiss the whole argument about what this means to the industry as mere naval gazing, but simply to once again remind folks, like Beaumont did, of that oft overlooked voice in this industry: the average consumer. As an extension of that point, I don’t think Shehan and others like him ought to be criticized so much for making “approachable beer.” When we talked, Shehan essentially said he wanted to bring more people into craft beer. “The main criticism [about craft beer] that I heard from my demographic,” he told me “which was admittedly Bay Street [Shehan left a career in finance to persue a career in beer], was ‘we’d love to support craft beer but there are two reasons we don’t. Number one, the beer is unapproachable and number two, I don’t want a lion jumping out of an airplane on a battleship on the can in my hand.” Now, Jason Fisher makes good points in my article about “approachable beer” not moving the craft beer needle forward, but I don’t think it’s fair to fault a guy like Shehan for trying to design a product that will sell. Shehan made a well-designed can and filled it with a crowd-pleasing (and now award-winning) beer. Consumers responded, and his sales numbers prove that if you’re providing a product people like, they don’t really give a shit that the company’s owner pays someone to make the beer in East York and Scarborough. 2. Contract Brewing is not the much-mythologized stepping stone to owning your own brewery that it’s often portrayed as It’s a fairly oft-repeated claim that new brewing companies lease space in the early days of their business simply to build up funds for a bricks and mortar location. This is roughly 90% bullshit. The margins for contract brewers are razor thin and I honestly don’t understand how half of them are still in business. For many contract brewers, like the kind Jason Fisher is likely railing against in my Globe piece, the idea of owning a “brewery” is a vanity project. There are many people who just like to say “I own a brewery.” Hogtown Brewing Co., for example, was started by nine finance guys who played rugby together. I interviewed them early on in my beer writing career and they confessed to starting the brand with “play money.” That company has since been sold off. They, and others like them, had no designs on building a brewery. Furthermore, given those thin margins, it’s often just not economically possible to “save up” for a brewery by contracting. Unless you are working your ass off to push beer, contract brewing is a very, very tough model to make money off. Aside from Shehan, there are only a couple brewing companies of this province’s 69 that I could say for certain are making money. They are making some dough because they bust their asses and push volume–and even they recognize this model isn’t ideal. “As well as we’ve done,” Shehan told me, “the contract model doesn’t really work based on our volumes so we are looking for space. We were just in deep negotiations to take over Mill Street’s old space but that didn’t work out.” Shehan and others like him who are committed to building their brand are currently shopping for bricks and mortars places of their own because they realize contracting actually isn’t a money maker and don’t want to give away money any more to other people who are making their beer. The thing that contract brewing CAN do for people who want an actual brewery someday is show investors that you have run a successful company and have an established brand. Mark and Mandie Murphy of Toronto’s Left Field Brewery, for example, used their hard-earned brand awareness from contract brewing to get loans to finance their east end brewery. Kensington Brewing Company, that other contract-to-bricks “success story,” actually dithered for years contracting until only recently bringing in investors to make the final push to finish their brewery. The guys who have gone from contract to bricks are the exception, not the standard. 4. Many bricks and mortar brewers use ‘contract brewing’ to brew their flagship beers in volume elsewhere to free up tank space Lots of people own breweries or brewpubs and also brew large volumes of their beer at other people’s facilities. Toronto’s Junction Craft Brewing currently does it for their Conducters Craft Ale, Duggan’s still brews volume somewhere other than their Parkdale brew pub, etc. It’s a perfectly acceptable–and, really, wholly logical–concept that one might brew one’s so-called “rent beers” in large volume at another brewery so that one’s small batch brewpub or brewery has more capacity for experimental stuff. Andrew Harris, the CEO of Factory Brewing in BC whom I also interviewed for this piece, is actually mostly hoping to court this kind of business. Only one of his future customers were so-called virtual breweries at the time of my writing and the rest were bricks and mortars places simply looking to free up tank space. There seems to be a weird distinction that it’s “OK” to brew most of your beer in someone else’s brewery so long as you own a brewery somewhere, but if you don’t own a brewery, this practice is scorn-worthy. 5. Shehan De Silva is not representative of all contract brewing companies and Jason Fisher is not representative of all bricks and mortar brewery owners While I used these two guys to speak to both sides of the argument for probably obvious reasons — Shehan ranks among the more successful and dedicated virtual brewery owners in Ontario and Jason is (as always) very vocal about his objections to contracting in favour of “real” breweries–they clearly don’t actually speak for the entirety of their respective segments. Indeed, for beer nerds reading this post and the Globe piece last week, this is really the main point I’d like to make. I’ve seen that it’s become de riguer to pile on “contract brewers” and paint them all with the proverbial “Ace Hill” brush as a bunch of non-beer-people marketers, and I realized it wasn’t a fair take. There are, unquestionably, a shit ton of opportunistic folks in Ontario craft beer these days and contract brewing does seem to be their preferred method of entry. I’ve seen my fair share of them too. But I’ve also seen Shehan’s success due to his own hard work and I’ve had lengthy conversations with guys like Graham Woodhouse and realized that there are hard-working, passionate “beer people” in this province who own virtual breweries too. It’s not fair to assume they’re all cut from the same cloth. On the flipside, let’s be honest, there are bricks and mortar craft brewery owners who do not give much of a shit about what their beer tastes like and are simply worried about marketing and their own bottom line. It’s likewise not productive or realistic to paint bricks and mortar brewers all as hardworking artisans toiling to advance the industry as a whole. And so, much like my Globe and Mail piece, while I don’t think this blog post will do much to sway anyone who feels strongly about contract brewing one way or the other, for me, it ultimately it just comes down to this: First, is the business in question making good beer and secondly, is that company being honest with its consumers about the business and the way their beer is produced.NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Swiss franc rallied hard against the euro and the U.S. dollar on Wednesday, as increased tensions between the United States and North Korea led investors to look for assets deemed as less risky. The new 50 Swiss Franc note is seen at a market stall after its release by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) in Bern, Switzerland April 12, 2016. REUTERS/Ruben Sprich/File Photo The Swiss franc was on pace for one of the largest single-day jumps against the euro since the Swiss National Bank removed its cap on the currency in January 2015. The greenback was down 1.1 against the franc, its worst drop in more than six weeks. The dollar also slipped 0.26 percent lower against the yen to 110.01 yen. The Swiss and Japanese currencies are often sought in times of geopolitical tension partly because the countries have big current account surpluses. Japan is the world’s biggest creditor nation and there is an assumption investors there will repatriate funds should a crisis eventuate. “Obviously we are looking at the increased tensions between the U.S. and North Korea,” said Brad Bechtel, managing director FX at Jefferies in New York. North Korea said on Wednesday it is “carefully examining” plans for a missile strike on the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump told the North that any threat it presented to the United States would be met with “fire and fury”. “It’s just a classic risk-off day,” said Greg Anderson, global head of foreign exchange strategy at BMO Capital Markets in New York. Weaker U.S. Treasury yields also helped the yen, boosting its appeal relative to the greenback. U.S. Treasury yields fell on Wednesday, with yields on the benchmark 10-year note hitting a six-week low, as investors reached for safe-haven assets such as government debt. The dollar index.DXY, which tracks the greenback against six rival currencies, was down 0.12 percent to 93.53, after rising as high as 93.888 earlier in the session. Most Asian currencies stumbled, with the Korean won KRW= on pace for its biggest fall in nearly eight weeks. Worries about increased U.S.-North Korea tension also weighed on the Canadian dollar, which weakened against its U.S. counterpart, despite higher oil prices and stronger-than-expected domestic housing data. Sterling was little changed at $1.3 and near a 2-1/2-week low, as investors looked to key data due next week for clues on the health of the British economy as the country prepares to leave the European Union.(Click to enlarge) Shortly after posting this on my own site, a reader emailed me asking if I was saying that I wanted the US to bomb Syria. But this cartoon isn't really about what we should do. I don't have any good answers. What I find fascinating about this whole situation is how different our reaction was ten years ago to the idea of chemical weapons in the hands of a brutal dictator. In that case, of course, Americans had been knowingly misled to think Iraq had some connection to 9/11. Much of our nonchalance about Syria is clearly a reaction to the debacle of Iraq. But I can't help wishing more of the skepticism and prudence people are exhibiting now (including many politicians who were gung-ho on attacking Iraq) had been around in 2003, when those of us who voiced such skepticism were pilloried. Adding: In response to readers who ask why I am mocking the characters "exhibiting prudence" in the 2013 column -- I'm only really mocking the last one for his disinterest. Some people may have learned a lesson from Iraq, but I believe many are being reactionary (such as Republicans who oppose Obama no matter what he does). I also think Iraq should not cause us to ignore the humanitarian crisis in Syria, although it is not clear to me how to best address it. Moreover, anyone who does not remember the Bush administration's conflation of 9/11 and Iraq was either in short pants at the time, or severely not paying attention. Get a signed print of this cartoon from the artist; follow Jen on Twitter at @JenSorensenIn the beginning, when darkness covered the Earth, there was the bagel. It was covered in sesame seeds or poppy seeds. Bagels were known as black or white. They were good. In Montreal, which refined and defined the bagel (which came from Eastern Europe), we would argue endlessly over the merits of each. Like most mysteries of the universe, there was no answer. So, as Jews, we would eat. That meant cutting the bagel in half – which is what you do with a bagel, before smearing it with butter or cream cheese – and analyzing its form, taste and texture, all with Talmudic precision. This wasn’t as effective in finding the truth as cutting the baby in half, which is how King Solomon determined the real mother when two women each claimed it was hers. But it was less trouble. We did know that getting dark poppy seeds between your teeth was disgusting on a first date, which often included a late-night visit to one of the two hallowed temples of bagels, St-Viateur Bagel and Fairmount Bagel. For Jews, then, the bagel was a talisman. It was ours. Gentiles had white bread and Velveeta; we had bagels and lox. At home our bagels came from Pinky, a florid-faced man with a gap between his teeth behind the counter at Richstone Bakery on Queen Mary Road. Around Christmas, we sang its cheeky jingle: “Hark the herald angels sing/Glory to the New Bun King!” All this was before the Age of Cultural Appropriation. It was before a social justice warrior could shut down yoga class at the University of Ottawa. Or a fashion house in London could borrow an ancestral aboriginal design and suffer a storm of criticism for not immediately acknowledging it. The bagel isn’t Jewish anymore. It is no longer our one-holed manna from Heaven. Others have taken it, changed it, adopted it, assaulted it. This isn’t appropriation, it’s desecration. The bagel of my childhood now comes in too many varieties: multi-grain, cinnamon and raison, flax, rosemary and salt, whole wheat and “all-dressed”, which sounds like a hot dog in the Montreal Pool Room. They come in caraway seed, chocolate chips, pumpernickel and onion. Astonishingly, Fairmount offers such bagels as “New York style pretzel”, “matzoh bread” and “the bozo”, three bagels twisted into one. The worst is Mueslix, as if the bagel were now an alpine delight. It gets worse. There are bagel chips and mini-bagels, the sliders of the bagel world. You see them in cafes, in supermarkets and restaurants. Let’s see this for what it is: cultural theft. But where are the social justice warriors? Where is the safe space? Where is “the trigger mechanism” and warnings for innocents of Hebraic persuasion accosted by a doughy impostor on the breakfast buffet at the Hampton Inn? It isn’t just bagels. Smoked meat – the kind I knew as a child in Montreal at Schwartz’s or Manny’s – has also travelled far from its roots. Like the bagel, it hasn’t travelled well. What Caplansky’s in Toronto presents on a sandwich and what Coorsh offers in a vacuum-sealed bag to be boiled in water bear no earthly resemblance to smoked meat. And when Americans confidently declare their lowly pastrami or corned beef is smoked meat, well, you know it’s over. Did anyone stand up for the smoked meat? Did anyone launch an action to reclaim our cultural property, like the Elgin Marbles? It’s the same with the Chai and the Star of David, which turn up on tattoos and costume jewelry in markets from Lima to Istanbul. Or the English language, which is full of Yiddish words, usually insults, from “schmuck” to “schlepper” to “nebbish.” The Jews offered all of this to the world and the world grabbed it. No one accused anyone of cultural genocide. No one offered us apology. No one marched to take back the bagel. So, from one appropriated people to another: get over it. Having your food eaten, your language spoken and your symbols copied is imitation, not appropriation. It’s flattering. Take it from us. Andrew Cohen is author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours that Made History. Email: andrewzcohen@yahoo.caBy Keith Mansur After nearly two years of tax collecting on marijuana sales by the state of Oregon, they have finally started to disburse some of the revenue to the cities and agencies that are earmarked to receive the funds. A whopping $85 million will begin going out to the different agencies immediately and state officials said Friday that they should have the distributions completed by October 11th. Over the past 20 months Oregon and local municipalities collected over 106 million in taxes, of which $9.53 million was distributed to the Oregon Liquor Control Commission to reimburse them for expenses they have already incurred while setting up the program and hiring new staff. Local jurisdictions have already been receiving their local tax money each quarter, which comprised $14 million of the total tax money raised. The balance of $85 million will now be dispensed to the different state agencies that were designated to be paid. How the disbursement breaks down: State School Fund = $34 million (40%) Mental Health, Alcoholism, and Drug Services Account = $17 million (20%) Oregon State Police = $12.75 million (15%) Oregon Health Authority = $4.25 million (5%) Cities and counties = $17 million (20% … 10% for each) Most distributions are straight forward, but that’s not the case for cities and counties that are receiving a portion of the state tax that has been imposed. Before July 1, 2017, the cities and counties portion was broken down strictly by population. After July 1st, the formula changed to include other factors beyond population. Only cities that allow ALL the cannabis license types will receive a portion of the 10%. Of the eligible cities, the revenue will be divided based on population (75 percent) and their cities total of the states licensed cannabis businesses (25 percent). County disbursements are also complicated. Half of their portion will be based on total available canopy in the county, and the other half based on their cannabis wholesale, retail, and processor license count. The counties that opted out of cannabis grow licenses are ineligible for the grow canopy portion and counties that opt out of the other licenses will be ineligible for that portion. The cities and counties have been especially anxious to get the funds since almost every jurisdiction is struggling financially. Many were asking last year what was going on with the disbursements, and it was blamed on a rule that required the OLCC to be reimbursed for their expenses before any tax distributions could be made. Why it took so long to pay the OLCC is not clear, but now that they have been reimbursed, the cash should begin to flow to the agencies and municipalities that are waiting for the funds. For more information on the tax revenue, visit www.oregon.gov/dor/marijuana or contact the Department of Revenue’s Marijuana Tax Program at (503) 947-2597 or you can email them at email at marijuanatax.dor@oregon.gov. For licensing information on the adult use market licensing, visit the Oregon Liquor Control Commission’s (OLCC) website at www.oregon.gov/olcc/marijuana. © 2017 Oregon Cannabis Connection. All rights reserved.While on The Howard Stern Show Tuesday, Sally Field was surprisingly honest about her experience playing Aunt May in The Amazing Spider-Man. After being asked by Stern if she “didn’t like that movie,” Field admitted that she wasn’t a huge fan and explained that she took the role to collaborate a final time with her friend, producer Laura Ziskin (Ziskin died from breast cancer in 2011, a few months after filming on The Amazing Spider-Man ended). Here’s a transcript, via Vulture: It’s not my kind of movie. But my friend Laura Ziskin was the producer, and we knew it would be her last film, and she was my first producing partner, and she was a spectacular human.” [Ziskin died in 2011.] Stern asked how much thought Field put into the character. “Not a great deal. […] It’s really hard to find a three-dimensional character in it, and you work it as much as you can, but you can’t put ten pounds of sh*t in a five-pound bag. If you listen to the full clip above, Fields goes on to say that she did love working with Andrew Garfield, and Stern likens the Aunt May part to the thankless, just-there-to-provide-emotional-support-for-the-male-hero role often fulfilled by a wife character in movies. It’s interesting to hear a little bit about what was going on behind the scenes for Fields on The Amazing Spider-Man, and it’s a shame that she didn’t feel more emotionally fulfilled by the role. It’s absolutely possible for Aunt May to be written as more than Peter’s long-suffering support system, and, with Marvel’s surprising casting of Marissa Tomei as Aunt May, I’ll be very curious to see if the next Spider-Man film avoids that trap. (via Uproxx) —Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.— Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?“I was hunting for fishies!” a four-year-old Clive Palmer said, as he was coaxed back through the porthole, having climbed out onto a thin ledge running around the Dutch freighter on which the Palmer family were travelling. Having resisted attempts by the crew to haul him in (“You get away from me!”), Clive had finally been persuaded by his mother that he had something on his back. Decades later, the anecdote, printed at the time in the Women’s Weekly, resurfaced and was passed around, to general amazement. For many it captured young Palmer: bumptious, foolish, easily distracted, lacking common sense. Simultaneously, there was another story being told, as Hedley Thomas’s investigations into Palmer’s mining interests continued their remorseless advance. Palmer was a shonk, a flim-flam guy. There was no shortage of corroborating evidence for that view. By 2008, Palmer’s involvement with the Queensland National and Liberal parties had become all-embracing, with a donation of nearly half a million dollars, and an emergency donation of $100,000 given to the Liberals to save them from bankruptcy. When the Nationals finally absorbed the Liberals and became the LNP, Palmer was accused of having bought a party. To anyone who had been following the LNP’s internal feudings – which was not many, outside Queensland – the motives for Palmer’s launch into brand-name politics were obvious. Having failed to split the LNP and form a new party with sitting members, he was entering federal parliament as a pincer movement against Campbell Newman – an accusation borne out by his subsequent success in having the Senate launch an inquiry into the Queensland government. Others suggested that it was only ever about getting the Galilee Basin project moving by any means necessary. Still yet a third interpretation was that Clive had gone a bit mad, and that this massive political endeavour was him off on a frolic of his own. By the time these three explanations had travelled a distance, intertwining and coming apart again, I’d spent a few months watching Clive in action, reading his backstory, trying to think ahead of his latest stunt. Increasingly, I began to wonder if we were seeing the same person. Whatever and whoever Clive Palmer was, he wasn’t a simple man, and his desires were not easily interpretable, even to himself. His standing up for the common folk was not always principled, naturally, but his apparent venality was not always selfish. If he was building a populist outfit to win over old culturally right-wing Labor voters and “cut the crap” Liberal ones, he was going about it in a pretty bloody funny way, standing next to Al Gore and taking on a greenish hue, thus pissing off Queensland Laborites, while holding the line against Hockey’s fiscally conservative, punishing budget. Who is Clive Palmer? He’s a man so utterly a creation of the Gold Coast that you can smell the coconut oil and sand on him, but he’s also an observant Catholic whose public statements have the timbre of religious tradition about them. He’s a man who wanted to be a lawyer and a stable man of the establishment, but found that his truer nature as a natural-born salesman and wheeler-dealer would win out in the end. He’s a long-time associate of the Queensland LNP, an outfit that was an enabler of racist brutality for decades, yet he wrote a poem lamenting the murder of Steve Biko. ‘Palmer’s conflicting tendencies are held together with a tad less calm integration than he would wish for.’ Photograph: Mike Bowers He’s a relentless builder of empires, however flimsy, whose life appears to have been genuinely influenced by the countercultural currents of the 1960s. He’s a man who speaks of a love revolution, then sues everybody. He contains multitudes, which explains the amplitude and the waddle. These conflicting tendencies are held together with a tad less calm integration than he would wish for, of which more in a bit, but for the moment it is worth considering that the politics of Clive Palmer, whatever personal vendettas and agendas may be being exercised through them, are exactly what they claim to be: a mildly centre-right politics, grounded in Australian Catholic traditions and social movement doctrine, and tracing their lineage back to the party whose name he wanted to adopt, the United Australia Party. In this respect, Palmer’s objective politics tap into his personal history – his father’s friendship with, and role as informal advisor to, Catholic centrist politician Joe Lyons, and his mother’s commitment to, and communication of, a serious Catholicism, with its notion of service in the world. Palmer’s first way of bearing witness to that commitment was in a relatively fraught and ostentatious form, as part of the aggressive Right to Life campaigns of the early 1970s, a movement he now leaves off his CV. It’s an embarrassing item, to be sure, but perhaps he is also genuinely ashamed of Right to Life’s merciless and persecutory style; he has continued to play up his involvement in Pregnancy Now, and his departure when it began to drift into a pure anti-abortion mode. The policies that Palmer urges now – which oppose harsh budgeting that targets the poor, which see the state, capital and labour as engaged in a triple partnership, which reflect a belief that further privatisations would be a betrayal of our common holdings, and take a Keynesian and demand-driven attitude to deficit and public debt – these are nothing other than the centre-right politics that determined the position of the non-Labor parties from the formation of the UAP in 1931, and carried right through, including into much of the Howard/Costello era. Indeed, this long period was bookended by two similar events: the Nationalists’ attempt to kill the arbitration system in the late 1920s, and the subsequent election of the Scullin government in 1929; and John Howard’s hubristic introduction of WorkChoices in 2005, and his subsequent election loss at the height of a boom. Because the arbitration system and the Harvester judgment that inaugurated it took their moral language from Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical that sparked off the Catholic social movements, we can say that it is this doctrine, and its secular variants, that sits at the very centre of Australian political values, and major parties depart too far from it at their peril. It consists not merely of a set of social rules, but of an idea of what it is to be human, an idea of depth, and of selfhood as achieved in the exercise of mutual obligation. Such a doctrine, drawing also from nineteenth-century social liberalism and classical and Christian notions of freedom as flourishing within communal life, is a world away from the atomised and content-less self of classical liberal doctrine, and the neoliberal political-economic movement that derives from it. Part of Tony Abbott’s success in the 2013 election was because he feinted towards that doctrinal ideal, and made an explicit compact with the voter that he would maintain the social policies that expressed such notions of collectivity – indeed, that he would execute them better than the chaotic Labor Party. Many of Abbott’s difficulties in the first half of 2014 arose not only because he lied about his intentions, but because this lie embodied an attack on the very foundations of our collective life, as expressed in Medicare and other measures. Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘To ask what it is that a political figure believes him or herself to be is not to take that belief as true.’ Bernie Fraser, Greg Hunt and Clive Palmer, 2014. Photograph: Mike Bowers Palmer has been completely consistent in doing what he said he’d do – vote to abolish the carbon and mining taxes – and completely in accord with his stated beliefs in developing a set of policies in response to the surprise budget. For six months he has said he and his party would not agree to the Medicare co-payment, the harsh new arrangements for unemployed youth, an increase in university fees or “assets recycling,” and he hasn’t. Much of what he was willing to compromise on with the government involved issues and policies peripheral to his philosophy. His rapid deal-making, a legacy of his real-estate and mining-lease years and his ability to package and repackage sets of options at a rapid pace seemed to bamboozle people, to convince them that anything was up for grabs. Yet this was nothing more than the horse-trading that is a necessary part of politics everywhere else, but that has been lessened by the lock-step nature of the Australian party system. One layer down is a set of core values, which are close to the centre of Australian politics. QE 56: Cliveosaurus Photograph: Quarterly Essay Whether Palmer advances those values because he genuinely thinks about the single mum who wouldn’t be able to take her kids to the doctor, and feels that we have a social obligation to her, or whether he imagines himself on the prow of a boat with cheering crowds garlanding him with flowers, as said single mum kisses him chastely and says, “Thank you for saving my baby’s life,” or some point in between the two, is of little moment. To ask what it is that a political figure believes him or herself to be is not to take that belief as true, or even seriously felt. But it is to presume that an idea about past formation will be a useful predictor of future action. In the first half of the year we saw Tony Abbott treated with deference to his values and beliefs, as his chaotic and lying government slid from one side of the ring to the other, while Clive Palmer, ploughing a steady course on a range of key issues, was treated as the inconstant one. No wonder no one could tell what he was going to do next – they weren’t even bothering to look at where he had come from. As Abbott moved out of the centre-right ground he had claimed in the election campaign, and Labor – infested with free-marketeers who would love the Coalition to introduce co-payments, higher university fees and welfare tightening so that they can continue them in a “progressive” fashion – refused to move into it, Palmer claimed it by default. Doubtless it would be possible to over-interpret the man, but since there has been so little interpretation of him to date, the danger is slight. What would be an error, however, would be to seek to find in Palmer’s life the key to his current hold on the political process. That hold came about not from any internal drive, but from external processes. Clive is not a cause of our current fractured politics: he is one of its most spectacular effects.Jindal Signs Chemical Castration Bill James Joyner · · 22 comments Lousiana Governor Bobby Jindal yesterday signed the “Sex Offender Chemical Castration Bill” hours after the Supreme Court overturned that state’s law allowing capital punishment for child rapists. It “provides that on a first conviction of aggravated rape, forcible rape, second degree sexual battery, aggravated incest, molestation of a juvenile when the victim is under the age of 13, or an aggravated crime against nature, the court may sentence the offender to undergo chemical castration. On a second conviction of the above listed crimes, the court is required to sentence the offender to undergo chemical castration.” Ben Domenech thinks Jindal is sending a suggestive message to the Supreme Court. But, of course, the law had passed through the legislative process before the Court’s 5-4 ruling, so it’s merely a politically happy coincidence. Of course, the Supremes court easily strike down this law on the same grounds as they did capital punishment, given that they have arrogated to themselves the sole power to decide what constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment.” One could certainly argue that robbing a man of his sexuality is at least as barbaric, and certainly more unusual, than killing him. On a side note, one imagines this will enhance Jindal’s image with the Republican base and not a few moderates as well, thus making him a more attractive candidate for vice president.Last month, Amazon invested $175 million in the number two online coupon site LivingSocial. True to form, Amazon is already using the platform to create enormous buzz: last week, they announced a coupon: $10 for a $20 Amazon gift certificate. Within hours, the offer generated massive interest, giving LivingSocial one of their biggest growth days and selling over $10 million in Amazon gift cards (over 1.3 million units sold in a single day). LivingSocial is not the first to create a compelling coupon offer. That honor goes to the market leader, Groupon. In August of last year, Groupon partnered with The Gap to offer a similar 50% off coupon, generating a whopping $11 million in sales in a single day. This likely influenced Google to reportedly offer Groupon $6 billion for the company (which was turned down) and the company to raise a record $950 million from investors. Now, thousands of companies are jumping on the latest trend trying to generate buzz for their products. Putting aside whether coupon sites are sustainable, all this begs the question of the value of buzz and being a first mover. The costs are clearly high, but companies with products that tend to generate early buzz seem to do very well. At least that is the conventional wisdom. But a new study shows that no amount of buzz, excitement or first mover’s advantage will lead a product to sustained growth. The study, led by MIT’s Dr. Sandy Petland who runs the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, tested whether early buzz could precipitate a product’s ultimate success. Using an online music test site, researchers tested whether music that was highly praised early on would be downloaded more than songs with less buzz. True to form, results from an initial study demonstrated that buzz and social influence generated early adoption and the more a song was discussed, reviewed and downloaded, the more people wanted the song. Success begets success. But then Petland’s research team took that data and dissected it further. When they did, a surprising result emerged: while social influence can give a product an early advantage, that edge is typically not sustainable. As Petland’s describes it, “social cues could convince you to take a look — do a little window shopping — but didn’t necessarily make you go in the store and buy something.” And yet venture capitalists and entreprenuers still go to great lengths to achieve first mover status; brands spend inordinate amounts of money to create buzz; and the latest trend is to increase influence through social media. But does any of this matter in the long run? I’d say it does, but only if the product you are selling delivers real value. In business, we too often forget that what we are selling is value: we instead try to sell technology, or packaging, or just plain vaporware. To add value, your technology needs to be productized, and to do that you need to offer unique value to a customer. Without a valuable and unique product, viral marketing, social influence and buzz will help initially but will be of no lasting consequence. No surprise, this is what many companies are finding on sites like Groupon and LivingSocial. There has been a large backlash by companies stating that these sites just don’t work: they cost a lot of money and the initial pop in sales dissipates moments later. A Rice University study found that upwards of 40% of companies who have used Groupon say they wouldn’t do so again. Is the problem actually Groupon, as was said previously with Facebook (and before that Google, Yahoo and the Internet as a whole)? No. Most businesses are quick to blame the underlying business model of these coupon sites, but the MIT research suggests otherwise: it is time for businesses to shift the blame internally and focus more on the quality of what they are selling. Jeffrey M. Stibel is Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. He is an entrepreneur, a brain scientist, and the author of Wired for Thought: How the Brain Is Shaping the Future
the relief of which electricity is eminently adapted."[3] Resources "Boyd's Miniature Galvanic Battery Paperwork!" (electrotherapymuseum.com) — scans of original advertising and testimonials for Boyd's Battery. ReferencesDual EC random number generator as the default in their flagship BSAFE library. I’ve Last Friday, Joseph Menn from Reuters published an article claiming that RSA, the pioneering security firm and division of EMC, accepted $10 million dollars to include theDual EC random number generator as thein their flagship BSAFE library. I’ve written a bit about Dual EC on this blog, so readers will know that I don’t think highly of it. For one thing, it’s a rotten choice for a commercial product, due to its lousy software performance. Much worse: it may introduce a practical backdoor into any system that uses it. Given the numerous problems with Dual EC it’s baffling that RSA would select this particular generator as the default for their software. It’s particularly strange given that BSAFE is designed for use in Java-based and embedded systems where performance truly is at a premium. And none of this can be explained by the needs of a single RSA customer, since those needs could be satisfied merely by making BSAFE an option, rather than the default. Of course there have been many people who had viewed RSA’s decision as potentially malicious. Unsupported rumors have been floating around since long before Reuters got involved. What’s new this time is that RSA insiders appear to be going on the record. I suppose time will tell how the industry reacts to this news. In the interim I have a few small facts to add to the discussion, so I thought I’d sketch them out in this post. #1: Dual_EC_DRBG’s ‘backdoor’ was known as of January 2005 In point of fact, the possibility of a backdoor was known to at least some members of the ANSI X9.82 standardization committee as far back in January 2005. This surprising news comes via a patent application filed by Certicom employees Dan Brown and Scott Vanstone. The application claims a priority date of January 2005. Here’s the scary bit: If P and Q are established in a security domain controlled by an administrator, and the entity who generates Q for the domain does so with knowledge of e (or indirectly via knowledge of d). The administrator will have an escrow key for every ECRNG that follows that standard. Escrow keys are known to have advantages in some contexts. They can provide a backup functionality. If a cryptographic key is lost, then data encrypted under that key is also lost. However, encryption keys are generally the output of random number generators. Therefore, if the ECRNG is used to generate the encryption key K, then it may be possible that the escrow key e can be used to recover the encryption key K. Escrow keys can provide other functionality, such as for use in a wiretap. In this case, trusted law enforcement agents may need to decrypt encrypted traffic of criminals, and to do this they may want to be able to use an escrow key to recover an encryption key. … For example, in the SSL and TLS protocols, which are used for securing web (HTTP) traffic, a client and server perform a handshake in which their first actions are to exchange random values sent in the clear. The patent also describes a number of ways to close the backdoor in Dual_EC_DRBG. Indeed, it may be due to Brown and Vanstone that the NIST standard includes an alternative method to close the backdoor (by generating a random Q point). The existence of this patent does not mean that Brown and Vanstone were responsible for Dual EC. In fact, the generator appears to be an NSA invention, and may date back to the early 2000s. What this patent demonstrates is that some members of the ANSI committee, of which RSA was also a member, had reason to at least suspect that Dual EC could be used to create a wiretapping backdoor. (Update: John Kelsey confirms this.) It would be curious to know how widely this information was shared, and whether anyone on the committee ever inquired as to the provenance of the default parameters. #2. Dual_EC_DRBG is not really a NIST standard This is hardly a secret, but it’s something that hasn’t been widely acknowledged in the press. Dual_EC_DRBG is generally viewed as a NIST standard, since it was published in NIST Special Publication 800-90. But that’s not the only place it appears, nor was it developed at NIST. A complete history of Dual_EC_DRBG would begin with NSA’s drive to include it in the ANSI X9.82 DRBG standard, with a standardization process kicked off in the early 2000s. The draft ANSI standard includes Dual_EC_DRBG with all of the known parameters, along with several additional elliptic curve parameters that were not included in the NIST standards. Members of the ANSI X9F1 Tool Standards and Guidelines Group which wrote ANSI X9.82. However you’ll also find Dual_EC_DRBG in the international standard ISO 18031. In other words, Dual EC was widely propagated in numerous standards long before NIST finalized it, and it’s hardly limited to US borders. The ANSI and ISO drafts are in some sense worse, since they don’t include a technique for generating your own Q parameter. #3. Dual_EC_DRBG is not the only asymmetric random number generator in the ANSI and ISO standards Cryptographers generally think of Dual EC as the only ‘public key’ random number generator to be widely standardized. We also point to NSA’s generation of the public parameters as evidence that Dual_EC may be compromised. But in fact, the ANSI X9.82 and ISO standards each include a second generator based on public key cryptographic techniques. And like Dual EC, this one ships with a complete set of default parameters! The additional generator is based on an algorithm due to Micali and Schnorr, and relies for its security on assumptions related to the hardness of factoring large composite numbers. It requires an RSA-type modulus, several of which are conveniently provided in the specification. Two default MS-DRBG moduli from the ISO 18031 specification. There’s no reason to suspect that MS-DRBG is used by any real products, let alone that there’s a backdoor in the standard. In fact, there’s a curious fact about it: it’s not obvious from the public literature how one would attack the generator even if one knew the factorization of the n values above — though it seems intuitively likely that an attack does exist. Solving the problem, and finding a practical attack for known factorization, would be a fun project for an enthusiastic mathematician. Since MS-DRBG comes from the same people who brought you Dual EC, if you are using it you might want to think twice.Saying President Barack Obama is waging war on religion, Texas Gov. Rick Perry adds in a TV ad his presidential campaign is airing in Iowa: "I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian, but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school." It’s widely known that Obama last year signed into law legislation permitting gay people to openly serve in the military. We wondered if kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school. Based on checking the schoolhouse scene in Iowa and Texas and consulting an array of national experts, it’s clear that school officials are not permitted to organize prayers or focus on a single religion in connection with Christmas, but kids may pray and also celebrate the holiday on their own. We started with the Hawkeye State, where voters caucus for president on Jan. 3. Iowa schoolchildren may both pray and openly celebrate Christmas, according to Carol Greta, general counsel of the Iowa Department of Education. In an interview, Greta said Iowa school children have never been prohibited from praying at school. "As one wag said, as long as there’s been algebra, there’s been prayer in schools," Greta said. But, she said, school employees may not coerce students into praying in keeping with the First Amendment, which bars Congress from making any law "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech." In a landmark 1962 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that school-initiated prayer in the public schools violated the First Amendment. A year later, the court said students could not be made to read a Bible passage before class because the practice constituted government endorsement of a particular religion. As for openly celebrating Christmas, Greta pointed us to a 2009 checklist of do’s and don’t’s for "holiday celebrations" posted by the education department for Iowa schools. The guidance opens: "Public school officials need to be especially conscious at this time of year that the birth of the Christian savior is not recognized or celebrated by all students and families." Prohibited activities, the checklist says, include displays of religious symbols such as a crèche, an angel, a menorah or a banner with a religious message as well as a display of a Christmas tree bearing only Christian religious symbols, though the checklist says a Christmas tree itself is not prohibited. Also barred are school-wide prayer or Scripture readings, the guidance says, and musical concerts with exclusively religious music. Schools are advised against holding a "Christmas party" in the classroom, the department says, though a "holiday" or "end of semester" or end-of-year party is permitted. The checklist says non-religious aspects of Christmas -- such as pictures of reindeer, bells and other non-religious symbols and sleigh rides -- are permitted. Caroling also is fine though songs that "celebrate the birth of the Christ are more problematic," the checklist says: "In an end-of-the-year music program open to the public, religious songs may be included as selections, as long as they are selected for their musicality and are not limited to Christian-themed songs." The checklist closes: "The holidays are a time for exercising goodwill toward all. It is not a time for Scrooges or Grinches. Go forth and be merry with due consideration for all." And what’s the Texas situation? Texas law provides an opportunity for students pray, if they choose, every school day, we learned from DeEtta Culbertson, spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency. The law states that each school board shall provide a minute of silence at each school during which "each student may, as the student chooses, reflect, pray, meditate or engage in any other silent activity that is not likely to interfere with or distract another student." Also, a 1995 Texas law states: "A public school student has an absolute right to individually, voluntarily, and silently pray or meditate in school in a manner that does not disrupt the instructional or other activities of the school. And a 2007 law requires each district to adopt a policy enabling student speakers at school events to voluntarily express a religious viewpoint with the policy stating that the student's speech "does not reflect the endorsement, sponsorship, position, or expression of the district." The latter law came about after the Supreme Court agreed with lower courts that a Texas school district could not permit student prayers delivered before football games because the speeches were at a school-sponsored event, using school facilities, and would be taken by most observers as a school endorsement of the student prayers that were likely to be delivered. Culbertson told us each Texas district is left to resolve how its individual schools handle Christmas. In a Nov. 30, 2011, online post, Tim Carroll, president of the Texas School Public Relations Association, advised school officials to read a publication by the Freedom Forum, a foundation that says it champions the First Amendment. The publication, "Religious Holidays in the Public Schools," notes that the Supreme Court has ruled that public schools may not sponsor religious practices but may teach about religion. "While it has made no definitive ruling on religious holidays in the schools," the publication says, "the Supreme Court has let stand a lower federal court decision stating that recognition of holidays may be constitutional if the purpose is to provide secular instruction about religious traditions rather than to promote the particular religion involved." The publication says it would be unrealistic to ban seasonal celebrations including references to Christmas. It continues: "The resolution would seem to lie in devising holiday programs that serve an educational purpose for all students — programs that do not make students feel excluded or identified with a religion not their own. In an interview, researcher David Masci of the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life told us that children may both pray and celebrate Christmas in school if their actions are self-directed -- not guided by teachers or administrators. Masci said that if Perry said school-directed prayer and Christmas celebrations are restricted, he’d be right. Masci said: "It’s one thing to acknowledge religion. Public institutions can do that. It’s another thing to promote religion." Some say, though, that schools often bow too much to constitutional concerns when it comes to Christmas. By e-mail, Hiram Sasser, director of litigation for the conservative Texas-based Liberty Institute, pointed out a sentence in the Freedom Forum publication that he said demonstrates Perry is on target about Christmas in school. The sentence: "Teachers must be alert to the distinction between teaching about religious holidays, which is permissible, and celebrating religious holidays, which is not." News stories illuminate instances of schools balancing Christmas season events against the constitutional limit on promoting a religion. In a Beaumont-area school this month, student singers replaced lyrics of "The First Noel" with "The first snow fall" and "the Lord has come" in "Joy to the World" with "my shopping's done," the Beaumont Enterprise reported Dec. 7, 2011. The story quotes the students’ teacher saying the kids sang the real carols at a local tree-lighting ceremony. According to a Dec. 1, 2011, news story in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Fort Worth school district’s attorney recently sent a memo to staff stating that students should not be allowed to exchange gifts or "distribute personal holiday messages" during class. The story says the memo cites legal concerns associated with the distribution of personal holiday messages. "For example, if students are allowed to exchange cards or small trinkets, the district would be required to allow a student to distribute a religious message with the gift or card," the memo says, according to the newspaper. "In other words, the school district cannot prohibit the distribution of unsolicited religious material directly to students if it allows other personal messages to be distributed during school activities held during the school day." The paper quoted a district spokesman, Clint Bond, saying that students can, however, exchange gifts and cards before and after school and during lunch. Students can say "merry Christmas" to one another during the school day, Bond was quoted saying. The Fort Worth district’s memo also says Santa Claus is not allowed to visit classes, the newspaper reported, though it says the memo also says that "seasonal decorations are appropriate if they are not religious in nature" and classroom parties are allowed if they "serve an appropriate instructional purpose." On Dec. 2,2011, the district responded to news coverage of the memo by saying the district was not banning Santa Claus or Christmas celebrations from the schools--though Santa visits would be barred while teachers were teaching. Also, the district said, children would be permitted to exchange presents and cards before and after class, in the hallway and at lunch. "Fort Worth ISD loves Santa Claus and continues to support his universal message of generosity and kindness," the district said. Sasser also urged us to consider a 2005 book, "The War on Christmas," by John Gibson, a Fox News host. The book explores decisions by officials in a few school districts to curb religious references to Christmas. After one such move, Gibson writes, a district turned to Charles Haynes of the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Institute to help draft a policy enabling students to learn about religious issues and Christmas without violating the First Amendment. We called Haynes about Perry’s double-barreled ad claim. "He’s using the language of the culture wars," Haynes speculated. "What he’s trying to do, I’m afraid, is to mislead people into thinking kids can’t pray... What he’s hoping is that people will hear that God and Christmas have been kicked out of schools. That isn’t the case." Asked to elaborate on Perry’s statement, his campaign spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, said by email that court decisions in the ‘60’s "banned prayer in schools." She said too there are endless legal cases involving students, schools and prayer or religious expression--and noted a dispute years ago involving the Plano, Texas, district and a child prevented from passing out candy canes with a religious message. She also pointed us to the transcript of a June 8, 2004, Senate subcommittee hearing that touched on the Supreme Court’s ruling restricting prayers before football games Our ruling So, can kids pray and openly celebrate Christmas in school? Absolutely, we conclude, though public school officials are barred from advancing a religion or making children pray or celebrate solely the Christian aspects of Christmas. The Supreme Court has not held that students can’t pray; Perry’s home state even has laws protecting that right. The highest court also hasn’t held that kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas at school. His statement shakes out as False.A man licensed by the state of South Carolina to carry a weapon and defend himself faces the threat of a lawsuit by the family members of an armed teen he shot and killed who was trying to rob a restaurant. The robber’s family alleges Justin Harrison should have been trained better, and they may even pursue legal action against him for shooting and killing Dante Williams, 19, who was trying to rob a Waffle House in Chesnee, South Carolina, in 2012. The case again is in the news because authorities recently released a video of the attempted armed robbery. Fox affiliate WHNS-TV in Greenville, South Carolina, posted the video online and reported that Williams’ family members admit the teen was in the Waffle House to rob it. Authorities say Harrison, who was in the restaurant, fired several times at Williams, killing him. How can a woman defend herself in Washington? Find out in “Emily Gets Her Gun: … But Obama Wants to Take Yours.” Williams’ accomplice, Jawan Craig, was caught later, convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Harrison recalled that when the robbers entered the restaurant, he didn’t follow the instincts of the crowd. “They’re yelling ‘everybody get down, get down,’ and I’m not getting on the floor. I am not going to be a victim,” he said. The attackers, according to Harrison, terrorized other customers, and then, suddenly, “He was approaching me and I saw that as him engaging me.” Harrison stood up and fired several shots at Williams, killing him almost instantly. Harrison then tried to hold Craig at gunpoint, but Craig grabbed at his gun and then escaped. There’s no question that Harrison handled the situation correctly, said David Blanton, a former Spartanburg County deputy who was Harrison’s weapons instructor. “Not only was he defending his own life, which the law says he can do, but there were other people in the restaurant,” Blanton told the WHNS. In South Carolina, permit holders are required to apply, take an eight-hour course, pass a written exam and complete a live-fire qualification. But the station said Tamika McSwain, Williams’ cousin, claimed that Harrison needed more training, and if he had had that, he might not have fired the fatal shots. “I understand he felt threatened by the situation,” McSwain told the station. “But he said the gun was pointed at him so he fired. In fact [Williams] was walking out.” She said her cousin was “always sharp, always goofy, loved to dance, he was a respectable boy.” She told the station her family was disappointed Harrison was cleared by police investigators and faced no charges. But the family still might pursue legal action.Neuroscience teaches us what it means to be human. —— Growing up in a staunchly conservative Christian home, I was taught very defined gender roles. Years later, when I came out as a gay man, it was nearly as difficult to reconcile my view of gender roles as it was my religion. I describe a little of this in my book, as I was getting acquainted with other gay men: Simon caught [my friend] Joseph’s eye at a local pub where we were meeting…Simon embodied all of the gay stereotypes that movies portray and reality TV adores. If I thought I’d conquered my own homophobia, Simon was about to reveal the raging Evangelical Republican that dwelt inside. “Hey, cutie,” he said to Joseph while clutching his gold lamé coin purse. “Hi.” Joseph smiled. I was watching what looked like a bad b-movie unfolding in front of my eyes. “My friends and I are going to a bar down the street to hang out some more. Do you want to come with us?” Simon asked. I was certain Joseph would say no. “Yeah, sure. Why not?” he said and looked at me, “You wanna go?” Simon disgusted me. I wasn’t sure what this half-man-mostly-girl was up to, but my suspicions ran high. I reluctantly went with Joseph and his new friends to the bar, mostly because I felt Joseph was going to need an alibi. Simon carried most of the conversation, waving his thin little arms around like a junior high girl, sauntering back and forth to the bar to refill his drink. My disgust must have been written all over my face. Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free Going Gay, My Journey From Evangelical Minister to Self-acceptance, Love, Life, and Meaning (CK Publishing, 2014) I’m ashamed to admit that I held on to that discomfort for years, looking down my nose on any man who didn’t act like the narrowly defined, Christian bred idea of masculinity I so firmly believed to be true. ♦◊♦ As I studied and researched gender and sexuality, however, I first learned that the two were not the same. As I studied and researched gender and sexuality, however, I first learned that the two were not the same. Sexuality is about attraction to another person, not about how masculine or feminine the sexually attracted person acts. My friend, Joseph, for example, spent 10 years in construction work. Most people never knew, or suspected he was gay. Simon, the person to whom he was attracted, could pass as a girl if he wanted to dress the part, though he was also sexually attracted to men. Gender roles are also not as clearly defined. One reason for this is that we are not purely binary, only male and only female. Neurology Professor Jeanette Norden breaks down the differences in her lectures on Understanding the Brain (a must-have series for neuropsychology nerds). Genotypic sex This is our gene, or chromosome type sex. Most of the time, females are XX and males are XY. However, there are instances where someone can appear to be one gender on the outside and have the opposite sex chromosomes. There are also individuals who have XXY Chromosomes. A majority of those are male and some are born with female genetilia. Phenotypic sex This is the genitalia with which we are born, and is determined by the development of internal and/or external genitalia. Generally, genotypic and phenotypic sex are related, though that is not always the case. As noted above, there are instances where someone can have the chromosomes of one gender and outwardly display the genitalia of the opposite gender. Gender identification Those who feel they were born with the wrong body are often diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a disconnect between the gender they feel they are the body they have. This is the subjective perception of one’s gender and is a construct created by the brain that relates them to their gender identity. Those who feel they were born with the wrong body are often diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a disconnect between the gender they feel they are the body they have. Brain sex Brain sex is the structural difference between male and female brains. The clinical term is “sexual dimorphism,” meaning brain structure size, number or density of neurons, etc. that separates male brains from female brains. There are particular areas of neurons that may be more or less dense in female vs. male brains and vice versa. Brain sex also contributes to how a person relates to his or her environment, as well as gender identification and expression. Brain sex is determined in humans before birth, while brain sex in a rat is postnatal, or after they are born. There is a critical period of time when brain sex can be manipulated. Studies show that when testosterone is given to a female rat during that critical period, she will sexually act like a male. Similarly, when young male rats are castrated, stopping the induction of testosterone that masculinizes their brains, they exhibit nesting behavior, typically found in female rats. People are born with a combination genotypic, phenotypic and brain sex types, meaning there is a combination of gender expressions and sexuality. People are born with a combination of genotypic, phenotypic and brain sex types, meaning there is a combination of gender expressions and sexuality. Gay men, in one study, were found to have the nucleus of a female brain, though it is difficult to definitively tell whether or not this plays into sexual behavior. Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free Similarly, a study of females with adrenal hyperplasia, showed that the adrenal gland appeared to have masculinized the brain. This study found these women were more likely to behave as tomboys, show aggressive behaviors, and identify with males, even when they were younger. They also showed an increased preference of other females as sexual partners. Most cultures tend to exaggerate the differences between males and females. Much of this has to do with who establishes the rules and what is considered culturally acceptable for each gender. In American culture, highly influenced by religion, we tend to keep gender roles more clearly separated and defined. However, as cultures become more open about sexuality, sexual orientation and a blending of roles, people feel more open to express themselves more authentically. We see this play out in younger celebrities such as Alex Newell, who played Glee’s transgender student, Unique Adams, and EJ Johnson, Magic Johnson’s son. Both blend traditionally male and female clothing options into their own styles. We call this gender fluidity, or the gender expression of a person who may feel male one day, female a different day, a combination of both, or neither. Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free ♦◊♦ It’s important to point out that expression of sexuality and gender can be changed, as well as behavior, however brain gender and sexuality cannot be altered by experience, therapy, or shaming or embarrassing anyone. These are variations found in humans and animals, and noted in science throughout history. I have to admit that learning the science behind what has become such a political issue was eye-opening. It’s where knowledge meets compassion and subjects become people. Following my friend Joseph’s month-long tryst with Simon, I asked, “How you can you so easily accept people like him?” In his wisdom he said, “There is a reason people do what they do. Who am I to judge them when I don’t know their stories?” Come to find out, people’s journeys are really only part of their stories. For more information, watch this Buzzfeed video, What It’s Like To Be Intersex. #BornPerfect Photo – Flickr/ djneightIn its latest quarterly publication “The Year in Hate and Extremism” (Issue 45, Spring 2012) the Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, names Men’s Rights Activists as a hate group, citing the MRAs’ — alternately known as “Father’s Rights Activists” — virulent misogyny, spreading of false anti-woman propaganda and applauding and even encouraging acts of domestic terrorism and extreme violence against women and children, up to and including murder. In the same issue, the SPLC reports on the activities of other hate groups with headlines such as Georgia Militia Members to be Tried Later this Year in Movement’s Latest Murder Plot; Son of Holocaust Memorial Shooter Discusses Family History of Racial Hate; and Animal Rights Extremist Camille Marino Calls for Violence. For those not in the know, the SPLC is a nonprofit civil rights organization dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of society.[…] The SPLC was founded to ensure that the promises of the civil rights movement became a reality for all. Since our founding in 1971, we’ve won numerous landmark legal victories on behalf of the exploited, the powerless and the forgotten. Our lawsuits have toppled institutional racism in the South, bankrupted some of the nation’s most violent white supremacist groups and won justice for exploited workers, abused prison inmates, disabled children and other victims of discrimination. The SPLC’s approach to monitoring, and toppling, hate groups is three-pronged, with the SPLC tracking the activities of hate groups and domestic terrorists across America and launching innovative lawsuits that seek to destroy networks of radical extremists; using the courts and other forms of advocacy to win systemic reforms on behalf of victims of bigotry and discrimination; and providing educators with free resources that teach school children to reject hate, embrace diversity and respect differences. In the current issue, the SPLC dedicates three feature articles to exposing, exploring and monitoring MRAs. In Leader’s Suicide Brings Attention to Men’s Rights Movement, SPLC reporter Arthur Goldwag describes the self-immolation of MRA Thomas Jefferson Ball just outside a family law courthouse, an act that was intended to be and has been subsequently embraced as a call-to-arms of American MRAs and misogynists who feel slighted by the American family law courts, which often delve deeply into accusations of sexual, physical and emotional abuse within families, where the family or “private sphere” has historically been men’s private domain, where they were allowed to terrorize and damage women and children with impunity, and where men could historically let themselves off the hook for financial support just by leaving town, denying paternity, or worse. In what was also an act of domestic terrorism by Ball, where he committed an illegal act that was dangerous to human life and was apparently intended to intimidate and coerce both civilians and the government, this self-immolation by the leader of the Worcester branch of the Massachusetts-based Fatherhood Coalition was also apparently a declaration of war against the family court system and against women and children: In a lengthy “Last Statement,” which arrived posthumously at the Keene Sentinel, Tom Ball told his story. All he had done, he said, was smack his 4-year-old daughter and bloody her mouth after she licked his hand as he was putting her to bed. Feminist-crafted anti-domestic violence legislation did the rest. “Twenty-five years ago,” he wrote, “the federal government declared war on men. It is time to see how committed they are to their cause. It is time, boys, to give them a taste of war.” Calling for all-out insurrection, he offered tips on making Molotov cocktails and urged his readers to use them against courthouses and police stations. “There will be some casualties in this war,” he predicted. “Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.” Predictably, the manosphere, the name for organized online MRA hate groups, largely supported Ball and sympathized with his persecution complex and feelings of male-entitlement and woman-hatred: Ball’s suicide brought attention to an underworld of misogynists, woman-haters whose fury goes well beyond criticism of the family court system, domestic violence laws, and false rape accusations. There are literally hundreds of websites, blogs and forums devoted to attacking virtually all women (or, at least, Westernized ones) — the so-called “manosphere,” which now also includes a tribute page for Tom Ball (“He Died For Our Children”). Only weeks later, the manosphere responded favorably to the mass-murder of 77 people by Norweigian MRA Anders Behring Breivik, who railed against “divorce on demand” and sounded the misogynistic dog-whistle to aggrieved men around the world: This kind of woman-hatred is increasingly visible in most Western societies, and it tends to be allied with other anti-modern emotions — opposition to same-sex marriage, to non-Christian immigration, to women in the workplace, and even, in some cases, to the advancement of African Americans. Just a few weeks after Ball’s death, while scorch marks were still visible on the sidewalk in Keene, N.H., that was made clear once more by a Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik. On July 22, Breivik slaughtered 77 of his countrymen, most of them teenagers, in Oslo and at a summer camp on the island of Utøya, because he thought they or their parents were the kinds of “politically correct” liberals who were enabling Muslim immigration. But Breivik was almost as voluble on the subjects of feminism, the family, and fathers’ rights as he was on Islam. “The most direct threat to the family is ‘divorce on demand,’” he wrote in the manifesto he posted just before he began his deadly spree. “The system must be reformed so that the father will be awarded custody rights by default.” The manosphere lit up. Said one approving poster at The Spearhead, an online men’s rights magazine for the “defense of ourselves, our families and our fellow men”: “What could be more ‘an eye for an eye’ than to kill the children of those who were so willing to destroy men’s families and destroy the homeland of men?” In the second article, Men’s Rights Movement Spreads False Claims about Women reporters Mark Potok and Evelyn Schlatter outline the most common anti-woman propaganda used by American MRAs to incite misogynist rage, encourage further violence, and to garner sympathy for their alleged mistreatment by women and the court system in cases of divorce and custody disputes and even cases involving criminal charges of stalking, rape, and murder. For example, MRAs often cite false statistics about the incidence and prevalence of female-initiated sex-crimes and abuse against male victims, claiming that the situation is at least as bad for men (if not worse) when the research consistently shows that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of abuses such as rape, intimate partner rape and stalking, and that women are overwhelmingly the victims. Unsurprisingly, the research also consistently shows that when men are raped, it is almost always by other men, and not by women. MRA hate groups are also consistently rageful — and untruthful — when disseminating false and debunked statistics regarding “false rape charges”. From the article: THE CLAIM Close to half or even more of the sexual assaults reported by women never occurred. Versions of this claim are a mainstay of sites like Register-Her.com, which specializes in vilifying women who allegedly lie about being raped. Such claims are also sometimes made by men involved in court custody battles. THE REALITY This claim, which has gained some credence in recent years, is largely based on a 1994 article in the Archives of Sexual Behavior by Eugene Kanin that found that 41% of rape allegations in his study were “false.” But Kanin’s methodology has been widely criticized, and his results do not accord with most other findings. Kanin researched only one unnamed Midwestern town, and he did not spell out the criteria police used to decide an allegation was false. The town also polygraphed or threatened to polygraph all alleged victims, a now-discredited practice that is known to cause many women to drop their complaint even when it is true. In fact, most studies that suggest high rates of false accusations make a key mistake — equating reports described by police as “unfounded” with those that are false. The truth is that unfounded reports very often include those for which no corroborating evidence could be found or where the victim was deemed an unreliable witness (often because of drug or alcohol use or because of prior sexual contact with the attacker). They also include those cases where women recant their accusations, often because of a fear of reprisal, a distrust of the legal system or embarrassment because drugs or alcohol were involved. The best studies, where the rape allegations have been studied in detail, suggest a rate of false reports of somewhere between 2% and 10%. The most comprehensive study, conducted by the British Home Office in 2005, found a rate of 2.5% for false accusations of rape. The best U.S. investigation, the 2008 “Making a Difference” study, found a 6.8% rate. And in Misogyny: The Sites, the SPLC highlights a dozen popular MRA websites and blogs, documenting examples of the “astounding” woman-hatred espoused by MRA hate groups. Of course, the women and girls who have been targeted by woman-haters and misogynistic hate groups both recently and over the years might not choose the word “astounding” to describe known reality, and what has been a raging online and in real life war against women for years, any more than any other targeted group might be “astounded” by organized hate groups who regularly disseminate political propaganda and incite class hatred and even violence against them. What might be “astounding” however is that the MRAs have not previously been exposed and actively monitored by a nationally renowned civil rights organization before, when they clearly meet the criteria of “hate group” and deserve to be monitored and even prosecuted when the facts warrant it, like any other hate group. Until now. And monitoring and prosecuting American hate groups is what the SPLC does best: Fighting Hate in Court In the early 1980s, SPLC co-founder and chief trial counsel Morris Dees pioneered the strategy of using the courts to battle organized, violent hate groups. Since then, we have won numerous large damage awards on behalf of victims of hate group violence. These cases are funded entirely by our supporters; we accept no legal fees from the clients we represent. Among the groups shut down by crushing jury verdicts in SPLC cases are the White Aryan Resistance, the United Klans of America, the White Patriot Party militia and the Aryan Nations. These cases have made the SPLC and Dees reviled enemies of the extremist movement. Our headquarters in Montgomery has been the target of numerous plots by extremist groups, including a firebombing that destroyed our offices in 1983. Several dozen people have been sent to prison for plotting against Dees or the SPLC. Anyone wishing to donate money or other resources to the SPLC can “donate now” through their website, or by mail or telephone. Please note that you may make charitable contributions to the SPLC and specifically earmark the funds toward individual projects, including the one monitoring the MRAs. Just
I have been intrigued by the naked bike class, and one of the top contenders year after year is the Aprilia Tuono. So getting my eager little hands on a Tuono Factory after a half-year hiatus from reviewing bikes to tend to family was the perfect way to get back in the saddle. Would the naked Italian compare to the superbikes I’m used to riding? Would I be able to throw it down without worrying about dragging hard parts like the Z1000? Or would it be too much of a compromise from superbike performance to easier riding ergonomics with a detuned superbike motor? Aprilia offers two versions, the RR and Factory, for the Tuono. The upgraded Factory gets fully adjustable Ohlins suspension, an Ohlins steering damper, racier livery and red wheels instead of black. The RR model is supplied with Sachs suspension and a non-adjustable steering damper. Both bikes get upper level braking systems, APRC electronics and Bosch ABS systems. Aprilia Tuono Factory. Aprilia photo. Aprilia supplied me with the Factory edition. The livery is very sharp and alluring. Several non-riders commented on how beautiful “my” bike was and some even correctly guessed it was Italian. What can I say… the Italian style bleeds through. This Italian bike draws compliments for its style. Photo by Bucky Bautista. The motor is still the same 65-degree V4 it has been since 2012. Last year, however, displacement was increased to a stout 1,077 cc with an 81 mm bore, up from 78 mm previously. What this means to you is an increase in torque and a broader powerband throughout the low to mid-range. I describe it as having the low-end grunt you would expect from a twin, but with a more linear drive all the way to redline. Not exactly something you feel from the fading top-end power of your typical twin. I’m a huge fan of how quickly manufacturers have progressed with their electronics. Since traction control and ABS systems became standard on race-ready machines, Aprilia has been ahead of the game. Offering three riding modes with preset electronic levels is a thing of the past. Now, rider adjustability is the name of the game. Changing traction control sensitivity on the fly is simple and intuitive for Tuono riders. Press a “plus” or “minus” button and you’re set. No pulling in the clutch lever for three seconds like with other makes. No decrease in speed while the system waits to see if you mean it. Instant adjustability. On the other hand, it takes some time to learn how to navigate through modern systems, as I’ve found on the Ducati, BMW, or Yamaha platforms. Aprilia has a simple menu button on the left control that toggles and is depressed to access settings. For the life of me, I just couldn’t get to the option where I was able to adjust the power map. That elusive menu also allows you to recalibrate to different wheel size, which could otherwise cause the electronics (traction control and ABS) to read incorrectly and possibly be hazardous. The Aprilia Tuono comes with high quality Brembo brakes. Aprilia photo. The braking system is on both models of the Tuono is outfitted entirely by Brembo. I’ve come to desire that initial bite of a Brembo system on performance bikes and these are the bee’s knees. The monoblock radial calipers up front on the Tuono stop you in a hurry! I also like the steel braided lines that come stock on Tuono models. If you’re a performance geek, you know that replacing rubber lines with steel provides better braking. The Bosch ABS system does an amazing job paired with the RLM (Rear wheel Lift-up Mitigation) system. I actually had a hard time sliding the rear into turns, which I love to do, but that also means more predictable and reliable stability under hard braking. Testing the Aprilia Tuono on the strip at Irwindale Speedway. It's no drag bike, but it did surprisingly well. Photo by Joshua Jeppesen. I had the idea of testing the launch control by taking the Tuono to the open "drag night" at Irwindale Speedway. Unfortunately, my test didn't go as planned. The launch control is designed for roadracing starts, when tires are already somewhat up to temperature. If I did a burnout to heat the tire, it would fault the electronics and I couldn't use launch control. So I could only use launch control with a cold tire. Despite that handicap, the Tuono jumped out of the gate well enough that if I'd gone half a second quicker, I'd have needed to get my pro license, under the rules. Not bad for a bike that isn't designed to be a drag racer. This bike is most at home on a canyon road or a roadrace course. Photo by Cameron Welther. My hand was a bit forced, due to road closures from the rare Southern California rain storm. I had to conduct my video review on a much tighter and technical road than I wanted. I was on a road I usually ride on my Husky 510SMR supermoto, because of its quicker handling, and I was concerned it was going to be too much for the Tuono. The precise handling, combined with the wider powerband of the V4 motor and the electronics package, proved me wrong within a couple of passes. The Tuono is a good choice for your favorite curvy road. Photo by Cameron Welther. Aprilia Tuono Factory. Aprilia photo. The Tuono is essentially the RSV4 with a handlebar instead of clip-ons I have been on several RSV4s and the Tuono Factory felt exactly the same, except with more front end feel thanks to the wider-set grips. The added leverage, compared to the clip-ons, facilitated faster transitions. The Ohlins steering stabilizer and top-notch suspension kept too much rider input in check, making everything smooth as butter. I am very familiar with some of the challenging sections on this testing ground from riding my tuned 2008 Honda Fireblade. I know exactly where bumps are in turns that I have to pick the bike up to keep from pushing the front from loss of grip. The Tuono Factory is the first bike I have ridden for an extended period of time with upgraded Ohlins suspension. I could literally stay at full lean through the same bumpy turn without the slightest sign of a front-end slide. The upgraded forks soaked it up and kept me planted, railing through the turn, able to hammer on the throttle without hesitation thanks to the traction control set at level four. The Aprilia Tuono Factory in its natural habitat. Photo by Cameron Welther. The trick suspension also does a phenomenal job when you’re just commuting on the highway. Splitting lanes in the motorcyclist war zone known as Southern California traffic, I was riding over the continuous line of the lane markers, not even knowing they were there. I once had to get off line and get back on the bumpy reflective mounds to make sure I was actually riding on them. Unexpected holes in the road were also met with unfamiliar smoothness instead of the slight pogoing of my personal bikes. Now I understand why upgrading suspension is the first step for most racers and why it costs so much. You get what you pay for. The only drawback with the Tuono, like most naked bikes, is the lack of wind protection. I can imagine holding on for dear life and trying to find a bubble behind the nonexistent windscreen on long straights at the track. The Aprilia Tuono is comfortable and versatile enough to be a good ride for the daily commute, as well as fun and games. Photo by Heather Bonomo. In the end, the Tuono struck me not as a commuter-friendly upright bike, but more of a superbike-supermoto hybrid on steriods. Turn off all the electronics, if you dare, and you’ll accumulate performance awards from the fuzz faster than Lorenzo changes helmet sponsors in the off season. I could easily see riders owning the Tuono to fulfill all their needs: commuting, track, twisties and longer journeys. If there is truly such a thing as an all-in-one performance bike, I would go out on a limb and say the Tuono is a top contender.Image copyright EPA Image caption A curfew in Indian-administered Kashmir remains in place - along with curbs on mobile internet access and on some cable television services Several leading newspapers in Indian-administered Kashmir say they have been have been raided by police seeking to end a week of violent protests. Police seized printing plates and thousands of editions overnight on Friday. Cable television is also reported to have been shut down. More than 40 people have died in recent clashes in the area. The crisis was sparked by the killing of a prominent separatist militant, Burhan Wani. More than 1,500 others have also been injured in fighting between protesters and the security forces. Image copyright EPA Image caption The crisis was sparked by the killing of a young, well-known pro-separatist militant Image copyright AFP Image caption The violence is the worst seen in the region for years A curfew remains in place - along with curbs on mobile and internet access. "The clamp-down was necessitated as Pakistani channels that are beamed here through cable television network have launched a campaign aimed at fomenting trouble here," an unnamed Jammu and Kashmir government minister told the Reuters news agency. "Some newspapers were also sensationalising the violence... We will take a decision on [their] restoration after 19 July." The Greater Kashmir, Rising Kashmir and the Kashmir Observer, are among the titles who said they were affected. Abdul Rashid Mukhdoomi, printer and publisher of the Greater Kashmir, said that there were no orders "under which the printing and circulation of our newspapers were stopped".Evgeni Nabokov appears ready to finally join the New York Islanders. The goalie told Newsday he will attend the team's training camp in September. "Yes I do plan on attending," Nabokov said, according the newspaper. "Now I will have full preparation for the season." The Islanders suspended Nabokov in late January for not reporting to the team after he was claimed off waivers from the Detroit Red Wings. Nabokov told Newsday he wants to "set the record straight" after failing to report to New York last season. "A lot of people speculated that I didn't want to go to the organization but that's totally not true," Nabokov told the newspaper. "What made me make that decision is that I hadn't skated for a month and a half when they claimed me. They were out of the playoffs, but battling to get in and, as a goalie, I know the goalie position is important when fighting for position (in the standings). I didn't feel that I could help them to get to the playoffs. I needed three to four weeks to get ready and the season would've been over." Nabokov, who played with the San Jose Sharks for parts of 10 seasons, had spent the start of last season with SKA St. Petersburg of the Russian KHL and hadn't yet played for Detroit. The NHL's collective bargaining agreement states that anyone who plays in a professional league before signing an NHL contract must clear waivers. Once he signed his one-year deal with the Red Wings, he became available to the Islanders. When Nabokov refused to report to the Islanders, the team suspended him. Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.The male is often troubled by concerns that his penis is not large enough to satisfy his partner or himself. He is ashamed to have others view his penis, especially in the flaccid state. Such concerns might be unfounded in reality and might be a presentation of social anxiety or some other clinical problem, such as erectile dysfunction. Concern over the size of the penis, when such concern becomes excessive, might present as the ‘small penis syndrome’, an obsessive rumination with compulsive checking rituals, body dysmorphic disorder, or as part of a psychosis. However, it is often a worry that can be described as within the normal experience of many men. Various potential causal factors are considered. A thorough assessment, normalizing the worry and then exploring the treatment options in detail with the man, is essential to allow the matter to be consolidated satisfactorily within the male ego. Abbreviations SPS small penis syndrome BDD body dysmorphic disorder (dysmorphophobia) ED erectile dysfunction CBT cognitive behavioural therapy SSRI selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. INTRODUCTION The penis, particularly in its erect state, is a symbol of masculinity. In many cultures it has come to symbolise attributes such as ‘largeness, strength, endurance, ability, courage, intelligence, knowledge, dominance over men, possession of women; a symbol of loving and being loved’. A review [1] is recommended which describes Indian Sadhus using weights, Dayak men in Borneo piercing the glans and then inserting items in the resultant holes to stimulate the partner, and the Topinama of Brazil, who encourage poisonous snakes to bite their penis to make it enlarge (for 6 months!). Some of these concepts date back over many thousands of years, and there is evidence that prehistoric cave dwellers attributed the symbolic values of strength and power to penile size, as well as those of virility and fertility, a process also recommended in the Kama Sutra [2]. Given the historical context it is perhaps no surprise that even today many men place great importance on the size of their penis. Hegemonic masculinity is defined by attributes such as physical strength, heterosexuality with authority over women and other men, showing no emotions (such as remorse and uncertainty, which might suggest vulnerability), economic independence, and an ability to demonstrate sexual ‘conquest’. While most men do not embody all of these qualities, society supports hegemonic masculinity within most of its institutions [3]. Given this historical and cultural background, it is perhaps unsurprising that for many men the size of their penis is an important issue. It is perhaps more surprising that when men are concerned about their penile size, this concern relates not only to the erect but also to the flaccid penis. These concerns, when severe, can lead a man to go to extreme lengths to try to change the size of his penis. This review deals with issues surrounding the aetiology, psychology and management of these men, who might be considered to have the ‘small penis syndrome’ (SPS). Classically, the SPS is found in men with a normal‐sized penis but who are anxious about the size of the penis, in contrast to men who have a truly small penis (micropenis). It is perhaps relevant that while men with a larger penis, in length and circumference, have a better body image, genital image and have a feeling of greater sexual competence [4], women do not necessarily believe that a larger penis is ‘better’. For instance, it was shown that 90% of women prefer a wide penis to a long one [5, 6]. The issue of attractiveness to women is complex, but most data suggest that penile size is much lower down the list of priorities for women than such issues as a man’s personality and external grooming. DEFINITIONS The SPS is defined as an anxiety about the genitals being observed, directly or indirectly (when clothed) because of concern that the flaccid penis length and/or girth is less than the normal for an adult male, despite evidence from a clinical examination to counter this concern. It might be an obsessive rumination, part of a body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), or as part of a psychosis (see below). The degree of emotional distress and behavioural impairment is often much greater than the size and nature of the defect sensed within the self. Often the specific matter of penile size is not an overtly acknowledged issue, and is often situational or context‐driven [7]. As such, the clinician might need to consider this matter as part of the overall assessment of different presenting problems within urology and psychiatry. Dysmorphophobia has been described for more than a century; it is a psychiatric condition, also termed BDD, and is observed as a fixation on an imaginary flaw in the physical appearance. In cases in which a minor defect truly exists, the individual with BDD has an inordinate degree of anguish. People with BDD frequently develop major depressive episodes and are at risk of suicide. They might also show violent behaviour toward their treatment providers that can cause concern to clinical caregivers. In many cases, individuals with BDD have drastic social and occupational dysfunctions that might progress to the point of social isolation. There is embarrassment and fear of being scrutinized or mocked, which often causes these individuals to avoid social situations and intimate relationships. As victims of poor self‐image, these individuals typically do not show sufficient social skills and frequently are single or divorced. People with BDD can believe firmly that a marked change in their perceived body defect is a prerequisite to their happiness and well‐being. As such, it can be a manifestation of abnormal body image. This contrasts with most men, who are likely to be satisfied with their erect (8%) and overall penile size (71%) than with their flaccid size (51%). Further overall satisfaction with the genitals was linked to increased body satisfaction [8]. PREVALENCE Most men rated their penis as average (66%) and only 22% as large and 12% as small, in a large Internet‐based survey of 52 031 heterosexual men and women [9]. Self‐reported penile size was correlated positively with height and negatively with body fat level. About 85% of women were satisfied with their partners’ penile size, although only 55% of men were satisfied, with 45% wanting to be larger (and 0.2% to be smaller). Most women who reported their partners’ penis as small were not satisfied. Men reporting a larger than average penis also rated their appearance most favourably. The authors noted that it might be the reverse; the men’s more general body image influenced their estimates of penis size [8]. Furthermore, self‐esteem might influence their estimate of penile size. These findings are similar to those reported by Lee [10] and Son et al.[11], although both studies had more men reporting small rather than large penises. Finally, the effect of the media might influence men, who give greater emphasis to this trait, that women might want something different from reality, and that women might have a different marketing target to that of men [12]. NORMAL PENILE SIZE Flaccid penile length is just under 4 cm at birth and changes very little until puberty, when there is marked growth. Schonfeld and Beebe [13] noted that the length of the stretched penis approximated the length of the erect penis, while the flaccid circumference was a poor indicator of erect circumference. There is marked variation within individuals, with heat and exercise, as well as anxiety, all contributing to the variation. There have been several reports of measurements of penile size, which are summarized in Table 1[11, 13-22]. These studies measured various aspects of penile size, including flaccid length, stretched length, erect length, flaccid girth and erect girth. The variability of some of the values recorded inevitably reflects the different populations studied and differing techniques of measurement. Stretched penile length in these studies was typically 12–13 cm, with an erect length of 14–16 cm. For girth, there was again remarkable consistency of results, with a mean girth of 9–10 cm for the flaccid penis and 12–13 cm for the erect penis. Table 1. A summary of reports of measurements of penile size Study N Mean or range age, years Population Flaccid* Erect* length stretched length circumference suprapubic fat depth length circumference [ 13 54 20–25 Caucasian – 13.02 8.55 – – – [ 54 2770 20–59 – 9.7 – – – 15.5 – [ 19 156 – Mostly Caucasian – – – – 16 13.5 (base) [ 14 80 54 White 67.5%, Black 20%, Asian 12.5% 8.85 12.5 9.7 (mid shaft) 2.85 12.89 12.3 (mid shaft) [ 20 184 – Heterosexual 60% – – – – 15.71 13.2 (base) [ 16 813 30.8 All homosexual 10.4 – 9.8 (max) – 16.4 12.6 (max) 3417 30.5 All heterosexual 9.8 – 9.4 (max) – 15.6 12.2 (max) [ 15 111 18–19 Potent German men 8.6 – – – 14.48 – 32 40–68 German men with ED 9.22 – – – 14.18 – [ 18 3300 17–19 Italian men 9 12.5 10 (mid shaft) – – – [ 21 200 20–22 Turkish men 6.8 8.98 – – 12.7 – [ 22 104 54 British men – 13 (median) – – – – [ 17 124 59 Before RP 9 13 9.5 (mid shaft) 2.5 – – 63 59 After RP 8 12.5 10 (mid shaft) 2 – – [ 11 123 21.7 Korean men 6.9 9.6 8.5 (mid shaft) 1.1 – – For penile length some general observations are possible. First, the values for penile length show some consistency, with the marked exception of the Korean study [11]. Second, with a value of 9–10 cm, the flaccid length is usually 3–4 cm shorter than the stretched penile length and 5–6 cm shorter than the erect length. Third, as suggested by the work of Schonfeld and Beebe [13], there is a good correlation between stretched penile length and erect length [14]. It is generally accepted that a true micropenis is >2.5 sds below the mean length, and given the values shown in Table 1, it was suggested that any penis with a stretched length of <7 cm is a true micropenis [14]. There are several areas where further work is needed. For instance, except for the Korean study, there is little evidence of racial differences. This runs counter to many widely held suppositions and needs further investigation. For the issue of age (in adult men), while there appeared to be a trend suggesting that men with a greater mean age had smaller penises than those in studies where the mean age was lower, when this question was formally assessed there were no differences [15]. One study compared the values for penile length in homosexual and heterosexual men [16]. That study was based on measurements made by Kinsey some decades earlier, and showed statistically significant differences, with homosexuals having the greater length and girth. The authors suggested that this might reflect greater in utero exposure to androgens, but again it is area that needs further research. Pelvic surgery, in the form of radical prostatectomy, has also been shown to result in penile shortening [17]. The explanation for this might be a direct consequence of the prostatectomy, but an alternative hypothesis is that, with the onset of erectile dysfunction (ED) caused by the prostatectomy, there is a gradual loss of smooth muscle within the penis, with associated fibrosis and shrinking. This further raises the issue of whether men who have severe ED have smaller penises than age‐matched potent men. Again, there are few data on this issue. AETIOLOGY Early observations The SPS or ‘locker room syndrome’ might have its origin in childhood, when the young boy observes the larger phallus of an elder sibling or a friend, or even of his father. In one study, patients visiting an andrology clinic complaining of a small penis were asked when they believed the problem had started. Of these men, 62.7% said that their concerns started in childhood, when they compared their penis to that of their friends, while 37.3% said that their concerns began during their teenage years, after seeing erotic images [23]. None of these people had a penis of >2.5 sds less than the mean. Often the first penis that a child sees is his father’s, which will inevitably not only be larger, but which will also look relatively larger from a child’s more lowly perspective, especially if the father is seen standing naked after a warm bath or during any state of arousal. When compared to the child’s penis, this observational perspective is compounded by the child looking down at his own penis. This issue of perspective is of course relevant at all ages. Relationships with others Fears and anxieties about penile size might also arise after the breakdown of a relationship, or after derogatory or malicious remarks made by a partner during sexual activities. The receptive partner might report that she or he cannot feel the man ‘inside’ during sexual intercourse. This might lead to poor sexual self‐confidence, with a tendency to feel inadequate in vulnerable public situations, and this in turn might prevent the man from establishing further (or any) intimate relationships. Under these circumstances, the anxiety is primarily related to the erect penis. There is a suggestion that for those men who consider that they have a small penis, there is an insecurity effect [9], although the direction of causality remains unclear. General body image and self‐esteem might influence this further. The denigrating effects of other men might have a strong effect on further concern [24]. Developmental issues There is some evidence that for those men with poorly developed and small testicles, the problem might be accentuated, as there is no upward and forward lift to the penis, and so the genital bulge is minimal. This has a secondary effect of less evidence of a penile form in men wearing tight jeans or swimming attire. Genital confidence can be impaired if there are small testicles, with the perception that the penis is small, when indeed it is normal in size. Occasionally there might be a history of congenital abnormality (e.g. hypospadias). Other impairments of neurological development have been proposed to explain a variation in normal sensation in the genital area, with subsequent ‘misreading’ of any sensations perceived. These include neurological impairment of tactile stimulation and sensation in the perineal area. An alternative theory suggests that there might be dysfunction in one of the ‘association areas’ within the parietal lobe that accumulates a sensory store for ‘perception’. Associated psychological contributions from the effect of cognition and of disgust (possibly via the amygdala) and of the cognition of parts belonging to self (prefrontal cortex) are all possible contributory factors [25], as may that arising from envy. Psychiatric disorder These include obsessive‐compulsive disorder, social phobia, anxiety and depression. BDD is marked by excessive preoccupation with an imaginary or minor defect in a facial feature or localized part of the body. Borderline and narcissism personality types might be over‐represented. Narcissism is a pattern of thinking and behaving in adolescence and adulthood, which involves infatuation and obsession with one’s self to the exclusion of others. Sexual dysfunction This condition is often raised by patients with other clinical conditions, such as ED or ejaculatory dysfunction, and less frequently in conditions such as sexual aversion. Other factors In men who are overweight, there are dual factors of a perspective issue (the penis cannot be seen with the abdominal overhang) and with the presence of a significant suprapubic fat pad causing the penis to be partly buried [18, 26]. Concerns over levels of female sex hormones and industrial pollutants in water have been raised by the media. ASSESSMENT The clinician must determine whether the main concern relates to flaccid or erect length, and whether girth is a significant concern. The motivation (internal and external) and expectations of the consultation must be understood. A full medical, psychosexual and psychiatric history should be undertaken. Specific themes that must be explored are around concerns about appearance, and body image (and specifically for BDD). General beliefs, values, assumptions and behaviours around genitals and sexuality should be enquired about. How does this affect the man? What is he unable to do in his life that bothers him? Can he use public toilets? Does he socialize in the public house, where beer drinking would necessitate many visits to the toilet? Actual paruresis (an inability to urinate in the presence, real or perceived, of others) might occur for many men (another presentation of social anxiety) and might need specific treatment. Can he go swimming or participate in athletic sports? Does he avoid meeting a potential partner because he is afraid of the consequences of emotional intimacy? Most men will have a normal sex drive but might not have a partner. Has he avoided certain occupations? If the man is in a relationship, try to see the man and partner together, and get the perspective from the partner. Psychological profile scores might be helpful to assess self‐confidence, self‐esteem, quality of life, social anxiety and symptom distress, but should be limited to those clinicians skilled in undertaking and interpreting such inventories. A physical examination should involve an assessment of body habitus, detailed genital examination (immediately after genital exposure, to prevent any changes due to external temperature) with careful exclusion of genuine penile anomalies such as hypospadias, epispadias and Peyronie’s disease. The presence of a significant suprapubic fat pad should be noted. Careful measurements of flaccid length, stretched length and flaccid girth are essential. If the erect size, particularly of girth, is an issue then measurements after intracavernosal alprostadil are also helpful (or ask the patient for a digital image of the erect penis). As endocrine abnormalities can cause true micropenis, a general assessment of the secondary sexual characteristics is valuable. MANAGEMENT AND TREATMENT OPTIONS Normalize and provide education It is important to avoid dismissing the concerns raised by the man; to do so might further humiliate him and heighten his anxiety and concerns. It is helpful to normalize the situation, as it is a common concern amongst many men, and to give the man some reassurance about the condition and his symptoms. As misinformation or lack of information is often apparent, it is important to educate the patient about the normal variation in penile size and how his penile dimensions relate to the normal range. It is also important to educate the patient about the relative importance placed on the size of the penis by most other men and women, as well as society and the media, and how he might selectively notice certain aspects of external cues around the genitals in general. Mirror work The patient is asked to look at himself undressed in front of a full‐length mirror. By doing so, he will observe the penis in the way that he would see other men. The penis looks longer and larger than when observed from above, looking down while standing upright. This can be done at home when alone, or can be done with a clinician or therapist, with the patient standing behind a curtain partition. This can be very useful for a man who avoids looking at himself naked or has no access to a full‐length mirror at home [27]. Psychological therapies Psychotherapy is important for many men with concerns about having a small penis. Whether the penis is actually small or just perceived to be small, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can be useful in building confidence and counteracting negative thoughts. CBT involves exploring the typical thinking patterns experienced by the patient and ascertaining if some of these can be ascribed as automatic, protective but also unhelpful and self‐defeating. Substitution of alternative generated thoughts (alone or with the input of the therapist) and/or changes in ways of responding (behaving) to such thoughts can bring about dramatic changes. Where the penis is on the lower side of normal dimensions, the man can be provided with suggestions on how to cope and accept these facts. CBT is also effective in BDD [28]. Wherever possible, explorative work with a partner should be encouraged. Themes around self‐confidence, self‐esteem, anger, fear of rejection and narcissism might emerge. Therapy in a facilitated group might help men to challenge each other and their stated anxieties more effectively than in individual therapy, although equally there might be ongoing competitiveness to have the ‘smallest penis’ or greatest social impairment. Physical treatments These include use of vacuum devices, penile extenders and traction devices, and penoscrotal and penile rings. Evidence on their efficacy is very limited and it is important that the patient is aware of this. Vacuum devices are ordinarily used as a treatment for ED but can also be used to ‘exercise’ the penis. This can have both a psychological uplifting effect for the patient but evidence suggests that there is minimal physical change. A recent study reported on 37 men with a stretched penis length of <10 cm who used the device for 20 min, three times a week. The mean penile stretched length increased from 7.6 cm to 7.9 cm after 6 months of treatment, although this change was not statistically significant. Interestingly, three men had an increase in their penile length of >1 cm, and nine were satisfied with the treatment [29]. Penile extenders have also been used as a means of stretching the penis, and devices are available for use throughout the day. There are several commercial devices available (including the Jes extender and Andropenis) although there are few data showing efficacy for any of them. A recent study of 31 men, with a mean baseline stretched penile length of 12 cm, showed that with daily use of the Phallosan® extender system for ≥3 h, by 3 months there was a mean stretched length of 13 cm with a further increase to 13.8 cm by 6 months (P < 0.001) [30]. Changes were also seen in penile diameter. There was a good correlation between the duration of use of the device and increase in length, and 80% of patients were happy with the outcome. An older study reported the use of a stretching device (Penistretcher®) in nine men with a baseline stretched length of 12 cm. They reported that after using this device for ≥6 h per day over a 4‐month period, the mean increase in stretched length was 1.8 cm [31]. Both these reports included few men and were only reported as abstracts. There are currently no peer‐reviewed publications related to the use of these devices in men with SPS. Other devices that have been used in this group of patients include ‘Cock rings’ and penoscrotal rings. In one small report, there was a suggestion that they might help to augment penile size and maintain erections in men with anxiety [32]. Medications These might be indicated for use in men with SPS; the main group of drugs used are the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Fluoxetine has been shown to be effective in treating BDDs [28] and is better than placebo in both delusional and non‐delusional patients. Buspirone is an anxiolytic that can be tried in extreme cases of anxiety. Anti‐psychotic medication can be used to treat delusional BDD but there is little evidence of efficacy beyond the treatment of the psychosis per se. A typical course of treatment might be 8 weeks on an SSRI and/or adjunctive treatments such as buspirone or pimozide (a rarely used antipsychotic agent) [33]. Testosterone therapy is only of value in men with micropenis [34] and is not considered further here. Self‐help sources Inevitably, many men, rather than seek formal medical help, prefer to use other sources of information, but might then seek medical advice. The Internet is a rich resource of sources offering to help men ‘increase their manhood’. Inevitably, there are no efficacy data relating to most of these treatments (especially the many pills and lotions available). Common sense advice can be found by some retailers, including ‘bulge underpants’ and swim shorts, body and genital hair trimming or shaving, the use of ‘hot towels and wraps’ and ‘jelqing’. The last is an ancient Arab technique whereby the hand pulls on the penis causing stretching (and effectively self‐focus work encouraging psychological acceptance of the penis, which will change in size and shape during the process) and is recommended on many websites. Some websites advocate that ‘small is beautiful’ and that the smaller penis can be celebrated by both the man and his partner. Surgical treatment This would appear to be an attractive option for many men with SPS, and indeed, for those who research the Internet there is no shortage of sites encouraging such an approach. However, the results of surgery are poorly documented and significant complications can ensue. Accordingly, it is recommended that any surgical procedure should only be used after a careful preoperative assessment, which should include a thorough psychological assessment as outlined above. Furthermore, careful advice on the potential results of surgery and the potential complications that might ensue is essential. Indeed, the 2nd International Consultation on Sexual Dysfunctions concluded that ‘most men will not wish to proceed to surgery when properly informed of the likely outcome and risks of complications’[35]. The ethical issues of offering such surgery to men with a normal sized penis (which is usually the case [36]) are reviewed by Vardi [37], especially as this appears to be increasing in the private sector rather than research or university settings [38]. If, after such an approach, the man wishes to consider surgery, then several surgical options are available. Some surgical approaches will potentially increase the flaccid length of the penis (e.g. division of the suspensory ligament of the penis), while others have been reported to increase both flaccid and erect length. Similarly, some approaches offer an increase in erect girth only, while others offer an increase in both erect and flaccid girth. Either liposuction or suprapubic lipectomy are potentially valuable in men with a significant suprapubic fat pad, thereby making a partly buried penis appear more prominent. Other than bruising, there are few complications with such an approach, and the cosmetic results are reasonable. However, there are few reported results for this approach [39]. Division of the suspensory ligament is the procedure that has been most commonly described for flaccid penile lengthening [39-44]; it allows the corpora cavernosa to be partly separated from the pubis, thereby increasing the apparent flaccid length of the penis. Some form of adjustment of the suprapubic skin is needed (usually a V‐Y advancement flap or a Z‐plasty), and it is sometimes helpful to place a ‘spacer’ between the pubis and the corporal bodies to prevent re‐scarring at the site of
. markdownRemark. frontmatter. title } </ h1 > < small > { this. props. data. markdownRemark. frontmatter. date } </ small > < div dangerouslySetInnerHTML = { { __html : this. props. data. markdownRemark. html, } } /> </ div > ) } } export default BlogPostTemplate export const pageQuery = graphql ` query BlogPost($slug: String!) { markdownRemark(slug: { eq: $slug }) { # Get the markdown body compiled to HTML. html frontmatter { title # Transform the date at build time! date(formatString: "MMM D, YYYY") } } } ` All data sourcing and transforming is plugin-driven. So in time, any imaginable data source and potential ways of transforming its data will be an npm install away. For the markdown ecosystem there’s already a robust set of plugins including adding syntax highlighting with PrismJS and resizing images referenced in markdown files so they’re mobile ready. There’s also source plugins written for Contentful, Wordpress, Drupal, Hacker News (really 😛), and more as well as transformer plugins for markdown, JSON, YAML, JSDoc, React prop-types, and images. We’re collecting a list of additional source/transformer plugins that’d be useful to have over at https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/issues/1199 These plugins are easy to write (somewhat similar to webpack loaders) so we expect to see the list of plugins grow rapidly. Building for the next billion internet users As Benedict Evans has noted, the next billion people poised to come online will be using the internet almost exclusively through smartphones. Smartphones with decent specs (as good or better than the Moto G4), a great browser, but without a reliable internet connection. Gatsby uses modern web performance ideas (e.g. the PRPL Pattern) developed by the Google Chrome Developer Relations team and others to help websites work well on modern browsers with unreliable networks. Sites built with Gatsby run as much as possible in the client so regardless of the network conditions—good, bad, or nonexistent—things will keep working. When a page loads, Gatsby immediately starts prefetching resources for pages nearby so that when a user clicks on a link, the new page loads instantly. Many of the top e-commerce websites in areas where people are coming online for the first time are developing their websites using these techniques. Read Google’s case studies on: Service worker and offline support Service workers are perhaps the most exciting technology that’s come to the web in the past several years. It makes possible (finally!) sophisticated client caching plus true offline support. We’ve added excellent support to Gatsby for Service Workers and a great offline experience. If you’re using Chrome or Firefox, this site loads and works offline! Service workers make your site much more resilient against bad networks. If someone loads your site on a train and goes through a tunnel, you won’t lose them as they’ll still be able to keep clicking around. Route-based code splitting Many sites generate one JavaScript bundle for the entire site. Which means someone loading your frontpage loads far more code than is necessary which is bad then users get frustrated when site isn’t responsive to their clicks and touches while the code loads. Gatsby 1.0 initially only loads the code necessary for the page you’re on. As you navigate around, Gatsby loads in the code needed for each route. This means that one page with heavy imports: import d3 from "d3" import threejs from "react-threejs" …won’t affect the performance of the rest of the site. This is particularly helpful for teams of people collaborating on a site with pages with very different technical and business requirements. Different parts of the site can evolve independently of each other. One client I’m working with on Gatsby 1.0 (a stealth startup in San Francisco) is using Gatsby to build both their marketing site and SaaS app within the same Gatsby codebase. The marketing pages of their site are built using markdown and React components along with a modern css-in-js library Glamor for styling. The SaaS portion uses Redux to communicate with their Django API. The marketing portion of the site loads quickly with minimal JavaScript. When a potential customer goes to sign-up for the app, there’s no awkward jump from the marketing website to the web app—just a simple page change which seamlessly loads in the needed JavaScript. The team is sharing components and styles across the site without stepping on each others shoes as they rapidly iterate on features. Ending note Gatsby is just getting started. We’re really looking forward to working with you! See you on GitHub! 👋Obama at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation awards dinner. The stories of total randos — more than one of them armed — getting way too close to the president continue to creep out. The latest reason to doubt the competence of the Secret Service comes via Bloomberg, which reports that all a man had to do to get backstage with Obama last week was claim he was in Congress. Definitely not a lawmaker, the man still managed to cruise past security at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation awards dinner in Washington, where actual members of Congress were having photo-ops with the president. It reportedly took a member of the White House staff to realize the man wasn’t Representative Donald Payne Jr., and he was removed without incident. “This guy went through security, fully screened,” the Secret Service said in a not-quite-reassuring-enough statement. As these worrying examples keep piling up, even after the resignation of Secret Service director Julia Pierson, the racial angle has become impossible to ignore. The New York Times has a front-page story today about the pervasive but unsubstantiated fears in the black community that President Obama’s protection is worse because of his race. “It is something that is widespread in black circles,” Representative Emanuel Cleaver II said, citing his constituents in Missouri. “I’ve been hearing this for some time: ‘Well, the Secret Service, they’re trying to expose the president.’ You hear a lot of that from African-Americans in particular.” The Secret Service, in constant defense mode for more than a week now, insists it’s not like that. “We recognize that protecting the president is a sacred trust we have with the American public and that they place in us,” said a spokesperson. “It’s never mattered to the service who the president is because we recognize that trust.” That trust, needless to say, is waning.Has Arvind Kejriwal become the last hope of Congress in its bitter struggle against Narendra Modi? Many Congress leaders no longer believe they can win in 2014, but hope that Modi can still be stopped from becoming prime minister. The sacrifice of a parish like Delhi is small change in the larger game. In theory, this strategy has its merits. Modi and Kejriwal have one asset in common. They are outsiders who promise to cleanse the gutters of Delhi corruption. If Modi, with an energized BJP cadre in support, remains the only claimant to honesty’s mantle, Congress could face electoral upheaval. But if the mantle can be shared, voter focus will be split. The problems are apparent, once you clear the gold dust of media coverage. Delhi has seven MPs; Parliament has a hundred times that and more. Television often gives more attention to seven seats than 700, but offering free water to the capital’s middle class from some magic jug is not quite the same as finding a solution to river disputes between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Delhi was the only state to produce a confused result, but the rough-and-ready opinion poll that Kejriwal conducted after the Assembly results to check the city’s mood confirmed an important fact: voters go to the polling booth to elect an alternative government, not only to give vent to anger. Kejriwal would have preferred another, quick, election, to maximize the positive surge in his direction. Citizens told him to get on with it, and deliver on promises instead of stretching an alibi. There is a consistent message from ground level. Voters want a stable government. Kejriwal cannot offer that at a national level. Nor can he promise a coalition, since he considers every other party corrupt. His only rationale for entering Parliament will be that of a security guard service. Good, but possibly not good enough. But there isn’t a gambler in a casino, or in a general election lottery, who will accept defeat before a last throw of dice. Before 2009, the pursuit of Modi was a catchment run for votes. In 2014, the confrontation has edged closer to existential. The camouflage, if there was ever any, has been ripped off. Modi’s slogan is unambiguous, an India rid of Congress. He asked Mumbai, from where Mahatma Gandhi told the British in 1942 to quit India, to launch a “Quit Congress” movement. At least some Congress seniors do not dismiss this as seasonal bluster. They feel that Modi could turn victory in 2014 to re-election in 2019, even as he coils Congress in corruption cases. Would a family-run Congress possess the commitment and resilience to survive such a difficult decade ahead? The party has already disappeared from huge swathes in the country, without any help from Modi. Time, and dejection, might do the rest. They are confident, however, that Congress can negotiate its way through the swamp if the next administration is led by anyone else. Only Modi would squeeze it out of political space. Congress has never pursued any politician with the ferocity it displays against Modi. This is not merely desire for retribution; it is also evidence of worry. The past few days have been particularly depressing to Congress, as accusations have peeled away despite long and intense scrutiny. CBI, which reports to the Centre, could not find “prosecutable evidence” against Modi in the Ishrat Jahan death. A magistrate’s court has ruled that Modi cannot be charged with collusion in the 2002 Gujarat riots. A final attempt is being made through the “snoopgate” allegations. But after setbacks in tougher cases, there isn’t too much credibility left in UPA’s storehouse, let alone time. In public life, an accusation often comes roaring like a lion, and retreats bleating like a lamb. But voters have sharp ears. By February we will know whether Kejriwal has been able to use Congress, or vice versa. It might suit both if Kejriwal loses Congress support because he has filed corruption cases. Kejriwal would be rid of government, and Congress would be rid of Kejriwal. A wounded Kejriwal could then be unleashed on the general election. In the meantime, all Modi has to do is wait, and keep quiet. If BJP had won Delhi, he would have no answers on electricity rates, water or crime. Delhi’s water comes from Congress-ruled Haryana; electricity from corporations, who are even less generous; and the police is run by the Centre. Some battles are better lost. The best New Year greeting has come to me from a friend. It consists of two lines from T S Eliot’s Four Quartets: “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language, And next year’s words await another voice.” We shall see which voice prevails.Of all of the ludicrous, misplaced, and, frankly, chilling criticisms and intimidation of the free press in recent days, none rises to the level of absurdity as the criticism leveled against the Minnesota media overnight for showing this. Gov. Mark Dayton fainted near the end of his annual statewide address https://t.co/IEi9bWE5Wm pic.twitter.com/GZgUeGRjSZ — Glen Stubbe (@gspphoto) January 24, 2017 Gov. Dayton fainted during the State of the State speech in the House of Representatives last night and local journalists had no choice but to tell you he did. It’s their job. “Let’s be respectful and not post these pictures for cripes sake,” one person on Twitter replied to Star Tribune photojournalist Glen Stubbe’s posting. Here’s a better idea: Let’s not. For the record, of course, it was a horrifying sight to see. A 70-year-old man collapsing, instinctively makes us want to look away, just as House TV panned away from the scene moments after it happened. The governor’s slurred speech just before he went down only added to the alarm, which hasn’t been assuaged by the good news that the governor appears to have recovered. But the time and the place dictates decisions such as this and there simply are no compelling reasons for journalists to shield viewers and readers from a potentially monumental moment in state history. This is journalism, not public relations, and sometimes it’s ugly and uncomfortable. There can and should be little expectation of privacy for a governor, and there certainly can be none for one delivering the State of the State speech. Yes, it is personally embarrassing to collapse at such a moment. It is horrifying to watch. So was this. And this… And this… And, of course, this… People always have the option of turning away, but there is no alternative when a free press sanitizes news and, potentially, history. It’s not a role any responsible citizen should be urging upon journalists. They ought not be assigned as guardians of dignity at the expense of providing important information to the people they serve. What can we learn by seeing the video of Gov. Dayton’s collapse? Most important, we can learn that the explanations surrounding the incident aren’t adding up to the lay-person. Within a few minutes of his collapse, politicial officials noted Dayton was “fine” and was joking as he walked out of the Capitol. His son provided us with the comfort we were seeking when he assured us his dad was OK. I'm with my dad now and he's doing great. Thank you all for your kind well-wishes and words of concern. — Eric Dayton (@ericdayton) January 24, 2017 He said the governor went back to the Governor’s Mansion and worked on a puzzle with his grandson. Dad and Hugo are now doing a very advanced puzzle together, so that has to be a good sign! pic.twitter.com/8auhKsniZc — Eric Dayton (@ericdayton) January 24, 2017 Dayton’s staff issued this statement: Statement from Governor Dayton’s Chief of Staff: https://t.co/LRnx2d1uif pic.twitter.com/2I8OJm7PIK — Governor Mark Dayton (@GovMarkDayton) January 24, 2017 Perhaps if people weren’t so concerned about journalists doing journalism, they instead could have noticed that, from afar, none of this makes any sense. Who collapses after slurring speech and then goes home and not to a hospital for a full medical checkout? Why are EMTs — not doctors — monitoring him at his home? Why is his staff still pointing out that he’ll be at the Capitol today to issue a new budget? Sen. Scott Jensen, R-Chaska, a doctor, was one of the people who rushed to Dayton’s side. He told MPR’s Cathy Wurzer this morning the governor’s pulse was “in the thirties.” He checked for signs of a possible stroke. “I have many patients who faint multiple times,” he said. “I think Gov. Dayton works very hard and, like most people, he’s his own worst enemy” about taking care of himself. A year ago, Dayton, who has had serious health problems from back woes, fainted at a dinner in Woodbury. He spent the night at the hospital. His staff said he was being treated for dehydration. That’s the expected course of action at moments such as this and to the extent it wasn’t last night is, itself, cause for additional concern. Perhaps there’s a good explanation for why a similar reasonable and cautious approach to the governor’s care wasn’t the order of the day last night. No doubt, some will insist it’s disrespectful and none of our business to ask. They’re wrong.Beulah Park racetrack in Grove City has been vacant since it closed for good in 2014. But as jockeys packed their bags, horses trotted elsewhere and decaying buildings came tumbling down, a champion of Ohio horse racing remained in the now-overgrown infield. Glacial Princess, Ohio's winningest racehorse, was ceremoniously buried there 30 years ago, not far from the finish line that she often crossed ahead of all others. A headstone on the right side of the tote board, visible from the grandstand, served as a tribute to the legacy of Ohio's "Iron Lady." An Ohio racing enthusiast and his helpers were determined to exhume her after the site was sold and primed for development. They planned to relocate the champion's remains to the nonprofit Old Friends thoroughbred retirement farm in Georgetown, Kentucky, so she could rest peacefully when construction begins. But after hours of digging Saturday, the group found no trace of her. It's possible the remains deteriorated, they said. They found a railroad spike, the remains of a small dog wrapped in a blanket, and a race ticket believed to be from the 1930s. Ultimately, after excavating a good portion of the infield, they decided that Glacial Princess will remain permanently at rest at the track where her impressive career began and ended. "It's definitely disappointing, but we're still going to memorialize her, not let her memory just fade into the past," said Ryan Brady, 31, of Elyria in northeastern Ohio, the racing fan and horse owner who led the effort. Glacial Princess was bought at Beulah Park as a yearling, and she was euthanized there in 1987 at age 6 after suffering a broken leg in the Ballerina Stakes. The park was Ohio's first thoroughbred track when it opened in 1923. Brady collected pieces of the winner's circle, the old ticket, some dirt from the finish line and the horse's burial site and placed it in a tote to send to Old Friends. Glacial Princess' former owner, John Graver of Marion, will ship her headstone there, too, and Brady plans to send red carnations, Ohio's state flower. Brady never saw Glacial Princess race, but he heard plenty of tales about the lightning-fast, steel-gray mare who routinely beat the boys. When the track closed, he feared that her grave might be disrespected. "I kept thinking, 'This champion can't have a parking lot paved over her,'" Brady said. Deanna Grimstead, assistant professor of anthropology at Ohio State University, led Saturday's dig with seven students. John Queen of Richwood, Brady's friend and a fellow racing enthusiast, brought the backhoe. Work has begun to redevelop the 210-acre Beulah Park site into houses, apartments and commercial space. A sizable park commemorating Grove City's racing history also is planned, and preliminary renderings show it encompassing Glacial Princess' grave, meaning that her remains won't be disturbed. A development plan could be finalized in the next few months, Grove City Administrator Chuck Boso said. Due to conflicting information, it's unclear whether Glacial Princess was buried whole. Traditionally, only a racehorse's head, hooves and heart are buried, and the rest of the animal is cremated. A whole burial is a high honor. Although Glacial Princess didn't have much of a national following, her dominance is well-known among Ohio's racing community. She was named Ohio Horse of the Year in 1985 and 1986. Hollywood Gaming at Mahoning Valley Race Course near Youngstown still hosts the Glacial Princess Stakes, a race that was hosted at Beulah Park until it closed. She won 27 of her 52 starts and earned nearly $550,000. John Engelhardt, head of Ohio Thoroughbred Breeders & Owners, produced a 12-minute documentary about Glacial Princess. "At the height of her game, it was 'catch me if you can' right out the gate," Engelhardt said. awidmanneese@dispatch.com @AlissaWidmanFemale flight attendants are furious that Air France will require them to wear headscarves and loose clothing in Tehran when service from Paris to Iran's capital resumes later this month, union representatives say. Multiple flight crew unions are fighting back against the rules, with at least one reaching out to a government minister in hopes that she would intervene. The headscarf requirement and clothing limitations are "true threats to their dignity," the Union des Navigants de l'Aviation Civile (UNAC) wrote in a letter to Laurence Rossignal, France's minister for women’s rights and families, Friday. Another union, Syndicat National du Personnel Navigant Commercial (SNPNC), also denounced the provisions in a statement, calling them "an attack on freedom of conscience and individual freedoms, and invasion of privacy." Union representatives have asked Air France to make service on flights to Tehran voluntary for female crew members who do not want to wear headscarves, without repercussions related to pay or schedules. Women are required to cover their hair in Iran; meanwhile in secular France, hijabs and full body veils are banned. Air France is set to resume service to Tehran on April 17 after an eight-year break. The service was initially cut as part of international sanctions related to Iran's nuclear program. Following the 2015 nuclear deal struck between Iran, the U.S., France and several other countries, Air France announced it would fly once again to the tourist-hungry country. Specifically, Air France's modesty rules require women to wear pants during the flight from Paris to Tehran and a loose fitting jacket and headscarf when they exit the plane. Those that don't comply could be penalized, Christophe Pillet, an SNPNC spokesperson told Agence France-Presse. “It is not our role to pass judgment on the wearing of headscarves or veils in Iran," Flore Ariighi, head of the UNAC told the Telegraph. "What we are denouncing is that it is being made compulsory. Stewardesses must be given the right to refuse these flights.” Air France told the AFP that the headscarf rule was not new. It was in place before service to Tehran was cut in 2008. "Iranian law requires that a veil covering the hair be worn in public places by all women on its territory," the airline said. "This obligation, which does not apply during the flight, is respected by all international airlines which fly to Iran." According to the union letter to the government minister, Air France also asked its female flight attendants to refrain from smoking in public. Male attendants were not given the same advisory. Air France has not responded to Mashable's request for comment. Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.I recently read Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots with the UMD CS faculty book club. The book considers the impact of the growth of information technology (IT) on the human labor market, and how the trend towards greater automation could eventually eliminate a substantial number of jobs. The result could be a radical, and disruptive, reshaping of the global economy. I would recommend the book. I found it well-written and thought provoking. Ford capably argues from past economic and technology trends and also digs into particular problems, products, and research in order to extrapolate future impact. Of the ten faculty who discussed the book, nine of us (including me) were convinced that future automation will be increasingly disruptive to human labor markets. While reading the book, I found myself wondering about my own role, and that of my field, in addressing this situation we’ve contributed to. Many computer scientists have high-minded ideals and wish to help society through IT innovation. What can we do to ensure that those ideals are realized, rather than perverted into the dystopian future that Ford is warning us about? Robots replacing humans The Rise of the Robots considers how automation is increasingly replacing human labor, and speculates about the long term impact of such replacement. One 2013 analysis quoted in the book suggests that 47 percent of current American jobs are at high risk of being automated within the next 20 years. The book provides its own specific, suggestive examples. One is a robot that can perform all of the tasks needed to construct a high-quality hamburger. This is a task with a clear specification that can be realized in a carefully controlled environment; another example is robot-based automotive manufacturing. As artificial perception and dexterity improve, the need for careful choreographing will diminish and the low-skilled tasks that only humans can do now will be automated, too, e.g., restocking boxes or constructing parts of houses (both mentioned in the book). Google’s (actually Boston Dynamics’) Atlas “robo human” is impressively capable. As artificial cognition improves, jobs involving analysis and management will also be increasingly automated. A contemporary example is financial analysis. Dan Nadler, the inventor of Kensho, a “computational analysis engine for the financial industry” now in use by top banks, was recently interviewed by the NYT: “Within a decade, he said, between a third and a half of the current employees in finance will lose their jobs to Kensho and other automation software.” Even today, most market trades—between 50 and 70%—are driven by algorithms, not people. This is how companies like Jane Street Capital can be so profitable with so few workers. An article in the NYT stated that “Jane Street, which is privately held, has increased its shareholder’s equity, or net worth, to more than $1 billion today from $228 million in 2007. … Moreover, it supports just 450 people in offices in New York, London and Hong Kong.” The book states that over the last 15 years, 50,000 Wall Street jobs have been lost—a 33% decline—even as overall revenue and profits are up. The book points to the future possibility of someone “doing everything right” in terms of getting a college degree and good grades, but still not being able to find a meaningful job. Even now, a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute says that higher unemployment and underemployment for college graduates “stems from weak demand for goods and services, which makes it unnecessary for employers to significantly ramp up hiring.” The impact of increased automation One view of how this plays out is that as some industries succumb to automation, other industries will emerge to offer new jobs that replace the lost ones. As support for this view, the book considers the agricultural industry. At the turn of the century, about 40% of the workforce was involved in agriculture. Today it is about 2%. As agriculture was increasingly carried out by machines, people moved to different sectors, with the service sector being the dominant today. During our book club discussion, one person referred to predictions of job growth from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which point to increasing employment in the health care industry, food preparation, and some areas of business and technology, as evidence that declines in other areas are being counteracted. As machines do more of the work, humans must find jobs that machines cannot do as well. But as robots and automation become even more capable, fewer opportunities for humans will remain. And a problem arises when these new jobs are less stable and pay less than the jobs they replace. Such a trend has been playing out since the mid-1970s as shown in a compelling graphic due to Robert Reich in the NYT. Here is a snapshot of one part of it: While automation tends to make the production of goods cheaper, it relies on the assumption that more people will buy them, raising profits. In the mid-20th century when this happened, the profits trickled down to the workers whose productivity was responsible for reducing costs. These workers then bought more goods, creating a virtuous cycle. However, this cycle is broken by IT: When machines do things instead of humans, the productivity gains need not be passed back to workers as higher wages. The rising tide does not lift all boats. Rather, the tide lifts the capital owners, who make more profits. Eventually no cheapening of goods will be sufficient—enough of the population will be sufficiently poor that they will be unable to buy the goods to keep things afloat. Ultimately, perhaps well into a period of significant human suffering, the whole system will collapse. Not everyone agrees with this analysis, or agrees that automation is a significant cause of income inequality; e.g., trade policy is an oft-cited source (and surely a contributor). Robert J. Gordon’s book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, was raised during the book club discussion as a thoughtful criticism of Ford’s point of view. Reflections The future dominance of automation raises many challenging questions. The most obvious question is: What can we do to prevent the large-scale suffering that could result from a radical shakeup of the labor market? Answering this question requires answering a more philosophical question: What is the value of the human being as such? Is every human being valuable or is a human being valuable only in reference to their production value, brain power, etc.? Robots are steadily doing everything better than humans at the level of production. How society responds to this reality will reveal how it values (all) human beings. Humans vs. machines One response might be to attempt to hold back technological progress, protesting today’s automation just as the Luddites protested textile automation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But on reflection this approach doesn’t make sense. The problem is not automation itself; to the contrary it has brought, and can continue to bring, tremendous benefits to humanity at low cost. The problem is rather how the treatment of automation as labor-replacing capital increases relative poverty and creates ever greater income inequality. The solution to this problem is social/political, not technical. On the other hand, it is worth asking: What jobs (or what human work) is fundamentally irreplaceable? What is the role of humans in an automated world? Again there is an important philosophical question here. Can a robot actually be a better mother than a human mother? Is there an irreplaceable value to a human teacher, present in the classroom in the flesh? Is there a value to a nurse and physical human touch? It may be that we will choose not to employ automation in some cases even if such automation could be developed. Or we will deploy it and later realize that doing so produced worse outcomes. Basic income The main idea suggested by the book to deal with dwindling jobs is to find a way to make gains derived from automation benefit everyone, not just capital owners. An idea proposed by Friedrich Hayek in the 1970s is one possible solution: Give all citizens a no-strings-attached stipend, or basic income. This approach might retain the efficiency and innovation benefits of a market-based system (since people choose how to spend their stipends) while cushioning individuals from the loss of wage-paying work. Supporting a basic income might be politically difficult, however, as it runs contrary to current ideals about work—this is where a philosophy about human worth apart from work is critical. Basic income has received recent support from Silicon Valley and some scientific studies and it is set to be attempted in the Netherlands and possibly Switzerland. Andrew Flowers has written a comprehensive piece on the idea. What can we do, as technologists? As I read the book I wondered about my own role in the rise of the robots. After all, as a computer science professor I am teaching students about software-based automation—how to use it, understand it, and program it. Just as someone concerned about global warming might buy solar panels or an electric car, I wondered what I could do to combat the ill effects of increasing automation. There are (at least) two things I think technologists can do in response to the rise of the robots. First, they can recognize that their work is upending the traditional economic model, and they can think about how to respond to the suffering of those whose labor is being obviated. As I said above, I don’t think this means we should stop developing new technology, but we should think about ways to ensure that technology is used for the greatest good. At Universities, I could imagine developing seminar series and discussion groups to work through possible ideas. Second, technologists can get the word out, so that other people will start thinking about solutions, too. Technologists are obviously among the most qualified to speak about trajectories involving automation, and so the rest of society needs to hear it from them. Apparently, Kensho’s Dan Nadler does both of these things. Quoting the above-linked NYT article: Some … have told Nadler that he would be wise to stop talking about the potential job losses at the same banks he is trying to secure as customers. Nadler has told them that he needs to carry on, partly to maintain his intellectual integrity. He often connects his discussion of jobs to his political fund-raising on behalf of candidates who call for a more robust social-safety net. Maybe if we can accept that the robots are rising and work towards structures that share the benefits of automation equitably, we humans can end up like those aboard the Axiom in Wall-E. Or if that particular lazy lifestyle seems unpalatable, we can use the benefits of automation to take advantage of our freedom in a whatever way makes sense to each of us! Thanks to Boniface Hicks for helpful comments on drafts of this article and suggestions for reflection, and for the UMD CS faculty book club for interesting discussions.Peshmerga fighters who spoke to ANF stated that they do not accept or want the presence of Turkish troops in South Kurdistan, and will be standing by guerrillas against Turkish military in Kurdistan lands. The peshmergas who fight alongside guerrillas against ISIS gangs that are openly supported by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said “Turkish army is occupier in South Kurdistan, and we do not want them in our territory.” 'WE DON'T WANT TURKISH SOLDIERS IN OUR LANDS' Hewkar Evdıla Remezan: As the peshmerga forces of Kurdistan, we do not want Turkish soldiers in Başurê (Southern) Kurdistan. Turkish army is occupier and ISIS is just an excuse for its deployment which is basically meant for fighting the guerrilla. In the event of any attack against guerrillas, we peshmergas will be standing by them at the same front, and fight together against the Turkish state. We call upon Masoud Barzani to disapprove the deployment of occupier Turkish army in Kurdistan. 'ATTACK ON GUERRILLA WILL MEAN AN ATTACK ON PESHMERGA' Mıstefa Evdıla Hadi : We peshmerga fighters of Kurdistan object to the Turkish deployment in Başurê Kurdistan. It is not possible for peshmerga to remain silent on this occupation. Guerrilla and peshmerga are united, they are the defense forces of the same folk. An attack on guerrilla will therefore mean an attack on peshmerga. 'THOSE MURDERING KURDS IN THE NORTH CANNOT BE OUR ALLIES IN THE SOUTH' Aso Evdıla Hadi: How could we ever expect the Turkish state to defend our lands while it murders Kurds in Northern Kurdistan? How could we ever remain silent on the deployment of an occupier force in our land? Those who are murdering Kurds in the North cannot be our allies in the South. This is a trick." 'GUERRILLA AND PESHMERGA ARE THE DEFENSE FORCES OF KURDISTAN' Mıhemmed Teyip: Deployment of Turkish soldiers in Başurê Kurdistan is aimed at pitting guerrilla and peshmerga against each other. Guerrilla and peshmerga are the defense forces of Kurdistan, they are fighting at the same front against ISIS in many areas today. We are defending our people in the front line. 'THEY WANT TO MAKE KURDS ENGAGE IN A CONFLICT' Berzan Rahman Rehim: Turkish troops have been deployed in Southern Kurdistan with an aim to create a conflict among Kurds. Yet, we Kurds are united and will always remain so. Everyone should know that guerrilla and peshmerga are one united force. The regional government should also do the necessary to expel Turkish military from Southern Kurdistan. ...The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player, that title goes to the MPMan. But not being first didn't hurt the iPod. Thanks to a combination of great marketing, superior design and Apple's elusive 'X' factor, the iPod quickly grew to dominate the market. Roughly 3/4ths of the personal media player market is owned, lock stock and barrel, by the iPod. But the iPod's domination goes well beyond market share or sales numbers. Check out the picture above. I snapped it while waiting for a flight in Chicago's O'Hare airport. I've seen similar signs in other airports. Five things are listed. Four generic device categories, and one specific product name. Now, any moderately informed consumer will understand at a glance that "iPod" is a stand-in for any pocket-sized media player. Apple so totally dominates that market, and has from an early enough date, that the name of their product line is an acceptable stand-in for the entire device category. I can guarantee you Apple hoped to do the same thing with the iPhone. The fact that "smartphone" was written up on that sign instead of "iPhone" is evidence that they have failed. The iPhone is still a wildly, preposterously successful device, but it didn't achieve the kind of ubiquity necessary to fully dominate the market. There are a lot of reasons for this, and I don't mean to suggest that Apple somehow "messed up" with the iPhone. It isn't easy for a product to do what the iPod did. You have to do everything right, and launch at the perfect time and under the perfect conditions. So, here's the big question: will 'iPad' be to 'tablets' as 'iPod' is to'media players'? Apple owns 95.5% of the tablet market right now. Obviously, that won't last through to the next year. Decent alternatives have already arrived, and real competition is sure to hit at SOME point in 2011. But it may not. Every possible challenger on the docket so far has at least one or two potential flaws that could sink it. The Adam has an unproven manufacturer. Lenovo's U1 has been delayed regularly. Acer may just straight-up suck at building tablets. All we know right now is that Apple is the first company to make tablets mass-market viable, with Samsung a distant second. For many consumers, the iPad is the first commercial tablet they ever heard of. The fact that the iPad already holds 22% of the E-Book market share is a sign of just how deeply it has penetrated. If Apple delivers a solid iPad 2 in time to take steam away from the next big crop of Android tablets, odds are good they'll end 2011 still holding an overwhelming slice of the market. iPad ubiquity is still far from a sure thing. First, Apple has to keep the pressure on and Not Mess Up a single iteration or major update. Second, the next year's competing tablets will need to come up way short against Apple's colossus. The instant we see the tablet equivalent of the Samsung Galaxy S or D
Walsh (born November 20, 1947)[1] is an American singer, guitarist, and songwriter. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he has been a member of five successful rock bands: James Gang, Barnstorm, Eagles, the Party Boys, and Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band. Walsh was also part of the New Zealand band Herbs. In the 1990s, he was a member of the short-lived supergroup the Best. Walsh has also experienced success both as a solo artist and prolific session musician, being featured on a wide array of other artists' recordings. In 2011, Rolling Stone placed him at the No. 54 spot on its list of "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".[2] In the mid-1960s, after attending Kent State University, Walsh played with several local Ohio-based bands before reaching a national audience as a member of the James Gang, whose hit song "Funk #49" highlighted his skill as both a guitarist and singer. Roger Abramson, legendary concert producer and artist manager signed the James Gang to a management agreement with BPI in Cleveland. After the James Gang broke up in 1972, he formed Barnstorm with Joe Vitale, a college friend from Ohio, and Kenny Passarelli, a bassist from Colorado, where Walsh had moved after leaving Ohio. While the band stayed together for three albums over three years, its works were marketed as Walsh solo projects. The last Barnstorm album, 1974's So What contained significant guest contributions from several members of the Eagles, a group that had recently hired Walsh's producer, Bill Szymczyk. At Szymczyk's suggestion, Walsh joined the Eagles in 1975 as the band's guitarist and keyboardist following the departure of their founding member Bernie Leadon, with Hotel California being his first album with the band.[3] In 1998 a reader's poll conducted by Guitarist magazine selected the guitar solos on the track "Hotel California" by Walsh and Don Felder[4] as the best guitar solos of all time. Guitar World magazine listed it at eighth of the Top 100 Guitar Solos.[5] Besides his work with his several bands, he has released twelve solo studio albums, six compilation albums and two live albums. His solo hits include "Rocky Mountain Way", "Life's Been Good", "All Night Long", "A Life of Illusion" and "Ordinary Average Guy". As a member of the Eagles, Walsh was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, and into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2001. The Eagles are considered to be one of the most influential bands of the 1970s, and they remain one of the best-selling American bands in the history of popular music.[6] His creative contribution to music has received praise from many of the best rock guitarists, including Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, who said, "He has a tremendous feel for the instrument. I've loved his style since the early James Gang."[7] Eric Clapton said that "He's one of the best guitarists to surface in some time. I don't listen to many records, but I listen to his."[7] The Who's guitarist, Pete Townshend, said "Joe Walsh is a fluid and intelligent player. There're not many like that around."[2][7] Early life and education [ edit ] Joseph Fidler Walsh was born on November 20, 1947 in Wichita, Kansas. Walsh's mother was a classically trained pianist of Scottish and German ancestry, and Walsh was adopted by his stepfather at the age of five after his biological father was killed in a plane crash. In the 1950s, it was common practice for Social Security, school registration, and health records for children to take the name of their stepfather, but Walsh's birth father's last name was Fidler, so he took that as his middle name.[8] Walsh and his family lived in Columbus, Ohio, for a number of years during his youth. When Walsh was twelve years old, his family moved to New York City. Later, Walsh moved to Montclair, New Jersey, and he attended Montclair High School, where he played oboe in the school band. Inspired by the success of the Beatles, he replaced Bruce Hoffman as the bass player in the locally popular group the Nomads in Montclair, beginning his career as a rock musician. After high school, Walsh attended Kent State University, where he spent time in various bands playing around the Cleveland area, including the Measles. The Measles recorded for Super K Productions' Ohio Express the songs "I Find I Think of You", "And It's True", and "Maybe" (an instrumental version of "And It's True"). Walsh majored in English and minored in music; he was present during the Kent State massacre in 1970. Walsh commented in 2012: "Being at the shootings really affected me profoundly. I decided that maybe I don’t need a degree that bad."[9] After one term, he dropped out of university to pursue his musical career.[7] Musical career [ edit ] 1965–1967: The Measles (Joe Walsh years) [ edit ] The Measles, an Ohio garage bar band, were formed in 1965 by four Kent State University students, one of whom was Joe Walsh. Two tracks on the Ohio Express' Beg Borrow and Steal album, "I Find I Think Of You" and "And It's True" (both featuring Joe Walsh vocals) were actually recorded by the Measles, led by Walsh. Additionally, an instrumental version of "And It's True" was recorded by the Measles, re-titled "Maybe" and released as the B-side of the "Beg Borrow and Steal" single. 1968–1971: James Gang [ edit ] Walsh (left) with the James Gang, 1970 Around Christmas 1967, James Gang guitarist Glenn Schwartz, who turned out to be AWOL from the army and was breaking up with his wife, decided to leave the band to move to California, where he ended up forming the band Pacific Gas & Electric.[10] Just days later, shortly after the new year of 1968 had dawned, a friend of Schwartz's, Joe Walsh (from a fellow band called the Measles), knocked on Jim Fox's door and asked to be given a tryout as Schwartz's replacement. Walsh was accepted and the band continued as a five piece for a short time until Phil Giallombardo, who was still in high school at the time, left. Jeric and Walsh worked together on guitar parts but Jeric ended up leaving as well in the spring of 1968. He was then replaced by a returning Ronnie Silverman, who had been discharged from the military. In May 1968, the group played a concert in Detroit at the Grande Ballroom opening for Cream. At the last minute, Silverman informed the others that he would not join them at the show. The band, desperately in need of the money, took to the stage as a trio. They liked their sound as a threesome and decided to remain that way. In 1968, the band signed with manager Mark Barger, who was handling the career of fellow Ohio outfit the Lemon Pipers, who had just scored a big hit with "Green Tambourine." Barger put the Gang in touch with ABC Records staff producer Bill Szymczyk, who signed them to ABC's new Bluesway Records subsidiary in January 1969.[10] They released their debut album, Yer' Album, in 1969. In November 1969, bassist Tom Kriss decided he was no longer into the music and left to be replaced by Dale Peters, who was brought in from another group called E.T. Hoolie. The addition of Peters created the most successful incarnation of the James Gang. Walsh proved to be the band's star attraction, noted for his innovative rhythm playing and creative guitar riffs. In particular he was known for hot-wiring the pick-ups on his electric guitars to create his trademark "attack" sound.[11] The James Gang had several minor hits and became an early album-oriented rock staple for the next two years. It was during 1969 that Walsh sold his Les Paul Guitar to Jimmy Page.[12] Later in 1969, the group's record producer, Bill Szymczyk, arranged for the band to appear in the "electric Western" film Zachariah, with two James Gang songs, "Laguna Salada" and "Country Fever," also being used. For the recording of these two songs, vocalist Kenny Weiss was brought in to allow Walsh to focus on his guitar playing; he was gone by the time the group arrived in Mexico to shoot their movie scenes. "Laguna Salada" and "Country Fever" later reappeared as bonus tracks on the 2000 re-release of The James Gang Greatest Hits.[13] Shortly before the release of their second album James Gang Rides Again, the James Gang opened a show for the legendary rock band the Who in Pittsburgh. Their guitarist Pete Townshend met with the James Gang before they left and was impressed enough to invite them on the Who's subsequent European tour. When Walsh was asked about this he said that, "Pete's a very melodic player and so am I. He told me that he appreciated my playing. I was flattered beyond belief because I didn't think I was that good."[7] The James Gang's next two albums, James Gang Rides Again (1970) and Thirds (1971), produced such classics as "Funk #49" and "Walk Away". The album James Gang Live at Carnegie Hall was Walsh's last album with them, as he became dissatisfied with the band's limitations. The two remaining members, Peters and Fox, carried on with the lead vocalist Roy Kenner and guitarist Domenic Troiano (both ex-members of the Canadian band Bush) for two albums, Straight Shooter and Passin' Thru, both released in 1972. But in recent interviews, Fox stated that things did not work out musically with Troiano as hoped, so he left the band in 1973 and joined the Guess Who. 1971–1973: Barnstorm [ edit ] In December 1971, Walsh left the James Gang. He was invited to move to England and join Humble Pie by Steve Marriott, since Peter Frampton had left the band, but declined his offer.[7] Instead he moved to Colorado and formed a band called Barnstorm, with drummer and multi-instrumentalist Joe Vitale, and bassist Kenny Passarelli, although both of their albums credited Walsh as a solo artist. They started recording their debut album immediately after forming, but at the time there were only Walsh and Vitale on these sessions. Chuck Rainey did the first bass tracks on the album but these were soon replaced by Passarelli. Walsh and Barnstorm released their debut album, the eponymous Barnstorm in October 1972. After taking a cue from Townshend, Walsh utilized the ARP Odyssey synthesizer to great effect on such songs as "Mother Says" and "Here We Go". Walsh also experimented with acoustic guitar, slide guitar, effects pedals, fuzzbox, talk box, and keyboards as well as running his guitar straight into a Leslie speaker 122 to get swirly, organ-like guitar tones. The album was a critical success, but had only moderate commercial success. The follow-up, The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get, released in June 1973, was marketed under Walsh's name (although officially a Barnstorm album) and was their commercial breakthrough. It peaked at No. 6 on the US Billboard chart. The first and leading single, "Rocky Mountain Way" received heavy airplay and reached No. 23 on the US Top 40 chart.[14] It featured new member, keyboardist Rocke Grace, and Walsh shared the vocals and songwriting with the other three members of the band. As a result, a variety of styles are explored on this album. There are elements of blues, jazz, folk, pop, and Caribbean music. In 1974, Barnstorm disbanded and Walsh continued as a solo artist.[15] In late 1974, Walsh played slide guitar on the former Barnstorm band member Joe Vitale's debut solo album Roller Coaster Weekend. Walsh was taught the slide technique by Duane Allman who played on Eric Clapton's Layla of Derek and the Dominos.[16] 1975–1980: The Eagles [ edit ] In 1975, Walsh was invited to join The Eagles as founding member Bernie Leadon's replacement. There was some initial concern as to Walsh's ability to fit in with the band, as he was considered far too "wild" for The Eagles, especially by their drummer and co-lead vocalist, Don Henley.[17] Released on December 8, 1976, Hotel California was the band's fifth studio album and the first to feature Walsh. The album took a year and a half to complete, a process which, along with touring, drained the band. The second single from the album was the eponymous title track, which topped the charts in May 1977 and became one of the Eagles' signature songs next to "Take It Easy" and "Desperado". It features Henley on lead vocals, with a guitar duet performed by Felder and Walsh. The hard rock "Life in the Fast Lane" was based on a riff by Walsh. It reached No. 11 on the charts and helped establish Walsh's position in the band. Hotel California is the last album to feature founding member Randy Meisner, who abruptly left the band after the 1977 tour. He was replaced by the same musician who had succeeded him in Poco, Timothy B. Schmit. In 1977, the band, minus Don Felder, performed instrumental work and backing vocals for Randy Newman's album Little Criminals, including "Short People," which has backing vocals by Frey and Schmit. The Eagles went into the recording studio in 1977 to begin work on their next album, The Long Run. The album took two years to complete. The Long Run was released on September 24, 1979. Considered a disappointment by some music critics for failing to live up to Hotel California, it proved a huge commercial hit nonetheless; the album topped the charts and sold 7 million copies. In addition, it included three Top 10 singles—"Heartache Tonight", the title track and "I Can't Tell You Why". "In The City" by Walsh also received considerable airplay. The band also recorded two Christmas songs during these sessions, "Funky New Year" and "Please Come Home For Christmas," which was released as a single in 1978 and reached No. 18 on the charts. In 1980, the band broke up. 1973–2012: solo career [ edit ] Walsh has released twelve solo studio albums. In December 1974, Walsh released his first solo album that was not considered a Barnstorm project, So What, which contained more introspective material such as "Help Me Through the Night" and "Song For Emma", a tribute to Walsh's daughter who had been killed in a car accident the previous year. On a few tracks, Don Henley, Glenn Frey and Randy Meisner of the Eagles contributed backing vocals. In March 1976, Walsh released a live album, You Can't Argue with a Sick Mind, which also featured the Eagles. As the Eagles struggled to record their follow-up to Hotel California, Walsh re-ignited his solo career with the critically well-received album, But Seriously, Folks... in May 1978. It contained the single "Life's Been Good", his comedic depiction of rock stardom, which peaked at No. 12 on the US Billboard Hot 100[19] and remains to date his biggest solo hit. Walsh also contributed "In the City" to The Warriors soundtrack in 1979, a song penned and sung by Walsh that was later rerecorded for the Eagles' studio album, The Long Run.[20] Following the break up of the Eagles in July 1980, Walsh continued to release solo albums throughout the 1980s, but sales did not meet the same level of his earlier successes.[21] There Goes the Neighborhood was Walsh's first album since the demise of the Eagles, and it peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard 200. The album only spawned one single, "A Life of Illusion", which became one of Walsh's most popular songs. The single also topped the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, in 1981. "A Life of Illusion" was recorded in 1973 with Walsh's first solo band Barnstorm but was not completed. The overdubs and final mixes were completed during the There Goes the Neighborhood sessions and released on the album. The promotional video for the track shows the making of the album's cover. This song also appeared in the opening credits of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and appears as the first song on its soundtrack. In May 1983, Walsh released You Bought It – You Name It; the album was received negatively by the majority of music critics, while other reviewers noted good points to the album. It was also not as successful as Walsh's previous albums, peaking at No. 48 on the Billboard 200. Walsh found moderate success with the single "Space Age Whiz Kids", about the pinnacle of the 1980s video arcade craze. The album contains hard rock songs such as "I Can Play That Rock & Roll" and a cover of the Dick Haymes track, "Love Letters". It also contains more introspective material such as "Class of '65", and contains a song titled "I.L.B.T.s", an acronym for "I Like Big Tits". Walsh's new girlfriend Stevie Nicks was involved in his next album, The Confessor. Her old friend Keith Olsen was hired to produce the album and the musicians were prolific LA session musicians including: Jim Keltner, Mike Porcaro, Waddy Wachtel, Randy Newman, Alan Pasqua and many other musicians that Walsh had never worked with before.[22] In 1987, Walsh released his final solo album of the 1980s, Got Any Gum?, which was produced by Terry Manning, and features vocal contributions from J. D. Souther and Survivor's lead vocalist Jimi Jamison, but the album was a commercial disappointment. In 1991, Ordinary Average Guy, his ninth solo studio album, and its title track single, were released on the Epic label. The album features Ringo Starr, Jimi Jamison, and drummer Joe Vitale from Walsh's former band Barnstorm. Vitale also sings the lead vocals on the final track of the album, "School Days". In 1992, Walsh released what appeared to be his final album (until 2012), Songs for a Dying Planet, his tenth solo studio album. Like its predecessor, it was released on the Epic label. Keen to re-establish himself after receiving some poor reviews for his previous album, Walsh enlisted his former producer Bill Szymczyk. At the end of the track "Certain Situations" you can hear a Morse code message that says "Register and vote for me". His song "Vote for Me" was a minor success, peaking at No. 10 on the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. Walsh's song "One Day at a Time" was released in 2012 and details his struggles with alcohol and drug abuse earlier in his career. The song appeared on Walsh's album Analog Man, which was released on June 5, 2012. The album was co-produced by Jeff Lynne, with Tommy Lee James co-writing some of the album's tracks.[23] Eagles reunion [ edit ] Walsh performing with the Eagles, 2008 An Eagles country tribute album titled Common Thread: The Songs of the Eagles was released in 1993, thirteen years after the break up. Travis Tritt insisted on having the Long Run-era Eagles in his video for "Take It Easy" and they agreed. Following years of public speculation, the band formally reunited the following year. The line-up comprised the five Long Run-era members—Frey, Henley, Walsh, Felder, and Schmit—supplemented by Scott Crago (drums), John Corey (keyboards, guitar, backing vocals), Timothy Drury (keyboards, guitar, backing vocals) and Al Garth (saxophone, violin) on stage.[citation needed] "For the record, we never broke up, we just took a 14-year vacation," announced Frey at their first live performance in April 1994. The ensuing tour spawned a live album titled Hell Freezes Over (named for Henley's recurring statement that the band would get back together "when hell freezes over"), which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart. It included four new studio songs, with "Get Over It" and "Love Will Keep Us Alive" both becoming Top 40 hits. The album proved as successful as the tour, selling 6 million copies in the U.S. The tour was interrupted in September 1994 because of Frey's serious recurrence of diverticulitis, but it resumed in 1995 and continued into 1996.[24] In 1998, the Eagles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. For the induction ceremony, all seven Eagles members (Frey, Henley, Leadon, Meisner, Felder, Walsh, and Schmit) played together for two songs, "Take It Easy" and "Hotel California". Several subsequent reunion tours followed (without Leadon or Meisner), notable for their record-setting ticket prices.[25][26] The Eagles performed at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas on December 28 and 29, 1999, followed by a concert at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on December 31. These concerts marked the last time Felder played with the band and these shows (including a planned video release) later formed a part of a lawsuit filed by Felder against his former band members.[why?] The concert recordings were released on CD as part of the four-disc Selected Works: 1972–1999 box set in November 2000. Along with the millennium concert, this set included the band's hit singles, album tracks and outtakes from The Long Run sessions. Selected Works received platinum certification from the RIAA in 2002.[27] The band resumed touring in 2001, with a line-up consisting of Frey, Henley, Walsh and Schmit, along with Steuart Smith (guitars, mandolin, keyboards, backing vocals; essentially taking over Felder's role), Michael Thompson (keyboards, trombone), Will Hollis (keyboards, backing vocals), Scott Crago (drums, percussion), Bill Armstrong (horns), Al Garth (saxophone, violin), Christian Mostert (saxophone) and Greg Smith (saxophone, percussion).[citation needed] In 2003, the Eagles released a greatest hits album, The Very Best Of.[28] The two-disc compilation was the first that encompassed their entire career, from Eagles to Hell Freezes Over. It debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard charts and eventually gained triple platinum status. The album includes a new single, the September 11 attacks-themed "Hole in the World". Also in 2003, Warren Zevon, a longtime Eagles friend, began work on his final album, The Wind, with the assistance of Henley, Walsh and Schmit.[citation needed] On June 14, 2005, the Eagles released a new 2-DVD set titled Farewell 1 Tour-Live from Melbourne, featuring two new songs: Frey's "No More Cloudy Days" and Walsh's "One Day at a Time". A special edition 2006 release exclusive to Walmart and affiliated stores includes a bonus audio CD with three new songs: a studio version of "No More Cloudy Days", "Fast Company" and "Do Something".[29] In 2007, the Eagles consisted of Frey, Henley, Walsh, and Schmit. On August 20, 2007, "How Long", written by J. D. Souther, was released as a single to radio with an accompanying online video at Yahoo! Music. It debuted on television on Country Music Television during the Top 20 Countdown on August 23, 2007. The band had performed the song as part of their live sets in the early to mid-1970s, but did not record it at the time because Souther wanted to reserve it for use on his first solo album. Souther had previously worked with the Eagles, co-writing some of their biggest hits, including "Best of My Love", "Victim of Love", "Heartache Tonight" and "New Kid in Town". On October 30, 2007, the Eagles released Long Road Out of Eden, their first album of all-new material since 1979. For the first year after the album's release, it was available in the U.S. only via the band's website, at Walmart and at Sam's Club stores.[30] It was commercially available through traditional retail outlets in other countries. The album debuted at number 1 in the U.S.,[31] the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands and Norway. It became their third studio album and seventh release overall to be certified at least seven times platinum by the RIAA.[citation needed] Henley told CNN that "This is probably the last Eagles album that we'll ever make."[32] The Eagles made their awards show debut on November 7, 2007, when they performed "How Long" live at the Country Music Association Awards.[citation needed] On January 28, 2008, the second single of Long Road Out of Eden was released. "Busy Being Fabulous" peaked at No. 28 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Songs chart[33] and at No. 12 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks chart.[33] The Eagles won their fifth Grammy in 2008, in the category Grammy Award for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for "How Long".[citation needed] On March 20, 2008, the Eagles launched their world tour in support of Long Road Out of Eden at The O2 Arena in London. The Long Road Out of Eden Tour concluded the American portion of the tour at Rio Tinto Stadium in Sandy, Utah on May 9, 2009. It was the first concert ever held in the new soccer stadium. The tour traveled to Europe, with its final concert date on July 22, 2009, in Lisbon. The band spent the summer of 2010 touring North American stadiums with the Dixie Chicks and Keith Urban. The tour expanded to England as the headline act of the Hop Farm Festival on July 1, 2011.[citation needed] Asked in November 2010 whether the Eagles were planning a follow-up to Long Road Out of Eden, Schmit replied, "My first reaction would be: no way. But I said that before the last one, so you never really know. Bands are a fragile entity and you never know what's going to happen. It took a long time to do that last album, over a span of years, really, and it took a lot out of us. We took a year off at one point. I'm not sure if we're able to do that again. I wouldn't close the door on it, but I don't know."[34] Walsh said in 2010 that there might be one more album before the band "wraps it up".[35] In February 2013, the Eagles released a career spanning documentary called History of the Eagles and kicked off the supporting tour with 11 arena dates from July 6 to 25.[36] Henley said that the tour, which would continue until 2015,[37] "could very well be our last... we're gonna include at least one former band member in this tour and kinda go back to the roots, and how we created some of these songs. We're gonna break it down to the fundamentals and then take it up to where it is now."[38] Original Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon also appeared on the tour. Walsh stated, "Bernie's brilliant, I never really got a chance to play with him, but we've been in contact. We see him from time to time, and I'm really glad he's coming because it's going to take the show up a notch, and I'm really looking forward to playing with him, finally."[39] It has been reported that former members Randy Meisner and Don Felder will not appear.[37] Meisner had been invited but could not participate due to health problems, while Felder was reportedly not invited due to ongoing legal disputes with the band.[37] Other bands [ edit ] In late 1984 Walsh was contacted by Australian musician Paul Christie, the former bassist for Mondo Rock. Christie invited him to come to Australia to perform with the Party Boys, an all-star band with a floating membership of well-known Australian rock musicians. These included the critically acclaimed guitarist Kevin Borich, with whom Walsh became good friends. Walsh accepted and performed with the Party Boys on their late 1984-early 1985 Australian tour and appeared on their live album, You Need Professional Help. He remained in Australia for some time after the tour, putting together the short-lived touring band "Creatures From America", with Waddy Wachtel (guitar), Rick Rosas (bass guitar) and Australian drummer Richard Harvey (Divinyls, the Party Boys)[21] In 1987, Walsh returned to the United States to work on his album Got Any Gum?, which was produced by Terry Manning and features vocal contributions from J. D. Souther and Survivor's lead singer Jimi Jamison. After the album's commercial disappointment, Walsh decided to return to Australia in 1989 to tour with another incarnation of the Party Boys. Walsh also toured with Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band in 1989 and 1992, alternating a handful of his best-known songs with Starr's and tunes by other of the members of the All-Starr Band.[40] In 1989, Walsh recorded a MTV Unplugged with the R&B musician Dr. John. Also in 1989 Walsh filmed a live concert from the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles with Etta James and Albert Collins, called Jazzvisions: Jump the Blues Away.[41] While producing their Homegrown album in 1989, Walsh briefly joined New Zealand reggae band Herbs. Although he had left by the time of its 1990 release, he still appears as lead singer on two tracks, "Up All Night" and "It's Alright". The album includes the first recording of his "Ordinary Average Guys" (sung by late Herbs bassist Charlie Tumahai), which subsequently became a solo hit for Walsh as "Ordinary Average Guy".[42] In late 1990, Walsh was part of a band called the Best, along with keyboardist Keith Emerson, bassist John Entwistle, guitarist Jeff "Skunk" Baxter and drummer Simon Phillips. The band performed several shows in Hawaii and Japan, with a live video resulting.[43] In 1993, Walsh teamed up with Glenn Frey for the "Party of Two" tour in the United States. In 1996, James Gang did a reunion for the Democratic president, Bill Clinton. The band consisted of their "classic" line-up (Walsh, Peters, Fox), and they performed at the Cleveland State University Convocation Center on November 4, 1996. In 1998, ABC wanted to use a classic rock song rock for Monday Night Football that year, so they asked Walsh to rewrite the lyrics to "Rocky Mountain Way" for the quarterback John Elway of the Denver Broncos. "Rocky Mountain Elway" was the new title of the song and Walsh appeared in a video that ABC showed on the Monday Night Football. 2000s and 2010s [ edit ] In June 2004, Walsh performed at Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival in Dallas, Texas. He was also featured in September 2004 at the Strat Pack, a concert held in London, England, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Fender Stratocaster guitar. In 2006, Walsh reunited with Jim Fox and Dale Peters of the James Gang for new recordings and a 15-date summer reunion tour.[44] The tour lasted into the fall. In 2008, Walsh appeared on the Carvin 60th Anniversary Celebration DVD as a celebrity endorser. In the recorded interview, he highly praised Carvin Guitars and claims that the bridge design is "just like the first Les Paul models. I can't even get Gibson to reissue it".[21] Kent State University awarded Walsh an honorary degree in music in December 2001.[45] In May 2012, the Berklee College of Music awarded Walsh, along with other members of the Eagles, an honorary doctorate for his accomplishments in the field of music.[46] Notable appearances [ edit ] Walsh performing with the Eagles in 2009 In 1974, Walsh produced Dan Fogelberg's Souvenirs album and played the guitar, electric guitar, 12 string guitar, ARP bass and provided backing vocals. He also contacted Graham Nash to sing harmony vocals on "Part of the Plan", which helped send the album to No. 17 on the 1975 Billboard album chart.[47] In 1981 Walsh and former Barnstorm bandmate, Joe Vitale, went to work on old friend John Entwistle's fifth solo album Too Late the Hero, whenever they were free to work on it. The album turned out to become John Entwistle's best-charting solo album, with hit singles "Talk Dirty" and "Too Late the Hero".[48] Walsh was a background musician (1st guitar solo) on Eagles band member Don Henley's 1982 hit "Dirty Laundry" (listed as such in the liner notes of I Can't Stand Still and Actual Miles: Henley's Greatest Hits). Walsh has also contributed to albums by: Ringo Starr, America, REO Speedwagon, Jay Ferguson, Andy Gibb, Wilson Phillips, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Steve Winwood, and on the Richard Marx hit "Don't Mean Nothing".[49] Walsh was a regular guest DJ on Los Angeles radio station KLOS during the mid-1980s. They had a Saturday evening feature, with celebrity guest-hosts taking over the microphone (Walsh was the guest host far more frequently than any other). He was also a frequent guest and guest-host of Detroit and Chicago radio personality Steve Dahl.[50] Onscreen, Walsh has appeared in: The Blues Brothers, RoboCop, Promised Land, The Drew Carey Show, Duckman, MADtv, Live from Daryl's House, Rock the Cradle and Zachariah.[50] In October 2004, Walsh undertook speaking engagements in New Zealand to warn against the dangers of substance abuse. He said the visit was a "thank you" to people who took him to Otatara Pa when he toured New Zealand with reggae band Herbs while under heavy alcohol and cocaine addictions in 1989, an experience he has cited as the beginning of a long journey back to good health.[51] At Otatara Pa in 2004 Walsh said, "This is a special place, and it is very special to me. It was here on a visit many years ago, up on the hills, that I had a moment of clarity. I don't understand it, but I reconnected with my soul, and I remembered who I used to be. I admitted I had problems and I had to do something about it. It was the beginning of my recovery from my addiction to alcohol and drugs, and when I got back to America it gave me the courage to seek help."[52] On February 12, 2012, Walsh appeared on stage with Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl, and McCartney's band at the Staples Center in Los Angeles to close out the Grammy Awards show.[50] Walsh also appeared on the 60th Episode of Live from Daryl's House with Daryl Hall, which premiered on November 15, 2012.[53] On February 9, 2014, Walsh was featured in several songs on the CBS special The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to The Beatles.[54] In 2014, Walsh made a guest appearance on Foo Fighters' eighth studio album Sonic Highways.[55] On May 24, 2016 Walsh appeared on NBC's The Voice in which he played slide guitar, talk box and performed Rocky Mountain Way with contestant Laith Al-Saadi. Influences [ edit ] Walsh cites influences and with rock music / pop music bands and guitarists with whom many he has encountered and met on concert tours : Les Paul, Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Jeff Beck, the Beatles, Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin, Ritchie Blackmore and Deep Purple, Manfred Mann, Duane Allman and The Allman Brothers, Ronnie Wood and The Faces, Pete Townshend and The Who. In turn, he has influenced Dan Fogelberg, Maroon 5, Kenny Chesney, Jonny Lang, Blitzen Trapper, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and George Thorogood.[56] Duane Allman of the Allman Brothers Band taught Walsh how to play the slide guitar.[57] Public service [ edit ] Walsh is active in charity work and has performed in a number of concerts to raise money for charitable causes. He has also been a personal contributor to a number of charity causes including halfway houses for displaced adult women in Wichita, Kansas. Walsh funded the first talent-based scholarship at Kent State University in 2008.[58] Walsh's love of Santa Cruz Island grew into a lifelong commitment to conserve the environment there, and he has been active in preserving the island's parks. He is President of the Santa Cruz Island Foundation, and has served on the Foundation's board since the 1980s. Walsh had often joked about running for office, announcing a mock presidential campaign in 1980 and a vice presidential campaign in 1992. Walsh ran for President of the United States in 1980, promising to make "Life's Been Good" the new national anthem if he won, and ran on a platform of "Free Gas For Everyone".[59] Though Walsh was only 32 at the time of the election and thus would not have met the 35-year-old requirement to actually assume office, he said that he wanted to raise public awareness
the state church, the Church of Iceland, is declining rapidly, at a rate of more than 1% per year. Culture Icelandic culture has its roots in North Germanic traditions. Icelandic literature is popular, in particular the sagas and eddas that were written during the High and Late Middle Ages. Centuries of isolation have helped to insulate the country's Nordic culture from external influence; a prominent example is the preservation of the Icelandic language, which remains the closest to Old Norse of all modern Nordic languages.[214] In contrast to other Nordic countries, Icelanders place relatively great importance on independence and self-sufficiency; in a public opinion analysis conducted by the European Commission, over 85% of Icelanders believe independence is "very important," compared to 47% of Norwegians, 49% of Danes, and an average of 53% for the EU25.[215] Icelanders also have a very strong work ethic, working some of the longest hours of any industrialised nation.[216] According to a poll conducted by the OECD, 66% of Icelanders were satisfied with their lives, while 70% believed that their lives will be satisfying in the future. Similarly, 83% reported having more positive experiences in an average day than negative ones, compared to an OECD average of 72%, which makes Iceland one of the happiest countries in the OECD.[96] A more recent 2012 survey found that around three quarters of respondents stated they were satisfied with their lives, compared to a global average of about 53%.[217] Iceland is liberal with regard to LGBT rights issues. In 1996, the Icelandic parliament passed legislation to create registered partnerships for same-sex couples, conferring nearly all the rights and benefits of marriage. In 2006, parliament voted unanimously to grant same-sex couples the same rights as heterosexual couples in adoption, parenting and assisted insemination treatment. On 11 June 2010, the Icelandic parliament amended the marriage law, making it gender neutral and defining marriage as between two individuals, making Iceland one of the first countries in the world to legalise same-sex marriages. The law took effect on 27 June 2010.[218] The amendment to the law also means registered partnerships for same-sex couples are now no longer possible, and marriage is their only option—identical to the existing situation for opposite-sex couples.[218] Icelanders are known for their deep sense of community: An OECD survey found that 98% believe they know someone they could rely on in a time of need, higher than in any other industrialised country. Similarly, only 6% reported "rarely" or "never" socialising with others.[96] This high level of social cohesion is attributed to the small size and homogeneity of the population, as well as to a long history of harsh survival in an isolated environment, which reinforced the importance of unity and cooperation.[219] Egalitarianism is highly valued among the people of Iceland, with income inequality being among the lowest in the world.[118] The constitution explicitly prohibits the enactment of noble privileges, titles, and ranks.[220] Everyone is addressed by their first name. As in other Nordic countries, equality between the sexes is very high; Iceland is consistently ranked among the top three countries in the world for women to live in.[221][222][223] Literature In 2011, Reykjavik was designated a UNESCO City of Literature.[224] A page of Njáls saga from Möðruvallabók. The sagas are a significant part of the Icelandic heritage Iceland's best-known classical works of literature are the Icelanders' sagas, prose epics set in Iceland's age of settlement. The most famous of these include Njáls saga, about an epic blood feud, and Grænlendinga saga and Eiríks saga, describing the discovery and settlement of Greenland and Vinland (modern Newfoundland). Egils saga, Laxdæla saga, Grettis saga, Gísla saga and Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu are also notable and popular Icelanders' sagas. A translation of the Bible was published in the 16th century. Important compositions since the 15th to the 19th century include sacred verse, most famously the Passion Hymns of Hallgrímur Pétursson, and rímur, rhyming epic poems. Originating in the 14th century, rímur were popular into the 19th century, when the development of new literary forms was provoked by the influential, National-Romantic writer Jónas Hallgrímsson. In recent times, Iceland has produced many great writers, the best-known of whom is arguably Halldór Laxness, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955 (the only Icelander to win a Nobel Prize thus far). Steinn Steinarr was an influential modernist poet during the early 20th century who remains popular. Icelanders are avid consumers of literature, with the highest number of bookstores per capita in the world. For its size, Iceland imports and translates more international literature than any other nation.[220] Iceland also has the highest per capita publication of books and magazines,[225] and around 10% of the population will publish a book in their lifetimes.[226] Most books in Iceland are sold between late September to early November. This time period is known as Jolabokaflod, the Christmas Book Flood.[224] The Flood begins with the Iceland Publisher's Association distributing Bokatidindi, a catalog of all new publications, free to each Icelandic home.[224] Art The distinctive rendition of the Icelandic landscape by its painters can be linked to nationalism and the movement for home rule and independence, which was very active in the mid-19th century. Contemporary Icelandic painting is typically traced to the work of Þórarinn Þorláksson, who, following formal training in art in the 1890s in Copenhagen, returned to Iceland to paint and exhibit works from 1900 to his death in 1924, almost exclusively portraying the Icelandic landscape. Several other Icelandic men and women artists studied at Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts at that time, including Ásgrímur Jónsson, who together with Þórarinn created a distinctive portrayal of Iceland's landscape in a romantic naturalistic style. Other landscape artists quickly followed in the footsteps of Þórarinn and Ásgrímur. These included Jóhannes Kjarval and Júlíana Sveinsdóttir. Kjarval in particular is noted for the distinct techniques in the application of paint that he developed in a concerted effort to render the characteristic volcanic rock that dominates the Icelandic environment. Einar Hákonarson is an expressionistic and figurative painter who by some is considered to have brought the figure back into Icelandic painting. In the 1980s, many Icelandic artists worked with the subject of the new painting in their work. In the recent years artistic practice has multiplied, and the Icelandic art scene has become a setting for many large scale projects and exhibitions. The artist run gallery space Kling og Bang, members of which later ran the studio complex and exhibition venue Klink og Bank, has been a significant part of the trend of self-organised spaces, exhibitions and projects.[227] The Living Art Museum, Reykjavík Municipal Art Museum, Reykjavík Art Museum and the National Gallery of Iceland are the larger, more established institutions, curating shows and festivals. Music Much Icelandic music is related to Nordic music, and includes folk and pop traditions. Notable Icelandic music acts include medieval music group Voces Thules, alternative and indie rock acts such as The Sugarcubes, Sóley and Of Monsters and Men, jazz fusion band Mezzoforte, pop singers such as Hafdís Huld, Emilíana Torrini and Björk, solo ballad singers like Bubbi Morthens, and post-rock bands such as Amiina and Sigur Rós. Independent music is strong in Iceland, with bands such as múm and solo artists. Traditional Icelandic music is strongly religious. Hymns, both religious and secular, are a particularly well-developed form of music, due to the scarcity of musical instruments throughout much of Iceland's history. Hallgrímur Pétursson wrote many Protestant hymns in the 17th century. Icelandic music was modernised in the 19th century, when Magnús Stephensen brought pipe organs, which were followed by harmoniums. Other vital traditions of Icelandic music are epic alliterative and rhyming ballads called rímur. Rímur are epic tales, usually a cappella, which can be traced back to skaldic poetry, using complex metaphors and elaborate rhyme schemes.[228] The best known rímur poet of the 19th century was Sigurður Breiðfjörð (1798–1846). A modern revitalisation of the tradition began in 1929 with the formation of Iðunn.[clarification needed] Among Iceland's best-known classical composers are Daníel Bjarnason and Anna S. Þorvaldsdóttir (Anna Thorvaldsdottir), who in 2012 received the Nordic Council Music Prize and in 2015 was chosen as the New York Philharmonic's Kravis Emerging Composer, an honor that includes a $50,000 cash prize and a commission to write a composition for the orchestra; she is the second recipient.[229] The national anthem of Iceland is Lofsöngur, written by Matthías Jochumsson, with music by Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnsson.[230] Media Iceland's largest television stations are the state-run Sjónvarpið and the privately owned Stöð 2 and SkjárEinn. Smaller stations exist, many of them local. Radio is broadcast throughout the country, including some parts of the interior. The main radio stations are Rás 1, Rás 2, X-ið 977, Bylgjan and FM957. The daily newspapers are Morgunblaðið and Fréttablaðið. The most popular websites are the news sites Vísir and Mbl.is.[231] Iceland is home to LazyTown (Icelandic: Latibær), a children's educational musical comedy program created by Magnús Scheving. It has become a very popular programme for children and adults and is shown in over 100 countries, including the Americas, the UK and Sweden.[232] The LazyTown studios are located in Garðabær. The 2015 television crime series Trapped aired in the UK on BBC4 in February and March 2016, to critical acclaim and according to the Guardian "the unlikeliest TV hit of the year".[233] In 1992, the Icelandic film industry achieved its greatest recognition hitherto, when Friðrik Þór Friðriksson was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for his Children of Nature.[234] It features the story of an old man who is unable to continue running his farm. After being unwelcomed in his daughter's and father-in-law's house in town, he is put in a home for the elderly. There, he meets an old girlfriend of his youth and they both begin a journey through the wilds of Iceland to die together. This is the only Icelandic movie to have ever been nominated for an Academy Award.[235] Singer-songwriter Björk received international acclaim for her starring role in the Danish musical drama Dancer in the Dark, directed by Lars von Trier, in which she plays Selma Ježková, a factory worker who struggles to pay for her son's eye operation. The film premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, where she won the Best Actress Award. The movie also led Björk to nominations for Best Original Song at the 73rd Academy Awards, with the song I've Seen It All and for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama.[236] Guðrún S. Gísladóttir, who is Icelandic, played one of the major roles in Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's 1986 film, The Sacrifice. Anita Briem, known for her performance in Showtime's The Tudors, is also Icelandic. Briem starred in the 2008 film Journey to the Center of the Earth, which shot scenes in Iceland. The 2002 James Bond movie Die Another Day is set for a large-part in Iceland. Christopher Nolan's 2014 film, Interstellar was also filmed in Iceland for some of its scenes, as was Ridley Scott's Prometheus.[237] On 17 June 2010, the parliament passed the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, proposing greater protection of free speech rights and the identity of journalists and whistle-blowers—the strongest journalist protection law in the world.[238] According to a 2011 report by Freedom House, Iceland is one of the highest ranked countries in press freedom.[239] CCP Games, developers of the critically acclaimed EVE Online and Dust 514, is headquartered in Reykjavík. CCP Games hosts the third most populated MMO in the world, which also has the largest total game area for an online game.[citation needed] Iceland has a highly developed internet culture, with around 95% of the population having internet access, the highest proportion in the world.[240] Iceland ranked 12th in the World Economic Forum's 2009–2010 Network Readiness Index, which measures a country's ability to competitively exploit communications technology.[241] The United Nations International Telecommunication Union ranks the country 3rd in its development of information and communications technology, having moved up four places between 2008 and 2010.[242] In February 2013 the country (ministry of the interior) was researching possible methods to protect children in regards to Internet pornography, claiming that pornography online is a threat to children as it supports child slavery and abuse. Strong voices within the community expressed concerns with this, stating that it is impossible to block access to pornography without compromising freedom of speech.[243][244][245] Cuisine Much of Iceland's cuisine is based on fish, lamb, and dairy products, with little to no utilisation of herbs or spices. Due to the island's climate, fruits and vegetables are not generally a component of traditional dishes, although the use of greenhouses has made them more common in contemporary food. Þorramatur is a selection of traditional cuisine consisting of many dishes, and is usually consumed around the month of Þorri, which begins on the first Friday after 19 January. Traditional dishes also include skyr (a yoghurt-like cheese), hákarl (cured shark), cured ram, singed sheep heads, and black pudding, Flatkaka (flat bread), dried fish and dark rye bread traditionally baked in the ground in geothermal areas.[246] Puffin is considered a local delicacy that is often prepared through broiling. Breakfast usually consists of pancakes, cereal, fruit, and coffee, while lunch may take the form of a smörgåsbord. The main meal of the day for most Icelanders is dinner, which usually involves fish or lamb as the main course. Seafood is central to most Icelandic cooking, particularly cod and haddock but also salmon, herring, and halibut. It is often prepared in a wide variety of ways, either smoked, pickled, boiled, or dried. Lamb is by far the most common meat, and it tends to be either smoke-cured (known as hangikjöt) or salt-preserved (saltkjöt). Many older dishes make use of every part of the sheep, such as slátur, which consists of offal (internal organs and entrails) minced together with blood and served in sheep stomach. Additionally, boiled or mashed potatoes, pickled cabbage, green beans, and rye bread are prevalent side dishes. Coffee is a popular beverage in Iceland, with the country being third placed by per capita consumption worldwide in 2016,[247] and is drunk at breakfast, after meals, and with a light snack in mid-afternoon. Coca-Cola is also widely consumed, to the extent that the country is said to have one of the highest per capita consumption rates in the world.[248] Iceland's signature alcoholic beverage is brennivín (literally "burnt [i.e., distilled] wine"), which is similar in flavouring to the akvavit variant of Scandinavian brännvin. It is a type of schnapps made from distilled potatoes and flavoured with either caraway seeds or angelica. Its potency has earned it the nickname svarti dauði ("Black Death"). Modern distilleries on Iceland produce vodka (Reyka), gin (Ísafold), moss schnapps (Fjallagrasa), and a birch-flavoured schnapps and liqueur (Foss Distillery's Birkir and Björk). Martin Miller blends Icelandic water with its England-distilled gin on the island. Strong beer was banned until 1989, so bjórlíki, a mixture of legal, low-alcohol pilsner beer and vodka, became popular. Several strong beers are now made by Icelandic breweries. Sport Sport is an important part of Icelandic culture, as the population is generally quite active.[250] The main traditional sport in Iceland is Glíma, a form of wrestling thought to have originated in medieval times. Popular sports include football, track and field, handball and basketball. Handball is often referred to as the national sport.[249] The Icelandic national football team qualified for the 2016 UEFA European football championship for the first time. They recorded a draw against later winners Portugal in the group stage, and defeated England 2–1 in the round of 16, with goals from Ragnar Sigurðsson and Kolbeinn Sigþórsson. They then lost to hosts and later finalists France in the quarter finals.[251] Following up on this, Iceland made its debut at the 2018 FIFA World Cup. For both the European and the world championship, Iceland is to date the smallest nation in terms of population to qualify. Iceland is also the smallest country to ever qualify for Eurobasket. They did it in both 2015 and 2017. Although Iceland has had great success qualifying for Eurobasket, they have not managed to win a single game in the European Basketball final stages. Iceland has excellent conditions for skiing, fishing, snowboarding, ice climbing and rock climbing, although mountain climbing and hiking are preferred by the general public. Iceland is also a world-class destination for alpine ski touring and Telemark skiing, with the Troll Peninsula in Northern Iceland being the main centre of activity. Although the country's environment is generally ill-suited for golf, there are nevertheless lots of golf courses throughout the island, and Iceland has a greater percentage of the population playing golf than Scotland with over 17,000 registered golfers out of a population of approximately 300,000.[252] Iceland hosts an annual international golf tournament known as the Arctic Open played through the night during the summer solstice at Akureyri Golf Club.[253][254] Iceland has also won the second most World's Strongest Man competitions of any country with nine titles, including four by both Magnús Ver Magnússon and Jón Páll Sigmarsson and most recently Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson in 2018. Iceland is also one of the leading countries in ocean rowing, Icelandic rower Fiann Paul became the fastest and the most record-breaking ocean rower. He has claimed overall speed Guinness World Records for the fastest rowing of all four oceans (Atlantic, Indian, Pacific and Arctic) in a man-powered row boat, as well as the Guinness title of the first rower to ever hold the record for all four oceans simultaneously, claiming 24 Guinness World Records in total for Iceland by 2017.[255][256][257][258] Swimming is popular in Iceland. Geothermally heated outdoor pools are widespread, and swimming courses are a mandatory part of the national curriculum.[254] Horseback riding, which was historically the most prevalent form of transportation on the island, remains a common pursuit for many Icelanders. The oldest sport association in Iceland is the Reykjavík Shooting Association, founded in 1867. Rifle shooting became very popular in the 19th century with the encouragement of politicians and nationalists who were pushing for Icelandic independence. To this day, it remains a significant pastime.[259] Iceland has also produced many chess masters and hosted the historic World Chess Championship 1972 in Reykjavík during the height of the Cold War. As of 2008, there have been nine Icelandic chess grandmasters, a considerable number given the small size of the population.[260] Bridge is also popular, with Iceland participating in a number of international tournaments. Iceland won the world bridge championship (the Bermuda Bowl) in Yokohama, Japan, in 1991 and took second place (with Sweden) in Hamilton, Bermuda, in 1950. See also References Bibliography Further reading Jonsson, Asgeir (2008). Why Iceland? How One of the World's Smallest Countries Became the Meltdown's Biggest Casualty. McGraw–Hill Professional. ISBN 978-0-07-163284-3. Jonsson, Ivar (2012) 'Explaining the Crisis of Iceland – A Realist Approach' in Journal of Critical Realism, 11,1. Heiðarsson, Jakob Oskar (2015) 'Iceland – My Small Island'. Coordinates:A new report is making the case for an LGBTQ+ community centre in Hamilton, as well as better efforts to facilitate safety and inclusion in community and public spaces. The report, presented Tuesday evening, was prepared by the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton. Its primary author, Deirdre Pike, is a senior planner with the SPRC and a prominent voice of the local LGBTQ+ community. Pike and the SPRC's primary recommendation is that the City of Hamilton conduct a feasibility study around the creation of a community hub that would offer a broad range of resources targeted at the LGBTQ+ population. These resources would include counseling, volunteer and peer mentorship, social programs and clubs, and extensive connections to other supports. Physical and mental health support lacking In regard to health care, the report says, members of the LGBTQ+ community are "rarely able to find knowledgeable and respectful services for their physical health needs." Further, sexual health services "are often ill-prepared to provide accurate information, treatment, and testing." As far as mental health services are concerned, the report finds that there is an "acute need" for counselors with LGBTQ-specific education in Hamilton. Recommendations in light of this are for health care providers, services for aging people, and counseling services to undertake a Positive Space campaign to ensure a more inclusive environment. In particular, it says, publicly-funded counseling services should be staffed by those with specific training in helping LGBTQ+ people. SPRC report: improve education and visibility Following from the premise that "professional and para-professional service providers cannot adequately respond to the needs of LGBTQ+ people without developing insight into the lived experiences of those they serve," the report recommends that: Public services and employers "make equity for LGBTQ+ people a strategic priority" LGBTQ+ issues be given greater prominence in the education of public service workers, such as emergency responders, and others Post-secondary institutions review and update curricula to include more material relevant to LGBTQ+ students and that the Hamilton public and Catholic school boards provide mandatory LGBTQ+ training to all staff Furthermore, it says, "the potential for or threat of harassment, discrimination and/or violence is a daily reality" for Hamilton's LGBTQ+ community, and therefore, public and private institutions should be vocal in their support of it. The report suggests this will help with continued efforts in dissolving persistent social stigmas. Organizational change across all sectors, and more resources toward research Finally, the SPRC report recommends that, since organizations across public, non-profit and private sectors "reflect a dominant social culture that discriminates against LGBTQ+ people," institutions of all stripes should commit to "transformative" changes, such as updates to policies, mission statements, and documentation, as well as gender neutral bathrooms, and revised human resources practices. The report says that more funding for research of this type is warranted, and that partnership with Hamilton's Arts community and the City of Hamilton will create the opportunity to archive local LGBTQ+ history, and to keep abreast of the community's needs.In this Nov. 7 file photo, medical marijuana is packaged for sale in a dispensary in Seattle. Massachusetts voters approved of medical marijuana on Election Day. (Ted S. Warren/AP) Medical marijuana dispensaries haven't opened yet in Massachusetts — and some communities in the state hope to keep it that way. Even before Massachusetts voters passed Question 3, which legalized medical marijuana, some cities and towns began researching how they could prevent medical marijuana dispensaries from opening within their borders. Now, some of those communities have passed zoning bylaws banning dispensaries, and they're waiting to hear whether the state attorney general's office will approve them. Melrose, Reading and Wakefield, which comprise a regional health district, have passed identical dispensary bans, and Attorney General Martha Coakley must issue her opinion on Wakefield's bylaw by March 21. WBUR's All Things Considered host Sacha Pfeiffer spoke with the health director for those communities, Ruth Clay, about why they oppose dispensaries. Ruth Clay: None of the three communities have a moral opposition to medical marijuana. The citizens of the community certainly want people who feel that they have a medical necessity or benefit to be able to access that. The main issue is basically the devil's in the details. And the way that Question 3 was written, there is a lot of unanswered questions. And we don't have the regulations from the state health department. If the regulations come out that there's reasonable dispensing, and it tightly regulates the use of home-grown and access to youth and people who don't have a real medical need, then I think the communities will reexamine that. But these three communities have strong histories of substance abuse prevention work. Reading and Melrose both have a history of federal funding, and they're called Drug Free Communities grants. Substance abuse prevention for youth is a big issue for these communities. So having a medical marijuana dispensing site in their community that would be available to their youth basically goes against all the work that the communities have been doing. Sacha Pfeiffer: And you think that actually distinguishes Melrose and Wakefield and Reading in a way different than any other community concerned about substance abuse? Not any other community, but from some communities. There are other communities that spend a lot of time and effort and money on dealing with substance abuse prevention, but not every community does. As you've pointed out, the [regulations] have not been written yet by the Department of Public Health, but these dispensaries are intended to be tightly regulated so that only people with a doctor's approval could be getting medical marijuana. Why are you worried that youth might end up getting access when they shouldn't? Because of the experience of other states that have already passed similar kinds of laws. The statistics show a significant increase in youths' use of marijuana once those laws went into effect. Do you know, though, that there is a definite connection between the rise in marijuana among young people and the arrival of medical marijuana dispensaries in those communities? Yes. The increase in youth marijuana use increased dramatically in Colorado and California when those laws passed. And you believe because the medical marijuana dispensaries came to town, that meant more availability of marijuana for young people? Sure. That was the only variable that changed. As a local public health official, what is your personal opinion about the benefits versus possible costs of having marijuana dispensaries in town? I don't think my personal opinion is relevant. I mean, it's really what each community wants to do. Well I guess I should say, then, your professional opinion. I mean, certainly many voters approved this because they felt that it was a real public health need. Do you have doubts about the medicinal benefits of medical marijuana? I'd like to see more research being done. With someone who's seriously ill, with using chemotherapy, with nausea, I think it's pretty clear that there are components of marijuana — the THC — that does help. I certainly don't want to withhold that medication from them. But by having zoning restrictions, that would obviously make it harder for people who are suffering to get it if they think it could help them. I don't think it does. It's not going to be that there's going to be a dispensing site in every city and town in Massachusetts. And people go from one town to another to grocery shop and go to their pharmacy as it is. In that sense, is there a Not In My Back Yard element to this? I think there are some communities that are better suited for it. Especially communities that have large oncology centers. So you think maybe have the medical marijuana dispensary be located near the hospital or the oncology center? Those are where the patients will be. Although there is a hospital in Wakefield, isn't there? Melrose. In Melrose. Melrose-Wakefield, yes. So, in that sense, would Melrose be a good place for a medical marijuana dispensary? I said in general terms that that might be a good place. But the mayor has been clear that this is not the best place for medical marijuana. It's not in keeping with the vision for this community. If the state regulations come out in a way that really addresses all the details, I think that's something that Melrose will definitely look at. Because, as I said, we're not morally opposed to medical marijuana. We just want to make sure it's done in a safe and appropriate way to protect the community. The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts opposes these bylaws banning medical marijuana dispensaries. Sacha Pfeiffer spoke with one of its staff attorneys in Boston, Sarah Wunsch, about why the ACLU considers the bans illegal: Sarah Wunsch: Cities and towns are not allowed to pass laws that are at odds [with] or undermine state law, and we think this kind of total ban on the medical marijuana dispensaries is directly at odds with what the voters chose to do in approving Question 3 for the humanitarian provision of medical marijuana. And part of what was approved was setting up dispensaries at the direction of the state Department of Public Health, which has been given the authority to decide where they should go. Sacha Pfeiffer: What if a town or a city doesn't totally ban a dispensary from within its borders, but just partially bans it from certain areas? Is the ACLU willing to accept that? You know, we're not there yet. If that question came up, it depends on how extensive the ban is. But right now what we are dealing with and what the attorney general's office is dealing with are total bans. And I think that, without question, is an effort to undermine and stop the operation of medical marijuana and what the voters approved when they passed Question 3. So how much authority do they have here to create zoning restrictions of some type if they're not totally comfortable with medical marijuana dispensaries? The limits aren't established by each city or town acting on its own, deciding, "We want it here" or "We don't want it here." Unlike when the state legislature passed the law that allowed needle exchange programs, the legislature specifically wrote in a provision telling DPH that they had to have local approval first. That's not true of Question 3; there is no requirement of local approval. But now we see cities and towns saying, 'Oh, well, not here.' That's just part of the opposition to the notion of medical marijuana. We are seeing some communities where people say, 'We support the idea of sick people getting access to medical marijuana, but we're very uncomfortable that the details of the law haven't been written yet and we're worried that maybe the regulations won't be tight enough and, for example, young people will get their hands on marijuana much more easily.' Do you think communities have a right to be concerned about that? I think they have a right to weigh in with the Department of Public Health about what kinds of restrictions they would like to see and what they would like the regulations to say. But I don't think they have the right to erect roadblocks that will make it impossible to site a dispensary in their community.David Cameron has pressed EU leaders for more international patrol ships to start turning back boats of refugees as soon as they set off on perilous journeys across the Mediterranean from Libya. At a European summit on Thursday night the prime minister pushed for a tougher deterrent strategy, similar to the controversial Australian approach of turning away boats containing migrants, as he argued it is essential to destroy the people smugglers’ business model. Tens of thousands of refugees are picked up in the Mediterranean by rescue boats every year and taken to European countries, but thousands have died during the passage, particularly on the route from north Africa to Italy. Cameron said at a European summit on Thursday night that the EU rescue mission in the central Mediterranean needs to be expanded so that the international operation’s boats work with the Libyan coastguards to send boats back to Libya. Cameron said that he is extending the deployment of HMS Enterprise on anti-trafficking operations in the central Mediterranean at least until the summer. Under Operation Sophia, the international rescue effort in the central Mediterranean, smugglers’ boats are being seized and destroyed, but the mission is operating in international – rather than Libyan – waters. A UK government source said: “We think operation Sophia has achieved a lot in terms of bringing the numbers down … but one of the challenges the operation has is that it is still only operating on the high seas. The source said that at the moment those picked up on the high seas were taken to Italy, but there could be an agreement with the Libyan government to return people. She said Cameron would also argue that the Nato mission in the Aegean needs to do “more with the Turks so that boats are sent back to Turkey”. © AP People on a dinghy off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa. This has begun to happen with the international operation in the eastern Mediterranean, which involves one British ship, but Cameron wants to see “more concrete action”. “He thinks we should be looking to return people to where they set off from,” the UK source said. Although Cameron is pressing to deal with the new Libyan government, the move may be met with scepticism given that the regime is a unity administration based out of Tunisia. There are also likely to be human rights concerns about sending back migrants fleeing from a country still in turmoil since the UK and allies participated in the removal of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Many of those who have undertaken the dangerous journey across the central Mediterranean are seeking refugee status in Europe. The prime minister warned other leaders that they must not “take their eye off the ball” about the potential for another migrant crisis from Libya to flare up over the summer. The war-torn country is currently claimed by four different factions: an elected parliament that has been forced out of Tripoli, the Libyan capital; a rebel outfit that now controls Tripoli; a UN-backed administration that was meant to unite the two warring factions but which has been rejected by both; and an Islamic State affiliate that has seized part of the central Libyan coastline, and has a presence in other areas. Any push-back of refugees would need a viable institutional partner on the Libyan mainland, but none currently exists amid the chaos. The internationally backed government cannot take office in Tripoli for safety reasons and has been forced to take refuge in neighbouring Tunisia. The two other administrations have previously been reluctant to engage with the west on migration-related military action. Italian officials have already said that the recent good weather is the main factor behind a spike in migrant crossings from Libya. Some 712 migrants were picked up on Thursday after 2,400 were picked up the two previous days, all grouped in small, flimsy rubber dinghies in international waters near Libya. Three bodies were found during Wednesday’s rescues, mostly by Italian ships. The UN refugee agency has said 9,800 migrants have arrived in Italy this year up to Wednesday, compared with 7,400 in the same period last year. Professor Brad Blitz, who researches migration in the southern Mediterranean at Middlesex University, said: “It’s just outrageous. Libya is a country that is divided, which cannot guarantee human rights, which has produced hundreds of thousands of displaced people.” Blitz added: “If the concern is to prevent deaths, as [Cameron] has said, then really he should be promoting safe passage, rather than diverting people so that they have to seek longer and more dangerous routes.”Hands-On Logitech recently added HomeKit to the Wired version of the Circle 2, making it just one of a handful of security cameras to support Apple's smarthome platform. The addition means that the camera —and its motion-sensing capabilities —can be integrated into complex scenes with other HomeKit accessories. If an outdoor-facing Circle sees someone approach the front door at night for instance, it can both turn on the lights make sure the door is locked. Indoors, the camera might be set to trigger things like fans and air conditioning.These scenes, and the camera in general, can be controlled via Siri and the iOS and Apple Watch versions of Apple's Home app. Home incorporates the Circle 2's livestream into its dashboard, and also supports two-way talk functions. Notably, the Watch app will even stream images via its paired iPhone.There are some limitations, above all that access or automation when away requires an Apple TV, iPad, or HomePod to serve as a HomeKit hub.The camera itself supports resolutions up to 1080p, with night vision and an adjustable field of view up to 180 degrees. Most functions —such as settings and access to highlights —are controlled via a Web portal or the Logi Circle app for iPhones and iPads.The hardware is weatherproof, and comes bundled with an adjustable base and wall-mounting supplies. Window and plug mounts cost extra, as does a 15-foot weatherproof extension cable —something that might be necessary for harder-to-reach outdoor locations.Stay tuned to AppleInsider for a full review coming soon.Manny Pacquiao of the Philippines reacts against Jeff Horn of Australia (not pictured) during their WBO World Welterweight title boxing match Sunday at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Photo by Dave Hunt/EPA An independent review of the scoring in Manny Pacquiao's World Boxing Organization welterweight title loss to Australian Jeff Horn confirmed Monday the controversial unanimous decision for Horn by judges in the July 1 fight. The Philippines government, of which Pacquiao is a senator, requested the WBO review the judging of the so-called "Battle of Brisbane" in Australia after Horn won a unanimous points decision against Pacquiao, Horn fought for his first world title, while Pacquiao is an
a Delta Green mission often causes agents to develop new Bonds with each other, which in turn weakens their Bonds back home. There’s an optional rule for tracking Work Performance, which could result in your agent getting fired for bringing too much baggage home from Delta Green missions, and which in turn can damage your Bonds. There’s an optional rule for detailing what kind of equipment and tools your agent can obtain. Trying to get too much too quickly can impact your Work Performance if it’s on the job or it can damage Bonds if you’re burning through your own money. The core mechanics received some tweaking, too, to suit the way we want Delta Green to run. Most actions revolve around skills that have percentile ratings, as before. But we encourage the GM to not bother having players roll dice for their skills at all unless the situation is a crisis or otherwise out of the agents’ control. In the slow investigative scenes that usually begin a mission, just look to the rating of a skill. Tell the player if the agent understands or finds what they’re looking for, or tell the player that they need someone with greater expertise. Leave the dice for events that SHOULD feel random, like using a skill in a crisis or interacting with unpredictable non-player characters. That way when your expert with a 65% skill fails the roll a third of the time, it makes sense. That was a terrible crisis — it would have been impressive to succeed at all! We’ve tightened up the way combat works to make violence swift, brutal, suspenseful, and unforgiving, while leaving many core issues firmly in the hands of the GM to allow room for common sense at the table. We’ve revised the way Sanity Points work, and the way characters develop mental disorders, to suit the way we want the game to run and to better reflect the way these disorders work in the real world. In Delta Green, an agent can gain a long-term disorder over a long period of time due to a slow accumulation of stresses and traumas. And sharp moments of overwhelming, immediate terror can cause a short-term loss of control as the “fight or flight” response kicks in. We want the way things happen in the game world to feel like they would happen in the real world. That makes unnatural horrors have even greater impact. Is there a threshold of success for the Kickstarter that could lead Arc Dream to think it viable to restart the Delta Green line beyond this project? At this point (Friday afternoon, Oct. 23) we’re less than $300 away from hitting 600% of the goal that we set to relaunch the game line. So yeah, it’s launched. Just from this project’s fundraising we’ll publish: -The Agent’s Handbook (the core rules for players without much information about the setting or the supernatural). -The Case Officer’s Handbook (everything in the Agent’s Handbook plus tons of information about the setting, the supernatural, the Cthulhu Mythos, cults and factions, and customizing any or all of it to keep players guessing). -A Game Moderator’s Screen with quickstart rulebook, sample characters, and a scenario. -Impossible Landscapes (a campaign and sourcebook about Carcosa and the King in Yellow). -Control Group (an introductory campaign built to bring newcomers into the game). -More than a dozen downloads, including six scenarios. -Conversions of nine scenarios written for earlier editions. -And it looks like we’ll hit the next big stretch goal to unlock yet another big book, Deep State, which will detail the secret government programs and private-public partnerships that surround and bedevil Delta Green. What we publish beyond those six books depends on how the game line performs over the next year or so. We have enough ideas to keep going for years as long as gamers stay with us. Which of the proposed source books are you most excited to see released? The Case Officer’s Handbook, though if the terminology matters it’s a core game book and not a sourcebook. It includes the rules engine that Greg, Dennis and I have been working on for years as well as great resources for building a Delta Green campaign as a world filled with secrets, so even the most die-hard, well-read player will always be surprised and frightened. Of the sourcebooks proper, I personally most look forward to Deep State. That book will let us really dig into the core philosophical issues that have always been at the root of Delta Green: the risks and benefits of power and secrecy, and the ways we change as individuals and as a culture when we come to accept things that we once found abhorrent. Those issues are even more relevant today than in the Nineties when Delta Green first appeared. How did you decide to add a Gumshoe version of Delta Green to this Kickstarter? Are you planning to continue a relationship with Pelgrane for Delta Green materials? We know Simon Rogers and the Pelgrane crew very well. Kenneth Hite, author of Trail of Cthulhu and Night’s Black Agents, is one of the developers of Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. Simon and Ken came to me with the idea of a Gumshoe version of some kind. I loved the idea and ran it by the Delta Green Partnership (the creators and owners of the Delta Green property: Dennis Detwiller, Adam Scott Glancy, and John Scott Tynes). There was immediate and unanimous enthusiasm. The rest was just hammering out details. Pelgrane plans The Fall of Delta Green and if that does well a supplement to it, probably a scenario collection. We’ll see how things stand after those come out. What do you think has lead to Delta Green’s enduring appeal? A large part of it has always been the setting — the non-player characters that players encounter in the game. Delta Green has always featured factions and actors who are well-rounded and interesting. Even the clear villains are three-dimensional characters. You may not find their aims and methods sympathetic, but you can see why they make the choices they make. Even when that choice is to throw the rest of humanity on a bonfire for the sake of just a little more life. Delta Green is about characters who feel real, in a world that feels real, encountering unreal cosmic horrors that are entirely beyond their capacity to understand or confront. It’s about player characters who stand up as long and bravely as they can in the face of the death that the universe wants to inflict on us all. Delta Green agents are incredible not because they’re so much more dangerous or lucky or bad-ass than everyone else, but because they are not any of those things — and yet they stand and fight. That means Delta Green does not pull punches. It does not offer second chances. It doesn’t give your character any points to spend for plot immunity. If you step into the darkness, you take your chances. It is incredibly suspenseful and chilling. Again, a huge thanks to Shane Ivey for his team, and all the people at Arc-Dream who are making it possible to get a chance to get this amazing product. There are tiers to get whatever you want, including, hardback books, PDFs, and releases of previous Arc-Dream materials. You can check out the Kickstarter, the website, or find Shane Ivey on Twitter. You can also find Delta Green @DeltaGreenRPG. Want to help spread the word and get more rewards? Look at some of the ways listed here! The campaign runs through October 29th, so get your pledge in while you can. Don’t forget to listen to this Sunday’s episode to hear more about Delta Green! RelatedPlease enable Javascript to watch this video UTAH COUNTY --- A pig wrestling match turned into a scuffle between animal activists and the wrestlers at the Utah County Fair Wednesday night, and on Thursday those activists are looking to file charges against a team of wrestlers, who they said violently pushed them out of the ring. The activists said what was meant to be a peaceful protest turned violent, all because they say they were trying to protect pigs from being beaten, demonized and brutalized. "We're here to stop violence, and we get violence in return," said Joseph Peters, who is an animal activist with the group Direct Action Everywhere. Dressed as clowns, four animal activists with the group Direct Action Everywhere entered the pig ring. But instead of wrestling the pigs, the four men held up signs defending the animals. “Of course we got the reaction I expected," said Benjamin Peters, who was among those who protested. "I expected people to throw mud and boo, but what I didn't expect is what happened afterwards." When they wouldn't leave the ring, the activists said a competing team began attacking them and spectators captured video of the moment. “He wanted to floor me, he wanted to put me on the ground as hard as he could,” said Don Ruark, an animal activist with the group Direct Action Everywhere. “Shortly after I got pushed, and I look over to the left and see my brother tossed--body slammed to the floor,” Joseph Peters said. “He grabbed my legs and flipped me up over the fence, and I hit my neck and slammed my back on the floor,” Benjamin Peters added. All four of the protesters said they feel the actions of those wrestlers was uncalled for, but the fair says the protesters broke the rules by staying in the pig ring for more than the 60 seconds they were allowed. “When their time ran out they refused to leave, so one of the teams went in and helped them out,” said Mike Stansfield, who is the Utah County Fair Director. But the protesters said staying in the ring longer should not make them a target of attack. “I don't know how us standing there an extra ten seconds to get notoriety to no more violence for animals allows somebody to pick someone up and body slam them,” Ruark said. The fair director agrees it could and should have been handled differently. “Obviously that's not the ideal way to handle it, and I don't think the kids who were involved with it really gave it much thought," Stansfield said. "They just thought: 'It's my turn, and I ought to be able to get in and participate.'" The Utah County Sheriff’s Office is now investigating the incident. Utah County says they have no plans to cancel the pig wrestling event in the future, and activists said as long as the event continues, they'll be there protesting.Twitpic’s photo archive acquired by Twitter hours before deletion Twitpic, the photo-sharing service built to be used with and almost completely reliant on Twitter itself, was forced into shutting down back in September, but its archive, full of years of user photos, was on its way to deletion until Twitter stepped in at the last minute. Oddly enough it was actually Twitter that forced Twitpic to close its doors, but at least now the latter’s archive will be preserved as it is. Here was the situation: Twitter was threatening Twitpic with a trademark dispute and left them with two options; drop its claim to the word “Twitpic,” or lose access to the social network’s API, in turn making it useless. Twitpic was unable to find a new owner, and founder Noah Everett said that the site was scheduled to be shut down on October 25th. A very last-minute deal will see ownership of the Twitpic site and its photos transferred to Twitter. If Twitpic had shut down, it would mean years of tweets with images attached left empty. Back before Twitter was able to host images itself, Twitpic was almost always the default service that various apps used have photos appear in users’ timelines. In a blog post, Everett commented that “Twitter shares our goal of protecting our users and this data.” This means that the Twitpic site will now remain in a read-only mode, keeping photos and their links alive, but preventing anything new from being posted. Likewise the Twitpic apps for iOS and Android have been taken down, and users can sign in to Twitpic to export their photos and/or delete their account if they choose. SOURCE Twitpic BlogAll statistics below are taken from war-on-ice. Note: I don't believe there's any difference in what Babcock, Holland, or Devellano want out of our 6D, and I think this is an important part of our strength as an organization, but for simplicity's sake I'll refer to what "Babcock-wants," instead of what "Babcock, Holland, and Devellano want." When I was growing up NHL teams had clearly defined roles for their 6D. "1st-pair," "2nd-pair," and "3rd-pair." The 1st-pair played the most minutes(often more than half of each game), the 2nd-pair received significantly fewer minutes, & the 3rd-pair played infrequently by comparison. Over the years the philosophy governing defense has evolved and with it has evolved the terminology used to describe defensemen. (Growing up I never heard the expression, "Top-4," for example.) Teams eventually began playing with a "Top-4" & a "Bottom-Pair," where the 1st-pair and the 2nd-pair recieved comparable TOI and the 3rd pair continued receiving lots of time on the bench. Currently in the NHL there are still teams that play a traditional 3-pairing system but most teams are using a variation of Top-4/Bottom-pairing. I don't think Babcock wants to play with a TOP-4/Bottom-pairing. I believe Babcock wishes to ice a team where all 6D play relatively equal EV-minutes but he can't do that until he has 6 defensemen who are worthy of receiving "Top 4"-type of minutes. We don't have 6D good enough for that right now, we only have 5. I think this is why Kindl ends up being a healthy scratch. He isn't good enough to receive "Top-4"-type of minutes. Calgary, Detroit, & the NYR. Calgary is a good example of a team that plays a system with a Top-4/Bottom-Pairing. Here's the EV-minutes(the first, smaller, number is 4x4 & the larger number is 5x5 in case anyone wishes to see the differing amounts) for Calgary this year: Giordano (1.5 + 18.3) = 19.8 Brodie (1.4 + 18.9) = 20.3 Russell (1.7 + 18.6) = 20.3 Wideman (1.6 + 18.4) = 20.0 Smid (0.2 + 12.8) = 13.0 Engelland (0.1 + 11.8) = 11.9 Diaz (0.2 + 10.4) = 10.6 Notice how similar Giordano/Brodie are to Russell/Wideman & how infrequently Smid/Engelland/Diaz see the ice. Here's Detroit's EV-minutes this season(including Ouellet and Marchenko if anyone's curious): Kronwall (1.3 + 16.2) = 17.5 Ericsson (1.0 + 16.4) = 17.4 Quincey (1.0 + 16.4) = 17.4 DeKeyser (1.3 + 15.9) = 17.2 Smith (1.0 + 15.9) = 16.9 Ouellet (0.9 + 14.9) = 15.8 Marchenko (0.1 + 15.4) = 15.5 Kindl (0.8 + 13.2) = 14.0 Lashoff (0.2 + 11.7) = 11.9 Note how even though Smith has been on our 3rd-pairing all year long(with Kindl, Lashoff, Ouellet, & Marchnko) Babcock has found a way to get him more minutes than his partner so that he has similar totals to the rest of our 4D. To me this looks like a coach who wants to run a Top-6 but only has 5D "good enough" just as the NYR's TOI looks like a coach who wants to run a Top-4/Bottom-Pairing but only has 3D "good enough" to play Top-4 minutes: McDonagh (1.0 + 17.4) = 18.4 Girardi (1.2 + 17.5) = 18.7 Staal (0.9 + 18.5) = 19.4 Klein (0.8 + 16.0) = 16.8 Boyle (0.8 + 15.6) = 16.4 Hunwick (0.9 + 14.5) = 15.4 Moore (0.7 + 13.4) = 14.1 Vigneault has had to make an effort to get Staal extra shifts with Klein or Boyle(or whomever) in order to give him the TOI of a Top-4 D. I don't think this is because Vigneault wants to play a system with a Top-3, I believe it's because he doesn't think anyone else on his roster is "good enough." Similarly, Babcock has made an effort to get Smith extra shifts here and there to get him minutes equivalent to what a "Top-4"-type of defenseman would receive not because he wants to run a system with a Top-5 but because he didn't/doesn't think that Kindl is "good enough" to play so many minutes. Vigneault isn't the only coach faced with this sort of dilemma. In Montreal, Therrien has to find extra shifts for Emelin in the same way(and for the same reason) & in Washington Trotz needs to do the same with Niskanen because he doesn't think Alzner is "good enough." Why not play Kindl? Babcock doesn’t WANT a 3rd-pairing D that plays only 14’-15’(heavily-sheltered)EVmin/gm. Babcock wants all 6 D to play "top-4" type of EV-minutes, but he doesn't think that Kindl is "good enough" for that much TOI. This is what he said about having Ouellet or Marchenko when Marchenko was first brought up this year: "We’re not going to keep one here to sit on the bench. The only way they’re staying here is if they’re playing 17 or 18 minutes a night, so we got to figure out what we’re doing." Kindl is a good 3rd-pairing D. If we used a Top-4/Bottom-Pairing system, Kindl would be good enough to be on our team. Amongst D with at least 350’min this year: CA60 = 40.7, 1st (BEST) in the NHL CF% = 58.5%, 1st (BEST) in the NHL CF%Rel = +5.1, 14th best in the NHL Not all Corsi-events are equal, and a newish stat is trying to add another layer of context in order to evaluate players by tracking Scoring Chances. If we look at this stat we see more of the same: SCA60 = 19.5, 2nd best in the NHL SCF% = 58.0%, 3rd best in the NHL SCF%Rel = +5.1, 19th best in the NHL Kindl is a good 3rd-pairing D, but Babcock doesn’t want to have a pairing that weak on the ice. We can see most easily how Babcock thinks Kindl is only worth 3rd-pairing type of work by how he shelters Kindl: ZSO% = 69.5%, 1st (EASIEST) in the NHL. No other team in the NHL is trying to play all 6D 17’-18’EVmin/gm. Every other team has room for a GOOD 3rd-pairing D. I hope Kindl can be traded to another team and have a long and productive career with them. Babcock's track record. Kronwall (1.1+16.8) = 17.9 Ericsson = (1.1+16.8) = 17.9 Quincey = (0.8+17.1) = 17.9 DeKeyser = (1.1+16.4) = 17.5 Smith = (1.0+16.5) = 17.5 Kindl = (0.6 + 14.7) = 15.3 Lashoff = (0.2 + 12.2) = 12.4 2013-14: We see the same pattern last year. Babcock gave "Top-4"-type of minutes to 5 of his defensemen but didn't trust Kindl at the same level. Kronwall (1.3+17.0) = 17.3 Ericsson (0.9+17.5) = 18.4 White (1.1+16.3) = 17.4 Smith (1.2+15.2) = 16.4 Quincey (0.8+15.0) = 15.8 Kindl (0.8+ 14.8) = 15.6 Lashoff (0.7 + 14.6) = 15.3 DeKeyser (0.9 + 14.0) = 14.9 2012-13(includes DeKeyser if anyone's curious): Top-3/Bottom-3. Babcock didn't trust Quincey(if I remember correctly) and neither Smith nor Kindl were trusted much more. Lidstrom (1.4+17.4) = 18.8 White (1.3+17.9) = 19.2 Stuart (1.2+16.6) = 17.8 Kronwall (1.3+16.2) = 17.5 Quincey (0.8 + 15.6) = 16.4 Ericsson (0.6 + 14.5) = 15.1 Kindl (0.4 + 13.0) = 13.4 Smith (0.4 + 13.4) = 13.8 2011-12(includes Smith if anyone's curious & Quincey who only played 18gms after the trade): Top-4/Bottom-Pairing. With the acquisition of Quincey there was a hope that things could change but we started to pile up some injuries right after the trade. Lidstrom (1.2+15.7) = 16.9 Rafalski (0.9+15.8) = 16.7 Stuart (1.0+16.6) = 17.6 Kronwall (1.0+16.6) = 17.6 Ericsson (0.9 + 16.5) = 17.4 Salei (0.6 + 15.3) = 15.9 Kindl (0.3 + 12.6) = 12.9 2010-11: This is the earliest we see an attempt at a Top-6 system & I think it's because of the improvement of Salei over Lebda. Salei is close to being "good enough," but Babcock didn't play him as often as the rest of his Top-5. Lidstrom (1.6+17.1) = 18.7 Rafalski (1.6+17.8) = 19.4 Stuart (1.2+17.8) = 19.0 Kronwall (1.1+16.5) = 17.6 Ericsson (0.6 + 14.3) = 14.9 Lebda (0.6 + 14.3) = 14.9 Meech (0.2 + 10.5) = 10.7 2009-10: Top-4/Bottom-Pairing. Lidstrom (1.2 +16.0) = 17.2 Rafalski (1.4 +16.8) = 18.2 Stuart (1.1 +16.3) = 17.4 Kronwall (1.2 +16.4) = 17.6 Lebda (0.5 + 13.1) = 13.6 Lilja (0.2 + 13.6) = 13.8 Chelios (0.0 + 10.0) = 10.0 Meech (0.1 + 9.6) = 9.7 Ericsson (0.8 + 15.6) = 16.4 2008-09(includes Ericsson if anyone's curious): Top-4/Bottom-Pairing. Lidstrom (1.3 + 16.5) = 17.8 Rafalski (1.3 + 16.6) = 17.9 Stuart (1.0 + 16.4) = 17.4 Kronwall (1.1 + 15.2) = 16.3 Lilja (0.4 + 14.9) = 15.3 Lebda (0.9 + 14.2) = 15.1 Chelios (0.2 + 12.5) = 12.7 Meech (0.3 + 10.5) = 10.8 Ericsson (0.6 + 12.0) = 12.6 Quincey (0.4 + 10.5) = 10.9 2007-08(includes Quincey & Ericsson if anyone's curious): Top-4/Bottom-Pairing. Lidstrom (1.2 + 14.8) = 16.0 Schneider (1.0 + 14.1) = 15.1 Kronwall (1.0 + 14.2) = 15.2 Markov (0.7 + 14.0) = 14.7 Lebda (0.7 + 11.8) = 12.5 Chelios (0.5 + 11.2) = 11.7 Lilja (0.3 + 11.3) = 11.6 2006-07: Here we see the standard Top-4/Bottom-Pairing along with Lidstrom getting a lot of extra shifts. Also of note is how low the minutes have become. It's might be surprising to realize how much the game has changed in such a short period of time, but there weren't as many EV-minutes in a game back then. Lidstrom also averaged 6.0 PPmin and 4.7 PKmin. Lidstrom (1.1 + 14.2) = 15.3 Schneider (1.2 + 15.1) = 16.3 Lilja (0.8 + 14.2) = 15.0 Chelios (0.5 + 11.4) = 11.9 Lebda (0.6 + 10.1) = 10.7 Woolley (0.5 + 8.9) = 9.4 Fischer (0.7 + 13.8) = 14.5 Kronwall (1.1 + 13.2) = 14.3 2005-06(includes Jiri Fischer & Kronwall if anyone's curious): Here is a Top-3/Bottom-3. {Or perhaps a Top-3/Bottom-2/dear-lord-it's-Woolley-back-there.} Post Script. This fanpost was prompted by a short discussion I had on Kukla's Korner(where I comment under my pen name, alwaysaurie) recently about why Babcock doesn't like Kindl. Much of what I've talked about in this essay has also been brought up on WiiM by myself over the last couple of seasons, as well.THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND…. We talked earlier about Wisconsin nurse Debra Bartoshevich, a former Clinton delegate who is now appearing in McCain campaign ads. It’s hard not to wonder what on earth she’s thinking. This afternoon, however, we actually got a better sense of the answer. At a Denver press conference this afternoon organized by Republicans, Bartoschevich, who claims to be a pro-choice Democrat, was asked about her concerns about reproductive rights under another pro-life Republican president. “Going back to 1999, John McCain did an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle saying that overturning Roe v. Wade would not make any sense, because then women would have to have illegal abortions,” Bartoschevich said. This is surprisingly helpful. I’ve wondered why a pro-choice Democrat who cares about women’s rights would even consider a conservative Republican with an abysmal record on women’s rights. It turns out, the answer is pretty straightforward: she’s terribly confused. McCain did, in fact, say in 1999, that he “would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade.” It was a reversal from his previous position, and soon after, McCain reversed right back, denounced Roe, vowed to overturn it, and assured voters he would lead an exclusively pro-life administration, arguably slightly to the right of Bush/Cheney. Indeed, Sarah Blustain had a great item in The New Republic recently, explaining just how serious a “zealot” McCain is on the issue of reproductive rights. During his political career, McCain has participated in 130 reproductive health-related votes on Capitol Hill; of these, he voted with the anti-abortion camp in 125. McCain has consistently backed rights for the unborn, voting to cover fetuses under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and supporting the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which allowed a “child in utero” to be recognized as a legal victim of a crime. He has voted in favor of the global gag rule, which prevents U.S. funds from going to international family-planning clinics that use their own money to perform abortions, offer information about abortion, or take a pro-choice stand. There’s a reason McCain has a zero rating from Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America. The 1999 quote was just a cheap ploy, intended to make McCain appear reasonable. He’s not — when it comes to women’s rights, he’s nothing short of a nightmare. Last week, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick had an excellent item, explaining that a key component of McCain’s campaign strategy is fooling women into thinking he’s not a staunch opponent of reproductive rights. Lithwick argued if McCain can “keep [voters] in the dark,” he might “snooker voters into thinking that his abortion views are centrist,” when that’s obviously not the case. As of this afternoon, the scheme appears to actually have fooled a couple of Democrats, who regrettably don’t know better. But here’s a fun little test, to see who’s right. Ask the McCain campaign if Bartoschevich was accurately describing John McCain’s current position on abortion rights. It’s a straightforward proposition: she said McCain believes “overturning Roe v. Wade would not make any sense.” Does McCain and his team agree with this assessment? Or is Bartoschevich & Co. under a false impression? We’re waiting.Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) were all the rage this summer raking in an ungodly amount of money that made entrepreneurs, advisors, and celebrity endorsers lots of money. The issue is that for every great opportunity, there are a dozen fake scams trying to take your money, and both good and bad are advertised on popular websites that list upcoming ICOs. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t money to be made. With the SEC still slow to respond to this paradigm shift with clear guidance and rules, there is a small window to make outsized gains through investing “speculating” on ICOs. Below are the essential questions I believe every investor should ask before contributing to an ICO. FUNDAMENTAL PROJECT QUESTIONS What does it do? The purpose of an ICO is to fund the development of a decentralized application (DAPP). The first thing you need to do is find out what exactly this DAPP does, which is also the first description you’ll see about any ICO. You can quickly and easily filter projects based on what their goal is and whether you not you believe there’s a market for what it proposes. How does it work? The next thing you want to do is actually read the white paper and try to understand how it works. This will probably take some work on your part in terms of looking up terms you do not understand if you are unfamiliar with computer science. If the white paper, or other documentation provided by the creators, does not explain how the project works and how the contract is implemented, you are better off avoiding the ICO. Does this really need to be on a blockchain? Once you understand what the creators are trying to do, and how they propose to implement your solution, ask yourself whether you think a blockchain is the best solution. Many (most) things are better off existing how they are in the real world. Modern blockchains are often slow, expensive, and inefficient to implement at scale. A blockchain is not a cure-all and should not be treated as some sort of business panacea. Is the token necessary? Lots of times, a DAPP can succeed without needing its own ERC20 token. If the project could easily work using Ethereum instead of requiring a brand new token, there is already a fundamental issue at hand. Can the team execute? This is a bit harder to judge, but you should try to assess the team and see if you think they are capable of bringing the project to fruition and carrying through. Do the founders have the technical acumen necessary to develop and maintain the DAPP? Do you think the team will stay on and keep developing the project after they raise the funds necessary to cash out? Do the advisors have a lot of industry experience? What is the money being used for? Make sure that there is a clear outline of what exactly the money is being used for. Usually there’s a large portion for legal fees, but make sure to watch out for money spent on marketing, and money spent paying off founders, influencers, and advisors. How are tokens allotted The most important thing of all is to see how the tokens are being allocated. At what price is each token being sold for? How many tokens will be in existence? How many tokens are being retained by the company? How many tokens are given to the advisors? How many tokens do the founders keep? How many tokens go to developers? How much was used on bounty? How big is the contribution limit? What you want to see is a majority of tokens going to the sale, with a small amount being given to the core team and a portion being retained by the company for giving to developers. Another important thing to look for is a lockup that prevents founders and advisors from dumping their tokens. They should slowly gain the ability to sell their tokens over several years. You also want to see contribution limits that prevents whales from gaining the power to manipulate the market, and also ensure there is unmet demand from those who want more than the limit, and will this drive up the price. Is there a pre-sale? Pre-sales are generally a bad thing. The pre-sale means that the company is selling the tokens at a discount (often a steep one) to the first people who put money in. What this means for later investors is that they are likely going to be screwed out of their money because a large part of the company was already sold at a much lower price. What this means for the pre-sale investors is that their money will likely be locked up for a very long time, and the company is not confident it can raise all the necessary funds in the public ICO (which is why they had the pre-sale). The stepper the pre-sale bonuses, the worse the ICO is. Are there bounty programs? Bounty programs are very very very bad news. Avoid bounties at all cost because it means that a large amount of tokens are being given out to those who post about the project on social media or write Steem and Medium posts about the project. This is your clue-in that this is really just a pyramid scheme where the company is indirectly paying bounty hunters to drive investments through artificial hype. Is there a lot of advertising? Many ICOs choose to advertise the sale very heavily. These ads can be on popular crypto websites, on websites that list lots of upcoming ICOs, and even on normal websites through Google or another ad partner. Avoid any project that advertises heavily because these projects are almost always just money grabs. Responsible teams do not spend heavily on advertising and let the project speak for itself. What is the pricing model and what value is being assigned to the company? Many ICOs just feature a hard cap that sets some amount of US dollars they want to raise and how many token they are offering. The actual contribution rate of N coins per ETH, BTC, NXT, etc. is determined at the start of the ICO based on the current USD price of the base coin. This model automatically gives the project a market capitalization that the founders choose, not the investors. This is not always the best model because it does not equate supply and demand. This can lead to overly high prices or overly low price. In this case, make sure that you agree with the price the project is being offered for and assess whether you think it is actually worth it’s implied market cap. Other formats such as that used by the Raiden Network ICO have more complex forms of auctions such as a Dutch Auction where the price goes down over time (others have the price go up over time). When the price is declining, contributors can enter at whatever price they think is reasonable and do not need to worry about whether they should have waited because everyone receives the cheapest price. I believe this is a better auction format because it finds a low price for investors, and the price is likely to go up since earlier contributors value the token higher than its sale price (meaning they valued it more than it sold for). How much are
. He said he also asked the American ambassador to Afghanistan at the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, with no result. “We did try but it was not working,” Hajji Zaher said in a phone interview. “When they are sending someone to Guantánamo, they have their own rules.” After Mr. Hekmati’s death at Guantánamo, his body was returned to Afghanistan and quietly buried in an unmarked grave in Kandahar on Jan. 8. His family did not dare attend the funeral, fearful of both the Taliban and the Americans, friends said. As the Taliban has reasserted itself in much of southern Afghanistan, Mr. Hekmati’s son remains in hiding. Neither he nor any relative or elder of their tribe collected his father’s body. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “He is caught in the middle,” said Hajji Wali, a family friend. “He is scared of the Taliban and scared of the government and the Americans, because the Americans took his innocent father and they could take him, too.”Joel Isfeld thought his precious Savannah cat, Cleo, was lost after she sneaked onto his condo balcony on Sunday night and jumped from the 17th floor. After she was nowhere to be found on the ground beneath his balcony, Isfeld immediately went searching for her, going floor by floor in his building. She was nowhere to be seen, so Isfeld posted his concerns about her the next day on Facebook. The response, he says, was amazing — with so many people sending messages and trying to help find Cleo. It wasn't until 11 p.m. on Monday night that Isfeld received word Cleo had been seen on the terrace of an adjacent building. "I didn't know if she was OK... if she was injured. I was in tears," he told CBC News. "She was shaken up, but other than that she was totally OK. No broken bones, no scrapes, just a small cut on her mouth." The Savannah cat is a breed known for intelligence — and, in Cleo's case at least, having a sense of adventure. Asked how many of her nine lives Cleo has used up, Isfeld said she was running out. "She's only got a couple left. She is a pretty cool cat."Swift: Common mistakes no one bothers about — Explicitness in property and function calls IDAP Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 20, 2017 Hello there, my sweet fellow developers, One thing I wanted to mention is, that Swift introduced implicitness in function and property calls (you can avoid calling self): We had such a thing for ivars in ObjC, but the illness has spread everywhere as of now. There are several points against using that language feature: The code without syntax highlighting is unreadable; Even with the syntax highlighting, if you don’t know the code base perfectly, if there are global functions and variables and local functions and variables with same names as globals, it’s hard to derive, what is being called; When used with properties, developers tend to forget, that multiple calls to properties should be cached in local variables, as they just don’t perceive the calls to properties as duplication without the explicit call. So, my advice to everyone is: don’t use shortcuts. Explicit and deduplicate the code instead of hiding the duplication visually, without hiding it logically. And yep, burying your head in sand like an ostrich, won’t do you any good, as properties are not ivars, no matter what you think, they could be or could become computationally expensive. So, just to rehearse, be explicit: That’s all, folks. Have a great day and stay DRY, no matter, where you are.NSW Poolice are a funny bunch, aren’t they? They certainly take Facebook comments seriously when they come from a bloke calling himself ‘Khaled’… But this came through to our blog earlier this morning from a user calling himself ‘timmy mcveigh’, using the email ns1488@mail.com (no surrender; and 1488 is a Nazi reference)… Of course, you might be wondering – what kind of dipshit makes up an email address like that. Well here he is: And if NSW Police are interested, there’s been death threats and bomb threats happening on Facebook on a DAILY basis. And a lot of these comments still remain publicly accessible, in open Facebook groups and pages. It really makes you wonder about ethnic profiling and what good it does. Let’s be perfectly clear about this – if a terrorist had wanted to cause mayhem in Sydney, how hard would it be for him to get on a crowded peak-hour train? No heavy security at any train stations I know of. How hard would it be to walk across the Harbour Bridge or inside the Sydney Opera House wearing a bomb? No heavy security there. Anti Terrorism measures are PURE BULLSHIT. If somebody had wanted to do something, they would have done it by now. Big Brother doesn’t sit everywhere. If we really want to eliminate terrorism, we need to stop giving extremists a reason to exist. Embrace human rights, and the right for all human beings to practice their faith while living in adherence to each country’s laws, and mutual respect is born. Live and let live. But take a look at what the Kleagle was up to soon after leaving school… Chris Smith, like so many here, has criminal charges to his name. Email us for his parole officer’s phone number if you wish. (Another Australian Defence Force representative) But wait…Twitter UPDATE: PayPal denies giving up any of Hiroshima's credit card information. Here's a blog post it wrote about the incident, preceded by the following tweet: Naoki Hiroshima was once offered $50,000 for a single-letter Twitter handle he acquired in 2007, @N. He says no longer owns the handle thanks to a savvy, aggressive hacker and security flaws with GoDaddy and PayPal. He detailed what happened on Medium. First, Hiroshima says the hacker tried some normal ways to access the account. This person allegedly sent Facebook messages prompting Hiroshima to change his Twitter email and password. The hacker also contacted Twitter and asked them to resend the password. Twitter wouldn't without more information, so the hacker went a more aggressive route. The hacker noticed Hiroshima had a GoDaddy account and that he had registered a number of domain names on it. The domains were paid for with a credit card Hiroshima had connected to PayPal. The hacker, according to Hiroshima, was able to gain access to all of the domains on GoDaddy by figuring out just a few numbers on the credit card. The hacker later explained this to Hiroshima in an email: I called paypal and used some very simple engineering tactics to obtain the last four of your card (avoid this by calling paypal and asking the agent to add a note to your account to not release any details via phone) I called godaddy and told them I had lost the card but I remembered the last four, the agent then allowed me to try a range of numbers (00-09 in your case) I have not found a way to heighten godaddy account security, however if you'd like me to recommend a more secure registrar i recommend: NameCheap or eNom (not network solutions but enom.com) Once the hacker had control of the valuable GoDaddy account, Hiroshima says he was black-mailed for his Twitter handle. Here's an email he says the hacker sent him: I see you run quite a few nice websites so I have left those alone for now, all data on the sites has remained intact. Would you be willing to compromise? access to @N for about 5minutes while I swap the handle in exchange for your godaddy, and help securing your data? Hands tied, Hiroshima gave up @N. Now he owns @N_is_stolen.Jerusalem: Israeli troops shot and killed a Jordanian judge of Palestinian descent at a West Bank-Jordan crossing after he allegedly tried to grab a gun from a border guard, causing new frictions with the Palestinians and Jordan. The military said the judge, 38-year-old Raed Zeiter, lunged toward the Allenby Bridge terminal yelling, ''Allahu Akbar,'' or God is Great, and tried to wrest a weapon from an Israeli soldier. Soldiers opened fire at his legs to try to restrain him, at which point he tried to strangle a soldier and was shot to death, the military said. The crossing is under overall Israeli security control. Protesters demonstrate near the Israeli embassy in Amman against the shooting of the judge. Credit:Reuters Jordan's Foreign Affairs Minister, Nasser Judeh, summoned Israel's No. 2 diplomat to Amman to condemn the shooting and demand the Israeli government immediately open an investigation, Jordan's state-run Petra news agency reported. Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah issued a statement condemning the judge's killing and calling for an international investigation. Petra said the judge was shot after an altercation with Israeli troops. Mr Zeiter lived with his family in Amman, where he was a judge in the Court of First Instance, the news service said.Steve Keim, the Arizona Cardinals' vice president of player personnel, is scheduled to interview this week for the San Diego Chargers' general manager job, according to ESPN's Adam Schefter. The Chargers fired former GM A.J. Smith and head coach Norv Turner on black Monday, ending two tenures that many felt should have ended much sooner than they did. Keim has been with the Cardinals organization since May 1999, when he started as a regional scout, and has served in his current role of VP of player personnel since May 2008. His track record in the NFL Draft is quite attractive to teams looking to build through the draft instead of through free agency, and the Chargers would fit that bill. Larry Fitzgerald, Patrick Peterson, Darnell Dockett, Adrian Wilson and Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie were all selections by the Cardinals in recent years. The Chargers finished 7-9 this season and missed the playoffs, despite what many viewed as a talented roster. This post first appeared on SB Nation.The picture for Venezuela grows grimmer by the day, as tankers waiting to load fuel oil from Venezuela ports grow in number as the national oil company, PDVSA, struggles to deliver the amounts needed to load. That’s what traders and shipping data from Reuters have revealed in recent days. According to this data, there are four tankers waiting to load crude oil and fuel oil at the port of Paraguana and another eight waiting at the Jose port—PDVSA’s largest export terminal—to load refined oil products. There are also ten vessels waiting to unload refined products for the Venezuelan market, but payments to the sellers have been delayed, and now so is unloading. Venezuela has been struggling to rein in the decline of its crude oil production resulting from underinvestment, mismanagement, and, most recently, U.S. sanctions. In October, crude oil production fell to the lowest in nearly 30 years, as PDVSA is unable to pay for services rendered by oilfield service providers, who are now refusing to continue working with it. To add insult to injury, the country’s largest refinery, Paraguana, suffered damages from a fire earlier this month, which caused a severe drop in capacity utilization to just 13 percent. The refinery has a daily capacity of 955,000 barrels of crude. Related: Are NatGas Prices About To Explode? Venezuela’s fuel oil production also declined as a result of the outages following the fire and a drop in the input of medium and light crude in the distillation units where the oil product is made. Over the last four years, crude oil production in Venezuela has fallen by about a million bpd, and in October the daily average was below 2 million bpd. Exports are also falling: in October, PDVSA exported 475,165 bpd to the United States, which was down 12 percent on September and 36 percent on October 2016. That’s the lowest daily export rate for the last 14 years. By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:This summer, for example, 30 homes in an outpost known as Ulpana were evacuated after a Sfard petition claimed they were on private Palestinian land; Israel pledged to build 800 settler homes in exchange. This week, Mr. Sfard’s chief adversary, the settler movement, bestowed on him honorary citizenship in “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical names for the West Bank, with a mock certificate noting that he “may have come to curse and cause damage” but had ended up “raising the morale and gladdening the hearts of those who love the Land.” Most of his work is financed by Israel’s premier left-wing nonprofit organizations, which in turn are financed in part by European governments. “He sees the courts as the way to force the changes that he perceives as necessary for Israel,” said Gerald Steinberg, who runs NGO Monitor, a right-leaning group that examines organizations like those that support Mr. Sfard. “But he doesn’t convince the Israeli public. In any democratic process, you can’t use just the legal system to impose an ideology.” Mr. Sfard makes no apologies for his dual role as legal advocate and political activist. His representation of conscientious objectors came after he served 21 days in a military jail in 1998 for refusing to do reserve duty in the disputed city of Hebron. His office shelves are lined with the works and likenesses of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His parents met during the student uprisings at the University of Warsaw in 1968. Mr. Sfard’s maternal grandfather, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, was kicked out of the university and labeled a traitor for supporting the students. His father, Leon, spent three months in a Polish prison, and avoided trial only by leaving the country. THIS legacy is ever-present for the younger Mr. Sfard: in his firm’s conference room hangs a large photograph he took of four Soviet-era Polish police cars that were on display in Warsaw when he went there on a trip to explore his roots two years ago. The police cars were much like the ones in which his father was taken from his home in the middle of the night. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “It reminds me time and again what am I doing, and what are the dangers of being a dissident,” Mr. Sfard said. “For him, I should be a bit more thankful that this is a democracy and I have freedom of speech and I can do what I do. For me, this is the starting point, not something that I have to appreciate every day.” 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. Once in Israel, his father became a high-tech consultant, his mother an education professor. They raised Michael and his younger sister in a Jerusalem neighborhood filled with journalists, who debated the issues of the day in their salon. In high school, he rallied for movie theaters to be open on the Sabbath, and for peace with the Palestinians. He served in the army as a combat medic, mostly in Lebanon, and chose law because “I don’t have what it takes to be a politician.” A side passion is literature — especially Polish poetry — and he co-wrote “The Last Spy,” a 2007 biography of Marcus Klingberg, a Polish-Israeli client of the first lawyer he worked with, who was convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union. Mr. Sfard and his high school sweetheart have 7-year-old and 15-month-old sons, whom they adopted for social-consciousness reasons. He spent a year studying in London, a self-imposed exile from the land with which he has a love-hate relationship, but could not stay away. “This is my place: this culture is my culture, this language is my language,” he explained. “I don’t see emigration as something that can be happy, only a tragedy. But if I stay here, I have to fight against things being done in my name.” Since it opened in 2004, Mr. Sfard’s firm has grown from a solo practice in one and a half rooms to a combined three apartments — his wife, a fashion designer turned social worker, did the interiors — with eight employees and two subletters. HIS signature is on many of the major cases decided in recent years by the Supreme Court: successes include the rerouting of the separation barrier around the village of Bilin, the 2005 demolition of nine settler homes in Amona, the impending move of the outpost called Migron and the recent evacuations in Ulpana. These and others have made him an enemy of the right: last year, a settler from Kiryat Arba was indicted in connection with an Internet posting that called for his assassination and included his address. But Mr. Sfard’s court statements and legal wisdom are respected by judges and adversaries. And clients praise him for adopting their causes as his own. “He didn’t treat me as a customer,” said Bassam Aramin, the father of a 10-year-old girl killed in a 2007 protest, whose petition forced an investigation, though not an indictment. “He treats this like his own daughter.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story David Zonshein, founder of the advocacy group Courage to Refuse, recalled Mr. Sfard’s taking him aside during the push in one case for a full military trial, which risked a long jail sentence, to say: “Don’t do it for other people. Other people will not take the consequences.” His office walls are at once a chronicle of the movement and his personal history. There is a framed 1958 map of Israel he found at the Jaffa flea market, “the only map you can find today where there are no settlements and the Palestinian villages are all marked,” he said. There is also a framed search warrant for his files in a case concerning interviews with dissident soldiers. In back, a small room is filled with a rainbow of three-ring binders, files of the roughly 500 cases the firm has fought over its eight years. They are, often, not legal genius, more a matter of spending the money and time to find, say, Palestinians with landownership claims. But even the victories are often bittersweet. In Bilin, the separation barrier took over half the village’s land; a fight lasting years returned about a quarter of the land. “The process is no less important than the result,” he said. “I am addicted. It’s not a question of whether it’s depressing or not, but whether I can live without it.”Saturday lunchtime, and the most compelling manager in the Premier League is strutting his stuff on the St James' Park touchline. Not José Mourinho -- the Special One, like his team, is unusually subdued. Some waving, some pointing, the occasional rueful smile. A broken unbeaten run, and a bizarre conspiracy theory about ball boys: that's not our smouldering José at his best. No, the most compelling manager in the Premier League is patrolling in front of the opposite dugout. Alan Pardew, whose Newcastle side have just beaten Chelsea, guides a team who have now won six of their last eight games and clambered from the bottom of the table to seventh, passing Liverpool, Tottenham and Everton on the way. This is not because Newcastle were bad and are now good, though their silver-haired tactical maven can take at least some of the credit for that. The usual reaction to a hideous run of form is to batten down the hatches, to seek solidity and stubbornness and resilience. By contrast, Pardew -- though injuries have perhaps guided his hand -- have embraced the chaotic, the youthful, and the quick. Ayoze Perez (21) made his first start of the season against Tottenham at the end of October; Sammy Ameobi (22) came on at half-time and scored the winner seconds later. Both have since become fixtures in the first team. After an assured performance against Manchester City in the League Cup, Mehdi Abeid made the jump to the Premier League against Liverpool and belied his 22 years, while Rolando Aarons, a mere stripling of 19 years, has also made a few promising cameos. With a rejuvenated Fabricio Coloccini and the flourishing Jack Colback providing a platform, it turns out the kids are alright. But that doesn't make Pardew compelling; he's that however things are going. That comes from the man himself, from his presence. From his celebrations: almost the right gestures in almost the right places, but all slightly stiff. Like they don't come naturally. Like they're product of long hours in front of the mirror, working angles, refining facial expressions, occasionally consulting a well-thumbed copy of Public Expressions of Joy for Dummies. It comes from the things he says, his intriguing composition of words that forces the listener to be drawn in. This resurgence, for example: "You can only do that if the training-ground spirit is great and you have a fantastic togetherness and a love for each other. It's about love -- it's about love and putting cover on each other." Or, on goalkeeper Rob Elliot's impending child, "Fortunately, the good news is that there seems to be a bit of a lull in the pregnancy, so we're not on tenterhooks." Or, on the signing of Remy Cabella, "A lot of work has gone into his signing and I'd like to pay tribute to my staff, in particular Graham, myself..." Even his table manners, at least according to club photographer Steve Bacon: When the gaffer sat down with his backroom team, deciding on his order, he asked fitness coach Tony Strudwick what he was getting - and told him he'd take it if it looked good. When the meals arrived, Pards said to Tony, ‘Yours looks better, I'm having that,' and swapped plates. I told him you can't just take someone else's dinner. Pards retorted, ‘When you're the king, you can do anything'. In short, it's not Pardew's results that make him compelling, he simply is. When Newcastle are going well, he cocks around the walk with all the swagger and confidence of a provincial estate agent who has just sealed another deal and, in the process, moved into pole position for the Employee of the Month award. It will be his third consecutive such triumph. When they're going badly he's that same estate agent, only the certificate and bottle of blended whisky has gone to somebody else and he's entirely at a loss to explain why or how. He knows, however, that it wasn't his fault. There is something appallingly captivating about men like Pardew and the way they exist in the world. (At least from safe, neutral distance; God only knows how Newcastle fans cope.) Real life manifestations of the vainglorious pillock archetype that underpins so many of Britain's most enduring comic creations, most notably Alan Partridge. Not evil, not malicious, not bad in any real sense, but just so overwhelmingly oblivious, so solipsistically swirled up in their own sense of self that it's hard not to gape, open-mouthed, as they open their mouths and words fall out. "It's credit to the owner and also credit to me because I've had to dig in a few times." That's a man congratulating himself on not having let the fact that he was doing his job badly, get in the way of his continuing to do the job badly. Plenty of managers draw deep from the well of self-belief -- it's almost a requirement, the job being what it is -- but few do so with such relentless thirst. Few, too, can match him when it comes to making excuses; slip-ups have, in the past, been blamed on everything from an over-excited home crowd to the Notting Hill Carnival. Some managers make excuses because they have to. Pardew makes them because, you sense, that he genuinely believes them to be the case. They must be! How could they not be? Ultimately, Pardew is the Premier League's most compelling manager because he is the Premier League's most appropriate manager: he might well be the Premier League in human form. Unquestionably the greatest, because the question simply never occurs. An ego lined, inside and out, entirely with Teflon. And, however, you slice it, extraordinarily good television.This product was a winner of the ThinkGeek Bounty Program, which means the design was an original submission by one of you. Unfortunately this program doesn't exist anymore, but to all who participated in the past, we're forever grateful for your brains. Your First Doctor Holds a Special Place in Your Heart(s) This is a shirt in tribute to all the unsung heroes out there -- the pediatricians. We salute you. No really. That's it. No subtext or nothin. You might occasionally see this shirt at science fiction conventions. We don't know what's up with that. We decided to make a shirt in tribute to one of the first traumatic experiences in life -- the visit to the pediatrician. It involves hanging out in waiting rooms with sick kids, toys you're not allowed to play with because other sick kids have been touching them, and an oversized children's Bible as the only reading material for folks under 3 feet tall. When you finally see the pediatrician, he does something to distract you so he can give you a shot, and all you get in return is a lollipop. Not a fair trade. Our 100% cotton black shirt features the phrase "You Never Forget Your First Doctor" under an inexplicable picture of an old-style British police phone box with a white starburst behind it. We have no idea what's going on with that.Former FBI Director Jim Comey's testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday confirmed Democrats' fears that President Donald Trump may have committed obstruction of justice, but most shied away from impeachment talk. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO Some Dems see stronger case for ‘obstruction’ after Comey bombshells Democrats are still dodging their base’s intensifying interest in impeaching Donald Trump, but former FBI Director James Comey’s Thursday testimony left some of them more confident in the strength of an obstruction of justice case against the president. Democrats are largely avoiding impeachment talk in part because their leaders want to stay focused on the GOP’s Obamacare repeal plan and other pocketbook issues that might help them rebound in the midterms, not a Russia scandal with an uncertain timeline. But after Comey testified that Trump directed him to ease up on a probe of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, some Democrats pointed to growing evidence of Trump’s obstruction. Story Continued Below “Having him, under oath, saying he felt he was directed to drop the investigation into the national security adviser, I do think strengthens that case” for obstruction of justice, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) told reporters. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s broad investigation into Russian electoral meddling, including the question of whether Trump tried to shutter Comey’s inquiry into his campaign’s alleged collusion with Moscow, could take months to reach a conclusion. But some Democrats viewed Comey’s Thursday testimony as a significant step forward. “The walls feel like they’re closing in on the White House,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said in an interview. Sign up here for POLITICO Huddle A daily play-by-play of congressional news in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. “No one here is planning for impeachment,” Murphy added. “But we theoretically don’t need to wait for a Mueller product in order to have that conversation — if more evidence like that which was presented today continues to mount.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a veteran prosecutor, said in a statement that Comey had "concluded that the president of the United States intended to obstruct an FBI investigation." Comey's testimony also suggested possible "complicity in the president’s improper and obstructive conduct" among other Trump advisers, Whitehouse said. Not every Democratic senator was ready to go that far, starting with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The New York Democrat warned in a floor speech that "the cloud hanging over this administration has just gotten a whole lot darker" in the wake of Comey's testimony, but steered clear of referencing obstruction as he described Trump's behavior toward the axed FBI chief. “I’ve been asked questions: Is this collusion? Do you have evidence of collusion? Right now, no,” the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, told reporters. “Not what I would call sufficient. Suspicion is one thing — evidence is another.” Senators are “not there yet” on an obstruction case either, Feinstein added. "For any of us to make an assumption on that is wrong," agreed moderate Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), an Intelligence Committee member who questioned Comey on Thursday. "Comey wouldn’t go there, and for us to go there would be wrong right now too.” Another Intelligence panel Democrat, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, pointedly declined to use the term “obstruction of justice," saying only that "what we are hearing and seeing is a pattern of abuse of presidential power." Abuse of power made up one of several impeachment charges against former President Richard Nixon in 1974, although he resigned before those charges could proceed, and one of two failed impeachment charges against former President Bill Clinton in 1998. The full House ultimately impeached Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, but he was not convicted by the Senate. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) made a subtle reference to the impeachment-and-removal process even as he urged colleagues to be measured in their discussions of Trump's actions toward Comey. "Whether it meets a certain legal standard or not remains to be investigated and determined," Schatz said in an interview. "But I think it’s important also for us to remember that we members of the Senate may even be sitting in judgment of this particular question, so we should be very precise with our thinking." The House Intelligence Committee's senior Democrat, California Rep. Adam Schiff, said in a statement that Comey's testimony "constitutes evidence of an intention to interfere or potentially obstruct at least a portion of the Russia investigation, if not more." But Schiff added that lawmakers now must gather further documentation of Comey's statements about Trump's behavior. Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), who is working with Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) to draft articles of impeachment against the president, said Comey’s testimony “validated the facts” needed to remove Trump from office for obstruction of justice. Green is one of more than a dozen House lawmakers who have in recent weeks stepped up calls for Trump to be impeached. But most other House Democrats were much more cautious in their assessment of the hearing, describing Comey’s testimony as alarming but also confirming fears that the president tried to interfere in the Russia investigation. “I don’t think there’s any question that there’s a lot more ‘there’ there,” said Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. “What I continue to say, and I can only speak for myself, is let the special prosecutor do his job and let the facts lead where they may.” Crowley and other House Democratic leaders also reiterated their calls for an independent commission to work alongside Mueller. They argued a commission completely independent from the White House and not under the Justice Department's umbrella is needed to prevent future hacking attempts by Russia. “Do I think from my layman’s point of view was this an attempt to obstruct? I think so,” Crowley said. “But can it be corroborated? Can you show intent?... That remains to be seen.”He’s made billions off slot-fed quarters, starred in 15 mobile games since 2008, featured in that goofy Bud Light commercial at this year’s Super Bowl, and even appeared his own Google Doodle. Who would’ve thought 35 years on that we’d still be raving about a banana-colored, dot-noshing disc with a love/hate ghost fixation and a more-than-mild fruit fetish? Today marks the 35th anniversary of Pac-Man‘s arrival in Japan on May 22, 1980, an arcade game whose eponymous character remains the most recognizable in the annals of gaming. We caught up with Pac-Man‘s Japanese creator, Toru Iwatani, who reminded us of what inspired the character, then told us how he feels about the game today. Iwatani first saw Pac-Man in a pizza It’s a long-told tale, but in case you haven’t heard it, Iwatani says his inspiration for the Pac-Man character came from one of the most popular dishes in the world. “While thinking about the word ‘eat’ when taking a piece of pizza, I saw that the rest of pizza looked like a character, and that’s how Pac-Man’s iconic shape was created,” says Iwatani. “I realized that although keywords such as ‘fashion’ and ‘love’ would appeal more to women, my opinion is that the word ‘eat’ is universally appealing and would attract their attention as well. That’s why I went with this idea.” The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now At the time, arcades were basically boys clubs “In the late 1970s, there were a lot of games in arcades which featured killing aliens or other enemies that mostly appealed to boys to play,” explains Iwatani. “The image of arcades was that they were darkly lit and their restrooms were dirty.” Iwatani wanted to make arcades into date hangouts “This perception [of arcades as dude hangouts] was similar in Japan,” says Iwatani. “I wanted to change that by introducing game machines in which cute characters appeared with simpler controls that would not be intimidating to female customers and couples to try out … and couples visiting arcades would increase.” 35 years later, Iwatani sees the game as plausibly feminist “My opinion is that Pac-Man became popular with everyone, from youngsters to elders to men and women because of our original idea to make a game that spoke to both female customers and couples,” he says. “Empowering Pac-Man to chase the ghosts gives players a refreshed perspective on the game’s core gameplay, and I think this idea also appeals to a new generation of female players who have grown up empowered and want to be the pursuer rather than being the pursued.” He “modeled” the sound effect Pac-Man makes when swallowing to sound designer Toshio Kai himself “I asked for a game version of the typical Japanese mimetic words ‘Paku Paku’ that’s commonly used to describe people eating food,” explains Iwatani. “I described the ‘swallow’ sound effect that I wanted to Kai-san by eating fruit, and by making actual gurgling sounds.” He sees Pac-Man as one of the medium’s exemplars “It might be a bit of a stretch to use a Beatles comparison, but if the song “Yesterday” is looked at as THE standard musical number for music, then I think Pac-Man is THE standard for games. Thus, Pac-Man will be loved forever, and I’m proud of that.” And there’s still more he’d like to do with the character “Outside of the original Pac-Man within the maze-game concept, there was the Pac-Land arcade game in which Pac-Man appeared as more of a full character with hands and feet giving him more abilities (the game also took him out of the maze),” says Iwatani, reflecting on some of Pac-Man’s later appearances. “And there’s Pac-Man World, when Pac-Man entered a 3D world.” “I’ll keep working on ideas for Pac-Man,” he says, then slyly adds “Perhaps there’s room for a singing Pac-Man in the future.” Write to Matt Peckham at matt.peckham@time.com.In this Dec. 5, 2017, photo, House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis., speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. Republican leaders have spent months promoting the myth that red low-tax states are subsidizing blue high-tax states because of the deduction for state and local taxes. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican leaders have spent months promoting the myth that red low-tax states are subsidizing blue high-tax states because of the deduction for state and local taxes. An Associated Press Fact Check finds it’s actually the other way around. High-tax, traditionally Democratic states (blue), subsidize low-tax, traditionally Republican states (red) — in a big way. Republicans are trying to eliminate the deduction as part of the sweeping tax package working its way through Congress. They added back a deduction for up to $10,000 in property taxes, in a concession to Republicans from high-tax states such as New York and New Jersey. California Republicans are pushing to extend the deduction to local income taxes, too. It is true that taxpayers in high-tax states benefit the most from the deduction. However, these states send far more tax dollars to Washington than residents in low-tax states. In fact, most high-tax states send more money to Washington than they get back in federal spending. Most low-tax states make a profit from the federal government’s system of taxing and spending. HOUSE SPEAKER PAUL RYAN: — Ryan said the rest of the country is “propping up profligate, big-government states.” — “States that got their act together are paying for states that didn’t,” the Wisconsin Republican said. TREASURY SECRETARY STEVEN MNUCHIN: — “We are getting the federal government out of the business of subsidizing states. That is going to impact high-tax states.” THE FACTS: Connecticut residents paid an average of $15,643 per person in federal taxes in 2015, according to a report by the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Massachusetts paid $13,582 per person, New Jersey paid $13,137 and New York paid $12,820. California residents paid an average of $10,510. At the other end, Mississippi residents paid an average of $5,740 per person, while West Virginia paid $6,349, Kentucky paid $6,626 and South Carolina paid $6,665. Low-tax red states also fare better when you take into account federal spending. Mississippi received $2.13 for every tax dollar the state sent to Washington in 2015, according to the Rockefeller study. West Virginia received $2.07,
a significant change. Former TCSO Major Shannon Clark testified to the grand jury last year that Glanz not only took donations from those he had appointed as appraisers, he required the maximum $2,700. ‘Safe Oklahoma’ Grant On Thursday, Regalado held a press conference to announce TCSO had received about $120,000 in grant funding from the state AG’s office. The funds would pay for a task force as well as purchase a year’s worth of access to crime-mapping software. Sherman said Friday during the debate that Regalado previously claimed the award marks the first time TCSO had applied for that grant, but that the sheriff’s office had previously applied for and received that same grant under Glanz. Regalado said in response that he was not aware that TCSO had previously applied for the grant, but if it had applied, the agency had not been awarded the grant money. Facts: A TCSO media release from May does include the quote attributed to Regalado that says: “This is the first time TCSO has applied for these grants.” However, Sherman quoted from a Dec 11, 2013 Tulsa County purchasing department memo that states the county received $75,000 from the Safe Oklahoma Grant Program, the same grant Regalado announced in Thursday’s press conference. The 2013 memo, sent to the media from Sherman’s camp, says nearly $70,000 of that award would be used for “overtime hours to target well-known hotspots for violent crime,” nearly identical to the purpose of the most recent Safe Oklahoma grant TCSO received. The differences between the two are only the amount of money, as the newest grant is worth about $45,000 more, and the type of equipment purchased. The 2013 grant paid for audio equipment, TCSO bought a year’s worth of access to “CrimeMapPro 6” software with the newest grant. That software is supposed to digitize the creating of crime “heat maps,” telling TCSO administration where to most efficiently distribute its deputies and task force. Essentially the task forces have the same funding source and same goals, to police crime “hot spots” and make arrests. Sherman’s past financial issues In the final question of the debate, Regalado mentioned that Sherman had filed for bankruptcy in 2004, and filed for foreclosure in 2014. He also said that Sherman has previously stated that he made some mistakes and learned from them, however “2004 to 2014 is quite a big gap.” “Why should the citizens of Tulsa County entrust millions of their hard-earned taxpayers money in your hands when you can’t even handle your personal finances,” Regalado asked. Sherman responded by saying Regalado was “hitting below the belt.” He said the two (both sergeants within the Tulsa Police Department when the campaign first started) had talked early on about staying friends and “staying above board” during the election process. Facts: Sherman did file bankruptcy in 2004, and entered into the foreclosure process in 2013. Sherman fired back at Regalado’s question, saying that the sheriff was wrong in saying that his home had been foreclosed on. Regalado didn’t specifically say Sherman had been foreclosed on; he said Sherman had “filed for foreclosure.” That is still technically incorrect, because it was Sherman’s lender that actually filed for foreclosure against him. Nevertheless, Regalado was correct that Sherman has faced financial problems both in the distant and recent past, and if elected would be tasked with managing a budget of about $40 million. The interaction between the two candidates was more interesting because it demonstrated for the first time really how much their relationship had deteriorated, and just how much dirt the two unearthed about each other. Regalado said that he and Sherman had a “handshake” deal not to go negative, but the sheriff said he quickly found out Sherman’s camp was “spreading some pretty vile rumors about me.” Sherman said Regalado’s camp, in response, had spread rumors that Sherman had filed for bankruptcy “four times.” How far have the two sides gone to background check the other? Regalado said Sherman was right, that he hadn’t been foreclosed on. Instead, Regalado said, the TPD sergeant had sold his house “for $30,000 less.” “You took an Obama bailout on it, and the taxpayers are going to suffer from it.” Records show the plaintiff in the foreclosure proceeding (Mortgage Clearing Corporation) vacated its judgment against Sherman in 2014 after Sherman “qualified for a government sponsored loss mitigation program to cure the delinquency.” Sherman later said he sold the house, using the difference as income on “an amended tax return,” what’s commonly known as a “short sale.” Takeaways from the debate: I tried to focus on the bits that I found most interesting, but there was a lot to digest in that hour. The most important thing to take away from it is that there is definite bad blood between the two candidates. And the two sides seem to be getting desperate leading up to Tuesday’s vote. Sherman’s camp flubbed a commercial and Regalado hastily paid for and filmed his own commercial in response, loaning himself $24,000 at the last minute. In the commercial, Regalado brings up Sherman’s five-day 2009 suspension for “conduct unbecoming an officer.” Sherman was suspended after an officer he supervised attended a party and crashed a car while leaving the party. However, the city ultimately sided with Sherman, awarding him back pay for the five days he missed. So there appears to be increasing tension between the two candidates, and it probably won’t end any time soon. If neither candidate receives 50.1 percent of the vote on Tuesday, the two will be headed to the runoff election Aug. 23.Mark Mallman (born July 20, 1973) is a Minnesota musician and composer for film. Since 1998, he has released 8 full-length studio albums, The End Is Not The End (2016) being his most recent. Education [ edit ] Mallman graduated from Waukesha South High School in 1991. He studied jazz piano at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music then moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1991. In 1995, at age 21, Mallman earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he studied painting and performance art. Musical career [ edit ] Mark Mallman has earned a reputation as one of the Twin Cities' must-see live acts, complete with his own star on the wall outside First Avenue.[1] He started his career in the late 1990s with the short-lived band, the Odd, a surprisingly popular postmodern joke on 1970s rock histrionics. Days after they topped the City Pages "Best new Band" poll, they broke up, but reunited to record and release one album, Oh My G*d – It's the Odd in 1998, which was co-written and co-produced by Mallman.[2] His solo debut came in 1998 with the release of The Tourist. In 2000, Mallman issued his sophomore effort, How I Lost My Life and Lived to Tell about It, which featured guest spots by Kat Bjelland of Babes in Toyland and Mallman's schoolmate, Davey von Bohlen of The Promise Ring. The Red Bedroom, his third album, was issued in Spring 2002. It was produced by Radiohead producer Paul Q. Kolderie. The Who's Gonna Save You Now? EP and the live effort Live from First Avenue, Minneapolis were released in 2003. Mr. Serious, Mallman's first self-produced album, followed in 2004. It marked his first album for Badman Recording Company.[3] His energetic performance style, combining the attitudes of punk rockers like Johnny Rotten and Darby Crash over the 70s disco-glam of Elton John, began to gain attention throughout the United States around the time of this record.[4] While he tirelessly performed 150 shows per year,[5] Mallman released Between the Devil and Middle C in 2006, and Invincible Criminal in 2009.[6] Invincible Criminal featured a duet with Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, and violins by Shannon Frid of Cloud Cult.[7] After an extensive amount of touring the United States, he spent the first half of 2012 in Los Angeles writing and recording Double Silhouette, which was released later that year.[8] On March 25, 2016, Mallman released "The End is Not The End." [9] David Bowie's Scary Monsters and Super Creeps helped inspire the direction Mallman took with each of the album's twelve tracks.[10] The theme of life after death and constant rebirth on earth is affirmed throughout the entirety of the album.[11] Mallman created the album after his mother died and he was dealing with depression and anxiety attacks. He says it's "a deliberate meditation on overcoming the roots of despair." [12] Marathon song cycles [ edit ] In 1999 Mallman performed a 26-hour long song titled "Marathon 1". Later, in 2004, Mallman's "Marathon Two" session took place back at the Turf Club in St. Paul, Minnesota. Seventy-five musicians took turns backing Mallman as he performed one song for over two consecutive days, only breaking to go to the bathroom.[13] On October 10, 2010, he completed "Marathon 3", a 78-hour long song complete with 576 pages of lyrics. During the performance, he injured his left foot. He finished at 10pm on Sunday night by biting into a bouquet of flowers and spitting them over the crowd.[14] Mayor Chris Coleman declared October 7–10, 2010 "Mark Mallman Days" in St. Paul, Minnesota in honor of his creative achievement. The mayor's proclamation included the statement "Whereas Mark Mallman is totally AWESOME."[15] From September 15 to Sept 22, 2012 he endured "Marathon IV: Road Rogue", an 8-day, 150-hour plus nonstop performance from New York to Los Angeles in the back of a van.[16] Marathon IV: Road Rogue was the first ever intercontinental mobile musical webcast in the history of the Internet.[17] In addition to the pioneering webcast, Mallman also employed a hacked midi brain controller which enabled him to perform music with his brainwaves while he was sleeping.[18] Film music [ edit ] Mallman started working on video game music in 2001. That led to working on trailers, starting with the 2007 remake of the thriller "The Hitcher." [19] Mallman was a professional composer of major motion picture trailers, such as Adventureland, 10,000 BC and Haunting of Molly Hartley from 2006 - 2009. He has also composed music for Living Arrangements (2009).[20] In 2012, he composed the score for the Lion's Gate / Machinima webseries Bite Me.[21] He currently operates his own music composition company, Bermuda Music, in Minneapolis.[22] Discography [ edit ] Mark Mallman swinging from the 7th Street Entry rafters in 2012. Awards [ edit ] "Best Male Vocalist Twin Cities" by City Pages (2000) (2000) Minnesota Music Award for best keyboard/piano player (2004) Minnesota Music Award for Rock Band and Rock Record for Mr. Serious (2005) (2005) "Best Live Artist Twin Cities" by City Pages (2010) (2010) "Best Music Video Twin Cities" for It's Good To Be Alive by City Pages (2010)Every nation has its own ‘Patron Saint’ who in times of great peril is called upon to help save the country from its enemies. St David is the patron saint of Wales, St Andrew of Scotland and St Patrick of Ireland – St George being the patron saint of England. But who was St. George, and what did he do to become England’s Patron Saint? Very little is known about St. George’s life, but it is thought he was a high ranking officer in the Roman army who was killed in around AD 303. It seems that the Emperor Diocletian had St. George tortured to make him deny his faith in Christ. However despite some of the most terrible torture even for that time, St George showed incredible courage and faith and was finally beheaded near Lydda in Palestine. His head was later taken to Rome where it was interred in the church dedicated to him. Stories of his strength and courage soon spread throughout Europe. The best-known story about St. George is his fight with a dragon, but it is highly unlikely that he ever fought a dragon, and even more unlikely that he ever visited England, however his name was known there as early as the eighth-century. In the Middle Ages the dragon was commonly used to represent the Devil. Unfortunately the many legends connected with St. George’s name are fictitious, and the slaying of the ‘Dragon’ was first credited to him in the 12th century. St. George, so the story goes, killed a dragon on the flat topped Dragon Hill in Uffington, Berkshire, and it is said that no grass grows where the dragon’s blood trickled down! It was probably the 12th century Crusaders however who first invoked his name as an aid in battle. King Edward III made him the Patron Saint of England when he formed the Order of the Garter in St. George’s name in 1350, and the cult of the Saint was further advanced by King Henry V, at the battle of Agincourt in northern France. Shakespeare made sure that nobody would forget St. George, and has King Henry V finishing his pre-battle speech with the famous phrase, ‘Cry God for Harry, England and St. George!’ King Henry himself, who was both warlike and devout, was thought by his followers to possess many of the saint’s characteristics. The Tomb of St George, Lod, Israel In England St. George’s Day is celebrated, and his flag flown, on his feast day, April 23rd. An interesting piece of trivia – Shakespeare was born on or around St. George’s Day 1564, and if the story is to be believed, died on St. George’s Day 1616. An appropriate end perhaps for the man who helped to immortalise the Saint in English tradition.They've been there for ages, and will be there long after we're gone. Will any of these be part of your itinerary? Published 12:15 PM, June 15, 2014 In my travels around the Philippines, I've seen spectacular rock formations littered along our coastlines that have left me both awed and curious. These geological heritages that were sculpted by time and nature were silent witnesses to the perpetual thumping of the sea waves, fiercest storms, and the sweeping winds that rage their way. I was blown away by the idea that these amazing rocks battled harsh elements of nature for millions of years, which formed it to its current state. Time and again, sites like these remind me that nature is still the best artist of the universe. Here are just 6 amazing rock formations I’ve come across during my travels around the Philippines: 1. Kapurpurawan Rock Formations, Burgos, Ilocos Norte This natural attraction off the coast of Burgos in Ilocos Norte is breathtaking. This immaculate rock formation fronting the wild waves of the sea looks every bit the geological wonder. It may be challenging to get to the site because it will require 15-20 minute-walk on a rocky shore, but the view that awaits is well worth it. Be extra careful as the rocks could be slippery. I recommend you wear comfy footwear and bring umbrella or cap for sun protection. 2. Biri Rock Formations, Biri Island, Northern Samar If you want to deviate from the usual tourist destinations, Biri Island in Northern Samar may be the perfect choice. Its main attractions are the unique rock formations lining the shore about half kilometer from the road. We rented a habal-habal or a local motorcycle to get there and trudged along the rocky beach to reach one of the well known spots there, Magasang Rock. Just a reminder, it’s best to be there during low tide and in time for the sunset or sunrise for perfect postcard-worthy pics and selfies! 3. Nakabuang Arc, Sabtang Island, Batanes I went to Batanes years ago to experience its well-preserved culture, see the old stone houses, and its magnificent rolling hills. But beyond these experiences, I learned that Batanes' rugged uniqueness is stamped on many of its beautiful sites. (READ: Through the eyes of a first-timer: Batanes, the evergreen) An example of this is the landmark arc at Nakabuang Beach in Sabtang Island. This white sand beach has a panoramic view that is accentuated by the famous arc rock formation, which has survived generations. (READ: 15 stunning PH sunsets) 4. Alapad Rock, Batan, Batanes Located along the coastline of Imnajbu in Batan Island, Alapad Rock stands among the many stunning spots that Batanes is known for. This was formed by tectonic movements and strong water current. 5. Apo Island Rock Formation, Negros Oriental Some of the prominent features that await visitors going to this small island in Negros Oriental are the beautifully sculpted natural rock formations. The Apo Island Rock Formation is a short walk from the beach area which is also a great spot to go snorkeling or swimming. This island is a marine protected site and a well-known dive spot. (READ: Meet barracuda, a thresher shark, turtles under the sea) 6. “Boto ni Kukarog,” Bagamanoc, Catanduanes The province of Catanduanes has several notable rock formations to show-off but the most distinguished and controversial because of its form is "Boto ni Kurakog" which literally translates as "Kurakog's penis.” It is located in Bagamanoc, 61 kilometers from the capital town, Virac. Local legend has it that this column, which rises about five meters above the sea and which resembles the male sex organ, belonged to a giant named Kurakog. It is said that he did not wake up from deep slumber and his body was washed away by the waves after which only the pointed column remained. Share stories from your travels. Will any of this be on your itinerary? Let us know in the comments below. – Rappler Che Gurrobat is the blogger behind backpackingpilipinas.com. She founded the literacy project, BookSail, and spent the last 5 years traveling 80 (of the 81) provinces of the Philippines. Visit her Facebook here. Editors' Note: This article has been modified to reflect the correct location of the Kapurpurawan rock formations – this is located in Ilocos Norte, not Ilocos Sur. We apologize for the error.Startups are trying "peer management" instead. LearnVest The most innovative tech companies today are building work cultures that fly in the face of tradition. At companies like Valve and Github, gone are the managers who boss people around and expect servile compliance. In their place is a flat organizational structure where individuals manage themselves and each other to build awesome things through peer management. These are companies without bosses. I know what you're thinking. "How does anything get done?" I admit that I had the same reaction when I first heard about bossless companies. But as I worked with and studied innovative companies like Zappos and up-and-comers like Wistia more closely, I saw how their focus on company culture drove productivity and motivation without hierarchy and authority. What's at stake can't be understated, and it's as Github's Zach Holman recently put it: "The product is the byproduct." If you get the "people, process, and technology" right at your company, innovation, motivation, and self-directed engagement will result as a byproduct. It won't be something you'll need to cram down your employees' throats. Trust is paramount, but it's also the biggest hurdle to overcome Effective peer management relies on individuals having accountability and autonomy, and none of that can happen without trust. People who are stuck on the concept of the traditional hierarchical structure as the gold standard, or even a necessary evil, once a business has aged sufficiently and successfully enough to be "established" are buying into a system of a lack of trust, which drives the need to control. Instead, peer management works by entrusting and empowering individuals to control themselves. A bossless or managerless company doesn't mean it's directionless. Peer management is guided by accountability, transparency, and work culture. The result is the autonomy and agility to carry out initiatives, and because of that freedom, those initiatives are very often creative and help mold the stand-out success of a company.1. Every individual in the company must be accountable In peer management settings, individuals steer themselves and others, and with that power comes great responsibility to be accountable. Companies can provide tools to help wield that great responsibility, such as accounting for peer feedback and even peer compensation. At Valve, employees crowdsource rates of pay, and at Shopify, peers give each other monthly bonuses that come out of company profits as a fun way to recognize good work.Skillshare uses a system called Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), where objectives are broken into key results, to help carry out accountability and alignment within teams. OKRs provide a measure, at every week, month, and quarter, for individuals to evaluate their performance. One of the building blocks of inspiring tech companies, OKRs go back to Andy Grove's reign at Intel in the 1980s and continue today in smaller companies like Skillshare to larger ones like Google and Zynga. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus sleeps better at night knowing that OKRs "keep everybody going in productive directions when you're not in the room."2. Unblock your information flow. The essential ingredients of peer management like trust, accountability, peer feedback, and decision-making autonomy rely on transparency of information. The problem with old school, hierarchical companies is that managers end up operating as obstacles for spreading information freely within a company. And this only becomes a bigger problem as your company grows. As the saying goes: "Do things, tell people. These are the only things you need to do to be successful." Opening an effective channel to "do things, tell people" is the surprisingly simple solution, distributing necessary information, including news of accomplishments, results, and feedback, to get stuff done. The snippets system that Google uses is a way to do things and tell people. Every week, you get an email asking what you did in the previous week and what you plan on doing in the next. Responses are stored in a public space and distributed automatically the following day by email. The value of snippets is in creating an open channel to communicate what you're getting done over which you'll receive feedback. This progress data and information-sharing are the fuel and food of peer management environments, driving dynamic, agile, and effective performance and building a culture of meritocracy and incredible individual professional fulfillment. Rising star companies like Shopify and Harvest track and celebrate their accomplishments in a similar way with a daily email system from us here at iDoneThis.3. Strengthen your culture with every new hire. Fit is paramount in peer management. Fit can require tactics more familiar to dating when trying to match candidates to a unique company of highly autonomous individuals. Stripe applies what they call the "Sunday test": " If this person was alone in the office on a Sunday, would that make you more likely to come in just to hang out with him? We only make a hire if the answer is a strong yes." Having taken such effort to build a team they believe in, Stripe also allows everyone a veto for candidates. Stripe, Github, and Skillshare also take time to acclimatize new hires with an on-boarding process, cementing fit in those awkward first days of work and aligning them with the company culture and vision. Github has an induction week of social events and assigns a buddy to help people settle in, while Skillshare welcomes new hires by cooking them breakfast. Stripe has newbies float through different groups in the first few days to meet people, familiarize themselves with work, and set up the ability to be mobile later on. Chris Savage, co-founder and CEO of the rapidly growing business-video hosting company, Wistia, finds that the interaction of culture and fit become "a competitive advantage." As Wistia grows with an eye toward whether candidates will mesh with its quirky culture, the company itself advances, because "we're hiring for values that the company believes in, and people with those values should make it stronger." Doubters have said that these companies will inevitably become hierarchical and bureaucratic, but that hasn't happened even as Valve and Github get into the hundreds of employees. What's startling is that these innovative companies retain this flat structure as they grow out of the fledgling startup phase, reinventing how businesses are built and organized by recognizing the role of peer management in their continued success. The bottom line is that innovation and information has trouble traveling through hierarchies and managers, and so the most exciting companies today have chosen innovation over predictability. As Andy Grove put it, "Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos." With peer management, accountability isn't to a boss or supervisor, it's to each other, your team, your company, your customers — and because of the level of autonomy and personal engagement with your work and objectives, it's to yourself. That's way more motivating than being told what to do. Using peer management to build a culture that enables motivation, autonomy, and purpose makes work fulfilling and joyful, and yields innovative results.The Mulcahy Tapes & Papers Published in 20th-century / Contemporary History For many years I have had an interest in my father’s large collection of papers. After his retirement from politics in 1961, Prof. Kevin B. Nowlan and I assisted him in putting his large collection of War of Independence, truce, civil war and later personal and political papers in order, and having them transferred to the archives of University College Dublin. I also provided him with a secretary and equipment to record his memoirs on tape and to write an important annotation of Piaras Beaslaí’s Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland. (Dublin 1926). All this was done during the last ten years of his life. The tapes, which number about 150, consist largely of interviews Mulcahy had with my mother and myself, with many of his friends and contemporaries, and with historians and the media. The annotation of Beaslaí’s biography of Collins is a detailed commentary of his views about the content of Beaslaí’s text and about his own close association with Collins. Both tapes and annotation are valuable sources of material which encompass Mulcahy’s views about the leaders and the more important events between 1916 and 1924, while the tapes also deal with some later events in post civil war Ireland, including the decline of the Cumann na nGaedheal party, the Irish language, the organisation of Fine Gael in the early days of his presidency, and the two inter-party governments. The annotation and tapes are also lodged in UCD archives. The index of his papers runs to ninety pages. I have abstracted the tapes and these are now on floppy disc where subjects can be retrieved by checking for key words. The annotation has been fully indexed. Brief biography Richard Mulcahy was born in Waterford in 1886 into a Catholic family where religion and Victorian values and standards of behaviour were closely linked. He and his seven siblings were guided by a strong work ethic, by a firm commitment to education, by an unflinching devotion to duty and authority, by a serene spirituality based on their strong faith in Catholicism, and by no overt concern about personal power or acquisitions. One outstanding feature of his political career, and one which was to adversely affect his political profile and his reputation as one of the founders of our democratic state, was his lack of personal ambition and the apparently altruistic motives which guided him during his further career. His family moved to Thurles, County Tipperary, where he continued his education by the Christian Brothers. At sixteen he joined the Post Office and spent three years in Bantry, County Cork, as a learner and, subsequently, two years in Wexford as a clerk prior his transfer to Dublin in 1907. In Bantry he came under the influence of radical nationalism when he encountered the writings of Arthur Griffith of Dublin, and of Denis McCullough and Bulmer Hobson of Belfast. He also became deeply immersed in Irish language and culture thanks to his proximity to the West Cork Gaeltacht at Ballingeary. In later years he was to describe his sojourns at the house of Siobhan an tSagairt in Ballingeary as his ‘university’. His love of the language and of the indigenous society of the Gaeltacht was to become a major factor in his sense of nationalism. Shortly after his arrival in Dublin in 1907 Mulcahy joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913 and played a leading role in the successful Ashbourne action in 1916 led by Thomas Ashe. He was subsequently imprisoned in Knutsford and Frongoch. Released in 1917, he was appointed commandant of the Dublin Brigade and, in March 1918, chief-of-staff of the newly constituted General Headquarters staff of the Irish Volunteers. A member of the first Dáil, he supported the Treaty, and became minister for defence in the post-Treaty Dáil cabinet. While remaining minister for defence, he rejoined the army as chief-of-staff at the start of the civil war in June 1922 and succeeded Collins as commander-in-chief in September 1922. He resigned from the army in May 1923 at the end of the civil war to pursue a full-time career in politics. He remained minister for defence from 1922 to March 1924 when he resigned as a result of the army mutiny. Mulcahy rejoined the cabinet in 1927 as minister for local government and public health. Succeeding W.T. Cosgrave, he was president of Fine Gael from 1944 to 1959 and served as minister for education in the two inter-party governments, 1948-1951 and 1954-1957. He retired from politics in 1961 and died in 1971. Forgotten hero? Maryann Valiulis, in her 1992 biography, described Mulcahy as a ‘forgotten hero’. Between 1918 and 1924, when he led the army, he had the same standing in Ireland as Michael Collins, at least in military terms. His reputation gradually declined after the revolutionary period had passed, despite the fact that his contemporaries and his immediate family and relatives were well aware of his seminal contribution to the revolutionary movement and to the subsequent formation of a stable and democratic state. Military accounts of the war of independence have tended to be imbalanced with an almost exclusive emphasis on the part played by Collins and the fighters in the field, with little reference to the crucial role of GHQ staff. Mulcahy’s reputation was tarnished because of his perceived draconian prosecution of the civil war, and by the political, economic and social problems which bedevilled the fledging Irish Free State. He had particular responsibility for the tricky problem of army demobilisation with the ending of the civil war in 1923, which strained relations with cabinet colleagues. The 1924 army mutiny, which led to his resignation and that of the army council, certainly caused his colleagues to further downgrade his former prominent role in military and political affairs. There were other reasons why his reputation was overshadowed. His own lack of personal ambition was inconsistent with success in politics, as was his indifference to the attention of the media. His personality was such that he became totally engrossed in his current work and interests. This was well exemplified during the two inter-party governments when he allowed himself to be buried in the Department of Education to such a degree that he seemed detached from the wider political issues arising at cabinet level, despite the fact that he was a regular attender at meetings. Maryann Valiulis refers to his extraordinary capacity, bordering on the obsessional, to become engrossed in the task in hand, an organisational attribute which might have served him well as head of the army and as president of Fine Gael but which was hardly appropriate for a senior politician in a cabinet, few of whose colleagues had served in government before. There is little doubt that the appointment of Jack Costello as Taoiseach in the two inter-party governments, and his remaining as leader of the opposition in the intervening period was a major factor in diminishing Mulcahy’s reputation in the eyes of the public. I believe the dual leadership of Fine Gael from 1948 to 1959, with a part-time politician leading in the Dáil and the head of the party being effectively in the background, had a long-term adverse effect on the fortunes of the party. * * * During his many recordings Mulcahy was frequently asked his opinion and recollections of other leaders, including in particular Griffith, Collins, de Valera and Cathal Brugha. Arthur Griffith Griffith was his political mentor. Griffith’s policies, aimed at full self-determination for Ireland, without quibbling about the more academic aspects of our relationship with Britain, appealed to Mulcahy’s own pragmatic outlook about the country’s constitutional status. He was extremely sensitive to any criticism of Griffith and he was particularly distressed that, despite his lifetime work for the cause of Irish freedom, his humility and his lack of personal ambition, Griffith should have been so vilified by the anti-Treaty members of the Dáil during the Treaty debates. He quotes M.J. MacManus’s Éamon de Valera— Lloyd George proceeded to deliver his hammer blow. The British could concede no more and would debate no further. The Treaty must be signed or else… Griffith surrendered. ‘I will give the answer of the Irish delegation at 9 o’clock to-night’, he said, ‘but Mr Prime Minister I will personally sign this agreement and recommend it to my countrymen.’ ‘Do I understand Mr Griffith that, though everyone else refuses, you will nevertheless agree to sign?’ ‘That is so’, replied Griffith. —and observes: The question arises to my mind as to whether these are not the most valiant words ever spoken in the course of Irish history. They were the words of a man who, in an unquenched gaiety of spirit, had suffered poverty and degradation and apparently fruitless labours for years, entirely devoted to the service of the uplift of the people in terms of spirit, economic well-being, social happiness, political strength. Mulcahy also refers in his memoirs to Griffith’s continued interest in the social and economic aspects of the new state, an interest which he shared with few other politicians at that time. Michael Collins Mulcahy was also a great admirer of Collins and, as chief-of-staff, he encouraged Collins in every possible way, even if Collins’s actions and responsibilities at times appeared to transgress those of the chief and other members of the staff. He admired Collins for his tremendous energy, his organisational and communication skills, his attention to detail and his intolerance of inefficiency, attributes which my father shared with him. He also admired Collins for his courage, his smiling buoyancy, his capacity for bearing tension, clearness of mind, perfectly controlled calm and a devil-may-carishness completely concealed. His clarity of mind and his whole manner and demeanour, together with his power of concentration on the immediate matter in hand, gave him a very great power over men. Mulcahy was highly sensitive to criticism of Collins and was infuriated by casual and unsubstantiated charges that Collins had committed improprieties in relation to drink or women. His recollections of Collins run to twenty-nine pages. The insight he had into Collins’s character and activities testifies to the close association between the two during the war of independence. I opened and kept open for him all the doors and pathways that he wanted to travel—our relations were always harmonious and frank and we didn’t exchange unnecessary information. We each knew what the other was at and particularly in his domain of intelligence—I had no occasion to be questioning him. Over many matters we exercised a constructive and practical Cistercian silence. He spoke about Collins’s propensity to horse play in which he had occasion to meet people, very often of a mixed kind, where light banter, indulged in to protect himself against serious conversation, could easily develop into a little rough and tumble. The basis of this is a natural kind of desire not to slow down, continually exercised energy of some kind, mental protection against awkward or inquisitive persons, escapism. His reminiscences allude to the conflict between Collins and the political leaders, Cathal Brugha and Austin Stack. Mulcahy eventually became enmeshed in this unfortunate affair because of his persistence in protecting Collins from his critics and his concern that the affair might have an adverse effect on the morale and safety of the members of GHQ staff. His involvement in the conflict led to Brugha sacking him twice as chief-of-staff during the truce, an impractical move in the circumstances, and one which did not affect his position, nor his professional relationship with the minister and his other political colleagues. Mulcahy had extended interviews during the 1960s with Paidín O’Keeffe, who was secretary of Sinn Féin during the War of Independence. O’Keeffe attributed to Collins some of the problems which lead to the Treaty division in the Dáil. Some resented Collins’s high profile and his occasionally abrasive tone but O’Keeffe was insistent that Collins’s dominant role in choosing the nominees for the first Dáil, virtually all military or political leaders with more than its share of radicals, caused considerable resentment, particularly among disappointed hopefuls. The whole thing about Collins was, he did too much, he was too much to the fore and he had the selection of the bloody first Dáil, which was a bloody curse. In another comment O’Keeffe said: Collins was a right eegit because he took on so much that, when Dev came back from America, the only person whom people wanted to contact about affairs was Collins, thus apparently leaving Dev out in the cold. Eamon de Valera Twenty two pages of memoirs record Mulcahy’s views about de Valera. These include his criticism of Dev for the part he played in provoking the division in the Dáil and the army, and thus precipitating the civil war. He could
nesheconombank. They are also directed against separatist groups in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. The sanctions restrict these entities’ access to US lending and the American financial system. Obama said, “These sanctions are significant, but they are also targeted,” adding that they were designed to limit “spillover” effects for US companies. Although Ukrainian government forces have repeatedly and provocatively shelled Russian border areas, Obama cynically placed responsibility for the crisis in Ukraine on Moscow. “We have to see concrete actions, and not just words that Russia in fact is committed to trying to end this conflict along the Russia-Ukraine border,” he said (see: “Moscow threatens response after Ukraine forces shell Russian border town”). Meeting in Brussels yesterday, EU authorities imposed sanctions on “individuals or entities who actively provide material or financial support to the Russian decision-makers responsible for the annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of eastern Ukraine.” These sanctions include travel bans and asset freezes affecting 72 Russian persons and entities. “The situation in Ukraine is unacceptable,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said. “The territorial integrity of that country is not being properly respected by Russia.” EU authorities proceeded with the new sanctions against Russia even though the economies of the EU and Russia are closely linked. With the two economies doing over $300 billion in yearly trade, broader sanctions risk triggering an economic collapse across the region. The Ukraine crisis has already had a serious impact on the European economy, according to figures released by the European statistics agency Eurostat, which found that EU exports to Russia have fallen 11 percent and Russian exports to the EU have declined by 9 percent. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Editor’s Note This is the third part of a three-part article on Paul Romer and charter cities. Read the first part here,, and the second part here. Honduras created special development zones once before. More than a century ago, the United Fruit Company and its twin subsidiaries, the Tela Railroad Company and the Trujillo Railroad Company, ran vast banana plantations from private enclaves in Tela Nueva and La Lima known as the Zona Americana–the American Zones. These were your classic company towns, complete with golf courses, hospitals and schools–a few of which are still around. advertisement advertisement “They’re some of the best in the country,” insisted Daniel Facussé, president of the Honduran Maquila Association, the trade group for the tax-free textile factories that employed 133,000 Hondurans prior to the financial chaos of the coup. He drew a straight line for me from the zonas to the REDs. “Yes, it’s true that all of them were made by the companies,” he said, “but they were physically set up in a small town. At the time, they also had their own rules and regulations.” “There was also a change of culture,” he added with a note of admiration. “A culture of saying the company is not only responsible for the benefits of their workers, but also for the benefits of their families…[and for] society itself.” To say the fruit companies played by their own rules would be an understatement. Honduras was the original “banana republic,” molded by United Fruit and its competitors in their own competing interests. Successive Honduran presidents ceded huge tracts of land for infrastructure that stopped at the plantations’ edges. (To this day, Tegucigalpa lacks a train station.) At one point, United Fruit’s fiercest competitor–and later, its controlling shareholder–sponsored a successful coup to overturn a rival’s concessions. The United States intervened seven times between the turn of the century and 1925; the fruit companies continued to back local military governments until the 1980s. The real coup is the privatizations they have planned. Opponents of President Porfirio Lobo’s government see similar parallels between the zonas and the REDs, with the latter a tool to finish the job started by the coup. When Manuel Zelaya was elected president in 2006, he appeared to be the latest in a long line of entrenched elites to hold office, dedicated to preserving the status quo. But by their standards he turned out to be a reformer, lowering school fees while increasing the minimum wage (which didn’t extend to the maquilas). He cut a deal with Venezuela for oil at below market prices in exchange for closer ties to its president, Hugo Chavez. He also hindered the privatization of the telecommunications industry, which eventually proved to be a massive success. And most alarming of all, in 2008 he called for a referendum to rewrite the constitution drafted under the generals. Zelaya’s enemies (and by then there were many) labeled this a power grab. The first thing to be erased, they charged, would be his term limit. As a compromise, he pushed for a non-binding national referendum in June 2009, on what would turn out to be the day of the coup. Explanations for his ouster tend to pivot on the referendum and his relationship with Chavez, although some activists insist the real reason was his tepid support for privatizing state-owned utilities. Dragging his feet on selling off the water, power and telecom industries brought him into direct conflict with the handful of families controlling large swaths of the economy, they say. advertisement “Zelaya was stopping that stuff; they were looking for a pretext,” says Dana Frank, a professor of Latin American history at University of California, Santa Cruz who has lobbied on Capitol Hill to suspend all U.S. military and police aid to Honduras. (The 2013 Obama budget would more than double it.) “The real coup is the privatizations they have planned.” As an example, Frank points to the law passed in March 2011 passing control of the national education system to the municipalities, which are now free to fund for-profit charters. Simultaneously, Zelaya’s predecessor will lead a program dramatically curtailing the pay of new hires in the public system. Unsurprisingly, the law’s passage prompted a nationwide teachers strike, which was met with teargas in Tegucigalpa and the threat of mass suspensions. Land reform is another sticking point. Fallow banana plantations in the northeast were converted to palm oil cooperatives in the 1960s and 1970s, until a law passed in 1992 permitted wealthy landowners to buy the struggling co-ops. Today, one of the largest plantations belongs to Corporation Dinant, which in turn is controlled by Miguel Facussé, the uncle of former president Roberto Flores. Following the coup, thousands of campesinos occupied Dinant farmland they claimed had been stolen from them, leading to clashes with soldiers, police and Dinant’s private security forces, resulting in the deaths and disappearances of dozens–including five campesinos acknowledged to have been killed by Dinant employees. In April, several thousand campesinos briefly occupied 30,000 acres of private farmland around the country before being dispersed–in some cases peacefully, in others with the use of force. Miguel Facusse described the occupation as horrorosa (appalling) to the newspaper El Tiempo. You see here the problems of impunity. “You see here the problems of impunity,” Antonio Maldonado told me in Tegucigalpa. Maldonado was appointed as the United Nations’ human rights advisor to Honduras in 2010 and has been frustrated in the role ever since. “We don’t know of one important case which has been duly investigated”–not one, he emphasized. The problem wasn’t a lack of resources, no matter what the government claimed, nor could it be solved by outsiders setting a good example. (“You can bring in the best trainers in the world and keep the same behaviors,” he said.) The problem, simply put, was institutional rot (“Prosecutors, judges and police officers don’t do their work!”), and it was slowly corroding democracy in Honduras. He described the REDs’ vow of judicial integrity as a “promise that is impossible to keep.” This corrosion is visible in the annual Latinobarómetro poll. Less than half of Hondurans presently believe democracy is preferable to any other type of government, while more than a quarter admit an authoritarian regime is occasionally preferable. Proportionately more Hondurans felt this way than residents of any other nation in Latin America. “The danger is the hollowing out of the rule of law,” said Kevin Casas-Zamora, a Latin America expert at the Brookings Institution and a former vice president of Costa Rica. “People are just willing to put up with the encroachment on their civil liberties for the sake of fighting crime. They’re terrified.” advertisement Market-ready Reform In Why Nations Fail, James Robinson and his co-author, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, stress the difference between “inclusive” and “extractive” economic institutions. Inclusive institutions such as property rights, contracts, education and competitive markets embody rules designed to maximize opportunities for everyone; extractive institutions such as monopolies and conglomerates consolidate wealth in the hands of a few, squelching growth and innovation. This dichotomy explains the development gap between Sierra Leone and South Korea–the same gap Romer is trying to close in Honduras through the REDs. But telling President Lobo and Congress which rules to adopt will never work, the authors argue. Failing states “get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance, but on purpose.” The reason we can’t simply transplant inclusive rules from one state to another has to do with a second set of institutions–political ones–and whether they manage to balance power between elites, the people and the state. Successful nations do this well, begetting the economic rules Romer cherishes. Failing states produce dictatorships, kleptocracies, and banana republics–or in Honduras’ case, all of the above. It’s clear that Romer envisions charter cities as a new kind of inclusive institution, engineered to cram centuries of socioeconomic evolution into decades. What’s less clear is whether Honduras’ entrenched elites are invested in reforming themselves. Is it true that “the politicians recognized they themselves were the biggest obstacle,” as Mauro De Lorenzo, the deputy director at the Urbanization Project, told me in Tegucigalpa? Can an extractive regime spin off inclusive institutions? Robinson is firm in his answer: no. Close observers of the region agree. “They control the game,” said Casas-Zamora, “and they will find a way to benefit from this.” They control the game, and they will find a way to benefit from this. If Romer has any qualms about his partners, he isn’t saying–he declined multiple requests for interviews–but Peter Henry leapt to his defense. “It’s a fallacy, in some sense, to think the markets are the enemy of the poor,” Henry told me, dismissing the charge that charter cities amount to neoliberal neocolonialism. “If you look at the last 35 years of human history,” he said, “there is overwhelming evidence that markets are helping people out of poverty.” For mayors across the developing world who are already swamped by the leading edge of the world’s final, epic migration–Solly Angel predicts urban populations will double in 40 years while the built environment triples in size–there may not be time to create a better option. Regardless whether the REDs work as Romer intended, they may still prove to be the template for privatizing urbanization. The size of the market dwarfs even Henry’s optimistic projections–a recent study by Booz & Company estimates the cost of building, running and maintaining the world’s cities at an astounding $350 trillion over the next 30 years. A land rush is underway in more ways than one. advertisement “The success or failure of the Urbanization Project doesn’t hinge on the success or failure of the Honduras experiment,” said Henry, who is already looking ahead to the opening of NYU Shanghai in 2013. “The story in emerging markets is cities.” With twin campuses in both the Middle East and China, perhaps no business school is better positioned to lead the charge than Stern, with Romer in the vanguard chartering new ones. If the REDs are really a tool for imagining an urban future, then the one thing everyone involved wants to see–or fears–are dollar signs. This article was first published in Next American City.(Newser) – Hate the short hours at your local bank? Think how Olga L. Perdomo feels. Last week, she tried to rob Albany Bank and Trust in Chicago, but was thwarted when a wily teller told her the bank was closed, and to come back tomorrow. The full story: Perdomo walked into the bank around 5pm last Thursday, clad in plaid pajama pants and a dark hooded jacket, the Chicago Tribune reports. She handed the teller a note reading, "all of your money, no cops, no dye pack." But the teller didn't hand over the cash. Instead, she said that the bank was closed, and that Perdomo should come back the next day. Perdomo politely agreed, leaving the bank. On Monday, a bank employee recognized her outside the bank and called the police. She was nabbed along with another man whom police say robbed the same bank for $2,589 a week earlier. (Read more Olga Perdomo stories.)Renowned Kung Fu Master Inspires Slew Of Action Flicks Enlarge this image toggle caption The Weinstein Company The Weinstein Company Forty years after his death, there's a name that's become practically synonymous with Chinese kung fu films. And no, it's not Bruce Lee. It's actually his teacher, Ip Man. The late kung fu master's life story has inspired more movie releases than Spider-Man. The five films so far include Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmaster, which opens Friday in New York and Los Angeles. Enlarge this image toggle caption Well Go USA Well Go USA The Filmmakers' Creation Ip Man (pronounced YEEP-mun in Cantonese) has long been renowned as a skilled teacher within the world of Wing Chun-style kung fu. But he's also a new popular creation of Hong Kong filmmakers, says Grady Hendrix, co-founder of the New York Asian Film Festival. "Ip Man was not a well-known public figure before these movies started," he says. "People haven't been sitting around going, 'Oh my god! I hope someone makes an Ip Man movie this year!' " Instead, Hendrix says, the character many filmmakers had in mind to put on screen was Ip's most famous student, Bruce Lee. But, Hendrix adds, "[filmmakers have] always been blocked by the Lee family who... carefully controls his image." (A recent exception is the 2010 biopic Bruce Lee, My Brother, which received the support of Lee's brother Robert.) Unable to make Bruce Lee movies, filmmakers turned to what Hendrix calls "the next best thing." The 'Traditional Chinese Way' Bruce Lee's kung fu teacher was born in 1893 to a well-to-do family in southern China. After the communist takeover of China, Ip moved to Hong Kong, where he later died in 1972. Teaching Wing Chun kung fu, a personal interest since childhood, became his financial lifeline as a mainland Chinese émigré living in Hong Kong. Enlarge this image toggle caption Hansi Lo Wang/NPR Hansi Lo Wang/NPR The Ip Man movies are loosely based on his life. They often portray him as a lone, nationalist hero with almost superhuman skills. In Ip Man 2, he nimbly balances on a tilting tabletop as he jabs at a challenger – a scenario that's more movie magic than an accurate display of skill level. A visit to Allan Lee's Wing Chun kung fu school offers a more accurate depiction of what Ip Man in action may have really looked like. Lee first took lessons from Ip Man himself and his disciples almost 50 years ago, when he began learning Wing Chun principles like how to overcome an opponent's physical advantage and minimize his movement. Today, Lee runs the Ip Man Wing Chun Kung Fu Academy in a former bowling alley in Queens, N.Y. On a recent Saturday afternoon, about a half-dozen of Lee's most senior students, armed with fraying wrist wraps and leg pads, threw punches and kicks atop a bare concrete slab. "I want to run my school in a traditional Chinese way," Lee says, though most of his students are not of Chinese descent. "So you don't follow the American way here. You have to at least have certain etiquette to respect our last generation." The last generation includes the smiling man in the painted portrait hanging in the back of the studio, where Lee's late teacher Ip Man appears to be keeping watch above a wooden dummy. Still A 'Fresh' Character Filmmaker Wong Kar Wai credits Ip Man's generation for passing on the martial arts tradition despite upheaval in China. His latest film, The Grandmaster, which stars Tony Leung as Ip Man, is an action-packed meditation on Chinese martial arts philosophy that is intentionally old-fashioned. "Today we see the Chinese went through rapid changes. It's time for us to return to our roots and to revisit our heritage," Wong says. True to Wong's signature art-house style, The Grandmaster is one lush sequence after another. In an early scene, a gleaming brothel serves as the battleground for Ip Man and his rivals. The film crisscrosses over decades between Hong Kong and mainland China. Enlarge this image toggle caption Well Go USA Well Go USA The other Ip Man movie this year — Ip Man: The Final Fight, which opens Sept. 20 in select U.S. cities — is rooted in nostalgia for 1950s Hong Kong. Its plot revolves around labor strikes and anticolonial politics. The Final Fight is the second Ip Man project for screenwriter Erica Li, who also wrote the 2010 prequel about the kung fu master's early years, The Legend Is Born: Ip Man. Li says she understands Ip's appeal to audiences as a character. "In the comic [book] world, you have Superman, Spider-Man, [and the] Avengers. You guys have a lot [of heroes]. But [there's] not enough for martial arts," she explains. "Up [until] now, Ip Man [has been] relatively fresh and, not to be offensive, [there's] still room for exploitation." In fact, Ip follows a tradition of celebrated folk heroes from southern China with impressive martial arts skills that inspire film and TV projects. (The popular martial arts hero Wong Fei-hung, who has been played by Jet Li in the Once Upon a Time in China series, is set to make a film comeback.) We've already seen Ip Man take down Japanese soldiers, British colonialists, Hong Kong gangsters and rival kung fu masters. Space aliens and robots — you may be next.On Media Blog Archives Select Date… December, 2015 November, 2015 October, 2015 September, 2015 August, 2015 July, 2015 June, 2015 May, 2015 April, 2015 March, 2015 February, 2015 January, 2015 On the left, a new Twitter favorite The political conversation on Twitter may be populated primarily by a Washington-based politico-media elite, but the Twitter meritocracy endures as well. A man from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who goes by the name Pete Nicely and the Facebook and Twitter handle LOLGOP, is social media's latest political satire sensation. In the last three months, his frequent tweets on GOP perfidy have taken his Twitter following from 7,000 to 20,000-not bad for a man without a public face. Nicely, unquestionably left-of-center, told a2politico.com this summer he feels "a need to balance the smug cynicism from the right." "I think by acting like a left-wing Rush Limbaugh, I'm begging the right to grow the f*** up and listen to some adults," he said in the interview. "My dream is to be the Grover Norquist of the left. He grabs every Republican, male or female, by the balls and makes them pledge to never balance… I mean, never raise taxes."Amid discussions of global terror threats and the nuances of diplomacy in faraway embassies in the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables release, we focused on the juicy tidbits about the downsides of armored travel and the fun of jet-skiing while drunk. Don't Get Locked In An Armored Car Leaders around the world are constantly at risk of assassination and therefore travel in heavily armored cars designed to be inaccessible from the outside. Unfortunately, in 2007 Turkey's Prime Minister Erdogan passed out in his armored Mercedes due to low blood sugar. His bodyguard was able to crack the window open with a sledgehammer, as was reported, but his diplomatic cable adds an interesting tidbit about Mercedes' view of the incident: Last Ramadan, when Erdogan got locked inside his armored car after collapsing from low blood sugar, his bodyguard Halit grabbed a sledgehammer from a nearby construction site and smashed the windshiel to break Erdogan out (Mercedes was apparently upset that it only took him six minutes). Despite the fiasco, made much of in the press, Halit kept his job; the PM viewed his action as one of true devotion and love for the Prime Minister. Advertisement Qadhafi Won't Fly Over Water It's been fairly well-reported that Libyan President Mumammar al-Qadhafi prefers to travel everywhere with a voloptious blonde Ukrainian nurse, but the cables also mention the leader doesn't like long flights and flying over water (who does?), forcing his staff to scramble to make travel arrangements for him. All the Hottest Diplomatic Gossip From the Latest Wikileak The giant diplomatic cable dump released by Wikileaks today represents the world's largest… Read more Read 4. (S/NF) Qadhafi's dislike of long flights and apparent fear of flying over water also caused logistical headaches for his staff. When discussing flight clearances with Emboffs,XXXXXXX explained that the Libyan delegation would arrive from Portugal, as Qadhafi "cannot fly more than eight hours" and would need to overnight in Europe prior to continuing his journey to New York. XXXXXXXX also revealed in the same conversation that Qadhafi does not like to fly over water. Presumably for similar reasons, Qadhafi's staff also requested a stop in Newfoundland to break his travel from Venezuela to Libya on September 29. [Note: The Government of Canada recently confirmed that the Libyan delegation canceled plans to stop in Newfoundland. End Note.] Advertisement A Rolls Royce Wasn't Designed To Carry AK-47s Even more entertaining than the exploits of the vain and paranoid Mumammar Qadhafi is the tale of a wedding in the Caucasus for the son of Gadzhi Makhachev, a major player in politics and head of the state-run oil company in Russia's Dagestan region. Gadzhi's son Dalgat married Aida in a high-profile arrangement that included a revelation about driving around in a Rolls Royce with an armed detail. Gadzhi has cashed in the social capital he made from nationalism, translating it into financial and political capital — as head of Dagestan's state oil company and as the single-mandate representative for Makhachkala in Russia's State Duma. His dealings in the oil business — including close cooperation with U.S. firms — have left him well off enough to afford luxurious houses in Makhachkala, Kaspiysk, Moscow, Paris and San Diego; and a large collection of luxury automobiles, including the Rolls Royce Silver Phantom in which Dalgat fetched Aida from her parents' reception. (Gadzhi gave us a lift in the Rolls once in Moscow, but the legroom was somewhat constricted by the presence of a Kalashnikov carbine at our feet Gadzhi has survived numerous assassination attempts, as have most of the still-living leaders of Dagestan. In Dagestan he always travels in an armored BMW with one, sometimes two follow cars full of uniformed armed guards.) Advertisement As if this wasn't fun enough, the wedding included just about every drunk activity imaginable, including "jet-skiing-under-the-influence." The humor of the happy occasion is sort of broken up by cold realizations about what life is like in one of the world's hotpoints. Gadzhi's main act, a Syrian-born singer named Avraam Russo, could not make it because he was shot a few days before the wedding... We're still walking through the documents, but you can find all of them at WikiLeaks. Advertisement (Photo Credit: Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)There’s a civic disaster brewing in Canada with its news industry. The public doesn’t understand it. Policy makers dare not speak its name. Many close observers think it is quite likely Postmedia will go into bankruptcy, or some kind of bankruptcy protection, within the next year — if not sooner. In the meantime, the chain is stripping its newsrooms of reporters and editors. This week, the Columbia Journalism Review remarked that the failure of Postmedia would be the equivalent of the top three U.S. newspaper chains going down at once. Outside of Toronto and Winnipeg, Postmedia controls all the paid daily newspapers in the ten largest English markets, and it controls scores of titles in smaller communities. Yet in this week’s report on media from the House of Commons heritage committee, there was no direct reference to this looming crisis. Similarly, the recent ‘Shattered Mirror’ report by the Public Policy Forum, commissioned by the government in an effort to figure out what to do, made only oblique references to the dying elephant in the middle of the room. It’s a problem. A poll conducted for the PPF report by Earnscliffe Strategy Group suggested that three-quarters of Canadians think — correctly, in my view — that democracy would be threatened if news outlets were no longer able “to fulfill their civic news function.” Yet the easy access we all now have to news online has convinced most of us that we are getting more news than ever before. The fact is Canadian media outlets have shed thousands of workers in recent years. Many Canadians, the polling suggests, don’t think the loss of local newspapers and broadcast news would affect them. They think online and social media would pick up the slack. Those people are wrong — and they’re wrong in part because few people outside the industry understand how central newspapers are to the local news ecosystem. When I was a local CBC television reporter in Edmonton at the start of my career, the news director sometimes demanded in exasperation at the morning editorial meeting: “Does anyone have a story idea that isn’t on the front page of the [Edmonton] Journal?” He may have been exaggerating, but he captured a truth: Most local journalism in any other medium is to some extent parasitic on newspapers. Even in these straitened times, a metropolitan broadsheet will have several times the number of reporters of any TV or radio station. That means newspaper reporters are much more likely to work steadily at a beat, day after day, whether it is city hall, cops and crime, or education. And it is in the course of that steady work that reporters are most likely to unearth new information and identify new stories. How do you support local news without subsidizing a failing newspaper industry? There’s really no point in funneling money in that direction just so that Postmedia’s U.S. hedge-fund creditors can siphon off a little more cash before the inevitable crash. How do you support local news without subsidizing a failing newspaper industry? There’s really no point in funneling money in that direction just so that Postmedia’s U.S. hedge-fund creditors can siphon off a little more cash before the inevitable crash. In the steady coverage of their beats, newspaper reporters don’t only act as ‘watchdogs’ — calling out problems when they intrude. They also function as ‘scarecrows’ — deterring trouble at city halls and legislatures by their mere presence. In contrast, broadcast reporters are much more likely to find themselves flitting from the scene of a fire one day to a politician’s press conference the next and the site of a school closure the day after that. And online outlets, thinly staffed, are often repackaging what they glean from more established outlets. Following the release of the committee report, the Trudeau government was quick to dismiss headline recommendation to bolster funds available to Canadian journalism through a 5 per cent levy on broadband internet service providers. The Conservative dissenting report, predictably, also denounced what it called a ‘Netflix tax’. Somewhat hilariously, the Conservatives referred to John Milton’s “marketplace of ideas” as the way to go. Pro-tip — that idea belonged to John Stuart Mill. (Milton was the guy who wrote a long poem about Satan — you remember him.) But the fact is, unlike Stephen Harper’s government, Justin Trudeau’s probably cannot just fold its arms in the face of a Postmedia collapse. When the public comes to understand the degree to which the disappearance of newspaper reporters means the disappearance of local news, the Liberals know they’ll be expected to respond. In the meantime, it is hard to rally public attention to an issue that the government and its advisers are too discreet to name directly: Postmedia is about to go ker-plop. The reluctance to identify the core problem disguises the key challenge to developing policy: How do you support local news without subsidizing a failing newspaper industry, and particularly a failing newspaper behemoth, Postmedia? There’s really no point in funneling money in that direction just so that Postmedia’s U.S. hedge-fund creditors can siphon off a little more cash before the inevitable crash. Obviously, the CBC could be part of the answer. Its commitment to core civic journalistic beats at the local level has not been as steady as some of us would like, though that may be changing with pressure from the government. But the CBC always will be a fundamentally national broadcaster in outlook. It cannot be an oilpatch broadcaster in Calgary, a red Tory broadcaster in Halifax and an artsy social-liberal outlet in Toronto. Only an organization whose editorial policies are set locally — as Postmedia’s once were, but no longer are — can fully reflect a community back to itself. Some people hope that Postmedia’s newspapers will end up being sold off to local ownership. But this is unlikely to happen with every one of the dozens of newspapers it runs. Besides, many of the back-office functions, like ad sales, website maintenance and payroll, have been centralized to cut costs. How will new individual local owners manage all that? That’s not to mention the fact that Postmedia also has centralized many journalistic functions, like opinion writing and coverage of Parliament. The PPF’s Shattered Mirror report had a number of interesting proposals, including the suggestion that the Canadian Press be funded to hire 60 to 80 journalists to staff city halls, courthouses and legislatures — journalism that would be made available to other news outlets. Since the report came out, PPF has maintained a working group, including representatives from big media chains, media unions and luminaries like former CBC vice-president Richard Stursberg. My understanding is that it will be submitting further recommendations to the Department of Heritage shortly. The government likely will make its move this fall, when Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly is scheduled to announce the result of a much broader review of cultural policies. That is, if Postmedia doesn’t go down first. The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.Last week, I was contacted by a reporter from FundFire looking for my comments on a new feature that Merrill Lynch has implemented as part of their $100 million platform consolidation project. The project, called Merrill One, is replacing five other legacy programs, some of which have been running for over 25 years. She was interested in my opinion as to whether the rest of the industry is also moving in this direction and what progress they have made so far. The new platform is designed to deliver a streamlined experience to Merrill’s 1.4 million clients in managed account programs. It includes a single set of documents, no matter how many different types of accounts or products the client has as well as a unified fee structure. If all of this is delivered, it will keep Merrill on the cutting edge of investment advisory technology. Merrill plans to sunset their five legacy platforms by the end of 2015. These include Consults, Mutual Fund adviser (MFA), Personal adviser (MLPA), Personal Investment Advisory (PIA), and Unified Managed Account (UMA) platforms. Launched between 1989 and 2007, these systems did not talk to each other, with advisors and client associates required to jump through hoops to implement even the simplest of changes. The One project was started in September 2013, after Merrill’s wirehouse competitors had already finished rolling out their own new platforms and integrating large acquisitions. It remains to be seen how Merrill deals with technical glitches and possible negative feedback from advisors. How well will the new system move towards providing advisors with a central, unified view of their clients? To quote the article: This new householding technology brings the platform closer to the unified managed household (UMH)-type model that industry professionals have deemed the next step in the evolution of advisory platforms. “Many clients think about their goals as joint goals and would like to combine accounts from multiple individuals into a single client account,” says Lorna Sabbia, head of the managed solutions group at Merrill Lynch. “At the end of the day we’ve done a lot to streamline the things you can do in a single account.” Sabbia had previously referred to the convoluted process that Merrill advisors had to go through to combine statements, performance reports and other materials for clients from multiple programs as, “sausage-making”. This new feature should streamline a large portion of that formerly very manual procedure. But what exactly does it mean to offer a UMH-type model? And is this the direction the industry is actually going? The article, written by Danielle Verbrigghe, has something to say about that: … the industry is headed toward more household level integration throughout advisory platforms … says Craig Iskowitz, a principal with Ezra Group. “A UMH is definitely more than combining accounts,” he says. “[But] most brokerages aren’t there yet.” Integrating technology across front- and back-end processes to implement household level wealth management is a significant undertaking, he says. “It’s difficult to do if you don’t have all parts of your system aligned.” This article was focused on the portfolio management and goals-based functionality, so Danielle didn’t include my other comments. I explained that a true UMH platform carries the household paradigm from end to end. If you only have household support in portfolio management, but not in proposals or performance reporting, it is not a real UMH solution. (See FolioDynamix v7.1 Delivers UMH Support) For Merrill, constructing a goals-based wealth management platform, rather than a UMH, is the ultimate goal, Sabbia says. “We’re not going about our work saying ’what does a UMH construct look like?’” Sabbia says. The focus is really on how best to deliver goals-based advice, she says. “We are going to continue to have that be our guiding principle.” I believe that UMH functionality is critical for goals-based advice. Very few clients are single with no children or other close family members they want to take care of. Their goals include these people, but if you can’t view all of their accounts in aggregate across all aspects of your system, then you are forcing advisors to do a lot of extra work, which was the main reason for the platform consolidation in the first place. (See Unified Managed Households: The Holy Grail of Wealth Management? Merrill is serious about the benefits of platform consolidation. They are even shutting down their Rep as PM platform (PIA) that was built on Charles River Development’s technology and only deployed in mid-2012. That decision had to ruffle some feathers, especially in their IT groups, which went through a difficult time dealing numerous delays from Charles River on delivery of customized platform functionality. Pricing Rationalizing their disparate pricing structure was also a key deliverable of the One project. According to a Merill advisor quoted in Investment News: Whatever they were doing before, mortgages, investments, IRAs and so on, we can now value that in total. We are able to bring out relationship-based pricing and it has been understood 100% by the clients.” There was concern that some advisors would experience a drop in revenue when switching to the new platform. Also, the higher, unified fee schedule might not be understood by clients who were used to multiple programs with smaller, separate fees. But the unified fee schedule will also bring more discounts since client assets will be lumped together. “The No. 1 thing I’ve heard from advisers is, they want to treat a client as a client regarding pricing,” said Sabbia. “So a client might have $10 million in a brokerage account, but a $500,000 Consults [separately managed account] is opened as a $500,000 account” and priced accordingly. View the full article below on FundFire’s website: Merrill Marches toward UMH with New ‘One’ Platform Update Related WM Today Content Which Portfolio Rebalancing Software is Right for You? Which Financial Planning Software is Right For You? Envestnet’s ENV2 Platform Delivers New UMA Features AdvertisementsIf you’re an Insider who is eagerly waiting for extension support to arrive on Microsoft Edge, I have some good news for you. According to contacts familiar with the matter, Microsoft is finally ready to begin flighting extension support for Edge in an upcoming Insider release preview build, just in time for BUILD at the end of the month. I’m told extension support for Microsoft Edge is now available in the latest rs1_release builds being flighted internally, meaning we’re mere days/weeks away from extensions landing for Insiders. This is great news for not only Insiders but for developers too, as it means work can finally start on porting over Chrome extensions to Edge. Calculating a timeframe in which a build with extension support will drop is tricky, as we never really know what build Microsoft is planning to release until Gabe is ready to push the button. Sources say build 14284 is the first rs1_release build to include extensions in Edge, so hopefully Microsoft pushes something newer than that out as soon as possible. What we can say is the wait really isn’t long now. Extensions for Microsoft Edge are scheduled to launch officially with the first wave of updates coming with Redstone in June, giving developers around three months to port and test their own extensions before extensions are rolled out to the public. This should be enough time to build up a healthy market of extensions for consumers, as it’s one of the most requested features currently submitted via
and Twitter are full of local news reports of apparent gas pump skimmer attacks, like this one at a Pilot station in Tennessee last week). Last year, I received some information from a police officer in California who is tasked with chronicling many of these incidents (this seems to have become something of a full-time job for him). He sent me some pictures of a few several more common gas pump skimmers that show up at filling stations in his state, including the devices show above right and below left. The incident reports he filed on the devices pictured below indicates that thieves involved in this type of crime have a typical playbook. These crimes, as with attacks on regular bank ATMs, tend to occur on weekends, often in the early morning hours. From his report: “M.O.: Two or three suspects exit vehicle, look around for people watching them, then pretend to pump gas by placing the dispenser into the gas tank. One suspect will eventually enter the store, pay cash to purchase a small amount of gas or a drink to distract attention away from the pump. Meanwhile, another suspect places a skimming device inside the pump by opening the front with a universal key. Time to install/remove is between 5 – 10 minutes.” I don’t worry too much about gas pump skimmers; there is virtually no way for the average consumer to tell if a pump has been compromised. But I would urge readers to avoid paying at the pump using a debit card. While debit cards have the same zero-liability protection afforded to credit cards, having your checking account emptied of cash can be a huge hassle and create secondary problems (bounced checks, for instance). More information about the indictments in the New York case can be found in this press announcement (PDF). Tags: Bluetooth skimmer, Cyrus R. Vance, gas pump skimmers, Jr., Pilot, Racetrac, Raceway, sucker pumped* Spending +1.3 pct vs +5.9 percent in 2009 amid austerity * U.S. spending +2.8 percent, European spending -2.8 percent STOCKHOLM, April 11 (Reuters) - Worldwide military spending edged up in 2010 to a record $1.6 trillion, a leading think-tank said on Monday. Global spending rose 1.3 percent in real terms, a slowdown from 5.9 percent the year before as the economic downturn caused by the 2008 financial crisis hit military spending, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said. “In many cases, the falls or slower increases represent a delayed reaction to the global financial and economic crisis that broke in 2008,” it said in a statement, adding that there were regional differences. Spending in Europe shrank 2.8 percent to $382 billion as governments started to rein in soaring budget deficits. The biggest cuts were in small economies in central and eastern Europe, and in crisis-struck southern European countries such as Greece. “Further cuts are expected in most of Europe in 2011 and subsequent years, although these are likely to remain relatively modest in the major spending countries,” SIPRI, which conducts independent research on international security, armaments and disarmament, said in a statement. The Unites States, with costly military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, increased spending by 2.8 percent to $698 billion — about six times as much as China, the second-biggest spender ahead of Britain, France and Russia. In 2009, U.S. spending grew 7.7 percent. “The United States has increased its military spending by 81 percent since 2001,” SIPRI said. “At 4.8 percent of gross domestic product, U.S. military spending in 2010 represents the largest economic burden outside the Middle East”, said SIPRI Military Expenditure Project chief Sam Perlo-Freeman.Man accused of sabotage threat at NSW Parliament fronts court, withdraws bail application Updated The man at the centre of a stand-off outside New South Wales State Parliament has faced a Sydney court and withdrawn his application for bail. A block of Sydney's Macquarie Street was shut down for two hours yesterday when 58-year-old Abdula Ganigi allegedly began making threats from his car parked outside Parliament's gates. Police negotiators joined the riot squad and bomb disposal officers at the scene after the Wollongong man allegedly threatened to set a jerrycan of flammable liquid alight. It is understood police struck when Ganigi moved for a cigarette lighter, with officers firing a gas round and smashing the car windows to drag the man into the street. He was taken to St Vincent's Hospital with minor cuts and injuries before being released and charged with threatening sabotage, possession of explosives and threatening to damage property. He appeared via video link in a Parramatta Bail Court this morning. Initially his barrister sought bail, telling the court she observed on the ABC last night that her client only possessed a two-litre fruit juice container, 100 millilitres of clear liquid and a green cigarette lighter. Magistrate Alan Moore said he would be more sympathetic to a bail application if he had access to a psychiatric assessment. After a brief adjournment, the bail application was withdrawn and the matter will return to court on January 6 when a written report from Ganigi's psychiatrist is available. Topics: courts-and-trials, law-crime-and-justice, state-parliament, parliament, police-sieges, sydney-2000, parramatta-2150, wollongong-2500 First postedIt's easy to think of soap suds when one thinks of bubbles, but these bubbles can clean without chemicals. These are cavitation bubbles, which are created when air is churned up in water. And what researchers are learning could ultimately lead to chemical-free cleaning methods for fruits and vegetables. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), biofluid scientist Sunghwan "Sunny" Jung and his team at Virginia Tech are studying how a cavitation bubble creates a suctioning effect when it collapses, pulling everything close by toward it. Cavitation bubbles are already in use for certain industrial applications, such as cleaning water at treatment plants. Jung's fluid mechanics lab is working with food scientists to see how effective cavitation bubbles are at pulling everything from soil to E. coli and Salmonella away from the smooth surface of a tomato or the bumpy surface of a cantaloupe. In the future, Jung envisions bubble machines as a common appliance at farmer's markets and maybe even in households. See this related YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuqHy53ffr8&feature=youtu.be. Research in this episode was supported by NSF grant #1335957, Collaborative Proposal: Long-term dynamics of water-entry. Jung also has similarly named but separate research grant from NSF. Miles O'Brien, Science Nation Correspondent Ann Kellan, Science Nation ProducerAUSTIN — Texas high school students matched their lowest scores on the SAT in more than a decade this year, as results dropped in math, reading and writing. Students across the nation also matched their lowest scores on the college entrance exam during that period, although their averages did not decline as precipitously as those in Texas, according to a report released Monday by the College Board. State education officials were quick to point out that Texas had a dramatic increase in the number of students who took the SAT, particularly among black and Hispanic students, signaling that more are considering college. “We are clearly building a collegegoing culture in Texas,” said state Education Commissioner Michael Williams. “The increased minority participation is important to the health of this state because of our changing demographics.” The big jump in the number of minority students had an impact on the overall scores for the state, as minorities typically score lower on the exam than white students. The average math score for the Class of 2012 was 499, down three points from a year ago. In reading, the average score was down five points to 474. And in writing, the average was down four points to 461. Twenty-one seniors earned a perfect score of 2400, or 800 on each of the three sections. “While I am pleased with the increased participation, we must improve our students’ readiness for success in college,” Williams said. “I am hopeful that changes the state has made in recent years to our curriculum standards, graduation requirements, assessment and accountability systems will result in improved performance.” In all, 156,486 Texas public school students from the Class of 2012 took the SAT, an increase of nearly 6 percent over the previous year. Including private schools, the number of students taking the college entrance exam was 172,802. Nationwide, average scores were down a point in reading (to 496) and writing (488), and unchanged from a year ago in math (514). The College Board also reported that only 43 percent of SAT takers who graduated from high school this year demonstrated the academic skills necessary to do well in college. “This report should serve as a call to action to expand access to rigor for more students,” said College Board President Gaston Caperton. “When less than half of kids who want to go to college are prepared to do so, the system is failing. We must make education a national priority and deliver rigor to more students.” Average scores for black and Hispanic students in Texas dipped in math, reading and writing. Results for white students stayed the same as last year in math and reading, while dropping in writing. Minority scores also were well under those for whites in all three subjects. In math, for example, the average score for white students was 540, while the average was 436 for blacks and 463 for Hispanics. Results for public school students were either the same or slightly under the statewide results, which included public and private schools. A comparison of Texas and two other states with similar demographics — California and Florida — shows Texas students lacking in all but math. California had notably higher average scores in all three subjects, while Florida students outpaced their counterparts in Texas in reading and writing. Texas students did score higher in math than Florida students. AT A GLANCE: National scores READING: National scores sank to their lowest point in 40 years. The average score on the exam’s “critical reading” section dropped to 496 points, down one point from last year and 34 points from 1972. WRITING: Scores dipped one point from last year, to 488 — the lowest result since an essay-writing section was added to the test in 2006. The average writing score in that initial year was 497. MATH: Scores remained steady from last year, at an average 514 nationwide.When it rains in L.A., no one blames anyone for anything. The sultry and gentle compact with nature is broken then, and everyone tries to just get by. So now that it's been raining for five days, why worry that Amanda Seyfried looks a bit housebound, wearing a mopsy little hoodie, too-loose sweatpants, and a pair of underused running shoes? Hood up, zipped up, purse clamped to her side like a knitting bag, she peers from inside the getup, gives a tick of a smile. "It's you," she says, over the hiss of rain on the skin of the parking lot, offering her hand, small and cool as a teaspoon. Just then, she allows a glimpse of her eyes, or she gives it. Or you steal it. Who can say? The eyes demand an adjective; they beg for a simile. Kayt Jones In those first moments outside the crowded gourmet shop in the Hollywood Hills, Seyfried says nothing particular. It's not that she has nothing to say. She can rev up the chatter engine when she wants to. It's just that the plan had been to sit outside, so there's a sigh and a kind of you-believe-this-shit nudge at the world before she sets out up the street, the eyes scanning the boulevard storefronts for a place to talk. Kayt Jones It's her: the twenty-four-year-old actress who emerged from adolescence as the sexy Mormon daughter on HBO's Big Love. She was the most memorable of Tina Fey's mean girls, which is to say, the dumb one. The most memorable corpus delicti in last year's Jennifer's Body, which is to say, the needy one. The single sunny nod to youth as Meryl Streep's daughter in the creepily nostalgic vapor that was Mamma Mia! Her days of playing a teenager might have ended, though — just — with her intense and sexy pass as a call girl in Chloe, which opens March 26. Right there in the dim light of a damp afternoon, it's Amanda Seyfried, peeking into the doorways of businesses that can't quite decide if they're open. Finally she locates a deserted bar that isn't serving lunch, where she plops down and pulls out a plastic box containing enough tabbouleh to stuff a softball. "I'm on a raw-food diet," she declares, raising her brows to make her eyes even bigger. "It's intense. And sort of awful. Yesterday for lunch? Spinach. Just spinach. Spinach and some seeds." She says the last word, seeds, and leans into the long vowel sound, scrunching her nose, making the word sound like a comic discovery. At times Seyfried traipses along as if she were the only one in the room who doesn't know she's adorable. They don't easily offer up forks in otherwise deserted bars, so Seyfried doesn't start on the tabbouleh right away. Instead she shows a picture of her new dog, an Australian shepherd. "It's so predictable," she says. "I just left him and I already want to run back and see him." Puppies are like that. True. But why lop off the edges of your freedom when you're young enough to use that freedom fully? Kayt Jones "Most of the time I just want to go home and throw the dog a stick," Seyfried says. "Can anything be more obvious than throwing a stick? I need to be needed." Glasses of water arrive. Seyfried allows that it might be foolish to get a dog when you live alone, travel a lot, and work all hours. She tilts her head. "I understand that the need is never with the dog." As she eats the tabbouleh, she covers her mouth with her fingers. This is unnecessary, and reassurances are given: It won't be necessary to mention if she gets tabbouleh stuck in her teeth. She chews. "Oh, I will have tabbouleh in my teeth," she says. "It is inevitable. Just go ahead and say it." She shows her choppers. There's tabbouleh in her teeth. "I would tell you," she says. "I would always tell somebody if they had shit on their face." It's agreed that this is a test of character. "Especially if it's really feces." Seyfried picks back and forth through the tabbouleh as if she were looking for a ring. She's a pal. "Well, I'm a BFF," she deadpans. "I play a BFF. It's what I do. I have an actual necklace from Jennifer's Body that says BFF. That's my role right there." Not in Chloe it isn't. In Chloe, she plays a call girl hired by a woman, played by Julianne Moore, to seduce her husband, played by Liam Neeson. Chloe then meets with the woman to describe the sex to her. Creepiness ensues. Seyfried spends a decent portion of the movie naked or seminaked. When the tabbouleh is nearly gone, talk turns to the fact that she's leaving. She's departing Big Love after her fourth year and is preparing to move to New York. "I sacrificed six years in L. A.," she says. "I did my job out here. I made the contacts and did the work I had to do. But I came here at eighteen. I'm out of here at twenty-four, and I feel lucky it wasn't longer." Kayt Jones The anxiety rises in her as she speaks, and she cracks open her purse, shakes a Lexapro into her hand. She halves it, then pops a birth-control pill from its foil pack and swallows both. "Yeah, yeah, I'm anxious," she says. "And yes, I use birth control." She cocks her big eyes upward. Water is running off the roof, rattling the shit out of a gutter somewhere. Her eyes seem to search for the sound, and it makes you wonder what she was thinking when she looked out at the photographer who took the photos that ended up on these pages. "I learned a long time ago that photographs are not theater. This is not acting. It's pretending. I pretend I'm looking at a man who is looking right at me, a man who sees me as exceptionally clever and adventurous." She looks up at the ceiling without tilting her head. "It sounds like it's running through the walls," she says. When she was eighteen, her eyes conveyed innocence, at once Mormonic and comically moronic. When she's thirty-two, she'll use them to lay a man down. Right now, it's a measure of worry, a measure of wonder. Her eyes demand an adjective, beg for a simile. Her eyes are winsome, like two parachutes. Published in the April 2010 issue.For months, the WikiLeaks Twitter account has carried on a secret correspondence with Donald Trump Jr., according to messages published today by The Atlantic. The messages, which have also been provided to congressional investigators, show WikiLeaks pushing President Trump’s son to share a variety of messages, ranging from anti-Clinton news to data stolen directly from the campaign. In one case, WikiLeaks even shared the password to an anti-Trump PAC’s website, a potential violation of computer hacking laws. Not all of the messages were anti-Clinton. There were also significant efforts to convince the younger Trump to release his father’s tax returns in October, which WikiLeaks argued would “dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality.” Trump Jr. does not seem to have taken WikiLeaks up on the offer. In a message shortly after the election, WikiLeaks also sought a more permanent status for Julian Assange, currently sequestered in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. “Obama/Clinton placed pressure on Sweden, UK and Australia (his home country) to illicitly go after Mr. Assange,” the account wrote to Trump Jr.. “It would be real easy and helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to DC.” More dramatically, WikiLeaks also reached out after The New York Times reported details of a private meeting between Trump Jr. and Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. In a direct message, WikiLeaks asked Trump Jr. to send them the emails for release, saying, “We think this is strongly in your interest.” Trump Jr. published the emails on his personal Twitter account shortly afterward — a puzzling move, since much of the conversation is now seen as incriminating. Assange had previously spoken about his role in the released emails, although many were skeptical at the time. As The Atlantic acknowledges, the conversation was largely one-sided, with WikiLeaks making a proposal and Trump Jr. either acting in accordance or going silent. Still, it shows an ongoing relationship between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, one that was controversial throughout the election. WikiLeaks was instrumental in distributing emails stolen from the Clinton campaign — now believed to have been stolen as part of a Russian influence campaign — but the Trump campaign repeatedly denied any direct coordination with WikiLeaks. The messages published today seem to indicate otherwise. Responding on Twitter, Julian Assange said he could not confirm the authenticity of the messages since Wikileaks “does not keep such records.” However, he argued the Atlantic had presented the messages in an unfairly damaging light. The news has already drawn harsh criticism from congressional investigators. In a statement, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said the news “demonstrates once again a willingness by the highest levels of the Trump campaign to accept foreign assistance.” Update 6:05PM ET: Updated with statements from Assange and Schiff.Minneapolis Craft Brewery Offers Equity Shares To Investors Bryn Mawr Brewing Co. is a craft brewery located in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood of west Minneapolis. Heading up the project is Minnesota craft beer veteran Dan Justesen. The new craft brewery is surely a welcome addition to that part of town. The brewery and taproom is set to open in late 2015/early 2016 and will specialize in classic European beer styles. The upstart brewery is currently seeking investments from accredited investors and conducting a separate crowdfunding campaign through the brewery’s VIPer Program. A Tradition of Innovation and Success Dan Justesen and the crew at Vine Park Brewing combined community and craft beer, turning them into a groundbreaking and successful brew-on-premise business. Dan is again breaking ground by truly opening up investment opportunities at Bryn Mawr Brewing Company. Bryn Mawr Brewing Company is seeking local residents and beer lovers anywhere in the country to invest in and become owners of its startup venture through equity crowdfunding rules. This unique opportunity gives accredited investors the potential for lucrative future income while supporting a local business and its community. A Return on Community Investment The financing of equity will be conducted through Bryn Mawr Brewing’s holding company, Utepils Investments LLC. Investors will receive accelerated cash distributions based on profitability of the brewery, which is expected to occur within three years of opening. Along with returns on their investments, Bryn Mawr Brewing Co.’s investors will also benefit from exclusive perks in the tap room and priority access to the annual Bryn Mawr Brewing Co. Beer Trip program. “This publicly announced private placement is truly a unique way to fund the start up of a brewery,” said Dan Justesen, Co-Owner of Bryn Mawr Brewing Co. “We plan to brew finely crafted beer for our neighbors while also putting money back in their pockets. Accredited investors interested in learning more about investing in Bryn Mawr Brewing Co. should visit the brewery’s website at brynmawrbrewing.com and click on the “Invest” tab to be directed to the investment portal. The Bryn Mawr Brewing Co. investment portal contains investing guidelines, relevant brewery information, and the payment form where the investment transaction can be completed. MemBEERship Bryn Mawr Brewing Co is also hosting a separate crowdfunding campaign through the brewery’s VIPer Program. Through this program, supporters that may not be accredited investors may purchase MemBEERships that come with a Host Of Privileges (HOPs) including free beer, special event programming, and a VIPer custom stein. One of the great things about the VIPer status is that it is transferable. Your VIPer status may be transferred via gift, inheritance, or sale. MemBEERships are good for 99 years, that kind of longevity will have your kids squabbling over their place in your will for decades to come. Dan from Bryn Mawr Brewing on The Minnesota BeerCast Subscribe: | | Web: http://brynmawrbrewing.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Bryn.Mawr.Brewing Twitter: https://twitter.com/brynmawrbrewing Instagram: https://instagram.com/brynmawrbrewing/ Location: 225 Thomas Ave. N, Suite 700 Minneapolis, MN 55405 Comments commentsBackground Edit The 1c magenta was part of a series of three definitive stamps issued in 1856 and was intended for use on local newspapers. The other two stamps, a 4c magenta and 4c blue, were intended for letter postage. The issue came about through mischance. An anticipated delivery of stamps by ship did not arrive so the local postmaster, E.T.E. Dalton, authorised printers Joseph Baum and William Dallas, who were the publishers of the Official Gazette newspaper in Georgetown, to print an emergency issue of three stamps. Dalton gave some specifications about the design, but the printer chose to add a ship image of their own design to the stamps. Dalton was not pleased with the end result, and as a safeguard against forgery ordered that all correspondence bearing the stamps be autographed by a post office clerk. This particular stamp was initialled E.D.W. by the clerk E.D. Wight. Description and history Edit Controversies Edit At one point, it was suggested that the 1c stamp was merely a "doctored" copy of the magenta 4c stamp of the same series, a stamp very similar to the 1c stamp in appearance. These claims were disproven.[13] In the 1920s a rumour developed that a second copy of the stamp had been discovered by then owner, Arthur Hind, who quietly purchased the supposed second copy to subsequently destroy it. The rumour has not been substantiated.[14] In 1999, a second 1c stamp was claimed to have been discovered in Bremen, Germany. The stamp was owned by Peter Winter, who is widely known for producing many forgeries of classic philatelic items,[15] printed as facsimiles on modern paper. Nevertheless, two European experts, Rolf Roeder and David Feldman, have said Winter's stamp is genuine.[16] The stamp was twice examined and found to be a fake by the Royal Philatelic Society London. In their opinion, this specimen in fact was an altered 4c magenta stamp.[14][17] Public display Edit See also EditFilmmaker (and daughter of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi) Alexandra Pelosi traveled to Mississippi at the behest of Real Time with Bill Maher to film voters and get their opinions of the 2012 Republican primary. Before showing the footage, Maher explained to the audience and his panel of guests that the people in the video were not “cherry-picked” and that the intent of the video was not to make fun of anyone. However, it becomes clear fairly quickly that some of these people are not going to be shortlisted for MacArthur “Genius Grants” any time soon. After the clip, panelists John Hamm from AMC’s series Mad Men and former RNC Chairman Michael Steele joked about the number of teeth the interviewees possessed, but otherwise refrained from poking too much fun. Former SEIU head Andy Stern, however, points out that the Democratic Party has no plans in place or any sort of programs to win over rural and working-class voters, saying, “Democrats have to learn how to speak to people, too.” Watch the video, embedded via Mediaite, below:5 Elements that Lay the Foundation of a Wes Anderson Film In a 10-minute mini-documentary, Paul Waters goes through five elements that are almost always part of a Wes Anderson film and thus have become over the 2 decades the American Filmmaker has been active, part of his signature. Wardrobe Wes Anderson films often take wardrobe a step further than other films by keenly reflecting the characters internal personal stories on their outer being. Overhead Shot What differentiates the “Anderson Overhead Shot” from others overhead shot is that he takes the opportunity to establish intimacy by showing personal rituals, letter writing or any other activity that gives further insight into a character. Font One of the most identifiable design choices is the use of the font FUTURA across most of his films. What makes this particularly interesting is that Futura is not only used in the title, but the font is also integrated into the films. Single Shot Wes Anderson is sought after for his talent choreographing successfully the single shot. Music In Anderson’s films, the soundtrack always plays an important role in setting the tone for characters, moods, and scenes. Although the choices are eclectic, varying from India Reggae to campfire sing songs, Anderson does have a certain signature style. He often uses the music of British invasion artists and in particular the Zombie, the Kinks, and the Rolling Stones. In addition to existing music, he also utilizes the talents of contemporary writers and composers, most notably Mark Mothersbaugh and Seu Jorge. Watch the full video below for more on each part: Wes Anderson: A Mini Documentary from Paul Waters – BEC on Vimeo. — More about Wes Anderson and his workThirty-two lives were lost when an arsonist set fire to the UpStairs Lounge June 24, 1973. Because the fire began in the stairwell leading to the second floor bar, the main escape route was cut off. A bartender led 20 patrons to safety out a back exit, but that door then was shut off and bars on the windows left many other patrons trapped. It is the deadliest fire in New Orleans' long history, and it has never been solved. The sad truth is that there didn't seem to be great interest in solving the case 40 years ago because the UpStairs Lounge was a gay bar. A police officer at the time dismissed the French Quarter lounge as a place where "thieves" and "queers" hung out. In reality, the crowd at the UpStairs Lounge that Sunday evening was enjoying cheap beer -- $2 for all you could drink from 5-7 p.m. -- and singing around the piano, according to news reports. The bar was a place they could be themselves at a time when many people, including the police, were hostile toward them. A decade ago, on the 30th anniversary, one woman told a Times-Picayune reporter that for years she was afraid to go to memorials for the dead because people might figure out that she was gay. Thankfully, attitudes have changed dramatically in the decades since the fire. Today, a plaque with the names of victims is imbedded in the bricks at the corner of Iberville and Chartres streets. The events being held to mark the 40th anniversary of the tragedy include a lecture at the Historic New Orleans Collection and a jazz funeral procession from there to the site of the fire. The city recognizes domestic partnerships for gay and straight couples, and Mayor Mitch Landrieu issued an official certificate commemorating the anniversary of the fire. The horrific loss of life that Sunday evening put change in motion in New Orleans. "This was our birthing process," the Rev. Dexter Brecht, pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of Greater New Orleans, said in 2003. "This was really where we became a people."ISIS fighters are reportedly hailing President Trump’s executive order on immigration as “the Blessed Ban” — saying it proves to their followers that America really does “hate” Islam. A resident in the Iraqi city of Mosul, which is still considered an Islamic State stronghold, told New York Times terror correspondent Rukmini Callimachi that the jihadists have been openly celebrating the ban ever since Trump singed it into effect on Jan. 27. “They’ve even coined a phrase for it,” she tweeted Wednesday. “‘The Blessed Ban.'” Iraq is one of the seven predominantly Muslim countries — along with Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — from which refugees and citizens are temporarily barred from entering. Callimachi claimed residents in Mosul had been up in arms about Trump’s executive order, while the Islamic State was praising it. “Everywhere I go, Iraqis want to ask about the visa ban,” she said. “But here’s the best part. Guess who else is talking about it? ISIS is.” Describing why the extremists were calling the order the “Blessed Ban,” Callimachi said her source told her it was because “ISIS sees this as their doing.” Click for more from the New York Post.The Marker degradation is a three-step synthetic route in steroid chemistry developed by American chemist Russell Earl Marker in 1938–40. It is used for the production of cortisone and mammalian sex hormones (progesterone, estradiol, etc.) from plant steroids, and established Mexico as a world center for steroid production in the years immediately after World War II.[1] The discovery of the Marker degradation allowed the production of substantial quantities of steroid hormones for the first time, and was fundamental in the development of the contraceptive pill and corticosteroid anti-inflammatory drugs. In 1999, the American Chemical Society and the Sociedad Química de México named the route as an International Historic Chemical Landmark.[1] The first large-scale application of the route took place in 1943, when Russell Earl Marker collected 10 tons of yam tubers to synthesize 3 kilograms (6.6 lb) of progesterone, which was the largest single amount of progesterone that had been produced by that time.[1] That single batch had a value of US$240,000 (approximately $3 million in 2009[2]) at the time it was synthesized.[1] The discovery of the Marker degradation led to the development of a fine chemical industry in Mexico which, starting from scratch and in less than ten years, supplied more than half the human sex hormones sold in the United States. The booming industry caused a huge expansion in chemical education in Mexico. Early development [ edit ] Marker's research at Pennsylvania State College (now Pennsylvania State University) was directed towards finding synthetic routes to steroid hormones from "relatively inexpensive starting materials".[3] While working on a series of plant steroids called sapogenins, he realized that the structure of the side chain[note 1] of one of the compounds, sarsasapogenin, had been incorrectly described in the literature: rather than having an unreactive "double-tetrahydrofuran" side chain, it actually had a much more reactive "ketone spiro acetal" side chain.[3] While the ketone spiro acetal was unreactive in basic or neutral conditions, it could be degraded under acidic conditions: indeed, Marker described it as "unusually reactive".[3] In showing the true nature of the sarsasapogenin side chain, Marker had discovered the first of the steps in what would become known as the Marker degradation. Sarsasapogenin was too expensive to be a commercial precursor to other steroids, so Marker set about looking for richer sources of sapogenins which were more closely related to progesterone. He identified one candidate in Trillium erectum ("Beth root" or "Wake-robin"), a sapogenin called diosgenin which had previously been found in Japanese yams (Dioscorea tokoro).[1][4] Marker showed that both sarsasapogenin and diosgenin could be converted into both progesterone[5] and other steroid hormones.[6][note 2] The quantities of diosgenin that could be extracted from T. erectum were still unsatisfactory, so Marker looked for richer sources. He eventually hit upon another species of Dioscorea, a Mexican yam known locally as cabeza de negro,[note 3] whose tubers were reported to grow up to 100 kg (220 lbs) in weight.[1] Route from diosgenin [ edit ] As with much steroid chemistry, the Marker degradation relies heavily on kinetic control to degrade the sapogenin side chain while leaving similar functional groups on the steroid nucleus (relatively) unaffected. The first step is the reaction that led Marker to discover that the sapogenins had a ketone spiro acetal structure in their side chain.[7] Acetals are inert in basic conditions, but can be hydrolysed in acidic conditions. Marker uses acetic anhydride to block the hydroxyl group formed by opening the six-membered pyran ring.[8] The five.-membered furan ring is then oxidatively opened with chromic acid. This forms the acetyl side chain of progesterone and an esterified hydroxyl group on the steroid nucleus. The ester is then hydrolyzed under strongly basic conditions. The use of ethanolic sodium hydroxide leads to the elimination of water to form a double bond. The resulting 16-dehydropregnenolone (3-hydroxypregna-5,16-dien-20-one) can be converted into progesterone in two steps. Firstly, the double bond in ring D is hydrogenated, followed by Oppenauer oxidation of the hydroxyl group and the concurrent migration of the remaining olefin from ring B to ring A so that it is in conjugation with the ketone carbonyl group at position 3.[1][5] It can also be converted into testosterone, estrone and estradiol.[1][6] Mexican steroid industry [ edit ] Marker's early developmental work was supported by Parke-Davis, a leading American pharmaceutical company now part of Pfizer.[1] However, Marker realized that it made more sense commercially to produce steroids in Mexico, near to the raw material (Mexican Dioscorea sp.; D. composita would come to be the preferred species[1]), than to ship the tubers back to the United States. Parke-Davis did not believe that it was scientifically feasible to operate a fine chemicals production facility in Mexico, and the collaboration foundered.[1] Instead, Marker decided to look for Mexican partners himself, and resigned his academic post on December 1, 1943.[1] One consequence of this split was that the Marker degradation was never patented.[1] Marker set up the Mexican company Syntex[note 4] in early 1944 in association with two Mexican investors, Emeric Somlo and Federico Lehmann. Marker is said to have partly paid for his 40% stake in Syntex with progesterone,[1] then valued at about $80/gram.[1] Within the year, Syntex was selling progesterone for $50/gram.[1] However Marker split with his partners in May 1945 in a row over profits, and set up a new company called Botanica-mex, which would later be sold to Gedeon Richter Ltd. and renamed Hormonosynth (later Diosynth).[1] The difficulties in fine chemicals manufacture in Mexico were indeed considerable: there was a severe shortage of trained chemists and indeed no doctoral program in chemistry at any Mexican university. When Marker left Syntex, his associates found no instructions for the production process and reagent bottles labeled in code.[1] They hired George Rosenkranz, a Hungarian organic chemist trained at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) who had been stranded in Cuba by the entry of the United States into World War II, to replace Marker.[1] Rosenkranz would have to virtually reinvent the production process for progesterone from diosgenin: he also established an Institute of Chemistry at the National Autonomous University of Mexico,[1] where one of the first research students was Luis E. Miramontes, later to become a pivotal researcher at Syntex. Rosenkranz also hired foreign talent for Syntex, including the Austrian Jewish refugee (and naturalized American) Carl Djerassi and the Uruguayan Alejandro Zaffaroni. In 1951, Djerassi, Miramontes and Rosencranz synthesized norethisterone at Syntex,
resembling a satellite dish (known as a thinking cap by Roland). King probably named him after a 1974 fantasy novel about a hunter who pursues a giant bear he presumes to have the power of God. Sara Laughs is a vacation home on Dark Score Lake. It appears to be an alternate reality version of Cara Laughs, a vacation home in the key world of the Dark Tower. An underground mobster who helps Billy find the gypsies and convince them to remove his curse. The only competitor in The Long Walk from Maine. Flagg first appeared in The Stand as a demonic figure who wreaks havoc after a plague kills most of the population. He has a variety of names, usually initialed "R.F." but with occasional exceptions, such as Walter o'Dim (originally envisioned by King as a separate character) in The Dark Tower series. Flagg is described as "an accomplished sorcerer and a devoted servant of the Outer Dark", with supernatural abilities involving necromancy, prophecy, and influence over animal and human behavior. His goals typically center on bringing down civilizations through destruction and conflict. Stephen King was heavily influenced by Charles Starkweather (the teenager responsible for the murder spree in the 1950s that inspired Natural Born Killers), and has implied that Randall Flagg was modeled after him. It's also revealed in The Stand that Flagg and Starkweather went to high school together. Ralph is a 70 year old man who lives in Derry and suffers from insomnia after the death of his wife Carolyn. Paul Sheldon is the main character of "Misery". He is the author of the Misery Chastain novel series. Patrick Danville (b. 1989) was the son of Sonia Danville. When he was a child, he dreamed of Roland Deschain and the Crimson King; in October of 1993, he drew a prophetic picture of Roland and the King at the Dark Tower. On October 8th, 1993, he attended a Susan Day rally with his mother at the Derry Civic Centre; due to the efforts of Ralph Roberts, he and his mother survived Ed Deepneau's attempt to crash a plane into the building. Long before he wrote 11/22/63, King was referencing the date of JFK's assassination. Invites Jamie to join his band, the Chrome Roses, in high school. Mr. Norbert Keene was the owner and operator of the Center Street Drug Store for fifty years from 1925 to 1975. Mordred Deschain, a were-spider, is the son of Roland Deschain (White Father), the Crimson King (Red Father), Susannah Dean (Black Mother), and Mia (White Mother). Mordred is based upon the Arthurian Legend of Mordred le Fay, an illegitimate son of King Arthur who ultimately murdered his father and was himself killed in the process. Pet Sematary was based on the 1902 WW Jacobs story "The Monkey's Paw." In a very meta moment, Louis Creed thinks of the story when he hears an ominous knocking on his front door. (King also uses a quote from the story as a lead in to one of the chapters in the book.) Miss Petrie is first mentioned in The Long Walk, as the softhearted district spellmaster. We never learn her first name. The pet cemetery is on burial ground which used to belong to the Micmac Indians. Obviously, most run-ins with the Micmac Indians do not end well for people. Maturin is one of the guardians of the Beam that support the Dark Tower. The Turtle is said to have vomited out our Universe when it had a stomach ache (and IT thought that Maturin died after this). He bears a resemblance to the World Turtle of Hindu myth. He also has a grandfather-like voice and is shown to be kind and loving. A town in Maine which is home to the gypsum mill where "Sparky" Landon works in Lisey's Story. Fun fact: this is where Stephen King went to high school. Helen (known as "Mama Sweet") is mentioned in the short story "The Man in the Black Suit." She's the oldest woman living in Motton, Maine and is the reason the narrator's mother stopped going to church. Haven has been described as "a longtime refuge for people that are afflicted with a remarkable range of supernatural powers." People with supernatural abilities have migrated to Haven for generations because it mutes their powers, allowing them to lead normal lives. George Bannerman was the sheriff of Castle Rock from 1972-1980, when he was killed by Cujo. In The Dead Zone, he works with Johnny Smith to track down the Castle Rock Strangler. The main character's son, who is killed and then brought back to life in the burial ground. Frank Dodd is (spoiler alert) discovered to be the Castle Rock Strangler, thanks to Johnny Smith. Evelyn ("Evvie") Chalmers is widely known as the oldest person living in Castle Rock. She's also Polly Chalmers' aunt. Ernest Calvert was the son of Lucien Calvert, the father-in-law of Joanie Calvert, and the grandfather of Norrie Calvert. He is the former manager of the Food City supermarket, and a resident of Chester's Mill, Maine. Edward Deepneau was the husband of Helen Deepneau, the father of Natalie Deepneau, and the distant cousin of Aaron Deepneau; he was also a neighbor of Ralph Roberts, and a research chemist at Hawking Industries. In 1993, he came under the control of the Crimson King after Atropos cut his thread, turning him into a "wild card." He later died attempting to crash a prop-plane into the Derry Civic Centre in order to kill Susan Day; Roberts intervened, however, to save the life of Patrick Danville, a child in attendance. Don Hagarty is a young homosexual man in Derry and the life partner of Adrian Mellon. He sees Pennywise murdering Adrian under a bridge (after he's been attacked by some homophobic teenagers) and tries to tell the police but nothing comes of it. Don leaves Derry after Adrian's funeral and the trial against his attackers. The main character of the titular story of this collection. When Dinky says "eventual" it probably doesn't mean what you think it means. Richard "Dick" Halloran was a chef in the Derry Army's E Company and later a chef at the Overlook Hotel. Dick had the Shining ability and was an expert chef. He drove a Plymouth Fury. Halloran's name is an allusion to the Halloran House in the Shirley Jackson novel "The Sundial", which was one of King's inspirations for The Shining. Although it was first mentioned in The Body and The Running Man, It was really the first Derry novel (and the first time that the underlying evil of Derry was revealed). Stephen King has said that Derry is his portrayal of Bangor, although the 1958 version of Derry in It is more closely modeled after Stratford, CT where King spent most of his childhood. Jessie's childhood vacation home - where she is assaulted by her father - is on Dark Score Lake. In Rose Madder, Cynthia Smith spent some time in the Daughters and Sisters shelter after running away from her boyfriend, Richard Judkins, who nearly tore off her ear while high on crystal-meth. Cujo was a massive St Bernard dog, owned by the Camber Family. Cujo was once a friendly and playful companion, but when he got rabies he went insane and was turned into a killer that attacked anybody who came near. A book purchased by Jake Chambers at the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. In Roland's world, the author of Charlie the Choo-Choo is Claudia y Inez Bachman. This name holds special significance. It has 19 letters, a special number in The Dark Tower Series. Also, Claudia y Inez Bachman is the wife of Stephen King's pseudonym, Richard Bachman. Castle Rock first appears in the Dead Zone, although the book mostly takes place nearby in Cleaves Mills. Carrie is a telekinetic, shy outcast who gets revenge on everyone at her high school. Captain Trips, a killer virus, first appeared in the short story "Night Surf" - but it's better known as the devastating disease in The Stand which kills 99% of the world's population. Fun fact: the name comes from Jerry Garcia's nickname, because The Grateful Dead's extensive tours across America served for King as an analogy for the way the Captain Trips virus travelled across America. The Can-Toi are first mentioned by Collie Entragien in relation to Tak. Stephen King seems to be a fan of Shakespeare's "As You Like It," or at least the poem "All the world's a stage." Several of his creative characters struggle with the idea of a bubble reputation - the idea of seeking fame for something that is actually not notable, or honorable. It's first found in Desperation, as Johnny Marinville reflects on the pointlessness of his quest for fame. Beverly Marsh is one of the members in The Losers' Club. She was in love with Bill Denbrough in 1958 and she fell in love with Ben Hanscom in 1985 after they defeated It for the final time. Stu Redman, one of the central characters of the stand, was born and raised in Arnette. Alice, nicknamed "Allie", is the proprietor and bartender of the bar, Sheb's, in the town of Tull. While her age is not specifically stated it is assumed that she is in her late forties due to her mentioning pre-menopause. Roland Deschain meets her while in pursuit of the Man in Black in The Gunslinger. She is described as being beautiful, but she has a major scar where her left eye is. In exchange for information about the Man in Black and Nort, Roland agrees to sleep with her. She was given a letter by the Man in Black, telling her to say the word "Nineteen" to Nort in order to learn about death. She eventually succumbs to the temptation knowing that the knowledge will drive her mad. She asks Roland to put her out of her misery, which he does, knowing that Sheb McCurdy (who was holding a knife to her throat during Sylvia Pittston's attack) would probably kill her anyway. Alan Pangborn was the sheriff of Castle Rock from 1981-1991. His wife Annie and son Todd were killed in a car crash. He's a gifted (albeit amateur) magician who falls in love with and marries Polly Chalmers. The fictional Freed is an evil version of the actual Freed, who in the story enthusiastically announces the names of deceased rock 'n' roll legends in You Know They Got a Hell of a Band as part of an upcoming concert to perform. John "Ace" Merrill is the primary antagonist in The Body. "Mother Abagail" serves as the pinnacle of good (in contrast to Flagg's representation of evil) in the aftermath of the plague. Stephen King's got a thing for Plymouths - understandably, since his first car was a baby blue '56 Plymouth. But he's especially into a certain red and white 1958 Plymouth Fury. Although the details are not always explicitly stated, it's probably safe to assume that any Plymouth spotted in a King novel is Christine lurking about. (Interestingly, a Plymouth Fury first showed up in The Stand, published 5 years before Christine. Foreshadowing?) In Little Sisters of Eluria, Jenna (the only sister that is good) uses insects to heal her patients. And John Coffey (the only prisoner that is innocent) can heal too, and when he does it, some insects appear. Maybe he knows the secrets of the Little Sisters. When Paul and the gang are bringing John Coffey back to the prison after healing Melinda, Paul is surprised to see that John hasn't made a break for it and says he thought he would have lit out for the Territories (a reference to the parallel universe of Jack Sawyer). A reference to one of Flagg's pseudonyms, Walter O'Dim? Lily Cavanaugh was in a movie called Blaze. Some Shawshank escapees were recaptured in Lisbon Falls. Weird but true: this seems like a pretty clear reference to Mike's compulsion in the hotel room in 1408. “Although he was not ordinarily a fussy man, he circled the room, setting them straight. ” A helpful robot in the Dark Tower has the same nickname as Bill. Nancy Deepneau tells Roland that she had an Uncle Ed, but it is not the same one that Stephen King wrote about in Insomnia. Roland believes that King named the antagonist, Ed Deepneau, to get their attention. When Ted first sees Jake, he mistakes him for Bobby Garfield - evidence for the theory that Jake and Bobby are twinners. One of Randall's aliases is Walter O'Dim; here we learn he's gone by yet another related name. Cara Laughs is Stephen King's vacation home (an echo of Mike Noonan's home in Bag of Bones: Sara Laughs). Susannah finds multiple doors through universes, including one to the JFK assassination on 11/22/63. Susannah sees an interesting poster when she's exploring with Nigel after the birth of Mordred. Alan Freed's habit of reciting dead people is reminiscent of Susannah's uncontrollable compulsion to do the same. Chip and Stephen King both walk (and get hit by cars) on the same road. In Stephen King's journal, he describes an idea he had for a novel. It appears to be referring to Rose Madder, where Rose does actually buy a picture in a pawnshop and discovers she can step into it. After Eddie and Roland leave, Stephen King finds himself thinking about The Dark Tower - and some of his other works. Tenuous, but this feels like a Shawshank reference. It is sadly never explained. When Eddie and Roland ask John Cullum about 'Salem's Lot, he tells them a little more about its author. Callahan mentions Mears as he recounts his tale. Boom. Callahan is back. Bryan Smith is a fan of the IT miniseries, and tells Stephen King so. Jake finds a note in Kansas that mentions Mother Abagail (as well as the dark man). Rico Balazar is involved with a thug named Ginelli. Flagg yells bool at Jonas after performing some sleight of hand. Coral remembers Sylvia's visit to Hambry years ago. Graffiti on the Turnpike references the Crimson King. Graffiti on the turnpike references lots of familiar enemies (the Walkin Dude is one of Randall Flagg's aliases). One of the streets in Topeka seems to be named after a certain little boy... Roland and the gang come across evidence that they have entered the version of the world which was destroyed by Captain Trips in The Stand. Skipper is the main antagonist against Dinky in the titular story. Flagg introduces himself with a typical RF alias, after Roland has known him as Walter O'Dim and Marten Broadclock at various points in his life. Aaron Deepneau, a cousin of Ed's, is a major player in the quest for the Dark Tower. Calvin Tower mentions The Territories (as in, Brooklyn?) while he's negotiating with Jake for the Charlie the Choo-Choo book. Roland recalls his memory of the twelve guardians of the beam, including a poem we've heard before, in It. The Mercedes Killer's signature (which he leaves in the car, in his notes, etc) is a yellow smiley face sticker. Peter Jackson wears a t-shirt with Mr. Smiley-Smile on it while talking with Cary Ripton. Peter's sister Dierdre puts a smiley face sticker on everything, including the bag of weed that gets Peter and Mary arrested. De Vermis Mysteriis ("The Mysteries of the Worm") is first mentioned the short story Jerusalem's Lot. Pretty sure Duane is a relative of Helen's. Nora Robichaud is one of the victims of the dome - and perhaps a relative of Helen Robichaud? The narrator references a story from nearby Castle Rock (and also mentions having written for the Castle Rock Call for 20 years, so maybe he ended up moving there later in life.) Pretty sure this reference inspired the novella "1922" in the later collection Full Dark No Stars. Edgar insists on painting alone even though it seems dangerous and jokingly likens himself to a certain lone wolf. The antagonist in Duma Key, although female, appears in a red robe and is probably in league with (if not an incarnation of) the Crimson King. A stretch, but Georgia's first car sounds pretty damn close to Christine. Hugh describes a nightmare to Jamie, who recognizes it from the story The Monkey's Paw - which inspired Pet Sematary. Tommyknockers in Desperation Billingsley tells David that the cause of the cave-in at the China Pit is rumored to have been caused by Tommyknockers. It is revealed that Ellen Carver is a fan of Paul Sheldon's Misery series. Wireman introduces Edgar to the idea of the bubble reputation, which Edgar repeatedly assures us he's not interested in. It's subtly revealed that Paul used to live across the street from the Kaspbraks (which, in turn, reveals that Paul grew up in Derry). First instance of many of Sheriff Alan Pangborn in the book. John Merrill - Ace's grandfather? great uncle? - is mentioned in the description of Ruth McCausland. Takes place in Sidewinder. Flagg makes an appearance in The Eyes of the Dragon as an evil wizard attempting to plunge the fictional medieval city of Delain into chaos. Callahan describes the can-toi (or as he calls them, low men, to Roland and the others). The Buick transports objects to todash darkness. It is implied to be the car of a low man. The short story "Low Men in Yellow Coats" in the collection Hearts in Atlantis involves Ted Brautigan running from Can-Toi attempting to recapture him. If there was any doubt that the surname-less Dinky in The Dark Tower is our guy, he makes suspicious use of the word eventual. Ted Stevens Brautigan was a Breaker with telepathic powers. He was a Facilitator which boosted the powers of all nearby telepaths. He was considered the most valuable Breaker because he was the only Facilitator the low men had ever recruited. When Ed McGovern goes crazy, he says something (unintelligible, mostly) to Ralph about The Crimson King. The Shop was involved in the Arrowhead Project, which resulted in the supernatural disaster in The Mist. The main characters are from Derry. Mike and Joanna live in Derry. A bit of a stretch (maybe - it doesn't seem like Stephen King does anything by accident), but there's a minor character called Henry Amberson in The Tommyknockers who is one of the casualties of the changes in Haven, when his pacemaker explodes. He might be a reference to Jake's alias in 11/22/63, George Amberson. Perhaps the real George Amberson grew up in Haven with Henry? Derry is mentioned and visited several times throughout the book, as it neighbors the town of Haven. Richard mentions his son's band, which has a lead guitarist named Norm. Seems like a stretch, but maybe...? Howard Cottrell, the narrator, is from Derry. When Jim Gardener comes to on the rocks of the Arcadia resort, he meets young Jack who mentions that his mother was crazy and died in a car crash. Eddie helps Jake get back to Roland. Mention of Dearborn Avenue (Roland went by Will Dearborn in Wizard and Glass). Phil Drake, the man who was once a priest but is no longer one bears a striking resemblance to Callahan. He makes a point of not wanting to be called "Father", he's an ex-alcoholic, he has an oddly scarred hand, etc. Rachel drives by a sign for 'Salem's Lot on her way to Ludlow. The short story "One for the road" is a prequel to the events in the novel Salem's Lot. Brady Hartsfield uses a smiley face as his trademark, just like Flagg. Annie mentions the Overlook Hotel when she's talking to Paul about Pomeroy. Eddie and Susannah come across a damaged young man in Lud and note that he reminds them of, respectively, Ronald McDonald and Clarabell the Clown. In IT, George sees Pennywise in the drain and thinks that he looks like a cross between Bozo and Clarabell. King notes that if George had been alive a year later, he probably would have been more likely to relate him to Ronald McDonald. Gage's shoe is discovered in Atropos' lair. Mike Hanlon works at the library and, among other things, directs Ralph Roberts to books on the subject of insomnia. A man with the initials RF was the leader of a student protest group that set off a campus bomb and killed people. Randall Flagg was known to go by other names, usually with the initials RF. The bear at the end that Trisha faces is the bear known as Shardik from the Dark Tower. Throughout the entire story, Trish follows a stream, the way of the land, and a road. It's said that everything follows the beams, and Trisha followed the bear beam by following the land while she was lost. When she encounters the bear, it is covered with bugs and maggots just like Shardik. She pretends to throw a pitch at the bear, which results in "batteries" falling out of him (which hints that the bear is robotic just like Shardik). The man who saves Mike in 1408 is named Dearborn. In Mejis, Roland was known as Will Dearborn. A subtle connection, but both Edgar and Elizabeth have the ability to remove things from reality by painting and erasing them - the same as Patrick Danville in the Dark Tower. Dan Torrance is talking to John Dalton on their drive through Iowa and is talking about the different aspects of the shining. Dan says the phrase "There are other worlds than these." Jake Chambers says the same phrase in The Gunslinger before falling to his death. "There will be water if God wills it" is a phrase used often by Roland throughout the Dark Tower series. Sarah lives on Flagg Street, which is where Johnny later gets picked up by the cab which changes his life forever. The man that sells Christine to Arnie is named Roland D. LeBay. Tom points out a children's ride called Charlie the Choo-Choo at the Northern Counties Expo. Pretty sure this is a reference to Carrie. Bobby Garfield is probably Jake Chambers' twinner. Alice Maxwell is a twinner for Alice from the Dark Tower. This becomes immediately clear when Alice in Cell is struck in the face with a cinder block; Alice in the Dark Tower has a mysterious scar over her left eye in the same spot. Father Callahan plays a large part in this book, but the strangest moment is when he and some of the other characters find a copy of Salem's Lot in the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind (the Stephen King book where Callahan first appeared). The movie Cujo is brought up by character Bryan Smith, who mentions the title to the Stephen King character as they wait for an ambulance to arrive. Their conversation may also suggest a minor connection to Jake, who died in the book (The Gunslinger) but also somehow lived. Nancy gifts Roland Insomnia, by Stephen King, and warns him that Patrick Danville may have an impact on his quest. Ralph gives Mike Noonan the advice to go on vacation, which leads Mike to his destiny at Sara Laughs on Dark Score Lake. In Dandelo's final moments, he bears a striking resemblance to a certain psychotic clown. Pennywise in Dreamcatcher When Mr. Gray takes Jonesy to Standpipe Hill in Derry to deliver his deadly infection into the water supply, the alien is incensed to find that the Standpipe no longer exists - it was destroyed in the great flood of 1985. A statue commemorates those lost in the storm. When Tommy Jacklin travels to Derry, he has a vision of a clown in the sewers. Frank Dodd's ghost is invoked as a warning (and possibly a haunting spirit?) in Castle Rock. Captain Trips is the name of the virus that takes out 99% of the world's population in The Stand. The narrator mentions how the local folk of Castle Rock are still talking about how Joe Camber was killed by his own dog. Joyland in Revival Charlie tells Jamie that he once worked at Joyland and describes a very familiar scene. Christine is mentioned as a fictional story. "1922" is set in Hemingford Home. Ernie Calvert is one of the townspeople in Chester's Mill on Dome Day. Junior worries about ending up in Shawshank several times throughout the book. Derry is mentioned several times throughout the book. Lisey tries to get in touch with Sheriff Ridgewick after an obsessed fan shows up at her house. Lisey's sister reads a Mike Noonan audio book. The graphic novel Clay sells at the beginning of the novel is entitled The Dark Wanderer, and the main antagonist, the Raggedy Man, wears a red hoodie from Harvard, a reference to the Crimson King. Jo is a fan of Bill Denbrough's novels. Mike asks Sheriff Ridgewick whatever happened to Alan Pangborn, the last sheriff of Castle Rock. George Randolph Footman, the former Castle County deputy sheriff who shot and killed Mattie Devore, now resides in Shawshank Prison. Brenda Meserve says that the Micmac Indians still haunt the land around Dark Score Lake. Takes place in Derry. Alan reflects on the death of George Bannerman at the hands of Cujo. Takes place in Castle Rock. Takes place in Haven. Lisey and her sisters grew up in Lisbon Falls. Derry Home, the hospital in Derry, and Arcadia Mental Health, the mental hospital in Derry, are both mentioned in Lisey's Story. Lisey buys cigarettes at a gas station; the proprietor is wearing a Dark Score Lake t-shirt. Mike Noonan's vacation home (Sara Laughs) is on Dark Score Lake. Dolores has a psychic connection with Jessie; they both have life-changing events occur during the eclipse over Dark Score Lake. Takes place in Castle Rock. "Secret Window, Secret Garden" takes place in Derry. Dick is mentioned as an Army cook and member of the African-American army nightclub in Derry called "The Black Spot", which was burned down by the Legion of White Decency (the Maine equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan) in 1930. Dick's Shining allowed him to save the lives of several other clubgoers, including Mike Hanlon's father. He is also notable for being one of the only sane adults able to see It in one of its varying forms. Steve Dubay gets sent to Shawshank for the murder of Adrian Mellon. Butch Bowers drove a '58 Plymouth Fury, and Henry Bowers has an unfortunate run-in with that same car... The adult Ben Hanscom ends up here. Derry is mentioned in both "Uncle Otto's Truck" and "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut". Andy Dufresne (first mentioned in "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption," in the same book) is mentioned as having done accounting work for Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander in “Apt Pupil." Chris mentions Derry when the boys are discussing how the body could have ended up where it did. At one point in his journey (around when he breaks the survival record), Richards makes his way to an airport in Derry. Chris mentions Salem's Lot as a stupid sounding town name to defend the one Gordie invents (Gretna). "The Body" takes place in Castle Rock. Cujo takes place in Castle Rock. Al Steinowitz drives a Plymouth. His happens to be light green, but there are two more Plymouths in the book (a Plymouth Arrow of unknown color and a gray Plymouth of unknown model). Johnny Smith mentions Salem's Lot as a town near Cumberland, where his mother has been taken to the hospital. Evvie breaks up the fight between Ace and Gordon in "The Body." George, the Castle Rock sheriff, fights (and loses to) Cujo. Alan Pangborn reminisces about his predecessor while considering a new murder victim he discovers in Castle Rock. Patty accuses Johnny Smith of setting Cathy's restaurant on fire, and mentions the book Carrie. A character named Raymond (Ray) Garraty appears in Mike Noonan's novel My Childhood Friend. Jessie hears a voice in her head that she calls Miss Petrie, after her second grade teacher. Stu Redman and Tom Cullen find an abandoned Plymouth with the initials "AC" engraved on the keychain. The DCHS football team plays (and defeats) the Arnette Bears. It has been theorized (and seems likely) that Randall Flagg was "He Who Walks Behind the Rows" from Children of the Corn. The hint comes in a sobriquet that includes all of the letters, in order, of the name Walter: "he Who wALks behind ThE Rows". Hemingford Home is the setting of the short story "The Last Rung on the Ladder". Dick Hallorann drives a Plymouth. Ok, so it's maybe not Christine, but close enough. Jake runs into Bev and Richie Tozier dancing in a picnic area in Derry in 1958. They mention the clown, talk about Dorsey Corcoran and Tugga Dunning, and even ask Jake about the Turtle. Jake helps Bev learn the Lindy and thinks about her often after their encounter (specifically, her feeling that the worst was over in Derry). The portal Jake travels to opens up in Lisbon Falls on Tuesday, September 9, 1958. Jake spots a red and white Plymouth Fury (mid-or-late fifties, ha!) in the parking lot when he arrives in Lisbon Falls in 1958. This is just the first of 11 times Jake sees this car (ultimately, it becomes clear that the car is playing a much larger part in his time traveling coincidences than he originally thought). Jake tells Al that Harry Dunning's father died in Shawshank. The prison is mentioned twice more in the book, as Jake worries about ending up there in the past. Sadie dances with Don at the Sadie Hawkins dance. Don's referenced a couple more times throughout the book as well. (Curiously, throughout 11/22/63, Don's last name is spelled with two G's.) Ernie Calvert writes the article (in 1963) about Sadie's near-miss when attacked by her husband with a knife. Jake meets Norbert Keene when he gets to Derry. He shows up a number of times throughout the book, particularly with Jake reminiscing about Keene winking at him in the drugstore.A while ago, Egypt's Islamic government discussed the presence of atheism. It was referred to as a plague which should be prevented from spreading. However, last time I checked, atheism was a viewpoint and not a lethal virus. Atheism, agnosticism and/or secularism are undoubtedly regarded as a threat by many in Egypt. But why would the legislature employ countless efforts to wipe out those who made these seemingly harmless personal choices? Not only is there a great stigma attached to being an atheist but stating one's lack of religious beliefs can easily lead to legal sanctions on the grounds of apostasy. Religion as Society's Number One Pillar In Egypt, religion appears on one's ID. Refusing to state religion or choosing something other than the three monotheisms is out of the question. As you can see, it plays a primordial role: religion insures belonging to a community and provides an identity. It makes people feel like they're part of a large, stable organism – a solid building structure. Furthermore, as a Muslim or a Christian, you live and prosper within your own religious community. You all follow the same traditions and cultural practices, share the same vision of life. You're handed out a script which indicates how you and your peers should act. It becomes a lofty nest, overflowing with a pleasant sense of security. Therefore, religion pretty much sets the social norms. If all are subject to predefined rules, it's easy to understand one's life stance. It's almost effortless to relate to members of a certain community and by extension, to control them, as Islamism wishes to do. Irreligion Screams Danger Any non-conformist behavior raises skepticism and disapproval merely for being different. When one is accustomed to a certain philosophy of life, it's difficult to grasp why and how there are deviations from one's standard life rules. A Muslim can guess how his fellow Muslims think and therefore remains within his security zone. However, while confronting an atheist he will be unable to predict his interlocutor's behavior, let alone relate to it. It will be a step out of the lofty nest. We tend to be threatened by the unknown and perhaps exaggerate the danger it represents. In addition to being threatened by the unknown, being unable to understand the other, renders one powerless. It is considerably harder for Islamists to influence the non-religious crowd with ideologies which suit the predominantly Muslim population. That's why atheists are expected to conform or be sanctioned, perhaps even discarded by being thrown away in a cell. Bonding Over the Enemy I also want to add that as herd-animals, human beings long to be part of a group. An effective way to consolidate this group is to find a common enemy. Religious communities aren't exempted from such bonding methods. Egyptian atheists, who are difficult to identify and to count since openly admitting one's lack of religious beliefs has adverse consequences, became victims in order to strengthen the Muslim society's sense of community. They also make good scapegoats: just blame global warming on the atheists, we want to be rid of them anyway. I used a recent example of atheophobia, or fear of atheism I've encountered, but the same pattern of behavior can be seen in numerous situations anywhere in the world. Vilifying atheism is an easy way for the religious to avoid the work of listening and understanding.State Rep. Jeffrey Guice probably wishes he’d never hit the send button after he messaged Nicole Nichols on Monday afternoon. He probably wishes he had checked out her Facebook page, too. The Richland mother of two was looking for help trying to find a vendor in her Medicaid network who would supply a piece of equipment crucial to her daughter’s diabetes treatment. She asked Guice and other lawmakers for help. “Have you thought about buying supplies with money that you earn?” he replied. That lit her fuse. So she posted the exchange on her Living in the World of Test Strips page, which she uses to advocate for children with diabetes. Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to the Sun Herald Had Guice, a Republican from Ocean Springs, looked at the page, he might have held back. “This place isn’t for everyone,” Nichols wrote in her page description. “I don’t do fear here.” For the record, Nichols’ husband works two jobs and she is a stay-at-home mom. Still, they qualify for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, also known as Children’s Medicaid. They ran the numbers. If she were working, it would essentially just pay for the day care for her children while she was at work. While she was staying home with her kids, she wrote a diabetes book for children to advocate for kids with diabetes. And to keep that advocacy separate from her family life, she started the Living in the World of Test Strips page. Commenters will comment She definitely thinks Guice was calling her a deadbeat. But she let her followers do the talking in the comments. It isn’t for the faint at heart. Guice hasn’t raised much of a defense. He told The Clarion-Ledger he doesn’t do interviews. His Capitol phone line is very busy. The cellphone number he gave the Sun Herald has been disconnected. He did email the Associated Press with this statement: “I realize my remarks to Mrs. Nichols were completely insensitive and out of line. I am sorry and deeply regret my reply. I know nothing about her and her family and replied in knee-jerk fashion. I’d like to think the people of Mississippi and my constituents know that I’m willing to help where I am able.” “He’s never met me, nor my husband,” Nichols said. “We’re not in his area. I believe he’s from Ocean Springs and we live south of Jackson.” She emailed all the lawmakers, she said. Three responded. Only Guice was rude, she said. I wasn’t asking for a handout. I wasn’t asking for something to be given to us.... I needed assistance navigating the red tape that surrounds Medicaid. Nicole Nichols “It was an effort to reach someone who is knowledgeable and would have the heart to help us navigate the situation,” she said. “I wasn’t asking for a handout. I wasn’t asking for something to be given to us. These children are already eligible for these benefits based on our family’s financial situation. I needed assistance navigating the red tape that surrounds Medicaid.” On Guice’s Facebook page, he shared a meme last month that said, “I’m so lucky people can’t hear what I’m thinking.” But now they have. And they’re not impressed. Nichols’ Facebook post starring Guice has been shared hundreds of times. “His response was probably something he is really not happy about having said,” she said. She went to Jackson, where she handed out fliers at the Capitol and met with media. She didn’t try to find Guice, though. “It wouldn’t have done any good,” she said. “I could not have reasoned with him and I would have lost my temper.” Loud and opinionated Not that she minds speaking her mind. “I have a lot of words and I can be very loud about them,” she said. “I’m very opinionated — much to a lot of people’s dismay. It’s just the way I was raised. “I want this to be about the kids and helping the kids. This wasn’t about my family and helping my family. We have walked this path and we know that it is difficult and extremely stressful. Now we’re seeing other families we know having the same problem. We want to show them how to walk the path.” At issue is a small connection for the diabetes pump her daughter, Bella, wears. Without it, Bella would have to endure six to 10 injections a day. That part must be changed at least every three days. And it is easily broken. In all, without insurance, it would cost $375 to $400 a month and that’s money the family just doesn’t have. Nichols, who said she’s socially liberal and fiscally conservative, has no political experience — “other than running
discussions, the message Mr. Flynn conveyed to the ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak — that the Obama administration was Moscow’s adversary and that relations with Russia would change under Mr. Trump — was unambiguous and highly inappropriate, the officials said. The accounts of the conversations raise the prospect that Mr. Flynn violated a law against private citizens’ engaging in diplomacy, and directly contradict statements made by Trump advisers. They have said that Mr. Flynn spoke to Mr. Kislyak a few days after Christmas merely to arrange a phone call between President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Mr. Trump after the inauguration. But current and former American officials said that conversation — which took place the day before the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia over accusations that it used cyberattacks to help sway the election in Mr. Trump’s favor — ranged far beyond the logistics of a post-inauguration phone call. And they said it was only one in a series of contacts between the two men that began before the election and also included talk of cooperating in the fight against the Islamic State, along with other issues.Get the biggest Manchester City FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email Gareth Barry's impressive start to life at Everton has brought the midfielder plenty of deserved praise. The 32-year-old has only joined the Merseyside club on a season-long loan, but has been quick to discuss the ease with which he has settled in at Goodison Park. Barry's fine performances have also led observers to remark that he might well have been moved on all too quickly by Manuel Pellegrini, with the Chilean's pursuit of Fernandinho perhaps misguided. After a shaky start, Fernandinho is showing signs that he is coming to terms with the Premier League and is certainly delivering a remarkable work rate. Here, we take a look at whether the Blues were in fact right to sacrifice the former Aston Villa midfielder for a Brazilian upgrade. DUELS WON Pellegrini - and, in fact, most modern coaches - like the anchor man in their midfield to act primarily as a destroyer. In that regard, Fernandinho has without doubt outperformed his predecessor thus far, winning 48.6% of his tackles on the ground. Despite excelling at Everton in the early stages of the season, Barry has won just 38.9% of his duels. AERIAL DUELS WON Although he is actually smaller than Barry, Fernandinho has also improved City's chances of repelling set pieces - as the statistics prove. The former Shakhtar Donetsk star has won an impressive 91.7% of his 12 aerial duels in the Premier League this season, while Barry has come out on top in 46.2% of his 13. City are without doubt stronger against the long ball as a result. PASSING ACCURACY Of course, there is little point in having a midfielder who can win the ball but then can't pass it in a straight line. Barry has clocked up a solid passing accuracy ratio of 85.6% so far, and has proven key to launching devastating Everton counter-attacks as a result. But Fernandinho is no slouch on the ball, either, and has found a team-mate with 86.1% of his passes during his City career. MINUTES PER INTERCEPTION It is also worth noting that Fernandinho's game is not all about blood and thunder - the 28-year-old is an intelligent presence in the City engine room. He averages an interception every 44 minutes in the Premier League in 2013-14, while Barry steals the ball once every 54 minutes so far. MINUTES PER RECOVERY The statistics don't all point in the favour of the Blues' summer signing, however. Despite possessing noticeably less pace than his successor in the City midfield, Barry recovers loose balls in midfield slightly more regularly. The 53-cap England international averages a recovery every 14.2 minutes, but Fernandinho does the same once every 17 minutes this season. Manchester City facebook boxPrehistoric period and age studied in archaeology, part of the Holocene Epoch The Bronze Age is a historical period characterized by the use of bronze, and in some areas proto-writing, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second principal period of the three-age Stone-Bronze-Iron system, as proposed in modern times by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, for classifying and studying ancient societies. An ancient civilization is defined to be in the Bronze Age either by producing bronze by smelting its own copper and alloying with tin, arsenic, or other metals, or by trading for bronze from production areas elsewhere. Bronze itself is harder and more durable than other metals available at the time, allowing Bronze Age civilizations to gain a technological advantage. Copper-tin ores are rare, as reflected in the fact that there were no tin bronzes in Western Asia before trading in bronze began in the third millennium BC. Worldwide, the Bronze Age generally followed the Neolithic period, with the Chalcolithic serving as a transition. Although the Iron Age generally followed the Bronze Age, in some areas (such as Sub-Saharan Africa), the Iron Age intruded directly on the Neolithic.[1] Bronze Age cultures differed in their development of the first writing. According to archaeological evidence, cultures in Mesopotamia (cuneiform script) and Egypt (hieroglyphs) developed the earliest viable writing systems. History [ edit ] The overall period is characterized by widespread use of bronze, though the place and time of the introduction and development of bronze technology were not universally synchronous.[2] Human-made tin bronze technology requires set production techniques. Tin must be mined (mainly as the tin ore cassiterite) and smelted separately, then added to molten copper to make bronze alloy. The Bronze Age was a time of extensive use of metals and of developing trade networks (See Tin sources and trade in ancient times). A 2013 report suggests that the earliest tin-alloy bronze dates to the mid-5th millennium BC in a Vinča culture site in Pločnik (Serbia), although this culture is not conventionally considered part of the Bronze Age.[3] The dating of the foil has been disputed.[4][5] Near East [ edit ] Western Asia and the Near East was the first region to enter the Bronze Age, which began with the rise of the Mesopotamian civilization of Sumer in the mid 4th millennium BC. Cultures in the ancient Near East (often called one of "the cradles of civilization") practiced intensive year-round agriculture, developed a writing system, invented the potter's wheel, created a centralized government, written law codes, city and nation states and empires, embarked on advanced architectural projects, introduced social stratification, economic and civil administration, slavery, and practiced organized warfare, medicine and religion. Societies in the region laid the foundations for astronomy, mathematics and astrology. Dates are approximate, consult particular article for details The Ancient Near East Bronze Age can be divided as following: Near East Bronze Age Divisions The archetypal Bronze Age divisions of the Near East have a well-established triadic clearness of expression. The period dates and phases below are solely applicable to the Near East and thus not applicable universally.[6][7][8] Early Bronze Age (EBA) 3300–2100 BC 3300–3000: EBA I 3000–2700: EBA II 2700–2200: EBA III 2200–2100: EBA IV Middle Bronze Age (MBA) Also, Intermediate Bronze Age (IBA) 2100–1550 BC 2100–2000: MBA I 2000–1750: MBA II A 1750–1650: MBA II B 1650–1550: MBA II C Late Bronze Age (LBA) 1550–1200 BC 1550–1400: LBA I 1400–1300: LBA II A 1300–1200: LBA II B (Bronze Age collapse) Anatolia [ edit ] The Hittite Empire was established in Hattusa in northern Anatolia from the 18th century BC. In the 14th century BC, the Hittite Kingdom was at its height, encompassing central Anatolia, southwestern Syria as far as Ugarit, and upper Mesopotamia. After 1180 BC, amid general turmoil in the Levant conjectured to have been associated with the sudden arrival of the Sea Peoples,[9][10] the kingdom disintegrated into several independent "Neo-Hittite" city-states, some of which survived until as late as the 8th century BC. Arzawa in Western Anatolia during the second half of the second millennium BC likely extended along southern Anatolia in a belt that reaches from near the Turkish Lakes Region to the Aegean coast. Arzawa was the western neighbor – sometimes a rival and sometimes a vassal – of the Middle and New Hittite Kingdoms. The Assuwa league was a confederation of states in western Anatolia that was defeated by the Hittites under an earlier Tudhaliya I, around 1400 BC. Arzawa has been associated with the much more obscure Assuwa generally located to its north. It probably bordered it, and may even be an alternative term for it (at least during some periods). Egypt [ edit ] Early Bronze dynasties [ edit ] In Ancient Egypt the Bronze Age begins in the Protodynastic period, c. 3150 BC. The archaic early Bronze Age of Egypt, known as the Early Dynastic Period of Egypt,[11][12] immediately follows the unification of Lower and Upper Egypt, c. 3100 BC. It is generally taken to include the First and Second Dynasties, lasting from the Protodynastic Period of Egypt until about 2686 BC, or the beginning of the Old Kingdom. With the First Dynasty, the capital moved from Abydos to Memphis with a unified Egypt ruled by an Egyptian god-king. Abydos remained the major holy land in the south. The hallmarks of ancient Egyptian civilization, such as art, architecture and many aspects of religion, took shape during the Early Dynastic period. Memphis in the Early Bronze Age was the largest city of the time. The Old Kingdom of the regional Bronze Age[11] is the name given to the period in the 3rd millennium BC when Egypt attained its first continuous peak of civilization in complexity and achievement – the first of three "Kingdom" periods, which mark the high points of civilization in the lower Nile Valley (the others being Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom). The First Intermediate Period of Egypt,[13] often described as a "dark period" in ancient Egyptian history, spanned about 100 years after the end of the Old Kingdom from about 2181 to 2055 BC. Very little monumental evidence survives from this period, especially from the early part of it. The First Intermediate Period was a dynamic time when the rule of Egypt was roughly divided between two competing power bases: Heracleopolis in Lower Egypt and Thebes in Upper Egypt. These two kingdoms would eventually come into conflict, with the Theban kings conquering the north, resulting in the reunification of Egypt under a single ruler during the second part of the 11th Dynasty. Middle Bronze dynasties [ edit ] The Middle Kingdom of Egypt lasted from 2055 to 1650 BC. During this period, the Osiris funerary cult rose to dominate Egyptian popular religion. The period comprises two phases: the 11th Dynasty, which ruled from Thebes and the 12th[14] and 13th Dynasties centered on el-Lisht. The unified kingdom was previously considered to comprise the 11th and 12th Dynasties, but historians now at least partially consider the 13th Dynasty to belong to the Middle Kingdom. During the Second Intermediate Period,[15] Ancient Egypt fell into disarray for a second time, between the end of the Middle Kingdom and the start of the New Kingdom. It is best known for the Hyksos, whose reign comprised the 15th and 16th dynasties. The Hyksos first appeared in Egypt during the 11th Dynasty, began their climb to power in the 13th Dynasty, and emerged from the Second Intermediate Period in control of Avaris and the Delta. By the 15th Dynasty, they ruled lower Egypt, and they were expelled at the end of the 17th Dynasty. Late Bronze dynasties [ edit ] The New Kingdom of Egypt, also referred to as the Egyptian Empire, lasted from the 16th to the 11th century BC. The New Kingdom followed the Second Intermediate Period and was succeeded by the Third Intermediate Period. It was Egypt's most prosperous time and marked the peak of Egypt's power. The later New Kingdom, i.e. the 19th and 20th Dynasties (1292–1069 BC), is also known as the Ramesside period, after the eleven pharaohs that took the name of Ramesses. Iranian Plateau [ edit ] Late 3rd Millennium BC silver cup from Marvdasht, Fars, with linear-Elamite inscription. Elam was a pre-Iranic ancient civilization located to the east of Mesopotamia. In the Old Elamite period (Middle Bronze Age), Elam consisted of kingdoms on the Iranian Plateau, centered in Anshan, and from the mid-2nd millennium BC, it was centered in Susa in the Khuzestan lowlands. Its culture played a crucial role in the Gutian Empire and especially during the Iranic Achaemenid dynasty that succeeded it. The Oxus civilization[16] was a Bronze Age Central Asian culture dated to c. 2300–1700 BC and centered on the upper Amu Darya (Oxus). In the Early Bronze Age the culture of the Kopet Dag oases and Altyndepe developed a proto-urban society. This corresponds to level IV at Namazga-Tepe. Altyndepe was a major centre even then. Pottery was wheel-turned. Grapes were grown. The height of this urban development was reached in the Middle Bronze Age c. 2300 BC, corresponding to level V at Namazga-Depe.[17] This Bronze Age culture is called the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC). The Kulli culture,[18][19] similar to those of the Indus Valley Civilisation, was located in southern Balochistan (Gedrosia) c. 2500–2000 BC. Agriculture was the economical base of this people. At several places dams were found, providing evidence for a highly developed water management system. Konar Sandal is associated with the hypothesized "Jiroft culture", a 3rd-millennium-BC culture postulated on the basis of a collection of artifacts confiscated in 2001. Levant [ edit ] In modern scholarship the chronology of the Bronze Age Levant is divided into Early/Proto Syrian; corresponding to the Early Bronze. Old Syrian; corresponding to the Middle Bronze. Middle Syrian; corresponding to the Late Bronze. The term Neo-Syria is used to designate the early Iron Age.[20] The old Syrian period was dominated by the Eblaite first kingdom, Nagar and the Mariote second kingdom. The Akkadian conquered large areas of the Levant and were followed by the Amorite kingdoms, c. 2000–1600 BC, which arose in Mari, Yamhad, Qatna, Assyria.[21] From the 15th century BC onward, the term Amurru is usually applied to the region extending north of Canaan as far as Kadesh on the Orontes River. The earliest known Ugarit contact with Egypt (and the first exact dating of Ugaritic civilization) comes from a carnelian bead identified with the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Senusret I, 1971–1926 BC. A stela and a statuette from the Egyptian pharaohs Senusret III and Amenemhet III have also been found. However, it is unclear at what time these monuments got to Ugarit. In the Amarna letters, messages from Ugarit c. 1350 BC written by Ammittamru I, Niqmaddu II, and his queen, were discovered. From the 16th to the 13th century BC, Ugarit remained in constant touch with Egypt and Cyprus (named Alashiya). The Mitanni was a loosely organized state in northern Syria and south-east Anatolia from c. 1500–1300 BC. Founded by an Indo-Aryan ruling class that governed a predominantly Hurrian population, Mitanni came to be a regional power after the Hittite destruction of Kassite Babylon created a power vacuum in Mesopotamia. At its beginning, Mitanni's major rival was Egypt under the Thutmosids. However, with the ascent of the Hittite empire, Mitanni and Egypt made an alliance to protect their mutual interests from the threat of Hittite domination. At the height of its power, during the 14th century BC, it had outposts centered on its capital, Washukanni, which archaeologists have located on the headwaters of the Khabur River. Eventually, Mitanni succumbed to Hittite, and later Assyrian attacks, and was reduced to a province of the Middle Assyrian Empire. The Israelites were an ancient Semitic-speaking people of the Ancient Near East who inhabited part of Canaan during the tribal and monarchic periods (15th to 6th centuries BC),[22][23][24][25][26] and lived in the region in smaller numbers after the fall of the monarchy. The name "Israel" first appears c. 1209 BC, at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the very beginning of the Iron Age, on the Merneptah Stele raised by the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah. The Arameans were a Northwest Semitic semi-nomadic and pastoralist people who originated in what is now modern Syria (Biblical Aram) during the Late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age. Large groups migrated to Mesopotamia, where they intermingled with the native Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian) population. The Aramaeans never had a unified empire; they were divided into independent kingdoms all across the Near East. After the Bronze Age collapse, their political influence was confined to a number of Syro-Hittite states, which were entirely absorbed into the Neo-Assyrian Empire by the 8th century BC. Mesopotamia [ edit ] In Mesopotamia, the Mesopotamian Bronze Age began about 3500 BC and ended with the Kassite period (c. 1500 BC – c. 1155 BC). The usual tripartite division into an Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age is not used. Instead, a division primarily based on art-historical and historical characteristics is more common. The cities of the Ancient Near East housed several tens of thousands of people. Ur, Kish, Isin, Larsa and Nippur in the Middle Bronze Age and Babylon, Calah and Assur in the Late Bronze Age similarly had large populations. The Akkadian Empire (2335–2154 BC) became the dominant power in the region, and after its fall the Sumerians enjoyed a renaissance with the Neo-Sumerian Empire. Assyria was extant from as early as the 25th century BC, and became a regional power with the Old Assyrian Empire (c. 2025–1750 BC). The earliest mention of Babylon (then a small administrative town) appears on a tablet from the reign of Sargon of Akkad in the 23rd century BC. The Amorite dynasty established the city-state of Babylon in the 19th century BC. Over 100 years later, it briefly took over the other city-states and formed the short lived First Babylonian Empire during what is also called the Old Babylonian Period. Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia all used the written East Semitic Akkadian language for official use and as a spoken language. By that time, the Sumerian language was no longer spoken, but was still in religious use in Assyria and Babylonia, and would remain so until the 1st century AD. The Akkadian and Sumerian traditions played a major role in later Assyrian and Babylonian culture, even though Babylonia (unlike the more militarily powerful Assyria) itself was founded by non-native Amorites and often ruled by other non-indigenous peoples, such as Kassites, Arameans and Chaldeans, as well as its Assyrian neighbours. Asia [ edit ] Central Asia [ edit ] Seima-Turbino Phenomenon [ edit ] The Altai Mountains in what is now southern Russia and central Mongolia have been identified as the point of origin of a cultural enigma termed the Seima-Turbino Phenomenon.[27] It is conjectured that changes in climate in this region around 2000 BC and the ensuing ecological, economic and political changes triggered a rapid and massive migration westward into northeast Europe, eastward into China and southward into Vietnam and Thailand [28] across a frontier of some 4,000 miles.[27] This migration took place in just five to six generations and led to peoples from Finland in the west to Thailand in the east employing the same metal working technology and, in some areas, horse breeding and riding.[27] It is further conjectured that the same migrations spread the Uralic group of languages across Europe and Asia: some 39 languages of this group are still extant, including Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian.[27] However, recent genetic testings of sites in south Siberia and Kazakhstan (Andronovo horizon) would rather support a spreading of the bronze technology via Indo-European migrations eastwards, as this technology was well known for quite a while in western regions.[29][30] East Asia [ edit ] China [ edit ] In China, the earliest bronze artifacts have been found in the Majiayao culture site (between 3100 and 2700 BC),[31][32] The term "Bronze Age" has been transferred to the archaeology of China from that of Western Eurasia, and there is no consensus or universally used convention delimiting the "Bronze Age" in the context of Chinese prehistory.[33] By convention, the "Early Bronze Age" in China is sometimes taken as equivalent to the "Shang dynasty" period of Chinese prehistory (16th to 11th centuries BC),[34] and the "Later Bronze Age" as equivalent to the "Zhou dynasty" period (11th to 3rd centuries BC, from the 5th century also dubbed "Iron Age"), although there is an argument to be made that the "Bronze Age" proper never ended in China, as there is no recognizable transition to an "Iron Age".[35] Significantly, together with the jade art that precedes it, bronze was seen as a "fine" material for ritual art when compared with iron or stone, stone only becoming popular for tombs in the Han on probable Indian influence (replacing wooden temple in that instance).[36] Bronze metallurgy in China originated in what is referred to as the Erlitou (Wade–Giles: Erh-li-t'ou) period, which some historians argue places it within the range of dates controlled by the Shang dynasty.[37] Others believe the Erlitou sites belong to the preceding Xia (Wade–Giles: Hsia) dynasty.[38] The U.S. National Gallery of Art defines the Chinese Bronze Age as the "period between about 2000 BC and 771 BC," a period that begins with the Erlitou culture and ends abruptly with the disintegration of Western Zhou rule.[39] The widespread use of bronze in Chinese metallurgy and culture dates to significantly later, probably due to Western influence. While there may be reason to believe that bronzework developed inside China separately from outside influence,[40] the discovery of Europoid mummies in Xinjiang suggests a possible route of transmission from the West beginning in the early second millennium BC,[41] however, this is still just speculation since it's lack of direct evidences, few human mummies alone cannot provide sufficient explanation of metallurgy transmission, the oldest bronze objects found in China so far were discoverd at Majiayao site in Gansu rather than Xinjiang[42] The Shang dynasty (also known as the Yin dynasty)[43] of the Yellow River Valley rose to power after the Xia dynasty around 1600 BC. While some direct information about the Shang dynasty comes from Shang-era inscriptions on bronze artifacts, most comes from oracle bones – turtle shells, cattle scapulae, or other bones – which bear glyphs that form the first significant corpus of recorded Chinese characters. Iron is found from the Zhou dynasty, but its use is minimal. Chinese literature dating to the 6th century BC attests knowledge of iron smelting, yet bronze continues to occupy the seat of significance in the archaeological and historical record for some time after this.[44] Historian W.C. White argues that iron did not supplant bronze "at any period before the end of the Zhou dynasty (256 BC)" and that bronze vessels make up the majority of metal vessels all the way through the Later Han period, or to 221 BC [sic?].[45] The Chinese bronze artifacts generally are either utilitarian, like spear points or adze heads, or "ritual bronzes", which are more elaborate versions in precious materials of everyday vessels, as well as tools and weapons. Examples are the numerous large sacrificial tripods known as dings in Chinese; there are many other distinct shapes. Surviving identified Chinese ritual bronzes tend to be highly decorated, often with the taotie motif, which involves highly stylized animal faces. These appear in three main motif types: those of demons, of symbolic animals, and of abstract symbols.[46] Many large bronzes also bear cast inscriptions that are the great bulk of the surviving body of early Chinese writing and have helped historians and archaeologists piece together the history of China, especially during the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC). The bronzes of the Western Zhou dynasty document large portions of history not found in the extant texts that were often composed by persons of varying rank and possibly even social class. Further, the medium of cast bronze lends the record they preserve a permanence not enjoyed by manuscripts.[47] These inscriptions can commonly be subdivided into four parts: a reference to the date and place, the naming of the event commemorated, the list of gifts given to the artisan in exchange for the bronze, and a dedication.[48] The relative points of reference these vessels provide have enabled historians to place most of the vessels within a certain time frame of the Western Zhou period, allowing them to trace the evolution of the vessels and the events they record.[49] Korea [ edit ] Korean Bronze Age Bronze artifacts from Daegok-ri, Hwasun, Korea The beginning of the Bronze Age on the peninsula is around 1000–800 BC.[50][51] Although the Korean Bronze Age culture derives from the Liaoning and Manchuria, it exhibits unique typology and styles, especially in ritual objects.[52] The Mumun pottery period is named after the Korean name for undecorated or plain cooking and storage vessels that form a large part of the pottery assemblage over the entire length of the period, but especially 850–550 BC. The Mumun period is known for the origins of intensive agriculture and complex societies in both the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese Archipelago. The Middle Mumun pottery period culture of the southern Korean Peninsula gradually adopted bronze production (c. 700–600? BC) after a period when Liaoning-style bronze daggers and other bronze artifacts were exchanged as far as the interior part of the Southern Peninsula (c. 900–700 BC). The bronze daggers lent prestige and authority to the personages who wielded and were buried with them in high-status megalithic burials at south-coastal centres such as the Igeum-dong site. Bronze was an important element in ceremonies and as for mortuary offerings until 100. Japan [ edit ] Japanese Bronze Age 2nd century BC Yayoi dōtaku bronze bell. 2nd century BC Yayoi bronze spearhead. The Japanese archipelago experienced the introduction of bronze during the beginning of the Early Yayoi period (~300 BC), which saw the introduction of metalworking and agricultural practices bought in by settlers arriving from the continent. Bronze and iron smelting techniques spread to the Japanese archipelago through contact with other ancient East Asian civilizations, particularly immigration and trade from the Korean peninsula and ancient Mainland China. Iron was mainly used for agricultural and other tools, whereas ritual and ceremonial artifacts were mainly made of bronze. South Asia [ edit ] Dates are approximate, consult particular article for details Indus Valley [ edit ] The Bronze Age on the Indian subcontinent began around 3300 BC with the beginning of the Indus Valley civilization. Inhabitants of the Indus Valley, the Harappans, developed new techniques in metallurgy and produced copper, bronze, lead and tin. The Late Harappan culture, which dates from 1900–1400 BC, overlapped the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age; thus it is difficult to date this transition accurately. It has been claimed that a 6,000 year old copper amulet manufactured in Mehrgarh in the shape of wheel spoke is the earliest example of lost wax casting in the world.[53][54] Southeast Asia [ edit ] Vietnam [ edit ] Dating back to the Neolithic Age, the first bronze drum, called the Dong Son drum, were uncovered in and around the Red River Delta regions of Northern Vietnam and Southern China. These relate to the prehistoric Dong Son Culture of Vietnam. In Ban Chiang, Thailand, (Southeast Asia) bronze artifacts have been discovered dating to 2100 BC.[55] However, according to the radiocarbon dating on the human and pig bones in Ban Chiang, some scholars propose that the initial Bronze Age in Ban Chiang was in late 2nd millennium.[56] In Nyaunggan, Burma, bronze tools have been excavated along with ceramics and stone artifacts. Dating is still currently broad (3500–500 BC).[57] Ban Non Wat, excavated by Charles Higham, was a rich site with over 640 graves excavated that gleaned many complex bronze items that may have had social value connected to them.[58] Ban Chiang, however, is the most thoroughly documented site while having the clearest evidence of metallurgy when it comes to Southeast Asia. With a rough date range of late 3rd millennium BC to the first millennium AD, this site alone has various artifacts such as burial pottery (dating from 2100–1700 BC), fragments of Bronze, copper-base bangles, and much more. What's interesting about this site, however, isn't just the old age of the artifacts but the fact that this technology suggested on-site casting from the very beginning. The on-site casting supports the theory that Bronze was first introduced in Southeast Asia as fully developed which therefore shows that Bronze was actually innovated from a different country.[28] Some scholars believe that the copper-based metallurgy was disseminated from northwest and central China via south and southwest areas such as Guangdong province and Yunnan province and finally into southeast Asia around 1000 BC.[56] Archaeological research in Northern Vietnam indicates an increase in rates of infectious disease following the advent of metallurgy; skeletal fragments in sites dating to the early and mid-Bronze Age evidence a greater proportion of lesions than in sites of earlier periods.[59] There are a few possible implications of this. One is the increase contact with bacterial and/or fungal pathogens due to increased population density and land clearing/ cultivation. The other one is decreased levels of immunocompetence in the Metal age due to changes in diet caused by agriculture. The last is that there may have been an emergence of infectious disease in the Da But period that evolved into a more virulent form in the metal period.[59] Archaeology also suggests that Bronze Age metallurgy may not have been as significant a catalyst in social stratification and warfare in Southeast Asia as in other regions, social distribution shifting away from chiefdom-states to a heterarchical network.[60] Data analyses of sites such as Ban Lum Khao, Ban Na Di, Non Nok Tha, Khok Phanom Di, and Nong Nor have consistently led researchers to conclude that there was no forentrenched hierarchy.[61] Europe [ edit ] A few examples of named Bronze Age cultures in Europe in roughly relative order. Dates are approximate, consult particular article for details The chosen cultures overlapped in time and the indicated periods do not fully correspond to their estimated extents. Balkans [ edit ] The oldest securely dated tin bronze artefact are found in the heart of the Balkans in Serbia. A tin bronze foil from the Pločnik (archaeological site) are dated to 4650 BC. The foil are not the only tin bronze artefact from the fifth millennium BC. 14 other artefacts from Serbia and Bulgaria are dated to before 4000 BC.[citations needed] The recent discoveries indicate that early tin bronze was more common than previously thought, and developed independently in Europe 1500 years before the first tin bronze alloys in the Near East.[citations needed] The production of complex tin bronzes lasted for c. 500 years in the Balkans. Shortly before the end of the fifth millennium BC, there are no longer evidence for production of tin bronze.[citations needed] This coincides with the collapse of large cultural complexes in the Balkans. Tin bronze would be reintroduced to the area again some 1500 years later.[62] Aegean [ edit ] Gold 'Mask of Agamemnon', Greece, 1550 BC The Aegean Bronze Age began around 3200 BC, when civilizations first established a far-ranging trade network. This network imported tin and charcoal to Cyprus, where copper was mined and alloyed with the tin to produce bronze. Bronze objects were then exported far and wide, and supported the trade. Isotopic analysis of tin in some Mediterranean bronze artifacts suggests that they may have originated from Great Britain.[63] Knowledge of navigation was well developed at this time, and reached a peak of skill not exceeded (except perhaps by Polynesian sailors) until 1730 when the invention of the chronometer enabled the precise determination of longitude. The Minoan civilization based in Knossos on the island of Crete appears to have coordinated and defended its Bronze Age trade. Illyrians are also believed to have roots in the early Bronze Age. Ancient empires valued luxury goods in contrast to staple foods, leading to famine.[64] Aegean Collapse [ edit ] Bronze Age collapse theories have described aspects of the end of the Age in this region. At the end of the Bronze Age in the Aegean region, the Mycenaean administration of the regional trade empire followed the decline of Minoan primacy.[65] Several Minoan client states lost much of their population to famine and/or pestilence. This would indicate that the trade network may have failed, preventing the trade that would previously have relieved such famines and prevented illness caused by malnutrition. It is also known that in this era the breadbasket of the Minoan empire, the area north of the Black Sea, also suddenly lost much of its population, and thus probably some capacity to cultivate crops.[citation needed]Drought and famine in Anatolia may have also led to the Aegean Collapse by disrupting trade networks, and therefore preventing the Aegean from accessing bronze and luxury goods.[66] The Aegean Collapse has been attributed to the exhaustion of the Cypriot forests causing the end of the bronze trade.[67][68][69] These forests are known to have existed into later times, and experiments have shown that charcoal production on the scale necessary for the bronze production of the late Bronze Age would have exhausted them in less than fifty years. The Aegean Collapse has also been attributed to the fact that as iron tools became more common, the main justification for the tin trade ended, and that trade network ceased to function as it did formerly.[70] The colonies of the Minoan empire then suffered drought, famine, war, or some combination of those three, and had no access to the distant resources of an empire by which they could easily recover. The Thera eruption occurred around the Aegean Collapse, 110 km (68 mi) north of Crete. Speculation include a tsunami from Thera (more commonly known today as Santorini) destroyed Cretan cities. A tsunami may have destroyed the Cretan navy in its home harbour, which then lost crucial naval battles; so that in the LMIB/LMII event (c. 1450 BC) the cities of Crete burned and the Mycenaean civilization took over Knossos. If the eruption occurred in the late 17th century BC (as most chronologists now think) then its immediate effects belong to the Middle to Late Bronze Age transition, and not to the end of the Late Bronze Age; but it could have triggered the instability that led to the collapse first of Knossos and then of Bronze Age society overall. One such theory highlights the role of Cretan expertise in administering the empire, post-Thera. If this expertise was concentrated in Crete, then the Mycenaeans may have made political and commercial mistakes in administering the Cretan empire. Archaeological findings, including some on the island of Thera, suggest that the centre of Minoan Civilization at the time of the eruption was actually on Thera rather than on Crete.[citation needed] According to this theory, the catastrophic loss of the political, administrative and economic centre by the eruption as well as the damage wrought by the tsunami to the coastal towns and villages of Crete precipitated the decline of the Minoans. A weakened political entity with a reduced economic and military capability and fabled riches would have then been more vulnerable to human predators. Indeed, the Santorini Eruption is usually dated to c. 1630 BC, while the Mycenaean Greeks first enter the historical record a few decades later, c. 1600 BC. Thus, the later Mycenaean assaults on Crete (c. 1450 BC) and Troy ( c. 1250BC) are revealed as mere continuations of the steady encroachments of the Greeks upon the weakened Minoan world. Central Europe [ edit ] Nebra sky disk Bronze Age sword In Central Europe, the early Bronze Age Unetice culture (
subjected to a smear campaign. The source of the smears was never clear, although the primary vehicle was Murdoch’s Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph. Although Towke successfully sued over the allegations, they were enough to deter the party’s state executive from endorsing him. A fresh ballot was held and Morrison installed as a non-factional compromise candidate. In his first speech to parliament, Morrison gave the impression of being a very small “l” liberal. As Nick Bryant wrote in The Monthly magazine: “Not only did he acknowledge the traditional owners, honour Desmond Tutu and William Wilberforce, quote Bono and pay tribute to Bruce Baird, he made reference to Kevin Rudd’s national apology to Indigenous Australians that had brought the chamber to its feet the previous day.” “Much of the speech could easily have been penned by Malcolm Fraser,” suggested Bryant, who went on to quote Morrison’s father saying the speech represented the real Scott. It is hard to reconcile this Morrison with the one we heard on 2GB barely three years later. The man’s own rationalisation of his harsh border protection policy was that it saved lives at sea. But the ginning up of the funerals issue belies that excuse. Those lives had already been lost. He sought only to find political advantage in the grieving. To sum up, Morrison stood for office as a non-aligned cleanskin, started out in parliament as a moderate under the moderate leadership of Malcolm Turnbull, and swung with the party under Abbott to become the darling of the right. And now, with the Abbott regime in decline and the dawning realisation that the Coalition government has swerved too far from the political centre, Morrison is again a moderate. It is tempting to offer the cynical analysis that it is all about positioning himself for political life after Abbott. And there is further evidence to support that interpretation. The popular wisdom has it that Morrison would become treasurer if Turnbull supplanted Abbott as PM. That’s as may be. But it is very clear that Morrison and Turnbull have patched up past differences, are in frequent contact and are not even trying to hide it. “They’re dating again,” said one recent story, noting they shared two meals at Canberra restaurants in three days, one of them at an “outside table, no less”. But to suggest Morrison’s shift is just about ambition is to sell him short, for it pays insufficient regard to his circumstances and his competence. Fixer not ideologue In his interview with the Herald, he declared himself to be a fixer rather then an ideologue. And that rings true, given his history. Assigned a particular task, he will seek an outcome, using whatever methods he deems necessary. If that means, as it did in immigration, being harsh and divisive, so be it. As they said in The Godfather, “It’s not personal, it’s just business.” Rob Oakeshott, the former independent MP, can attest to that. He knows Morrison well. There is a family connection, and some years ago the two men retraced the route of the Sandakan death march together. “With most politicians,” Oakeshott says, “there is that separation between the private and the public face. And I think Scott’s a really good example of that. Personally he’s a really good guy. He’s personable and charming and good company.” But dealing with Morrison politically during the period when he was opposition immigration spokesman, says Oakeshott, was “enormously frustrating”. “You just couldn’t pin him down. In my view, he was playing games for their political benefit. They didn’t want to resolve anything in that period, because it was to their benefit that it wasn’t resolved.” Morrison’s style is a bit reminiscent of the archetypal Labor fixer, Graham “Whatever It Takes” Richardson. “Richo”, the meaty Machiavelli of the NSW Right and denizen of a thousand smoky backrooms, was incongruously appointed minister for the environment and proceeded to make it an election-winning issue. When shifted to communications he immediately stopped hugging trees and embraced Kerry Packer instead. These days a commentator for Sky News, Richo clearly recognises in Morrison a kindred spirit. He schmoozed the minister on air in late January: “You’re the tough guy of the place, you also know which way is up. I think you know the electorate pretty well, I don’t think you live in some on-high castle. I think you’ve been pretty good at what you do.” Morrison’s new constituency in the welfare sector also recognises him as highly competent. David Crosbie, CEO of the umbrella group, the Community Council of Australia, says: “There are two important things to say about Morrison. First, he does the work. He knows his brief. Second, you get the feeling that he is listening. He’s not necessarily committing, but he is listening.” This contrasts with his predecessor, Andrews, whose strong conservative ideology saw him lose the respect of the sector. Andrews’ intentions were good, says Crosbie, but “were not always matched by those around him”. Kasy Chambers, executive director of Anglicare, also sees a welcome contrast not just in the minister but in his staff. “One measure of a politician is who they have around them,” she says. “He seems to have put together an office reflective of what I see in him, which is optimistic and solution focused.” She is encouraged that one of Morrison’s first actions as minister was to dump one of Andrews’ pet projects, which allocated scarce resources to 100,000 relationship counselling vouchers for couples. Only a few thousand people ever attended a counselling session. “That was a very personal hobbyhorse of Minister Andrews,” Chambers says. “Morrison couldn’t signal better that he was a different minister from the last one.” Cassandra Goldie, CEO of the Australian Council of Social Service, also saw that decision as an important indicator that he was not wedded to anachronistic ideas of family values. “He has certainly a much more pragmatic view on modern society,” she says. “He doesn’t care about what choices families make, but about making sure Australian families have the choices available.” In early discussions, Morrison has indicated he is not committed to the policy of cutting access to the dole for young unemployed, driven through cabinet by Abbott and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. Nor does he appear to share Andrews’ determination to abolish the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, the national regulator strongly supported by the sector. He has brought a measure of order to the chaos surrounding funding cuts, although he has not yet reversed the cuts themselves. But the sector heavyweights all say he has indicated a preparedness to at least consider alternative savings measures. That’s not to say they entirely trust the new, fluffy Morrison. But they at least respect his competence and the fact that he has not resorted to the sort of negative stereotyping the government has previously employed about welfare recipients and which he used against asylum seekers. They live in hope that their new man will elevate the discussion about welfare policy to a more mature level. That he will be, to misquote his prime minister, a lifter not a demeaner.Titanfall 2's tech test went live for the first time over the weekend, and the feedback hasn't been great. "Pilots... This isn't looking good," goes one post on the game's Reddit page, dramatically titled 'Titanfall 2 Feels Like a Game Designed by People Who Hated the Original. "I think it's pretty certain that Titanfall just "shit the bed" as a franchise." Fans haven't been happy with the new direction that developer Respawn wanted to take the sequel. Movement had been slowed to make firefights less chaotic, while Titans are now granted to those who play the objective rather than being doled out to players on a timer. Elsewhere, a new health system has been introduced that sees Pilots able to steal a battery from an enemy Titan, lowering its energy, before giving to an allied Titan to lend it access to more shields. After the outcry that's met the open beta Respawn has been quick to address feedback in a frank post on Titanfall's official site. Movement is being tweaked, with wall-running and air speed amped up while the ability to accumulate speed while wall-running - something that was in earlier versions of Titanfall 2 played by the press - is being restored. Meanwhile, the Titan meter that leads to the acquisition of a Titan will now be topped up over time - although playing the objective is still the fastest way to get hold of a mech. I played Titanfall 2's multiplayer a short while back, and I think I was more impressed by it than most players over the past weekend. One thing I will agree with, though, is that the Homestead map that's one of the two initially available in the tech test is a bit of a stinker, with too few opportunities to engage in the free-running that's Titanfall's strong suit and too many opportunities for lone snipers to dominate the map. A new map, Forwardbase Kodai, that's more self-contained and closer to the designs seen in the original Titanfall, may help the perception of the sequel a little when it's introduced into the beta's rotation this coming weekend.Kenny Loggins "Your Mama Don't Dance?" We dare you not to. On this episode of Live From Daryl's House, Kenny Loggins drops by to get "Footloose" with Daryl. Choose an Episode Episode 82: Kenny Loggins Episode 81: Grace Episode 78: The O'Jays Episode 77: Elle King Episode 76: Wyclef Jean Episode 75: Cheap Trick Daryl Hall started Live From Daryl's House, the free monthly web show in late 2007, after having the idea of "playing with my friends and putting it up on the Internet," and the show has since garnered acclaim from Rolling Stone, SPIN, Daily Variety, CNN, BBC, Yahoo! Music and influential blogger Bob Lefsetz, who cited Live From Daryl's House as a perfect example of a veteran artist reinventing himself in the digital age by collaborating with both established colleagues and newer performers. Read more Daryl Hall has had the great good fortune, in his own words, of “being in the right place at the right time” for what has turned out a rich and varied career. He has worked with virtually all of the great musicians of modern popular music as well as entering into new relationships with the best of the latest generation of artists. Read more...Copyright by KHON - All rights reserved A new proposal before the Honolulu City Council aims to encourage people to leave their cars at home and bike to work instead. The ordinance would require special amenities for employees in certain buildings as an incentive. If the bill is passed, showers and lockers at the workplace could become the norm in Oahu office buildings. Councilwoman Carol Fukunaga's bill hopes it will inspire commuters to switch from a gas pedal to a bike pedal. Here's how it would work: Any new or converted office buildings would be required to provide shower facilities to employees who get to work by means other than a motor vehicle. The requirement would only apply to buildings with a floor area of at least 40,000 square feet. There must be separate facilities for men and women and no less than four shower heads in each area. Daniel Alexander with the Hawaii Bicycling League says he's supports the bill. "I bike-commute to work all the time and I know quite a few people that do. To be honest, I think the majority (of riders) don't have showers available to them, so some use kind of a slow commute approach." If the bill passes, buildings won't get an occupancy permit until they meet the shower facility requirements. "It points out bicycles, but certainly for other active modes (of commuting) like walking or running. There are similar sweat issues there. Anything where you're physically moving, this would be a beneficial thing to have showers at workplaces," Alexander said. He added that the idea could be beneficial for employers as well. "You can drive down their healthcare costs if they're more physically active. It does things like even fewer sick days when you have healthier staff." Fukunaga's bill is on the council's agenda for Wednesday at 10 a.m. We'll let you know about its progress through the City Council.Promises are quite an old concept that took off only recently in the JavaScript world. Since version 1.2 promises have become such an important part of AngularJS that they cannot be overlooked anymore. In this post we will cover the basic concepts of promises in AngularJS with a few use cases at the end. So what are promises? The simplest definition of promises is given by the Promises/A+ specification: A promise represents the eventual result of an asynchronous operation. The two main functions performed by promises are: provide an interface for handling incomplete (asynchronous) operations error handling for the said operations With a few nice extras derived from the above: chain asynchronous operations while avoiding callback hell a syntax that loosely resembles the try catch finally construct Generic vs AngularJS implementation Promise instances can either be constructed by specialized factories (the case with Angular), or by static methods on the Promise object itself. The MDN article on this topic defines a Promise as an object that has a few static methods such as resolve and reject. This object is used to construct a new Promise instance. Note that a promise will either: resolve with a value or reject with a reason. Resolve or reject can be called at any later time, a feature which gives promises their asynchronous nature. In Angular promises are created with the Deferred API. The $q.defer() method will construct a new Deferred instance that can either be resolved or rejected. Note that Angular also has a notify method that provides updates on the execution status. The Promise instance can then be obtained from the promise property found on the Deferred instance. Either approach works, but Angular might change its behavior in the future to reflect the (eventually) upcoming ECMAScript 6 specification. After construction, the Promise instance will expose a few methods such as then, catch and finally. then accepts a success and an error callback function. Angular also has a notify callback. accepts a success and an error callback function. Angular also has a notify callback. catch only accepts an error callback and is a shorthand for then(null, errorCallback). only accepts an error callback and is a shorthand for. finally will be run regardless of the outcome of the promise. Promises can be chained together (composed): Promise. then ( successCallback ). then ( successCallback ); Each then function will return a derived promise passing either: the success value down the chain, or the error reason. A nice feature of the AngularJS implementation is that if a success callback returns a promise instance as value, the chain will resume execution only after that promise is fulfilled and its value will be passed on to the next success callback. So basically, we can nest other promises inside the success callbacks and have them interleave with the main promise chain. This is immensely powerful and enables us to build services such as the ones mentioned in the Use cases below. The $http service In AngularJS, the $http service depends heavily on promises. Each $http call will return a special kind of promise instance that has two extra methods attached: success and error. These methods will receive parameters such as data, status, headers and config from the service, which enable us to work more easily with requests. However, it’s the $http interceptors where promises really shine. Interceptors allow us to hook into http requests and responses, and react to them or modify their outcome. Here are a few examples: Pre-processing of requests: Displaying a progress indicator. Changing the request Content-Type header, useful when performing asynchronous file uploads for example. Post-processing responses: Authentication: each time a 401 http response is encountered the user could be redirected to the login page. Global error handling: each time a certain kind of error is received from the backend (such as the user not having enough credits to perform an action) a notice could pop up. Interceptors can be chained together, since they can return a promise. Use cases Here are two custom services that rely on promises. ACL service In larger client-side applications you will most probably need some form of ACLs. ACL stands for Access Control Lists and represents a mechanism for authorizing users to certain parts of the application based on the user group they belong to. Reduced to its simplest form, ACL could be expressed as a list of user groups, with each group entry containing a list of allowed application routes. At Zooku, we use a hybrid ACL service for the upcoming Control Panel. This service obtains its routes in two ways: synchronous: some of them are predefined and do not change while the application is running. asynchronous: some are requested from the server-side and change when the user’s active group changes. Promises enable us to have a common interface for checking both synchronous and asynchronous requested routes. By creating an initial promise that always resolves, we can then chain a getUserGroup and a getAcls request to it. These two requests are performed in the bootstrapping phase of the application or when the user changes credentials, such as logging in. After the active user group and the asynchronous ACLs are set, we can then proceed to perform the route check itself, which will also be chained to the previous requests. In our case subsequent route checks will not request the user group nor the ACL routes again (they will be cached for the active session), but by using promises we created an uniform interface that works regardless of the application session state. Validation service A well designed validation service has the potential to truly help the user and eliminate a lot of frustration. While HTML5 introduced a few helpful attributes for dealing with validation, employing them in a large application can quickly result in views overloaded with validation attributes, or with attributes that are out of sync with the backend. For both Zooku and Sendmachine, we developed a Validation service that has a few nice features: Uses a chain of rules to validate a field, each rule providing the user with hints about the current state of the field. Requests validation rules from the server-side, which enabled us to use the same rules on both the server and the client application. While most rules perform synchronous checks, like checking if a required field is filled-in, others perform asynchronous checks, like checking with the backend if an email is already registered. This is another case there promises prove to be very useful and enable us to perform checks on a field regardless of their nature. The logic is very similar to the ACL service: an initial Promise instance that always resolves is created, and promises that perform further validations are chained to it. These are just a few use cases where promises play a significant role. More documentation and code samples can be found in the resources below. Further readingThe Balloons are coming in the world’s first endless floater! Join our heroes Magenta, Blue, Unicorn, Bee, Ghost, Bubble, Frog and even Dead Bird as you try to avoid obstacles like deadly spikes, dastardly dart shooters, and even flying ninja stars. Collect as many coins as possible on your way to some seriously mind-blowing high scores. Aim for the stars or pop trying! Simple tap-tap gameplay 22 unlockable characters 8 secret skins Slots style lottery system Special “Gifty Time” bonus rounds Stunning pixel art graphics Original theme music and sound FX Leaderboards for competitive gameplay HINT: Unlock the coin character. He’s super cool *wink*wink* We really hope you enjoy our game. We certainly had a blast making it. Even if you didn’t, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at balloons@appsorama.comYPG Press Office has announced in a written statement that fighters of the YPG/YPJ (People's/Women's Defense Units) have launched last night “Revenge Operation for Kobanê Martyrs” in the southern parts of the town. Dozens of gang members were reportedly killed in the operation. YPG reported that the operation which was launched to cleanse Sirîn district and its surroundings of the ISIS gangs continues successfully. YPG said the villages of Şikeyif and Tirkmên and some strategically important hills nearby were cleansed of the gangs last night, while the casualties of the gangs could not be verified. YPG said the operation continues. In the meantime, a gang group of 6 persons attempted at an attack in Girê Spî town centre yesterday afternoon, reported the YPG and added that the group was encircled at a certain point by the YPG/YPJ forces. In the clashes that took place at the point, 3 gang members were killed, while another 2 wounded and escaped to the other side of the border, said the YPG, adding that the operation to find out an other gang members who is guessed to be hiding in the area continues. YPG lastly reported that a fighter of Defense Units lost his life in the clash in the mentioned clash in Girê Spî.Who will Nami and Robin be matched up with? With Hody’s cou p successful, how will the Ryuuguu government regain control of the kingdom? UPDATE: – Hody has been defeated, only his accomplices remain. Is Luffy really the culprit of Madame Shirley’s prediction? > “Fishman Island will be destroyed by ‘a human wearing a straw hat’!?”—Madame Shirley – UPDATE: Luffy is trying to destroy the Noah, not Fishman Island. Was Madame Shirley’s prediction a misinterpretation? ▪ If so, how will Big Mam react? Where on Fishman island is “Mermaid Kidnapper” Caribou? – Last sighting: He has set his eyes on Princess Shirahoshi as his next target… Is Caribou’s crew still alive? Where and from whom did the New Fishman Pirates acquire the “energy steroids”? – Hody obtained them while he was still in the Neptune army. Whereabouts of the former Fishman Pirates who left Fishman Island together with Jinbe. Will Luffy actually manage to bring the Princess home by dinner time? Who is “Joyboy” mentioned on the Fishman Island Poneglyph’s “apology letter”? Is the “ Tamatebako ” real and if so, how can it make people age faster than natural? – Possibly a devil-fruit ability? NEW: What does Sanji and Jinbe plan to do with the comically large Wadatsumi? What sneaky trap has Usopp set up to take out Daruma in only 3 moves? How will Decken’s incoming island-destroying ship projectile, Noah, be dealt with? UPDATE: – Luffy plans to destroy it before it hits the island. What’s the problem with Nami’s Log Pose? > “You’ll never get to the New World with a simple Log Pose like that! Ignorant pirates!”—Minister of the Left Will Franky make use of the “Sunlight Tree Eve”? – It may be related to the “Treasure Tree Adam”. What is the significance behind the giant ship, Noah, and why mustn’t it be moved until the “the day that needs to come“? > “Our distant ancestors also attempted [to befriend the humans]! It was a wasted dream that ended in regret.”—King Neptune > “Until the day it needs to come! It must absolutely not be moved!!!”—King Neptune ▪ Who is this “great man” the Fishman Island ancestors made a promise with? > “Centuries ago, a promise was made with a ‘great man’”–King Neptune Is Haoshoku Haki related to Princess Shirahoshi’s legendary ability to communicate with the Sea Kings? Will we see Koala again in the present day? Who is the mysterious figure destined to, one day, guide Princess Shirahoshi and “change the world”?Of all the ways to talk about color, sign language must be the most expressive. If you don't already speak sign language, color words are a fun place to start. You'll learn that it doesn't take a palate to discuss a palette. How To Sign Your Colors Orange: This colour sign pantomimes squeezing an orange fruit. In front of your mouth, form the letter "c" with your right hand (make a "c" shape by curving your fingers toward your thumb, as if you're grasping a can). Then squeeze your hand into a tight fist. Repeat this squeezing and inflating motion several times. Blue: Form the letter "b" (fingers extended and held tight, thumb tucked against the palm) with your right hand, to the right of your body. Slightly shake your hand to the right from the elbow, without bending the wrist. Red: Touch your lips with the tip of your index finger. (All other fingers are gathered toward the palm.) With a downward motion, glance the top lip, then the bottom. This motion is performed once, though sometimes people double it. Brown: Form the letter "b" with your right hand (fingers extended and held tight, thumb tucked against the palm). Move your hand down the side of your right cheek, from your nose to the bottom of your mouth. Gold: Touch your right ear with your right index finger. As you move your hand away, form the letter "y" (thumb and pinkie outstretched, other fingers tucked into the palm). Then shake your hand slightly. Silver: Touch your right ear with your right index finger. As you move your hand away, form the letter "s" (a tight fist). Then shake your hand slightly. Yellow: Form the letter "y" (thumb and pinkie outstretched, other fingers tucked into the palm) with your right hand, to the right of your body. Gently shake your hand to the right from the wrist. White: Touch your chest with all the fingers and thumb of your slightly curved right hand. Move your hand away (about eight inches) while closing the fingers. Black: Form the letter "d" with your right hand (index finger extended, middle finger and thumb touching). Touch your forehead with your index finger, then move it toward the right, across the tops of your eyebrows. Gray: Spread the fingers of both hands. Move your hands in opposite directions, passing the fingers through the open spaces of each hand. Green: Form the letter "g" with your right hand (index finger and thumb extending as if to pinch, other fingers tucked into the palm). Slightly shake your hand up and down from the wrist. Pink: Form the letter "p" with your right hand (index and middle fingers extended, palm facing toward you). Draw your hand down your lips. Purple: Form the letter "p" (index and middle fingers extended, palm facing toward you) with your right hand, to the right of your body. Move it from side to side. How To Sign Your Letters More Signs For more photos of color signs in action, see Dr. William Vicars' tutorial. Many thanks to Dr. Vicars for capturing so many signs and for allowing us to share some with you. For illustrations of colour signs, see ASL tutor Joanne Mikola's website.Shannon Guess Richardson, 36, was sentenced in federal court in Texarkana, Texas, on a federal charge of possessing and producing a biological toxin. A Texas woman who had minor acting roles in film and television was sentenced Wednesday to 18 years in prison for sending ricin-laced letters to President Barack Obama and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. A judge sentenced Shannon Guess Richardson, 36, in federal court in Texarkana, Texas, on a federal charge of possessing and producing a biological toxin. She had pleaded guilty to the charge in December in a deal her attorney said capped the sentence at 18 years. Richardson also must pay restitution. Prosecutors say Richardson mailed three letters from New Boston, outside Texarkana, then went to police and claimed that her estranged husband had done it. Richardson was arrested last June after authorities said she tried to implicate Nathan Richardson, who had had filed for divorce. Prosecutors say investigators noted inconsistencies in Richardson's statements and later learned that she had purchased materials online to produce ricin, a toxin that can cause respiratory failure if inhaled. Richardson has had minor roles in the television series "The Walking Dead" and the movie "The Blind Side." She also is the mother of six children — including one born prematurely while she was in custody. She acknowledged in a signed plea agreement that she ordered castor beans online and learned how to process them into a substance used to make ricin. She obtained an email address, a PayPal shopping account and a post office box in her husband's name without his knowledge, according to the document. On the morning of May 20, 2013, she said she waited for Nathan Richardson to go to work. "After he left the house, I printed the mailing labels for President Barack Obama, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Mark Glaze with The Raben Group," Richardson said in the document. At the time, Glaze was director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Bloomberg's group advocating for tougher gun control. The letter to Obama read, "What's in this letter is nothing compared to what ive got in store for you mr president," according to the document. "You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns. Anyone wants to come to my house will get shot in the face." After mailing the letters, she admitted to trying to blame her husband and lying to authorities. Copyright Associated PressTheresa May stopped surveys into the impact of migrants on British wages British Prime Minister Teresa May defended yesterday the idea of ​​EU immigration control measures and notes that immigration implies people, infrastructure and access to services, but above all, paying the lowest-qualified workers in UK. Except for May’s comments, ministers from the conservative government tried not to discuss media reports about the government’s plan to severely restrict EU migration. Only Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said the government would follow a “balanced” migration policy. The leader of the British Liberal Democrats and former business minister, Vince Cable, said the Theresa May government has stopped publishing 9 studies showing that immigration has little or no impact on UK wages. However, the results were considered as politically uncomfortable. “Many of them show that foreign workers have been complementary and have not competed with British”, said Vince Cable. The disclosure of the British plan to severely curb EU migration after Brexit could resume splits in the cabinet as to how to implement it. At least two senior ministers from May’s office have distanced themselves from plans for Brexit. Interior Minister Amber Rudd and first Minister Damien Green have expressed “reservations” to immigration plans, which have caused a negative reaction both in the business world and in Brussels. They both hinted that they did not fully support the prime minister’s plans. Damien Green has made it clear that the government can change its intentions for immigration as it worries about the effect they will have on Brexit. Although the Rudd-led ministry has compiled the media’s plans, it can support lighter constraints to make it easier for businesses to recruit EU workers.StatCounter: IE6 Usage Falls Below 5% In The US, But IE8 Still On The Rise Microsoft’s oft-lamented browser, Internet Explorer 6, may finally be put to rest. This will make many a Web developer happy – but also Microsoft itself. Web analytics company StatCounter claims its latest global data set shows IE6 usage in the US and Europe has fallen to 4.7 percent of the market from 11.5 percent a year ago. That said, IE8 usage in the US increased to 30.5 percent in May (up from 8.5 percent a year ago) while IE7 is currently at 16.6%, so it’s not all bad news for Redmond. Firefox 3.6 comes in second in terms of browser usage in the US, with almost 19.85%, while Google Chrome 4.0 only has some 6.5% of market share according to StatCounter. Update: Results from Net Applications paint a similar picture, although different numbers: the firm has Internet Explorer’s overall share dropping to below 60 percent from 67 percent and Firefox at the 24 percent mark, up 2 percent from the same period last year. NetMarketShare has Chrome’s usage at 7 percent in May, up from 3 percent a year ago. Still according to Net Applications, Internet Explorer 8’s share in May surpassed 31% among Windows customers, the only OS on which Internet Explorer is available, and 28.94% share across all operating systems. Undoubtedly, major Internet services dropping support for IE6 on an ongoing basis (YouTube, Google Docs and Sites, Google Reader, etc.) are advancing its impending death. But the reason Internet Explorer 6 is still around in the first place is likely because of some large corporations still clinging on to it despite massive security issues with the ancient browser. StatCounter also adds that Africa and Asia, where IE6 still has 20.8% usage, are making it harder to kill support for the browser already. Hopefully, everyone will soon see the light. (StatCounter says the data is based on an analysis of 15 billion page views – 3.8 billion from the US and 4.3 billion from Europe – for May 2010 collected from a network of over three million websites.)GOSHEN – A local law that will allow the Orange County District Attorney to seize assets in misdemeanor cases passed in the county legislature on Thursday. Legislature Chairman Stephen Brescia believes it will be a beneficial law enforcement tool. “It is basically what we are using now, the asset forfeiture law, and this gives the county a little share of that we can distribute money to health and mental health or other programs,” Brescia said. Democratic Minority Leader Jeffrey Berkman, who was among those who voted against the law, is concerned about the constitutionality of seizing assets in cases involving misdemeanors. “The district attorney had a different view and I implored him to have close monitoring of it and he did give his commitment for that,” Berkman said. The new law will have a sunset clause at which time it will expire if it is not renewed.An all-LGBT council in Palm Springs, Calif., takes charge A very large and long rainbow flag goes down Palm Canyon during the annual Palm Springs Pride Parade on Sunday, November 5, 2017. (Photo11: Richard Lui/The Desert Sun) PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — For years — starting with the election of Ron Oden, an openly gay man, in 1995 and then the passage of a domestic partnership ordinance — LGBT voters and their allies had been making slow but steady progress at Palm Springs City Hall. Then in 2008, after the passage of a statewide initiative to ban same-sex marriage, the community erupted in anger. Hundreds of frustrated residents took to the streets. It was an awakening for many of the area’s gays and lesbians that would transform the city’s politics. They organized and strategized. Tuesday’s blowout victories by Lisa Middleton and Christy Holstege were the peak of that decades-long climb. The council that will be installed in December consists of three gay men, one transgender woman and a millennial woman who identifies as bisexual. The city’s LGBT contingent is now the dominant political force — and completely in charge. More: Top takeaways from Democratic wins in Tuesday's elections More: A year later, Bernie Sanders calls Donald Trump's election an 'unprecedented disaster' for America "You're now looking at a progressive city that remains business-focused," said James Williamson, who ran Middleton's campaign. "And I think that’s what we’re gonna see happen play out over the next 10 years." As the number of registered Republicans shrinks and the number of registered Democrats and independents grows, a gap exists where the socially liberal, fiscally conservative voter used to stand. L-R Board Members James Williamson, Lisa Middleton, Premier Sponsor Harold Matzner, and Red Carpet Sponsor Geoff Kors. (Photo11: David A Lee/Special to The Desert Sun) “For a lot of progressives," Williamson said, "they’ve moved away from the kind of Kumbaya politics and they realize if they want the social programs they believe are important, we need to have a strong business-base to support those programs." Williamson, a Palm Springs Unified School District board member, is at the center of the new coalition alongside his husband and current City Council member Geoff Kors, who was elected in 2015 with more votes than any candidate in at least 16 years. The Desert Stonewall Democrats, a LGBT political group chaired by Ruth Debra, also played a major role in the last election, paying for advertising that ignored other Democrats in the race and targeted the lone Republican. The endorsements and financial support of those progressive players and more, including Rep. Raul Ruiz and outgoing council member Ginny Foat, sent a clear signal to many Democrats that they ought to unite. "The city has changed a great deal in the last decade," Kors said, "but regardless of party it's very accepting of LGBT people and that's evident in the fact that the candidates who won, their sexual orientation and gender identity was never really an issue." “There’s been a shift in Palm Springs from a red city to a purple city and now to a blue city.” — Lisa Middleton Holstege acknowledged that changing demographics and local party leadership played a role in her victory, but also credited her supporters who ran a grassroots campaign in a city that doesn't often see grassroots campaigns — contacting, by her count, 9,500 voters by phone or in-person. "Lisa and I ran on being positive and forward-thinking and really talking about the issues and hope and change for a better Palm Springs," she said. Middleton spoke of friends who moved here in the early 1970s and encountered poll workers who'd never met Democrats. In the last election, Hillary Clinton received more than 70% of the vote. “There’s been a shift in Palm Springs from a red city to a purple city and now to a blue city,” she noted. Compared to the rest of the county, the makeup of the Palm Springs City Council is undoubtedly unique, but the fact remains that its members are all white. Four are bona fide progressives and one is a self-described moderate. Contributing: Corinne Kennedy, The (Palm Springs, Calif.) Desert Sun. Follow Jesse Marx and Barrett Newkirk on Twitter: @marxjesse and @barrettnewkirk Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2AnOe9nDec 7 2017 0.2mb update text changes Xanek Dec 7th, 2017 1,925 Never 1,925Never Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up, it unlocks many cool features! rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 8.83 KB __New updated text__ MSID_H_死神の暗器: After combat, if unit attacked, inflicts Def/Res-7 on foe through its next action. If unit initiated combat, deals 7 damage to foe after combat. MSID_H_キャンドルサービス: After combat, if unit attacked, inf
’s Heathrow Airport base and decides to go AWOL. He flees by motorcycle and winds up at a pub in London, watching the battle on TV. There’s still no escape for him — the old barflies size him up immediately as a deserter, and within minutes the aliens Cage has been fighting on the beaches of France take London and Cage is killed yet again. But for a second, the movie toys with the idea that Cage could just ride off into the fog, leaving the whole “grinning Tom Cruise triumph or death” binary behind. The unspoken implication: What if movies like this one could deviate from the formulas that govern them? What would happen if we used the $178 million this film reportedly cost, and the abundant technical genius that clearly went into it, to create something besides a new and improved vision of the apocalypse? Would it really be the end of the world? If Michael Bay’s ever asked himself those questions, he’ll never admit it publicly. He’s put too much work into creating MICHAEL BAY, a larger-than-life character who eats bad reviews for breakfast off a solid-gold platter, and anyway he’d never give his critics the satisfaction. But if your brain hasn’t shut down to safeguard its last remaining unscorched neurons by the time the final act of Age of Extinction unspools, it’s all right there on the screen. Tucci’s Joyce realizes what he’s wrought and joins the good guys, taking personal responsibility for a duffel bag containing the doomsday MacGuffin, preventing it from being deployed. When it’s all over, his geologist assistant tells him, “I’m proud of you”; Wahlberg’s Yeager pulls the now-repentant capitalist in for a bro-hug. Before that, though, there’s an interminable fight scene involving robot dinosaurs and the near-destruction of Hong Kong by a UFO armed with some sort of giant magnet that sucks up cars and boats and buildings indiscriminately. It’s excess pushed to the point of near-total abstraction and a perfect metaphor for the movie: Look at all of this junk. Look at how pretty it is when it flies around. I don’t know that I would ever have pegged Michael Bay as the first director who’d manage to turn the summer blockbuster into a critique of the blockbuster mentality and still make hundreds of millions of dollars doing it. But like the old Vulcan proverb says, only Nixon could go to China.Browse > Home Parish Life / Local Catholic Frustrated That No Woman On Catholic Match Pure Enough, Hot Enough To Consider Local Catholic Frustrated That No Woman On Catholic Match Pure Enough, Hot Enough To Consider Explaining the difficulties of finding a pure, near sinless, smoking hot blond on the dating site Catholic Match, local Catholic Devin Porter told friends late last night that he was considering giving up ever marrying. “It’s sad that we live in a world where a devout and humble guy like me just can’t find the right girl,” said the 35-year-old bachelor, explaining how past relationships have always failed because the women either “had a past” or weren’t drop dead gorgeous. “Most of the time I’ll spot a girl on CM and they’re either not saint-like, or they don’t have that front-cover-of-Cosmo-magazine-physique look.” “I once talked to a really pious girl on the site and everything was going great for a few months until I noticed one day while we were Skyping that she had this little pimple on her cheek,” Porter went on to say. “Needless to say, that relationship didn’t go anywhere. Thing is, if I’m gonna consider a girl, she needs to be a daily communicant so that she can inspire me to start attending Mass more than just on Christmas and Easter. Now, I do admit that I have a bit of a promiscuous past, but that’s over with now. Whatever girl I accept has to be able to accept my past. With that said, I won’t consider a girl with a past of her own. That would be imprudent of me. Also, she needs to have that airbrushed look at all times, because I don’t wanna settle. God didn’t create us for mediocrity.”Update #5: This is the final update on this story. For continuing coverage of the ongoing Halo: The Master Chief Collection problems, you can read our follow-up. Update #4: Microsoft has cleared the Halo-related items from the ongoing service alert. Update #3: Microsoft has added leaderboard problems to the list of Halo woes. A new statement on the Xbox Live support page. Xbox members, if you are having a tough time matchmaking in Halo: The Master Chief Collection, please restart your search. We are aware that some users are experiencing longer than normal matchmaking search times. We are actively working on a fix. If you are having issues matchmaking in Destiny, hang in there. We’re steadily moving toward a resolution, and we appreciate your patience in the meantime. Another update is coming your way in half an hour. We know that some of you are also having trouble posting statistics to leaderboards and viewing the online state of other users on your Friends list. As you read this message, we’re working to get everything straightened out. We’re grateful for your patience during this process and invite you to check back in 30 minutes for an update on our progress. Update #2: The official Halo account has offered more news on the Halo matchmaking problems. A fix has been deployed, but the work isn't done yet. "We're aware of issues some have been having with matchmaking and we’re working around the clock, alongside the Xbox Live team, to address," 343 Industries says via Twitter. "We've also deployed an update that has shown some improvement, and we work around the clock to optimize. This is our top priority." Update #1: Microsoft has responded to our request for comment on the Halo: The Master Chief Collection multiplayer problems. "We’re seeing longer than expected Matchmaking times for some regions, as the game is not yet available in all regions," a representative told us via email. "Matching times will improve as we continue to roll out. If you do not find a match after a few minutes, please restart your search.” Original Story: If you're hoping to take the fight to your friends online in the newly released Halo: The Master Chief Collection, be prepared for some obstacles. Users are reporting matchmaking issues with the game. The official Halo Twitter account confirms that there are issues with the matchmaking side of the experience. "We're aware that some users are experiencing longer than normal Matchmaking search times," 343 Industries writes. "We are actively working on a fix for this issue." The developer does suggest a workaround in event of problems. "If after a few minutes you're unable to find a match, exit Matchmaking and then begin searching again," 343 says. Halo: The Master Chief Collection uses Microsoft's Azure platform for dedicated servers during gameplay. We've reached out to Microsoft with a request for more information on how matchmaking is handled and when a fix for these problems is expected. For more on The Master Chief Collection, check out our review. You can also read up on the Halo 5 Multiplayer beta in our hands-on preview. [Source: Halo on Twitter (1), (2)] Our Take My understanding is that using Microsoft's cloud server technology was supposed to make for smoother launches. We'd like to understand what's gone wrong here and why the publisher and developer weren't ready for launch of one of the platform's biggest exclusives this fall.Aurelien Collin re-signed with the New York Red Bulls in early January and arrived in camp on Thursday. "It's really good to have Aurelien back," Head Coach Jesse Marsch said. "His energy in the group is always great, he always has a smile on his face, he always comes with a lot of energy. "We said this a lot last year, but from the day he came into the team, it was like he’d been here for years." The 30-year-old Collin made 23 MLS appearances and contributed two assists last season after being acquired from Orlando City SC in a trade last April. Collin said he's already hoping to get some minutes in New York's first preseason game on Friday. "The more games we play, the better we can prepare for the first game," he said. Though not everyone is exactly thrilled to see Collin back with the team. "I’m not so happy because he is my roommate, so I was by myself until tonight and now I have to share it," Felipe joked. The midfielder continued: "To have him back, it’s just a positive note for us and he’s going to make the team better," Felipe said.In an age when people seem obsessed with mobile devices and smart phones, we thought we’d introduce you to a man who has brought back an older method of sending messages. His name is Charles Edwards. If that name sounds familiar, that’s because he’s the interim news director here at WABE. But what many people don’t know is that he sometimes uses carrier pigeons to communicate with reporters in the field. WABE’s Steve Goss began this interview by asking him how he got started. Here are the names of all of our carrier pigeons: 1. Nina Totenbird 2. Lakshmi Fling 3. Carl Kestrel 4. Lowest Flight-zes 5. Doug Birdman 6. Jim Birdess 7. Ari Sharp-eye Row 8. Denis Fly’dare 9. The Phoenix 10. Peter Seagull 11. Robert Seagull 12. Melissa Flock 13. Jason Birdbien 14. John Weatherbird 15. Susan Stambird 16. Audie Cornish Hen 17. Gregory Warbler 18. Allison Osprey 19. Fly Ryssdal 20. From “Car Flock”, the ‘flap it’ brother, Tom 21. From “Car Flock”, the ‘flap it’ brother, Ray 22. Wren Rossetto KasperUpdate: This post is being updated to reflect the additional contribution from dedicated Kof fans since the article was originally published. Following KOF’s disappointing showing at West Coast Warzone last weekend with a paltry 10 entrants, many bystanders have proclaimed that KOF is dead, but is KOF really dead? Many players on the East Coast disagree. KOF is in fact alive and well on the East Coast with many passionate players willing to go to great lengths to show love for their favorite game. “Wyseguy” (@ThatWyseguy), NYC resident and KOF super fan, has stepped up to provide a $1,000 bonus pot at NEC XV. This will make the KOF XIII tournament FREE TO ENTER for everyone. The exciting news quickly reverberated amongst the East Coast KOF scene. Following this exciting news, BigE, the boss behind NEC, followed suit and decided to add $250 to the pot. Not willing to be outdone by his fellow comrades, NYC resident and super Terry fanboy “Garou Mike” decided to match BigE’s $250 to the pot bonuses, on the condition that the number of entrants exceed 62, which is double the 31 entrants at Summer Jam. Seeing this, fellow NYC player and KOF/Fatal Fury super fanboy “Rome himself” decided to follow suit and pledged $200 to the pot if the entrants reach 62. The news of all the pot bonuses from KOF fans quickly snowballed overnight. Dedicated NYC based streaming group Kick, Punch, Block (KPB) whose members consist of many long-time KOF fans including “Meanestrage” and “Roddyness” decided to add $300 to the pot. KPB has been supporting the east coast KOF community consistently in the past by streaming many of the past KOF tournaments and holding qualifier events for KOF majors. SB2, an up and coming gaming venue based on the Bronx has pledged $100. The gaming lounge, in an effort lead by Galley the Pirate, has been pushing to include KOF XIII in its tournament and weekly casuals line up. Together with Wyseguy, BigE, Garou Mike, Rome himself, KPB, and SB2’s contribution, the total bonus pot for KOF at NEC XV will be $2,100 IF the entrants exceed 62 players. Ever since the news of Wyseguy’s $1000 bonus pot was released, the hype surrounding KOF at NEC XV is exploding fast, many players have already confirmed their intention to attend the event. Besides the usual KOF players on the East Coast, the hype has reached players across the country and beyond. Several players from CA, TX, CO, and Scotland have already confirmed their attendance or expressed strong interest in the event. Since KOF at NEC XV will be a free-to-enter tournament, there is no excuse not to sign up. NEC XV takes place this December 5-7 at the Clarion Hotel and Conference Center in Essington, PA. You can find out more about the event at bigegaming.com or check out the Facebook Page for the event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1521414411428753/The choice above isn’t an imaginary one. In January 2015, four people in the UK died after taking red pills bearing the Superman “S” logo, believing they contained MDMA (the “hug drug”), when in fact they contained PMMA (“Dr. Death”). Other pills, also branded with the Superman logo and available at the same time as those containing PMMA, did in fact contain the comparatively much safer MDMA. This is the dilemma faced by every person who uses ecstasy (and its supposedly purer equivalent, “Molly”) whenever they consider taking the drug, because very rarely, if ever, can they know for sure what the pill, powder, or capsule actually contains and what effects it will have on their body once swallowed. To find out what ecstasy and Molly really contain, we analyzed 27,000 test reports from five different countries, made over a 10 year period. There are a few basic things you should know about ecstasy. The first is that the vast majority of the time, when people talk about ecstasy, they’re really talking about its active ingredient: MDMA. It’s MDMA that makes people feel happy, alert, energised, and ecstatic. There’s also Molly, ecstasy’s supposedly cleaner cousin. Molly, especially in powder form, has a reputation for being pure MDMA, which – unlike an ecstasy pill – contains no adulterants. In reality, neither ecstasy nor Molly are guaranteed to be pure, or even contain any MDMA at all, because drug makers and dealers frequently include other substances in ecstasy pills, capsules, and powders to maximize their profits. They don’t, contrary to urban myths, put glass or brick dust in their products, as it simply wouldn’t be good for business. What they do instead is include substances that mimic the effects of MDMA, some more closely than others. The challenge for someone who wants to take ecstasy is making sure their pill or powder does in fact contain mostly MDMA (which is as pure as possible), and not another active ingredient that could at best spoil their evening by not giving them the experience they desire, and at worst land them in hospital. This is where pill reports come in. If it Ain’t Black, Throw it Back Despite what some people think, you cannot tell what a pill, capsule, or powder contains simply by looking at it. For proof of this fact, take a look at the animation to the right. It shows 300 pills and capsules that contained only MDMA next to 300 pills sold as “ecstasy” that contained no MDMA at all. Nothing about the size, shape, or color of the pills on the far right betrays the fact that they did not contain MDMA – to know that, you would have to test them. Several organizations maintain databases of ecstasy test reports. Their goal is to reduce the potential harm of bad “ecstasy” by scientifically testing various samples and publishing their actual ingredients alongside descriptions and photos. This way, users can refer to the reports to get some idea of what they are about to consume and therefore what it will probably do to them. EcstasyData.org is an “independent laboratory pill testing program” launched in 2001. It tests several hundred “ecstasy” samples each year using the very accurate gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC/MS) method and less accurate, but still very useful, “reagents.” Reagents are chemical solutions that turn different colors when a drug sample is dissolved in them; then these can be compared to charts to gauge which active ingredients the sample probably contains. For example, if the solution turns black, the sample probably contains an ecstasy-like substance (such as MDMA, MDE, or MDA). If it turns bright orange, it probably contains speed (methamphetamine or amphetamine). There are dozens of different possible reactions (fizzes, multiple colors, varying reaction speeds, etc.), and each must be carefully monitored to get an idea of whether a sample should actually be called “ecstasy” or “Molly,” or if it is what a seasoned pill popper would call “bunk.” We downloaded all 3,400 reports held by EcstasyData.org to include in our analysis. PillReports.net is another database of ecstasy pill reports, but unlike those found at EcstasyData.org, they are created by the people who buy and consume ecstasy pills. Some reviewers consume their pills and base their reports on what effects they produce. Others test their pills using the same kits described above and publish the results. And many reviewers do both: chemically test pills, consume, and subjectively experience them, and then use an average of the two methods to say what they believe the pill contains and whether or not it deserves a warning. On PillReports.net, a site that focuses on ecstasy, a pill receives a warning if it does not contain what buyers expect. For example, if it contains speed and not MDMA, it will receive a warning, even if the speed is “good speed.” Generally speaking, it won’t receive a warning if it contains only an ecstasy-like substance, such as MDMA, MDA, or MDE. We downloaded every pill report from PillReports.net for Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and the Netherlands – 23,500 in total (70% of the entire database), spanning 10 years. Then, altogether, we had nearly 27,000 pill reports from EcstasyData.org and PillReports.net, created by laboratories and ecstasy users who employed a variety of testing methods, including consumption, testing kits, and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. We were ready to find out what ecstasy really contains. The 23,500 reports we downloaded and analyzed from PillReports.net spanned 2005 to 2015. The overview above summarizes reports made in roughly the last five years (2010 to 2014). We will include older reports a little later when we look at the pills’ contents (typically using data from 2006 onward, as we noticed some anomalies in 2005). The graphs above are important because they reveal differences in how pills are assessed by users depending on where in the world they live. Australian and British reports are largely conducted in the same way: 44–47% of users base their reports only on consuming the pill and considering its effects; 25–27% base their reports only on home testing kits; and 28–29% consume and chemically test pills before compiling their reports. American users are a bit different. More American users (56%) only consume pills for their reports. And Canadian users are the most different group of them all. A massive 78% of Canadian reports are based solely on the consumption of the pills. Only 10% use testing kits without consuming the pills too. These geographical differences in how users test their pills presumably go some way to explaining why the percentages of pills from each country with warnings differ so much. Again, Britain and Australia are fairly similar: 28% and 33% of their respective reports between 2010 and 2014 were given warnings to highlight the fact that the pills did not contain “MDxx” (MDMA or a very similar substance). America had more (41%). Canada had the most by some margin (73%), and the Netherlands had the fewest (11%). Before we conclude that Canadians are more reckless than the other groups, because nearly eight out of 10 of their reports are based solely on consumption, or that Canadian ecstasy is considerably more adulterated than ecstasy from the U.S., Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands, let’s examine pill warnings over the last decade for each country. Perhaps Canada just had one very bad recent year, or the Netherlands a couple of very good ones. Ecstasy pills from the Netherlands have consistently been given warnings less often since 2006 than those from any of the other four countries. Canadian ecstasy pills, on the other hand, have consistently received the most warnings. That is, they have been deemed by the people who bought them – based on either a chemical test, consumption, or both – to not be an unadulterated pill containing only an ecstasylike active ingredient. What’s more, since 2011, warnings on Canadian pill reports have rocketed far beyond any of the other four countries. Perhaps consuming a pill makes it easier to judge if it is adulterated, and given that Canadian reviewers consume the large majority of the pills they review, they catch the most adulterated ones. If this were true, reports that included only pills which were tested without consumption should have a very different warning rate than the alternative testing method. But in fact, they don’t. Reports from the U.S. show a similar relationship: 44% that were only consumed were given warnings, compared to 41% that were only tested with a kit. Something else is therefore responsible for Canadian pills’ high rate of warnings and the Netherlands’ much lower rate (82.6% versus 6.2% in 2014). It is presumably the contents of the pills. The Contents of 23,500 “Ecstasy” Pills (PillReports.net, 2006-2014) When a report is created for an ecstasy pill on PillReports.net, the user is given a list of about 30 substances and substance combinations to choose from. Then the user decides which suspected substance to label a pill with based on the effects the pill had on him or her after consumption or the results of using a home testing kit – or both. If the reviewer (or a moderator of the database) feels that there is insufficient evidence to accurately determine the contents of a pill, its substance is labeled “Unknown.” The table above reveals a lot about what ecstasy pills really contain and how their contents can differ wildly by country. While there are lots of exotic-sounding chemicals in the table above, the most important to consider are MDMA, MDxx, amphetamine, and piperazine. MDxx, being any substance that is structurally very similar to MDMA, can almost be grouped together with MDMA. MDxx/MDMA is what the average ecstasy/Molly user wants his or her pill or powder to contain. 53% of the pills on PillReports.net between 2006 and 2014 contained only MDMA/MDxx. For Dutch pills only, however, this figure was much higher: 70.5%. Canadian pills contained MDMA/MDxx the least often: 33.1%. U.S. pills were in the middle, at 54%. The reason pills from Canada on average had far less MDMA in them appears to be because they so often contained speed (amphetamine). 18.4% of Canadian pills contained only speed, compared to 2.5% of U.S. pills, 3.2% of Australian, 2.0% of British, and 1.1% of Dutch. We can see this more clearly demonstrated in the two graphs below. The one on the left shows MDMA/MDxx contents by country over time, while the one on the right shows amphetamine. Ecstasy pills from the Netherlands have, since 2006, consistently contained only MDMA/MDxx more often than any of the other four countries. Pills from Canada have consistently contained MDMA/MDxx the least. In fact, the graph above left shows how, after 2009, MDMA/MDxx in Canadian pills dropped significantly, while (as shown on the graph above right), amphetamine content rocketed. The other countries have for the most part been more consistent in both regards, although the U.K. has seen MDMA/MDxx increase a lot since 2010. The dip and rise of the U.S. lines on both graphs around 2012 are clear illustrations of how when MDMA/MDxx content drops, it is replaced by an adulterant like amphetamine. Let’s zoom out again now and see how the substances found in ecstasy have changed over time for the five countries combined. Most ecstasy pills do contain the substance that gives ecstasy its name: MDMA, or a substance similar enough in structure that it might as well be MDMA. But pills also frequently contain speed, which doesn’t mimic MDMA’s empathogenic quality and carries with it its own health risks, especially when consumed alongside other active ingredients. There are also a lot of pills with contents that cannot be determined by PillReport.net’s users, despite their extensive first-hand knowledge and home testing kits. This is because home testing kits can only tell you so much about a pill’s contents. If you want to know exactly what it contains, with no ifs, ands, or buts, you have to analyze it using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. This is the technique used by EcstasyData.org, our second data set. Let’s take a look at what its reports reveal. EcstasyData.org’s reports, although fewer in number than PillReports.net’s, are far more accurate in pinpointing which active ingredients ecstasy samples contain. We can see, for example, that the most common substance for ecstasy to be cut with is actually caffeine – an ingredient never mentioned at PillReports.net, probably because it’s of little consequence to users and also practically impossible to qualitatively detect. The four tables above break down pill reports by how many active ingredients were found in samples. The leftmost table includes all pills and shows that one third of those tested contained only MDMA as their active substance. This is exactly the same proportion as revealed by PillReports.net’s data (2006–2014, all five countries). Of pills with only one active ingredient, 61.3% contained MDMA. Of pills with two active ingredients, methamphetamine was found in 7.6%. The graph to the left shows how many active ingredients are typically found in ecstasy samples. About half (54.7%) only contain one active ingredient. Four in every 100 samples tested didn’t contain MDMA or any other active ingredient – they were just sugar, baking powder, or some other inert substance. Because EcstasyData.org can determine how many active ingredients a sample contains with far more accuracy than PillReports.net, it’s possible to see whether Molly deserves its reputation for being pure MDMA, unadulterated by other substances. There are a few ways to isolate Molly reports. One is to count only samples that had “Molly” in their names. Of 143 that did, only 27.3% contained “pure” MDMA. 16.1% contained methylone, a substance that has a similar potency to MDMA, but not the same euphoric effects. Another way to isolate Molly reports is to only look at powders. Many drug users believe that powders are the “pure” drug, before it’s been mixed with adulterants and pressed into a pill. Of 71 powder samples, 36.6% contained only MDMA. 8.5% contained MDMA and a substance called MSM, which is used to fake the appearance of the crystals you find in pure MDMA. The last way is to look at only capsules, which are effectively the same as powders but in capsule form. 39.4% of 193 capsules contained only MDMA. 10.4% contained methylone, and 3.6% contained MDMA and MSM. Based on EcstasyData.org’s tests, Molly doesn’t contain any more MDMA or any fewer adulterants than regular ecstasy pills. In fact, a strong argument exists against the reliability of Molly powder, which is that powder can easily be cut by anyone with almost anything. A pressed pill, on the other hand, cannot be changed once it is made. Therefore, a pill can be traced and, through the use of databases like PillReports. net and EcstasyData.org, be fairly reliably known to contain MDMA or undesirable alternatives. Ecstasy Pills that Kill We’ve so far seen that most adulterated ecstasy pills and powders contain caffeine, speed, and piperazine. But these substances aren’t usually the ones you see in news reports of “ecstasy deaths.” Most people who die when they take ecstasy have unknowingly consumed a rarer but potentially more toxic chemical: PMA (or PMMA) – a.k.a. Dr. Death. At low doses, PMA can loosely mimic the effects of MDMA, especially to users who haven’t taken MDMA many times before. However, PMA taken at higher doses can easily raise a person’s body temperature and heart rate to lethal levels. PMA takes longer to take effect than MDMA too, which means that users will sometimes pop one pill, not feel the effects after half an hour, and then pop another. This “double dosing” of PMA is what can kill users – or at least take them to brink of total collapse. Not many pill reports on either site we looked at contained PMA (three out of 3,400 on PillReports.net and about 100 out of 23,500 on EcstasyData.org), but when you extrapolate those numbers to the millions of pills “in the wild,” the situation becomes more alarming. Ecstasy users on PillReports.net are aware of the dangers too. We scraped every comment from all 23,500 reports and counted the number of mentions of “PMA.” Mentions of PMA in ecstasy pill report comments from PillReports.net have increased in recent years for the Netherlands and Australia, and the U.K. saw significant increases from 2012 to 2013, probably as a result of batches of PMA pills flooding the market. The U.S. has remained steady and relatively low for the entire nine years. There are other things that can be learned about ecstasy users from the comments they leave on pill reports. One is when they take pills. Most consumption-based reports on PillReports.net include descriptions of what the experience of taking the pill was like, often with timelines of when the effects set in and what they felt like. We extracted the first time code (e.g. “Took the first pill at 1a.m.”) from 2,221 reports to get a fairly accurate idea of when users first swallowed their pills. We also ran a word frequency check on the same experience descriptions to see which types of feelings and reactions were most common. Given that MDMA typically takes about 40 minutes to kick in and its effects are best appreciated during nights out, it makes sense that most users consume ecstasy pills in the late evening (58% of reviewers on PillReports.net took their first pill between 9 p.m. and midnight). The most used words in users’ reports are possibly more enlightening than the times. They talk of “rolling” (the experience of being on MDMA); “sleep”; “friends”; “dancing”; their “eyes wiggling”; “jaws clenching”; feeling “happy,” “intense,” and “tired.” Conclusions Ecstasy users publish reports on pills using the same level of analytical precision employed by wine connoisseurs when they describe the bouquet of a new and as-yet unproven bottle. They say if the pill is hard or crumbly, bitter, or tasteless. And, as every wine has a distinct “mouthfeel,” every ecstasy pill has its own cerebral and physiological effects. Some feel “speedier” than others. Certain pills produce nasty hangovers, while others don’t. Most make people feel happy. A very, very small number of people die because of them. And it’s all because of what they contain… the MDMA, the adulterants, and at what purities and ratios they’re combined. By analyzing thousands of pill reports, we now know that most ecstasy pills – or at least those that people bother to test and tell other drug users about – do contain MDMA or an MDMA-like substance. But how much MDMA is in any given pill, and whether it’s mixed with speed (as it very often will be), is down to chance and possibly where you live. Canadian pills almost always seem to contain some speed, whereas those from the Netherlands, where pill testing is much more common than any of the other four countries we looked at, are much more likely to contain just MDMA. We’ve also seen that Molly, the apparently pure form of MDMA mentioned by Madonna and Miley, is typically anything but pure. It’s no more likely to be pure MDMA than an ecstasy pill selected at random. Betting on the purity of any illicit street drug is ultimately a losing proposition. Furthermore, subjectively testing out the composition of any illicit pill on oneself can be a very dangerous game, with potentially risky health consequences. It’s unrealistic, if not impossible, to envision a scenario involving substance use and abuse if one’s long-term goal is to be happy and healthy. If you’re concerned that the frequent use of ecstasy or other drugs has begun to negatively impact your life, or has resulted in a difficult-to-break cycle of dependency, help is available.A pit bull rejected by its mother is being taken care of by an unlikely surrogate: A mama cat. When Noland was merely 1 day old, he was taken to the Cleveland Animal Protective League without his mother. "Obviously a 1-day-old puppy, even in the best of circumstances, [the chance of survival] is pretty iffy," Sharon Harvey, president and CEO of the CAPL, told Yahoo News by phone. "We want to give him every chance we could." The staff decided Noland's best chances were to join a litter of nursing kittens. The question: Would the cat accept a puppy into her brood of four? Amazingly, mom-cat Lurlene welcomed the outsider. The image says it all: The pit bull is being nursed back to health by a very tolerant feline. “They’re a happy family now,” said Harvey. For anyone in love with the orphaned pup who might want to take him home, he’s not quite ready for adoption.“Noland is going to be with us for quite a while,” Harvey told NewsNet5. “We need to be really sure with him. We’ve got to focus on giving him the care he needs right now.” In addition to spending eight to nine hours a day with the newborn kittens, the now-week-old pit bull, already growing bigger than the kittens, is being bottle-fed and taken home by staffers who watch over him at night. The little guy has a ways to go before he's in the clear. But a team of staffers—including a cat—have stepped in to help. Harvey remains hopeful—and touched by the simple gesture of a cat saving a dog. "It’s really crazy what animals can do to give us hope," she said. "Talk about acceptance." The nutrition and nurturing Lurlene provides Noland are giving him a chance at life. “We definitely want Noland to have the happy ending that he deserves," Harvey said.Nexus Mods user taprosoft has recently uploaded a very interesting mod for Skyrim, which does only one little thing with the acclaimed game: it changes the branch textures of the aspen trees. This allows to achieve an absolutely incredible look. The game looks much more realistic, very crisp and just begs for you to on on an adventure. There’s a whole bunch of other mods running in this version of the game (you can find the full list in the description to this video). Be sure to check it out and if you want to get your second chance with Skyrim, please install it. This little fix shows that you can change the whole way your game looks if you find the right way to influence the design of even one tiny element. Interesting Links Source: nexusmods.comBreaking Down The Best Orlando Summer League Players (Part 1) by The Orlando summer league allows us to get our first glimpse of the new NBA prospects playing at the pro level. For us as hoops junkies its like unwrapping a bunch of christmas presents, but for many of these guys its their first impression to their new organization and the league in general. For guys who aren’t first round picks its about getting one of these teams to fall in love with you enough to give you a contract. Marcus Smart, Shabazz Napier, Aaron Gordon, Elfrid Payton and Jordan Adams headline the 2014 first round picks in the Orlando summer league. Aaron Craft and Nick Johnson make up the undrafted players looking for a spot in the league that were pretty well decorated in college. So without any further delay lets get into the positives of the Orlando summer league. James Ennis (Miami Heat) Of every returning player in the Orlando summer league no player has come back as improved as the 6-7 forward out of Long Beach State. If you made me pick and MVP for summer league this far then this would be my guy, he looks like he’s ready to step into the Heat rotation right now and produce. With his 6’11 inch wingspan he is exactly what Pat Riley would be looking for on the perimeter and would fit in very nicely into the Heat’s rotation. They are going to need Ennis to replace the now retired Shane Battier and shoulder the burden of a role player who can defend the perimeter and stretch the floor with his shooting. The difference between this year and last year is that Ennis has come back more refined on the offensive end. You watch him play now and he can do a lot of positive things with the basketball in his hand. He’s got one-dribble ups, step backs, catch and shoot along with so much more potential to be had moving forward. If there was one player who hasn’t played a minute of NBA basketball that looks NBA ready then it would be this guy. Stats: 3 games, 25.7 minutes, 17 points, 55.2 field goal %, 6.3 rebounds, 1.7 assists, 1 steal Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (Detroit Pistons) Last season the Pistons drafted Kentavious Caldwell-Pope with 8th overall pick and was thrown right into the fire as the teams starting shooting guard. After about a half a season of underwhelming basketball his minutes were reduced as Kyle Singler and Rodney Stuckey started the rest of the game at the shooting guard position for the Pistons. The struggles were good and it looks like it helped Caldwell-Pope become more aware of what it takes to produce at the NBA level. The result of last years struggles have been what looks like a completely different player. The Pistons swingman has been lighting it up and of all last years
for Node.js DevelopersMy co-blogger David Bernstein e-mailed me to note the department in which the thug role model professor who stole the anti-abortion sign — and apparently assaulted a protester — teaches. It’s not a department of women’s studies, but a department of feminist studies. In principle, having a Department of Women’s Studies may make good sense for an academic institution. Traditional department boundaries — history, psychology, anthropology, sociology, law, and the like — are often useful, because each field has its own intellectual toolkit that is often worth teaching separately. But at the same time, the department boundaries often make it harder to effectively study a particular subject area. The role of women in society, for instance, is an important question that is raised in many different fields of study. Having a department that’s focused on that subject rather than on a particular academic discipline could be useful, though, as with all such things, it could be implemented poorly. But a Department of Feminist Studies, it seems to me, by definition limits itself not just to a single subject of study, but to a single ideology or closely connected bundle of ideologies. It means that the department is guaranteed to exclude faculty and even students of other ideological views. (Ideologically skewing happens to some extent in lots of contexts already, but here it seems to be baked into the definition of the department in a particular sharp way.) And it puts the university’s scholarly imprimatur on one ideology — and perhaps even just particular versions of that ideology — to the exclusion of its rivals. It means that other views are automatically defined to be outside the department’s area of focus — the possibility that there are women who aren’t feminists (or who disagree with most of the modern academic feminist movement on questions such as abortion) who are worth studying and whose arguments are worth considering is defined away. Ideological homogeneity and lack of engagement with contrary views is always a danger in many human institutions. But a department of feminist studies seems to be tailored to maximize these dangers. Of course, I would say the same about a department of patriotic studies, a department of libertarian studies, and the like. (A department of feminist/patriotic/libertarian studies that is all about studying those ideologies or movements, rather than using those ideologies to study other things, would be a different matter; there the objection would be that it’s likely too narrow.) I wouldn’t always say the same, incidentally, about particular classes that are devoted to particular ideological approaches to law, history, moral philosophy, and the like. Studying Austrian economics, Keynesian economics, Marxist economics, and the like in separate classes might well make sense (again, depending how such classes are implemented). But professors who teach different classes and students who take different classes tend to interact a lot with professors and students who are involved in other classes, so there’s less of an insularity concern there. In any event, that’s my tentative thinking about the Department of Feminist Studies, albeit just based on general principles rather than specific experience with this department or others like it. If you have more direct experiences, either with Feminist Studies departments or similarly structured departments, I’d love to hear your more informed views below.China's leaders are positioning the country for a new era of lower, single-digit growth led more by consumer spending. That reshuffles the lineup of suppliers to the world's second-largest economy and appears set to push Canadian commodities producers to the margins. "The commodities super cycle – I don't know if it's over, but it's not looking as good as it used to and it's going to hurt a major part of our economy," said Yuen Pau Woo, president and CEO of the Vancouver-based Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. "We did less badly out of the global recession of 2008-09 on the back of Chinese demand for commodities. That honeymoon is over." As demand for resources moderates, Mr. Woo warns that Canada needs to strike a trade agreement with China and better promote its banks, automotive sector and other products that don't depend on construction. Story continues below advertisement China's leaders have been warning its companies for much of the past decade about their over-reliance on infrastructure investment and the need to prepare for a shift to consumer-led growth. Last week, China's government acted by announcing an end to some government-determined interest rates and warning that further rate reforms "will be more profound." Analysts say this direction points toward the end of easy credit for China's manufacturing and construction sectors. China's economic growth held at 10 per cent or above for seven of the past 10 years, according to World Bank data. Macquarie Group Ltd. said in a report released Wednesday that its researchers have lowered their 2013 and 2014 China growth forecasts to 7.3 per cent and 6.9 per cent, respectively, partly because "the peak of investment spending has likely passed." Much of that investment went into roads, bridges, factories and ports, all of which helped propel China's economic ranking past the U.K., Germany, and Japan within the past decade. It also required commodities like coking coal, a key steel-making ingredient, which benefited Canadian commodity producers such as Teck Resources Ltd. The Vancouver-based company ships about 15 to 20 per cent of the 25 million tonnes of coking coal it produces annually to China, according to analysts. China is undergoing a transformation, Jim McNerney, chief executive of airplane giant Boeing Co. said during a conference call Wednesday. "I think they have difficulty transitioning their economy right now," Mr. McNerney said. "It's more of a demand driven, consumer-led, domestically driven economy. And that transition is not easy to make from an external investment, foreign direct investment kind of led economy." Mining companies are already bearing the brunt of slowing demand in China, which consumes about 40 per cent of the world's base metals. Metal prices have dropped amid weakening demand, which has led to a slump in equity prices. Teck's shares, for example, are down by more than a third this year. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement "The Canadian market continues to be in a bit of a pickle," said Macquarie Private Wealth Inc. chief investment officer Craig Basinger in Wednesday's note, cautioning investors about China's weaker growth. "Overall, we are more defensive in the Canadian market given the headwinds to our resource industries and the view the Canadian economy is not as well positioned to benefit from the composition of global growth. The TSX is lacking in a number of our preferred industries including Information Technology and Industrials." Attention is starting to turn instead to the U.S., which is not only experiencing an economic recovery, but has more industries that will benefit from a shift in China's economy. For example, Ford Motor Co. said on Wednesday that its second-quarter results were boosted by a strong performance in the Asia-Pacific, including China. Pre-tax profit in the region hit a record, led by market share in China, which grew to 4.3 per cent as Chinese buyers snapped up the compact Focus car and Kuga and EcoSport crossovers. "Most of the buyers in China are first-time buyers," Ford's chief financial officer Bob Shanks said during a call with investors and analysts Wednesday. "That is one of the great things about our investments there – we are going after first-time buyers. We don't have to steal them, if you will, which is really hard." Still, some see China's economic readjustment as a positive development. Story continues below advertisement Economic growth in China is softening from a searing pace in recent years, which is probably healthy for the long-term prospects of the economy, Mr. Shanks said. Peter Harder, president of the Canada China Business Council, says China's economic shift should be no surprise to industry, but doesn't believe it's commodities versus consumer products in the future race for Chinese demand. "It's a modulated shift from a unique resource base to a resource and domestic consumer market base," he said. With files from Greg Keenan“I THINK it’s detrimental to democracy to have low levels of voter participation.” We couldn’t agree more with that assessment from University of Maryland government and politics professor Michael Hanmer in advance of Tuesday’s primaries in Maryland for local, state and federal offices. We hope voters turn out in healthy numbers, but pollsters are predicting that turnout in Maryland, as in other states that have held primaries this year, will be low. In a recent Post poll, more than half of registered voters in Maryland said they were not paying attention to the state’s three-way gubernatorial Democratic primary, underscoring worries that the state might join California, Texas and the District of Columbia in posting low voter turnout. There can be many reasons for voter disinterest, but the date of a primary and how consistently a state maintains its schedule certainly can make a difference. In both Maryland and the District, September has long been the traditional time for primaries, but officials in both places said they had to change to comply with a new federal law making it easier for overseas service members to vote. The law requires that absentee ballots be mailed 45 days in advance of federal elections in November; officials said a September date didn’t provide enough time. That didn’t leave good options. Too many people are away in July and August. District officials held their primary in April, which required campaigning in bad weather, depressed voter turnout and created an interminable nine-month period of lame duckery. Maryland’s late-June date may bump into vacations, graduations and weddings that are traditional at this time of the year. In September, children are back in school, summer travel has concluded and voters may be more ready to think about election season. Five states — Delaware, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island — have managed to keep their primaries in September and still comply with federal law. “We were determined we were not going to change the primary... so our discussion was, what did we need to do so we could keep the primary where we already had it,” New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner told us. He cautioned that what works for New Hampshire may not be practical for other jurisdictions. Nonetheless, we urge Maryland and D.C. officials to examine how these states have succeeded in maintaining their traditional primary schedule.Playing and winning three elimination games on their way through the 2011 Women’s College World Series, No. 4 Florida Gators softball defeated the No. 2 Alabama Crimson Tide twice on Sunday to advance to the event’s Championship Series beginning on Monday. The Gators (56-11), after dismantling the Crimson Tide (53-11) with their bats by a tune of 16-2 earlier in the afternoon, utilized strong pitching and timely hitting to earn a 9-2 victory in the evening. Freshman right-handed pitcher Hannah Rogers (36-7) retired the first 11 batters she faced and threw six shutout innings before allowing a pair of runs. She tossed a complete game, struck out seven and gave up only four hits and one base on balls. Florida took it to Alabama right out of the gate once again on Sunday. Junior center fielder Michelle Moultrie (2-4, R) led off with a single to right, advanced to second on a sacrifice bunt by senior catcher Tiffany DeFelice (0-2, BB), and found her way home when senior left fielder Kelsey Bruder stepped up and hit a two-run homer to right-center. Sophomore right fielder Brittany Schutte wanted in on the fun and hit a solo shot to right-center to give her team an early 3-0 advantage. The Gators increased the pressure on the Crimson Tide just two innings later. Bruder reached base after being hit by a pitch, and Schutte (2-4, HR, RBI, 2 R) moved her to second by singling to right. Senior first baseman Megan Bush (1-3, BB) singled to left to load the bases, and freshman shortstop Cheyenne Coyle (1-3, 2 RBI) hit a ball hard up the middle to score both runners and give UF a 5-0 lead. The first five runs allowed were all attributed to Crimson Tide pitcher Kelsi Dunne, who gave up six hits and walked one while striking out three in two innings. She was tagged for a total of 11 earned runs in just 2.1 combined innings of action on Sunday. Looking to extend their lead even further, Florida found themselves with runners on first and second with one out in the top of the fourth. Bruder (2-2, HR, 3 RBI, 3 R) hit a long fly ball to deep right-center that was eventually nabbed, but freshman third baseman Kasey Fagan (1-3, R) used it as an opportunity to tag up and score all the way from second base, putting the Gators ahead 6-0. With two on and two out in the top of the seventh, UF struck one last time. Senior second baseman Aja Paculba (2-4, HR, 3 RBI, R) stepped up and sent a ball flying out of the park, hitting a three-run homer and capping another top-notch performance from the Orange and Blue offense. Rogers kept Alabama off the bases through six but got tagged for a few hits in the seventh. She allowed two runs before closing out the game with a strikeout to cap her stellar showing. Bruder tied a WCWS record for most total runs scored in the event (eight), and Florida as a team has scored as many runs (41) as every other team in the WCWS combined. The Gators’ 41 runs are currently second-most in WCWS history. Florida advances to the Championship Series and will play for the NCAA Championship for the second time in three seasons. They will take on No. 1 Arizona State (58-6), which earned a 6-5 walk-off victory against UF on Friday, in the three-game series beginning Monday at 8 p.m. live on ESPN2.And he means war. Clearly he is a Misunderstander of the Religion of Peaceâ„¢. “Saudi Columnist: ‘There Is No Islam without Jihad,'” from MEMRI, August 6 (thanks to all who sent this in): Anas Zahed, a columnist for the Saudi government daily Al-Madina, criticized Arab and Muslim intellectuals who limit the term jihad to a personal, spiritual struggle and reject its interpretation as waging war against occupation, which he said is its principle meaning. Following are excerpts: “Islam without jihad is the product of colonialism and is in no way connected to the Islam of Muhammad. Without question, the greatest jihad is personal jihad, and therein lies the proof that the term jihad in Islam is not limited [solely] to waging war… [But] this does not mean that the term jihad does not include many other aspects, among them those which relate to the individual’s responsibilities to society, and the relations of the [Muslim] society and ummah with societies and countries that declare war on a Muslim state. “[However,] ever since the American [declaration of] war against what is called terrorism, there has emerged a group of Arab and Muslim authors and academics who try to limit jihad to one dimension, namely to personal jihad. This is exactly what happened in India during the period of British colonialism, when the Qadian sect, also known as Ahmadiyya, emerged and rejected the principle of fighting the colonialists. [They] abolished the duty of jihad in the sense of waging war, and were content with preaching merely personal jihad. “What is striking is that these preachings, which were intended to rescind the duty of jihad from Islam, existed then, and still exist now, alongside the most brutal type of imperialism and occupation ever known to the Islamic world, and specifically to the Arab world. This fact sheds doubt on the intent of the philosophers, authors, and members of the media who took it upon themselves to disseminate a ‘friendly’ Islam that obligates its followers to live with occupation, [population] transfer, the resettlement of land, and the expulsion of its inhabitants by force of arms. “I completely understand that we Muslims must reexamine the term jihad, after the extremist terrorist gangs have attempted to appropriate this noble term. Likewise, I completely understand that we are bound by the conditions and limitations of [declaring] jihad, namely [that jihad can only be declared when] Muslims are being expelled from their land and [are subjected] to religious coercion. “But I do not at all understand Muslims’ calls for the reexamination of the term jihad from a viewpoint that rejects declaring war on those who occupy their land, kill the innocent, destroy homes, and expel millions. Islam is a religion of justice, and the most basic principle of justice demands that evil be opposed and not surrendered to. It goes without saying that occupation is the severest form of evil. If we add to occupation the resettlement of land and expulsion [of population], we arrive at the greatest degree of evil that can befall man. There is no Islam without jihad.”[1] Endnotes: [1] Al-Madina (Saudi Arabia), July 24, 2010.The Atlanta Chapter of the NAACP is calling for the removal of the Confederacy from Stone Mountain Park. Local chapter president Richard Rose says, “It is time for Georgia and other Southern states to end the glorification of slavery and white supremacy, paid for and maintained, with the taxes of all its citizens.” According to Rose, “All of this recognition of Confederate generals is upholding the white supremacy on which the Confederacy was founded and the war was fought.” He goes on to say: “All of this should have ended in 1865 when Lee surrendered to Appomattox.” He’s referring to, what historians refer to as, one of the last battles before Confederate Army General Robert Lee surrendered to Union Army Lt. Ulysses Grant on April 9, 1865. Recent debate about the emblems was sparked by the mass killings at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Alleged gunman Dylann Roof was seen in photographs posing with the Confederate Flag. While some consider the flag as a commemoration of their heritage, others consider it a symbol of hate. On Friday, South Carolina removed the flag from its statehouse grounds. Georgia removed the Confederate emblem from its flag in 2001, though the “Stars and Bars” from the First National Confederate Flag remain on the state flag. The Confederate Flag still flies at Stone Mountain Park, which is owned by and run by the State of Georgia. Many, like Congressman Hank Johnson, see the park as a museum for the Confederacy. According to Johnson, “Where do we draw the line, do we blast the faces off of Stone Mountain?” Rose says “Yes.” He adds, “They can sand blast Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Jackson off tomorrow. I’d be extremely elated.” Rose calls it “unfair, unfortunate, and unconscionable for the State of Georgia and any other government to continue to commemorate and spend taxpayer dollars in upholding and preserving Confederate monuments and symbols including the flag.” On any government property, Rose says, “those symbols should be eradicated.” A compromise, Rose says, would be to “add other figures to Stone Mountain”, those who he says have been “instrumental in bringing peace between the races” and in “elevating Georgia beyond the Civil War and Jim Crow eras.” -Maria Boynton, CBS Local'Aquilani could go to MLS' By Football Italia staff Alberto Aquilani could move to MLS at the end of the season, according to the Fiorentina man’s agent. The midfielder’s current deal expires at the end of this season, and it was revealed in March that no talks had taken place. With the former Liverpool man’s affairs now being handled by a new agent, Andrea D’Amico, there is a possibility he could follow Sebastian Giovinco to MLS. “Aquilani is a top player,” D’Amico told SportItalia. “He’s a player with a great record. I haven’t spoken to anyone, but I’m sure we’ll get a satisfactory outcome, a high-level project, whether that’s in Italy or abroad. “MLS, where Giovinco now plays will soon become an important League, with all the multimedia communication which we’ve neglected.”I survive winters by abiding by these three simple rules: enjoy the white snow, drive carefully in the grey snow and don’t eat the yellow snow. I don’t know what to do if orange snow falls and neither did the residents of the Russian city of Saratov when it was blanketed this week with a deep covering of orange flakes. Saratov is a major port (population over 800,000) on the Volga River, 858 km (533 miles) from Moscow, and has a moderate (for Russia) climate with an annual snowfall of about 163 centimeters (64 inches) which, until now, has never been orange. The orange snow was widespread and of various shades of orange along with patches of yellow and brown. Saratov’s residents were rightly skeptical to avoid eating snowflakes or jumping in the juice-colored banks until finding out what caused it. The most likely reason, according to Saratov weather forecast service director Mikhail Boltukhin, was a cyclone that blew colored sand from Africa’s Sahara desert into Siberian snow clouds. The air coming from the West contains tiny particles of sand, which give the falling snow an orange hue. Similar phenomena have been observed recently in various districts of the region and in other parts of the country, particularly in Crimea. Well, the second part is true. In 2007, an orange snow covered over 1500 sq km (570 sq miles) in the Omsk region of Russia. That stuff was oily and smelled rotten and was blamed on the area’s oil industry, although it also contained four times the normal level of iron ore. Colored snow can have other causes. Red-and-pink watermelon snow is common in alpine regions and gets its colors and telltale smell of watermelon from an algae (Chlamydomonas nivalis). So-called blood snow falls near Blood Falls in Antarctica’s Taylor Glacier for a different reason. Iron-rich saltwater leaking from an ancient reservoir under the glacier oxidizes when it hits the air and turns the waterfall and snow blood red. Saharan sand, algae, oxidation … or something else. What do you think was the real cause of Saratov’s orange snow?Image copyright Mark Wilson/Getty Image caption Pilots from World War Two in 2010 during Congressional Gold Medal ceremony. More than 70 years after serving in World War Two, American female pilots have finally won the right to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. The cemetery is where US presidents, honoured military personnel and national heroes are buried. President Barack Obama has recently signed a law that allows the pilots from the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) to buried in the famous cemetery. This is not the first battle they have won in their fight for recognition. When they served as pilots during World War Two, they were considered civilians. They flew non-combat missions in the US but were trained like their male counterparts, lived in Army barracks and flew military aircraft. Image copyright Erin Miller Image caption Elaine Danforth Harmon served as a pilot during WW2 and wanted to be buried in Arlington National Ceremony Thirty-eight women died during that time and as civilians they weren't entitled to be buried with the US flag on the coffin or any benefits for their families after their deaths. When the Army no longer needed their help in 1944 they were sent home, having to pay their own way back, without any honours and without the status of veterans. Nell Bright, who is 94 years old, joined up in May 1943. She said they were told if the WASP programme was successful they would be given the status as veterans. But the move was defeated in Congress. She said: "We were not very happy about it." That unhappiness turned into something stronger in the 1970s when the Army bragged about allowing women to fly military aircraft for the first time. Nell Bright said it was the spark that set off the campaign for recognition. It took a few years and culminated in President Jimmy Carter signing legislation to treat them as veterans in 1977 - including burial rights in Arlington Cemetery. 'Unjustified' On 21 April, one of the women involved in the 1970s campaign for recognition passed away. Elaine Danforth Harmon wanted to be buried in Arlington Cemetery, but when her family applied they were rejected. It turned out the Army had changed their minds and the women could no longer be buried in the famous cemetery. Specifically it was the then Secretary of the Army John McHugh who made the ruling, which Nell Bright said was done "behind closed doors." Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Erin Miller speaking in March 2016 (before the bill was passed in Congress) about the fight to get her grandmother buried in Arlington National Cemetery. There are some pilots from the WASP group buried in Arlington National Cemetery, as they were eligible at the time of their deaths. Others have been buried alongside their husbands, not in their own right, but as the spouses of their veteran husbands. Elaine Danforth Harmon's granddaughter Erin Miller said apart from a technicality no real reason for the sudden change was given. She said: "I felt the policy change was unjustified." Along with her sisters, the family felt they needed to challenge that decision, so they started a petition on change.org which received over 170,000 supporters. It was picked up by Republican Representative Martha McSally, who before entering politics served in the US Air Force and was a combat fighter pilot and commanded a fighter squadron. Responding to the news of the Women Airforce Service Pilots Arlington Inurnment (WASP AIR) Act being passed by Congress she said: "It's been just 19 weeks since the Army's decision to kick out our pioneering female World War II pilots was brought to light, and we've been fighting ever since." The process was a frustrating experience for the Miller family but knowing the law has been enacted is exciting for Erin Miller. To celebrate she got a tattoo with the bill's number on her arm, despite her sister calling it crazy. Image copyright Aaron Falk Image caption Erin Miller, granddaughter of Elaine Danforth Harmon who was a pilot during World War Two, with her celebratory tattoo. She's hoping their application to bury their grandmother might be fast-tracked, but is aware it could take another few months to see if they are successful. At the moment the ashes of Elaine Danforth Harmon are being kept in a closet in their home. "Nobody should have to ask Congress to bury their grandmother" she said. Not all the families of the pilots or even the pilots themselves who are still alive wanted to be buried in Arlington. Nell Bright said: "I don't particularly care where I'm buried, but it's the principle, and many of the women do want to."In a large dark Victorian house on Barton Street, Westminster, something dreadful is happening. The gas lamps are dead. Screams are rising from the next room – sounds of ordeal and agony. You wouldn't run in to help; you'd knot sheets together and escape through the window. I know it's all confected for the cameras. I've read all the scripts. We're in Ardmore Studios – a cluster of hangars on the edge of the Wicklow mountains – and I've been walking around them all day. I've examined the maps of the Belgian Congo pinned to the drawing room wall; goggled at the batteries in Victor Frankenstein's laboratory; ducked low to inspect the cogs and pulleys under the stage of the Grand Guignol theatre. I know the rats heaped in the prosthetics store have been moulded in latex; that, contrary to small print on the bills pasted on the walls, no Victorian playwright called Michael Grandage ever wrote a play called Emperor of the Universe; that the people gathered beside me – Timothy Dalton and Josh Hartnett – are actors, watching the business of another actor – Eva Green – being relayed from a camera in the next room. The performance she's giving, though, is so intense, so out-there, so Renée Jeanne Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, that even these two rugged old turns are exchanging glances. And, hunkered down over the monitor, the man who unleashed this madness is grinning from ear to ear. Penny Dreadful, eight hours of gothic television filmed in and around Dublin, gathers a synod of monsters, criminals and lost souls – a vampire-hunter (Green), a sharpshooter (Hartnett), a grief-wracked explorer (Dalton), a prostitute (Billie Piper), Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) and Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney). The story has been bubbling away inside John Logan – author of the Rothko play, Red, screenwriter of Hugo and The Aviator and Skyfall – for a decade or more. Ask him about its origins and he'll talk about his regard for the Romantic poetry that crackled into life beside Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; the late-Victorian moment that brought Dracula, Dorian and Dr Moreau into being; the uses to which these creatures were put by Hollywood and Hammer. He'll also talk about his own feelings of monstrosity and his sense of isolation as a young man. How it felt to make scarifying visits to New York's Christopher Street in the 1970s, or to be young and gay in the years when America first became acquainted with HIV. Logan is keen to ensure that everybody involved in the series feels like part of his gang. If you're there, you're one of the Dreadfuls. When he says it, it feels good. In the 19th century, "penny dreadful" was an unofficial literary category – used by its enemies and its fans to describe cheap serial fiction produced in weekly eight or 16-page instalments, which might, in the course of months or even years of publication, supply rambling narratives founded on poisoning, strangling, burglary, flagellation and hairbreadth escapes from drowning and sexual assault. Their titles generally gave away their natures: Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (1845-7); Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (1846-7); The Night-Hawks of London; or, the Noble Highwayman and the Miser's Daughter (1865). The semi-literate – who made up an important part of their market – were reeled in by the lurid woodcuts: Black Bess, rearing against the moon; the heroine, bare-breasted and manacled in a burning attic; a bloodsucking fiend scuttering over a four-poster bed. Their authors, who might keep 10 of these stories spinning simultaneously, were paid at the rate of a penny a line, which had a legible effect on the text. Skilled practitioners knew that staccato sentences were the most profitable, and learned how to oblige the compositor to leave one or two words hanging at the end of a paragraph. The typography of the genre was as full of widows and orphans as its plots. Smart strategy, if you're hungry. Some writers pursued parallel careers of the sort that didn't bleed lampblack all over your fingers. As Mary Elizabeth Braddon's sensational Lady Audley's Secret (1862) was being devoured by subscribers to Mudie's Circulating Library, its author was staying up late to meet her deadlines on a rather less prestigious project: The Black Band; or The Mysteries of Midnight – a 240,000-word shocker about a bigamous noblewoman, a persecuted ballerina, a clique of Italian revolutionaries and an Austrian gangster whose brain is being slowly dissolved by poison. Unsurprisingly, Braddon produced the keenest sketch of a "dreadful" writer at work. In The Doctor's Wife (1864), itself a sophisticated heist on the plot of Madame Bovary, Braddon introduces the reader to the fictional Sigismund Smith, inky-fingered author of Count Montefiasco; or, The Brand Upon the Shoulder-Blade, a cheerful hack who specialises in pop-fiction plagiarism. "I'm doing a combination novel now," he explains. "The Heart of Midlothian and The Wandering Jew. You've no idea how admirably the stories blend together." Reality went one better: in 1884 the American newspaper Beadle's Weekly published a story called Monte Cristo Afloat; or The Wandering Jew of the Sea: A Romance of Weird Mystery One Hundred Years Ago. 'Narratives are founded on poisoning, strangling and flagellation' … Wagner the Wehr-Wolf Cheap, violent serial fiction had flourished since the 1830s, but its strongest, maddest phase of life was the product of a statutory lightning-strike: the 1861 repeal of the paper tax. The sudden rush of printing caused a type-famine that brought about the momentary return of the 18th-century's long "S" letter, unpacked from dusty boxes in printshop backrooms. The hunger for stories sent writers back to old tropes, to folklore, to half-remembered figures from chapbooks and broadside ballads. In James Malcolm Rymer's The Dark Woman; or Plot and Passion (1861) for instance, the fictional heroine (an organised crime boss and illegitimate royal) collides with two historical figures whose lifetimes did not overlap – the highwayman Jack Sheppard (1702-1724), and the Prince Regent, later George IV (1762-1830). Logan's TV series occupies the same dreamlike space: in Penny Dreadful, Frankenstein coexists with Dorian Gray and the survivors of Bram Stoker's Dracula, who, over the course of the series, form a strangely familial alliance. Resurrection men remain busy, in defiance of the 1832 Anatomy Act. The Romantic era and fin-de-siècle seem to be occurring simultaneously, brought together by blood and electricity. For most of its history, the penny dreadful was a genre for lost boys. Boys were often its protagonists, its readers, and the figures who legislators and campaigners believed required protection from its pleasures. Wily publishers, keen to exploit a growing market for more self-consciously wholesome material, picked up their pitchforks in sympathy with this moral panic. "The police court reports in the newspapers are alone sufficient proof of the harm done by 'penny dreadfuls'," asserted Alfred Harmsworth, future owner of the Daily Mail, as he launched a new boys' title, the Halfpenny Marvel, in 1893. "It is an almost daily occurrence with magistrates to have before them boys who, having read a number of 'dreadfuls', followed the examples set forth in such publications, robbed their employers, bought revolvers with the proceeds and finished by running away from home and installing themselves in the back streets as 'highwaymen'. This and many other evils the 'penny dreadful' is responsible for. It makes thieves of the coming generation, and so helps fill our gaols." In August 1895 the MP for Leicester launched a campaign against the "grossly demoralising and corrupting character" of the penny dreadful. By a sweet coincidence, his name was John Logan. The boys in whom this corruption was identified have left sad little footprints in the printed record. Thomas Richard Nash, a 15-year-old who, in September 1895, killed himself by drinking carbolic acid: the Leeds Times reported that his box of belongings contained "a number of books of the penny dreadful description, dealing with daggers and poisons, guillotines, scaffolds etc". George Sharp, a young sailor, was, in 1904, reprimanded for threatening his stepfather with murder: "Sharp had in his possession a 'penny dreadful' and also a clasp-knife," said the Dundee Evening Post. In 1892 Joseph Margerison and Robert Thompson, two teenage textile workers from Blackburn, robbed a local farmer while he was milking his cows. Under the headline "Effects of the Penny Dreadful", the Grantham Journal claimed "the boys formed part of a gang who, led by sensational literature, had built a cave in a yard and filled it with firearms, knives, and the proceeds of robberies". Reading back over such reports, what strikes me is the breathless journalistic effort required to transform the penny dreadful into the cause of the crime. Nash left a suicide note that stated: "I wish you to know the reason I did it is because I could not work." Sharp declared that his threats were made in protest against his stepfather's violent treatment of his three-year-old sibling. Accounts of the Blackburn boys written by hacks closer to the scene supply sharper details of their lives. Margerison was a creeler – a boy who dodged under the whirring loom and replaced spent spools for a few shillings a week. A more considered description of their criminal activities mentions no bandits' cave, no guns, no knives – just a loose sod in the Moss Street Corporation Yard that concealed cash tied in a handkerchief. "No one in his senses," wrote George Orwell in 1939, "would want to turn the so-called penny dreadful into a realistic novel or a socialist tract." A kind of radicalism, though, does haunt many of these stories. Its protagonists are outcasts and outlaws, its villains figures of privilege and authority. George WM Reynolds's The Mysteries of London (1844-6) thrums with Chartism and thieves' cant. The Boy Detective; or, The Crimes of London (1865-6) is led by a youth who assumes transvestite disguise to foil the plans of his wicked stepmother, Barbara, kingpin of a gang of counterfeiters. The Wild Boys of London; or, The Children of the Night (1864-66) details the adventures of a gang of dangerously likable sewer-dwelling thieves. In 1877, copies were seized in police raids. Decades later, they were pored over by William S Burroughs, who populated his fiction with their criminal descendants. They're present, too, in Penny Dreadful – a drama about a group of wounded individuals who have a number of things in common – aching loneliness, a cognisance of their own sin, and knowledge of a supernatural world unseen by those they pass on the pavement. It would be against the rules of bloodcurdling serial fiction to reveal what was happening behind the wall in that house on Barton Street – except to say that the dreadful world has space in it for the possessed, as well as the dispossessed. Penny Dreadful continues on Tuesdays at 9pm on Sky Atlantic. Matthew Sweet's books include Inventing the Victorians.People always say to me, find what you love and do that for the rest of your life. I love making videos about Bitcoin. I’m not a video making professional, but I try to do a little better each
, among other crimes. Greg Loles, half of the former Farnbacher Loles ALMS team that ran works-assisted Porsches through the 2009 season, had been awaiting trial since December of '09, and after admitting his guilt, the court spent a considerable amount of time investigating the length of his crimes before bundling the 55-year-old off for a quarter-century behind bars. He'll also get credit for time served. Loles follows former driver Henri Zogaib who bilked money from the Grand-Am sports car paddock during a similar time frame. And with a rich history of sports car owners/drivers from the 1980s being imprisoned for drug trafficking, it's doubtful we've seen the final member of the paddock end up in handcuffs.greenatlas: atane: In the wake of this Gazi Kodzo character, these are the main problems with the behaviors of these “conscious” ankh types in a listicle form. Let’s call their antics “Hotep Ankh Mathematics”. If you encounter Hotep Ankh Mathematics, here are 10 points to keep in mind. 1. Ankhs think they are beyond… The problem that I have with this is that it’s full of condescension and devoid of tolerance, love or an attempt to understand what fuels the likes of Gazi. I honestly don’t understand how this evolves the collective conversation positively. Though, reasonable points were made they were all overwhelmed by a dismissive attitude and invalidism. No. Just no. What you’re suggesting is that Africans should tolerate people who denigrate, insult and talk over us. No. I’m not tolerating someone saying insulting, ridiculous, outlandish and not to mention incorrect things all the time. Sorry, I have no love for that. It’s not even about this Gazi character, but rather the surge in characters like him. They get followers and those followers come to African spaces to lecture us. I recently posted here about a woman who came to a facebook page to insult Tuareg people. She called them “Arab invaders”. She got combative after I respectfully corrected her. That post got me an absolutely ridiculous response from another Afrakan imbecile who said that I’m a Christian and accused me of being anti-Black, to which I responded here. I’m not a Christian, but even if I was, so what? You don’t stop being an African if you are a Christian. This is the nonsense they spew. They want to police African identity and they have the gall to tell Africans what they should be doing, like they are authorities on being African, whatever that means. Do I even need to respond to being labeled anti-Black? I kept seeing this Gazi character’s posts on my tumblr dash recently and the posts continued to get more absurd. I spoke with a few other people privately, wondering why his awful “conscious” posts were being shared and cosigned, but assumed it was just typical tumblr bullshit, most of which I ignore. I had no idea people actually took this clown of the earth seriously. His post about “Afrakan” spirituality with regards to Christianity and Islam was the last draw. I’ve been tolerant and patient for years, but enough is enough. We as Africans have to pushback against people inaccurately using our ancestral customs and traditions. We have to pushback against people who spread misinformation about us, our customs and our identities. If we don’t, then who will? Their garbage becomes the truth. One look around tumblr and social media, and it’s clear that this garbage is gaining traction. In addition, these conscious Afrakan wankers keep centering themselves in conversations about Africa. How does that work? If African voices aren’t centered in conversations on Africa, African cultures and traditions, then what the kind of conversation are you actually having? No really, what are you bloody talking about if the people from the cultures you are adorning yourself with are dismissed and talked down to in a paternalistic manner? Their arrogance makes them think they know more about us than us. It is bizarre. It’s no different than Gaijin who watch anime, read manga and listen to J-pop who think they are now one with Japan. Except it’s not just a country like in the case of Japan, they are doing it with an entire continent. These fools keep multiplying and they keep spreading their nonsense. These guys build a following because a lot of impressionable people who are not African think what they are saying is knowledgeable. When you’re coming with an empty slate, it probably does sound knowledgeable. Almost everyone who follows these “Afrakans” around are not Africans. Isn’t it interesting how that works? Do you think that’s a coincidence? Whenever there’s a symposium or get together of these “Afrakans”, the one constant is the dearth of continental Africans with them. The reality is that these people get acquainted with all these pseudo-scientific “scholars” via old youtube videos and laughably bad websites + books. This is their initial scholarship. The scholarship graduates to the next level when they perhaps get acquainted with an actual African traditional system. These days, it’s usually Yoruba systems. Orishas are now the standard. Egyptology and Kemet is so last week. Talking about the Kingdom of Kush and being Nubian is old news too. Orisha is where it’s at. What happens is that a Babalawo fills their head with who knows what (something they probably misunderstood) and then they run with it. Now they are a dangerous mix of pseudo-scientific history and a little bit of tradition that is specific to one ethnic group, in this case Yoruba people. This system is not applicable to anyone else but Yoruba people, but they will use this “Afrakan” system as a foundation for everything, much like the old school Ankhs did with Kemet and Egyptology. A while ago I had to write this post about it, because many of these people kept coming up to me to talk about Orishas. They incorrectly use the faith system of one group of people (Yoruba) as something that encompasses “Afrakan” spirituality. Maybe one day, next level "conscious” folks will get hip to Odinani (Igbo system) and will start talking about Dibias and getting Nsibidi tattoos. They’re definitely not there yet. On the bright side, at least they’ve left Kemet and landed in West Africa. Who knows, 10 years from now they might discover Southern Africa. Maybe we’ll get “conscious” Sangomas in due time…lol These people are infinitely unaware and the scary part is that they don’t know that they are and they will never know it because of their wild arrogance and dismissal towards Africans who know more than them about African identity. I’m not really concerned about these jokers in the grand scheme of things because they tend to fizzle out in time. You can only hold up tons of bullshit for so long before the weight makes your knees buckle. What is worrying is that they always get a large and loyal following of young people who imbibe their nonsense. A large and loyal following that will in turn challenge African people about their identities like they are the authorities on it and not the Africans themselves. This happens because some joker on the internet started talking about “Afrakans” and it sounded right to them because they have no foundation to begin with. No one teaches them about the vast and diverse continent of Africa and African people, so whatever they hear becomes the default truth. Why they always hear nonsense first is a mystery. Why they always want to hear about Africa from non-Africans is also another mystery. Figure that one out for yourself. The formula to success is always the same for these silly, uber-afrocentic, ankh, hotep types. Come out initially swinging hard against white people, that’s always a hit and will get you attention. It helps to be witty about it, so say white people are cave dwellers or something along those lines. Talk about white people all the time. Make videos and posts “dragging” white folks. People will eat that shit up. After dragging white people for filth, the next step is to center Afrocentricity. Always sprinkle in African terminology. Here’s the kicker, it doesn’t matter where in Africa the terminolgy, words or phrases come from, and you don’t have to make a lick of sense. You can have Yoruba and Swahili in the same sentence. Why not? No one will question you. Only Africans that no one ever bothers to listen to will be able to tell that you’re full of shit. Why listen to them, when you can listen to someone who thinks spelling Africa with a K is revolutionary? Just say things like Uhuru, Ase, Obatala, Shango, Harambe, Ogun, and Zulu. If you’re advanced, you could add some Dogon astronomy into the mix. With that you can delve into astrology. You want “Afrakan” horoscopes and not horoscopes from the devilish, cave dwelling, white man, don’t you? You’re not a Leo anymore, you’re an Afrakan Lion. The Dogon people are the ticket to Afrakan intergalactic and constellation knowledge. Be warned though, this is only for advanced “conscious” people, so proceed with caution. Follow these steps and you’ll hotep your ass all the way to the top and people will think this is African, oh excuse me “Afrakan” identity. It’s literally just a grab bag and smorgasbord of Africanness. It’s absolute nonsense that has been homogenized. This would be completely hysterical if non-Africans didn’t believe it hook, line and sinker. I don’t know what it will take for people to start listening to us about our own damn cultures. Jesus Christ. African people are tired of this crap. Leave us and our things the fuck alone. Stop turning our ancestral traditions into nonsensical crap. When will this nightmare end? With respect to this Gazi guy, he was making videos like this below a little over a year ago, before he became Gazi. He went from that to an “Afrakan revolutionary” in what, a month or two? How did it happen so quickly? The guy just reinvented himself. With the way he’s acting now, you would think he was a longtime “Afrakan”. The image he’s peddling is all fairly new and it ain’t cute. This is all within the last year! I have no idea how old he is, so maybe he’s still young and this is all a phase. Whatever the case may be, he needs to go back to his regular self and stop playing “I’m an Afrakan revolutionary” on the internet. Perhaps he wanted to get interested in African cultures. That’s cool, and if genuine, I don’t know a single African who would not be receptive and happy about people showing genuine interest in them. Are you kidding? Africans are probably the most open and hospitable people on earth. The problem is that these Afrakans seem to want to perform their transition to consciousness and it’s so corny. You don’t have to start typing or saying Ase and Uhuru in random sentences. I know it might be hard to fathom, but are you ready for this? People, you can still wear your Hello Kitty glasses and Britney Spears t-shirts like in the video of Gazi above and still proudly represent as someone that is part of the African diaspora. You don’t have to perform your Africanness, don a dashiki (that was probably made in China), or start spelling Africa with a K, or start making daily videos ‘dragging’ white people, talking about how they are cave people. The only people still saying that are the guys wearing bowties, selling bean pies on the street, talking about Yakub. People like Gazi need to grow the fuck up and get a hold of themselves. This is a shit show and if he took his head outta his ass, he’d see how embarrassing all his antics are…lol (via greenatlas)The family of Nairobis Alvarez Cruz said they didn't find out until they went to court that she died in custody. (Published Thursday, April 16, 2015) As a South Florida family walked into a courhouse expecting to see their daughter appear for a hearing, they recieved a phone call from an inmate informing them that the inmate had died in custody, family attorney Sabino Jauregui told NBC 6. The family says they were told their daughter was screaming for help inside the jail when she had a medical emergency but no one came to her aid. And the attorney for Nairobis Alvarez Cruz, said he wasn't notified of her death until the hearing had started. The corrections department issued a statement about the woman's death, saying there was a "medical emergency." "The Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department (MDCR) would like to extend our condolences to the Cruz Family," the statement read. "MDCR Corrections Officers responded appropriately and timely to a medical emergency to include emergency room transportation. Due to an on-going Miami-Dade Police Department investigation, no further comment can be made at this time." Cruz was arrested for robbery with a weapon last month. Jauregui said he saw her last weekend to prepare for Thursday's arraignment and he told us her family had spoken to her since that, but it was on the courthouse steps about 9:30 a.m., just before they went inside, when they got a call from an inmate at the Pre-trial detention Center about what allegedly happened to Cruz overnight. Investigative Car Used to Drag Officer Linked to Miami Gardens Pastor "Its alleged she was screaming for help for hours... that she was ignored. Until she finally passed away," Jauregui said. The medical examiner's office indicates Cruz died at 12:19 a.m. Jauregui had no idea Cruz was dead and the state attorney had no idea either until they were inside the courtroom about to begin, and Judge Stacy Glick told them about Cruz, her family downstairs in shock. "They are hysterical. They are crying. They are in very bad emotional state," Jauregui said. "They can't believe that their daughter is gone that she is passed away... vibrant full of life... 20 something." One source told NBC 6 Cruz was being held on a floor for women with mental health issues and until two months ago corrections officers were inside the open bay cell with the women, but that was changed and the officers are now outside the unit. "Corrections holds a duty to everyone in the jail to not be negligent to take care of them to make sure their medical needs are met," Jauregui said. Corrections told us it has a full investigation underway so it can't say anything about what happened. When it comes to how this family discovered their loved one was deceased, their lawyer certainly indicated the family first and all of the parties should have been given notice about this woman's death and not be surprised here at the courthouse.WASHINGTON (AP) -- The winless Washington Wizards waived Jannero Pargo and signed free-agent guard Shaun Livingston on Thursday, bringing back a player they hope can help fill the void until John Wall returns from injury. The Wizards will try to avoid falling to 0-8 for the second consecutive season when they host the Utah Jazz on Saturday night. A post Thursday on Wizards owner Ted Leonsis' blog said: "We are certainly playing shorthanded, but we still should be a better team with better results than where we sit today." Washington is the only club in the 30-franchise NBA without a victory this season. Pargo appeared in all seven of Washington's games so far, averaging 3.0 points and 2.0 rebounds in 14.6 minutes. He was signed shortly after the Wizards announced that Wall would miss the first month or so of the regular season with a left knee injury. Wall, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2010 draft, led the Wizards by averaging 16.3 points and eight assists last season. Neither he nor center Nene has played in a game this season. The 6-foot-7 Livingston was waived by the Houston Rockets in late October after spending the preseason with them. He played for the Milwaukee Bucks last season, averaging 5.5 points, 2.1 assists and 2.1 rebounds and making 27 starts. Since being the No. 4 overall pick in the 2004 NBA draft out of high school, Livingston has played for six clubs across seven seasons, averaging 6.8 points, 3.5 assists and 2.6 rebounds. He was with the Wizards in 2009-10, when he appeared in 26 games, with 18 starts, and averaged 9.2 points and 4.5 assists.National Rural Assembly Poll results on the presidential race released Monday (pdf) found unsurprisingly that swing-state rural voters preferred Mitt Romney over Barack Obama by 14 points. Also not surprising is that the pollsters found that party identification likely matters more in determining whether or not a position will draw support or opposition from these voters than does the substance of the policy position in question. Demonstrating the point, 600 likely voters were asked to choose between the Republican and Democratic party platform position statements on immigration. A majority of the rural voters (50 percent to 39 percent) chose the Republican position. When party labels were removed from the same two position statements, however, opinion among the voters swung to support for the Democratic position by virtually the same percentage spread (40 percent to 49 percent). As Bill Bishop at Daily Yonder put it, “Democrats have a more popular position on immigration in rural America– until that position is linked with the Democratic Party.” The poll was conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, which targeted voters in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin. Greenberg is a left-leaning firm that polls for Democratic campaigns. But Republican-friendly polster Glen Bolger at Public Opinion Strategies helped write and analyze the survey and its results. The poll was commissioned by the National Rural Assembly and the Center for Rural Strategies and was paid for by the Carnegie Corporation. Bishop provides a short sharp summary of the findings. “Rural voters are all over the map on the immigration issue,” he writes. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) say immigration is “good for America.” A slight majority (45 percent to 42 percent) say immigration is good for the U.S. economy. Seven out of ten rural voters, however, support laws “like the ones in Arizona and Alabama that allow local law enforcement officers to check the papers of people they suspect are illegal immigrants.” But they also support a “path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrant children and they oppose (62 percent to 31 percent) a constitutional amendment that would eliminate citizenship for children of illegal immigrants. The closer the immigration question comes to home, the more wary rural voters become. But, basically, rural voters agree, 59 percent to 31 percent, that the “growing diversity of the country is good for America.”Rural voters are less sure that immigration is good for “rural America,” 50 percent to 45 percent. And a majority of rural voters in swing states (50 percent to 37 percent) say immigration is bad for the rural economy. You can see in the poll that rural Americans are open to immigration and ways to work through the problem of illegal immigration. But then political party intrudes… EDITOR'S NOTE: We have all had a political discussion with a friend from "the other side" and found that we are in agreement (or near agreement) on an issue. Please share examples of other issues where we have common ground, in the absence of party affiliation, in the comments section.Australia must heed lessons: Lehmann Australia have made another alteration to their squad for the one-day international leg of the Qantas Tour of Sri Lanka starting at R. Premadasa Stadium in Colombo on Sunday, with Mitchell Marsh sent home following the Test side's embarrassing three-nil series sweep that concluded yesterday. At this stage, a replacement has not been named. Marsh's exit brings the ODI touring party back to 15 members after rising star Travis Head was flown over to Sri Lanka late last week and means the selectors have ultimately made two changes to the squad that tasted success in June's tri-series against South Africa and West Indies in the Caribbean. Glenn Maxwell makes way for Shaun Marsh after the Western Australian batsman missed the tri-series for the birth of his first child, while Moises Henriques replaces fellow allrounder Marsh. The elder Marsh brother and captain Steve Smith are the only Australians in the squad who also featured in the 2011 series in Sri Lanka, when the visitors claimed the series 3-2. Quick Single: Sri Lanka shambles has larger repercussions Mitch has become an increasingly reliable presence in Australia's 50-over side, with an unbeaten knock of 79 leading Australia into that tri-series final against the West Indies before a match-winning spell of 3-32 from his 10 overs helped the visitors to victory in the decider. Australia coach Darren Lehmann insists it's simply an opportunity to freshen up the young allrounder ahead of a crucial five-month period for the national team. "It's a big summer ahead for him," the Bupa Support Team head coach told media following the third Test defeat. "We've obviously got some quality allrounders in our one-day squad anyway, so we get a chance to freshen him up and ready to go for South Africa and moving forward." Australia enter the five-match ODI series with a hefty lead on top of the ICC rankings, while sixth-ranked Sri Lanka will hoping to continue their winnings ways after the historic Test series triumph. Following the ODI leg on the island nation, Australia will take on Sri Lanka in two Twenty20 internationals before travelling to South Africa for a one-off clash with Ireland and five ODIs against the Proteas. Watch all of Starc's 24 wickets v Sri Lanka Squads for those subsequent series are still to be announced. While Marsh was unable to find the breakthrough score that has so far eluded him in the game's longest format, Steve Smith (247 runs) was the only Australian to score more runs this series than the powerful allrounder, who finished level with David Warner on 163. With the ball, Marsh's seamers were only called upon for 35 overs throughout the three-Test campaign for the reward of just two wickets as Australia relied on the frontline bowlers to do the bulk of the work. Quick Single: By the numbers - how the Aussies stack up The chance to rest and recuperate may be just what the 24-year-old needs ahead of a packed summer schedule featuring Commonwealth Bank Test series against South Africa and Pakistan, a pair of Chappell-Hadlee series with New Zealand both home and away, as well as a Victoria Bitter ODI campaign against Pakistan. From there, it's on to the biggest challenge Australia will face in the foreseeable future; a gruelling four-Test series in India in February and March. Australia ODI squad: Steve Smith (c), David Warner (vc), George Bailey, Nathan Coulter-Nile, James Faulkner, Aaron Finch, Josh Hazlewood, Travis Head, Moises Henriques, Usman Khawaja, Nathan Lyon, Shaun Marsh, Mitchell Starc, Matthew Wade, Adam Zampa Sri Lanka ODI squad: TBA First ODI: R. Premadasa Stadium, 21 August at 7pm AEST Second ODI: R. Premadasa Stadium, 24 August at 7pm AEST Third ODI: Rangiri Dambulla Stadium, 28 August at 7pm AEST Fourth ODI: Rangiri Dambulla Stadium, 31 August at 7pm AEST Fifth ODI: Pallekele Stadium, 4 September at 7pm AESTWe got a lot of reactions following our report yesterday on Tesla’s problem with long wait times for repairs and now Tesla President Jon McNeill himself is weighing in on the issue. The executive says that they are “turning their efforts” to improving customers experience when it comes to “accident repairs in body shops” and plan to add a record number of 300 body shops to Tesla’s network in “the next few weeks”. As we reported yesterday, Tesla claimed that the problem with a recent case where it took 8 months for an owner to get his Model S fixed after an accident was mostly due to the body shop and not Tesla. McNeill added to the claim that the body shop is at fault: “The body shop in the OP article did not begin repairs on the car for three months and then ordered more than 90 parts and took over seven months to repair the car. Neither of those are indicators of competence. To top it off, they blamed their performance on Tesla. We know from complaints that the body shop experience needs to get a lot better – and fast.” For our original report yesterday, we reached out to the shop in question and they said that they wanted to reply to Tesla’s claims, but that “it would take a few days”. McNeill added that they found similar issues at other body shops, which could explain similar reports of long wait times. He reiterated that lead time for parts have been improved and now they are working on adding new body shops and eliminating “low performing shops”. Tesla service employees will manage each case at the body shops in order that no other case, like the one we reported yesterday, slip through the cracks: “We are applying brute force to this immediately. We will have individuals on our team personally manage each car on behalf of our customers that are in 3rd party body shops.” The biggest announcement that McNeill made is that they plan to add 300 body shops in just a few weeks. It will be interesting to see if they really can pull that off since it can be quite difficult for a body shop to be certified by Tesla. They need to send technicians to California for weeks of training and they often have to purchase expensive equipment to work with aluminum – something most body shops don’t have though it’s becoming more popular as some automakers have increased the use of the material. Here’s McNeill’s full response about repairs at body shops:CMT ARTISTS OF THE YEAR 8 p.m. on CMT. Country music has expanded and mutated in surprising ways in the last decade: It has leaned jauntily into hip-hop, opened the door for rebellious female songwriters, and swerved back into masculine Strait-and-narrow balladry. But while a new era of “nice guys” rises up the charts, as the critic Jon Caramanica of The New York Times noted last month, the genre’s mainstream center is still held by charming rogues like the ones being celebrated at this performance in Nashville: Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan, Florida Georgia Line, Chris Stapleton and Keith Urban. Because of the deadly attack at Mr. Aldean’s festival appearance in Las Vegas this month, the program’s award presentations will be shelved in favor of additional performances. “It doesn’t feel right to be patting ourselves on the back that night like we would normally do,” Margaret Comeaux, the show’s executive producer, said in an interview. DEBATE NIGHT WITH TED CRUZ AND BERNIE SANDERS 9 p.m. on CNN. The former presidential candidates couldn’t be more different in their political stances, oratorical approaches or hometowns. But they are both forcefully persuasive and more than willing to wade into substantive policy discussions, as seen in their health care debate in February. On Wednesday they will face off on another contentious issue coming before Congress: President Trump’s tax reform plan. Mr. Cruz called Mr. Trump’s plan “encouraging”; Mr. Sanders called it “morally repugnant and bad economic policy.” Sparks and grimaces will fly. (You can also catch Mr. Sanders on Wednesday’s “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” at 11:30 p.m. on CBS.)If Higgs Boson Calculations Are Right, A Catastrophic 'Bubble' Could End Universe Enlarge this image toggle caption AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images For a universe so old and so illustrious, the end may be boring and lightning quick: According to one Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory theoretician, if what we know about the Higgs boson subatomic particle is true, the universe may come to an end when another universe slurps us up at light speed. "If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news," Joseph Lykken said at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on Monday. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself." Here's how he explained his theory to NBC News' Cosmic Log: "He said the parameters for our universe, including the Higgs mass value as well as the mass of another subatomic particle known as the top quark, suggest that we're just at the edge of stability, in a'metastable' state. Physicists have been contemplating such a possibility for more than 30 years. Back in 1982, physicists Michael Turner and Frank Wilczek wrote in Nature that "without warning, a bubble of true vacuum could nucleate somewhere in the universe and move outwards at the speed of light, and before we realized what swept by us our protons would decay away." "Lykken put it slightly differently: 'The universe wants to be in a different state, so eventually to realize that, a little bubble of what you might think of as an alternate universe will appear somewhere, and it will spread out and destroy us.'" According to Discovery News, Lykken said if this happens, it'll happen at light speed, which means if anyone is around to witness it — our solar system will be long gone — they'll be gone before they realize it. Now, all of these calculations use what we know about a subatomic particle discovered by CERN back in July, which scientists said bears the hallmarks of the Higgs boson. As we've explained before, scientists believe the Higgs is the thing that gives other subatomic particles their mass. We won't know more about the Higgs for a while. The New Scientist reports that Large Hadron Collider, where the Higgs-like particle was discovered, has gone into a two-year hiatus. Scientists will make tweaks to the atom-smashing machine and it will reach peak energy in 2015. Update at 6:24 p.m. ET. At Any Moment! Of course, this gets weirder. Two of our very smart readers (j m and Sean McElroy) point out that our universe is billions of light years big. "You wouldn't want to be standing next to a 'bubble of true vacuum,' that would be immediately fatal, but if it's far enough away, you'd have time to, well, fall prey to any of the myriad other types of death," Sean writes. We asked Fermi Lab's Lykken about this observation. He said it was correct. "The bubble forms through an unlikely quantum fluctuation, at a random time and place," Lykken tells us. "So in principle it could happen tomorrow, but then most likely in a very distant galaxy, so we are still safe for billions of years before it gets to us." Our friend Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College, explained back in January that this is the rub with this theory. If true, we should be able to "see" a "neighboring" universe. We won't be able to see the destruction a collision would bring because both the light (image) of it and the destruction itself are moving at light speed. So, could we see a precursor of sorts? Marcelo says that some scientists are working on that. He wrote: "Just as with soap bubbles that vibrate when they collide with one another without popping [emphasis ours], if another universe collided with ours in the distant past, the radiation inside our universe would have vibrated in response to the perturbations caused by the collision. These perturbations would be registered in the cosmic radiation and could, in principle, be observed. Matthew Kleban from New York University and his collaborators, and Anthony Aguirre from the University of California at Santa Cruz and his have been studying what kinds of signals would be left over from these dramatic events. Kleban found a unique signature, concentric rings where the radiation temperature would show a characteristic fluctuation. On top of the rings the radiation itself would be polarized, that is, it would oscillate in tandem in a specific direction of the sky. At least for now, no telltale rings have been found in the cosmic radiation, although the European satellite Planck promises to deliver more accurate polarization data that may shed light on the issue." Phew! Perhaps, all of this can be summed up by a scene from Annie Hall, when a young Alvy discovers the universe is expanding and he is paralyzed. YouTube Alvy's mom says "You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!" Alvy's doctor says: "It won't be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we've gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we're here!"Would You Sign This Contract? Note: This piece is another 15-minute read, I'm afraid. But, by the end of it, you should begin to understand just how devious and dishonest is the domestic violence industry when it proclaims that women are the main victims of domestic violence. The evidence is absolutely clear that men make up the vast majority of domestic violence victims and, further, that the women who nowadays report domestic violence to the police are mostly the aggressors, not the victims. Furthermore, as a husband or a partner, you might well believe that you are in an 'equitable' relationship with your wife or your partner. but you would be very mistaken in this belief. If she wants you out - out of the house, out of the children's lives and out of the way - then out you will go. Would You Sign This Contract? "Your employer can, at any time, dismiss you, without justification, and he can have you imprisoned if you object too strongly to your dismissal. For example, if you raise your voice in anger at the way in which you are being treated, your employer may have you arrested for 'violence'. In any event, your employer can dismiss you regardless of the circumstances, and at his sole discretion. "Your employer can fire you from your job whenever he wishes, no matter how long you have served his company, and even if you have done absolutely nothing wrong. Further, your employer can insist that you are evicted from your own home, and never allowed to re-enter it. " Your employer may further demand that you must, under threat of imprisonment, forfeit part of any future income to your employer for some considerable time into the future." How many incidents of violence against employers would take place annually if these were the terms and conditions that were set for all employees? An enormous number, one would imagine. Now read this. It's the Lovers Contract. "A woman can, at any time, dismiss her male partner, without justification, and have that partner imprisoned if he objects too strongly to his dismissal. For example, if he raises his voice in anger he may be arrested for 'domestic violence'. In any event, a woman can dismiss the man regardless of the circumstances, and at her sole discretion. " She can fire him from his jobs as father and partner, whenever she wishes, no matter how long he has served the family, and even if he has done absolutely nothing wrong. " Further, the woman can insist that the man is evicted from his own house, and never allowed to re-enter it. If she has children, a woman may further demand that her sacked partner must, under threat of imprisonment, forfeit part of any future income to the woman and her children for some considerable time into the future - and, in some instances, this is the case even if her children turn out not to be his." How many incidents of DOMESTIC violence against women would take place annually if these were the terms and conditions that were set for all their male partners? An enormous number, one would imagine. But, here in the West, they are the terms and conditions for their male partners! Is it really surprising to find, therefore, that the incidence of 'domestic violence' against women has hardly decreased in 20 years? I say 'hardly decreased', but no-one actually knows the true figures for domestic violence. The official figures are virtually meaningless in that they derive mostly from incidents that would paint us all as 'domestically violent'. domestic violence is now largely defined by the woman's attitude to whatever she claims to be experiencing at the time The legal reality, however, is that domestic violence is now largely defined by the woman's attitude to whatever she claims to be experiencing at the time. And the problem with this - apart from the sheer unfairness of it all from the point of view of the man - is that her attitude is not something that is objectively definable, and neither is it 'fixed' - in the sense that a woman's attitudes can change and fluctuate almost as much as the wind. Indeed, in the USA, some 20 million women experience clinically severe emotional disturbances every single month through PMS, and about 5 million have significant personality disorders. And sometimes, of course, a woman's real attitude isn't even 'observable' - such as when she's exaggerating, lying, or 'confused', perhaps through drink, drugs, medicines. Nevertheless, the number of body bags arising from domestic violence incidents, while not directly indicating the exact number of domestic violence incidents themselves, must surely reflect quite reasonably whether domestic violence is on the rise, or whether it is on the wane. As such, the number of intimate partner homicides can give us a good insight into the patterns and incidence of domestic violence. This number can certainly be calculated objectively, and a woman's attitude - about whether or not an act of domestic violence has actually taken place - becomes something of a trivial irrelevance when the victim is actually dead. Now, as a result mostly of feminist propaganda, prejudice and, quite frankly, perjury, about domestic violence for the past three decades, many countries have created increasingly draconian laws which have disempowered the male gender when it comes to their relationships - in fact, just as described in the Lovers Contract outlined above. But have these draconian laws worked? After all, billions upon billions of dollars have been spent annually on implementing them. If they have worked, then the number of female body bags filled by acts of male domestic violence should have decreased over this period. In fact, however, they have not. Well, not by much. What has decreased significantly is the number of male homicide victims of domestic violence. According to the figures from the US Justice
of M. S. Randhawa’s classic book Kangra Paintings on Gita Govinda, first published by the National Museum in 1963, reprinted as recently as 2010, and still on sale at the museum. Randhawa describes this painting under the heading “Love Play of Radha and Krishna” and informs the reader that it is based on an ashtapadi from Canto XII of the Gita Govinda. Its translation, given by Randhawa, is as follows: “Radha, preparing to array herself, before the company of the gopis could see her confusion, spoke thus with exultation to her obsequious lover: “Paint, O Krishna, with fingers cooler than sandal-wood, leaves and flowers with musk on his breast, which resembles a vase of consecrated water, crowned with fresh leaves, and fixed near a vernal bower, to propitiate the God of Love.” A second painting (top of the page) is also based on an ashtapadi from Canto XII. Randhawa describes it in the following words: “In the morning she rose disarrayed, her eyes betrayed a night without slumber; her bosom had nail-marks, her lips were crimson from a rain of kisses, her hair was disarranged, her sari and her girdle had slipped….The yellow-robed God, who gazed on her with joy, thus meditated on her charms in his heavenly mind: “Though her tress-knot is loosened, her cheeks perspiring, the lustre of her lips faded, her necklace of pearls dimmed in beauty by her jar-shaped breasts, and though she hides their place with her hands, looking towards me with modesty, yet even thus disarrayed, she fills me with ecstatic delight.” Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda is full of erotic description of love scenes between Radha and Krishna. Not only this, there are amorous descriptions of Krishna’s frolicking with many gopis at the same time. Shlisyati kamapi chumbati kamapi, kapi ramayati ramam |Pashyati sasmita-charutaramaparamanugacchati vamam— (Radhe, haririha mugdha-vadhu-nikare) || Jayadeva describes the delightful dance of love of Krishna with all the gopis in the dark forest of Vrindavan. All the gopis surround him, embracing him with joy, and caress him passionately. He in turn praises them, hugging one, kissing another passionately, glancing at another and smiling at other maidens in love. In the Ashtam Sarg or Canto VII of Kumarsambhavam, Kalidasa offers graphic descriptions of sexual play between Shiva and Parvati in the course of which Shiva makes Parvati drink liquor too. Even our two epics – the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – do not display any squeamishness regarding sex. However, it is too much to expect that those who have formed violent Hindutva vigilante groups would be familiar with our ancient religious, literary and artistic traditions. When Europe experienced the Renaissance, great works of art were created that drew inspiration from Greek heritage. The Vatican was adorned with nude statues and frescos and so were prominent cities of Italy. However, when the Protestant Reformation took place, censorious tendencies took over and fig leaves were attached to nudes and frescos were clothed. Does the same fate await our temples of Khajuraho and Konark? Will Hindutva erase the eclectic, liberal and uninhibited legacy of Hinduism? Only time will tell. Kuldeep Kumar is a senior journalist who writes on politics and culture.Soon, you will have the opportunity to vote for your favourite Halloweek art! So be around for the following ones, too Have a very nice Halloween day! Zieg' I try to continue my Halloweek Project on a good rythme, despite what happened to Mimiko yesterday. Don't worry, she is fine now and even though she is still in pain, she is already feeling a lot better.For this eleventh art of the Halloweek, i introduce you to's zoona, a red fox, disguised in the Gambler, an Irish demon who hides under the guise of a sailor to play gambling games in the port's bars. Once he has dispossessed his victims of all their property, he offers them to recover everything in exchange for their souls. Of course, the Gambler always wins in the end...Switzerland's reputation as a secretive tax haven looks set to end following the introduction of rules over sharing bank account data. The International Convention on the Automatic Exchange of Banking Information (AEOI) entered into force on January 1, pulling Switzerland in to line with international standards on taxation. The convention, developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the global financial industry, states that financial information on Swiss bank accounts held by citizens of certain countries will in future be shared annually and on an automatic basis. In the past, Switzerland would only provide banking information if requested by a limited number of countries and even then, full co-operation was not guaranteed. The regime came under international pressure in 2008 after the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) probed a multi-billion dollar tax evasion case involving the Swiss bank, UBS. According to the Swiss State Secretariat for International Financial Matters, Switzerland will now start collecting data on 1 January 2017 and exchange it for the first time in 2018.Early on Monday morning, a convoy of Al-Nusra Front (Jabhat Al-Nusra) fighters was traveling from the ‘Arsal District in Lebanon to the Syrian village of ‘Assal Al-Ward in the Qalamoun Mountains, attempting to resupply and reinforce their comrades combatting the National Defense Forces (NDF) and Hezbollah (Party of God) in this area. NDF scouts identified a convoy of militants from the Al-Nusra Front making their way to ‘Assal Al-Ward during a reconnaissance mission near the Lebanese border. As a result, a joint force of Hezbollah and NDF fighters prepared an ambush on the road leading to ‘Assad Al-Ward around 7 A.M. on Monday; this surprise attack led to the death of over 30 militants from the Al-Nusra Front. The Al-Nusra Front suffered significant casualties as a result of this attack in the Qalamoun Mountains, including a number of senior members that were traveling with this convoy. Among the dead senior members of the Al-Nusra Front killed in the ambush was the field command “Mohammad Khalouf” – he was identified as key figure of the Al-Nusra Front’s operations in the Qalamoun Mountains. Khalouf led the failed counter-attack on Hezbollah fighters at Faleeta and Rankous in early October 2014. Advertisementsdesigned by frits van dongen, the gangnam A5 housing block in seoul has won the prestigious korean architecture award (KAA) in the category of collective housing. the building complex — located in seoul’s infamously affluent gangnam district — offers affordable public housing for low income families. the neighborhood represents a combination of dutch housing traditions presented in a korean context, and is therefore unique for korean standards in residential architecture. the neighborhood, designed by architect frits van dongen, is unique for korean standards in residential architecture based on the topography of the landscape of the site, the urban plan is a combination of public roads, private courtyards and a new typology called ‘tower block hybrids’. the typology serves multiple additional functions which include: creating a clear distinction between public and private outdoor space, generating a sense of community between those who share the inner court, and gently influencing behavior by clearly establishing the formal nature of the street and intimate nature of the inner courtyards. van dongen-koschuch architects and planners assembled the collective courtyards in an inter-connected car free zone, enabling a living environment that stimulates informal encounters between residents. the tower-block hybrids are positioned in such a way that sunlight can penetrate deep into the courtyards, providing privileged views of the surrounding landscape. the urban plan is a combination of public roads, private courtyards and a new typololgy called ‘tower block hybrids’ despite its peripheral location, the korean architecture award winning design has proved a success by illustrating the complex’s close connections to the city while also existing as a self-sufficient community. the development comprises 1,363 apartments, 1,600 parking spaces and a local community center. with a total floor area of 180,000 m2, the buildings are arranged into five distinct blocks. the towers are defined by their pitched, sloping roofs that ascend and descend in a rough circle, creating a vaulted rollercoaster effect. sunlight can penetrate deep into the courtyards the towers are arranged into five distinct blocks the design has proved a success by demonstrating close connections to the city while also existing self-sufficiently the plan is based on the topography of the surrounding landscape masterplan of the site floorplans for block D elevations for block D concept diagrams for the site urban sections project info: client: korea land & housing corporation (lh group) architect: frits van dongen (van dongen-koschuch architects and planners), at that time as partner of architektencie, amsterdam. project team: jan-willem baijense, rui duarte, laura mezquita gonzalez, sasha hendry, nam dong ho, andrea sooyoun kim, patrick koschuch, jason lee, eunsong park, mathew winter local partners: hyundai engineering & construction co. ltd, sunjin engineering & architecture designboom has received this project from our ‘DIY submissions‘ feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here. edited by: peter corboy | designboomFor years, leaders in the Alaska Native community have tried to negotiate with the U.S. Department of Agriculture for permission to serve traditional foods to those who need them most. Now a bill from U.S. Sen. Mark Begich aims to eliminate the red tape involved with serving traditional foods in programs in Alaska and across the nation. "The Traditional Foods Nourishment Act of 2013" would make it easier to serve Alaska Native foods in facilities like hospitals, schools, childcare and eldercare facilities. While some Native foods are already served in parts of Alaska -- several school districts have popular fish-to-school programs -- it's been a struggle to incorporate more traditional foods in programs. In some instances, particularly in the healthcare sector, serving traditional foods is more than just a taste issue -- it's a healing issue. "It makes so much sense it hurts," said Dr. Ted Mala, former commissioner for the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services and director of traditional healing at the Alaska Native Medical Center. "Native elders have told us, 'We need our own food,'" he said. "For compassion alone, they should be doing this." Traditional foods, untraditional challenges Traditional foods are so common in Alaska it almost seems unfathomable there would be challenges in serving them. Salmon, halibut, moose and crab are common at dinner tables across the state in both urban and rural areas. Fish-to-school programs are gaining traction in fishing communities from Dillingham to Sitka. Barley and locally grown vegetables are showing up on school lunch menus, thanks to a successful state farm-to-schools program. In Tok, students can even find bison on the menu. Aside from the economic benefits of serving local food, studies show it's healthier, too. Traditional foods can help in the healing process as well. Jeannette Lawson, general manager for dietary food service at the Alaska Native Medical Center, said familiar foods can be huge comfort for people in the uncomfortable setting of a hospital far from home. Instead of craving chicken soup when sick, some crave caribou stew. "If you're raised on it, it can be very healing," she said. Lawson said the hospital, which provides comprehensive health care to Alaska Native and American Indians in Alaska, already serves a variety of traditional foods. Cod, smoked salmon, Pilot Bread and fry bread all make appearances on the plates of patients. It's a good start, but Lawson said there's still plenty more the hospital wishes it could serve. The hang-up? All food served must go through a USDA processing facility. Begich's bill, which was introduced last month, would grant the Secretary of Agriculture the authority to approve traditional foods that are allowable for donation, preparation and consumption in public facilities, as long as certain safety requirements are met. Melissa Chulpach, dietitian for the Native Medical Center, said the two most requested items from patients are muktuk (generally bowhead whale skin with carefully trimmed portions of blubber) and seal oil. Those would still be off the menu if the bill went through because the processing (muktuk is served raw, seal oil is fermented) cannot be completely monitored. Since the hospital deals with immune-compromised individuals, it's not something that could safely be served. State law, while fairly open to traditional foods, does have some limitations. For example, walrus, bear and fox can't be served in public facilities due to concerns over trichinosis. Fermented foods -- think "stinkheads," fermented fish heads or seal flipper -- would also be off the menu. But things that could be served include moose, caribou, beaver or other game. Currently, wild game can be donated (it can't be sold under state law), but Lawson said processors are often hesitant to deal with the meat for fear of USDA sanctions. "This bill will help clarify and crystalize that this is an acceptable process," Lawson said. Limited availability There are still plenty of other challenges to serving traditional foods across the state. While serving wild game might be easy to do in small school or childcare programs, the larger the program the bigger the challenge, said Jo Dawson, child nutrition administrator for the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development. "If there was commercial availability, more schools would do it," she said. "But the issue is finding it." At the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp. in Bethel, chief executive Gene Petula said getting enough of certain traditional foods, like berries, could be a challenge, especially when trying to serve a large group of people. The corporation, which runs the hospital in the rural Western Alaska hub town, already serves fish, thanks to easy access from a local food processor. Occassionally, reindeer is also on the menu. The menu is "limited to what we can get commercially," he said. He did note that a regional inhalant treatment center has found success in having its patient participate in subsistence hunting as part of the healing process. They're allowed to process the game onsite into jerky and summer sausage, Petula said. Local seafood processors have donated 1,000 pounds of coho salmon each year to schools in Sitka, including the state-run Mt. Edgecumbe High School that boards many students from Alaska villages, said Andrew Thoms, executive director of the Sitka Conservation Society. The school program even includes lesson plans on the importance of fish in the coastal community and a "We Love Our Fishermen" Valentine's Day salmon lunch. But Thoms noted that the cost of the commodity -- the fish -- is high. Even with incentives from the state, long-term it may not be financially sustainable for the local processors to keep up with donations. Thoms isn't sure what the answer is, but having lawmakers like Begich take on the food issue and chip away at road blocks is a start. Danny Consenstein, state executive director of the Alaska Farm Service Agency, agrees with that sentiment. While Begich's bill might make only small changes to food policy, it's part of a growing conversation about where Alaskans, and Americans, get their food. Consenstein, who is also a member of the Alaska Food Policy Council, said that in 1955, about half of Alaska's food came from outside the state. Now that number is up to 95 percent. "Alaskans like to think of themselves as reliant, but I think a lot would stare at that number and think we're not that self-reliant," he said.Security researchers have this week been getting themselves het up about a new malware threat to both iOS and OS X. WireLurker appears to be emanating out of Chinese file exchange sites and, at least at the moment, looks fairly limited in both its spread and its damage (update: Business Insider is reporting that Apple has blocked WireLurker-infected apps from launching). However, researchers at Paolo Alto Networks are pointing out that what makes WireLurker particularly worrying is that the malware exploits weaknesses in Apple’s software that could, they claim, be easily be used for far more dangerous threats. You can easily scan for the malware threat with my free app FastTasks 2 (v 1.53 or later). If you don’t see the warning as in the screenshot above or any results in the Analyser ‘Issues’ pane, you’re clean of any of the currently known files associated with WireLurker. If you do see the warning, locate the infectious files from the Analyser pane and delete (OS X will demand your Admin password to remove some of them), then restart your mac. 🙂Scientists have given the world fair warning: Climate change could -- and likely will -- result in a catastrophic rise in global sea levels. As you'll see in the video below, that could affect more than 100 million people in the U.S. For some coastal cities in the U.S. -- notably New Orleans, Miami and Boston -- it may be too late to reverse the damage that's already been done. Others could still be saved if we take swift action to reduce carbon emissions. Climate Central Ben Strauss, vice president for sea level and climate impacts at Climate Central, told Agence France-Presse last month that if we don't cut back on burning fossil fuels between now and 2100, the planet will likely face sea level rise between 14 and 32 feet. The only uncertainty is how quickly that would happen. "Some of this could happen as early as next century," Strauss told Agence France-Presse. "But it might also take many centuries." For a look at how sea level rise could affect cities around the U.S., visit Climate Central's interactive online tool. More on this topic: Also on HuffPost:Washington (CNN) The US Army will conduct a court-martial hearing in the desertion case of Bowe Bergdahl, who is expected to enter a plea before the court. The court-martial will take place in a Fort Bragg courtroom on Monday, according to a media advisory from the US Army Forces Command. Bergdahl is charged with desertion and endangering fellow soldiers after he disappeared from his base in Afghanistan in June 2009 and was held in captivity by the Taliban until May 2014. He was released by the Taliban in a prisoner swap for five detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Former President Barack Obama did not grant Bergdahl's request for a pardon before leaving office despite commuting 330 sentences just 24 hours ahead of transferring power to President Donald Trump. Read MorePhoto courtesy Gazettenet.com Jill Griffin, Western Mass’ top medical marijuana gatekeeper, is getting out of the game. On Aug. 1, Griffin posted an open letter to her patients and the Valley saying that she will no longer recommend medical marijuana to new or existing patients after Aug. 31. Her decision was driven largely by what she called “hostility toward cannabinopathic medicine from government regulators and the medical establishment.” In June, two Massachusetts doctors had their licenses suspended for over-recommending marijuana to patients the state says did not have an “established” relationship with the physicians. “Several colleagues now face disciplinary action arising out of their practice in this field,” she wrote. “Although I know, as a matter of my experience and training, that I have done nothing wrong in caring for you, the risk of losing my medical license is a peril I can no longer endure.” Griffin did not return phone messages left at her office seeking comment. On the voicemail at her office, Griffin said she may reconsider her decision following the outcome of the ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana in November. Griffin is one of only 13 doctors in western Massachusetts who provide the bulk of annual certifications needed by patients to purchase medical marijuana. Griffin has 3,284 active certifications – over half of the 6,270 provided by doctors in the region, according to state records. And those in the medical marijuana industry expect that over 16,000 people in western Massachusetts will eventually seek access to medical marijuana, raising questions about whether enough local doctors will be able to meet that need. Those in the industry say there’s a strong demand for doctors willing to offer the drug to patients, since an overwhelming majority of physicians have declined to get involved. Of Massachusetts’ nearly 36,000 active registered physicians, 155 have completed the certification process needed to provide medical marijuana certificates, according to state data. “There are many, many people with chronic pain, undergoing chemotherapy, those who have seizures, and myriad other debilitating conditions, and medical marijuana helps them,” said Canna Care in a statement to the Advocate. “That was the intent of the law and the early indications are that it is working.” Despite the small pool of certification providers, Northampton-based medical marijuana consultant Ezra Parzybok said he hasn’t heard of prospective patients having trouble gaining access to the drug. “I personally haven’t heard about patients facing a long wait list,” he said. But Hadley psychiatrist Dr. Bruce I. Goderez called the lack of willing physician-certifiers “a big problem.” “Very few people are doing it. Dr. Griffin does what she can, but she’s maxed out,” Goderez said. “It’s available, but now people can’t get access.” While many patient certifications are provided by doctors at dedicated medical marijuana practices such as Griffin’s Locust Street office, Goderez is among the small group of local physicians who have embraced cannabis as an option to treat their existing patients’ ailments. In order to provide marijuana access to patients in Massachusetts, doctors are required to complete a course about the proper use of the drug, including side effects, dosage, substance abuse recognition and treatment related to cannabis. They are then required to register with the state. “I got the certification just so I have another tool that I can use to deal with my ongoing patients,” Goderez said. “I already know them, I know their situation.” Goderez has 24 active certifications. Doctors avoid getting involved in the world of medical marijuana for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s what Goderez calls a “moralistic attitude,” one that centers around historic thought of marijuana as a drug of abuse and the fact that it remains a Schedule I drug – the federal government recognizes no legitimate medical use for it. That category is shared by heroin and LSD. Another problem is the lack of education for physicians about the legitimate uses of marijuana for treatment of medical conditions, said Dr. James Gessner, president of Massachusetts Medical Society. The reason why there’s no wide spread and popular use [of recommending medical marijuana] among physicians because the data is not there,” Gessner said. “Physicians would welcome it — if the studies were good and people didn’t have to smoke it, if they could have it in a pill, I can guarantee physicians are interested in taking care of pain and chronic pain, but there’s nothing to guide us. We really need that. Doctors like working with facts.” Parzybok said that Griffin is highly respected in the local medical community and particularly knowledgeable about the intricacies of cannabis-based treatment. That reputation provides comfort to many patients wary about walking into an unfamiliar doctor’s office, he said. “There are many patients who are terrified about medical marijuana,” he said. “They don’t understand how to use it, or they want to go to a doctor they trust.” That includes patient-to-patient ones, especially among older people who are unschooled in marijuana. They feel comfortable going to Griffin given her reputation for thoroughness, he said. Griffin’s existing patients and reputation provided her with a large base of medical marijuana patients, Cutler said. “A number of practices in the Valley prohibit doctors from certifying patients,” he said. “She has an outstanding reputation with those doctors as a very competent diagnostician and care-provider – she has a huge referral base of existing doctors in the Valley.” Two of the largest health care providers in the region, Baystate Health and Cooley Dickinson Hospital, have differing approaches to medical marijuana. Cooley Dickinson has no specific policy regarding cannabis treatment, according to spokeswoman Julia Sorensen. “Our approach is that we want physicians to practice in areas they feel comfortable with,” she said. “Some providers have moved ahead and started prescribing it and others have elected not to,” Sorensen said. Baystate leaders have decided it’s best for that system’s doctors to steer clear of marijuana for now, according to spokesman Brendan Monahan. “They didn’t feel it was appropriate for them to move forward with this as a routine means of treatment,” he said. Some areas of the Baystate system have stringent policies against offering certification, while others have more informal rules. While the vast majority of Baystate physicians do not offer medical marijuana, Monahan said, that doesn’t suggest that none of its doctors have provided certifications. “Because it has not been federally regulated, there has been no adoption of certifying across our health system,” he said. “We are constantly talking about it and looking at evidence and research.” Griffin is the top provider of medical marijuana certifications in the state. The doctors with the second and third greatest number of active certifications, Dr. John C. Nadolny and Dr. Tyrone S. Cushing, had their medical licenses suspended by the state earlier this summer for allegedly improperly certifying that thousands of patients were eligible to receive medical marijuana, according to the Boston Globe. Cushing worked at CannaMed, a medical marijuana practice with an office in Framingham. Nadolny was medical director of Canna Care Docs, which has eight offices in Massachusetts. According to the state’s medical marijuana law approved by voters in 2008, patients must have a “debilitating condition” to qualify for certification. What exactly counts as debilitating can range from AIDS to insomnia and is at the discretion of the certifying physician. Department of Public Health data shows that 78 physicians across the state and 13 in western Massachusetts had seven or more active medical marijuana patient certifications as of June 3. Those numbers do not include doctors who have provided fewer than seven certifications in order to protect patient privacy, according to DPH spokesman Scott Zoback. The number of physicians registered to offer certification totals 155 as of June 30, according to Zoback. Dr. David Getz, of Springfield’s MariMed Consults, is the second greatest provider in the region with 1,351 active certifications. He’s followed by Dr. Kwesi Ntiforo, who operates DocsConsult Medical offices in Greenfield and Longmeadow. Other top providers in the region include Dr. Mario Addabbo and Dr. Lydia Kapell, who work in the Canna Care Docs Northampton office in the Potpourri Plaza on King Street. The office opened in January after the company noticed some of its patients were coming from the Valley to its Worcester office. “There was a tremendous demand in the Pioneer Valley,” said Marta Downing, Canna Care’s chief operating officer. Canna Care started offering appointments two days per week and recently added another day, Downing said. “It’s been a very steady increase,” she said. “I expect by the end of the summer we’ll be at five days per week.” The remaining seven doctors, including Goderez, have a total 307 active certifications. They all work in either private or group practices. It’s a common benchmark in the medical marijuana industry that 2 percent of a state’s population will seek the drug as medicine, Downing said. That would mean that over 135,000 of Massachusetts’ 6.79 million residents will become medical marijuana patients. There are now over 31,000 active marijuana certifications. Like Parzybok, officials at Northampton dispensary New England Treatment Access say educating physicians about medical marijuana will be key in ensuring access to certifications. “As an industry I think our goal in the near-term is to educate providers that this is legal, this is a real option and there’s a safe way to recommend and to use medical cannabis,” said Norton Arbelaez, NETA’s standards and practices consultant. Part of that includes reaching out to large medical organizations such as Partners HealthCare and other institutions, some of which prohibit their doctors from recommending marijuana, he said. Goderez said he views marijuana just like any other drug – one that has potential downsides and potential benefits – an attitude he thinks more doctors ought to have. “I’ve seen many patients who it’s made a huge difference for them. It just seems like a reasonable thing to do,” he said. “I see no solution to the supply-demand problem until more doctors are just willing to do it for their own patients.” He also said the state Legislature could act to allow advanced practice registered nurses and physicians assistants to provide certifications. Parzybok is looking to the results of a November ballot referendum that will decide whether to legalize recreational marijuana. Such a decision could drastically change the way that cannabis is provided as medicine, he said. “I’m interested in opening a very health-focused dispensary. One that can really serve patients as opposed to just churning out as much cannabis (for recreational use) as possible,” he said. “Someone like Jill Griffin, who’s familiar with the science of cannabis and not afraid to back up her knowledge with advocacy, could work a couple hours per week at this dispensary or come to a clinic and give a lecture.” Kristin Palpini can be reached at editor@valleyadvocate.com. Chris Lindahl can be reached at clindahl@gazettenet.com. Related PostsMe and my boyfriend have been together for 5 years now. We have this 5th anniversary on Tuesday and we’ve been thinking, how are we going to celebrate that day. We don’t buy any gifts for each other, but we’ll do something fun together instead. We haven’t made any plans yet, but the day is Tuesday and my boyfriend has to go to work, so it can’t be that big of a thing. But it’s definately going to be something special. So because I’m thinking that thing anyway, I want to share my ideas, even the crazy ones, with you babes. Hopefully this post gives you some ideas for a date or anniversary. Go to a spa. Swim on the pools and take some nice, relaxing treatments. Afterwards go for a dinner and if there is a hotel, spend a night there. Cook something special at your home. Maybe something that takes a little bit longer to make. Cook together and when the food is ready, turn the lights off, burn some candles, play romantic music, drink champange and enjoy the food and each other. Have brunch together. This is actually so much fun. Go to your favrite cafe and have a looooooong breakfast with fruits, muffins, croissants and cappucino. Yummy! You can also prepare bunch at your home. Go to a theme park. Ride rollercoaster, scream and laugh together. Eat some cotton candy. We did this with my boyfriend this summer and it was really fun and a little bit different than just dinner and movie. I can really recommend that. Striptease, striptease, striptease. Do I have to say more? But yeah practise some private show for your partner. Don’t be ashamed, I’m quite sure that he won’t laugh at you. You don’t have to be a dancer or a stripper to do this. Just practice couple of moves, add some music, heels and right attitude and you are ready. But remember to choose the right time. Don’t wait him from work on your underwear, because there is always a risk that he is coming home with his friends. And that could be awkward 😀 Do the tandem bungee jump. The adrenalin rush is incredible and it’s even better when you can share it with someone special. Have a picnic in the park. Everything tastes better outside. Put some Food, strawberries, wine and love on your bag and you’re ready to go. My favorite place to have a picnic is the arboretum of my city. It’s so beautiful in the summer. Travel together. We are trying to do this at least once a year. We go for a long weekend or even for a whole week somewhere and discover new places together. Travelling is one of the best things to do in life and it’s even better when you have someone with who you can share this adventure. Last year we where in Iceland and now I’m dreaming about Morocco. Spend the whole day together in bed. Eat some strawberries and whip cream. This doesn’t need explaining. It’s just sexy. If you normally like to go to movies, this time go to theatre, ballet, art gallery or opera instead. I’m not the biggest fan of movies, but I definately enjoy theatre and all those things above. You can have a dinner together before or after the show. It’s traditional, but a little bit different. I am dreaming about some nice autumn picnic with warm and cozy blankets, some wine, delicious food and just you and me there. Or maybe a romantic evening at the ballet or treatments at the spa… I can’t decide! But let’s see what will happend 🙂Forget Big Sean, New Jersey rapper Fetty Wap must be really feeling blessed after becoming the first rapper since Lil Wayne to land two concurrent top-10 singles on the Billboard charts. As if that wasn't enough, he's now getting Royal treatment from one of baseball's best teams. According to Kansas City Star writer Andy McCullough, Royals players are randomly slipping the numbers 1738 -- one of the opening lyrics to Fetty's smash hit "Trap Queen" -- in interviews, with punitive action taken against those who fail to comply. KC players are fining each other if they don't use "1738" in postgame interviews. I have no idea what it means. Success has driven them mad. — Andy McCullough (@McCulloughStar) July 29, 2015 Here's a quick offering of how players have used the line in the songs, courtesy of the Star: Mike Moustakas on a slick defensive play by Eric Hosmer: "Hoz picks that thing 17 out of 38 times." Cain on Trevor Bauer of the Indians: "He was like a 17-38 to the plate." Royals center fielder Lorenzo Cain, one of the more creative 1738 droppers and believed to be the originator of the challenge (see below), has adopted "Trap Queen" as his walk-up song, further demonstrating the team's affinity for the catchy song. And there was also this astute observation from a Royals fans: In a sport that reveres numbers, the Royals are raising the stakes and mystifying the media in the process, which begs the question: What will reporters do if manager Ned Yost continues the Fetty love by starting his pressers with "I'm like, 'Hey, what's up hello'"?Predators goaltender Pekka Rinne made 28 saves in a 5-1 win against the Avalanche on Tuesday. (Photo: David Zalubowski / AP) GLENDALE, Ariz. — The victorious Predators filed off their bench at Pepsi Center on Tuesday and streamed toward Pekka Rinne, lining up to exchange the customary congratulatory head bumps with their goaltender. As much as the Predators collectively needed Tuesday’s 5-1 win against the Avalanche, so did Rinne, whose start to the season hasn’t quieted a growing number of critics. Despite his strong, 28-save outing in Colorado, Rinne's numbers this season — a 2-4-1 record, 2.89 goals-against average and.914 save percentage — aren't sparkling. "It's a team sport, but inside a team sport, it's an individual position," said Rinne, who turns 34 on Thursday. "Every single goal you give up matters and it shows in your statistics, so it's easy to look at those statistics and let that show you how you're playing.... I've learned not to look at those numbers. Eventually, if you keep doing the right thing, playing well and working hard, those things are going to take care of (themselves)." Goaltending historically has been Nashville's one constant, but it's now perceived as the team's biggest weakness with Rinne's game having slipped, according to national media and analysts. Such criticism reached its height last season, when Rinne had the worst save percentage among the NHL's workhorse goaltenders (at least 60 starts). He was receiving the workload of an elite goaltender, but not playing like one. Rinne's season to date, much like the team's as a whole, has been inconsistent. He allowed at least three goals in each of the first three games of the Predators' five-game road trip, which ends Thursday against the Coyotes. When hotshot prospect Juuse Saros dazzled in place of Rinne, who was sidelined by illness, in a victory against the Penguins on Oct. 22, a vocal portion of the fan base called for the Predators' succession plan in goal to be sped up. RELATED "Pekka's not escaping criticism, either," Predators general manager David Poile said while discussing the team's overall start. "We need and he needs to be part of the solution to get us out of this. Higher save percentage, the save at the right time. Do I think he's playing good? Yes, I do. Do I think he can play better? We need him to play better, just like the same thing I'd say with the forwards and defensemen. Everybody's got to take their game up a notch." Rinne did that against the Avalanche, allowing a goal on Colorado's fourth shot before stopping the next 25. It was a reminder of what he's still capable of. "Sometimes it's hard because the results dictate so much how you feel and how you feel about yourself, how you feel about your game," Rinne said. "To me, that's the biggest thing, wins and losses. But at the same time, you try to be honest with yourself and be able to look at yourself in the mirror. NEWSLETTERS Get the Sports newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Top and trending sports headlines you need to know for your busy day. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-342-8237. Delivery: Daily Invalid email address Thank you! You're
Platform government that it replaced, that’s because both reflect the majority views of Poland’s political elites. But other views do exist, including a minority opinion that NATO compromises Polish sovereignty and that good relations with Russia, as well as with the E.U., are in the country’s interests. A new twist, however, is how the new government has gone to greater lengths to suppress dissent. Mateusz Piskorski, an outstanding spokesman of the minority view and founder of the Zmiana (or Change) party, was arrested last week in Warsaw on unspecified espionage charges. While that bald fact was picked up by Western media, little or nothing has been written about the context of the arrest, namely its connection with the forthcoming NATO summit in Poland in July. Still less has been said about how the expanding U.S. influence – with Poland eagerly enlisting in the cause of the new Cold War – is putting Polish freedoms in jeopardy. During a visit to the European Parliament on May 30 to participate in a closed conference, Zmiana National Board Member Janusz Niedzwiecki cast light on these chilling developments in a speech, which I cite in full below: Poland’s Political Repression and Militarization By Janusz Niedzwiecki, National Board Member, International Cooperation, Zmiana I would like to begin by quoting a famous poem written by Pastor Martin Niemöller, the German anti-Nazi theologian: “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” Although it might seem overstated, the situation described in Niemoller’s poem is beginning to take shape in Poland. A country which was considered for many years as a symbol of the fight against totalitarianism and pioneer of democratic reforms in Central and Eastern Europe is today quickly being transformed into a tyrannical satrapy where civil liberties are curtailed and repression is applied to people with different ideological views than the prevailing political narrative. On the morning of May 18, 2016, officers of the Polish Internal Security Agency (ABW) searched apartments of members of the national leadership of the Zmiana (Change) Party, demanding that they hand over hard-disks, memory sticks, documents etc. The search took place in three different cities at the same time, and in some cases (as in our Warsaw office) with a serious violation of legal procedures. Besides seizing computers, telephones and hard drives, ABW officers took all our books, leaflets, posters, the sound system we used during a demonstration, banners our party flags and even Polish national flags – to prevent and complicate any political actions and protests in the future. Some members of our party who did not want to participate in the unlawful activities of the Internal Security Agency were intimidated. This type of action is an obvious form of a political repression against those who hold different visions of Poland’s foreign, domestic and socio-economic policies than those of the Polish neoconservative and pro-NATO authorities. Arrest of an Anti-NATO Dissident The leader of Zmiana, Mateusz Piskorski, affiliated organizations and independent groups were acting in conformity with Polish law in spite of harassment from state institutions, such as prolonged registration procedures of the party. The action of the ABW was a significant breach of law and order which is not acceptable in a democratic state that declares respect for the freedom of speech. Mateusz Piskorski is one of the most important anti-NATO activists in Poland, a political expert and a co-founder of the Polish think-tank, the European Center for Geopolitical Analysis. He was a Member of the Polish Parliament from 2005-2007 and for many years he has spoken out in favor European-continental cooperation and against the NATO and American policy towards Europe and the Middle East. Mateusz Piskorski was arrested and is being held for three months of preliminary custody on charges of “spying for a foreign country,” with various media sources hysterically spreading the “unconfirmed reports” that he was employed by the intelligence services of Russia, China “and/or” Iraq. Specific charges are unknown, the whole case is being kept secret, thereby preventing anyone related to Mateusz Piskorski from preparing a defense. Instead, the government-controlled media have made a spectacle of hatred and slander, spinning irrational speculation, not only about the detainee but also about so-called “agents of the influence” – a term that de facto covers everyone who proclaims views other than those set down by the Polish authorities. The wide-scale coordinated action against the Zmiana political party comes on the heels of an increasingly tense political situation in Poland. Several weeks ago, activists from the Communist Party of Poland and the Grunwald Patriotic Workers’ Union (both organizations are fully legal) were sentenced to “restricted liberty,” including community service, fines, and travel bans for “promoting totalitarianism.” Following these events and just two days before his arrest, Piskorski warned that the Polish government will attempt to “pacify” opposition organizations and individuals in the run-up to the NATO summit to be held in Warsaw on July 8th-9th. Pikorski’s Warning Let us quote this text from Mateusz Piskorski which turned out to be prophetic: “Predictions concerning the upcoming NATO summit in July in Warsaw are beginning to clearly indicate that today the alliance’s goal is first and foremost preventing the emergence of social movements demanding the liberation of Europe from the tutelage of the United States. As can be seen, The Financial Times’ inadvertent mention of the words of one of the Polish Army’s senior commanders show just what decisions can be expected this summer. “These are decisions which completely undermine not only the sovereignty of Warsaw in the field of foreign policy, but also clearly speak to the fact that from this moment on NATO is supposed to be a police force ready to participate in the pacification of eventual social protests or intervene in the affairs of domestic Polish politics. “The actual intentions of the alliance’s latest decisions were revealed honestly and in a frankly military way by Brigadier General Krzysztof Krol, the commander of the Multinational Corps Northeast. The issue under consideration was the concept of the so-called NATO spearhead advocated for years by the Americans and longed for by the Polish politicians of both the former and current government. “Let us give the floor to the general: ‘The VJTF (Very High Readiness Joint Task Force) is to deal with Article 4 situations [of the North-Atlantic Treaty] and that is our intention with it.’ “Article 4 speaks of cooperation and consultation between member states which cannot be described as in article 5 as experiencing armed aggression against any of them, but rather subjective feelings of para-military threats. “What kind of situations are we dealing with here? General Krol leaves no doubt: ‘The plan was developed to react to hybrid threats in our area of operation. Our plans are scalable to the situation,’ he told The Financial Times. Repression Excuse: ‘Hybrid War’ “The concept of ‘hybrid war’ or hybrid actions has blossomed as a definition of the activities of Russia following the Ukrainian revolution of 2014. But what is interesting is that to this day it has not attained any unambiguous academic interpretation and various authors and experts define its scope in different ways. In The Financial Times, however, we read that the NATO spearhead has the right to take action in case of the destabilization of the international situation in the country triggered by, for example, public protests. “What does this mean in practice? Any internal disturbance could be treated and presented by native as well as American ‘spearheadologists’ as part of the activities vaguely defined as ‘hybrid war.’ This might lead to a case in which protests against the effects of the TTIP Agreement supported by the Polish state could be treated as ‘hybrid activities.’ Poles’ protests against crimes committed by US Army soldiers stationed in Poland could also turn out to be ‘hybrid war.’ “Antoni Macierewicz’s sick imagination could suggest dozens of different theories. After all, the current Defense Minister is so divorced from common sense that he believes that Radoslaw Sikorski, another pro-American hawk, is actually working for Moscow. “Social unrest, protests, strikes, attempts to form information resources independent from the establishment, demanding transparency in the defense and foreign policies of the Polish authorities – all of these could become pretexts for one or another swing into action of advisors from NATO (mainly from the USA), who would provide ‘fraternal aid’ to the Polish units and services subordinated to them. “In this situation, all that is left is to hope that officers and officials will not want to stay in an ‘oral relationship’ (the colorful expression of Sikorski) with their American overlords, will remind themselves of the dignity of the Polish uniform, and send all those representatives of foreign interests ‘concerned about our security’ far back across the Atlantic Ocean. “Meanwhile, we have been left with one thing: to loudly protest and by all law-abiding means block the realization of NATO’s plans which it will announce in July in Warsaw. It is also worth organizing a social movement for Poland’s exit from this pact as a condition of regaining elementary statehood.” [End of Piskorski’s comments.] Pre-War Prep So what is actually going on in Poland, and how could it be connected with the pre-war preparations? First of all, our biggest concern should be to highlight the fact that in parallel with the political repressions inspired by pro-NATO circles (unprecedented since the fall of the Berlin Wall), there is a huge wave of militarization and Russophobe, pro-war rhetoric. Polish neoconservative authorities have not only significantly increased military spending and created new types of troops and paramilitaries, but also begged for the presence in Poland of U.S. troops and military installations. After Antoni Macierewicz (who was previously head of the para-committee ineffectually trying to reject the official version of the Smolensk disaster, so that they could blame for the incident on Vladimir Putin) was appointed as a Minister of Defense, not only was decision taken to allow the creation of a US base for ballistic missiles (an element of the so called “anti missile shield”), but also to create six U.S. military bases. To calm public opinion in the media they are called “warehouses of military equipment”. The definition of “hybrid war” was extended to the limits, so that any action differing from the line drawn by the official propaganda may be regarded as hostile in not only political but also military terms. Thus the proclamation of ideas contrary to the official propaganda is openly called by government run media as “inspired by foreign intelligence services.” Another important issue is the fact that Poland was one of the few countries in Europe to officially support the aggressive version of TTiP advocated by the U.S. government. This can be read as a direct involvement of the Polish authorities in sabotaging a competitive project – the New Silk Road – run by China. As if all this were not enough, Polish President Andrzej Duda a few days ago signed a law which equates the rights of American troops stationed in Poland with the rights of the Polish Army. They can thus move freely around the country without having to consult the government about their current activities. It is worth mentioning that such privileges were not available even to Soviet troops formerly stationed in Poland, who were forced to remain in their bases at all times. Overall, the situation in Poland is tense and in many ways resembles the changes that have occurred in Turkey during the rule of Erdogan. This combination of authoritarianism, militarism and political repression has to be worrisome, because it is a typical mix of measures taken by authorities that are preparing for war. Taking into account the geopolitical conditions of Poland under every possible scenario such a war has to end tragically. [End of Niedzwiecki’s speech.] Gilbert Doctorow is the European Coordinator of The American Committee for East West Accord Ltd. His most recent book, Does Russia Have a Future? was published in August 2015. © Gilbert Doctorow, 2016Picture all your friends and family brutally murdered or coldly displaced by illegal loggers, daring gold miners, brutal drug traffickers, cattle ranchers or land speculators — threats from all sides at virtually all times. Some get old and die, and your population dwindles until it’s just you left. That’s the harrowing existence of one solitary native Brazilian Indian known to anthropologists as the “Man of the Hole.” Very little is known about him, but he’s believed to be the last survivor of his tribe. We don’t know his name, we don’t know his tribe’s name, and we know very little about how he lives, except that he must be very lonely. He digs out large holes — more than 6 feet deep — to either trap animals or avoid threats himself in the vast Amazonian jungle, near the Tanaru River in the state of Rondonia in western Brazil. “It’s almost certain that the rest of his tribe died from a combination of disease, full-on violence and getting simply pushed out of where they used to live,” Rob Walker, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri, told The Post. “Just bulldozing the habitat, basically. It’s pretty sad.” “This guy’s the last of his tribe. It must be terrifying.” - Smithsonian senior staff scientist Fernando Santos-Granero Walker, who has searched for the man using satellite imagery, said he most likely uses simple tools like bows and arrows to hunt animals like monkeys, peccaries, deer, armadillos and pacas. He might fish a little bit as well and probably has a garden, although maintaining it could be tough all by himself, Walker said. Among anthropologists, one of the key questions regarding uncontacted or isolated tribes — of which there are an estimated 50 to 100 worldwide, primarily in Brazil — is whether to make contact with them. Most uncontacted Indians are likely aware of outsiders and possibly have had limited interactions with some, but choose to remain hidden and isolated. The “Man of the Hole” has rejected attempts at contact, sometimes violently — but more on that later. “The problem here is he sees the outside world as the enemy,” Walker said. “And then when teams do make contact, he thinks it’s going to end poorly for him. But if he had better information, he would know that people do actually care for indigenous people’s rights. I think he’d be much more open to making contact.” Walker and Arizona State University anthropology professor Kim Hill argued in an editorial in Science magazine last year that the “leave them alone” strategy supported by Brazil, Peru and the United Nations is misguided. In 2007, Brazilian government officials declared a 31-square-mile safe zone around the man, ideally making him immune to ranchers and creeping development. Brazil later decided to enlarge that territory by 11.5 square miles and to not contact the “Man of the Hole.” Walker and Hill claimed that approach makes two implicit assumptions: that isolated populations are viable in the long term, and that they would choose isolation if they knew contact would not lead to massacre or enslavement. “Controlled contact with isolated peoples is a better option than a no-contact policy,” Walker and Hill wrote. “This means that governments should initiate contact only after conceiving a well-organized plan.” Walker told The Post his rationale for that editorial was simple: With modern medicine, the “Man of the Hole” will likely live longer than if left entirely alone. Besides, good actors like anthropologists are surely better than the cadre of others who might not have such altruistic intentions. “That might sound good in a perfect world,” Walker said of no-contact policies. “But in reality, there’s all sorts of contacts going on. They’re just not peaceful ones.” Stephen Corry, director of Survivor International, a London-based advocacy group for tribal peoples, blasted the editorial as “dangerous and misleading,” claiming examples of contact it referenced left many of the isolated people dead. “Walker and Hill play straight into the hands of those who want to open Amazonia up for resource extraction and ‘investment,’” Corry said in a statement. “That they claim this is for tribes’ own benefit is dangerous and misleading nonsense.” Corry insisted isolated tribes are “perfectly viable” as long as their lands are protected. “To think we have the right to invade their territories and make contact with them, whether they want it or not, with all the likely consequences, is pernicious and arrogant,” Corry’s statement continued. “The decision as to whether to make contact or not has to be one for the people themselves, not for outsiders who think they know what’s in the Indians’ best interests.” In 2009, gunmen believed to be ranchers who opposed Brazil’s efforts to protect the “Man of the Hole” reportedly attacked him in Tanaru, an indigenous territory in Rondonia, Brazil. Officials from FUNAI, Brazil’s indigenous affairs department, said its protection post nearby was ransacked and spent shotgun shells littered the forest. The lonely tribesman somehow survived the ruthless, seemingly unprovoked attack. Scott Wallace, an expert on isolated tribes and author of “The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes,” said Walker’s idea of controlled contact usually ends in failure. “The ideal condition of having a great deal of resources and personnel and the wherewithal that one would need to prevent an epidemic, or to provide all the best Western medicine has to offer these people … they are never going to get that,” Wallace told The Post. “They’re just not going to get those things and most of them are going to end up dying. In many cases, the mortality rate is up to 90 percent after contact.” Wallace, whose book is an account of a three-month Amazon expedition in 2002 with Brazilian explorer Sydney Possuelo, acknowledged there’s no easy answer. “It’s a difficult issue because clearly time is running out for these groups,” Wallace said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s still not our responsibility to try to protect their land and to protect them.” Despite the reported close call and likely more that went undocumented, the plan to protect him seems to be working. The “Man of the Hole” is indeed alive — thriving, perhaps. Marcelo dos Santos, a former FUNAI official who personally made contact with the “Man of the Hole” in a 2009 documentary by filmmaker Vincent Carelli, confirmed to The Post that the man planted a small garden as recently as a week ago and that he’s still able to hunt for food. “He is in good health, apparently because he was walking in the woods,” Santos wrote The Post in an email translated from Portuguese. “Farmers have respected the untouchability of his land.” A spokesperson for FUNAI told The Post that officials from the agency last confirmed he’s alive in June. “He is alive,” read an email from a FUNAI official to The Post, translated from Portuguese. “The monitoring activities consist of field expeditions aimed at observing and recording conclusive traces of the presence of isolated indigenous peoples, characterize their use of processes and occupation, without any contact.” Fernando Santos-Granero, a senior staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, told The Post he believes humanity must respect the will of isolated peoples. “And their will is not to be contacted, so don’t contact them,” he said during a recent interview. “Unfortunately, economic factors always have a lot of weight in the political decisions of governments and often they decide to open these protected areas for oil exploration and mining instead of protecting people who are considered wild and arrogant. Should we extract a lot of oil so the entire country can get richer, or do we protect the lives of 35 people?” Santos-Granero said he imagines the “Man of the Hole” lives a frightening, extremely vulnerable existence, one that could end in seconds due to any number of threats, including but not limited to disease, violence and shrinking habitat. “He represents something that has, unfortunately, become increasingly common: human beings depleting nature and pushing other species to extinction,” he said. “This guy’s the last of his tribe. It must be terrifying.”(CNN) Jerry Lewis, the slapstick-loving comedian, innovative filmmaker and generous fundraiser for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, died Sunday after a brief illness, said his publicist, Candi Cazau. He was 91. Cazau would not elaborate on the illness from which Lewis was suffering. John Fudenberg, coroner for Clark County in Nevada, said Lewis died from heart failure due to peripheral vascular disease. Lewis first gained fame for his frenzied comedy-and-music act with singer Dean Martin. When that ended in the mid-1950s, Lewis went solo, and by the early '60s, he had become a top draw in movies such as "The Bellboy," "The Nutty Professor" and "The Patsy." Along the way, he pioneered the use of videotape and closed-circuit monitors in moviemaking, a now-standard technique called video assist. He first helped raise money for muscular dystrophy in a telethon in 1956. He was so successful, and so devoted to the cause, that children affected by the disease became known as "Jerry's kids." The telethon, long known as "The Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon," began airing on Labor Day weekend in 1966, and Lewis served as host until 2011. Loved and criticized A promotional photo from "The Jerry Lewis Show," which aired in 1963. Despite his success, Lewis also was a controversial figure. A number of people suffering with muscular dystrophy claimed Lewis presented victims as childlike and worthy of pity, rather than as equal members of society. Lewis lost some fans when he criticized women doing comedy -- "I think of (a female comedian) as a producing machine that brings babies in the world," he once said -- and when he lashed out at MDA critics. "You don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!" he said in 2001 on the "CBS Morning Show." He later apologized. When Lewis was one of America's leading box office attractions, critics mocked him for the broadness of his comedy -- and took more shots at him when he became a renowned figure in France. In 1984, the French awarded Lewis the Legion of Honor, the country's highest tribute. The White House also paid respects to Lewis, with a statement released late Sunday night. "Jerry Lewis kept us all laughing for over half a century, and his incredible charity work touched the lives of millions. Jerry lived the American Dream -- he truly loved his country, and his country loved him back. Our thoughts are with his family today as we remember the extraordinary life of one of our greatest entertainers and humanitarians. Thank you, Jerry. You will be missed," the White House statement said. Lewis was emotional, big-hearted, eccentric -- once successful, he never wore a pair of socks twice -- proud and forever playing to the back row. He seldom apologized for it. "Let me tell you that probably 50% of the film community plays a game and does their thing because they're prominent and they're making a lot of money. And what they do is they give up a piece of their soul... and for them, they're comfortable, and they feel that's fine," he told CNN's Larry King in 2000. "It was never fine for me and I wouldn't go there. I told (legendary Hollywood gossip columnist) Louella Parsons I thought she was a fat pig, because I thought she was. I had an opinion." The controversy Lewis stirred up over the years did little to dampen his peers' and successors' appreciation of his art. Several celebrities took to social media to share their sadness over his passing. Comedian Jon Lovitz called Lewis an "amazing talent," while "Star Trek" actor George Takei thanked him for "the laughs and the feels." Jerry Lewis! Oy! Another comic legend gone. What an amazing talent and philanthropist. A long, well lived life!#RIPJerryLewis — Jon Lovitz (@realjonlovitz) August 20, 2017 We have lost a great comedian and even greater heart. Thank you for the laughs and the feels, Jerry Lewis. https://t.co/vdYCfd7atJ — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) August 20, 2017 "I sincerely hope his afterlife is a warm, peaceful......haven," actor Patton Oswalt wrote. Jerry Lewis passed today,millions around the world loved him,millions of kids he helped w/his telethons. R.I.P. &condolences 2 his family — Whoopi Goldberg (@WhoopiGoldberg) August 20, 2017 Jerry Lewis has passed on. I sincerely hope his afterlife is a warm, peaceful... ...haven. — Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) August 20, 2017 Wrote Public Enemy frontman Chuck D: "Earth is less funny today." Jerry Lewis passes today. HipHop had a dance named after him. Last time I performed on @jimmyfallon He was there. Earth is less funny today — Chuck D (@MrChuckD) August 20, 2017 A lonely boy JUST WATCHED Jillette: Jerry Lewis was the king of comedy Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Jillette: Jerry Lewis was the king of comedy 01:13 Joseph Levitch -- he changed the name to Lewis as a teenager -- was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 16, 1926. Entertainment ran in the family: His father was a vaudeville performer, his mother a piano player. Lewis occasionally performed with his parents, and by the time he was a teenager he had developed his own act. He was a regular in New York's Catskill Mountain resorts, popular summertime retreats for area Jews. But Lewis was also a lonely boy, essentially raised by his grandmother. Lewis told King that his comedy was rooted in hurt. "I found (the comic) through pain. And the pain was that I couldn't buy milk like the other kids in school at recess time," he said. He met Martin at a club in 1945 where the two were performing as soloists. The next year they premiered as a duo in Atlantic City, New Jersey. According to show business lore, their first show flatlined and the team was warned by the club manager to improve or be fired. For the second show, the two went wild with a no-holds-barred mix of comedy and music. It was a hit. "He provided belly laughs...he just had that spark of genius," says actress Carol Burnett of Jerry Lewis https://t.co/1aK5FT8wJa — CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) August 20, 2017 Within four years, they were headlining and breaking records at New York's Copacabana club. Lewis later wrote that they set off Beatlemania-type reactions among fans -- especially female fans -- long before the term Beatlemania was coined. Martin played the romantic, crooning straight man, and Lewis was the anything-for-a-laugh comedian of chaos. (Some observers called them "the organ grinder and the monkey.") The act often featured a stint of Martin chasing Lewis around the stage. They appeared on the very first "Ed Sullivan Show" (then called "Toast of the Town") and shrewdly negotiated control of their various appearances, earning them millions. But over the course of a decade -- a period that included 17 movies, beginning with 1949's "My Friend Irma" -- the two grew apart. Toward the end, Martin told Lewis he was "nothing to me but a dollar sign." Martin's last performance with Lewis -- also at the Copa -- was on July 25, 1956. Big life post-Martin Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Jerry Lewis, the slapstick-loving comedian, innovative filmmaker and generous fundraiser for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, died August 20 after a brief illness, said his publicist, Candi Cazau. He was 91. Hide Caption 1 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis monkeys around with Pierre, a 5-year-old chimpanzee, in 1950, during Lewis' early Hollywood days. Hide Caption 2 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis joined forces with singer Dean Martin in 1946 and they became a hugely popular duo. Martin and Lewis were comedy partners for 10 years. Hide Caption 3 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Martin, center, kisses actress Denise Darcel, as Lewis feigns irritation. The pair were at a golf event in 1953 in Eastchester, New York. Hide Caption 4 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis and Martin parted less than amicably in 1956. Both had long and successful careers after their breakup. Hide Caption 5 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis In 1960, Lewis starred in and directed "The Bellboy," a silent-film-style story of pratfalls and adventures. Hide Caption 6 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis' film heyday was the '60s. Here, he stars with Susan Oliver in 1964's "The Disorderly Orderly." Hide Caption 7 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis and his wife, Patti, sing in an impromptu New York performance in 1955. They divorced in 1982. Hide Caption 8 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis and his family in 1967. He also had a daughter with his second wife. Hide Caption 9 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis stars in "The Nutty Professor" in 1963. Lewis also directed the film. Hide Caption 10 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis was the longtime spokesman for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Here, Lewis visits President John Kennedy at the White House with Bobbie and Kerrie Whittaker, the 1963 national poster children for the association. Also shown, from left, are actress Patty Duke and the children's parents, Mr. and Mrs. C. Leigh Whittaker. Hide Caption 11 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis tries out a Jerry Lewis special in 1971. The ice cream special was offered by a Troy, New York, pharmacy where Lewis worked as a young man. Lewis' former boss, Ben Silberg, helps eat the giant sundae. Hide Caption 12 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis arrives at Nice Airport on his way to the Cannes Film Festival in 1979. Lewis was hugely popular in France, where in 1984 he was awarded the Legion of Honor, the country's highest tribute. Hide Caption 13 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis with Robert De Niro in a scene from "The King of Comedy" in 1982. Lewis' part in the film was a rare serious role. Hide Caption 14 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis married Sandra Pitnick in 1983. Hide Caption 15 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis performs with the United States Army Reserve Band before receiving the the military's highest civilian award in 1985. The Medal for Distinguished Service was awarded to Lewis for his role in fighting muscular dystrophy. Hide Caption 16 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis brings former CNN host Larry King to tears with a joke in 1999. Hide Caption 17 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis wipes away tears at the 39th Annual Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon in 2004. In 2011, Lewis and the Muscular Dystrophy Association announced they were parting ways. Hide Caption 18 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis arrives for the Emmy Awards in 2015. Hide Caption 19 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis In 2013, Lewis starred in the drama "Max Rose." He's shown here at the photo call for the movie at the Cannes Film Festival. Hide Caption 20 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis holds up his cement covered hands during a 2014 ceremony to add his hand prints and footprints to the sidewalk at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Hide Caption 21 of 22 Photos: The life and career of Jerry Lewis Lewis and director Martin Scorsese attend a Friars Club event honoring Scorsese in New York in 2016. Hide Caption 22 of 22 Despite the acrimonious breakup, the two eventually reconciled, and Lewis and James Kaplan released a book in 2005 with a title that explained how Lewis saw the relationship: "Dean and Me (A Love Story)." Upon their breakup, Martin was expected to be the greater success. He was an established singer and was beginning to make inroads as a respected actor, including performances in two 1958 films: "The Young Lions" (opposite Marlon Brando) and "Some Came Running" (with Frank Sinatra, with whom Martin would become longtime pals as part of the Rat Pack). Lewis, on the other hand, was considered a lightweight, if crowd-pleasing, clown. His early solo films, such as "The Delicate Deliquent" (1957) and "Rock-a-Bye Baby" (1958), made under a longstanding contract with producer Hal Wallis, were more of the same. That fool was no dummy. Jerry Lewis was an undeniable genius an unfathomable blessing, comedy's absolute! I am because he was! ;^D pic.twitter.com/3Zdq9xhXlE — Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) August 20, 2017 The greatest is gone. RIP Jerry Lewis. — Stevie Van Zandt (@StevieVanZandt) August 20, 2017 But upon the end of his Wallis contract, in 1959, Lewis set out to take greater control of his work. He signed a huge contract with Paramount, a seven-year deal promising him $10 million and 60% of the profits for 14 films, according to his agency biography. He starred in "Cinderfella," written and directed by the noted comedy director Frank Tashlin, and -- when that movie was held for release -- came up with "The Bellboy," a silent-film-style story of pratfalls and adventures that Lewis wrote, directed and starred in. It was for "The Bellboy" that Lewis first used video assist, so he could monitor his performance as he directed. He received a patent for the invention. "The Bellboy" was released in July 1960 and was a hit, helping establish Lewis as an auteur. He exercised similar writing-directing-starring control over several successive films, including "The Errand Boy" (1961), "The Nutty Professor" (1963) and "The Patsy" (1964). "The Nutty Professor" was perhaps the prototypical Lewis vehicle. A twist on Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," the film starred Lewis both as nebbish professor Julius Kelp as well as smooth-talking boor Buddy Love, the man he turned into after drinking a strange potion. (More than one commentator has compared Love to Martin, Lewis' former partner, but the filmmaker regularly denied Martin was the basis for the portrayal.) Lewis considered it his best film, and the American Film Institute ranked it as the 99th-best American comedy of all time. Eddie Murphy remade the film in 1996, and Lewis brought a musical version to the stage in 2012. 'Mozart of humor' Comedian Jerry Lewis in 2013 at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2015, the Library of Congress announced it had acquired a huge collection of films and documents from Lewis, including copies of his most popular films, home movies and spoof films made by Lewis at home, which sometimes starred neighbors such as Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. "For more than seven decades I've been dedicated to making people laugh. If I get more than three people in a room, I do a number," Lewis told the library. "Knowing that the Library of Congress was interested in acquiring my life's work was one of the biggest thrills of my life." Though Lewis' humor sometimes left reviewers cold, he had a sizable fan base. "My generation, we grew up on Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. They were our heroes," said the late British funnyman Marty Feldman, crediting Lewis as one of the reasons he became a comedian. "Jerry Lewis actually has genius." "Lewis is the Mozart of humor," wrote Agnes Poirier of the UK newspaper The Guardian in 2006. "You can keep sneering. I don't care." Jerry Lewis loomed large in my family. Many movies with my mom & he made home movies with Janet and Tony. He made me and many laugh. #rip pic.twitter.com/4LbEbc9FCT — Jamie Lee Curtis (@jamieleecurtis) August 20, 2017 Lewis remained a box office attraction during the 1960s, but his popularity waned with changing tastes in comedy and some dismal films, such as "Way... Way Out" (1966) ("About as funny and unusual as the daily trip on the subway," wrote The New York Times) and "Which Way to the Front?" (1970). One attempt at an early-'70s film comeback, "The Day the Clown Cried" -- intended to be Lewis' first serious film -- became Hollywood legend. In the rarely seen film, Lewis plays a circus clown, Helmut Doork, who ends up entertaining children at a concentration camp -- and eventually leads them to the gas chamber. The movie was never released but has been viewed by a select few, including comedian and "Simpsons" star Harry Shearer, who was blunt in his assessment. "This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is," Shearer told Spy magazine in 1992. "'Oh, my God!' — that's all you can say." It was incredible knowing & laughing with the Amazing Jerry Lewis! He'll keep'em laffin in the ever after! — Samuel L. Jackson (@SamuelLJackson) August 20, 2017 Lewis rarely lacked for activity or money -- he performed regularly,
pulling him by the arm; and Iv�n followed the lad. When he was being carried out of the hut, some burning straw had fallen on to the old man and burnt him, and he had been taken to the village Elder's in the farther part of the village, which the fire did not reach. When Iv�n came to his father, there was only the Elder's wife in the hut, besides some little children on the top of the oven. All the rest were still at the fire. The old man, who was lying on a bench holding a wax candle (Wax candles are much used in the services of the Russian Church, and it is usual to place one in the hand of a dying man, especially when he receives unction) in his hand, kept turning his eyes towards the door. When his son entered, he moved a little. The old woman went up to him and told him that his son had come. He asked to have him brought nearer. Iv�n came closer. 'What did I tell you, Iv�n?' began the old man 'Who has burnt down the village?' 'It was he, father!' Iv�n answered. 'I caught him in the act. I saw him shove the firebrand into the thatch. I might have pulled away the burning straw and stamped it out, and then nothing would have happened.' 'Iv�n,' said the old man, 'I am dying, and you in your turn will have to face death. Whose is the sin?' Iv�n gazed at his father in silence, unable to utter a word. 'Now, before God, say whose is the sin? What did I tell you?' Only then Iv�n came to his senses and understood it all. He sniffed and said, 'Mine, father!' And he fell on his knees before his father, saying, 'Forgive me, father; I am guilty before you and before God.' The old man moved his hands, changed the candle from his right hand to his left, and tried to lift his right hand to his forehead to cross himself, but could not do it, and stopped. 'Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!' said he, and again he turned his eyes towards his son. 'Iv�n! I say, Iv�n!' 'What, father?' 'What must you do now?' Iv�n was weeping. 'I don't know how we are to live now, father!' he said. The old man closed his eyes, moved his lips as if to gather strength, and opening his eyes again, said: 'You'll manage. If you obey God's will, you'll manage!' He paused, then smiled, and said: 'Mind, Iv�n! Don't tell who started the fire! Hide another man's sin, and God will forgive two of yours!' And the old man took the candle in both hands and, folding them on his breast, sighed, stretched out, and died. Iv�n did not say anything against Gabriel, and no one knew what had caused the fire. And Ivan's anger against Gabriel passed away, and Gabriel wondered that Iv�n did not tell anybody. At first Gabriel felt afraid, but after awhile he got used to it. The men left off quarrelling, and then their families left off also. While rebuilding their huts, both families lived in one house; and when the village was rebuilt and they might have moved farther apart, Iv�n and Gabriel built next to each other, and remained neighbours as before. They lived as good neighbours should. Iv�n Stcherbak�f remembered his old father's command to obey God's law, and quench a fire at the first spark; and if any one does him an injury he now tries not to revenge himself, but rather to set matters right again; and if any one gives him a bad word, instead of giving a worse in return, he tries to teach the other not to use evil words; and so he teaches his womenfolk and children. And Iv�n Stcherbak�f has got on his feet again, and now lives better even than he did before. Literature Network » Leo Tolstoy » A Spark Neglected Burns the House Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Anfere Profile Joined June 2010 Canada 231 Posts Last Edited: 2010-06-27 09:01:30 #1 My source is: It's a French Esport website. It doesn't seem weird since PC BanG are one of the partners Blizzard announced during their press conference of the 24th of June. Team aAa confirmation on this thread (page 6): PC BanG leaked that the Beta of SC2 will restart the 27 of June exclusively on their Cyber cafés while it will restart for everyone else on the 1st of July. The news comes from PC BanG employees.My source is: http://www.team-aaa.com/news-16590-0-1-la_beta_reprend_le_premier_juillet.html It's a French Esport website.It doesn't seem weird since PC BanG are one of the partners Blizzard announced during their press conference of the 24th of June.Team aAa confirmation on this thread (page 6): Being from team aAa's shoutcast staff and having a colleague who lives in Korea who confirmed this on top of everything, I can pretty much assure you guys that the news is legit. Our website has a reputation amongst french esports fans which obliges us to be as accurate as possible whenever we post anything in our news, getting multiple confirmations to ensure quality of information and professionalism behind every post. Update: Korean links from PlayXP and GameMeca talking about beta restarting on June 28. Since i only used google translator i have no confidence, just pointing articles related to a potential restart of the beta. http://sc2.gamemeca.com/special/section/html_section/sc2/community/common/view.html?subcode=c2035&id=478&gid=477 http://www.playxp.com/sc2/news/view.php?article_id=1971358 Korean links from PlayXP and GameMeca talking about beta restarting on June 28. Since i only used google translator i have no confidence, just pointing articles related to a potential restart of the beta. Immortal or no Immortal, that is the question! Someone give me a hamlet skull! Darkren Profile Blog Joined February 2010 Canada 1258 Posts #2 WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO "Yeah, I send (hopefully) helpful PM's quite frequently. You don't have to warn/ban everything" - KadaverBB Midj Profile Joined March 2010 Canada 252 Posts #3 yay! Hope this is true. I enjoy watching more than playing. DISHU Profile Blog Joined April 2010 United Kingdom 348 Posts #4 cant wait! If not i will be like the France revolution! on your asscant wait! Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. But what are timeflies and why do they like an arrow? Sparkyrabbit Profile Blog Joined May 2010 29 Posts #5 This is better news then when i found out I was straight.. travis Profile Blog Joined May 2003 United States 23276 Posts #6 Ok so June 27? Not July 1? Team Liquid Takkara Profile Blog Joined April 2010 United States 1753 Posts #7 On June 26 2010 03:40 Sparkyrabbit wrote: This is better news then when i found out I was straight.. Perhaps the news was great, but the situation you found yourself in at that point was probably less than ideal. Perhaps the news was great, but the situation you found yourself in at that point was probably less than ideal. Gee gee gee gee baby baby baby Neverhood Profile Joined August 2009 United States 2684 Posts #8 On June 26 2010 03:40 travis wrote: Ok so June 27? Not July 1? June 27th in PC bangs and july 1st for general public June 27th in PC bangs and july 1st for general public Jaedong :D TSM Profile Blog Joined June 2010 Great Britain 582 Posts #9 ;P i don't know how many messaging forums, ustream/livestream chat there has been about when it's coming back but. OH YEAH 1st July;P The person to smile when everything goes wrong has found someone to blame it on - arthur bloch **** tl:dr *user was banned for this post* Anfere Profile Joined June 2010 Canada 231 Posts Last Edited: 2010-06-25 19:09:48 #10 if you go play on PC bangs cyber cafés yes it's june 27, if you want to log on to the beta from your house using your account, it's july 1st. Immortal or no Immortal, that is the question! Someone give me a hamlet skull! heishe Profile Blog Joined June 2009 Germany 2235 Posts #11 june 27th? on a sunday? yeah, pretty sure this is legit If you value your soul, never look into the eye of a horse. Your soul will forever be lost in the void of the horse. MangoTango Profile Blog Joined June 2010 United States 3670 Posts #12 On June 26 2010 03:40 Sparkyrabbit wrote: This is better news then when i found out I was straight.. lol. So with 10 new and conflicting rumors coming out a day, how can we be sure this one is real? Wasn't there the Korean news conference that said June 28? lol.So with 10 new and conflicting rumors coming out a day, how can we be sure this one is real? Wasn't there the Korean news conference that said June 28? "One fish, two fish, red fish, BLUE TANK!" - Artosis Krissam Profile Joined April 2010 Denmark 189 Posts #13 On June 26 2010 03:43 heishe wrote: june 27th? on a sunday? yeah, pretty sure this is legit june 27th? on a sunday? yeah, pretty sure this is legit You do realize how much work it is to actually start the server if it's ready to go right? You do realize how much work it is to actually start the server if it's ready to go right? If you can chill, chill!" - TLAF-Liquid´Tyler Warrior Madness Profile Blog Joined April 2008 Canada 3791 Posts #14 back so soon?? The Past: Yellow, Julyzerg, Chojja, Savior, GGplay -- The Present: Luxury, Jae- The Future: -Dong, maGma, Zero, Effort, Hoejja, hyvaa, by.hero, calm, Action ---> SC2 (Ret?? Kolll Idra!! SEN, Cool, ZergBong, Leenock) Ichabod Profile Joined May 2010 United States 1657 Posts Last Edited: 2010-06-25 18:51:49 #15 Seems odd; would this only apply for europe then? asia and US servers are up in the air? Edit: whoops, guess july first applies to only US then? Puosu Profile Blog Joined April 2007 6689 Posts Last Edited: 2010-06-25 18:51:27 #16 On June 26 2010 03:47 Ichabod wrote: Seems odd; would this only apply for europe then? asia and US servers are up in the air? It would only apply to Korea, the article states that the company "PCBang" is Korean. Also with my weak French I think the first sentence says Blizz announced this on their official forums, anyone willing to dig up the post? I read it slightly wrong. It would only apply to Korea, the article states that the company "PCBang" is Korean.I read it slightly wrong. Anfere Profile Joined June 2010 Canada 231 Posts Last Edited: 2010-06-25 19:10:13 #17 Translation of the first paragraph: ''Not long ago, blizzard announced on their forums that the beta will restart early july without giving a precise date or any details concerning the beta reopening. Today, we got the information that the beta will restart the 1st of july for us and the 27 of june for our korean friends exclusively in the PC bang cyber cafés chain.'' So no they didn't say that blizzard announced this on their forums PC Bang is a chain of cyber cafés that is the place where all people who play starcraft regroup and stuff, it's a well known cyber café chain in korea and it's blizzard partner.Translation of the first paragraph: ''Not long ago, blizzard announced on their forums that the beta will restart early july without giving a precise date or any details concerning the beta reopening. Today, we got the information that the beta will restart the 1st of july for us and the 27 of june for our korean friends exclusively in the PC bang cyber cafés chain.''So no they didn't say that blizzard announced this on their forums Immortal or no Immortal, that is the question! Someone give me a hamlet skull! susySquark Profile Blog Joined May 2010 United States 1509 Posts #18 Google translate actually works on that page pretty well. Some time ago, Blizzard announced on its official forums that the beta would resume in early July without giving any further detail on the alleged date. Today we learned that the beta would resume July 1 for us and the June 27 exclusively for our Korean friends in their cafes appointed PCBANG. ataryens Profile Joined June 2010 Iran 207 Posts #19 On June 26 2010 03:48 Puosu wrote: Show nested quote + On June 26 2010 03:47 Ichabod wrote: Seems odd; would this only apply for europe then? asia and US servers are up in the air? It would only apply to Korea, the article states that the company "PCBang" is Korean. Also with my weak French I think the first sentence says Blizz announced this on their official forums, anyone willing to dig up the post? I read it slightly wrong. It would only apply to Korea, the article states that the company "PCBang" is Korean.I read it slightly wrong. It doesnt say that they announced this on their official website but that they said it would come early july. Article says 1st july for all and 27th june for that cafe in korea. It doesnt say that they announced this on their official website but that they said it would come early july.Article says 1st july for all and 27th june for that cafe in korea. jamesr12 Profile Blog Joined April 2010 United States 1549 Posts #20 Not confirmed by blizz and acording to PC bangs it was coming back the 28th i still say bull http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=306479 1 2 3 4 5 22 23 24 Next AllPlease pardon our French, we've been watching a lot of Breaking Bad and Jesse Pinkman is a bad influence. This collection of Steve Snowden's photographs of Breaking Bad filming locations around Albuquerque, N.M. is essentially TV porn for any super fans of the hit AMC drama. We kept all descriptions extremely vague, so don't worry about major spoilers. Some of the links to videos in descriptions may contain spoilers, however, so if you don't wanna have one of the best shows around ruined for you, be careful what you click on. The White Residence Jesse Pinkman's House Video: When Jesse first bought the home (with added reactions). Los Pollos Hermanos (Twisters) Gus is the proud owner of this chicken business. A Jesse Pinkman favorite. A1A Carwash (Octopus) Walt took a part-time job at A1A in season 1 and then got a major promotion. Here's a video of someone doing T'ai Chi outside of the carwash. Saul's Office (Hooligans) Originally the "Hooligans" wasn't there, but maybe a visit to the bar will still make you feel like you're partying with Saul. Maybe you could try calling him up. Jesse's "pickup point" in a recent episode. Where Walt tries to meet Jesse. The Taqueria (Garduño's) The Whites and the Schraders meet for dinner. They didn't order the guacamole. Gustavo Fring's House Gus and Jesse have a nice dinner here. Denny's Walt and Jesse have breakfast after cleaning up a body and then later Walt eats here alone in the first scene of season 5. He makes a "52" out of the bacon. The Schrader Residence Vamonos Pest Control Walt, Jesse and Mike's office. Gustavo Fring's Laundry Front (Delta Uniform Cleaners) Some pretty crazy stuff happened outside this building. And inside it. Casa Tranquila Nursing Home Lazer Base (Hinkle Family Fun Center) Saul, Walt, and Jesse hang out here early on and then Walt and Jesse later aggressively turn it down as a potential meth cooking spot. Walt and Lydia would conduct business meetings here. Aaron Paul apparently frequented the place as well. Walt's Condo Walt lives here after he is kicked out of his home. Where Walt truly becomes Heisenberg. BONUS: The Candy Lady has embraced the show's presence. She sells Heisenberg "Meth" Rock Candy which you can buy online.An IDF officer from the Armored Corps serving in the unit’s 401st brigade has been dismissed from his position after an investigation revealed that he fled the scene of a terror attack in Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem last month. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter A few days after the attack, which claimed the lives of 1st Sgt. Yosef Kirma, 29, and Levana Malihi, 60, a police investigation concluded that the officer, serving at the rank of second lieutenant, acted incorrectly by failing to retaliate against the terrorist, who was identified as Masbah Abu Sabih, a 39-year-old resident of Silwan in eastern Jerusalem. Police shootout with the terrorist X The investigation, facilitated by the analysis of a video clip capturing part of the incident, showed that despite wearing uniform and being armed with a gun, the officer failed to open fire, instead choosing to flee the scene. Paramedics treat victims at the scene The decision on the officer's fate was taken by Brig. Gen. Amir Abulafia after the former was summoned for a hearing where it was determined that he would be relieved of his command position but would nevertheless remain in the military. Levana Malihi (left) and Yossi Kirma. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit released a statement shortly after the decision was announced. “The investigation revealed that the officer did not attempt to engage the attacker and acted contrary to what is expected of him in a situation such as this,” the statement read. “Therefore it was decided that he be dismissed from his position.” Since the attack the soldier has been suffering from severe mental distress and has struggled to explain his conduct. A Hamas poster celebrating and featuring Masbah Abu Sabih The deadly attack took place in early October when Sabih committed a shooting near a police station next to the Ammunition Hill light rail station in Jerusalem. He then proceeded in the direction of Tomb of Simeon the Just in Sheikh Jarrah where he stopped his vehicle and began shooting at riot police pursuing him on motorbikes. One of the officers, who was later identified as 1st Sgt. Yosef Kirma, was critically injured during the shootout and died from his wounds shortly thereafter. Sabih managed to shoot to death Levana Malihi and wound five other before Israel Border Police shot him dead.London is facing renewed pressure over its dominance of the €1tn (£880bn)-a-day euro clearing market after the European Central Bank set out proposals aimed at giving it more oversight of the lucrative business. The move by the Frankfurt-based ECB – the central bank for the 19 countries using the euro – follows a report by the European commission that called for the EU to have more powers over clearing of financial products denominated in euros after Brexit. The City dominates the market in clearing, a process which is supposed to reduce the risks in complex financial transactions by matching buyers and sellers as well as reducing the cost of trading, through the use of clearing houses. What is euro-denominated clearing? Euro-denominated clearing refers to the trade of financial products, such as derivatives priced in euros. Clearing houses act as buyer and seller in these trades. They agree to take on the risk of a default​, on behalf of the actual buyers and sellers such as investment banks​, in exchange for a payment. London clearing houses dominate the euro side of things, ​dealing on a daily basis with €1tn ​of foreign-exchange contracts (​converting an amount of euros into another currency), compared with €400​bn in New York. The business has been hotly contested since the EU referendum a year ago, when Xavier Rolet, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, warned that 100,000 jobs across the UK were at risk if the City lost the ability to process euro-denominated transactions. In an announcement on Friday, the ECB said its governing council was setting out a recommendation to have more oversight of the business. Using the technical term for clearing houses – central counterparties – the ECB made clear that London was in its regulatory sights, as it demanded “clear legal competence in the area of central clearing”. The bank said: “These powers include a significantly enhanced role for central banks of issue in the supervisory system of central counterparties, in particular with regard to the recognition and supervision of systemically important third-country CCPs clearing significant amounts of euro-denominated transactions.” Business Today: sign up for a morning shot of financial news Read more It builds upon the report from the European commission earlier this month which fell short of forcing the relocation of euro clearing after Brexit but would allow tougher regulation of “systemically” important amounts of trade being conducted by clearing houses outside the remaining 27 members of the EU. In a speech this week, Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, outlined the scale of the clearing market. He said the London Clearing House (LCH) clears swaps – a form of financial instrument – in 18 currencies for companies in 55 jurisdictions, handling more than 90% of cleared interest rate swaps globally and 98% of all cleared swaps in euros. He argued that pushing business through clearing houses reduced the risks in the markets. “Prior to the crisis, derivative transactions created a complex, opaque – and dangerous – web of exposures that helped turn a shock into a panic,” Carney said the speech to an audience at the Mansion House. He said clearing houses also reduced the cost of business. “Any development which prevented EU27 firms from continuing to clear trades in the UK would split liquidity between a less liquid onshore market for EU firms and a more liquid offshore market for everyone else,” he added, warning that the costs would be passed on to households and businesses. The argument about where euro clearing should take place raged even before the referendum. George Osborne, when he was chancellor, had taken the matter to the court to fight an attempt by the ECB to argue that clearing houses – such as the LCH – should be based in the eurozone when they handle trades in euros. In 2015, the general court of the EU had ruled that the ECB did not have the power to demand such a move. The euro clearing issue is one of many competitive threats to the City in the wake of the Brexit vote. Europe’s pre-eminent financial centre is also battling to retain major investment banks – from Goldman Sachs to UBS – that are openly considering moving British-based operations to the EU.Newly inducted WWE Hall of Famer Kurt Angle explains how he feels with such a prestigious honor and if there is a chance fans see him wrestle for the company again. (2:33) When he left the WWE in August 2006, there was a feeling and a hope that he'd return to the fold at some point. Nobody could have predicted it would take almost 11 years, but Friday night's WWE Hall of Fame ceremony in Orlando made it official. Kurt Angle is home. WrestleMania 33 All the matches. All the events. Everything you want to know about the biggest week and biggest event of the year in wrestling. Drink it in, man The Olympic gold medalist, five-time WWE world champion and former Wrestling Observer 'Wrestler of the Decade' headlined an emotional proceeding that carried on for almost five hours at Orlando's Amway Center. In one of the most star-studded Hall of Fame classes in recent memory, Diamond Dallas Page, Rick Rude, The Rock 'N' Roll Express, Beth Phoenix, Teddy Long and 'Warrior Award' winner Eric LeGrand joined Angle as part of the class of 2017. There were also eight new 'legacy' inductees announced during Friday's ceremony, including Japanese legend Rikidozan and promoter Toots Mondt.TCU's Kelsey Patterson connected with other football coaches' wives to raise money for hurricane relief efforts. (Published Friday, Oct. 6, 2017) There's something special about the pageantry of college football. Campuses across the country can't wait for the weekend, and no one knows the stakes more than a coach's wife. "Come Saturday morning, it's on," joked Kelsey Patterson, wife of TCU head football coach Gary Patterson. "Yeah, for three hours, you want to beat them." The devastation left by recent hurricanes got Kelsey thinking, what if she connected with her rivals to help provide relief. Texas Connects Us North Texas Sisters Blog About Coffee Across Texas "People in Houston and Florida and Puerto Rico are still in need," she said. So, she reached out to other coaches' wives. "The response was immediate. It was positive, everybody wanted to help," she recalled. Texas Connects Us Dallas Wood Carver Helps Make Deep-Rooted Creations The campaign is called 'Giving Beyond The Game.' Wives representing football programs from all five power conferences are on board. "Shelley Meyer, with Ohio State, immediately responded back that they wanted to help," she said. "Kathleen Swinney, at Clemson, so we've got a wide variety of people participating." As word spreads, more schools are expected to join the cause. "I didn't leave anybody out," Kelsey added. "I want everybody to have an opportunity to do it." The goal is to raise as much money as they can to support hurricane relief efforts in Houston, Florida and Puerto Rico. They may be bitter rivals on game day, but this is much bigger than football. ONLINE: Giving Beyond The GameHoms Documentary has documented by names from sources 786 IRG ( by nationalities: Iranians-Afghans and Paskistanis) among them 75 officers. The statistics run from 1/01/ 2016 to 31 August 2016. N.B. Lists remain Homs Documentary intellectual property. Overall view : The following lists only contains the officers List of the 786 names of iranians all inclusive. الإحصائية (3) قتلى (ميليشيات الحرس الثوري الإيرانية) في سورية العدد الموثق بالأسماء (786) قتيل من الجنسيات الإيرانية و الباكستانية والأفغانية بينهم(75) ضابط وفترة التوثيق :من1-1-2016 حتى 31-8-2016 …………………………………………………………………. 1 – اللواء : سعيد مسلمي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 2 – اللواء : محسن مسعودي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 3 – العميد : أحمد حاجيوند/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-نبل 4 – العميد : جهانكير جعفري/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 5 – العميد : حسين طاهري/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 6 – العميد : حفيظ خدادي/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-العيس 7 – العميد : حميد طباطبائي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 8 – العميد : سجاد حبيبي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 9 – العميد : سعادت خواه/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 10 – العميد : شفيع شفيعي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خان طومان 11 – العميد : علي أصغر فولاد كر/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خان طومان 12 – العميد : ماشاء الله شمسه/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ دمشق-المرج 13 – العميد : محسن إلهي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خان طومان 14 – العميد : محسن فرامزري/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 15 – العميد : محسن قاجاريان/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-نبل 16 – العقيد : أحمد عارفي/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 17 – العقيد : أسد الله إبراهيمي/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خان طومان 18 – العقيد : بهرام صديقي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خان طومان 19 – العقيد : جواد دوربين/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خان طومان 20 – العقيد : حسن أكبري/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 21 – العقيد : حسن رحيمي/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خان طومان 22 – العقيد : حسن ماندني/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 23 – العقيد : حسين علي رضائي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خان طومان 24 – العقيد : حسين غلامي/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خناصر 25 – العقيد : حسين مشتاقي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خان طومان 26 – العقيد : حمدالله بخش ندة/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-العيس 27 – العقيد : حميد رضا أنصاري/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب 28 – العقيد : خدأكرم رضائي/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 29 – العقيد : داوود مراد خاني/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 30 – العقيد : رضا رستمي مقدم/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 31 – العقيد : رضا فرزانة/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-نبل 32 – العقيد : رضا مراثي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ملاح 33 – العقيد : زمان جعفري/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 34 – العقيد : سعيد سمانلو/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-نبل 35 – العقيد : سعيد سياح طاهري/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف ج 36 – العقيد : سعيد قارقلي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 37 – العقيد : عاشق حسين خان/باكستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 38 – العقيد : علي بيات/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-العيس 39 – العقيد : علي منصوري/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 40 – العقيد : فريد كاوياني لرد/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 41 – العقيد : قاسم تيموري/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ درعا-ش.مسكين 42 – العقيد : كاظم حسن دولت حسين/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خناصر 43 – العقيد : مجتبى ذو الفقار نسب/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 44 – العقيد : مجيد محمدي/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-نبل 45 – العقيد : محمد تقي زلقي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 46 – العقيد : محمد رحيمي/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 47 – العقيد : محمد كاظم توفيقي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 48 – العقيد : مرتضى مسيب زادة/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 49 – العقيد : مصطفى جكيني/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف ج 50 – العقيد : مهدي جعفري/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 51 – المقدم : عمار بهمني/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-العيس 52 – الرائد : محمد بلباسي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خان طومان 53 – الرائد : مهدي حيدري/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خلصة 54 – النقيب : أفشین زورقي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 55 – النقيب : حسين بواس/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 56 – النقيب : حسين همتي/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-العيس 57 – النقيب : زكريا شيري/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 58 – النقيب : سلیم سالاري/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 59 – النقيب : عباس دانشكر/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 60 – النقيب : علي رضا صفر بور/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-العيس 61 – النقيب : علي ناظري/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-راموسة 62 – النقيب : محسن قیطاسلو/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 63 – النقيب : محمد إبراهيم توفيقيان/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-نبل 64 – النقيب : محمد إينانلو/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف ج 65 – النقيب : محمد تقي أربابي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 66 – النقيب : محمد جواد رضائي/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ درعا-ش.مسكين 67 – النقيب : محمد رضا فخيمي هريس/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 68 – النقيب : محمد مرادي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-راموسة 69 – النقيب : مرتضى زرهرن/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-العيس 70 – ملازم1 : إمام نقي/باكستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خناصر 71 – ملازم1 : أحمد أصغري/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ درعا-ش.مسكين 72 – ملازم1 : أحمد رضائي أورندي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 73 – ملازم1 : سعيد حداديان/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-خناصر 74 – ملازم1 : مجتبى يد إلهي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-العيس 75 – ملازم1 : محمد علي قلي زادة/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-نبل 76 -:إبراهيم بور أحمد/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب 77 -:إبراهيم جمشيدي نصيرمحلّه/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب 78 -:إبراهيم رسولي/أفغانستان/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب 79 -:إبراهيم عشرية/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب-ريف 80 -:إبراهيم فاتح/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب 81 -:إبراهيم فزوني نژاد چوبري/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب 82 -:إبراهيم محمودي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب 83 -:إبراهيم نجفي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب 84 -:إبراهيم هادي/إيران/قُتِلَ بـِ حلب
, were added time and again by colourist Steve Oliff, preferably in the form of concentric rings. An instance of such a circular colour gradient is the coloured panel in Fig. 2, in which the background colour changes in six steps from light grey in the middle to dark grey on the edges. Additionally, this gradient effect is combined with a ‘lens flare’ effect: Oliff placed four bright polygonal and circular shapes over Akira’s head, which look like light reflections on a camera lens. In the original, neither of these two effects are visible. In the colouring of Akira, the principle of local colour is prevalent: objects are usually coloured in the colour tone that they would have in real life under normal lighting conditions. Occasionally, however, the colouring deviates from local colour completely, rather following atmospheric aspects instead. This is an option already mentioned before by Klaus Kaindl (my translation): The atmospheric connection [between panels] as either continuity or change can also be expressed through certain situative or colouristic depictions. This is sometimes employed in the translation of Japanese comics, which are originally black and white, but are coloured for the American and European market, which in turn – due to specific symbolic meanings of colours – may lead to changes in the depiction of the narrative. (2004: 204–205). In a scene in the 22nd Epic issue (p. 82–83 in the 11th Carlsen volume), for instance, two figures fight each other using psionic powers. Each of these characters seems to illuminate himself and the space behind him in a different colour, green and orange, respectively (whereas in the original, on p. 302 in the 4th Kōdansha volume, they are simply rendered in different shades of grey). Through this kind of colouring, certain aspects of the narrative are made easier comprehensible, such as the effects of invisible supernatural forces in this case. Furthermore, the characters become, in a way, colour-coded: the colouring separates the figures into two parties, so that readers can tell the ‘good’ (orange) and the ‘evil’ (green) combatants apart simply by their colours. Sometimes, however, one cannot help but speak of colouring errors. For instance, in a scene in the Epic issue #26 (p. 91–93 in the 13th Carlsen volume, cf. vol. 5, p. 150–152 in the Japanese 6-volume edition), Kaneda is given a control unit for some kind of robot and is warned not to use ‘the red switch’. The control box is shown from all sides, but none of the switches is coloured red. All things considered, though, the colouring of Akira must be regarded as decidedly high quality for that time, especially when we compare the novel computer based colouring of Akira to the conventional colouring of other comics published by Marvel at that time, in which colour areas are usually confined in black outlines and evenly filled with one single colour. Multi-stage colour modulations, let alone continuous colour gradients as in Akira, are rarely to be found in these comics. Marvel/Epic seem to have been proud of the colouring in Akira when they wrote, ‘Akira is the first regular comic book in the world to be coloured using such a system’ (Ōtomo 1988–1995: issue #15). Apparently, Oliff was Ōtomo’s ‘personal choice for colourist on the project’, as another editorial text informs us (Ōtomo 1988–1995: issue #1). Script Let us now turn to the translation in a narrower sense, i.e. the translation of Japanese script into English and German. In Akira, there are three kinds of script: sound effects, speech bubble script, and inscriptions or labels integrated into the drawings, e.g. on signs etc. We will consider sound effects first. In the Japanese original, sound effects appear in two different forms: on the one hand those that are typeset in regular Japanese machine fonts and placed in speech bubbles which are assigned to the source of the sound, as if the objects making the sound would talk. This peculiar (from a Western point of view) use of the speech bubble has been described before by Klaus Kaindl (my translation): In this context, the culture-specific differences in the use of the speech bubble should be mentioned. In Japanese, for instance, it is also used for rendering sounds made by machines and objects, which is unusual in Western comics (cf. fig. 2+3). (2004: 212). The figures referred to by Kaindl are in fact panels from Akira, even though they do not actually contain the sort of sound effect in question. On the other hand, we find regular sound effects as drawn katakana characters integrated into the panel drawings. These letters are rendered in a multitude of different shapes and tonalities (white, black, or shades of grey). In the manga translation practice of today, sound effects would be more likely left in Japanese script in the drawings, and printed as approximate transcriptions or translations in footnotes or in smaller script next to them. In the Epic edition, however, both kinds of sound effects were transferred into American equivalents and integrated, usually without speech bubbles, into the drawings. Many different typographic effects and colours were employed for the rendering of these new sound effects. In the first German edition (and, incidentally, also in the second German edition, which was printed in black and white), these American sound effects were taken over unchanged, which meant a reduction of labour and thus costs as opposed to yet another pass of translating and retouching the sound effects. This practice is also reported to have been employed in French manga translations (Howell 2001). In a survey among German-language comics publishers conducted by Klaus Kaindl in 1997, several publishers mentioned ‘international comprehensibility’ (my translation) as a reason not to translate sound effects (2004: 175). Although it may be true that German-speaking readers can easily guess the sound implied by the American sound effects, those sounds would of course be rendered with different letter combinations in the German language. Interestingly, on a panel on which there is a hand dropping pills on a table (p. 41 in the 1st Carlsen volume), the sound effect ‘KLATTER’ (originally チャラッ, ‘chara!’ on p. 39 in the 1st Kōdansha volume), obviously derived from the clattering sound, is spelled with a K instead of a C and thus looks reminiscent of German. (The word ‘klatter’ does not exist in the German language, though; the closest German equivalent of ‘clatter’ would probably be ‘klappern’ or ‘klacke(r)n’.) In this context, we should also consider the lettering in general. In the original manga, script in regular speech bubbles is varied only through font size and the shape of the speech bubbles themselves. In the translations, however, the background within the speech bubbles is often apparently arbitrarily coloured, e.g. light blue in the first panel on p. 23 in the 1st Carlsen volume (cf. p. 21 in the 1st Kōdansha volume). Occasionally, the letters in the translations are coloured and graphically designed like sound effects in order to add emphasis, as in the second panel on said page, in which the hand-drawn letters ‘YEAH!’ overlap each other and are coloured in an orange-to-yellow gradient. Altogether, the lettering in the translated editions gives a decidedly different impression than the original one: more diversified and elaborate, but it is also not far-fetched to imagine that this lettering might appear to readers as more unsettled and strenuous to read. Let us now consider the translation of script in speech bubbles. Caption boxes and thought bubbles are used only rarely in Akira, which is why in this article, the term ‘speech bubble script’ is used for these kinds of script. As mentioned above, this speech bubble text was translated in a two-tiered process from Japanese into American English. According to the imprint, the German translation was made directly from Japanese, but sometimes the German translators appear to have turned to the earlier English translation as well (e.g. in the Carlsen volume 6, p. 75, on which the text of a speech bubble is attributed to a different character than in the Japanese original; the same questionable attribution was made in the Epic issue #12). Using English as a relay language instead of translating directly from Japanese was also employed in other German manga editions (Jüngst 2008) and other foreign-language manga editions, e.g. French (Howell 2001). One translation decision for which some readers might criticise the Epic edition is the name of the female protagonist, which is given as ‘Kay’ in English. In the original Japanese, it is usually rendered with the katakana syllables ケ (ke) and イ (i). In German, this name is spelled ‘Kei’ accordingly. One might thus suspect that the translators of the Epic edition turned a common Japanese given name into an American one, possibly in order to make the whole setting of the comic appear less alien (see Howell 2001 for more examples of character name substitutions in American manga editions). To be fair, however, it must be said that Kei’s/Kay’s name never appears in the kanji logographic script, so that it cannot be decided which of the several homophonous Japanese names the phonetic sequence ‘kei’ refers to, if at all. In fact, there are at least two instances in the original comic in which that name is spelled with the Latin letter K (Kちゃん ‘K-chan’), which would then, in English pronunciation, indeed be probably more accurately rendered as ‘Kay’. A difficulty common to the translation of all kinds of Japanese text are the Japanese suffixes after personal names, such as -chan, -kun, -sama, -san, etc. Nowadays in manga translations, these suffixes are often only transliterated (i.e. the Japanese syllables are rendered in Latin characters) instead of translated (Brienza 2009). The two Akira translations, however, experimented with various translation solutions. For example, on p. 174 in the 4th Kōdansha volume, Kei/Kay is adressed as ケイ様 (Kei-sama), i.e. with the respect-indicating suffix -sama. In the English translation (Epic issue #20), this form of address is expressed in the phrase ‘You, honored lady, are Kay, are you not?’ In the German edition (p. 62 in volume 10), it is reflected by putting the whole sentence in plural form, the archaic and equally respect-indicating ‘Ihr müßt Kei sein’. These different forms of translation are, however, not used consistently within the respective translated editions, and sometimes these suffixes are ignored entirely so that information is lost. (A similar example regarding the translation – or lack thereof – of formal speech in a French comic into German is given in Kaindl 2004: 242.) Still, altogether the English and German translations of the speech bubble script seem thoroughly careful and elaborate. More problematic than the speech bubble translation though, is the translation of that kind of script in Akira that is part of the drawings themselves, e.g. street signs, graffiti on house walls, advertisement boards, etc., sometimes called ‘inscriptions’ or ‘labels’. A radical solution to this translation task is the deletion without replacement of this script, so that it does not need to be translated anymore. This solution was employed in a few instances, even in some that contained Western script in the original Japanese comic already, such as in a panel on p. 99 in the 1st original collected volume, in which the character Masaru has the number 27 in Arabic numerals clearly visibly tattooed on his palm. He is thus marked as one of the ‘Numbers’, children with supernatural abilities who all have a different number on the palm of their right hand (or the left hand in the flipped translated editions, respectively). This quite important information gets lost in the translations at this point (Epic issue #2/p. 101 in the 1st Carlsen volume), as the number was removed entirely, possibly in order not to have it appear in mirror writing. Another possibility to deal with this kind of script is to simply leave it in the original language and not offer any translation at all. This is practised in several instances, such as the writing on the house wall shown on p. 39 in the 1st Carlsen volume (Epic issue #1, cf. p. 37 in the 1st Kōdansha volume), which says that ビリヤード (biriyādo) and 卓球 (takkyū) – billiards and table tennis – can be played in this building. The comprehension of these two words is not crucial for the comprehension of the narrative, even more so as their meaning can be easily guessed when considering the adjacent pictorial representations of the corresponding tools of these games – a billiard cue, billiard balls, and table tennis bats. Still, it might have an irritating effect on American and German readers to be confronted, time and again, with script that the majority of them cannot read. The third variant of dealing with inscriptions and labels is its complete tacit translation. This method is employed in many places, for instance on a panel in the final Epic volume: a banner with ‘GREAT AKIRA EMPIRE’ written on it is unfolded there. Thus the phrase ‘Great Tokyo Empire’, which appears frequently in the comic and must be familiar to the reader at this point in the series, seems to have been re-written by replacing the word ‘Tokyo’ with ‘Akira’. In the Japanese original comic (p. 423 in volume 6), however, the well-known phrase ‘Great Tokyo Empire’ was retained unaltered in the characters 大东京帝國 and merely extended by adding the word ‘AKIRA’ in Latin letters and an exclamation mark. The difference in meaning between the two wordings might be marginal, but this example makes clear what great liberties the translators sometimes have taken. The last two label translation methods mentioned here may also be used jointly in an unfortunate combination. In the panels in Fig. 3 we see the same truck from the same side. The inscription on it is given in one panel as ‘the GReat TOKYO EMPIRE’ in Latin script. On the other panel, however, it is retained in Japanese characters. This does not affect the comprehension of this label, because this English wording ‘great Tokyo empire’ is the one used throughout the comic as the translation of this phrase. Yet any immersive effect of the reading experience is disrupted as two different diegetic levels clash in these panels. The script in the bottom panel is diegetic, which we see in the same way as it could be perceived by the characters in the story, whereas the script in the upper panel is extra-diegetic script. This extra-diegetic script is meant for the readers but cannot be perceived by the characters in this form, as it is highly unlikely that the soldiers of the ‘Great Tokyo Empire’ label their vehicles in English. And even if they would, this would mean that the English writing would have been erased and painted over with Japanese writing within the mere seconds that pass between the two panels. This translation variant is therefore a clumsy one, and an unnecessary one too, as the Japanese phrase for ‘Great Tokyo Empire’ has already been shown untranslated several times in the translated editions at this point in the series. Reception To sum up, the first American and German translated editions of Akira can be characterised as translations that have, by means of flipping, colouring and above all the book format, made great efforts to adapt this manga to the habits of the US and German comic markets and those of the readers there. The translation practice back then, which Brienza (2009) characterises as “illogical” and “decidedly self-defeating”, differed considerably from today’s in which manga are usually published unflipped, in black and white, and in formats similar to those in Japan (Jüngst 2008, Brienza 2009). However, it was not the formal commonalities between translated manga and original American and European comics that seemed to attract the recipients’ attention, but rather the purported differences in content. An example of this kind of reception is an announcement text of the publication of the first two Carlsen volumes in an issue of Rraah! from February 1991. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Rraah! was one of the leading German-language magazines on comics. This short text starts with quotes from the cover blurb (my translation): Moebius has called it “the hard rock comic of the 90s”. The New York Times spoke of a “masterpiece”, Libération even of a “mega comic”. Nice words for a series that, in pseudo-literary guise, pioneers the influential violent tendencies of modern Japanese comics. The comic in question is Katsuhiro Otomo’s “Akira”, which Carlsen begins to publish this month. (Rraah! 1991: 43). Then the plot is summed up. The brief announcement article ends with the following lines: Katsuhiro Otomo (born 1954) is one of the most successful comic creators in his home country. He published his first works already at the age of 19. Between 1980 and 1982, his series “Domu” achieved sales figures of over 500.000 copies and stayed at number one of the Japanese charts for weeks. Volume three of the Carlsen Akira edition will already be published in May, after that a new album is going to be published every two months. (Rraah! 1991: 44). This short review shows quite clearly the ambivalence with which Western comics criticism initially reacted towards Akira: on the one hand, Akira is discounted as the confirmation of the old prejudice against Japanese ‘violence comics’. This tendency of the Western press to highlight depictions of violence in manga was already present in the 1970s: according to an article in another German comics magazine from 1978, (my translation), ‘Japanese comics are pervaded by a dark, malign nihilism which leads to almost every comic ending in an orgy of violence and death’ (Burgdorf 1978: 19). On the other hand, Rraah! feels compelled to report on manga as the latest success story on the German comics market. Basically, this point in time is already the beginning of the schism in the German (as well as the whole Western) comics scene into manga fans on one side, and fans of American and European comics on the other – a schism that continues to the present day (Brienza 2009). At the same time, we must conclude that there was nothing wrong with these two translations in Benjamin’s sense: while they adapt the manga to their respective domestic comic markets, they are ‘translucent’ and make it obvious that they are translations, not originals. The quality of the translation, however, seems to have had little effect on the success of Akira in America and Europe, which, while unprecedented for a manga, was still moderate in comparison to the popularity achieved by later manga series (Jüngst 2008). If we follow Brienza’s explanation of the development of the American manga market, the Western Akira editions were still too much part of the narrow ‘comics field’ instead of the wider ‘book field’ to have been able to spearhead a real manga boom in the West.Facing a decline in “progressive” politics, San Francisco supervisor John Avalos is offering a city charter amendment to allow 16-year-olds to vote. He argues that allowing the teenagers to vote will stimulate more civic involvement and inculcate a desire to vote that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Avalos told the San Francisco Chronicle, “I have seen the power of young people to be able to make changes and positive contributions to their community, and it makes sense to give them the right to vote.” Avalos is following the path laid out in January by the San Francisco Youth Commission, which passed a resolution to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to vote. If Avalos succeeds in getting six votes from the eleven-member Board of Supervisors, the teenagers would be eligible to vote in city elections. Two cities in Maryland, Takoma Park and Hyattsville, have given 16-year-olds the right to vote, but San Francisco would become the first major city to do so. San Francisco Youth Commissioner Joshua Cardenas, 18, complained, “You can drive, you can work, you can pay taxes and you can be tried in adult court, and yet you are denied the right to vote. There is a contradiction there. Certainly, they have the knowledge and competence to vote at 16.” Claremont McKenna College political science professor John Pitney vehemently disagreed, telling the Chronicle, “It’s a terrible idea. Sixteen-year-olds have a lot going for them, but civic judgment isn’t one of those things.” Political scientist David Latterman told the Chronicle that Avalos was trying to boost the flagging fortunes of “progressives” on the city council, “looking under the couch cushions to get more votes.” Avalos denied the accusation. The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 nationally in 1971 in the 26th Amendment as Congress decided that anyone old enough to fight in Vietnam should also be allowed to vote.Sandro has made 18 appearances this season Queens Park Rangers have been advised not to select midfielder Sandro for Sunday's Premier League game against Manchester City because of an issue with his UK residency visa. The Brazilian, 26, played the full 90 minutes of Rangers' last match, a 2-1 defeat at Liverpool on 2 May. But he will sit out Sunday's game at Etihad Stadium, which Rangers need to win to avoid relegation. A QPR statement said: "The club are working to resolve the issue." The west London side are nine points from safety with three games to play - against City, at home to Newcastle and away at Leicester. In their statement, Rangers added: "In response to an article which was published by the Sunday Mirror, the club can confirm it was informed by the Home Office on Thursday, 7 May that there is an issue with Sandro's UK residency visa." Sandro joined Rangers from Tottenham in September 2014, having spent more than four years at White Hart Lane.Steve Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers but is from Seattle and was possibly going to be part of an ownership group for a new team there before buying the Clippers, says don’t hold your breath for Seattle getting an expansion team, at least in the next year or two: “It’s just not likely to happen,” Ballmer told those attending the conference. “There has been no discussion about expansion since I have been involved with the league. So, I don’t think that will happen. The league has really moved to favor teams staying in their current markets. You’d have to find a team that’s at the end of their (arena) lease, where it looks hard to build an arena and where they’ve tried really hard to build an arena.” The next year or two is an eyeblink in league expansion time, so that’s really no surprise. Why it’s significant is that the city’s memorandum of understanding with Chris Hansen expires in November 2017, so even if the Seattle council works out its qualms over closing a street to make way for the arena, there may not be an NBA team to build one for, which is required as part of the deal. Hansen’s best chance of building an arena, said Ballmer, is to find an NHL team to bring to town — something that would take some fast footwork, since Hansen doesn’t have a team owner lined up, and the NHL just announced expansion that didn’t include Seattle, and there’s at least a $100 million funding gap if Hansen brings hockey to town instead of basketball, and also Hansen doesn’t really like hockey. Verdict: mostly dead.WASHINGTON — It’s safe to say the new proposal to undo the Affordable Care Act, if it becomes law, would lead to fewer Americans having health insurance. Some argue more than 22 million people could left without. Others say it would be fewer. Why is 22 million an important figure? It’s how many more people would lack coverage under the Better Care Reconciliation Act — the health care bill the Senate tried but failed to pass in July. That estimate haunted Republicans as they tried to defend an already unpopular piece of legislation. Republicans in the Senate won’t have to combat such an unpopular number if they vote on the Cassidy-Graham bill next week, as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has announced he intends. That’s because the Congressional Budget Office — the official scorekeeper for the legislative branch — says it will release only a partial analysis by then. It will take several more weeks to estimate the bill’s costs and how many more people may be uninsured than under Obamacare. On one hand, voting without this key information means Republicans will endure more criticism that they’re ignoring the measure’s impact on a sizable segment of the population and economy. On the other, it means they’re not up against another scary number from the scorekeepers yet. And yet the question remains: How would the bill repealing and replacing parts of the Affordable Care Act, advanced by Sens. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., affect coverage? We have a few clues. A big reason for the coverage reductions under the failed Senate bill was because it would have trashed the requirement to buy coverage or pay a fine — the individual mandate. The Congressional Budget Office previously estimated that would mean about 15 million fewer people buying plans right away. Like the failed bill, Cassidy-Graham also gets rid of the individual mandate. So it appears the measure would result in at least 15 million fewer insured Americans, if scorekeepers use the same methods. But how would cuts to Medicaid and marketplace subsidies further affect coverage rates? Cassidy-Graham enacts cuts to traditional Medicaid that are comparable with those envisioned under the failed bill, reducing nationwide spending on the program by about 8 percent by 2026. But up until 2027, when there’s a big funding cliff if the law were to expire, Cassidy-Graham appears to maintain more of the funding for rate subsidies and Medicaid expansions allowed under Obamacare than the earlier bill. Under that bill, the federal government would have spent $389 billion less on subsidies between 2020 and 2026, according to the nonpartisan scorekeepers. But under Cassidy-Graham, it would spend $243 billion less during the same period on both subsidies and Medicaid expansion combined, according to a projection by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Avalere Health set the figure at $215 billion in an analysis Wednesday. So some conservatives argue Cassidy-Graham could result in more people receiving coverage than would have under the failed Senate bill — depending on how states implement it. “States could take the fact they’ve regained control of the insurance rules in their markets and have a lot of money from the federal government and could end up with something that covers a lot more people,” former Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Holtz-Eakin said. “I can make the case they could beat that number.” Assumptions about how states will behave are key. Under Cassidy-Graham, the federal dollars used for subsidies and Medicaid expansion would go to the states in a lump sum they could use in a huge variety of ways. That makes calculating the coverage effects of the Cassidy-Graham bill decidedly difficult, experts say. For the scorekeepers to come up with a ballpark figure for how many people would have health coverage under the GOP measure, the agency must make a lot of assumptions. To top it off, 36 states — including Iowa — are holding governor races next year, making it incredibly difficult to predict how they’d all act. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ADVERTISEMENT NEWS AND SPORTS The day's top stories right in your inbox. I am above 13 years of age, and agree to sending policies. SIGN ME UP Thank you for signing up for our e-newsletter! You should start receiving the e-newsletters within a couple days. These reasons are why health policy firn Avalere hasn’t yet released an estimate of how many people would have coverage under Cassidy-Graham, said the group’s founder, Dan Mendelson. It’s a little easier to make assumptions about how states like California or New York, which are more actively involved in providing care to residents, would act than to guess the behavior of less-involved states like, say, Mississippi or Kansas. “It is very dependent on state decision-making,” Mendelson said. Under the bill, states would have only two years — until 2020 — to make and then enact those decisions.Just when you think the Palm Beach County Tea Party can't sink any deeper into the quicksand of gullibility, it brings in another clown act to prove you wrong. Last time around, it was an uproar over a mythical U.N. plot to subvert local government via mind control. This time, crackpot science is on the menu. See also: Tea Party: Let's Rewrite the U.S. Constitution! Continue Reading This week's joker is one John L. Casey, president of the Space and Science Research Corp. and CEO of the International Earthquake and Volcano Prediction Center -- both outfits conveniently located in Orlando, just down the road from Disney World. Casey, with a CV spotty as a case of measles, describes himself as "a former White House space program adviser, consultant to NASA Headquarters, and space shuttle engineer." He claims an M.A. in management from Webster University in St. Louis and a B.A. in physics and mathematics from "JSU" -- whatever and wherever that is. Claiming to be the "foremost institution in the United States dedicated to communicating the need to prepare for the new cold climate epoch" (a dubious honor), Casey's Space and Science Research Corp. has, according to its website: led all climate research companies in alerting the White House, Congress, and the maintsream [sic] media to the ill-effects of the next climate change predicted by the SSRC and other international scientists to be decades of potentially dangerous cold weather. Casey's International Earthquake and Volcano Prediction Center came about, according to the SSRC website: Because of the respect [Casey] had earned in his climate research in September 2011 he was asked by a group of the world's best geologists in earthquake prediction to bring them together in a new company to help save thousands of lives each year by predicting the most dangerous earthquakes in advance, a never before achieved objective. Casey's work has never been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, only self-published on the internet. He told New Times that's because "the importance of the findings and conclusions mandated the widest public dissemination possible, which the web supplies." (Spreading the news of global cooling is so urgent that, in an April 28 letter to the White House, Casey warned President Obama that "African Americans, other minorities, and the poor will suffer the most because of the new cold era and your climate policies. This assertion is supported by the fact that a large percentage of these citizens are largely dependent on the US government for food, which we will start to run short of as the cold starts to damage crops.") When New Times pressed Casey about his avoiding scientific journals, he cited their "limited space," "lack of expertise," and the "history of bias by some journals to publish anything that does not support manmade global warming." University of Miami climate scientist Dr. Benjamin Kirtman told New Times this about Casey's work: It looks to me that Casey is confused about global dimming, which actually seems to be in a reversal... As for the "global cooling" Casey is arguing for, all evidence is to the contrary. Indeed, ocean heat uptake has continued to steadily rise since the 1950s, and there is no plausible physical process (including changes in solar output) that would end this trend in the near-term (10-30 years). Casey's "Summary Climate Assessment" has some unsupportable statements. For example, Casey's assessment states that "Integrated Global Atmospheric Temperatures continue to show a long term COOLING trend that began in 2007. (100 year trend)." This is untrue (by far, 2001-10 is the warmest decade since the 1850s) and it is not mathematically possible detect a 100-year trend with seven years of data. The assessment goes on to state, "The rate of oceanic temperature decline has been slightly reduced over the past year but is expected to continue its long-term decline." This is also untrue -- July 2014 ocean temperatures are the warmest on record. On the topic of Casey's rationale for avoiding peer-reviewed journals, Kirtman was brief: "This is the usual nonsense associated with individuals who are afraid their work cannot withstand peer review." (We also sought comment on Casey's work from climate scientists at Yale University. A media rep there replied: "Unfortunately no one has the time for those clowns. There's too many of them.") As for Casey's expertise on earthquakes and volcanoes, UM marine geoscientist Dr. Larry Peterson told us: I'm afraid I can't be of much help. You asked for my thoughts about what's on the IEVPC website having to do with earthquake and volcano predictions, but that's way outside my expertise. Nonetheless, I forwarded the message to two other faculty here, one an earthquake seismologist and the other who does volcano monitoring by satellite, and they said they had never heard of any of the principles or those listed as Associated Scientists. They preferred not to comment further, and I don't think anything more needs to be said. Our discussions with global cooling/earthquake/volcano expert John L. Casey ended on rather a wan note. Casey asked us to "help in the SSRC mission of alerting the public to prepare for the coming cold epoch" and join him in "educating the public about the Earth's real climate status versus what we hear from the U.N. and the U.S. government." We replied that we "would feel more confident about joining in your crusade if you could provide more detail about your work as 'White House space program adviser, consultant to NASA headquarters, and space shuttle engineer.' Function? Dates? Superiors? Supporting documentation would be helpful." To which Casey responded "I wish I had more time for our dialogue, but I don't see it going anywhere, at least not to the extent of helping the SSRC mission. It appears we are at an end point... I wish you the best in your future endeavors." John L. Casey speaks to the Palm Beach County Tea Party tonight and tomorrow, to the Jupiter chapter on Monday, September 1, and to the Boca Raton chapter on Tuesday, September 2. Fire Ant -- an invasive species, tinged bright red, with an annoying, sometimes-fatal sting -- covers South Florida news and culture. Got feedback or a tip? Contact fire.ant@browardpalmbeach.com.IT SEEMS that the ageing politicians who appear on the official Palestine television station are in “urgent need” of a makeover. So, at least, said one of the channel’s directors in a letter to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. He proposed hiring a make-up artist, a prestigious one who has “already worked with several international stations.” Her fee, though, was $12,000 per month—roughly what the average Palestinian will earn in four years. Many such average people are distinctly unimpressed by that kind of extravagance. The document, published last month on a local website, is the latest scandal to roil Palestinian politics. In August it was a letter from an Abbas adviser, begging the foreign minister of Bahrain for $4 million to build an exclusive housing complex for Palestinian officials. Education officials, meanwhile, have been accused of selling off a batch of 1,000 medical scholarships offered by the Venezuelan government. The Palestinian Authority (PA), the limited self-governing body in the occupied territories, has been plagued by waste, graft and accusations of both since its inception in 1994 following the Oslo accords. When auditors looked at the books three years later, they concluded that nearly 40% of the budget had been frittered away. By 2006, according to the PA’s own attorney-general, officials had embezzled some $700m. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. Aman, a local watchdog group, claims that the bloated public-sector payroll includes an unknown number of “ghost employees” whose salaries line the pockets of managers and ministers. There are ghost businesses, too, like a $6m joint Palestinian-Italian venture to build a pipe factory that existed only on paper. Western donors, who give the PA about a sixth of its annual budget, have periodically threatened to withhold aid. Their concerns were alleviated by the appointment in 2007 Salam Fayyad as prime minister. A respected economist and a longtime IMF official, he took solid steps to combat graft, and millions of dollars were recovered during his tenure. Mr Fayyad resigned in 2013, however, and Mr Abbas quickly turned the anti-corruption effort into a cudgel to use against his enemies. Last year he ordered an investigation into the legal status and finances of some 2,800 NGOs in the Palestinian territories. The goal, he said, was to make them “transparent and accountable.” Critics, though, saw it as an attempt to muzzle civil society. Mr Fayyad himself was caught up in the sweep: his development institute’s bank accounts were frozen in June on vague charges of money laundering. The most prominent target is Mohammad Dahlan, once a prominent member of Mr Abbas’s Fatah party and now thought to be planning a run for the presidency from his exile in Abu Dhabi. He is acused of having siphoned millions of shekels from Gaza’s tax authority in the 1990s. A PA court dismissed corruption charges against him in April, however, ruling that he still enjoyed parliamentary immunity. Asked to name the “most serious problem” in their society, 24% of Palestinians say it is corruption—only slightly below the 28% who point to the Israeli occupation. Four-fifths believe their leaders are corrupt. A new poll found that, for the first time, more than half of them want to dissolve the authority altogether. “A majority believes that it has become a burden,” said Khalil Shikaki, who carried out the poll. Perhaps not even a $12,000 makeover can help.The first job you have doesn't necessarily define your career. In fact, the second, third, and fourth jobs you have don't necessarily define your career — so don't panic, even if you're on your third job this month
(right) The fuel tank of Obama's beast was coated with armor plating and contains a special foam which expands on impact and that prevented it from exploding, even if it suffered a direct hit. The tires were coated in Kevlar to protect them from bursting, but even if they did, the metal rims were strong enough to hold up the vehicle and keep it rolling in case the outer layer was blown away. The vehicle may be equipped for just about any attacks, but it has ironically broken down on two public occasions. In 2013, Obama's limo broke down on his first presidential trip to Israel after his driver accidentally put gas in the tank instead of diesel. One of the fleet cars got stuck leaving the US Embassy in Dublin in 2011 after it couldn't overcome a speed hump. An adjustable suspension may be included in the new model to avoid similar incidents. The virtually indestructible car has come a long way since past state cars as President Lyndon Johnson's 1968 custom-built black stretch limousine did not have bulletproof features or weaponry. Warren G. Harding was the first president to be driven to his inauguration in 1921. President Lyndon Johnson's 1968 custom-built black stretch limousine did not have bulletproof features or weaponryBig Brothers Big Sisters of America is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization whose goal is to help all children reach their potential through professionally supported, one-to-one relationships with volunteer mentors. Big Brothers Big Sisters is one of the oldest and largest youth mentoring organizations in the United States. Big Brothers Big Sisters mentors children, all ages in communities across the country. Congressional charter [ edit ] The group holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code. History [ edit ] Effects [ edit ] Public/Private Ventures, an independent Philadelphia-based national research organization, conducted a study from 1994–95, monitoring 950 boys and girls nationwide to study the effects of Big Brothers Big Sisters. Out of the 950 children, half were randomly chosen to be matched, and the others were put on a waiting list. According to the study the matched children meet with their Big Brother or Sister about three times a month for a year. After surveying the children at the beginning of the study, and again after 18 months, the researchers found that the Little Brothers and Little Sisters, compared to those children not in the program, were: 46% less likely to begin using illegal drugs 27% less likely to begin using alcohol 52% less likely to skip school 37% less likely to skip a class 33% less likely to hit someone They also found that the Littles were more confident of their performance in schoolwork and got along better with their families.[6] "We have known all along that Big Brothers Big Sisters' mentoring has a long-lasting, positive effect on children's confidence, grades, and social skills," affirms Karen J. Mathis, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America’s Past President and CEO, "and the results of this impact study scientifically confirm that belief." "These dramatic findings are very good news, particularly at a time when many people contend that 'nothing works' in reaching teenagers," said Gary Walker, then-President of Public/Private Ventures. "This program suggests a strategy the country can build on to make a difference, especially for youth in single-parent families."[6] Public/Private Ventures conducted another study in 2011 that evaluated the school-based Big Brothers Big Sisters Program. Unlike the conventional community-based Big Brothers Big Sisters where Bigs and Littles can engage in their activities in any setting, some Big Brothers Big Sisters agencies offer opportunities for school-based mentoring. In this type of mentoring, the Bigs meet with their Littles at their school – whether it is in the classroom or on the playground.[7] Public/Private Ventures randomly assigned 1,139 nine- to sixteen-year-old students in either a treatment group that received mentoring or a control group that did not receive mentoring. They followed the students for 1.5 school years. The outcomes that the researchers measured fell into three broad categories: school-related performance and attitudes, problem behaviors, and social and personal well-being. At the end of the first school year, compared to the control group, mentored youth performed better academically, had more positive perceptions of their own academic abilities, and were more likely to report having a “special adult” in their lives. However, the mentored youth did not show improvements in classroom effort; global self-worth; relationships with parents, teachers, or peers; and rates of problem behavior. Academic improvements were also not sustained into the second school year. The researchers predict that more permanent changes in the youth's school performance might depend on more fundamental changes that do not occur in the first year of involvement.[8] Accountability [ edit ] In a recent review, Big Brothers Big Sisters was selected by Forbes magazine as one of its top ten charities, making the publication’s “gold star” list of charities worthy of donor consideration. The magazine surveyed 200 non-profits and rated them on how efficiently they collect and distribute dollars. Forbes looked at three categories: charitable commitment; fundraising efficiency, and donor dependency. Big Brothers Big Sisters of America received a rating of two out of a potential four stars. Charity Navigator, America’s premier charity evaluator. The low rating is due to the 23.3% of expenses that are used for things other than programming expenses.[9] Big Brothers Big Sisters of America meets the BBB Wise Giving Alliance's Standards for Charity Accountability.[10] Big Brothers Big Sisters received the American Institute of Philanthropy's highest rating, an A+.[11] On June 24, 2013, The United States Department of Justice issued an Audit Report that stated it was freezing the disbursement of all grant funds to Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (BBBSA), noting that the organization was "in material non-compliance with the majority of the grant requirements" that were tested by the audit. The audit also noted that "as a result of these weaknesses", the agency "questioned $19,462,448 in funding that the grantee has received and recommended the $3,714,838 in funds not yet disbursed be put to better use". The audit further stated that "most significantly", it "found that BBBSA's practices for recording and supporting grant-related expenditures were inadequate to safeguard grant funds and ensure compliance with the terms and conditions of the grants".[citation needed] Since 2013, Big Brothers has replaced its management team and begun implementing policies governing the use of federal grant funds. “We appreciate the support of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the Civil Division in working with us on these kinds of cases,” said Department of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz. “The OIG’s auditors and investigators will continue to work with each other closely to uncover misuses of grant funds, and with our law enforcement partners to ensure that justice is served.” In addition to paying the United States $1.6 million, and as part of the settlement, Big Brothers has agreed to institute a strict compliance program that requires the organization to engage in regular audits, both internally and by independent auditors; establish a compliance team, an employee code of conduct, whistleblower policies and a disciplinary policy for employees who engage in or fail to disclose abuses of federal grant funds; provide regular employee training on these policies; and employ risk assessment tools to detect abuses that might otherwise go undetected. The settlement was the result of a coordinated effort between the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the Civil Division’s Commercial Litigation Branch. The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General conducted the investigation. The claims resolved by this settlement are allegations only; there has been no determination of liability.[12] Origins and operations [ edit ] In 1904, a young New York City court clerk named Ernest Kent Coulter was seeing many boys come through his courtroom. He recognized that caring adults could help many of these boys stay out of trouble, and he set out to find volunteers. That marked the beginning of Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City and the Big Brothers movement. By 1916, Big Brothers had spread to 96 cities across the country. At around the same time, the members of a group called Ladies of Charity were befriending girls who had come through the New York Children’s Court. That group would later become Catholic Big Sisters, an independent organization. In 1958, the Big Brothers Association was granted a Congressional charter. Big Sisters International was founded in 1970. Both groups continued to work independently until 1977, when Big Brothers of America and Big Sisters International joined forces and became Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. Big Brothers Big Sisters currently operates in all 50 states and in 13 countries around the world, including Australia, Austria, Bermuda, Bulgaria, Canada, Cayman Islands, Ireland, Israel, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Trinidad and Tobago.[13] Big Brothers Big Sisters International [ edit ] Big Brothers Big Sisters International was founded in 1998. BBBS International's mission is to promote and support the development of Big Brothers Big Sisters mentoring programs throughout the world, operating independently in various countries. This is done by providing consultation, technical assistance, training and materials for NGOs wanting to develop this mentoring model. Big Brothers Big Sisters International headquarters is located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.Those two gymnasts — Rachael Denhollander, who was the first to step forward by name, and Jamie Dantzscher, who initially remained anonymous but later spoke out publicly — broke a dam of silence in the sport, more than a year before the #MeToo movement began revealing sexual misconduct by innumerable men in powerful positions. More than 130 women — mostly but not exclusively gymnasts — have now described abuse by Dr. Nassar (who worked both for the national team and for Michigan State University). Among them are at least seven former members of the United States national gymnastics team, including four Olympians. Many of the women submitted victim impact statements to the court before the sentencing on Thursday. Judge Neff ruled last week that they could not be read aloud in the courtroom, but some women shared their statements through other channels. McKayla Maroney, a 2012 Olympian who came forward in October as one of Dr. Nassar’s victims, wrote in her statement that he “deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison.” “He abused my trust, abused my body and left scars on my psyche that may never heal,” Ms. Maroney wrote, according to ESPN. And Aly Raisman — the captain of the American women’s gymnastics teams at the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, and one of the most outspoken survivors of Dr. Nassar’s abuse — published thousands of words in The Players’ Tribune on Thursday.On a Friday night, I'm at the historic Sixth and I Synagogue in downtown Washington, DC, for a little Shabbasana. That's a combo platter of yoga and Shabbat observation. It might seem like an unholy mash-up, but to the folks "om"ing and "namaste"ing their way through class, Shabbasana is just what they need to round out the week. I am neither Jewish nor a yogi. But I have come to this class at the urging of its Italian Catholic instructor, Greg Marzullo. The class, he says, perfectly encapsulates the malleability of modern yoga. “So many of the same truths are coming through,” he says. “The lens is different, but the image behind the lens is the same.” In a way, this is what yoga has always been — pliant, hybridized, something for everyone. Even though it comes from India and is an integral part of the Hindu tradition, it's never been one size fits all, says Debra Diamond, the curator of a new exhibit about yoga at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington. The exhibit may be the first ever to focus on the visual history of yoga, and the objects on display tell a surprising story. Before $90 yoga pants and luxury retreats, there were mercenary ascetics and supernatural yogis... along with deep rifts between devotees of different yoga sects. “Yoga has been very fluid and it has permeated all corners of Indian culture over time,” says Diamond as she walks me through the exhibit. We stop at a series of folios from the first-known illustrated manuscript of yoga poses. The paintings were made in 1600 for a Mughal emperor. The description for each pose was written in Persian by a Sufi shayk based on an Arabic translation of Sanskrit texts. Got that? “Yoga is like a rope made up of many different threads,” Diamond says. “Some of those threads are present at any given moment. The strength of the rope comes from the overlap of these traditions.” While the exhibit shows how yoga has been able to transcend religious and spiritual divisions, it also makes clear that sometimes yogis could be flat out violent. Diamond shows me a painting called the Battle of Thaneshwar from the late 1500s, which depicts yogis fighting over who gets the prime bathing spot at a sacred river during a solar eclipse. “Once we realize that yoga in history can accommodate a phenomenon like militant ascetics, then people will understand what I mean by multiple traditions,” she says. Which brings us back to Shabbasana. I haven't done yoga in years and my bones object to every downward dog and sun salutation. And I'm a little skeptical about this hybrid yoga situation. At what point does the true essence of yoga get lost? “How many now are practicing in America, 18 million? So to say here's yoga, wouldn't really be authentic,” says Debra Mishalove, who owns a popular yoga studio in Washington, DC. “This one style, this one type of yoga probably wouldn't be able to reach so many people.” Plus, this is America. We're spoiled for choice, and we like it that way. Cereal alone has its own aisle in the supermarket. So why wouldn't it be the same with yoga? But just like cereal is still cereal, whether it has marshmallows, raisins, corn or whole wheat, yoga is still yoga. “It's a living, moving thing. Somehow it's had a pretty strong resonance that we're still talking about it, practicing it, embodying it 5,000 years later,” Mishalove says. And just as we evolve, so, too, does yoga. Namaste, divine souls.At a rally in North Carolina on Thursday, Donald Trump said he regrets not always choosing the right words. It was the first time Trump spoke publicly since changing the leadership of his campaign DONALD TRUMP: Listen closely: we will deliver justice for all of these American Families. We will create a system of immigration that makes us all proud. Hillary Clinton’s mistakes destroy innocent lives, sacrifice national security, and betray the working families of this country. Please remember this: I will never put personal profit before national security. I will never leave our border open to appease donors and special interests. I will never support a trade deal that kills American jobs. I will never put the special interests before the national interest. I will never put a donor before a voter, or a lobbyist before a citizen. Instead, I will be a champion for the people. The establishment media doesn’t cover what really matters in this country, or what’s really going on in people’s lives. They will take words of mine out of context and spend a week obsessing over every single syllable, and then pretend to discover some hidden meaning in what I said. Just imagine for a second if the media spent this energy holding the politicians accountable who got innocent Americans like Kate Steinle killed – she was gunned down by an illegal immigrant who had been deported five times. Just imagine if the media spent this much time investigating the poverty and joblessness in our inner cities. Just think about how much different things would be if the media in this country sent their cameras to our border, or to our closing factories, or to our failing schools. Or if the media focused on what dark secrets must be hidden in the 33,000 emails Hillary Clinton deleted. Instead, every story is told from the perspective of the insiders. It’s the narrative of the people who rigged the system, never the voice of the people it’s been rigged against. So many people suffering in silence. No cameras, no coverage, no outrage from a media class that seems to get outraged over just about everything else. So again, it’s not about me. It’s never been about me. It’s about all the people in this country who don’t have a voice. I am running to be their voice. I am running to be the voice for every forgotten part of this country that has been waiting and hoping for a better future. I am glad that I make the powerful a little uncomfortable now and again – including some powerful people in my own party. Because it means I am fighting for real change. There’s a reason the hedge fund managers, the financial lobbyists, the Wall Street investors, are throwing their money at Hillary Clinton. Because they know she will make sure the system stays rigged in their favor. It’s the powerful protecting the powerful. The insiders fighting for the insiders. I am fighting for you. Watch the full speech below:Ashford is a town in the county of Kent, England. It lies on the River Great Stour at the south edge of the North Downs, about 61 miles (98 km) southeast of central London and 15.3 miles (24.6 km) northwest of Folkestone by road. In the 2011 census, it had a population of 74,204. The name comes from the Old English æscet, indicating a ford near a clump of ash trees. It has been a market town since the Middle Ages, and a regular market continues to be held. St Mary's Church in Ashford has been a local landmark since the 13th century, and expanded in the 15th. Today, the church functions in a dual role as a centre for worship and entertainment. Ashford has two grammar schools; the Norton Knatchbull School and Highworth Grammar School. The town has been a communications hub and has stood at the centre of five railway lines since the 19th century. The arrival of the railways became a source of employment and contributed to the town's growth. With the opening of the international passenger station it is now a European communications centre, with new lines running between London and the Channel Tunnel (via High Speed 1). The M20 motorway also links Ashford to those two destinations for road traffic. Ashford has been marked as a place for expansion since the 1960s and appeared on several Government plans for growth. Changes have included the County Square shopping centre, the redevelopment of the Templer Barracks at Repton Park, and the award-winning Ashford Designer Outlet. In the 1970s, a controversial ring road scheme and construction of the multi-storey Charter House building destroyed significant parts of the old town, though some areas were spared and preserved. History [ edit ] Early developments [ edit ] There has been evidence of human habitation around Ashford since the Iron Age, with a barrow on what is now Barrow Hill dating back to 1500 BC. Two axes from the Lower Paleolithic period have been found near Ashford. During the construction of the Park Farm estate in the late 1990s, excavation in the area revealed tools from the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic period dating back to the 7th millennium BC. A number of other Mesolithic tools were discovered during construction of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link through Ashford. During Roman Britain, iron ore was mined in the Weald and transported to Ashford where two ironworks processed the ore into a workable metal. Archaeological studies have revealed the existence of a Roman town to the north of the current centre, roughly at the junction of Albert Road and Wall Road. The present town originates from an original settlement established in 893 AD by inhabitants escaping a Danish Viking raid, who were granted land by a Saxon Lord for their resistance.[6] The name comes from the Old English æscet, indicating a ford near a clump of ash trees.[7] At the time of the Domesday Book of 1086 it was still known by its original Saxon name of Essetesford (or Eshetisford, Esselesford, Asshatisforde, Essheford).[8][9] The manor was owned by Hugh de Montfort, Constable of England and companion of William the Conqueror, and had a church, two mills and a value of 150 shillings (£7.50) at the time.[9][10][11][12] One of the earliest houses in the area still in existence is Lake House at Eastwell Park to the north of the town, which contains the grave of Richard Plantagenet. Middle ages [ edit ] Ashford's importance as an agricultural and market town grew in the 13th century, and in 1243, King Henry III granted the town a charter to hold a market for livestock. The pottery industry expanded in the 13th and 14th centuries, with the main works based at what is now Potter's Corner, a few miles west of the town centre. Later evidence from examining waste suggests that production was on a large scale. The Kent Archaeological society have discovered sandy ware at this location dating from around 1125 – 1250.[15] Jack Cade, who led the Cade's Rebellion against corrupt Royal officials in 1450, is believed to be from Ashford. In William Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2, Cade is shown conversing with "Dick, the Butcher from Ashford".[17] In the 16th and 17th centuries, Ashford became known for nonconformism. A local resident, John Brown, was executed for heresy in 1511, and may have inspired the later namesake of the song "John Brown's Body". Thomas Smythe acquired the manor of Ashford as dowry from Queen Elizabeth I in the mid-16th century, and is buried in the parish church. Dr John Wallis, the internationally recognised mathematician and one of Isaac Newton's main tutors was born in Ashford in 1616, but moved to Tenterden in 1625 to avoid the plague. He was a promising student, and subsequently graduated from Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Modern developments [ edit ] Ashford Market in 1975. A market had been based here since 1856. By the 1780s, local farmers had begun to hold informal market days, and advertised the town's ideal location between London, Chatham and the Kent Coast.[22] The market was held in the High Street until 1856, when local farmers and businessmen relocated to Elwick Road and formed a market company that is the oldest surviving registered company in England and Wales. There is still a regular street market in the town, but the market company relocated outside Ashford town centre after part of the 19th-century site was demolished to make way for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. It is still used by around 5,000 farmers.[22] The Army first established a presence in Ashford in 1797 when it built a garrison on Barrow Hill, and storerooms along what is now Magazine Road. The military presence was scaled back during the 19th century, though the town was still considered strategically important in the event of an invasion. The Territorial Army established a presence in Ashford in 1910. During World War I, Ashford's importance as a transport hub and its location between the continent and London made it a target for aerial bombing. A bomb fell on the railway works on 25 March 1917, killing 61 people, while the town was a target in the Battle of Britain during World War II, including an attack on 15 September 1940.[28] During the latter war ultimately 94 civilians were lost to enemy action in the Urban District.[29] The Joint Services School of Intelligence was based at Templer Barracks to the west of town.[30] Robert Runcie, later to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, was stationed at Ashford during the war while Prince Andrew, Duke of York attended a course here in 1982 while he was stationed in the Royal Navy.[32] The barracks closed in 1997 to build the Channel Tunnel Rail Link,[30] and the site was sold to developers in 2002,[33] Repton Manor House, in the centre of the barracks, is a Grade II listed building and remains intact.[34] Ashford has been associated with the German town Bad Münstereifel since the 20th century. British forces occupied the town in 1919 under the command of Major J Goode, following the end of the war. Goode subsequently formed close friendships with some Bad Münstereifel residents. John Wiles, Major Goode's brother in law, later became mayor of New Romney in 1946, and subsequently arranged a visit to the Rhineland with Winston Churchill. Wiles arranged several other exchange visits between British and German families, at a time where travel between the two countries was rare. He was declared an honorary citizen of Bad Münstereifel in 1961, which led to the two towns being formally twinned in 1964.[35][36] Bad Münstereifel was twinned with the French town of Fougères, Brittany two years later, which led to a twinning with Ashford in 1984.[35] During the early and mid-20th century, print and media became a noted industry in Ashford. The Headley Brothers, a printing services company, was founded in 1881[37] and by the mid-1950s printed and exported over 2 million books. The Letraset company set up an arts material factory in Ashford in the 1960s. It closed in 2013, following the decline of Letraset and the company's decision to relocate works abroad.[39] Little is left of the old Ashford town centre, apart from a cluster of medieval half-timbered buildings in Middle Row and around the churchyard in the town centre. A number of old buildings were removed to make way for the controversial ring road around the centre, including four public houses. Further demolition was required to build Charter House, an eight-story office building for Charter Consolidated, that opened in 1975. Charter subsequently moved back to London in 1985, and the building is now being converted into flats, though progress stalled owing to the discovery of asbestos.[43][44] Charter compensated for the demolition by funding a restoration scheme on North Street, preserving several historic buildings. The motto of Ashford Borough Council is "With stronger faith", taken from To Lucasta, Going to the Warres, a poem by the 17th-century poet Richard Lovelace who came from the borough.[46] The relevant verse is :[47] “ True, a new mistress now I chase, The first foe in the field; And with a stronger faith embrace A sword, a horse, a shield. ” The council's coat of arms uses gold to symbolise richness, three sprigs of ash tree representing former council areas, and a lion to commemorate nearby Tenterden as one of the Cinque Ports.[46] Geography [ edit ] By road, Ashford is about 61 miles (98 km) southeast of central London, 20.9 kilometres (13.0 mi) southeast of Maidstone, and 15.3 miles (24.6 km) northwest of Folkestone.[48] The town lies at the intersection of two valleys in Kent – the south edge of the North Downs and the valley of the River Stour, at the confluence of the Great Stour and East Stour rivers. This made it an ideal place for a settlement. The Borough of Ashford lies on the eastern edge of the ancient forest of "Andredsweald" or "Anderida". This originally stretched as far west as Hampshire and formed the basis from which the Weald is formed. The original town of Ashford, like many other settlements, has outgrown its original size and has combined with smaller villages in a conurbation. These villages include Bockhanger, Kennington, Sevington, Singleton and Willesborough. In addition, housing estates have been built in the open spaces amongst Bybrook, Godinton, Kingsnorth, Park Farm and Stanhope.[51] In 1727, an underground fire was reported in nearby Hinxhill, while a larger earthquake struck the town on 1 June 1756. The 2007 Kent earthquake, which registered 4.3 on the Richter magnitude scale, was felt in Ashford, though its effects were greatest in Folkestone.[53] Climate [ edit ] Ashford gets around 750 millimetres (30 in) of rain a year, though the town generally has less rainfall than areas closer to the North Downs.[54] The area around the Stour, particularly south of the station, is prone to flooding, which means it has been generally uninhabited. Recent development has been possible by putting foundations on concrete stilts. The nearest official Met Office station is located in Faversham, which is 12 miles (19 km) north of the town.[56] Economy [ edit ] Borough The population growth of the Ashford Ashford has been targeted as a key area for population development since the 1960s. In 1959, the London County Council negotiated 5000 new homes to be built in Ashford as overspill from London, which created most of what is now South Ashford and Kennington. The Buchanan Report, published in 1967, identified Ashford as a major town for growth. In 2001, Ashford was identified as one of four key areas for expansion in South East England. Subsequently, the Ashford's Future Company was set up to support a mix of publicly and privately funded projects in the town[59]. In 2014, Ashford Borough Council launched AshfordFor, an inward investment campaign, which has helped support the town's growth. Developers agreeing to invest in the town include Quinn Estates[60], GRE Assets[61], U+I[62] and Stanhope PLC.[63] The soup manufacturer Batchelors became a significant employer in Ashford when they opened a £2.5m factory in Willesborough, east of the town centre, in 1957. A substantial proportion of Batchelors staff moved from their main production unit in Sheffield to Ashford. The factory is now owned by Premier Foods.[65] Proprietary Perfumes Ltd (PPL), a division of Unilever opened a fragrance and flavour factory and research laboratory next door to the Batchelors factory in 1962. It was subsequently renamed as Quest International and purchased by Givaudan in 2007.[67] In 2017, the Kent-based Curious Brewery constructed a factory on a brownfield site adjacent to Ashford International station in 2017 after a £1.7 crowdfunded cash investment. It is planned to open in March 2019.[68] The wholesale frozen food firm Brake Brothers was established in 1957. Initially based at nearby Lenham, it later moved to Ashford and expanded. The current European headquarters are in Eureka Park to the north of the town. In 2004 Regional Planning Guidance set out plans to invest £2.5m in Ashford, including a targets of 31,000 new homes and 28,000 new jobs in the area.[70] In 2005 a Channel 4 poll ranked Ashford the fourth-best place to live in the United Kingdom.[71] However, the formation of the coalition government in 2010 saw regional planning targets scrapped, along with growth area status.[72] Ashford has continued to develop, with new homes planned for urban areas such as Repton Park,[73] Park Farm,[74] Singleton and Chilmington,[75] and planning permission granted for a new £25m college campus.[76] The extension of Victoria Road has created new development space in Ashford, though plans to build a Morrisons supermarket here were scrapped in May 2014.[77] The 2011 census revealed that the borough of Ashford saw the largest population growth in Kent, with records showing a 14.6% rise to 118,000 inhabitants.[78] In 2012, Ashford Borough Council predicted there would be a net gain of 620 jobs per year.[79] The increase in the town's commercial importance, as well as its strategic location, is witnessed by the number of industry, business and retail parks in the town[80]. These include Waterbrook Park, where there is dedicated space for HGV parking,[81] Eureka Science and Business Park, including manufacturing sites and office complexes;[82] and Orbital Park, the market's current location, which has a regular boot fair.[22] Three modern shopping centres are located in the town. Park Mall opened in 1985 on the former Folkestone Glass Works site and is now managed by Ashford Borough Council, as part of its strategy to regenerate the town centre[84]. The town's main shopping centre is County Square, which was built over Hempsted Street and connecting roads, opening in 1973 as the Tufton Centre. In 1989, the centre was renamed to County Square and refurbished by CIN Properties, who added a glass roof. In 2008, the centre was expanded to include 50,000 sq ft of new retail space[87] including a Debenhams store.[88] Outside the town centre is the Ashford Designer Outlet designed by Richard Rogers, which attracts around 3 million customers a year.[90] The centre has won industry awards for Retail Destination of the Year and Best Shopping Venue[91] and has been praised by the British Parking Association for its range of facilities, cleanliness and lack of crime.[92] The Ashford Designer Outlet is currently undergoing a 100,000 sq. ft expansion, which will include 50 new luxury brands and 6 new restaurants. This is due to be completed by Autumn 2019.[93] A Waitrose store opened in November 2009 on the former Templar Barracks site,[94] followed by a John Lewis store in November 2013.[95] In 2014, Ashford Borough Council launched loveashford.com, a website designed to promote new businesses in the town centre as part of the Portas Pilot scheme, which encourages regeneration of town high streets in decline.[96][97] Brandon Lewis, High Streets Minister said he would "encourage all businesses in Ashford to sign up and be part of this excellent opportunity to boost their trade in the town centre."[98] Landmarks [ edit ] St Mary's Church, Ashford, dates from the 13th century, but was extensively modified in the 15th by John Fogge St Mary's parish church lies in the town centre. Parts of it date from the 13th century, including a brass of the first rector, Robert de Derby. John Fogge supervised substantial changes to the church in the late 15th century, including creating the 120 feet (37 m) tower and raising the roof. He was buried in the church and a memorial window is dedicated to him.[101] In the 17th century, a free grammar school was founded here; it was built on the churchyard's west side, and remained there until 1846, now used as a museum. On 7 October 2010, the church was reordered by the Bishop of Dover, Trevor Willmott, to improve its dual function as both a place of worship and an arts centre and performance space for up to 350 people, in a similar style to Union Chapel, Islington. Around £1.7m was spent improving the venue, of which £1.2m was provided by European Union funding through the Green Reonvation Cluster programme.[103] Acts that have since appeared at the church include the Lightning Seeds, Tim Burgess, Gaz Coombes and Turin Brakes.[104] The Mk. IV tank, St George's Square, Ashford A Mk. IV tank built in Lincoln and used in World War I was presented to the town on 1 August 1919 to thank the townsfolk for their war efforts. It is situated in St Georges Square near the town centre. For some years, electricity provider Seeboard fitted an electricity substation inside the tank, but this has now been removed. A protective cover was built over the tank in 1988. H.S. Pledge & Sons Ltd built two flour mills in Ashford, and became an important employer in the town. The first opened on Victoria Road in 1890 while the second opened on East Hill in 1901. The mills closed in 1972 and were both partially destroyed by subsequent fires. The East Hill Mill fire occurred in 1974, but the main six-storey tower block survived. It was used as a nightclub until 2014, when the nearby Ashford School, which acquired the building in 2011, decided not to renew the lease.[107] The Victoria Mills were almost completely destroyed by a fire in September 1984, and the remainder of the building had to be demolished. The Corn Exchange, situated at the junction of Bank Street and Elwick Road, opened on 3 December 1861.[108] As the name implies, it was originally used for trade, but during the early 20th century its role expanded to cover dinners, dances and trade shows. The building was extended to improve capacity in the 1930s. It was demolished in 1963. Ashford's main library originally opened in 1966 on a war-damaged site on Church Road. In 2010, the building was redeveloped to house Ashford Gateway Plus, which provides local council services in addition to the library itself. Other attractions near the town include Ashford Borough Museum, Godinton House and Gardens[112] and the New Mill at Willesborough, which is Grade II listed.[113] Ornate fountain in Victoria Park, Ashford The first cinema in Ashford was the Odeon on Lower High Street, which opened in 1936 and closed in 1976. The current main cinema in Ashford is a 12 screen theatre in Eureka Leisure Park to the north of town. In 2013, Ashford Borough Council announced plans to build a new cinema in the town, using vacant land off Elwick Road.[115] The Ashford Green Corridor is a linear park alongside the two main rivers through the town, which is protected from development by lying on the main flood plain. Most of the area covered by the park has been marked by Ashford Borough Council as a nature reserve.[116] This area includes Victoria Park, which lies to the immediate south of the town centre and the railway. It includes an ornate fountain first shown at the 2nd International Exhibition in London in 1862, and presented to the park by George Harper on 24 July
30 29 23 23 20 Wrong track 48 46 44 49 49 52 54 57 59 60 59 69 67 71 NJ3 withheld for subsequent release ELEC1 through ELEC7 released October 18, 2016 AMEND1 through AMEND5 withheld for subsequent release BG1 How closely, if at all, are you following the federal trial of Governor Christie’s top aides in the so-called Bridgegate scandal? 1 Very closely 2 Somewhat closely 3 Not at all closely 8 DK (vol) 9 Refused (vol) BG2 Based on what you have heard or read, do you believe Governor Christie was unaware that his aides ordered the lane closures on the George Washington Bridge before emails and text messages were released publicly? Would you say it’s… 1 Very likely 2 Somewhat likely 3 Somewhat unlikely 4 Very unlikely 8 DK (vol) 9 Refused (vol) BG3 Which of the following best describes your opinion, even if neither statement is perfect: There is not enough proof that Governor Christie was in a position to prevent or stop the lane closures; There is sufficient proof that Governor Christie knew about and did nothing to stop the lane closures. 1 There IS sufficient proof 2 There is NOT sufficient proof 8 DK (vol) 9 Refused (vol) BG4 Which of the following best describes your opinion, even if neither statement is perfect: Governor Christie should remain in office until his term expires; Governor Christie should be removed from office, either by stepping down or through removal by impeachment 1 Remain in office 2 Leave office 8 DK (vol) 9 Refused (vol) Sample characteristics (weighted)If you run a business that’s all about the bottom line, and have a flat roof, you want it to be white. But here’s the real stunner: these white or “cool” roofs could even be the best choice for the planet, beating out celebrated green roofs on climate-change benefits. That’s the conclusion of government researchers, who compared three major roof types – standard black; white; and green, aka living roofs. The researchers did 50-year life-cycle cost analyses on nearly two dozen commercial flat roof projects. The green roofs got the advantage of an assumed 40-year service life, compared to 20 years for white and black roofs. Even so, green roofs were the most expensive. From the Berkeley Lab release: The 50-year life-cycle cost analysis found that even the most inexpensive kind of green roof (with no public access and consisting of only sedum, or prairie grass) costs $7 per square foot more than black roofs over 50 years, while white roofs save $2 per square foot compared to black roofs. In other words, white roofs cost $9 per square foot less than green roofs over 50 years, or $0.30 per square foot each year. But what about climate change? White roofs win there, too. [U]nlike white roofs, green roofs do not offset climate change. White roofs are more reflective than green roofs, reflecting roughly three times more sunlight back into the atmosphere and therefore absorbing less sunlight at earth’s surface. By absorbing less sunlight than either green or black roofs, white roofs offset a portion of the warming effect from greenhouse gas emissions. The researchers do acknowledge that green roofs can have benefits that weren’t measured in their study, said to be the first to compare the economic costs and energy savings benefits of these three major roof types. For example rooftop gardens provide stormwater management, an appreciable benefit in cities with sewage overflow issues, while helping to cool the roof’s surface as well as the air. Green roofs may also give building occupants the opportunity to enjoy green space where they live or work. The Berkeley Lab study appears in the March 2014 issue of the journal Energy and Buildings. The abstract is available free online here.One of the essential elements in Mann’s reliance on EPA findings is his assertion that his supposed exoneration by EPA had been “widely available and commented” on in the media and had been “read by the Defendants”: All of the above reports and publications were widely available and commented upon in the national and international media. All were read by the Defendants. The claim that all nine “inquiry” reports had been “read” by Steyn and the other defendants is surely a fantasy on the part of Mann and his lawyers. While Steyn seems to be a man of eclectic interests, somehow I can’t picture him poring through the dreck of the turgid “reports” from the various inquiries. I am particularly dubious of Mann’s claim that Steyn (and Simberg) had read the EPA documents. Some climate blogs took notice of the EPA decision denying various petitions for reconsideration of the EPA Endangerment Finding when it was issued, but none understood it to supposedly be an “investigation” and “exoneration” of Michael Mann, something which would have occasioned great interest in July 2010, then only a few weeks after the Muir Russell and second Penn State reports. The EPA denial decision was first included in a list of inquiries in an unmarked Feb 2011 revision of a November 2009 post by SKS, but really was brought to public attention for the first time in Mann’s Statement of Claim itself. It seems very improbable to me that Steyn (or Simberg) were aware of EPA’s supposed findings in connection in Mann (not that Mann’s characterization is accurate, but that’s a story for another day), or why they would be obligated to be familiar with them. Given Mann’s allegation that Steyn, Simberg and others were supposed to be aware of EPA’s investigation and “exoneration” of Mann, the contemporary unawareness of this supposed EPA investigation – especially at SKS and Real Climate – is really quite remarkable. The Decision Denying Petitions for Reconsideration of the EPA Endangerment Finding The draft EPA Endangerment Finding was issued in April 2009, within a few months of the new administration. The final Endangerment Finding was issued in December 2009, a few weeks after Climategate, and attracted very little commentary on climate blogs, then still astonished by the Climategate emails. In February 2010 (60 days after the Endangerment Finding), ten petitions for reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding were filed, including one in which CEI was a party. In the EPA Endangerment Finding, the EPA had been very wary of relying on Mann’s work or even recent paleoclimate. It showed a spaghetti graph (from the NAS 2006 report) that did not include the MBH98-99 hockey stick and placed caveats on recent paleoclimate. EPA’s guardedness was noted in one petition (Peabody Energy) who nonetheless argued that EPA was obliged to consider the controversies of MBH98-99, an invitation that EPA evaded as much as possible. Blog Reaction to the EPA Decision On July 29, 2010, the EPA announced the decision denying reconsideration of the various petitions. Given the centrality of this decision in Mann’s pleadings, it is remarkable that climate blogs (including Real Climate) were completely unaware that the EPA was reporting on an “investigation” and “exoneration” of Michael Mann, a topic then of considerable interest (Muir Russell and the second stage of Penn State had just reported and were widely commented on.) Climate blogs were aware that the EPA had referred to the “inquiries”, but not that EPA purported to be reporting on its own “investigation”. Anthony Watts reported on the EPA decision here. Anthony quoted from Administrator Lisa Jackson’s statement, which referred to “clean energy”, “green jobs”, “oil addiction” and “national security”, all important issues, but ones that are not relevant to the investigation of academic misconduct. Indeed, the use of such language raises questions about the impartiality of EPA in their investigation. “Defenders of the status quo will try to slow our efforts to get America running on clean energy. A better solution would be to join the vast majority of the American people who want to see more green jobs, more clean energy innovation and an end to the oil addiction that pollutes our planet and jeopardizes our national security,” she added Anthony observed that EPA had referred to the “inquiries” (Muir Russell, Oxburgh, UK Parliamentary Committee and Penn State) being known to readers, but there is no evidence that Anthony had any inkling that EPA purported to have done its own “investigation” of Mann’s conduct: Jackson claimed that the scientists had been cleared of wrongdoing by multiple whitewashes investigations. At Climate Audit, I wrote a two line notice of the EPA decision, a denial that, needless to say, had been expected. I noted that EPA had referred to the “inquiries”, but was unaware that the EPA report could itself be construed as the report of an “inquiry”: The EPA, as expected, has denied the various petitions for reconsideration of their Endangerment Finding. They refer to the various “inquiries” on some points. Interesting reading here http://epa.gov/climatechange/endangerment/petitions.html Joe Romm published an article endorsing the EPA decision a couple of days later, but likewise did not seem aware that the document contained a report on an “investigation” and “exoneration” of Michael Mann, whose name was not mentioned. But most tellingly, Real Climate itself did not report the news that EPA had “investigated” and “exonerated” Michael Mann. The EPA report did not attract a headpost, but was mentioned in several comments in a thread about Andrew Montford’s then recently published book. Of much more interest to blog commenters at the time was the astonishing news from Gavin Schmidt that, after months of Schmidt denying that the Tiljander sediments impacted the Mann et al 2008 reconstructions, Schmidt finally admitted that the contaminated Korttajarvi sediments did impact Mann’s vaunted no-dendro reconstruction. Schmidt’s admission did not impact the EPA documents which cited Mann’s nodendro reconstruction on several occasions as a supposed refutation of the divergence problem and hide-the-decline (adding to the interest in whether Schmidt was a reviewer of the EPA documents.) In September 2010, Ross McKitrick wrote a thorough review of the Climategate inquiries, cited at WUWT on Sep 15 here: McKitrick reviewed the Muir Russell, Oxburgh, Parliamentary Committee and Penn State inquiries, but was unaware of the EPA and UK Department of Energy and Climate Change reports as relating to investigation of Michael Mann or other Climategaters. In the same month, Andrew Montford also published a report for the GWPF entitled The Climategate Inquiries, considering the same list as McKitrick and likewise being unaware of the supposed EPA “investigation”. SKS As the first anniversary of Climategate approached, Stephen Lewandowsky and his proteges at SKS were pondering methods of “re-framing” Climategate so that attention was drawn away from the offputting spectacle of climate scientists deleting data to hide the decline and destroying documents to evade FOI requests. On November 17, 2010, Stephen Lewandowsky puffed that there had been “six vindications”: Not one, not two, but six vindications. This comes as no surprise to anyone with passing familiarity of the distinction between private chat and public actions. But Lewandowsky’s list of six did not include EPA: in addition to the three known UK inquiries, it counted the two Penn State stages as separate investigations and added a previously unknown report by UK Department of Energy and Climate Change to the list. The first inclusion of the EPA inquiry on the SKS list appears to have occurred in January 2011 as an an unmarked revision of the SKS webpage – it is mentioned in a January 2011 version in here, but absent in the preceding archive from December 2010. The SKS description of the EPA inquiry consisted of a short quote from the EPA Press Release as follows: In July 2010, the US Environmental Protection Agency investigated the emails and “found this was simply a candid discussion of scientists working through issues that arise in compiling and presenting large complex data sets.” As an editorial note, this language does not occur in the EPA denial decision itself or in any of the supporting volumes: it appears to be spin from the EPA press office and appears to owe more to Real Climate than the formal EPA documents. Between early 2011 and July 2012, SKS added two more inquiries to their list, bringing their total to nine by July 2012, when it was consulted by Mann’s lawyers. Mann’s Lawyer Copy SKS, August 2012 In July 2012, Simberg published his blogpost on Mann and the Penn State inquiry, noted up soon afterwards by Steyn. Following criticism of Simberg’s Sandusky image, CEI removed two “inappropriate” sentences from its blogpost. Nonetheless, on August 21, 2012, Mann’s lawyers sent a letter to CEI saying that the “damage from the original post…has already been done” and that they intended to “pursue all appropriate legal remedies”. In their letter, Mann’s lawyers copied SKS’ list and descriptions of the nine inquiries almost verbatim (though neither SKS nor John Mashey, to my knowledge, have accused Mann’s lawyers of plagiarism. For example, Mann’s only slightly revised description of the EPA inquiry was as follows: In July 2010, the US Environmental Protection Agency investigated the [certain] emails [that supposedly formed the basis of the allegations against Dr Mann] and “found this was simply a candid discussion of scientists working through issues that arise in compiling and presenting large complex data sets.” Mann’s Statement of Claim, October 2012 For eight of the nine inquiries, Mann’s Statement of Claim in October 2012 (and Reply Memorandum of January 2013) stuck more or less to the SKS script. For their description of the Muir Russell inquiry, Mann’s lawyers even used the same fake quotation that SKS had used. However, for the EPA, Mann’s lawyers departed from the SKS script, though one may question the “value added”. Whereas the EPA “inquiry” had been unknown to Montford, McKitrick and Lewandowsky in their lists of Climategate inquiries and only one of nine in the SKS list, it was promoted to a pre-eminent status in the pantheon of inquiries in the Mann Statement of Claim – it was the Zeus of inquiries, so to speak. The Statement of Claim included an extended quotation from the EPA (taken from the Myths versus Facts webpage, rather than the decision documents), while, for seven of nine inquiries, no quotation whatever had been provided. Oddly, the “money quote” selected by Mann’s lawyers was a declaration by the EPA press office that allegations that “temperature data and trends had been manipulated” was a “myth”, a declaration that seems oddly irrelevant to Mann’s actual research, which concerned proxy reconstructions rather than “temperature data”, except for the fact that Mann’s lawyers had previously misrepresented Mann’s research as being about temperature data, even declaring that Mann had been “one of the first” to “document” the increase in observed temperatures in the 20th century. The complete except is given below: 22. Notably, in July 2010, CEI, a defendant in this case, and others, filed a request entitled Petitions to Reconsider the Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act. In response, the Environmental Protection Agency published a summary of its findings, entitled “Myths vs. Facts: Denial of Petitions for Reconsideration of the Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act,” which stated: Myth: The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) emails prove that temperature data and trends were manipulated. Fact: Not true. Petitioners say that emails disclosed from CRU provide evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate data. The media coverage after the emails were released was based on email statements quoted out of context and on unsubstantiated theories of conspiracy. The CRU emails do not show either that the science is flawed or that the scientific process has been compromised. EPA carefully reviewed the CRU emails and found no indication of improper data manipulation or misrepresentation of results. Myth: The jury is still out on climate change and CRU emails undermine the credibility of climate change science overall. Fact: Climate change is real and it is happening now. The U. S. Global Change Research Program, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have each independently concluded that warming of the climate system in recent decades is “unequivocal.” This conclusion is not drawn from any one source of data but is based on multiple lines of evidence, including three worldwide temperature datasets showing nearly identical warming trends as well as numerous other independent indicators of global warming (e. g., rising sea levels, shrinking Arctic sea ice). Some people have “cherry- picked” a limited selection of CRU email statements to draw broad, unsubstantiated conclusions about the validity of all climate science. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Decision Document, Denial of Petitions for Reconsideration of Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act” (July 29, 2010). Available at http://epa.gov/climatechange/endangerment/petitions/decision.html Later, in the segue from background to discussion of the disputed blog articles (paragraph 25), Mann again relied uniquely on the EPA investigation that: “CEI’s claims of data manipulation were labeled a “myth” by the EPA in 2010”. Both CEI and National Review appear to have puzzled, to say the least, at the relevance of the declaration by Mann’s lawyers that their clients should have been cowed by EPA’s press kit statement about “temperature data and trends” and did not discuss the EPA inquiry in their initial memoranda of December 2012. Their lack of interest in this seemingly irrelevant EPA declaration caused Mann’s lawyers to go ballistic in their Reply Memorandum of January 2013, but that is a story for another day. Conclusion: In general, it seems doubtful to me that Steyn (or Simberg) read “all” nine reports from the various “inquiries”. Indeed, it seems entirely possible that they hadn’t read any of them. It seems particularly questionable that Steyn (and/or Simberg) read the EPA denial decision together with its three volumes of supporting documents. Indeed, it seems entirely possible to me that neither Steyn nor Simberg were aware from contemporary reporting of the EPA denial decision that EPA had supposedly “investigated” and “exonerated” Michael Mann, given that no such claims had been made at the time at any climate blogs (including Real Climate) and that none of the contemporary reviews of the Climategate inquiries knew of or discussed the supposed investigation by EPA. Postscript: Subsequent to the announcement of the EPA denial decision on July 29, 2010, I touched on the EPA decision in two posts. On October 4, 2011, I noted with amusement that EPA had conceded to the Office of the Inspector General that the peer review procedures for the Endangerment Finding and key assessment reports relied on in the Endangerment Finding had not complied with Office of Management and Budget policies for peer review of “highly influential scientific assessments” – a topic that had been raised in many of the petitions. EPA defended themselves by claiming that the Endangerment Policy had not been a “highly influential scientific assessment” and that they therefore did not need to comply with OMB policies. Given the far-reaching consequences of the Endangerment Decision, EPA’s argument seems laughable, both at the time and in retrospect. In November 2011, I wrote a post discussing EPA’s citation and reliance on the no-dendro reconstruction of Mann et al 2008 (upside down Tiljander). In that post, I quoted from and linked to the supporting volumes of the denial decision. I don’t recall what prompted me to consider the EPA report in that particular context. By that time, I was aware that the EPA documents discussed many paleoclimate controversies and many emails, but I certainly didn’t consider them to have carried out an independent, non-partisan investigation, as opposed to recapitulating Real Climate talking points. In respect to the Mann et al 2008 no dendro reconstruction, their reliance was, to say the least ironic, as almost concurrently with the announcement of the EPA decision, Gavin Schmidt, after months of arguing the contrary, had disclosed that Mann’s no-dendro reconstruction was impacted by upside-down and contaminated Tiljander after all. Schmidt then had a hissy fit and said that the topic didn’t matter.Moscow (AFP) - Armed police on Thursday raided the office of a Russian rights group led by exiled Vladimir Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, during the president's marathon annual phone-in session. A group of police and special forces searched the Moscow office of Open Russia, a rights network led by Khodorkovsky, for protest flyers, Khodorkovsky's spokeswoman Kulle Pispanen wrote on her Facebook page. "As we're preparing for the phone-in, masked men came to the office," Pispanen wrote. "They are looking for posters and flyers for a protest on April 19 that we were not planning to participate in and which has been cancelled." Moscow authorities have refused permission for an opposition march on April 19, although activists said they may hold solo pickets instead. Open Russia is Khodorkovsky's network of activists and journalists which aims to discuss alternatives to Putin's rule and is heavily critical of his policies. The organisation is run out of central Moscow while Khodorkovsky himself lives in Switzerland following his release from prison after a presidential pardon from Putin in late 2013. Open Russia posted a scan of the search warrant on its website. Police said they received a tip-off that the group was producing "materials containing extremist calls" ahead of the planned protest. The warrant authorised police to seize electronic equipment and accounting documents from the organisation. Khodorkovsky however said the real reason was a documentary the group is working on about the relationship between the Kremlin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, known for his heavy-handed governing of the Caucasus region. "The real reason for the search in Open Russia is the making of a film about Kadyrov's place in the current power structure," Khodorkovsky said in a comment posted by the group. "The raid is happening as Putin is talking about the 'usefulness of opposition's participation in the elections'," Khodorkovsky added incredulously. Employees of Open Russia wrote on social networks that the search was conducted by seven anti-extremism officers and 10 riot police armed with automatic rifles who were not letting them make phone calls. "They are seizing everything that can carry data: computers, hard drives, flash drives," wrote employee Veronika Kutsyllo posting a picture of stacked hard drives on Twitter. "Looks like those are the orders." The search began just as Putin was starting his annual televised question and answer session, which usually lasts for several hours and dominates all media coverage. Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man who owned oil company Yukos, spent 10 years in prison over two controversial convictions for embezzlement and fraud, which his supporters said were politically motivated.The coal industry and its allies in the Trump administration have devoted considerable energy to arguing that subsidies to renewable energy have distorted energy markets and helped drive coal out of business. “Certain regulations and subsidies,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry has said, “are having a large impact on the functioning of markets, and thereby challenging our power generation mix.” You can guess which regulations and subsidies he’s talking about. This is nothing new, of course. It is in keeping with a long conservative tradition of challenging the economic wisdom and effectiveness of energy subsidies. At least, uh, some energy subsidies. Energy analysts have made the point again and again that fossil fuels, not renewable energy, most benefit from supportive public policy. Yet this fact, so inconvenient to the conservative worldview, never seems to sink in to the energy debate in a serious way. The supports offered to fossil fuels are so old and familiar, they fade into the background. It is support offered to challengers — typically temporary, fragmentary, and politically uncertain support — that is forever in the spotlight. So let’s change that. Let’s talk about “certain regulations and subsidies” — namely, the ones propping up US fossil fuels. Three recent analyses can help. The first does the yeoman’s work of tallying up federal and state energy subsidies. The second shows the effect those subsidies have on oil and gas production. And the third shows how thoroughly the US coal industry is propped up by regulatory policy. Together, they paint a clear picture: The profits of US fossil fuels are built on a foundation of government assistance. All right then. First: What gets subsidized, and how much? US fossil fuel production is subsidized to the tune of $20 billion annually Researchers at Oil Change International (OCI) set out to quantify the level of US fossil fuel subsidies, but before we get to their results, a few important caveats. OCI is only counting direct production subsidies. As they acknowledge, that leaves out a great deal. For one thing, it leaves out the annual $14.5 billion in consumption subsidies — things like the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps lower-income residents pay their (fuel oil) heating bills. (There are better ways to help poor people, but let’s leave that aside for now.) It also leaves out subsidies for overseas fossil fuel projects ($2.1 billion a year). Most significantly, OCI’s analysis leaves out indirect subsidies — things like the money the US military spends to protect oil shipping routes, or the unpaid costs of health and climate impacts from burning fossil fuels. These indirect subsidies reach to the hundreds of billions, dwarfing direct subsidies — the IMF says that, globally speaking, they amount to $5.3 trillion a year. But they are controversial and very difficult to measure precisely. Finally, OCI acknowledges that its estimates of state-level subsidies are probably low, since many states don’t report the costs of tax expenditures (i.e., tax breaks and credits to industry), so data is difficult to come by. All of which is to say: OCI has produced about the most conservative possible estimate of the subsidies received by fossil fuels in the US. These are solely production subsidies — taxpayer money that goes directly to producing more fossil fuels. So what’s the verdict? Adding everything up: $14.7 billion in federal subsidies and $5.8 billion in state-level incentives, for a total of $20.5 billion annually in corporate welfare. Of that total, 80 percent goes to oil and gas, 20 percent to coal. On the right, subsidies are broken down by stage of production. Extraction gets the most. Notice that asterisk by remediation, which refers to the cost of cleaning up environmental messes and abandoned infrastructure left behind by fossil fuels. Shady insurance, bonding, and liability-cap policies mean that taxpayers are probably on the hook for lots more than this in the end, but it’s difficult to quantify in advance. There are dozens and dozens of fossil fuel production subsidies — OCI’s report has a whole appendix devoted to listing them — but here they are broken down by the biggest offenders: You probably can’t read that text, so here are the top six: Intangible drilling oil & gas deduction ($2.3 billion) Excess of percentage over cost depletion ($1.5 billion) Master Limited Partnerships tax exemption ($1.6 billion) Last-in, first-out (LIFO) accounting ($1.7 billion) Lost royalties from onshore and offshore drilling ($1.2 billion) Low-cost leasing of coal-production in the Powder River Basin ($963 million) (I listed six because that sixth one is the biggie for coal.) These kinds of obscure tax loopholes and accounting tricks are not widely known or debated, partially because you have to be a tax lawyer to understand them, and partially because they are simply old. The single biggest one, the intangible drilling deduction, has been around for over a century! As subsidies age, they start to look less like subsidies. They start looking like fixed features of the landscape, like mountains or rivers, rather than choices we are making. They just look like the status quo. How does this compare to renewable energy subsidies? In terms of permanent tax expenditures, fossil fuels beat renewables by a 7-1 margin: (The primary federal tax supports for renewable energy — the investment and production tax credits, respectively — are not permanent. They are set to phase out over the next five years, and are politically vulnerable in the meantime. But if you include them, Stephen Kretzmann of OCI confirmed for me over email, permanent fossil tax breaks still win, at $7.4 billion to $5.6 billion.) If you ask people in fossil fuel industries, their support staff in conservative think tanks, or fossil-state politicians, they will tell you why these fossil fuel production subsidies are necessary. It’s always been this way. They’re more than paid back by tax revenue. Other industries get them too. (For the record: More than half the $20 billion is available to fossil fuels alone). They create jobs. They’re important for national security. Tax expenditures aren’t subsidies at all, if you think about it. Etc. If the endless debate over energy subsidies has taught me anything, it’s that nobody thinks their own subsidy is a subsidy — and no one outside think tanks and universities really gives a damn about the economic distortions of subsidies as such. Everyone thinks their favored energy sources deserve support and the other guys’ don’t. Period. They use whatever economic argument is handy — “picking winners” if you’re against the subsidy, “supporting jobs” if you’re for it — but such arguments are always instrumental. As I said recently about coal’s rent-seeking, there are no true free marketeers in struggling industries. Speaking of rent-seeking, here’s a final fun factoid from OCI: In the 2015-2016 election cycle, oil, gas, and coal companies spent $354 million in campaign contributions and lobbying and received $29.4 billion in federal subsidies in total over those same years — an 8,200% return on investment. Not bad. So, do all these subsidies make a difference. Why, yes. Yes, they do. How much do oil subsidies matter? A lot. The effects of consumption subsidies are fairly well-understood, as it is fairly easy to aggregate consumer decisions and find patterns. But the effects of production subsidies are trickier to pin down; it is difficult to tie particular background subsidies to particular investment decisions by producers. In an analysis published in Nature in October 2017, researchers from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) attempt to clear this up, quantifying, to the extent possible, just how much a difference production subsidies make. They do this by focusing in on a specific economic decision on the part of producers: whether or not to develop a new oil field they’ve discovered. After tallying up their own long list of production subsidies and attempting to calculate how those subsidies shift the economic returns of new production, they came to some pretty startling conclusions, emphasis mine: We find that, at recent US oil prices of US$50 per barrel, tax preferences and other subsidies push nearly half of new, yet-to-be-developed oil into profitability. This potentially increases US oil production by almost 17 billion barrels over the next few decades, equivalent to 6 billion tonnes (Gt) of CO2. Almost half of the new oil fields getting drilled would have been left alone if not for subsidies. That is no small effect! The researchers acknowledge that the impact of subsidies on these decisions is extremely sensitive to oil prices. If oil prices rise back up to, say, $75bbl, as some forecasters project, the impact of subsidies will appear far smaller. But at current low oil prices, subsidies are making a huge, huge difference. Coal is propped up by government policy too As the charts from OCI show, direct federal tax expenditures on behalf of coal production are dwarfed by oil and gas subsidies. The main federal tax subsidy is cheap leases to mine coal on public land. But as a report from Carbon Tracker details, coal is still very much propped up by public policy. It’s no big revelation that new coal plants are uneconomic. There hasn’t been a new coal plant built in the US in years and there will probably never be another one, for reasons of raw economics. Here are net capacity additions and subtractions from the US power fleet, from 2011 to 2016: As you can see, crappy old coal plants are coming offline and nobody’s building new plants to replace them. Problem is, new coal plants have to be “clean,” which is to say, they have to have the filters and scrubbers to meet modern pollution standards. And as I’ve been saying for years, coal can either be cheap or clean, not both; making a new coal plant clean makes it uneconomic (to say nothing of what happens when you force it to bury its carbon). What’s more striking is how imperiled existing, fully paid-off coal plants are. Even many of those can’t compete against natural gas or renewables. Many existing coal plants are balanced on a fine edge. To the extent they can escape requirements to upgrade to modern pollution equipment — and believe it or not, decades after the Clean Air Act was passed, they still can — they can stay profitable for longer. “When current costs are considered, 72% of operating coal units are unprofitable compared to the operating cost of an equivalent [natural gas plant],” Carbon Tracker writes, “and 98% when the anticipated costs [of environmental upgrades] are included.” In other words, once the entire coal fleet upgrades to modern pollution standards... basically none of it will be economically competitive. Cheap or clean; never both. That’s a narrow path to remaining profitable, and coal plants are only on that path at all because of all the other ways they are propped up by regulatory policy: Capacity markets favor already-built coal over new natural gas or renewables: Unlike electricity markets, which pay for power, capacity markets pay for the ability to spin up, just in case. They are a way of maintaining reserve capacity in case other power plants unexpectedly go offline. For various reasons (see the report), such markets favor plants that are already amortized and have readily available fuel, i.e., generally coal plants. So yeah, even coal plants that rarely produce power still get paid to sit around and... not be closed. Unlike electricity markets, which pay for power, capacity markets pay for the ability to spin up, just in case. They are a way of maintaining reserve capacity in case other power plants unexpectedly go offline. For various reasons (see the report), such markets favor plants that are already amortized and have readily available fuel, i.e., generally coal plants. So yeah, even coal plants that rarely produce power still get paid to sit around and... not be closed. In regulated energy markets, utilities get paid to keep investing in unneeded, expensive coal plants: In competitive energy markets, plants close if they can’t make enough profit from their power to cover their ongoing costs. But in fully regulated markets (which contain 67 percent of US coal capacity), a utility’s return on investment in a plant is guaranteed by regulators, whether or not closing that plant would be better for ratepayers (as it very often would). Ironically, that’s why more coal plants in regulated markets have pollution-control equipment. In competitive markets, that would render them uneconomic (better just to shut them down). But in regulated markets, hell, why not? Every bit of investment means more guaranteed profits. Utilities shuffle coal plants from their deregulated side to their regulated side, to shield them from competition: This one is so devious. Utility holding companies — which own utilities in both regulated and deregulated markets — move coal plants from the books of the latter to the books of the former, to shield them from competition and keep them alive via regulation. “This accounting practice typically shifts the economic burden from the shareholder to the consumer,” Carbon Tracker writes, “with the former often benefiting to the detriment of the latter. This one is so devious. Utility holding companies — which own utilities in both regulated and deregulated markets — move coal plants from the books of the latter to the books of the former, to shield them from competition and keep them alive via regulation. “This accounting practice typically shifts the economic burden from the shareholder to the consumer,” Carbon Tracker writes, “with the former often benefiting to the detriment of the latter. Utilities hedge against changing natural gas costs: Some forecasters expect natural gas prices to rise in coming years (though, honestly, everyone is guessing). To hedge against that, utilities often keep uneconomic coal plants open, just in case rising NG prices retroactively render them economic. This is just a partial accounting. The broader point is that the edifice of regulation governing the US electricity sector favors coal incumbents in myriad ways. If all coal plants had to adopt their full costs and face full market competition tomorrow, the US coal fleet would quickly shrink to negligible size. It only survives because, through taxes and regulations, the US has protected it. All three reports make it clear we’re accelerating in the wrong direction All three reports are very clear that, to achieve the global target of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius or less this century, fossil fuels will have to be aggressively phased out. As OCI shows, staying within a 2 degrees Celsius carbon budget means that we can’t even burn all the fossil fuels in already developed reserves: Hitting our target means no new fossil fuel exploration, no new fields or mines, no new development. Carbon Tracker, meanwhile, develops a detailed scenario for phasing out the US coal fleet on schedule with a 2 degrees Celsius carbon budget. Here’s what it looks like: (B2DS and 2DS are two International Energy Agency scenarios. You don’t need to worry about the difference.) The 2C carbon budget dictates an extremely rapid phaseout — far faster than anything currently projected by utilities themselves. That is the background against which to understand fossil fuel subsidies: They are intrinsically incompatible with current climate goals. So, let’s take a step back and sum up. Right now, the US pays rhetorical fealty to a carbon goal that would require stopping all new fossil fuel development and phasing out all coal plants. Meanwhile, US taxpayers are spending tens of billions of dollars a year subsidizing new fossil fuel exploration and exploitation, and US regulatory policy keeps the zombie coal fleet shambling on. All the while, conservatives complain volubly about subsidies to renewable energy and the US energy secretary tries to use them as an excuse to dump even more public money on coal companies. It’s a train wreck. But still. The oil and gas companies making decisions to develop new fields and the utilities keeping coal plants alive are going to realize,
some closure. Also, we didn’t want Alicia to be devastated by the loss of someone she didn’t have any kind words for. We really wanted to find a place, without giving away where we were going, where there was a comfort level about the new terms of their relationship. It wasn’t forgiveness, but there was a total shift in their relationship. MICHELLE: There was no way to bring them back to the kind of warmth they once shared without it being false; that was the last thing we wanted to do. We wanted to bring them to a place that felt true. TVLINE | Will had some nice moments with many characters in this episode, particularly Kalinda, but his final scene with Alicia wasn’t nearly as weighty. Was that intentional? ROBERT: Yes, and there is a point to that which is played out [in next week’s episode]. We wanted something that was not as emotionally heartfelt or even on the passionate side or the loving side, because a lot of [next week’s episode] is about Alicia dealing with the irredeemability of death. Can you find closure in your memory if life doesn’t give you closure? TVLINE | Does next week’s episode pick up right where this week’s left off? ROBERT: We rewind just a little bit, like a minute. And then the next eight hours are compressed into one episode. TVLINE | What else can you say about the episode? ROBERT: I will only say that some of it involves flashbacks. We asked Josh to work in that episode, too. The episode really puts us quite a bit in Alicia’s mind. There has been the accusation – and even we felt it – that sometimes Alicia feels like a character who closes herself down emotionally. And we always think of her as a passionate character, so this year we’ve been moving more and more into her thoughts – and Will‘s thoughts too, as with “The Decision Tree.” TVLINE | What does Alicia’s life look like beyond next week’s episode? MICHELLE: Our efforts are to play this like life. If someone you care about dies suddenly and violently, it isn’t just going to impact you for a week. It will probably reverberate the rest of your life. And certainly the next few months. ROBERT: One of the reasons we wanted to have this incident [to take place] two-thirds into the season and not at the end of the season is so that you really could see the outcome of all of this on all levels in Alicia’s life. What impact does this have on Peter and Alicia? What impact does this have on Alicia and her kids, especially with her daughter who believes in God? And what about Cary, who has never had the best relationship with Will? And, obviously Diane, where it’s been almost like a marriage. And Michael J. Fox, who comes back into this [as attorney Louis Canning]. There are two earthquakes in this season — one was the split up of the two firms, and the other is [Will’s death], and you will see how it plays out over the next seven episodes. TVLINE | How does this affect Alicia and Peter? ROBERT: Having something end like this in her life doesn’t just make her question her love life, it makes her question all of her choices in her life. Did she make the right choices in her life and career? And it’s complicated by the fact that Will was not the [most] ethical guy, either. It’s a little bit of a mix of whether she’s doing the right thing with her life on five or six levels. TVLINE | What was the experience like writing this episode? ROBERT: It wasn’t pleasurable. It wasn’t a pleasurable tragedy. I’m sure when some great playwrights write tragedies they feel good afterwards — like, “Wow, that cleansed my spirit.” That wasn’t this. It really was the loss of an actor who we so much enjoyed writing for. And it’s also a character who won’t come back, and that didn’t make it happy. There was no joy in this at all, unfortunately. There was this tension in the air over what we were doing. TVLINE | Was there a Plan B that had Will go to jail or leave town? ROBERT: We didn’t have a Plan B because we knew in some way that Will-Alicia love wasn’t the George Clooney-Julianna Margulies love like on ER. It was a relationship that would always be there in the background for Alicia, even if Will went to Amsterdam or something to work. You’d always have this sense that, “That’s the real relationship.” So it didn’t seem like the best way to keep making Alicia an underdog — an underdog emotionally, an underdog in her career. The better way was to pull the Band-Aid off and make Alicia face, “OK what is my life about? Is it about Peter? Work? Power?” It felt like that jolted Alicia into the better place. TVLINE | It would seem like this event would give you the perfect opportunity to bring the two firms back together. ROBERT: Within the next two episodes a lot of those questions get raised and are answered, either affirmatively or negatively. TVLINE | How does Matthew Goode’s Finn figure into all of this? ROBERT: He’s Alicia’s connection to Will’s last moments, because he was there [in the courtroom]. He was with Will. And it turns out he was fairly heroic in covering Will. And Finn was hit a few times with gunfire because of that. So Alicia feels a connection there. The problem is, the State’s Attorney’s office needs someone to scapegoat for the events because it becomes evident that Jeffrey Grant [played by Hunter Parrish] did not commit the crime he was accused of. So it becomes a little bit of a black eye for the S.A. office, and Finn is kind of caught in the political crossfire, for lack of better words, over the events that were a real crossfire. TVLINE | Was Matthew brought in specifically to fill the Will void? ROBERT: Yes. Josh created a great jolt of male energy in the show. We wanted an equivalent jolt once we knew Josh was leaving. So no matter what way Josh was leaving the show, we knew we needed to get more male energy. TVLINE | Is there anything you wanted to do with Will that you didn’t get a chance to do? ROBERT: I wanted to see him with his dad. There was a really good setup there, but [we worry about the personal stories] pulling us too far off the main track. And yet I love the story about a son who became a little more pragmatic financially because the dad was so profligate. That actually felt really ripe for Will and for a relationship.On Sunday, the International House of Pancakes or IHOP stated that their Twitter account was hacked after the appearance of a politically charged retweet involving a tweet from a user going by the handle of PoojaSlays about Hillary Clinton citing that the ex-first lady ran a “major garbage campaign.” Must Read: Twitter suspends ‘Pharma bro’ Martin Shkreli’ account for harassment Once the retweet reached to IHOP’s 291k followers, several of them tweeted never to visit the restaurant again, however, when their social media team realized what happened they immediately checked on the “Undo Retweet” feature. IHOP also tweet a statement claiming their account was hacked: “After a thorough investigation, we have confirmed that the IHOP Twitter account was hacked this morning. The retweeted post in question was immediately removed, and we have taken the necessary steps to ensure the security and integrity of our social media accounts. We appreciate our fans bringing this to our attention and recognizing that this is not normal content shared by IHOP.” After investigation, we have confirmed that our account was hacked this morning. We appreciate our fans bringing this to our attention. — IHOP (@IHOP) January 15, 2017 @IHOP retweeted?!!? Wow! I decided not to go to IHOP anymore. pic.twitter.com/kOvn8ESh5k — Giggy Gal (@GiggyGalWa) January 15, 2017 I got so much hate in the past 24 hours, but none of that could compare to the hate I have for Clinton lol. — Pooja. (@poojaslays) January 16, 2017 Whoever is tweeting for @IHOP today should start getting his resume in order. pic.twitter.com/aPzla2slZh — Darren List (@DarrenList) January 15, 2017 [fullsquaread][/fullsquaread]The dominating issue of last Friday’s debates could have (and probably should have) been ISIS, ObamaCare, or the economy. Instead, the audience was practically water-boarded with sex scandals. Even the moderators persisted in asking Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE about a 2005 video of him making lewd comments about women. The media, liberals, and all of your anti-Trump Facebook friends have been absolutely obsessed with this recording. ADVERTISEMENT In effort to take some heat off of himself, Trump brought Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick to that debate. The one thing all of these women have in common is that they’ve accused Bill Clinton William (Bill) Jefferson ClintonKasich fundraises off 2020 speculation Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Howard Schultz must run as a Democrat for chance in 2020 MORE of sexual assault. What’s that? Bill isn’t running for the White House? If you honestly believe the Clintons haven’t been working as one well-oiled machine since the 1970s, then I have a casino to sell to you. It’s absolutely important that the media covers Trump’s offensive words and accusers. But journalists are showing their bias by refusing to give fair coverage to the Clintons’ alleged actions. Why won’t the left, including Hillary, live up to her own standards? And more importantly, why won’t the press? Trump’s words are offensive, but the alleged actions of Bill Clinton are extremely disturbing. As such, even though he is not running for office, it’s fair to ask what it means that Hillary would stand by such a man — for such a long time — when these sorts of accusations have dogged him every step of the way. And again, even though he’s not running for office, a win for Hillary puts Bill back in the White House, and back on the largest stage imaginable. "Believe the victims," shouts the feminist-left, often from their Twitter accounts. Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE has even raised her voice with theirs, tweeting: "You have the right to be believed, and we're with you.” Unfortunately for Hillz, Broaddrick, the woman who accused Bill Clinton of rape in 1978, also took to Twitter in effort to keep her accusation alive. As you may have guessed, Hillary’s original tweet was deleted shortly after. With so many on the left claiming that all sexual assault victims deserve to be believed, why then aren’t the numerous women who Bill Clinton allegedly sexually assaulted treated with respect or seriousness in the mainstream media? Instead these women are dismissed or even worse, slut-shamed by the usual talking heads. Even though it seemed distasteful to many viewers for Trump to trot these alleged victims out as props for the debate, sitting them in the front row as heartbreaking reminders of the evil that men can do to women, at least it kept them in the discussion. Much like Bill Cosby, if properly investigated and given the attention such claims deserve, a snowball effect might occur with more women coming forward. But maybe that’s exactly why these charges continue to be ignored. The human brain is a pattern-making machine. After a predator selects a victim for the first time, whether what follows takes the form of an ill-intentioned seduction or full-on sexual assault, the predator’s brain learns one of two things from the result: If caught and punished, the brain learns a lesson. If there are no tangible consequences, the predator has no reason to reform. Serial abusers of women will continue to act with impunity as long as they have no reason to think they’ll be punished. Those women seated in the front row of that debate hall were a reminder that if guilty of their alleged crimes, Bill has not learned the right lesson. He would’ve never had to. And if you believe these accusers you would have to agree that for her part, Hillary has obviously never insisted that her husband be held accountable. That, on its own, is enough to call her judgment and morals into question. Kristin Tate is a conservative columnist and author of the book "Government Gone Wild: How D.C. Politicians Are Taking You For a Ride And What You Can Do About It." The views of Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.DETROIT — Mike Babcock spent Sunday enjoying Super Bowl XLIX as a fan, having a few beers, eating hot wings and Greek ribs, rooting for the New England Patriots. Then he watched coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady’s press conference Monday, and he went back to work, jotting down tidbits on two pieces of pink notebook paper. “When I listened to those guys talk, all I thought to myself was, ‘I hope the demand and the preparation for excellence here is as good as it is there,' ” said Babcock, coach of the Detroit Red Wings. “I liked to hear what they had to say about the process, about building a team, about putting your work in daily, about the effort, the grind every day. These are things that just resonate with me.” Babcock sat in his office after practice Tuesday at Joe Louis Arena and read from his notes. He said Belichick talked about “the group getting better,” “keeping the great leaders on the team,” “changing their identity every year based on their personnel.” Scroll to continue with content Ad Babcock picks the brains of coaches in other sports and tries to apply what he learns to the Wings. (USA Today) “That’s what we try to do here,” he said. He went on to say Belichick talked about how Brady prepared and competed, how he had so much poise, how he fought to the end. Maybe these weren’t novel concepts, but they were reminders, examples. That Babcock, a coach who has already won a Stanley Cup and two Olympic gold medals, felt they were important says something about him. He wants to keep learning. He wants to keep winning. Babcock studied physical education and psychology in school – and he hasn’t stopped studying since. He picks the brains of other hockey coaches and follows coaches in other sports like Belichick and Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski. He works for a couple of venture capitalist companies. Story continues “My job is to coach the CEOs,” he said. “What I get to do is, I get to learn from those people and their businesses. You’re always getting ideas.” Babcock wrote a book with friend Rick Larsen titled “Leave No Doubt: A Credo for Chasing Your Dreams.” It’s set against the backdrop of Team Canada’s gold at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. The foreword is by Scotty Bowman. But in the introduction, Babcock writes that it’s not about hockey, but about life. He writes that it’s about “learning moments – big and small.” He describes himself as “a lifelong learner – with a lot still left to learn.” Each chapter ends with a question. “I’ve always liked questions,” he writes. “I think too many of us are too busy trying to prove we have answers, and not enough of us are asking questions. The right question can unlock life-changing possibilities.” On his desk Tuesday was a book by James Kerr about the All Blacks, New Zealand’s national rugby union team. The title: “Legacy: 15 Lessons in Leadership.” According to the description on Amazon.com, it asks: “What are the secrets of success – sustained success? How do you achieve world-class standards, day after day, week after week, year after year? How do you handle pressure? How do you train to win at the highest level? What do you leave behind after you’re gone? What will be your legacy?” Good questions. Especially now, with the Wings back among the top teams in the NHL and Babcock in the last year of his contract. * * * * * When the Red Wings won four Stanley Cups in six years in the 1950s, writers liked to compare them to the New York Yankees. Jack Adams, then the general manager, would say: “We are not the Yankees of hockey, the Yankees are the Red Wings of baseball.” When the Wings won their third Cup in six years in 2002, writers compared them to the Yankees again. They outspent everyone else in the NHL. They had Bowman behind the bench and a star-studded roster. Seven players from that team are now in the Hockey Hall of Fame, and three more are headed there. Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg have gone from the new wave to the old guard in Detroit. (Getty) But then came 2005-06, the salary cap’s first season in the NHL – and Babcock’s first season in Detroit. The Wings had to navigate a new world of parity. More than once, GM Ken Holland pointed to the NFL and said: “That’s what the NHL is like now.” They had to draft and develop – without high picks. They stayed patient with their prospects. The Wings won the Cup again in 2008. They went to Game 7 of the final in 2009, coming agonizingly close to another championship. They slipped out of the elite after that, and the Chicago Blackhawks and the Los Angeles Kings became the first teams to win two Cups in the cap era. Still, the Wings kept making the playoffs, extending their streak to 23 seasons, and all that drafting and developing and patience started to pay off as young players came up from the minors and seized opportunities. Now look: The Wings aren’t the Yankees of hockey anymore. But they have a chance to be the Patriots of hockey. “That’s what we hope to be,” Babcock said. Babcock looks up to Bowman. It makes sense he would look up to Belichick. Bowman won nine Cups as a coach, more than anyone else, and Belichick has won four Super Bowls, tied for the record with Chuck Noll. Like Bowman, Belichick is mysterious and cunning. Bowman didn’t give much to the media; neither does Belichick. Bowman was accused of dirty tricks like having the visitors’ dressing room painted in the playoffs; Belichick had Spygate and now has Deflategate. More to the point, Belichick is creative and cutting-edge. Bowman used the Russian Five and moved Sergei Fedorov from center to defense; Belichick uses receivers as cornerbacks, linemen as tight ends. Bowman evolved with the game; so has Belichick. “Belichick for me, when I look from the outside in, obviously he’s a master of the game and all that, but he’s a master of personnel,” Babcock said. “He doesn’t confuse the player and the person. He makes hard decisions.” He’s ruthless? “Well, is it ruthless, or is it right?” Babcock said. “When you’re making the wrong decision because of someone’s feelings, it’s compromising someone else’s feelings, is it not? So when you challenge each and every day, you challenge your kids to go out and do things right, and then when you go to work and you won’t make the hard decision, what good’s about that?” The Patriots won three Super Bowls in four years. They went back to the Super Bowl twice after that but lost. They started 2-2 this season, and some started to write off Brady at age 37. But they came back and won the Super Bowl again after a decade of trying, and Brady was the game’s MVP for the third time. Brady is the only player who was on all four championship teams. The Patriots completely changed over the rest of their roster. The Wings already have done something similar. Only five players were on all four of the Wings’ 1997, 1998, 2002 and 2008 Cup teams – Kris Draper, Tomas Holmstrom, Nicklas Lidstrom, Darren McCarty, Kirk Maltby. Lidstrom was the equivalent of the quarterback. “We don’t have Tom Brady now,” Babcock said. Lidstrom has retired along with the other four. But players like Pavel Datsyuk, Niklas Kronwall and Henrik Zetterberg, once the new wave, are veterans now, and the Wings have kept regenerating. They have a new new wave of young players like Gustav Nyquist and Tomas Tatar, and they have more prospects coming like Anthony Mantha and Dylan Larkin. Holland and his staff – which has turned over tremendously, too – deserve a ton of credit. The Wings entered Wednesday night with 67 points, two off the lead in the Eastern Conference. They had the fifth-best points percentage in the NHL. And it was based on a strong foundation – strong possession, balanced offense, good special teams. Goaltender Jimmy Howard was playing well enough to make the All-Star Game. Then he suffered a lower-body injury, and the Wings still won seven of eight. “If you polled the league or the people on the outside, they didn’t even have us making the playoffs,” Babcock said. “Now when you poll the league, I think they probably think we might make the playoffs, but I don’t think they have us as the team to win the Cup.” The Wings aren’t the Cup favorites. But is any one team at this point? The Wings, at the very least, are in the mix again. * * * * * Let’s pause here to make something clear: The Red Wings have a multi-year deal on the table to make Babcock the highest-paid coach in the league, and it’s up to him, as it has been for months. Only he knows what he’s thinking. There are a lot of variables. Read the tea leaves at your peril. Babcock: ''I want to win the Cup, period.'' (USA Today) But wherever Babcock is coaching, he won’t be content just to make the playoffs every year. And in Detroit right now, he has been encouraged by the Wings’ progress and intrigued by what the Patriots have done. “I want to win the Cup, period,” he said. “Now, are we as a group willing to do it?” What does he mean by that? Make the sacrifices necessary? “Yes,” he said. “And not just that. You’ve got to build your assets, and in the end, you’ve got to make some decisions, too, right? We’ve been in the process of building our assets. Now we think we’ve taken some good steps. … So here we are now. We’re in a better situation.” Babcock has been part of the process of building the team, putting in the work, grinding every day. He said his job is to develop assets. He admires the way Belichick developed one in Malcolm Butler, the undrafted rookie corner who made the game-saving interception on the goal line Sunday. He added: “Our asset management has been crucial to where we’re at.” He has been part of making hard decisions. Coaches tend to think short-term no matter their contract status, and he has his wish list. But by all accounts, he works well with Holland and has balanced going for the Cup now with putting the Wings in position to win it in the future. The Wings have built enough assets to burn some, but they have worked too hard to waste them. At this point, they want to pay the price at the March 2 trade deadline only for a real upgrade that goes beyond this season. Whether he stays or goes, Babcock will have done things right in Detroit. If he stays, he will have a unique challenge and opportunity. As he took notes on Belichick and Brady, he asked himself some questions. “I thought about this the other day,” Babcock said. “When they were standing there talking, I thought about the fact Brady’s in his 15th year. I’m going to be here a long time if I continue to stay on. Can you keep doing it? Belichick’s been able to do it. We’ve changed our whole team, really. The veteran guys are Z, Pavel and Kronner. So do we have enough in Mantha and Larkin and all these kids we have coming? Do we have enough? I don’t know.” MORE NHL COVERAGE ON YAHOO SPORTS:93% of finance directors who have worked abroad say that the experience has benefited their career. It wasn't the adventure, the food or the exciting surroundings that made Julie Herreman so grateful for her six years as an expat in China. It was what happened next. “As soon as I got back to France I was offered two job options,” said Herreman, 34, who is now the manager of the human resources Europe team for SMCP, a major French clothing retailer. She said her experience as a recruitment consultant in Shanghai made her a catch for French firms. Now she oversees a team of five and is responsible for all recruitment, payroll and training for the European zone. “China still intrigues,” said Herreman, who said it would have otherwise taken her months otherwise to find the perfect job. “It opens a lot of doors.” It’s a sentiment many former China expats are feeling after they return to their home countries. Lack of talent in China a decade or so ago meant that companies were scrambling for people from other countries to fill positions, and were often quick to trust those who were bold enough to accept jobs there. Many of these early expats in China fast-tracked their way up the corporate ladder. That gave them plenty to use to their advantage when they headed home—a trend that has continues as more expansion-minded companies across the globe recognise the value of having worked in China Such was the case for Christina Aman-Riglet, 31, a restaurant marketing director who moved to Beijing in 2009. She was offered a sales and events manager’s position in a five-star hotel just out of graduate school. She parlayed that experience into a job as head of the marketing and business development arm of a small start-up group called Mosto. That proved smart: Mosto has become an award-winning brand with several restaurants scheduled to open across the Middle Kingdom. Back in the United Kingdom since December, it took Aman-Riglet less than a month to land three job offers. “It’s only now I realise what China has really given me. It’s definitely been a career boost,” she said. Expat attraction Figures published by the Centre for Future Studies show that the number of expats working in China reached 38,000 in 2011 from 31,160 in 2007. But most estimates say there are as many as 400,000 foreigners living and working in China, now, with that figure increasing about 5% annually. Today many have returned home with unique professional and personal skills that could not have been acquired elsewhere. At a time when China boasts the world’s second-largest economy, and companies of all kind are scrambling to break into a growing middle class market of Chinese consumers, this group of professionals has in-depth knowledge of how things really happen in China, plus in-country contacts and an invaluable network that can be leveraged by companies worldwide. Aman-Riglet said recruiters are attracted by her international profile, her professional accomplishments and that extra edge an overseas experience has given her profile. “I was given responsibilities I would never have had in the United Kingdom at that age,” she recalled. “That’s been a real plus.” Not just China Human resources specialists agree an overseas experience is valuable — in China and in other emerging economies where companies are looking to enter or expand existing business. “An overseas experience will give you a competitive edge. It’s a significant advantage,” said Barney Ely, the director of recruitment at Hays HR, a specialist recruitment business in London. “Businesses are looking at where they can expand, especially in East Asia. They will look at someone with that experience. The candidate will have insight into how to do business there, the culture, how people on the ground view the UK.” A survey published by Hays in May showed that 93% of finance directors who have worked abroad say that the experience has benefited their career. Sectors where a China experience is most appreciated include: trade, sales, marketing, HR, engineering and finance. Of course, just having worked a bit in China won’t automatically grant you your dream job. Recruiters will also look at career progression and skills acquired. In certain sectors, such as law and accounting, an experience may be valuable for only a limited time, as legislation and jurisdiction evolve quickly. That was the case for Olivia Luzi, 37, partner with French law firm Marie-Feral Schuhl, who lived in Shanghai from 2004 to 2008. “French law and Chinese law are fundamentally different. It took me six to eight months to get back on track,” she recalled. Nevertheless, working overseas, especially in lesser understood places such as China, gives an insight into a candidate’s personality, even if the work skills aren’t directly applicable, Ely said. “Companies are looking for ambitious individuals with a broader mind-set, those who can generate creativity,” he said. “People with an overseas’ experience have a bigger well to dig into for innovation.” Six years later, Luzi said that what she really gained from her experience in China was confidence and networking skills. “I am much more capable now of going towards people, participating in conferences,” she said. “This comes from having been forced to get out of my comfort zone to meet so many different people.” Restaurant marketing manager Aman-Riglet agrees. “I feel I can now face any situation. I was forced to take risks. I am now more flexible and open-minded,” she said. And that is often what recruiters are tapping into when they look for people with China and other emerging market experiences. The years far from home are often enough to forge a leadership persona or a more flexible manager. HR experts also say maturity gained overseas is just as important as professional accomplishments. “All in all there are very little downsides to an overseas’ experience,” Ely said. To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.Play Doom With John Romero If you’re lucky enough to have bought some tickets to this years Game Developers Conference (March 17 -21), you’ll be happy to know that you have the chance to play Doom with none-other than creator John Romero! Starting today, you’ll be able to stop by a dedicated room on the second floor of the West Hall of the Moscone Convention Center. There, you and seven other attendees will have a chance to play Doom with co-creator John Romero and other special guests. The event will be bases on a specific frag count, and the lowest-scoring player must give up their chair to the next person in line. You can stop by the room 10am to 6pm Monday through Thursday, and 10am to 3pm on Friday.0 Fresh off the announcement that the film will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Lionsgate has unveiled the first Sicario image from Prisoners and Enemy director Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming dramatic actioner. Penned by Taylor Sheridan, the story takes place near the U.S.-Mexico border and stars Emily Blunt as an idealistic FBI agent who is enlisted by members of a government task force (Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro) to take out a Mexican cartel boss. This is one of my most anticipated films of the year for a number of reasons. First off, female-led action films are rare, and Emily Blunt is incredible. Secondly, while I wasn’t blown away by Prisoners, I thought Villeneuve’s Enemy was superb. And thirdly, freaking Roger Deakins is the cinematographer, reuniting with Villeneuve after Prisoners. He’s simply the most masterful director of photography working today, and I’ll jump at any chance to see new work of his. Villeneuve has quickly assembled an incredibly promising slate, as he’s next set to helm the sci-fi drama Story of Your Life with Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, after which he will direct the Blade Runner sequel with Harrison Ford and possibly Ryan Gosling. We can only hope that his Deakins collaboration continues through to Blade Runner 2, as the prospect of seeing Deakins work within that world is glee-inducing. But first we’ve got Sicario to look forward to, and I can’t wait to see what Villeneuve has put together. Check out the first image from the film below, via Lionsgate. The film also stars Jon Bernthal and Victor Garber and opens in limited release on September 18th, followed by a wide release on September 25th. Here’s the official synopsis for Sicario:What’s this about? Humans Behaving Badly. What’s the point? Why do people climb Mt. Everest? Why do they dive the Mariana Trench? We do the same thing, but with t-shirts. What would I be supporting? A startup that will be selling apparel, prints, and other objects under the banner of Hellbrand. How did this come about? This started as a self-promotion project about four years ago, in which I rebranded Hell as a family-friendly tourist destination. It then snowballed into something entirely different. Why no reference to an afterlife? Traditional Hell-related themes—including sin, punishment, and pain—are reflections of the human experience. They were created by and for humans. Where are the demons and flames? That kind of imagery has been done ad nauseum. I wanted to create a more contemporary image of Hell on Earth by employing the visual language of corporate branding and propaganda. Why focus on decadence and depravity? We are inundated with consumer-oriented messaging that whitewashes reality. This project is all about balanced reporting. I could use some hyperbolic marketing copy. For centuries, Hell has hosted all manner of luminaries, from statesmen and celebrities, to artists and clerics. Now you can count yourself among this exclusive company. Live the dream, with Hellbrand. How about a catchy tagline? Take your pick: It’s a State of Mind Veni, Vidi, Veni We’re Looking for People to Test Hunting Products On The Relentless Pursuit of Perversity This Machine Kills Fat Cats Going Down? What’s the square root of 443556? Who cares? - - - Product Punishments Poster, 16” x 20” on 80lb White Cougar Smooth - - - Punishments Poster Detail (arrangement subject to change) - - - T-Shirts All shirts are black American Apparel 2001 Unisex Fine Jersey Tees. 4.3 ounce 100% fine jersey cotton, medium shown. Available sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXL T-Shirt choice and size selection will be made after project is funded. Fall-Star T-Shirt - - - Crest T-Shirt - - - Sins T-Shirt - - - Sins T-Shirt Detail - - - Mercury Rising T-Shirt - - - Wanted (for Induction into the Hell Hall of Fame) Flyers Shown: The Financier, The Senator, The Pedophile, The Killer, The Caporegime. 8.5” x11” on white 70# text. Any resemblance of these illustrations to real human beings is coincidental. - - - Range Targets 8.5” x 8.5” printed on 100lb White Cougar Smooth (lot of 5) - - - Branded Fall-Star Graphic Lasered into unfinished hard maple plank 11.5” (W) x 9.25” (H) x.75” - - - Embroidered Baseball Hat Black Port & Company 6-Panel Structured Twill Cap. Adjustable cloth velcro closure. - - - Automobile and Square Stickers Automobile Stickers are 5” x 3” on durable vinyl with a UV laminate. Square Stickers (5) are 2.5” x 2.5” on vinyl with laminate. - - - Bookmarks 1.5” x 6” bookmarks on 100lb White Cougar Smooth (lot of 2) - - - Brand Reviews “An adept exploration of the decadence and depravity that result from the abuse of power on individual and institutional levels.” The Bennington Beacon “I laughed… I cried… I felt nothing.” The Nashua News “I don’t get it, but it offends me.” The Brookline Banner “No strife, no stripes.” Karl Jaspers “There ain't a bull that can't be rode; there ain't a man that can't be throwed.” The Sanford Times “You're still here? It's over. Go home. Go.” The Coventry Courier - - - Coming Soon Fall-Star Etched in Stainless Steel - - - Sin City Coasters (Bordello, Nightclub, Casino, Cabana) 2-color letterpress coasters (black and blind deboss) - - - Star-Spangled Skateboard Deck - - - Individual Deadly Sins T-Shirts - - - T-Shirts - - - Dog Tags and Buttons - - - The Hellbrand logo is a registered trademark of Dark Ops, LLC.Official Admits 'Mistake' In Gun-Trafficking Case Enlarge this image toggle caption Ross D. Franklin/ASSOCIATED PRESS U.S. Border Patrol vehicles drive from a checkpoint in December 2010, as teams of border officers comb the Arizona desert about 10 miles north of Mexico in search for a suspect in the fatal shooting of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in the rugged terrain in Rio Rico, Ariz. Ross D. Franklin/ASSOCIATED PRESS A top political appointee in the Obama Justice Department says he made a "mistake" when he didn't flag questionable tactics used by federal agents in a gun-trafficking case for his superiors last year. Lanny A. Breuer, assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division, told NPR he found out in April 2010 that agents at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had let more than 400 guns connected to suspicious buyers cross the Southwest border during the Bush years, but he didn't tell senior leadership at the Justice Department. "Knowing what I know now, I wish that I had alerted
According to Birth.Movies.Death., Matt Damon has signed on to star in Charlatan, a movie about a man named John Romulus Brinkley who claimed to be a doctor in the early 1900s and ended up killing a number of people with his fraudulent—yet oddly crowd-pleasing—medical advice. As spoiled by the headline up there, his big claim to fame was inventing a cure for male impotence that involved inserting goat testicles into humans, presumably so they could absorb all of the excess goat energy into their human genitals. Unfortunately, a bunch of people ended up dying from his operations and he lost his medical license (which wasn’t real to begin with), but not before he could get rich and try to become a politician. He later lost all of his money to malpractice and wrongful death suits, so it all worked out. Back to the movie, it’s based on Pope Brock book Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, The Man Who Pursued Him, And The Age Of Flimflam, and the script is coming from Ocean’s Thirteen writers Brian Koppelman and David Levien. No director is attached yet.AFP•Getty An Eastern European supermarket in Boston (l) and the famous town church (r) Families who moved from Eastern Europe to Boston, Lincolnshire, say they feel no need to integrate. The small market town was revealed last week as the least integrated place in the country. Analysis of census figures showed that the 11,000 immigrants of Boston - around a sixth of the population - live more separate lives than anywhere in the country. AFP Another Eastern European-branded shop in central Boston Many say they can get by speaking no English, and there are Eastern European pubs, shops and jobs for them. One family said: "We love it here. It is just like living in Lithuania." Emil Koval, a 39-year-old father of two, lives on a street where more than 85 per cent of his neighbours are also immigrants. Alamy One local complained that many of the town's shops are now not for natives Mr Koval, a factory worker, moved to Boston from Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, with his family six years ago. He said: "We do have respect for British culture but there is so much of our country here it is hard to get homesick. "Both my sisters are here — I’m thinking of getting Mum to come."Tim Ireland/Associated Press Tottenham are deeply involved in the Premier League title race. It has been decades since Spurs could genuinely make that claim, but there is no escaping it in 2016. Mauricio Pochettino has built a resilient and exciting team, adding to the work of previous managers like Andre Villas-Boas and Harry Redknapp. Having hammered Manchester City and outplayed Arsenal, there is little doubt that this Tottenham team are good enough to win the league and end their 55-year title drought. This weekend's fixture, at home against Watford, is another tricky step on the road to what would be an unlikely title win. Before the seriousness resumes, it's time to address the real question: whether they pass the cliche test. The first and most important cliche is that experience is necessary to win it. Spurs have no significant title-winning experience. Only the former Ajax trio of Christian Eriksen, Toby Alderweireld and Jan Vertonghen have league winner's medals. PAUL ELLIS/Getty Images This starts Tottenham off on a poor footing in the cliche test. Of course, this cliche has an exception. Alan Hansen famously observed of Sir Alex Ferguson's youthful Manchester United side in 1995 that "you can't win anything with kids." United went on to claim the league title with a largely untested squad and a superstar goalkeeper. Among Tottenham's star outfield players are 22-year-old Harry Kane, 19-year-old Dele Alli and 23-year-old Christian Eriksen. Hugo Lloris is not at the level of the great Dane Peter Schmeichel, but the Frenchman is busily carving out a legacy and could yet reach such exalted status in time. Bucking the "experience" cliche with this playing group would fit snugly into that same narrative. Another piece of received wisdom about league champions is that they are often built around a native core, home-grown if possible. Every dynastic Premier League champion has fit this description. United's class of '92 formed the core of their success from the mid-90s. Arsenal's Invincibles featured European stars strutting around a British core. Jose Mourinho's Chelsea had John Terry, Ashley Cole and Frank Lampard. Pochettino's Tottenham have five Englishmen in their strongest lineup, and a handful more fill out the squad. Michael Regan/Getty Images Moving away from specifically British cliches, the notion that champions win playing badly is virtually universal. The best teams always seem to find a way to win matches even when notably below top form. No team is at its best every week, but every title winner will win the vast majority of their games. At the beginning of this season, Spurs were drawing while playing poorly. While better than losing, picking up one point every week is insufficient for the aspirations that Tottenham suddenly have. Recent results, the 2-1 win over Watford and the 3-1 victory against Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park, suggest that a corner has decisively been turned. In both matches, Spurs struggled at times but emerged victorious. Even in the supremely confident 3-0 win over Norwich City, there were a pair of lucky bounces in the lead-up to Alli's opening goal. Whether this is indicative of some kind of champion spirit or simply revisionism at work, this cliche is rooted in truth. It must wait until the final league table is confirmed before it can be known whether Spurs possess this particular virtue in sufficient quantity. Of the last five league champions, only Manchester United in 2012-13 were outside the top three defensive teams. Another cliche that seems to ring true is one borrowed from our American friends, that titles are built on defence. It has been well documented that Tottenham have the best defence in the division this season. At their current rate (19 goals conceded in 24 games), Spurs will finish with the third best defence of any team in the last five seasons. The injury Vertonghen suffered at Selhurst Park may undermine their defensive strength, but there is no arguing with their results so far. Tottenham have passed all the tests they have faced up to this point. They've won when playing below their best, they've got a tough, young, British core and they possess the strongest defence in the league. Other cliches stand ahead. Can they juggle their commitments in multiple competitions? Will they display the necessary mental fortitude in the final weeks of the season? Can they win away at Stoke City? Pochettino and his team must clear all these hurdles and more if they are to claim this year's Premier League title.As I was digging into a fresh bag of candy corn, an idea suddenly jumped into my mind. Why do we have candy corn kernels and not a full cob of candy corn? Clearly this is an imbalance in the world that needed to be fixed. I did a quick google search to see if someone else has stumbled upon this cob-shaped void in the universe; I was surprised at how little I found. There was a creator that attempted to accomplish the impossible by fusing the kernels with melted chocolate. His story can be found here: http://somethingaweek.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/82-candy-corn-on-the-cob/. He was successful and made a beautiful cob of pure sugar. I also found another attempt on youtube where a guy used icing, but ended up with a frozen block of sugar. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZKeseqwaL8 I was looking for something easier, cheaper, and more fool proof. I experimented with fondant first, that was completely unsuccessful. Then I though of gluing it together with caramel (since I had a fresh bag of that around too). Too messy and too hard. Then, another light bulb went off.....cookie dough! Sugar cookie dough works perfectly (don't attempt with chocolate chip dough, the chips just get in the way and jeopardize structural integrity). It only took about 4 minutes to assemble and looked authentic. Update: For those afraid of the raw eggs in cookie dough, I recommend making egg-free cookie dough instead.Here is a handy recipie I found online: http://www.food.com/recipe/egg-free-no-bake-cookie-dough-for-eating-391880 Second Update: I have received a lot of recommendations to substitute marzipan instead of the cookie dough...the choice is yours :) Some helpful details: I only used about 1/10 of the tube of cookie dough for the cob core(hooray for leftover cookies!). I rolled it thinner in my hands to get the half-sized cob. I pushed the candy corns into the cookie dough only as deep as the white part., if you push them in too deep then they start to collide in the cookie dough and cause it to loose its shape. I layered the kernels by alternating the spacing each row (length-wise). As you can see in the picture, I set the rows with the kernels flat against each other, not the longer way. Also, I only used about half a bag of candy corn ( a lot of them were broken). So you could easily make two small cobs from one bag or one impressive full-sized cob! Its pretty stable on its own, but a quick set in the fridge really helps hold it together. It also helps to have the cookie dough chilled before pushing in the candy corns. Now I have fixed the sugar-cob-shaped hole in my life and have a brick of sugar to eat. Although the earthy-vanilla of the sugar cookie balances out the unadulterated sweetness of the candy corn, I do not recommend eating it all at once (unless you don't want to move for a while). I could see this being a fun center piece or a part of a candy table where guests may pick off candy corns as they like. It was a fun experiment, and its so cheap and easy I would love to see what people can do with it. Get out there and help fill the candy-corn cob shaped holes in the universe!These amazing pictures were actually taken in Qatar - which may surprise some who never expected to see such majestic wildlife in the harsh desert environment. The Greater Flamingo (Phoenicopterus roseus) come to Qatar every November, mainly from African countries. These birds filter-feed on shellfish and algae - their oddly-shaped beaks are specially adapted to separate mud and silt from the food they consume, and are uniquely used upside-down. These birds usually leave Qatar by April when it starts getting too hot for them. From there, the birds go as far as North America. The other amazing thing is that these pictures were not taken on the coast, but much further inland - at the Al Karaana Sewerage Ponds. Click here to see where that is on the map: Al Karaana Sewerage Ponds The pics were taken by jameel riaz and shared on the QL Flickr group. Have you spotted these birds before? Please share your photos with us.About “Swish Swish” “Swish Swish” is the third single from Katy Perry’s fifth studio album, Witness and marks the first song featuring vocals from both Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj. It is a self-empowerment anthem that calls out haters. Katy has mentioned that her album is about a “360° liberation” and this song is about escaping pointless negativity. The central hook uses the image of a basketball player consistently scoring points, imitating the ‘swish’ sound of the hoop’s net. Fans speculated the song to be a response to Taylor Swift’s 2014 hit “Bad Blood,” citing many lyrical references. This was later confirmed when she starred in James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke interview. Katy explained: She started it and it’s time for her to finish it. Now, there is the law of cause and effect. You do something, there’s going to be a reaction, and trust me, daddy, there’s going to be a reaction. The song was indirectly confirmed days prior by EDM artist and ex-Taylor flame Calvin Harris, who said he “wasn’t involved” in a now-deleted tweet.Image caption The Olympics have a long history of athletes who put themselves forward with no chance of a medal The elite athletes are racking up the golds at London 2012, but what about those who compete knowing they don't stand a chance? Everybody admires the sacrifices a medallist makes, devoting four years of their lives, knowing milliseconds or millimetres could be the difference between gold and an agonising fourth-place finish. But what about those athletes who go knowing they won't be anywhere near the leading pack? What if you're the lone figure trailing in a minute after everybody else? These also-rans and no-hopers earn affection and no small measure of fame. "I have no technique, I only rely on power," admitted Niger rower Hamadou Djibo Issaka after fighting his way over the finishing line of the men's single sculls at Eton Dorney on Friday. Issaka managed 8:39.66, leaving him miles behind the next worst competitor J Fraser-Mackenzie on 7:19.85. Issaka the Otter, as he is now affectionately known, had some 25,000 fans on their feet, cheering him on. The 35-year-old only started rowing three months ago, practising in an old fishing boat. In Issaka's case, Niger received an Olympic wild card - given out so all 204 National Olympic Committees can compete, even when no athlete qualifies. Then there was 16-year-old debutant judoka, Wojdan Shaherkani - the first Saudi woman ever to compete in the Olympics. She stepped up to represent her country amid suggestions Saudi Arabia had purposefully sent weak female competitors to the Games. Image caption Sarah Attar is the second female Saudi Olympian ever Facing a heavyweight Puerto Rican 12 years her senior and far more experienced, Shaherkani lasted just one minute and 22 seconds. But the crowd roared her on nevertheless. Saudi runner Sarah Attar had her moment in the spotlight on Wednesday, completing the 800m over 43 seconds behind the heat's winner - but with a full Olympic Stadium ovation. "It's an incredible experience," she said after. Marshall Islands runner Timi Garstang, for example, clocked the slowest sprint in the biggest event in athletics - finishing the men's 100m preliminary round in 12.81 seconds. The system has been changed so the slowest runners have to get through qualifying before finding themselves in a heat with Bolt or Blake. The 25-year-old Garstang told Reuters he had no regrets: "I'm not disappointed, I guess I'd have to run a bit faster if I want to run in his [Bolt's] heat. It's a great feeling to be here." Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Niger rower wins hearts of fans And India's only swimmer, 20-year-old Gagan Ullalmath, went out in the first round of the 1500m freestyle event with the slowest heat time of 16:31.14.Even his personal best of 15:59.33 would have left him last by more than 10 seconds. "I was hoping to make it to the top 16, so I could call myself a semi-finalist," says Ullalmath. "However, I actually fell ill on the day." The also-rans are one of the guilty pleasures of any Olympics. In theory, one should politely applaud them for their effort. In practice, they can become instant cult heroes. Ullalmath seems as happy as any of his quicker rivals. "The crowd was amazing and stood up for me in the last 100m of the race. It was a real honour and I feel good about it. "These Olympics have been a great chapter. When I get back to India I will start training for Brazil straight away." The spirit of Ullalmath is, in many ways, an expression of the amateur ideal that underpinned the birth of the Olympics. Every amateur runner or swimmer or cyclist knows what it is like to race as hard as your body will allow, knowing that even a top-50 finish is out of the question. Not everyone is in it for the medal, explains sports psychologist and performance consultant, Andy Barton. "Only a very small proportion are aiming for gold. Most competitors have their own gold to aim for - maybe a personal best, to be in the top 50, or qualify first in their country. "And many just want to compete. Wouldn't you take the chance?" The crowds love the also-rans for their effort and their never-say-die attitude, but the Olympic authorities' attitude has a note of ambivalence about it. The best example of this is the story of Eddie "the Eagle" Edwards. "Competing in the Olympics was a dream come true," he recalls. The British ski jumper shot to fame during his last-place performance at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. "The support was a tremendous promotion for sport because it thrust attention on ski jumping, which suddenly went from page 57 to one [in the UK]. "But I ended up getting more attention than the guy who won - a few officials really didn't like that." The response was swift. The International Olympic Committee changed the rules so only those above a certain Olympic standard could take part in the future. "I was effectively forced into retirement," says Edwards. "But I was just exemplifying the true Olympic spirit of taking part as an amateur athlete." Image caption Japan's rider Hiroshi Hoketsu was the oldest Olympian at London 2012, finishing 40th out of 50 Yet at the same time, the Olympic wild cards ensure there are always no-hopers. Everybody remembers Eric Moussambani, aka Eric the Eel, from the 2000 Olympics and his 100m freestyle time of 1:52.72. But anyone tempted to chuckle should also remember that his time was a personal best and a national record. And he came from a country without the lavish training facilities and programmes of the swimming superpowers. Who can fail to be moved by the story of Philip Boit, the first Kenyan to compete at the Winter Olympics? He came last in the cross country skiing 10km classic in 1998. The winner, cross country legend Bjørn Erlend Dæhlie, delayed receiving his medal so he could embrace Boit at the finish. Boit responded by naming his son Dæhlie. It's the sheer bloody-mindedness of some competitors that inspires. For many, the famous image of Italian marathon runner Dorando Pietri struggling across the line in 1908 sums up the spirit of the Olympics. Despite leading, he endured a near-collapse and had to be helped across the line, prompting his disqualification. "He got into trouble and ran in stumbling and falling over," says Olympic historian Philip Barker. Officials ended up helping him over the line, which meant he lost. Image caption A brave marathon finish for Dorando Pietri as he is helped across the line "But everybody knew about Dorando from Italy. The little bloke with a moustache - he looked a bit like Manuel from Fawlty Towers. Even back then people loved the plucky loser." Of course, Pietri was a superb athlete who had a bit of a lapse. The real also-rans make us feel like they are representing the ordinary fans. "Someone like Eddie the Eagle is normal," says Barker. "You could meet him down your local. People embraced him because he was the everyman doing an Olympic sport. Eddie used to practise ski jumping on the roof. "He lost but also held the British record for ski jumping. Really and truly he deserves our respect." Unlike Edwards, and the Jamaican bobsled team of the 1988 Winter Olympics, most of the true also-rans are from developing nations with limited budgets for sport. And remember, the no-hopers only have no hope against the best. Many of them are great athletes by amateur standards. Boit was originally an 800m runner with a reported personal best of 1:46.06. That's outside the medals but probably a fair bit better than anyone tempted to laugh at an also-ran.Police were today forced to free a child from a sweltering car on the hottest day of the year - after a woman left the youngster for 40 minutes while she went shopping. Panicked shoppers called officers after loudspeaker calls for the woman to return to her vehicle, which was left in a disabled bay outside a Next branch in Watford, went unanswered. One onlooker told how passersby were'screaming' at security guards to do something to release the child as the temperatures outside the vehicle soared to above 30C. A woman allegedly spent 40 minutes looking around a Next store in Watford and was called several times to return to her car and child The woman allegedly looked around the shop at Waterfields Shopping Centre and was asked to return to her car (left) Police arrived and got the young child out of the Nissan vehicle, which was parked in a disabled bay at Waterfields Shopping Centre The onlooker told MailOnline: 'An elderly woman was on the scene and screaming at a security guard to do something and let the child out. 'There were quite a few people looking on as the police arrived.' Officers called to the scene eventually freed the child from the white Nissan Qashqai - one onlooker said it appeared the door was able to be opened from the outside without damage. And after the child was released, the driver returned to her car having apparently been shopping the whole time at the store at the Waterfields Shopping Centre. The onlooker added: 'All the woman got was a ticking off - it must have been unbearable for the child.' A Hertfordshire Police spokesman said: 'Police were called at 12.40pm on Monday to Waterfields Retail Park in Watford to reports of concerns for the welfare of children that had been left in a car. Officers attended and the mother was located. Strong words of advice were given to the woman.' The incident came as the UK had its hottest day of the year so far, with temperatures reaching 33.4 degrees. The RSPCA has also seen a spike in calls from members of the public concerned about dogs left in hot cars, conservatories, sheds and caravans. ClientEarth said air pollution is also set to reach dangerous levels, and the hottest parts of England are expected to be the North West and South East. And forecasters have also predicted torrential downpours in parts of the country tonight, with up to two inches of rain expected in some areas. This will bring a risk of flash flooding, with the Met Office also warning of frequent lightning, large hail and strong winds as additional hazards. The heat has been caused by a warm plume of air from Spain and will bring temperatures close to the July record of 36.7C set only last year.DB are hoping their new Bond-like miniature helicopters – red all over, with the DB logo - will be able to detect and film spray-painters and vandals in the act, wrote Bild am Sonntag. The machines, which like a military drone are fitted with heat-sensitive cameras, are due to be tested over the next weeks – for now only on DB property and airspace. If suspicious movement is detected, the operator on the ground alerts a pilot also at ground level, who can then chase down the culprits using a remote control which works up to 40 kilometres away. The whole thing – including a log of GPS data - will be filmed so that the culprits can be later brought to justice in court, wrote the paper. At €60,000 each, the battery-operated helicopters can fly silently for over 80 minutes at 54 km/h at a height of 150 metres, said Bild am Sonntag. “We have to find new ways of fighting graffiti,” Gerd Neubeck, head of security at Deutsche Bahn told the paper. In the past year alone, the rail company has recorded 14,000 separate spray-painting incidents at a total damage of €7.6 million. The Local/jlbThe Justice Department said Friday it will reverse its stance on a Supreme Court case, in which the department previously favored workers over management. The Justice Department under the Obama administration had thrown its weight behind the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in the case, NLRB v. Murphy Oil, but the department is now weighing in on the side of Murphy Oil. ADVERTISEMENT The case seeks to answer whether an employee agreement that makes employees wave their right to bring a class action lawsuit against their employer goes against the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The Department of Justice (DOJ) claimed in a new amicus brief first reported by Politico that “nothing in the NLRA’s legislative history indicates that Congress intended to bar enforcement of arbitration agreements like those at issue here.” DOJ acknowledged that it previously supported the position of the NLRB, which had ruled against such arbitration agreements, but said that "after the change in administration, the office reconsidered the issue and has reached the opposite conclusion." It is uncommon for the Justice Department to change positions in a Supreme Court case.The Verge has learned that national, third-party AT&T retailers will stop offering two-year contracts at the end of the month and will instead only offer smartphones with the AT&T Next program or at full retail price. The move was originally reported by Droid-Life, and comes just a little more than two years after T-Mobile declared it had become the "uncarrier," becoming the first major US wireless carrier to kill all mobile contracts. AT&T isn't really going that far though, at least not yet. Industry sources tell The Verge that AT&T will continue to offer two-year contracts in its own stores and online, so it's not a coup de grâce for consumers. And even if AT&T killed contracts, programs like AT&T Next are sort of like contracts by a different name — they're still expensive commitments. Even if AT&T plans on dragging its feet, competition has been getting better in the mobile industry. T-Mobile has largely been leading the way, even if the prickly and occasionally uncouth demeanor from CEO John Legere is off-putting. AT&T has already followed T-Mobile's aggressive moves with discounted data plans and cash incentives for people who switch carriers. Hopefully the company's ripple will soon turn into a wave.Behind closed doors at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) VRFocus managed to get an interview with Damjan Mravunac the CMO of Croteam. The Croatian based studio are best known for Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter, Serious Sam: The Last Hope and Serious Sam VR: The Second Encounter. VRFocus writer Peter Graham wrote a rave review about the videogame here. The Talos Principle was a huge hit back in 2014. This philosophical puzzler has a narrative that is supposed to make you question life and the universe. It also has various puzzles, and the Croteam team received various requests to make the Talos Principle a virtual reality (VR) game. Based around Talos, a giant bronze man in Greek mythology – apparently this is a must play game in VR. The feedback from the few who managed to play it has been incredible according to Damjan, no release date has been given yet and the CroTeam want to expand to support more headsets in the future. To find out more watch the video below.Authorities have arrested a man suspected of being the would-be bank robber who walked away after a New Jersey bank teller asked for some identification. A man wearing a hooded sweatshirt walked into the Santander Bank branch along Brewers Bridge Road in Jackson Township Wednesday afternoon and handed the teller a note asking for money. Lt. Steven Laskiewicz told the Asbury Park Press the teller told the man to remove the hood and show some ID. “It was reported that a male subject had entered the bank and passed a note to a teller asking for a sum of money. When the teller told the male, who was wearing a gray, hooded sweatshirt, to remove the hood and also asked for identification, the male claimed he did not have any and then left the bank,” Laskiewicz told the paper. Ryan Higgins of Jackson was arrested and held on $100,000 bail, charged with attempted robbery. Laskiewicz told the paper the 40-year-old was arrested Thursday after police received multiple tips from people who saw a photo from bank surveillance cameras. The same bank was robbed on Valentine's Day. Copyright Associated Press / NBC 10 Philadelphia(Newser) – Police have identified the man who this morning fatally shot two firefighters responding to the blaze he set in his own house as 62-year-old William H. Spengler Jr., reports the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Spengler was convicted of first-degree manslaughter in 1981 for beating his 92-year-old grandmother Rose Spengler to death with a hammer; he served 17 years in prison and had an "uneventful" parole that ended in 2006. Rose Spengler was killed in the house next-door to the house where firefighters were responding today. Webster Police Chief Gerald Pickering said that because Spengler was a convicted felon, he couldn't legally own guns; Pickering said investigators found "several different types of weapons, including a rifle used on first responders." He added that mental health issues were probably involved. After exchanging fire with officials, Spengler was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound around 11am. He was reportedly living with his sister, who has not been found. Fire officials would not rule out that anyone had died in the blaze, which consumed seven homes. Two firefighters injured in the shooting are currently listed in guarded condition. A Facebook page has been set up for the victims. (Read more William Spengler stories.)These electric blue shapes in the brown desert are potash evaporation ponds managed by Intrepid Potash, Inc., the United States’ largest producer of potassium chloride, and are located along the Colorado River, about 30 km west of Moab, Utah. These ponds measure 1.5 square kilometers, and are lined with rubber to keep the salts in. Unlike other salt evaporation ponds that get a naturally reddish tinge due to the presence of certain algae, the bright blue color of these potash evaporation ponds come from an artificially added dye that aids the absorption of sunlight and evaporation. Once the potassium and salts are left behind, they are gathered and sent off for processing. Photo credit Most of the world reserves of potassium came from ancient oceans that once covered where is now land. After the water evaporated, the potassium salts crystallized into large beds of potash deposits. Over time, upheaval in the earth's crust buried these deposits under thousands of feet of earth and they become potash ore. The Paradox Basin, where the mines at Moab are located, is estimated to contain 2 billion tons of potash. These formed about 300 million years ago and today lies about 1,200 meters below the surface. To extract potash from the ground, workers drill wells into the mine and pump hot water down to dissolve the potassium. The resulting brine is pumped out of the wells to the surface and fed to the evaporation ponds. The sun evaporates the water, leaving behind crystals of potassium and other salt. This evaporation process typically takes about 300 days. Intrepid Potash, Inc. produces between 700 and 1,000 tons of potash per day from this mine. The mine has been open since 1965, and Intrepid Potash expects to get at least 125 more years of production out of it before the potash ore runs out. Photo credit Photo credit Photo credit Photo credit Photo credit Photo credit Photo credit Sources: Live Science / NASA / Wikipedia via MessyNessyChic More Multicolored Salt LakesPARIS — The unemployment rate in the euro zone hit double digits in November for the first time in more than a decade, tempering hopes for a rapid recovery in the job market. Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, said on Friday that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in the 16 countries that use the euro rose to 10 percent in November, from 9.9 percent in October and 8 percent in November 2008. For the euro area, the rate was the highest rate since 1998, a year before the euro was introduced. The number of unemployed in November rose by 102,000, still a significant pace of increase although down from the monthly peak of 475,000 seen at the start of last year. The unemployment rate for the broader 27-member European Union was 9.5 percent in November, from 9.4 percent in October and 7.5 percent in November 2008. Advertisement Continue reading the main story In France, the rate stood at 10 percent, up from 9.9 percent in October. In Germany, it was 7.6 percent, unchanged from October. For Italy, the rate was 8.3 percent, up from 8.2 percent.Mr. Obama was less bracing than during the campaign, when A.I.G. executives were caught going to posh retreats after taking an $85 billion bailout. He called for them to be fired and to reimburse the federal Treasury. Now that he has the power to act, Mr. Obama spoke, as his spokesman Robert Gibbs put it, “like that disappointed parent that doesn’t embarrass you in the mall, but you feel like you’ve let somebody down.” That’s not enough, not with the president and Geithner continuing to dole out what may end up being a trillion dollars to these “malefactors of great wealth,” as Teddy Roosevelt put it. USA Today wrote about “the A.I.G. effect:” executives finding ways to spend more discreetly, choosing lesser-known luxury hotels and $110 pinot noir instead of the $175 variety. More than a disappointed parent, they need a special prosecutor or three. Spare the rod, spoil the jackal. Anyone who gave bonuses after accepting federal aid should be fired, and that money should be disgorged to the Treasury. Claire McCaskill popped out a bill to limit the pay of anyone at firms taking federal money to no more than the president makes — $400,000. Photo “These people are idiots,” she said on the Senate floor. “You can’t use taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses.... Right now they’re on the hook to us. And they owe us something other than a fancy wastebasket and $50 million jet.” One Obama official said her idea is catchy, but it won’t work “because no one would come to Treasury to participate, and that means our economy would continue to stumble downward.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story Senator Chuck Grassley urged the administration to snatch back the bonuses. “They ought to give ’em back or we should go get ’em,” the Republican told me. “If this were Japan and a corporate executive did what is being done on Wall Street, they’d either go out and commit suicide or go before the board of directors and the country and take a very deep bow and apologize.” 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. He was shocked to learn that the Office of Management and Budget, insistent on following the Paperwork Reduction Act, was dragging down a special inspector general’s investigation of what banks are doing with taxpayer money. (After complaints, the O.M.B. yielded on Friday.) “Once in a while, some C.E.O. comes and talks to me and I wonder if they’re laughing under their breath at having to talk to someone who makes 1 percent of what they make,” he said. Treasury officials and Barney Frank are dubious about recouping bonuses. “Paulson let the cat out of the bag,” Frank said of Henry Paulson, Geithner’s predecessor, “and it can’t be gotten back.” But aren’t taxpayers shareholders in these corporations now, and can’t shareholders sue or scream “You misspent my money!” like Judy Holliday? “In ‘The Solid Gold Cadillac,’ ” said Frank, who knows the movie. “We got some preferred shares,” he mused, “but I don’t think we could sue on that basis.” Rudy Giuliani resurfaced Friday to defend corporate bonuses, telling CNN that cutting them would mean less spending in restaurants and stores. Stupid. Even without bonuses, these gazillionaires can still eat out. It’s like Rudy’s trickle-up Make Work Program: Make Leisure. Some Obama policy makers still buy into the notion that if they’re too strict, these economic royalists, to use F.D.R.’s epithet, might balk at the bailout, preferring perks over the prospect of their banks going belly-up.The Shining and Pixar may not seem like natural bedfellows. But Lee Unkrich – one of the studio's core directors (he co-helmed Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, and directed Toy Story 3) – is also the self-appointed 'Caretaker' of the fantastically exhaustive Shining blog TheOverlookHotel.com. Despite being hard at work on Pixar's Día de los Muertos film, he was happy to talk to Empire about the enormous impact The Shining has had on him in advance of The Shining documentary Room 237 coming out on October 26. Click here to see Lee Unkrich's nods to The Shining in Toy Story 3 “I was 12 years old,” he says of his first viewing, when the film was released in 1980. “I was right at the tail of a stretch of time when I was really afraid to see horror films, because I had been taken to see a scary movie when I was in fifth grade that lead to a year of nightmares. It also happened to be the beginning of the whole slasher film era. Scary movies were on TV all the time, and I really wanted nothing to do with them after my bad experience. But my mom took me to see The Shining, I never asked her what she was thinking! A few times during the movie she turned to me and said
because of the Wi-Fi because we don’t know yet, but I’ve pretty much eliminated every other possible source.” Two years later, Mr. Palmer has still not produced his evidence that he has “pretty much eliminated every other possible source”, despite once claiming before a parliamentary comittee that he had “become an epidemiologist.” This is an alarmingly common charge: that kids show symptoms at WiFi-equipped school, but not at home. Well, it would be alarming, if you’re an alarmist, I suppose. I see a few problems with this logic, that no one in the media seems to pick up on. 1) The claims of the parents are taken at face value. I’m not suggesting the parents are dishonest, but how do we know these parents are adequate judges of illness? Yes, some symptoms are pretty easy to identify (mucous comes to mind), because you can quantify them. However, these parents are reporting things as non-specific as “lethargy”, “grogginess” and “difficulty concentrating”. This makes their claims difficult to accept at best. Give me some data (or better still, give it to a doctor), and then I can be sure you’re not misrepresenting something, knowingly or not. 2) If these symptoms are genuine (and I have no evidence that they are, but giving the parents the benefit of the doubt, I’ll assume they are), knowing what we know about EMF, it strikes me that these parents are unwittingly risking the health and safety of their children by assigning a cause to something with next-to-zero plausibility. What if these symptoms are genuine, and they’re the first stages of something more serious, like depression or diabetes? By blaming EMF, how many kids who do suffer will be denied adequate medical attention? Remember what I said about irony being a common theme? 3) Were these parents ever children? Do they remember how bad it sucked going to school? Were they ever picked on by a bully, picked last for sports, or singled out by the teacher for not getting a math question right? School is a very stressful time for a kid,and whether real symptoms are manifesting or not, it seems like rather than show the kids some sensitivity to what is a difficult time in their lives, the parents would rather blame a proven, safe technology. 4) Where is the body count? If the claims of EMF/WiFi opponents were a smidgen legitimate,* there should be sick, dizzy, nauseous kids everywhere, especially in WiFi saturated areas like Toronto, New York, or Tokyo. Wifi technology is ubiquitous these days: go for a walk along Dundas or Spadina in Toronto, and count the number of wireless networks you’ll pass through. So we are left with a glaring question: Why is it these claims largely seem to erupt in small, rural and suburban towns (Collingwood and Orillia in Ontario, and Maple Ridge, BC, though there are others), and not in regions where WiFi technology is saturated? 5) Luddites. I say this not to be glib, but in the sense that WiFi is a new(ish) technology, and new(ish) technologies that penetrate the masses are always met with a fringe group of opposition who claim the same, non-specific symptoms. We heard the same thing when Microwave ovens were commonplace in the 70′s and 80′s (and some stallwarts still hold to this notion), and the Luddite attitude goes something like this: We were once told that these other things were safe. They weren’t. Remember thalidomide and cigarettes? Huh? Do ya? I thought so! They’re like Hitler, but are chemicals! Because of thalidomide and ciagarrettes, anything scientists tell me is safe, must not be safe. Ergo: no wireless technology in my kids’ schools. (seriously, thalidomide and tobacco). (photo source) To add fuel to the fire, the World Health Organization listed EMF as a possible carcinogen. It’s easy to be alarmed by that, until you see what else is in that very same list, of possible carcinogens: 1) Coffee 2) Construction Work 3) Talcum powder Wifi is everywhere. I find it a little amusing (and a little sad) that people think they can protect their kids by moving them to a different room of their house (What of their neighbours WiFi?). More amusing (and more sad) is the story of this woman, who claims she suffered from EMF waves so badly, her husband built a cage for her to live in. Wifi is safe. I did my first story on this over two years ago, and the science that has come out since just re-inforces what I said then. It’s safe, and people are needlessly panicking. The media has given these cranks (yes, cranks) entirely too much positive reinforcement, and I call on media outlets to treat this claim the way they would a guy on the street in a sandwich-board handing out pamplets warning of approacing doomsday. Like Susan Powter said at 2:00 am every morning in 1995, “STOP THE INSANITY!” Oh, and before any commenters bring it up: Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity, the claim that some people suffer allergic-like reactions to EMF waves, is bunk. It’s not a thing, and when it’s tested on the people who claim they have it, their symptoms disapear whenever they think the EMF is turned off. My fellow Skeptic North bloggers and I have extensively coverred this topic. Inevitably, there will be some commenter come in and accuse us of not having done the research. I beg to differ. If you’re still unhappy with this article and want to call me nasty names (as one insipid commenter tends to do), do everyone a favour, and take it to Twitter, not the comment thread. *I shall coin a new word that applies here, “smidgenimate.”Merkley, Levin: Free the Volcker Rule Faced with Losing Vote on Amendment, Wall Street Lobbyists and Republicans Try to Rig the Result WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Senate Republicans refused to allow a vote on a long-anticipated amendment to the Wall Street accountability bill that will ban the high-risk trading that brought our economy to the brink of meltdown. The amendment’s chief sponsors, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and Michigan Senator Carl Levin, today called on Republicans to stop protecting Wall Street lobbyists and allow the amendment to come up for a vote. “We got into this financial crisis because Wall Street set the rules to benefit itself, and now with an assist from Senate Republicans, they’re doing it again,” said Merkley. “Obviously the lobbyists are afraid they’ll lose this vote, and in typical Wall Street fashion their solution, with help from Senate Republicans, is to rig the result. Main Street is being shut out of this debate. It is time to stop letting Wall Street call the shots – let this amendment have a vote.” “The long arm of Wall Street reached directly into the Senate chamber today,” Levin said. “By blocking us from even debating this amendment, the Republican leadership is carrying Wall Street's water and standing in the way of real reform.” Despite repeated efforts by Dodd to reach agreement on a vote on the amendment, Republican Leadership refused to agree to even a 60-vote supermajority requirement on a day that two Democrats are absent. Under Senate rules, votes on amendments must be agreed to by unanimous consent. For weeks, the Merkley-Levin amendment has been one of the handful of amendments expected to be at the center of debate on the legislation. The Merkley-Levin amendment, implementing the so-called “Volcker Rule” named after the former Fed chairman, would restrict proprietary trading at banks and other large, important financial institutions. By keeping our banks and other large, complex financial institutions away from these risky activities, the bill will help protect taxpayers from bailouts and the damage to the economy that comes from the failure of critical financial institutions. At the same time, the bill leaves plenty of space for smaller firms to do speculative trading, but outside of taxpayer-supported commercial banks. Specifically, the bill: • Bars banks, bank holding companies, and their affiliates and subsidiaries from engaging in high risk speculation involving any stock, bond, option, commodity, derivative, or other security or financial instrument. Also bars those entities from investing in a hedge fund or private equity fund. • Requires massive, systemically-critical nonbank financial institutions (i.e., giant Wall Street investment houses whose failure will damage the banking system and access to credit) to set aside additional capital to decrease the risk posed by speculative trading. • Prohibits conflicts of interest such as we saw when Goldman Sachs bet against the packages of securities they assembled and sold to their clients.On Monday, a Reddit thread surfaced with links to Pastebin files containing a slew of Dropbox logins. And, said the hacker, there’s plenty more where that came from—roughly 7 million compromised accounts in total. The initial leaks came to hundreds of unencrypted Dropbox usernames and passwords, all available in plain text. The anonymous perpetrator claimed this was just a taste of the voluminous hack and promised to leak more in exchange for bitcoin “donations.” The top of one of the Pastebin files reads: 6,937,081 DROPBOX ACCOUNTS HACKED PHOTOS – VIDEOS – OTHER FILES MORE BITCOIN = MORE ACCOUNTS PUBLISHED ON PASTEBIN As more BTC is donated, More pastebin pastes will appear At this time, the source of the data is unknown. Although 7 million accounts only comes to about 3% of the 220 million that Dropbox services, that’s no consolation for the folks whose logins have been compromised. Just after contending with a Selective Sync glitch that errantly deleted user files, Dropbox finds itself at the center of another data integrity issue. But this time, the company says, it’s not to blame. In a statement to The Next Web, the cloud storage provider flat-out denied that it was hacked. Instead, it pointed the finger at third-party services: Dropbox has not been hacked. These usernames and passwords were unfortunately stolen from other services and used in attempts to log in to Dropbox accounts. We’d previously detected these attacks and the vast majority of the passwords posted have been expired for some time now. All other remaining passwords have been expired as well. The Reddit community set about checking if the logins were legitimate, and some members claimed that, while several were expired, some others still appeared to be valid as of late Monday night. How To Safeguard Yourself Some Dropbox users may notice a prompt or message from the company, urging them to change their passwords or turn on two-factor authentication, a secondary measure that requires entering a six-digit security code in addition to login credentials. But whether you see the warning or not, you would still be wise to take action. It’s better to be safe than sorry. Log into your Dropbox account and change your password. (For tips on choosing good ones, click here.) On the same page, you can switch on two-step verification. For more information about this extra step, check out Dropbox’s description here. Once you’ve secured your Dropbox account, take one more step and think about anywhere else you may have used the same username and password combo. You’ll want to change those too—and then vow never to use the same credentials in multiple places again. Once logins are out in the open, other parties can try them at various sites, from Facebook and Gmail to the major online banking sites. Automated bots would make very easy work of this. As for this breach, ReadWrite has contacted Dropbox for more information, and will update this post if the company responds. Update: Dropbox posted a message on its blog stating that the logins were “stolen from unrelated services.” Unlike Snapchat, whose data breach stemmed from other services using its APIs to connect with it, Dropbox chalks this one up to a much more mundane reason: people using the same password on different services. The company says the attackers just kept trying the logins at various sites, including its own:I see that New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who wants to run for president, has walked back her assertion last week that Bill Clinton should have resigned over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Last week, The New York Times asked her if Clinton should have stepped down back in 1998. She gave a dramatic pause and then said: “Yes, I think that would have been the appropriate response.” Sunday on MSNBC, she backed off a bit: “My point is that the tolerance that we had 25 years ago, what was allowed 25 years ago, will not be tolerated today, is not allowed today. And that we have to have the kind of oversight and accountability that society needs so that we can protect people in the workplace.” I’m glad to see she’s pivoted, but honestly, it was an irresponsible thing to say. Some prominent liberals in the media have said it recently, too. The idea that Clinton should have resigned is insane. It’s insane from the perspective of the historical record, which in no way supports the idea that he should have quit his job. And it’s insane for political purposes today, given that it remains one of the top priorities of the right to smear and discredit both Clintons in the history books, a project that liberals should in no way, shape, or form be abetting. Let’s start with the historical record. The Clinton-Lewinsky dalliance was distasteful and inappropriate. I wrote plenty critically of what he did, both at the time and in my book on him that came out earlier this year as an entry in the American Presidents series. It was, I wrote, “unfathomably irresponsible.” He knew what kind of enemies he had, and that prosecutor Ken Starr would do anything to get him. He knew (I wrote) that “reckless behavior on his part could imperil not just his presidency, but the presidency, as well as, potentially, Democratic and progressive politics for years.” All that is what the affair was. But here’s something it was not: sexual assault. I know we have those two or three other more serious allegations about Clinton along those lines, but let’s leave those to the side for now because Gillibrand and the others said specifically that Clinton should have resigned over Lewinsky. It was not assault. It was a consensual affair between two legal adults. We can have a debate about the power dynamics at play, and Clinton won’t emerge from that debate looking too good (and by the way, that debate did happen in real time—it wasn’t quite as Stone Age-y then as some younger people seem to think). But it was a consensual adult relationship. It was legal. And while he did lie about it, and that’s not one of your great moments in presidential history, there was never any proof that he suborned perjury—told others to lie. From all we know, he did not. That was a smear, planted (perhaps indirectly) by Starr’s prosecutors to whip up a Beltway frenzy against him. But all that isn’t even the most important point. The most important point is that the Republican effort to remove Clinton from office was a constitutional coup d’etat. If you’re young—all this hatred you see today, this right-wing rage machine (which does have its much smaller counterpart on the left); it all started then. The right hated Bill Clinton pretty much because he was a liberal (a moderate-liberal, but as they saw him, a dangerous leftist) from the Woodstock generation who had the effrontery to beat a Republican incumbent at a time when conservatives thought the presidency was theirs for life. Literally from the day he won, some people were plotting how to undo the voters’ verdict. And finally, years later, he handed them some rope. That is what liberals were confronting. The right’s aim was to nullify a presidential election. Two of them. If Clinton had acquiesced in that, having obviously committed no high crime or misdemeanor, the precedent would have been chilling. No Democratic president after him would have been safe from a similar assault. They would have gone straight after President Gore, on the slightly dodgy fund-raising stuff, and they’d have had the added talking point that Gore’s presidency was especially illegitimate because unlike Clinton he wasn’t even elected. I’m not saying they could have driven Gore from office. I am saying they’d have tried, and they’d have tried with Barack Obama or whatever Democrat came next in that timeline, too. There is no way on earth Clinton should have opened that door. So that’s the then. Here’s the now. The current conservative effort is clearly to make the Clintons political pariahs for all time. If you’re a liberal or somewhere on the left, you may or may not like the Clintons. Whatever. But if you can’t see that the effort to wipe them out of the history books is part of a larger effort to discredit the whole project of progressive governance in this country—a project in which you have a stake—then you’re just being shallow. Since 1920, we’ve only had seven Democratic presidents, to 10 Republicans. Of the Democrats, only Jimmy Carter was not very consequential. The other six did big things. They did some bad things. All presidents do. It was Clinton’s fate to come around at a time when liberalism was at its lowest point in more than 60 years. He couldn’t be Lyndon Johnson (or Bernie Sanders). But he did plenty to advance the cause of progressive governance. And Hillary did, too. And we may yet find out, even as conservatives caterwaul about prosecuting her, that her defeat last year happened through foul means, and that by rights she should be in the White House today, proposing a tax bill that we could with a straight face call “reform.” The Clinton legacy may be complex, but Democrats and liberals certainly shouldn’t be participants in their historical defenestration. They should remember the history accurately, and keep in mind all that’s at stake now. I wouldn’t have thought, with the assaults on progress coming daily and even hourly, that should be so hard to do.A group of Indian engineering students have created electrified lingerie in hopes of protecting women from rape attacks inside the country. The lingerie, called Society Harnessing Equipment, shocks anyone who touches the outside of the bra, while the women wearing it are protected by an inner polymer lining, The Daily Express reports. "A person trying to molest a girl will get the shock of his life the moment pressure sensors get activated," said co-inventor Manisha Mohan, a student at SRM University. The students who invented the lingerie say the bra is capable of sending out 3,800kV shock waves, and it can also alert police to the location that the victim is being attacked, The Daily Express reports. Violence against women, and the huge publicity generated by recent attacks, is threatening India’s $17.7 billion tourism industry. A new study shows tourism has plunged, especially among women, since a 23-year-old Indian student was raped on a New Delhi bus and later died from her injuries — a case that garnered worldwide publicity. The government denies any fall off in tourism. Concerns only grew after the reported gang rape of a Swiss woman in central India last month and after a British woman jumped out of her hotel room window fearing the manager was trying to break into her room to sexually assault her. That incident happened in Agra, home to the Taj Mahal, one of India's chief tourist attractions. Foreign tourist arrivals have dropped 25 percent since the December gang rape in New Delhi, and the number of female travelers fell by 35 percent, according to the study by the New Delhi-based Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry. The study, which surveyed 1,200 tour operators across the country, indicated that "concerns about the safety of female travelers" have changed tourists' plans. Instead, they are going to countries perceived to be safer, including Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. Tourism Minister K. Chiranjeevi disputed the survey Wednesday, saying that foreign tourist arrivals into India in January and February grew by 2.1 percent. Click for more from The Daily Express. The Associated Press contributed to this report.Welcome to the very first, highly-coveted Major League Soccer Hustler of the Week Award. Like any arbitrary, weekly award, this is given to the best player of the week, with a twist. It is given to a former MAC player currently playing in our domestic soccer league. For this week, this coveted award, our first one ever, goes to the Portland Timbers' Darlington Nagbe. The former Akron star followed his coach, Caleb Porter, to Portland and he has had a few amazing years there. But this game was especially good for the attacking midfielder. First, he flicked a flashy back-heel pass to Rodney Wallace, who shoveled the ball over the top of the L.A. Galaxy defense and set up the Timbers' first goal for Fanendo Adi. For that, we will credit him with a hockey-style assist, but still assign him some major flair points. But the second goal was vintage Nagbe. He charged into the Galaxy's penalty area, fended off multiple L.A. defenders and neatly passed the ball to his far post, where Adi was there to slot it home for what appeared to be the winning goal in the 90th minute. While Portland did concede after that to draw its second game of the season, Nagbe looked great in possession, always looked a threat going forward and looked to have returned to the form of 2013, where he recorded nine goals and four assists. After his star-studded appearance on Sunday, he deserves Hustle Belt's first-ever MLS Hustler of the Week.To the non-Canadians reading this, you may wonder if the hockey stereotypes about Canadians are true. “Canadians can’t be THAT crazy about hockey.” I’m sorry (woo stereotypes), but shut your mouth. We are beyond ravenous for people smashing into other people, beating the stuffing out of each other, and shooting a vulcanized piece of rubber in the middle of three red posts. Canadians have developed a love for this game to the point where we have accepted it as a national icon. Obviously I can’t speak for a whole nation, but I guarantee the numbers showing our passion for our national pastime are ridiculous. With 5 out of 7 Canadian NHL teams selling out 100% or more in attendance for the 2013-2014 season, and the other two who had 99.9% and 94.5% of attendance (Edmonton and Ottawa respectively), Canadians love their NHL teams. Three out of the four most valuable teams in the NHL are Canadian, with remaining four being in the top 16. It doesn’t stop there though, here is the attendance statistics from the past fourteen years of World Junior Ice Hockey Championships: World Junior Hockey Attendance Figures Year Host Per Match Total 2012 Alberta 14,668 455,342 2009 Ottawa 14,622 453,282 2011 Buffalo 10,635 329,687 2006 British Columbia 10,488 325,138 2010 Saskatchewan 9,740 301,944 2003 Nova Scotia 7,790 241,504 2005 North Dakota 6,234 193,256 2014 Sweden 4,654 144,268 2002 Czech Republic 3,250 110,828 2013 Russia 3,554 110,175 2008 Czech Republic 3,328 103,179 2004 Finland 3,244 100,551 2001 Russia 2,424 82,400 2007 Sweden 2,048 63,493 2000 Sweden 1,191 41,693 Table 1 Statistics collected from the WJC Wikipedia Pages Looking at this table, five out of the top seven tournaments with the best attendances were Canadian, and the other two tournaments were border hugging States North Dakota and Buffalo. Sweden 2014, the highest selling non-Canadian/Canadian border hugging WJC would have to sell 3.14 times more tickets, or 311,074 tickets, to match the highest selling Canadian tournament. This is just the tip of the ice berg. Here is a video at a mall in Ottawa for the 2014 Olympic Games Canada vs. USA Women’s Hockey final: Notice the lack of jerseys, this is people who were going about their day and dropping what they were doing at the sight of hockey to watch the game. Then there is the Men’s final: Photo Credit: Beat The Traffic GTA That’s the Canadian Highway 401 Toronto, AKA the busiest highway in the world, during the Canada vs. USA’s gold medal hockey game. So I don’t have to twist your ear anymore, we Canadians are crazy about hockey. I personally have been molded into this hockey fanatic. I watch every Leafs game (please don’t leave, I am level headed I swear). When a Leafs game isn’t on, I will watch another hockey game. When it is -30 degrees Celsius outside, I think it’s a great idea to play pond hockey. Most importantly, I was driven by this passion so much to create this website. How does this happen though? How come most Canadian families wake up and grab a Tim Hortons (I can keep these stereotypes coming) coffee at 4 am to bring their kids to hockey practice? Why have most of us dedicated their Saturday nights to Hockey Night in Canada? Why is a sport that important? Photo by Tim Hortons Well it starts out when we are very young. We are indoctrinated into the sport as if it were a religion. Parents start us out at the ripe young age of four, or in my case, three (as a result of a hockey crazed family) with the dream of becoming an icon for the sport. We go to practice early in the mornings at least once a week in one of the arenas each town has (we have towns as small as 1000 people that have their own hockey arenas), then we play hockey games at night a couple nights of the week. That’s at least three times a week that we are at the rink starting at the age of four. So now that we are all done playing hockey for the day, let’s watch some TV. Before advancements in cable and satellite television, all we had was over the air television which had less than 10 channels, the Canadian Government funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) being one of them. So what does the CBC show? Run of the mill stuff: news, popular American shows, and of course Hockey Night in Canada. We literally couldn’t escape from hockey. Fellow Beer League Blogger Jordan Montean (left) and I (right) skating on the Rideau Canal after getting bombed watching the stressful Canada vs. Latvia game. Photo by Karley Doucette Conspiracy theories aside though, it’s just a fun way for us to occupy our time. Most of the people in the world go to work day in and day out and just want a way to unwind at the end of the day. For Americans, it’s Football. For Europeans, it’s soccer. For us Canadians, it turned out to be hockey. Nothing is more satisfying than sitting down on a Saturday night listening to Don Cherry and Ron Maclean give their speech of the evening knowing that there are millions of Canadians like myself doing the same. It’s just a sport like any other, but we developed it as a part of our cultural identity. There is nothing like the feeling of going to a sports bar in the nation’s capital donning the Team Canada jersey and cheering on with your fellow Canadians with each goal that is scored. We are crazy about it because we choose to be crazy about it. It’s a national identity because we want it to be our national identity. It is our passion, because we want it to be our passion. Check out my article about the changes coming to Hockey Night in Canada this year! Follow my twitter! Cover Photo by Darren Calabrese via National PostImage copyright Getty Images Image caption Economists expect Japan's policymakers to roll out more measures to boost the economy Core consumer prices in the world's third largest economy, Japan, fell on an annual basis for the first time in over two years in August. The core consumer price index (CPI), which includes oil but not fresh food prices, declined 0.1% from a year ago - the first drop since April 2013. The headline consumer price index rose 0.2% from a year ago, but remained flat from the previous month. Deflation fears have plagued Japan, putting pressure on policymakers. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Japan's central bank have pledged to get the economy out of the deflation it has been battling for years. Even though the fall in prices last month was expected, economists said the latest reading would result in the Bank of Japan stepping up its pace of easing in October. "CPI data continues to show a weak acceleration, which suggests that the Japanese central bank may need to do more," said Bernard Aw, market strategist at trading firm IG. "Even with this aggressive pace of asset buying, it is still nowhere near its 2% inflation target," he added, referring to the central bank's goal to reach that target in the first half of next year. Backing that view, Marcel Thieliant, economist at Capital Economics added that on the whole the economy was struggling to return to growth after shrinking in the second quarter. Japanese Economics Minister Akira Amari told the media on Friday that it was up to the central bank to take appropriate steps on monetary policy after the data came out.A young man taking part in a Virginia program designed for troubled youths is accused of killing two of the program’s counselors in the past five months. Nineteen-year-old Ronald Francis Dorsey Jr. was charged Friday with murder in the deaths of Erica Janelle Hickson, 37, and Lizeth Yadira Lopez, 36, both found dead a few blocks from the Woodbridge apartment complex where Dorsey lived and they worked. Hickson disappeared in the middle of her shift Thursday evening. Her body was found Friday morning in a wooded area near Golf Side Circle. Lopez was reported missing by her family on April 17 when she failed to come home from work. Her body was found near a drainage ditch nearly two weeks later in a case that remained open until Hickson’s body was found in the same area and police arrested Dorsey. “She was a good person, but she was trusting, too,” Lionel Smith, a friend of Hickson’s, said Saturday. “I think that might have been her problem: She thought she could help the world.” It was not clear Saturday how police linked Dorsey to the recent case and whether they had suspected him in the earlier killing. Police said only that Dorsey “was known to both victims.” Police also did not say how the women died. Dorsey was a resident in Youth Quest Independent Living, a private program operated under Richmond-based Intercept Youth Services, police said. Intercept is licensed by the Virginia Department of Social Services to place young people in foster homes, adoptive homes, child-caring institutions and independent living arrangements, according to its website and a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Social Services. The Woodbridge location is part of the independent living program that serves youths ages 17 to 21 coming out of the foster care and juvenile justice systems or otherwise struggling to be on their own, according to the program’s website. State licensing officials are “fully aware and will closely monitor the situation throughout the investigation” into the Woodbridge deaths, the spokeswoman said. Officials at Youth Quest and Intercept did not respond to requests for comment. “It makes you feel uncomfortable,” said Tammy Robinson, a resident for two years of the apartment townhouse community where the women’s bodies were found. Like several other residents of the complex, she said Saturday that she was unaware that the young man from the program lived in the complex. She also said managers of the complex had not notified the larger community about the killings. “I always find it best when you’re upfront with people,” she said. “Tell them what’s going on.” In addition to her counselor job, Hickson worked during the day at Annandale High School, helping special-education students find careers. “She showed a tremendous amount of compassion, a tremendous amount of empathy, she was very humble,” Annandale High School Principal Tim Thomas said Saturday. “Someone who made connections with kids that others couldn’t. Just a wonderful human being.” Thomas said Hickson showed her commitment to young people by juggling both positions. Smith said there was another reason Hickson had taken on so much work: She was caring for her own son and her late sister’s three children. In an interview posted online by a friend two years ago, Hickson talked about growing up in a mixed-race, constantly moving military family. “I asked my grandmother at one point, ‘What are we?’ ” she recalled. “And she looked at me and said: ‘You are human. You belong to the human race.’ ” Hickson also talked about her commitment to working with ­special-needs students as a teacher and counselor. “Every day is a challenge, but this is a labor of love,” she said. “I love what I do.” Neville Adams, a teacher in Prince George’s County, met Hickson in graduate school at George Washington University. He said her father, a Marine, instilled “an attitude of looking out for the little guy. She always went the extra mile for kids and for anyone really... She didn’t see anything bad in kids. She always looked for the best.” While a counselor, Lopez was also a student. She was about to graduate from the University of Maryland with a degree in criminal justice, her family told WUSA-TV after her disappearance. The families of both victims declined to comment Saturday. Relatives of Dorsey could not be located for comment. The homicide investigation stunned some residents of the quiet residential complex where the youth program is housed in the 12300 block of Pond Run Drive. “It’s never felt at any point unsafe,” said Brendan Shehan, a resident approaching his third lease. Shehan was unaware of the youth program, but he said the circumstances of Hickson’s death grieved him. “This was a person here for humanitarian reasons,” he said. “To lose their life trying to help someone in need, that is sad.” Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.Eileen Sullivan Associated Press July 18, 2008 WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal officials are investigating whether millions of dollars are being steered improperly toward a government contractor to run the country’s largest counterterrorism exercise. At issue is a written request for companies to compete for the TOPOFF 5 exercise contract and whether an employee of Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) wrote parts of the proposal, according to officials familiar with the contract who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive procurement activity. It would be considered a conflict of interest if an SAIC employee both drafted the document and intends to compete for the contract, according to Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The Federal Emergency Management Agency would not say how much the TOPOFF 5 contract is worth. The last exercise cost about $25 million. The contract for TOPOFF 5 has not been awarded. Read articleBy Oren Liebermann PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Teresa Marquard took care of her husband until the very end. “My mom, she’s a hero, and I’m very glad she saved my dad for us, because we’d be lost without both of them,” said Teresa’s daughter, Monica. The 58-year-old Northeast Philadelphia native was on a morning walk with her husband in Wissinoming Park when police say a drunk driver, identified as 33-year-old Eric Luciano, swerved across Frankford Avenue onto the sidewalk and hit Teresa Marquard. She pushed her husband out of the way to save him. “She saved my dad. She pushed my dad out of the way and saved my dad,” said daughter Denise Hirschman, fighting back tears. “That was what she cared about. She cared about us more than anything.” A man who identified himself as Luciano’s brother at the family’s Kensington home said Luciano was a truck driver. “He’s a working man. He’s an honest person. It’s a freak accident that happened,” said the brother. When asked why it is a freak accident when police say Luciano was drunk, the brother responded, “Everyone has their own thing,” before closing the door. Marquard’s family says the two have been married for 42 years and have been together ever since they were 14-years-old. “She said he was the only one for her,” said Monica Marquard. When Teresa’s husband was diagnosed with heart disease 15 years ago, she started working at family court to support her loved ones and her husband. “She was a hero. She was amazing. She did so much with not a lot of tools,” said Teresa Marquard, who was named after her mother. Marquard’s family says she always put her family and her husband first, even the one time it meant giving up her own life for his.No filmmaker combines live action with stop-motion quite like Jan Švankmajer, and certainly no filmmaker has used that combination to such imaginative and troubling ends. An avowed surrealist who got his start in animation more than half a century ago in his homeland of the former Czechoslovakia, he's continued to craft his distinctive cinematic experiences however and whenever possible through the decades. His filmography now includes such enduring trips as Dimensions of Dialogue (see below), which no less a visionary than Terry Gilliam calls one of the best animated films of all time; Alice, his dark interpretation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; and Little Otik, a modernization of a folktale about a tree stump that turns into a monstrous baby. But as well as he brings the bizarre to vivid life on screen, he's always had higher ambitions than that. "Švankmajer is capable of creating dark yet playful worlds that dissect the very core of our society," says the Indiegogo page now raising the funds for his latest — and last — feature film, Insects. "The civilization we live in has little interest in authentic artistic creation," laments the filmmaker. "What it needs is well-working advertisement, the iconographic contemporary art, pushing people towards more and more mass consumption. It gets increasingly difficult to fund independent art that scrutinizes the very core of our society. Who would deliberately support their own critics?" Now, in this age of crowdfunding, you can support one of its most entertaining critics alive yourself. Insects has already succeeded in raising the first phase of its budget, but still has a way to go before it can assure its esteemed creator and his collaborators full artistic freedom (Švankmajer is looking to raise $400,000 in total), so if you'd like to chip in, you can make yourself eligible for such rewards as the first opportunity to download the film, its Blu-Ray edition with an accompanying art book, or even — if you've
with things I felt were questionable, or even wrong. … So, I’m making it official and embarking on a new journey. I will “try on” atheism for a year. For the next 12 months I will live as if there is no God. I will not pray, read the Bible for inspiration, refer to God as the cause of things or hope that God might intervene and change my own or someone else’s circumstances. (I trust that if there really is a God that God will not be too flummoxed by my foolish experiment and allow others to suffer as a result). I will read atheist “sacred texts” — from Hobbes and Spinoza to Russell and Nietzsche to the trinity of New Atheists, Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett. I will explore the various ways of being atheist, from naturalism (Voltaire, Dewey, et al) to the new ‘religious atheists’ (Alain de Botton and Ronald Dworkin). I will also attempt to speak to as many actual atheists as possible — scholars, writers and ordinary unbelievers — to learn how they have come to their non-faith and what it means to them. I will visit atheist gatherings and try it on. In short, I will do whatever I can to enter the world of atheism and live, for a year, as an atheist. It’s important to make the distinction that I am not an atheist. At least not yet. I am not sure what I am. That’s part of what this year is about. As much as I appreciate what he’s trying to do, this is a badly-designed experiment. As someone who once visited a hell of a lot of churches in the span of a year, I feel like I can talk about what it’s like to cross over to the “other side.” At no point did I ever pretend I was “trying on” Christianity. I was merely an atheist visiting church and no one assumed otherwise. Make no mistake: Bell is not “trying on atheism.” He’s just a Christian doing what all people should do and exposing himself to an alternative perspective. That’s a very good thing, no doubt, but scrutinizing your own beliefs isn’t a substitute for being godless. Just as celebrating Hanukkah doesn’t make someone Jewish and fasting during Ramadan doesn’t make you a Muslim, not going through typical Christian rituals doesn’t make you an atheist. Ultimately, Bell still believes in God, at least for now. Until he changes his mind about that, he’s not really living as an atheist. He says, for example, that he won’t read the Bible over the next year… but neither do a lot of Christians and it’s not like they’re giving atheism a try. Bell also says he’ll read books written by atheists and attend atheist gatherings… but let’s be honest: it’s not like a lot of atheists do those things either. Again: It’s all about what’s going on in your head. I’m all for religious people (or those like Bell who still have a foot on the religious side) reading things that might change their mind or talking to people who might point out the holes in their logic, but none of that makes you an atheist until you realize that God is a myth. I love that Bell’s exploring atheism. I appreciate that he’s trying to learn more about a perspective a lot of Christians assume is just immoral or wicked. But no one can “live as if there is no God” while still believing God’s out there. All that said, here’s some advice for Bell: If you really want to give atheism a try, then look for rational explanations when you might have previously assumed God had something to do with it. You’ll soon realize that the rational explanation is there if you look for it — and if you can’t find it, then you just need to look harder or assume it’s a mystery to everyone. If you’re interested in following Bell’s journey, he’ll be writing about the experience here. (Thanks to Joel for the link)Jim White reports on the first 20 years of England's Premier League when it has established itself as the most marketable and valuable domestic football competition in the world. Big business or community concern, club or corporation? Journalist Jim White reports on the first 20 years of England's Premier League when it has established itself as the most marketable and valuable domestic football competition in the world. But with new overseas players, managers and owners, has the sport become divorced from the communities it came from? Or is it accurately reflecting modern Britain? (Image: The Manchester City players celebrate with the trophy following the Barclays Premier League match between Manchester City and Queens Park Rangers at the Etihad Stadium on 13 May 2012 in Manchester, England. Photo by Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)It has become a bit of a tradition for me to let this website die and then revive it with all the good intentions in the world to keep posting new stuff and this time definitely for real unlike the last times yaddah yaddah yaddah, but here we go again... The last time I had visited a mid-sized abandoned metal manufacturing business was Metal Works August, in 2009. Meeting up once again with urbancologne for the first time since then (if I haven't forgotten anything), we set sails to visit another one. Oven Doors Benjamin Raspail started a company that manufactured metal parts used in shoes in 1827. The business went well and in the 1860s had to move to a larger location. They got their hands on a failed farm for an attractive price and built an entirely new factory. The sons took over the business and the range of products expanded to blades, knifes and later parts of agricultural machines. Casting Mold When agriculture became less and less important for the European countries' economies, revenue started to drop. The number of employees was reduced from more than 1,000 to under 300 and despite best efforts to establish new product lines, the company went bankrupt in 1999. The remains were taken over by another company and production moved to a new factory. The old factory was left mostly abandoned. Urban Still Life Today, some of the office buildings on the large factory area have been rented out to different companies and institutions, but some of the manufacturing halls remain in their old glory. We weren't sure what to expect after such a long time of abandonment and were pleasantly surprised to find numerous items and tools still lying around, despite a few traces of vandalism and graffiti. From a photographer's point of view, a sheer endless amount of details was waiting to be captured almost everywhere. I had contemplated bringing along the analog camera but ultimately decided against it. Now I think the location would have been perfect for the film treatment. Club Mate In addition to the offices, a few halls have been rented out to local farmers. Farmers or whoever else drives around with tractors on Sunday mornings. Of course, we heard and saw them long before they could ever spot us and avoided them for a while, waiting for them to leave the premises again. After about half an hour, we got bored and decided to head to the nearest fast food joint for some lunch. As we walked past on the street outside, the driver of the last tractor on the terrain was standing next to his bike, ready to go home. But at that point we were too hungry to go back inside. More photos in the Gallery: Raspail & SonsI’ve had several people ask me about what our life is like on this Moroccan oasis. As you can imagine, being so remote doesn’t create a lot of opportunities for “entertainment” and activities. In my last post, I discussed the challenges of Morocco and what a typical shopping trip into town is like. I figured, though, I’d share a slice of our typical daily life. Either the rooster has stopped crowing, or I’ve just tuned him out, because he no longer wakes me up in the morning. I’m really thinking he’s just become lazy, because he’s right outside my bedroom window. Nevertheless, when I wake up, blessedly without an alarm clock, the first “chore” is to let the chickens and rabbits out of their houses. We have 3 adult chickens and 2 tweens. They get fed, and then I generally go from there to the garden which is watered on a daily basis. Our irrigation water comes from cisterns. We have one on the roof, and the hoses and drip irrigation system are connected to that. When the cisterns get close to being used up, a call is made, and water is moved through the oasis via canals to our in-ground tanks. Every couple of days or so, I have to pump (electric) water from the cistern into the rooftop tank to water the plants. The rest of our water, which is potable, comes from the town’s supply and comes from indoor plumbing (yay!). After the garden is watered, then it’s time for breakfast. After we eat, we take the dog on a walk around the oasis, and then he gets his meal. If it isn’t watering day for the rest of the plants, then I’m basically free until the afternoon call to prayer, which is when I give the chickens and rabbits their second meal of the day. After that we take the dog on his second walk. We refer to the call to prayer at around 5:45 PM as the “call for chickens.” That’s when it’s time to put the chickens and bunnies in their houses. Rough day, huh? Every two days, I have to water the rest of the plants on the property. Most of that is handled by the aforementioned irrigation system. Since we don’t have a lot of water pressure, I have to manage which valves get turned on at the same time. The whole process takes about a couple of hours. While the drip system runs, I use the hose or pots to water the plants that aren’t on the system, including the ones in the inner courtyard of our home. So what do I do in the large number of hours in between? This is why I’m thankful I was already trained for “slow living.” There is the occasional minor cleaning, and there are always dishes to do (no dishwashing machine). Laundry is done about once a week. We have a washer, and the clothes are line dried. Other than that, I can often be found writing, either doing articles, working on a book, or working on the blog. Tigger and I have all of our meals together, which is nice. We have a bit of a challenge with 3G signal strength sometimes, so he often is sitting in the outer courtyard where the signal is stronger, and I’m usually in the inner courtyard where it’s more comfy. He comes in for regular hugs and kisses, and I watch him jump and hop around the yard every so often as he gets his extra energy out. Sometimes I change places where I’m sitting just for a change of scenery. We do the same with meals. Sometimes we eat in the kitchen, other times we eat in the “outdoor lounge” area. We’ve yet to use the room I call “the formal dining and living room.” What’s the house like? We have lots of photos of the house and property on our Facebook page. It’s really a gorgeous home with an interesting layout. Each room of the house opens onto the inner courtyard. We have a kitchen and sitting area in one room, then there’s my bedroom, Tigger has his own bedroom (both bedrooms have their own full bathroom, although I have a tub), and then there is a room with a living room and nice dining area with a TV (for DVDs) and a stereo. There are a couple of sitting areas in the courtyard, including a large one that also has an outdoor mattress so you can sleep al fresco. It’s almost like glamping. You have such an amazing view of the sky, and since there are no city lights, the night sky is absolutely full of stars. What I call the outer courtyard is the rest of the property. Here we have a lovely garden with spinach, garlic, coriander, sweet potatoes, and the local plant that the chickens and rabbits are fed. There are numerous trees and plants around the yard, so it’s quite beautiful and peaceful. The walls are ringed by large date palms. We are definitely enjoying our little slice of heaven, but I’m sure we’ll be ready for some bigger city amenities when it’s time to leave in mid January. What do you think? Could you handle living in such a remote location?Dr. Greene`s Answer: It has been a quarter century since the term ‘coffin birth’ or ‘sarg geburt’ appeared in the medical literature. This old phrase was used to describe an unusual grim parody of one of life’s greatest moments. It happens when a pregnant woman spontaneously delivers her child after her own death. The gas that builds up in her decomposing body can build up enough pressure to propel the baby through the birth canal. This odd occurrence has taken place throughout history, albeit rarely. Scientists have even found paleopathologic evidence of a case of coffin birth in Europe of the dim past, before recorded history. Today, modern embalming customs have made coffin birth so rare as to no longer be described in typical medical textbooks. Coffin birth made news headlines again in 2003 when the body of an infant boy washed ashore in the San Francisco Bay, followed by the body of an adult woman. Perhaps there was not enough of the woman’s body intact to hold the baby inside. Alternatively, the chief medical examiner of San Francisco offered coffin birth as one explanation of how the baby could have become separated from his pregnant dead mother. This would have been a tragic, un-witnessed drama in the cold, silent, lonely depths of the Bay – a sharp contrast to the joy and celebration a birth should bring.Shakhtar Donetsk ran in six goals by half-time against Bate Borisov Shakhtar Donetsk recorded the joint-biggest away win in Champions League history as they trounced Bate Borisov on a night when a record 40 goals were scored. It is the most goals scored on a night with just eight matches, though 44 were plundered on one matchday in 1997 when 12 games were played. Shakhtar equalled Marseille's win at MSK Zilina in 2010 as striker Luiz Adriano scored five, levelling Lionel Messi's record for goals in a single Champions League match. Bayern Munich hammered Roma 7-1 at the Stadio Olimpico, scoring five goals inside 36 minutes. Liverpool's 8-0 win over Besiktas in 2007 remains the biggest ever win in the Champions League But such was the nature of an incredible night of football, Shakhtar went one better by the interval to set a new record for first-half goals away from home in the Champions League. At that stage, both sides had Liverpool's record win in the Champions League - 8-0 against Besiktas in 2007 - well within their sights. Neither could manage the feat, but Adriano's 82nd-minute penalty - his second spot-kick of the night - ensured he moved on par with Messi's haul for an individual, set in Barcelona's 7-1 win over Bayer Leverkusen in 2012. His brilliant display also means 65% of Shakhtar's goals in Champions League football have come from Brazilians. They moved second in Group H on five points, two behind leaders Porto who beat visitors Athletic Bilbao 2-1. Champions League record wins Result Year 8-0 Liverpool FC v Besiktas November 2007 7-0 Juventus v Olympiakos December 2003 7-0 Arsenal FC v Slavia Prague October 2007 0-7 MSK Zilina v Marseille November 2010 7-0 Valencia v KRC Genk November 2011 7-0 Bayern Munich v Basel March 2012 0-7 Bate Borisov v Shakhtar Donetsk October 2014 Chelsea beat NK Maribor 6-0 at Stamford Bridge where Didier Drogba scored for the 12th consecutive Champions League campaign. Jose Mourinho's side now top Group G ahead of Schalke, who won a seven-goal thriller against Sporting Lisbon with an injury-time penalty. Manchester City conceded for the 10th consecutive Champions League encounter to throw away a two-goal lead at CSKA Moscow and now sit third in Group E, seven points behind Bayern. Edinson Cavani struck late as Paris St-Germain won 1-0 at Apoel Nicosia and lead Barcelona by a point in Group F after they beat Ajax 3-1. Bayern Munich scored five times in the opening 36 minutes away at Roma, who sit second in Serie A Schalke's 4-3 win over Sporting Lisbon moves them second behind group leaders Chelsea Didier Drogba's penalty marked his first goal since returning to ChelseaIn a country where culture can be declared sinful and cinemas were shut down in the 1970s, just showing a film can be revolutionary In a country with no public cinemas and where only a few films have been shown to the public in more than three decades, it is a radical step: a handful of film-makers in Saudi Arabia has launched a secret cinema group, showing their own films that explore social and political issues such as women's rights, the lives of migrant workers, urbanisation and the belief in black magic. Last Thursday, after evening prayers, more than 60 people attended the first screening by the Red Wax secret cinema in a large warehouse in the south-western city of Abha. Directed to the clandestine event by text message, they crowded inside the hired space, which was then bolted shut. Most sat on cheap red plastic chairs placed in rows before a makeshift screen made from a large white sheet, but as the audience was larger than the organisers had expected, some stood. As the lights dimmed, nervousness gave way to quiet anticipation and in silence they watched a film about the lives of migrant workers on one of the country's major building projects. After the screening the audience discussed the issues it raised and the ban on cinema in the kingdom. "I was really nervous; everyone was nervous," said the film's director, one founder of Red Wax. "We didn't have a plan if [police came]. Everyone parked away from the place. We sent them directions by text message to their mobiles or rang them. Our fears are just to get caught or sent to jail." Cinemas were shut in the 1970s down after the assassination of King Faisal, who was criticised for introducing television to Saudi Arabia. Religious conservatives consider cultural activities such as films and concerts to be immoral and against Islamic values. There were signs of liberalisation with the launch in 2006 of the annual European film festival in Jeddah, which shows films to a select audience in embassies and consulates. The first official Saudi film festival followed in May 2008 in the eastern city of Dammam, although it has not been repeated. Later that year the comedy Menahi, financed and produced by King Abdullah's billionaire nephew Prince Waleed bin Talal's Rotana media, became the first film, apart from a few children's cartoons, to be shown publicly for 30 years when it ran for barely a week in Jeddah and nearby Taif. But there was a backlash following its more limited screening in the capital Riyadh, with hardliners issuing a fatwa against cinemas in July 2009 that led the government to ban their construction. The collective of five film-makers – four men and one woman – said Red Wax referred to the official stamps used to restrict freedoms in the kingdom, although one member added it is also a strong kind of local cannabis resin. The first event was only open to men, with the audience including students, writers and artists aged from 20 to 40. But women will be invited to future events, scheduled to take place in other cities and organised via social networking websites to attract a wider audience. The director of the first film shown said: "Saudi people love cinema. People drive to Bahrain at the weekend just to see films or fly to Dubai. You can see thousands of films on pirate DVDs for $2 or $3. You can download on BitTorrent or see it on satellite TV. You cannot imagine how much filesharing there is. "The problem is with some of the religious movements and extremists. They say its haram [sinful] because of the content of the films and people being there communally. But we say it's not haram because cinema is not mentioned in the Qur'an or the Hadith [the sayings and acts of Muhammad]." The group said they decided to set up a secret cinema after the authorities cracked down on Saudi film-makers who posted work on YouTube which, according to Al-Arabiya, receives as many as 90m page views from the kingdom every day. Feras Bugnah, a video blogger, was arrested and detained for two weeks last year after posting a film about poverty in Riyadh on the site, which attracted more than 800,000 views. "On YouTube they always watch you and restrict the page," said another Red Wax founder. "Secret cinema is Banksy style – no one knows who he is." The film-maker denied their activities were un-Islamic. Their aim, they said, was both to stimulate grassroots film production and a critical audience. "The films should be made by people here [to give] more freedom of expression to our community. It's [about] our daily life, our struggle against all these banning forces, not to be free to say what we want. We need to reach average people so we can raise the level of awareness. It's not provocative, it's more real. If I make a film, I need an audience. It's not interesting if a film is not showing inside [the kingdom] because not all Saudis can travel abroad." The next film to be screened explores women's rights and was shot with a camera hidden in a black abaya robe. Another looks at the belief in black magic. The director said: "It's restricted in Islam to go to a wizard but it's really common because a lot of people believe it is more than medicine. "One of my friend's brothers was in hospital with a liver infection and people told him to buy a black rooster and pour its blood on his body." Haifaa al-Mansour, whose first feature film Wadjda was shown in the 2012 London film festival, said the secret cinema showed there was a desire in the country for young people to come together and tell their stories and raise issues through film. When she shot her film in the kingdom, despite opposition from conservatives, "a lot of people wanted to be extras." But she added: "It might be more difficult and take more time but it's important to work within the system to see real change." Mansour said the lack of a public audience made it difficult to produce films in the kingdom. "The funding is very difficult because a lot of people don't know what to do with a film from Saudi Arabia. How politically will it be placed? Where's it going to show? So they'd rather give money to film-makers in Lebanon and Egypt. It's very frustrating." Mona Deeley, a producer for Cinema Badila: Alternative Cinema on BBC Arabic TV, said: "The secret cinema is an interesting initiative for both subverting the ban on cinema and as a form of civil and cultural resistance." Egyptian writer and curator Omar Kholeif, director of the UK's Arab Film Festival, also gave a cautious welcome to the secret cinema: "I would personally question what real impact a'secret' cinema event could have – after all, it is secret. In spirit, and in ethos, I think it is to be applauded, but what I would really like to see is how this group could intervene publicly – to mount a true act of subversion."When Peppermint was growing up, she didn't have any good examples of transgender people to look up to or model herself after. The most she had were talk shows like Jerry Springer, where the show would single out transgender people, humiliate them, and exploit and sensationalize their stories for ratings purposes. Even though Peppermint always knew she was different, she also knew she didn't want what she saw to be her experience. Peppermint remembers in high school there was an event where students would dress in drag and perform, so she put on a fur coat, a blonde wig and a beret before strutting around in front of her entire school. "They were screaming and hollering, and I won," she said. "And that was very validating. I was like, 'Oh, this is it. I get to be a woman, and they are cheering me on. This is how I have to do it.'" After performing as a drag queen locally in Delaware and then Philadelphia and eventually New York, she found it still wasn't enough. Though the best way Peppermint could express her femininity was first as a drag queen, she came to a realization. "I wasn’t giving myself the time to really sit down with myself and focus and really become comfortable with my trans-ness," she said. She checked certain things off her list — she had traveled the world and made a successful living doing drag, but still she wasn't happy. "And that’s when I was kind of forced to deal with what I hadn’t dealt with for so long." As she started to transition, she says people started to just get it, and now she lives her life as the woman she's always been. Catch Peppermint in season nine of "RuPaul's Drag Race,” airing Friday's at 8 p.m. EST on VH1, as she competes for the title of America's Next Drag Superstar.Deze site geeft een beeld van mijn bierglazenverzameling, waar ik zo rond 1997 intensief mee ben begonnen. Al voor die tijd was ik zeer geïnteresseerd in het fenomeen bier in het algemeen.Voorheen spaarde ik lege bierflesjes en had er op een gegeven moment maar liefst bijna 1000. Daarvan werden de etiketten afgeweekt en een tijdlang gespaard.Door de vormgeving en soms fantasievolle opschriften van bierglazen besloot ik om bierglazen te gaan verzamelen.Ik verzamel bierglazen uit alle landen van de wereld. Welliswaar ligt de nadruk op Nederlandse bierglazen. De verzameling bestaat momenteel uit 9832 verschillende bierglazen. Ik ben wel bezig om mij te specialiseren. Zo spaar ik uitsluitend bierglazen en geen aardenwerken pullen meer.Tevens ben ik een trouwe bezoeker van rommelmarkten en beurzen. Daar kom ik ook wel eens een verdwaald glas tegen. Mijn verzameling breidt zich verder uit door glazen die ik krijg van familie, vrienden, bekenden en verzamelaars.Ook op de digitale snelweg komt er nog al eens een glas voorbij.Amicus briefs in support of Apple in its court battle with the FBI are rolling in today, and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Technology’s contribution is a horror story of impending dystopia, with eerie parallels to 1984. The CIT technologists lay out a scenario in which the FBI uses the Apple ruling as precedent to force tech companies to turn televisions, computer monitors, and other internet-connected devices into a web of in-home surveillance hubs. Advertisement The FBI wants Apple to create a special software to help it unlock the iPhone of a San Bernardino mass shooting suspect. Apple is arguing that conscripting it to write code that will weaken its security will set a chilling legal precedent to allow the government to strong-arm tech companies into weakening their security measures. In CIT’s projected scenario, it’s not just police pressuring Apple to turn on iPhones—it’s law enforcement turning Amazon Echo and Samsung’s smart TVs into surreptitious listening devices: iPhones and other mobile phones are not the only common consumer appliances that this Order sets a precedent for converting to surveillance devices. Amazon distributes an appliance called the Echo that captures spoken voice.15 While Amazon designed the Echo only to send voice data to Amazon if it “hears” the word “Alexa,” that limitation, like the iPhone passcode limitations, is encoded in software. Similarly, smart TVs, like those sold by Samsung, capture and transmit owners’ voices in an effort to identify natural language commands and search requests. In responding to consumer privacy concerns, Samsung assured the public that TV owners’ voice data would only be collected if the TV user clicks the activation button and speaks into the microphone on the remote control. Again, like the iPhone passcode limitations, this privacy safeguard is a function of software. If the government is allowed compel Apple to change its software to enable decryption and forensic access here, will it also be allowed to compel Amazon to update the Echo, or Samsung to update its Smart TVs, to always collect some customers’ conversations? Advertisement I know 1984 is a pretty stale literary reference for describing a terrifying surveillance state, and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if the clever people crafting this brief deliberately worded this section to remind readers of the always-listening gadgets surrounding the people in George Orwell’s novel. But the CIT writers did a hell of a job. You can read the full brief here: AdvertisementAir travel in the U.S. is about to get a bit more annoying: Devices like tablets, e-readers and gaming handhelds will soon join laptops in the class of electronics that need to be placed in a bin for X-ray screening, the Transportation Security Administration announced today. Extra security procedures including enhanced screening of electronic devices will go into effect at “all U.S. airports in the weeks and months ahead,” the TSA said in a news release. The revised guidelines — the implementation of which comes after a pilot program at 10 airports around the country — are meant to address “an increased threat to aviation security” and “raise the baseline for aviation security worldwide.” Under the new TSA guidelines, fliers will be forced to remove “all electronics larger than a cell phone” from their carry-on luggage and place those devices in a bin with nothing above or below. That means that travelers may have to use multiple bins just for electronics, if they can’t lay everything flat in one bin. This is the way the TSA has long handled larger electronics, like laptops and gaming consoles. But extending the policy to smaller devices such as an iPad, Kindle, Nintendo Switch or 3DS — which are much more common travel companions — will likely cause additional delays and longer lines at security checkpoints. Think of parents traveling with young children: That family of four might be carrying a laptop, a couple of e-readers, a tablet and a Switch between them — all of which have to go in bins. The TSA’s new domestic guidelines apply only to passengers in standard screening lanes. Customers who have paid for a TSA Precheck membership — which costs $85 for a five-year term — and are in a TSA Precheck lane are exempt from the policy change. The introduction of this revised screening procedure follows the retraction last week of the so-called laptop ban, the controversial policy put in place by the Trump administration in March. Under that travel restriction, passengers flying out of 10 airports in majority-Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa could not bring large electronic devices — including laptops — in their carry-on luggage.While the US has had its share of deadly social violence over the past year, much of split along along racial lines, it has mercifully avoided a full-blown racial war. However, in recent weeks there has been a troubling increase in invocations toward even more violence, and even more deaths, which seek to achieve just that: a United States gripped in racial warfare. The latest such call for violence was caught on tape just a few days ago, when on July 30 during a speech delivered at Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Miami, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan called for black Americans to "rise up" and "kill those who kill us" if the federal government fails to "intercede in our affairs." Follows an excerpt from his troubling sermon: I am looking for 10,000 in the midst of the millions, 10,000 fearless men who say death is sweeter than continued life under tyranny. Death is sweeter than to continue to live and bury our children while the white folks give the killer hamburgers. Death is sweeter than watching us slaughter each other to the joy of a 400-year old enemy. The Koran teaches persecution is worse than slaughter. Then it says, retaliation is prescribed in matters of the slain. Retaliation is a prescription from God to calm the breaths of those whose children have been slain. So if the federal government will not intercede in our affairs, then we must rise up and kill those who kill us. Stalk them and kill them and let them feel the pain of death that we are feeling." Recording below: Video of the excerpt was posted on Farrakhan’s Facebook page Monday with the hashtag "#JusticeOrElse." So far there has been no condemnation of this open outcry to violence by anyone in the mainstream media. The Blaze adds that Farrakhan is scheduled to speak next month in Washington, D.C., during a demonstration organized in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of his 1995 million man march.Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf recently wrote an open letter to the world on the Ebola crisis. The letter was broadcast over the BBC. She called on every country around the world to do what it can to help stop Ebola saying everyone has a stake in the fight against the disease. She said a generation of Africans are at risk of “being lost to economic catastrophe” because of the disease which has killed more than 4,500 people in West Africa alone, almost half of them in Liberia. Check out the letter below. Please share your thoughts. By Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Dear World, In just over six months, Ebola has managed to bring my country to a standstill. We have lost over 2,000 Liberians. Some are children struck down in the prime of their youth. Some were fathers, mothers, brothers or best friends. Many were brave health workers that risked their lives to save others, or simply offer victims comfort in their final moments. There is no coincidence Ebola has taken hold in three fragile states – Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea – all battling to overcome the effects of interconnected wars. In Liberia, our civil war ended only eleven years ago. It destroyed our public infrastructure, crushed our economy and led to an exodus of educated professionals. A country that had some 3,000 qualified doctors at the start of the war was dependent by its end on barely three dozen. In the last few years, Liberia was bouncing back. We realized there was a long way to go, but the future was looking bright. Now Ebola threatens to erase that hard work. Our economy was set to be larger and stronger this year, offering more jobs to Liberians and raising living standards. Ebola is not just a health crisis – across West Africa, a generation of young people risk being lost to an economic catastrophe as harvests are missed, markets are shut and borders are closed. The virus has been able to spread so rapidly because of the insufficient strength of the emergency, medical and military services that remain under-resourced and without the preparedness to confront such a challenge. This would have been the case whether the confrontation was with Ebola, another infectious disease, or a natural disaster. But one thing is clear. This is a fight in which the whole world has a stake. This disease respects no borders. The damage it is causing in West Africa, whether in public health, the economy or within communities – is already reverberating throughout the region and across the world. The international reaction to this crisis was initially inconsistent and lacking in clear direction or urgency. Now finally, the world has woken up. The community of nations has realized they cannot simply pull up the drawbridge and wish this situation away. This fight requires a commitment from every nation that has the capacity to help – whether that is with emergency funds, medical supplies or clinical expertise. I have every faith in our resilience as Liberians, and our capacity as global citizens, to face down this disease, beat it and rebuild. History has shown that when a people are at their darkest hour, humanity has an enviable ability to act with bravery, compassion and selflessness for the benefit of those most in need. From governments to international organisations, financial institutions to NGOs, politicians to ordinary people on the street in any corner of the world, we all have a stake in the battle against Ebola. It is the duty of all of us, as global citizens, to send a message that we will not leave millions of West Africans to fend for themselves against an enemy that they do not know, and against whom they have little defence. The time for talking or theorizing is over. Only concerted action will save my country, and our neighbours, from experiencing another national tragedy. The words of Henrik Ibsen have never been truer: “A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed. Yours sincerely, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Share this: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Reddit WhatsApp Skype TelegramAmericans don't agree on much these days but one thing a majority can find common ground on is the belief that the government is concealing information about the 9/11 attacks. That's from a new Chapman University survey that also finds nearly half of the responders also believe a coverup surrounds the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Surprisingly, “The Chapman University Survey on American Fears” from the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences finds much larger percentages of folks buying into conspiracies about alien encounters and global warming than about President Barack Obama's birth certificate and the moon landing. Everyone agrees with one conspiracy or another. How conspiratorial are we? A third of those asked believe the government is concealing information about the North Dakota crash—an event Chapman totally made up. This year's survey compilers asked questions about levels of belief in nine different popular conspiracies/conspiracy theories. Here are the subjects and the corresponding percentages of those who agreed or strongly agreed: The 9/11 attacks 54.3% The JFK assassination 49.6% Alien encounters 42.6% Global warming 42.1% Plans for a one world government 32.9% Obama’s birth certificate 30.2% The origin of the AIDs virus 30.1% The death of supreme court justice Antonin Scalia 27.8% The moon landing 24.2% “We find strong evidence that the United States is a strongly conspiratorial society,” say survey takers. “Only about a fourth of Americans (26 percent) disagreed or strongly disagreed with all nine conspiracy theories. The remaining three-fourths (74 percent) of
McCombie, one of three new trustees elected by alumni to the board, was one of the most outspoken trustees at a July 25 board session about Erickson not consulting a majority of trustees before signing the consent decree, trustees said. After that three-hour session in State College, the board issued a statement saying it was standing by Erickson's decision to sign the consent decree. ESPN The Magazine reported last week the university was facing a four-year death penalty if Erickson had not signed the decree, and that the NCAA had warned Penn State that if there were a leak about proposed sanctions to the media, the discussions would end and the death penalty would be all but certain. In his letter to trustees Monday, McCombie wrote: "It is my belief that this matter did require board approval and that we should engage in a full, and complete, review. In the end, we all benefit from having this matter handled correctly and with full regard for due process -- only then can we be truly confident in the result and the actions we take as a board. "Furthermore, only after we have given all involved the opportunity to be heard can we move forward together as one university." Penn State spokesman David La Torre declined comment. NCAA spokesman Bob Williams said the Penn State sanctions are not subject to appeal. Last week, attorneys for the family of former coach Joe Paterno requested the NCAA hold an "open hearing" before its Infractions Appeals Committee of the package of sanctions accepted by Penn State. The NCAA quickly rejected their request. "The Penn State sanctions are not subject to appeal," Williams said last week. McCombie closed his letter by writing: "I know my actions will be poorly received by some on this board and in the community at large. To that end it would be easier to remain silent and allow these unfair actions to remain unchallenged. I cannot do this." Much of the McCombie appeal takes aim at the Freeh report, an investigation commissioned by the board of trustees last November after the Sandusky sex-abuse charges became known. The board hired former FBI director Louis B. Freeh for $6.5 million to investigate the university's role in the sex abuse scandal. Freeh's report contains damning allegations against university employees and trustees, concluding that the board did not perform its oversight duties. The NCAA relied on the Freeh report to determine what sanctions should be handed down to Penn State.The Chilcot report, the U.K.’s official inquiry into its participation in the Iraq War, has finally been released after seven years of investigation. Its executive summary certainly makes former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led the British push for war, look terrible. According to the report, Blair made statements about Iraq’s nonexistent chemical, biological, and nuclear programs based on “what Mr. Blair believed” rather than the intelligence he had been given. The U.K. went to war despite the fact that “diplomatic options had not been exhausted.” Blair was warned by British intelligence that terrorism would “increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-U.S./anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the West.” On the other hand, the inquiry explicitly says that it is not “questioning Mr. Blair’s belief” in the case for war — i.e., it is not accusing him of conscious misrepresentations. Blair is already spinning this as an exoneration, saying the report “should lay to rest allegations of bad faith, lies, or deceit.” But consider that for as long as the Chilcot commission has existed, the U.K. and U.S. intelligence communities have probably fought over the language of the executive summary. So the place to look for the less adulterated truth about Blair and the U.K. government is in the rest of the report’s 2.6 million words, including footnotes and newly declassified documents. Consider this July 28, 2002, letter from Blair to George W. Bush. The first thing you’ll notice is its tone: It sounds like an adult trying to placate a heavily armed 8-year-old. “I will be with you, whatever,” Blair writes. “Getting rid of Saddam is the right thing to do.” But, he writes, “Suppose it got militarily tricky.” And suppose “the Iraqis feel ambivalent about being invaded.” Blair suggests Bush not go it alone. “If we win quickly, everyone will be our friend.” Chillingly naïve stuff. But the most important thing about Blair’s letter is that it’s clearly a response to a British cabinet meeting memorialized in the famous “Downing Street Memo” of July 23, 2002, which was authored just five days before Blair wrote to Bush. The Downing Street Memo, sometimes called the “smoking gun” document of the Iraq War, was leaked to the U.K.’s Sunday Times in 2005 (and the original has now been declassified as part of the Chilcot report). According to the Downing Street Memo, the British cabinet — including Blair — was informed by Richard Dearlove, then head of British intelligence, that the U.S. government was being consciously deceptive about its case for war. Dearlove, the memo reads, “reported on his recent talks in Washington. … Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Blair’s letter five days later was obviously his attempt to address the British government’s deepest concerns about Iraq. So: On July 23, Blair’s cabinet expressed concern about the dishonest case for war. On July 28, Blair wrote to Bush that “I have been told the U.S. thinks [evidence] unnecessary,” but such evidence was crucial if the two leaders were to have any kind of coalition behind them. Blair’s cabinet thought the best strategy was to create a casus belli by giving Saddam Hussein an ultimatum on letting inspectors into Iraq. Five days later, that’s what Blair suggested to Bush. So the Blair letter is, among other things, the final proof of the seriousness of the Downing Street Memo, which, if you recall, the mainstream U.S. media ignored and mocked when it was leaked. The memo did not record meaningless D.C. gossip, as pundit Michael Kinsley suggested when it was published in 2005. Instead, it was the basis for the most crucial communication possible between the U.S. president and the U.K. prime minister.AUSTIN, Texas - A large group of activists gathered outside the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission meeting Thursday. They're continuing to call for Commissioner Kelcy Warren to step down. Warren was appointed by Governor Greg Abbott in November 2015. "He's the CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline," said Tane Ward, an activist. The Dallas-based company is also behind the Trans-Pecos and Comanche Trail pipelines in West Texas. Activists who call themselves "water protectors" see that as a major conflict of interest. "There's no reason that the CEO of this company that benefits from these pipelines should be sitting on the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission," said Ward. Warren was absent from Thursday's meeting. He was at the last meeting in November, however, where he recused himself from a vote on a pipeline easement for a wildlife area in East Texas. Although he did not have a direct conflict of interest, he said he did so out of respect for the commission. After another commissioner also recused herself, there was not enough for a quorum. "It's not even on the agenda this time," said Juan Mancias, another activist. Officials say they do not know when it will be brought up again. Protestors say until Warren steps down, they're going to continue showing up at meetings. "We're not going anywhere and we're always going to be here," said Mancias. "We definitely respect everyone's rights to protest, to gather, to assemble, to express their opinions," said Josh Havens, spokesman for Texas Parks and Wildlife. While activists plan to keep fighting, they feel Warren's absence Thursday proves they're already making headway. We reached out to Warren's company for a statement from him, but have not yet received a response. Activists also tell us they remain frustrated over Warren walking back on his promise to meet with the Society of Native Nations. He told a member of the group at the November meeting that he would meet with them.Nintendo has limited the ability for younger Wii U gamers to send friend requests through Miiverse. The rule affects users aged 12 and under, and was quietly announced in a recent update to the social network. Nintendo explained it had reached the decision in a bid to protect younger users. "For the protection of younger users, direct friend requests are not possible in Miiverse for users aged 12 and under," reads a new section of the console's Miiverse Code of Conduct (spotted first by Aussie-Gamer). Nintendo closely moderates Miiverse posts and removes any offensive text or line drawings. "At the same time, younger users can make friends on Wii U outside Miiverse by entering each other's Network IDs in the friend list on the HOME menu." It means that users under 13 can still befriend others, although not exchange messages with them through Miiverse. "We encourage younger users to make friends on Wii U only if they are friends in real life (such as friends from the same school or neighbourhood). Therefore, do not attempt to exchange your Nintendo Network ID with other users on Miiverse." Other changes include a five-minute posting limit on Miiverse communities (you'll still be able to comment on existing posts) and stricter notification controls (you'll now only be notified if the original poster responds to your comment, rather than any user). Eurogamer has asked Nintendo for comment on the changes. We'll update when we hear back.Lotto Belisol continues to strengthen its squad for the 2014 season, signing talented Belgians Kris Boeckmans and Sean De Bie. Both riders have signed two-year contracts. The Belgian team has already secured the services of Andre Greipel and his lead out train for the next two years and signed Tony Gallopin for the Classics. Related Articles Greipel extends contract with Lotto Belisol Lars Bak earns contract extension with Lotto Belisol Henderson extends contract with Lotto-Belisol Hansen extends with Lotto Belisol for another two years Tony Gallopin signs for Lotto Belisol Cannondale and Lotto Belisol sign talented young riders Boeckmans, 26, joins from Vacansoleil-DCM, but rode for the Lotto U23 team in 2009. While he has no wins on his palmares, Lotto Belisol noted that what they describe as had a “remarkable” Tour de France in 2012, finishing in top tens on three stages, including a fifth place on the final stage on the Champs Elysees. “This year he was less in the picture, partly because of the very heavy programme that was imposed on him,” said Lotto Belisol team manager Marc Sergeant. “I think we can make an even better rider of him, also because of an optimal support through Energy Lab, a good programme and a Belgian team where he definitely will feel at home." Boeckmans said he was “very satisfied” with the deal. “This will certainly give a boost to my career. There is trust on both sides. The Belgian atmosphere is motivating, “ he said. “I have fast legs and I want to further develop that asset within Lotto Belisol. This is the right choice to do that. To begin the classic season will be important next year, I look forward to riding Milan-Sanremo." A future star De Bie, 21, will be make his WorldTour debut with Lotto Belisol in 2014. Currently riding with the Leopard-Trek Continental team, he is the U23 European road race champion, having won the sprint of an eight-man group in the Czech Republic last month. In 2012 he won the first stage of the Triptyque des Monts et Châteaux.Two of his uncles are Belgian national cyclo-cross coach Rudy De Bie and former cyclo-cross rider Danny De Bie. De Bie is “part of a cycle family, can be effective on different kinds of terrain but is someone with a preference for the Classics and isn't slow in a sprint finish,” Sergeant said. “I'm definitely proud that Lotto Belisol has succeeded in taking him on. The competition was high but giving chances to talented Belgian young riders is part of our vision and with this we've proved it." De Bie said he was ready for the step up. “I feel I've become physically and mentally stronger. Now my career can really begin. It means a lot to me that Lotto Belisol has offered me this opportunity. I'm very grateful.” “I will try to get some good results. I also want to help the team and hope to become a key part of it. One day races and short hills suit me the best.”Two years ago, I wrote an article on when to go for two when trailing. There's a lot of math involved there (and this one will have a bit too), but a brief summary on late-game strategy: If you need a two-point conversion, it's often best to do it early - sometimes there are alternate paths to success if the two-point try fails early, but postponing the conversion puts all your eggs in one basket. If down 8, 11, 15, 18, 19, 22, 23, or 24 before the touchdown, you should always go for two. If down 6, 9, 13, or 20, you should always kick. Down 16, you should only kick if you think your chances of another TD and a FG are very high and your chances in OT are very low. Almost all realistic assumptions give you a better chance by going for two. Down 14 or 21, you should usually go for two - success means you avoid OT entirely, while failure is recoverable. This also applies down 17, though the awkward strategic situations down 11 if you fail make it a little less valuable there. Only a team that is much more likely to win in OT than to make a two-point conversion should kick and play for OT. Down 7 or 10, go for two if you are more likely to succeed at that than win in OT, but err on the side of kicking if there is significant time left down 10 (or more than about 10 seconds left down 7). Note that it's much better to go for two on the first touchdown while down 14 than it is to do it on the second after kicking the first time. better to go for two on the first touchdown while down 14 than it is to do it on the second after kicking the first time. Down 12, you should go for two late in the game but probably not early. Going for two is harmless if the opponent doesn't score again, necessary at some point if they do, but potentially risky if they score multiple times. Now, let's look at scenarios where the touchdown has already put you ahead (score is listed by the pre-touchdown margin). Some simplifying assumptions which are applied unless otherwise stated: P(2) (probability of success), P(O2) (opponent's probability of making a two-point conversion), and P(WOT) (probability of winning if the game goes to OT) are independent constants within a game. You don't score again (if you do, you're likely to run enough time off the clock that it's moot, since this is targeting endgame strategy). The opponent has enough time for as many scores as are needed to tie but probably not any more (alternative strategies open up quite a bit if they have time for more scores, and nothing matters if they don't have time for enough to tie). Kicks are assumed automatic. Down 5 Let's start with an obvious one. If you kick, you're up two and lose if the opponent kicks a field goal. Fail the two-point try and the situation is effectively the same, but if you succeed a field goal only ties the game. There's no practical downside to going for it and the payoff is big. Go for 2. Down 4 If you kick, a field goal for the opponent ties the game. If you go for two, either 1) you miss and a FG wins the game for the opponent or 2) you make it and they need a touchdown. In mathematical terms: Kick: Your chances of winning are P(opp doesn't score) + P(opp FG)*P(WOT). Success: P(opp doesn't score) + P(opp FG) Failure: P(opp doesn't score) Superficially, this suggests that (as in the down 7 case) the break-even point is when you are just as likely to make the 2 as to win in overtime. However, the probability of the opponent scoring is not a constant across these three cases. A team that needs a touchdown isn't going to kick a field goal and will instead take a riskier strategy to increase their chances of a touchdown, while a team that wins with a field goal is likely to play it safe once in comfortable field goal range. (If a field goal ties, they'll likely fall somewhere between these extremes, though most teams tend to err on the side of forcing overtime if they are in a "FG ties, TD wins" situation.) In effect, if you go for two, the opponent knows what they need and adjusts accordingly. Thus, the break-even point is significantly lower and you should only go for two if you really don't like your chances in overtime. Down 3 Another easy one: missing the two-point try leaves you up only a field goal, kicking or success means a touchdown beats you but a field goal is useless. If the opponent scores a touchdown, a failed two now means you would have to score a touchdown to answer, while success may not be enough to make a field goal win the game (the opponent would likely go for two as well, attempting to pad the lead back to 3). Kicking it is the right call. Down 2 The opponent needs a touchdown no matter what. If you kick, the opponent will likely go for two to try to make it a 3-point lead. If you succeed at a two-point try, the opponent will likely kick to take the lead, whereas if you fail they will almost always kick to go up 3 (they could, as noted in the "down 4" heading, go for 2 to try to make it 2 or 4, but that's usually poor strategy). Either way, you will end up down either 1 or 3, but you get to decide whether it is your two-point try or your opponent's that determines which. The break-even point is where you are equally likely to succeed in your own two-point try or stop the opponent's; if you are more likely to make it, go for 2, but if you are more likely to stop them, kick and make them do it. Down 1 If you kick, your opponent (after scoring a touchdown) can kick for the win. If you go for 2 and fail, you're in the same position. If you succeed, they have to kick to tie (or go for two for the win). The correct decision is obvious: go for 2. Tied Assuming the opponent matches with a touchdown of their own, there is another question to consider: are your opponents risk-averse or will they go for 2 on that touchdown? If you kick, your opponent can kick to force OT but might put everything on a two-point conversion instead; if you go for two, your opponent is forced to match to tie if you succeed but will just kick for the win if you fail. The scenarios: Kick: Your chances of winning (assuming an opposing TD) are either P(WOT) if they always kick or the minimum of P(WOT) and 1-P(O2) if they are smart (assuming their answering score is very late). Fail on the two: If the opponents score a touchdown, you lose. Succeed on the two: (1-P(O2)) + P(O2)*P(WOT) The graphs below illustrate the break-even points: Interestingly, the two graphs show somewhat opposite behavior. If your opponent follows the conventional strategy of just forcing overtime, the better your chances are in OT, the less likely you should go for two (since kicking guarantees OT). Similarly, the more likely they are to make a two-point conversion if forced to attempt one, the less you have to gain by forcing them to do so, so kicking becomes more advantageous. But if the opponent considers going for two themselves, you should be more likely to go for it the more heavily favored in overtime you are (the opponent won't take their chances with overtime anyway) and more likely to go for it if the opponent is good at two-point tries (they will go for it anyway, so your best chance is to preemptively match their two-point conversion). Even under the assumptions that your opponent will play it smart if you kick, you're still better off kicking in most cases unless your opponent is extremely good at two-point conversions. This is another instance of the principle that early risks help the side whose strategy is most affected by the new information, but here the opponent is the one who benefits. Up 1 This is a situation a few people have mentioned as a possible situation to go for 2, the theory being that success puts you up 9 and makes it a two-score game. While true, failure means the opponent can tie just by kicking and has a chance to win the game in regulation by going for two. Worse, if you do it early enough, the opponent knows they need two scores and will adjust their strategy to maximize their chances of getting them. Down 7 or 9, they know how many scores they need; down 8, they don't. If you kick, your chances of winning are (1-P(O2)) + P(O2)*P(WOT). If you go for two, assuming the opponent has no time for a second score, your chances of winning are P(2) + (1-P(2))*min(P(WOT), 1-P(O2)) if the opponent follows the smart strategy down 7 (if they follow the conventional strategy, the second term is just (1-P(2))*P(WOT)). Assuming conventional strategy, the break-even point is where your chances of success on a two-point try and stopping your opponent on one are equal, as in the down-2 case. However, if your opponent follows the optimal strategy, you also need P(2) > P(WOT) to make going for two correct because the opponent may decide to go for two and win the game outright if you fail. Note that in both cases, this is slightly skewed toward going for it, because it doesn't include the possibility of two scores by the opponent, which is much more likely if they know they need two scores. Thus, if it's close, kick. Up 2 Kicking guarantees that the opponents need two scores. The benefit of going for two is that a TD+1 and FG only ties the game, but failure leaves the possibility of a TD+2 to tie by itself. Better to play it safe and kick. Up 3 This is essentially the same as the tied scenario (with the opponent needing an extra FG). The biggest change is that success puts you up 11, which is a strategically awkward position for your opponent - on 4th down in field goal range, should they kick and possibly find out later that they needed two touchdowns, or go for the touchdown first so they will know if a field goal will help next time? While that's useful, I don't think it's enough to move the break-even point very far, although it's enough to make going for 2 slightly more attractive. Up 4 A kick leaves your opponent needing a TD+2 and FG to tie. Failure on the 2 makes it a TD+1 and FG, while success means two touchdowns are needed to win. The awkwardness of being down 11 makes me lean toward kicking here. The main difference between this and up 1 is that success on the two-point try doesn't force the opponent to make an extra score; it just forces both scores to be touchdowns, which is a much smaller advantage. Up 5 Failure leaves the opponent the opportunity to tie with a TD+2 and FG; a kick or successful two-point try makes it two touchdowns to win. Since there's little benefit to success on the two and a potentially steep penalty for failure, kicking is correct. Up 6 Kick or fail the two-point try and two touchdowns will beat you; success on the two-point try makes it two touchdowns to tie (or TD+2 and TD+1 to win). Here there's no harm to failure and plenty to gain from making the two, so go for it. Up 7 Failure makes it two touchdowns to win. Kicking makes it two touchdowns to tie or TD+2 and TD+1 to win. Success makes it TD+2 and TD+1 to tie or TD+2, TD+2 to win. If the opponent follows conventional strategy, this breaks down exactly the same as the tied scenario, but if they're smart: Kicking wins the game (assuming two touchdowns by the opponent) with probability either P(WOT) or (1-P(O2))*((1-P(O2)) + P(O2)*P(WOT)), whichever is less. (The opponent will likely go for two on their first touchdown.) Going for it wins with probability P(2) * (1-P(O2) + P(O2)*min(P(WOT), 1-P(O2))); the opponent will certainly go for two the first time and might the second time (to go for an outright win). The resulting graph: The graph follows three ranges: at the far left, it matches the strategy while tied with the opponent following conventional strategy. The flat part represents where the opponent should go for 2 down 14 but not down 7 and the break-even point is where you are as likely to make your two-point try as to stop theirs. On the right, the opponent should go for two twice if down 15 to try to win the game outright. Going for two against a smart opponent is better than doing so against one following conventional strategy (since they have better options than to just kick and play for OT if you kick), but it's still usually the wrong move. Up 8 If you kick, the opponent needs a TD+2 and TD+1. If you succeed at a two-point try, they need to match it twice; failure allows a tie with TD+1 x2. Assuming conventional strategy from the opponent: Kick wins with probability (1-P(O2)) + P(O2)*P(WOT) Going for two wins with probability P(2)*((1-P(O2))^2 + P(O2)^2*P(WOT)) + (1-P(2))*P(WOT) Break-even: P(2) = 1 / (1 + P(O2)) However, with optimal strategy the opponent can do a little better in both cases (possibly winning outright if down 15 by going for two twice, or increasing their chances significantly by going for two the first time down 14). The resulting chart: Here there's very little to gain unless the opponent is excellent at two-point conversions and you are a massive favorite in overtime. (If the opponent follows conventional strategy, the flat line at the far left extends all the way across; your chance of winning in OT is completely irrelevant since the opponent will never win in regulation.) Up 9 Kicking makes it 2x TD+2 to tie. Making the two forces them to get three scores, but failure allows TD+2 and TD+1 to tie. Assuming exactly two scores, the break-even line works out identical to that of the up-1 scenario, since an additional TD+2 is needed in all cases; however, I'd err even more on the side of kicking than I do up 1 because it's a smaller adjustment going from needing two scores to three (with a reasonable amount of time left) than going from needing one score to two. Up 10 Kicking forces three scores to tie. Making the two does require the opponent to either score three touchdowns or get a TD+2, TD+1 and FG, but failure allows the possibility of tying with two scores (2x TD+2). Just kick it to get up three scores. Up 11 This works out identically to up 8, except with an extra field goal needed. No matter what the outcome, the opponent needs three scores, and a FG may be one of them if they make sufficiently many two-point tries. Three touchdowns beats you regardless. Up 12 This is three scores regardless. Kicking makes it TD+2, TD+2, FG to tie; a failed two makes it TD+2, TD+1, FG; success makes it three touchdowns to win. If we assume two touchdowns and a field goal, the decision comes out identical to up 9 (and therefore up 1), but the gain from making the two-point conversion is smaller since it does not force an additional score but instead changes a field goal to a touchdown. If it's at all a close decision, kick. Up 13 If you kick, you always lose to three touchdowns but the opponent cannot tie with two TD+2s and a FG. Making a two gives you a chance to win opposite three touchdowns, but failure allows TD+2, TD+2, FG to tie. For typical numbers, assuming smart strategy by the opponent, success on the two-point try gives you about a 35-50% chance of surviving three touchdowns (possibly more if the opponent is an underdog but plays for OT anyway), while failure gives the opponent about a 7-15% chance of beating you given two touchdowns and a field goal. The calculations here are quite complex since you have to consider whether the opponent would settle for a field goal down 19 or 11 (before getting both of the TD+2s they need) if you fail, whether three touchdowns is more likely down 20 or 21 than down 19, how much more likely a field goal is than a third touchdown, and several additional factors. However, unless your opponent is very good at two-point conversions and you are very poor at them, the risk of the miss, TD+2, TD+2, FG sequence is probably not enough to offset the possibility of surviving three touchdowns. Go for two. Up 14 If you go for two and fail, three touchdowns always beats you. If you kick, the opponent can automatically force OT (assuming three touchdowns) or can go for the win with a successful two-point conversion or failure followed by two successes (or fail, succeed, kick for OT). If you go for two and succeed, the opponent has to go for 2 the first time; if they fail, they have to make the next two to force OT, but if they succeed they can kick twice for OT or go for two again to try to win in regulation. The equations here, assuming the opponent scores three touchdowns and follows optimum strategy (if they always play conservative, the rule is the same as if you are tied and assume the opponent will play conservative): Kicking wins with probability P(WOT), (1-P(O2))*(1-P(O2) + P(O2)*P(WOT)), or (1-P(O2))*(1-P(O2)^2), whichever is lowest. Going for two wins with probability P(2) * ((1-P(O2))*(1-P(O2)^2 + P(O2)^2*P(WOT)) + P(O2)*min(P(WOT), (1-P(O2))*(1-P(O2) + P(O2)*P(WOT)))). The chart: The fact that failure is an automatic loss (assuming the opponent scores three touchdowns) makes kicking usually the correct play, but when the opponent is good enough at two-point conversions to go for best two-out-of-three instead of just kicking for overtime if you kick, it can be worth the risk. That said, for typical two-point conversion rates, it's almost always right to kick. Up 15 If you kick, the opponent needs one two-point conversion (with a backup plan of making the next two after failing the first) to tie. If you go for two and fail, they can tie with all kicks; if you succeed, they need two successes to tie (with no second chance). If the opponent follows the conventional strategy of attempting only as many two-point conversions as they absolutely have to, this case simplifies to a question of whether you are more likely to make your own two-point attempt or stop the opponent (going for it either forces them to try an extra one if you succeed or permits them to skip it if you fail). If the opponent follows the smart strategy, it gets messy; I'll spare you the full set of equations here, because it's significantly messier even then the up-14 case. But the graph is as follows: Since the opponent has to attempt a two-point conversion unless you fail, it is often better to kick. When the opponent follows the smart strategy, the advantage of kicking is increased, as it gives the opponent fewer chances to try to win in regulation. Up 16 If you kick, the opponent needs two two-point conversions. A successful conversion of your own bumps that number up to three, but failure reduces it to one and allows them a second chance (by making two in a row after missing the first). You should only consider going for two if you are extremely likely to make it, your opponent is extremely likely to make theirs, you are a huge favorite in overtime, and you are worried about the possibility of the opponent making three conversions in a row to win in regulation. Up 17 As in the up-1 and up-9 cases, a successful two-point try forces an extra score at the expense of potentially removing one forced two-point try from the opponent. The break-even point is the same, although the extra information of knowing they need an extra score once again skews things in favor of kicking if it's a close decision. Note that when leading, it's generally rarer to attempt a two-point conversion than when trailing. This is because the extra information about what they need is of more use to your opponent than to you. While trailing, on the other hand, you are usually the one to benefit from that information and thus it pays off to go for two more often. A summary:SREBRENICA, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA — ON July 11, 1995, a Dutch­ contingent of United Nations peacekeepers ceded control of Srebrenica, leaving the town’s civilian population — swollen with thousands of Bosnian Muslim refugees — at the mercy of besieging Serb forces. Serb soldiers and paramilitary police officers systematically executed about 8,000 Muslim men and boys, dumping their bodies in mass graves, which were bulldozed to hide the evidence. The images most people remember today — the skeletal prisoners behind barbed wire, awaiting death in concentration camps — are only a part of the genocide. This was the worst atrocity on European soil since World War II; the entire region is dotted with mass graves. Less well known is the history of “The Column,” a group of about 15,000 Bosnian Muslims who tried to escape the executions by walking more than 60 miles northwest through thick forests toward the safe haven of Tuzla. The harrowed survivors who reached the town were emaciated and traumatized. To honor the memory of those who died, and to highlight the lack of justice served on those who perpetrated war crimes, hundreds of survivors and supporters this week walked the route taken by The Column in reverse. Working with the photographer Laura Boushnak, I interviewed survivors and relatives of the victims. Nedzad Avdic was 17 when, together with his father and an uncle, he joined The Column, setting out across rough terrain to escape Srebrenica’s killing fields. The march took its name from the formation the fugitives used to traverse minefields; if the leader was blown up, at least those behind stood a chance. Amid the confusion, the boy soon lost his father. “I cried, calling for him,” Mr. Avdic told me. “But everyone wanted to save themselves.” Scraps of his father’s remains, identified by DNA testing, were recovered from a mass grave a decade later. After two days in the forest, Mr. Avdic was captured with his uncle. The Serbs took them to a school building in the village of Petkovci, about 35 miles from Srebrenica. “They called for us five at a time,” he said. They heard shots and bodies crumpling to the ground. His uncle went first, in hopes of somehow sparing him. It was the last time Mr. Avdic ever saw him alive. His uncle’s remains were finally located two years ago in a secondary mass grave (his body was bulldozed and reburied in another location to conceal war crimes). A soldier bound Mr. Avdic’s wrists and ordered him to take off his shoes and shirt. He had no shoes, so he took off his socks instead. His group was driven by truck to another killing field. The soldiers lined them up in front of rows of bodies. The shooting started and he fell, with bullets in the arm and torso. “I prayed to God to die because my pain was terrible,” he said. But he stayed quiet, fearing the Serbs would finish him off in some unspeakable way. When the soldiers finally left, he saw another man move among the bodies. Mr. Avdic rolled over the dead to reach this survivor. Mr. Avdic used his teeth to untie his companion’s ropes. First, they hid in bushes as Serb paramilitaries marched another group of Muslims to slaughter. Then they resumed their flight, hiding in burned-out houses, even sleeping in a graveyard. After four days, Mr. Avdic’s wounds were infected and he could no longer even crawl. His companion carried him until, at last, they reached Tuzla. Only a few thousand survived the “death march.” Many were killed by land mines or attacks by Serb forces. Some died of dehydration and sheer exhaustion. A few committed suicide rather than face capture by Serb forces. To this day, there are many in Bosnia — teachers, municipal officials, police officers — who played a dark part in the mass killings of 1995. Until recently, Serb-dominated schools still proudly displayed pictures of indicted war criminals, including the Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic and the commander of the Army of Republika Srpska, Gen. Ratko Mladic. Both men are on trial in The Hague for war crimes related to the Srebrenica genocide. Mr. Avdic lost his father, four uncles, six cousins and at least 20 other relatives in the war. Despite the horrors of S
"UCERF3" (http://www.WGCEP.org/UCERF3), provides authoritative estimates of the magnitude, location, and likelihood of earthquake fault rupture throughout the state. Overall the results confirm previous findings, but with some significant changes because of model improvements. For example, compared to the previous forecast (UCERF2), the likelihood of moderate-sized earthquakes (magnitude 6.5 to 7.5) is lower, whereas that of larger events is higher. This is because of the inclusion of multifault ruptures, where earthquakes are no longer confined to separate, individual faults, but can occasionally rupture multiple faults simultaneously. The public-safety implications of this and other model improvements depend on several factors, including site location and type of structure (for example, family dwelling compared to a long-span bridge). Building codes, earthquake insurance products, emergency plans, and other risk-mitigation efforts will be updated accordingly. This model also serves as a reminder that damaging earthquakes are inevitable for California. Fortunately, there are many simple steps residents can take to protect lives and property. This research was supported by: What is UCERF3? The Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast, Version 3 (UCERF3) is a comprehensive model of earthquake occurrence for California. It represents the best available science for authoritative estimates of the magnitude, location, and likelihood of potentially damaging earthquakes in California. Two kinds of scientific models inform decisions of how to safeguard against earthquake losses: (1) an earthquake rupture forecast tells us where and when the Earth might slip along the state’s many faults, and (2) a ground motion prediction model estimates the ensuing shaking from a fault rupture. UCERF3 is the latest earthquake rupture forecast for California. Who developed UCERF3? UCERF3 was developed by the 2014 Working Group on California Earthquake Probabilities (WGCEP), a multi-disciplinary collaboration of leading experts in seismology, geology, geodesy, paleoseismology, earthquake physics, and earthquake engineering. The development of UCERF3 involved numerous public meetings and included formal evaluations by five separate review panels. The study was led by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Southern California Earthquake Center, and the California Geological Survey, with partial financial support from the California Earthquake Authority, which is the largest provider of homeowner earthquake insurance in California. The development of earthquake rupture forecasts by the WGCEP (in 1988, 1990, 1995, 2003, and 2007) shows progress towards more accurate representations of the very complex California fault system. What is improved or innovative about UCERF3? UCERF3 includes more than 350 fault sections, compared to the 16 and 200 faults considered by the WGCEP in 1988 and 2007, respectively. As detailed geologic data about the history of earthquakes and locations of faults is limited in many parts of California, UCERF3 has incorporated analysis of the gradual movement of hundreds of locations throughout California using space-based geodesy (GPS data) in order to estimate rates of deformation for faults lacking geologic data. Recent events demonstrate that earthquakes can rupture beyond previously understood fault boundaries, resulting in a much larger fault-rupture area and magnitude than expected (e.g., 2010 M7.2 El Mayor-Cucapah; 2011 M9 Tohoku, Japan; 2012 M8.6 Sumatra). Scientists now recognize that faults are not isolated, but instead are often interconnected in a broad network or “fault system”, where multiple nearby faults can occasionally rupture simultaneously. Unlike previous models, UCERF3 accounts for the possibility of these multi-fault ruptures. A “grand inversion” was developed for UCERF3 to solve the rate of all possible earthquake ruptures in the interconnected California fault system. This new system-level approach also draws upon a broader range of observations to arrive at the solution. By employing the “grand inversion” technique, the resulting UCERF3 forecast rate for moderate-sized earthquakes (magnitude 6.5 to 7.5) is more in line with the observed rate in nature. All previous earthquake rupture forecast studies for California estimated a much higher rate for these moderate-sized events than compared to the observed rate. Calculating the UCERF3 “grand inversion” results required the use of supercomputers to cover a broad range of models (>5,000), each considering more than 250,000 fault-based earthquake possibilities (including multi-fault ruptures) throughout California. The same calculation would take more than 8 years on a single desktop computer. After a fault ruptures, it takes time for tectonic stress to re-accumulate on that fault – a concept known as Reid’s elastic rebound theory (Reid, 1911). UCERF3 includes this notion of fault “readiness” in the earthquake rupture forecast. Faults are more likely to rupture (more ready) where tectonic stress has built up over many years without an earthquake. Conversely, faults are less likely to rupture (less ready) when and where a recent earthquake has occurred. We may not know when the most recent earthquake occurred on most faults in California, but we can assume it was before reliable recordkeeping began (in 1875). By accounting for this “historic open interval” for events prior to 1875, we can quantify fault readiness throughout the entire California fault system, unlike previous studies that were limited to only a subset of faults with well-known histories. What are the major findings of UCERF3? UCERF3 confirms many previous findings, but it sheds new light on how future earthquakes will be distributed across California and how big those earthquakes might be. Greater California. UCERF3 shows the likelihood of moderate-sized earthquakes (magnitude 6.5 to 7.5) is lower, while the likelihood of larger events is higher when compared to the UCERF2 results. This is because UCERF3 includes the possibility that multiple nearby faults may occasional rupture together to cause larger earthquakes. The increased rate of these larger earthquakes must be balanced by a decreased rate of lower-magnitude events in order to maintain the overall plate tectonic, fault system budget. The estimated rate of earthquakes around magnitude 6.7 (the size of the destructive 1994 Northridge earthquake) has gone down by about 30 percent. The expected frequency of such events statewide has dropped from an average of one per 4.8 years (in UCERF2) to about one per 6.3 years (in UCERF3). The likelihood that California will experience a magnitude 8 or larger earthquake in the next 30 years increased from about 4.7% in UCERF2 to about 7% in UCERF3. UCERF3 shows the likelihood of moderate-sized earthquakes (magnitude 6.5 to 7.5) is lower, while the likelihood of larger events is higher when compared to the UCERF2 results. Southern California / Los Angeles Region. The UCERF3 model estimates a greater increase in the likelihood of larger earthquakes in the Los Angeles Region compared to most of California, because the region has more faults that can host multi-fault ruptures. UCERF3 concurs with previous studies that consider the Southern San Andreas Fault the most likely to host a large earthquake. Compared to UCERF2, the likelihood of M≥6.7 earthquakes on the San Jacinto Fault decreases three-fold in UCERF3, but is balanced by an equivalent increase in likelihood of M≥8 earthquakes on that fault. Northern California / San Francisco Region. The Northern San Andreas Fault has a lower likelihood of hosting an earthquake (compared to the Southern San Andreas) partly because of the relatively recent 1906 earthquake on that fault. The Hayward-Rodgers Creek and Calaveras Faults are more likely to rupture (compared to the Northern San Andreas) because it has been a long time since the last earthquakes occurred on these faults. Compared to UCERF2, the Calaveras Fault shows a three-fold increase in M≥6.7 earthquake likelihoods, but no compensating decrease in rate at higher magnitudes. This is because most events on the Calaveras in UCERF2 were well below magnitude 6.7, so the inclusion of multi-fault ruptures in UCERF3 increases the likelihood of all M≥6.7 earthquakes. How is UCERF3 used? UCERF3 can be combined with ground motion prediction models to ascertain the seismic hazard, or ground shaking generated by each possible earthquake rupture. These seismic hazard estimates, coupled with engineering models of the built environment, are used to ascertain seismic risk, or the probability that humans will incur loss or damage to their built environment if exposed to a seismic hazard. to ascertain the, or ground shaking generated by each possible earthquake rupture. These seismic hazard estimates, coupled with, are used to ascertain, or the probability that humans will incur loss or damage to their built environment if exposed to a seismic hazard. UCERF3 has been used for the 2014 update of the U.S. Geological Survey National Seismic Hazard Maps. The California Earthquake Authority will use UCERF3 to evaluate insurance premiums charged to customers, as well as their own level of reinsurance. UCERF3 will be used for other risk mitigation efforts for years to come, including engineering design of building and lifelines, loss estimation for catastrophic bonds and other risk-linked securities, and emergency preparedness – all to increase public safety and community resilience. What are the limitations of UCERF3? It is difficult to make generalizations about the hazard or risk implications of UCERF3 without first specifying both asset types and their locations. Conclusions will vary depending on whether you are designing a single family dwelling, retrofitting a bridge, considering the location of a power plant, laying pipeline across the San Andreas Fault, or considering aggregate losses over a large insurance portfolio. The practical implications will need to be considered on a case-by-case basis. How can we prepare for future earthquakes? Through the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program (www.nehrp.gov), the U.S. Geological Survey and its partners will continue to conduct research aimed at improving our understanding of fault behavior and estimates of earthquake hazard in the future. UCERF3 should also serve as a reminder that California is earthquake country, and residents should always be prepared. Simple safeguards include practicing “drop, cover, and hold on,” securing items in your home and workplace that could fall during an earthquake, and storing seven days’ worth of food and water. Homeowners can also consider structural retrofits, such as bolting the house to its foundation, as well as earthquake insurance options. For further guidance on how to prepare for, survive, and recover after big earthquakes, follow the Seven Steps to Earthquake Safety (www.earthquakecountry.org/sevensteps). Where can I find additional information about UCERF3? Additional Links Working Group on California Earthquake Probabilities USGS Earthquake Program National & Regional Seismic Hazard Maps National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program Southern California Earthquake Data Center Putting Down Roots in Earthquake Country Media Contactsstorage Full-featured LAMP stack We've hand crafted a full-featured LAMP development environment perfectly tuned for any type of WordPress project. Our roadmap also includes plans to support additional platforms in the future. flash_on Isolated dev environment Quickly get up and running using a secure, isolated Vagrant virtual machine. No more wasting time debugging your local system's PHP and MySQL version – everything you need comes pre-installed and pre-configured! layers Unlimited local projects Many tools limit how many local development projects you can create. Not us. 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To get to the ghost town, we hired a severe Chukchi taxi. Our road. Anadyr-1 located in a valley between two hills. There was no opportunity to get on this closed territory from all extraneous. Of course, many local people knew that there were some army units here, but nothing more. Houses for officers. Communications and pipes are hidden in the wooden corridors. Military posters. In the headquarters building. There was a dining room. Shopping mall Snow does not melt even at the end of June. We’re going to the military base. Pillbox. Top secret. The object “C” was built in 1958, in 1961 he entered combat duty. The purpose of the facility is the storage and routine maintenance of nuclear weapons. Submission to the 12th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR. The facility is a self-contained underground facility with multi-kilometer galleries, has full anti-atomic protection. Inside it is divided into different levels of access. Transportation of goods was carried out by an underground narrow-gauge railway. The photo shows one of the two input portals. It housed four nuclear missiles RSD-10 “Pioneer.” Source: MacosIn the second blog in the 4-part series about participation in evaluation, Irene Guijt and Leslie Groves focus on making power relationships and values in 'participatory' evaluation processes explicit to avoid tokenistic participation. ‘Participation’ is used as a shorthand for a wide range of values that underpin the power that people have to influence evaluation processes. For some evaluators or commissioners, asking for more views from more community members to ensure relevance of interventions is sufficient. For others, evaluations must meet the information needs of local citizens so that these citizens decide what gets asked and how. In the first case, community members are allowed to influence by sharing in a one-way form of feedback. In the second, power extends to influencing multiple aspects of the evaluation as part of a wider commitment to empowering citizens. The use of the same word “participation”- to cover a range of practices is problematic. Mentioning the word in an evaluation design or report, does not – in and of itself – make clear the scope and quality of engagement. For us, looking at participation through a power lens can help clarify what it means, particularly as the evaluation community lacks agreed standards on the term. In this blog, we offer evaluation commissioner and evaluators three steps for further clarity on participation in evaluation: Decide on the extent to which you want and are able to share power Be clear about why participation matters and which values are informing your choices Be pro-active and explicit in how you will avoid tokenistic participation. 1. Participation involves sharing power – so decisions need to be made about how power over different aspects of evaluation processes will be shared and between whom. Being clear about the form that participation by different stakeholders in an evaluation will take requires deciding whether you are willing and able to share power. (Even being in a position that gives you the power – or not – to make this choice is important to think about!) Leslie’s research on beneficiary feedback found two forms most common. First, a one-way system of data extraction i.e. from those affected by injustices, poverty or disasters to the evaluator. Participants thus have power to influence the evidence base related to the programme. However, the extent of that influence is not always clear. This is particularly the case where evaluators retain the power to make evaluative judgements and analysis without cross checking their interpretations with data providers. The other form was a two-way system or a closed feedback loop that involves a dynamic process of listening and responding to feedback, recommended by ALNAP for humanitarian work and in the peace-building domain. Here the evaluation process is making visible what power people had over the findings. Sincere power sharing has very practical consequences. Let’s take transparency about evaluation reports – commitment to the principle that people have a right to information about the quality of interventions meant to improve their lives. Such information often goes no further than organisational gatekeepers. DFID, for example, has a commitment to dissemination of evaluation reports. Indeed all evaluation reports can be found online. But how do those without internet access, computer literacy or relevant language skills access the information? How do they find out about what changes have resulted from the sharing of their views and experiences? How can they learn from others’ experiences so as to scale up good practice themselves? Questions such as these highlight hidden forms of power that mean that claims to participation and transparency remain an aspiration rather than a reality. 2. Be clear about why participation matters for you in your situation. Clarity about the level of aspiration will help you be precise about what choices need to be made (this will be discussed in more detail in our next blog in the series). People opt for more participation in evaluation for diverse reasons. Respect for people and their rights to shape their own futures. Listening to and engaging with people in different evaluation stages is about respect for their input on issues that have a bearing on their destinies. Simply put, power over evaluation processes is morally right. Supporting empowerment and human rights outcomes. Seeking, valuing and engaging people’s voices can be empowering. It can support women and men to exercise more control over their lives and to seek fulfilment of their rights. Participatory evaluation, when done well, can directly contribute to these outcomes. Ensuring relevance. Listening to people matters because what is designed, funded and implemented must meet people’s actual, rather than presumed, needs. To do so, interventions must be designed and implemented with them. Imposing ideas of what should or could work has led to inefficient and costly initiatives that have, at times, done harm. Optimising results. To improve implementation, evaluation needs insights on the process of change. To improve strategy, unintended and negative consequences are particularly important – and who knows this better than those to whom it is happening? 3. Tokenistic participation in evaluation is common and avoidable. Tokenism occurs when high expectations or ambitious claims of empowerment do not match evaluation practice. Promises of power sharing around decisions about evaluation questions or generating recommendations can become empty promises. Local participants might be given an opportunity to validate findings but might not have the capacity or be given sufficient time to engage with the data in a meaningful way. An evaluation steering group may include a local citizen but offer little opportunity to influence a process driven by others. Sometimes a small number is assumed to represent large numbers of others on whose behalf they are asked to speak. Such practices can harm the individuals, who are under pressure to contribute or left feeling disempowered, perpetuating power differences that lead to domination of a vocal few. They contribute to participation fatigue and unnecessarily increase a time burden on intended beneficiaries without clear benefit. Tokenism is likely when: The purpose of stakeholder participation in evaluation is not clear or the kind of participation is not agreed. Facilitation of participation in evaluation is weak with insufficient time or money available to do this well. Attention is only given to participation in data collection (the one-way feedback form mentioned above) and not to seeking input on other evaluation tasks. Hearing about your experiences Does the idea of participation as degrees of power sharing help you clarify what participation could mean in your evaluation situation? If not, are there other concepts that can help us as evaluation professionals define participation in evaluation? What other reasons have you come across for shaping power in evaluation and thereby making them more participatory? Image credit: Participatory Evaluation, by Chris Lysy on Fresh Spectrum Q&A / webinar In response to popular demand, Irene Guijt and Leslie Groves held a Q&A on the reflections presented in their blog series on participation in evaluation. View the recording below.Executive Summary: Habitual Mastery is a very efficacious and delicate process. It is a process that requires self-discipline and a strategic mindset. Only a few have managed to pursue it consistently, but those are the ones that enjoy a sustainable, long-term, effective lifestyle. I want you to consider the following parable for a second. A woodcutter strained to saw down a tree. A young man who was watching asked “What are you doing?” “Are you blind?” the woodcutter replied. “I’m cutting down this tree.” The young man was unabashed. “You look exhausted! Take a break. Sharpen your saw.” The woodcutter explained to the young man that he had been sawing for hours and did not have time to take a break. The young man pushed back… “If you sharpen the saw, you would cut down the tree much faster.” The woodcutter said “I don’t have time to sharpen the saw. Don’t you see I’m too busy?” I first came across this parable in the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Steven Covey. Covey uses it in order to showcase the message of the 7th habit – Sharpen the Saw. In his words: “Balance and renew your resources, energy, and health to create a sustainable, long-term, effective lifestyle.” Covey was a really smart guy. He understood from a very young age that one can never experience an effective lifestyle if one doesn’t familiarize himself with a simple yet powerful idea – The idea of habits. Habits are present throughout our everyday lives. They are the reason we fail but also the reason we succeed. They are the reason we are effective but also the reason we are ineffective. They are the reason we are happy but also the reason we are extremely dissatisfied with our lives. Covey could have easily used the word trait instead of habit for the title of his book. He chose not to do it. He did so because he knew that trait is quite a general world; a word that cannot be related to effectiveness. He knew that effectiveness can only be achieved by adopting a concrete and established mindset; a mindset that one can adopt only by understanding the powerful idea of habit. And that’s what we are going to scrutinize in this article. We are going to talk about good habits and bad habits. We are going to discuss how you can make effective behaviors last and how to gradually eliminate bad habits that suck the life out of you. We are going to challenge your beliefs and your creativity. And finally we are going to employ, science, storytelling, and humor, all to serve one important goal – Make the power of habit a tool for a sustainable, long-term, effective lifestyle. THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE Last week I tried to convince my flatmates to adopt a more conscious mindset with regards to our recycling habits. I live in Austria at the moment and for Austrians, recycling is a big deal. I was raised in Greece and later on I moved to the UK and none of the two countries cultivate a recycling-conscious mindset to their citizens. After moving to Austria however, I became accustomed to the Austrian approach and decided to adopt this environmental-friendly mindset. I discussed the matter with my flatmates and all of us agreed to start recycling. We divided the waste into 4 categories – paper, plastic, aluminum and general waste. The paper and the general waste bins were placed in front of the sink and the plastic and aluminum bins were placed inside the cabinet underneath the sink. Everything seemed perfectly organized and I was extremely pleased that our recycling habit would start to take effect. A couple of days after our agreement, however I started noticing that someone was throwing beverage cans and plastic packages in the general waste bin. I asked one of my flatmates and he admitted that he did it. When I asked him to explain the reason behind this he said that although he is willing to adopt our new mindset, whenever he wants to throw away a beverage can or something made out of plastic, he becomes lazy and decides to follow the path of least resistance. Throwing the waste inside the bin that is in front of him seems way more effortless than opening the cabin door and throwing it in the right bin. I can’t blame him. I actually felt the same every time I was about to throw away a beverage can or something made out of plastic. But why is that? Why is it that every time we decide to start a new habit our mind raises a mental fence between us and the new habit, thus making us more resistant to it. Thomas B. Ward is a professor of psychology at the university of Alabama and his research focuses on the nature of concepts, including how they are acquired, structured, combined, and used in creative and noncreative endeavors. In his paper called “The Role of Specificity and Abstraction in Creative Idea Generation Specificity and Abstraction in Creative Generation,” he points out that when we think about anything, we follow the path of least resistance. Former experience is a guide for us to automatically categorize every situation. Even if we are excited about starting something new, our memory drives us back to previously adopted methods. Especially when it comes to creativity, our efforts are thwarted before we even decide to take action. In an experiment conducted back in 2004, Ward and his assistants asked a group of participants to perform creative tasks like drawing aliens. Often without realizing it, most people start with a familiar animal and then modify it to create the new one. As a result, almost all of the drawings have key properties of animals on Earth such as symmetry, eyes, and legs. Everything we do in life is governed by past experience. Events of our past and specific things we have learned, act as mental guides in order for us to solve mental problems. Therefore, whenever we are faced with a new task and especially if this task requires some novelty to be deployed, our mind fails to recognize this process as familiar and decides to follow the path of least resistance. The path of least resistance can be a huge hurdle in one’s pursuit of a more effective and purposeful lifestyle. In some situations, it can actually be so big that past experiences won’t allow us to move on in fundamental areas our lives like starting new relationships or testing new ideas. In such events, therapy is usually the most commonly suggested method because through therapy you can access part of your subconscious where a specific memory is stored and eventually identify the problem before deciding to tackle it. In simpler events, however, like the one with my flatmates and our recycling habit, therapy might sound like an extreme measure. Nevertheless, the main principles that apply in therapy can be used in tackling simpler problems we encounter every day and are leading us to the path of least resistance. Every new idea you have is rooted in one or more old ideas you have encountered in the past. So, when you find yourself in a creative rut, you need to start thinking about which of your memories is influencing your creativity. Why are you interpreting the creative problem you are solving in the way you are? What aspects of your experience are driving you in that direction? Then, you have to change the memories you are using. But we will get to that in a second. First, we need to understand what habits actually are and the science behind them. HABITS AND YOUR BRAIN Habits are the brain’s own internal productivity drivers. Due to its efficiency-driven nature, the brain constantly looks to transform tasks and behaviors to habits so we can do them automatically, thus freeing more memory and brainpower. The part of the brain responsible for this operation is a golf ball–sized lump of tissue toward the center of the skull called basal ganglia. Basel ganglia work as a hard drive for the brain where habits are encoded once they are learned and never really disappear. Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter at The New York Times where he writes for the business section. Back in 2012 Duhigg published his New York Times bestseller “The Power of Habit” where he deals extensively with the science of habit and habit transformation. With regards to the operation of basel ganglia Duhigg notes: “Conserving mental effort is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, such as a predator hiding in the bushes or a speeding car as we pull onto the street. So our basal ganglia have devised a clever system to determine when to let habits take over. It’s something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends.” THE HABIT LOOP “Habits aren’t destiny. Habits can be ignored, changed, or replaced. But the reason the discovery of the habit loop is so important is that it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit—unless you find new routines—the pattern will unfold automatically. However, simply understanding how habits work—learning the structure of the habit loop—makes them easier to control. Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears,” Duhigg suggests. So what exactly is this infamous habit loop and how does it actually work? According to Duhigg, it is sort of like a computer program consisting of three parts: Cue. A cue is a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. This trigger can be anything from a physical location and a person, to a smell, a taste or an emotional state. Routine. The routine is the activity you are about to perform when you are triggered by a cue. It can be physical, mental or emotional. Reward. Duhigg refers to the reward as something that helps our brain figure out if a particular loop is worth rememberingin the future. The reward is mainly achieved mentally after a connection with something physical like a chocolate or a cigarette. The more we encounter this loop, the more automatic the habitual process becomes. However, the real moving force behind the habit loop is what Duhigg refers to as cravings. Image Courtesy: Charles Duhigg As we associate cues with certain rewards, a subconscious craving emerges in our brains that starts the habit loop spinning. Image Courtesy: Charles Duhigg Whenever we crave something, our brain somehow urges us to feel the same feeling we will experience when we actually reach the reward stage of the loop. The stronger the craving, the stronger our desire to perform that particular habit. And whether we like it or not all of us associate ourselves with specific cravings throughout our daily lives. Some of them are extremely beneficial for our well-being, but some of them can be extremely toxic. Understanding how habits work is the first step to empowering the good ones and also working towards reducing to the toxic ones. Hacking the Habit Loop. Achieving Habitual Mastery in 6 Simple Steps. After reading “The Power of Habit,” I encountered the following realization. To change a habit, you must simply follow the Golden Rule of Habit Change: Keep the Cue and Reward; Change the Routine. That’s it. As Duhigg mentions in his book: “It seems ridiculously simple, but once you’re aware of how your habit works, once you recognize the cues and rewards, you’re halfway to changing it. It seems like it should be more complex. The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.” Well, although this idea is quite compelling, from inception to fruition is a long way. Yes, there are habits that can be changed simply by finding a substitute, like chewing a nicotine gum for instance if you want to quit smoking or eating a banana instead of a cookie every time you crave a cookie after a coffee break, but for more advanced level habits these things start to get more complicated. And they get more complicated simply because for advanced level habits you need to employ a tremendous amount of willpower in order to “habitualize” a process. After doing some research on the topic I stumbled upon a really interesting self-improvement blogger called Scott Young. Scott suggests that “with the right conditioning, you could automatically do what you normally need willpower for.” What does he mean by that? Well, he wants to point out that because some habits in order to change they require a lot of effort and willpower – and because most of us lack the required amount of willpower – it is wiser to let the habit happen by automating it. And by automation, he means to create the right conditions for the habit to change gradually and eventually become automatic. Inspired by his approach I put together a six-step process that if followed methodically can reframe your understanding of habits and eventually put you in the path of habitual mastery. Step 1. Set a Conditioning Period. Brain Pickings in their article called “How long it takes to form a new habit” mention the following study: “In a study carried out at University College London, 96 participants were asked to choose an everyday behavior that they wanted to turn into a habit. They all chose something they didn’t already do that could be repeated every day; many were health-related: people chose things like “eating a piece of fruit with lunch” and “running for 15 minutes after dinner.” Each of the 84 days of the study, they logged into a website and reported whether or not they’d carried out the behavior, as well as how automatic the behavior had felt. This notion of acting without thinking — known in science as “automaticity” — turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be a central driver of habits. And it helps illuminate the real question at the heart of this inquiry: How long did it actually take for people to form a habit? The simple answer is that, on average, across the participants who provided enough data, it took 66 days until a habit was formed. As you might imagine, there was considerable variation in how long habits took to form depending on what people tried to do. People who resolved to drink a glass of water after breakfast were up to maximum automaticity after about 20 days, while those trying to eat a piece of fruit with lunch took at least twice as long to turn it into a habit. The exercise habit proved most tricky with “50 sit-ups after morning coffee,” still not a habit after 84 days for one participant. “Walking for 10 minutes after breakfast,” though, was turned into a habit after 50 days for another participant.” Although 66 is a good number to use as a rule of thumb, after experimenting with different habit-building processes, I can argue that 30 days of complete focus on this habit is usually enough. Step 2. Make the Habit Daily. The idea of doing something every day might sound kind of overwhelming. The reality, however, is that the smaller the time-chunks you decide to use in order to reach a goal, the less effort you need to put in the process. It is strongly associated with the least resistance theory as described above and apparently all it takes is a mentality shift. Steven Convey in the “7 habits of highly effective people” puts it really nice: “Most of us think we don’t have enough time to exercise. What a distorted paradigm! We don’t have time not to. We’re talking about three to six hours a week — or a minimum of thirty minutes a day, every other day. That hardly seems an inordinate amount of time considering the tremendous benefits in terms of the impact on the other 162-165 hours of the week.” Step 3. Strategically Replace the Most Important Lost Needs This step is where Duhigg’s suggestion for substitution of the routine comes in. No matter how hard you will try to forget the need of the habit you want to change, the need will always be there and this is a huge distraction to your goal. I will make this step clearer with a personal example from my diet. I wanted to quit sugar. Not because I was eating too much of it but because I wanted to adopt a healthier lifestyle in general. I told myself: “You will stop eating sugar for a week and then you will forget about it. Everything is in your head.” First day in my attempt and everything went great. No cravings at all. The second day my sugar craving started to kick in. The third day I was suffering. In the fourth day, I went to the bakery and bought a triple layer chocolate cake with vanilla frosting. Guilty.. What I realized was that quitting wasn’t the answer. The answer was substituting. And that’s what I did. I substituted sugar with other sweeteners, which are not considered harming, like xylitol and stevia. And it worked. Obviously, it was impossible to find bakeries that use those sweeteners but I became creative and starting baking my own sweets. I love chocolate pudding for instance. Do you know how easy it is to make chocolate pudding? Check out this recipe and replace sugar with xylitol or stevia (just be careful with the conversion because 1 cup Sugar = 1/8 cup Stevia). Simple as that. This is just one of the numerous examples where substitution of the craving makes the habit easier to break and create new ones. Eventually the new habit not only will replace the last one but it will also stop the craving in general because the new substances are not as addictive as the last ones. Step 4. Employ the 2-minute rule This is an amazing idea suggested by James clear in his article”How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the ‘2-Minute Rule.’” When it comes to habit-building tasks, the most difficult part is the take-off. That small timeframe in the beginning of the task until you get immersed in it and enter a state of flow. The idea behind this small but effective rule is that, whatever the situation you find yourself into, force yourself to stay in the task for at least two minutes, even if you find it extremely difficult to do so. For example: Want to write 1000 words every day? Start writing for two minutes and you will often find yourself writing without even thinking. Want to practice coding for an hour every day? Start coding for two minutes and you will often find yourself coding for more than an hour. Want to work out every day? Do a warm-up with push-ups for two minutes and you will get fired up for the rest of the training session. You get the general idea. The reason the two-minute rule is so powerful, is that these two minutes are enough to get your mind from a passive state to an active state. Once it gets into that state, anything is possible. Step 5. Monitor Your Progress. “What gets measured, gets managed.” –Peter Drucker If you want to improve on something, you need to monitor your progress and the behaviors that cause progress. Researchers call this “self-monitoring” — the process of tracking and analyzing your thoughts and actions to become more aware of how they impact your goals. If you’re not willing to do so, then you’re likely suffering from “The Ostrich Problem,” a phenomenon described by psychologists in England as the widespread tendency for people to avoid information about progress towards their goals. After all, it feels good to keep moving, and who wants the frustration of discovering that they’ve actually been driving in the wrong direction? Well in order to understand the importance of progress monitoring you need to understand the importance of
’t help them legally, this was a clever maneuver to get the historically conservative show (sort of like the Kohaku of China, I guess) to not want to bother with any of the drama. Furthermore, it allows SME to media play the shit out of this in Korea and say that they’ve won or whatever else. The downside, like has been mentioned before, is if the Chinese companies backing the duo don’t take much of a liking to this and attempt to strike back somehow, so we’ll see on that front. In the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t mean that much since SME still haven’t filed any legal stuff like I really wanted. But for a while there, this was looking a lot less like the SME/TVXQ/JYJ clusterfuck of years ago, and a lot more like a one-sided victory for Kris/Luhan. Now that SME has struck some kind of successful blow, maybe this leads to the fireworks down the road we all want. Here’s hoping.Bitcoin investors are still the minority when compared to the total investors worldwide, a recent Global Investor Survey by Monex Group has found. The study’s findings allude to the unknown nature of Bitcoin: “We asked retail investors about much-talked-about “virtual currency” such as Bitcoins. The results showed that the percentage of retail investors actually investing is still low, with only 3% of retail investors in Japan and the US, and only 10% of retail investors in China (Hong Kong) answering that they had already invested in virtual currency.” Investors in Japan more familiar with cryptocurrencies Around 20% of the total investors in both China and the US do not possess knowledge of cryptocurrencies. "The study also revealed that many in Japan are familiar with cryptocurrencies, yet they haven’t invested in them yet." Embracing Bitcoin With the developments in the value of Bitcoin, it is possible to see the number of existing investors grow over time. One of the key drivers of this prediction is that Japan has already legalized Bitcoin as an official currency, which can be used as a payment method for day to day purchases. Ethereum on the map Aside from Bitcoin, Ethereum is a strong contender, which has been rumored to potentially overtake Bitcoin’s position in the upcoming years. This is mainly due to the various ICO’s powered by the technology. While Bitcoin price has already skyrocketed and left behind many investors who were unable to capitalize on the rising trend, Ethereum appears to be the next logical choice. Given that Ethereum is still growing in value when compared to Bitcoin, it could be the perfect opportunity for people to get more familiar with cryptocurrencies and start with Ethereum.Image copyright UUP Image caption John and Jenny Palmer with Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt A former DUP councillor who quit the party after claiming she had been bullied has joined the Ulster Unionists along with her husband. In a joint statement, Jenny and John Palmer said it was like returning to the family home. Jenny Palmer told BBC Spotlight she had been ordered by a DUP special adviser to change the way she intended to vote at a Housing Executive Board meeting. A Stormont committee inquiry widened the gulf between her and the party. She left the DUP ahead of an internal disciplinary hearing. She and her husband, John, who's also a Lisburn councillor, say the Ulster Unionists leaving the executive was the factor in the decision to re-join the party. UUP leader Mike Nesbitt said there could be more like her. "They were previously members of the party, they're very, very welcome back and let me say so are others," he said. "We know there are others out there who are now looking to the Ulster Unionist Party as the way forward, because we have momentum, we have belief in ourselves and we have credibility with the electorate that we did not previously have." He added: "Politics is a rough and tumble game, we know that, but what Jenny, in particular, was subjected to by members of the DUP was way, way beyond the pale." 'UUP spin' In their statement, Mr and Mrs Palmer said they were looking forward to a "new beginning in politics". "Something that was an important factor in our decision was the courage shown by the Ulster Unionist Party," they added. They have led by example during what is a shocking state of affairs. "We look forward to playing our part in the Ulster Unionist team." Mrs Palmer told BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback programme that it was Mr Nesbitt's decision for the UUP to leave the Executive that made up the couple's minds. "Mike Nesbitt's announcement about walking away from the Executive I think was the trigger for saying well this is healthy, this is something I think that most people in Northern Ireland who have had so many years of it not working at Stormont would agree with," she said. "It was personally then that we decided that's the party we want to go to." Relations between the two main unionists parties appear to be rapidly worsening. This development will rub further salt in the wounds. In a statement, the DUP said: "This move has been expected for some time. The Palmers are in the right place as they've been working with the UUP long before today. "The timing of this announcement is further evidence that the UUP's actions in recent days are entirely about positioning the party for an election. "The unionist people want substance rather than UUP spin. They want responsible leadership rather than UUP stuntary."Given the inability of its election candidates to explain their party’s climate change policies, it is clear that the Coalition needs some help in defining Direct Action. When Greenway (NSW) candidate Jaymes Diaz last week was asked to explain Direct Action, the best he could come up with was “Green Army”, “planting real trees”, and “a solar panel.” On Monday, Wakefield (SA) candidate Tom Zorich couldn’t even get that far, saying in a debate doing the rounds on Youtube that “I haven’t got much to tell you about that”. That’s really not surprising, given that the Coalition policy chiefs are unable to explain the policy either, and will be looking for good ideas to make it work under an energy white paper that Greg Hunt will call for should the Coalition get elected next month. The one constant we do know about is the creation of Tony Abbott’s Green Army. The Coalition has allocated $300 million (yes, $300 million) to the Green Army, but what will its 15,000 members do? So far, the Coalition has suggested that it will be deployed to pick up litter, plant trees (real ones according to Diaz), and to build things like boardwalks in mangrove swamps. “The Green Army will march to the rescue of our degraded land and polluted waterways,” Tony Abbott said (with a straight face) at its re-launch in July. But what else could it do? We’d like your ideas of how the Green Army could be deployed. We’ll kick it off with a few ideas of our own, but we will really need your support to get to the goal of 101 great ideas. Please add here to comments, or tweet at #greenarmy. Turn back the boats: Two slogans in one, axe the tax, stop the boats. The Green Army could form an impenetrable barrier – either on land or at sea – to repel the invasion of asylum seekers Reduce ocean levels by forming a human chain with buckets: As cartoonist Alan Moir suggested in last week’s SMH, the Green Army could form a human chain and use buckets to reduce rising sea levels. Act as a mobile sea wall: To extend on Moir’s suggestion, and given that coastal erosion is one of the major threats to the Australian coastline, the Green Army could be deployed in brigades up and down the coast (or as a single force in worst hit areas) to stand in front of the ocean at king tides to protect vulnerable dunes. Act as a human solar tracker: If each of the members held one module each, that would equate to around 5MW of capacity. If they followed the sun from dawn to dusk, they could boost output by around 20 per cent, and get rainy days off. Given that the Coalition will likely scuttle the renewable energy target, the army and its mobile solar farm could be deployed to different states to give all Australians the benefit of utility-scale solar power. Chop down wind turbines: The Canberra Times cartoonist David Pope came up with his own suggestion last week, suggesting the Green Army could be used for chopping down wind turbines, given the hostility among many Coalition members, and aspiring members and advisors, to the deployment of wind energy. And now, over to you …… .@renew_economy suggestion for ‘101 uses for #greenarmy‘: explain climate science & renewable energy to politicians. http://t.co/L02x0BDiVv — hepburn wind (@hepburnwind) August 20, 2013 @renew_economy the green army could be issued with reflective overalls & aluminium foil hats to reflect the sunlight back into space. — Geoff Bragg – SEIA (@sunman_geoff) August 20, 2013 101 Uses for #GreenArmy @renew_economy: Mining sand & stockpiling ready for sandbag-filling deployments to #climatechange induced flood ops — Brent Hoare (@brenthoare) August 21, 2013Pancakes are my first food memory. I’m one of 8 kids (all girls, wrap your head around that) and one of about 27 cousins (I don’t even know the actual number) which made alone time with my grandparents really special. The spring after I turned 4, I spent a Saturday night in a My Little Pony sleeping bag on the floor of my Grandparents bedroom, falling asleep to a wall mounted TV playing Wheel of Fortune. When I woke up, my Grandpa (Papa) was already gone. He was an artist that had done quite a bit of the original artwork for the Madonna Inn, looked a lot like Desi Arnaz and had a heart of pure gold. My Grandma packed me into her 1980′s Cadillac with overstuffed seats that felt a lot like recliners and headed for the San Luis Obispo community center’s Pancake Sunday. My Papa was the “featured chef” and the hall was packed. My Grandma shuffled me past tables of seniors, wide eyed and waving at the tiny blond 4 year old. I was like a celebrity, I was Harry Tregarthen’s granddaughter and I was a “baby” to these ladies who just wanted to pick me up and squeeze my cheeks. My Grandma and I joined a round table with four other older ladies. “Your Papa makes the best pancakes, you know,” one of the ladies was actually talking to me, instead of about me, that was new for me as a 4 year old, “That’s why this place is so busy. Last weekend, when Sal was cooking, only half full. Today, standing room only!” I didn’t know what “standing room only” meant, but I knew it was good. “They must be good pancakes!” It’s all I could think to say, but the thing about being 4 is that as long as you form a coherent sentence and say it with enthusiasm, people laugh. And they did, these ladies were my crowd and I was on fire. “Do you know the secret ingredient is?” She asked, clearly as excited with the banter as I was. “Sugar?!” I said, because I’m 4, and that’s pretty much my life. I hit again, they were rolling. I could have mic dropped. Once she caught her breath the older lady let me in on the secret, “7-up! Can you believe it? Instead of milk!” I didn’t know how to make pancakes, or even that milk was a part of the process but I did like 7-UP. He was brilliant, I couldn’t believe it. He had put soda in pancakes?! At 4 years old, before I had even seen a recipe, let alone followed one, my Papa taught me that you should experiment. Break the rules, do your own thing. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that it was the carbonation that did it. The bubbles in a carbonated beverage gave a light and fluffy texture to the World Class Pancakes. I’ve graduated from soda to beer, but the effect is still the same. To bring that a step further, I whip the egg whites separate to give an ultimate light and fluffy texture with a slightly crispy outside.Tyre behavior warm-up phase (the firsts one or two laps) performance phase (depending on the compound, from 10 to 20-30 laps), degradation phase (depending on several factors, it can be very few laps), Give-up (in very short time). During the warm-up phase the tyre reach the optimal working temperature in its working range. The working range depends on the compound and other factors. Pirelli tyres for F1 2013 season have the following working ranges: Low Working Range Super Soft, 85-110 deg Medium, 90-115 deg Hard New, 90-115 deg (from Bahrain 2013 onward in the season) High Working Range Soft, 105-125 deg Hard, 110-135 deg The degradation phase occurs for wear, abrasion, graining and blistering and the lap time start to increase. It is time to make a pit-stop to change tyres. The give-up occurs when the cyclic stress reached the maximum acceptable level for the compound and construction. The combination of stress and heating generate mechanical and chemical changes in the rubber causing the lap time increasing sharply. Usually the car is called at the pit stop before this phase because it can cause tenths of retard on the pace. Weight effect (on lap time) The weight-effect is a value that expresses how faster the car run while the weight decrease because of the fuel burned. It is measured as seconds/lap/10 Kg. It can be estimated at the Lap Time Simulator (LapSim), an application running on a PC, with experiments at different level of fuel or just by fitting real data public available from FIA. The LapSim gives, for Australia 2013, a value for Weight Effect of 0.22 sec/lap/10kg. As alternative, the Weight Effect can be easily estimated by fitting real data. Let’s consider the real lap times from Australia 2013 F1 race from three drivers. The weight-effect is a value that expresses how faster the car run while the weight decrease because of the fuel burned. It is measured asIt can be estimated at the Lap Time Simulator (LapSim), an application running on a PC, with experiments at different level of fuel or just by fitting real data public available from FIA.The LapSim gives, for Australia 2013, a value for Weight Effect ofAs alternative, the Weight Effect can be easily estimated by fitting real data. Let’s consider the real lap times from Australia 2013 F1 race from three drivers. For comparison, if we take the best of the fitting cases above we get a Weight Effect of 0.0722 sec/lap. Knowing that the fuel consumption in Australia is somewhat as 2.5 kg/lap, the fitted Weight Effect will be 0.29 sec/lap/10kg, not so far from what we get from the more accurate simulation and not so bad considering the “noise” affecting the second measure. Going through a normalized value per 10 Kg is not really needed for this purpose but it is important to compare the weight effect of different race circuits. Race Strategy example Option-A and Option-B. Both options use the same sequence of tyres, SuperSoft/Medium/Medium. For comparison, if we take the best of the fitting cases above we get a Weight Effect of 0.0722 sec/lap. Knowing that the fuel consumption in Australia is somewhat as 2.5 kg/lap, the fitted Weight Effect will be, not so far from what we get from the more accurate simulation and not so bad considering the “noise” affecting the second measure.As a race strategy example, we want to compare two tyre management options for the Australia race, calledand. Both options use the same sequence of tyres, SuperSoft/Medium/Medium. Option-A do pit at lap 13 and lap 35. Option-B do pit at lap 17 and lap 38. The pit-stop time is the same in both cases (20 seconds) and the tyre model, very simple and just for the purpose of this demonstration, is based on the Weibull degradation formula. We calculate the lap time lap-per-lap for both options on the race distance including the weight reduction effect and the tyre behavior effect. Then we sum the lap times in order to have a cumulative curve for Option-A and Option-B and we make the difference, lap by lap, of the last two cumulative curves. Results are plotted on the next chart. By reading this chart, the conclusion is that at the end of the race, Option-A is slower of about 3.61 seconds respect to Option-B. Using this procedure, it is possible to play with different scenarios. During the race, simulated lap times are updated, lap by lap, with the real lap time and the scenario update in accordance. This is, in a very simplified way, what is behind a dynamic race strategy application. This tool is used trackside by the Performance Engineers with the support of the Strategy Engineer at remote garage, the facility located at the Team’s Headquarter. Such example is Neil Martin from Scuderia Ferrari, who has been known to update the team in terms of strategy via remote link from Italy. Making the right strategy call is, of course, very important. The recent example was Mark Webber in Hungary, 2013 - he had to start P10, running for a long period on Medium compound and eventually making it to P4 with very late usage of the Softs. Maurizio Bollini is the owner of MET Milano (www.met.it), a consultancy firm involved in motorsport. In the past he worked as engine engineer for Michael Schumacher when he was the Ferrari F1 driver, during 1996 to 2006. He can be contacted at maurizio.bollini@met.it. A given set of tyres is used in a race stint. During the utilization in the stint, the tyres go through four phase of life:Theis a window whose duration depends on the compound, the track characteristics and the car. For the softer tyres it could be somewhat like 10 laps, for harder tyres it could be in the range 20-30 laps. In this phase the tyres gives the best performance and so the lowest lap time.The Super Villain is back… Almost two years ago, I penned an article for URB Magazine detailing the pure shenanigans of MF DOOM and his concert antics. I’ve been patiently waiting for DOOM to return to the City of Wind to see this first hand, and last night I had that opportunity. Now, whenever DOOM is scheduled to headline a show, you have to be leery. Especially when Mos Def is the opener, which really doesn’t make sense if you think about it. Def to open for DOOM? What part of the game is that? This particular concert was originally scheduled for January 29th, but was pushed back until last night due to “scheduling” conflicts. Knowing DOOM, I figured some tomfoolery was at play. However, despite the new date and the always-present chance that DOOM would send a Doompostor, the Congress Theater was still sold out. It was busting at the seams packed. I haven’t seen the Congress so crowded since Nas’ 2006 ‘Hip Hop Is Dead’ show where be brought the casket on stage. To put it into perspective – the Snoop Doog, Method Man and Redman concert in November was about 25% of what this show was last night. A thousand white teens in tight jeans, indeed. The doors opened at 7pm sharp, and if you’ve ever been to the Congress, you know it’s standing room only (unless you’re in the balcony or skybox). There were a few opening acts including BBU and DJ Intel (who were both booed for no apparent reason), Qwel from Typical Cats, Mike Relm a San Fran trickster-DJ and Psalm One. The crowd was annoyed and rowdy and by Midnight, with no sign of DOOM or Def, they began throwing beers, cups, cans, bottles of water and whatever objects they could find on stage. I honestly thought we might have an E2 situation on our hands. I was just waiting for the moment where the promoter emerged to the stage to say the headliners weren’t coming on. It would’ve turned real ugly had that happened, but lo and behold, at 12:30 The Mighty Mos Def hit the stage. Mos came out donned in a DOOM-esque mask and began performing various DOOM songs. Confused but intrigued, I watched as Mos ran through his mostly-singing set, which, for the most part, included nothing from his early catalog. Mos’ set was pretty entertaining, and he must’ve performed 5 or 6 DOOM’s tracks and almost without warning, The Supervillain emerged from behind the curtain around 1:30am. DOOM and his 6’6″ 300lb hypeman took the stage as Mos made his exit and the crowd went absolutely apeshit. DOOM was in the building! Well, so they thought. The first thing I noticed about “DOOM” was that he was about 5’4″, and in no way shape or form was his microphone turned on. Also, as RTC pointed out, DOOM had a DJ, but this guy wasn’t doing anything but standing behind a laptop. These guys were performing over a CD! It may have been a recorded live show CD, but there was no instrumentals…It was straight album tracks. The only mic turned on onstage was the hypeman’s, who did adlibs and tried to get the crowd going – he was super obnoxious. Victor Von was draped in a gigantic parka jacket that hung to the floor, with his hood up, and mask on. The mic was constantly an inch from his mouth so you really couldn’t even tell if the impostor was lip-synching or not. Fans caught on and began pelting DOOM and his hypeman with bottles and cans. It was actually pretty hilarious. The DOOM character had absolutely no interaction with the crowd and didn’t speak once. After 15-20 minutes, the DOOMpostor decided he was finished and abruptly walked off stage as his hypeman thanked the crowd for coming out. Then came more boos and bottles from the crowd as the lights came on. No encore for the villain. I actually saw a kid from Shaumburg’s heart break when I told him it wasn’t really DOOM. He wept a little. The saga continues… Read: MF DOOM: Rap Snitch Knishes [URB Magazine ]Synopsis Chu Yang, the Ninth Master of the Nine Tribulations Sword, sacrificed almost everything he had for the sake of improving his martial arts, including the love of his life. After spending three years locating the fifth fragment of the Nine Tribulations Sword, he was ambushed by all sides at that very place. Mortally injured with no means of escape, Chu Yang executed a sacrificial technique by plunging the Nine Tribulations Sword into his very own heart. “With the blood of my heart, ten thousand tribulations will collapse!” After witnessing the death of all his ambushers, Chu Yang’s vision began to darken. At a distance, moments before his death, he saw the mastermind who had plotted his downfall — Mo Tian Ji. With that, his eyes finally closed. However, with a start, Chu Yang once again awoke to find that he had returned to when he was sixteen years of age! Furthermore, the Sword Spirit of the Nine Tribulations Sword now resided within his Dantian, the energy center of his body! From that very moment, Chu Yang would then begin to right all of his past regrets, and carve his very own legend by fulfilling his destiny as the final Master of the Nine Tribulations Sword, and defeating the Heavenly Devils beyond the realm of the Nine Heavens Continent.Card descriptions English English This weakened dragon can no longer fly, but is still a deadly force to be reckoned with. French French Ce dragon affaibli ne peut plus voler, mais il reste redoutable. German German Dieser geschwächte Drache hat seine Flugfähigkeit eingebüßt, stellt allerdings immer noch eine tödliche Bedrohung dar. Italian Italian Questo drago indebolito non può più volare, ma resta un avversario letale da affrontare in battaglia. Portuguese Portuguese Este dragão enfraquecido já não pode voar, mas ainda é uma força letal a ser reconhecida. Spanish Spanish Este dragón debilitado ya no puede volar, pero todavía es una fuerza mortal a tener en cuenta. Japanese Japanese 力が弱り、空を飛べなくなったドラゴン。しかしまだ攻撃は強い。 Chinese Chinese 力量弱小無法飛天的龍，但攻擊還是很強的。 The Eternal Duelist Soul This weakened dragon can no longer fly, but is still a deadly force to be reckoned with. The Sacred Cards A dragon that grew weak and became incapable of flying. In spite of that, it still retains its power of attacking.On the road to the World Cup 2012 Tweet Share this article The 9th edition of the the Electronic Sports World Cup will be taking place from July to October 2012 with the international qualifying phase, and from November 1st to 4th for the international Grand Final, organized for the second successive year during Paris Games Week, in Hall 1 at Porte de Versailles in Paris, France. Games titles have already been selected as official disciplines for the ESWC 2012: Starcraft 2 © Activision Blizzard, 1v1 on PC, real time strategy (RTS) © Activision Blizzard, 1v1 on PC, real time strategy (RTS) Dota 2 © Valve Software, 5v5 on PC, multiplayer battle arena (MOBA) © Valve Software, 5v5 on PC, multiplayer battle arena (MOBA) ShootMania Storm © Nadeo Ubisoft, 3v3 on PC, multiplayer action game (FPS) © Nadeo Ubisoft, 3v3 on PC, multiplayer action game (FPS) TrackMania Nations © Nadeo Ubisoft, 1v3 on PC, racing game simulation © Nadeo Ubisoft, 1v3 on PC, racing game simulation FIFA 13 © EA Sports, 1v1 on console, soccer simulation © EA Sports, 1v1 on console, soccer simulation Tekken™ Tag Tournament 2 © NAMCO BANDAI Games, 1v1 on console, versus fighting Beside the official competitions, the ESWC will feature additional tournaments during the Paris Games Week: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive © Valve Software, for international teams © Valve Software, for international teams Trackmania Canyon © Nadeo Ubisoft, for international players Additional games, tournaments or show matches may be announced in the coming weeks. The organization of the preliminary trials will be announced separately by territory. For France, there will be qualifying tournaments in September and October, and during the 2 first days of Paris Games Week (October 31st and November 1st).Published by Steve Litchfield at 9:23 UTC, January 2nd 2017 A source of mine, Robin [surname withheld], has produced an interesting slide, purporting to be from an upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 presentation, and interesting here on AAWP because it shows a very Continuum-like 'workspace' experience. Is this real? Maybe. Is it a Samsung-only thing? Probably. Will it work as seamlessly as Continuum under Windows 10 Mobile? Probably not, but your comments are welcome! There are several interesting things here, assuming that all this is for the Galaxy S8 and is going to be a real shipping 'experience'. The slide clearly shows a wired, connected solution, with the phone tethered to the monitor directly. Now, we've been able to connect smartphones directly to monitors in the past (e.g. here), but this is the first time that I've seen a non-Windows smartphone expand what's shown in the way depicted above, with a full desktop experience, multi-windowing, and so on. As to exactly what's going on here we can only guess. Mine is that the graphic, obviously a mock-up, shows one of the various multi-windowed implementations of Android - it's not at all clear how this ties in with Samsung's plans for TouchWiz, but it's conceivable that (perhaps inspired by Continuum) Samsung has engineered the OS to handle both single window phone use and multi-window desktop use depending on what's physically hooked up via USB Type C. Also shown is a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, presumably paired with the phone. Take this with a pinch of salt, of course, not least because this is AAWP and Continuum is almost certainly slicker and more mature, so this - if real - would be Samsung playing catch-up. PS. 'Multi-windowing' in Continuum is expected to appear very shortly in Insider builds of Windows 10 Mobile, on the Redstone 2 branch, destined to ship to production status phones in March/April.Arthur: We... We have a little...family tradition, Kyle, before we start...of saying what we're thankful for. I'll start. I'm thankful for this family. Pass your plates. Sally? Sally: I'm... I'm thankful for this lovely home...and for my son, who I am so proud of. Rebecca: Me too. Arthur: Is that all? Sally: And for my beautiful teenage daughter...who is growing up...so quickly. I am so blessed. Rebecca: I'm thankful that Mrs Wilder gave us an extra two days to finish our report on Aeschylus. And I'm also thankful for this nice home. Dexter: [Voiceover: Is this what it takes to survive with him?] Jonah: I'm thankful for this house too...and for God. Arthur: You know what I'm thankful for? My car... Dexter: I'm thankful for yams. Arthur: Yams? Dexter: Comfort food. Thank you all for the comfort of your home. Arthur: Where no one said they were thankful for me. Did you, Jonah? Did you say you were thankful for me, Jonah? What's that? Jonah: I did not say that I was thankful for you...because I'm not. Sally: I am so thankful for you, Arthur. Arthur: Shut up, cunt. Dexter: Whoa, Arthur... Arthur: Kyle, perhaps it's time for you to go. Dexter: I think I should stay. Jonah: Yeah, sure - stay. Watch the show. Rebecca: I'm thankful for you, Daddy... Arthur: Go to your room, Vera. Jonah: No! She's not Vera! And she's not your goddamn prisoner and she's not eight any more! This whole life... Your life is a lie! These are lies! F***ing community hero? Dexter: Jonah, this isn't the way. Jonah: I know what you really are! Arthur: Who am I? Jonah: You're a killer! Sucking the f***ing life out of all of us! Mom, Becca, me!In the early 1980s veteran pollster Stan Greenberg, conducted a focus group in Macomb County, a Detroit suburb, of former Democrats who had switched allegiance to the Republican Ronald Reagan. After he read a statement by Robert Kennedy about racial inequality, one participant interjected: "No wonder they killed him." "That stopped me and led to a whole new analysis of Reagan Democrats," wrote Greenberg in a recent report, Inside the GOP. "I realised that in trying to reach this group of people race is everything," he told me. While conducting a focus group with Republicans over the summer he had a similar revelation, although it came not from a sole outburst but almost throwaway comments, often left on cards after the session. As one man left his handout he half-joked: "It's probably digital, so you can check it on the NSA files." Another asked: "Now you're going to guarantee that what we put down here, we won't be getting a call from the IRS about an audit or anything like that?" Alongside this sense of being spied upon was relief that, in these Republican-only groups, they had found kindred spirits. "I'm not alone in the way I view things for the most part," wrote one on a postcard. "Not by myself in thought process," confided another. Those seeking to understand what drove the Republican party to shut down the government this month in a strategically disastrous move that laid bare its deep internal divisions – and ultimately led to humiliating defeat – could do worse than start here. The report reveals a sense of ideological, demographic and cultural siege, on the American right, from which there is no obvious escape. Unable to comprehend or process last year's election defeat, they feel the nation has become unmoored from its founding principles and is on a full-scale, unrelenting descent into chaos. Obama has been victorious in implementing socialism and the party they identify with has proved incapable of halting the decline, leaving them alienated not only from the country at large but one another. If it appears as though they are howling at the moon, it's because they feel all earthly options have been exhausted. Describing Ireland's economic and cultural transformation in his book The Deportees, Roddy Doyle wrote: "I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one." Many Republicans have precisely the same feeling. Central to this deep-seated sense of angst is race. In 2012, 92% of the Republican vote came from white people who, within 30 years, will no longer be in the majority. "They are acutely racially conscious," says Greenberg. "They are very aware that they are 'white' in a country that is becoming increasingly'minority'." Growing increasingly dependent on an ever-shrinking base, they see their electoral fortunes waning but are resistant to adapting their message to broaden their appeal beyond their narrow racial confines. Race is less the explicit target of their anxiety (issues such as affirmative action and civil rights no longer dominate) than the primary (if not exclusive) prism through which their political consciousness is being filtered. "Race," writes Greenberg, "is central to their worldview." There are three main ways in which this has been a factor in the recent government shutdown and Republican schisms. First is gerrymandering. Since race is one of the best predictors of voting behaviour, House congressional seats have been manipulated largely on racial grounds. Politicians at state level carve constituencies into odd and unlikely shapes, shuffling around various racial groups to protect incumbents. Both parties do this when they have the chance but Republicans, who run more state houses, have had more chance and have undertaken the task with much zeal and guile. As a result, in 2012 the Democrats won more votes nationally for Congress but still got fewer seats, giving the Republicans who shut down the government a fragile mandate. It also means incumbents need not fear losing their seats, leaving them able to act out. Second is the perceived beneficiaries of government spending. Republicans are more likely to regard intervention as being to support minorities rather than to support the poor. This goes not only for food stamps and welfare but also for Obamacare – which was the issue that initially sparked the shutdown. "Obamacare is a racial flashpoint for many evangelical and Tea Party voters," writes Greenberg. Their despair is largely rooted in the assumption that by championing programmes that disproportionately help minorities, Obama is effectively buying votes and securing a growing tranche of the electorate who will for evermore be dependent on government. One participant, echoing the views of many, said: "Every minority group wants to say they have the right to something, and they don't. It's life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't say happiness. You get to be alive and you get to be free. The rest of it's just a pursuit … you're not guaranteed happiness. You have to work for it." Finally, there is Obama – the black son of an African immigrant and white mother – who stands as an emblem for all this unease, personifying, in their minds, not only their political impotence today but their demographic irrelevance tomorrow. The word they're most likely to use to describe him is "liar". But their hostility goes beyond his policies and pronouncements to a deeply rooted suspicion of his authenticity. "[There] is a sense of him being foreign, non-Christian, Muslim – and they wonder what really are his motives for the changes he is advancing." As he moves into his second term, there is now an elision in the Republican mind between what they think he is (an immigrant, a fraudster, a non-American) and what they think he does (assist immigrants and fraudsters in contravention of American ideals). Their inability to craft a credible strategic response to these insecurities only serves to reinforce them. "You don't like a particular policy or a particular president?" taunted Obama last week. "Go out there and win an election." The trouble is Republicans can't because their racially charged rhetoric alienates minorities, leaving them more electorally isolated, prompting defeat – which leaves them ever more divided. Meanwhile, their reckless obstruction in Congress, which nearly triggered a default, makes the nation's descent into chaos more likely. Unable to come to terms with the country in which they live, they are complicit in creating the very future they most fear. Twitter: @garyyoungeJovani Alexander Caprio knew that his Delray Beach townhouse was filled with drugs and cash. But when he was asked by members of a Palm Beach County sheriff’s drug task force if they could check the home on the 100 block of Coconut Key Lane despite not having a warrant, Caprio agreed and even showed the agents inside the residence. Among the findings were around 40 pounds of marijuana, 15 pounds of marijuana edibles, 3 Glock handguns, cocaine and more than $300,000 in cash stashed inside safes and a vehicle. Two Rolex watches were also seized. » Get the latest breaking news at PalmBeachPost.com Caprio, 22, is facing charges of money laundering of $100,000 or more, marijuana trafficking, cocaine trafficking and possessing a property for trafficking, sale or manufacture of a controlled substance. He was released from the Palm Beach County Jail on Saturday after posting a $50,
There is still a huge appetite for big commercial triple A titles if you get it right - look at GTA V. But obviously developers are looking at other ways to monetise and I think that will carry on. The HD conundrum There have also been technical questions over the Xbox One hardware, with several early multiplatform titles running in full 1080p HD definition on PlayStation 4, but only 720p resolution on Xbox 360. “Let’s be clear about this: Xbox One fully supports 1080p at 60 frames-per-second,” said Eagle. “Forza Motosport 5 is an example of a game that delivers on that. It’s up to individual developers to determine what is the best balance in order to deliver the best experience to gamers. No longer can you measure or talk about power in terms of pixels and polygon counts. Performance in this era comes from three areas: hardware, software and the cloud. “The reason the Titanfall beta has been so successful is that it is powered by dedicated servers – that makes the game run smoothly without interruptions. You need to think about what power really means in the next generation.” “We’re committed to allowing developers getting the maximum out of the investment that we’ve made,” said Eagle. “We said at launch that we’d built a server farm of 300,000 dedicated servers to support multiplayer games - it would be foolish of us not to work with developers to ensure they get the maximum from that power.” As for forthcoming games, Eagle has said that Microsoft understands the importance of original and exclusive content – as well as supporting the indie development community – and predictably promises that more will be announced at the E3 video game exhibition in Los Angeles in June. “Look out for some very exciting game announcements, both from Microsoft studios and also our third-party partners... We’re very excited about E3.” • Xbox One gets price cut to £399 – with free copy of Titanfall “We’ve made some exclusive announcements, including Project Spark, Kinect Sports Rivals and Sunset Overdrive,” he said. “There will also be a significant pipeline of new games coming from Microsoft studios, some of which have been announced, some you’ll hear about at E3.“Look out for some very exciting game announcements, both from Microsoft studios and also our third-party partners... We’re very excited about E3.” So will other developers, outside of exclusive deals and first-party studios, be supported in using Microsoft’s vast server network to ensure multiplayer games run as smoothly?Once upon a time, Alex Rodriguez wanted nothing to do with the Yankees. Perhaps it was just a negotiating ploy; perhaps he had no desire to come to Derek Jeter’s team and play another position. But that he wanted no point of the Yankees is what he said on November 3, 2000. “I would like to sign with another team and help dethrone the Yankees — they’ve won too much already,” the then 25-year-old said as teams prepared to bid on him. “I like playing shortstop and I’m young. I want to play it until I’m 35, and then I’ll study the possibility of being moved.” Well, as the saying goes, the best laid plans of A-Rod often go astray. Just three years later and to escape a $250 million contract, the Texas Rangers shipped the short stop to New York in a deal for Joaquin Arias and Alfonso Soriano. By the time he turned 29, A-Rod would no longer be a short stop, and he would be on those damned Yankees, playing for the team that’s won too much already and helping them win even more. As far as all of that True Yankee™ hoodoo voodoo goes, A-Rod earned his stripes years ago on the day the Yanks acquired him. There is no rite of passage. Since arriving in the Bronx, he’s won two MVP awards, destroyed the Twins in the playoffs, destroyed the Angels in the playoffs and even found a way to knock in a few runs against the Phillies. As the Yankees won the World Series in 2009, he was grinning like a little boy. The overpaid and unclutch prima donna, as the media likes to label him, had finally captured that elusive ring. At 33, just two years younger than when he expected to be moved from short, A-Rod the third baseman was the king. This year marks A-Rod’s seventh full year with the Yankees. He’s already far surpassed the number of games he played with the Rangers and topped his Seattle totals in early 2009. He’s hit 255 home runs as a Yankee, 99 more than he hit in three years with the Rangers and 66 more than he hit with the Mariners. He’s driving in 803 runs; he’s scored 726; and he’s within spitting distance of 1100 hits. Doesn’t it seem as though he just got here? Meanwhile, as A-Rod’s career totals climb, his place amongst the team’s historical leader boards does as well. His 255th Yankee home run tied him with Jorge Posada for seventh all time among Yankees. Only Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra and Bernie Williams have hit more. His career Yankee slugging percentage is behind only Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio. Those are some historic names. But the image many in New York — and especially in the media and especially at ESPN New York — have of A-Rod is one of a hired gun. He’s the mercenary brought in by Brian Cashman to stymie the Red Sox and act as the interloper. He’s the guy who isn’t Derek Jeter. He doesn’t have a pristine image as Jeter does. He isn’t a tried-and-true Yankee, drafted by the team out of high school. He doesn’t have five World Series rings and legions of swooning fans. He says the wrong thing at the wrong time and continues to put his foot into his mouth at seemingly every opportunity. That isn’t the A-Rod I see though. I see someone blessed with extraordinary talent and a lot of money who doesn’t know how to fit in quite as well as some of his peers. I see a baseball player who pushes himself to be the best that he can be and gets frustrated when he isn’t playing up to his standards. I see a player who tries to deliver on every pitch but can’t hit a five-run home run when he wants to. He’s A-Rod; he’s a Yankee; he fits with the team. From now until the end, he’s with us, faults and all, good times and bad. It’s also not the team I see either. A-Rod might be the highest paid player; Jeter might be the captain. But as the two play out their mid-30s, time is, inevitably, passing them by. The young guns — Nick Swisher, Robinson Cano, Mark Teixeira — are the big run producers who hit the flashy home runs. Still, as A-Rod has shown and as Jeter has shown, they’ll still come through when the team needs them. They’re not done yet with their great moments. With all of the good A-Rod brings, though, definitely comes the bad. Thanks to an overzealous move by Hank Steinbrenner, the Yankees will be paying Rodriguez exorbitant amounts of money until he’s far too old. During his age 38 season in 2014, he’ll earn $25 million; during his age 39 season, he’ll take home $21 million; and from ages 40-41, the Yankees are on the hook for a total of $40 million plus the historic home run milestone incentives. That’s a lot of money for a guy hitting.264/.334/.473. and on pace for just 26 home runs, his lowest total since 1997. His hip has been a nagging issue for two years, and he has been showing signs of the inevitable decline. It happens to the greats. But as he sits on 600, A-Rod’s baseball prowess should be admired. His 600th was a swing for the tape, that majestic arc, that no-doubter reminiscent of the two-run blast he shot off of Joe Nathan in Game 2 of the ALDS. It was vintage A-Rod with a long wait, a great payoff and one relieved baseball player at the end of it, just as it was at the end of the World Series, just as it always is with Alex Rodriguez.Office Leaks, a new online forum for discussing, condemning and otherwise straight-up insulting your co-workers, bosses and work environment, may seem like it is inviting a whole lot of hate and reckless gossip. After all, it offers a space for users to write whatever they want about their companies with little fear of reprisal. But that is not what it is meant to be, founder and CEO Ryan Masanz maintains. "It's a place where people can speak their piece and not be afraid to do it," he says with some conviction, threat of slander be damned. Office Leaks hopes to be a "Water Cooler 2.0," where employees can digitally gather around their laptops and QWERTily whisper about their company's policy -- or current management, air conditioning temperature or whatever -- a place where they can vent without fear that their boss or an office snitch is listening in, according to Masanz. That protective shield of anonymity is key to Office Leaks' success, Masanz says: Registration requires nothing but an email address, which then goes through one-way encryption so that not even Office Leaks employees know who is posting what. Subpoenaing this information would be impossible, the CEO says, since Office Leaks does not log any information at all from its users. As a website, Office Leaks is fairly straightforward. Users sign up with an email address and choose the company they work for. After selecting a cartoon avatar to represent themselves, Office-Leakers have two options: They can post a new thread about whatever is on their mind: Or they can scroll down to see "What's New" in their company, what their co-workers are discussing, debating and commiserating about: For Office Leaks to work as an advocacy site -- its best-case outcome -- anonymity is paramount, of course. But what about the worst-case outcome, when anonymity becomes not protection for the brave, but a hiding place for the mean and weak -- the kind of anonymity that former Facebook marketing director Randi Zuckerberg says "has to go away"? When I first saw Office Leaks, I was instantly reminded of JuicyCampus. Shuttered in 2009, JuicyCampus was an anonymous online forum for college students that was overrun and undone by personal attacks, rampant name-calling and horrific rumor-mongering. But where JuicyCampus was never anything more than a trashy gossip site, Masanz says that OfficeLeaks aims to be something more civilized: a place for "activism, whistle-blowing, blowing off some steam, general chatter" and yes, "some gossip." "Out of 500 threads submitted so far," Masanz said with a trace of pride, "only two have had to be deleted." Masanz said that the website's next release will have "flags" that users can select for inappropriate content and the option for a companies to become moderators of their own sites (which gives them the ability to make all of the related posts private and to send in threads for review to Office Leaks' internal moderators -- but doesn't allow them to delete the threads themselves) for a fee of $100 per month. Though posts on Office Leaks are set to private by default, users can choose to make their posts public for all to see (if their company's network has not been set to total privacy by its sponsor). Where Masanz got the idea for OfficeLeaks says a lot about what he hopes the website will grow into, and why he argues that it will never become a JuicyCampus. Brainstormed in late 2010 and launched to the public on April 1, 2011, the site was inspired by two events, one personal and one national: First, the Wisconsin Right-to-Work Saga of early 2011, which Masanz says would have benefited from a portal for union supporters and sympathetic government officials to anonymously supply each other with vital information. Second, by a more personal incident. Masanz's mother found out that one of her best friends going to be fired, but she was not allowed to inform her friend, even though the friend was planning on taking out a mortgage under the assumption that she had job security, Masanz said. Masanz said he started work on OfficeLeaks immediately after that happened. If Office Leaks takes off, could Masanz become the target of criticism by his own employees on his own site?: "I don't know what to expect, but it certainly has been in the back of my mind," he laughed, before again becoming serious: "I really do believe in free speech, and I'm not trying to hurt any company. I'm just trying to put a light on the issues they wouldn't otherwise see."Director's Note “GDP. I grew up hearing that phrase on the radio at the top of the hour and 30 minutes after, or as close as the news could get to it. ‘GDP.’ ‘Dow Jones Industrial Average.’ ‘Consumer Price Index.’ ‘Trickle Down.’ Those were all words jumbled together at the end of the news, almost as an afterthought. It signaled to me the news was over and another Journey song was about to come on. I never really paid attention and just hoped the Journey song was not ‘Open Arms.’ I was thrilled when Morgan asked me to participate in the WE THE ECONOMY series. I teamed up with Adam Davidson who made GDP exciting and figured this might be an opportunity to enlighten other folks out there about the economy. Hopefully, some kid like myself listening to the radio will now have a better understanding of what the news is talking about between Journey and Katy Perry songs and be able to do something about it.”Terrorists Don't Act Alone Wolves are not born in a vacuum, they are born in packs. In fact, the term 'lone wolf,' is a misnomer--self-radicalization does not exist. Radical Islamists recruit in social environments such as radical mosques, social media chat rooms and radical schools and neighborhoods, just to name a few. Sophisticated groupthink and manipulation techniques are used to brainwash recruits into believing that killing infidels, or non-believers, is honorable. Promises such as 72 virgins, forgiveness for family members, along with payment for martyrs, provide incentives for terrorism. But the most effective inducement is the radical Islamist ideology that most terrorists espouse. Packs of new recruits are trained together by using social processes that create a competitive environment. Ego plays a part in trying to one-up one another, thereby escalating the violence and hatred towards the infidel, the unbeliever. Social psychologist Albert Bandura reported that violence is "socially determined." Radicalization occurs in this type of environment, not in secluded basements of a parents' home. Immediately following a terrorist attack, one of the first queries is whether a terrorist acted alone. According to Fox News, it is estimated that there are 23,000 jihadists, and 20,000 people who are a residual risk in the U.K. today. The current Manchester murder investigation is uncovering the fact that recruits are embedded in a jihadi network, plotting terror attacks, even though it may seem as though they are acting alone. As the Manchester investigation proceeds, it has been reported that after seventeen raids, eleven suspects have been arrested. Perhaps some of those raids have uncovered underground social groups in addition to links to Libya and other networks. The web of Islamist terrorism is connected worldwide, radicalizing foot soldiers much faster than law enforcement can keep up. In this case, the terrorist Salman Abedi, was on New Scotland Yard's radar screen before his attack at the Ariana Grande concert, but could not be arrested without probable cause. Until Abedi targeted and killed the young teens as they exited the Manchester arena, (seats up to 21,000 fans), no crime had been committed. To arrest a known wolf, clear evidence of an attack must be found--and clearly, jihadis are taking advantage of this freedom. Author Patrick Poole coined the phrase, 'known wolves,' to describe these jihadis. The tangled web of jihad is not always visible underneath the mask of "known wolves." Dozens of websites teach prospective jihadis how to build sophisticated explosive devices. Al-Qaeda created Inspire, an online magazine which describes in gruesome detail how to build suicide bombs. The Anarchist Cookbook, is another site with chat rooms where prospective jihadis can share information in a social setting and learn how to build an IED, (Improvised Explosive Device,) using household items such as pressure cookers. Violence is the primary vehicle for communication in radical Islamism. The more death, the stronger the message. The jihadists' ultimate goal is to enforce Sharia law worldwide. The brutal attack in Manchester tacitly spoke of the Islamist disdain for loud music, unescorted young girls, and forbidden dress, displaying non-compliance with Sharia law. Islamist terrorists are fond of symbolism and this heartbreaking and brutal attack occurred on May 22, two months to the day after British terrorist Khalid Masood attacked the reins of power in the United Kingdom. Dozens of young teens' lives were cut short and over 63 innocent youths wounded in the jihadi-martyrdom bombing claimed by ISIS. We should prepare for more attacks along the horizon, especially on national holidays. Islamic radicalization is an extreme political doctrine submitting to the tenets of jihad through the socialization from an archaic interpretation of Sharia law. When innocent bystanders and children are savagely attacked, as they were in Manchester, we are reminded that we are in a battle to defend our civilization against barbarism. The justification for these attacks stems from the extreme jihadi ideology that uses references from the Qu'ran, as a political tool. Extremist fundamentalists reminded us once again, that Salafi-jihadism is not compatible with freedom and democracy. Terror, as an instrument for political change, attacks the very foundations of our democracies and Western values. We are all victims of a subversive radical Salafist ideology, from Manchester to London, to New York to Tel Aviv to Paris and beyond. We must stand together to eradicate our common enemy that rejects freedom in favor of a militant totalitarian belief system. Radical Islamists are masters of manipulation by using a recruiter, a plan, and a radical ideology to indoctrinate their followers. This must be stopped. There must be a way to stop known wolves, before they act. What Can Be Done? With all due respect to Prime Minister Theresa May, vigilance and more security services will not be enough to keep Britons safe. Terrorists must be acknowledged, delegitimized, and demonized. President Donald Trump on his recent Middle East tour stated, "drive them out." Every country, including the Arab and Muslim countries, must be a part of the solution, especially because the victims of Islamism are often Muslims themselves. President Trump called for NATO countries to attack the terrorist hubs and "drive them out of this world." If the Islamist soldiers come to realize that they are pawns in a violent game, dying as collateral damage for radical Sharia, would they continue to steal young lives, including their own? What if the media demonized, discredited and disregarded terrorist acts? Or if anti-Islamist Muslims discouraged violent extremism as a farce with fools-gold rewards after death? The U.S. must learn from Europe's mistakes and create stronger border control, tighten immigration laws, stand strong against radical Islamic lobbies, and protect our Constitutional freedoms. That is only the beginning. The number one job of the British Prime Minister and the President of the United States is to keep our countries safe and secure. Citizens must demand answers about what our leaders are doing to make it so. Valerie Greenfeld is the author of Backyard Caliphate: Radicalization in our Neighborhood. Visit her blog at backyardcaliphate.weebly.com.The City of Toronto could leave itself open to a Charter challenge if council turns down an application to relocate a men's shelter in Oakwood Village, according to a legal opinion put forward by the shelter's lawyers. The opinion is that not allowing Cornerstone Baptist Tabernacle to move the 50-bed shelter from its former location on St. Clair West could violate the Charter rights of the shelter's clients. The paper, written by Andrea Wobick of the firm Ursel Phillips Fellows Hopkinson, says Cornerstone is prepared to consider "the full gambit of legal options at its disposal" if the application to relocate the shelter is denied. The shelter had operated on St. Clair Avenue West for 14 years but a recent sale of the property has forced Cornerstone to find a new location. A group of residents is opposing the proposed relocation to 616 Vaughan Rd., which is near the corner of Oakwood Avenue. They say a shelter is a poor fit with the neighbourhood, which has struggled in recent years with drug activity and other issues. Andrew Ross, chair of the Oakwood Village Community Association, spoke about the proposed shelter relocation earlier this month on CBC Radio's Metro Morning. He described the area as "vulnerable" and said adding a homeless shelter could reverse recent improvements in the neighbourhood. But not every Oakwood Village resident is opposed to the plan. In a CBC interview, local resident Sue Sneyd said blocking the shelter's move would set a bad precedent for the city. Cornerstone's offer to buy the Vaughan Road property expires at the end of the month and is conditional on council's approval. The last council meeting of the term got underway today. The meeting is expected to take four days and will be the last meeting ahead of the Oct. 27 municipal election. If the shelter's relocation is not approved by this council, the Vaughan Road property will go back on the market on Sept. 3.This weekend only, from Friday November 21st 10AM PST until Monday November 24th 10AM PST, all Standing, Hanging, and Mounted Cockpit items are buy-one-get-one-free of that same type! All you have to do is go to your 'Mech Cockpit Loadout, select the Standing, Hanging, or Mounted item of your choice, save the customization, and purchase it with MC. Then, every hour at 10 past the hour, our database will automatically add a duplicate of that purchase to your inventory. So if it doesn't show up right away, don't worry.* We're not stopping there, though. We realize we just added some delicious new Cockpit items in the last patch, and some sweet-toothed players snapped them up right away! So, to show some love for "early-waffle-adopters", we're enacting a program called "Retro-active Waffles". Anyone who purchased one of the new Cockpit items (Parking Permit, Sparkling Wine bottle, Lucky Cat, Luminglass, and Strawberry Waffles) between Tuesday November 18th 10AM PST and November 24th 10AM PST will be getting an additional identical Cockpit item free! * If the second identical Cockpit item doesn't show up after two hours from the original purchase, please contact support with the subject heading "Missing Free Cockpit Item"Microsoft has released a new tool ‘NetCease’ to help security teams in protecting corporate networks from the reconnaissance of attackers. The tool, named “NetCease,” is developed by Tal Be’ey and Itai Grady of the Microsoft’s ATA (Advanced Threat Analytics) research team. The tool is made available on Microsoft’s TechNet Gallery, but it is not official. The tool is available under the default license terms for “Software on Documentation Portals”. NetCease is a small PowerShell script that must be executed once on a domain controller or each server to protect them from attacks. Since it is a script, its source code is also available. During the monitoring phase of an attack, hackers collect information that allows them to move from compromised device to other machines on the victim’s network. Specifically, the attackers need to identify computers they access and its privileged users. Once the target is identified, attackers can use the NetSessionEnum (NSE) function to attain information about sessions created on domain controllers or on other servers. NSE can be executed by any authorized user and provide information such as IP address and device name, the length of session, and the username that created a session. This technique has already been used in various attacks and it has been integrated into famous penetration testing tools such as BloodHound and PowerSploit. Any domain user, by default, is allowed to start the NSE method remotely. The default permissions can only be changed through manual editing of a registry key. Be’ery and Grady created NetCease to make it easy for administrators to modify these permissions and make it difficult for malicious attackers to obtain information needed for moving laterally within the network. The researchers explained, “The NetCease script hardens the access to the NetSessionEnum method by removing the execute permission for Authenticated Users group and adding permissions for interactive, service and batch login sessions,” “This will allow any administrator, system operator and power user to remotely call this method and any interactive/batch/service login session to call it locally.” The tool is released as a preview for the upcoming Black Hat Europe session where Grady and Be’ery will demonstrate what they term as “offensive cyber defense” methods.Microsoft Office 2010 (codenamed Office 14[6]) is a version of the Microsoft Office productivity suite for Microsoft Windows.[1] Office 2010 was released to manufacturing on April 15, 2010,[1] and was later made available for retail and online purchase on June 15, 2010.[7] It is the successor to Office 2007 and the predecessor to Office 2013. Research and development of Office 2010 began in 2006, before the release of its predecessor.[8] Office 2010 introduces user interface enhancements including a Backstage view that consolidates document management tasks into a single location. The ribbon introduced in Office 2007 for Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word is the primary user interface for all apps and is fully customizable in Office 2010.[9][10][11] Other new features include extended file format support;[6] co-authoring features that enable multiple users to share and simultaneously edit documents;[12] OneDrive and SharePoint integration;[12] and security improvements such as Protected View, a read-only, isolated sandbox environment to protect users from potentially malicious content.[13] It also debuted Office Online—formerly Office Web Apps—a collection of free web-based versions of Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Word.[14][15][16] Office Starter 2010, a new edition of Office, replaced Microsoft Works.[17][18][19] Office Mobile 2010, an update to Microsoft's mobile productivity suite, was released on May 12, 2010 as a free upgrade from the Windows Phone Store for Windows Mobile 6.5 devices with a previous version of Office Mobile installed.[20][21][22] Office 2010 is the first version of Office to ship in two variants for IA-32 and x64,[23][24] but the x64 version is not compatible with Windows XP or Windows Server 2003.[25][26] It is also the first version to require product activation for volume license editions.[27][28] Office 2010 supports Windows XP SP3, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Vista SP1, or a later version. It is the last version of Office compatible with Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 as its successor, Office 2013, does not support these operating systems.[29][30][31][32] Reception to Office 2010 was generally positive, with critics praising the new Backstage view interface, the new customization options for the ribbon, and the incorporation of the ribbon into all apps.[33][34] While sales were initially lower than those of its predecessor,[35] Office 2010 was a success for Microsoft and surpassed the company's previous records for adoption,[36] deployment,[36] and revenue.[37] As of December 31, 2011, approximately 200 million licenses of Office 2010 were sold,[38] before its discontinuation on January 31, 2013.[39] Mainstream support for Office 2010 ended on October 13, 2015; extended support will end on October 13, 2020.[40] History and development [ edit ] Development started in 2007 while Microsoft was finishing work on Office 12, released as Microsoft Office 2007. The version number 13 was skipped because of the fear of the number 13.[8] It was previously thought that Office 2010 (then called Office 14) would ship in the first half of 2009.[41] On April 15, 2009, Microsoft confirmed that Office 2010 would be released in the first half of 2010. They announced on May 12, 2009, at a Tech Ed event, a trial version of the 64-bit edition.[42][43] The Technical Preview 1 (Version: 14.0.4006.1010) was leaked on May 15, 2009.[44] An internal post-beta build was leaked on July 12, 2009. This was newer than the official preview build and included a "Limestone" internal test application (note: the EULA indicates Beta 2).[45] On July 13, 2009, Microsoft announced Office 2010 at its Worldwide Partner Conference 2009. On July 14, 2009, Microsoft started to send out invitations on Microsoft Connect to test an official preview build of Office 2010.[46] On August 30, 2009, the beta build 4417 was leaked on the internet via torrents.[47] The public beta was available to subscribers of TechNet, MSDN and Microsoft Connect users on November 16, 2009.[48] On November 18, 2009, the beta was officially released to the general public at the Microsoft Office Beta website, which was originally launched by Microsoft on November 11, 2009 to provide screenshots of the new office suite.[49] Office 2010 Beta was a free, fully functional version and expired on October 31, 2010.[50] In an effort to help customers and partners with deployment of Office 2010, Microsoft launched an Office 2010 application compatibility program with tools and guidance available for download.[51] On February 5, 2010, the official release candidate build 4734.1000 was available to Connect and MSDN testers. It was leaked to torrent sites.[52] A few days after, the RTM Escrow build was leaked. Microsoft announced the RTM on April 15, 2010, and that the final version was to have speech technologies for use with text to speech in Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Word. Office 2010 was to be originally released to business customers on May 12, 2010,[53] however it was made available to Business customers with Software Assurance on April 27, 2010, and to other Volume Licensing Customers on May 1.[54] MSDN and TechNet subscribers have been able to download the RTM version since April 22, 2010. The RTM version number is 14.0.4763.1000.[55][56] On June 15, 2010, Office 2010 reached general availability.[57][58] Service packs [ edit ] Service pack Version number Release date Service Pack 1 (SP1) 14.0.6029.1000[59] November 17, 2010[60] Service Pack 2 (SP2) 14.0.7015.1000[59] April 8, 2013[61] Microsoft released a total of two service packs for Office 2010 that were primarily intended to address software bugs. Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Service Pack 2 (SP2) were released concurrently with updates for additional products such as Office Online, SharePoint, and SharePoint Designer.[60][61] On November 17, 2010, Microsoft invited a select number of testers at the Microsoft Connect web portal to test the beta release of SP1.[62][63] SP1 was officially released by Microsoft on June 27, 2011 and included compatibility, performance, security, and stability improvements. SP1 is a cumulative update that includes all previous updates, as well as fixes exclusive to its release;[60][64] a list of exclusive fixes was released by Microsoft.[65] SP1 also introduced additional features for Access, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. As examples, OneNote 2010 SP1 introduced the ability to open notebooks stored in OneDrive directly from within the app itself, while Outlook 2010 SP1 introduced Office 365 support.[64] With its release, the use of Office Online in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 9 was officially supported by Microsoft for the first time.[66] On April 8, 2013, a beta build of Office 2010 SP2 was released.[67] SP2 was a cumulative update officially released on July 16, 2013 and included all of the previously released compatibility, performance, stability, and security fixes, as well as numerous exclusive fixes;[61] a list of fixes exclusive to SP2 was released by Microsoft.[68] Microsoft claimed that with the release of SP2, Office 2010 would feature improved compatibility with Internet Explorer 10, Office 2013, SharePoint 2013, and Windows 8.[61][69] Because SP2 is cumulative, SP1 is not a prerequisite for its installation.[70] New features [ edit ] User interface [ edit ] In both its client apps and its Internet implementation, the design of Office 2010 incorporates features from SharePoint and borrows from Web 2.0 ideas.[71][72][73] Office 2010 is also more "role-based" than previous versions, with specific features tailored to employees in "roles such as research and development professionals, sales people, and human resources."[73] Backstage view [ edit ] The Info tab on the navigation pane of the Backstage view displaying an overview of the current document alongside management tasks in Word 2010. A new Backstage view interface replaces the Office menu introduced in Office 2007 and is designed to facilitate access to document management and sharing tasks by consolidating them within a single location.[74] In theatre, backstage refers to the area behind the stage where behind the scenes activities and preparations commence; the Backstage view is accordingly an interface dedicated to activities and preparations before saving or sharing a document.[75] It consists of both a left-hand navigation pane and an adjacent main pane. The navigation pane includes a series of vertically arranged common commands to open or save files and tabs that, when opened, expose document management tasks and contextual information within the main pane.[74][76] A customizable number of recently opened documents can also be displayed within the navigation pane.[77] Tasks that are accessed via tabs in the main pane are categorized into separate groups that display contextual information related to app configurations, files, and tasks; each tab displays contextual information relevant to that tab. On the Info tab in Word, for example, document metadata details are displayed within the Prepare for Sharing group to inform users of potentially personal information before the file is shared with other users,[78] whereas the Help tab displays Office version information and product licensing status.[79] In Office 2007, this information was included within separate locations.[78][79] From the Info tab, users can access revisions of currently open Excel, PowerPoint, and Word documents, as well as the latest unsaved version of a document that was previously closed.[80] Within the Print tab, the Backstage view also combines the previously separate print and print preview features by displaying printer tasks, settings, and a zooming user interface to preview the currently open document.[81] The Backstage view, like the ribbon, is extensible; developers can add their own commands, tabs, tasks, and related information.[82][83][84] File tab [ edit ] The new File tab replaces the Office button introduced in Office 2007 and offers similar functionality. The previous Office button—a round button adorned with the Microsoft Office logo—had a different appearance from the ribbon tabs in the Office 2007 interface and was positioned away from them, with a target that extended toward the upper left corner of the screen in accordance with Fitts's law.[77][85] Microsoft has stated that this button enhanced the usability of Office, but many users saw it as "branding decoration, rather than a functional button." As a result, in Office 2010 it was replaced with a File tab that appears next to the other tabs in the ribbon instead of the upper left-hand corner of the screen.[77] The File tab is colored on a per-app basis (e.g., it is colored orange in Outlook). Opening the File tab displays the new Backstage view.[86] Pasting options gallery [ edit ] Office 2010 introduces a pasting options gallery on the ribbon, in the context menu, and in the object-oriented user interface that replaces the Paste Special dialog box and Paste Recovery feature seen in previous versions of Office. The gallery introduces Live Preview effects to the paste process when users position the mouse cursor over an option in the gallery so that the result of the process can be previewed before it is applied to the document; a tooltip with an associated description and keyboard shortcut for that option will also appear. If users position the mouse cursor over a gallery option in the context menu, the rest of the context menu becomes transparent so that it does not obstruct preview results within the document. To facilitate keyboard-based paste operations, users can navigate the gallery by using the arrow keys on a keyboard or press Ctrl after pressing Ctrl + V to display gallery options. Gallery options change based on the content in the clipboard and the app into which the content is pasted.[87] Ribbon improvements [ edit ] The ribbon interface, introduced in Office 2007, is fully customizable and included in all apps in Office 2010.[9][10] Users can add or rename custom ribbon tabs and groups, add additional commands to the default tabs, and hide tabs that are not used. Users can also export or import any customization changes made to the ribbon to facilitate backups, deployment, or sharing, or reset all ribbon customizations.[88] The ribbon was also updated with a visible interface option to minimize it, which leaves only the tabs exposed.[89] After the launch of Office 2010, Microsoft provided free downloads for customized ribbons with a new "Favorites" tab that consolidated various commands based on customer feedback in regards to the most frequently used commands in Office; the customized ribbons were available as separate downloads for Access
, easy-to-overlook way of othering them. You often find this sort of thing with skin colors written by white authors. Some authors liken non-white characters to food, which is very weird and dehumanizing. I even wrote a piece about that topic. Having a beta reader who is sensitive to these topics is one good way to avoid these problems. However, no beta reader will be able to catch everything, and everyone walks in with their own prejudices. Also, it puts the onus on that beta reader to do your social due diligence. Often I find writers fall back on beta readers as a shield. “I had a black beta reader who would have caught it if it was racist.” Um, no. That’s not how it works. And it’s ultimately your responsibility as the author, not the beta reader’s. Your name’s on that cover. Instead of relying on your beta readers (which are super valuable, mind you,) you should comb your draft for descriptive references which are ultimately irrelevant and only seek to describe the way characters are superficially different. Readers are clever, and will imagine how characters might look or sound based on their backgrounds and contexts. Instead of telling me about your Sri Lankan character’s accent, add some depth to the character. Add context. Show me who she is, and why that matters. In the end, does her accent add anything of value to the story that the specifics of her cultural identity won’t do better? Now You Can Consider Writing Them Intentionally So really, the difference here is that you want to avoid microaggressions as the writer, but you can use them within the narrative as a storytelling tool. To avoid things like racism, sexism, and bigotry is a choice you can make, but if you’re trying to present a realistic world, minor issues like microaggressions can go a long way without being too overbearing. But you really need two things to make microaggressions in the narrative work. The first is context, and the second is introspection or examination. By context, I mean that the microaggression needs to be contextually sound, and serve a function. Just throwing slurs and random hostility into your book is going to fall flat, and reek of the kind of edgy nonsense that won’t attract anyone sensitive to these issues. If I see racism in a book that doesn’t serve to build upon the narrative framework, if it just seems to exist to shock or paint villains as villains, that story’s going to fall flat on me. I’ll likely put it down. It’s not that it’s “offensive,” or anything like that, but it’s just fucking tiring. My favorite example of this is in the film Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’re familiar, at one point Drax calls Gamora a “green whore.” Drax’s single most important driving character element is his pure literalism. He is very blunt, very direct, and very honest. And, frankly, Gamora isn’t a sex worker. It’s completely out of character for him. Sure, James Gunn backpedaled a bit to explain it. But, the line still falls hard and flat because it completely ignores the narrative context to score some shock points. If you squint hard enough, it works. But you shouldn’t have to justify it, and it turned off a lot of viewers. By introspection, I mean that as a writer, you need to explore what it means. If a character suffers a microaggression, or if a character commits a microaggression, you should approach it as a valuable part of your story. After all, if you put a gun in act one, you should fire it in act three, right? Microaggressions are tiny guns. If you can’t come up with how they matter, maybe they don’t. Maybe you should consider omitting them. Sometimes, “it says something about the character” is enough. But in most cases, we already know enough about the character that the microaggression is just piling it on. And remember, writing advice is a dildo. Not every dildo works for every person, or every encounter. This is just how I do things, and it may not work for you. AdvertisementsHey y’all! First off, a big thanks to everyone who gave feedback for the gameplay trailer I released last week! It’s been such a great ride and I’m just overwhelmed by the positive enthusiasm in both the comments and posts elsewhere on the ‘net. It’s already over 10,000 views, which is great as I was hoping to reach that number by the end of the month. Outreach and building a base of fans was a huge goal for this year, and is something I’m constantly striving for. I think marketing and global outreach is another topic that would be good for a Gamasutra column, as it’s so much different than it was just a few years ago. Maybe I’ll write one later this year. Speaking of the trailer, there are a few fun facts and some clarifications I want to talk about. Such as… • The music in the trailer is a new rush hour track for the game by Jonathan Geer, composer for this game and my *secret game* that I’ll start working on after CSD 2 is released. He’s also done the Owlboy soundtrack, which is finally getting a release this year! Woo! • The footage was from the alpha version, and is missing a lot of final effects. For instance, the backgrounds are entirely stationary in the trailer. In the final game, you’ll have clouds moving across the sky, planes and other vehicles off in the distance, and perhaps even some more restaurant activity. • It was a hot alpha release, and had a few bugs in the trailer. Pretzels would not have side dishes ordered along side it, for example, as that would be a simple food with a new detractor trait. But in the trailer it shows two side dishes of green beans missing. There are a few other bugs that I saw that’s not really worth pointing out but that was a big one I wanted to clarify a bit. • Most of the UI on the top (the combo meter and the time/buzz/money bar) was added in late last minute and is the most non-final asset in the trailer. It may change significantly, or not at all, it’s hard to say. • No voices in the trailer as well, but don’t worry, they’ll be back in the final! I’m thinking about doing an open call for people to do their best customer voices and having the chance to be in the game. We’ll see how it goes! After launching the trailer on Thursday I took the last four days off to catch up on some other things I’ve been putting off, and basically relax until I start working pretty much non stop until the game is released. It’s been a real nice mini-vacation but I’m eager to get back to programmin’. What’s going to happen immediately is I’m gonna fix the bugs I saw in the trailer, and replace a lot of the things that were held together by duct tape for purposes of shooting the alpha trailer, and begin some of the engine work that I need to do before progressing further (like offloading all text to an external text file for translation purposes, etc.). That should take a few weeks, and that’s the kind of boring stuff that doesn’t show in photo/video updates. After that I’ll be getting back to adding new stuff to the game and I’ll have more screenshots to share around that time. There probably won’t be another trailer until early next year; I wanna focus on getting the game closer to completion for the new 2017 release date. I’m even thinking about live streaming some coding sessions…it wouldn’t be a big deal and I’d probably only get five viewers or so, but it could be fun, I dunno! :D There’s still a lot of work to do for sure, but I’m super excited about how the game is shaping up and I’m so thrilled that many of you agree based on the trailer feedback. This is gonna be the most delicious game ever.The single-player campaign in DOOM will take roughly 13 hours to complete, id Software has stated on its Twitter account when asked how long the campaign will last for. id Software added that the difficulty level players play on will influence how long the campaign will take to complete, with “folks playing at the office average 13+ hours in the campaign.” Those playing on a tougher difficulty can expect to be playing the campaign for longer depending on their skill. .@Unreal389 The difficulty level plays a factor, but folks playing at the office average 13+ hours in the campaign — DOOM (@DOOM) February 11, 2016 It is good news then for fans of single-player games that id Software have put a lot of work into making DOOM’s campaign lengthy and filled with gore and action as the game also comes packed with a multiplayer mode. You can grab DOOM on PS4, Xbox One and PC on May 13.Back in May, Chris Baker released these three videos on DA/SA handguns for the LuckyGunner YouTube channel. They are all of the same high standard of quality I’ve come to expect from Chris, so I recommend my readers watch all three of them before continuing: Chris makes some interesting points for discussion, although most of what I’m about to discuss in tow will be about culture rather than equipment. First, I think Chris is 100% right about choosing DA/SA pistols… IF you are the kind of shooter he is. That is, someone who shoots pistols a lot, who always is practicing from concealment, who is always trying to get better scores and times, and who is (probably as a consequence of the last thing) picky about their triggers. In that case, DA/SA stands a good chance of being “for you”. But, while I recognize that there are many people who fit that description (and you can usually identify them by their reaction when you say “Todd Green”), I wonder about how their approach compares with my life, and the lives of many other gun owners. Are they professional competitive shooters who also carry concealed for self defense? Some are, but many others aren’t, yet they too still train aggressively. I’ve met many people who are quasi-competitive about their shooting, but aren’t exactly racing open guns in IPSC championships, either. These sorts of people are very likely to treat competition as more of a skills-honing exercise than a sport, and they are very likely to be extremely thorough in every aspect of carrying a firearm concealed. They have, in other words, gone way beyond “maintaining proficiency” and have turned their choice to carry concealed into a hobby, which I should say is far from a bad thing! It’s these folks I am most likely to turn to for advice on concealed carry, and a great many of them have made successful and lucrative careers in the industry this way. In fact, it’s a great thing that people pursue this avenue, and I’m not at all writing this to denigrate or belittle people who choose to participate in the shooting hobby in this way. What this approach isn’t, though, is reflective of most people’s use of a handgun, myself included. Even though I am by the dictionary definition a professional (of some odd variety) in the shooting sports world, handguns take a decided back seat to everything else I do there. Since they interest me less, I shoot with them often enough to maintain proficiency, and that’s about it. Accordingly, my focus when I carry a handgun centers around what I consider to be the most likely scenarios that I could encounter, rather than improving my skills with a pistol to the highest possible level. Don’t get me wrong, if there’s going to be a firefight and all my buddies and I get to have are concealed pistols, I want the concealed carry wizards to be on my team! Likewise, if a highly trained shooter goes nuts and decides to massacre a room of people, “maintaining proficiency” is not going to cut it. Even so, here’s what I actually care about when I carry a gun: Do I have a gun? Am I behaving safely with said gun? If I am concealing my gun, is it adequately concealed? Whether/when/how do I present the gun? (Every single “incident” I have actually experienced involved me presenting the firearm first, to show I was armed. Not every one will, but this is a major consideration for me.) If I need to, how quickly and accurately can I fire off the first shot? And, Do I have subsequent shots available as well as a reload in the event of a malfunction? That is about it for me. I am not really worried about split times, beyond being able to create a reasonable group at 15 yards quickly, and my emphasis is on the first round fired. If I have to fire my gun, the ONLY shot that is guaranteed (gun reliability permitting) to be discharged is my first shot, so I A.) want it to hit my target, and B.) want it to not hit anything else. Now, if I have taken 300 hours of training and I am hitting the range to practice my pistol shooting from a holster 1.5 times a week, then I might be totally confident I can satisfy 4A and 4B with a DA/SA handgun that has an 11lb trigger pull when decocked, but I am not that person. I don’t “live a concealed carry lifestyle”, I just carry a gun to protect myself, the difference being the number of priorities that either require my time, or that I’d rather devote it to besides handgun practice. This is the big reason why, when folks tell me I should get new sights for my Glock, I think in the back of my head “why? The current sights work just fine.” It’s true, I probably would shoot better with a $100 set of Trijicons, but I also shoot pretty satisfactorily with the $0 stock sights. It’s also true that at my level of proficiency, if Rob Pincus challenged me to a gunfight, I’d be pretty screwed, but it’s not roving Mike Pannones or Rob Leathams I’m worried about, it’s 2Cent the local crack dealer. Factory Glock sights and pistol practice twice a month are probably good enough for 2Cent, I think. So my priority then is to achieve and maintain a good level of proficiency with my handgun without spending too much time practicing. That’s good enough for me, at least until I catch that pistol shooting bug that’s going around. Finally, bringing it back around to DA/SA handguns, I actually started out shooting a DA/SA CZ-75 (which I mostly carried cocked and locked), and I would recommend DA/SA handguns to those who prefer their particular strengths. For me, though, the simplicity, durability, and ubiquity of the Glock family are the kind of pragmatic advantages that appeal to me personally. However, what is “pragmatic” depends on who you are!That idea for a PC wargame you’ve been mulling over for the past five… ten… twenty years – is it ready for primetime yet? Are you prepared to run it past five of the most talented and experienced people in the industry? Today’s Flare Path is a light-hearted Dragons’ Den-style competition (Each of the five dragons will be choosing their favourite submitted concept). A chance to get feedback from the pros. It’s also an opportunity to put cherished ideas to fellow Flareopaths who could be coders in search of themes. If you know deep down you’re never going to get round to programming Kia Mate Toa: The NZ Wars, or Red Ball Express: Fuelling The Fight, then why not place your blueprints where they can inspire. There’s no rush To enter the Flare Path Dragons’ Den (or The Flare Path Shark Tank if you’re not from these parts) you’ll need to send me, via the email address at the top of the article (timfstone at gmail dot com) your historical strategy/tactics game idea by midday GMT next Wednesday. I’ll then weed out any horribly hackneyed or vague submissions (judging by the usual calibre of FP comments, there won’t be many of these) before forwarding the rest to the five dragons. Designs the judges admire will be highlighted and discussed in a follow-up piece a fortnight from today. Pithy pitches, please Ideally, your pitches won’t be more than 500 words in length (I don’t want to swamp the dragons) and will leave the reader with a clear idea of how the game works and why it will be engaging. I’ll provide one of my own ideas as an example at the end of this article. Meet the dragons The five people I’m about to introduce know what it takes to turn great ideas into great games. All of them have hunted the AI snark, grappled with the GUI octopus, and jammed splintered paddles into the gaping maw of the feature-creep crocodile. From left to right… Johan Nagel is a rising star in the wargame design firmament. His first two creations – Vietnam ’65 and Afghanistan ’11 – simulate counter-insurgency warfare in a refreshingly unconventional manner, and his next project, the Age of Sail captain sim HMS, looks, from a distance, every bit as innovative. Seated beside Johan is Tomislav Uzelac the Croatian clever-clogs behind the world’s first successful MP3 player and the brilliantly conceived and executed Unity of Command. Tomislav is taking time out from sequel crafting to peruse your pipedreams. Next to Tomislav is Steve Grammont, one of the two men behind the incomparable Combat Mission franchise. When Steve isn’t toiling away on the next CM module, he’s wistfully recalling the days when he had the time to trundle about his property in an M29 Weasel and indulge his passion for military uniform collecting. Dragon number four is Iain McNeil, the director of development at Slitherine. In the business for over twenty years, Iain has midwifed more military strategy games than you’ve changed hot MG 42 barrels. If you’re a coder or artist fascinated by martial matters, he’s a man you want in your contacts list. Some say dragon number five is wearing that macabre IJAAS leather mask because his face is hideously disfigured by duelling scars. Others claim he doesn’t want to be recognised because he’s a serving member of both the SAS and the Peace Pledge Union. Personally, I reckon he’s incognito because he hasn’t opened his invite yet. ****** *******, please check your inbox! The Stone Prize For what it’s worth, I’ll also be choosing my favourite game pitch and explaining the reasons for my choice in the follow-up piece (ETA May 5) The judging process I’m leaving it up to the individual panelists to decide on their own judging criteria. If one dragon wants to put practicality and commercial realism before originality and historical realism while another dragon prefers to do precisely the opposite, that’s absolutely fine with me. Personally, I reckon I’ll be looking for a bit of everything. Send me a design that does or explores something unusual, has the common touch, and wouldn’t require a team of twenty devs twenty years to execute, and you’re guaranteed to get my attention. An idea of mine by way of an example (There’s no need to provide pics or links with your submission) ‘WW2 Aerial Recon Wargame’ The result of a recent ludo-literary collision – I happened to be reading Taylor Downing’s Spies in the Sky at the same time as the lovely Hidden Folks sidled into my life – ‘WW2 Aerial Recon Wargame’ (awful working title!) is a combat-light operational wargame inspired by the work of Allied photo-reconnaissance pilots like Adrian Warburton and image interpreters such as Constance Babington Smith. The player’s role is somewhat stylised. They act as both the leader of a small RAF photo-recon squadron and as an unsung photo scrutineer at the Central Interpretation Unit in Medmenham. Sorties (one per plane per campaign day/turn) are plotted and followed using a theatre map. As aircraft move over the map their flight paths are compared with the positions of unseen enemy units and top-down photos are generated. When the planes return to base, the images must be manually analysed, observations contributing to an overall intelligence picture which ultimately determines how friendly AI generals choose to mount attacks or organise defences. Failure to identify or quantify threats accurately may prove costly in the long run. Missed AFVs, fortifications, minefields etc can lead to overwhelmed DZ s and untenable bridgeheads. Commanders may not choose the best beaches for their amphibious assaults or the most convenient landing zones for their gliders. Basically, the friendly AI is as blind as a bat without your intel. When the combat phases arrive and the operational arrows begin stirring on the map, the player becomes a helpless spectator. Complicating the recon gathering effort are dynamic weather conditions (fairly reliable forecasts allow for some forward planning), limited assets (routing your PR Spitfires close to enemy airbases and major flak concentrations is always risky) and randomly generated optional secondary tasks. Using the game’s unarmed bluebirds to search for elusive enemy radar sites or research stations is a gamble. Success equals kudos and kudos equals more aircraft, new aircraft marks, and the pick of replacement pilots (pilots are rated in several areas including navigation, determination, and evasion) but combining needle-in-haystack hunts with bread-and-butter recon gathering jaunts won’t always be possible. In the PI (Photo Interpreter) element of the game, the primary headaches are going to be tree cover, camouflage, smoke, and the sheer acreage of terrain that needs to be examined. I’m tempted to use difficulty level-linked time limits to pressurise stereograph sessions. Successful completion of certain secondary missions will boost the time limits, but you’ll still need to analyse with alacrity to get the most out of your snooping expeditions. As, obviously, it would be prohibitively expensive to handcraft a Close Combat-quality 2D map of a region as vast as, say, Normandy, it’s quite possible the game will feature smaller maps, fictional areas or, if funds are very short, even use rotatable ASCII-style characters to depict landscapes and units. In a sense the PIs at Medmenham were pattern studiers. While it would be lovely to include hundreds of different handpainted vegetation sprites and Panzer silhouettes, I believe you could sell the illusion almost as effectively with clever, naturalistic collisions of far simpler shapes. A cheap, abstract approach to terrain rendering/generation would, in theory, permit a larger and more varied campaign selection. In a perfect world, on completing the Dieppe Raid introductory-campaign-cum-tutorial, the buyer of ‘WW2 Aerial Recon Wargame’ would be able to move onto Husky, Overlord, and Market Garden-themed challenges. * * *Abstract Carbohydrate-restricted diets (CRD) significantly decrease body weight and independently improve plasma triglycerides (TG) and HDL cholesterol (HDL-C). Increasing intake of dietary cholesterol from eggs in the context of a low-fat diet maintains the LDL cholesterol (LDL-C)/HDL-C for both hyper- and hypo-responders to dietary cholesterol. In this study, 28 overweight/obese male subjects (BMI = 25–37 kg/m2) aged 40–70 y were recruited to evaluate the contribution of dietary cholesterol from eggs in a CRD. Subjects were counseled to consume a CRD (10–15% energy from carbohydrate) and they were randomly allocated to the EGG group [intake of 3 eggs per day (640 mg/d additional dietary cholesterol)] or SUB group [equivalent amount of egg substitute (0 dietary cholesterol) per day]. Energy intake decreased in both groups from 10,243 ± 4040 to 7968 ± 2401 kJ (P < 0.05) compared with baseline. All subjects irrespective of their assigned group had reduced body weight and waist circumference (P < 0.0001). Similarly, the plasma TG concentration was reduced from 1.34 ± 0.66 to 0.83 ± 0.30 mmol/L after 12 wk (P < 0.001) in all subjects. The plasma LDL-C concentration, as well as the LDL-C:HDL-C ratio, did not change during the intervention. In contrast, plasma HDL-C concentration increased in the EGG group from 1.23 ± 0.39 to 1.47 ± 0.38 mmol/L (P < 0.01), whereas HDL-C did not change in the SUB group. Plasma glucose concentrations in fasting subjects did not change. Eighteen subjects were classified as having the metabolic syndrome (MetS) at the beginning of the study, whereas 3 subjects had that classification at the end. These results suggest that including eggs in a CRD results in increased HDL-C while decreasing the risk factors associated with MetS. Introduction Overweight and obesity have continued to increase rapidly in the United States, affecting both adults and young children. This is in general a result of genetics and lifestyle consisting of low levels of physical activity and consumption of excess carbohydrate (1). In obesity, the main health risks are a result of increased adipose tissue. Adipose tissue synthesizes and secretes biologically active molecules believed to affect metabolic syndrome (MetS)5 and cardiovascular diseases (2). Carbohydrate-restricted diets (CRD) have been shown to reduce weight and hence reduce these risks (3,4). In numerous studies evaluating the effect of CRD on weight loss, a significant reduction in weight mostly from the abdominal area has been reported (3). This area has been associated with increased lipolytic activity of abdominal adipose tissue, leading to higher plasma free fatty acid concentrations, which, in turn, decrease both hepatic removal of insulin and insulin-stimulated glucose uptake by peripheral tissues (5). Compared with a low-fat diet, a CRD results in preferential loss of fat in this region (6). According to the National Cholesterol Education Program adult treatment panel III (ATP III) diagnostic criteria, the parameters associated with MetS include levels of plasma fasting glucose > 100 mg/dL, (5.5 mmol/L), triglycerides (TG) > 150 mg/dL (1.88 mmol/L), blood pressure (BP) > 130/85 mm Hg, low levels of HDL cholesterol (HDL-C) <40 mg/dL in men and <50 mg/dL in women (1 mmol/L in men and 1.3 mmol/L in women), and waist circumference (WC) > 88 cm in women and >102 cm in men (7). From 1994 to 1998, there were ∼45–50 million Americans (24%) who met the ATP III diagnostic criteria for MetS, of which 37% were Hispanic women and 16% were men of African-American origin (8). There also have been dramatic and rapid increases of MetS and diabetes among children and teens, which are not due to the results in the changes of the criteria by AHA and the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute but rather, from complications developing earlier in their lives due to overweight/obesity and diabetes (9). In this study, we used eggs as part of a CRD due to their high protein and low carbohydrate content. Because eggs contain substantial amounts of dietary cholesterol (10), we were able to evaluate the effects on weight loss and features of MetS of a CRD that was either low or high in cholesterol. Results from previous studies in our laboratory revealed that hyper-responders to dietary cholesterol (a response higher than 0.06 mmol/L for each additional 100 mg of dietary cholesterol) in the context of a low-fat diet increased both LDL-C and HDL-C concentrations while maintaining the LDL-C:HDL-C ratio, whereas the cholesterol carried by these lipoproteins did not change in hypo-responders (11,12). The objective of this study was to compare the effects of a CRD high in cholesterol (provided by eggs) to one low in cholesterol (using an egg substitute) on the variables of MetS. We hypothesized that including eggs in the CRD would not alter the beneficial effects of the CRD on plasma lipids and body composition. Methods Materials. Liquid whole eggs and cholesterol-/fat-free eggs were purchased from Vistar. The composition of these products is as follows: 3 eggs are the equivalent to 1.76 g carbohydrate, 18.95 g protein, 22.99 g fat, and 1239 kJ and cholesterol-/fat-free eggs are the equivalent to 2.90 g carbohydrate 19.79 g protein, 0.31 g fat, and 394 kJ. Kits for total cholesterol (TC) and TG were from Roche Diagnostics; glucose kits were from WACO (Waco Diagnostics). Study design. We recruited 31 men between the age of 40 and 70 y with a BMI of 26–37 kg/m2 from the university and the surrounding community and randomly assigned them to consume the equivalent of 3 liquid eggs per day (EGG) or the same amount of egg substitute (SUB). Three individuals dropped out of the study due to compliance issues. Subjects were excluded if they had hypothyroidism, documented heart disease, type I diabetes, gout, or egg allergies. All subjects followed a CRD for 12 wk. Similar to other studies in our laboratory (4,6), carbohydrates were restricted to 10–15% of total energy. The energy percent contribution was set at 10–15% from carbohydrates, 25–30% from protein and 55–60% from fat. This was a parallel, randomized, placebo-controlled, single-blinded study. The substitute had the same color and consistency as the eggs. Fifteen subjects from the EGG group and 13 subjects from the SUB group completed the study. Blood samples, body composition, food records, BP, and anthropometrics were collected at baseline, wk 6, and wk 12. Logs were provided to subjects to record physical activity at baseline and each week during the intervention. All study protocols were approved by the University of Connecticut Institutional Review Board and all subjects signed an informed consent form before participating in the study. Diet. These were free-living subjects who were not provided with any other foods apart from either eggs or egg substitute to consume as part of their diet and energy intake was not restricted. Subjects received individual and personalized dietary counseling from registered dietitians prior to the dietary intervention. Detailed dietary booklets, specific to each dietary treatment, were provided outlining dietary goals, lists of appropriate foods, recipes, sample meal plans, and food record log sheets. No explicit instructions were provided regarding energy intake for either diet to allow expression of any noncognitive aspects on food intake. Subjects received weekly follow-up counseling during which we measured body mass, assessed compliance, and provided further dietetic education. A 3-d weighed food record was obtained at baseline to assess nutrient intake and 5-d records were completed during wk 1, 6, and 12 of the intervention. Subjects were given specific instructions regarding the type of foods that must be avoided as a result of following a CRD and they could not consume any additional eggs beyond what was provided to them weekly. Subjects in the EGG group were taking an additional 640 mg/d of cholesterol, whereas this product was excluded from the SUB group diet. They could consume unlimited amounts of meat and fish, moderate amounts of cheese, vegetables and salad dressings with low carbohydrate content, and small amounts of seeds and nuts. There were no restrictions on the type of fats consumed. Subjects were asked to maintain their normal routine of physical activity during the course of this study. Dietary assessment. We analyzed dietary intake using the Nutritional Data System 5.0 (University of Minnesota). The mean values were obtained for nutrient intake at each data collection point. Values for total energy as well as absolute and percent contribution from the macronutrients were obtained. Contributions from different dietary fats and cholesterol were also calculated. Blood collection. After overnight food deprivation, blood (12-h fasting) was collected from an antecubital vein into EDTA tubes and was immediately centrifuged at 2000 × g; 20 min. Preservatives (1 mL/L sodium azide, 1 mL/L phenylmethylsulfonyl fluoride, and 5 mL/L aprotinin) were added to the plasma once separated from red blood cells. The plasma was then aliquoted and frozen at −80°C and the plasma to measure lipids was stored at 4°C. The subjects were requested to fast on 2 d in the same week to average their plasma lipids. Plasma lipids: TC, TG, LDL-C, HDL-C, and plasma glucose. Plasma TC concentration was measured by enzymatic methods using Roche Diagnostics standards and kits (13). We measured plasma HDL-C concentration in the supernatant after precipitation of Apo B-containing lipoproteins (14) and we measured plasma LDL-C concentration using the Friedewald equation (15). The TG concentration was determined using Roche Diagnostic kits, which adjust for free glycerol (16). Glucose was determined by a colorimetric method as previously reported (3). Anthropometrics and BP. Anthropometrics and BP were measured at baseline, 6 wk, and 12 wk. Weight was measured to the closest 0.5 lb (0.25 kg) and height to the closest 0.5 inch (1 cm) on a portable stadiometer/scale. Weight and height were converted into metric units to calculate BMI (kg/m2). WC was measured mid-way between the lowest rib and iliac crest to the nearest 0.1 cm. BP was measured on the right arm using a Welch Allyn, Tycos BP cuff with the participant seated, following a 5-min rest. BP and anthropometrics were measured twice by the same individual during the same week to account for variability. Body composition/dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry scan. Body mass and body composition were measured in the morning after an overnight fast. Body mass was recorded to the nearest 100 g on a calibrated digital scale with subjects wearing only underwear. We assessed whole body and regional body composition using a state-of-the-art fan-beam dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) (Prodigy, Lunar). Analyses were performed by the same technician who was unaware of study details. Statistics analyses. Two-way repeated measures ANOVA was used to determine diet effects and time effects on plasma lipids, food intake, body composition, and BP. Each individual's response to the intervention over time was the repeated measure and EGG vs. SUB were the between-subject factors. P < 0.05 was considered significant. SPSS version 13.0 for Windows was used to perform the statistical analyses and the data are reported as means ± SD. Results Dietary analysis. Energy intake decreased during the intervention compared with baseline in both groups (P < 0.05; Table 1). Energy contribution from carbohydrates was reduced from 42.4% at baseline to 14.9% at wk 12 in the EGG group, whereas these changes were from 41.5 to 19.1% (P < 0.0001) in the SUB group. Carbohydrate intakes at baseline and 1, 6, and 12 wk for individuals are in Supplemental Figure 1. The contribution of energy from fat and protein increased after 12 wk (P < 0.0001). The only nutrient that differed between the groups was that of cholesterol. In the EGG group, dietary cholesterol increased from 319 ± 150 to 826 ± 192 mg/d (P < 0.0001), whereas it did not change in the SUB group (Table 1). Absolute protein and carbohydrate intakes (g/d) by all subjects changed during the study but that of fat did not, despite a change in its energy contribution (Fig. 1). Protein intake increased (P < 0.01) and that of carbohydrate decreased (P < 0.01). Physical activity did not change during the study (data not shown). TABLE 1 Variable Baseline Wk 1 Wk 6 Wk 12 P-value (time effect) Total energy, kJ/d EGG 2544 ± 921 1821 ± 311 1909 ± 641 1962 ± 691 <0.05 SUB 2318 ± 1030 1973 ± 465 1985 ± 738 1821 ± 408 Carbohydrate, % en EGG 42.4 ± 8.3 11.1 ± 5.0 13.8 ± 7.7 14.9 ± 9.3 <0.0001 SUB 41.5 ± 9.5 15.6 ± 8.8 17.8 ± 9.7 19.9 ± 12.1 Fat, % en EGG 39.9 ± 7.2 57.9 ± 6.6 58.1 ± 9.5 56.1 ± 10.3 <0.0001 SUB 39.2 ± 8.4 54.5 ± 7.4 54.7 ± 8.6 54.9 ± 13.8 Protein, % en EGG 17.1 ± 3.7 28.9 ± 5.1 25.9 ± 5.8 26.9 ± 6.5 <0.0001 SUB 18.6 ± 5.9 27.9 ± 4.1 25.1 ± 3.5 24.5 ± 3.6 Cholesterol, mg/d EGG 319 ± 150 778 ± 240 832 ± 253 827 ± 192 <0.0001 SUB 354 ± 170 403 ± 174* 337 ± 133* 277 ± 100* Variable Baseline Wk 1 Wk 6 Wk 12 P-value (time effect) Total energy, kJ/d EGG 2544 ± 921 1821 ± 311 1909 ± 641 1962 ± 691 <0.05 SUB 2318 ± 1030 1973 ± 465 1985 ± 738 1821 ± 408 Carbohydrate, % en EGG 42.4 ± 8.3 11.1 ± 5.0 13.8 ± 7.7 14.9 ± 9.3 <0.0001 SUB 41.5 ± 9.5 15.6 ± 8.8 17.8 ± 9.7 19.9 ±
the Saturday before Christmas. Q. What's new? A. Black Friday mania is seeping into Thanksgiving Day. Nearly 1,000 Gap stores will be open on Thanksgiving. Toys R Us will open at 9 p.m. And several other stores will open at midnight that evening, including Target, Best Buy, Kohl's and Macy's. Wal-Mart, whose supercenters already operate around the clock, also is opening most of its other stores by 10 p.m. Thanksgiving evening. Q. Will you get the best deals of the season on Black Friday? A. Not necessarily. Stores have discounts that are just as good throughout the holiday season. And there are even better deals to be had after Christmas Day. But the problem is if you wait too long, you might not get exactly what you want since stores have kept their inventories lean this year. ‘Though many retailers are already touting select Black Friday ads, there’s no doubt we’ll all be blown away by what retailers still have in their bag of tricks for shoppers,’ said NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay. ‘We fully expect to see excited shoppers as early as midnight at stores around the country, as many holiday shoppers would rather stay up all night to take advantage of retailers’ Black Friday deals rather than set their alarm to wake up the next morning.’ But some economists are skeptical. They said opening stores even earlier may just change the time people shop, but not increase the number of shoppers coming through stores on Black Friday. Toys and electronics are likely to be the biggest draws this year, experts say. 'This is going to be the most promotional holiday period for electronics of the last few years,' Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at the NPD Group told CNN. Deals include the Xbox 360 console with Kinect at Wal-Mart for $199, Target's Westinghouse 46-inch LCD HDTV for $298 or the Sharp 42-inch LCD HDTV at Best Buy for $199. Analysts DisplaySearch. expect L CD TV prices to hit an all-time low this Black Friday. But, alongside mass consumption, stores can also expect expect mass protests - and are bracing themselves for 'Occupy Black Friday' as Wall Street demonstrators ask shoppers to get involved with something besides door-buster sales and crowded mall car parks. Some protesters from the Occupy Wall Street movement do not want people to shop at all but others are hoping to divert them from giant chains and malls to local convenience stores. Their actions are uncoordinated but hold similar themes of supporting small businesses while criticising the day's dedication to consumption and the shopping frenzy that fuels big corporations. Nearly each one promises some kind of surprise action on the day after Thanksgiving, which marks the traditional start of the holiday shopping season in the U.S. In Seattle, protesters are driving to Wal-Mart stores to protest with other Occupy groups from around Washington state. Washington D.C. is offering a ‘really, really free market,’ where people can donate items they don't want so others can go gift shopping for free. Elsewhere the 75-person encampment in Boise, Idaho, will send ‘consumer zombies’ to wander around in silent protest of what they view as unnecessary spending. In Chicago, protesters will serenade shoppers with revamped Christmas carols about buying local. The Des Moines, Iowa, group plans flash mobs at three malls in an attempt to get people to think about what they're buying. ‘We didn't want to guilt-trip people at a mall,’ Occupy Des Moines organiser Ed Fallon said. ‘We wanted to get at them in a playful, friendly way, to support local businesses.’ Happy customer: One man carries out his new 32-inch LCD TV from a Best Buy store in Fairfax, Virginia Excitement: One of the youngest shoppers waits in line as Toys R Us CEO Gerald L. Storch greets crowds Anticipation: People stand in line outside of Macy's department store in New York Protesters say the movement should not take away money and seasonal jobs from the working-class majority it purports to represent. They want the corporations to be the focus of any protests. But organisers do hope their actions drive people to reconsider shopping at national chains and go to small locally-owned stores instead. That may not fly with small businesses wary of any association with the movement, which presents itself as pushing back against corporate power. ‘If you ask, a lot of small business owners identify as business owners, not specifically small business,’ Jean Card, of the National Federation of Independent Business, said. ‘I would like to believe there is a silver lining, but I don't picture a frustrated consumer that can't get into a box store turning around and going to a small business. I see that person going home.’ OCCUPY FEARS PROMPT ORDERS FOR SHOPPERS TO REMOVE TENTS Fears that shoppers camping out for Black Friday deals may secretly be Ocuupy Wall Street demonstrators have prompted some stores to demand tents are removed. The annual tradition of bargain hunters hoping to be first in line is thought to be the perfect pretext for the anti-capitalist protesters to set up a permanent encampment outside businesses. One of the stores - Best Buy in Roseville, California, claimed that having tents in front of the store is a liability issue. But, as this has not been the case in previous years, those now forced to huddle up with only blankets and each other for warmth, are convinced the protests have caused the change of heart. Trying to shop exclusively local neglects economies of scale, job specialisation and other benefits that big, multi-state corporations can bring, said George Mason University economist Russ Roberts. ‘Don't punish yourself by not shopping where you can get the best deal - that's foolish,’ he said. Small businesses are not necessarily better employers in terms of wages, benefits, opportunities for advancement and other measures, said North Carolina public policy research expert John Quinterno. He calculates small ‘mom-and-pops’, which he defines as businesses with fewer than 10 employees, account for nearly 80 per cent of employer firms in the U.S., but only about 11 per cent of the jobs. ‘Sometimes we romanticise small business - and I say this as a small business owner myself - so that it skews some of our debates about economic and labour policy,’ Mr Quinterno said. ‘It doesn't mean they aren't important. It just means that larger businesses tend to create a lot more value-added per job,’ the principal of public policy research firm South by North Strategies said. The protests are largely focused on shopping areas in affluent suburbs home to big chain stores. As with the entire movement, the protests bring with them a litany of causes. In addition to protests of big chains, causes include clothes made from animal fur, McDonald's, homelessness and, in Las Vegas, the low gambling taxes paid by casinos. The formula is ideal for the Occupy protests - many of whom have faced evictions from large-scale encampments in recent weeks. Happy camping: Shoppers camp out at Best Buy for Black Friday in Pembroke Pines, Florida Camping for bargains: Shoppers wait for midnight at a Best Buy store at Santee, California Waiting for goods: These shoppers erected themselves a canape to shelter from the elements Ready: Barbara Riccelli, Vicki Hawkins, Robert King and Vicki Lawrence (left to right) sit outside their tents while camping out outside the Best Buy store waiting for when the store opens at midnight in Mesquite, Texas Online shopping: Staff at an 800,000 sq ft Amazon centre in Britain process orders as they prepare their busiest time of the year as Black Friday begins in America and Cyber Monday follows in the UK With a large number of people in a confined space, the Black Friday protests present one of the earliest tests for the movement in its new, fragmented iteration. Most protests plan to make a point and move on - a strategy they have implemented in some cities with targeted marches for specific causes since the camps were broken up. ‘It's not about specific occupation camps anymore,’ said protester Peter Morales of Austin, Texas. ‘It's more of, you know, real awareness of what's going on in our government.’ Another shop local movement, Small Business Saturday, was started last year to encourage people to shop at small businesses on the day after Black Friday. But the Occupy groups are underwhelmed as this movement was started by American Express. Last year, small retailers that accept American Express saw a 28 per cent increase in sales volume on Small Business Saturday from the same day the year before, the company says. ‘It's just another example of the banks and Wall Street trying to take the very real desires of working people to have a humane economic system and twisting it to their ends,’ said Peter Rickman of Occupy Milwaukee. BARGAINS GALORE: THE BEST OF THE BLACK FRIDAY DEALS Amazon is offering top of the range smartphones for just one penny between November 22 and November 28. Best Buy are offering dig discounts on tech items from midnight tonight. It is slicing $200 off the cost of 42in Sharp LCD TVs and $150 off Nikon Coolpix digital cameras. Gap has cut 60 per cent off selected items in its outlets since Wednesday, until tomorrow. Old Navy is offering Kodak EasyShare Sport digital cameras free to the first of its Black Friday shoppers who spend more than $40. The cameras are worth about $100. Office Depot has cut the price of Blackberry's Playbook tablet computers by $100 from today and is offering 15.6in Toshiba laptops with Intel processors for just $399.99. OfficeMax is offering discounts on printers, including Canon MX870 Colour Inkjet wireless models worth $250 for just $80 and HP Colour Photosmart Inkjets for $79.99, reduced from $199.99. Staples is slashing the price of Targus Leather iPad Covers from $50 to just $9.99 and offering HP Photosmart Plus wireless printers at a special price of $49.90, down from $149.99. Target will be selling Nikon L105 Digital Cameras for just $99.99, less than half the usual retail price of $199.99, while the more domestically oriented will be drawn to the KitchenAid Ultra Power Stand Mixer for $199, cut from $249.99. Macy's, the department store, is to open at midnight tonight - the first time in its history it has opened early on Black Friday - to offer selected items at between 20 per cent and 50 per cent off. Toys'R'Us will open at 9pm tonight with a range of discounted video games. The chain is also expecting massive demand for classic toys like Barbie and Hot Wheels. Walmart is offering a range of deals including video games and big screen televisions, including Xbox 360s with Kinect and a $50 gift card for the knock-down price of $199.96. Warning: Contains strong language Grandpa Arrested After Black Friday Brawl: MyFoxPHOENIX.comWithout hesitation, most Cincinnati Bengals fans can rattle off a couple of quick facts about Marvin Jones and Mohamed Sanu, two receivers who are no longer on the roster. But ask those same fans who Jake Kumerow is and they'll probably offer a quizzical look in return. Maybe by the end of this summer that will change. Wide receiver Jake Kumerow could help fill the void left by the departures of Marvin Jones and Mohamed Sanu in free agency. AP Photo/John Minchillo Kumerow was signed by the Bengals in 2015 as an undrafted free agent. The 6-foot-5, 205-pound Wisconsin-Whitewater product is the son of former Dolphins first-round pick Eric Kumerow. He spent all of last season on the practice squad. From there, he impressed coaches with his ability to fire off the line of scrimmage and get quickly into his routes. Since receiver depth wasn't an issue last season, he didn't get on the field. But teammates think 2016 could be a different story. "He's got a lot of skill, a lot of talent," tight end Tyler Eifert said. "He's smooth in the way he runs. The first time he came here, nobody knew who he was and then it was like, 'Oh? Who is that guy?' He kind of stands out. If he continues to get better and learn the offense, he could be one of those pieces." As in, one of the pieces the Bengals will use to replace Jones and Sanu. Much of the draft chatter concerning the Bengals this week will center upon the receiver position. Most mock drafts have the Bengals selecting a receiver in the first round, with Will Fuller (Notre Dame), Josh Doctson (TCU), Corey Coleman (Baylor) and Laquon Treadwell (Ole Miss) among the popular picks at No. 24. But Kumerow has a leg up on any rookie receivers given his year of experience. Coaches already know what he can do well. "Jake has unbelievable get-off," Bengals receivers coach James Urban said. "When I do my get-off drills, he'll be right with all of them in their first five or 10 yards. He really threatens the vertical. He comes off [the line of scrimmage] aggressive and he can really start and stop. Some of the routes need to be cleaned up. We run routes a little bit differently than he ran them. But he can run fast and stop -- really well." When evaluating Division III prospects like Kumerow, it can be difficult determining if a player stands out because of the lesser competition he's facing, or if it's because he truly is a dominant player. Urban recalls the latter being the reason Kumerow caught his eye. "He was a man among boys at times in college film and straight up dominated," Urban said. "Jake was a Division I athlete that transferred from Illinois, so he was in the gene pool so to speak in the first place. But yeah, if they're playing at that level, I want to see a guy show. I can't watch the game and be like, 'I can't remember what he did.'" Kumerow certainly left his mark at Wisconsin-Whitewater. In three seasons there he caught 36 touchdown passes, including 14 his senior season. That same year, he had seven catches for 103 yards and two touchdowns in the Division III national championship game win over top-ranked Mount Union (Ohio). "He was a mainstay in what they did," Urban said. With A.J. Green, Brandon LaFell and Eifert factoring into Cincinnati's offense, Kumerow may not end up being a Bengals mainstay this season but he still has as good a shot as anyone to prove he could be.Nathan Thornburgh / Roads & Kingdoms Copenhagen, Denmark. May 09, 2012. Roads & Kingdoms editor Matt Goulding, in full ogre costume, participates in a medieval-themed larp (Live Action Role Playing) performance hosted by Rollespilsfabrikken, one of the largest Danish larp organizations. This year’s Comic-Con is over, and withdrawal has surely set in. Where else for fans and celebrities of the comic and fantasy world to meet in the (sometimes alien) flesh? How else to find out what Luke Skywalker thinks about Mitt Romney? or hear Gollum drop f-bombs? Where’s a thoughtful person with a love of narrative and a nerdy streak to go now? One suggestion: Denmark. In the United States, the big Comic-Con comes just once a year. In Denmark, fantasy and role-play is a year-round obsession. It’s called larp—it used to be an acronym for Live Action Role Playing, but is popular enough that it entered the language as a standard noun (or verb)—and it is said to be the third most popular pastime in the kingdom, behind soccer and handball, but ahead of basketball and everything else. According to Lizzie Stark, author of Leaving Mundania, a book about larp culture in the U.S. as well as Scandinavia, Denmark is the global hotspot for the activity, with over 100,000 participants. Not bad for a country that has fewer people than the state of Indiana. (More from Roads & Kingdoms: 16 Things to Know Before You Go to Denmark) What does larp look like? It depends. In its most mainstream form, it may look a lot like U.S. hobbies like Civil War Reenacting or Renaissance Faires: dress-up and role-play for adults. Lord of the Rings is a big influence, with some of the best-attended larps featuring scores of orcs and elves and meticulous recreations of the tunics worn by the knights of Gondor. On a typical weekend larp in Denmark, you might see anywhere from a few dozen to several hundred larpers, dressed as their favorite characters, smashing each other with boffers (foam weapons) while improvising a larger combat scenario that uses Tolkien’s world as a launching point. “After Lord of the Rings came out, instead of playing cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, kids were playing orcs and elves in the backyard,” says Claus Raasted, a co-founder of Rollespils Fabrikken, one of Denmark’s leading larp organizations. “And then they found that there was this whole community out there doing this, saying here’s your foam sword, here’s your elf ears. And it might not look as good as the movies, but at least you’re in it.” (More on Roads & Kingdoms: Gin and Tonic, A Love Story in Spain) It’s that participatory aspect that gives larp its saying power in Denmark. The Danes—is it because they live in such a small country? Because they are otherwise abused by the long winters?—are a gregarious and trusting people. And the level of person-to-person engagement that comes from playing out scenarios, like video games but with real people, has a broad appeal. In the U.S., “there’s sort of this no-touching rule,” says Stark. “We have different physical boundaries in the U.S. I don’t think we trust each other. That’s the thing that blows me away in the Nordic scene: how much [game] managers trust each other.” (More on Roads & Kingdoms: The World’s Most Controversial Condiment) That goes doubly for what is known as art larp or progressive larp. Far from the simple hack-n-slash of a combat scenario, Nordic art larp is designed to challenge, even offend. The goal: something they call “bleed”, the way that whatever you learn or feel during the game can bleed into your life outside of the game. These intentionally disturbing, thought-provoking scenarios often have a political subtext. Take, for example, 2011’s Kapo, which functioned a bit like a modified Stanford Prison Experiment and was named after the Jews who were brutalized into serving as Nazi enforcers in concentration camps. Players paid for the privilege of entering an Orwellian prison camp for 48 hours, where they quickly learned to abuse or be abused. “We had people coming in who said before the larp that they would never ever, even as a game, do inhuman stuff,” he says. “36 hours later that same guy is dragging a girl’s head through muddy water, screaming at her that she has to work faster or else he’ll get no food.” If there was a lesson to the larp, says Raasted, it was to think about what it’s like to be caught up in the penal system of a paranoid security state, in places like Gitmo, where “morality is something you can’t always afford.” Kapo was, incidentally, funded in part by cultural grants from the Danish government. (More on Roads & Kingdoms: 10 Things to Know Before You Go to Peru) Kapo is far from the most controversial larp Raasted has been involved in. “Heroes of the Eastern Front” was a 2008 larp that saw children playing the roles of Communist and Nazi soldiers.That same year, “Motherland” envisioned an alternate history in which Germany had won World War II. Players spent the larp torturing each other or plotting to assassinate an aging Adolf Hitler. In many of these larps, the players and their actions, not a script, determine the eventual outcome. The bad guys often win. Seen in that light, larp might be a sensible diversion for restless minds in Denmark, which was recently named the happiest country on earth. Reality is simply more pleasant in Denmark than in many other places, so perhaps escapism means digging for more complicated, intense human interactions. For all my eggheaded enthusiasm for the dark side of larp, the one Danish larp I was able to participate in—so little time in the country, with no free weekend to do a truly adult larp—wasn’t supposed to have much bleed. It was a hack-n-slash with 200 middle-schoolers from a Danish church group, loosely based on a fantasy story they’d been reading, the Brothers Lionheart. (More on Roads & Kingdoms: Freetown for Sale in Copenhagen) Roads & Kingdoms co-founder Matt Goulding was the first into the fray. Earlier in the morning he was an ogre, which meant he had put on a rubber mask with a heavy burlap suit that stank of years of larp-sweat. The kids had been bused in from central Copenhagen, handed brightly colored tunics, and given a Braveheart speech of sorts. Group leader René Pedersen was in full warrior mode, yelling at the kids not to touch the swords yet, that first he was going to line them all up and hit each of them very hard (“I think he’s kidding,” whispered instructor Nynne Rasmussen,though she later explained that one of the first things she learned as a larp leader was that kids like to be hit harder with the foam weapons than you think). Once they were pacified, the middle-schoolers were led in six groups to several stations, each with its own scenario and its own vaguely pedagogical purpose. Matt’s station was meant to teach the kids courage, which means he ambushed them from a dense wood, roaring and swinging a massive foam pike. Time and again, the groups that had been looking for this monster turned heel with real fear when he came lumbering from between the trees, growling and smelling like a thousand gym socks. And it was also supposed to teach them compassion, because they would then be shown that Matt’s ogre had a dagger stuck in his back, and once they took the dagger out, he would stop being so angry. (More on Roads & Kingdoms: Machu Picchu Through a New Light) My chance came at the end, in the final battle of the day: kids versus adults. There were a dozen of us against a hundred, but we adults poured bravely over a ridge as the kids assembled below. By the end of the morning, the weaponry and the exercise had transformed these children from undifferentiated mumbling adolescents into their truer selves: hellions, heroes, cowards, and even some psychopaths. After my death in battle—a meek death, alas—I lay flat on the grass, the international death pose. And then, from the middle of this church group, there appeared some bleed. One corpse robber of a kid tried to take my shield from me as I lay there, and as he did, another came up and tried to bludgeon me in my nether regions. These children of Danes, that gentle race of men, suddenly had the wild, wide eyes of horses in danger. “HaHA!” said the boy as he brought his foam sword down on my crotch. And then, in the first English I had heard from the kids all morning: “F–k you, a–hole!” Larp had created a world, we were all living it together, and in that moment we all experienced the pain, and relief, and escape, of a little bleed. This post is in partnership with Roads & Kingdoms, a new journal of food, travel and foreign correspondence. You can read their full Danish larp report, with gallery, here.In France, officials and pundits like to talk about how France is 20 years behind the United States. Sometimes this is portrayed as a positive (obesity rates, crime statistics), and sometimes as a negative (technology, business, customer service). As an American living in France for over ten years, I can see how it’s both. Those Americans who grew up before the 80s may remember certain freedoms we had as children: playing outside on summer evenings on the sidewalk with the other neighborhood kids, riding bikes around aimlessly, walking to swimming pools and friends’ houses to play. I have fond memories of long road trips in our family station wagon. The part we called “the back-back” would be transformed into a small but cozy nest where we lounged with pillows, listened to cassettes and read books, without a seat belt or car seat in sight. Now, of course, you could go to jail (or at least get a hefty fine) if you dared drive around without properly securing your children. And obviously that’s a good thing. But some other simple pleasures seem to have been lost in the United States. It’s rare to find a neighborhood where kids play together freely outside as parents sit on porches or work in the kitchen, popping their heads out from time to time. Bike riding alone through the neighborhood? That’s dangerous! Even something as simple as letting your children play at the park playground has become parent-intensive, as parents hover to make sure no one gets pushed, stepped on or has any toys snatched out of their hands. Recently, a woman in New York City created a huge stir when she allowed her nine-year-old son to take the subway home alone, armed only with his MetroCard, a map, a cell phone and cab fare. Not so in France. Our apartment is in a residence of six or seven buildings built around a series of courtyards. There are large green lawns, a sandbox, lots of trees, little paths that are safe for walking and biking and no busy streets to worry about. After school, if the weather is nice, or even bearable, these courtyards are filled with children, some accompanied by parents, others not. If the parents show up, they sit on benches and use the time to smoke, play with their phones, read books or chat. The kids run around in groups, teasing each other, playing games (Remember the games we used to play? Those games.). Sometimes there are tears, occasionally even blood. That’s when the parents intervene. Some kids are sent out to play without supervision, which feels very odd to my hyper safety-oriented American sense of How Things Should Be. But why? In reality, there is very little danger. No cars, plenty of people around to supervise, people who know each other—even if it is only to nod to each other in the elevator. Kids as young as nine regularly navigate public transportation to go to school—this is considered normal. Depending on their schedules, children may even have gaps in their day where they don’t have classes. They are free to come and go between home and school. It’s a common sight to see groups of pre-teens and teens biking around the neighborhood or playing complex games at the parks. They also get themselves to after-school activities without relying on their parents chauffeuring them around. Other ways that France is behind the times seem far less benign. An acquaintance, who I know through a local Anglophone parenting association, recounted a bone-chilling story last week. She dropped off her seven-year-old son at a city-run sports program one morning, taking him into the gym and nodding hello to the coach. When she went back to pick him up at noon, he was nowhere to be found. The coach in charge shrugged his shoulders when she asked where her son was and told her that he had marked the boy as absent. She did find her son. He had wandered off to another city-run daycare program, but when she called the director to complain, she was told it was her fault that he wandered off. And this is not the first time I’ve heard a version of this particular story. Luckily, all the stories I’ve heard have ended with children reunited with their parents. Still, the lack of security measures and the unwillingness to accept responsibility for a mistake mean I’m unlikely to ever use one of these programs. How else is France behind the times? Children’s birthday parties are a great example. Among middle and upper-middle class American families, birthday parties seem to have become the childhood version of extreme sports, with parents competing to see who can create the most magical moment to mark the arrival of their offspring. Bouncy castles, entertainers, lavish goodie bags, extreme decorating, party themes, heck, party planners. Among similar circles in France (in terms of education and income) the simplicity of the parties is like a breath of fresh air. Decorations are limited to balloons and the odd “Happy Birthday” banner and food is copious quantities of candy, soft drinks and a birthday cake (usually simple and homemade). Party games include Simon Says, egg-and-spoon races and other simple pastimes. Gifts are modest, goodie bags contain candy. Fabulous as they are, it turns out that five-year-olds don’t need magicians, live animals or bouncy castles to have a great time. The downside of birthday party simplicity is the way invitations to the parties are handled. No attempt is made to disguise the fact that some kids in the class are invited and others aren’t—parents hand the invitations to teachers, who distribute them to the kids in front of everyone. On the other hand, kids learn early on that you aren’t always invited to other people’s parties. But the American notion that you should protect kids’ feelings by a) inviting the whole class or b) using extreme discretion if you don’t, do not apply here. What about playdates? The American culture of fear, for lack of a better expression, means parents are reluctant to send their children to homes that haven’t been thoroughly vetted. While this attitude is understandable and even commendable, French parents are much more relaxed about the playdate. No questions about firearms, strange men, whether there’s smoking in the home…French parents drop their children off at the front door and don’t look back. Three or four hours later, they return. I’m not claiming that this is better than American protectiveness, but it certainly is different. And a reminder that most kids will be just fine. In terms of my parenting choices, I often feel like an oddball here. I seem to be the only parent worrying about which school my child should go to (the vast majority of parents would never consider sending their children anywhere but the default public school), whether it’s safe for my son to play at so-and-so’s house since I met them only at the beginning of the school year and don’t even know if they smoke, how to discipline my kids (corporal punishment is the norm here) and even what to feed them (what do you mean, bread and Nutella isn’t a nutritious after-school snack?). Am I over-thinking things or are the French too unconcerned? There are plenty of old-fashioned and behind-the-times things I adore about France like merry-go-rounds in every park, the puppet shows featuring Guignol, which has been entertaining French children for two hundred years, the pony rides in the park. One of my absolute favorite ways that France is behind the times has nothing to do with parenting, although it has a lot to do with family life. I’m talking about Sunday. With a few exceptions, all stores are closed on Sundays. No grocery shopping. No trips to the mall. Sunday is a day to eat long family lunches, play in the park, go to a movie or just relax at home. The only shopping that one can do is at the market and the bakery, and then only until noon. It’s a day free of consumer temptations more complex than that delightful eclair au chocolat calling your name at the boulangerie. The simple pleasures of life still reign supreme here. I feel lucky to experience them and am thrilled that my children will grow up with them.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Donkey hides are prized in China for supposed medicinal properties South African police say they are investigating the illegal donkey skin trade after seizing 5,000 hides in a recent raid east of Johannesburg. Police suspect the skins found at a farm in Benoni last week came from illegally slaughtered animals whose hides were destined for China. They described the raid as a major breakthrough against smugglers. Trade in donkey skins is worth millions of dollars, with hides prized in China for supposed medicinal properties. The gelatine in the hides is used as a medicinal tonic, with some believing it can slow down menopause in women. It is also used to try to treat conditions such as insomnia and poor circulation. The raid in Benoni followed a tip-off from a woman who had complained about the smell of rotting meat. Police did not make any arrests at the farm but have said the raid provided important new information about a syndicate suspected of slaughtering the animals and transporting the meat and hides, without them being certified disease-free. South Africa's Mail & Guardian newspaper said Chinese nationals were suspected of involvement. 'Bludgeoned with hammers' On Monday, the paper reported that a site where more than 100 donkeys were illegally slaughtered had been discovered on a farm in Olifantshoek, in the Northern Cape. The South African National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (NSPCA) spoke of animals there "being bludgeoned with hammers and being skinned alive". It called practices there "barbaric and inhumane" and criticised the government for "doing very little to end this illegal practice". The Mail & Guardian quoted NSPCA inspector Mpho Mokoena as saying a suspect arrested at Olifantshoek had said skins there were transported to Benoni, suggesting a link between the two sites. Police say donkey theft, slaughter and animal skin sales have been rising in South Africa since 2015. Last year, Burkina Faso banned the export of donkey skins and Niger the export of donkeys saying a sharp increase in trade to Asian countries was threatening their donkey populations.How Did This Get Made? #139 HDTGM All-star Jensen Karp (Get Up On This, Kanye West Owes Me $300) joins Paul, June, and Jason in-studio to talk about the Sarah Michelle Gellar 1999 romantic comedy Simply Irresistible. Why is there so much unwarranted sexuality in the movie? Is the crab giving SMG magical powers to cook? Do guys really touch their belts when thinking about sex? Tune in to hear the HDTGM crew get to the bottom of all this insanity! This episode is sponsored by Loot Crate, Audible, Casper Mattresses, Blue Apron, and Dinner Party Download. WATCH Filthy Preppy Teen$ on the FullScreen App today! Get yourself a BB-8 “What Is Its Mission?” T-shirt or Tote Bag over at http://howdidthisgetmade.bigcartel.com/ Set your DVRs for Party Over Here, a new FOX sketch comedy show from The Lonely Island and Paul starring Nicole Byer, Jessica McKenna, and Alison Rich. It airs Saturdays at 11 pm. People of the internet: Watch Paul in Fresh off the Boat on ABC. Awhile ago, Paul and Rob Huebel did a comedy special on a 60 foot glass bus that traveled around LA. Now you’ll be able to see it. Go to https://itun.es/us/3M4J9 now to buy it! You can also see Jason and June in Lady Dynamite on Netflix! Also, check out June in Grace and Frankie available on Netflix, and in all the episodes of NTSF:SD:SUV:: on HULU for free, and Jason in The Dictator (he’s still in it!).In one of the most bizarre stories of the day, a 73-year-old grandmother has been arrested for allegedly running a major marijuana drug operation out of her northeast Oklahoma home. According to local authorities, Darlene Mayes of Craig County, Ok. supplied 40 percent of the pot in her area, which includes Tulsa and parts of Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri. “We feel like it was coming in from all over, and we think this is a real good arrest,” Sheriff Jimmy Scooter told kjrh.com. “We think we really put a big dent in the drug trade in Northeastern Oklahoma.” Huffington Post writes that the silver-haired “drug kingpin” stored the marijuana in her bedroom in a vacuum-sealed bag she kept in her closet, adding that police reported her room “reeking” of the substance upon her arrest. Besides the drugs, Mayes also had $300,000 in cash and numerous guns stashed throughout the house. Bundles of dollar bills labelled “$15,000” were found under her bed. The Daily reports police chief Bobby Floyd said: “I raised the mattress up and there was money. Our intel didn’t say that she had cash, just product.” Police, who reportedly had been investigating the marijuana operation for several years, believe Darlene Mayes may have been a drug kingpin for as long as 20 years. As the mastermind, police believe she had a network of dealers, including her son Jerry who was also arrested. Despite the eccentricity of the case, ABC points out Mayes is not the first grandmother accused of ditching retirement for a second career in drug dealing. In the United Kingdom in 2005, 68-year-old Patricia Tabram — dubbed the cannabis grandmother — was charged with intent to supply after authorities say they found a marijuana farm in her home, the site reports. More on Darlene Mayes and the “Granny Kingpin” bust in the video below: via FOXThe Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (widely abbreviated and cited as TLP) (Latin for Logical Philosophical Treatise or Treatise on Logic and Philosophy) is the only book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that was published during his lifetime. The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science.[1] It is recognized by philosophers as a significant philosophical work of the twentieth century. G. E. Moore originally suggested the work's Latin title as homage to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus by Baruch Spinoza.[2] Wittgenstein wrote the notes for the Tractatus while he was a soldier during World War I and completed it during a military leave in the summer of 1918.[3] It was first published in German in 1921 as Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. The Tractatus was influential chiefly amongst the logical positivist philosophers of the Vienna Circle, such as Rudolf Carnap and Friedrich Waismann. Bertrand Russell's article "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" is presented as a working out of ideas that he had learned from Wittgenstein.[4] The Tractatus employs an austere and succinct literary style. The work contains almost no arguments as such
age in which we live, and it tells us that the need to create a structure of peace in a multipolar world is urgent. This essay first appeared on Antiwar.com. The Best of John V. WalshThe theory of evolution is false. It is simply not true. Actually, it is just a fairy tale for adults based on ancient pagan religious philosophy that hundreds of millions of people around the world choose to believe with blind faith. When asked to produce evidence for the theory of evolution, most adults in the western world come up totally blank. When pressed, most people will mumble something about how “most scientists believe it” and how that is good enough for them. This kind of anti-intellectualism even runs rampant on our college campuses. If you doubt this, just go to a college campus some time and start asking students why they believe in evolution. Very few of them will actually be able to give you any real reasons why they believe it. Most of them just have blind faith in the priest class in our society (“the scientists”). But is what our priest class telling us actually true? When Charles Darwin popularized the theory of evolution, he didn’t actually have any evidence that it was true. And since then the missing evidence has still not materialized. Most Americans would be absolutely shocked to learn that most of what is taught as “truth” about evolution is actually the product of the overactive imaginations of members of the scientific community. They so badly want to believe that it is true that they will go to extraordinary lengths to defend their fairy tale. They keep insisting that the theory of evolution has been “proven” and that it is beyond debate. Meanwhile, most average people are intimidated into accepting the “truth” about evolution because they don’t want to appear to be “stupid” to everyone else. In this day and age, it is imperative that we all learn to think for ourselves. Don’t let me tell you what to think, and don’t let anyone else tell you what to think either. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions. The following are 44 reasons why evolution is just a fairy tale for adults… #1 If the theory of evolution was true, we should have discovered millions upon millions of transitional fossils that show the development of one species into another species. Instead, we have zero. take our poll - story continues below Will the media learn anything from their biased reporting of the Jussie Smollett story? Will the media learn anything from their biased reporting of the Jussie Smollett story? Will the media learn anything from their biased reporting of the Jussie Smollett story? * Yes, they've gotten so much wrong recently that they're bound to be on their best behavior. No, they suffer from a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Jussie who? Email * Phone This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Completing this poll grants you access to Freedom Outpost updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to this site's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. #2 When Charles Darwin came up with his theory, he admitted that no transitional forms had been found at that time, but he believed that huge numbers certainly existed and would eventually be discovered… “Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed. But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?” #3 Even some of the most famous evolutionists in the world acknowledge the complete absence of transitional fossils in the fossil record. For example, Dr. Colin Patterson, former senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History and author of “Evolution” once wrote the following… “I fully agree with your comments about the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them …. I will lay it on the line – there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.” #4 Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University, once wrote the following about the lack of transitional forms… “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.” #5 Evolutionist Stephen M. Stanley of Johns Hopkins University has also commented on the stunning lack of transitional forms in the fossil record… “In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.” #6 If “evolution” was happening right now, there would be millions of creatures out there with partially developed features and organs. But instead there are none. #7 If the theory of evolution was true, we should not see a sudden explosion of fully formed complex life in the fossil record. Instead, that is precisely what we find. #8 Paleontologist Mark Czarnecki, an evolutionist, once commented on the fact that complex life appears very suddenly in the fossil record… “A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth’s geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin’s hypothetical intermediate variants – instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God.” #9 The sudden appearance of complex life in the fossil record is so undeniable that even Richard Dawkins has been forced to admit it… “It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Both schools of thought (Punctuationists and Gradualists) despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and both reject this alternative.” #10 Nobody has ever observed macroevolution take place in the laboratory or in nature. In other words, nobody has ever observed one kind of creature turn into another kind of creature. The entire theory of evolution is based on blind faith. #11 Evolutionist Jeffrey Schwartz, a professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, openly admits that “the formation of a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed.” #12 Even evolutionist Stephen J. Gould of Harvard University has admitted that the record shows that species do not change. The following is how he put it during a lecture at Hobart & William Smith College… “Every paleontologist knows that most species don’t change. That’s bothersome….brings terrible distress. ….They may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that’s not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don’t change, its not evolution so you don’t talk about it.” #13 Anyone that believes that the theory of evolution has “scientific origins” is fooling themselves. It is actually a deeply pagan religious philosophy that can be traced back for thousands of years. #14 Anything that we dig up that is supposedly more than 250,000 years old should have absolutely no radiocarbon in it whatsoever. But instead, we find it in everything that we dig up – even dinosaur bones. This is clear evidence that the “millions of years” theory is simply a bunch of nonsense… It’s long been known that radiocarbon (which should disappear in only a few tens of thousands of years at the most) keeps popping up reliably in samples (like coal, oil, gas, etc.) which are supposed to be ‘millions of years’ old. For instance, CMI has over the years commissioned and funded the radiocarbon testing of a number of wood samples from ‘old’ sites (e.g. with Jurassic fossils, inside Triassic sandstone, burnt by Tertiary basalt) and these were published (by then staff geologist Dr Andrew Snelling) in Creation magazine and Journal of Creation. In each case, with contamination eliminated, the result has been in the thousands of years, i.e. C-14 was present when it ‘shouldn’t have been’. These results encouraged the rest of the RATE team to investigate C-14 further, building on the literature reviews of creationist M.D. Dr Paul Giem. In another very important paper presented at this year’s ICC, scientists from the RATE group summarized the pertinent facts and presented further experimental data. The bottom line is that virtually all biological specimens, no matter how ‘old’ they are supposed to be, show measurable C-14 levels. This effectively limits the age of all buried biota to less than (at most) 250,000 years. #15 The odds of even a single sell “assembling itself” by chance are so low that they aren’t even worth talking about. The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Gray’s book entitled “The Forbidden Secret“… Even the simplest cell you can conceive of would require no less than 100,000 DNA base pairs and a minimum of about 10,000 amino acids, to form the essential protein chain. Not to mention the other things that would also be necessary for the first cell. Bear in mind that every single base pair in the DNA chain has to have the same molecular orientation (“left-hand” or “right hand”)? As well as that, virtually all the amino acids must have the opposite orientation. And every one must be without error. “Now,” explained Larry, “to randomly obtain those correct orientations, do you know your chances? It would be 1 chance in 2110,000, or 1 chance in 1033,113! “To put it another way, if you attempted a trillion, trillion, trillion combinations every second for 15 billion years, the odds you would achieve all the correct orientations would still only be one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion … and the trillions would continue 2755 times! “It would be like winning more than 4700 state lotteries in a row with a single ticket purchased for each. In other words…impossible.” #16 How did life learn to reproduce itself? This is a question that evolutionists do not have an answer for. #17 In 2007, fishermen caught a very rare creature known as a Coelacanth. Evolutionists originally told us that this “living fossil” had gone extinct 70 million years ago. It turns out that they were only off by 70 million years. #18 According to evolutionists, the Ancient Greenling Damselfly last showed up in the fossil record about 300 million years ago. But it still exists today. So why hasn’t it evolved at all over the time frame? #19 Darwinists believe that the human brain developed without the assistance of any designer. This is so laughable it is amazing that there are any people out there that still believe this stuff. The truth is that the human brain is amazingly complex. The following is how a PBS documentary described the complexity of the human brain: “It contains over 100 billion cells, each with over 50,000 neuron connections to other brain cells.” #20 The following is how one evolutionist pessimistically assessed the lack of evidence for the evolution of humanity… “Even with DNA sequence data, we have no direct access to the processes of evolution, so objective reconstruction of the vanished past can be achieved only by creative imagination.” #21 Perhaps the most famous fossil in the history of the theory of evolution, “Piltdown Man”, turned out to be a giant hoax. #22 If the neutron were not about 1.001 times the mass of the proton, all protons would have decayed into neutrons or all neutrons would have decayed into protons, and therefore life would not be possible. How can we account for this? #23 If gravity was stronger or weaker by the slimmest of margins, then life sustaining stars like the sun could not exist. This would also make life impossible. How can we account for this? #24 Why did evolutionist Dr. Lyall Watson make the following statement?… “The fossils that decorate our family tree are so scarce that there are still more scientists than specimens. The remarkable fact is that all of the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed, with room to spare, inside a single coffin!” #25 Apes and humans are very different genetically. As DarwinConspiracy.com explains, “the human Y chromosome has twice as many genes as the chimpanzee Y chromosome and the chromosome structures are not at all similar.” #26 How can we explain the creation of new information that is required for one animal to turn into another animal? No evolutionary process has ever been shown to be able to create new biological information. One scientist described the incredible amount of new information that would be required to transform microbes into men this way… “The key issue is the type of change required — to change microbes into men requires changes that increase the genetic information content, from over half a million DNA ‘letters’ of even the ‘simplest’ self-reproducing organism to three billion ‘letters’ (stored in each human cell nucleus).” #27 Evolutionists would have us believe that there are nice, neat fossil layers with older fossils being found in the deepest layers and newer fossils being found in the newest layers. This simply is not true at all… The fossil layers are not found in the ground in the nice neat clean order that evolutionists illustrate them to be in their textbooks. There is not one place on the surface of the earth where you may dig straight down and pass through the fossil layers in the order shown in the textbooks. The neat order of one layer upon another does not exist in nature. The fossil bearing layers are actually found out of order, upside down (backwards according to evolutionary theory), missing (from where evolutionists would expect them to be) or interlaced (“younger” and “older” layers found in repeating sequences). “Out of place” fossils are the rule and not the exception throughout the fossil record. #28 Evolutionists believe that the ancestors of birds developed hollow bones over thousands of generations so that they would eventually be light enough to fly. This makes absolutely no sense and is beyond ridiculous. #29 If dinosaurs really are tens of millions of years old, why have scientists found dinosaur bones with soft tissue still in them? The following is from an NBC News report about one of these discoveries… For more than a century, the study of dinosaurs has been limited to fossilized bones. Now, researchers have recovered 70 million-year-old soft tissue, including what may be blood vessels and cells, from a Tyrannosaurus rex. #30 Which evolved first: blood, the heart, or the blood vessels for the blood to travel through? #31 Which evolved first: the mouth, the stomach, the digestive fluids, or the ability to poop? #32 Which evolved first: the windpipe, the lungs, or the ability of the body to use oxygen? #33 Which evolved first: the bones, ligaments, tendons, blood supply, or the muscles to move the bones? #34 In order for blood to clot, more than 20 complex steps need to successfully be completed. How in the world did that process possibly evolve? #35 DNA is so incredibly complex that it is absolutely absurd to suggest that such a language system could have “evolved” all by itself by accident… When it comes to storing massive amounts of information, nothing comes close to the efficiency of DNA. A single strand of DNA is thousands of times thinner than a strand of human hair. One pinhead of DNA could hold enough information to fill a stack of books stretching from the earth to the moon 500 times. Although DNA is wound into tight coils, your cells can quickly access, copy, and translate the information stored in DNA. DNA even has a built-in proofreader and spell-checker that ensure precise copying. Only about one mistake slips through for every 10 billion nucleotides that are copied. #36 Can you solve the following riddle by Perry Marshall?… 1) DNA is not merely a molecule with a pattern; it is a code, a language, and an information storage mechanism. 2) All codes are created by a conscious mind; there is no natural process known to science that creates coded information. 3) Therefore DNA was designed by a mind. If you can provide an empirical example of a code or language that occurs naturally, you’ve toppled my proof. All you need is one. #37 Evolutionists simply cannot explain why our planet is so perfectly suited to support life. #38 Shells from living snails have been “carbon dated” to be 27,000 years old. #39 If humans have been around for so long, where are all of the bones and all of the graves? The following is an excerpt from an article by Don Batten… Evolutionists also claim there was a ‘Stone Age’ of about 100,000 years when between one million and 10 million people lived on Earth. Fossil evidence shows that people buried their dead, often with artefacts—cremation was not practised until relatively recent times (in evolutionary thinking). If there were just one million people alive during that time, with an average generation time of 25 years, they should have buried 4 billion bodies, and many artefacts. If there were 10 million people, it would mean 40 billion bodies buried in the earth. If the evolutionary timescale were correct, then we would expect the skeletons of the buried bodies to be largely still present after 100,000 years, because many ordinary bones claimed to be much older have been found. However, even if the bodies had disintegrated, lots of artefacts should still be found. #40 Evolutionists claim that just because it looks like we were designed that does not mean that we actually were. They often speak of the “illusion of design”, but that is kind of like saying that it is an “illusion” that a 747 airplane or an Apple iPhone were designed. And of course the human body is far more complex that a 747 or an iPhone. #41 If you want to be part of the “scientific community” today, you must accept the theory of evolution no matter how absurd it may seem to you. Richard Lewontin of Harvard once made the following comment regarding this harsh reality… We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs,... in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated commitment to materialism.... we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. #42 Time Magazine once made the following statement about the lack of evidence for the theory of evolution… “Yet despite more than a century of digging, the fossil record remains maddeningly sparse. With so few clues, even a single bone that doesn’t fit into the picture can upset everything. Virtually every major discovery has put deep cracks in the conventional wisdom and forced scientists to concoct new theories, amid furious debate.” #43 Malcolm Muggeridge, the world famous journalist and philosopher, once made the following statement about the absurdity of the theory of evolution… “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.” #44 In order to believe the theory of evolution, you must have enough blind faith to believe that life just popped into existence from nonlife, and that such life just happened to have the ability to take in the nourishment it needed, to expel waste, and to reproduce itself, all the while having everything it needed to survive in the environment in which it suddenly found itself. Do you have that much blind faith? For years, I have been looking for someone that can explain to me the very best evidence for the theory of evolution in a systematic way. My challenge has been for someone to lay out for me a basic outline of the facts that “prove” that evolution is true. Perhaps you believe that you are up to the challenge. I’ll even get you started… A) #1 #2 #3 B) #1 #2 #3 C) #1 #2 #3 If you think that you can prove that evolution is true, please leave a comment below with your best shot. Or if you would like to discuss additional evidence for why you believe that the theory of evolution is false, please feel free to share it by posting a comment below. For those that would like to learn more, there are a couple of videos that I would recommend. One is entitled “Evolution vs. God“… The other one is entitled “The Case For A Creator“… May we all keep open minds, and may we all keep searching for the truth. Get my new book about the future of America: The Beginning of the End.In the municipality of Dimiao in the province of Bohol, Philippines, lies an eerie and perplexing image – rows and rows of honeycomb-like tombs. The site would not be so strange if it were not for one unusual fact – they are all empty. Empty tombs in Bohol. Photo source. The old cemetery, known as the Ermita Ruins (meaning ‘chapel in a lonely place’), dates back to the early 1800s and is protected by as a National Cultural Treasure. It is the only cemetery of its kind in the Philippines. It was commissioned by Fr. Enrique de Santo de Villanueva during the Spanish colonial period and built be a population that was willing to work for the church. Side entrance of the ruins that looks like a chapel. Photo source. Experts are baffled by the empty tombs, particularly considering archaeological teams have discovered a mass grave full of skeletons stacked on top of each other in the centre of the cemetery. Some historians have speculated that the area’s residents died of an epidemic before the cemetery was completed or who were hastily buried to prevent the spread of illness. The Bohol ruins. Photo source. Other researchers believe that the absence of bones can be explained by the closure of the cemetery in 1844. It is thought that it was shut down before being extensively after it was discovered that it was too near to a church, which was considered ‘unhealthy’. By April Holloway<Home Editor's Choice IDF and Syrian rebel officers meet clandestinely in Jordan: Reports DEBKAfile Special Report Israeli officials have been holding talks in Jordan with Syrian opposition officials “in advance of a possible Israeli-U.S. operation in Syria to protect the Golan Heights,” Western intelligence sources reported Tuesday, Jan. 1. There was no further information about this operation or how rebel commanders were involved in military plans “to protect the Golan Heights,” according to DEBKAfile, a security and intelligence news outlet. Altogether, the goings-on on the Israeli and Jordanian borders with Syria are in deep hush. But European intelligence sources, some of them French and Russian, reveal nightly clashes taking place between US, Jordanian, Israeli special forces and Syrian rebels, on the one hand, and Syrian special forces, on the other. DEBKAfile’s military sources disclose what they are fighting for: 1. Each of the four is jockeying both for control of the buffer strips along those borders and for keeping their opposite numbers from establishing intelligence-gathering posts there. US forces, the IDF and the Jordanian army have a major tactical interest in keeping Syrian observation posts from settling in the border sectors, where they would be in position to mark out military and civilian targets if the Syrian conflict spilled over. 2. The Assad regime has two special interests in gaining a foothold in Jordan’s border area. The first is to block the path of Syrian rebels heading back into the country and joining the various warfronts. At least five military facilities in Jordan are training special units of the Syrian opposition. They are managed by American, British, French, Czech and Polish military instructors. They are imparting tactics for capturing Syrian military chemical weapons caches and combating Syrian units armed with chemical or biological weapons. Some of the rebel trainees return to Syria when they graduate; others are attached to units standing by in Jordan in case the Syrian conflict slides into hostilities with Israel and Jordan. The second is back-up for the spy and sabotage networks the Assad government is running in Jordan’s refugee camps – just as they are in Turkey. Jordan houses some 60,000 Syrian refugees, most of them in the big Zaatari camp on the Syrian border. To facilitate communication with its undercover networks and the free passage of information, instructions and funds, Syria needs control over both sides of the common border. Monday, Jordan imposed a blackout on the capture of four Syrian soldiers in the zone between the two countries. The security spokesman in Amman revealed only that they were unarmed and being interrogated - but not whether they were entering the kingdom or on their way out. Earlier that day, a senior Jordanian military spokesman warned of an attempt to expand the Syrian war into Jordan. He did not attribute the attempt to any party. Military sources in Moscow are more forthcoming about happenings on Syria’s southern borders. Tuesday, Jan. 1, those sources reported that the Syrian army had repulsed a Syrian rebel assault from Jordan. They added that “Syrian border police had also seized a large pile of weapons, some of them Israeli-made, designated for the Free Syrian Army in the southern city of Deraa. 3. Extensive preparations are secretly afoot by US special forces, the IDF and the Turkish and Jordanian armies ready for President Bashar Assad to hand down the order to his army chiefs to launch a chemical war offensive on the military concentrations of Syrian rebels and their allies in the lands neighboring on Syria. Jordan’s training facilities for rebels are seen as likely to be Assad’s initial targets. Western military sources explain that, for this purpose, the Syrian ruler requires maximum control of Jordan’s borders, including the section abutting the Israeli side of the Golan Heights. The London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper reported that, when Israel officials met Syrian opposition commanders in Jordan this week, they asked for help to locate the remains of Eli Cohen, one of Israel’s most celebrated spies. He was caught and publicly hanged on May 18, 1965 after an epic career. For years, Cohen, posing as a wealthy Arab businessman, gained the confidence of Syrian officials at the highest levels of government and managed to obtain its secret war and political plans.Advertisement Once again the top dogs saw off the underdogs at this year's edition of the Nathan's Famous July fourth hot dog eating contest in New York. In the early afternoon, Joey 'Jaws' Chestnut, 33, successfully took home his tenth victory at the event, held near the original Nathan's Famous store in Coney Island, Brooklyn, by devouring 72 hot dogs in just ten minutes. Earlier, in the morning, the women's competition saw Las Vegas' Miki Sudo, 31, retaining her belt for another year, beating 17 others by chowing down a personal best of 41 hot dogs. Scroll down for video Joey 'Jaws' Chestnut (pictured) triumphed in the men's competition at the Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest on Tuesday, taking home the prized belt for the tenth time in 11 years Chestnut fended off Matt Stonie (pictured in black headband), who ate into his spree in 2015, to take home the prize once more. If he can retain the belt by 2019, he will have broken records at the competition, which has run since 1916 Chestnut wets the buns to make them go down easier, and managed to eat 11 buns and dogs in his first minute. In total he has consumed 709 hot dogs and buns since he first took the top prize in 2007 Miki Sudo is declared the female winner of the Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest on Tuesday. The annual 'dog-munching competition has been running annually since 1916 Sudo (pictured) beat challenger Michelle Lesco of Tuscon, Arizona, chowing down a personal best of 41 hot dogs in ten minutes. It is her fourth Nathan's Famous win in a row There were 13 other competitors at the women's event - although some of them seemed to have a tougher time of it than Sudo and Thomas Crowds wore Nathan's Famous hot dog hats and held up messages - including this cheeky 'Grab 'em by the wiener' sign - to show their enthusiasm for the bun-chomping fest As well as the competition, the event is accompanied by performers, gymnasts, DJs and musicians Chestnut faced off fellow San Diegan Matt 'The Megatoad' Stonie, 25, in a rematch, along with 14 other competitors at the Independence Day tradition, which has been held since 1916. Stonie had eaten into Chestnut's otherwise unbroken run - which began in 2007 - by beating him in 2015, but Chestnut won the title back in 2016. JOEY CHESTNUT: A HISTORY IN DOGS Joey Chestnut has taken the Nathan's Famous belt for the tenth time in 11 competitions since 2007, during which he's consumed 709 dogs and buns. 2007 Winner: 66 hot dogs 2008 Winner: 59 hot dogs 2009 Winner: 68 hot dogs 2010 Winner: 54 hot dogs 2011 Winner: 62 hot dogs 2012 Winner: 68 hot dogs 2013 Winner: 69 hot dogs 2014 Winner: 61 hot dogs 2015 Lost 60-62 to Matt Stonie 2016 Winner: 70 hot dogs 2017 Winner: 72 hot dogs On Tuesday Chestnut shoveled the dogs and their buns - lubricated by water - into his mouth one after the other, clocking 11 dogs in the first minute. Stonie, on the other hand, seemed to be struggling, and appeared to be stalling at the midpoint. But eventually Chestnut was victorious, later telling ESPN he was 'not a buffet buster' but someone who trains and fasts in preparation. 'I make my body work for me and I've been really lucky with how it's performed,' he said. Last year the champ downed 70 franks and buns, topping his own Coney Island record - which he then beat again this year by a further two dogs. Chestnut holds 44 world records, including eating 73-and-a half hot dogs in 2016 during a competitive eating qualifier. If he can retain the title into 2019 he will had held the trophy for longer than anyone in the competition's history. Prior to their match, Stonie called Chestnut 'a monster,' but said he would 'have fun' at the competition. Chestnut claimed before the men's competition began that he believed he could consume as many as 90 hot dogs if the time limit were not a factor. Among the other male competitors was 73-year-old Rich 'The Locust' Lefevere, the spam-eating champion of the world, and Carmen Cincotti, 23, who said he hoped to defeat Chestnut before the champ's eventual retirement. HOW TO CHOMP LIKE A CHAMP THE CHESTNUT WAY Ten-time Nathan's Famous hot dog competition winner Joey 'Jaws' Chestnut works hard for his victories. 'I put about two months into it; my first hot dog practice run was May 1,' he told told MLB Central on Friday. 'I simulate the contests, I eat for ten minutes hot dogs, very similar to contest conditions.' He also drinks lukewarm water mid-game to relax his muscles, and fasts for days before competitions. 'I slowly eat less and less and I'll make sure I’m absolutely empty the day of,' he said. '[Friday] I'll have a pretty big salad, and then [Saturday] will be less. And then Sunday and Monday, almost nothing.' Of course, a straight-up fast would see his stomach shrinking, so he fills up with liquids - big time. He'll drink three quarters of a gallon of water and at least half a gallon of milk to ensure his belly remains competition-ready, he told Cleveland.com. For other food types, Chestnut said he likes to get in 'at least two practices. First a practice, then I'll fast for two days, then do a practice and then recover and try to eat normal the next day. 'Every time I do a practice I push it a little farther, making my body adapt and getting stronger. After two or three practices I should be ready.' He added that he 'absolutely' has hot dogs in his downtime too. 'I love to eat,' he said. 'If I'm at a baseball game it's hard to hold back.' Chestnut also travels the world for competitions, and said his least pleasant experience was downing kimchi in South Korea. But he told USA Today that the one contest he'll never take part in is eating raw oysters - he can't stand them. Animal rights activists were hauled away from the Nathan's Famous competition by police on Tuesday as they attempted to disrupt the competition The activists were brought in as they shouted at the crowd. It's not clear which group they represented, but People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have denied involvement A cop detains a protester at the event. Some of them had tried to unfurl a banner, but were stopped. Last year members of Direct Action Everywhere sprayed contestants with ketchup and snatched a sausage from contestant 'Crazy Legs' Conti This year's event was mildly marred when five animal rights protesters were taken into custody for trying disrupt the event. About midway through the men's competition, some people amid the crowd of spectators were spotted trying to unfold a black banner. Police stationed there rushed into the crowd, handcuffed the demonstrators and took them away. It was unclear what was on the banner. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) had members giving away free vegan hot dogs outside the event, but a spokeswoman said the people arrested inside weren't with the group. Last year grassroots animal rights network Direct Action Everywhere, raided the stage at the contest, sprayed the eaters with ketchup and snatched a sausage from contestant 'Crazy Legs' Conti. Sudo and competitor Michele Lesco hug after the competition Sonya Thomas (right) had been victorious at the competition from 2011-2013 before falling to Sudo (left) in 2014; she hasn't managed to reclaim the title yet Hundreds of hot dogs were prepared for the event, which is attended by thousands and watched by many more on ESPN The crowd get hyped up ahead of the famous competition, which puts 'fast' in fast food Earlier in the day, Miki Sudo took her fourth title in a row when she beat Sonya Thomas, known as 'The Black Widow,' in the women's competition, eating 41 hot dogs However, there was some drama when the figure was miscounted as 36. Sudo said she knew that the count was off because she eats the buns and hot dogs separately, leading to an initially unclear cleaned plate count. She also told ESPN that she practices with Thomas and that her pal has been getting better and better with each session. 'Maybe next year she'll get me,' she added, 'but I knew this wasn't her year yet,' she said. However, Thomas - who won in 2011, 2012 and 2013 before falling to Sudo in 2014 - still holds the women's record, having downed 45 franks in 2013. The chowdown showdown usually draws thousands of spectators and is televised on ESPN. Spectators attempt their own records - though matching Sudo's 41 buns is unlikely Sudo and Thomas are seen here during the weigh-in for the contest, in Brooklyn Borough Hall, in New York on Monday. Suto weighed-in at 126 pounds, while Ms. Lesco tipped the scales at 104.5 pounds Chestnut holds up his belt at his weigh-in. As well as being the Nathan's Famous champ, Chestnut is the world record holder Reigning women's champion Miki Sudo, of Las Vegas, holds her championship belt during the weigh-in on Monday; she clocked in at 126 pounds George Shea, master of ceremonies for the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, gives a sample of his introductions for the event, during the weigh-in Competitive eating does come with some potential dangers, according to 'Competitive Speed Eating: Truth and Consequences,' a 2007 study entitled and published in the American Journal of Roentgenology. 'We speculate that professional speed eaters eventually may develop morbid obesity, profound gastroparesis, intractable nausea and vomiting and even the need for a gastrectomy,' it said. 'Despite its growing popularity, competitive speed eating is a potentially self-destructive form of behavior.' Training can potentially result in gastric ruptures and sodium levels dropping to dangerous lows, USA Today reported in 2015. Kim Dennis, an eating disorder expert from Chicago. told USA Today that 'Putting all of the health risks aside, there are certainly some psychological or psychiatric risks with regards to development of an eating disorder for people who had any sort of genetic predisposition to have one. 'Somebody eating 70 hot dogs in 10 minutes is self-abuse to some extent.' Chestnut poses with a stack of 'dogs. Hundreds are produced for the eventAs far as I know, no. We could make one up, here. "-phile" and "-phobe" are derived from the greek words "philia" (love) and "phobos" (fear), so we'd want to look for an greek word meaning "indifference", I think. "adiaphoria" looks like an early contender, being what Google translate comes back with for "indifference". There is already a philosophical concept "adiaphora" (note no 'i' at the end) meaning "indifferent things", referring to (my summary) things which are neither moral nor immoral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiaphora This isn't quite what we're after, and it's a bit long, anyway - it would be nice to be able to have a single-syllable suffix like "phile" or "phobe". "neutral" gives "oudéteros", which again is a bit long. Perhaps we could use "mesis" which means "middle"
2008 NHL Draft, has amassed 11 goals and 55 assists for 66 points in 192 career games. TJ BRODIE – DEFENCE BORN: Chatham, ONDATE: June 7, 1990 HEIGHT: 6’2” WEIGHT: 183 lbs. SHOOTS: Left HOW ACQUIRED: 4th round, 114th overall, in the 2008 NHL Draft Career Regular Season Statistics Season Team GP G A P +/- PIM PP SH GW S S% 2006-2007 Leamington Flyers-OJHL-B 43 8 38 46 104 2006-2007 Saginaw Spirit-OHL 20 0 4 4 23 2007-2008 Saginaw Spirit-OHL 68 4 26 30 73 2008-2009 Saginaw Spirit-OHL 63 12 38 50 8 67 7 1 2009-2010 Saginaw Spirit-OHL 19 4 19 23 15 20 3 0 2009-2010 Barrie Colts-OHL 46 3 30 33 18 38 0 1 2010-2011 Flames 3 0 0 0 -3 2 0 0 0 1 0.0 2010-2011 Abbotsford Heat-AHL 68 5 29 34 3 32 2 0 0 123 4.1 2011-2012 Flames 54 2 12 14 3 14 1 0 2 44 4.6 2011-2012 Abbotsford Heat-AHL 12 1 2 3 4 10 0 0 0 22 4.6 2012-2013 Flames 47 2 12 14 -9 8 0 0 0 44 4.6 2012-2013 Abbotsford Heat-AHL 35 1 19 20 5 22 0 0 0 41 2.4 2012-2013 Canada-WC-A 7 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 2013-2014 Flames 81 4 27 31 0 20 1 0 2 104 3.8 2014-2015 Flames 7 3 4 7 5 4 1 0 0 16 18.8 NHL Totals 192 11 55 66 -4 48 3 0 4 209 5.3 Career Playoff StatisticsIn the heartland of the District of Columbia, a most unusual wildlife refuge has emerged. The preserve, dubbed the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, has fostered a uniquely urban jungle environment for over half a century. Within its walls, a delightful assortment of creature are housed, ranging from insects and interns to small mammals and journalists. One may even find the occasional footballer on its grassy fields. Join us now as we look at some of RFK’s wild inhabitants. Gryllus Assimilus First spotted: October, 2013 Volatility: 1 The referee’s locker room at RFK is a sacred place. It is here, deep within the bowels of RFK stadium, that many MLS officials have taken pause, reflecting on a particular moment in a match. “Was that foul really severe enough to warrant a red?,” a pensive Red-card-o Salazar thought to himself. “Did they notice me?” pondered Mark Geiger, staring at himself longingly in the mirror. “But what really is soccer - this cruel dance of light and sound, a mesmerizing ballet where man meets nature,” sang Baldomero Toledo, operatically. That particular changing room is also adjacent to the media work room, and many a media member has made use of those facilities, answering nature’s call before churning out another 1500-word “what happened to Freddy Adu” opus. Just a week or two ago, while conducting end-of-the-year player interviews, I found myself in need of such a visit. You can imagine my surprise when I gazed downwards and saw this monster gazing back at me. We stood silent, eyes locked; I completely abandoned the idea of urinating, terrified that this uninvited guest would take advantage of my vulnerable state and move in for the kill. I backed away slowly, retreating shamefully to the urinal in the hallway leading to the dugout. Advantage: Gryllus Assimilus. One wonders what that cricket was doing in that bathroom stall that day. Perhaps, undeterred by the league-issued anti-match-fixing posters plastered on the wall, it arrived to gently chirp some instructions into the AR’s ear. Or perhaps it arrived in search of a Red Bull. Yes, there’s a Red Bull refrigerator in the referee’s changing room at RFK. Get your pitchforks.Usage: sayepurge.sh [options] sources... OPTIONS: --inc merge incremental backups -g <nguarded> recent files to guard (8) -k <nkeeps> non-recent to keep (8) -d <maxdelet> maximum number of deletions -C <dir> backup directory -o <prefix> output directory name (default: 'bak') -q, --quiet suppress progress information --fake only simulate deletions or merges -L list all backup files with delta times DESCRIPTION: Delete candidates from a set of aging backups to spread backups most evenly over time, based on time stamps embedded in directory names. Backups older than <nguarded> are purged, so that only <nkeeps> backups remain. In other words, the number of backups is reduced to <nguarded> + <nkeeps>, where <nguarded> are the most recent backups. The puring logic will always pick the backup with the shortest time distance to other backups. Thus, the number of <nkeeps> remaining backups is most evenly distributed across the total time period within which backups have been created. Purging of incremental backups happens via merging of newly created files into the backups predecessor. Thus merged incrementals may contain newly created files from after the incremental backups creation time, but the function of reverse incremental backups is fully preserved. Merged incrementals use a different file name ending (-xinc).Drugs are bad. Drugs destroy peoples' lives. Didn't you know that marijuana turns regular everyday people into zombie pot smokers? That's why we have a war on drugs in America: to protect our children from potheads. Drugs are bad. Especially marijuana. I learned this the other day when I visited an elementary school as a guest speaker. The schoolchildren were well trained in describing the dangers of drugs. On command, they would spout out any number of statements describing them. But then a funny thing happened. I started asking how many of them were on drugs. You know, drugs their doctor prescribed. Drugs that alter brain chemistry to keep them docile, or free of pain, or to dilate their lungs so they could breathe easier. It turned out that 60% of these schoolchildren were either on drugs at that very moment, or had been on such drugs within the last twelve months. Two-thirds of the teachers were on drugs, too. And it's not at all a stretch to believe that 40% or more of all parents are on drugs. Mild-altering drugs like antidepressants, no less. A nation of drug addicts Fact is, we are a nation of drug addicts. We drug ourselves, our elderly and our children on a daily basis. We do it with prescription medications, over-the-counter pills, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine... and we say it's all fine because those drugs are legal. But wait a minute, you say. Those legal drugs are different from marijuana. They're FDA-approved drugs, prescribed by a doctor. They have a medical purpose. Oh really? Ritalin has a medical purpose? What medical symptoms does Ritalin treat, then? What measurable physiological state is addressed with Ritalin? There are none, of course. Ritalin is an authority drug. It keeps children in line. It makes teachers feel less stress and parents feel less guilt. Ritalin is a mind-altering narcotic, and yet millions of children are on it today. Its purpose is not to help children, but to make life more convenient for those who manage children. You think statin drugs have a medical purpose? Think again. In reality, they only have a profit purpose. These drugs were invented to sell pills that manage disease states in people, not that solve any real health problem. Don't believe me? Just stop taking your statin drugs, if you dare, and watch your cholesterol skyrocket. You'll find out you're a slave to the drug, and no healthier than before. What's the difference between legal and illegal drugs? So what's the real difference between legal drugs and illegal drugs? Some people think that only illegal drugs are habit-forming. Yet legal drugs can be just as addictive as illegal drugs. Just ask anyone who has tried to quit smoking, go off caffeine, or kick to Oxycontin habit. So is there some other difference between illegal drugs and legal drugs? People argue that legal drugs are safe. They're FDA-approved! And yet they fail to recognize that prescription drugs kill more Americans each year than all the crack, meth, and heroin deaths combined. Okay, then, what about the argument that illegal drugs have no medicinal purpose, and legal drugs do have a medicinal purpose. What about that? Wrong again. Medical marijuana is a medically proven treatment for a variety of conditions, yet marijuana still remains illegal. Even MDMA (now called "Ecstasy" on the street) was long considered an effective "experiential drug" that helped severely traumatized adult patients overcome past pains through improved clarity. At the same time, tobacco smoke has no medical purpose whatsoever, yet cigarettes remain perfectly legal. No, the real difference between these two classes of drugs is not their medical merit, nor their safety. The real difference is something far more sinister. It gets right down to answering the question of why DEA agents will raid medical marijuana clinics, yet stand by doing nothing while Americans smoke themselves to death on tobacco. Want to know the real answer? I very much doubt you do. Because, like most Americans, you won't believe it. You've been blinded to the obvious truth for your whole life, manipulated by the media, and brainwashed by advertising that has turned you into a statistically-validated consumer. You'll think, no, this couldn't possibly be true. The world isn't that unjust, you think. But you're wrong. (Take the free Gullibility Factor test to find out if you're really a mind slave or not...) Here's the raw, blunt truth about the war on drugs. Drugs are declared legal or illegal based primarily on who benefits from their manufacture, distribution and sale. Corporate and government profits determine the legality Let me put this another way. You know why cigarettes are still legal? Consider this: here's a product that admittedly kills people. It has no health benefit whatsoever. It is a threat to the public health. Yet why does it remain legal?thanks to the Big Tobacco settlement a few years back. Keeping cigarettes legal results in desperately-needed revenues for states... revenues that are almost never spent on anti-smoking campaigns, by the way. It's a classic racket: tobacco is allowed to remain legal because powerful institutions get a cut of the action. While people die from lung cancer, states get financial resuscitation by taking a cut of every sale. States are trading your health for their revenues. Think I'm being overly cynical? Let's take a look at gambling laws. Organized gambling is illegal at both the state and federal levels in this country. Except, of course, when government gets a cut. Casino-friendly states didn't just make casinos legal for the good of the public: they legalized gambling in exchange for a cut of the action. It's a classic, mob-style "protection fee." If you want to test this theory, launch your own online gambling website. You'll be shut down almost immediately and charged with serious crimes. Gambling and organized betting is illegal, didn't you know? That is, unless the state runs the show, as in state lotteries. It's right in your face, folks: gambling is legal when powerful corporations or institutions get a piece of the action. It's illegal when they don't. It has nothing at all to do with morality, or protecting people, or doing what's right. It's all about money, pure and simple. Just ask all the corrupt politicians in Missouri who legalized riverboat gambling a few years back. Getting back to drugs, why do you think alcohol remains a legal drug? Because states and cities tax it. State governments are addicted to alcoholics as a source of revenue to fund their voter entitlement programs that get politicians reelected. Alcohol is a cash machine for cities and states. Sometimes the exact same chemical is both legal and illegal, depending on who profits from it. The FDA, for example, banned the Chinese herb ma huang because it contains ephedra. Yet the exact same chemical compound remains perfectly legal in over-the-counter drugs like Sudafed and a variety of cold medicines. Sudafed even gets its name from ephedra: "pseudo-ephedrine." So why is ephedrine illegal in herbs, yet legal in pharmacy drugs manufactured by drug companies? You already know the answer. With all that in mind, why do you think prescription drugs that kill people remain legal? Think carefully now... If you guessed, "Because powerful corporations generate billions in profits selling drugs, and governments get a cut of that via state sales taxes and corporate income taxes" then BINGO! You win a prize: a lifetime of free Prozac to keep you happy! Legal drugs generate windfall profits for those in power Think about it: if prescription drugs were peddled by street dealers instead of doctors, and if all that revenue changed hands in a non-taxable, non-corporate structure (i.e. street cash), then you'd be seeing full-scale law enforcement action against the makers, distributors and sellers of those drugs. You'd also see endless headlines about how dangerous they were: "Street painkillers kill twelve in South Miami!" The sad truth of the matter, though, is that those very same painkilling drugs killed at least twelve people in South Miami this very day. But you'll never here about it in the media. Because the news networks are sponsored by drug companies, of course. (The news is not designed to inform you, it's designed to shape your reality, to turn you into a consumer of whatever products the corporations are peddling this year. Didn't you know?) Every drug that's legal is legal for one simple reason: somebody in a position of power is keeping it legal because they're getting a cut. Non-patentable drugs are usually outlawed That's why medical marijuana is illegal: because government doesn't control its distribution, nor does government receive a financial cut. You can bet your life that if Big Pharma owned the patents on medical marijuana and could set monopolistic prices on it,. That is, as long as you got it from a pharmacy where prices and distribution could be controlled. Control is the key here. You think the FDA is discrediting drugs from Canada in order to protect your health? Get real. The FDA is simply protecting the monopoly drug market in this country. It's controlling distribution points in the U.S. in the same way that a crack dealer assassinates his street corner competition. Eliminate the competition, and you can set whatever price you want. That's why uninformed U.S. consumers pay 30,000% markup prices for drugs that can be acquired in Mexico or Canada for pennies on the dollar. It's not about your health, it's about their wealth You see, corporate America doesn't really care what you put in your mouth, up your nose, through your lungs or into your veins, as long as they get a cut from it. That's the whole prescription drug racket in a nutshell: it's billions of dollars in annual profits generated from mind-altering (yet legal) drugs that flat-out kill people. Lots of people. Like 100,000 Americans a year (or a lot more if you believe more critical statistics). So if you've ever wondered why Ritalin -- which has no medical purpose whatsoever -- is perfectly legal, and yet medical marijuana -- which has a well-proven medical purpose -- is outlawed, now you know the answer: because Ritalin makes powerful people rich. And marijuana doesn't. Anybody can grow marijuana. Drug companies don't control the patents. Why I teach people to be 100% drug free Now, just for the record, I do not personally use any drugs whatsoever (recreational, over-the-counter, prescription or otherwise), and in fact, I teach people to be 100% free of all drugs, including caffeine and alcohol. I bought into the "just say no to drugs" advice of Nancy Reagan, and I actually applied it to ALL drugs, not just selective drugs. And as far as I can tell, aside from the Mormons and the Amish, there are only a small percentage of truly drug-free people living in this country. Practically everybody I meet is addicted to at least one of the following: coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, pain meds, prescription drugs or sugar (which alters brain chemistry in drug-like fashion). At the same time, I'm not at all fooled by this silly "War on Drugs" charade, which is really nothing more than enforcement of corporate drug profits at gunpoint. If we had a genuine war on drugs in this country that really worked to protect the American people we'd send DEA agents into drug company offices and confiscate all the legalized but deadly medications being manufactured, distributed and deceptively sold to unwitting Americans today. Medical marijuana is a threat to both the profits and power of drug companies, not to mention the credibility of the DEA. Letting grannies smoke pot in California makes DEA agents look silly. If it were allowed, it would also undermine the billions of dollars already spent incarcerating people for "pot crimes." Basically, it would make the whole War on Drugs look stupid. Which it most assuredly is, at least when it comes to marijuana. I can understand taking a tough stance on hard drugs (crack, meth, heroin, etc.), but arresting cancer patients who smoke joints for pain control sounds a lot more like oppression than law enforcement to me. So what is the War on Drugs? It's an excuse to control you. It is a system that keeps the population in a state of constant fear so that heroic politicians can get elected on empty promises to "keep fighting the war on drugs!" The DEA is AWOL on most drug issues Where is this War on Drugs when it comes to Grandma in the nursing home, who died of a stroke caused by Cox-2 inhibitor drugs? Where is the War on Drugs when little Johnny schoolboy picks up a rifle and blows away his classmates because he's on antidepressants and can't tell the difference between real life and a first-person-shooter video game? Where is the War on Drugs when 16,500 people each year die, shitting digested blood until they pass out and die because that daily dose of aspirin tore a gaping hole in their stomach? The War on Drugs, you see, turns a blind eye to the death and suffering caused by these drugs. The DEA pretends prescription drugs don't even exist. No prescription drug death has ever been prevented by the DEA as far as I know. Yet 100,000 Americans are killed each year by FDA-approved drugs. The DEA has no interest whatsoever in protecting Americans from these drugs. Ever wonder why? The DEA is properly named, by the way. It's the Drug Enforcement Agency. It's enforcing drugs. The right drugs. The legal drugs. The drugs that make money for drug companies, drug distributors, drug retailers, cities, states and countries. It's enforcement at gunpoint, and as long as the money keeps flowing, the drugs will stay perfectly legal, regardless of who dies. The entire distribution system is well in place: the false and misleading television advertising, the outright bribery of drug dealers (doctors), the street corner fulfillment centers (pharmacies), and the coordinating drug lord running the show (the Fraud and Drug Administration). It's a brilliant system for manufacturing, promoting, delivering and selling deadly, addictive drugs to children, adults and seniors while generating corporate profits and tax revenues for cities, states and nations. And that's the raw truth about the War on Drugs. You may not like it, but now, at least, you know why it exists. So I have a common sense question for all the people in this country. If you support the War on Drugs, then why are you taking so many drugs yourself? And why are you allowing your children to be drugged? Get breaking news alerts on GMOs, fluoride, superfoods, natural cures and more... Join over four million monthly readers. Email privacy 100% protected. Unsubscribe at any time. About the author: Mike Adams is a natural health author and award-winning journalist with a mission to teach personal and planetary health to the public He has authored more than 1,800 articles and dozens of reports, guides and interviews on natural health topics, and he has published numerous courses on preparedness and survival, including financial preparedness, emergency food supplies, urban survival and tactical self-defense. Adams is a trusted, independent journalist who receives no money or promotional fees whatsoever to write about other companies' products. In mid 2010, Adams produced TV.NaturalNews.com, a natural health video sharing website offering user-generated videos on nutrition, green living, fitness and more. He also founded an environmentally-friendly online retailer called BetterLifeGoods.com that uses retail profits to help support consumer advocacy programs. He's also the CEO of a highly successful email newsletter software company that develops software used to send permission email campaigns to subscribers. Adams also serves as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a non-profit consumer protection group, and pursues hobbies such as martial arts, Capoeira, nature macrophotography and organic gardening. Known by his callsign, the 'Health Ranger,' Adams posts his missions statements, health statistics and health photos at www.HealthRanger.org Have comments on this article? Post them here: people have commented on this article.There are billions of star systems in the galaxy to explore, each with endless possibilities and their own story to tell. Frontier Developments is giving players the chance to explore all of them with their multiplayer space adventure, Elite: Dangerous. The latest game in the heralded Elite series began as a Kickstarter project and wound up raising roughly $1.5 million. Frontier has since issued the game's alpha and beta, offering a mere taste of what the final product will entail. Fans are already enthusiastic and many of Shacknews' Chatty posters are among them. Elite: Dangerous has frequently popped up as the subject of a number of Chatty threads, many expressing excitement for the game's second beta, which deployed on September 30. Shacknews spoke to producer Adam Woods about the current state of Elite: Dangerous, what's coming up in the future, Oculus Rift integration, all the while pitching questions directly from Shacknews' Chatty community. Shacknews: What's the current state of Elite: Dangerous? In what ways has it changed over the course of the past few months of development? Adam Woods, producer: We have just released Beta 2; it has been a couple of months since Beta 1 was launched and as well as adding many 'forward facing' features that are visible in-game, we have done a huge amount under the hood which is really vital to getting the game released. Shacknews: What does Beta 2 look add to the game? Woods: Lots! We have player ratings, so people can now work their way up to the famous 'Elite' rating, and they have per faction and per star system reputations that influence attitudes and prices offered to them. There are now 570 star systems in 381,033 cubic light years to explore, and you can scan and sell data on new systems you discover, which in turn feeds into the new detailed system maps that are now available. There are new 'Outposts,' which are smaller exposed stations in remote locations, and a whole new class of starports called 'Ocellus' – they're smaller and designed to be the first major base in a star system. And as well as the new Lakon Asp Explorer ship, there many new ways to upgrade all ships with a wide range of Life Support modules, Engines, Hyperdrives, Power Distributors, Sensors, Shield Generators and Cargo Racks, plus new weapons including mines and a Cargo Hatch Limpet built for non-lethal piracy. You can see other ships in supercruise, and the ability to track pilots through supercruise and hyperspace, and there are now in-game newsfeeds, reporting story events from around the galaxy and each system. We've also added all backers names from the appropriate crowd-funding reward tiers to the NPC naming database, so people can come across themselves in game! There are tons of incredible visual improvements (try flying around an Earth like planet in supercruise. Seeing the sun set and rise on each side is life changing!) and even more great music. There are some tutorial missions to help new players begin flying in space, there have been many tweaks and optimizations, and we’ve added SLI and Crossfire support which has opened up play at 4k resolution (if you have the right spec machine). It all makes for a very rich release! Shacknews: How much does the overall experience change when going from standard controls to VR? Woods: The overall experience doesn't change; it's still you, a fistful of credits, a Sidewinder, and the Milky Way. Regardless of how the game is displayed you still experience the vulnerability of being in deep space; limping desperately back to a Starport to repair your ship with your life support timer ticking down, and a breached canopy is a stressful and exhilarating experience with or without VR! The biggest difference though is with VR you are "inside" the cockpit; it's all around you wherever you look, and that is amazing. Shacknews: How has player feedback helped change Elite: Dangerous for the better? Woods: It's been a tremendous help. We have basically been as open as possible with our backers and their feedback has been invaluable. Apart from the obvious benefit of us being able to look at balancing things with large numbers of people playing, some design aspects such as the supercruise method of travel within a system were made better with player feedback. They lobbied strongly for Oculus Rift support – which we were delighted to implement! Even just recently their testing helped us to come up with some really quick fixes to problems people were having following the launch of Beta 2. It really does feel like we are all in it together, making the game we have all wanted for a very long time. Woods then addressed some questions from the Chatty community. He wasn't able to answer all of them, since they address some features that are still in development. However, he did answer a handful. boarder2 asks: Any plans to let us leave our ships and walk around the space stations? Woods: Yes, but not in the initial release. We have big expansions planned for the future, including this, and getting onto the surface of planets. Watch this space! boarder2 also asks: Will we get anything like a tractor beam to make scavenging easier than picking things up with the cargo scoop? Woods: If things are too hard then of course we’ll look to address that. We try to keep the development as far as possible based on 'hard science' – what would be scientifically possible/plausible in the year 3300. senor135 asks: Are there plans to expand the lineup of ships and ship classes to be flyable by the player? Woods: Yes! In the initial release of the game we will have fighters, traders, passenger liners, and multi-role ships. Lots to get your teeth in to and we're still in development! shavenwok asks: Are there any plans to make the Lifetime Expansion Pass available again in the future? Woods: Not at the moment. Elite: Dangerous is currently in its 'Beta 2' phase. Those looking to join the beta can find it on the Elite: Dangerous website.Ivanka Trump, the daughter of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, posted a picture of herself and Wendi Deng Murdoch sightseeing in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on Aug. 14 Deng, the ex-wife of Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch, is rumored to be dating Russian President Vladimir Putin, noted Us Weekly. An unidentified insider told Us Weekly in March that Putin and Deng were in a "serious" relationship. The magazine also noted that reports of Putin and Deng have been circulating ever since they got their respective divorces a few years ago. Ivanka's father has encouraged Russia to hack Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's emails, and praised Putin. The New York Times reports that the Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau recently found handwritten records in an office used by Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager, in Kiev, Ukraine. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website The records reportedly that show $12.7 million was designated to Manafort while he was consulting for Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian leader, between 2007 and 2012. It's not clear if Manafort actually received the money, which investigators think was possibly used in an illegal off-the-books system to pay off election officials and others. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website Investigators are also investigating some offshore shell companies that allegedly assisted in helping Yanukovych’s cronies fund their rich lifestyles, including an $18 million deal involving Manafort and Oleg Deripaska, a wealthy Russian friend of Putin's. "[Manafort] understood what was happening in Ukraine," Vitaliy Kasko, a former official with a prosecutor’s office in Kiev, Ukraine, told the newspaper. "It would have to be clear to any reasonable person that the Yanukovych clan, when it came to power, was engaged in corruption." Manafort did not issue a response, but his attorney, Richard A. Hibey, said Manafort did not receive "any such cash payments" that investigators described. "These are suspicions, and probably heavily politically tinged ones," Hibey added. "It is difficult to respect any kind of allegation of the sort being made here to smear someone when there is no proof and we deny there ever could be such proof." In addition working for Yanukovych, Manafort also consulted for Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s. Sources: Us Weekly, The New York Times / Photo credit: Ivanka Trump/InstagramAMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Global chemical weapons investigators have gone to Turkey to collect samples as part of an inquiry into an alleged chemical weapons attack in neighbouring Syria last week that killed 87 people. A crater is seen at the site of an airstrike, after what rescue workers described as a suspected gas attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in rebel-held Idlib, Syria April 4, 2017. REUTERS/Ammar Abdullah The fact-finding mission was sent by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague to gather bio-metric samples and interview survivors, sources told Reuters on Thursday. The toxic gas attack on April 4, which killed scores of people including children, prompted a U.S. cruise missile strike on a Syrian air base and widened a rift between the United States and Russia, a close ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his conflict with rebels and militants fighting to oust him. Syrian authorities have repeatedly denied using any chemical weapons. Russian officials said the gas had been released by an air strike on a poison gas storage depot controlled by rebels. Washington said that account was not credible, and rebels have denied it. Samples taken from the poison gas site in Syria’s Idlib governorate tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, the British delegation at the OPCW said on Thursday. “UK scientists have analysed samples taken from Khan Sheikhoun. These have tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, or a sarin-like substance,” the delegation said during a special session on Syria at the OPCW in The Hague. The UK result confirmed earlier testing by Turkish authorities that concluded that sarin had been used for the first time on a large scale in Syria’s civil war since 2013. Related Coverage UK PM May says highly likely Syrian government behind poison gas attack The OPCW mission will determine whether chemical weapons were used, but is not mandated to assign blame. Its findings, expected in 3-4 weeks, will be passed to a joint United Nations-OPCW investigation tasked with identifying individuals or institutions responsible for using chemical weapons. International investigators have concluded that sarin, chlorine and sulphur mustard gas have been used in Syria’s six-year-old conflict, with government forces using chlorine and Islamic State militants using sulphur mustard. Last week’s poison gas attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in the rebel-held province of Idlib near the Turkish border was the most lethal since a sarin attack on Aug. 21, 2013 killed hundreds in a rebel-controlled suburb of the capital Damascus.If you’ve ever tried to create your own iOS framework, you know that it’s not for the faint of heart – managing dependencies and writing tests doesn’t make it any easier. This tutorial will walk you through creating your first iOS framework from start to finish so that you can go out and create your own. We’re going to build a framework that exposes a function called RGBUIColor(red:green:blue) that returns a new UIColor created from those values. We’ll build it using Swift, with Carthage as our dependency manager. Our framework will be consumable using Carthage, CocoaPods, or git submodules. Let’s begin! Select File → New → Project. Select iOS → Framework & Library from the left sidebar and select “Cocoa Touch Library” on the right. Click “Next” and fill in the option prompts. Make sure to select the “Include Unit Tests” check box. Select where you’d like to save your project. Uncheck “Create Git repository on My Mac”, we’ll manually set it up later. Click “Create” and the project will open in Xcode. Go to File → Save As Workspace and save it in the same directory as your Xcode project with the same name. We put the project in a workspace because we’ll be adding our Carthage dependencies as submodules; they must be in a workspace for Xcode to build them. Close the Xcode project with File → Close Project. Open the workspace with File → Open. Click on the scheme on the top left of Xcode and select “Manage Schemes”. We need to mark our scheme as “shared” so that the project can be built with Carthage. Locate the “RGB” scheme and check the “Shared” check box and click “Close”. Let’s jump over to the terminal. First, navigate to the directory you saved your project in. Run git init to initialize an empty repository. to initialize an empty repository. Create a.gitignore which will keep out some pesky Xcode and dependency files we don’t want to track in git. Here’s a standard one for Swift projects with a few modifications. We added.DS_Store and removed fastlane and extra comments. ## OS X Finder.DS_Store ## Build generated build/ DerivedData ## Various settings *.pbxuser!default.pbxuser *.mode1v3!default.mode1v3 *.mode2v3!default.mode2v3 *.perspectivev3!default.perspectivev3 xcuserdata ## Other *.xccheckout *.moved-aside *.xcuserstate *.xcscmblueprint ## Obj-C/Swift specific *.hmap *.ipa # Swift Package Manager.build/ # Carthage Carthage/Build Create a file in your project directory named Cartfile and the runtime dependencies to it. We’ll add Curry. github "thoughtbot/Curry" Create a Cartfile.private. It will house private dependencies like our test frameworks. We’ll use Quick and Nimble. github "Quick/Quick" github "Quick/Nimble" Create a bin/setup script. It’s used to give our contributors (and us) a simple way to set up the project and the dependencies. mkdir bin touch bin/setup chmod +x bin/setup Open up bin/setup and fill it with: #!/usr/bin/env sh if! command -v carthage > /dev/null ; then printf 'Carthage is not installed. ' printf 'See https://github.com/Carthage/Carthage for install instructions. ' exit 1 fi carthage update --platform iOS --use-submodules --no-use-binaries In this script, we make sure the user has Carthage installed and run its update command to install the iOS dependencies. We’re using --use-submodules so that our dependencies are added as submodules. This allows users to consume our framework outside of Carthage if they want. We use --no-use-binaries so that our dependencies are built on our system. With bin/setup created, let’s run it so that Carthage will download our dependencies. In the terminal, run bin/setup. Now we need to set up our project to build and link the new dependencies. Since our dependencies are submodules, we need to add them to our workspace. Open up Carthage/Checkouts and add each dependency’s.xcodeproj to the root of the workspace. They can be dragged from Finder into the navigator of the Xcode project. When you’re done it should look like: With “RGB” selected in the Navigator and the “RGB” target selected on the middle sidebar, select the “Build Phases” tab and expand the “Link binary with libraries” section. Click the “+” icon and select the Curry.framework from the Curry-iOS target. from the target. Click “Add”. Select the “RGBTests” target from the middle sidebar. Using the same process as before, add the Quick and Nimble frameworks to the “Link binary with libraries” section for this target. When adding dependencies to each target, Xcode will automatically add them to the “Framework Search Paths” under the “Build Settings” tab. We can remove these from the “RGB” and “RGBTests” target because Xcode treats them as implicit dependencies due to them being in the same workspace. Select the target, locate the “Framework Search Paths” setting, highlight it, and press “backspace” on your keyboard. Next, look in the “RGB” project in the Navigator; you’ll see there are three new frameworks at the root level. To keep this area organized, highlight all three, right click and select “New group from selection” to
evidence for independence from various non-face categories, we found little to no impact of environment on face recognition ability. Genetic variation accounted for most or all of the reliable face recognition variance, in contrast with face IP (68% versus 22% heritability; p of difference < 1E−14; see Figure 2 C and Table 1 ). Indeed, looking across the behavioral genetic literature, face IP is among the most environmental objectively measured behavioral traits, whereas face identity recognition is among the most heritable []. We conclude from this etiological dissociation that the observed environmental effect is highly specific to face attractiveness judgments. 28 Little A.C. Burt D.M. Perrett D.I. What is good is beautiful: face preference reflects desired personality. 29 DeBruine L.M. Resemblance to self increases the appeal of child faces to both men and women. 30 DeBruine L.M. Jones B.C. Crawford J.R. Welling L.L. Little A.C. The health of a nation predicts their mate preferences: cross-cultural variation in women’s preferences for masculinized male faces. 31 Little A.C. Cohen D.L. Jones B.C. Belsky J. Human preferences for facial masculinity change with relationship type and environmental harshness. 32 Little A.C. DeBruine L.M. Jones B.C. Exposure to visual cues of pathogen contagion changes preferences for masculinity and symmetry in opposite-sex faces. 33 Pettijohn II, T.F. Tesser A. Popularity in environmental context: facial feature assessment of American movie actresses. 34 Apicella C.L. Little A.C. Marlowe F.W. Facial averageness and attractiveness in an isolated population of hunter-gatherers. 35 Carbon C.C. Ditye T. Face adaptation effects show strong and long-lasting transfer from lab to more ecological contexts. 36 Cooper P.A. Geldart S.S. Mondloch C.J. Maurer D. Developmental changes in perceptions of attractiveness: a role of experience?. 37 Cooper P.A. Maurer D. The influence of recent experience on perceptions of attractiveness. 38 Rhodes G. Jeffery L. Watson T.L. Clifford C.W. Nakayama K. Fitting the mind to the world: face adaptation and attractiveness aftereffects. 39 Rhodes G. Louw K. Evangelista E. Perceptual adaptation to facial asymmetries. 19 Cesarini D. Dawes C.T. Johannesson M. Lichtenstein P. Wallace B. Experimental game theory and behavior genetics. 40 Jones B.C. DeBruine L.M. Little A.C. Burriss R.P. Feinberg D.R. Social transmission of face preferences among humans. 41 Little A.C. Caldwell C.A. Jones B.C. DeBruine L.M. Observer age and the social transmission of attractiveness in humans: younger women are more influenced by the choices of popular others than older women. 42 Perrett D.I. Penton-Voak I.S. Little A.C. Tiddeman B.P. Burt D.M. Schmidt N. Oxley R. Kinloch N. Barrett L. Facial attractiveness judgements reflect learning of parental age characteristics. 43 Verosky S.C. Todorov A. Generalization of affective learning about faces to perceptually similar faces. 44 Waynforth D. Mate choice copying in humans. 12 Bronstad P.M. Russell R. Beauty is in the ‘we’ of the beholder: greater agreement on facial attractiveness among close relations. 22 Little A.C. Perrett D.I. Putting beauty back in the eye of the beholder. Previous evidence has indicated that preferences for particular faces or face characteristics are shaped by a range of factors, including personality preferences [], the rater’s own facial characteristics [], features of the socioeconomic and cultural environment [], previous visual experience [], and history of social learning []. Individual preferences for faces are also correlated among friends and spouses []. In our sample, most of the variations in face preferences were explained by the contribution of unshared environment—those aspects of the environment that are unique to individuals and not shared between twins. Our data suggest that individual life history and experience are a driving force behind individual face preferences []. 45 McEvoy B.P. Montgomery G.W. McRae A.F. Ripatti S. Perola M. Spector T.D. Cherkas L. Ahmadi K.R. Boomsma D. Willemsen G. et al. Geographical structure and differential natural selection among North European populations. 46 Turkheimer E. Haley A. Waldron M. D’Onofrio B. Gottesman I.I. Socioeconomic status modifies heritability of IQ in young children. Does this mean that shared environments are not important for individual face preferences? Not necessarily. Our study was conducted with a relatively homogeneous sample of Australian twins []. Given the sociocultural homogeneity of our sample, the low contribution of genetic variance to face IP is particularly noteworthy: estimates of genetic contributions tend to be higher where environments are less variable [].Amoebiasis also called as Amoebic dysentery is an intestinal infection caused due to a protozoa called as “Entamoeba histolytica” and is characterized by dysentery associated with presence of blood and mucus in feces.This can be chronic or acute with patients showing varying degree of illness from no symptoms to mild dysentery to severe dysentery causing collapse and even death of the patient. Diagnosis is can be done by stool testing for presence of Entamoeba histolytica.Treatment is aimed not only for the patients with symptoms but also for the one those who are dormant carriers of the disease.The drugs which are used in treatment of the Amoebiasis are called as “Antiamoebic Drugs” Life cycle of Entamoeba histolytica:Entamoeba histolytica exist in two life forms,Cysts: (Tough form, non-motile and can exist outside the body).Trophozoites: (Motile form, can not exist outside the body).Life cycle consists of following steps: Entry of cysts in the body:Cysts enter into the body through …0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard First the Benghazi scandal bit the dust after Hillary Clinton testified, and then the Department of Justice released their report that found no targeting of conservatives and no criminal wrongdoing at the IRS. In his letter to Congress, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik wrote, “We found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution. Based on the evidence developed in this investigation and the recommendation of experienced career prosecutors and supervising attorneys at the Department, we are closing our investigation and will not seek any criminal charges.” Democratic Ways And Means Committee Ranking Member Sander Levin delivered the blunt truth that Republicans wasted 20 million taxpayer dollars on an empty conspiracy theory, “I was one of the first Members of Congress to call for Ms. Lerner’s resignation in 2013 in response to her mismanagement and poor judgement. Since May of 2013, the IRS has spent $20 million and provided to Congress more than one million pages of documents related to this investigation.” The bogus Republican investigations are dropping like flies. Of course, Republicans still refuse to see reality. They are still clinging on to the belief that the IRS was out to get them. The IRS scandal was one of the fishing expeditions of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). Issa was never able to produce any evidence to back his claims that President Obama was behind the IRS scandal, but he did manage to humiliate himself by releasing a report that proved that he had nothing. The IRS scandal was supposed to bring down President Obama. The Benghazi scandal was supposed to be the end of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Instead, both Democrats are stronger than ever, and it is Republicans who are collapsing under the weight of their dysfunction. If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:Python is the most frequently taught programming language in introductory computer science classes. There are many universities and colleges training students in Python, as well as many online classes to help introduce new people to coding, via Python. As students seek avenues to grow their Python coding skills and become expert coders, the CheckiO community has seen continuous expansion with thousands of new players signing up every month. We have seen great adoption of CheckiO by the top universities in the United States as they look for new ways to supplement their traditional curriculum and engage their students. The infographic shows the top 20 universities represented on CheckiO. We salute these universities and their professors for encouraging students to learn coding skills that will aid them as they embark on careers in coding. As CheckiO player and University of South Florida student Thomas Dietert stated in a recent interview: "I think solving practical coding challenges and learning from one another to be essential to not plateau in knowledge gain. Books and theory can only get you so far-- such a significant part of learning is practicing in a way that relates to the real world." CheckiO is about helping you to improve your Python coding skills with the support of a great coding community. Players can ask for help from others and receive code reviews for their solutions. Similar to a programming class, there is a feedback loop and interaction with expert Python coders to help guide the way so students don't get stuck. This applied learning method helps make programming concepts stick with students. Wenzheng Xu from New York University describes CheckiO as a home, saying: "I remember many firsts in CheckiO: first time to solve a problem, first time to unlock a section, first time to publish my solution, first time to vote and get voted for, first time to argue with others in comments, and first time to get my position on the first page of the leader board. I met my friends, learnt the beauty in code style and even spent a whole day to get one more score in the 'golf' questions. I have great memories from CheckiO and these precious days make CheckiO like a home more than a game for me." In CheckiO, players solve coding challenges to level up. Players can ask for help from the community, and can view others' solutions once they have cracked the mission. Community support and self-learning through doing reinforces programming materials that students may have covered in class or online. Says player Séverin Hatt from MIT: "By allowing the users to view the existing solutions, only once the problem is solved allows you to fully appreciate the beauty of some implementations and learn much more". At CheckiO, we've devised an innovative and fun way to learn how to code elegantly. At CheckiO, we make coders.Sara la Kali: The mysterious saint loved by the Gypsies Continue reading the main story Related Stories Every year, the sleepy French town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea comes alive with the sound of Gypsy music. In May, Gypsies from all over Europe arrived in their caravans for the annual pilgrimage in honour of their enigmatic saint: Sara la Kali, or Black Sara. Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, literally the Saint Marys of the Sea, gets its name from a French legend. The Marys are mothers of Jesus's apostles and are mentioned in the Gospels as being amongst those who witnessed the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Continue reading the main story Find out more Heart and Soul will be broadcast on the BBC World Service on Saturday 12 July at 03:32 GMT. They were members of the first Christian community, expelled from Palestine during the Roman clampdown, and put to sea in a boat without oars and without a sail. They drifted across the Mediterranean and came ashore in the place where the town stands today. On the strength of this story, pilgrimages to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer were popular from the early Middle Ages. The Marys' relics are kept in the High Chapel above the altar in the local Catholic Church. Black Sara In the 19th Century, the practice began of taking the relics in a procession down to the sea, in remembrance of their journey across the Mediterranean. But it's not the Marys who are honoured by the Gypsies every May - it's another woman whose name has become linked with theirs. There are no relics for Sara la Kali, nor is she mentioned in the Gospels; she's not even an official saint of the Catholic Church, but her effigy is also found in the local church. The Gypsies are here for her. Her statue is kept underground, in the church's crypt, an unimposing doll-like, dark-skinned figure. Men and women form a reverential queue in order to have a few moments with her. They touch her clothes, they kiss her, they leave photos of departed loved ones, they pin notes and trinkets to her clothing. She is dressed in several colourful robes made by Gypsy women and presented to her every year. On her head is a tiara that twinkles in the light from the hundreds of candles lit in her honour and which throws out an extraordinary heat. It's an intense, emotional encounter. "She's our mother," says one woman. "When we come here we ask for forgiveness for our sins, and she forgives us. She comforts us and takes our cares away." But there's a puzzle at the heart of this story. Who is Sara la Kali and how did she become embedded in the story of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer? One claim is that she was the Marys' servant who arrived with them from Palestine, but there's no mention of her in the Gospels or in the early descriptions of the pilgrimage. Another version is that she was a Gypsy woman living in the Camargue who welcomed the Marys ashore and became their first convert to Christianity, but there were no Gypsies in France until the 15th Century. Dominic Charmaison is a Gypsy who's been venerating Sara la Kali all of his 56 years. "My grandmother was devoted to Sara, and now I'm passing that devotion on to my grandchildren," he says hugging them close. Dominic is a leader in the Gypsy community and is respected for his faith and devotion to Sara. "At home in Arles I've got a shrine to her, but here in the caravan there are just a few pictures," he says producing several large posters. But even he's unable to give a definitive answer about Sara's identity. His best guess is that she arrived with the Gypsies in the 15th Century having entered their consciousness when they were living in the Byzantine Empire. 'Vive la Sainte Sara!' Pilgrimage is an important aspect of Gypsy spirituality, and there is evidence that Gypsies have been coming to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer to honour the two Marys from the 19th Century. Lourdes and Santiago de Compostela are also popular pilgrimages for them. Continue reading the main story Romani communities have their roots in Northern India. They arrived in Europe over a thousand years ago. The main groups that are found in France today are: Gitanos. They spent several generations in Spain some fled persecution from Franco's Spain. They're known for their Flamenco music and dancing. The Gypsy Kings (who come from this group) were formed around a campfire in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer Roms generations in central Europe. The women are easily recognised by their long, traditional skirts. They have a very distinctive language Manouches/Sinti several generations around Northern Europe. They're also known as musicians, the famous guitarist Django Reinhardt (pictured above) came from this group In his book I Met Lucky People, Yaron Matras of the University of Manchester says pilgrimage allows travelling people to combine spirituality with the cycle of travelling and coming together for family gatherings. And indeed, as well as honouring Sara, this pilgrimage is an opportunity for families to have their children baptised, to arrange marriages, and sometimes to settle scores. This score-settling means that not all locals are happy to see the caravans roll into town. "I prefer not to risk staying open," says one bar owner as he pulled down the shutters on his bar in the late afternoon. "There have been fights in my bar, one guy even pulled a knife. Drunk people aren't easy to deal with," he adds. Shops also close. "I stay open because I'm not afraid of the Gypsies," says one shopkeeper. "But many do close because of the shoplifting. And it's tiring because you say €3 they try to get it for €2!" Nonetheless, it was down to one local, the Marquis de Baroncelli, that Sara's pilgrimage exists. He was a champion of marginalised peoples and in 1935 persuaded the Catholic Church to allow the Gypsies to take the uncanonised Sara in a procession down to the sea. In the early years, the pilgrimages were held without the participation of the church, but since 1965 the procession has been led by the Archbishop of Arles and Aix-en-Provence. The current incumbent is Monseigneur Christophe Dufour. "In the Catholic faith, some of the most important things are hidden from our eyes," he says, as he blesses children outside the church. "There's a huge mystery at the heart of faith, and this is a mystery of love. Sometimes we need to touch and see that love, and it can be revealed to us through our saints. That's what you see here today," he adds. The emotion is palpable during the mass that precedes Sara's procession. Everyone's eyes are focussed on the altar, above which is the High Chapel. At the climax of the mass, the chest containing the relics of the two Marys is lowered into the church. As it descends on ropes adorned with flowers, the people raise their hands and shout: "Vive les Saintes Maries! Vive la Sainte Sara!" Sara la Kali emerges from the entrance to the crypt, swamped by her many layers of bright clothing. She's mounted on a wooden platform, and hoisted onto the shoulders of Gypsy men who battle their way through the crowds to carry her down the central aisle of the church and out into the sunshine. She's taken the short distance from the church down to the sea, wobbling on her wooden platform, held high on the men's shoulders. Thousands of people line the streets and thousands more await her arrival on the beach. 'Icon of love' She's accompanied by women singing popular hymns, clergy on loudspeakers reminding the crowd of the religious significance of the pilgrimage, Flamenco musicians singing and playing guitar, and men on horseback. As she arrives on the beach, the crowd divides and she's immersed in the waters of the Mediterranean. We'll never know the truth about Sara la Kali's origins, but perhaps that's not what's important about her story. Martine Guillot is a lay member of the ministry team at the church. "In all the stories about Sara, I think the most important thing about her is that she loved and served the Holy Marys, and if she loved them she also loved Jesus," she says. "She's an icon of love and welcome." Gypsies have been enslaved, marginalised and persecuted ever since they arrived in Europe from India over a thousand years ago. Just 20 miles from Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is a memorial marking Saliers Concentration Camp, where Gypsies were detained during World War II. But this pilgrimage is a time and a place when the Gypsies take centre stage, their culture is celebrated, and the Church validates their faith and welcomes them.Alamo Drafthouse Theater in Austin, Texas (Photo by alamosbasement via the LAist Featured Photos pool) A little piece of Texas could be making its way to downtown's historic core. Texas' Alamo Drafthouse Cinema—famous for serving delicious beer and food, screening awesome movie and shaming jerks—has been expanding nationally. There were rumors that the company would be opening a movie theater in Los Angeles, but now we have something a little bit firmer. The Downtown News is reporting that there's a plan to bring the theater to 4th and Main streets in the city's historic core. (h/t Curbed LA) (Gentrification giveth and gentrification taketh away: the Electric Dusk Drive-In was recently booted from its location just a few blocks away at 4th and Broadway). The developer said the Texas-based Alamo Drafthouse chain has signed a letter of intent to open an 8-screen theater and is expected to sign a lease this month. The new location would be 30,000 square-foot and a single-story. There are plans for the theater to have a rooftop garden. If it all works out, the theater could be up and running in a year and a half. The chain already has theaters in Missouri, Colorado, Virginia and another is set to open in San Francisco. There's been talk of one opening up in New York, as well. A couple years ago when there was talk of the Alamo Drafthouse coming to downtown, James Kirst, the executive director of the nearby Downtown Independent, gave the rumors a positive spin, telling Indiewire, "We're basically the last theater left on Main Street. There's definitely room for a resurgence." He added, "I think having the Drafthouse in the mix would be a really great thing, whether they're across the street or across town. Having another theater entity in town would make the moviegoing experience in L.A. much richer." Related: The Best Movie Theaters In Los AngelesA Baptist preacher from Homewood, Alabama, wrote to two of his gay lovers that he was praying and waiting for the death of his wife months before her murder, reports AL.com. Richard Shahan was arrested in January 2014 for the murder of his wife, Karen Shahan, as he attempted to board a plane bound for Germany, where he claimed he would be working with the Children’s Ministry of Bible Mission International. Karen Shahan was found stabbed to death, with her hands showing defensive wounds, in the couple’s home in July of 2013. Documents released by prosecutors show the pastor had been confronted by his wife over multiple gay affairs he was having with men outside of Alabama. In an email to an unidentified friend, she wrote, “I said that if he was having any interactions that were not right before God that he should go to God and be completely honest with him because he knows anyway.” Prosecutors say that email and text message conversations between Richard Shahan and his two lovers — described as “paramours” — include explicit sexual comments as well as wishing for his wife’s death. “I’m in a legal marriage contract [sic]. There is not an acceptable way for me to dissolve that and continue with the things that are important to me (my job and children)” Shahan wrote. “There is only one way I could become legally ‘single’ and I have to wait until God grants me that gift. It will come; the woman I live with is slowly killing herself – she is diabetic and refuses to take care of herself physically. Her mother died early with the same disease and did the same thing to her body. So I pray and wait. It will happen in God’s timing.” Shahan also expressed fear that the community might learn of his affairs, while writing to one lover that he someday wished to move to Scotland to be with him. “And then I find myself thinking about and picturing myself packing up and leaving my life and moving to Scotland and the two of us living together for the rest of our lives, he wrote in 2011,” he wrote. Shahan was reportedly in Franklin, Tennessee on the day his wife was murdered, however prosecutors believe he used that as an alibi, returning that day after checking into his hotel room and then turning off his phone. In a court filing, Deputy District Attorney Patrick Lamb wrote, “”Clearly, the State believes the Defendant attempted to create an alibi, covertly returned to Birmingham, and was present when Karen Shahan was killed. While it is probable that Defendant personally killed his wife, it is possible he had an accomplice.” Defense attorneys for Shahan described the evidence against the pastor as “circumstantial.”Houston police have arrested a man who allegedly confessed to fatally stabbing a 14-year-old boy in southwest Houston on Monday.Christopher Bert Taylor, 52, was arrested Wednesday without incident after investigators received a Crime Stoppers tip, according to police. Joseph Aguirre-Flores was stabbed multiple times outside a check cashing place at about 11pm and staggered toward Beechnut Street and collapsed. It's a scene Chanz Larry keeps replaying over and over."I was holding him, 'Come on, man. Keep breathing. You're doing so good. You're doing so good. Are you hurt? You okay? You okay?'" Larry said, while kneeling down and showing how he held the boy's head above the ground.Larry found Aguirre-Flores in the middle of the street while he was on his way home from the grocery store. The teen had been stabbed multiple times."'Just think about your brother and sister,'" Larry instructed him. "I was like, 'They're almost here. Just hang in there. You're doing good.'"Witnesses told police they heard a scream and saw the boy running. Surveillance cameras captured him as he struggled to survive. Police say Taylor is the sole suspect in his murder. Taylor has a lengthy rap sheet, including a DWI and five convictions for drug possession and four theft cases.The arrest is little comfort to Larry."He's... old. 50's. He's lived. That kid was 14, you know. He didn't get a chance to live," Larry said.Larry never met the boy his family called Jose, but he will never forget him."Although I didn't know him, I feel like I knew him at one of the most important and critical times of his life."As you know, I’m not enthusiastic about a fiscal stimulus plan. What we need is a stimulus plan that does not increasing the budget deficit or waste taxpayer funds but that does increase the incentive to produce output. So what would I do? Here’s a new idea. The IRS knows how much income that each taxpayer reported last year. So let’s cut everyone’s marginal tax rate based on last year’s income. In other words, suppose that last year Joe earned $66,520 which puts him in a 25% tax bracket. Joe’s tax schedule this year will be exactly the same as last year except for every dollar earned above $66,520 the tax rate drops to 15%. We do this for all taxpayers so that each taxpayer has their own schedule and for each taxpayer there is a decreasing marginal tax rate. Note that this plan increases the incentive to work and it doesn’t increase the deficit. In fact, the Tabarrok plan increases tax revenues! The key is a marginal tax cut with a different margin for every taxpayer based upon last year’s return. That’s the basic idea but there are some obvious modifications that could solve various problems. For example, the new schedule could be based on an average of say the last three years of income or the average plus some roundup for growth etc. It’s also possible to cap the base on which the lower marginal tax rate applies, for example, we could create a lower tax rate on every dollar of income above last year’s income up to an increase of 20%. It is true that a permanent system like this could be (partially) gamed but the system can work very well if used occasionally, say for the most serious recessions. We would also learn a lot by applying this system and looking at the taxpayer response.After a controversial press conference last week, NRA head Wayne LaPierre made an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" saying the American people would be "crazy" to not put armed guards in schools. Meanwhile, Newtown, Conn., continues coping with the death of 26 people during the tragic shooting. NBC's Ron Mott report. Updated 10:50 a.m. ET: On NBC’s Meet the Press, National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPierre on Sunday refused to support new gun control legislation and maintained his support for putting armed guards and police in schools in response to the Dec. 14 school shootings in Newtown, Conn. See the Meet The Press page “If it’s crazy to call for putting police in and securing our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy,” LaPierre told NBC’s David Gregory. “I think the American people think it’s crazy not to do it. It’s the one thing that would keep people safe and the NRA is going try to do that.” He added that the United States is now spending $2 billion to train police officers in Iraq and asked why federal funds could not be spent to train school guards to protect schools in the United States. Asked about restricting the size of ammunition magazine or clips, LaPierre said, “I don’t believe that’s going to make one difference. There are so many different ways to evade that, even if you had that. You had that for 10 years when (Sen.) Dianne Feinstein passed that ban in ’94. It was on the books. Columbine occurred right in the middle of it – it didn’t make any difference.” For the first time since the Connecticut shootings, NRA Chief Wayne LaPierre answers questions from NBC's David Gregory about his organization's stance on gun violence in America. Feinstein, D-Calif., was the author of the 1994 ban on certain types of semiautomatic firearms which expired in 2004. She has announced that she will introduce new legislation early next year. Semiautomatic firearms, including semiautomatic weapons sometimes called “assault weapons,” fire one round per pull of the trigger. “I know there’s a media machine in this country that wants to blame guns every time something happens,” LaPierre said, but he insisted that an armed guard might have been able to stop Adam Lanza, the killer in Connecticut. “If I’m a mom or a dad and I’m dropping my child off at school I’d feel a whole lot safer” if there were trained armed security guards or police protecting the school from people such as Lanza, LaPierre said, although he conceded that “nothing is perfect” as a deterrent against crime. LaPierre also said, “We have a mental health system in this country that has completely and totally collapsed. We have no national database of these lunatics” and complained that de-institutionalization of the mentally ill had put too many dangerous people on the streets of America. “We have a completely cracked mentally ill system that’s got these monsters walking the streets,” LaPierre said. And he said many states do not put their records of those adjudicated to be mentally ill into the national instant check system that is designed to screen out convicted criminals and the mentally ill from buying guns. The NRA CEO also argued that the federal government had invested far too little effort into enforcing the longstanding federal law that makes it illegal for convicted felons to possess guns. The federal effort to enforce existing restrictions on gun possession, he said, is “pitiful.” On Meet the Press, NRA chief Wayne LaPierre forcefully defended his call for armed officers in every school. NBC's Peter Alexander reports. He said, “If you want to control violent criminals, take them off the street.” But he firmly opposed curbs on private gun sales and contended that the advocates of stringent restrictions on such sales want to put “every gun sale under the thumb of the federal government.” LaPierre called Feinstein’s bill “a phony piece of legislation” which he predicted would not become law. After a week of silence following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School the NRA responded, saying armed guns in schools is the answer. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," said Wayne LaPierre, NRA's executive vice president. NBC's John Harwood reports. President Barack Obama has tasked Vice President Joe Biden with the job of consulting with members of the Cabinet and outside organizations to come up with legislative proposals by next month. When asked about this initiative, LaPierre said, “if it’s a panel that’s just going to be made up of a bunch of people that for the past 20 years has been trying to destroy the Second Amendment, I’m not interested in sitting on that panel…. The NRA is not going to let people lose the Second Amendment in this country.” Following LaPierre on Meet the Press, Sen. Charles Schumer, D- N.Y., said that the NRA leader is “so extreme and so tone deaf that he actually helps the cause of us passing sensible gun legislation in the Congress…. He is so doctrinaire and so adamant that I believe gun owners turn against him as well.” Schumer said that LaPierre believes “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is good gun with a gun. What about trying to stop the bad guy from getting the gun in the first place? That’s common sense. Most Americans agree with it.” But Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., said killers such as Lanza were “non-traditional criminals… people who are not wired right for some reason. And I don’t know if there’s anything Lindsey Graham can do in the Senate to stop mass murder from somebody that’s hell bent on doing crazy things” -- apart from better security in schools. The South Carolina Republican also called for getting “mass murders off the streets before they act, by better mental health detection.” After a week of calls for tighter gun restrictions, the National Rifle Association called for putting more armed security officers in the nation's schools and expressed concerns about violence portrayed in video games, movies and music. NBC's Pete Williams reports. Graham said that while he was out Christmas shopping in South Carolina this weekend, people “have come up to me (and said) ‘Please don’t let the government take my guns away.’ And I’m going to stand against the assault (weapons) ban because it didn’t work before and it won’t work in the future.” LaPierre’s appearance on Meet the Press followed the strong reaction over his defiant stand during a Friday press briefing about the NRA’s response to the Connecticut school shootings. Amid a national debate over what security measures school administrators should take to ensure the safety of students, gun-control advocates reacted with disbelief Friday to LaPierre’s call for armed guards in every school and his blaming of Hollywood films, video games, and popular music for school shootings such as the one in Connecticut. How firmly the NRA’s allies in Congress will oppose any new legislative initiatives from Obama, Feinstein or others remains an open question. In a test of the NRA’s legislative influence, the House of Representatives late last year passed the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act, which has not yet been acted on by the Senate. In the House vote, 229 Republicans and 43 Democrats voted for the NRA-backed bill. The House bill allows a person with a photo identification card and a valid permit to carry a concealed firearm in one state to carry a concealed handgun in another state in accordance with the restrictions of that second state. Related content from NBCNews.com: Follow US news from NBCNews.com on Twitter and FacebookThink of American politics today as a tale of two Donalds. First, there’s Donald Trump, political provocateur, a man with his eye on the Oval Office who’s ready to say just about anything to get into it. That includes insisting, in his “America First” campaign, that he -- and he alone -- will bring back millions of manufacturing jobs to this country (that are unlikely ever to return) and that he’ll create boom times for both the coal and natural gas industries (though they are in direct competition with each other). And then, of course, there’s the other Donald Trump, the one who will do anything for a buck (or a million bucks, for that matter), including offshoring jobs galore for his own product lines and hiring cheaper foreign labor for his hotels and resorts (or building projects). You might think that, in the heat of this election campaign, he’d decide to take a modest hit by hiring American labor rather than foreign “guest workers,” and by repatriating the making of those Trump shirts (Bangladesh), Trump ties (China and Mexico), and similar products; that, at the moment, he might put his money where his mouth is when it comes to "America First." As it happens, we have a curious snapshot of The Donald and outsourced products from the latest Trump International Hotel, the one he recently opened just down the street from the White House with full campaign trail publicity and at prices meant only for the super-rich. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank spent a night there (on Jeff Bezos’s tab) and in his room ($856 plus tax) he found one all-American product: a “small package of milk-chocolate Trump gold bullion ($25).” Here was his description of what the room otherwise contained: “a Trump logo bathmat and towels from India, bone china from Japan, Italian cutlery and tiles, two telephones from Malaysia, a Swiss refrigerator, German coffee cups, Trump soaps and lotions from Canada and, from China, all four lamps, the coffee machine, the bathroom scale, the valet stand, and the shower cap.” Milbank adds, “The hotel’s managing director is from France. Most hotel workers I met during my stay had Caribbean or African accents.” That hotel room fits a pattern, and don’t think of it as a case of Trumpian hypocrisy either. That doesn’t begin to catch the flavor of what’s going on. No, when it comes to The Donald’s businesses, political positions be damned. He’s happy to rouse Rust Belt and other communities with talk about the nightmare of outsourced jobs for American workers and to slam companies like Ford and Nabisco for sending their factories abroad. There’s one thing he’s not prepared to do, however: give up what’s best for Donald Trump. And if that’s true now, imagine how essential it is to the man and how likely it is, as Nomi Prins, TomDispatch regular and author of All the President’s Bankers, indicates today, that it’s one trait -- even obsession -- that would enter the Oval Office with him and change the nature of the American presidency big time. Tom Madoff is a businessman, not a politician. He’s run and won as an anti-establishment maverick. Now, he’s faced with a choice: save the United States or his own posterior. During the campaign, he promised that he could separate the two, that his kids could run his empire, while he did the people’s business. But no one wants to talk to his progen
on every single issue there are means of challenging, and sometimes thwarting, the bad guy can be debated and argued and ignored and otherwise muddled in consciousness. But the fights are never truly fought, and then the compromised policies are marketed as great successes, not as capitulations. Take that at face value. One doesn't attempt to celebrate when one is left unsatisfied, rather one wakes up the next day determined to fix what needs fixing. But there has been no such determination. Instead, there has been much marketing of these false successes. The Republicans are a convenient foil. To anyone paying attention and not under the sway of the corporatist media, they would be almost an amusing carnival were they not so dangerous in that their destructiveness now has legitimate political currency. But they didn't force the president's hand. He pursued the policies as he chose to do, and he fought the fights he chose to fight. He and his team have mocked and disparaged his party's traditional base. That doesn't mean he is a Republican. It does indicate the degree to which he buys into what is now conventional thinking among Village Democrats. President Obama is not stupid and he is not weak. He is very smart and he is very courageous. He is pursuing the politics he is pursuing not because anyone is forcing him to, and not because he is being beaten at the political game. He is pursuing the politics he is pursuing because it is who he is. Politicians are but political tools, and they are not the only political tools. They are only as useful as the agendas they are willing to pursue. We don't owe them our loyalty, they owe us theirs. There are other political tools, and there are means of organizing that transcend the elective political game. It's about the issues. Given the gravity of the stakes, we have to focus on the issues, without excuses, and in some cases without compromise. That means we have to accept some politicians when there are no immediate alternatives, and we have to try to push them to do better and to be better even when it is counter to their own political ideologies, but it also means we can't pretend they are something they are not; and it also means we have to create a climate where there will be better and legitimate alternatives. Crashing the gates was but a first step. There are more gates to crash.Types Edit Theology and cosmology Edit Afterlife Edit It is common for families to participate in ceremonies for children at a shrine, yet have a Buddhist funeral at the time of death. In old Japanese legends, it is often claimed that the dead go to a place called yomi (黄泉), a gloomy underground realm with a river separating the living from the dead mentioned in the legend of Izanami and Izanagi. This yomi very closely resembles the Greek Hades; however, later myths include notions of resurrection and even Elysium-like descriptions such as in the legend of Okuninushi and Susanoo. Shinto tends to hold negative views on death and corpses as a source of pollution called kegare. However, death is also viewed as a path towards apotheosis in Shinto as can be evidenced by how legendary individuals become enshrined after death. Perhaps the most famous would be Emperor Ojin who was enshrined as Hachiman the God of War after his death. Unlike many religions, one does not need to publicly profess belief in Shinto to be a believer. Whenever a child is born in Japan, a local Shinto shrine adds the child's name to a list kept at the shrine and declares him or her a "family child" (氏子, ujiko). After death an ujiko becomes a "family spirit", or "family kami" (氏神, ujigami). One may choose to have one's name added to another list when moving and then be listed at both places. Names can be added to the list without consent and regardless of the beliefs of the person added to the list. This is not considered an imposition of belief, but a sign of being welcomed by the local kami, with the promise of addition to the pantheon of kami after death. Shinto funeral Edit Shinto funerals were established during the Tokugawa period and focused on two themes: concern for the fate of the corpse and maintenance of the relationship between the living and the dead.[31] There are at least twenty steps involved in burying the dead. Mourners wear solid black in a day of mourning called Kichu-fuda and a Shinto priest will perform various rituals. People will give monetary gifts to the deceased's family called Koden, and Kotsuge is the gathering of the deceased's ashes. Some of the ashes are taken by family members to put in their home shrines at the step known as Bunkotsu.[32] Shrines Edit Practices Edit Omairi Edit Temizu Basin—Itsukushima Jinja Any person may visit a shrine and one need not be Shinto to do this. Doing so is called Omairi. Typically there are a few basic steps to visiting a shrine. At any entrance gate, bow respectfully before passing through. If there is a hand washing basin provided, perform Temizu: take the dipper in your right hand and scoop up water. Pour some onto your left hand, then transfer the dipper to your left hand and pour some onto your right hand. Transfer the dipper to your right hand again, cup your left palm, and pour water into it, from which you will take the water into your mouth (never drink directly from the dipper), silently swish it around in your mouth (do not drink), then quietly spit it out into your cupped left hand (not into the reservoir). Then, holding the handle of the dipper in both hands, turn it vertically so that the remaining water washes over the handle. Then replace it where you found it. Approach the shrine; if there is a bell, you may ring the bell first (or after depositing a donation); if there is a box for donations, leave a modest one in relation to your means; then bow twice, clap twice, and hold the second clap with your hands held together in front of your heart for a closing bow after your prayers. There is variation in how this basic visitation may go, and depending on the time of year and holidays there may also be other rituals attached to visitations. Be sincere and respectful to the staff and other visitors, and if at all possible, be quiet. Do be aware that there are places one should not go on the shrine grounds. Do not wear shoes inside any buildings. Harae Edit Main article: Harae The rite of ritual purification, usually done daily at a shrine, is a ceremony of offerings and prayers of several forms. Shinsen (food offerings of fruit, fish, and vegetables), tamagushi (sakaki tree branches), shio (salt), gohan (rice), mochi (rice cake), and sake (rice wine) are all typical offerings. On holidays and other special occasions the inner shrine doors may be opened and special offerings made. Offerings to the kami Tamagushi offering at Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gū Offerings at Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America Mochi offered at Meiji Jingū offered at Meiji Jingū Sake offerings at Itsukushima Shrine Tamagushi and food offerings (shinsen) offered at Katori-jingū Misogi Edit Main article: Misogi Misogi means purification. Misogi harai or Misogi Shūhō (禊修法) is the term for water purification. The practice of purification by ritual use of water while reciting prayers is typically done daily by regular practitioners, and when possible by lay practitioners. There is a defined set of prayers and physical activities that precede and occur during the ritual. This will usually be performed at a shrine, in a natural setting, but can be done anywhere there is clean running water.[7] The basic performance of this is the hand and mouth washing (Temizu 手水) done at the entrance to a shrine. The more dedicated believer may perform misogi by standing beneath a waterfall or performing the ritual ablutions in a river.[33] This practice comes from Shinto history, when the kami Izanagi-no-Mikoto first performed misogi after returning from the land of Yomi, where he was made impure by Izanami-no-Mikoto after her death. Imi Edit Another form of ritual cleanliness is avoidance, which means that a taboo is placed upon certain persons or acts. To illustrate, one would not visit a shrine if a close relative in the household had died recently. Killing is generally unclean and is to be avoided. When one is performing acts that harm the land or other living things, prayers and rituals are performed to placate the Kami of the area. This type of cleanliness is usually performed to prevent ill outcomes. Amulets and talismans Edit omikuji) to a frame at A woman tying her fortune written on a white piece of paper () to a frame at Kasuga Shrine Main article: Ema (Shinto) Ema are small wooden plaques that wishes or desires are written upon and left at a place in the shrine grounds so that one may get a wish or desire fulfilled. They have a picture on them and are frequently associated with the larger Shrines.[34] Ofuda are talismans—made of paper, wood, or metal—that are issued at shrines. They are inscribed with the names of kami and are used for protection in the home. They are typically placed in the home at a kamidana. Ofuda may be kept anywhere, as long as they are in their protective pouches, but there are several rules about the proper placement of kamidana. They are also renewed annually.[34] Omamori are personal-protection amulets that are sold by shrines. They are frequently used to ward off bad luck and to gain better health. More recently, there are also amulets to promote good driving, good business, and success at school. Their history lies with Buddhist practice of selling amulets.[34] They are generally replaced once a year, and old omamori are brought to a shrine so they can be properly disposed of through burning by a priest. Omikuji are paper lots upon which personal fortunes are written.[34] The fortunes can range from daikichi (大吉), meaning "great good luck," to daikyou (大凶), meaning "great bad luck."[35] A daruma is a round, paper doll of the Indian monk, Bodhidharma. The recipient makes a wish and paints one eye; when the goal is accomplished, the recipient paints the other eye. While this is a Buddhist practice, darumas can be found at shrines, as well. These dolls are very common.[34] Other protective items include dorei, which are earthenware bells that are used to pray for good fortune. These bells are usually in the shapes of the zodiacal animals:[34] hamaya, which are symbolic arrows for the fight against evil and bad luck;[34] and Inuhariko, which are paper dogs that are used to induce and to bless good births.[34] Amulets and Protection Kamidana (home shrine) with kagamimochi and Ofuda Daruma of various sizes Hamaya at Ikuta Shrine Various Omamori from Shrines in Japan and Tsubaki Grand Shrine of America Ema dedicated at Sewa Jinja Kagura Edit Kagura traditional dance, Katori Jingu, Katori City Kagura is the ancient Shinto ritual dance of shamanic origin. The word "kagura" is thought to be a contracted form of kami no kura or "seat of the kami" or the "site where the kami is received."[36] There is a mythological tale of how kagura dance came into existence. The sun goddess Amaterasu became very upset at her brother so she hid in a cave. All of the other gods and goddesses were concerned and wanted her to come outside. Ame-no-uzeme began to dance and create a noisy commotion in order to entice Amaterasu to come out. The kami (gods) tricked Amaterasu by telling her there was a better sun goddess in the heavens. Amaterasu came out and light returned to the universe.[7] Music plays a very important role in the kagura performance. Everything from the setup of the instruments to the most subtle sounds and the arrangement of the music is crucial to encouraging the kami to come down and dance. The songs are used as magical devices to summon the gods and as prayers for blessings. Rhythm patterns of five and seven are common, possibly relating to the Shinto belief of the twelve generations of heavenly and earthly deities. There is also vocal accompaniment called kami uta in which the drummer sings sacred songs to the gods. Often the vocal accompaniment is overshadowed by the drumming and instruments, reinforcing that the vocal aspect of the music is more for incantation rather than aesthetics.[37] In both ancient Japanese collections, the Nihongi and Kojiki, Ame-no-uzeme’s dance is described as asobi, which in old Japanese language means a ceremony that is designed to appease the spirits of the departed, and which was conducted at funeral ceremonies. Therefore, kagura is a rite of tama shizume, of pacifying the spirits of the departed. In the Heian period (8th–12th centuries) this was one of the important rites at the Imperial Court and had found its fixed place in the tama shizume festival in the eleventh month. At this festival people sing as accompaniment to the dance: "Depart! Depart! Be cleansed and go! Be purified and leave!"[38] This rite of purification is also known as chinkon. It was used for securing and strengthening the soul of a dying person. It was closely related to the ritual of tama furi (shaking the spirit), to call back the departed soul of the dead or to energize a weakened spirit. Spirit pacification and rejuvenation were usually achieved by songs and dances, also called asobi. The ritual of chinkon continued to be performed on the emperors of Japan, thought to be descendents of Amaterasu. It is possible that this ritual is connected with the ritual to revive the sun goddess during the low point of the winter solstice.[39] There is a division between the kagura that is performed at the Imperial palace and the shrines related to it, and the kagura that is performed in the countryside. Folk kagura, or kagura from the countryside is divided according to region. The following descriptions relate to sato kagura, kagura that is from the countryside. The main types are: miko kagura, Ise kagura, Izumo kagura, and shishi kagura. miko (woman consecrated to a Shinto deity) at Inari Shrine. Miko kagura is the oldest type of kagura and is danced by women in Shinto shrines and during folk festivals. The ancient miko were shamanesses, but are now considered priestesses in the service of the Shinto Shrines. Miko kagura originally was a shamanic trance dance, but later, it became an art and was interpreted as a prayer dance. It is performed in many of the larger Shinto shrines and is characterized by slow, elegant, circular movements, by emphasis on the four directions and by the central use of torimono (objects dancers carry in their hands), especially the fan and bells.[40] Ise kagura is a collective name for rituals that are based upon the yudate (boiling water rites of Shugendō origin) ritual. It includes miko dances as well as dancing of the torimono type. The kami are believed to be present in the pot of boiling water, so the dancers dip their torimono in the water and sprinkle it in the four directions and on the observers for purification and blessing.[41] Izumo kagura is centered in the Sada shrine of Izumo, Shimane prefecture. It has two types: torimono ma, unmasked dances that include held objects, and shinno (sacred No), dramatic masked dances based on myths. Izumo kagura appears to be the most popular type of kagura.[41] Shishi kagura also known as the Shugen-No tradition, uses the dance of a shishi (lion or mountain animal) mask as the image and presence of the deity. It includes the Ise daikagura group and the yamabushi kagura and bangaku groups of the Tohoku area (Northeastern Japan). Ise daikagura employs a large red Chinese type of lion head which can move its ears. The lion head of the yamabushi kagura schools is black and can click its teeth. Unlike other kagura types in which the kami appear only temporarily, during the shishi kagura the kami is constantly present in the shishi head mask. During the Edo period, the lion dances became showy and acrobatic losing its touch with spirituality. However, the yamabushi kagura tradition has retained its ritualistic and religious nature.[41] Originally, the practice of kagura involved authentic possession by the kami invoked. In modern-day Japan it appears to be difficult to find authentic ritual possession, called kamigakari, in kagura dance. However, it is common to see choreographed possession in the dances. Actual possession is not taking place but elements of possession such as losing control and high jumps are applied in the dance. History Edit See also Edit Notes Edit ^ Other names are:[1] kannagara-no-michi, "way of the divine transmitted from time immemorial"; , "way of the divine transmitted from time immemorial"; Kodo, the "ancient way"; , the "ancient way"; Daido, the "great way"; , the "great way"; Teido, the "imperial way". Both mean the "way of the divine" or "of the gods".Other names are: ^ Shendao was used to identify what is currently known as "A Popular Dictionary of Shinto. Routledge, 2005. During the history of China, at the time of the spread of Buddhism to the country, the namewas used to identify what is currently known as " Shenism ", the Chinese indigenous religion, distinguishing it from the new Buddhist religion. (Brian Bocking.. Routledge, 2005. ASIN B00ID5TQZY p. 129) References EditHeading into summer, one SEC West team with a new, high-priced defensive coordinator is being hailed as a College Football Playoff contender with serious national title potential. The other school that shelled out the big bucks to bring in a new defensive boss is an afterthought, barely sneaking into most early top-25 projections. Despite coming from similar starting points, the expectations for Texas A&M and Auburn seem to be wildly different. The question is why the two teams are viewed so differently heading into the summer. This offseason, both schools made similar moves to pair a defensive mastermind with their juggernaut offensive machines. John Chavis and Will Muschamp both have similar track records of building top-15 defenses at every stop; Muschamp at LSU, Auburn, Texas and Florida (as head coach), Chavis at LSU and Tennessee. Yet for a variety of reasons, Texas A&M is viewed as a fringe contender in the SEC. Auburn is clearly talented; they’re calling up Jeremy Johnson to replace Nick Marshall at quarterback, and he has the makings of a star. He’s already showing up on Heisman watch lists and is talking about putting up the greatest quarterback season in Auburn history. The Tigers have a talented group of running backs, a star at receiver and a few core offensive line pieces on offense as well. They also have talented veterans returning on defense, along the defensive line and linebacking corps, as well as a pair of talented corners in Jonathan Jones and Joshua Holsey. Auburn is thin in spots, especially in the secondary, but for the most part Muschamp and Malzahn are getting the benefit of the doubt. Texas A&M should be afforded at least somewhat of the same. The Aggies don’t have the same kind of proven defensive veterans coming back, but it’s not like they lack for talent. Since 2013, Texas A&M has signed 20 four- or five-star defensive players, and that talent should have an easier time performing in a simplified defensive scheme. The Aggies also have one of the biggest game-changers in the SEC in Myles Garrett, a player who should thrive in the new defensive scheme and thereby make life easier for his defensive teammates. Garrett did have his problems at times last year, wearing down against SEC opponents and struggling to stop teams that ran right at him, but given the reports out of spring practice it sounds like improvement is coming in all facets of Garrett’s game. The real question, though, is why the rest of the country isn’t as fearful of Texas A&M’s offense as they are of Auburn’s. Auburn is replacing its entire core, save for star receiver D’haquille Williams. The Aggies, meanwhile, are bringing back nearly all of their key skill players. Kyle Allen, the No. 1 quarterback recruit in the nation in 2014, just got a full spring under his belt as unquestioned starter after taking over the position in the final month of the 2014 season. He returns with receiving weapons Josh Reynolds, Speedy Noil and Ricky Seals-Jones, among others, in one of the most loaded pass-catching group in the nation, adding in five-star freshman Christian Kirk for good measure. The running game gets back Tra Carson and Brandon Williams while adding two interesting freshmen, and it should be a more effective weapon with new offensive line coach and running game coordinator Dave Christensen, a respected offensive mind plucked away from Utah. There are questions along the offensive line after losing a couple of starters, including first-round pick Cedric Ogbuehi, but that unit was shaky for much of 2014, far from the dominance it showed in 2012. Like Chavis on defense, Christensen doesn’t lack for talent to restore the line to its former excellence. Texas A&M certainly has a long way to go. The defense is climbing out of the bottom of the conference and from the depths of the national rankings, giving Chavis a very different kind of challenge than what he faced at LSU. And, without a doubt, the Aggies have as difficult of a road to contention as anyone in the SEC West, although they do get a break with Vanderbilt as one of their cross-divisional games. Life when the other six teams in the division are all in consideration to go into the season with a ranking next to their name is never going to be easy. Maybe the Aggies aren’t ready to be talked about as a national title contender yet, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone if they give the rest of the SEC massive headaches.ANKARA Mart ayı fotoğraf ve görüntüler arasından, haber ve yaşam kategorilerinde 5'er fotoğraf arasından ''Ayın Fotoğrafları'' ile 7 video arasından da 'Ayın Videosu'' seçilecek. AA'nın web sitelerinden Türkçe, İngilizce ve Arapça dillerinde yapılan ''Ayın Fotoğrafı ve Video Haber Oylaması'', 3 Nisan Çarşamba akşamı sona erecek. Mart ayının unutulmaz kareleri AA fotoğraf editörlerinin ''haber kategorisi'' için oluşturdukları seçkide, Taner Aydın'ın ''Mescid'i Aksa'da Çatışma'', Mehmet Kaman'ın ''Hasretle Beklenen Kucaklaşma'', Musa Samur'un ''Minderde Çetin Mücadele'' başlıklı fotoğrafları bulunuyor. ''Yaşam kategorisi''nde ise Vügar İbadov'un ''Yangın Söndürme Uçağı'', Salah Malkawi'nin ''Suriye Devriminin Yıldönümü'', Onur Çoban'ın ''Diyarbıkır'da Nevruz Kutlamaları'', Eyad Al Baba'nın ''Gazze Tünelindeki Gelin'' ve Ali İhsan Öztürk'ün ''Bitmeyen Kar Mücadelesi'' başlıklı fotoğrafları yer alıyor. Ses getiren görüntüler Görüntü editörlüğünün mart ayı seçkisinde ise Necdet Pamuk ve Servet Ülkü'nün terörle mücadelede önemli operasyonlara imza atan Jandarma Özel Harekat timlerinin becerilerinin sergilendiği ''JÖH'lerin eğitimi'', Mustafa Berber'in Ürdün Kralı Abdullah'ın Anıtkabir ziyaretine dair ''Kral'ın gözyaşları'', İbrahim Yozoğlu'nun ahırın kapı kilidini ağzıyla açabilen atın yeteneğinin yer aldığı ''Becerikli Rokset'', Fatih Başaran ve Engin Çorlu'nun TSK'nın şampiyon pentatloncularının konu edildiği ''Şampiyon pentatloncular'', Tolga Çıplak'ın kamu görevlilerinin Şırnak'ta aileleriyle buluşma anına tanıklık ettiği ''Kamu görevlileri serbest'' ve AA ekibinin Halep'te görüntülediği Esed güçlerine ait ''Helikopterin düşürülme anı'' başlığını taşıyan görüntülerden oluşan 7 video bulunuyor. Geçen ayların birincileri Ocak ayı oylamasında haber kategorisinde Selim Bostancı'nın, Kozlu'da maden kazasında yaşamını yitiren madenciye nişanlısının vedasını yansıtan ve ''Madenciye nişanlısından veda'' başlığını taşıyan fotoğrafı en çok oyu alarak birinci olmuştu. Yaşam kategorisinin birincisi ise Berk Özkan'ın ''İstanbul, kar ve martı'' başlıklı fotoğrafı olmuştu. ''Ayın Videosu'' da Yakup Bay'ın ''Hastayı 20 kilometre taşıdılar'' başlıklı görüntüsü seçilmişti. Şubat ayında, haber kategorisinde Durmuş Genç'in "Araziler Göle döndü" başlıklı fotoğrafı, yaşam kategorisinde ise Atılgan Özdil'in ''Mali'de Dram'' başlıklı fotoğrafı birinci olmuştu. Ayın Videosu da Ali Ballı'nın ''Köpeğin vefası'' başlıklı görüntüsü olmuştu.We got a good look at what appears to be Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S6 smartphone this morning. Now new images have leaked to show its sibling, the Galaxy S6 Edge, featuring a curved display similar to the one seen on Samsung's Galaxy Note Edge. Pictures shared on xda-developers forum claim to show an S6 and the S6 Edge side by side, corroborating the expectation that Samsung would be releasing two versions of its latest flagship phone. Update: Read the Galaxy S6 Edge review. The purported S6 Edge is said to feature a dual curved-edge display, but the angle from which the photo was taken doesn't make it explicit. From the rear, the phones look markedly similar, but where the Note Edge's curved section was large enough to act like a second screen, the sides of the S6 Edge's display appear to curve more subtly and offer little room for menu icons — the home screen in the photo simply stretches over the curved area. It's not quite the "3-sided screen" reported by Bloomberg earlier this month. The only other manufacturer showing off a true "three-sided" display at the moment is LG, whose Active Bending OLED screen was seen on a 6-inch smartphone at CES earlier this year. We'll know whether these images are truly of Samsung's next big things very soon, when The Verge hits the show floor at Mobile World Congress on March 1st.TribLIVE's Daily and Weekly email newsletters deliver the news you want and information you need, right to your inbox. The Pittsburgh Baseball Club’s tormented fan base is probably unlike any in sports, certainly unlike any locally. It’s passionate yet paranoid, dedicated yet distrusting, capable of cheering and jeering in the same breath with the same conviction. All of which, if you ask me, is wonderful. It means that this 128-year-old franchise, one of our great civic institutions, is vibrant as ever. People care. They’re invested. Even after two decades of failure. But man alive, can this city lose its collective mind when things don’t go well for the Pirates, with conspiracies, myths, narratives, outright lies … pretty much anything other than, hey, these guys aren’t playing very well. Let’s review the latest … Myth: Bob Nutting has ordered his front office to keep Gregory Polanco, the 22-year-old phenom, in the minors. Reality: I took the daring step of, you know, actually asking Nutting about that Thursday. His direct response was that he’s had no input on Polanco, adding, “I have a tremendous amount of trust in our baseball operations staff, their ability and the process to make the right decisions for the future of all our players.” Myth: Of course Nutting would say that. He’s secretly funneling orders via masked courier to 115 Federal St. Reality: Asked Frank Coonelly, team president, if he were giving any such orders. His response: “Like all baseball decisions, such as when a player is promoted to the 25-man roster, those are made by baseball operations. Gregory Polanco’s path is no different.” Myth: This is all about the money, the fact that Polanco would be eligible for Super-2 arbitration status if he comes up before mid-June, and the Pirates should just say so. Reality: I do believe it is about the money, at least mostly. I’ve written that all along. But neither the Pirates nor any other team can say so. If they did, the players union would come down on them with full force. That’s why you’ll never hear any team — and most avoid Super-2 — admit it publicly. Myth: This is outrageous. It’s unprecedented. Reality: Sure, except for, oh, Andrew McCutchen, Pedro Alvarez and Gerrit Cole. I supported all those cases, too. Myth: Promoting Polanco would only cost an extra couple million. Big deal. Reality: Not close. There can’t be an exact figure, but history shows that all four of a Super-2 players’ salaries during the arbitration years rise based off the previous year. Internally, the estimate for an elite player’s extra cost in that case — and if Polanco isn’t elite, no point in having this discussion — is $15 million. That’s for just two months. Myth: Come on. Anyone can throw any number out. Reality: In May 2006, the Phillies called up Cole Hamels just two weeks before they could have avoided Super-2. The team’s baseball side pushed, and the business side relented. Well, Hamels made three starts that ultimately cost Philadelphia $17 million over his arbitration years, per one industry insider. And that was a half-decade ago. Myth: Yeah, yeah, Nutting is why Polanco isn’t here. Reality: Nutting’s the only reason Polanco is about to be here. It was his initiative to ramp up the Pirates’ scouting in Latin America, to build the Dominican academy and to support top scout Rene Gayo that produced Polanco. Myth: The Pirates didn’t raise payroll from last season. Reality: The only payroll figure that counts is actual dollars spent at season’s end. Total cost of the 40-man roster in 2013 was $74,608,266, per MLB accounting. That figure for the current season won’t be known until December. At the moment, the Pirates’ own numbers show they are at roughly $79.7 million. That’s highly likely to rise, through new player acquisitions — Ike Davis, for example, added $3.5 million since that mid-April trade — as well as September callups and other variables. Myth: The Pirates made a killing since last season with extra attendance, TV ratings, merchandise, parking, etc. Reality: The increase in PNC Park crowds from 2012 to 2013 was a total of 164,944. With an average ticket price of $17.21 last season — third cheapest in baseball, per Team Marketing Report — that netted an additional $2.8 million at the gate. Which is nice, but it barely pays for a middle reliever. TV ratings are nice, too, but all that extra cash goes to Root Sports. All merchandise profits are split evenly among the 30 teams. And the Pirates’ parking revenue always is zero. They neither own nor operate any lots or garages. Myth: They didn’t try to keep A.J. Burnett. Reality: They placed a $12 million offer on the table and left it there well after spending $5 million on Edinson Volquez to fill out the rotation. Most free-agent offers have a very short shelf life. This one sat there for months and would have made Burnett, at age 36 and with creeping health issues, the highest-salaried player in franchise history. Myth: The Pirates are too cheap to prioritize the present. Reality: Wandy Rodriguez. Dejan Kovacevic is a sports columnist for Trib Total Media. Reach him at dkovacevic@tribweb.com or via Twitter @Dejan_Kovacevic.Saturday Night Live co-head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider are leaving the venerable late-night sketch comedy program after six years but staying in business with the company behind it, Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video. Bryan Tucker and Kent Sublette, who worked alongside Kelly and Schneider last season, remain SNL‘s co-head writers, leading the charge starting with the Season 43 premiere tonight. Kelly and Schneider will be focusing on a siblings comedy they have at Comedy Central. The cable network in March gave a pilot order to the project, from Kelly, Schneider and Broadway Video. The pilot has been shot and is now awaiting a series pickup. No decision has been made yet but I hear its prospects look good. Kelly and Schneider were named SNL head writers at the beginning of last season, joining Tucker. The trio, along with Sublette, who was promoted to co-head writer in Episode 12, presided over one of the most successful seasons in SNL history. Buoyed by viewers’ interest in the November election and Donald Trump’s headline-making presidency, Season 42 of SNL was its most watched in 23 years and earned 9 Emmy awards — the most for any program this year — including Variety Sketch Series. SNL is getting a major infusion with seven new writers added for Season 43, Sam Jay, Gary Richardson, Erik Marino, Andrew Dismukes, Steven Castillo, Claire Friedman and Nimesh Patel, as well as three new cast members, Heidi Gardner, Luke Null and Chris Redd. Kelly and Schneider served as writers on NBC’s late-night show since 2011. Among other things, they worked with Kate McKinnon on her Hillary Clinton sketches and were behind the “Bern Your Enthusiasm” skit, featuring Larry David as Bernie Sanders, and the Emmy-nominated “(Do It On My) Twin Bed”. In addition to his SNL gig, Kelly was as a writer on Comedy Central’s Broad City. He also wrote and directed the feature Other People, which earned him 2017 Indie Spirit Award nominations for best first feature and best screenplay and earned a Spirit trophy for star Molly Shannon. Schneider also was a writer on Netflix’s Master of None. She previously was a writer and co-star of CollegeHumor Originals.Justice League Inspired Cars NEW YORK — The 2013 New York International Auto Show brought the shiniest new car models to the Big Apple this week, but none are as much fun as the Justice League-inspired vehicles from Kia Motors. From the Superman Optima Hybrid and the Batman Optima to the Wonder Woman Sportage and Green Lantern Soul, Kia featured a series of cars with intricate details related to each superhero. For example, Batman's Kia car has the bat symbol in the headlights, as well as his ammo hidden in the arm rest. Cars have its own custom paint and trims based on costumes and color schemes too. SEE ALSO: How Much Would It Cost to Be Batman in Real Life? [INFOGRAPHIC The concepts are a part of an effort to raise awareness for DC Entertainment’s “We Can Be Heroes” fighting hunger relief campaign. Although the concept cars — which aren't available for purchase — have already been revealed at other auto shows, the Wonder Woman model made its debut this week. Kia also has models for other Justice League characters such as Aquaman, The Flash and Cyborg. For a full look at the line, check out the images above. Images by Mashable, Samantha MurphyNote: this column first appeared in The Hill. It's been a good couple of weeks for voting rights. Judicial opinions have struck down or limited strict voter ID laws in several states, showing that politicians cannot be trusted to write laws that effect our elections. In the past two weeks, courts in Wisconsin, Texas, and North Carolina have rooted out partisan abuses by invalidating or limiting strict voter ID laws. These decisions show that politicians do a poor job of crafting election rules. Most often, the main motivation is to discriminate against members of the opposite political party, often with racial overtones as well. Indeed, North Carolina argued (unsuccessfully) that benign politics, not race, motivated its voter ID law. But why should the issue of how best to run our elections turn into partisan warfare? Why must litigants and the courts spend their resources to root out these abuses? Politicians think they can win by rigging the election system in their favor. A Republican staffer in Wisconsin revealed that state Republicans were "giddy" when they passed a new voter ID law that they believed would help Republicans win in the state. A Pennsylvania lawmaker was quoted in 2012 saying that the state's new voter ID law would help win the state for Governor Romney. Democrats have sued Arizona because they fear that the state's voting rules will harm their supporters come November. Election laws should be above politics. Whether to enact an election regulation should be about only one thing: will the law improve the democratic process for all voters? Yet the history of voter ID laws, among most significant and partisan issues infecting our elections, has always involved politics. As I recount in a new book, Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri slipped a voter ID provision for first-time voters who register by mail into
a 73 percent increase in government-owned limousines. More Government Subsidies As part of his question about Bachmann's family farm, Fox News' Wallace also asked about government subsidies that went to her husband's counseling clinics. Bachmann claimed that government money did not benefit the business, because it paid for employee training. But even if the $24,041 the counseling clinics received for training "didn't help our clinic," as Bachmann said, the business received thousands more in government funds, including payment for treating crime victims. Wallace asked how Bachmann could be a "fiscal hawk," when she has "gone after federal and … state government money." In addition to farm subsidies, the June 26 Los Angeles Times story said her husband's Christian counseling clinics, Bachmann & Associates, had received about $30,000 since 2006, according to the state's online database. Los Angeles Times, June 26: The bulk of the money — $24,041 — came in the form of grants from the state Department of Human Services to train staff how to deal with clients suffering from chemical dependency and mental illness. That program was financed in part by the federal government. Bachmann told Wallace that the money didn't go to the clinic, but that it "went to employees" and that it "actually took away from the clinic." Bachmann, June 26: First of all, the money that went to the clinic was actually training money for employees. The clinic did not get the money. And my husband and I did not get the money either. That's mental health training money that went to employees. … Wallace: In terms of the money — and, obviously, I don't know the details nearly as well as you do about the clinic that's run by your husband. If you say money is going to employees, that — I mean, if he runs the clinic, that would seem to be benefiting you guys. … Bachmann: Actually, it did not. It actually took away from the clinic, because these were training hours where employees were not able to bring more income in. This is one-time training money that came in from the federal government. And it certainly didn't help our clinic. It was something that was additional training to help employees. We'll leave it up to readers to judge whether or not government grant money to train employees is beneficial to the employer. But Bachmann & Associates still received other state money, including $3,237 from 2007 through 2011 from the Department of Public Safety. That money was "reparation payments for services for victims of crime," Dennis Smith, public information officer for the department, told us in an e-mail. Bachmann's congressional office gave us an e-mail address for a campaign spokeswoman, and we sent requests for further explanation of those government funds and the family farm income. We have not yet received a response. Repeating a Falsehood on Health Care Bachmann also continued to push a falsehood about the federal health care law and jobs, distorting the Congressional Budget Office's analysis. Not once, but twice. On Fox News, she said: Bachmann, June 26: Even worse, the Congressional Budget Office is saying we'll lose 800,000 jobs with Obamacare. When we're in a situation now where we have massive job loss, this is not what we want to do with Obamacare. And on CBS' "Face the Nation," she said: Bachmann, June: The Congressional Budget Office estimated Obamacare will cost economy eight hundred thousand jobs, probably the — Host Bob Schieffer: Again, that is data that other people would question. Bachmann: That’s — well, that’s the Congressional Budget Office, that’s not Michele Bachmann, that’s Congressional Budget Office figures saying that we’re– we have the potential of losing 800,000 jobs. The CBO didn't say that. Instead, the CBO said that the law would cause a reduction in the amount of labor workers choose to supply. Some Americans would decide to work fewer hours or retire earlier because their ability to get health insurance would be more secure. And low-income workers would receive subsidies to purchase insurance, putting more money in their pockets. Overall, the CBO said the impact on jobs would be "small." CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf told Congress in February that this "reduction in the labor used" would be equal to roughly "half a percent" of the economy at the end of this decade — which would be equivalent to 800,000 workers. But those aren't 800,000 jobs lost. Elmendorf and the CBO have repeatedly made clear that the impact on jobs is primarily due to Americans cutting back on the work they supply. Yet, Bachmann, and other Republicans, have repeatedly twisted the CBO's findings, ignoring the full explanation in its analysis. 'People Can Make Mistakes' Bachmann visited Waterloo, Iowa, where she lived as a child, to announce she was running for president. She peppered her speech with references to Waterloo — including the famous Sullivan brothers who joined the Navy together and died from wounds suffered together in the same attack. The speech contained no blunders. But after the speech, she made a gaffe in referring yet again to Waterloo in an interview with Fox News. Bachmann, June 27: What I want them to know is, just like John Wayne is from Waterloo, Iowa, that's the kind of spirit that I have too. By now you know: John Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa, in 1907 and raised in California. He was not from Waterloo. But John Wayne Gacy, the notorious serial killer, was from Waterloo. A day later, Bachmann told CNN's "American Morning" that John Wayne's parents' "first home was in Waterloo, Iowa." Asked about her misstatements that have been catalogued over recent years, Bachmann said she cannot be perfect. Bachmann, June 28: People can make mistakes and I wish I could be perfect every time I say something, but I can’t. And that is true for everyone. — by Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson, Wendy Zhao and Dave Bloom Sources Congressional Budget Office. "The Budget and Economic Outlook: An Update." Aug 2010. House Budget Committee YouTube Channel. "CBO Confirms Health Care Law Destroys Jobs." YouTube.com. 10 Feb 2011. "Bachmann Officially Announces Her Run for the Presidency of the United States in Waterloo, Iowa." Press Release. Bachmann For President. 27 Jun 2011. "Wallace apologizes." Boston Globe. 28 Jun 2011. Mason, Melanie and Matea Gold. "Bachmann's had her share of government aid." Los Angeles Times. 26 Jun 2011. "Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace." Transcript. Fox News. 26 Jun 2011. Bachmann, Michele. "United States House of Representatives Calendar Year 2009 Financial Disclosure Statement." Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. 16 Jun 2010. "2011 Farm Subsidy Database." Environmental Working Group. Accessed 28 Jun 2011. Bachmann, Michele. "United States House of Representatives Calendar Year 2007 Financial Disclosure Statement." Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. 13 Jun 2007. Bachmann, Michele. "United States House of Representatives 2008 Financial Disclosure Statement for 2007 Calendar Year Reporting Period." Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. 16 Jun 2008. Bachmann, Michele. "United States House of Representatives Calendar Year 2008 Financial Disclosure Statement." Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. 26 Jun 2009. "Face the Nation." Transcript. CBS News. 26 Jun 2011. The National Bureau of Economic Research. "US Business Cycle Expansions and Contractions." Accessed 28 Jun 2011. U.S. Office of Personnel Management. "Employment Cubes: Generic Interface." Accessed 28 Jun 2011. U.S. House. "H.R. 2638, Consolidated Security, Disaster Assistance, and Continuing Appropriations Act, 2009." (as signed into law 30 Sep 2008.) Ballenstedt, Brittany R. "Senate sends 3.9 percent pay raise to President Bush." GovernmentExecutive.com. 29 Sep 2008, accessed 28 Jun 2011. Jackson, Brooks. "Federal Pay Raise." FactCheck.org. 30 Nov 2009, accessed 28 Jun 2011. "Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the Senate." Press release. White House. 31 Aug 2009. "Cutting the Deficit by Freezing Federal Employee Pay." Press release. White House. 29 Nov 2010. U.S. Office of Personnel Management. "General Schedule Salary Table for 2011." Accessed 28 Jun 2011. Eaton, Joe. "Limousine Liberals? Number of government-owned limos has soared under Obama." iWatch News. The Center for Public Integrity. 31 May 2011. DeMint, Jim. "DeMint helps launch Reagan21 Caucus." United States Senator Jim DeMint. 1 Nov 2007. Kucinich, Jackie. "GOP Netroots finds faults with Reagan group." The Hill. 14 Nov 2007. "Swearing Off Pork in 2008." Club for Growth. 14 Jul 2008, accessed 27 Jun 2011. "Swearing Off Pork in 2009." Club for Growth. Undated. Accessed 27 Jun 2011. "Swearing Off Pork in 2010." Club for Growth. Undated. Accessed 27 Jun 2011. "Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota, 6th) – Earmarks Requested." LegiStorm. Accessed 27 Jun 2011. Diaz, Kevin. "Bachmann on defense after claiming she did not accept earmarks." Minneapolis Star Tribune. 17 Mar 2009. Espinoza, Ambar. "Bachmann's responses to Northstar questions." Minnesota Public Radio News. 17 Jun 2009. "Bachmann pulls 2 transportation funding requests." St. Cloud Times. 23 Jun 2010. Schouten, Fredreka. "House GOP imposes sweeping earmark ban." USA Today. 11 Mar 2010. Herb, Jeremy. "Bachmann: Transportation projects shouldn't be earmarks." Minneapolis Star Tribune. 15 Nov 2010. "A Transportation Earmark is Still an Earmark." Taxpayers for Common Sense. 19 Nov 2010. "Rep. Michele Bachmann's John Wayne Comment." Politico. Undated. Accessed 28 Jun 2011. "John Wayne Biography." JohnWayne.com. Accessed 27 Jun 2011. "John Wayne Gacy." clarkprosecutor.org. Accessed 27 Jun 2011. Schwarz, Gabriella. "Bachmann: I'm Scholarly." CNN.com. 28 Jun 2011. State of Minnesota. Minnesota Management & Budget. State Payment Reports. accessed 28 Jun 2011. Smith, Dennis, Minnesota Department of Public Safety. E-mail interview with FactCheck.org. 28 Jun 2011.Apertures in bodywork are strictly controlled by the regulations in order to limit any aerodynamic advantages that may have been gleaned in the past. One of the areas that leaves scope for cooling apertures around the main body of the car is alongside the cockpit. As such, teams use a plethora of design ideas to improve how the heat is rejected and the aerodynamic impact it has. Each team has various solutions that it will use throughout the season based on the demands of the power unit at the given circuit. Clearly, lower speed events like Monaco and Hungary demand much more cooling to keep air passing through the car to maintain power unit efficiency. At high-speed circuits, like Monza, the teams will open up bodywork as little as possible to negate drag caused by the turbulence of the air flowing around and through the car. This small window in the regulations affords a smorgasbord of differing solutions from the teams, highlighting how each of them have their own design philosophies. We can't show you every solution used by every team but the following gallery gives a good indication as to just how different each team is. Mercedes Mercedes W07 top exits, Hungarian GP Photo by: Giorgio Piola Mercedes has numerous solutions to keep the W07 cool depending on the circuit at hand but in the image above we can see its maximum cooling solution, which features eight louvres to direct the airflow. In this high demand configuration, used in Hungary, the shape and height of the deck has also been altered to accommodate the redistribution of the hot air exiting the sidepod. Red Bull Red Bull Racing RB12 detail Photo by: Giorgio Piola The RB12 features only a handful of bodywork panels around its midriff with the team utilising a one piece engine cover. However, its cockpit cooling solution is one of the panels that can be changed at the behest of the prevailing demand. The solution used by Red Bull features a panel that forms part of the headrest protection with almost chevron-like shaped apertures used to shape the rejected heat, as it looks to proportionally improve performance as it meets with the airflow moving over the sidepod and engine covers surface. Ferrari Ferrari SF16-H detail Photo by: Giorgio Piola Ferrari utilises a removable panel on the upper surface of the sidepod that transitions with the vertical cockpit protection. However, whilst most of the teams shape the louvres to create a curvature, Ferrari's louvres maintain a flat finish. Williams Williams FW38 side vents, Monaco GP Photo by: Giorgio Piola Williams has a fairly conventional layout when it comes to its louvred outlet, with the number of fins dictated by the circuit layout and powerunit demands. However, for maximum cooling the team employs a pair of slots which extrude up the side of the headrest section, allowing more heat to escape whilst changing how it impacts on the aerodynamic surfaces. Force India Sergio Perez, Sahara Force India F1 VJM09 Photo by: Giorgio Piola Rather than using a louvred panel, Force India continues to utilise a chimney-style arrangement, something we've seen teams do for many years in this area of the car. Like the other solutions, the size and frequency of the chimneys is determined by the demands of the given circuit. Toro Rosso Scuderia Toro Rosso STR11 detail Photo by: Giorgio Piola The Italian outfit uses a stylised louvre outlet that is shaped to encourage the direction of the airflow as it leaves the aperture and improve flow over the sidepod. McLaren McLaren MP4-31 detail Photo by: Giorgio Piola McLaren's louvre panel sits on the transition between the sidepod's upper surface and the vertical cockpit protection, leaving rise to a curved set of louvres that increase in size as they move along the car. Haas Haas F1 Team VF-16 detail Photo by: Giorgio Piola The VF16's internal sidepod layout is very similar to Ferrari's with the radiators, oil and intercoolers stacked in a V-shape within. The number of coolers within the sidepod clearly demands a certain level of cooling at every circuit and as such the Ferrari-powered team has a significant number of openings alongside the cockpit. The chevron-shaped louvres start off flat but twist upwards to take advantage of the space granted to the vertical cockpit protection. Renault Jolyon Palmer, Renault Sport F1 Team RS16 Photo by: XPB Images The RS16 is one of the odd balls in this rogues gallery, as the team does not use cooling apertures in the area around the cockpit. However, we must remember that the car was conceived on a relatively low budget, with the design team unsure if it would be a Mercedes or Renault power unit being used too. The sidepod and engine covers have been designed in such a way that apertures could be used if necessary but even at the likes of Monaco and Hungary it has done without thus far. Manor Racing Manor Racing MRT05 detail Photo by: Giorgio Piola The MRT05 is the other oddball here as it doesn't feature the cooling apertures beside the driver. However, it does feature a novelty in this area, as the vertical cockpit protection, which is 20mm taller for 2016, has been shaped at the trailing edge to form a fin. This allows the team to meet the dimensional constraints from a side view but remove the internal bulk, hopefully improving the aerodynamic footprint of that region, which has many conflicting aero structures due to the surface geometries all meeting. Sauber Marcus Ericsson, Sauber C35 cockpit louvres detail Photo by: Giorgio Piola The Swiss outfit's 2016 machine is outwardly very similar to the 2015 car as it has been held back by budgetary issues. One such carry over is the layout of the cockpit cooling louvres, which come as two panels that can be interchanged for blanks depending on the cooling criteria. In Sauber's case, the smaller and most forward of these panels starts just behind the sidepod's leading edge, much further forward than most of the other teams. Behind this is a much larger panel that mirrors the transition curvature of the sidepod and cockpit protection and features the most apertures on the grid.Urgent: Is Obama Telling the Truth on IRS, Benghazi Scandals? Urgent: Is Obama Telling the Truth on IRS, Benghazi Scandals? The original author of the Patriot Act says the government's "excessive" use of it to collect the phone records of millions of Verizon customers is an abuse of power."While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses," Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, said in a statement."Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American."And in a scathing letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Sensenbrenner added: "These reports are deeply concerning and raise questions about whether our constitutional rights are secure. …"How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation as required by the Act?"Sensenbrenner's remarks came a day after London's Guardian newspaper revealed the National Security Agency had been collecting the records under a court order."This is a big deal, a really big deal," Sensenbrenner told Fox News, noting that the broad seizure of the call records was "never the intent" of the law.He added that he may try to amend the Patriot Act before it expires in 2015 to prevent further alleged abuses.Not all of Sensenbrenner's GOP colleagues agree with him.Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and chairman of the House intelligence committee, insisted the program has been already used to effectively stop a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican, said the mining of phone records to assist in terrorism probes has been going on for seven years."Everyone should just calm down," Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said.On Friday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit privacy advocate, asked Congress to launch a series of oversight hearings on whether the collection was legal.The center said the domestic surveillance was "unrelated" to the government's scrutiny of foreign intelligence related to terrorism.An order signed by a federal judge in April requires Verizon to deliver "on a daily basis" to the National Security Agency all information about all domestic and overseas calls, "including local telephone calls."The judge also ordered Verizon not to go public with its handing over the records.Friday afternoon, President Barack Obama defended the surveillance, saying that Congress has repeatedly authorized it.Transcript for Who Is the First Female Secret Service Director? Now to a new crack in the glass ceiling for the first time ever. A woman will be in charge of protecting the president. Julia pierson has been nominated to run the agency by president obama and jim avila has more details from the white house. Reporter: They call it secret for a reason. Julia pierson, the first female director of the secret service has been on the job for 30 years but we can only find two pictures, one official and one not of the former disney world employee who worked her way up from the parking lot to cartoon character in the parade telling the smithsonian magazine in a 2007 article, the experience of dealing with large crowds at the park had a good influence on my ability to do that sort of work with the secret service. From there she worked as a police officer for the city of orlando, liked it but wanted to travel so the secret service made sense as her next step. The white house announcement mentions nothing of her personal life saying only that she consistently exemplified the spirit and dedication the men and women of the service demonstrate every day. Important since pierson takes over a service badly damaged by a sex scandal just a year ago. What happened here in colombia is being investigated by the director of the secret service. Reporter: A group of secret service agents advancing the president's trip to colombia were caught hiring prostitutes and fired. It led to the resignation of director mark sullivan last month. I am deeply disappointed and I apologize for the misconduct of these employees. Reporter: Pierson's appointment should signal a culture shift at the heavily male service where of the 2,000 agents only 20% are women. I think given the fact that the first female agent was accepted by the secret service in 1975, that's about time the secret service finally did get a female director. Reporter: Now, women now head the dea, the u.S. Marshals office, the secret service and also the clandestine wing of the cia. Women on the front line. Barriers broken all over the place, thanks. To the new details we mentioned now emerging in that This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.Defense secretary nominee Gen. James Mattis issued a grave warning Thursday at his Senate confirmation hearing, saying the established world order is under its “biggest attack” since World War II as he called for boosting military readiness and America’s alliances. Under questioning from Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., about Russia and other threats, Mattis said the U.S. should “recognize the reality” of dealing with Vladimir Putin’s government and that he’s trying to “break” the North Atlantic alliance. Citing Russia’s aggressions and other concerns, he said: “I think [the world order is] under the biggest attack since World War II … from Russia, from terrorist groups and with what China is doing in the South China Sea.” To address this, Mattis testified, “deterrence is critical.” His assessment came as he called for strengthening “military readiness” while also pursuing “business reforms” at the Pentagon. He said U.S. forces must be the “best led, best equipped and most lethal in the world.” “If you confirm me, my watchwords will be solvency and security in providing for the protection of our people and the survival of our freedoms,” he said. Mattis, a tough Marine general who earned the nickname “Mad Dog” over the course of his career and most recently led U.S. Central Command before retiring in 2013, is poised to become the first career military officer in charge of the Pentagon since the 1950s. He addressed any potential concerns about that break from tradition at his hearing Thursday, saying he recognizes civilian control of the military is a “fundamental tenet of the American military tradition.” “Civilian leaders bear these responsibilities because the esprit-de-corps of our military, its can-do spirit, and its obedience to civilian leadership reduces the inclination and power of the military to oppose a policy … it is ultimately ordered to implement,” he said. Before Mattis can join the Cabinet, Congress must approve a one-time exception to a law requiring a military officer to be out of uniform for at least seven years before leading the Pentagon. Even some of Trump's strongest critics say Mattis merits the exception -- and the Senate voted decisively Thursday to approve the waiver on a 81-17 vote. It goes next to the House. The question of budget restraints at the Pentagon is a critical one for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. McCain warned at Thursday’s hearing that the military can’t proceed with “business as usual” as he ripped “arbitrary” congressional caps on spending. Mattis agreed that those policies cause concerns. His assurances on dealing with Russia also follow concerns from McCain and other senior lawmakers that the incoming Donald Trump administration is wrongly warming to Moscow. Mattis’ testimony falls amid a packed week of confirmation hearings for top Trump Cabinet nominees, including Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general and Rex Tillerson for secretary of state. Both nominees have faced pushback on Capitol Hill, but virtually all of Trump’s picks – Mattis included – are expected to win confirmation provided Republicans hold together on the final vote. In prepared remarks for the hearing, Mattis expressed unqualified support for traditional U.S. international alliances. In contrast, during the White House campaign, Trump insisted that U.S. treaty allies and security partners pay more for their own defense and for hosting American forces on their soil. Mattis is a former leader of NATO's transformation command, in charge of efforts to adapt the alliance's structure and capabilities to 21st century threats. In his testimony, he spoke about the importance of the alliance, calling for the U.S. to maintain "the strongest possible relationship with NATO." On the Iran nuclear deal, Mattis said he would not have personally signed the pact, but said that when America gives its word, we have to "live up to it." Mattis also was challenged by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., on his views on allowing homosexuals and women to serve in combat roles: "Do you believe that openly serving homosexuals along with women in combat units is underminding our force?" she asked. “Senator, my belief is that we have to stay focused on a military that’s so lethal that on the battlefield it will be the enemy's longest day and their worst day when they run into that force," Mattis responded, before saying he had no intention to roll back current policy. "I believe military service is a touchstone of patriots of whatever stripe." Eliot A. Cohen, a senior State Department counselor in President George W. Bush's administration who has publicly criticized the incoming Trump team, said at a Senate hearing Tuesday that he feels a "sense of alarm" about the judgment of the incoming administration. But, he said, Mattis "would be a stabilizing and moderating force, preventing wildly stupid, dangerous or illegal things from happening." Mattis, 66, is one of three recently retired senior generals selected by Trump for top jobs in his administration. After retiring, Mattis joined the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning think tank. He also is a member of the board of directors of General Dynamics, the big defense contractor. He has remained outspoken in his concerns about Iran. In remarks last April at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mattis called Iran "the single most enduring threat to stability and peace in the Middle East." Mattis is best known as a battle-hardened combat officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he also has worked behind the scenes with senior civilian officials at the Pentagon. The Associated Press contributed to this report.French Prime Minister Manuel Valls (L) speaks at the Leon Blum high school in Creteil, before presenting the government's plan aimed at fighting Racism and anti-Semitism, April 17, 2015. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Friday pledged to finance a $107 million plan to fight racism and anti-Semitism. The recent increase in prejudice in France is “insufferable,” he said at a press conference, announcing the plan. “Racism, anti-Semitism, hatred of Muslims, of foreigners and homophobia are growing in an insufferable manner in our country,” Valls told reporters in Creteil, just outside Paris, after presenting his plan. Creteil was chosen because of an attack on a young couple in their home there five months ago, Radio France Internationale reported. The attackers raped the woman and said that they believed the victims had money because they were Jewish. In January, after Said and Cherif Kouachi murdered 12 people at the headquarters of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, another assailant, Amedy Coulibaly, took hostages and killed four people at a kosher supermarket, prompting the government to promise action against anti-Semitism, racism and terror attacks. Five ministers, including Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve and Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, accompanied Valls in Creteil. The government pledged $107 million over three years to putting the 40-point plan into action. Among its principal measures are the inclusion of hate speech, previously banned in the law on the press, in penal law; the establishment of racism or anti-Semitism as an “aggravating factor” that can lead to tougher sentences for a related crime; permitting class-action suits for discrimination and the creation of a national police unit to combat hate on the Internet. Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Email * Please enter a valid email address Sign up Please wait… Thank you for signing up. We've got more newsletters we think you'll find interesting. Click here Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Try again Thank you, The email address you have provided is already registered. Close The allocated funds will be spent on publicizing the aims and taking local action against prejudice. “French Jews should not be afraid of being Jewish,” said Valls. “French Muslims should not be ashamed of being Muslims.”Citing poverty, high unemployment and broken education systems, Donald Trump on Friday attempted to appeal to African-American voters with the simple question: “What the hell do you have to lose?” “Look at how much African-American communities have suffered under Democratic control. To those I say the following: What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump?” he asked at a rally in Michigan. "You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good. You have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed, what the hell do you have to lose? " he added. The Republican presidential nominee also guaranteed, if elected, he would win 95 percent of black voters in his re-election bid in four years. Most surveys now show Trump polling in the low single digits among African-American voters. Mitt Romney earned the support of about six percent of black voters in 2012.LGBT Sikhs took part in London pride 2015 under the banner of Sarbat, a social and support group for LGBT Sikhs in UK, and were cheered on by the crowd with hugs and claps. This was the third time that Sarbat was taking part in London Pride. Sarbat is a self-funded UK based support group for LGBT Sikhs and started its journey in 2007. Sarbat, meaning all (of mankind), derives its name from the final line of the Ardas (the congregational Prayer of Supplication) where Sikhs pray for the happiness and goodwill of the whole of mankind. “LGBT Sikhs form part of that mankind for whom prayers are given on a daily basis, and we do not consider ourselves to be distinct from the Sikh faith solely because of our sexuality,” the group states. However they describe themselves as a “mixture of both practising and non-practising Sikhs” and mention that they “are not a wholly religious group but share common Sikh values.” The Sikh community in the UK, with its south-Asian roots, still holds on to many South Asian biases and prejudices, and it becomes difficult for LGBT South Asians to come out or find support amongst the community. Add to this that there aren’t enough resources for the family members of the LGBT Sikh/Punjabi community in the UK and in India such as literature etc., making it difficult for them to deal with the issue. “LGBT issues are very complex and cultural background plays a significant role, it is very hard to change the Punjabi ‘Macho’ mind-set, but ultimately it’s about perseverance and visibility- Perseverance to challenge the rigid mind-set, and visibility to start the discussion in the community,” tells Pawan Singh, a member of Sarbat. He also points out how the “loog kya kaheinge” (what will the society say) fear among south Asians plays a major hindrance. “Most South Asian communities live under the ‘what the neighbours will say/ Samaj’ fear, so even where they sympathise with the gay community they rather not have this as their own problem.” Sarbat has been working towards generating more resources for LGBT Sikhs, and on its website and through it pamphlets, it highlights how Sikhism and its principles aren’t opposed to homosexuality. The forums on its websites have multiple threads that discuss spirituality, Sikhism, sexuality, coming out etc. Its pamphlets too stress the fact that the Ten Gurus of the religion laid emphasis on equality. “Discriminating against people or groups, including the gay community, would be going against Sikh teachings. Any form of prejudice is not tolerated in Sikhism,” the pamphlet reads. They also point out that “there is nothing in the Holy Scriptures that states that marriage must be between a man and a woman.” The work undertaken by the group in the past 8 years has led to greater awareness that challenges homophobia within the South-Asian community these days. Recently, when a senior member of the Sikh community challenged same sex marriage in the UK parliament, a MP responded by giving a reference of the group and challenged his opinion. Singh cites this example and stresses the important of similar groups, “Under the overarching South Asian quest for LGBT rights, it’s very important that there are groups that represent the demographic and culture diversity of south Asian community.” Sarbat though doesn’t see itself as only a British group, as they say that Sikhs are in every part of the world. They are also looking forward to working with local groups in India and listen to their stories and challenges. They expressed their disappointment at the re-criminalization of homosexuality and the subsequent anti-gay stand taken by the Indian Government at the United Nations, where it sided with nations such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to oppose benefits for same-sex couples. “We want everyone to engage within their local communities and fight for the Sikh LGBT cause, we can’t do it all by ourselves. The time has come when there shouldn’t be any awkwardness or taboo attached to discussing LGBT issues in our communities,” tells Mr. Singh. In the near future, they plan to address mental health issues faced by LGBT Sikhs and the lack of support to unsuspecting girls who get married to gay men. “Many of our members have suffered depression because of non-acceptance by their family or by living a false Bisexual identity. Also, there is no support for girls who get married to gay men and are trapped in love-less relationships,” he mentions. It is a long struggle that the group has embarked upon, and they realise that religious institutions aren’t the best place to seek support for such a cause. But they haven’t lost hope. “Religious institutions are not going to help us and we have little hope from the Government in India –but if people in catholic Ireland can do it; then we can do it,” Pawan says.The 2012–13 television season officially passed into the Nielsen history books last night, bringing to an end what will likely be remembered as one of the worst years ever in the history of network TV (assuming, of course, that anyone still remembers what “television” is in 50 years). There were hardly any new breakout hits (though The Following, Revolution, and Elementary did okay). And, as has been widely reported, the Big Four as a whole bled viewers: They collectively lost about 10 percent of their adults-under-50 audience this season, with none of the major broadcasters growing year to year in the key demo. But as bad as things look on the macro level, the devastation is even more evident — and jaw-dropping — when you dig into the numbers for all the returning shows. The vast majority of the nearly 90 series that had their second or higher season on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and the CW lost ground among adults under 50. In the expandable chart below showing the year-to-year ratings change of all returning network shows, you’ll see that more than 50 series declined by double digits, nearly 30 fell by 20 percent or more, roughly a dozen gave back a quarter or more of their young audience, and an unlucky seven saw their ratings collapse by at least one-third. And in case you’re wondering, you can’t blame most of these losses on DVRs: The season’s Nielsen numbers include viewers who time-shift shows within a week of their initial broadcast. Overall, the chart paints a pretty ugly picture of where network TV stands right now. The good news for broadcasters: They get to wipe the slate clean and start all over again in just four months. NOTES: Our chart is based on Nielsen data comparing all available viewing data for the season to date (through Sunday) against Nielsen’s final measurement for the 2011–12 season. Because Nielsen still needs to tally DVR data for the last couple of weeks of this season, the numbers we used for this season are not 100 percent complete. For most shows, this won’t change whether they’re up or down versus last season. However, in the case of shows that had a very small drop this year, like Grey’s Anatomy, The Middle, NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, Suburgatory, and Revenge, it’s possible that the final numbers will show the series either flat or up a tick, rather than their current status as “down” compared to last season. And Person of Interest, currently shown as flat, may yet rise to “up” when all numbers are tallied.Hello everybody! To those interested I have returned from a very long slumber (college and shitty ass effe wifi). But I'm back and hopefully as a better artist. I plan to start over by posting a shit ton (nah its like.. four.) of stuff I had been doing last month, most of them are things I had forgotten and left behind but pffHA no more of that bs from me..............I hope. I give you a free pass to slap me if I for some reason stop out of nowhere again.. I mean not that I was that big of a hot shot to worry about but whatever. Ill stop rambling now.. Hope you enjoy! <3 Flutteshy is probably one of my favorite ponies.. certainly the one I enjoy the most drawing or coloring <3 So here ya go. Also! quick notice that I have changed my signature <3 Whoever figures out what it
that instead of growing up to recognise and embrace their gender non-comformity and same-sex attraction, they would have thought they were boys… (i)ndeed, there are many critics of transactivism who say that this new trend for medicating young people on the basis of gender identity is a form of gay eugenics… Transactivist Scout Barbour-Evans said, himself, on RadioLive, that gender is a “social construct”, and he was right about that. And when young people are medicated, to the point of sterilisation, just to better align with and conform to social constructs – that is eugenics. And because gender conformity has so much to do with compulsory heterosexuality – it’s a form of gay eugenics. Is it such a leap to suggest that for girls who are masculine (or boys who are feminine), such personality traits are being interpreted as an indicator that the child’s “gender identity” is not correspondent with the child’s sex? Is this not tantamount to suggesting that personality determines sex? Just as cultural ideas of gender are not stable over time, neither does the gender non-conforming behaviour of children appear to be stable over time either. In a review of eleven follow-up studies from 1972 to 2013, James Cantor concluded as follows in ‘Do trans- kids stay trans- when they grow up?‘: …all the studies have come to a remarkably similar conclusion: Only very few trans- kids still want to transition by the time they are adults. Instead, they generally turn out to be regular gay or lesbian folks. The exact number varies by study, but roughly 60–90% of trans- kids turn out no longer to be trans by adulthood. If we can agree that masculinity in females is socially coded as being lesbian and femininity in males is socially coded as gay (as Gerlich observes) there is a real danger that gender non-confirming behaviour in children is being interpreted not as this being a child who will grow up to be homosexual, rather our feminine boys and masculine girls are being perceived to be and treated as being “transgender”. Should children continue to transition at the increasing rates we have been seeing, there is a danger this will annihilate our lesbian and gay population. References to the research material referenced follow: [1] “Call me Katie: U.S. boy, 8, to live as a girl after being diagnosed with ‘gender identity disorder’” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1184245/Call-Katie-U-S-boy-8-live-girl-diagnosed-gender-identity-disorder.html [2] ‘Boy, 12, turns up for school as a girl after sex swap during the summer holidays’ 21 September 2009 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1214314/Boy-12-turns-girl-summer-holidays.html#ixzz4YOLdKdlZ [3] ‘The schoolgirl who was born a boy: Parents defy local bullies to support child’s transition after she was diagnosed with gender identity disorder at seven years old’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2611975/Little-girl-9-born-boy-determined-live-normal-life-despite-backlash-hate-campaigns-local-community.html#ixzz4YOMRZtKc [4] ‘”He’s asking what parts of a boy I have”: Transgender teenage girl, 12, faces new problems as she starts dating’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2264745/Hes-asking-parts-boy-I-Transgender-teenage-girl-12-faces-new-problems-starts-dating.html#ixzz4YOO1SRq3 [5] ‘’We’re just like everyone else’: Transgender girl, 11, writes speech in response to Obama’s historic inaugural address because she wishes he’d spoken about her community too’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2267777/Sadie-Croft-Transgender-girl-11-writes-speech-response-Obamas-inaugural-address.html#ixzz4YOPMLMHz [6] ‘This is Ryan’s first day as a girl, and everyone better be nice’: How transgender kids are navigating school challenges with increased support’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2332346/This-Ryans-day-girl-better-nice-How-transgender-kids-navigating-school-challenges-increased-support.html#ixzz4YOQRQNpw [7] ‘”When kids said I was a boy it made me sad”: Transgender eight-year-old reveals why she’s much happier living as a GIRL’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2062296/When-kids-said-I-boy-sad-Transgender-child-says-shes-happier-living-girl-born-male.html#ixzz4YOS7Eout [8] ‘Transgender children: “I first realised Jackie was different when she was 18 months old”‘ https://www.daynurseries.co.uk/news/article.cfm/id/1571947/Transgender-children-How-nurseries-can-support-those-with-gender-identity-issues accessed 13 February 2017 [9] “’When I was a girl’: Transgender men share pictures of themselves before transition and reveal what it’s REALLY like to change sex” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3270572/Transgender-men-share-pictures-transition-reveal-s-REALLY-like-change-sex.html accessed 1 March 2017 [10] “Transgender student takes a selfie EVERY DAY for three years to document his transition from a girl to a man” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3264587/Transgender-teenager-takes-selfie-DAY-three-years-document-transition.html accessed 1 March 2017 [11] “R. Kelly’s 14-year-old Jaya comes out as transgender and reveals the singer hasn’t spoken to him since he announced he’s a boy” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2655163/R-Kellys-14-year-old-Jaya-comes-transgender-reveals-singer-spoken-announced-hes-boy.html accessed 1 March 2017 [12] “Transgender man who says his body feels ‘completely wrong’ starts crowdfunding to raise £5,000 to remove 34DD breasts” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3301747/Transgender-man-says-body-feels-completely-wrong-starts-crowdfunding-raise-5K-double-mastectomy.html accessed 1 March 2017 Share this: Twitter Facebook Tumblr RedditTime's reputation for distorting the past is well established and equally deserved. It's so good at what it does that at some point in every person's life they begin to doubt - to some degree at least - the validity of their own memories. I bring this up because in my surely flawed mind, 90 percent of the games Louisville played against Cincinnati in the 1990s took place on Thursday nights at 9 p.m. on ESPN. Both teams always had legitimate national title aspirations, and every game between the pair rivaled Game 5 of the 1976 NBA Finals. Most people experience several drastic life changes in their 20s, 30s or 40s, but there's a sense of familiarity inherent in established adulthood that makes all the rearranging feel like it's still part of the same "era," for lack of a better term. The same can't be said for youth, where the period from ages 6-13 essentially encompasses three or four different lives. It's likely this phenomenon that has made late Thursday night games against Cincinnati feel like more of a staple of Cardinal basketball in the '90s than they may have been for other generations. Still, the memories feel fresh to your faithful narrator. This was a period where Cincinnati was consistently one of the best team in college basketball, and almost always the baddest. The rivalry between the Cardinals and Bearcats was Conference USA basketball, and it always demanded a national audience. In the days leading up to the games against UC, my friends and I would update each other on the status of our persuasive attempts to earn permission to attend the game or at least stay up and watch it. Some would celebrate an unparalleled triumph of youth, while others would shed tears and be relegated to an early morning update from their father or The Courier-Journal. The one memory I have that stands out above all others from this period was basking in the glow of the '96 victory in the old living room at my parents' house and realizing that The Late Show With David Letterman was on. The Cards just beat Cincinnati, Letterman's on, I've got school tomorrow and holy mother of God I'm still awake. It may have been the most celestial moment of my childhood. The rivalry with Cincinnati was never on par with Kentucky (nothing is), but it certainly had its own place. While disdain for the wild brand of cats is an almost inherent aspect of being a Louisville fan, the Bearcats had to earn their ire. The players were dirty and didn't care (Kenyon Martin is still the most intimidating human being I've ever been in the presence of), Bob Huggins' antics made him perhaps the ultimate U of L villain of the '90s, and more times than not they got the better of our beloved Cardinals. All of these factors made the pair of annual games two of the biggest events during winters in Louisville, and made the victories incredibly special. Again, nothing can compare to the Louisville/Kentucky rivalry, but those games against Cincinnati are still some of my first thoughts whenever the topic of Freedom Hall is brought up. They were special, especially for someone in that twilight era of fan development. Then the rivalry tapered off. First, it was because Cincinnati dominated. The Bearcats won eight straight games over Louisville between 1997 and 2001, making their own overly generous contribution to the "Fire Denny" movement. Things were revived slightly when Rick Pitino arrived and both programs experienced success in the early part of the last decade, but the old mutual disdain was noticeably lacking. The pair of programs then made the move to the Big East together in 2005, Bob Huggins resigned, and UC has never been able to get back to the heights it reached under him. The rivalry had survived periods where one of the two had dipped before, mostly because the teams played in conferences that lacked a multitude of fellow premier programs. This wasn't the case anymore, and with Cincinnati turning into a league doormat, the Cardinals had several other ranked Big East foes to steal their focus. The Bearcats have improved drastically under former Pitino assistant Mick Cronin, making each of the past three NCAA Tournaments and winning a total of three games after getting there. They even threw in a nasty brawl with rival Xavier a couple of years ago to try and revive the old bad boy image for us. This all brings us to tonight's game between the Cardinals and the Bearcats, which has a bit of an old-time feel to it. Cincinnati will enter the game as the only undefeated team in the American Athletic Conference, and is ranked No. 13 in the latest edition of the Associated Press Top 25. Louisville sits alone in second place behind UC in the league standings, but one spot ahead of them in the AP poll. It should be a fitting final duel in the Derby City between two programs that have met 97 times before, and which have spent the past 46 years as members of the same conference. If this rivalry has to die, then tonight's game (as well as the return tilt in Cincinnati on Feb. 22) should make for a fitting farewell. Hopefully we'll all get to do a little school night celebrating with Dave.The other night, after a long hard day of studying for grad school finals, I came home to find a mysterious package waiting for me by my apartment. I wasn't too excited since I've been ordering plenty of gifts for other people and had completely forgotten that I was to receive something, as well! The moment I opened the package I was elated. An envelope labeled "free bacon" awaited me, but the card inside was even better - I had a good old-fashioned "I'm home alone and I'm going to laugh my ass off anyway" moment when I saw the Harry Potter/Moaning Myrtle card (pictured). From there I delved into the package like Randy with his Zeppelin on Christmas morning and discovered a plush Enterprise, which was truly awesome because I only mentioned my love for TNG as a side note. I then saw a fantabulous cup that features my outlook on life (glass half full), which is especially important in my field of study: mental health counseling. I immediately poured myself a half (full) glass of Brooklyn Winter Ale and went to town as I discovered the other things in store for me. Next! A pocket whiteboard! It was already filled with messages from my dear Jawshie (who are you, mysterious Jawshie?), which I contributed to, as well. I think I'm going to hang it up in my apartment somewhere. My friends should make good use of it on New Years Eve. FINALLY: The prize of them all. A book entitled "All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome." If Jawshie had stepped foot into UPenn's counseling program for a second he/she would have known this was the perfect gift - but he/she didn't have to because he/she is just that goddamn awesome. I immediate texted a number of student friends a pic of the book and the universal consensus was "That's fucking hilarious." Indeed it is. So Jawshie, thank you for making the end of my semester so much brighter, and making a sad, dull evening into a fantastic one. Even my fiance thinks your package was badass. I don't know how you did it, but even with my incredibly vague bio you totally hit the nail on the head with everything you sent me. Thank you thank you!!!I suppose this one falls into the category of, “did you think he was kidding when he said it 500 times on the campaign trail?” All through the 2016 contest, Donald Trump promised that he was going to support police departments and make sure that the law was enforced. Those promises were being made against a backdrop of Loretta Lynch working around the clock to draft so called “consent decrees” with multiple police forces in large cities, essentially accusing them of abusing their power, racism and everything else under the sun. These departments would be restructured in some fashion to cut down on abuse. But all of that action seems to have been put on hold this week with a new memo coming from the offices of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. (Washington Post) Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered Justice Department officials to review reform agreements with troubled police forces nationwide, saying it was necessary to ensure that these pacts do not work against the Trump administration’s goals of promoting officer safety and morale while fighting violent crime. In a two-page memo released Monday, Sessions said agreements reached previously between the department’s civil rights division and local police departments — a key legacy of the Obama administration — will be subject to review by his two top deputies, throwing into question whether all of the agreements will stay in place. The memo was released not long before the department’s civil rights lawyers asked a federal judge to postpone until at least the end of June a hearing on a sweeping police reform agreement, known as a consent decree, with the Baltimore Police Department that was announced just days before President Trump took office. You may recall that less than three months ago there was a big press conference held in Baltimore where Loretta Lynch sat down with the Mayor to announce the approval of one of these consent decrees. In a very expensive program, the cops in Charm City would be in line for all sorts of “reforms” which would change their mandatory training regimens and the way they conduct business. Listed among the goals of the program were ways for police to focus on “deescalation” in violent confrontations, how to be more “respectful” of protesters (one assumes that would come before they actually begin setting buildings on fire) and putting civilians from the community in charge of police oversight. Keep in mind that they were taking all of these steps even as Baltimore was experiencing a two year surge in violent crime which hadn’t been seen in decades. Much of the “reform” work was obviously in response to the Freddie Gray riots, which is particularly ironic because as I’m sure you will recall, all of the trials against the police were eventually dismissed with no evidence of foul play being established. So now there will be a 90 day “pause” before any of these consent decrees move forward. What will happen during that time? Just a guess on my part, but I imagine there will be “modifications” rather than scrapping them completely. The changes will probably focus a bit less on reasoning with potentially violent mobs in the streets and getting some better armor and equipment. But as I said… that’s just a guess. It would certainly be in keeping with the promises that President Trump made while running for office, though.Chrome/Firefox: The Decreased Productivity browser extension strips styling from web pages so they look boring, dull, and completely work appropriate. Advertisement Last year we shared Decreased Productivity for Firefox—now the style stripping and image subduing of the original extension are available for Chrome. Turn websites into a mundane and camouflaged sea of blue links and basic text. Click on the image above for a closer look. Lifehacker reader andryou ported Decreased Productivity to Google Chrome so he could enjoy the stealthy browsing he had become accustomed to in Firefox. Decreased Productivity strips web pages down to the bare bones. Background and style-sheet colors are removed, flash is disabled, and images are subdued—barely visible until moused over. You can toggle the images and flash back on (but in doing so you negate the main reason you'd use the extension—stealth browsing). Advertisement Decreased Productivity for Chrome is free and works wherever Chrome does. You can still grab the Firefox version at the link above. Decreased Productivity [Google Chrome Extensions via #tips]Support for the federal opposition has surged ahead of the government, the latest Morgan poll has found. The coalition has overtaken the government for the first time since the federal election in August, according to the poll, published on Friday. Support for the coalition is up four per cent since the start of December, with 51.5 per cent on a two-party preferred basis. Labor Party support is down four per cent at 48.5 per cent, the face-to-face poll conducted last weekend found. According to the poll, if a federal election was held now the coalition would win government. The Labor Party primary vote is 38 per cent (down 2.5 per cent) behind the coalition at 43 per cent (up 2.5 per cent). Support for the Greens and independents remained unchanged. AAPGrieving passenger's sagging pants lead to arrest CRIME Lincoln High Asst. Coach Kevin Doherty hugs his star running back, Deshon Marman, as the final seconds run off the clock. Lincoln High Asst. Coach Kevin Doherty hugs his star running back, Deshon Marman, as the final seconds run off the clock. Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Grieving passenger's sagging pants lead to arrest 1 / 3 Back to Gallery SAN FRANCISCO -- A dispute that began after a passenger refused to pull up his sagging pants led to his arrest and removal from a plane at San Francisco International Airport on Wednesday, police said. Deshon Marman, 20, a University of New Mexico football player who was in the city to attend the funeral of a close friend, former Lincoln High School standout David Henderson, was being held at San Mateo County Jail on suspicion of trespassing, battery and resisting arrest. Marman grew up a block from Henderson in the Bayview neighborhood, and the two were teammates at Lincoln High School and City College of San Francisco before they transferred to separate four-year universities. Henderson was shot May 26 on Kirkwood Avenue and died 11 days later. On Wednesday, San Francisco police got a call about 9 a.m. that someone was exposing himself outside a US Airways gate, Sgt. Michael Rodriguez said. An airline employee spotted Marman before he boarded Flight 488, bound for Albuquerque, and complained that Marman's pants "were below his buttocks but above the knees, and that much of his boxer shorts were exposed," Rodriguez said. The employee asked Marman to pull up his pants before he boarded the plane, but he refused, Rodriguez said. Marman allegedly repeated his refusal after taking his seat on the plane. "At that point he was asked to leave the plane," Rodriguez said. "It took 15 to 20 minutes of talking to get him to leave the plane, and he was arrested for trespassing." Marman allegedly resisted officers as he was being led away. Marman's mother, Donna Doyle, said he was still in an emotionally raw state after attending Henderson's funeral Tuesday, where he spoke of his intention to honor his friend's memory by making it to the NFL. Doyle said she had encouraged her son to leave soon after the funeral. "I didn't want him to stay here in the city because of what happened to David," Doyle said. "A lot of it is jealousy. These kids are trying to make it, they're going off to college and other people get jealous." She added that her son was targeted at the airport "because of the way he looks - young black man with dreads and baggy pants. But he's a good kid trying to make it, and he's going through a lot. And then this happens." Valerie Wunder, a spokeswoman for US Airways, said the airline's dress code forbids "indecent exposure or inappropriate" attire. Marman was being held on $11,000 bail.Oakland schools affected by Occupy strike (11-02) 13:40 PDT OAKLAND -- At least 15 percent of Oakland teachers took today off to participate in the Occupy Oakland general strike, the school district said. A little more than 300 teachers missed work to join the strike, said Troy Flint, a district spokesman. The district won't know exactly how many didn't come to work until later today, Flint said There weren't enough substitute teachers in a handful of schools, so some students had to be moved into other classrooms, he said. "These are the people who followed our procedures," Flint said, referring to the teachers who stayed away. Teachers were allowed to take the day off if they submitted a request by Monday and the district was able to find a sub, Flint said. There's no sign that a large number of students took the day off to join the protest, Flint said. Gretchen Bailey, a kindergarten teacher at Global Family School in Oakland for 15 years, said she took the day off without pay to protest both local budget cuts and the national goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement. "I think we need new tax laws," she said. "We all need to share more of the burden." Eric Robertson, a first-grade teacher who gave the district notice he was planning to join the protest, said he was frustrated with governmental divestment in local government and schools. "I'd like to see responsible capitalism," he said. "I think it is a good model but you have to have restrictions on it." It is time people started paying government for what they expect of government, he said. "I am tired of smelling piss on the street," he said. "We want responsibility." Both teachers said they didn't mind taking the day off since they knew their students were in good hands with substitute teachers. Adam Bergman took his two children and one of their friends out of the school to come to the protest. Concerned about violence, Bergman said he wanted to stay at the back of the pack. "I think it is important to show them what's happening right now," he said. "It's part of our civic duty to support freedom of speech... to stand up for the 99 percent of us." Pat Kaplan, who teaches fourth grade at Bridges Academy in East Oakland, was waiting at the Fruitvale Station to board a BART train and wearing a military uniform emblazoned with the title "Gen. Huelga" - "general strike" in Spanish. "We've had tremendous cuts at our school and lost four staff people," Kaplan said. "We have no field trips and we have to ask parents for paper and pencils, but banks made billions of dollars this year." Chronicle staff writer Carolyn Said contributed to this report.In 1961, President John F. Kennedy spoke in front of a Joint Session of Congress, publicly requesting financial and broad civic support for Project Apollo — a program through which the United States would land a man on the Moon within the decade. Eight years of intensive research and development by staff at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and by key contractors across the country eventually proved Kennedy’s goal a reality, sending three men to the Moon via the Apollo 11 mission in the summer of 1969. The Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston, now known as the Johnson Space Center, served as the focal point of activity for Project Apollo. Thousands of NASA employees, working with hundreds of contractors, coordinated the design and testing of manned spacecraft components at the MSC and communicated this work via live broadcasts and films produced on site. While the film artifacts featured in this exhibition are less well-known than Hollywood’s Apollo 13 or The Right Stuff, they accurately document NASA’s progress towards achieving the historic Moon landing to a degree that previously has not been available to the public. Though the majority was produced by NASA, also included in the exhibit are films shot by major contractors such as North American Aviation and Rockwell, home movies made by Texas families visiting the MSC, and even a star appearance by Doris Day. While the space program as a whole was truly national in scope, the heart of the Apollo program beat firmly at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. Texas was where the Apollo spacecraft were designed and tested; it was where the astronauts were trained and returned after their time on the Moon; and it was their lifeline to call to while in space. Please join us on a Journey to the Moon through Texas! Click the Apollo insignia below to enter the exhibit.Description The Gen2 Instigator AR 80% Lower is now better than ever! Crafted from a single block of 6061 billet aluminum with improved CQB grip retention features on the magazine well. The magazine button area has been carefully designed based on operator feedback. Although holding true to the original intent of protecting the button from accidental depression, there is no interfering feature between the trigger and the button. The fence is designed to slope away from the button so large gloved fingers do not mistake the fence features with the button itself. The magazine well is machined for accuracy with a flair that is large and deep. It was specifically designed for rapid magazine changes with both the USGI and polymer magazines. Included Features: Bolt Catch Set Screw Upper/Lower Fit Tension Screw Improved Guide for the Magazine Catch Operations Left to be completed: Fire Control Pocket Trigger Slot Trigger Pin Hole Hammer Pin Hole Safety Selector Hole Note for the AR-9 (9mm) Version only: These are compatible with Glock Small Frame Magazines. Magazine Release Included. *These lowers are compatible with 5D Tactical Router Jig Systems. Other manufacturers’ jigs may not accommodate the flared magazine well and trigger guard.About SHUT THE F%&# UP! … is what she is thinking, and about to "advise" in a not so friendly tone. In this short clip of "The Break Up", there are three prime examples of how Vince Vaugh's character is clueless as to her needs, and look at his dumbfounded expressions! He's so confused, he has no clue what she is trying to communicate. Simply, he just needs to... SHUT THE F%&# UP! Eat a little crow and apologize, then, actually discuss why she is upset. But instead, his lips keep moving, and so does she. Remember, it’s not about YOU liking antique shops, it’s about HER, liking antiques shops AND at the same time spending it with you! Yes, it is possible. And here you are, wanting to state your case about why you don’t want to stop as you drive home from a weekend out of town. And you wonder why you're not getting any? Dude! Stop the car and look at some antiques! (true story) I've since learned too like antiques. Yes, that statement may sound harsh, but let's get real, some of your significant others are already thinking it, and to kind to just say it. We men tend to talk ourselves further and further down that hole and right onto the couch. So, SHUT THE F%&# UP and be quiet. Let things simmer, stop trying to be right all the time! It's a losing battle, remember and learn her hot buttons. It’s the little things in relationships that go a long way, I mean a LONG way! Our bullheadedness as men, overinflated egos, lack of understanding of the opposite sex and overall, what I like to call Neanderthal-ness, tend to get in the way of really listening to what our partner is trying to communicate or need. Neanderthal-ness SHUT THE F%&# UP! is a Guide, a collection of real life stories, experiences, scenarios and advice, put together in an effort to communicate many of the lessons I have learned, and failed! My goal is to help mankind understand their “Neanderthal-ness”, be one with it and still be the man You want to be in your relationship. After two failed marriages, finally learning the rules of the road, and finding the 'one', I hope you find entertainment and enlightenment in my experiences and most of all- avoid my mistakes! ( a free tip from the Guide ) TIP #5: For the guy who finally got the nerve to ask "that" pretty girl on a date, and she said yes! Don't be the guy who brings a dozen roses on the first date, it will also be your last. For the women and significant others out there thinking there is no hope, well, here it is! A simple, no holds bared guide for your significant other to reference when they need help, when they are falling short in hearing You. So men, remember:Please select your country: United States Argentina Australia Austria Belarus Belgium Brazil Brunei Bulgaria Canada Chile China Colombia Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Czechoslovakia (1945-1992) Denmark East Germany (1949-1990) Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Ireland Israel Italy Japan Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Macau Macedonia Malaysia Malta Mexico The Netherlands New Zealand North Korea Norway Philippines Poland Portugal Romania Russia Saudi Arabia Serbia Singapore Slovakia Slovenia South Korea Spain Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Turkey Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Uruguay Vietnam U.S.S.R. (1922-1991) Yugoslavia (1945-1992) Africa » Cameroon Africa » South Africa Worldwide Other Not an American user? Description Screenshots Promo Images In, you play as a ninja whose world is populated solely with robots. Unlike other pop culture ninjas, this ninja is equipped with no weapons, and must rely entirely on speed, flexible mobility, and the way of N.As we all know, ninjas possess an irrational thirst for gold. So while dodging laser blasts and homing missiles,'s ninja also has the opportunity to satisfy the lucre craving.is a puzzle-platformer featuring 150 levels encapsulated in 30 episodes, with a time limit of 90 seconds per episode. Gameplay progress is saved after each episode (comprising 5 levels), but the player can indefinitely retry a level if they die.features physics-based control in a tile-based world. Distinguishing characteristics include complex collision detection, and quirky ragdoll physics. There are no promo images for this game Part of the Following Groups User Reviews Critic Reviews Forums There are currently no topics for this game. Trivia There is no trivia on file for this game. Related Web SitesIn a major step towards realising its nuclear energy ambitions, India is engaged in talks with the European Union to sign a civil nuclear cooperation agreement and the deal is expected to be inked by next year. "An agreement is expected to be signed between the India's Department of Atomic Energy and Joint Research Centre of the European Union. It will mostly focus on areas of research and energy," EU's Ambassador to India Joao Cravinho told at the sidelines of an event last week. Cravinho said talks between the two sides are on and the agreement should be signed next year. He, however, did not give any specific time frame on when the agreement will be inked. "There were concerns raised by few countries about signing an agreement because India is not a signatory of the Non- Proliferation Treaty, but there is a consensus on this now," he said. Both the sides and countries within the EU are ironing out the differences over the "language" to be used in the draft. "The countries are now discussing the language to be used in the draft. This should be resolved and the deal could be signed next year," Cravinho said. India and the EU have been cooperating on various aspects like environment, sustainable development, renewable energy and clean technology. The deal would provide a major boost to India's efforts in getting an entry to the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group, considering the clout of the EU on the global platform. The technology transfer in various aspects related to nuclear sector, especially in the health sector, would benefit India, sources said. After the landmark Indo-US nuclear deal, India has signed nuclear deals with Russia, Kazakhstan, United Kingdom, South Korea, Mongolia, and France. It also signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with Australia in September, paving way to import uranium for its reactors.I found a really fascinating and powerful story about the nonviolent path of transforming enemies into friends, in Walter Wink’s book The Powers That Be. On a Sunday morning in June 1991, Cantor Michael Weisser and his wife, June, were unpacking boxes in their new home, when the phone rang. “You will be sorry you ever moved into 5810 Randolph St., Jew boy,” the voice said, and hung up. Two days later, the Weissers received a manila packet in the mail. “The KKK is watching you, scum,” read the note. Inside were pictures of Adolf Hitler, caricatures of Jews with hooked noses, blacks with gorilla heads, and graphic depictions of dead blacks and Jews. “The Holohoax was nothing compared to what’s going to happen to you,” read one note. The Weissers called the police, who said it looked like the work of Larry Trapp, the state leader, or “grand dragon,” of the Ku Klux Klan. A Nazi sympathizer, he led a cadre of skinheads and klansmen responsible for terrorizing black, Asian, and Jewish families in Nebraska and nearby Iowa. “He’s dangerous,” the police warned. “We know he makes explosives.” Although confined to a wheelchair because of late-stage diabetes, Trapp, forty-four, was a suspect in firebombings of several African Americans’ homes around Lincoln and was responsible for what he called “Operation Gooks,” the March 1991 bombing of the Indochinese Refugee Assistance Center in Omaha. (He later admitted to these crimes.) And Trapp was planning to blow up the synagogue where Weisser was the spiritual leader. Trapp lived alone in a drab efficiency apartment. On one wall he kept a giant Nazi flag and a double-life-sized picture of Hitler. Next to these hung his white Ku Klux Klan robe, with its red belt and hood. He kept assault rifles, pistols and shotguns within instant reach for the moment when one of his enemies might come crashing through his door to kill him. In the rear was a secret bunker he’d built for the coming “race wars.” When Trapp launched a white supremacist TV series on a local public access channel — featuring men and women saluting a burning swastika and firing automatic weapons — Michael Weisser was incensed. He called Trapp’s KKK hotline and left a message on the answering machine. “Larry,” he said, “do you know that the very first laws that Hitler’s Nazi’s passed were against people like yourself who had no legs or who had physical deformities or physical handicaps? Do you realize you would have been among the first to die under Hitler? Why do you love the Nazis so much?” Then he hung up. Weisser continued the calls to the machine. Then one day Trapp picked up. “What the f— do you want?!” he shouted. “I just want to talk to you,” said Weisser. “You black?” Trapp demanded. “Jewish,” Weisser replied. “Stop harassing me,” said Trapp, who demanded to know why he was calling. Weisser remembered a suggestion of his wife’s. “Well, I was thinking you might need a hand with something, and I wondered if I could help,” Weisser ventured. “I know you’re in a wheelchair and I thought maybe I could take you to the grocery store or something.” Trapp was too stunned to speak. Then he cleared his throat. “That’s okay,” he said. “That’s nice of you, but I’ve got that covered. Thanks anyway. But don’t call this number anymore.” “I’ll be in touch,” Weisser replied. During a later call, Trapp admitted he was “rethinking a few things.” But then he went back on the radio spewing the same old hatreds. Furious, Weisser picked up the phone. “It’s clear you’re not rethinking anything at all!” After calling Trapp a “liar” and “hypocrite,” Weisser demanded an explanation. In a surprisingly tremulous voice, Trapp said, “I’m sorry I did that. I’ve been talking like that all my life … I can’t help it … I’ll apologize!” That evening the cantor led his congregation in prayers for the grand dragon. The next evening, the phone rang at the Weissers’ home. “I want to get out,” Trapp said, “but I don’t know how.” The Weissers offered to go over to Trapp’s that night to “break bread.” Trapp hesitated, then agreed, telling them he lived in apartment number three. When the Weissers entered Trapp’s apartment, he burst into tears and tugged off his swastika rings. Soon all three were crying, then laughing, then hugging. Trapp resigned from all his racist organizations
Mann Indian International Neel Jani Armaan Ebrahim Parthiva Sureswaren Zaamin Jaffer Mathias Lauda Aditya Patel Akhil Khushlani Phiroze Billmoria Cyndie Allemann Indian Drivers Gaurav Dalal Ashwin Sundar Vishnu Prasad Chirag Malhotra Abdul Ahmed Raj Bharath Ameya Walavalkar Sahil Shelar Amittrajit Ghosh Sailesh Bolisetti Parth Ghorpade About i1 series: i1 Supercar Series is the all new motorsport racing league promoted by Machdar Motorsport. The i1 Supercar Series will consist of 10 races with 9 teams representing different Indian cities. The inaugural i1 Supercar Series season will begin in January 2012 and be held in India, UAE, Malaysia, Bahrain and Qatar. The teams will race the Radical Sportscars' SR3 roadster in the sports car racing series. Each team will be represented by two drivers. At least one driver for each team must be a driver of Indian origin. Teams will compete for a USD 2 Million prize. New racing series are popping up all the time in different locations around the world. So what makes the new i1 Super Series special? Somehow, the organizers have managed to attract an enviable roster of former F1 drivers to participate.The series, originally known as the Indian Racing League (but which probably changed names to avoid confusion with the defunct Indy Racing League ), is a new spec racing series centered in Asia. For the inaugural season, it will be using the Radical SR3 (pictured above), a production-based, LMP-style sports car with a 1500cc Suzuki motorcycle engine custom-tuned to produce around 260 horsepower. That may not sound like much power, but with such a such a light frame, it's capable of hitting 60 in three seconds flat, cornering at nearly 2.5 Gs and consistently holds the lap record at the Nürburgring.Nine teams (each representing a major city in India ) will each field two cars: one piloted by an up-and-coming Indian driver, and one by an established pro. Those are being chosen from a pool that includes such notable talents as Jacques Villeneuve, Giancarlo Fisichella, Jean Alesi, Heinz-Haral Frentzen, Mika Salo and Sakon Yamamoto.Ten races will be held in this inaugural season at five circuits: India's new Buddh circuit in New Delhi, Sepang in Malaysia, Losail in Qatar, Yas Marina in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain. Read more in the press release after the breakNew Delhi: Leading broadcasters Sony Pictures Networks India (SPN) and Discovery Communications have bought the bid documents for the upcoming auction of media rights of the Indian Premier League (IPL). The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) on 21 July invited bids for media rights for a five-year period from 2018 to 2022. Both television and digital media rights of the IPL Twenty20 cricket tournament will be up for auction. When contacted, SPN and Discovery Communications confirmed the development. SPN was the official broadcaster for the last season of the IPL. Sony Pictures Network India’s rights for years 2015-2018 are due to expire. The last date for buying the bid documents is 24 August and the bidding process will close on 28 August. The results will be announced on the same day. Discovery Communications has launched its sports TV channel DSPORT for the Indian subcontinent. The channel focuses on bringing over 4,000 hours live sports content from around the world to Indian audiences. Chinese mobile firm Vivo has retained the IPL’s title sponsorship for the next five years with a mammoth bid of Rs2,199 crore, an over 500% increase from their previous deal. It had held the rights for 2016 and 2017 seasons. The deal was pegged at an estimated Rs100 crore per year.Gifs: Unplayable stuff! Ryan Harris bowls the most perfect swinging delivery NAR133 FOLLOW ANALYST News 70.70K // 16 Dec 2013, 17:46 IST SHARE Share Options × Facebook Twitter Flipboard Reddit Google+ Email England have been battered and bruised in this Ashes series so far. Today, they were stunned. First, Shane Watson‘s attacking hundred on Day 4 morning put them firmly on the backfoot, if the humongous lead had not done so already. Then, as captain Alastair Cook came out to bat with Michael Carberry, facing a target of 504, he got a dream delivery first up. The first ball of the innings by Ryan Harris, faced by Cook, who is appearing in his 100th Test, swung into the batsman first, and Cook followed it. The red cherry then hit the deck, getting a hint of seam movement, which was enough to beat Cook’s edge. And then suddenly, it swung late, away from Cook, and much to his horror, hit the bail on his off-stump. In a span of a few seconds, the ball had changed its mind a couple of times. It was beautiful to watch! If that’s not clear enough, watch this: In the 99 Test matches he had played so far, Alastair Cook was never dismissed for a golden duck. Today, he got his first in his 100th Test. If it’s any consolation to the English captain, there’s no shame in getting out to that delivery.The Cincinnati riots of 2001 were a series of civil disorders which took place in and around the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of downtown Cincinnati, Ohio from April 9 to 13, 2001. The riots were the largest urban disturbance in the United States since the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The riots were sparked after 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, an unarmed African American man, was shot and killed by Cincinnati Police Department Patrolman Stephen Roach during an attempt to arrest him for non-violent misdemeanors, most of which were traffic citations. Tensions were already high in the city following a series of other incidents of alleged police brutality and racial profiling, including thirteen deaths. Protests erupted into four nights of rioting in Cincinnati, with rioters throwing objects at police officers, vandalizing and looting businesses before a city-imposed curfew effectively ended the unrest. Ultimately it was determined the riots caused $3.6 million in damage to businesses and another $1.5 to $2 million to the city. A subsequent community boycott of downtown businesses had an estimated adverse impact of $10 million on the area. Incidents of violent crime rose in the downtown area for several years thereafter. The city worked with the community and police to improve training and policies to prevent incidents like that in which Thomas was fatally wounded. Background [ edit ] The initial incident and much of the subsequent unrest took place in Over-the-Rhine, a neighborhood immediately north of Cincinnati's central business district. A 2000 demographic profile of the neighborhood showed a resident population of 7,368, of whom 5,974 were African American. The profile also showed significant poverty, unemployment, and a lack of development in the area for several decades. Some 1,667 of 3,594 housing units, or more than one third, in the neighborhood were vacant. About 96 percent of the occupied houses were renter-occupied. The neighborhood had a concentration of African Americans, who otherwise made up 40 percent overall of the 331,000 residents of the city. At the time of the riot, the median income in Over-the-Rhine was $8,600 compared to $26,774 for the city overall. Author David Waddington attributed the poverty of the area to high unemployment resulting from a loss of manufacturing jobs in the city, as well as cuts in youth programs in the city. The neighborhood had a high rate of crimes, in particular drug-related offenses. The array of poverty-associated problems resulted in heightened tensions between African-American residents in the neighborhood and the Cincinnati Police Department. Between 1995 and April 2001, fifteen black males suspected of crimes had been killed by Cincinnati police during confrontation or while in custody, including four since November 2000, while no white suspects were killed in that period. In particular, two recent deaths had sparked tensions: Roger Owensby, Jr. died November 7, 2000, allegedly of asphyxiation from a chokehold from a police officer, and Jeffrey Irons died the next day in a scuffle with police. One of the officers was acquitted, while the other case ended in a mistrial and the officer was not re-tried. While the police were criticized for racism by the community, Heather Mac Donald wrote that "only three of the 15 cases raise serious questions about officer misjudgment and excessive force."[9] She said most of the deaths resulted from defensive actions by police. In the last four shootings by the department, two of which were lethal, all the police officers were black.[9] Mac Donald also wrote that the incidence of police shootings was comparable to other cities of the same size, and below those in St. Louis, Missouri.[9] Three weeks before the riots, the American Civil Liberties Union and a group of local organizations filed a civil lawsuit against the police department and city, alleging 30 years of racial profiling. A number of other civil suits were initiated against the department, including one African-American man who alleged he was handcuffed and beaten during a traffic stop. Bomani Tyehimba filed a lawsuit in 1999 against the city of Cincinnati. He claimed that during a routine traffic stop, police illegally ordered him out of his car, handcuffed him and held a gun to his head.[10] A local independent newspaper, CityBeat, published research that an "analysis of 141,000 traffic citations written by Cincinnati Police in a 22-month period found black drivers twice as likely as whites to be cited for driving without a license, twice as likely to be cited for not wearing a seat belt and four times as likely to be cited for driving without proof of insurance."[11] The NAACP argued that such statistics were the result of police targeting "driving while black," rather than actual differences in the rate of offenses committed by different groups.[12] Incident [ edit ] In little more than two months preceding this incident, Timothy Thomas had received numerous traffic citations: he was pulled over 11 times by six different white officers and four black officers. They cited Thomas for 21 violations, almost all of them for exactly the same things – not wearing a seat belt or driving without a license." In the early morning hours of April 7, 2001, Cincinnati police in Over-the-Rhine attempted to arrest the 19-year-old, who was wanted on 14 nonviolent misdemeanor counts, of which 12 were traffic citations. Thomas was pursued for 10 minutes by nine officers, who were later joined by Patrolman Stephen Roach. The pursuit culminated at 2:20 a.m. when Thomas rounded a corner in a dark alley and surprised Roach, who shot him in the chest at close range. Roach said he believed Thomas was reaching for a gun in his waistband, but investigation later determined Thomas was trying to pull up his "baggy pants." Roach also said that he was not aware that charges against Thomas were non-violent, and that Thomas ignored an order to stop. Thomas was rushed to a hospital, but died of his wounds. Disturbance [ edit ] The shooting of an unarmed teenager, Timothy Thomas, sparked widespread outrage in Over-the-Rhine. On April 9, a group of 200 protesters brandishing signs, including Thomas' mother Angela Leisure, gathered outside Cincinnati City Hall while the city council was in session, to demand public explanation for Thomas' shooting. The protesters also demanded to know the results of the police investigation of the shooting, but were told the department was not ready and was still investigating. The council members were trapped inside city hall for three hours and did not respond to the crowd's demands. Later that evening, several hundred residents gathered outside the Cincinnati Police District 1 headquarters in Over-the-Rhine and confronted a line of police officers on horseback and in police cruisers. For about an hour, the crowd threw stones and bottles at police, smashed the station's front door, pulled the station flag from its mast and re-hung it upside down. Police in riot gear dispersed the crowd with tear gas, bean bags and rubber bullets. Ten arrests were made during the incident. On the afternoon of April 10, violence resumed after a static protest of 20 to 50 young African-American men began moving and was followed by police officers. At two road intersections, the crowd began throwing bottles and garbage at police, who retreated both times. Parts of the crowd headed downtown, where they began to overturn garbage cans, vendor carts, and newspaper boxes. The crowd began smashing windows of businesses and looting stores. A number of white motorists were allegedly pulled from their cars and beaten. Police moved in on horseback or with linked arms and dispersed the crowd with bean bags, tear gas and rubber bullets. They made sixty-six arrests over the course of the day. The city called in deputies from the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office to help when looting and vandalism broke out in other poorer neighborhoods in Cincinnati, including Walnut Hills and Avondale, where vandals broke windows and set small fires. Several gunshots were fired during the night, and there were a number of injuries reported in the incidents. Rioting dispersed in the early morning hours. Many of the damaged downtown businesses resumed normal operations the next day. But, at nightfall on April 11, another round of rioting broke out downtown, and more businesses were damaged and looted. Sporadic incidents continued the next evening, and a police crackdown resulted in another 82 arrests. By April 12, many downtown businesses did not open, and workers for many others refused to go downtown. A third night of rioting continued that evening, causing further damage. The morning of April 13, Cincinnati Mayor Charles J. Luken announced a citywide curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. for all but work travelers. He also declared a state of emergency and brought in 125 Ohio Highway Patrol troopers to assist with policing. In all, 800 people were arrested for violating curfew conditions. This curfew did not extend to the city's suburbs, prompting some criticism from Cincinnati residents of uneven enforcement of the curfew. April 14 was the day of Thomas' funeral. Police kept a helicopter airborne and stationed riot police two blocks from the service. About 2,000 protesters began a peaceful march downtown following the service. A procession of 30 from the funeral marched to the intersection of Elm and Liberty streets. A group of seven law enforcement personnel arrived in patrol cruisers and fired bean bag ammunition into a crowd of 20, injuring four, including two children. Police contended they were acting under orders to disperse a large crowd blocking the intersection, while witnesses claimed the police did not provide warning and singled out black members of the group. Aftermath [ edit ] The total damage sustained from the riots amounted to $3.6 million. In all, the city said 120 businesses suffered damage from the rioting. It cost the city another $1.5 million to $2 million for emergency responders and equipment damage.[16] The four days of riots are considered the largest urban disturbance in the United States since the 1992 Los Angeles riots. There has been extensive discussion within the local community about the effects of suburbanization and urban decay in the city, as well as the redevelopment of Over-the-Rhine, a historic neighborhood. The incidents again strained the relationship between the police and residents of the city's minority communities. In 2002, the city signed an agreement for initiatives to improve police service to minority communities, revise use-of-force guidelines and form a committee for community policing initiatives. CPD officers began an unofficial work slowdown, which coincided with a rise in violent crime in the downtown area. In 2001 and 2002, violent crime and property crime rates rose in the city, with property crime rates peaking in 2003 before declining through 2010. The city has a crime rate higher than the national average but similar to other major cities. Initiatives were subsequently begun by community groups to reduce violence. Sixty-three rioters were indicted on felony charges.[21] Roach was tried for negligent homicide in September 2001. Cincinnati police attempted to waive the trial in favor of a bench ruling. Roach, who left the force to join a suburban police department, was later acquitted of the charges. Several isolated incidents of violence occurred after his verdict was announced. An internal police investigation found Roach had lied in his incident report, had not followed department firearm procedures, and had not given Thomas sufficient time to respond to his order. Angered by police reaction, particularly the April 14 incident, several community groups organized a boycott of downtown businesses. Several prominent African-American entertainers scheduled to perform in the city, including Bill Cosby, Whoopi Goldberg, and Smokey Robinson cancelled their performances there. After a year, the community boycott was estimated to have caused a $10 million negative economic impact on the city. Significant gentrification of the Over the Rhine community began just before and continued after the riots, as developers found property values low enough to allow acquisition and redevelopment. A number of tech companies and nightlife spots have opened in the neighborhood. By 2007, several new community events had been organized. Several large Cincinnati companies, including Fifth Third Bank, Procter & Gamble and Kroger, announced support for reforms in the city, such as investment in schools and minority-hiring programs. Police behavior and protocols were investigated, and changes were made to improve training and interaction with the community. On the ten-year anniversary of the riots, Cincinnati Enquirer reported that "[t]he riots neither initiated the racial tension nor the police reforms, but accelerated both."[23] Among the reforms were the following: Training officers to deal with "low-light situations" (such as the alley where Thomas was fatally shot). [23] Training officers to how to recognize suspects' potential mental health issues and how to interact with mentally ill people. [23] Cincinnati patrol cars were equipped with computers to give police officers access to complete and detailed criminal records. [23] Changes in the department's "foot pursuit policy," requiring officers to "assess whether a pursuit is appropriate, taking into consideration the seriousness of the offense, whether the suspect is armed and their ability to apprehend at a later date." [23] Requiring officers to complete "contact cards" after traffic stops, noting details about the car's driver and passengers, including race. This change arose from complaints of racial profiling in traffic stops. [23] The Citizens Complaint Authority was created in 2002 to independently review all "serious uses of force" by police officers. [23] In late 2003 the city 'updated Tasers for all officers after the death of Nathaniel Jones, an African-American man with drugs in his system."[23] Jones died after officers "hit him repeatedly with their batons."[23] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] CitationsThe right and left are gridlocked in a battle over voter registration laws. The right wants to tighten security and ensure that only eligible voters are participating in elections. The left argues that this makes it too difficult for legitimate voters to successfully cast their ballots. While you might be inclined to believe that both sides have merit, a quick Google search or scan of mainstream media would tell you the science agrees with the left. As always, this is more propaganda than fact. There are studies on both sides of these arguments, so we are going to take a few minutes to uncover as much truth as possible. We’ll see how reliable different studies are and what makes them more or less applicable to the greater debate. Liberal Claims When Trump mentioned illegal voting during the campaign, the liberals reacted quickly and decisively. Politifact debunked the claim in no time, and a number of leftist news outlets cited nine different studies that all agree: widespread voter fraud has never happened in the U.S. and is virtually impossible. This is pretty compelling, and roughly half the country bought it. As is always the case with liberal “facts,” peering even a little deeper annihilates the claims. All of the studies in question only reviewed voter impersonation fraud. That is when someone impersonates a registered voter to cast a ballot. While Trump acknowledged the possibility of such fraud, his (and the GOP’s) real concern is with ineligible voters casting ballots under their own names. The liberals have cited no studies in regards to this statistic for two reasons. First, it is almost impossible to successfully study. Second, the one study that has been published looks very bad for the left. A New Study in Virginia Just this year, a study was published by the Public Interest Legal Foundation on the very topic of ineligible voting. A follow-up to what was published last year, the new results are telling. Since 2011, roughly 5,500 non-citizens registered to vote in the state of Virginia. This is a felony-level offense. Of those, more than 1,800 were confirmed to cast ballots in multiple elections with higher participation totals being possible. Now, Virginia was one of the more blue states this past election and the 5,500 illegal votes were not enough to sway the state, but in closer calls, these numbers could represent something sinister. New Hampshire was settled by a difference of only 2,701 votes and could easily have been settled by voter fraud. More importantly, Virginia is estimated to be in the bottom half of states in terms of illegal voter participation. There are states where the problem is likely much worse. A Lack of Data As you can guess, the three states estimated to have the most voter fraud are Washington, New York and the behemoth California (New Mexico may have the highest participation rate, but it pales in terms of total number of illegal voters). You’ll notice that all of these states are extremely blue. You’ll also find that there is absolutely no public data to confirm or deny these suspicions. While it’s easy to see why Democrat-run governments are hiding the truth, it’s interesting to discover just how determined they are. The study in Virginia was remarkably difficult to run. It took multiple lawsuits upheld by federal courts to get the Virginia government to comply and release the data. In states like California, you can expect the results to be far worse, and thus, the government will fight much harder to keep the truth hidden. Think about this for a moment. If the Virginia government was adamantly refusing to release voting statistics, then they knew about the problem the whole time. While this surprises no one, it exposes a whole new facet of corruption. There is now actionable proof that Virginia officials were elected by illegal votes and took deliberate action to hide and uphold that situation. We can reasonably assume that the same thing is happening to greater degrees in other states. The left will continue to hide behind their excuses. They will shout that voter registration and affirmation is discriminatory and suppresses votes. In a manner of speaking, they are right. Voter I.D. laws discriminate against illegal voters and suppresses their ability to break the law. In the meantime, it is imperative that the right pushes for more studies to expose the true extent of ineligible voting in this country. It is very likely that Trump was right all along and that Hillary’s popular vote win was only sustained through illegal practices. ~ American Liberty ReportSummary: Using optogenetics, researchers manipulated pulses of neural activity during non REM sleep that made mice either remember of forget things they had learned. This novel study demonstrated that altering sleep spindle oscillations during sleep has an impact on memory formation and retention. Source: Institute For Basic Science. IBS researchers find that manipulating the pulses of electrical activity in the thalamus during non-REM deep sleep make mice remember or forget. Have you ever tried to recall something just before going to sleep and then wake up with the memory fresh in your mind? While we absorb so much information during the day consciously or unconsciously, it is during shut eye that a lot of facts are dispatched to be filed away or fall into oblivion. A good quality sleep is the best way to feel mentally refreshed and memorize new information, but how is the brain working while we sleep? Could we improve such process to remember more, or maybe even use it to forget unwanted memories? Scientists at the Center for Cognition and Sociality, within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), enhanced or reduced mouse memorization skills by modulating specific synchronized brain waves during deep sleep. This is the first study to show that manipulating sleep spindle oscillations at the right timing affects memory. The full description of the mouse experiments, conducted in collaboration with the University of Tüebingen, is published in the journal Neuron. The research team concentrated on a non-REM deep sleep phase that generally happens throughout the night, in alternation with the REM phase. It is called slow-wave sleep and it seems to be involved with memory formation, rather than dreaming. During slow-wave sleep, groups of neurons firing at the same time generate brain waves with triple rhythms: slow oscillations, spindles, and ripples. Slow oscillations originate from neurons in the cerebral cortex. Spindles come from a structure of the brain called thalamic reticular nucleus and spike around 7-15 per second. Finally, ripples are sharp and quick bursts of electrical energy, produced within the hippocampus, a brain component with an important role in spatial memory. “Often during the night a regular pattern is manifested, where a slow oscillation from the cortex is immediately followed by a thalamic spindle and while this happens, a hippocampal ripple appears in parallel. We believe that the correct timing of these three rhythms acts like a communication channel between different parts of the brains that facilitates memory consolidation,” explains Charles-Francois V. Latchoumane, first co-author of the study. The researchers focused on spindles because it was shown that the number of spindles is connected with memorization. It has been shown that the number of spindles increases following a day stuffed with learning and declines in the elderly, and in patients with schizophrenia. This is the first study to show that artificial thalamic spindles affect memory, if administered in sync with slow oscillations. In the experiment, mice were put in a special cage and given a mild electric shock after hearing a tonal noise. The day after, their memory was tested, by checking their fear reaction in response to either the same noise or the same cage. Latchoumane explains that this could be simplified and compared to the experience of hearing a fire alarm in a certain location, like a cafe. The incident would be followed by either another visit to the same cafe or the sound of the fire alarm in another cafe on the following day. At nighttime between the two days, scientists introduced artificial thalamic spindles in some of the mice using a light-based technique called optogenetics. The mice were divided into three groups. The first group received the light input just after the slow oscillations, so their spindle could form a triple rhythm (in phase): slow oscillation-spindle-ripples. In the second group the light stimulations were applied later “out of sync”. The third group was used as a control and did not receive any light stimulation. The day after, mice were placed in the same location and their movement was recorded. The mice of the first group were frozen in fear 40% of the time, even in absence of the noise. On the contrary, mice in the second and third groups only froze up to 20%. Instead, when the mice heard the same tone in a different location, remembered the tone and froze in fear up to 40% of the time, independently from the group they belonged to. The hippocampus is involved in spatial memories which might explain the difference. The opposite was also true: it was possible to make mice forget. By reducing the number of overnight spindles, the researchers could reduce the memory recall. The research team thinks that the thalamus is the coordinator of long-term memory consolidation, the process where recently acquired information is transferred from the hippocampus to the cortex to be filed away as long-term memory. The hippocampus is like a hub, where a lot of information comes in and has to be redirected to the correct destination within the brain, especially to the cortex. This study shows that the thalamus seems to mediate the information exchange between hippocampus and cortex. “We think that memorization during deep sleep has to do with time coordination. If the hippocampus tries to exchange information when the cortex neurons are not ready to receive it, the information could be wasted,” describes Latchoumane. “Slow oscillations might be the signal used by the cortex to flag that it is ready to accept information. Then, the thalamus would alert the hippocampus via the spindles.” It is possible to foresee that patients with memory deficiencies could benefit from translation of this research into humans. However, several points need to be clarified: can we manipulate single memories independently? Is the REM phase influencing the outcome? How is stored memory retrieved? While waiting for the next research outcomes on the science of sleep, sweet dreams… and sweet memories too. About this neuroscience research article Source: Jung Gyu Kim – Institute For Basic Science Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to IBS. Original Research: Abstract for “Thalamic Spindles Promote Memory Formation during Sleep through Triple Phase-Locking of Cortical, Thalamic, and Hippocampal Rhythms” by Charles-Francois V. Latchoumane, Hong-Viet V. Ngo, Jan Born, and Hee-Sup Shin in Neuron. Published online July 6 2017 doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2017.06.025 Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article MLA APA Chicago Institute For Basic Science “Controlling Memory By Triggering Specific Brain Waves During Sleep.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 6 July 2017. <http://neurosciencenews.com/memory-sleep-brain-waves-7040/>. Institute For Basic Science (2017, July 6). Controlling Memory By Triggering Specific Brain Waves During Sleep. NeuroscienceNew. Retrieved July 6, 2017 from http://neurosciencenews.com/memory-sleep-brain-waves-7040/ Institute For Basic Science “Controlling Memory By Triggering Specific Brain Waves During Sleep.” http://neurosciencenews.com/memory-sleep-brain-waves-7040/ (accessed July 6, 2017). Abstract Thalamic Spindles Promote Memory Formation during Sleep through Triple Phase-Locking of Cortical, Thalamic, and Hippocampal Rhythms Highlights •Spindles in-phase with slow oscillation up-states boost hippocampus-dependent memory •Phase coupling of slow oscillations, spindles, and ripples underlies memory formation •Thalamic spindle stimulation drives cross-regional co-occurrence of spindles •Thalamic inhibition phase-locked to slow oscillation up-states impairs memory Summary While the interaction of the cardinal rhythms of non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM) sleep—the thalamo-cortical spindles, hippocampal ripples, and the cortical slow oscillations—is thought to be critical for memory consolidation during sleep, the role spindles play in this interaction is elusive. Combining optogenetics with a closed-loop stimulation approach in mice, we show here that only thalamic spindles induced in-phase with cortical slow oscillation up-states, but not out-of-phase-induced spindles, improve consolidation of hippocampus-dependent memory during sleep. Whereas optogenetically stimulated spindles were as efficient as spontaneous spindles in nesting hippocampal ripples within their excitable troughs, stimulation in-phase with the slow oscillation up-state increased spindle co-occurrence and frontal spindle-ripple co-occurrence, eventually resulting in increased triple coupling of slow oscillation-spindle-ripple events. In-phase optogenetic suppression of thalamic spindles impaired hippocampus-dependent memory. Our results suggest a causal role for thalamic sleep spindles in hippocampus-dependent memory consolidation, conveyed through triple coupling of slow oscillations, spindles, and ripples. “Thalamic Spindles Promote Memory Formation during Sleep through Triple Phase-Locking of Cortical, Thalamic, and Hippocampal Rhythms” by Charles-Francois V. Latchoumane, Hong-Viet V. Ngo, Jan Born, and Hee-Sup Shin in Neuron. Published online July 6 2017 doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2017.06.025 Feel free to share this Neuroscience News.Posted 03 July 2013 - 11:34 PM This is truly incredible. There have been multiple people over the years that have tried to replicate this, and I think every one failed except for one guy that got lucky. so props to you for making something assumed impossible by many. I really want to believe that the range is 80-90 ft PTG, however: 1. Although ingenious, the sealing mech does not look like it seals perfectly/near perfectly 2. You have 3" draw with a 3/4" plunger tube. Blasters like the snap use 1 1/4" PT's with more draw and get just slightly higher ranges Regardless of range you just created a completely new breech setup that (judging by your video) works consistently, so well done. I'm sure once other people try making their own variations and polish and enhance this design, I'm sure the range issues will be solved and be brought up to standard homemade range. So yeah, well done on inventing a new breech setup, creating something most viewed as unachievable, and making it work consistently. I'll have to try making this one day as it looks super fun to use. This is really cool! It's good to see something out of the mold. I think it's really cool the way that you designed this with a real weapon in mind. Kind of like BoltSniper did on his homemades. I'm curious about the ability of this design to be reproduced. Do you think that people other than you can build one, or is it one those homemades like the FAR, which is basically impossible to build? Also, how strong and reliable is the feeding mechanism? Nope I clearly get how it works as I stated but I wanted a video as well. I can't believe you actually got a tube magazine to work. There was a thread by Shadow, and it lasted for two years, just barely touching on successful prototypes. And you managed to do it with just pvc and paint sticks. Now, how many darts does the magazine hold? What flaws can you currently find in the design and construction of the blaster? How reliable is the tube magazine? Wow, like many of the others have said, this is an amazing design that is not too hard to replicate at all. I definitely hope to try and make on of these in the future. Also, judging that most of the blaster are PVC and wood, would this be a fairly inexpensive build? Again, great work on the loading mechanism. Thanks for all the kudos!1. Bolt seal at the front end with the coupler is excellent. The seal at the rear is also fairly good.2. 3" plunger draw and 1 1/4" plunger tube diameter is enough to achieve such ranges.If I get the tools, I'll work on something that can be more easily replicated. All the parts can be made with polycarbonate, so I'll make some templates for the build in the future. The only unusual part is the loading mechanism, so this should much easier to construct than the FAR. All the other components are pretty standard with SNAPs and other homemades.I'll try and get a video for it soon.As Azrael said above, it holds five 1.5" long darts. The tube magazine is reliable as long as the darts are the same length and there are no more than five darts in the tube. The construction is solid, but new designs need to be made so that the blaster can be easily replicated.This would probably cost $30-40 to make. It was a lot less for me since I had all the leftover parts from my SNAPs. Edited by Setro, 03 July 2013 - 11:35 PM.Man who supplied women for prime minister's parties said to have been paid to do a deal with prosecutors to avoid trial Two people alleged to have blackmailed Silvio Berlusconi were arrested in Rome on Thursday, in a move that further embarrassed Italy's embattled prime minister. Giampaola Tarantini, who was arrested at dawn at his flat near Via Veneto – one of Rome's most expensive streets – was a central figure in a sex scandal that threatened to bring down Berlusconi two years ago. In a statement to police published in September 2009, the businessman, from Bari in southern Italy, acknowledged supplying some 30 women for parties and dinners at the prime minister's Roman palazzo. He said at least six women had spent the night there. Tarantini's wife, 34-year-old Angela Devenuto, was also taken into custody and a warrant was issued for the arrest of a third person believed not to be in Italy. According to Italian media reports, they are accused of receiving €500,000 (nearly £441,000) from Berlusconi along with benefits in kind including the rent on the Tarantinis' Rome flat. Details of the investigation were leaked last month in a news magazine belonging to Berlusconi. The magazine, Panorama, claimed the prosecutors believed Tarantini was being paid to stop him contradicting the prime minister's claim that he was unaware that any of the women who visited his home were prostitutes. Berlusconi, who turns 75 later this month, has made much over the years of his talents as a playboy. And he has repeatedly insisted he would never wish – or need – to pay a woman for sex. Panorama said that, in telephone conversations secretly intercepted by police, Tarantini had repeatedly said Berlusconi was indeed oblivious of the payments the women were receiving. The magazine claimed that the main reason why the prime minister was passing money to the businessman was to ensure he did a deal with the prosecutors to avoid a trial and the disclosure of "telephone wiretaps held to be embarrassing". But Berlusconi told the magazine: "I helped someone and a family with children who found themselves and continue to find themselves in very serious financial difficulty. I didn't do anything illegal. I limited myself to helping a desperate man without asking for anything in exchange. That's the way I am and nothing will change that." It is hard to imagine, however, what could be more compromising
nefarious. And it means that when you work your way through the grandiose final battles and the game boils down to a single one-on-one duel between the true Sephiroth and a rage-fueled Cloud, that final, essentially unlosable face-off comes as cathartic payback after several dozen hours of fear, torment, and murder. Next time: I wrap this Final Fantasy VII look-back by asking, "Who am I?"OAKLAND, Calif. — California’s Latino and African American homeowners experience twice the rate of foreclosures than that of non-Hispanic whites, a recent report found. As the nation’s foreclosure crisis worsens, efforts are underway by the Obama administration and in California to ease the situation. Among the key findings reached by the Center for Responsible Lending are: · Between 2004 and 2008, Latinos in California accounted for nearly half, 48 percent, of all foreclosures despite having received only 29.9 percent of all loans. Similarly, African Americans experienced 7.6 percent foreclosures on 5.7 percent of loans. · Foreclosure rates have been higher — 2.3 percent for Latinos and 1.9 for African Americans — than that of their white counterparts in a state that ranks near the top when it comes to mortgages seriously in arrears (defined as 90 days or more delinquent or in foreclosure) just behind Florida, Nevada and Arizona. Reaction to the report — a first-of-its-kind study released to the public in August — was swift. Center for Responsible Lending “has sounded the alarm for the last two years about the devastating impact foreclosures have had on communities of color, but this report reveals a shocking level of concentration among Latino homeowners in California,” said Janet Murguía, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza. “Dishonest brokers peddled their high-cost loans, steered our families into risky products designed to fail and now Latinos and all of California are paying the price,” she said. The report further reveals the potential for an increase in foreclosures in the near future. Between 2000 and 2007 California accounted for more than 30 percent of the nation’s Alt-A loans, considered riskier than A-paper, or “prime,” and less risky than “subprime.” While these loans have already experienced a sharp rise in defaultssharp rise in defaults, once the low introductory payments begin to expire after 2012 and new higher payments kick in, “the resulting payment shocks threaten to worsen the crisis,” the report warns. “All Californians are severely impacted by the foreclosure crisis,” declared Paul Leonard, director of CRL’s California office. “We need solutions now that ease the pain everywhere.” Recognizing that the housing crisis continues unabated, both California’s CRL and the Obama administration are taking steps to allay the situation. After home sales nationally dropped in July, the Obama administration announced in late August that it would soon set up a Federal Housing Authority refinancing effort to help borrowers struggling to pay their mortgages. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said the federal agency will also start an emergency homeowner’s loan program for unemployed borrowers so they can remain in their homes. Meanwhile, the CRL study also outlines a series of policy recommendations aimed to alleviate the foreclosure epidemic. They include: • Requiring banks to finish reviewing loan modification applications before initiating foreclosure procedures. This is the main feature of a bill that recently passed the state Senate but died in the state Assembly. • Reducing the principal amount due by the borrower, not just the interest on the loan, especially in cases where borrowers are seeking relief from sub-prime loans. • Changing the law to allow bankruptcy judges to consider loan modification of the borrower’s principal residence. • Expanding funding of housing counseling agencies and legal aid providers. The CRL study also reveals that, contrary to right-wing lore, more than half (50.3 percent) of foreclosures resulted from refinance loans, not from people buying properties they could not afford. Often working-class borrowers refinanced their homes, cashing out a set amount in order to supplement personal and family income inadequate to meet health care costs and other necessities of life. More than three-quarters of the state’s foreclosures were on modest properties, not on sprawling “McMansions” as some would have it. Contributing to an increase in mortgage defaults is the state’s high unemployment rate, among the worst in the nation at 12.3 percent, which triggers a vicious cycle, the study showed. Unemployed workers unable to meet their mortgage payments further drag down the economy, resulting in higher unemployment, which in turn translates into an increase in mortgage defaults. While beyond the study’s purpose, the report’s findings suggest that part of the solution to the foreclosure epidemic is the massive creation of (good paying) jobs, in addition to mortgage lending reform. Photo: Another study said Latino kids suffer most from home foreclosures. (Pepe Lozano/PW)Ciguatera Fish Poisoning This information is courtesy of Lora E. Fleming, NIEHS Marine and Freshwater Biomedical Sciences Center The most commonly reported marine toxin disease in the world is Ciguatera, associated with consumption of contaminated reef fish such as barracuda, grouper, and snapper. Under-diagnosis and under-reporting (especially in endemic areas such as the Caribbean) make it difficult to know the true worldwide incidence of the Marine Toxin Diseases. At least 50,000 people per year who live in or visit tropical and subtropical areas suffer from Ciguatera worldwide. For example, CDC and others estimate that only 2-10% of Ciguatera cases are actually reported in the United States. In the US Virgin Islands, there are an estimated 300 cases per 10,000 or 3% of the population per year; a similar rate is found in the French West Indies. In St. Thomas, a household survey estimated that 4.4% of all households suffered from Ciguatera annually (at least 2640 persons per year or an annual incidence of 600 cases per year); in Puerto Rico, 7% of the residents have experienced at least one episode of Ciguatera in their lifetime. Ciguatera, especially in the Caribbean, suffer for weeks to months with debilitating neurologic symptoms, including profound weakness, temperature sensation changes, pain, and numbness in the extremities. The dinoflagellate Gambierdiscus toxicus produces ciguatoxin throughout tropical regions of the world. Clinical Presentation: Ciguatera presents primarily as an acute neurologic disease manifested by a constellation of gastrointestinal (diarrhea, abdominal cramps and vomiting), neurologic (paresthesias, pain in the teeth, pain on urination, blurred vision, temperature reversal) and cardiovascular (arrhythmias, heart block) signs and symptoms within a few hours of contaminated fish ingestion. The pathneumonic symptom of Ciguatera intoxication is hot/cold temperature reversal, although not all patients report this. The attack rate has been reported to be 73%-100% with ingestion of contaminated fish, without any apparent age-related susceptibility. Acute fatality, usually due to respiratory failure, circulatory collapse or arrhythmias, ranges from 0.1% to 12% of reported cases; presently in the Pacific, the mortality is less than 1%. Lethality is usually seen with ingestion of the most toxic parts of fish (ie. the liver, viscera, roe and other organs). The clinical picture may be variable among individuals, even with the same food source, different ethnic groups, and possibly with different types of fish and/or geographic location. It appears that ciguatera from consumption of carnivore species may be more toxic than that from consumption of herbivores due to exposure to more than one toxin and/or transformation of the toxin(s) and/or an increased dose response. In Polynesia, Ciguatera is dominated and initiated by neurologic symptoms (90% of patients report paresthesias and dysesthesia), while reports from the Caribbean suggest that Ciguatera initially presents acutely as a gastroenteritis often with associated cardiovascular symptoms, with the gradual onset and dominance of neurologic symptoms over the first 24 hours. This may be due to different toxins mixtures elaborated by Caribbean and Polynesian G. toxicus. The symptoms of Ciguatera poisoning, especially the paresthesias and weakness, can persist in varying severity for weeks to months after the acute illness. Prolonged itching due to chronic Ciguatera can present as a dermatologic disease when it is really due to ciguatera paresthesias. Chronic ciguatera can also present as a psychiatric disorder of general malaise, depression, headaches, muscular aches, and peculiar feelings in extremities for several weeks. It is reported that those with chronic symptoms seem to have recurrences of their symptoms with the ingestion of fish (regardless of type), ethanol, caffeine, and nuts 3 to 6 months from initial ingestion. Ciguatera can be sexually transmitted. With exposure of the mother, premature labor and spontaneous abortion have been reported, as well as effects on the fetus and newborn child through placental and breast milk transmission. In the differential diagnosis of Ciguatera, poisoning with the other marine toxins, especially NSP and PSP should be considered since dysesthesias with nausea, vomiting and diarrhea are the presenting symptoms. Obviously the history of fish versus shellfish consumption should help to differentiate. Type E botulism with ingestion of smoked fish, Scromboid and even Eosinophilic meningitis from helminthic infection of Angiostrongylus cantonensis from ingestion of raw mollusks, crabs and certain fish should be considered. Finally, poisoning with organophosphates pesticides can present initially with a similar clinical picture except for the exposure history.Tags: Economy It’s head for “the mattresses” time for savers worldwide (GE Christenson) However, this emergency funding comes with a draconian penalty for the trusting taxpaying savers. In this instance, the European Central Bank has cut a secret deal with the Cypriot government to raid the bank accounts of all the country’s bank depositors, between six and ten percent (the latest plan is to confiscate about 40% of uninsured deposits). This proposed robbery, if it comes to pass, will confiscate billions from citizens and non-citizens alike who have placed their trust in the security of Cyprus’s banks. What has resulted, of course, is riotous response throughout the nation and frantic sell-offs in world equity markets. Cyprus banks reopen amid tight security and tough curbs (Nervous Nelly) Cyprus is the first eurozone member country to bring in capital controls. Cyprus needs to raise 5.8bn euros ($7.4bn; £4.9bn) to qualify for a 10bn-euro bailout from the European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the so-called troika. Cyprus - The Answer Is Uniastrum (Wendy SD) The problem is the way these things work. The reporters, from any news agency, are handed out stuff from the government. They have to publish it. There is no choice. So it appears as official jargon that they hope we will all believe. Then the members of the Press cannot be too critical or say too much or they will be shut off and ostracized by Brussels or Berlin or wherever they reside. Consequently much of what we read in or from the European Press is less than forthcoming. Not lies necessarily; but not exactly all of the truth. I do not fault the Press one iota here because there is nothing else they can do but I caution you not to believe too much of what you read. America has much more, significantly more, freedom of the Press than Europe allows. Hundreds Of Armed Vigilantes Seize Mexican Town, Arrest Local Police (Wendy SD) Members of the area’s self-described “community police” say more than 1,500 members of the force were stopping traffic Wednesday at improvised checkpoints in the town of Tierra Colorado, which sits on the highway connecting Mexico City to Acapulco. They arrested 12 police and the former director of public security in the town after a leader of the state’s vigilante movement was slain on Monday. After court rules Hollande he can’t put 75% tax on salaries, French President vows to hit companies directly (westcoastjan) But in a delicate balancing act designed to woo business, the Socialist president also pledged a “simplicity shock” that would slash France’s notorious red tape and added that he would not raise taxes in the next two years but would cut state spending instead. He also re-iterated his promise to reverse rising unemployment, despite record levels in France. Les misérables: Despite welfare state and wine, unhappiness reigns in France (westcoastjan) Despite free access to health care, hospitals, public school and universities, dissatisfaction is so prevalent in France it ranked worse than Iraq and Afghanistan in a survey of expectations for 2012, according to a WIN-Gallup poll. Hollowed out: US Army fights brain drain (westcoastjan) He and the other students are learning about military doctrine in an educational programme for officers. During class, someone mentions the Iraqi city of Falluja, where American contractors were once killed and strung up from a bridge. The seminar leader, Zsolt Szentkiracli, changes the subject. Highest paid banker on Wall Street suing renovators of neighbouring building for ruining view from his 360-degree glass penthouse (westcoastjan) However Mr. Handler, whose three-bedroom apartment sits atop 1 York Street, claims that as well as causing him anguish, the renovations do not comply with the TriBeCa neighbourhood’s planning laws. The dispute has tarnished a run of good fortune for Mr. Handler, who received a 36% rise last year after the share price of Jeffries, once a boutique investment bank, rose by 48%. Should airlines start charging passengers by the pound? (westcoastjan) That was especially true when soaring fuel prices in 2008 threatened to upend the industry — a year before the recession actually did. But one economist suggests airlines haven’t gone far enough, that it’s time airlines built a system to monetize their greatest weight variable: the passenger. More Scientific Evidence Linking Fracking and Earthquakes (James S.) The study focused its research on seismic activity in Oklahoma over the past two years and concluded that a 4.8-magnitude earthquake centered near Prague on 5 November 2011, was "induced" by the injection wells. Two subsequent earthquakes, including a 5.7-magnitude “event” the following day, was the biggest in contemporary state history, were caused by the first earthquake and existing tectonic stresses in the earth. Money for aquaculture, but not wild salmon, critics note (westcoastjan) "This is an extensive report with serious implications for the British Columbia sockeye salmon fishery. Going forward, the Government is working with partners and reviewing Justice Cohen's findings and recommendations very carefully. The Government of Canada has long recognized the importance of protecting sockeye salmon in the Fraser River," DFO Official Melanie Carkner wrote to the CBC. Gold & Silver Article suggestions for the Daily Digest can be sent to [email protected]. All suggestions are filtered by the Daily Digest team and preference is given to those that are in alignment with the message of the Crash Course and the "3 Es."Have your say Conor Clifford weighed up a future with Pompey and promised: I have no doubts about joining. The rising young Chelsea star has spoken of his desperation to ply his trade on loan at Fratton Park next season. That’s despite the uncertainty that shrouds the Blues, with the club in the middle of a week which looks certain to decide whether they can survive. Administrator Trevor Birch has indicated Pompey will be liquidated this Friday unless the futures of the club’s senior players can be resolved. Liam Lawrence and Tal Ben Haim remain the two key problems on that front, with time ticking down until the deadline. Clifford has no hesitations about linking up with Michael Appleton’s squad in League One, however. The 20-year-old is currently training with Pompey with a view to a loan move, until what lies ahead becomes clear. And the Republic of Ireland under-21 midfielder has insisted he is keen on wearing a royal blue shirt next season. Clifford said: ‘I’m really happy to be here. Hopefully the club can get sorted and I can sign here for the season. ‘From what I’ve seen, you wouldn’t know there were problems off the pitch. I’m not worried about that. It’s been good. ‘I’m on my last year at Chelsea and I’m looking to go out on loan. ‘I got the call off the gaffer (Appleton) here to come down, have a look and see what happens. ‘Hopefully the club can get sorted and I can come here on loan for the season. That’s what I’d love to do. ‘I can see it’s an unbelievable club with great fans and good lads. Hopefully it can get sorted. ‘I’ve been playing games for the reserves at Chelsea but it’s such a massive squad at the club. ‘There are lads who are looking to go out on loan and look somewhere else because it’s so hard to break through at Chelsea. ‘So my plan is to get out and play as many games as I can this year. ‘Then I can see what happens next year. ‘I just need to get out and play first-team football somewhere – and I’d love that to be at Portsmouth.’ Clifford has already enjoyed success at Stamford Bridge, captaining his side to FA Youth Cup victory two years ago. And the Dublin-born talent knows about football in the lower leagues after spells on loan at Plymouth, Notts County and Yeovil. Clifford believes he can impress at Pompey next season – in a side he feels can bounce back up to the Championship. ‘I feel I’m a midfielder who is hard in the tackle and gets from box to box,’ said Clifford. ‘I like to shoot when I’m in and around goal so, hopefully, I have an eye for goal, too. ‘League One’s going to be a good league but I think Portsmouth can be strong. ‘We will have the atmosphere at home and the fans pushing us on. ‘People won’t want to come to Fratton Park. ‘I definitely see Portsmouth bouncing straight back up if they can get a good squad together.’Upon taking over as president of ‘Our Revolution’, Bernie Sanders’ organization, Nina Turner was interviewed by Collier Meyerson and asked “How will Our Revolution relate to the DNC, the DCCC, the DSCC, that kind of establishment that so many activists and politicians, including you, have frequently criticized?” Her response was “I don’t think it is our job nor our obligation to fit in. It’s their job to fit in with us.” That mirrors how Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has handled his entire political career. It is also why he has few real accomplishments to his name after over forty years in office. It may behoove Ms. Turner to take a few moments on this July 4th to reread our constitution and realize to make progress on her goals may require some compromise. That is how the founding fathers set up our government. It doesn’t mean compromising your principles, it does mean working steadily toward your goals. Winston Churchill is credited with saying “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Meyerson went on to ask “And how will Our Revolution relate to progressives within government who didn’t back Bernie, like Sherrod Brown and Tammy Baldwin, if they go on to seek reelection?” Her response is an indication of what is clearly self-destructive about both Nina Turner and ‘Our Revolution’. She said about those two successful and respected progressives “If they want Our Revolution’s endorsement they will seek it like everybody else and so they gotta start with the local affiliates, and if the local affiliates say that this is the person that we want to back, then there it is. There it is.” So ‘Our Revolution’ isn’t about supporting progressives or helping people learn how the system works so they can move forward progressive change. Rather it is about catering to groups of local activists, often self-indulgent, to the point of taking action that actually hurts the causes they believe in. To bring about change one has to understand the system; understanding how Congress works. Like it or not when it comes to Congress there are only two parties, Democrat and Republican. If you don’t work to support one of them you are helping the other. We saw that in the last Presidential election and we saw it in 2000 when we ended up with George W. Bush. One must wonder what turned Nina Turner from a rational Democrat who won her legislative seat running as a Democrat in Ohio to the irrational person she appears to be today. She served in Ohio as a Democrat from 2008 to 2014 then lost her race for Secretary of State in 2014. There were a number of other surprising statements from Turner in the same Meyerson interview. They include who ‘Our Revolution’ would consider endorsing. She said “And for me, I’ve also heard the senator (referring to Sanders) say this lately too: Let’s put the political affiliation to the side. If there is a Republican or a Libertarian or Green Party person that believes in Medicare for all, then that’s our kind of person. If there’s somebody that believes that Citizens United needs to be overturned, that we need the 28th amendment to the Constitution that declares that money, corporate money, is not speech and that corporations should not have more speech than Mrs. Johnson down the street and Mr. Gonzalez around the corner, then that’s our kind of people.” Does ‘Our Revolution’ not have a responsibility to the people who fund the organization, and the ones Turner wants to recruit, to explain a simple fact; there will be a Republican or Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives and a Democratic or Republican Majority Leader in the United States Senate. There will not be a Libertarian or Green Party member in those positions. She should explain to her donors if the first vote of any person they help elect to Congress is not for Democrat leadership all their objectives will be non-starters. They won’t even be on the agenda for debate. One is forced to assume what Ms. Turner is now doing is more for self-aggrandizement and less about getting anything done. I met Nina Turner once at a Ready for Hillary event in New York City. She spoke passionately about Hillary and why she would make a great president. She is a good speaker and excited her audience. The next time I heard of her she had gone through some personal epiphany and became a rabid anti-Hillary Sanders supporter. It might be in the Clinton campaign she would have been one of thousands and with the Sanders campaign she was special. When the Democrats had a chance, however small, to win in Georgia she criticized Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff as not being progressive enough. She said that in an interview where she was trying to justify a Sanders type candidate and talking about how Trump won 70 percent of the vote in 30 Ohio counties. What she conveniently forgot is in the Ohio primary Hillary only lost fourteen Ohio counties to Sanders and won by nearly 15 percent. So trying to say a Sanders type of candidate in Georgia would be better is looking at the world with a myopic view and will keep ‘Our Revolution’ from being the success it could be if they worked with Democratic candidates across the nation instead of trying to divide the liberal and progressive movement. One example of ‘Our Revolution’ working to divide was their support of Tom Perriello in Virginia. He was a late entry into the Democratic Gubernatorial primary against a progressive Democrat who had the support of every elected Democrat in the state. Perriello was a candidate whose progressive credentials had to be questioned. In his one term in Congress he supported the Stupack amendment barring funding for abortions and voted against the assault weapon ban. His campaign was financed 57 percent by people outside of Virginia and by mostly big donors, two of whom each contributed $500,000. But contrary to Turner’s idol Sanders, Tom Perriello handled his loss with grace. Rather than play games he immediately and graciously endorsed the winner, Dr. Ralph Northam, pledging his unequivocal and enthusiastic support. I still haven’t heard from Turner or ‘Our Revolution’ about their endorsement of this progressive Democrat. I would hope Turner rethinks some of her statements if she wants ‘Our Revolution’ to have a lasting impact other than helping elect Republicans by splitting the progressive vote. We are seeing that again in Maryland where there are a host of progressive Democrats looking to run against Republican Governor Larry Hogan in 2018 and the local ‘Our Revolution’ group is working in secret to make an early endorsement of one candidate who was on the ‘Our Revolution’ board until he declared his candidacy. They are creating dissent within the Maryland progressive movement by doing that. Educating these local groups on how to win, not just make noise, would be important.TORONTO/FRANKFURT (Reuters) - The cyber attack that crippled Ukraine businesses and spread worldwide to shut down shipping ports, factories and corporate offices has taken a costly toll on the results of major U.S. and European companies in the latest quarter, with more to come. While individual companies have been laid low by hacking attacks in the past, this financial reporting season marks the first time that major players across a range of industries have blamed them for significant financial damage to their results. On Thursday, German consumer products maker Beiersdorf AG (BEIG.DE) blamed the attack for a shortfall in its half-year financial results, which caused 5 to 10 days of shipping and production delays after its computer and communications froze. Six more major international companies, four based in Europe and two in Russia, which acknowledged they suffered disruption, are due to report quarterly results later in August. The June 27 attack, dubbed NotPetya, first targeted Ukraine, taking down many government agencies and businesses there, before spreading rapidly through corporate networks of multinationals with operations or suppliers in eastern Europe. Beiersdorf, the maker of Nivea cosmetics, said 35 million euros ($41 million) worth of second-quarter sales were delayed to the third quarter and it was totting up the costs of the attack for items such as calling in outside experts, promotions and using other production sites to make up for shortfalls. “It is very important to stress there is a cost and there will be a cost associated with this,” Chief Financial Officer Jesper Andersen said. “We are still working our way through it. Our focus so far has been on recovery.” Beiersdorf said the costs would not have a material impact on its profit outlook for the full year. Its shares were down 3.1 percent in Frankfurt at 1010 GMT. Cadbury chocolate maker Mondelez and freight logistics company FedEx Corp (FDX.N) are among five multinational firms, three from the United States and two in Europe, which have previously reported material financial damage from the cyber “worm” that hit on June 27, in the closing days of the quarter. Mondelez (MDLZ.O), formerly known as Kraft and the world’s second-largest confectionary company, reported a 5 percent drop in quarterly sales on Wednesday, blaming shipping and invoicing delays caused by the June attack. GROWING RISK FACTORS Investors should get used to hearing about cyber attacks during earnings calls, said Ian Winer, equity co-head at Wedbush Securities. “The trend is accelerating,” he said. “As hackers get more sophisticated they are taking shots at major companies.” More hackers are becoming adept at developing or finding malware to wipe data on computers, making them inoperable. Danish shipping company AP Moller-Maersk S/A (MAERSKb.CO), which handles one out of seven containers shipped globally, said on July 20 that operations worldwide had been significantly affected, but that it lost no corporate data to outside parties. Maersk declined to comment and said it would address the impact on Aug. 16, when it reports second-quarter results. “We anticipate a limited impact from the cyber attack (estimates range from $50-$450 million) as it started towards the end of (the second quarter),” Jefferies analyst David Kerstens said in a note to clients. Analysts, on average, estimate the hit to Maersk results in a range of $100-$200 million. German mail and logistics firm Deutsche Post DHL Group (DPWGn.DE) and retailer Metro AG (CECG.DE) also said their Ukrainian operations were infected, but have provided no further details. Deutsche Post reports results on Aug. 8 and Metro Group is expected to report results later in August. Other NotPetya victims include Merck & Co Inc (MRK.N), which last week warned the attack had halted production of some drugs, saying it had yet to understand the full costs associated with it. The attack slowed deliveries at FedEx and halted production lines at British consumer goods maker Reckitt Benckiser (RB.L), according to accounts by those companies. FedEx said the attack would have a “material” effect on its full-year results. NASTY LINE ITEMS Jake Dollarhide, head of Longbow Asset Management in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which manages $85 million in assets, said he expects cyber attacks to become as common as reports that a storm or oil prices hurt results. Cyence, a firm that helps insurers measure cyber risk, estimated that economic costs from NotPetya would total $850 million. Major global cyber attacks have the potential to cause economic losses on par with catastrophic natural disasters such as U.S. Superstorm Sandy in 2012, Cyence and Lloyd’s of London Ltd [SOLYD.UL] said in a joint report in July. Average economic losses caused by such disruptions could range from $4.6 billion to $121 billion, the report said. One mysterious group known as The Shadow Brokers in April dumped a trove of powerful hacking tools on the Internet, which security experts said were developed by the U.S. National Security Agency. Code the group released was used for spreading NotPetya and in the “WannaCry” attack in May on hospitals, businesses and governments worldwide. “As stock market investors we have to accept this brand new reality in this new digital age,” Longbow’s Dollarhide said. A man types into a keyboard during the Def Con hacker convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. on July 29, 2017. REUTERS/Steve Marcus Most businesses are inadequately protected from cyber attacks, said Tom Kellermann, chief executive of investment firm Strategic Cyber Ventures. “The day of reckoning has come for shareholders,” Kellermann said.Apparently you can go home again. TVLine has learned that a long-running TV drama is working with a former cast member to pull off a most surprising encore — no small feat given how the character in question was originally written off the show. Truth be told, the series and star already have their most difficult, covert work behind them, seeing as the fan favorite filmed his/her scenes just last week, successfully undetected, thanks to top-secret levels of planning. Although a cynical few might have thought such a homecoming would never happen, the truth is that the returning star quite enthusiastically went to great lengths to disguise his/her identity while en route to the set, where the hush-hush scenes were filmed under close guard, and strictly indoors. As for the on-screen ramifications of the long-gone character’s reappearance, one should expect more than a little drama. His/her timing… could be better, yeah. Hit the Comments with your guesses as to the covert comeback! BLIND ITEM REVEALED!Offering customers a true alternative for faster Internet, TV and Home Phone services. Toronto, April 18/19/20, 2017 – Telecommunications provider Beanfield has taken over the Internet and home phone assets to provide services to the Concord CityPlace condominiums in Downtown Toronto. Previously serviced by TELUS, CityPlace is a 44-acre site west of the CN Tower, consisting of 24 condo buildings with approximately 9,200 units. Beanfield is the only true facilities based alternative to the large Internet, TV and home phone providers, and doesn’t re-sell over anybody else’s network. They are currently in over 100 condo buildings across the GTA and that number continues to rise. “We are thrilled to be able to offer our services to the residents of CityPlace,” said Beanfield President, Chris Amendola. “Tenants of CityPlace have been requesting our services in their buildings for a very long time. It’s a great feeling to finally be able to give them the choice they deserve.” While the process of replacing the existing infrastructure with new Beanfield fibre is underway, full roll-out to all condo buildings in CityPlace will be completed by the end of the summer. The Beanfield fibre-optic network will be delivered to each individual suite. Beanfield prides itself on the quality of their customer service. The support team and call centre are located nearby in Liberty Village and are always available for assistance. They have confirmed that there will be no price increases on existing packages. New customers are also welcome to join the Beanfield network and are encouraged to contact info@beanfield.com for package details. About Beanfield Metroconnect Beanfield Metroconnect has been servicing the complete telecommunication needs of businesses and residents for over 20 years. Located in Liberty Village, it is a privately held, Canadian-owned company that owns and operates the largest private fibre optic network throughout Toronto and the GTA, specializing in Fibre Optic Internet, Business and Home Phone, TV Services, Colocation, Transparent Lan, Dark Fibre and Broadcast Services. http://www.beanfield.com/ For more information please contact: Customer Inquiries: Grant Dyer Beanfield Metroconnect 416-532-1555 grant@beanfield.com PR Inquiries: Samantha Molenda Paradigm Public Relations 416-413-5187 smolenda@paradigmpr.caDownload DynaHack 0.6.0 DynaHack 0.6.0 marks a large departure from the 0.5.x series by introducing quite a few gameplay and content changes aimed at eliminating tedium, improving fairness, and increasing tactical and strategic variety. As always, changes in DynaHack tend to lean in favor of the player more often than not, so players of all skill levels will find something to appreciate. New body armor and shield skills: grants bonus AC and MC; heavier suits of armor and shields get bigger bonuses and train the skills faster. Magic chests! Any item put into a magic chest can be looted out of any other magic chest in the dungeon, placed at set locations. This eliminates tedious stash consolidation and transporting of items to and from stashes and fixed dungeon resources like altars, shops and water. Mazes completely removed from Gehennom! New resistance system: resistances gained from corpses and crowning only provide partial protection. Reflection no longer reflects breaths (except disintegration). Instant petrification completely replaced with delayed petrification: you will always have a few turns to save yourself from instant death. Drawbridge instant death removed: drawbridges can only be destroyed by force bolts when closed, not open. Extra turn before drowning attack instant death. Players upgrading from an older version of DynaHack should adjust their msgtype as described in the Configuration section of this changelog. as described in the Configuration section of this changelog. Zombie corpses may revive (lower chance if playing a priest). Sokoban prizes moved to Mines End, making Sokoban much more optional. Nymph level moved into Town branch; Town shops are larger to compensate. Effect of skills on to-hit and damage raised in general. Items that spawn with a magical property have a much higher chance to spawn with additional properties. Slings now get damage bonuses from strength and enchantment. Spells can be aborted at direction, position and item prompts without using power or hunger. New repeat_prefix keymap and repeat_num_auto option for people accustomed to NetHack's classic number key movement scheme. keymap and option for people accustomed to NetHack's classic number key movement scheme. New msg_per_line option: Shows each message on a new line in the message area when enabled. option: Shows each message on a new line in the message area when enabled. Potion color alchemy improved in favor of players, making it more of an alternative to NetHack's alchemy instead of a nerf. Curses on armor, jewelry and eyewear are now revealed when they are worn instead of when trying to take them off. More messages for things that used to happen silently: uncontrolled teleportation, finding secret doors/corridors while searching, items becoming randomly cursed. Iron bars can be destroyed by acid or eaten by certain monsters. Read changelog.txt for the full list of changes. New to this release are 32-bit and 64-bit packages for both Windows and Linux (built on Ubuntu 15.10, but they should work in other distros). Note: I (tungtn) will no longer be working on DynaHack after this release, so please do not email me bugs or feedback. Instead, post them to https://github.com/tung/DynaHack/issues so that other people can see them. Update: I wrote a post on stepping down from maintaining DynaHack.Verizon Throttles Netflix Subscribers In 'Test' It Doesn't Inform Customers About from the just-the-beginning dept So for years Verizon Wireless refused to compete on price, insisting that the company's network was just so incredible, it didn't have to. Then came increased competition from T-Mobile, which forced the company to not only start competing a little more seriously on price, but to bring back unlimited data plans Verizon had spent years telling customers they didn't need. And while Wall Street cries about this rise in competition hurting earnings at least once a week, it has generally been a good thing for consumers. But there's two things waiting just over the horizon that could ruin everybody's good time. One is a looming merger between Sprint and T-Mobile, which would significantly reduce competition in the wireless sector, eliminating much of the pressure on mobile providers to compete. The other is the impending death of net neutrality protections at the FCC, which currently keep these carriers from abusing this lack of competition to drive up costs and hamper content competitors. But another, important part of net neutrality rules is the requirement that carriers are clear about just what kind of connection you're buying. Last week, Verizon apparently got a running start in being less transparent when it decided to begin throttling its wireless customers without telling anybody. Users at Reddit began noticing that when they streamed Netflix content or
tanks. Now the tanks must be spread out to in order to be used to maximize efficiency. However they cannot be too spread out or the opponent can blitzkrieg through a weak part in the line. There then becomes an interesting tension between clumping the tanks too much so that too many shots are wasted and spreading too thin and making the tank line vulnerable to penetration. i) RED- first salvo from front row ii) BLUE- goliaths coming in from behind iii) GREEN- back tanks unfired due to positioning ready to fire on incoming goliaths 2) Turning Splashed Damage Against There is even greater cause to spread out your tanks with overkill. With no overkill, if you sneak zergling or zealot right up beside the tank, just the right number of tanks will fire and the enemy unit will die. The surrounding tanks will suffer damage from splash, but the bare minimum. With overkill, the same unit dies, but because tons of tanks are fired, the nearby tanks are absolutely obliterated by all the stacked splash damage. So this further pushes the Terran to spread out tanks to minimize splash damage. Furthermore, it makes it even more imperative to that the Terran throws cannon fodder in front to prevent units from getting next to the tanks because they will get absolutely destroyed. So already we're starting how these changes would further promote further positional play 3) Dropping on Top Tank Lines With overkill, the Terran's opponents are further encouraged to try more drop play. Zealot bombing works because the shuttle gets the zealot over the cannon fodder and when the zealot is dropped next to tank(s) all of the nearby tanks fire at it, destroying the nearby tanks by stacked splashes due to overkill. There are other problems preventing zealot bomb style play- Terran air superiority with marine-Viking, but overkill opens up a greater possibility. It's cute tactics like this that pushes away from ball vs ball or multiple mini-ball concaves. Dropping zealots out of shuttle to make tanks kill each other. 4) Incentive for Terran Opponent to Spread Out Now is when we really start cutting into the deathball. Before, tank position didn't matter (as much) and Terran opponent's army formations only mattered so much as to minimize splash as best as can be managed. But without overkill, the opponent has less control in dictating the battle through better execution. No matter how the opponent attempts to spread out their units, the tanks will still hit to evenly distribute its AoE damage. There is a difference, but it's a much more subtle difference. But I don't think that a spectator sport should settle for'subtle' when we can go for obvious/ blatant skill differences. This is a visual medium and obvious skill is more spectator friendly than subtle only the greats will pick out. There should be subtle shifts for players to gain advantages, but there should also be obvious shifts, where it was clearly evident that better execution allowed the player to win. As opposed to better composition. So with staggered tanks, an oncoming clumped army (deathball or a concave of miniballs) will be shelled to pieces from the alternating barrages. With increased tank power (and more of them), the Terran player with better positioning, will wreak havoc on the clumped army. Therefore, this promotes more spread out play from the Terran opponent. To counter better positioning, they need to stagger their own troops. Spread them out. Not just into mini-clumps, but to actually spread them out. Or maybe flank them with fast cannon fodder from one side and then send in the main force in a concave on the other. (Especially with Turret rotation and if Tank rate of fire was slowed.) The Terran opponent, can even bait Tank fire with a couple sacrificial units before sending in the main force. Hm, this is actually kinda hard to capture on screen cap. But that's because the battle ranges across multiple screens which is rather what people are often pushing for when they complain about SC2 battles. 5) Appeal to Race Distinctives One of the distinctives about Terran Mech Play was there crazy powerful splash damage. Between Siege Tanks and Spider Mines, armies could just melt to smaller Terran merch armies. However, that same crazy powerful splash could be turned against the Terran. Spider Mines could be pulled into the Terran's own army and Tanks' splash could be turned against their own tank lines to wipe themselves out. Overkill was part of the equation that allowed Tank damage to be both the Tanks' best weapon and it's own worst enemy. Losing Overkill loses part of the distinctive of the Terran Mech Play. Sure there's still splash damage that can hurt tanks, but the difference is less extreme and thus minimizes the Terran distinctives. With overkill, the opponent can bait your clumped together tanks with one zealot. The entire tank line fires and then the opponent can close the distance to get at the tanks. Therefore, Overkill promotes/ encourages the player to stagger their tanks.Now the tanks must be spread out to in order to be used to maximize efficiency. However they cannot be too spread out or the opponent can blitzkrieg through a weak part in the line. There then becomes an interesting tension between clumping the tanks too much so that too many shots are wasted and spreading too thin and making the tank line vulnerable to penetration.i) RED- first salvo from front rowii) BLUE- goliaths coming in from behindiii) GREEN- back tanks unfired due to positioning ready to fire on incoming goliathsThere is even greater cause to spread out your tanks with overkill. With no overkill, if you sneak zergling or zealot right up beside the tank, just the right number of tanks will fire and the enemy unit will die. The surrounding tanks will suffer damage from splash, but the bare minimum. With overkill, the same unit dies, but because tons of tanks are fired, the nearby tanks are absolutely obliterated by all the stacked splash damage.So this further pushes the Terran to spread out tanks to minimize splash damage. Furthermore, it makes it even more imperative to that the Terran throws cannon fodder in front to prevent units from getting next to the tanks because they will get absolutely destroyed. So already we're starting how these changes would further promote further positional playWith overkill, the Terran's opponents are further encouraged to try more drop play. Zealot bombing works because the shuttle gets the zealot over the cannon fodder and when the zealot is dropped next to tank(s) all of the nearby tanks fire at it, destroying the nearby tanks by stacked splashes due to overkill. There are other problems preventing zealot bomb style play- Terran air superiority with marine-Viking, but overkill opens up a greater possibility. It's cute tactics like this that pushes away from ball vs ball or multiple mini-ball concaves.Dropping zealots out of shuttle to make tanks kill each other.Now is when we really start cutting into the deathball. Before, tank position didn't matter (as much) and Terran opponent's army formations only mattered so much as to minimize splash as best as can be managed. But without overkill, the opponent has less control in dictating the battle through better execution. No matter how the opponent attempts to spread out their units, the tanks will still hit to evenly distribute its AoE damage. There is a difference, but it's a much more subtle difference.But I don't think that a spectator sport should settle for'subtle' when we can go for obvious/ blatant skill differences. This is a visual medium and obvious skill is more spectator friendly than subtle only the greats will pick out. There should be subtle shifts for players to gain advantages, but there should also be obvious shifts, where it was clearly evident that better execution allowed the player to win. As opposed to better composition.So with staggered tanks, an oncoming clumped army (deathball or a concave of miniballs) will be shelled to pieces from the alternating barrages. With increased tank power (and more of them), the Terran player with better positioning, will wreak havoc on the clumped army.Therefore, this promotes more spread out play from the Terran opponent. To counter better positioning, they need to stagger their own troops. Spread them out. Not just into mini-clumps, but to actually spread them out. Or maybe flank them with fast cannon fodder from one side and then send in the main force in a concave on the other. (Especially with Turret rotation and if Tank rate of fire was slowed.) The Terran opponent, can even bait Tank fire with a couple sacrificial units before sending in the main force.Hm, this is actually kinda hard to capture on screen cap. But that's because the battle ranges across multiple screens which is rather what people are often pushing for when they complain about SC2 battles.One of the distinctives about Terran Mech Play was there crazy powerful splash damage. Between Siege Tanks and Spider Mines, armies could just melt to smaller Terran merch armies. However, that same crazy powerful splash could be turned against the Terran. Spider Mines could be pulled into the Terran's own army and Tanks' splash could be turned against their own tank lines to wipe themselves out. Overkill was part of the equation that allowed Tank damage to be both the Tanks' best weapon and it's own worst enemy. Losing Overkill loses part of the distinctive of the Terran Mech Play. Sure there's still splash damage that can hurt tanks, but the difference is less extreme and thus minimizes the Terran distinctives. Overkill is a chain reaction. Tanks need to be staggered/ spread to get maximum damage, this in turn forces their opponent to also spread their troops even more. Further Tools There are a couple tools that allows the players to respond better to Overkill. There are a couple tools that allows the players to respond better to Overkill. Group Movement. I'm still unsure why people seem to think SC2 unit clumping, with all the pushing and shoving is superior to alternate solutions. Forget about buggy unit ai. (The dragoon thought it was smaller than it actually was, which is what caused that set of problems.) Can we agree that giving the player multiple options in moving their troops around is better? For instance, if they had tools that allowed them to spread out a little better, allowed them to clump up, and also to stay in formation relative to the the other units in the group? Why would we want just one of these options? 1) Spread Out on the Move One tool that could be added is when you right clicked your units and the group travels a distance, the troops spread out in a longer line rather than keeping clumped up. This has both an advantage and a disadvantage. The long line, spaces out the units (the zealot conga line) which allows the player to execute their attack better to counter the tanks overkill. With conga line can be run perpendicular to the tank line and then attack moved in so that the troops will spread out once they get amongst the enemy, thus minimizing splash and overkill from the tanks. i) GREEN- Right click after long distance travel ii) RED- a-move forward to in a spread out line. The drawback is that the army is more vulnerable on the march- it's more spread out. But this actually gives greater variance between an army on the move and an army set-up, which I think creates a more interesting dynamic. It gives advantage to the player who has set up in position. It also means the army on the march needs to form up form up before attacking. In addition, harassing the army on the march is a little more viable as the units are more spread out. (I don't like appealing to real life very often because gameplay matters more, but it actually makes more sense that an army on the march is more spread out into long lines than to move in a great big ball. It's more incidental than an actual reason.) So the army can still gather close together, but we add a second option that allows the units to spread out more. There's also a more significant difference between army moving an army prepared. I'm still unsure why people seem to think SC2 unit clumping, with all the pushing and shoving is superior to alternate solutions. Forget about buggy unit ai. (The dragoon thought it was smaller than it actually was, which is what caused that set of problems.)Can we agree that giving the player multiple options in moving their troops around is better? For instance, if they had tools that allowed them to spread out a little better, allowed them to clump up, and also to stay in formation relative to the the other units in the group? Why would we want just one of these options?One tool that could be added is when you right clicked your units and the group travels a distance, the troops spread out in a longer line rather than keeping clumped up. This has both an advantage and a disadvantage. The long line, spaces out the units (the zealot conga line) which allows the player to execute their attack better to counter the tanks overkill. With conga line can be run perpendicular to the tank line and then attack moved in so that the troops will spread out once they get amongst the enemy, thus minimizing splash and overkill from the tanks.i) GREEN- Right click after long distance travelii) RED- a-move forward to in a spread out line.The drawback is that the army is more vulnerable on the march- it's more spread out. But this actually gives greater variance between an army on the move and an army set-up, which I think creates a more interesting dynamic. It gives advantage to the player who has set up in position. It also means the army on the march needs to form up form up before attacking. In addition, harassing the army on the march is a little more viable as the units are more spread out.(I don't like appealing to real life very often because gameplay matters more, but it actually makes more sense that an army on the march is more spread out into long lines than to move in a great big ball. It's more incidental than an actual reason.)So the army can still gather close together, but we add a second option that allows the units to spread out more. There's also a more significant difference between army moving an army prepared. 2) Magic Box The other tool for more interesting interesting troop movements is to fix ground magic box. This one should just be a no-brainer. (Air already has it, so why not make it work better for ground?) Longer description if you don't know what this is: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Magic_Boxes Ground magic box exists to some extent in SC2, but it seems relatively smaller/ less useful. With magic box, players can clump their units if they want or spread and keep in formation if they want. It requires skill to use as it depends on where the units are in relation to each other. If the units are too far apart when you select them, they'll clump. If they're too close when you select them, they'll clump. But if you select them within between, they'll move in precise formation without shuffling around. This allows for very controlled, predictable movement. This in turn allows for very precise micro control. (See Bisu versus spider mines- there is no way that's possible if units had no option except to clump, shuffle and shove. But we still keep unit clumping (especially if you select your entire army.) But more than anything it just expands the players options. Maximum Area Selection Minimum Area Selection What this means is unlimited selection is still in place so the game is the same difficulty for low level players, but for medium level players and up, there is an even greater benefit to moving small groups around rather than the one big mob (assuming they want to spread their units.) Yes splash may have to be bumped up to compensate, but balance shouldn't get in the way of giving a player better tools. The other tool for more interesting interesting troop movements is to fix ground magic box. This one should just be a no-brainer. (Air already has it, so why not make it work better for ground?)Longer description if you don't know what this is:Ground magic box exists to some extent in SC2, but it seems relatively smaller/ less useful. With magic box, players can clump their units if they want or spread and keep in formation if they want.It requires skill to use as it depends on where the units are in relation to each other. If the units are too far apart when you select them, they'll clump. If they're too close when you select them, they'll clump. But if you select them within between, they'll move in precise formation without shuffling around. This allows for very controlled, predictable movement. This in turn allows for very precise micro control. (See Bisu versus spider mines- there is no way that's possible if units had no option except to clump, shuffle and shove. But we still keep unit clumping (especially if you select your entire army.) But more than anything it just expands the players options.What this means is unlimited selection is still in place so the game is the same difficulty for low level players, but for medium level players and up, there is an even greater benefit to moving small groups around rather than the one big mob (assuming they want to spread their units.) Yes splash may have to be bumped up to compensate, but balance shouldn't get in the way of giving a player better tools. How does group movement apply to Tanks and overkill? It's quite simple really. Overkill + more powerful tank damage means that the Terran's opponent encourages their opponent to spread out their troops more. However, this by itself is not of much use if the player does not also have the proper tools in order to spread out. Giving the player 2 methods of spreading out their units (and keep them spread out) as well as keeping the ability to clump allows them to respond exactly they way they want. It's quite simple really. Overkill + more powerful tank damage means that the Terran's opponent encourages their opponent to spread out their troops more. However, this by itself is not of much use if the player does not also have the proper tools in order to spread out. Giving the player 2 methods of spreading out their units (and keep them spread out) as well as keeping the ability to clump allows them to respond exactly they way they want. Conclusion. If I haven't convinced you that Overkill is necessarily'smarter-ai'/ the better choice, then perhaps you can see that it is more a design choice rather than the ai being'smarter.' There is a tremendous trade-off when splash damage can be evenly distributed with greater ease. The cost is in damage, price, and supply so that not nearly tanks can be made and the ones that are, aren't as impressive. I don't think Overkill will solve Deathball attacks per se. But I do think that Overkill forces the Terran to spread out even more which in turn forces their opponent to spread out even more. However, it's not enough to simply promote a certain behaviour if the tools are not in place that will allow the player to respond appropriately. That's where adding a couple extra options in troop movement allows players to spread out their units better. Overkill was part of what made the Terran race distinctive. Tanks and mines could lay waste to enemy armies with powerful splash damage... or be turned against themselves. There still exists friendly fire damage, but without Overkill, the distinctives are minimized. TLDR I'm really, really sorry. This was supposed to be a short addendum. Now I can see why I didn't add this to my original blog as it is equally long. If I haven't convinced you that Overkill is necessarily'smarter-ai'/ the better choice, then perhaps you can see that it is more a design choice rather than the ai being'smarter.'There is a tremendous trade-off when splash damage can be evenly distributed with greater ease. The cost is in damage, price, and supply so that not nearly tanks can be made and the ones that are, aren't as impressive.I don't think Overkill will solve Deathball attacks per se. But I do think that Overkill forces the Terran to spread out even more which in turn forces their opponent to spread out even more. However, it's not enough to simply promote a certain behaviour if the tools are not in place that will allow the player to respond appropriately. That's where adding a couple extra options in troop movement allows players to spread out their units better.Overkill was part of what made the Terran race distinctive. Tanks and mines could lay waste to enemy armies with powerful splash damage... or be turned against themselves. There still exists friendly fire damage, but without Overkill, the distinctives are minimized.I'm really, really sorry. This was supposed to be a short addendum.Now I can see why I didn't add this to my original blog as it is equally long. Moderator "Words are just words until action actually starts. And actions speak louder than words... but at the same time words speak louder than actions because sometimes it's the right thing to do." Overpass JohnPhotography by Nina Corcoran It takes a great amount of effort to find someone who doesn’t respect Angel Olsen. The folk rock singer-songwriter performs with a style of authenticity that, especially in today’s hyper-informative environment, is unparalleled. She cracks jokes onstage that usually ridicule herself, and she perfects the art of production, firing forward with punchy emotional numbers even on her 2010 covers cassette, Lady of the Waterpark. She never gets wrapped up in the power of her own creations — a talent most fans and musicians alike can ramble on about for hours. So it’s a bit surprising to read over Angel Olsen’s short press sheet and see, listed at the very bottom, a brief list of her interests: “Reading, rollerskating, going to softball games, making films, and writing letters to friends.” Based on hobbies, Olsen sounds more like an introverted, creative townie, someone who prioritizes family values, holes up in a cabin near a farm, walks to the park to watch little league games alongside neighbors. That’s not too distant a reality to imagine. Olsen was adopted at a young age by a family of eight, born and raised in St. Louis before bouncing for Chicago at age 20 — an important factor in her music. Olsen’s ability to tune in to the inner workings of heartbreak, the grip of independence, and the justification of desires propel her work into the hearts of fans enduring the pain of new love. By having the peace and quiet needed to observe the ways in which a heart can degrade, she pens lyrics and guitar lines that offer a 3D rendition too beautiful to look away from. And then, apparently, she goes back to rollerskating or writing a letter. That’s not to say she isn’t attached to the internet like the rest of us. When Consequence of Sound meets up with the artist in Brooklyn to chat, Olsen picks seats right next to the floor-to-ceiling window. A grin spreads across her face, and she lets out a giggle. “Oh man,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief. “Look at this guy!” A french bulldog sits across from us and makes direct eye contact while waiting for its owner. It’s summer in the city, and the city gets hot — the type of heat where ice-less water perspires in its pitcher — so his tongue is flopped out, but it looks like he’s stoked to be joining us for the conversation. “Sorry,” she says while picking up her phone. “One second.” Olsen snaps a couple pictures, looks at the screen, and takes a few more as she laughs. When she puts her phone down, her eyes wander over to the dog once more. Another smile creeps out. It’s calming to see happiness this simple. The 29-year-old finds herself in a new place, and it’s a contagious spirit that brightens her personality without her having to say a word. Angel Olsen is chatty and friendly, willing to detail whatever is asked, never once struggling to find her voice. Last time she toured, Olsen was working behind 2014’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness, a near-flawless album of gutted realizations in the wake of emotional and physical brawn. It wasn’t draining, but live, Olsen seemed to get lost in her own words, reliving pain even when it wasn’t autobiographical. But now, she’s wide-eyed and refreshed with the impending release of My Woman. She’s her own woman, and she knows better than ever how to command it. My Woman is a huge chapter of Olsen’s life captured in sound. The drastic shift to ‘60s and ‘70s rock funnels her influences into a bowl: the aftertaste of country twang, the guitar-centered solos of early classic rock, the belted vocals of someone on a road trip. It’s bold; her songs land somewhere between The Pretenders and Jefferson Airplane. It’s hard to see the indie rock crescendos of her last record and the warbling folk of 2012’s Half Way Home in the rearview mirror, but at the heart of these songs is Olsen’s confidence, a woman who finally found a source of joy that lets her instruments sing just as often as her voice. “I remember when I was younger, like around the time of Strange Cacti, I was in a really bad place,” she says. “I’d just sit in my bedroom for hours. It wasn’t well lit. That was in Chicago and it felt like this constant coldness and it lasted… forever. Or at least it felt like it did.” At that time, Olsen worked as a barista to pay for living expenses while writing material. A coworker caught word of her music and gave it a listen, but it took months for him to approach her and propose he and a pal back her up as percussionists. “I thought he hated me,” she laughs. “He always had this look on his face. Though, I guess I would’ve looked that way, too. It’s funny how those things happen.” In the next few years, she roped together a band — drummer Joshua Jaeger, guitarist Stewart Bronaugh, and bassist Emily Elhaj — who finally took the stage for their second ever show to perform Burn Your Fire for No Witness material back in late 2013. Though cool-headed, they were nervous. The following year they found their footing. Now, look closely and their growth is apparent. On My Woman, Olsen is no longer performing with musicians. She’s controlling a band, and the band is very clearly following her lead. It’s a natural bond that expands on their intertwined connections. In turn, she feels in control of her life. “I write all the songs, I go over them myself, I send the band demos of different version with all the lyrics. They can listen to them all,” she explains, “but I’ll tell them, ‘Demo B is the version we’re going with today,’ and then we’ll started digging into that. Everyone was comfortable changing instruments if need be, like Seth would switch off bass, and he plays lead guitar on ‘Woman’. A lot was pre-planned by me, and then Seth and Josh helped address the structures first.” Then comes her relationship with producer Justin Raisen. Brought on to record and produce the record, Raisen’s love of her music guided the two of them into unfamiliar territory. Though he usually works with the likes of pop stars like Charli XCX, Sky Ferreira, and Santigold, Raisen tapped into Olsen’s jam side, recording live to tape for an extra warm appeal. Part of that came from her desire to step up to the plate. “Not going to lie, I was nervous the first day,” she says. “I wanted to impress him, to be this person he thought I was. He’s a big name and I have a ton of respect for him, but we got along so well right from the start, and that made it easy.” It was her trust in him that guided her towards backup material. “Some of the songs weren’t even ones we wanted to record, but he heard the demos and suggested we record a few of them, one of which we captured in one take, and that version is on My Woman.” The change didn’t happen overnight. Olsen pushed herself to great lengths in the past year, tampering with old material and reworking old cuts to fit the full-band setup. That’s clear onstage and on the record. The prolonged classic rock howl on “Not Gonna Kill You” alone makes that obvious. Though she didn’t intend to, the album’s title wound up speaking to her own strength and those of women she’s met along the way. “I didn’t really think about the title as a big statement, but I suppose I should have,” she says. “I had some weird questions in my Eurotrip where journalists said, ‘Are you afraid of losing your male fans because your album is titled My Woman?’ I was like, ‘Dude, I named the album after the song on the record. I’ve done that with many records. I decided to say My Woman because I love the ideas that come up with that. It’s as flirtatious as it is degrading. I think a lot of the subjects in this record — without it necessarily applying to a woman — it’s more a subject of love and the different subjects of that. It’s a little less literal too in that it’s about my sister. It’s what you think about when you think of a sister, what you think about when you think of the term ‘my woman.’” When asked to pick the three most influential women in her life, Olsen doesn’t hesitate to list them off either: her mother, Susan Sarandon, and Tilda Swinton. It’s a list of females that she respects just as much as she dreams of mirroring. “Susan Sarandon is killing it right now politically. She’s such a fucking siren. No bullshit, doesn’t give a fuck, using her fame to do really good things and be really active,” she says quickly. “And I love Tilda Swinton just for being fucking crazy and weird. I think about powerful ladies I like. I love Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton. The movie 9 to 5 still relates so much to everything.” Part of that strength takes form in Olsen’s recent directorial work. She directed the music videos for both “Intern” and “Shut Up Kiss Me”. Critics often believe her music is autobiographical, and now with the footage directed by and starring Olsen herself, they seem sure that it’s a purging of her diary. In her eyes, it’s simply a matter of creative control, of finishing what you started since she, as its creator, knows the story better than anyone else. “Sometimes I like a good acting experience in a video, but I didn’t want it to be that way. I knew I could portray it exactly the way I wanted to,” she explains. “There’s none of that ‘Do something weird with your hands’ and stuff that directors tell you to do. No. I don’t want to do anything weird with my hands anymore. No more hands things. I made the song that the advertisement is for. I should be in charge of the image it projects. It’s less my trying to be narcissistic and it’s more, ‘No, this is my song; I should be in the fucking video.’ I should be able to create the character I want and edit it all the way through. I know that’s totally neurotic and controlling, but I made the song. That, to me, is just as strong of an image. I don’t just make the song and then let someone puppet me around. That seems backwards. Even if the image I was creating was those videos and not necessarily about the songs.” No more questions about those glittery wigs. No more questions about female songwriting. No more questions about country icons or Joni Mitchell. Olsen is at a point in her life where her personality and character are more sturdy than ever, and it’s sprouting a happiness that’s very much deserved. Olsen once again peers out the window. The french bulldog is still there. Laughs erup from her in a quiet way whenever she looks at him. He explores what little area he can, his leash tethered to the bench, sniffing the sidewalk but, ultimately, returning his gaze to the two of us and grinning like he can hear our discussion through the glass. He’s not the only one smiling. Six years into her career, it finally feels like Olsen doesn’t need liner notes. Her music spans a breadth so deep that it articulates each area of her life. Thankfully, it sits at a place of happiness now — and she can head back into the world with that strength fueling every mesmerizing performance.LINCOLN COUNTY -- A Lincoln County man told investigators he shot his son in the back because he was "acting disrespectful and wearing his pants too low." The domestic assault call first went out on Sunday from the 6000 block of Copperhead Lane. When deputies arrived, they found 61-year-old Richard Phillips standing on his porch. He was taken into custody after a short verbal confrontation. His son, a 26-year-old man, was found at a neighbor's house suffering a gunshot wound to the back. He was taken to a nearby hospital where he's listed in stable condition. His injuries are not considered life threatening. Phillips told investigators his son had been drinking all day. He says he had asked his son to leave then he flipped their table over. That's when Phillips told investigators he grabbed his.38 caliber handgun and shot his son. He then called 911 and requested an ambulance. Phillips has been charged with first-degree assault and armed criminal action. He's being held in the Lincoln County Jail on a $500,000 bond. Photos: 2016 STL area mug shotsJames Harris of Midwest Customs of Howards Grove, Wis., is in the process of fixing the 1979 Lincoln Continental that Taylor Bradford died in after a botched robbery. (Photo: Gary C. Klein/ Gannett) Jim Harris was watching TV one evening at his home in Howards Grove when he saw something that would change his life and the life of a father he'd never met. The show was "The First 48" on A&E network, and the true-crime program highlighted the murder of 21-year-old Taylor Bradford, a student at the University of Memphis. Bradford was shot in his car as he drove near his dorm in September 2007. As he tried to drive away, he crashed into a tree and died of his injuries. The program included a three-minute segment on Jimmie Bradford, Taylor's father, who couldn't bear to part with the 1979 Lincoln Continental and instead brought the mangled car home after authorities were finished with it. "I miss my son," said Bradford, 65, a retired principal in Antioch, Tenn., near Nashville. "To see the car, and look on the inside and see the blood stains, see the windshield cracked, see where his head hit, there was skin fragments still in the glass, see where the officer had put yellow chalk marks on passenger side where the guy had stuck the gun in and shot him... I think about it all the time." Paying it forward Harris, the owner of Midwest Custom in Howards Grove, was capivated by the story of the car, which symbolized the connection between Taylor Bradford and his father. "(Taylor) was really attached to the car with his dad and I felt that connection," said Harris, 40. "I was like, I can fix that car and make it brand new again, and he and his wife can go out and enjoy it and still have the car in their family. It's a part of Taylor they'll have back." Harris called Bradford out of the blue and offered to drive down and get the car, bring it back to his Howards Grove shop and restore it. "I just called him up told him I saw the show, I really felt like I needed to do this for him," Harris said. "This is me paying it forward to him." Bradford, who receives plenty of calls every time a show about his son's death airs on television, wasn't especially surprised to hear from Harris, although the offer was unusual. "Most of the time after they show those episodes we'll either get calls or letters from people all over the U.S.," said Bradford, 65. "He's a good man. It's a good family and they just want to do something that they feel will help. It's beyond me, but it's something like — I can't find the words to say." Taylor's car, more or less Jimmie Bradford bought the car in about 2000, and as his son grew up he drove it more and more, until it became, more or less, Taylor's. Bradford promised to buy his son a new car when he graduated from college, but until then Taylor was happy driving the big luxury auto, Bradford said. One day after driving the car the roughly 250 miles to the university, he called his mother, Marva Bradford, to tell her he'd been pulled over. "He called and said, 'Mom, a state trooper stopped me,'" his dad said, remembering the trooper scolded his son not for driving too fast, but too slow. "He said, 'Son you need to pick it up a little bit.' He was going kind of slow. He was a good kid." The car also got attention from someone who was looking to use vehicles like that as movie props, an idea that excited Taylor a lot, Bradford said. The last time Bradford saw his son was Labor Day of 2007. Bradford had driven down to campus to visit Taylor, and they spent part of their time together washing and detailing the Lincoln. "The last time I really actually saw him, he was in his car," Bradford said. "I pulled up beside him and he was turning and going into football practice and I was headed out to get gas and hit the Interstate." Jimmie Bradford places the high school football jersey worn by his son, Taylor Bradford, in front of Taylor’s casket during his 2007 funeral in Nashville. (Photo: Mark Humphrey / Associated Press) 'These guys plotted' Four men were subsequently convicted of Taylor's murder. Two are found guilty at trial and are serving life terms and two were sentenced to 15 and 12 years in prison on plea deals for facilitation of first-degree and second-degree murder. Bradford never missed a court date, driving the nearly 500-mile round trip to Memphis dozens of times for hearings and trials. "When it happened, and then they finally caught the guys, I pledged every time they were in court, I was in court," Bradford said. According to published reports from trial coverage, the four men targeted Taylor because they knew he'd won thousands of dollars at a local casino and because there was bad blood between Taylor and the mastermind over a former girlfriend. "Just to think about, he was on his
record making statements which encourage racism, homophobia, xenophobia and religious intolerance are reinforcing beliefs which lead to discrimination and violence, as we have seen in Charlottesville and Gainesville. This is not about free speech, it is about hate crimes. Flag Flag Reply 85 Recommend Recommend Share this comment on Facebook Share this comment on Twitter NYT Pick Paul Germany 14 hours ago Being German, I must say that I disagree with Mr Schill. If there is one thing that we have learnt, it is that fascism is an autoimmune disease - it attacks liberal democracies through the rights, laws, and mores which usually serve to protect and safeguard it. Simply put, all rhetoric of the extreme right is solely designed to market and sell the murderous, violent ideology of white supremacy, first by making it more palatable, and then by directly promoting racist violence. There simply are no other ideologies where every word spoken is in direct service to a genocidal "final solution". Spencer may speak of an absurd "peaceful ethnic cleansing", but the first word serves solely to make the latter more acceptable. Which is why Germany does not treat fascist rhetoric as speech, but as what it is, namely eo ipso violence, thus depriving it of the fig leaf of a free exercise of civil rights which it uses to infect people's hearts and minds. Shuttung down Nazi speech has not led to a slippery slope of totalitarian censorship: our media are among the freest in the world. This is because Nazi speech is always qualitatively different from all other speech. Flag Flag Reply 203 Recommend Recommend Share this comment on Facebook Share this comment on Twitter NYT Pick Steve Downers Grove, IL 13 hours ago In principle, I heartily agree with the author. You can never win an argument by preventing the other side from speaking. I'm a product of the 60's, which is known for a wee bit of protest. We always let the other side have its say, and then denounce their arguments for the nonsense they truly were. But at that time, we were all sharing the same basic information from the broadcast news sources of the time. Today seems different. When I try to debate my conservative friends and workmates, they raise "facts" I'd never heard of. I suspect it's fake, but try convincing them of that. Logical debate becomes impossible when the two sides have different set of facts. I suspect this may have some part in the students' unwillingness to allow the opposing side to speak. But, I think a better approach would be to allow them to speak, but denounce the "alt facts" as fake, and force the speakers to provide their proof. Flag Flag Reply 57 Recommend Recommend Share this comment on Facebook Share this comment on Twitter NYT Pick Bob Laughlin Denver 9 hours ago One question I have that I have not seen answered, or even asked; Why are neo nazis and white supremacists being invited to speak in the first place? Are there no legitimate conservatives to hear from? (I suspect the answer to that is no.) Is there a real legitimate need to hear from someone why they think our black and brown brothers and sisters are second class citizens? Or why the holocaust might have been a good idea? Or that they somehow think Jesus agrees with them about these things? I am sensing that our young people are getting tired of the false equivalence that all sides deserve the same attentive hearing, even if one side is made up wholly of hatred, lies, fear and greed. Flag Flag Reply 33 Recommend Recommend Share this comment on Facebook Share this comment on Twitter NYT Pick David McKirnan Chicago 9 hours ago I am a retired academic who got kicked out of university for aggressively protesting the Vietnam war. Hence, I agree with David Greenberg that some issues are too important to “be nice” about. Why, however, do these anti-free speech justification so often boil down to ”…well, if Joseph Goebbels were there advocating the extermination of Jews we would have to stop him”? This is a University President delivering his annual report, not a murderous lunatic drumming up support for a human rights disaster. Systemic protest is vitally important now. When the President and his sycophants are producing highly destructive policies behind closed doors, and a secretive commission is cooking up more ways to disenfranchise voters, the public must be right in their faces. That is different that eliminating free speech for anyone whose positions are not a clone of your own. Of course Condoleezza Rice should have been able to deliver a commencement address, much less a routine annual report by a University President. I am sorry Mr. Greenberg, but we are in fact witnessing a “snowflake” moment, that has strong fascist overtones. Remember, those who protested the Nazis were eliminated, not given a forum. Flag Flag In Reply to David Greenberg Reply Reply 20 Recommend Recommend Share this comment on Facebook Share this comment on Twitter NYT Pick OldManKeith Baltimore 9 hours ago Since the students are not in a position of power, the whole first amendment/free speech argument against them makes no sense. The first amendment is about government (Congress) suppressing our right to speech (among other things). These students are not Congress. Never mind the whole fascism argument against the students, it seems like their protest (just judging by this column) was against ever rising college tuition - is keeping education affordable fascism? Flag Flag Reply 15 Recommend Recommend Share this comment on Facebook Share this comment on Twitter NYT Pick Peycos Rochester, NY 9 hours ago So true. "Never Again" doesn't mean "Never Again, unless somebody gets upset about us not being polite." We went down the road where people turned a blind eye and pretended the rise of Nazism was just another political movement like anything else and it ended up costing millions and millions of lives. Good for these students for not buying the current attempts to perfume up the current, serious global push to re-popularize the vilest ideas of the last century and pretend it's just another polite political debate. Never Again means Never Again. Flag Flag In Reply to Lexington Reply Reply 11 Recommend Recommend Share this comment on Facebook Share this comment on Twitter NYT Pick Maria Gil Montclair, NJ 8 hours ago I grew up under fascism (in Spain under Franco's rule). I fear that, because the U.S. is young and has not experienced a dictatorship (neither fascist nor communist) my fellow citizens may not see the signs of danger. With deep gratitude for and respect for the freedoms I enjoy in my adopted country, in this case I must strongly disagree with the legal protection of hate speech and sound an alarm. In my experience, the way to protect the First Amendment is to identify hate speech for what it is: verbal assault, a form of inciting to riot, a frighteningly effective tool used by extremists that facilitates the dehumanization of others, making it easy to hate and perpetrate violence against them and, ultimately, could result in the loss of our all of our freedoms. Hate speech has always existed, yes, but what is alarming about it today is the perceived tacit defense of it by the White House. This creates a potentially extremely dangerous situation. Perhaps this is perceived most easily by those of us who have experienced totalitarianism under irrational, hate-filled leaders. Surely it could never happen here. And perhaps that is the case, but why not protect our citizens from it, as other democratic countries already do? This is not a First Amendment issue. The college students seem to instinctively understand this. Listen to them. Flag Flag Reply 16 Recommend Recommend Share this comment on Facebook Share this comment on Twitter Loading...Home » Xiegu QRP X'ceivers X108G QRP Transceiver Xiegu Technology Avg. of 2 Customer Ratings click image for larger view Xiegu X108G QRP Transceiver Outdoor Version (with easy to read display) (Xiegu is pronounced "zia goo") X108G QRP Transceiver 9 Bands AM / SSB / CW 1 - 20 watts Features: Microphone - multifunctional CW Filter (500 Hz) SSB Filter (2.4 kHz) AGC S Meter - PO Meter - SWR Meter Adjustable 1-20 watt output Modes - AM - SSB - CW 0.5 - 30 MHz (9 filtered ham bands) High SWR protection Pre-amplifier / Attenuator USB control port (uses plain USB-a to USB-b cable) CW Keyer SO239 antenna connector 0.5 ppm TCXO Module Noise Blanker Front & Rear Handles 4-3/4 x 1-3/4 x 7-1/16 inches Radio Weight - 1 kg - 2.2 lb Mic Weight - 0.143kg - 5oz 12.5 - 14.5 vdc / 0.5 - 6.0 amps Warranty Information General: Wouxun.US / Import Communications does not offer any type of Free Trial, Remorse-buy, Trade-in or Evaluation returns. Xiegu radios are warranted only by the factory. X108G Specific: Warranty is for a period of one year after the date of purchase (determined by sales receipt) and is handled directly between the purchaser and the factory. THIS IS THE "OUTDOOR" VERSION OF X108G Inventory Clearance Price (US Sales Only) $499.00 inc shipping OUT OF STOCK Request re-stock notice? Email A Friend Previous Item (Portable All Band Antenna) Customer Reviews X-108G Purchase By Robert After quite a bit of time on the fence, I just happen to purchase during a recent sale. Less than an hour after making the on-line purchase, I received an email with tracking number of shipment. The rig was received, and I am pleased to date with my purchase. Emails on other items were responded to in a very timely manner by Import Communication's. As far as the rig, it was put on the air right away, and even with terrible band conditions I received excellent reports on 20 & 17 meters. Appears to be excellent for field & portable use thus far. X108G first impressions By Steve First of all, this company is top notch in communication and they ship lightning fast. I purchased this radio on Monday and received it on Wednesday the same week. Ed responds to all email inquiries right away! I received the radio today and I was absolutely amazed with it's ability. Using only 15 watts, I was immediately receiving strong signal reports from here in Washington State to Arizona and Ohio. The operators on the other end couldn't believe I was only using 15 watts. My contact in Ohio gave me a 5/9 report and said my signal was stereo quality. All I can say is WOW! This little gem is out performing my ICOM IC-718 using 100 watts of power with the same antennas. This radio is small but powerful and I'm glad I made the purchase, especially from Import Communications. 73/KG7VCL... Steve in Washington. Create a review.CHARLESTON - The same day two energy companies announced plans to build West Virginia's first coal-to-gasoline plant, a spokeswoman for one of the state's largest environmental groups was trying to convince state lawmakers that coal-to-liquids technology would be a step in the wrong direction. Vickie Wolfe of the West Virginia Environmental Council said coal- to-liquid technology was less efficient than conventional fuels, resulted in more greenhouse gas emissions and would lead to more environmental damage caused by coal mining. "Coal is not clean and won't be," she told lawmakers on the Joint Committee on Economic Development, which is studying the issue. CONSOL Energy of Pittsburgh and Synthesis Energy Systems of Houston announced July 28 they were entering into a joint venture to build a coal gasification plant in Marshall County. Coal-to-liquid technology is seen as a tool by many policymakers for decreasing the nation's reliance on foreign oil. It has been used by the Germans during World War II and by South Africa, which lost access to oil due to international embargoes resulting from the country's apartheid policies. The reason coal-to-liquid hasn't been more widely used is the expense of converting coal into useable fuel. But now with a barrel of oil costing as much as $147, coal-based fuels can compete commercially. Before Wolfe spoke to committee members, they heard from state Division of Energy Director Jeff Herholdt, who pointed to figures showing energy demand will continue to rise over the next two decades. Coal is expected to meet more than a quarter of that demand. Asked by a committee member what the state was doing to promote coal-to-fuel technology, Herholdt said "I certainly have to run that by the governor." But he also said the governor has traditionally stressed it is the state's job to provide the infrastructure businesses need to build coal-to-liquid plants. Wolfe didn't think that would be a wise use of resources. She said the process of producing coal-based fuels uses about half the BTUs the fuel actually puts out, making it less energy efficient than traditional fuels. She compared it to corn-based ethanol, which has been criticized for taking nearly as much energy to produce than it delivers. "It is not a very efficient process," she said of coal to liquids. Converting coal to liquid also produces roughly twice the amount of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, than the production of traditional fuels. CONSOL and Synthesis said they would bury the CO2 deep withinthe earth, a process known as carbon sequestration. However, carbon sequestration has yet to be shown effective on a large-scale industrial basis. Wolfe pointed to the climate change report produced by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which determined the technology was decades away from maturing. She also pointed to research stating even with sequestration, coal to gas technology still puts out more CO2 than traditional fuels. A large part of Wolfe's presentation was trying to convince lawmakers to start thinking about alternatives to coal as an energy source. She said coal led to environmental damage and referred to a recent study by a West Virginia University researcher that says people living in coal-mining communities had more health problems. Committee members took no action of Wolfe's suggestions, given the hearing was only for informational purposes. Copyright State Journal Corporation Aug 1, 2008 (c) 2008 State Journal, The. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved. Source: State JournalHigh-ranking police officers were involved in a ploy to coerce citizens into buying hard drugs to boost crime detection figures, the Dail has heard. High-ranking police officers were involved in a ploy to coerce citizens into buying hard drugs to boost crime detection figures, the Dail has heard. Independent TD Luke "Ming" Flanagan said a new whistleblower from within the Garda has come forward with a fresh dossier of alleged corruption linking the force to heroin dealing. "We have a situation here where heroin dealing and the Garda Siochana are being connected," he said. In the Dail, Mr Flanagan said Garda Nicky Keogh - based at Athlone Garda station - has handed the evidence over to retired judge Patrick McMahon, an interim watchdog charged with overseeing whistleblower allegations. Education Minister Ruairi Quinn said everybody shared the concerns raised by the latest claims, which come amid a wave of controversies that have rocked the force, resulting in the resignations of the Garda chief and the Justice Minister. Mr Flanagan, who represents Roscommon-South Leitrim, said the fresh dossier includes serious allegations of a Garda cover-up, stolen files, manufactured evidence and the failure of officers to fully comply with court orders to hand over records. The Independent politician singled out one particular case for mention. "[The whistleblower's] greatest concern with the drugs operation in November 2009 is that there was a systematic and orchestrated effort by high ranking Garda officers to induce and coerce Irish citizens - in this case with no previous criminal convictions - to buy drugs from drug dealers and in doing do, putting them in personal danger and in turn to sell drugs to undercover gardai without making any profit, thus boosting crime detection figures for arrest," he said. Mr Flanagan said among allegations handed over by the serving Garda officer was a claim his colleague threatened a defendant to plead guilty on the day of his hearing. "A further grave aspect, of grave concern, in relation to the planning of this operation was that the list of nominated persons to be targeted had a notable omission in that a significant and well-recognised drug dealer in the area who has been seen long associated with a senior member of the drugs unit was excluded," he added. Appealing for whistleblower protection, Mr Flanagan said the mostly young citizens targeted in the alleged operation now have serious drugs convictions. "Nicky Keogh is a hero," he told the Dail. "I wish I knew more heroes like him. There are plenty of them in the Garda Siochana, he's done them proud today and I hope they shake his hand rather than tie a knot in a rat's tail and put it on his door." Representing the Taoiseach Enda Kenny during Leaders Questions, Mr Quinn said a Garda Authority, based on the Northern Ireland model, was being established along with a whistleblowers' charter as part of a raft of reforms for the force. "We will move to have those things put in place so the kind of thing you are describing today will no longer be necessary," he said. Press AssociationEast Tennessee man checkerboards father's gravesite before Vols rivalry games Copyright by WATE - All rights reserved Jamie Beckler checkerboards his father's grave. [ + - ] Video CLEVELAND, Tenn. (WATE) - You've heard of being a Vol For Life, but does that ever stop or go away? One East Tennessee man doesn't think so. Orange and white traditions have lived on and even been created despite loved ones passing away. Orange and white is a way of life for Jamie Beckler. Even though he lives in Cleveland, Tennessee, he was raised to be a UT fan. "God, family, and Tennessee football. Pretty much how it's always been," he said. Out in a cemetery, where it's peaceful, it's likely you'll hear the shaking of a spray paint bottle before a big rivalry game. "The white is a lot easier. Seems like the white covers better," said Beckler. He's not touching up the end zone in Neyland Stadium. He's checkerboarding his father's grave. Rickey Beckler passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2008. "He wasn't real big on flowers. So, we thought of this and this became a tradition," said Beckler. It was a tradition to watch every big orange football game with his dad. "He was quick with the criticism and also there with the faith that we'd pull through," Beckler said. That's why making this checkerboard pattern is so special to this son. "Hope he's watching down and rooting for them, especially this season," said Beckler. Making the checkerboard takes about an hour to 90 minutes and lasts a few months. Beckler says painting brings him closer to his dad. By the looks of it, there's no need to wonder if this Vol For Life is happy with how things look. "He's got that little grin on his face he had, probably humming Rocky Top too," said Beckler. While checkerboarding may seem strange to some, Beckler says people love this idea and friends have asked him to paint their loved one's plot. Though, Beckler says he only paints with permission from the cemetery. The family says there's one memory they still cherish. In 2006-07 while Rickey Beckler was in the hospital, he was able to meet members of UT's football team. The family says it was the highlight of his life.Rice University researchers have synthesized a new and greatly improved generation of contrast agents for tagging and real-time tracking of stem cells in the body. The agent combines ultrashort carbon nanotubes and bismuth clusters that show up on X-rays taken with computed tomography (CT) scanners. The stable compound performs more than eight times better than the first-generation material introduced in 2013, according to the researchers. “The primary application will be to track them in stem-cell therapies to see if the cells are attracted to the site of disease — for example, cancer — and in what concentration,” said Rice chemist Lon Wilson of the compound the researchers call Bi4C@US-tubes. “Magnetic resonance imaging is currently used for that purpose and it works quite well, but X-ray technology in the clinic is much more available,” he said. “It’s faster and cheaper, and it could facilitate preclinical studies to track stem cells in vivo.” The process developed by Wilson’s team and colleagues at CHI St. Luke’s Health-Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center and Baylor College of Medicine is detailed this month in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. Bismuth is used in cosmetics, pigments, and pharmaceuticals, notably as the active ingredient in pink bismuth (aka Pepto-Bismol), an antacid. For this application, bismuth nanoclusters developed by the lab of Rice chemist Kenton Whitmire, a co-author of the paper, are combined with carbon nanotubes chemically treated to shorten them to between 20 and 80 nanometers and add defects to their side walls. The nanoclusters, which make up about 20 percent of the compound, appear to strongly attach to the nanotubes via these defects. When introduced into stem cells, the treated nanotubes become easy to spot, Wilson said. “It’s very interesting to see a cell culture that is opaque to X-rays. They’re not as dark as the bone (which X-rays cannot penetrate), but they’re really dark when they’re loaded with these agents.” The compound was tested in a CT scanner at St. Luke’s Baylor Hospital, which compared the abilities of empty nanotubes, the previous generation of Bi@US-tubes and the new compound. Hounsfield units are used to measure X-ray attenuation of contrast agents. The tests found about 188 Hounsfield units for plain ultrashort nanotubes, 227 for older Bi@US-tubes and 2,178 for the latest compound. Most soft tissues fall between 30 and 100 Hounsfield units, so cells labeled with the new compound were expected to stand out. Further testing showed the clusters hold tight to their nanotubes. The researchers detected no release of bismuth from the nanotubes tested at body temperature over 48 hours. Wilson said it will be up to the federal Food and Drug Administration to approve the new compound for use in humans. “But we’re in a position to start pre-clinical studies now that we’ve determined how well we can load cells and the fact that cells are not seemingly harmed by the technology and short bursts of X-rays,” he said. Provided by: Rice University This article has been published with official permission from Rice University.Because the system blends unmanned air vehicle, missile, and wing-in-ground-effect concepts, it can use lift to drastically increase its range and increase its overall size and load carrying capability compared to its traditional missile counterparts. This means more fuel and a larger explosive payload can be carried. Most importantly, normal anti-ship missiles fly anywhere from low to high altitudes during their flight out to the target area, before dropping down to very low altitude for their terminal attack run—skimming over the horizon at their target and thus giving said target's defenses little time to react. This hybrid system would presumably stay at extremely low altitude throughout its entire flight profile following launch. Although the air is thick at low altitudes and drag is high, the wing-in-ground-effect design overcomes that drawback by providing copious amounts of lift and a "cushion" of air below the craft as it rips across the ocean's surface. By staying so low throughout its flight, this missile-drone of sorts would remain harder to detect than higher-flying traditional missile systems, as it could consistently hide from radar among the reflective clutter of the ocean's surface. Massive leaps in radar capabilities have been realized in recent years, especially when it comes to active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar sets' "look-down/shoot-down" abilities. These technological leaps have made it much easier for fighters and airborne early warning and control aircraft to detect very-low flying targets—but depending on the situation and the combat environment, the tactic of flying low still offers a substantial added degree of survivability. Additionally, not all combat aircraft are equipped with active electronically scanned array radar systems that excel in this unique niche. For older pulse Doppler radar sets, detecting and successfully shooting down very low-flying targets with small radar signatures can be extremely challenging. So for this new weapon system, staying not just low but a mere handful of feet above the waves at any given time throughout its flight profile means it stands a better chance of remaining undetected—or at the very least, unengaged—than normal anti-ship missile systems. Range is probably the biggest benefit of such a system. Where a normal shore defense system's cruise missile could fly out 100 or 200 miles, this thing could potentially reach distances of double or even triple that. With a 1.5-hour endurance, even if the system is only capable of say 300 miles per hour, that would give it a range of 450 miles. If the craft can reach higher speeds, say 500 miles per hour, that range increases drastically to 750 miles. That gives China a fairly potent( although lower-end) anti-access weapon system for contending navies to deal with during a time of conflict. There is also the swarm factor. Although a sea-skimming threat that flies at subsonic speeds is not a high-end capability for well-defended surface combatants to deal with, if used as part of a larger anti-access strategy, it could be deadly. These missile-drones are not super high-tech craft and are likely comparatively cheap to manufacture, so China could potentially sling dozens or even hundreds of them in a large volley at a known area where enemy naval assets are lurking. Combined with aircraft, ship and submarine launched anti-ship weaponry, as well as China's budding anti-ship ballistic missile capabilities, even the most well armed naval armadas—like a US carrier strike group—would likely be overwhelmed with targets to engage. Considering how low this system stays throughout its flight profile, it would be challenging to engage many of them at standoff ranges. As a result, "leakers" could get through....and with 2,200 lbs of explosives onboard, just one of these things could do a huge amount of damage to a targeted combat vessel. China's far more traditional C-602 anti-ship missile in action:A nice expansion to an already lovely game. I'm reviewing this way late after I've purchased it, but I've been through most of the expansion's story. If you liked the first 1-50 level range, this is a great addition as the Main Quest Story line continues on with twists and turns at every step. All the dungeons added are fun, and the Primal battles add their own unique challenges. All the added zones are gorgeous, as usual, and there's plenty to see in them, especially adding flying. The addition of the three new Jobs are also a welcome with new stories to go with their lines! I do have some criticism that puts it at 4 stars, where I'd give Realm Reborn 5 stars. One thing I noticed right away, and this is because I got Heavensward right after I finished the last story quest for the stock game, is the Voice Actors all changed. Some sound like they're trying to keep to the old actors, but others are jarringly different. The Job/class quests don't feel as fun as they did in the main game. They don't keep me drawn in like the others did, which is a shame because that helps me to level up alternative roles. Having to return to the city of Ishgard for Levels is annoying in its own right. It makes grinding 50-60 for alternative roles difficult as well. Though it has its faults, I still think it's a great expansion with plenty to do, great dungeons/raids, and a wonderful story that will have you grinding levels/gear for more! I look forward to the next expansion!When the state-based insurance exchanges open next year under Obamacare, many Americans should finally have access to affordable insurance. But millions of others will most likely be left out in the cold and remain uninsured. These folks -- mainly low-income adults in the 21 states that aren't expanding Medicaid -- will not be eligible for either the long-standing government health insurance program for the poor, or for premium subsidies in the new exchanges. Some 4.9 million people will not be covered in 2016 if these states don't expand, according to the Urban Institute. Another 1.5 million uninsured are in six states that are considering expansion, but have yet to approve it. "You have a group of low-income adults who really don't have any affordable options for health insurance," said Benjamin Sommers, assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. This gap was not supposed to happen under the original Affordable Care Act, as Obamacare is formally known. All adults with incomes below 138% of the poverty level -- $15,850 for an individual and $32,500 for a family of four -- were to be covered by Medicaid. Those with incomes between 138% and 400% of poverty would receive federal subsidies to defray the cost of buying insurance on the state-based exchanges. But a Supreme Court ruling in June 2012 left it up to each state to decide whether to expand... and only 23 states and the District of Columbia chose to do so. In these places, Obamacare will work as originally envisioned. Related: I'm signing up for Obamacare The problem lies in that the law does not allow those under the poverty level to receive subsidies for the exchanges if their state doesn't expand Medicaid. These people will not be charged a penalty for not having health insurance. Very few non-disabled, working-age adults qualify for Medicaid now. While eligibility varies by state, many do not cover childless adults and only provide insurance to parents with very low-incomes. Take Texas, which has the highest number of uninsured residents in the nation and some of the most restrictive Medicaid eligibility rules. To qualify, working parents can make no more than 25% of the federal poverty level, or $4,770 for a family of three, while jobless parents can make no more than 12%, or $2,290, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Were the state to expand Medicaid, enrollment would jump by 1.5 million people in 2016, according Urban Institute estimates. But Texas is one of the states that has opted out of the expansion. Those people who remain uninsured may be able to seek care at community health centers, which are expanding thanks to an $11 billion infusion under Obamacare, said Timothy Jost, professor of law at Washington and Lee University. And tax-exempt hospitals have to provide more charitable care under health reform. It's still possible that states will join the expansion program in coming years. Governors and lawmakers there are facing heavy pressure from consumer advocates, as well as interest groups such as hospitals, which treat the indigent. After all, it took years for all states to join the original Medicaid program, which was founded in 1965. All but one state had signed on by 1972, and Arizona didn't opt in until a decade later.by Robin White Goode via blackenterprise.com Efforts are underway to recruit more teachers of color, and one such successful initiative is in New York. NYC Men Teach was started two years ago under Mayor Bill de Blasio; the program is part of the mayor’s Young Men’s Initiative (YMI), started under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. NYC Men Teach, a three-year pipeline program, has a goal of recruiting 1,000 men of color into the teaching profession. Two years into the program, it has already recruited 900 men. Deputy Mayor Richard Buery, under whose purview YMI falls, said that the program is a priority because of the administration’s commitment to equity. “This is a critically important issue,” Buery stated. “We’re in a crisis in terms of diversity in our nation’s teaching force. The real question is, why aren’t men of color entering the teaching profession and why aren’t they staying there?” In New York, students of color make up a majority of the city’s public school students; more than 43% are boys of color. Yet only 8.3% of its teachers are black, Latino, or Asian men. This matters because research shows that, especially for low-income black boys, having a black teacher significantly lowers—by 39%—the likelihood that they will drop out of high school. Interestingly, other studies have suggested all students prefer teachers of color. It’s also worrisome, Buery pointed out, that 85% of white students in New York State attend a school without a black or Latino principal or assistant principal. Those kids are going to school seeing “no model of black or Latino leadership or authority in the building,” Buery said. But to get them in the building requires getting over hurdles that can be barriers to entering the profession. “In talking to the teachers, we’ve learned that many men of color have not had positive school experiences themselves,” Buery told me. “That can have an impact on their willingness to pursue a teaching career.” Anecdotally, Buery is getting positive feedback about NYC Men Teach. The recruited men are being retained and finding support. It’s too early for quantitative results—and some results won’t be apparent for years, not until today’s students are faring well in college. But in the end, it’s not just about academics, Buery said. “It’s about citizenship and leadership. It’s about having people see a vision of the world where people of all races lead and guide. We need our schools to look like the world we’re trying to create.” For more about NYC Men Teach, visit its website. To read full article, go to: http://www.blackenterprise.com/education/3-year-pipeline-initiative-recruits-men-color-teaching-profession/John, the veteran farmer beside her in his lambing shed at this East Sussex farm, says grimly: ''He's getting cold now. I will have to shoot him. It's not easy.'' This is one of 74 farms across England that have been struck by a new disease that is causing thousands of lambs to be born dead or with deformities that mean they cannot survive for more than a few minutes. A thousand farms across Europe have been hit in the last month or so - but nobody knows how bad things will get, because the lambing season is not in full swing. The disease is invisible in sheep until the infected ewes give birth. Schmallenberg disease is so new it was named only in December, after the town in western Germany where the first cases were seen last August in dairy cows. Scientists are not sure how it is transmitted, but the leading theory is that plumes of midges carrying the disease were blown across the sea in autumn. Sheep have a gestation period of five months, so the adults infected then are beginning to give birth now.Blogs The Copyright Reform Debate Continues Uncensored December 06, 2012 Last month the House Republican Study Committee (RSC) released (and then retracted 24 hours later) a thought-provoking policy paper entitled Three Myths About Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix It. As the leading group for conservative policy ideas and discussion in the U.S. House of Representatives, the RSC could play a critical role in presenting the conservative arguments for copyright reform. However, as PK President Gigi Sohn detailed, it is a sad day when pressure from content industry can stifle a policy discussion and debate before it even gets started. The RSC Paper was retracted less than 24 hours after it was released under the explanation that the paper had not had adequate review and did not reflect all viewpoints. It is not a stretch to believe that the RSC and other Congressional offices received quick, arm-twisting pressure from content industry advocates that who agree with the debunked myths in the paper. Fear not, the discussion on how to reform copyright for the digital age will not be censored! Tuesday afternoon Public Knowledge hosted a four-person panel briefing for Congressional staff interested in hearing more about these reform ideas and wished to discuss them openly. PK Vice President Sherwin Siy led the almost 90 minute discussion about the challenges and solutions to extending the rights and benefit of copyright law to new digital uses, with a personal emphasis on how small updates to first sale protections can permit uses of digital media that your average consumer would assume already exist. He was joined by Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University School of Law, who led with why copyright protections are based in conservative and libertarian philosophy. Brito advocated for shorter copyright terms, registration by rights holders, and a real searchable database of who those rights holders are. Margot Kaminski from Yale University participated and argued that there should be bipartisan support for reform in Congress. Kaminski raised concerns that efforts by Executive Branch agencies to control copyright laws through trade agreements constitute a land grab of Congressional authority. Matt Schreurs of CCIA rounded out the foursome with boiled down arguments as to how intellectual property protection are different from traditional property laws. However we will not edit or censor any of the views expressed in the briefing. Watch the full video for yourself. Watch the video of the panel here Last week Rep. Bob Goodlatte was selected by the Republican caucus to serve as the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee starting in January. He has said in the past that he looks forward to welcoming all ideas to the table on copyright issues. However, as recent as this morning it was reported that some GOP members such as Rep. Marsha Blackburn have helped to keep other members from considering these ideas. Even the author of the paper has been let go by the RSC. Hearings and other open discussions will not happen in 2013 unless your representatives hear that this is a priority for consumers and our economy. And they must hear it from you the public. If you agree that Congress should having open hearings and discussions about how copyright reform can promote innovation and new ideas, contact your Representatives and Senators and tell them that the Congress needs to promote copyright reform in 2013.Sevilla beat Benfica on penalties to win the Europa League in Turin, their third triumph in the competition in nine seasons. Benfica, losers in their seven previous European finals, were seeking a first continental trophy since 1962. And the Portuguese side might have ended that sequence had Lima's late effort not been hooked off the line. It fell to Kevin Gameiro to score the winning spot-kick after Sevilla keeper Beto denied Oscar Cardozo and Rodrigo. Carlos Bacca, Stephane Mbia, who is on loan from Queens Park Rangers, and Jorge Moreno were also on target for the Spanish club. Brazilian Lima and Luisao did find the net for Benfica
200 "remarkable people who have played a major role in the nation". Award-winning poet William Letford has also produced a special work to mark the 200th anniversary. The first edition of the paper was published on 25 January 1817. It was founded by lawyer William Ritchie and customs official Charles MacLaren. Image copyright The Scotsman Image caption Charles MacLaren (L) and William Ritchie founded the Scotsman The paper's original premises were at 257 High Street on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. It now has its headquarters on Queensferry Road in the capital. In a letter to the Scotsman, The Queen writes: "Please convey my congratulations to all those on the newspaper's staff and my good wishes to your readers in Scotland, and elsewhere, as you mark this significant anniversary." Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has also sent her congratulations, writing: "The Scotsman occupies a special place in Scottish journalism, and I commend its staff, past and present, for all the work they have done in ensuring its success over so many years." Image copyright Scotsman Image caption A souvenir edition of the paper was produced to mark the anniversary The newspaper's owners, Johnston Press, said the special edition marked the start of a year-long calendar of celebrations "showcasing both the paper's rich heritage and looking ahead to the publication's future, shining a light on the digital innovations across the brand's platforms". Ian Stewart, editor at The Scotsman, said: "For two centuries The Scotsman has been at the heart of Scotland as a nation, covering the breaking news stories that have shaped our past and influenced our future; and we're incredibly proud to be part of that story. "The celebrations that have kicked off today are just the beginning, with various events and editorial initiatives still to come throughout 2017. "We very much look forward to taking our readers on this journey with us, as we take our step together into the third century of The Scotsman as Scotland's national newspaper."BEIJING (Reuters) - China will “pressure” the United States on maritime issues at talks in Beijing next week because of Chinese concern about an increased U.S. military presence in the disputed South China Sea, a major state-run newspaper said on Tuesday. The amphibious assault ship USS Boxer transits the East Sea during Exercise Ssang Yong 2016 March 8, 2016. REUTERS/U.S. Navy/Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Craig Z. Rodarte/Handout via Reuters China has been angered by what it views as provocative U.S. military patrols close to islands China controls in the South China Sea. The United States says the patrols are to protect freedom of navigation. “Beijing will pressure Washington over maritime issues during the upcoming Strategic and Economic Dialogue, as the United States’ increasing military presence in the South China Sea is among China’s major concerns,” the official China Daily said, citing unidentified officials. China claims most of the South China Sea, through which $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year. The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei have overlapping claims. This month, Beijing demanded an end to U.S. surveillance near China after two Chinese fighter jets carried out what the Pentagon said was an “unsafe” intercept of a U.S. military reconnaissance aircraft over the South China Sea. The South China Sea is also likely to feature at a June 3-5 security forum in Singapore known as the Shangri-La Dialogue. China’s Defence Ministry said on Tuesday that Admiral Sun Jianguo, a deputy chief of the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission, would lead China’s delegation at the Singapore talks. At the Beijing talks with the United States, which U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will attend, other issues will also be on the table. China will bring up the issue of self-ruled Taiwan - claimed by Beijing but which elected a pro-independence party to power in January - as well as the situation on the Korean peninsula, the China Daily added. “The two countries have differing pursuits on major issues at the strategic level. However, the two still have many common interests,” the paper said. “Whether it is on the South China Sea issue or on the Korean Peninsula issue, the two countries have a shared security goal to maintain regional stability,” it added. The newspaper did not elaborate. China is reclusive North Korea’s only major ally but has been angered by Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile tests and signed up to tough U.N. sanctions against it in March.The data accumulated by the Kepler space telescope over the years of its successful operation gives literally tons of useful information about our Universe. One of the newest findings based on the analysis of the data acquired from Kepler mission was published yesterday at arXiv.org. The authors also report the discovery of the first seven planet candidate stellar system situated around a star named KOI-351. The team reports a total of 14 new transiting planet candidates detected by the Kepler space telescope. They also note, that this research is an outstanding example of cooperation between astronomers and public scientists, as more than 250,000 volunteers have participated in the Planet Hunters project. Until now two other stars with the largest number of confirmed planets (excluding our Sun) were known to contain six planets each: HD 10180 and Kepler-11, and only five exoplanetary systems with five confirmed planets are known. By the way, there are claims stating that HD 10180 could be a nine-planet system, although these statements are highly uncertain from the scientific point of view. Of course, the crowdsourcing was not the only method for identification of exoplanets. The data has been previously processed with the so-called Transit Planet Search, or TPS algorithm, based on the detection of planet transit (crossing) in front of its parent star’s disk. However, some exoplanet transit signals can be missed despite the effectiveness of this method. Therefore, the paticipants of the Planet Hunters project have checked visually more than 19 million Kepler’s light curves, and this work helped to detect five new planet candidates which should have been detected by the TPS algorithm, but were missed. This volunteer effort amounts to a cumulative total of 180 years of work according to the authors. The orbital periods of the new exoplanet candidates range from 124 to 904 days. Eight of them also reside in the habitable zone of their host star, which make them an interesting targets for further studies on habitability-related planetary characteristics. The object of particular interest is a star system with 7 planets – the KOI-351 (where KOI stands for Kepler Object of Interest). The KOI-351 was first described in a scientific paper published in 2012. At that time ‘only’ three orbiting planets were detected by analyzing the data from the Kepler spacecraft obtained during a 16-month period (May 2009 – September 2010). Later, additional planets located in the same star system have been also identified. The scientists say in the current publication that KOI-351 has many similarities to our own solar system: the sizes of five inner planets range from Earth to mini-Neptune, whereas the outer planets are gas giants. However, this system is very compact if compared with the Solar system: all seven candidate exoplanets reside within a distance of 1 astronomical unit (AU) from their host star. Additionally, the authors have performed numerical stability tests, which show that the KOI-351 system has remained stable for over 100 million years, which theoretically prove the uniqueness of the exoplanet transit signals. The tests also provide a high probability that KOI-351 is a true seven-planet system. By Alius Noreika, Source: Technology.org​Screengrab: Big Boring System ​When a user signs up for Big B​oring System, the site doesn't ask for an email, name, age, or gender, and it doesn't request access to location information. It just asks for a phone number. A four digit PIN is then sent to the user's cell phone, allowing them to log in. It's a weirdly anachronistic introduction to an unconventional social network. Big Boring System is an ope​n-source social network spearheaded by iconoclastic web developer Jen Fong-Adwent, better known by her online pseudonym Ed​na Piranha. The name itself is both a piss-take at big players like Facebook and Twitter and a reference to the text-based Bulletin Board​ Systems popular during the dialup days of the internet. The site allows users to make text-only posts on their public pages and chat in real-time. There are no images, no GIFs, no videos, no comments, no likes, and no friends. You can call yourself whatever you want, and messages sent in the chatroom are automatically deleted from the server after a short period of time. The platform is aggressive in its internet-age retro-future minimalism, like the synth-pun​k of social networks. As a result, it lies in stark contrast to its feature-stuffed competition. "To compensate for this lack of [real-time conversation] a lot of these systems contained features such as 'likes,' 'faves,''reblogs,''retweets,' and 'comments,' to try and keep users interested," Fong-Adwent told me. "There are many flaws with these features and they have never in my mind created anything of real value to a community." The chat room was a little slow on Sunday. Screenshot: Big Boring System. The original Bulletin Board Systems were often run on private servers owned by their system operators and had to be dialed into using modems hooked up to phone lines, making them de facto local com​munities unless users wanted to incur long distance charges. Big Boring System, which Fong-Adwent runs on her home server and moderates along with several other system operators, aims to mimic the communal experience of those original online hubs. The rules are simple. Screenshot: Big Boring System. "By removing features and only focusing on the content someone writes with minimal interaction in replying to posts, and also providing a simple chat mechanism for interacting with other writers in the system," Fong-Adwent explained, "[Big Boring System] encourages communities and trust to develop more often than not." Unlike other upstart social networks like Ello, which explicitly positioned itself as an alternative to Facebook, Big Boring System shouldn't be thought of a replacement for any of your existing networks. The stripped-down format is more likely to appeal to people who still use BBS boards—here's a direc​tory of (mostly) active BBSs and a dedicated su​breddit—or have fond memories of them. Internet forums and message boards, the spiritual successors to BBSs, are still going strong as well. Forums with a local focus like William​sboard, which is all about life in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or contain discussion on niche interests like realistic se​x dolls (NSFW), often have a community vibe and layouts that would dovetail nicely with Big Boring System's. To be sure, Fong-Adwent isn't a novice when it comes to engaging with alternative modes of online communication. She recently presented M​eatspace, a chat chat forum she designed, at the 2​014 XOXO conference. Meatspace is a barebones chat room where members make GIFs of themselves, shoot the shit, and listen to dance music. Big Boring System is a similar experiment in new arenas of online community formation. "Throughout this process, I always ask the following questions over and over," Fong-Adwent said, "what makes things work and what doesn't? How much can you take away before it is useless? What makes communities form and how do they stay together?" The 'Discover' page allows you to look at other users' public posts. Screenshot: Big Boring System. But a community is only as robust as the dedication of its members. Whether people will actually want to use a site that does away with so many of the familiar features of major social media networks remains to be seen. However, Fong-Adwent noted, a huge amount of traffic was driven to the site last week after a sho​ut-​out in science writer Alexis Madrigal's popular email newsletter, 5 Int​eresting Things. "I cannot predict what will become of [Big Boring System]," Fong-Adwent told me, "because it is an open source project and there are now others involved, not just myself, what will become of it is what the community wants it to be."Michael Strickland, the 36-year-old man accused of pulling a gun on Don't Shoot PDX protesters marching outside Portland's Justice Center, had a round in the chamber of the loaded handgun he swept in front of the crowd and five other magazines of ammunition on him Thursday night, according to court records. Multnomah County deputy district attorney Kate Molina Friday successfully argued for Strickland's bail to be set at $250,000 after two felony counts of unlawful use of a firearm were added to misdemeanor allegations of menacing and second-degree disorderly conduct. Four sheriff's deputies then placed him in handcuffs and led him to jail directly from arraignment court at the Justice Center. Strickland had an extended clip in what appeared to be a Glock 26 that he swept at chest level multiple times in front of protesters and a plain-clothed Portland police officer, the prosecutor said. Hundreds of protesters had gathered downtown to demonstrate against the deaths of two black men in back-to-back police shootings this week in Minnesota and Louisiana. Portland Officer Branden L. Combs was in Chapman Square during the protest and heard people running by him yelling, "Gun! Gun!'' and "He's got a gun,'' according to a probable cause affidavit. One of the protesters told police that he had recognized Strickland from other demonstrations where he had tried to "incite or instigate others," and attempted to tell Strickland to leave Thursday night. That's when he saw Strickland reach under his shirt and pull out the weapon, the affidavit said. Officer Combs was standing about 20 to 25 yards from Strickland when he saw him sweep the crowd with the firearm, Molina wrote in the affidavit. Once Strickland was arrested, police found an extended clip in the handgun, a round in the chamber of the gun, plus two magazines of ammunition in a belt pouch on his left side, two magazines in his front right pants pocket and one magazine in his left front pants pocket, Molina said. He also had a pocket knife in his right front pants pocket. Strickland's attorney Chris Trotter countered that Strickland was a journalist with a concealed weapons license who "has every right to protect himself.'' He said he'd never heard of such a high bail sought for a defendant with no past criminal record. Trotter accused the district attorney's office of "making an example'' of his client in front of a courtroom with media and news cameras, and amid a climate of heightened sensitivity to guns. Molina said she took offense at the characterization. "Given that Mr. Strickland pulled a gun on a crowd of people in front of the steps of the Justice Center" while heavily armed, and has a past police report alleging "possibly race-based threats'' against an attendee at a Portland vigil for the victims of last month's nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, the heightened bail is justified, Molina responded. The Portland incident unfolded as gunfire erupted Thursday night during a Texas protest, killing five Dallas police officers and wounding seven others. Two civilians also sustained injuries. Multnomah County Circuit Judge Leslie G. Bottomly set Strickland's bail at $250,000, citing the seriousness of the allegations and to ensure that he returns to court. Strickland, who films videos for the website, "Laughing at Liberals,'' was captured on other people's videos grabbing a gun from his waistband and sweeping it across Southwest Third Avenue, yelling, "Get the hell back!'' as marchers approached. People in the crowd yelled, "He's got a gun!'' and several walked up to him, shouting at him to put the firearm away and leave. Strickland told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Thursday night that he was surrounded by "anarchists'' who were pushing him and telling him to leave. Strickland told court authorities he was videotaping the protest and that protesters went after him. He also said he's self-employed and that part of his income comes from filming controversial events. Last month, police were alerted to harassing text messages and phone calls that Strickland allegedly made to a person who had attended a candlelight vigil in Portland for the 49 victims of the June 12 nightclub shooting in Orlando. The vigil participant asked Strickland to leave, as he believed that Strickland was a "white nationalist anarchist.'' In the days that followed the vigil, the participant began receiving numerous threatening text messages and phone calls, which cited the vigil participant's race, Molina wrote in her motion for the bail increase. Strickland has not faced any criminal charges stemming from that incident. The two counts of unlawful use of a firearm added Friday accuse Strickland of intending to use a gun unlawfully against protesters and the undercover officer, and threatening the use of the firearm, according to court records. If he makes bail, he must not possess any weapons as he awaits trial, the judge ordered. His next court date is July 18. Strickland's lawyer called the state's allegations "conflated and confused.'' It's Strickland, Trotter said, who has been previously assaulted during his work. Strickland declined comment in court, often hiding behind an unidentified man who attempted to block other media from photographing Strickland. Portland Police Chief Mike Marshman said earlier Friday that Strickland's alleged actions during a peaceful protest were "fully unacceptable," and he praised his officers for taking Strickland into custody and allowing the march to continue without violence. Many in the area say they recognize Strickland and his pursuit of self-branded journalism through his YouTube channel "LaughingAtLiberals." According to the website, the channel has more than 21,000 subscribers. The channel claims its videos specialize in "exposing the lunacy of the left, and various other tidbits." The channel does not identify Strickland as its producer, but people have identified him through social media. Liela Forbes, the president of Portland State University's Associated Students, has been the subject of a LaughingAtLiberals video after a Students for Trump event and counterprotest. Forbes, who took part in the counterprotest, said she recognized Strickland at Thursday night's Don't Shoot PDX demonstration. "When I saw him separating from the audience I started telling folks around me who he was, and then someone shouted 'He's got a gun' and I turned and looked back and saw him waving it," she said. State records show Strickland registered in 2014 a corporation called the 2nd Amendment Action Center, but the nonprofit was dissolved by the state. The state dissolves corporations when it doesn't receive annual reports or fees, and doesn't notify the state of changes to its registered agents or offices, according to state law. Staff Writers Lizzy Acker, Tony Hernandez and Jim Ryan contributed to this report. -- Maxine Bernstein mbernstein@oregonian.com 503-221-8212 @maxoregonianby Just like humans, dogs also have their own fears and anxieties. And being able to recognize signs of dog anxiety is a skill that any pet owner should have. A dog’s anxieties may not necessarily be like yours or mine, however they cause physical reactions and stress just the same. Some common dog anxiety issues include the following: Noise anxiety – A dog is afraid and stressed out when he is exposed to unusual or loud noises. Common examples would be thunderstorms, garbage truck, fireworks, etc… Confinement anxiety – Your pet would get so stressed when he would feel confined or trapped. Separation anxiety – He gets so nervous and anxious when left all alone. Travel anxiety – Your car is actually like a den however, dogs are not used to moving dens. Thus, they would end up being nervous at something they are not sure of. When a dog gets anxious, they would also engage in displacement or repetitive behaviors in order to relieve the stress they are feeling. This is the same with us when we feel nervous we end up biting our nails, tug or hair or pace around. In this case, an anxious dog may groom, pace and more. And there are some behaviors that would lead to destroying our properties, may become aggressive or simply do things that are undesirable to us. Signs of Dog Anxiety Posture. Look at his posture. Dogs who are anxious often freeze with tensed muscles once they feel threatened or they would simply turn away from the said threat. Dogs who are severely anxious would tend to crouch with head and upper body close to the ground. Or an overly submissive dogs would roll over and expose their belly and urinate a bit. Other subtle signs of anxiety include: shaking, stretching, tucking his tail between his legs, lowering his head or lifting a paw. Check his eyes. Dogs who are nervous and worried may use aggression and will use his eyes – giving his source of stress a wide, unblinking stare, showing the white part of his eyes. Ear position. Generally, anxious dogs will tend to pin their ears back as a sign of fear or submission. If you see this sign along with the other signs then try to remove him from his anxiety source. Not eating. A dog who is flooded with frightening or unpleasant stimulus will tend to shut down and is unable to eat. Get to know him. The best way to see if your pet is having some anxiety issues is for you to get to know him better – know his character and personality. Know what are his dislikes and likes. If you are able to get this then it is rewarding to know that you can understand your pet’s language. Whether you are wondering why your pet is not ‘himself ‘ when you are out in the park or you are trying to warn kids about taking precautions in approaching a dog, being able to determine the signs of dog anxiety is a skill that any pet owner should have. Do you know how to read your pet’s body language? Can you understand what he is trying to say to you? If you happen to know more about this topic, then please do share your knowledge with us below.This article is over 1 year old Exclusive: Election-eve ban aims to cut contamination from coal and oil spills to help struggling reef The Queensland Labor government has banned the loading of coal ships at sea in the Great Barrier Reef marine park, following through on its 2015 election promise. The environment minister, Steven Miles, signed off on the ban on Saturday, in response to public concerns after the environment department last month flagged allowing so-called trans-shipping in the marine park under certain rules. The move came on the eve of Annastacia Palaszczuk calling a snap election, in which Labor’s pledge to restore bans on tree clearing will be a key point of difference in environmental policy to the Liberal National party opposition. It followed a joint federal and state government report card on the reef showing run-off pollution to the ailing reef fell in the last year, but which did not take into account increased run-off from a surge in deforestation under LNP deregulation. Australian Marine Conservation Society campaigner Imogen Zethoven lauded Miles “for his leadership” on the decision, which removed unwanted contamination from coal and oil spills for a reef “already under severe threat from climate change”. “I am absolutely thrilled the government have followed through on this crucial ban,” Zethoven told the Guardian. Great Barrier Reef: Queensland Labor may break election vow and allow ​coal ship loading Read more The report card showed coral in the reef’s southern stretch had recovered from an unprecedented second consecutive annual bleaching event triggered by underwater heatwaves. However, conservation groups queried the report’s claimed improvement in the overall health of the reef in the same year bleaching killed 29% of its coral. They said Australia was not moving fast to meet some 2018 run-off reduction targets, and was not recording a rising source of run-off pollution from land clearing, which has recently surged. Conservation groups strongly endorse the Labor government’s vow to restore clearing bans if it wins a looming state election, and have called on the LNP to prioritise the reef and drop the objections of its rural constituency. The ban on trans-shipping in the marine area will apply to all coal ships and big vessels, including those that transfer bulk materials, such as sugar or petroleum to other ships at sea. A consultation paper released last month proposed allowing trans-shipping off Hay Point off Mackay and three other “priority ports”, including Adani’s Abbot Point. The proposal had appeared at odds with Labor’s promise of a ban in 2015 after the UN’s peak scientific body raised concerns about a trans-shipping proposal off Hay Point. The consultation paper prompted thousands of responses against trans-shipping. Zethoven said Miles’ decision on Saturday was “a huge relief”. “I’d like to thank Minister Miles for his leadership and acting upon our real concerns today,” she said. “The risk of contaminating waters from accidental coal and oil shipment spills needed to be removed.” The reef report card on Friday said there was an overall reduction in sediment flowing to reef waters since 2008-09. Miles in a statement said “working farmers” had made the most effective land management practice changes to date. The government was also trialling “gully remediation techniques, bioreactors which remove dissolved inorganic nitrogen from water, and constructed wetlands”. “Thanks to lots of hard work on the ground, we’ve finally got pollution falling,” Miles said. But WWF spokesman Sean Hoobin said the report did not estimate how much sediment was created by the bulldozing of more than 600,000 hectares of forest in reef catchments in that time. This includes a recent surge since clearing controls were relaxed by the former LNP government, and which Labor tried unsuccessfully to overturn, vowing to do so in its next term of government. Run-off can harm coral’s ability to recover from heat-induced stress, or bleaching, and reducing it is the key bipartisan commitment in Australia. Hoobin called for future reports to included run-off impacts of forest clearing, which according to the 2017 Scientific Consensus Statement for the Great Barrier Reef “can result in a doubling of run-off”. “Only by measuring the increased sediment caused by destroying trees can we get an accurate picture of the pollution impacting the reef,” he said. Hoobin said climate change had also revealed a problem with the report, which focused on pollution and so had never collected data from the remote northern third of the reef. But in 2016, underwater heatwaves caused mass coral bleaching and mortality mainly in the reef’s northern stretch. Queensland tree clearing wipes out federal emissions gains Read more This gives rise to the “unfortunate situation” where the report found the reef’s overall condition improved from a “D to a C in the same year that coral bleaching killed 29% of its coral”, Hoobin said. Zethoven said the report showed Australia was not going “fast enough” to meet a UN World Heritage Committee call this year to accelerate its efforts to meet water quality targets in its Reef 2050 conservation plan. Australia will not meet its 2018 targets to cut “sediment, agricultural fertiliser and pesticide runoff”, she said. AMCS called on the LNP to “put politics aside and put the reef first” by backing Labor’s tougher tree clearing laws. “64,000 jobs depend on a healthy Great Barrier Reef,” she said.Democrats Know the Damage Obama Did RUSH: You know, folks, not only is Biden dumping on Hillary, Joe Biden’s out there saying (paraphrasing), “Well, you know, she never really knew where she was running. You gotta cut her some slack. She didn’t really know. Maybe wasn’t even really sure she wanted to. She did it ’cause she thought she had to to break the glass ceiling.” And they’re trying to cover for her loss. They’re starting to dump it on her now. This is only a matter of time. You can only blame the Russians for so long. Now they’re starting to blame Hillary, some people are. Not everybody yet, but some are. And Biden, as an agent of Obama, Biden’s purpose is to make sure that Obama remains the power figure in the Democrat Party going forward, not Hillary. In the normal scheme of things, Hillary would be the power figure. She ran for president, even though she lost, and Obama’s leaving the office. But he wants to be the power figure, he wants to be the face of the Democrat Party going forward. So all this stuff that is designed to blame it on Hillary for whatever reasons is designed literally to take her out as the face of the party. And there’s another story about this. I think this is the Clinton camp fighting back, because the headline, this is the Wall Street Journal: “Candidates for DNC Top Job: Obama Failed Us.” I love this, folks. The long knives are coming out. Now, let me give you the dirty little secret. Everybody in the Democrat Party knows this. They would never say it while Obama is still in office, and many wouldn’t say it even after he left. But there isn’t a Democrat in politics alive who does not know what the Obama presidency has meant for the Democrat Party around the country. They’ve lost 1,500 seats. The Democrats only have five states, ladies and gentlemen, where they control the governorship and the state legislature, only five! This election, this presidential election was supposed to cement Democrat rule for two generations, the Supreme Court, it was supposed to wipe out the Republican Party. This was going to be the end of it. Trump as the nominee losing was to be the end of the Republican Party. The Democrats were gonna have basically one-party rule for 50 years, and look at what actually has happened. It’s practically the reverse. The Democrats are not a national party. They have lost governorships, state legislatures, mayoralties. They have lost 1,500 seats since elections, 2010, ’12, ’14, and this one, it’s been devastating. And it’s all Obama. It’s the rejection of the Obama agenda, and it’s inarguable because he campaigned on it for Hillary. (imitating Obama) “If you want to protect my legacy, you’ll vote for her.” It was incredible what he did. He really put his agenda on the record because he believes he has the same kind of connection to the American people that Trump has. He thinks he’s universally loved and adored because of that approval rating, which is a lie or a misrepresentation. It’s mainly people that don’t have the guts to tell a pollster that they disapprove of the job because of the racial component, because whenever Obama’s policies are on the ballot, they get skunked! If he’s on ballot with them, not so bad. Well, this story in the Wall Street Journal, “The painful truth is that despite President Obama’s strong victories in 2008 and 2012, the Democratic Party has lost enormous political ground over the past eight years,” said Bernie Sanders at a rally for the socialist Muslim Keith Ellison, who wants to run the Democrat National Committee. Whatever the leadership of the Democrat Party’s been doing over the last many years has failed, and we need fundamental change. Mo Elleithee, a top DNC official under Debbie “Blabbermouth” Schultz, said of party officials, they don’t want a chair — get this, now. Mo Elleithee: we don’t need a chairman who’s gonna disrespect or critique Trump. We need somebody that recognizes things have not been going well for us, and we have to fix some things. The future is not about destroying Trump. The future is about rebuilding the Democrat Party. This is all coming out now. And some people, you know, as the race for power in the Democrat Party intensifies, this is where the honesty begins to surface. Obama destroyed this party, folks, literally has destroyed this party while elevating himself to whatever heights, if he’s really achieved them, I still don’t believe it, but I’ll go along with the flow for now. But the party has bitten the dust. It was happening right in front of our faces, and we didn’t have the confidence to believe it ’cause of the media. We believed the media was convincing 80% of the American people of the opposite, and it turned out that wasn’t true, either. Here is Kevin, Elkhart, Indiana. Welcome, sir. Great to have you on Open Line Friday. Hi. CALLER: Merry Christmas, Rush. RUSH: Same to you, sir. CALLER: The way the deranged liberals are treating President Trump and his family right now, do you think that will have a negative impact on the independent and swing voters? RUSH: Do you know how many electoral votes the independents got? CALLER: How many? RUSH: Zero. CALLER: Well, they say that the independents are key to winning elections. RUSH: Yeah, the independents mostly broke for Trump, and they broke for Romney. You know, this is one of these old saws, that he who wins the independents wins the White House. That’s a liberal Democrat trick, by the way. But here’s your question. Is all of this stuff, like is being done to Ivanka Trump, I think it is having a devastating effect on Democrats. We know this by virtue of the election in November. I don’t think that, Kevin, there’s any doubt that it is. These people have been under the same illusion that we have, that they are the majority and that everybody agrees with them or the vast majority agrees with them and that’s what has emboldened them to act so reprehensibly. I think the truth of the matter is that most of America when they hear about this — look, you’ve got some deranged and unhinged leftists that applaud this and a lot of them are on social media, but I’m telling you the bulk of the people when they hear about it, there’s no reason to disrespect Ivanka. In fact, if you get right down to it, Ivanka is for climate change. Ivanka is all for single-parent families, and so she’s as close to liberal as you’re gonna get in her dad’s inner circle. These people are just deranged. I’ve got confidence that most people in this country still have a decent sense of manners, propriety, morality, and I’m confident that most people, when they hear about this, are disgusted by it. The real question is how many people hear about it as it actually happened? CALLER: Right. RUSH: And the media is trying to sanitize this, Kevin. CALLER: Yeah. RUSH: The media is not describing this guy and his husband as the provocateurs that they are. They are not reporting that the guy and his husband were tweeting an hour in advance that Ivanka was getting ready to board the plane, let’s go harass her, they’re not reporting any of that. The media knows full well how damaging this is and so they’re trying to clean it up a bit. But, again, the media is not nearly as monolithically successful as we think, as evidenced by this last election. I think you can feel better today than you would have six months ago that incidents like this are not helpful to the Democrat cause and do indeed irritate average, ordinary voters. I don’t have any doubt about it. I have a renewed confidence on that, in fact. CALLER: That’s good to hear. RUSH: I really do. And I’m like you, I know why you’re asking, because it’s been part of the frustration — CALLER: Yeah. RUSH: — that attitudes like this go unpunished, that attitudes like this have gone rewarded, that actions like this have gone rewarded. We’ve been banging our heads against the wall, it doesn’t make any sense. How could the country have become such mass reprobate? And it hasn’t, is the bottom line. We still got problems, don’t misunderstand, but I think we still have a majority of the population paying attention to these kind of things, that this is not helping Democrats. It’s not helping them get independent voters down the road or whatever. Look, every caller gets an iPhone 7 or 7 Plus. It’s your turn. Which one would you like? CALLER: Oh, 7 Plus, please. RUSH: 7 Plus. And your carrier is — dadelut dadelut dadelut — CALLER: Sprint. RUSH: Sprint. Fine and dandy. So do you have a color preference? CALLER: Gold? RUSH: Gold. Got it, dude. So what you are gonna get, you’re gonna get a gold iPhone 7 Plus that has no SIM card in it. It is unlocked which means it will work on any carrier, including Sprint. Hang on. Mr. Snerdley will get your address, and if you want us to send this — I think FedEx is doing Saturday delivery tomorrow, so if you want it Saturday delivery, we will try to make that happen. It’s up to FedEx, but we’ll send it that way. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Yeah, look at this. The New York Times on the op-ed page, Stanley Greenberg, do you know who Stanley Greenberg is? He used run a polling unit with James Carville. May still run a polling unit with James Carville. He is the husband of the lovely and gracious Rosa DeLauro, who is a Democrat congresswoman from Connecticut. Anyway, he’s got a piece in the New York Times today: “Was Barack Obama Bad for Democrats?” They know, folks. Not only was Barack Obama bad for the Democrats, you know who else Barack Obama has done great damage to? That is the media. JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday! RUSH: Absolutely I mean that. Folks, the media has been damaged greatly in this entire campaign. Their polling data was all wrong, everything about them is all wrong, and because they were wedded to making sure that Barack Obama looked good, that was their objective. And the reason for that was twofold: ideology and race. And boy, would I love to delve into both of those in great detail, but I’m gonna do that at another time because there are lessons to be learned. People continually ask me, “Why does the media do what it does? Why are they so obviously self-destructive? Why are they so obviously predictable? Why is the media so obviously biased? Do they not see how other people see?” No, they don’t. But then again, they don’t care, folks. They really do think — well, as I said, I’m not gonna get into it. But they have done great damage their own credibility, their reputation, their legacy, just the Democrat Party has been
200 during that span. The guy who was recently an example of how you didn’t need elite power to be a great hitter is now an even greater hitter with legitimately elite power. And there’s nothing in his batted ball profile to suggest the power is going back to where it was a few years ago. Freeman’s 95.3 mph average exit velocity is second only to Miguel Cabrera this year, and he’s fifth on exit velocity on balls in the air, so he’s not just inflating that by hitting high-EV grounders that don’t do a lot of damage. As Tony noted in his first base write-up over the winter, Freeman’s 2016 batted ball profile suggested that his breakout wasn’t a fluke. Freddie Freeman is emerging as the best offensive first baseman in the NL. Like Votto, Freeman is an absolute line-drive machine, cranking them out on an annual basis. His traditional numbers were held down a bit by his pitcher-friendly home park, but his combination of fly balls, liners and walks is a lethal one. I would expect the fly-ball rate to regress downward a bit, while his new home park gives him a bit back in return. He’s not an extreme grounder-puller, so he gets away with relatively light grounder authority. He’s a hit-before-power guy with lots of power, squarely in the prime of his career. For years, Votto was the natural comparison for Freeman, as both were liner-first 1Bs who were elite hitters despite not putting up huge home run totals. But the current version of Freeman looks a lot more like 2010 Votto than the more recent versions, when he launched a career-high 37 home runs and put up a 172 wRC+. That’s what you can do when you add top-shelf power to a lot of walks and an average-ish strikeout rate. We shouldn’t expect Freeman to run a 172 wRC+ this year — that’s above even Trout’s career average — like Votto did in 2010, but the additional power Freeman has gained doesn’t look to be going away any time soon, and Freeman was a power spike away from being in the very top (non-Trout) tier of hitters in the game. With this kind of ability to do damage on contact, and enough strike zone control to keep his walks up and his strikeouts down, Freeman is putting himself in the conversation for best hitter in the National League. Once-again-healthy Bryce Harper is, of course, also mashing up in Washington, Votto is still around, and Paul Goldschmidt is still very good, so Freeman isn’t clearly the big bat in the NL anymore. But this new Freeman — the guy who does all the things the old Freeman did but now also hits twice as many homers — is in that conversation. And while the Braves still have some other issues with their roster before they’re ready to win, their belief in Freeman as a franchise player has certainly paid off.More than a decade after the demise of supersonic Concorde jets, the drive for easy and affordable access to space has inspired proposals for a new generation of superfast airliners able to streak across continents in minutes. Recent advances in propulsion and spacecraft design—featuring lower-cost, reusable boosters and capsules—are transforming the way commercial and military entities view orbital missions. Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic LLC, and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin LLC are among the private companies developing space vehicles designed to launch multiple times with scant refurbishment. Public references to Pentagon research, some classified, that describe how this new space technology could be used for spy planes, or to rapidly replace national-security satellites destroyed in a conflict, also have helped fuel talk of using similar concepts to revolutionize air travel. Now, despite daunting technical and cost challenges, some entrepreneurs are betting they can do it. By incorporating innovative engine designs, the benefits of 3-D printing and principles of using the same booster repeatedly, these entrepreneurs plan to transform commercial aircraft into so-called hypersonic space planes capable of carrying passengers. Powered by engines that burn hydrogen fuel with oxygen from the atmosphere, but without the piping and moving parts essential for today’s rockets, they would travel at least five times the speed of sound, or about 3,500 miles an hour, versus the 500 mph or so at which conventional jetliners typically cruise. Among those championing hypersonic travel for fare-paying passengers is Chris Milam, a Texas real-estate developer and technology investor who has pledged to invest as much as $20 million of his own funds over the next few years to design such a system. Along with Preston Carter, an expert formerly with the Pentagon’s advanced-research arm, Milam aims to develop a two-stage concept in which a rocket carries a hypersonic, winged vehicle and releases it to cruise at high altitude. The passenger-carrying craft would land at its destination like a conventional airliner. “There has been lots of discussion about high-speed flight since the end of Concorde, but little has been realized,” Milam says. “The reality is systems like this are expensive.” Preliminary designs call for the space plane to carry about 100 passengers and cruise at an altitude of 70,000 to 100,000 feet, with the goal of reaching any point on Earth within four hours. It would have a total takeoff weight of some 500,000 pounds, less than half of a fully loaded Airbus AIR, -0.19% A380 superjumbo. The upshot, proponents argue, would provide options far beyond those promised by most of today’s civilian supersonic projects, which remain focused on building business jets or mini-airliners that essentially are updated versions of the Concorde on steroids. Closely held Boom Technology Inc., for example, is developing a three-engine, 45-passenger jet intended to fly 1,500 miles an hour—or roughly twice the speed of sound. But if an entirely new category of airliner-like suborbital vehicles becomes reality in coming decades, they would fly many times faster and higher, traveling from London to New York in some 40 minutes—or 10 times as fast as current airline schedules. That is still less than the anticipated top speed of the Pentagon’s unmanned XS-1 experimental craft being developed to launch satellites (the Pentagon approved the design a month ago), or NASA’s earlier X-43 rocket ship demonstrator that hit a record-breaking velocity of more than 7,500 miles an hour without a pilot. For a hypersonic passenger jet to become a reality, some major hurdles need to be cleared. The biggest one is that engineers so far have failed to produce materials or devise other means to safely handle the intense heat when airliners reach such hypersonic speeds. Aerospace giants including Boeing Co. BA, -0.02% and Airbus SE have had limited success, while Lockheed Martin Corp LMT, -0.03% only recently decided to pursue a scaled-down test vehicle for military purposes. Skeptics such as consultant and entrepreneur Joel Sercel, a former government space researcher, consider that hurdle particularly challenging. “The problem of cooling any vehicle going that fast isn’t solvable,” he says. “These issues have been plowed before.” But others in the aerospace industry are more optimistic. Julie Van Kleeck, vice president at engine maker Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc., AJRD, -3.32% says 3-D printing allows production of engine parts and other structures with unique shapes that allow them to stay cooler. Longer term, she says, “it can probably be broadened” to commercial applications. Milam says there are other potential solutions to the overheating problem, some of which he is paying NASA experts to help develop. Entrepreneurs, he argues, “simply have never been willing to engineer” such fast airliners. Part of the impetus for the renewed focus on hypersonic options stems from an initially little-noticed report prepared by Air Force planners and outside experts in late 2016. Titled “Fast Space,” the document spells out various strategies for “ultra low-cost,” entirely reusable launchers eventually able to whisk cargo, soldiers and weapons around the globe in a matter of minutes rather than many hours. Citing a “confluence of government research and private sector innovation,” the report describes “a window of opportunity for the U.S. to shift its approach” to space access. Increasingly embraced by Air Force brass, parts of the document emphasize the long-term advantages of joining with industry to revamp commercial transportation. Milam says his Austin, Texas, startup, Supernature LLC, needs substantial federal funding or additional private investors to build a prototype. On the upside, he says, interest among potential backers has been “bolstered by the success of commercial space.” Get a daily roundup of the top reads in personal finance delivered to your inbox. Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Personal Finance Daily newsletter. Sign up here.MSNBC's Rachel Maddow had the highest ratings in the history of her program on Tuesday after hyping on Twitter she was in possession of "Trump's tax returns" about 90 minutes before the show aired. BREAKING: We've got Trump tax returns. Tonight, 9pm ET. MSNBC. (Seriously). — Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) March 14, 2017 ADVERTISEMENT When including the broadcast networks, Maddow had the third most-watched program in all of television on Tuesday, only behind the NBC hit "This is Us" and CBS's "NCIS: New Orleans." Fox's "Tucker Carlson Tonight" finished in sixth place overall on TV with 3.015 million viewers, while CNN delivered 1.1 million. The Form 1040 from 2005 showed that Trump reported $150 million in income and paid $38 million in federal taxes, for an effective tax rate of about 24 percent. The White House confirmed just before Maddow's program that the documents were authentic while slamming Maddow for releasing the documents and being "desperate for ratings." Trump is the first president in decades to not publicly release his tax returns. He has said he would not release them while he is being audited by the IRS, but the IRS has noted that an audit would not prevent anyone from releasing the information on their own. The hyped release on Maddow's show was widely mocked by media members on the left and right. Imagine Geraldo's regret when he opened Al Capone's vault to find Rachel Maddow's report on Trump's taxes. pic.twitter.com/RH3FRZtV66 — Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) March 15, 2017 Rachel Maddow announces she will release Donald Trump’s tax returns as a 10-episode Netflix series. — Sam Adams (@SamuelAAdams) March 15, 2017 if you have news, Rachel, please tell us. soon. I'm not young. — Bob Ley (@BobLeyESPN) March 15, 2017 .@VanJones68: If all we get tonight is that Trump paid $38M to America's government, that's a good night for Trump https://t.co/kvYlq8udPf — Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) March 15, 2017 MADDOW:...and here they are, the returns which we have so badly wanted for the reasons I explai-- [two small children burst onto the set] — Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) March 15, 2017 Rachel Maddow's next big TV spectacular will be Donald Trumps 1997 dental records. #TrumpTaxReturn — MARK SIMONE (@MarkSimoneNY) March 15, 2017 the NYT had a much bigger Trump tax scoop with much less annoying wind-up and irresponsible and unhelpful speculation — Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) March 15, 2017 Geraldo Rivera's infamous and highly promoted opening of the late Al Capone's empty vault live was watched by nearly 30 million people back in 1986.CRISPR Clinical Trial In a monumental development for the field of gene-editing, a pharmaceutical company has applied to run the first CRISPR clinical trial. CRISPR Therapeutics hopes to begin industry-sponsored, clinical human trials with a CRISPR therapy in 2018. Officially submitted to European regulatory authorities, the application outlines a test of CTX001, a CRISPR treatment designed for patients with sickle cell disease and β-thalassemia. In an interview with Wired, Samarth Kulkarni, CEO of CRISPR Therapeutics, said, “I think it’s a momentous occasion for us, but also for the field in general. Just three years ago we were talking about CRISPR-based treatments as sci-fi fantasy, but here we are.” CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is a relatively new gene-editing technique based off of a bacteria defense system. Generally speaking, it is a “programmable” system that targets and edits specific pieces of DNA. This technique can also be used as a diagnostic tool. At first, the concept of “gene-editing” could seem like part of a dystopian sci-fi nightmare in which we have an ethically murky amount of control over our biology. But as the technology has progressed and the incredible potential of gene-editing has been further explored, CRISPR is seen much more as an innovative tool that has the potential to save lives. This is apparent in this clinical trial, as both patients with sickle cell disease or β-thalassemia have specific genetic mutations that adversely affect a subunit of hemoglobin, which is integral to the red blood cell’s ability to carry oxygen to the body. The mutations can cause symptoms ranging from fatigue to jaundice, severe pain, and potentially death. Advancing Gene Editing The treatment that will be tested in these trials, CTX001, works by cutting out a gene that represses the production of fetal hemoglobin. This fetal form of hemoglobin gets switched off when a baby begins making the adult form, but since the adult form is mutated in patients with sickle cell disease or β-thalassemia, turning fetal hemoglobin back on could allow the red blood cells to carry oxygen efficiently again. According to data collected through cell and animal experiments, as presented by the company at the American Society of Hematology meeting in Atlanta, CTX001 is highly efficient in editing these genes and so far shows no signs of affecting other genes. However, Stuart Orkin, a hematologist-oncologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, said to Chemical & Engineering News, “It is important that they do this very carefully. Because if there is a mistake or bad effect [from CRISPR], it will have repercussions beyond a single patient.” Orkin is right. If there are any ill-effects of this treatment, not only could it be potentially disastrous for the patient receiving treatment, it could be a major detriment to the future of CRISPR-based therapies. If this CRISPR clinical trial goes badly in any way, not only could other companies be put off from starting other clinical trials, but governing organizations might not approve future testing. However, if this clinical trial proves to be a success, or at least does not produce any harmful complications, it could spell a long future of innovative and boundary-pushing CRISPR treatments. From antibiotic resistance to disease reversal and eradication, gene-editing could become a new staple in the medicine of tomorrow.* A guest-post by C. Pierce Salguero. TIME magazine’s 2 Feb 2014 cover (above, left) announces the arrival of the “Mindful Revolution.” The publication joins a flurry of recent examples confirming that a shift is taking place in the representation of meditation in American popular media. This is not the first time that meditation has been featured by TIME—a strikingly similar cover was published on 4 Aug 2003 (above, right). Compared to the 2014 cover, the earlier one is transitional. The photograph of a white, attractive, blonde woman in her thirties is a none-too-subtle argument that meditation should be considered part of the American mainstream. But, if we pay attention to the words, we see that this cover takes a defensive posture. We are told that meditation has links with “health,” “well-being,” and “science.” However, meditation’s close associations with the 70s counterculture and Asian Buddhist teachers still linger, and TIME must work to distance itself from such “New Age mumbo-jumbo.” The more recent cover demonstrates that today meditation is unquestionably mainstream. The need to explicitly distinguish it from “mumbo-jumbo” no longer exists: there is no doubt that it is a “science” that holds the revolutionary antidote to stress. There is no doubt that it can help us develop focus while multitasking (and thus keep the gears of twenty-first century American capitalism churning). The word “meditation,” with all of its New Age and Orientalist baggage, has been dropped in favor of “mindfulness,” the prevailing lingo among scientists and a growing cadre of meditation teachers. The half-lotus seated position in the 2003 cover—all too reminiscent of the Buddhist roots of the practice—has also been removed. One way to think about these magazine covers is as attempts to use text and visuals to “translate” an originally foreign practice, and to resituate it in the contemporary American context. As in all cases of translation, the creators of these covers made decisions about how to represent foreign knowledge, and they had at their disposal a spectrum of options for doing so. The two TIME covers both utilize highly domesticating representations of meditation, downplaying the foreignness of the practice and highlighting its compatibility with mainstream American life. What a difference a decade makes, however. While the 2003 cover’s dismissal of meditation’s Asian expressions as “mumbo-jumbo” belies a lingering anxiety over the domesticatability of meditation, the 2014 cover can collapse meditation into the totalizing rubric of science and into the no-less totalizing image of a white female sex object with nary a second thought. Contrast these domesticating approaches with the more foreignizing representations of meditation on the cover of the Jan 2014 issue of the Buddhist periodical Shambhala Sun, which may well have sat on a shelf alongside the second issue of TIME discussed above. The photo and name of the Vietnamese Buddhist leader Thich Nhat Hanh, the other foreign names and words strewn across the cover (Ram Dass, metta, Anyen Rinpoche), even the title of the magazine itself, all highlight the Asian origins of meditation. The magazine also makes no bones about associating meditation with Buddhism, with all of the connotations of exoticism and claims of tradition that that connection invokes for readers. Unlike TIME, which must speak to the mainstream, Shambhala Sun attracts a small but passionate minority by mobilizing foreignizing translations that appeal to an upper class readership in search of authenticity. The fact that there are these radically different approaches to the representation of Buddhist meditation—and, indeed, of Buddhism more generally—in contemporary America is not surprising. In fact, varying approaches to translation are the norm whenever aspects of foreign knowledge are introduced, absorbed, or appropriated into new cultures. These different approaches are the result of variances in the preferences, ideologies, and economic interests of different groups of translators and readers. The divergences in approaches between these magazine covers caught my eye because I have recently written a book on the very similar diversity in the representation of Buddhism during its introduction to China in the period AD 150-1000 (C. Pierce Salguero, Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014 [Amazon, TOC & Excerpt]). Due out this summer, this book looks at arguments being made in medieval China—as in the U.S. today—that Buddhism offered new ways of maintaining health and well-being. The book concentrates on the wide range of foreignizing and domesticating strategies employed by Chinese translators in trying to forward such arguments. Some translators preferred domesticating approaches that made Buddhism seem accessible and compatible with Chinese norms, while other preferred to highlight the foreign origin of Buddhist ideas in order to capitalize on their exoticism. These strategic approaches and the social dynamics behind them seem, in broad outlines, quite analogous to the range of efforts to place Buddhism in contemporary America. Many Translation Studies scholars speak of their work as being “descriptive” rather than “prescriptive.” In other words, they do not analyze translations to determine which approach is better or worse, but rather to understand the underlying reasons behind why such decisions are made in particular times and places. This is my position as well. The TIME cover has come under fire for its representation of meditation, but Translation Studies reminds us that all translations without exception are intimately entangled in an array of social, cultural, and ideological influences. The TIME cover is an easy target for criticism because it utilizes the extreme domesticating end of the spectrum. In doing so, it becomes a caricature of itself and lays bare its ideological commitments. But we should not forget to critically examine all kinds of representations of Buddhism in contemporary America, especially those that seem upon first glance to be the most “authentic.” ~ C. Pierce Salguero is an interdisciplinary humanities scholar interested in the role of Buddhism in the crosscultural exchange of medical ideas. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from Johns Hopkins University, and teaches Asian history, religion, and culture at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. The major theme in his scholarship is the interplay between the global transmission and local reception of Buddhist knowledge about health, disease, and the body. His website is www.piercesalguero.com.Welcome back to Top Shelf Prospects, the daily column that brings you the next crop of professional hockey players. Each day I will bring you a new player profile or topical article in the lead-up to the 2015 NHL Draft. Be sure to bookmark the site, follow me on Twitter, and spread the word for the site that will bring you analytical and critical profiles and scouting reports! Last Word On Sports is your new headquarters for everything “NHL Draft”! For a Complete Listing of all our 2016 Draft Articles Click here. The second line centre on the U.S. National Team Development Program U-18 squad, Trent Frederic comes from a very athletic family. His brother Grant plays for the Green Bay Gamblers of the USHL, older sister K.C. played volleyball at Oregon State University and older brother Gene played football at the University of Memphis. Trent Frederic had a strong season with the US NTDP putting up 20 goals and 20 assists for 40 points in 61 games. He added four goals and seven points in seven games as the US took home bronze at the 2016 World Under 18 Hockey Championship. He also took home a silver at the 2015 World Under 17 Hockey Challenge. Frederic is committed to play for the University of Wisconsin Badgers next year. Should he change his mind and elect to go the CHL route, his rights are owned by the Niagara Ice Dogs. Trent Frederic Scouting Report: 2016 NHL Draft #58 Centre/Left Wing — shoots Left Born Feb 11 1998 — St. Louis, MO Height 6’02” — Weight 201 lbs [188 cm / 91 kg] Trent Frederic shows good size, and plays a power forward style of game. He loves to get in on the fore check, pressuring defencemen, and throwing hits in the offensive zone. He creates turnovers, and generates offence by winning battles along the boards or working to establish space in front of the net. He protects the puck well down low, and is able to prolong possession and generate plays. Frederic has the ability to score goals, with a strong wrist shot and good release. He is also able to score in close, taking the puck to the net when he gets the opportunity, or throw fast hands that get rebounds and deflections. In terms of stick handling Frederic protects the puck well, but he is not one to make a lot of fancy one on one moves. His passing game also relies on making the simple play and does not typically look for the overly fancy or creative play. Frederic shows good hockey IQ, finding open space away from defenders, and making smart safe plays. Frederic is a good skater. He has the speed and acceleration necessary to be dangerous off the rush, or be the first one in on the fore check. He could use some work on his edge work and agility, as he can sometimes have issues navigating through traffic. Frederic shows good power in his stride, with the ability to fight through checks and the balance to win battles on the boards as well as establish position in front of the net. For a young player, Frederic is already developing a strong defensive game. He is tenacious on the back check and willing to use to use his size and grittiness in all three zones. Frederic is a smart player who contains well against the cycle game and provides good back pressure. He is good in the face-off circle, and does a good job cutting down passing and shooting lanes on the penalty kill. It is unclear if Frederic has the agility, creativity and vision to play centre at the next level. A move to left wing may be in his future, as he does a good job of playing a simple straight ahead game, and has the offensive ability to score goals. The question will be if his offence develops enough in the next few years to see him as a second line or third line player. Frederic’s game is similar to David Backes of the St. Louis Blues from a stylistic perspective, but this is not a talent comparison or analysis based on potential. The following is a compilation of Trent Frederic highlights, assembled from youtube. Check back tomorrow for the #59 prospect on our NHL Draft Board. Main Photo via USNTDPGURUGRAM: Two Muslim teachers accused of forcing the only two Hindu students of a government-run residential school in Mewat to offer namaz have been suspended, while another has been transferred.A three-member panel, led by the district education officer, has also been constituted by deputy commissioner Mani Ram Sharma to investigate the charges against the three teachers of Mewat Model School in Madhi village. The school has 207 students and is one among several run by the Mewat Development Agency (MDA) for local residents.Action was taken against the trio — a computer science teacher, an Urdu teacher, and a social science teacher who’s also the hostel warden — after parents of the Hindu students complained to Sharma on July 22. While one of the Hindu boys is a student of class VIII, the other studies in class IX. They are cousins.“Other students in the school have said the three teachers would ask the two Hindu students to abide by Islamic norms and offer namaz. The teachers also often asked the two Hindu students to convert to Islam,” teacher in-charge Naveen Shakti said.The computer science teacher and the Urdu teacher were suspended on July 28, while the hostel warden has been transferred to another school in Firozpur Zhirka, she added. The school, however, is left with only five teachers now.Shamim Ahmad, project officer of the Mewat Development Agency, said, “As per the complaints of the parents, action has been taken against the teachers. The truth will come out after the final probe report.”Other than district education officer Dinesh Shastri, the two others on the probe panel are tehsildar Basti Ram and Ahmad.“We have constituted a committee to carry out investigation independently, but we took action against the three teachers based on preliminary investigation. The matter is sensitive,” Sharma said.Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks to guests during a rally at Des Moines Area Community College Newton Campus on November 19, 2015 in Newton, Iowa. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is under fire after comments he made about 9/11 and New Jersey on Saturday. Trump was talking about his Muslim database plan while at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama when he made this comment: “I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down, and I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering,” Trump said. “So something’s going on, we gotta find out what it is, I do want surveillance.” He repeated that assertion on Sunday morning, claiming that he’d seen the scenes on television. Footage of Muslims in Middle Eastern countries cheering news of the attacks were broadcast on television. But there is no evidence of mass celebrations by Muslims in Jersey City, which sits right across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan. Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop says Trump is “plain wrong” and is politicizing an emotionally charged issue. “No one in Jersey City cheered on September 11th,” Fulop said in a statement. “Trump needs to understand that Jersey City will not be part of his hate campaign.” Dozens commented on Fulop’s Facebook page, including several who insist they did see Muslims celebrating in small numbers in Jersey City on 9/11, 1010 WINS’ Glenn Schuck reported. In the wake of the terror attacks on Paris, Trump has introduced a plan to require all Muslims in the United States to register in a national database. The plan has been sharply criticized and condemned by other GOP candidates, as well as Democratic party nominees. (TM and © Copyright 2015 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2015 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)<> on May 7, 2010 in Los Angeles, California. LOS ANGELES, CA - MAY 07: Musician Ace Frehley performs at the 6th Annual MusiCares MAP Fund Benefit Concert at Club Nokia on May 7, 2010 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images) NEW YORK (AP) — A suburban New York house owned by former KISS lead guitarist Ace Frehley has gone up in flames. The Journal News reports that firefighters were called to the stone house in the town of Yorktown Heights late Saturday morning. The home was heavily damaged, with flames burning through the roof. The newspaper says the musician had been fighting foreclosure on the property in Westchester County Court. The Red Cross helped a resident with emergency lodging. A neighbor says a caretaker had been living in the home. It was not clear where the 62-year-old founding member of the famed rock band was at the time of the blaze. He played with the group until 2002, during what was billed as their farewell tour. (Copyright 2013 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) You May Also Be Interested In These StoriesDemocrats across the nation continue to worry about the Virginia governor’s race as the polls remain tight between Republican Ed Gillespie and Democrat Ralph Northam. Democrats continue to lag behind Republicans in fundraising ahead of the 2018 midterm election. Democrats continue to worry about what a potential loss for Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam against Republican Ed Gillespie on November 7 could mean for the midterm election. Susan Swecker, the chairwoman of the Democratic party of Virginia, explained, “We’re Ground Zero. All eyes are on us. I can understand that because last year broke my heart.” Democrats amped up the Virginia governor’s race by bringing in former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden. Obama, at his first public campaign rally since leaving office, said that “democracy is at stake” in the Virginia gubernatorial race. Other democratic operatives believe that Democrats have a branding problem, one that makes it more difficult to rally middle-class and rural voters who flocked to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Ken Martin, the chairman of Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, charged, “From a branding perspective, we have a huge problem. It was the biggest challenge for us in the last year — and our biggest mistake was uniting around ‘Stop Trump.’” Defeat could prompt increased tension between the Democratic Party’s establishment and the progressive activists. Northam, who was backed by most of Virginia’s Democratic establishment, beat the Sen. Bernie Sanders-endorsed (I-VT) Rep. Tom Perriello, a race that many believed to mirror the 2016 Democratic presidential election’s primaries. Martin then suggested that Democrats’ overconfidence in the 2016 presidential election led to a stunning defeat. Martin said, “That sense of complacency led people to take their foot off the gas. We saw a dip in volunteers in the last few weeks, turnout dropped. That cannot ever happen again.” The Democratic National Committee (DNC) began dumping resources into Virginia since July, where it spent $1.5 million and hired almost 40 staff members, although that pales in comparison to the Republican National Committee (RNC). The DNC raised $4.4 million in August, although it has a debt of $4.1 million, which remains almost twice the size of its cash reserves. The RNC has $45.9 million in its coffers and no outstanding debt. The RNC spent $3 million in Virginia and hired 80 staff members in Virginia. RNC spokesman Michael Ahrens said, “The RNC never left Virginia and has had field staff on the ground since 2013.” Republican candidate Ed Gillespie recently took the lead in the polls against his Democratic competition, Ralph Northam. Gillespie’s rise in the polls coincides with his outreach to the Republican base. Gillespie barely eked out a victory over his populist primary opponent, Corey Stewart. Stewart is now running for Senate against incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA). Gillespie made sanctuary cities, one of Trump’s staple issues, one of his own. In the third and final debate between Gillespie and Northam, Gillespie attacked his Democrat opponent when Northam refused to say whether he would sign a bill that bans sanctuary cities in Virginia. Gillespie also said he will push for issues that will help rural voters to better rally Trump’s base amidst concerns that Republicans do not have the same enthusiasm towards Gillespie as they did towards Trump. Local Virginian Kim McFall said that she had not been impressed by Gillespie, although she will probably vote for Gillespie. McFall said, “He’s wishy-washy.” Gillespie stated that he seeks to improve rural Virginia’s economy with tax cuts and fewer regulations. Gillespie said, “We need industrial hemp, we need to have more outdoor recreation jobs, we need to complete the Clinch River State Park. All the detailed specifics I’ve put forward tonight I think are going to rally people here and they’re going to turn out to vote for me.” Cliff Cauthorne, a local Virginia town council member, said that Gillespie only has one good option to rally his rural town’s voters: a Trump rally “or two.”Starting THIS SUNDAY, June 1st, and running through June 7th, all Sinful Colors nail colors will be on sale again at Walgreens for $0.99 each (regularly $1.99). No coupon required. This will be an excellent time to pick up some of the Summer 2014 Collections polishes (more on that in a moment)! Do Sinful Colors nail polishes perform better than Chanel nail polishes? According to Consumer Reports' recent findings, the answer is YES. (I think many of us already believe this to be true, but it's nice to see that others agree!) Thanks so much to reader March for sharing that link with me today! 1444 Peppered Amazon Two coats, no top coat Peppered Amazon is a gorgeous Shamrock green with tons of silver micro-shimmer (the shimmer looks a bit like glass flecks in person). This shade is similar to the permanent shade Mint Apple but definitely not a dupe. Mint Apple is a lighter, more mint-colored green and the shimmer in Mint Apple is gold, not silver. Peppered Amazon was almost a one-coater with excellent opacity after just one coat (but of course I always apply two). The formula was a tiny bit thick, but not difficult to work with. Dry time was average for both coats. 1443 Mint Tropics Three coats, no top coat I feel like we've seen this color (or similar colors) a few times from Sinful over the years, but it's still a color I tend to gravitate toward. Unfortunately, I've encountered way better formulas when it comes to mint greens--this one was super finicky. Even after three coats there were still some obvious streaks, and this polish did not want to level (which you can clearly see above). Super streaky + no self-leveling is bad enough, but this one also took a long time to dry. I'm afraid I would give this shade a pass. 1433 Blue La La Two coats, no top coat Alright, alright...I caved. I said I wasn't going to buy any more blues from Sinful for a while (I have an ungodly amount already) but so many of you have been loving this one that I decided to pick it up to see if it wowed me when I got it on my nails. And yes, it wowed me. It's beautiful, just as you said it would be. It's lighter and more purple-leaning than Essie Butler Please and Sally Hansen Pacific Blue, but it is nowhere near as purple as OPI You're Such a Budapest. It's kind of right on the line between blue and periwinkle. And in case you missed my previous post, Blue La La, you kind of "need" it....I caved. I said I wasn't going to buy any more blues from Sinful for a while (I have an ungodly amount already) but so many of you have been loving this one that I decided to pick it up to see if it wowed me when I got it on my nails. And yes, it wowed me. It's beautiful, just as you said it would be. It's lighter and more purple-leaning than Essieand Sally Hansen, but it is nowhere near as purple as OPI. It's kind ofbetween blue and periwinkle. And in case you missed my previous post, this is NOT a dupe for Sinful Colors Sail La Vie/Hip to be Square/Alfresco. I required two coats for great opacity and the only issue I had was with leveling (which you can see above). But of course you can fix that with a good top coat. If you don't already have, you kind of "need" it. 1432 Embers Only Two coats + top coat Ruby Glisten (also part of the Summer 2014 Collections--you can Ruby Glisten is a red jelly with tiny red hex glitters, Embers Only has a lot more going with it. The base color is a pinkish-red jelly and there are small metallic gold hex glitters in this one, as well as tiny iridescent flakes. My sw
e-governance services firm Vakrangee; Vijay Shekhar Sharma (No. 99, USD 1.47 billion) of fast-rising mobile wallet Paytm; and Rana Kapoor (No. 100, USD 1.46 billion) of Yes Bank, India’s fifth-largest bank in the private sector," Forbes said. Veteran investor Radhakishan Damani, boosted by the listing of his supermarket chain D-Mart in March, returned to the list at No. 12 with a net worth of USD 9.3 billion. Other returnees are Future Group’s Kishore Biyani (No. 55, USD 2.75 billion) and siblings Murli Dhar and Bimal Gyanchandani (No. 75, USD 1.96 billion). The top 10 richest in India are: 1) Mukesh Ambani; USUSD 38 billion 2) Azim Premji; USD 19 billion 3) Hinduja brothers; USD 18.4 billion 4) Lakshmi Mittal; USD 16.5 billion 5) Pallonji Mistry; USD 16 billion 6) Godrej family; USD 14.2 billion 7) Shiv Nadar; USD 13.6 billion 8) Kumar Birla; USD 12.6 billion 9) Dilip Shanghvi; USD 12.1 billion 10) Gautam Adani; USD 11 billion The complete list is available at www.forbes.com/india and www.forbesindia.com. The list can also be found in the October issue of Forbes Asia and in the Forbes India issue, which will be available on newsstands from November 3."Another skeleton with a perfect skull!” I shouted to the team, all of whom were face down on the quarry floor exposing other skeletons. In the years I had spent as a paleontologist, never had I seen anything like this. Our team of fossil hunters had been prospecting for only 15 days in the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia, but already we had uncovered a veritable graveyard of intact fossils. Over the next few weeks we would apply chisel, pickax and bulldozer to the site, digging up more than a dozen examples of an ostrichlike dinosaur that was to become one of the most well known in the dinosaur world. But the story would soon grow far richer than a simple body count of fossil bones, as intact and well preserved as they might be. This group of individuals would reveal how these dinosaurs interacted with one another, how their society was built, as well as the circumstances surrounding their gruesome and untimely deaths. We were just beginning to uncover the first clues of this 90-million-year-old murder mystery. Little did I know that what we were about to learn would end up making this the richest site for a single dinosaur species I had ever encountered. The Lure of the Gobi Americans inevitably associate dinosaur discovery in the Gobi with Roy Chapman Andrews, the swashbuckling expedition leader from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In the 1920s Andrews ventured into the desert regions of Outer Mongolia and returned to great fanfare with the first known dinosaur eggs and the sickle-clawed wonder Velociraptor. Andrews was not the only explorer combing the desert, however. At around the same time, Swedish explorer Sven Hedin was recovering unprecedented fossils from the southern half of the Gobi in Inner Mongolia, a region that is now part of China. In the intervening years, scientists searching near Hedin’s sites have uncovered dinosaur egg nests with brooding parents and sickle-clawed raptors that rival the best discoveries in Outer Mongolia. Yet scholars and public attention have favored Outer Mongolia; as a result, scores of international fossil expeditions have crisscrossed the area since it opened to the West more than a decade ago. In contrast, Inner Mongolia has remained relatively untouched. I was a 27-year-old graduate student in geology in the middle of an around-the-world tour when I first visited Inner Mongolia in 1984—the first year that China allowed foreign tourists to travel in the country without an escort. After I arrived in the capital city of Hohhot by coal-powered steam locomotive, I visited the museum in the center of what was then a one-story town. Outside, dinosaur-age rock stretched for hundreds of kilometers west, flanking the fabled Silk Road linking the Mongolian steppe with the heart of Central Asia. When I returned to Beijing, I met with Zhao Xijin, a professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology and one of China’s most accomplished fossil hunters, who had at the time already been responsible for discovering more than a dozen new species. We discussed exploring the area together at some time in the future. Some 16 years later the timing and circumstances finally aligned. In 2000 I returned to Hohhot with Zhao to arrange the logistics of a major dig in the area. We stepped from the train onto the platform in Hohhot and were greeted by Tan Lin, a geologist and director of the Long Hao Institute for Stratigraphic Paleontology in Hohhot. Looking much younger that his 60 years, Tan energetically laid out the details of vehicles and supplies needed for a Gobi expedition the following spring. Fortunately, we would have no problem finding suitable expedition vehicles in Hohhot. The one-story town I knew had been replaced by a bustling metropolis with wide boulevards lined with flashing neon signs. Tan suggested we revisit sites made famous by the fossil discoveries of Hedin and later expeditions. Certainly more fossils were there to be discovered. But I had other ideas. “Anywhere no one has been” was my refrain. Eventually the pull of the unknown won the day, and we decided to set out on the Silk Road in the spring, heading to the remote western reaches of the Gobi. The First Clues By mid-April 2001 our 16-person crew composed of American, French, Chinese and Mongolian fossil hunters had gathered in Hohhot. We divided ourselves among four field vehicles and a truck packed with tons of supplies for the 700-kilometer trip along the banks of the Huang He (Yellow River) and out into the desert. We set up our first base camp not far from the tiny outpost of Suhongtu. The Gobi wind battered our iron-framed Chinese army tents, spraying a coat of silt and dust on everything inside. Hair soon stood erect as if gelled. Showers were out of the question, given the shortage of water and profound chill. Every day we set out to hunt for fossils. Team members would walk for miles over the uneven terrain, searching for interesting finds that might be peeking out of the rock. With fossil hunting, it’s good to be lucky, but it’s better to be blessed with the “nose”—a natural talent for sniffing out fossils. Montana State University paleontologist Dave Varricchio spotted the first major find—a three-toed footprint on the underside of a low ledge of rock. That footprint, notable for its short side toes, was small for a dinosaur, though bigger than his hand. We deduced that it was likely made by a large ornithomimid, or “bird mimic.” Soon we would have no doubt about what made the print. The area surrounding the camp was Late Cretaceous in age—about 90 million years old—according to a Chinese geology map printed some 25 years earlier. Besides the footprint, our finds were limited to bones of small dinosaurs found before in the Gobi, and so we moved into a broad valley nearby where fossils were more plentiful. Soon team members were poking at several finds, including what was likely a primitive duckbill skull poking out of the surface. Another fossil appeared to belong to a small sauropod, the four-legged plant eaters that often grow to enormous size. The most interesting site was a vertical wall of layered red and blue rock that was peppered with the leg bones of several relatively small dinosaurs. This was not a natural wall. Hewn by chisel and pick, it was the back wall of a fossil quarry. Someone had been there before us. Tan explained that this site was originally found in 1978 during a mapping survey by a geologist and former classmate of his. “Look here,” he said, pointing to a small bone symbol on the geology map. Using this map, Tan had guided a joint Chinese-Japanese-Mongolian expedition to this site four years earlier in 1997. Running short of time and materials, they had collected multiple skeletons but stopped before the excavation was complete. In my backpack was a paper from 1999 on a new ornithomimid from the Gobi by a young Japanese paleontologist, Yoshitsugu Kobayashi, who at the time was a graduate student at Southern Methodist University. I now realized that the paper was based on finds from the quarry before me. Kobayashi and his colleagues had noted the presence of many fossils as well as their exquisite preservation; some fossils even included stomach stones—pebbles that ancient sauropods (and modern-day alligators, seals and birds) ingest to help grind food and aid digestion. In 2003 Kobayashi would name this dinosaur Sinornithomimus dongi. Yet mysteries remained: Why were so many fossils preserved in one small area? Did they all die at the same time or over millennia? And if they did all perish at once, how? The quarry was located at the base of a small, rocky hill in a desolate windswept region of the Gobi. The horizon had turned gray brown—an early warning of an approaching dust storm. In the desert, these warnings are best measured in minutes, not hours. We raced for the field vehicles, hoping to dash back to camp while we could still navigate by the tracks we left on the way there. Within minutes the wind began to sling sheets of sand, dulling the paint on the lower reaches of our trucks. The pore-filling dust and bone-chilling cold was offset at day’s end by the camp cook, who regularly served seven-course meals for dinner—always a different seven from the night before. Fortunately, the camp was located not far from an army outpost, giving us access to fresh vegetables. Chinese cuisine, to my palate, is the best the world over. Equally renowned is Chinese beer, which we downed by the quart that season in celebration of our luck racking up noteworthy finds. The Death Trap We returned to that valley every day for the next few weeks, many of us devoted to unraveling the mystery of the ornithomimid quarry. One skeleton led to another, as our tools pushed the back wall of the quarry deeper into the hill. Others studied and sampled the cliff face, compiling a detailed log of the rocks entombing the graveyard. When multiple individuals of a single species are preserved in one place, a paleontologist must ask whether that assemblage is natural—that is, was it a family group or herd congregating, as it might on a given day, only to be caught dead in its tracks? Most bone accumulations of a single species are not so interesting. Rather they are composed of unrelated individuals that, over some unknown length of time, died near a water hole or were washed in by a flood. If we quickly bagged the remaining skeletons, the most interesting part of the story—how all these dinosaurs died—would be lost forever. Clues to the cause, circumstances and timing of death do not reside solely in the bones themselves but also in the position of skeletons, in the presence of tooth marks or splintered bone, and in the character of the sediment that is laid down before, during and after death. A crime scene, not a pa­leontologist’s trophy trove, is how we must view such a quarry. We soon came to believe that these animals all met their fate at the same time. The skeletons were not randomly distributed—all the bones seemed to point in the same direction. That could have been the result of a flood or a river carrying multiple sets of bones to the same place, but we could not find any evidence that the bones were moved in this way. All the skeletons were intact. In addition, the thin-layered red and blue rock of the cliff face implied that the area used to consist of fine-grained mud and silt. We found spots in the infilled mud cracks, suggesting that the area went through wet and dry periods. Tiny, flat shells of freshwater creatures called conchostracans blanketed some of the skeletons, the flotsam from an expanding lake. Near the skeletons the mud was nearly pure, lacking the worm burrows and roots of a soil that supported plant life. All in all, the rock surrounding the skeletons suggested the ebb and flow of an ancient lake—an oasis in an otherwise dry area. A collection of fossils such as this was unheard of—it was (and remains to this day) the only known Pompeii-like sampling of a dinosaur species. As the quarrying operation continued, we spent many hours musing on death scenarios. Perhaps these dinosaurs perished from a nearby volcano or succumbed to a flash flood? “Perhaps they just got stuck in the mud?” team member Gabrielle Lyon suggested, while outlining with a jeweler’s needle the clenched digits of the foot of a fallen dinosaur. To me, the idea of a mud trap seemed a bit far-fetched. Though an experienced excavator, Lyon was an educator, not a paleontologist or geologist. Modern animals such as cows sometimes die near water holes—the large beasts get mired up to their kneecaps in mud and ultimately die of thirst, exposure and starvation. Yet it is extremely rare for entire herds to die this way (although sometimes it does happen to wild horses, noted Varricchio, the expedition’s expert on taphonomy—the science of death and dying). As we dug, more clues began to accumulate. Dave spotted ­V-shaped patterns on the cliff face near the horizon preserving the skeletons. The layers of mud were deformed downward, as if pulled by the passage of a thin object such as the claw on a dinosaur’s toe. Was this evidence of a lethal dance in mud? Unfortunately, we were not going to be able to dig for much longer. Our ornithomimid quarry was angling downward into the hill, getting more difficult to extract by the day. A complete excavation using the tools we had available would take months, if not years. Fortunately, we were soon to learn that in China, anything is possible. On our day off we traveled out to the Chinese army outpost, where we were challenged to a game of basketball by the recruits. Professors Tan and Zhao watched from the sidelines, noticing the impressive heavy equipment parked nearby. Having befriended the soldiers during the basketball game, we took our case to officials at the base that evening, helped along with mind-numbing rounds of baijiu, a spirit that euphemistically translates to “white wine,” even though it is served by the shot. A few days later a giant bulldozer arrived at the site. As the blade trimmed off the top of the hill a few centimeters at a time, we followed in its wake, searching for fossils above the graveyard. “Stop!” shouted Jeff Wilson, who was hunched over a block tipped up by the monstrous blade. A paleontologist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Wilson had spotted some jaws and teeth. We picked through the tailings to each side of the last pass until we found all the missing pieces. Locked in that concretion just one human body length above the graveyard was a 45-centimeter skull of an unknown predator. By the fourth day at the quarry, the bulldozer had removed the entire hill, its blade just above the graveyard. We resumed excavation until we unearthed the last of 13 individuals. Skeletons usually collapse on a flat surface to be buried in mere centimeters of sediment, but as we chipped the mudstone from the main horizon containing the skeletons, the hind legs of several dinosaurs plunged deep into the mud. Some of the otherwise perfectly preserved skeletons were missing hipbones. These individuals looked as if they were trapped in mud, only to suffer the attention of ancient scavengers. It was just what we would expect if a herd of dinosaurs on the move all became stuck on the same muddy shore. Lyon’s hypothesis, drawn from the panic she must have sensed in the bones, was emerging as the most likely death scenario. In Life and Death Back at the University of Chicago, members of my research team cleaned the skeletons one by one under the microscope, revealing a remarkable level of preservation. Not only were stomach stones preserved, but they seemed to retain the shape of the gizzard where they once pulverized plants. We also discovered a thin film of black carbon coating either side of the gizzard. The black material was the remains of the dinosaurs’ last meal. Additional evidence helped to confirm one of our hunches from the excavation. In the desert we had noticed that all the skeletons in the quarry were immature. At a field site the best way to measure a dinosaur’s age is to examine the individual bones that constitute the backbone. Every vertebrae is made of a spool-shaped bone (the centrum) below and a curved structure (the neural arch) above. If these two parts are fully fused, the backbone is no longer growing, and the dinosaur is mature. All skeletons collected at Suhongtu had vertebrae preserved as two parts. Yet this feature provided only a crude estimate of the dinosaurs’ ages. Back at Chicago, we sliced bones into thin sections to count their annual growth rings as you would a tree. We learned that the skeletons ranged from one to seven years of age, with most ranging between one and two years old. This pattern told us two things. First, it meant that Sinornithomimus must have required about 10 years to reach maturity. And second, we realized that the herd at Suhongtu was a band of adolescents—dinosaur teenagers cruising in a pack. With this realization we could put together the full history of the dinosaurs—not just the way they died, but the way they lived as well. Paleontologists have speculated about the social habits of half-grown dinosaurs, but the herd at Suhongtu provides the best evidence to date. Because maturation took about a decade in Sinornithomimus, juveniles had plenty of opportunities to congregate. Adults were busy with a range of activities during the breeding season—courtship, nest building, nest defense, brooding, and nurturing of hatchlings. Juveniles seem to have wandered about, fending for themselves as they went. This particular group had met an untimely end. To a passing herd, the mud trap would have looked like many other areas along the lake’s edge—mud that might record a footprint rather than swallow a foot. A central pair of skeletons most dramatically captures the 90-million-year-old tragedy. These two animals lay hopelessly trapped, their bodies collapsed sideways on the surface, one on top of the other, their feet deeply anchored in mud. Their skeletons were exceptionally complete except for their hipbones, which must have been pulled off by hungry scavengers. An isolated hipbone helped to confirm that scenario, the central portion of its blade crushed under the weight of an intruder’s toe. Then the water level rose, at least briefly, gently sealing in mud the graveyard and its tale of woe.Karst topography One of the great things about Crete is that it is full of holes. The island is predominately limestone which is easily dissolved by slightly acidified water to produce rocks that look like this, a feature known to geologists as karst. Some of these holes are rather big and I thought we’d investigate one of them today. So, torches in hand, let us wander up into the Thriptis mountains and explore the Cave of the Two-toned Goat. Its correct name is Vreikos Cave but whenever I come up here this goat is always standing sentinel: I’m not sure if it’s a white goat that has stuck his head in a tar pit or a black goat that has sat in a tub of ice-cream but he’s certainly distinctive. March flowers of the sub-montane zone (see text) As we walk along the rough track to the cave I’ll just point out some of the wild flowers to you as we go. This pretty little mauve one is an iris (Iris unguicularis) and the pale yellow job with the disk shaped seeds is Buckler Mustard (Biscutella didyna). The prickly shrubs currently tearing our ankles to shreds is Greek Spiny Spurge (Euphorbia acanthothamnos). Oh look, a lizard just disappeared under that one. The other shrub littering the mountainside is Milkwort (Polygala verulosa). Notice how both shrubs are compact and mat forming with small leaves. You either have to be tough to survive the conditions up here all year round or make your appearance briefly to flower and set seed before snuggling up underground again which is what this orchid (Orchis anatolica) is doing. Vreikos cave entrance Here’s the entrance to the cave and another sentinel: a fig tree. What with two-toned goats slyly eyeing us from the rocks above and the twisted fingers of the fig beckoning us from below it feels as if we’re entering into a world of myths and legends. Naturalists in The Underworld, I wonder if we’ll meet Orpheus down there? Best to go down backwards I think. This is a swallow hole or sink hole, formed when a cavity beneath the surface can no longer support the weight of the ground above it. Just like the ones we see on TV swallowing cars and houses occasionally. Heart-shaped Valerian, Valeriana asarifolia Now here’s an interesting plant growing on the wall. It’s H Malachite column Silver stalagmite Hanaki's Dwarf Pipistrelle which was only discovered here in 2004 having previously thought to be endemic to Libya. I’m afraid all I saw was a ball of fur with wings that almost collided with my face. (Being English I, of course, apologised to it immediately.) Here we are at the next level. Wow, silvery grey stalagmites. We could really do with a mineralogist down here with us. My guess would be a lead-zinc ore but that really is only a guess. I’d estimate that we are now approaching a depth of one hundred feet below the surface and though the cave goes deeper I think we’d be unwise to progress any further without a back-up team. What we’ve seen so far has been truly awe inspiring (or even ore inspiring) and the feeling of other-wordly isolation is beyond words. Being in a commercialised cave with dozens of other tourists just doesn’t hold a candle to being down here alone with a torch and the echoing drip, drip, drip of work in progress. Let’s go and explore the other tunnel. The second cavern Daylight. We’re back at the fig tree. It looks as if we’ll have to bend double to go down here so mind your head. It’s nowhere near as steep after the first bit and the floor flattens out but it’s littered with rocks so be careful not to turn an ankle. No more bats, I suspect that they’re further in. As far as I can tell there is just the one chamber here but look at those mighty columns, I doubt if two of us could get our arms around this one. The reddish hue, I believe, denotes the presence of iron ores. (Note – the colours in the photographs are all natural and haven’t been enhanced. They were taken with a perfectly standard Fujifilm digital camera with flash and I’ve merely tweaked the exposure and contrast to make them stand out from the background. SD). Griffon Vulture, Gyps fulvus So here we are, back in the world of the living again. The skies are darkening with clouds from the south so the temperature difference is not noticeable. I expect that in the height of summer it feels quite chilly when you emerge. Look up there above the crags – a Griffon Vulture. Very often, when you see these huge birds hanging in the air, you see their “fingers” outstretched and turned up. They do this to reduce the vortices of air that build up at the tips of their wings (their wingspans are about two and a half metres or eight feet) and reduce drag. At present Jumbo Jets and Dreamliners don’t use this neat trick but I understand that the military are looking into it. I suppose they have a bigger budget than anybody else for investigating such things and it’s pleasing to know that even the military cloud has some sort of silver lining even if it’s just a touch of avian research. Makry Gialos from Vreikos Cave Now if you’re still feeling energetic we can walk from here and right down through the Pefki Gorge to the seaside town of Makry Gialos. Don’t let me stop you but personally I’m all in favour of a spot of lunch and a leisurely drive home. I still can’t get those stalactites and stalagmites out of my mind. What a magnificent planet we live on. Naturalists Group If you fancy a bit of Cretan caving then feel free to contact me via theon facebook. Anyone’s welcome to join and discuss the things we’ve seen. By the way, I’ve added a few “share” buttons to the bottom of the blog so feel free to pass it around. The more the merrier. Until next week then – good hunting. *********************************************************************************** Special thanks this week to Julia Jones et al at Flowers of Crete Special thanks this week to Julia Jones et al atto whom I delegated all of the flora identification. LINKS:Rather than propping up failing industries, what if government instead provided incentives like tax breaks for expanding firms to locate in regional centres? This would help policymakers avoid a retreat to protectionism while also going some of the way to addressing rising inequality in Australia. So far in response to failing industries, policymakers have often tried to prop those industries up. They have also spent some money on retraining, provided some small subsidies for relocation, and tried to make education of young people a little more suited to the globalised economy. In short, that’s not enough. It has led to a bigger economic pie — to be sure. But is has also led to rising inequality. Those with with in-demand skills have seen rising wages. Some of those without such skills have adapted or retrained. But many have never recovered from the advent of globalisation. And it has led to the political arrival of Brexit, Trump and Le Pen. So far. A retreat to old-style protectionism and industry policy would be a disaster. It would be the economic equivalent of stopping a speeding freight train dead in its tracks. Yet the current approach is not working, and the anti-globalist forces it fuels might be just as bad. Protect my job Twelve years ago, Thomas Friedman’s worldwide best seller The World is Flat was published. Friedman emphasised the inevitability of globalisation, while acknowledging that there were winners and losers. Yet he argued that the best way to combat the downsides of globalisation was to make the workforce more adaptable though reskilling, more mobile through portability of healthcare and retirement benefits, and more prepared though an emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math disciplines. That same year Friedman’s book came out, he co-taught a freshman class at Harvard College with economist and university President Larry Summers, and philosopher Michael Sandel. We were PhD students then and the other day we dug out the final exam. The first question on was: “From an economic point of view, the case for open immigration is as strong as the case for free trade and capital flows.” Do you agree or disagree? Whether you agree or disagree, would you say that non-economic considerations strengthen or weaken the case for open immigration, free trade, and capital flows? Twelve years, it turns out, is a long time in globalisation. Today, in the age of Trump, we live in a world of walls, rising inequality, and protectionism. Forget open immigration, free trade is very much up for grabs. Last month, President Trump issued an executive order titled Buy American and Hire American, Bill Shorten has been quoted saying “We will buy Australian, build Australian, make in Australia and employ Australians”. The Coalition government — when not closing our borders to foreign talent — is busy impersonating Willie Sutton and taxing banks “because that’s where the money is”. To be fair, economists shoulder some of the blame for this anti-globalisation turn. The mantra has always been that free trade maximises the size of the economic pie, allowing society to slice it up in a way that makes everyone better off. If only it were that easy. In practice, jobs disappear. Sometimes whole industries, and towns. Re-slicing the pie through cash handouts are problematic. It requires vast amounts of money, doesn’t solve the geographic problems of dying towns, and most importantly it doesn’t provide people with the dignity and sense of purpose that a job does. Similarly, retraining and reskilling a 55 year-old steel worker to prepare for the gig economy is, well, really hard. But there is an alternative. A focus on towns not industries Rather than prop-up failing industries, we should provide incentives, like tax breaks, for expanding firms to locate in regional centres. These could involve lower corporate tax rates, abolishing payroll tax, and immediate deductibility of capital investment. Sometimes it might involve loan guarantees. The money should go to towns instead because they are a point of coordination in a way that industries are not. If a good size business locates in a town then people locate there. Those paychecks drive other local jobs, which drive more people. This, in turn drives more local businesses, local vibrancy, and so on. Towns can be the centrepiece of a virtuous circle of coordination. Industries are important but they are, well, just industries. At one level, policymakers can’t get away from the “towns problem”. The workers in rural and regional areas who are affected by globalisation aren’t easily moved for numerous reasons, yet not every town can be saved. Figuring out which ones can, through the infusion of new commercial activity, is the key to providing hope for the victims of globalisation. This approach is not entirely without precedent. China, has made development of new cities a centrepiece of its economic development planning, with numerous very large cities built and infrastructure fully established before residents ever arrive. For instance, the Chinese government recently announced the Xiongan New Area, a city three times the city of New York, to be built near Beijing. Now, China does this because of population growth, urbanisation pressures, and environmental concerns. Yet it demonstrates the merits, and feasibility, of making the town the centre of policy. Government should be focusing on what it takes to make a town succeed, rather than what it takes to make an industry survive a little longer. Adding to these imperatives, Australia is beset by a housing affordability crisis driven by absurd tax breaks like negative gearing that artificially fuel demand, but also by serious supply constraints. Barnaby Joyce’s admonition to move out of capital cities would be made much more compelling by the influx of new businesses and new capital to regional towns. A “picking towns” policy could make housing more affordable across the board. The side effects of globalisation that have led to our current populist politics will not be successfully addressed by old-style industry policy. But focusing on the aggregate benefits of globalisation is also not working. We need to redistribute those benefits by focusing on regions that can succeed, and breathing new economic life into them.36 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Reddit Tumblr Digg Linkedin Stumbleupon Mail Print Write-up by Josh Wiley posted to CerebralIndustrialComplex.com Modern society is living through a revolution of information sharing. Current technology has allowed for an expansion of human intellect and knowledge unparalleled in history, in a league separate from even the technological prowess of the Gutenberg press. That being said, humanity becoming privy to new scientific breakthroughs has proliferated the idea that such unprecedented achievements in the realms of math and science make us virtually infallible to error or manipulation of data. A brief examination of the history of corruption in America’s top criminal analysis laboratories, however, calls this notion into question. Whereas last week’s article on the replacement of State-run enforcement in favor of citizen-implemented structures delved into the sociological and moral aspects of law enforcement by fiat, today’s will primarily explore a number of important news stories which you’ve probably never heard of involving rampant corruption in State-run crime labs in an attempt to quell the reader’s incredulity on the subject of government law enforcement inefficiency. The citation of such stories throughout this article are recorded for posterity as well as the benefit of the reader, serving as mere examples of an under-reported issue endemic of American society at large. This author would challenge the reader to search for such scandals local to themselves, as unfortunately, this problem is not unique to the area codes mentioned herein. New York City, New York (via New York Post): While NYPD criminal analysis labs have been marred with controversy for decades, the most recent findings as of 2010 have called into question a large percentage of police lab findings within the city after the revelation that “thousands” of criminal cases hinge upon falsified drug tests. State of Virginia (via Chicago Tribune): State police labs in Virginia have, after convictions made decades ago in some cases, re-opened investigation after widespread errant DNA tests were found to have contributed to the aforementioned convictions. Paul Ferrara, director of the crime lab in question and responsible for the results of the DNA analysis, called such criticisms “unfounded,” in spite of original tests having proven to be untrue. Boston, Massachusetts (via CBS News): In December of 2012, the City of Boston was forced to release hundreds of nonviolent drug offenders after it was found that one Annie Dookhan, an employee of the city crime lab, had falsified numerous drug tests during her tenure with the department. While the city maintains that Dookhan acted alone, the motivation behind this deception and its greater implications within the department at large remain unknown and uninvestigated. Houston, Texas (via Houston Chronicle): The Houston Police Department remains one of the most prolific violators of the right of Americans to a fair trial in the country’s short history. Recent scandals rocking HPD’s crime lab include such varied offenses as false DNA tests, untested rape kits, destruction of evidence, inaccurate blood alcohol detectors, firearm forensics falsification, fingerprint misidentification, and false drug tests, just to name a few. Detroit, Michigan (via USA Today): After being shaken by scandal as a result of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick being convicted of taxpayer theft, interim mayor Kenneth Cockrel, Jr. was forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: The Detroit Police Department crime lab was responsible for erroneous or false findings in 10% of 200 randomly-selected cases. Mayor Cockrel eventually shut down the crime lab entirely, evidently deciding that no laboratory analysis at all was better than forensic evidence that wrongly enslaved the citizens of Detroit. This author once again reiterates that the above examples are but the tip of the iceberg in terms of crime lab corruption in America. Some may posit theories about such instances being isolated events, but such theories ignore the nationwide nature of such corruption. As America and much of the Western world becomes an increasingly technocratic society, the importance of people questioning the powers that be on the conclusions they draw based on the implementation of such technology becomes evermore imperative as time crawls forward. Such issues are primarily the result of the centralization of criminal analysis power by the state, and may very well not come to an end until a truly free model for crime labs is adopted by society at large. 36 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Reddit Tumblr Digg Linkedin Stumbleupon Mail Print EPNBuy Photo Morris County courthouse, Morristown, NJ (Photo: Daily Record file photo)Buy Photo A Randolph resident who lists his occupation as a tattoo parlor manager has been charged with having a sexual encounter in his car in Long Hill Township with a 13-year-old he allegedly called his "dirty little business lunch secret." An arrest affidavit made public Monday in Superior Court, Morristown, shows that Jonathan P. Wagner, 34, of Randolph, was charged Aug. 14 with luring, criminal sexual contact and endangering the welfare of a child. Wagner has posted $75,000 bail to be released from the Morris County jail. A message left for Wagner has not yet been returned. The affidavit, prepared by Long Hill Detective Gary Bauer, states that a person reported to police on Aug. 11 that they believed the 13-year-old girl had been sexually assaulted. An examination of the teenager's cell phone revealed text conversations between her and Wagner, and a message from Wagner to the girl in which he said he would pick her up at her home, the affidavit said. Wagner allegedly said in the texts: "I'm sure I can keep myself occupied with you for a little while. We can go old school in the back of a car for all I care. We will figure it out." The affidavit said he also referred to the girl as his "dirty little business lunch secret." Interviewed by police, the teenager disclosed that Wagner picked her up on Aug. 5 and drove to the parking area of the Long Hill Public Library where he allegedly had the teen touch an intimate part of his body, the affidavit said. Staff Writer Peggy Wright: 973-267-1142; pwright@GannettNJ.com. Read or Share this story: http://dailyre.co/1Ef6JhdSteamed Steamed is dedicated to all things in and around Valve’s PC gaming service. The first Halo was chock full of memorable levels. Know what would’ve made them even more memorable? Goddamn dinosaurs. Modder Spartan464748 decided to turn that weirdly specific fever dream into a reality, creating gorgeous renditions of Halo: Combat Evolved’s second and fourth levels—“Halo” and “The Silent Cartographer”, respectively—in Ark: Survival Evolved. Lots of evolution going on here, is what I’m saying. Here’s a video of Silent Cartographer, courtesy of TheBeachedHippo: If you’ve played Halo before, you’ll pretty much immediately recognize the level geometry, and you will probably struggle to keep your heart from swelling with nostalgic retrojuices (and possibly also hypertension, given that Halo: CE first launched in 2001 and you have Aged—decidedly devolved, to keep with the theme). Advertisement You will probably not immediately recognize the dinosaurs, but don’t worry: they’ll grow on you. Or they’ll devour you and poop your remains into a convenient little dung boulder. Either way, you won’t have to worry about them anymore. You can grab both levels on Ark’s Steam Workshop, which is quietly turning into one of the
bison grass is traditionally placed in each bottle of żubrówka, though this is largely decorative. Since the beginning of the 21st century, there are also new brands available in Poland, such as Żubrówka Biała Wódka (white), Żubrówka Czarna Wódka (black) and Żubrówka Złota (gold). Etymology [ edit ] The words zubroŭka in the Belarusian language and zubrovka in Russian are the words for bison grass. In Polish, the word turówka is used for the grass. The name comes from zubr (Polish: żubr, pronounced [ʐubr]), the word for the European bison in many Slavic languages. History [ edit ] The zubrovka has been produced since at least the 16th century[1] in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the region of the contemporary Polish-Belarusian border. By the 18th century it was one of the favorite raw drinks of nobility (szlachta) and peasantry alike. In the 19th century, the famous Odessa-based brandy manufacturer Shustov began producing żubrówka.[3] In 1926, the company Polmos from Brześć nad Bugiem (now Brest, Belarus) invented a method to mass-produce żubrówka, which was then copied by numerous companies worldwide, under a variety of brand names. The original distillery company in Brest (nationalized by the Soviets after 1939 and now known under the name Belalco) still produces Brestskaya Zubrovka. There are also brands of zubrovka in many countries including Lithuania (Stumbrinė), United States (Bison Vodka), Ukraine (Зубрiвка, Zubrivka), Germany (Grasovka and Blauer Bison), Russia (Зубровка, Zubrovka), the Czech Republic (Zubrovka), and others. The brand [ edit ] Currently the brands Zubrovka and Żubrówka are registered by Sojuzplodoimport/Russia and the Polmos Białystok company in Białystok, Poland.[4] However, żubrówka is considered a generic name for a type of liquor by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, so anyone may use the name for products in the United States, and the name has been used by various companies there.[4] In popular culture [ edit ] In the United States [ edit ] Bottle of export Żubrówka The tincture of bison grass found in żubrówka is prohibited as a food additive by the Food and Drug Administration because it contains coumarin, which showed hepatotoxic effects in rats and has a blood thinning effect.[6] Importation of żubrówka was banned in 1978 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Canada has no similar regulations on coumarin, so the alcoholic drink is legal there. When produced according to traditional methods (between one and two kilograms of grass per thousand litres of alcohol), żubrówka contains approximately 12 milligrams of coumarin per litre. In 1999, distilleries that were not connected with the Polish brand introduced lower quality reformulated versions of the product,[4] sometimes using artificial flavours and colors, with the emblematic blade of grass in every bottle but "neutralised" so as to be coumarin-free. In 2011 the American licensee of the Polish company worked with Rémy Cointreau to introduce a new American formulation, which they called "Żu".[4] In addition to the coumarin problem, American authorities determined that the trademark on Żubrówka brand was diluted and unenforceable, as it was a generic name, like aspirin.[4] Serving suggestions [ edit ] Like most vodkas, żubrówka is usually served chilled on its own. A very popular alternative is mixing it with apple juice[7] (a drink known in Polish as tatanka (Lakota for "American bison") or szarlotka (Polish for "apple cake"); known in the UK as a Frisky Bison;[8] and in the US as a Polish Kiss). It is sometimes served over vanilla ice cream,[9] and another common mixer is ginger ale.[9] While a "Black Bison" is żubrówka mixed with black currant juice.Blue-blooded Creatures! 5 Awesome Amimals Blue blood is awesome on its own, but did you know it also gives the ones who have it, great abilities? We put together a list of 5 animals with blue blood, and we’ll tell you why they are so awesome. Could their blue blood be the key to their survival? Stay tuned right here to find out the answer. The key ingredient that makes the blood of these animals blue is good old copper. Animals with blue blood are called teuthida, and instead of iron, they have copper in their hemoglobin. Their blood contains a copper-rich protein known as hemocyanin which is dissolved in the plasma, instead of being carried by the red blood cells, hence, it lends the blood a blue color. Find out below which awesome creatures have this cool blood. 1. The Mighty Octopus This awesome creature has a pretty amazing superpower: it’s blue blood helps it survive in the icy cold waters, as well as in warm ones. Scientists have found that hemocyanin is different in various species, hence allowing them to survive in extreme conditions. 2. The Cute Little Pillbug (Roly-Poly) We all know and love this little guy, but did you know that he has blue blood? Yep, the armadillo bug is part of the classy selection of creatures with blue blood. Fun facts about him: – these crustaceans (yep, they ain’t no insects!) do not urinate – they are able to drink with their anus – sadly … the little guys eat their own poop (but we shouldn’t hold that against them, they’re still cute) – when they are sick… they turn blue (not just of sadness) because the hemocyanin is altered by other chemicals in their blood system 3. The Fast & Serious Snails The lovely snails have blue blood, yep, they sure do. Most mollusks have the awesome blue blood we’re talking about, and snails are no exception. Here’s some fun facts about the snails: – some snails can live up to 15 years – their slime causes suction, enabling a snail to crawl upside down (in your face Spider Man) – the Australian trumpet (Syrinx aruanus) reaches lengths of 77.2 cm (30 inches) and weighs 18 kg (40lbs) – garden snails have up to 14,175 teeth located on their tongue (radula) 4. The Lucky Horseshoe Crab – These awesome creatures have been around for 450 million years, they are the descendants of trilobites – they are capable of feeding on almost any organic matter (this kept them around for so long) – they are not crabs, they are part of a special group called Limulidae – scientists use their blue blood to test drugs and implants for toxins – the Horseshoe Crab’s blood is milked (basically like cows, in a stressless environment) and then they are released back into the wild. – their blue blood has amazing primitive-antibiotics properties, which are used for medical break-throughs See a of these remarcable creatures and their blue blood (5 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5) votes, average:out of 5) Is this cool enough? You can share it on Reddit Pinterest StumbleUpon Digg Tumblr VK email Written with love and coolness by crissa on July 10, 2013 in Awesome Stuff How do you rate this article?Schitt's Creek (stylized as Schitt$ Creek) is a Canadian television sitcom created by Eugene Levy and his son Daniel Levy that premiered on CBC Television on January 13, 2015.[1] The series is produced by Not a Real Company Productions.[2] On March 6, 2018, the show was renewed for a 14-episode fifth season,[3] which began airing on January 8, 2019.[4] The show airs on the cable network Pop in the United States. The series has won various accolades, including an ACTRA Award and 11 Canadian Screen Awards.[5] It is the first Canadian comedy series to be nominated for a Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Comedy Series.[6] Synopsis [ edit ] The wealthy Rose family—video store magnate Johnny (Eugene Levy), his wife and former soap opera actress Moira (Catherine O'Hara), and their adult children David and Alexis (Daniel Levy and Annie Murphy)—lose their fortune after being defrauded by their business manager. They are forced to rebuild their lives with their sole remaining asset: a small town named Schitt's Creek, which they had bought their son as a joke birthday gift years earlier.[7] The Roses relocate to Schitt’s Creek, moving into two adjacent rooms in a run-down motel. As the family adjusts to their new lives, their well-to-do attitudes come into conflict with Schitt's Creek's more unsophisticated (but usually down-to-earth) residents, including mayor Roland Schitt (Chris Elliott), his wife Jocelyn (Jennifer Robertson), and the motel's manager, Stevie (Emily Hampshire).[7] Episodes [ edit ] Season Episodes Originally aired First aired Last aired 1 13 January 13, 2015 ( ) March 31, 2015 ( 2015-03-31 ) 2 13 January 12, 2016 ( ) March 29, 2016 ( 2016-03-29 ) 3 13 January 10, 2017 ( ) April 4, 2017 ( 2017-04-04 ) 4 13 January 9, 2018 ( ) December 19, 2018 ( 2018-12-19 ) 5 14 January 8, 2019 ( ) TBA Cast [ edit ] Main [ edit ] Recurring [ edit ] John Hemphill as Bob Currie, proprietor of Bob's Garage and a member of the town council Rizwan Manji as Ray Butani, the only real estate agent in town and a member of the town council Karen Robinson as Ronnie Lee, a member of the town council Steve Lund as Jake, David and Stevie's former love interest Jasmin Geljo as Ivan Robin Duke as Wendy Kurtz (season 2), dress shop owner who employed David[8] Production [ edit ] Daniel Levy came up with the idea for the show while watching reality television. He told Out.com, "I had been watching some reality TV at the time and was concentrating on what would happen if one of these wealthy families would lose everything. Would the Kardashians still be the Kardashians without their money?"[9] He turned to his father, Eugene Levy, to help develop the show; Eugene Levy came up with series title. Daniel Levy decided to make the location of Schitt's Creek vague, but in August 2018 said that it is in Canada.[10][11] Annie Murphy was cast as Alexis after Abby Elliott, who was initially slated for the role, had to drop out.[10] Eugene Levy suggested Catherine O'Hara for the role of Moira Rose.[10] The series is filmed on location in Goodwood, Ontario, the Regional Municipality of Durham of the Greater Toronto Area, and Mono, Ontario, where the motel scenes are filmed.[12] The interior scenes for the first two seasons were filmed at Pinewood Toronto Studios in Toronto,[13] while interior scenes for season 3 were shot at Dufferin Gate Studios in Toronto.[14] The opening shot of the first season features Lisa Vanderpump’s former Beverly Park estate as the facade of the Rose family estate. The executive producers are Eugene Levy, Daniel Levy, Andrew Barnsley, Ben Feigin, Fred Levy, and Daniel White. Daniel Levy is the showrunner. Broadcast [ edit ] The series was picked up in the United States by Pop and premiered on February 11, 2015.[15][16] Season 5 will air on January 16, 2019 on Pop.[17] The show has also been picked up in New Zealand by TV2 and TVNZ on Demand and in Australia by the ABC and its iView streaming service.[18] The four seasons appear, though not always together, on different streaming television services worldwide. Netflix in USA, UK, Ireland, South Africa, and Australia carry the full series. In India, the show is broadcast on Comedy Central India. Reception [ edit ] Critical response [ edit ] The first season of Schitt's Creek received generally positive reviews. It holds an approval rating of 61% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 23 reviews, with an average rating of 6.38/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "The title is one of the best jokes of Schitt's Creek, but performances from Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara give the writing a comedic boost."[19] On Metacritic, the first season has a score of 64 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "generally favourable reviews".[20] Vinay Menon of the Toronto Star wrote that the show "is one of the best CBC comedies in years,"[21] though John Doyle of The Globe and Mail sharply criticized it as "as anodyne and polite as the feel-good remarks made by its stars when asked about it. It's nice and it's droll, but it fails."[22] After being picked up by Pop, the Los Angeles Times described the show as "very funny, beautifully played, [and] sometimes touching",[23] while Mike Hale of The New York Times called Schitt's Creek "drab and underwritten."[24] Subsequent seasons of Schitt's Creek have been more positively received, with the show growing in popularity after debuting on Netflix in January 2017.[25] On Rotten Tomatoes, seasons 2, 4 and 5 have approval ratings of 100%, with season 4's consensus reading, "The comedic real estate value rises for Schitt's Creek in its fourth year, the series gradually maturing into appointment viewing with a big, beating heart beneath its absurdity."[26][27][28] Bridget Read of Vogue wrote that while the series "started off with typical fish out of water scenarios," it has "fully come into its own, with a whole cast of Twin Peaks-meets-Christopher-Guest-universe characters that are as equally endearing."[29] In New York Magazine, Maggie Fremont wrote that "the show takes a few episodes to get into its groove, but once it does, you’ll never want to leave."[30] The series has placed on annual best-of lists published by Esquire,[31] Glamour,[32] The New Yorker,[33] and Variety.[34] The series has also been praised for its portrayal of a pansexual character, played by Dan Levy,[35][36] as well as for how David's sexuality is simply accepted by the other characters with no expressions of homophobia in the storyline.[37] Awards and nominations [ edit ] In 2015, Schitt's Creek's first season received two Directors Guild of Canada awards from three nominations. At the 2016 ceremony, season 1 received nine Canadian Screen Awards from 16 nominations. Schitt's Creek's second season received 13 nominations at the 5th Canadian Screen Awards.[38] In 2018, the series received nominations from the US-based MTV Movie & TV Awards and the Critics' Choice Television Award.NEW DELHI: Oil Ministry is mulling recouping 195 million it believes is due from Reliance Industries in the flagging KG-D6 block from oil and gas it sells to public sector firms from the separate Panna/Mukta and Tapti fields.The Ministry believes RIL has to remit additional profit petroleum of $195 million to the government after $2.376 billion in KG-D6 expenditure was disallowed for output lagging targets.With RIL contesting cost disallowance and taking the matter to arbitration, the Ministry first asked Chennai Petroleum Corp Ltd CPCL ) and GAIL India Ltd, which used to buy oil and gas from KG-D6 block respectively, to deduct $195 million payments to be made to RIL.But this plan could not materialise as the fall in output meant that GAIL no longer bought any of KG-D6 gas and CPCL had lost out on a tender to buy oil from the block.The Ministry asked upstream regulator DGH to suggest possible alternatives for the recovery of $195 million, sources privy to the matter said.The Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH) on December 24 wrote to the Ministry saying Indian Oil Corp (IOC) and GAIL are buyers of crude oil and gas respectively produced from Panna-Mukta field, where RIL holds 30 per cent interest.It suggested to the Ministry that the sale proceeds due to RIL for the sale of oil and gas from IOC and GAIL may be sought for recovering the additional profit petroleum, they said.Since the arbitration proceedings on cost disallowance are yet to commence, DGH suggested that the government file an application for securing the amount in dispute as interim measures.DGH also advised seeking an opinion of Solicitor General before deciding on the alternative remedy available, they said, adding that the Ministry has now sought the opinion of the legal officer.The Ministry had disallowed $2.376 billion in cost for gas output from main fields in KG-D6 block falling short of target between 2010-11 and 2013-14. It calculated that the government should have got an additional profit share of $195 million.To recover this, it wanted CPCL and gas utility GAIL India to deduct this amount from revenues due to RIL. GAIL has not bought any gas from KG-D6 since June 2013 and could not deduct any amount. CPCL too lost out the crude tender in May 2014.RIL says the output from Dhirubhai-1 and 3 gas fields in KG-D6 block fell to about 8 million standard cubic meters per day instead of rising to projected 80 mmscmd because of unanticipated water and sand ingress shutting down most wells.The Ministry and DGH, however, blame the output fall to RIL not drilling the quota of committed wells.U.S. vice presidential candidate Mike Pence speaks to Republicans at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. (Photo11: Mark Ralston, AFP/Getty Images) WASHINGTON — Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence released 10 years of tax returns Friday, leaving Donald Trump as the only major party nominee running for the White House who has not disclosed how much he’s paid in taxes. The Indiana governor’s returns show he and his wife, Karen, reported adjusted gross income of $113,026. Most of the Pences' income came from his gubernatorial salary. Pence, who served 12 years in Congress, also received $9,370 from his congressional pension. The Pences contributed $8,923 to charity. Their tax bill was $8,956, for an effective federal income tax rate of 8%. Because they withheld more taxes during the year than they owed, they received a refund of $10,162. Karen Pence, a self-employed artist, reported earning $495 and spending more than that on expenses. She also lost $3,407 on her business selling identification charms for beach towels. Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, has said he won’t release his tax returns because of an ongoing IRS audit. Christina Reynolds, spokeswoman for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign, said the campaign is pleased that "one member of the Trump ticket has decided to meet the long-held threshold for disclosure in a modern day presidential campaign." But she said it's Trump who is running for the top job, and accused him of hiding "behind fake excuses to avoid coming clean." Clinton and running mate Tim Kaine released multiple years of returns, the most recent ones last month. Pence’s 2015 income is far below the $10.7 million reported by the Clintons. And it’s less than the $313,441 reported by Kaine and his wife. “These tax returns clearly show that Mike and Karen Pence have paid their taxes, supported worthy causes, and, unlike the Clintons, the Pences have not profited from their years in public service,” said Pence spokesman Marc Lotter. Pence's adjusted gross income last year was the lowest in the 10 years of returns he made public. The family's highest reported income was $187,495 in 2009. Their charitable donations peaked at $17,265 that same year. The Pences gave 8% of their adjusted gross income to charity last year. That compares with the 7% Kaine and his wife gave and about 10% the Clintons donated. Pence jokes on the campaign trail about how his wealth is dwarfed by Trump’s. “Other than a whole bunch of zeros, we really have a lot in common,” Pence said at an event in Georgia. “I mean a bunch of zeros.” The campaign said Pence released his returns “with the full support of Mr. Trump, who plans to release his tax returns upon completion of a routine audit.” Trump has filed the financial disclosure report required of candidates. But those only include estimates of assets, income and debt. While Trump has said he’s worth more than $10 billion, Forbes estimates Trump’s worth at $4.5 billion. If Trump doesn’t release his tax returns, he’ll be the first major party nominee not to do so in decades. Pence has defended Trump’s decision, calling questions about it “a distraction by many in the media who simply don’t want to focus on this widening scandal around the Clinton Foundation.” Trump has asserted: “You don’t learn much in a tax return.” Experts, such as the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center’s Steve Rosenthal, have said many things could be learned from examining Trump’s returns — whether he’s a successful businessman; whether he gives generously to charity as he's claimed; whether he would benefit from the changes he’s proposed to the tax code, and how much he pays in taxes. “Tax returns paint a revealing picture of who we are,” Fred Goldberg, former IRS commissioner, wrote in a recent opinion piece in which he called on Trump to release at least the first two pages of his returns. That would reveal at least some information on income, charitable contributions and the amount of tax he paid without affecting an audit, Goldberg wrote. There's also no IRS prohibition against Trump releasing his returns while being audited. Rosenthal has noted the president and vice president’s tax returns are automatically audited every year, yet they’ve been voluntarily released to the public. Nearly three-quarters of likely voters, including 62 percent of Republicans, said in a recent Quinnipiac University survey that Trump should publicly release his returns. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2cdyJVP(NationalSentinel) War Clouds: Two developments over the past several hours raise the specter of armed conflict on the Korean peninsula, and soon, unless some major diplomacy occurs. The first development: The U.S. has dispatched a so-called “nuke-sniffing” plane to the area. The plane, a WC-135 Constant Phoenix, is bristling with sensitive gear designed to detect even slight traces of a nuclear explosion. Readers of The National Sentinel know that Pyongyang is said to be preparing its sixth nuclear test, one that could be a test too far for the Trump administration, which is also sending naval and air force assets to waters off Korea in the form of at least one aircraft carrier battle group, the USS Carl Vinson. As reported by South Korea’s Yonghap News Agency: The U.S. Air Force dispatched a nuclear sniffer aircraft Thursday to the east of the Korean Peninsula amid the possibility of North Korea’s imminent nuclear test, a government source said. “The WC-135 Constant Phoenix, a special-purpose U.S. plane, made an emergency sortie today over the East Sea,” the source said, requesting anonymity. It arrived at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, early this month amid indications that the North is preparing for another nuclear test. Thursday’s flight appears meant to check whether the secretive communist nation has detonated a nuclear bomb. Now, the second development: As reported by CNN, the Chinese appear to be ratcheting up military preparedness ahead of what they may believe is an imminent U.S. attack against the North’s nuclear, chemical and conventional weapons: The US is seeing evidence that the Chinese military is preparing for a potential North Korea contingency, a US defense official told CNN Thursday. Chinese air force land-attack, cruise-missile-capable bombers were put “on high alert” on Wednesday, the official said, adding that the US has also seen an extraordinary number of Chinese military aircraft being brought up to full readiness through intensified maintenance. The official said that these recent steps by the Chinese are assessed as part of an effort to “reduce the time to react to a North Korea contingency.” Such a contingency could include the risk of an armed conflict breaking out as tensions on the peninsula have risen in the wake of multiple North Korean missile tests. There has also been ratcheted up rhetoric from the US and Pyongyang, with the latter’s state media warning Thursday that a pre-emptive strike by North Korea would result in the US and South Korea being “completely destroyed in an instant.” Beijing has long been concerned about potential instability in North Korea should the regime in Pyongyang collapse, fearing both an influx of refugees and the potential of reunification under a South Korean government closely allied to the US. We reported earlier, based on foreign reporting that included a South Korean source, that China may have been deploying tens of thousands of troops to its border with North Korea, in anticipation that a) an attack was coming; and b) to stem the tide of North Korean refugees into China. This morning, we noted that Russia appears to be doing the same thing – both prudent measures. It’s not clear that the Trump administration would alert the Russians to any prior attack against North Korea, but its highly likely President Donald J. Trump would alert Chinese President Xi Jinping, with whom he met a couple of weeks ago at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida (where he proclaimed some progress had been made on the issue of North Korea and U.S.-China trade deals). Whatever else is happening behind the scenes, both Russia and China now appear to believe that some level of conflict is in the offing and they are preparing for it. While some experts have said they didn’t believe China would act to pressure Pyongyang to end its nuclear program, a separate report by the Nikkei Asia Review noted that Beijing was set to cut off oil – at least temporarily – to North Korea: A nuclear test or the launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles would violate United Nations Security Council resolutions, and China is certain to respond with additional sanctions, said Zhang Liangui, a professor at the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Party School and noted authority on North Korea. The option to cut off the North’s crude supply will be put on the table, Zhang said, while stressing that the Chinese government will ultimately decide its course of action. North Korea relies almost entirely on China for oil. The Asian giant shipped about 500,000 tons of crude to the North each year until 2013, according to the Chinese customs agency. Bilateral ties cooled that year after Pyongyang carried out its third nuclear test, and exports officially have remained at zero since 2014. But China is believed to still provide crude to North Korea off the books. A complete freeze would impact the North Korean economy. Time will tell. AdvertisementsVeterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki said Tuesday he won't be resigning despite calls for him to quit over a string of scandals involving the treatment of servicemembers at VA facilities. Shinseki told The Wall Street Journal his agency will work to improve communications and collaborate with veterans advocacy groups to rebuild confidence after allegations of mismanagement that reportedly led to patient deaths. "I serve at the pleasure of the president," he told the newspaper when asked if he would be resigning. "I signed on to make some changes, I have work to do." Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., issued a call Tuesday morning for Shinseki to resign on the Senate floor, a day after the American Legion demanded Shinseki's resignation, along with that of other top VA officials. Some influential lawmakers and groups, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, have been reluctant to go that far, but Moran echoed the American Legion in saying VA leadership needs to change. "It's clear that accountability at VA is absent, oversight doesn't mean much," Moran, a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee, said on the floor. "There's a difference in wanting change and leading it to happen. Today I am demanding accountability and true transformation within the VA system in its culture from top to bottom and all across the country. Secretary Shinseki seemingly is unwilling or unable to do so, and change must be made at the top. "I ask the secretary to submit his resignation, and I ask President Obama to accept that resignation," he said. He was followed later in the day by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who said in a statement the White House needs to get to the bottom of what happened and Shinseki's time as secretary "has come to an end." "The president needs to find a new leader to lead this organization out of the wilderness, and back to providing the service our veterans deserve," Cornyn said. Shinseki told The Wall Street Journal his reaction to the mounting calls for him to quit is "to redouble my efforts and make sure there's good communication." The White House released a statement on Monday, in response to the growing controversy, standing by Shinseki and saying the president "remains confident in Secretary Shinseki's ability to lead the department." Other lawmakers have pushed back on the calls for resignations at the top. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee, said: "While it might be temporarily satisfying to call for firing someone, it doesn't get us any closer to the truth or solve problems that may exist." On the Republican side of the aisle, House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said he would wait until the results of an inspector general investigation on a scandal in Phoenix "before deciding to call for any personnel changes." "This much is clear: for nearly a year, we have been pleading with top department leaders and President Obama to take immediate steps to stop the growing pattern of preventable veteran deaths and hold accountable any and all VA employees who have allowed patients to slip through the cracks," he said. VA officials at a Phoenix facility have been accused of keeping a secret list of patients waiting for appointments to hide treatment delays. In that case, up to 40 patients allegedly may have died because of delays. In light of those accusations, three executives at the veterans hospital in Phoenix were placed last week on administrative leave amid an inspector general investigation. "As a result of what's under way in Phoenix, I'm very sensitive to the allegations," Shinseki told The Wall Street Journal. "I need to let the independent IG complete his investigation." Phoenix VA officials have denied any knowledge of a secret list and said they had found no evidence of patient deaths due to delayed care. In response to the American Legion's call for resignations, VA spokesman Drew Brookie said the department takes allegations about misconduct seriously, and "swift and appropriate action will be taken" if the probe backs up the allegations. Brookie said the department has made "strong progress" under Shinseki toward enrolling more veterans in high-quality health care and providing educational benefits, among other areas. "As the secretary says, providing veterans the quality care and benefits they have earned through their service is our only mission at VA," Brookie said. The most recent blow to the VA was a report that a Colorado clinic allegedly falsified documents to make it seem like patients were being seen in a timely fashion. The findings were contained in a report by the VA Office of Medical Inspector. The report found that staff who did not go along with this were placed on a "bad boy list." A VA spokesman, in response to the findings, said that in every area where the investigation substantiated allegations, "a plan with clearly defined objectives was developed with set deadlines for compliance, and corrective actions are ongoing." The spokesman noted that "there is no indication that health outcomes were affected." The Associated Press contributed to this report. Click here for more from The Wall Street Journal.The Audit the Fed bill, sponsored by Texas Republican Ron Paul, was approved by the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday and will now advance to a full House vote. The bill, passed by a voice vote, calls for a full audit of the Federal Reserve System by congressional investigators. The Washington Times explains that the Federal Reserve “consists of a board of governors and 12 regional banks, which act as lenders of last resort to the country’s banking system.” Federal law does not provide for such an audit, but Ron Paul’s bill would change that. The Federal Reserve has been the subject of controversy, particularly as it has unconstitutionally usurped the power of regulating money. Likewise, its monetary policies and secrecy have provoked a great deal of criticism, particularly from Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. Rep. Paul has been an adamant critic of the Federal Reserve System, and his opposition to it has drawn millions of Americans to question the monetary policies of the central banking system. A limited audit of the Federal Reserve conducted by the Government Accountability Office last year found that the central bank “repeatedly invoked emergency authority to expand its lending during the Wall Street crisis in 2008 and 2009, including major loans to prop up the housing market,” reports the Washington Times. The audit also found a number of blatant conflicts of interest among federal officials. The audit, as well as Paul’s resolute opposition to the institution, began to awaken the American people to critique the Federal Reserve and question its purpose and its policies. Among the various criticisms of the Federal Reserve, analysts blame it for the staggering inflation that is virtually destroying the value of the dollar through policies such as monetizing the debt and setting reserve requirements for banks. Likewise, the Federal Reserve’s policies have been blamed for creating moral hazard that has had a significant impact on the strength of the American economy. Last December, the Fed drew negative attention when the Wall Street Journal reported that it was using funds to secretly bail out European banks, and not for the first time. At the time, Dr. Paul pointed to the secret bailouts as further proof that the Fed should be audited: The Fed’s latest actions in cooperating with foreign central banks to undertake liquidity swaps of dollars for foreign currencies is another reason why Congress needs enhanced power to oversee and audit the Fed. Under current law Congress cannot examine these types of agreements. Those who would argue that auditing the Fed or these agreements with central banks harms the Fed’s independence should reevaluate the Fed’s supposed independence when the Fed bails out Europe so soon after President Obama promised US assistance in resolving the Euro crisis. Conservative pundit Glenn Beck addressed the secret beginnings and the inner workings of the Federal Reserve on his Fox News program last year, noting that the Fed is “nothing more than a cartel like OPEC, except it’s a money cartel, and this cartel has brought the federal government into it, and it’s only to enforce the rules of the cartel … it operates under the protection of the federal government and the government has virtually given a monopoly to create the nation’s money supply. There are no elected officials … no accountability to anyone.” Fortunately, once the American people began to ask questions about the Federal Reserve, lawmakers began to question the policies of the Federal Reserve and the secrecy with which the agency has shrouded itself. “Clearly the Fed must be made too big to fail, and too big to fail requires a considerable amount of oversight,” said Rep. Darrell E. Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the committee that approved Paul’s bill. “This whole idea about ‘Well, we can’t touch the Fed‘ is baloney,” said Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, (D-Ohio). “We have to be able to have control over the Fed because it’s controlling every aspect of our economy.” Similar sentiments were voiced by Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) during a March 2009 Senate budget meeting. Sanders was infuriated at the level of secrecy with which Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke answered questions regarding the Federal Reserve’s lending. Sanders said: We have spent a lot of time in Congress talking about the $700 billion TARP bailout … not a whole lot has been talked about with regard to the $2.2 trillion that the Fed has lent out. Now I find that absolutely extraordinary that I wrote you a letter and I said, "Hey, who did you lend the money to? What were the terms of those loans? How can my constituents in Vermont get some of that money? Who makes the decisions? Do you guys sit around in a room? Do you make it? Are there conflicts of interest?: So my question to you is, will you tell the American people to whom you lent $2.2 trillion of their dollars? Will you tell us who got that money and what the terms are of those agreements? To which Bernanke responded, “Any bank that has access to the U.S. Federal Reserve system.” Sanders asked for the names of the banks, but Bernanke refused to submit any because he claimed it “is counterproductive and will destroy the value of the program … banks will not come to the Federal Reserve.” Sanders grew angry at that response and said, “Well isn’t that too bad. In other words, they took the money, but they don’t want to be public about who received it.” The dialogue continued for several minutes, but in the end, no specific information regarding the exchanges between the Federal Reserve and the recipients of its funds was revealed. Paul’s bill is expected to come up for a vote in July and will likely have success in a full House vote, as it has well over 200 co-sponsors in the House including a number of senior Democrats. Unfortunately, a similar bill in the Senate has less support. Photo: Federal Reserve Building via Shutterstockby For the second time in just a month, a British academic institution has been intimidated by an orchestrated Zionist lobby. Yesterday we learned that Southampton University has decided to withdraw its permission to hold the academic conference on International Law and the State of Israel. The decision was taken on the grounds of “health and safety” with the university claiming it did not have enough resources to mitigate the “risks.” This comes just one month after the Royal Northern College Of Musiccancelled a concert of mine for similar safety reasons. Like Southampton University,
time, the results can be spectacular. But if your pills are half ingested or if you are taking a placebo, then not only do you stay sick, but you have the possibility of re-infecting others who are trying their best to get better. The whole point of the red pill, in my opinion, is that we get to move past bio-programming entirely and into an existence that does not mandate our disposability or tolerate abuse, by anyone, even the state. Even from each other. So far, most in the MRM have done pretty well with seeing and addressing the knee-jerk response in men to support women, no matter the cost or lack of legitimacy (white knighting). We have also done pretty well with taking a look at how women tend to circle the wagons and defend each other, no matter the cost or lack of legitimacy (feminism). And we have begun to sharpen our focus on the notion that both of these factors, though we call them out with modern terminology like feminism and white knighting, are actually just manifestations of what has always been present in men and women. We are learning that the new boss is just the old boss in a different costume. This is progress for sure, but hardly a stopping point. And unless we are going to stagnate where we are (and ultimately perish because of it) then we need to complete the red pill prescription. We need to keep chugging those little red bastards down till we are able to see that the part of the programming that leads us to compete with each other for alpha-primacy also forms a mentality with the same biological roots that make men disposable and enables feminism. I am going to use a recent article on this site, and some of the comments that followed, to point to what I am talking about. In this I am going to directly use the words of other MRA’s. I don’t really like doing it, but it is important to show examples, and we were provided them in a quite classical way in the past few days. A new writer to the MRM penned a piece in which he described his path to becoming an activist. A new writer doing this kind of work is precisely why AVfM is here; to give a forum to a growing chorus of men and women who are manifesting the effects of the red pill and taking a stand. Within that piece there were a couple of areas that I thought revealed a man who is a work in progress. The first is clear cut: I still believe that men who brutalize women are the scum of the Earth. I admit I flinched a little when I read this. Clearly these are words rooted in old world sexist notions about violence; that somehow men who brutalize women are worse than women who brutalize men. It is old programming that tends to swim around in the unconscious even after the first few rounds of red pills. In addition to that, and a perhaps more subtle revelation about the authors mentality, he describes physically defending oneself from an attack as “reciprocal violence.” I don’t personally agree with either one of these statements. Indeed, I think they reflect a collective problem in societal consciousness; one that gets corrected with sufficiently therapeutic levels of red pill Realitol™ in the system over a long enough period of time. It will not, I respectfully submit, be rectified with standardized doses of blue pill shame. But that is what happened. Case in point, the very first comment to this article contained the following: When a woman hits a man and he hits her back, this is not a male-on-female crime; this is reciprocal violence. Really? Is it not self-defense against a woman’s violence? or justified payback against a female aggressor? I am always shocked that even fervent men’s rights proponents still are too pussy-footed. “Pussy-footed.” Really? It is as though the rest of the article, which was actually quite good, inspirational even, somehow didn’t exist. Suddenly, in the eyes of this MRA, he was not a fellow man stepping out of the shadows for the first time to raise his voice against a corrupt, feminist dominated domestic violence industry. He was just “pussy-footed.” Need I fill in the blanks for all that implies? At the time I am writing this, that comment was up voted 27-2, and one of the two down votes was mine. Yet another person who commented took it even a step further by name calling. You’re still a mangina/white knighter. Fortunately that one was the recipient of more down votes than up, but voting is not really the issue here. Culture is. And so is our shared understanding and values. I posted a nudge for readers to consider that we need to measure our responses and reactions to each other; that we need “constructive dialogue that strengthens our ties and encourages the refinement of our ideas.” The reaction from the one calling names was, “Isn’t that what we are doing?” Uh, no. MRA’s name calling and shaming other MRA’s is not constructive. It is petty alpha-gaming, but I will get to that in a moment. The options here are pretty straight forward, as far as I can tell. How do we choose to react to new MRA’s who are “getting it” but have not had the time or opportunity to fully refine their understanding of the modern zeitgeist? Do we support their work and encourage them to perhaps re-evaluate some of their less thoughtful ideas? Or do we call them names and publicly humiliate them? Well? It isn’t just common manners that make prefer the former. I think I have long demonstrated the belief that good manners with the wrong people are a waste of time. No, my aversion here is to blue pill thinking. As I noted at the start of this article, a significant part of the dynamics that hinder progress in the MRM is the innate friction between men which is driven by an undercurrent of sexual competition. Our unfortunate programming is to apply downward pressure on each other in order to vie for sexual selection. In the last 50 years, we have seen much of that downward pressure manifest in the legal system, in politics and in the PC mandates that dictate social conduct. It is without a doubt a core reason that the MRM even exists in the first place. And it will serve no better purpose here than it does in society at large. Part of AVfM’s mission is to create an alternative environment to that. That mission is made all the more difficult by latent misandry. And so it must be addressed from time to time. My perspective on this is in keeping with my perspective on sociobiology. Feminism is an outgrowth of chivalry. It is dependent on male sexual competition to thrive. In short, misandry, feminism, the stinking lot of it, is a human problem rooted in men’s mindless competition for women. We don’t get out of that competition by simply rejecting women or Going Our Own Way. We get out of it by identifying and respectfully challenging the elements of that competition when they prove dysfunctional, as in going after MRA’s for blood any time we imagine they are not 100% on message. This conduct, when distilled down to its essence, is just a tell-tale artifact of pussy-centric masculinity. Of course, I know there are many who feel that tearing down each other’s points is just a part of the vetting process, and I agree with that. But when it becomes attacking on a personal level, or an exercise in shame, it is immediately proven that it is not about the point but about the primacy. It is time for another red pill, and then another, till we wake up and realize that it is us, not the target, who is off message. If you have ever looked around at the explosive numbers of blogs and other efforts to promote men’s rights and wondered “Why the fuck aren’t these guys pooling resources, organizing and flexing more collective muscle?” then in my opinion you have just been given the answer. Men have never done well at working together in ways intended to benefit men, as a monolithic group. We have always been too busy cooperating for the sake of others, stabbing each other in the back for the sake of pussy, and helping women who work only for their own gain. I doubt that we will ever see the end of that in the human race. However I also believe that with time and effort we can construct a sub-culture for men and women who want something better than that. From time to time we may have to gently turn to our brothers with a bottle of red pills and say, “Have another.”WASHINGTON, Nov. 30, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Michigan ranks 41st in the nation in funding programs to prevent kids from smoking and help smokers quit, according to a national report released today by a coalition of public health organizations. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20080918/CFTFKLOGO ) Michigan currently spends $1.8 million a year on tobacco prevention and cessation programs, which is 1.5 percent of the $121.2 million recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Other key findings for Michigan include: Michigan this year will collect $1.2 billion in revenue from the 1998 tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes, but will spend just 0.1 percent of it on tobacco prevention programs. This means Michigan is spending less than a penny of every dollar in tobacco revenue to fight tobacco use. this year will collect in revenue from the 1998 tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes, but will spend just 0.1 percent of it on tobacco prevention programs. This means is spending less than a penny of every dollar in tobacco revenue to fight tobacco use. The tobacco companies spend $313 million a year to market their products in Michigan. This is 171 times what the state spends on tobacco prevention. The annual report on states' funding of tobacco prevention programs, titled "A Broken Promise to Our Children: The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement 13 Years Later," was released by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, American Heart Association, American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, American Lung Association, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights. Michigan took a big step forward in 2010 by implementing a strong, statewide smoke-free law. However, it is falling far short in funding tobacco prevention programs. To further reduce tobacco use, health advocates are urging Michigan to raise the state tobacco tax and increase funding for tobacco prevention programs. "Michigan again is one of the most disappointing states when it comes to funding programs to protect kids from tobacco and is falling far short of what the CDC recommends," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "To reduce tobacco use, it is critical Governor Snyder and the Legislature raise the cigarette tax and increase funding for tobacco prevention. Even in these difficult budget times, tobacco prevention is a smart investment that saves lives and saves money by reducing tobacco-related health care costs." In Michigan, 18.8 percent of high school students smoke, and 17,200 more kids become regular smokers each year. Tobacco annually claims 14,500 lives and costs the state $3.4 billion in health care bills. Nationally, the report finds that most states are failing to adequately fund tobacco prevention and cessation programs. Altogether, the states have cut funding for these programs to the lowest level since 1999, when they first started receiving tobacco settlement payments. Key national findings of the report include: The states this year will collect $25.6 billion from the tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes, but will spend just 1.8 percent of it – $456.7 million – on tobacco prevention programs. This means the states are spending less than two cents of every dollar in tobacco revenue to fight tobacco use. from the tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes, but will spend just 1.8 percent of it – – on tobacco prevention programs. This means the states are spending less than of every dollar in tobacco revenue to fight tobacco use. States have cut funding for tobacco prevention programs by 12 percent ( $61.2 million ) in the past year and by 36 percent ( $260.5 million ) in the past four years. ) in the past year and by 36 percent ( ) in the past four years. Only two states – Alaska and North Dakota – currently fund tobacco prevention programs at the CDC-recommended level. The report warns that the nation's progress in reducing smoking is at risk unless states increase funding for programs to prevent kids from smoking and help smokers quit. The United States has significantly reduced smoking among both youth and adults, but 19.3 percent of adults and 19.5 percent of high school students still smoke. Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death in the U.S., killing more than 400,000 people and costing $96 billion in health care bills each year. More information, including the full report and state-specific information, can be obtained at www.tobaccofreekids.org/reports/settlements SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free KidsThe Department of Energy’s new electric grid study concluded energy efficiency is playing a key role in maintaining a reliable power system, even though the Trump administration is seeking to reduce programs that support efficiency. Improvements in energy efficiency have contributed to flattening energy demand in recent years, putting less pressure on the nation’s power system, the study found. The slowdown in total electricity use in the United States has been driven in part by energy efficiency policies adopted by utilities. New technologies developed with assistance from the federal government also have helped to strengthen the reliability and resilience of the power grid. “One of the overlooked aspects in the discussion around this report is the powerful role that energy efficiency is playing to strengthen the reliability and resilience of the grid,” Alliance to Save Energy president Kateri Callahan said in a statement Thursday. “As the report states clearly, energy efficiency is working to level demand and reduce strain on the grid.” Despite DOE’s finding value in energy efficiency, the Trump administration is hoping Congress will sign off on massive budget cuts to the office that funds energy efficiency research. In its fiscal year 2018 budget, the administration proposed $636 million for DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, about $1.4 billion, or 70 percent, below the FY16 funding for the office. Advertisement The administration’s budget request also calls for the elimination of the Energy Star program, which is jointly housed at the Environmental Protection Agency and DOE. Energy Star, widely viewed as a successful federally run program, enjoys nearly 90 percent brand awareness and has helped lower energy bills across the United States. The energy efficiency policies put in place over the past 40 years, such as appliance efficiency standards and building energy codes — along with growing investments from utilities now totaling nearly $9 billion annually — are paying enormous dividends, according to the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit group founded in 1977 to promote energy efficiency. Energy Secretary Rick Perry ordered a grid study to back up his claims that solar and wind power were undermining the U.S. electric grid’s reliability and forcing the premature retirement of baseload nuclear and coal plants. In July, Bloomberg obtained the draft report, written by Department of Energy staff, and revealed that they found essentially the opposite. The draft version of the report found that the “the power system is more reliable today due to better planning, market discipline, and better operating rules and standards.” However, the final report, officially called the “Staff Report to the Secretary on Electricity Markets and Reliability,” did not contain this information, leading to speculation that DOE political appointees chose to remove conclusions that may have conflicted with the Trump administration’s anti-renewable energy policies. Meanwhile, DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy has set goals of providing energy savings of 25 percent to 50 percent by 2030. The office is tasked with developing new materials, technologies and processes for homes, buildings, and industry. It implements minimum energy performance standards, improve building energy codes, and support home weatherization. Advertisement “As we look at the portfolio of solutions we can’t just look at supply. We have to remember that increasing efficiency and productivity is the fastest and cheapest way to reach our goals — and it’s also a tremendous economic opportunity,” Callahan said. Energy efficiency is the leading job creator in the clean energy sector, with about 2.2 million jobs in construction, manufacturing and other fields, according to her group. “We look forward to working with the Department of Energy to further capitalize on this growth opportunity,” she said. Under the House budget plan, which is less drastic than the White House plan, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy still would see its funding fall by about half, from $2.1 billion to $1.1 billion. DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) also has played a role in developing energy efficiency technologies by providing seed money for energy- and efficiency-related projects in between the research and commercialization stages. For example, ARPA-E is investing $25 million in nine different efforts to improve the efficiency of data centers. The new technologies could help reduce energy use at data centers, which are responsible for 2.5 percent of all U.S. electricity consumption. Both the Trump administration and the House have proposed eliminating ARPA-E.Erickson got a milder form of the same tactic. "Tonight, my family was sitting around the kitchen table eating dinner when sheriffs deputies pulled up in the driveway," he wrote Sunday at Red State. "Someone called 911 from my address claiming there had been an accidental shooting." Writing about this matter is made slightly awkward by the fact that all these writers are persuaded that they know who is behind these attacks against them, having amassed what they call circumstantial evidence. I'm refraining from mentioning the name of the accused because "circumstantial" is insufficient to my way of thinking; I haven't the time to investigate the matter myself; and I have no idea whether or not they are right. In any case, the perpetrator's identity is also irrelevant to my purpose, which is to note and lament that this sort of intimidation is happening, whoever is behind it. As blogger Radley Balko put it, "It's an attempt to terrorize political opponents into silence... The sociopaths who are harassing Patterico and the other bloggers involved need to be arrested and charged with about a dozen different crimes." Quite right. Theirs is a corner of the blogosphere I frequently critique. The rhetorical tactics some of the named writers employ vex me. And it's absurd that some of their defenders are attributing their harassment to "the left," which detracts from the core point that this isn't about ideology. It is vital, for anyone who cares about robust political discourse, that a bright line be drawn separating words and what is effectively violent intimidation. Were these writers employed by mainstream media outlet I cannot help but think that their experiences would garner much more attention than it already has. Law enforcement ought to prioritize catching their harasser or harassers, for the tactic being used has the effect of putting lives at risk, chilling free speech, and undermining the ability of 911 to address real emergencies. (Full disclosure: I've contributed a negligible amount of money to a fund being established to defray costs incurred by victims of this tactic.)Palestinian Ibrahim Mohammad al-Toum, 85, sleeps on the floor on a thin mattress in a Gaza schoolroom, displaced for the third time in six years. This is despite a higher death toll – 1,938 Palestinians and 67 Israelis – than in past Gaza clashes. Local rights activists say the monthlong conflict has displaced around 520,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and at least half of them, like Toum and his family, have been staying in United Nations refugee camps in schools. Toum is not sure how he will repair his house again. When the fighting began, Toum traveled to the U.N. camp in the school on a donkey cart with members of his family, taking only two mattresses and a coarse gray blanket, which four of them would later share. Then back to Tawam, and they had destroyed my home," he said, starting to cry quietly. He was given 4,000 euros from the United Nations to rebuild the house but four years later it was bombed for a second time. ...Henry ‘s Rating: 4.0 / 5.0 ‘s Rating:/ 5.0 Whether you are looking to lose 10 or 100 pounds, this plan can help you lose weight quickly, avoid the dreaded plateaus, and revamp your metabolism, so says author Michael Moreno, MD. That all sounds great but I’ve got to ask… do these claims REALLY hold their ground? Let’s dig in and get to the bottom of this! So what exactly is “The 17 Day Diet”? The 17 day diet is a weight loss system that actually consists of 3 cycles, each lasting 17 days, plus a long-term “maintenance cycle” that’s supposed to help you maintain your weight loss. Here’s a breakdown of the cycles, according to the author: Cycle 1 is called “Accelerate” and it strips your diet down to the bare bones of approximately 1,200 calories per day. Cycle 2 is called “Activate” and this is where the Cycle 1 food plan is alternated with a slightly higher-calorie food plan. The author, Michael Moreno says the zig-zag between cycles keeps the metabolism guessing, helps prevent boredom, and continues to stimulate fat burning. *The plan also instructs you to exercise for at least 17 minutes per day during the first 2 cycles Cycle 3 is called “Achieve” and it’s the stabilization period that allows healthier foods with a slower rate of weight loss of about 2-3 pounds, Moreno says. So now we’ve heard from Moreno, what does the Health Hound think of all this? The overall methods and food choices taught in the 17 Day Diet receive high marks in my book and the exercise portion is a big plus too. I also like the fact that the methods in the 17 Day Diet are based on actual research and not just “weight loss theory”. My only real complaint is where it restricts you from healthy foods such as fruits and low-fat dairy. Eating these foods isn’t going to make you gain any excess weight and NOT eating these foods isn’t exactly healthy. The Final Verdict: It’s good! I like this diet a lot. The methods are backed by real studies and known to work, it’s a solid weight loss plan and the company and creator behind it don’t create any hype or engage in any “questionable” marketing practices. Is there a free way to lose weight? There is a great alternative to the 17 Day Diet that my pack loves. It’s a 100% free report I’ve put together that teaches you several proven methods to lose weight. In the Health Hound’s opinion, I would say that it’s a no-brainer not to at least give this free report a try before forking out any money . Save Your Money! Download the Health Hound’s FREE Weight Loss Report! My 100% no-bull report “The Health Hound’s Fast, Safe, & Effective Way To Lose Weight Quickly!” has been downloaded over 137,782 times and has the simple action steps anyone can take to lose weight fast. All I ask in return is that you check out my free newsletter (you can unsubscribe any time!) that contains periodic health and weight loss tips and scam alerts delivered right to your inbox. You owe it to yourself to check this out! [ois skin=”Weight loss in post”] “I respect your privacy! Your information will NEVER be sold or shared with anyone.” Don’t just take it from me! Here are a few emails from others who have checked out my weight loss report: “Dear Henry, I want to thank you for the weight loss report. I started on it 2/23/11 as of today I have lost 23 lbs. and feel great! I am exercising and lifting weights along with the clean eating. This is the first plan that has helped me keep losing and not crave anything like I always did on other eating plans. again thanks for getting me on the right path I am so happy I found your website!” Teri (Submitted on 2011/04/26 at 10:28 am) “Henry, Great download! I am a real skeptic – especially with downloads, but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by your write-up. It makes sense! A friend recommended Sensa and after reading your site, I am (once again) too skeptical to try.” Thanks again, BethCHENNAI: If your child was born in the last couple of years, he or she is likely to live five years more than children born a decade ago.Statistics released by the Union ministry of health and family welfare show that life expectancy in India has gone up by five years, from 62.3 years for males and 63.9 years for females in 2001-2005 to 67.3 years and 69.6 years respectively in 2011-2015. Experts attribute this jump — higher than that in the previous decade — to better immunization and nutrition, coupled with prevention and treatment of infectious diseases.The World Health Organization defines life expectancy as “the average number of years a person is expected to live on the basis of the current mortality rates and prevalence distribution of health states in a population”. In India, average life expectancy which used to be around 42 in 1960, steadily climbed to around 48 in 1980, 58.5 in 1990 and around 62s in 2000.The overall health indicators have also shown significant improvement across the country in the past 10 years. Infant mortality ratio has come down to 42 in 2012 from 58 per 1,000 live births in the 2005. “Maternal mortality ratio has declined from 301 per 100,000 live births in 2001-03 to 212 in 2007-09,” the health ministry said.“A steady supply of food is the prime reason for increased life expectancy,” says Dr George Thomas, editor of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics. Since the time of Independence, famine has reduced dramatically in our country and people have a decent supply of nutrition. However, the real challenge lies in taking the numbers beyond this.”Thomas pointed out that increasing life expectancy beyond 70 years would depend on environmental factors. “Supply of clean drinking water and better control of non-communicable diseases would play a major role. However, India is still grappling with communicable diseases,” he said.Dr S Balasubramanian, joint director of Tamil Nadu public health, said the increase shows health policies are in the right direction. “Earlier, people had more children, and the chances of all the kids getting a balanced diet were low. Family planning has helped. Childhood vaccination has checked epidemics and saved lives,” he said. Life-threatening diseases like diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough have been eliminated completely. “India has also been recently declared a polio free nation, which is an added feather to the cap,” he said.Some experts still advocate caution. “With increased life expectancy, the disease burden would increase,” said geriatrician Dr B Krishnaswamy. “Yes, we will live longer, but the big question is how healthy our lives would be,” he said.A 5-year-old boy's run as mayor is over in a tiny tourist town in northern Minnesota. Robert "Bobby" Tufts lost his bid for a third consecutive term as mayor of Dorset on Sunday. Eric Mueller, a 16-year-old from Mendota Heights, Minnesota, won when his name was drawn from the ballot box during the annual Taste of Dorset festival. Bobby was only 3 when he was first elected mayor in 2013. Dorset, about 150 miles northwest of Minneapolis, has no formal city government and a population ranging from nine to 28. "It was fun, but it's time to pass on the vote," Bobby told The Associated Press by telephone Monday. Then he suggested his little brother get a shot at some point: "I'm gonna let James do it. He's 2." People can vote as many times as they like in the "election" -- for $1 a vote -- at ballot boxes in stores around town. The proceeds go toward organizing the festival. Bobby said he was proud of his efforts to raise money for the Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Red River Valley in Fargo, North Dakota, One of his other major acts was to declare ice cream top of the food pyramid. His mother, Emma Tufts, said family members joked about having Bobby and James build up a political resume to prepare for a presidential run in 2048. But she said she's happy that Bobby will get a break. Now, for example, he can catch candy at parades rather than be the one throwing it. "He really enjoyed being a kid in some festivals, not having to perform," she said. Eric, the new mayor, said he came up with the idea to run after he ate five fried ice creams at one sitting. He'll be a high school junior this fall.Penticton, BC, — The 2014 Young Stars Classic in Penticton, BC, beginning Friday, September 12, 2014, will feature a number of notable prospects of the Vancouver Canucks, Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers and Winnipeg Jets. A total of twelve first round draft picks will be participating in the event this year. Over the past three Young Star Classics, over 65 players have gone on to play NHL games. Complete rosters will be released at a later date. The Vancouver Canucks roster will include five players selected in the first round of the NHL Entry Draft since 2011: Jared McCann (24th overall in 2014), Bo Horvat (9th overall in 2013), Hunter Shinkaruk (24th overall in 2013), Brendan Gaunce (26th overall in 2012), and Nicklas Jensen (29th overall in 2011). Dane Fox, who led the Ontario Hockey League in goals (64) and ranked second in points (107) in 2013.14, will also attend the event alongside two players, Frank Corrado and Mike Zalewski, who spent time on the Canucks roster last season. The Calgary Flames roster includes three first round draft picks: Sam Bennett (4th overall in 2014), Emile Poirier (22nd overall in 2013) and Morgan Klimchuk (28th overall in 2013). In addition, Mason McDonald, the 34th overall pick and first goalie to be drafted in the 2014 NHL Entry Draft has been named to the roster. John Gaudreau, winner of the 2014 Hobey Baker Award, will also be in attendance. The Edmonton Oilers roster will include Leon Draisaitl (selected 3rd overall in 2014), Darnell Nurse (selected 7th overall in 2013), Mitch Moroz (selected 32nd overall in 2012) and David Musil (selected 31st overall 2011). Laurent Brossoit, who was named to the ECHL All-Rookie Team and ECHL 2nd All-Star Team following the 2013.14 season, will also attend the event. The Winnipeg Jets roster includes two first round picks: Nikolaj Ehlers (9th overall in 2014) and Josh Morrissey (13th overall in 2013). The list also includes Nic Petan and J.C. Lipon, who represented Canada at the World Junior Championships in 2014 and 2013, respectively. Ryan Olsen, who collected 73 points in 2013.14 with the Kelowna Rockets, has been named to the tournament. Scott Kosmachuk, who collected 101 points and appeared in the Memorial Cup final with the Guelph Storm and 2014 NCAA Goalie of the Year Connor Hellebuyck will appear at the Young Stars Classic. Tournament ticket packages include six games for $60.00* on sale July 11 at 10:00 AM. This all-event package offers best value to fans with savings of 30% available until August 15th. A new offering this year are two VIP ticket packages for $85.00* and $180.00* (*plus applicable fees). For information and details on what VIP packages include please visit canucks.com/youngstars and valleyfirsttix.com. Tickets are available online at valleyfirsttix.com, by phone at 1-877-763-2849, in person at the South Okanagan Events Centre Valley First Box Office or at Penticton & Wine Country Visitor Centre. For more information about the Young Stars Classic and surrounding events, please go to canucks.com/youngstars. Young Stars Classic Schedule* Game Team Date Time Game 1 Calgary vs Winnipeg Sept. 12 4:00 pm Game 2 Vancouver vs Edmonton Sept. 12 7:30 pm Game 3 Calgary vs Edmonton Sept. 13 7:30 pm Game 4 Vancouver vs Winnipeg Sept. 14 2:00 pm Game 5 Vees’ Exhibition Sept. 14 5:30 pm Game 6 Edmonton vs Winnipeg Sept. 15 11:30 am Game 7 Vancouver vs Calgary Sept. 15 5:30 pm *Game dates, times and opponents subject to change.Mixed martial arts fighter Jeff Monson who has been long proclaiming his love for Russia and the Russian people will soon have his dream come true – his Russian passport is almost ready. In an interview with RT Jeff Monson shed light on the reasons why he feels so connected to such a distant and mysterious country that he’s decided to become its citizen and fight in the ring under its flag. When asked to explain the phrase “I have the Russian soul” from a recent interview, Monson entered into a detailed explanation, saying that his fascination with Russia is rooted in his childhood when the USSR still existed. Read more “People say ‘why did you choose Russia?’ and I say, ‘I think Russia chose me as much as I chose Russia… I feel like this is home.’" Starting with Moscow and St. Petersburg, Monson has visited around 40 Russian cities over the last five years. However, the most “shocking and surprising” thing for him have been the Russian people. “They are so generous, they open their homes to me, they open their hearts to me.” Monson, who has a Twitter account partially written in Russian, admits that those tweets are currently written by a special group working on it, but he plans to improve his Russian skills nonetheless. Every day he adds a couple of new words to his active vocabulary and keeps practicing. Monson, being interested in the current political situation, also commented on the US-Russia relationship. Although it is reminiscent of the Cold War, people should not pay attention to what’s going on between the governments because we all share basic human values, he noted. The only things about Russia that really bug Monson are traffic jams and the Wi-Fi connection, which he deems volatile – we say, check your phone, Mr. Monson! As for now, all the documents necessary for his acquiring a new passport have been approved and the procedure of turning him into an official Russian is almost complete.The UK has been waiting over six years for a full blown Slipknot tour. Now, in January 2015, it has finally begun. As the Prepare For Hell tour, featuring Slipknot, their long time brothers in metal KoRn and newcomers King 810 rolled into Glasgow on Sunday, Rock Sins was granted the biggest interview in our five and a half year history. Our very own Lisa Fox sat down with Slipknot percussionist Chris Fehn (aka #3) for an in-depth chat about everything from censorship to golf. Yes, that’s right, golf. Take it away Lisa and Chris…. Rock Sins: Hi how are you? Chris Fehn: Good how are you? I’m very well. Thank you. Good. First off, I know you’re an enthusiastic golfer. Have you managed to get a game in while you’re in Scotland? Noo, its too snowy. I wanna play St Andrew’s so bad. St Andrew’s has a wonderful golf course. One day I’ll get there. Yeah. I wanna play the old course though. I’m sure they’d let you. Well, that would be great. How have the first couple of European shows gone? Amazing. Amazing. There’s so many metal heads up here. It’s just… it’s unbelievable. You know, they just come out in droves. We know they’re in to it and it just makes the shows much better. When Slipknot were starting out, Korn were the big boys in the metal world. Yeah. What’s it like being on the road with them now? Well, they were a huge part of life before I was even in Slipknot. I mean, I love that band. I’d never traveled to see bands, and I traveled to Minneapolis to see Korn, and I was blown away. The great thing is, they’re amazing people, other than musicians. And that to me is the full package, because you never know. You meet a lot of people that are your idols and they turn out to be fucking assholes and these guys are nothing but gracious and good friends. Is it like you’re just hanging out with your buddies? Yeah it’s great because we all go through the same thing. We all know that things don’t always go smoothly. Any band basically has all these things in common, and to have somebody that can empathise and you can talk to and they understand is huge out here. I’ve heard that you guys are a lot calmer now than you used to be back in the day. Not just Slipknot, but Slipknot and Korn together. Is that true? Yeah. I mean you can only burn so long you know? Then, age and responsibilities catches up a little bit. Slipknot is something that a lot of people enjoy so it’s our job to make sure that we can deliver. Without having other things happen to you, that don’t need to happen. Lets talk about the new album. The Gray Chapter has been described as dark, like the new Iowa. Was that something intentional or was it a natural progression? Yeah it was just organic. We never go in with a plan, its never like “okay this record’s gonna be like this because we want this to be seen this way or heard this way”. That’s one good thing about this band; we don’t try to please. It’s just what we like when it’s recorded, and we like it, then that’s just the way it is, you know? We don’t answer to anybody or any thing about it. Custer has been getting a lot of radio play recently, but when it’s they remove the swear words, do you think that impacts on the songs? I do. I do. I hate that you know. There’s so many songs out there that they’ll all go [sound effects] or blip, the worst is when they re-do it with a different word
ratio of three girls to one boy in some of the schools it works with. This is to encourage more girls into the tech sector. Due to a lack of funding, this years program will be starting later than planned says Uzochukwu. So far over 500 children have passed through its clubs with 700 currently going through it's after school programs. While the foundation caters to both boys and girls it deliberately chooses a ratio of three girls to one boy in some of the schools it works with. This is to encourage more girls into the tech sector. Due to a lack of funding, this years program will be starting later than planned says Uzochukwu. Stella Uzochukwu self-funded the charity to get it started. She'd initially written to the government to set up a program, "but here in Nigeria it takes a whole year and in the end nothing happens" she says. "I thought how could I get this thing started quickly and decided to set it up myself." Stella Uzochukwu self-funded the charity to get it started. She'd initially written to the government to set up a program, "but here in Nigeria it takes a whole year and in the end nothing happens" she says. "I thought how could I get this thing started quickly and decided to set it up myself." The girls are part of 20 state schools across Abuja the charity works with. Its founder hopes to equip children with skills in coding, and computer programming. The girls are part of 20 state schools across Abuja the charity works with. Its founder hopes to equip children with skills in coding, and computer programming. Stella Uzochukwu set up the Odyssey Educational Foundation program in 2013, after traveling to India and discovering after school clubs there offer extra tuition in STEM - science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Stella Uzochukwu set up the Odyssey Educational Foundation program in 2013, after traveling to India and discovering after school clubs there offer extra tuition in STEM - science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The girls coding were part of the First Lego League challenge. For this year's competition, children had to build and program robots that could pick up and drop off pieces of garbage on a play area. The girls coding were part of the First Lego League challenge. For this year's competition, children had to build and program robots that could pick up and drop off pieces of garbage on a play area. Young girls in Nigeria have built robots to tackle waste as part of the Odyssey Educational Foundation after school program. Since 2009, Boko Haram attacks in the region have partly been aimed at discouraging girls from pursuing education. Young girls in Nigeria have built robots to tackle waste as part of the Odyssey Educational Foundation after school program. Since 2009, Boko Haram attacks in the region have partly been aimed at discouraging girls from pursuing education. By encouraging girls not only to stick with education but to pursue careers in science and technology, a school led by a female engineer in Nigeria is challenging Boko Haram. By encouraging girls not only to stick with education but to pursue careers in science and technology, a school led by a female engineer in Nigeria is challenging Boko Haram. But Rihab, who proudly describes herself as a "feminist," is determined to finish her education. She dreams of becoming an entrepreneur and being the CEO of a major company, and she recently appeared on Moroccan TV urging girls to work hard and follow their passions. I had the privilege of meeting Raphina and Rihab when I traveled to Liberia and Morocco earlier this week to highlight our global girls' education crisis -- the fact that right now, more than 62 million girls worldwide are not in school. This is such a heartbreaking loss, because these girls are so bright and so hungry to learn -- and like Raphina and Rihab, they have such big dreams for themselves. These girls are no less smart or deserving of an education than my own daughters -- or any of our sons and daughters. The only thing that separates them from our children is geography and luck. Sometimes the issue is resources: their families simply can't afford the school fees; or the nearest school is hours away; or the school nearby doesn't have adequate bathroom facilities for girls, so they're forced to stay home during their menstrual cycles, and they wind up falling behind and dropping out. But often the root of the problem is really about attitudes and beliefs: families and communities simply don't think girls are worthy of an education, and they choose to marry them off as teenagers instead, often forcing them to start having children when they're basically still children themselves. Michelle Obama hugs a student following a lesson plan about girls' leadership and self-esteem in support of the Let Girls Learn initiative, in Kakata, Liberia, June 27. The girls I met in Morocco and Liberia want to be doctors, teachers, entrepreneurs, engineers. One of them wants to run for office so she can fight for women's rights and combat climate change. Another hopes to open her own auto shop to teach women about cars so they can be more independent. But we know that when we give these girls the chance to learn, they will seize it. They'll walk for miles each day to school. They'll study for hours every night by candlelight, determined to learn as much as they possibly can. We know that when we give these girls the chance to learn, they will seize it. Michelle Obama We also know that educating girls doesn't just transform their life prospects -- it transforms the prospects of their families, communities, and nations as well. Studies show that girls who are educated earn higher salaries -- 10 to 20 percent more for each additional year of secondary school -- and sending more girls to school and into the workforce can boost an entire country's GDP. Educated girls also marry later, have lower rates of infant and maternal mortality, and are more likely to immunize their children and less likely to contract malaria and HIV. JUST WATCHED Michelle Obama's advice for men Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Michelle Obama's advice for men 00:52 That's why, last year, President Obama and I launched Let Girls Learn, an initiative to help adolescent girls worldwide attend school. And this week, we were proud to announce major new efforts by the U.S. government to promote girls' education in Africa. In Liberia we'll be running girls' empowerment programs, working to end gender violence in schools, and supporting new, second-chance schools for girls who were forced to drop out because of pregnancy or rape. In Morocco we'll be working closely with the Moroccan government to help transform high schools across the country, and we'll be supporting new school dormitories to allow girls from rural areas to attend school far from home. Large scale efforts like these are critically important, and will affect the lives of countless girls, but they're simply not enough. Governments alone cannot solve this problem -- not when we're talking about a number like 62 million. That's why I ended my trip this week in Spain delivering a speech to an audience of young Spanish women. I wanted to make a simple, but urgent point: Every single one of us in countries like Spain and the US has the power -- and the obligation -- to step up as a champion for these girls. JUST WATCHED U.S. First Lady in London to promote education Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH U.S. First Lady in London to promote education 02:22 I told these young women: If you have access to social media, then you have a platform to tell these 62 million girls' stories and raise awareness about the challenges they face. And that's just as true for everyone at home in the US. You can go to 62MillionGirls.com right now to find all the information you need to get started and to learn how you can take action to support girls' education efforts across the globe. Once you know these girls' stories, I think you'll find, as I have, that you simply can't walk away from them. After traveling the world as First Lady and meeting so many girls like Raphina and Rihab, I carry their hopes and their ambitions with me everywhere I go, and I plan to continue my work on their behalf not just for my final seven months as First Lady, but for the rest of my life. I hope you will join me in this mission.Drug companies are spending millions of pounds every year on all-expenses-paid trips to conferences around the world for doctors and other hospital staff, in what critics say is a massive marketing exercise dressed up as medical education. The Guardian can reveal the scale of pharmaceutical company sponsorship following an examination of the registers of gifts and donations to doctors that all hospitals are required to keep. They show considerable largesse - from drug companies regularly picking up hefty bills for travel to international conferences in Europe, Asia and America, to specialist nurses' salaries, and weekly sandwich lunches for hospital staff training sessions. All-expenses-paid trips to conferences in the US, Vietnam or Hungary are a regular feature of the registers, costing the companies up to £5,000 per doctor. Many of the declarations by doctors do not put a price on the trip. The total amounts received by staff at individual hospital trusts with complete registers are substantial - Sheffield's staff received funding of more than £105,000 from pharmaceutical and medical devices companies in the 12 months to last June. Examples of the firms' hospitality include: · Astra Zeneca paid £2,500 for a doctor at the Royal Bournemouth trust and £1,500 for a doctor at Sheffield teaching hospital to attend a cancer conference in Texas · Sanofi-Aventis, the world's fourth biggest pharmaceutical company, paid for doctors at the Countess of Chester trust to go to conferences in Cape Town, New Orleans and Barcelona. At Gateshead trust, their reps gave a breakfast for 30 staff "to discuss drugs for the treatment of breast cancer". The trust's register records that "the donor was seeking to secure business". · Roche spent £2,000 for an oncology consultant at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge to go to a conference in May last year. · GSK, the biggest British pharmaceutical company, paid £1,200 for a consultant at Sheffield teaching hospital to attend the 11th international congress of Parkinson's disease and movement disorders in Turkey last June. · Companies have also been taking hospital staff to top football and rugby matches. Carillion, a public sector construction firm, spent £180 taking a senior manager at Milton Keynes trust to lunch and then a rugby match at Twickenham last August. Most doctors deny that their reliance on drug company cash makes them biased. The pharmaceutical companies argue that they are helping doctors acquire further medical education by funding their trips to conferences in foreign cities, but they refuse to reveal how much they pay out. However, the health select committee warned in a report in 2005 that the industry's sponsorship of doctors and other medical staff had drug promotion as its motive and could lead to unsafe prescribing of drugs such as Vioxx, the arthritis drug which was found to cause heart attacks. Joe Collier, the recently retired professor of medicines policy at St George's hospital, London, a former member of the Medicines Commission and an adviser to the select committee, said: "Through its orchestrated campaigns affecting all those involved in the use of medicines, the pharmaceutical industry enormously influences what patients are prescribed. On the whole these influences are detrimental to best practice." Payments to doctors are far from transparent. The Department of Health requires NHS trusts to compile registers of their medical staff's and directors' possible conflicts of interest and to make them available to the public. Only a minority do so. The Guardian requested the registers for 90 hospital trusts under freedom of information legislation. Only around a quarter returned data that included the names of the doctors and the sponsoring companies and the amounts of money received. Some refused to give any information at all. Collier said this was unacceptable. "Declarations of interest are a key way to help break the pharmaceutical industry's stranglehold. It is not a trivial issue. Public declarations by doctors are essential if prescribing is to be sensible and appropriate and according to patients' needs." Consumers International (CI) said the lack of transparency was unacceptable. "When a medical professional speaks on a health issue, we assume that they are putting patients' interests first. If that person has a conflict of interest because they or their organisation are receiving funding from a drug company the least we should demand is the right to know about it," said Justin Macmullan, head of campaigns. "Pharmaceutical companies will tell you that what they are funding is medical education. But our concern is that this is really highly effective, well-targeted marketing. This throws any notion of impartiality out of the window and jeopardises a doctor's ability to make an informed, balanced decision about the most appropriate treatments." CI wants drug companies to declare how much they give to doctors. "Countries such as the US and Australia have woken up to this issue and are now requiring pharmaceutical companies to disclose their funding of medical organisations and medical education. European regulators have been sleeping on the job," he said. Labour MP Paul Flynn described as "codswallop" the companies' claim that their only intention was to help educate doctors. "It's not true. It's part of a huge marketing budget. It's all about maximising their profits, not helping people in life-threatening situations," he said. "The influence of these companies is enormous." Doctors who receive funding believe they are not influenced by it. Robert Storey, a consultant cardiologist at Sheffield involved in drug trials, took four trips to conferences in the year to June 2007 courtesy of Astra Zeneca at a total cost of £12,000. However, he regards these as business trips because he is asked to disseminate research findings and are funded from the R&D budget. More junior doctors have their funding arranged through the drug rep and must fly economy class under Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) rules. "If it is done through the local rep, who may expect some sort of favour in exchange for that sponsorship, there is more stringent regulation," said Dr Storey. "[Those doctors] are seeing reps on a regular basis and although it is explicitly stated in the ABPI rules that there shouldn't be any conflict or conditions [on the funding], it probably does influence doctors' behaviour because they are unsure whether they will get further sponsorship for going to further meetings, so it is useful to them to engender good relationships with different reps. "One has to be careful how one judges oneself, but when you get to my level where you are getting a lot of interest from different companies, you can pick and choose to a certain extent. If you feel uncomfortable about any particular request or association, you can very easily walk away. If I'm asked to put certain points across in a talk which I think are biased, I won't do it in the best interests of patient care." Storey, who makes a fuller declaration than most doctors, would prefer to see a different system. "I certainly think it would be preferable if sponsorship or money for travelling to meetings was independent from the pharmaceutical companies but there is no pot of money for providing that," he said. Dr Willy Notcutt, an expert in pain relief at James Paget hospital in Great Yarmouth, has recently returned from a big conference in Glasgow. Two companies, Eli Lilly and Boehringer, paid £800 for his travel, accommodation and registration fee. He says he has been prescribing a drug sold jointly by the two companies but was not "brainwashed" into it by their hospitality. He made his own independent evaluation of the merits of the drug. "I don't give a toss what the drug company rep says. I prescribe drugs which give benefit to my patients," he said. The ABPI said doctors would not be able to attend conferences where they hear from experts in their field without sponsorship, but it was important this was transparent.Small but vocal group of neo-Maoists dismiss western focus on famine and chaos to praise the republic’s founder on anniversary of passing On Friday morning Zhang Hongliang, a 60-year-old academic, will jump out of bed and make his way to a secret rendezvous in north-western Beijing to sing a song about Mao Zedong. Flanked by dozens of kindred Maoist spirits, the Chinese scholar will observe a minute’s silence before delivering a speech on the glories of the Great Helmsman’s 27-year-reign called: “Mao Zedong: the People’s Leader”. Later that day, after hours spent pondering Mao’s teachings, the memorial meeting will conclude with a rendition of The Internationale. “If we abandon Mao’s thoughts China will no have no future,” said Zhang, a professor at Beijing’s Minzu University and one of the country’s most outspoken neo-Maoists. “Without Chairman Mao there would be no new China.” Zhang is not alone. As the People’s Republic of China prepares to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its founder’s death, on 9 September 1976, similar memorials have been taking place across the country. 'What mistake did we make?' Victims of Cultural Revolution seek answers, 50 years on Read more In Tangshan, an industrial hub that was levelled by an earthquake just over a month before Mao’s death, supporters marked the revolutionary’s passing with a two-day festival of poetry, shadow puppetry, calligraphy and storytelling. A photograph published by the Huan Bohai News website showed participants huddled around a banner that read: “Chairman Mao is China’s Number One”. In Hengshui, another northern city, a Communist party-run website said high school students mourned the Great Leader with “impassioned poetry recitations, dance and opera”. And in Beijing newspapers have reported a spike in the number of Maoist pilgrims flocking to Tiananmen Square, where the Chairman’s embalmed body has been on display since a colossal mausoleum was opened there in 1977. Once inside, mourners lay yellow chrysanthemums at the feet of a three-metre marble statue of the revolutionary leader, in a quasi-religious display of reverence. “My journey won’t be complete until I see Chairman Mao,” one 56-year-old pilgrim, Huang Xin, told the Global Times as he queued to see the casket this week. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mao Zedong on holiday in 1961 in Lushan. He died 40 years ago on 9 September 1976. Photograph: XINHUA/AFP/Getty Images Shedding tears as he saw Mao’s rubbery cadaver up-close for the first time, Huang told the newspaper: “Our generation has a very deep attachment to Mao, who created a harmonious society in which people could trust each other with no tricks at all”. Perhaps unsurprisingly in the country with the world’s largest online population - 710 million at the last government count – cyberspace has also been marking the event. The Global Times said almost 2.5 million people had taken part in an “online flower-laying campaign” paying tribute to the Great Helmsman on the social networking app WeChat. The commemorations sit uneasily with the widespread consensus among historians about the evils of Mao’s rule. “I see him as one of the greatest criminals of the 20th century,” said Frank Dikötter, the Dutch historian who has written a trilogy of books about the horrors of Mao’s rule. “I’m very reluctant to put him above Hitler but equal, head-to-head. It’s a tough race to win.” This is a selective commemoration of parts of Mao’s life, that aren’t the ones that we dwell on outside China Some believe Dikötter goes too far in his unflinching demolition of Mao’s reputation but few serious China scholars describe the communist dictator’s reign as anything but calamitous. The economy was crippled and up to 45 million people are believed to have died in the Great Famine caused by Mao’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward push for breakneck industrialisation in the late 1950s. Up to two million more lives are thought to have been lost in the tumultuous decade-long Cultural Revolution that began 50 years ago this year and officially ended with Mao’s death in 1976. Even the Communist party itself has admitted that period of Mao’s rule inflicted “grave disorder, damage and retrogression” on the country. Despite all this, Jeff Wasserstrom, a professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine, said Mao remained a revered figure in some parts of China. Many in the west felt disbelief at how people could have “anything other than revulsion at somebody who was responsible for the Great Leap famine and the Cultural Revolution”. Chinese villagers build giant golden Chairman Mao Read more “[But] within China that is seen as just one part of Mao’s life,” said Wasserstrom, editor of the recently published Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China. Rather than focusing on the terrible calamities he inflicted on China during the 1950s and 1960s, many Chinese would this week remember the Mao of 1949, a revolutionary hero “who led to the creation of a country that they now take great pride in, that is able to throw its weight around in the world”. “This is going to be a very selective commemoration of parts of Mao’s life, that aren’t the ones that we necessarily dwell upon outside of China,” Wasserstrom said of this week’s memorials. Zhang, who is part of a small but vocal minority of neo-Maoists, said criticism of the Great Leader was a consequence of his unflinching support for the masses. The leftist scholar claimed Mao, who was 82 when he died, had been “misread and even demonised” for daring to single-handedly take on the academic elite and bureaucrats in order to defend the interests of the people. “Chairman Mao was the loneliest leader in Chinese history,” Zhang said. On Friday, like-minded devotees will congregate in Shaoshan, a small town in central China where he was born in 1893, to pay tribute to Mao. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A 4m-high Mao Zedong statue overlooks farmland in Shaoshan, the former Chinese leader’s hometown. Photograph: How Hwee Young/EPA “We miss the life of equality and justice experienced in Mao’s time,” one told state media. In Beijing, a source with ties to the Chinese leadership told Reuters there would be “low-key” remembrance events. Dikötter said Mao’s central role in the Communist party’s history meant Beijing was in a catch-22 situation over how to handle the anniversary. “On the one hand, they fully realise that there are large portions of the population who know perfectly well what a horrendous figure Mao was … On the other hand you can’t really do without him. So the compromise position is to have some sort of low-key celebration here or there.” The Dutch historian predicted Beijing would also seek to silence anyone attempting to use the anniversary to revive debate over the sins of China’s founding father. “The attempt here is to make sure that nobody really sullies that image, that nobody really undermines history, which is one of the great pillars of legitimacy for the Communist party of China,” he said. Yang Jisheng, a Chinese journalist who helped expose the millions of deaths caused by Mao’s Great Famine, said he was unable to comment on the anniversary of the Chairman’s passing. “It is not convenient to be interviewed,” he said, using an expression common in China when someone has been pressured by authorities not to speak out. “I’m sorry.” Additional reporting by Christy Yao.'HAIR of the dog' has taken on a whole new meaning in Darlington, with a combined barbers shop and bar opening in the town. And the name above the door might be familiar as former Big Brother winner, Anthony Hutton, is the shop’s owner. The unique Mr Hutton’s Barbers and Bar, in Blackwellgate, welcomed its first customers before Christmas and Mr Hutton, from Consett, is pleased with the progress. He said: “I’ve had the idea for ages and it was one of those things that was put on a pedestal, but I was always hell-bent on doing it. “I started doing research about it and couldn’t find anything like it – though Carlsberg had an advert saying, ‘if we did barber shops’, and that’s the kind of concept I’ve gone for. “I’ve been in Darlington for the last three years with my partner, Sophie, and we have a lot of friends and support in the area. “When we saw the spot had become available, we just had to have it.” The former Ron’s Music store was converted to accommodate a barbers area at the back of the shop, which is closed off to the bar each evening. Clients have already received cut-throat shaves and haircuts from owner Mr Hutton, who completed his hairdresser training in Darlington. He added: “There was a mixed reaction when people heard about it being a barbers and bar and you’re always going to get some differences of opinion and thoughts, but once people came inside, they were happy with it. “It’s already going really well and we’ve had a great response so far.” And Mr Hutton has been supported by his mother, Annette Hutton, from Consett, who has praised her son’s ambition to open the quirky barbers and bar. Ms Hutton said: “It’s really busy already and that’s only through word of mouth or people passing by – so far, so good.”Tonight, we are joined by Sayo from Grand Old Podcast, and we discuss Blizzcon, Patch 5.3, Hotfixes, Bacon, and new ridiculous internet sensations. Yup we hit everywhere, also can Ray get a question right during Geek Cred? Random World News Baby Mugging – Newest Internet Sensation http://www.today.com/moms/baby-mugging-everyones-doing-it-6C9624612 Bacon News Bacon Fest in Chicago – http://baconfestchicago.com/ Gaming News XBOX 720 Details on 5/21 XBOX Always online clarification? www.theverge.com/2013/4/26/4270224/new-xbox-rumored-sharing-publishers-decide-always-on-internet Razer Beta Testing VOIP and In-game chat overlay program http://www.razerzone.com/comms/?src=pgm.87681000&utm_source=RazerStore&utm_campaign=RazerComms&utm_medium=edm_US Warcraft Hotfixes We’re deploying a hotfix late tonight that will reduce the number of Lesser Charms of Good Fortune required to purchase 3 Mogu Runes of Fate from 90 down to 50. Meaning when you log in Wednesday and purchase your 3 Mogu Runes of Fate, which are used for 5.2 raid boss bonus rolls, it will only cost you 50 Lesser Charms. Oondasta and Nalak can now be completed cross realm for loot Patch 5.3 News Experience needed to increase from level 85 to level 90 has been reduced by 33% Shado-Pan Assault belts now require Friendly reputation to purchase, down from Revered. Shado-Pan Assault chest pieces now require Honored reputation to purchase, down from Revered. Discussion Topic: What panels do you want to see at Blizzcon? FOFFs, & Random Facts! Guest: Sayomara @SayomaraV @GrandOldPodcast Grand Old Podcast rivalcastmedia.com RAY Twitter: @rayfyst XBOX Live: Rayfyst Steam: Rayfyst CER Twitter: @ceraphus Blog: variantavatar.com XBOX Live: Amish Mafia Steam: Ceraphus XIA Twitter: @itsxia Xbox Live: itsxia The Show WEB: thesundering.net Twitter: @thesundering itunes Email: thesunderingpodcast@gmail.com Phone Number: 323-SUNDER-0 or 323-786-3370 Steam Group: The Sundering Forums at: http://thegeekhole.net Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TheSundering Stitcher Internet Radio: http://stitcher.com/listen.php?fid=19490Activists have taken action after the first shark is caught, shot and taken out to sea as part of controversial cull program Shark cull activists have removed bait from drum lines in Western Australia's south-west after the first shark caught on the line was killed on Australia Day. A three-metre female tiger shark was shot four times in the head, dragged out to sea and dumped after being caught a kilometre off Meelup Beach less than a day after the drum lines were set. The fisherman who took the tender for the south-west said the shark was a threat to public safety and had to be removed. "I'll continue to do it and then hopefully later we'll perhaps be able to take some samples or contribute in some way to knowledge and better understanding," he told Fairfax radio on Monday. The fisherman, who asked not to be named, said protesters had kept away from his vessel and he believed the shark died quickly. "I was satisfied that I managed to get the rounds in the right place and we dispatched it as quickly as we possibly could," he said. But the president of West Australians for Shark Conservation, Ross Weir, said it was an inhumane way of killing the animal and about 22 activists were keeping an eye on the fisherman's activities. "They have been out on the water and they have removed baits from the lines," he said. Weir said the fisherman did not have experience with sharks and his.22 rifle was not an appropriate gun. Sea Shepherd Australia’s managing director, Jeff Hansen, said it was a cruel and painful death for the shark, which could have been stuck for hours. "How can we condemn Japan for the indiscriminate killing of whales and dolphins, and do this to our precious protected marine life here in Australia?" he said. "This method is utterly cruel and inhumane and these animals can take many hours to die." The controversial program to kill sharks larger than three metres that came close to shore went ahead after the federal environment minister, Greg Hunt, granted WA an exemption under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, allowing the protected great white shark to be killed. But the state government will be forced to use its own Fisheries Department officers in Perth after commercial operators pulled out following threats from activists. Hunt said last week that when the trial ended on 30 April, a federal environment act assessment would determine if the policy should continue. The policy was introduced after the death of Chris Boyd at Gracetown late last year, which was the seventh in WA since August 2010. The premier, Colin Barnett, was heckled at an Australia Day event on Sunday, but brushed it off and said people were entitled to free speech. The issue has also made international headlines and attracted anti-cull comments on social media from Sir Richard Branson and Ricky Gervais. A rally will be held at Cottesloe beach – Barnett’s home suburb – on Saturday. Thousands attended the previous protest.Cartoon Network has got a thing for bruins. The Time Warner-owned cable outlet has granted a second-season order to the animated comedy “We Bare Bears,” a series about three bear brothers trying to make their way into human society. The network cited the program’s early ratings performance. Since debuting July 27, a weeklong strip of original episodes that ran between July 27 and July 31 ranked first in its time period among kids 2 to 11 and 6 to 11, and in key demographics for boys. Cartoon Network said all premiere week plays of the show reached a combined audience of more than 10 million viewers over two years of age, including 4.8 million kids between 2 and 11 and 3.6 million kids between 6 and 11. The network said “We Bare Bears” was one of the top three shows on its new Cartoon Network video app and contributed to a 14% increase in CartoonNetwork.com video plays over the prior four week site average. The series is created by Daniel Chong, and developed out of Cartoon Network Studios’ shorts program, which tries to identify promising concepts from up-and-coming creators.Abstract The association between diagonal earlobe creases and fatal cardiovascular disease was investigated in a consecutive series of 303 coroner's necropsies. Those studied all died outside hospital in the Brighton Health District. Data were analysed on the cause of death and on the type of earlobe, the presence or absence of diagonal creases, age, sex, height, and any previous history of cardiovascular disease or diabetes mellitus. The age of nine men and six women was not known. Cardiovascular causes of death included ischaemic and hypertensive disease, calcific valvar stenosis, ruptured dissecting aneurysm of the thoracic aorta, and ruptured atheromatous aneurysm of the abdominal aorta. The mean (SD) age at death was 72 (15) and the male to female ratio was 1.3:1. Diagonal creases were present in 123 (72%) of 171 men and 88 (67%) of 132 women. A previous history of cardiovascular disease was present in 90 (30%) of the total of 303 and 74 (35%) of the 211 with diagonal creases. A cardiovascular cause of death was present in 154 (73%) of 211 with and 41 (45%) of 92 without diagonal creases and was associated with an increased risk of a cardiovascular cause of death of 1.55 in men and 1.74 in non-diabetic women.Attention, Filmmakers: Essential DIY Tips So much of DIY filmmaking involves doing research to find out what’s worked for other filmmakers. We’ve compiled some handy low-budget tips for DIY filmmakers (many of them courtesy of DIY filmmaking guru Joey Shanks). READ MORE: 6 Best Apps for Filmmakers: Cinematography This Cinematographer Created An Incredible DIY Camera Rig: While shooting “Singapore Sling,” DP Ivan Rodrigues designed a camera rig for around $100. Read how and why he did it (and be safe out there!). DIY or DIE: 10 No Budget Filmmaking Musts: It’s easy to spend money in the wrong places when shooting your own film. These 10 tips will help you keep costs down while getting the shots you want. How to Create the ‘Film Noir’ Look With No Budget: This tutorial shows aspiring film noir directors how to create the famous and distinctive lighting style on a budget. Here’s How to Light Your Film Using an IKEA Trash Can: In this handy video tutorial, David F. Sandberg shows how he shot his short horror film “Not So Fast” using a trash can from IKEA and other household items. Here’s How to Create the Magic Behind Cloud Tanks: In a new web video courtesy of PBS Digital Studios and Shanks FX, special effects guru Joey Shanks highlights the process behind cloud tanks. How to Re-Create the ‘Interstellar’ Black Hole: In honor of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” Joey Shanks shows how to recreate the film’s black hole with all “In-Camera” elements. How to Use Front Screen Projection: The video instructs viewers on how to use Front Screen Projection, the technique Kubrick used for the “Dawn of Man” segment of his masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Here’s How to Find What You Need for Your Indie Production at a Thrift Shop: Thrift shops are filled with many great items that can serve as filmmaking tools. How to Shoot Your Film Using Flashlights: Joey Shanks shows other DIY filmmakers how to create special effects using household objects such as flashlights. READ MORE: Attention, Filmmakers: Essential Tips for Micro-Budget Features Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.It was forgettable, yet just so unforgettable, the dirty absurdity that was the XFL. Remember that league? Run by pro wrestling kingpin Vince McMahon, who wanted to provide an alternative to the NFL, the XFL was over the top, from the personas to the nicknames to the uniforms to the rule changes. For one glorious (notorious?) year, this wild pro football league was in full, furious function. The year was 2001, and now, all these years later, only one player from the XFL is still kickin’ in the NFL. And that player is Broncos starting middle linebacker Paris Lenon. “It was entirely different than the National Football League,” said Lenon, 36. “I’m pretty sure people have a lot of jokes about the league, but at the time for me, it was a situation where I had the opportunity to play in NFL Europe or stay in the states and make more money. And that’s what it boiled down to.” He was a member of the Memphis Maniax (I’m still trying to figure out how to spell the singular version of that nickname). Lenon had played at the University of Richmond, and after being cut by the Carolina Panthers, he revived his career with the Maniax, which led to jobs in the NFL for the next decade. “Playing in that league, all it did was it gave me more playing experience,” he said. “Anytime you get more experience, get more comfortable, the better you are from it.” For the Broncos he has tallied 22 tackles, most of them late in the season since he took over as the starter for Wesley Woodyard. Lenon now essentially splits the snaps with Woodyard — who primarily plays in nickel packages. “He understands the game, he understands the schemes of offense, and he’s gotten more comfortable in our defensive scheme as we’ve moved along,” Broncos coach John Fox said Wednesday. “And as I mentioned awhile back, when we started plugging him in there, he earned that opportunity. And he’s done a good job.” ESPN.com once ran a list of the 25 biggest flops in the past 25 years. The XFL finished second — behind Ryan Leaf. Asked for one of his XFL memories, Lenon laughed. “It was crazy. I had a coach who’d smoke cigars in the meetings,” he said. “I ain’t lying. He’d smoke the cigars in the meeting. He was old school. He was a great guy, but he enjoyed his cigars.” Nuggets broadcaster Chris Marlowe still proudly keeps his XFL gear — Marlowe was an XFL announcer, paired with another aspect of football infamy, Brian Bosworth. “It was sure fun while it lasted,” Marlowe said. “There were (innovations). Some of the things that didn’t work out as planned were some of the rules they implemented. They started the game off with a sprint, one guy from each team running to the ball on the 40, and whoever ran the fastest and got the ball would have the choice. It was great — until one of the better players in the league dislocated his shoulder on that play. “They had the bright idea that they wanted announc
of wealth, or loot, or even letting us level because he was afraid of us getting “too powerful”. Literally, every mob we killed or reward we earned was enough for food and board for a night. He absolutely despised my conjuration wizards charm spell and ability to make objects with his Minor Conjuration talent. What’s more if he didn’t like where we were going this deux ex machina mist would appear and paralyze us all without a save. One time I attempted to use Dispel Magic on it, but i was told it had no effect. One time he forgot to plan any encounters for our game, so the whole session was set in this luxury hot spring we couldn’t escape from for some reason. During my bath i had an idea and openly spoke to another player about robbing the spa, as it’s full of wealthy people. Obviously our DM heard this and started scribbling stuff down. I used my Minor Conjuration to make a beautiful sapphire necklace, put it on, and went to the front desk to ask where i could store valuables. The DM looks up from his notes, smiles, and asks me to follow him. For the next 10 minutes he goes through the 15 step security scheme including; voice recognition, finger prints, retinal scan, blood offering, and several other tests and examination. Finally we get in the vault where he shows me a locker to put my necklace in. He seals it with a drop of blood and on the way out I inquire about the strength of the security, which he happily responds “It’s practically unbreakable.” I waddle back to my other PC, get back in the hot springs, smile and tell them we’re about to make some money. The players looks at me with a confused expression and is like “how are we going to break in with all that security dude?” I replied “We won’t. We just go back in an hour when my necklace has disappeared and ask for compensation for my missing jewelry.” I’ve never seen a DM’s expression change so fast.For a study released this week, Pew Research Center interviewed more than 2,750 people who have access to the internet. They devised a new measure of connectivity called “digital readiness,” and arranged internet users into five distinct categories based on their readiness. Three of those categories contained people who are “relatively hesitant” to use technology for learning, even though they have access to a reliable internet connection. “The data show that there are real barriers to drawing people to use digital resources for learning,” said John Horrigan, the Pew study’s lead author. The main barriers that Horrigan and his team identified were a lack of digital skills and a lack of confidence in one’s own ability to find trustworthy information on the internet. Horrigan named the least technologically savvy group “the unprepared.” His study found that the 14 percent of Americans who fell into this group are the least likely to use online learning tools, due to the barriers he identified. A small group of Americans—just 5 percent—were categorized as “traditional learners.” Even though they’re interested in learning outside the classroom, they prefer to avoid using resources tools to do so. At 33 percent of Americans, the largest single group of internet users is made up of “the reluctant.” They’ve got better computer skills than members of the “unprepared” group, but they’re very unfamiliar with educational resources online and where to find them. Altogether, the study found that just over half of Americans who have access to the internet don’t have the tools to use it effectively, or at all, for learning. And when the Pew researchers examined the demographic groups that were most likely to show up in the three “hesitant” groups, they found a handful of traditionally disadvantaged groups: minorities, women, and lower-income households. The same types of divisions appear to be affecting enrollment in online courses. Although free and open to all, MOOC enrollment is biased toward the already highly educated and the relatively wealthy, according to a pair of studies from researchers at Harvard and MIT. One study published last year examined the average neighborhood income of enrollees in nine Harvard MOOCs by matching up students’ mailing addresses to census income data. The researchers found that the neighborhoods that MOOC students lived in had an average income of $14,000 more than the average neighborhood in the U.S. In another analysis, which examined more than 150,000 students who took at least one of 68 online courses that Harvard and MIT offered between 2012 and 2014, the same authors estimated that for every $20,000 added to the average income of a person’s neighborhood, the odds that the person would enroll in an online course increased by 27 percent.Of course, that's partly because amid war (at least, amid a popular war, such as World War II) many of their readers and viewers want them to behave that way. But that's kind of my point: If the frequency of mass killings reaches a point where it is perceived as a true national crisis, there will be growing pressure to do something about it, and lots of people may agree that punishing killers with obscurity (in the literal sense of not showing their faces, at least) is one thing that should be done about it. It could even get to a point where the self-censorship actually makes sense in business terms--where the New York Times is considered, in a sense, patriotic for eschewing images of mass killers, and is rewarded for this by readers. Which leads to my second point: Gould suggests that media be shamed into self-censorship, both by credentialed critics who appear on mass media and, via social media, by lay critics as well. I absolutely agree. I would just say that I don't see this shaming as an alternative to my proposal but rather as a complement to it. In general, the shaming of norm violators is one of the mechanisms by which a norm is strengthened and upheld. But that doesn't mean the norm can't first be planted by a few elite media institutions that take the initiative. It's kind of a chicken and egg question: Which will happen first--the eschewing by some media outlets of images of accused mass killers, or the shaming of media outlets that fail to exercise that self-censorship? I'm indifferent, so long as both wind up gaining momentum. The problem of mass killings may not yet be seen as serious enough for that to happen, but that doesn't mean it can't happen or won't happen.The study, published in the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal, included 20 people, half of whom had never celebrated Christmas. Based on the interviews the participants were divided into a "Christmas group" who had positive associations with Christmas, and the "non-Christmas group" who were indifferent and did not celebrate. The participants were then shown a succession of Christmassy and neutral images, while having their brains scanned. Five areas of the brain lit up in the participants from the Christmas group, including parts associated with spirituality, physical senses, and the recognition of facial emotion. In the study, the researchers, led by Anders Hougaard of the Danish Headache Center and Department of Neurology at the University of Copenhagen, write that they wished to help the "millions’ who have a Christmas spirit deficiency – or the ‘bah humbug’ syndrome." "Accurate localisation of the Christmas spirit is a paramount first step in being able to help this group of patients," they wrote. The researchers said that the Christmas spirit could not be scientifically explained in its entirety. "Although merry and intriguing, these findings should be interpreted with caution," they wrote. "Something as magical and complex as the Christmas spirit cannot be fully explained by, or limited to, the mapped brain activity alone." They called for further research to determine in what way the Christmas spirit differed from other festive emotions. "Comparative studies of these patterns will also be imperative in studying other seasonal disturbances, related to, for example, Easter, Chanukah, or Diwali," they concluded.Florida lawmakers are considering an alimony reform bill that's proved quite controversial. The measure would eliminate lifelong alimony payments and use a formula based on the length of the marriage and spousal income differential to set alimony amount and duration. Introduced by state Rep. Colleen Burton (R-Polk), Florida House Bill 943 "is stirring emotional arguments for and against," AP reports. Alimony reform advocates have sought the change for years, saying recipients use permanent alimony to extort a lifetime meal ticket even when they could work. Opponents say that would make it impossible for mothers to leave careers to stay home with their children, for fear of being left destitute after a breakup. Obviously forgoing paid work to raise children can leave women financially vulnerable. Perhaps those who fear financial ruin if they drop out of the workforce to raise kids shouldn't drop out of the workforce to raise kids. If they take that gamble, and the marriage ends in divorce, they may have to take a job that's less than optimal or otherwise live with the consequences of these choices. Like taking out too many student loans for a worthless degree or putting off having children until it's too late, it's a pitiable situation. But not one that should necessarily be corrected for with state force. And let's be clear: Florida lawmakers are in no way trying to abolish alimony payments. Under the new formulation, alimony duration could be set at between 25 percent and 75 percent of the length of the marriage. "We want to be able to give judges discretion, but we don't want to give them so much discretion that there's no consistency from one sector to another, because right now there's no predictability or consistency," said Alan Frisher, co-founder of The Family Law Reform group. Perhaps with lifelong alimony off the table, we'd see a greater role for voluntary prenuptial agreements. Perhaps we'd see increased women's workforce participation. Perhaps we'd see public assistance rolls go up. Regardless of outcome, prohibiting a more objective, proportionate alimony formula seems hard to justify. H.B. 943 would also let people lower or end payments upon retirement, create a rebuttable presumption that no alimony be awarded for marriages of two years or less, prevent combined alimony and child support requirements from constituting more than 55 percent of the paying spouse's income, and establish that an increase in the payer's income "does not constitute a basis for a modification to increase alimony unless at the time the alimony award was established it was determined that the obligor was underemployed or unemployed." And it changes terms like "husband" and "wife" to the gender-neutral "spouse," presumably to accommodate Florida's now-legal same-sex marriages. The bill has been panned as "anti-woman, anti-marriage, and anti-traditional family," but that's from members of the First Wives Advocacy Group, so take that for what you will. Florida Gov. Rick Scott vetoed alimony reform legislation in 2013, but that bill had language allowing for the reopening of old divorce cases, which the new legislation omits. A similar version of H.B. 943 has been introduced in the Florida Senate.Five years ago, Nicolas Sarkozy was the candidate of the “France that wakes up early.” Today he is the “President of the rich.” It’s his government that has brought about this switch, and it shows how much the country has changed through the crisis. Michel Sieurin leans forward, sets down the shoe-hammer and lowers his voice: “Five years ago I voted for Nicolas Sarkozy. Today, I’m embarrassed by that. That slogan, ‘Work more to earn more’, I liked. But he’s done nothing for the little people. He’s the president of the rich.” For 25 years Sieurin has been the shoemaker of Montivilliers, a small town in northern France near Le Havre. “The anti-Sarkozyism is a phenomenon of the Parisian elite,” Carla Bruni-Sarkozy said not long ago, and the pro-government media picked up the refrain: the Parisian literati, journalists and intellectuals are all against Sarkozy, but the “silent majority” out there think differently. That’s the story told too by the man himself, who out on the road in the provinces – surprise, surprise! – meets nothing but admirers. Perhaps Sarkozy should talk with someone like the shoemaker of Montivilliers. As a young man the now 56-year-old Sieurin was a metal worker, organised in the CGT trade union devoted to class struggle. “In 1981, when Mitterrand brought the Left to power, I was expecting miracles.” The Left departed, capitalism stayed on. Sieurin saw a lot more wither away. His dreams of a united society. His job as an auto mechanic, and with it thousands of other industrial jobs in the region. France is going downhill On 22 April the French go to the polls to vote for a president; the concluding ballot, if needed, will be on 6 May. Michel Sieurin will probably leave his ballot blank. For him the socialist Francois Hollande is “just another Liberal” – a word that in France refers to the hated economic liberalism. The hard-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon is too aggressive for the shoemaker, and the radical nationalists with Marine Le Pen are beyond the pale. “But not for some of my friends,” says Sieurin. “They’re angry and they want to show it. Fascists they’re not.” Montivilliers is a small town like many others. Paris is a two-and-a-half-hour drive, but when it comes to culture the capital city is light-years away. The public debate is being thrashed out all on sides there, with the great city’s usual nervous energy. Life in the provinces of France moves at a different pace. Opinions take shape quietly here, among family, friends, in clubs. This is the France where the election will be decided. The geography of the country is changing. Low earners and long-term unemployed are moving into small towns and out into the countryside. In the big cities they often have only the choice between expensive neighbourhoods and dangerous ghettos. “It’s quiet here,” is the first answer you get when you ask residents of Montivilliers for the good points about their town. Ancient houses surround the square, some half-timbered, most admittedly run down. It’s been a long time since the city had a market. The building in the best shape on the other hand is the nearly thousand-year-old abbey, which the state keeps up. Its history ended with the French Revolution, when the nuns refused to swear by the new Republic. From 1793 the building even housed a brasserie. There is still an “Abbey Brasserie”, but it’s sited across from the abbey. Now it’s a meeting point for workers. Claude Far and Salim Khaoua, 28 and 30 years old, from Algeria and Morocco, and as “inseparable” as brothers, as they say, have met up there. They admire the Germans for their chancellor and their cars, and think that France is going downhill. “President of the rich” In this they’re in tune with the majority opinion, which is fed by a flood of books and articles that bemoan the decline into second-class status and with it the erosion of the “French social model”, which can be summed up in one word: Égalité. “Our buddies are almost all unemployed,” says Salim. “They can’t afford to go to the restaurant, like we can.” Claude and Salim are almost always on the move, checking the welds of nuclear reactors around the country. Sometimes there are working wages, sometimes only money to tide them over, depending on whether their bodies have already received the critical dose of radioactivity and they have to take a mandatory break. The two belong to that “France that gets up early,” whose virtues Sarkozy likes to praise. “He promised people like us that we would earn more – huh! It never happened.” And again: “He’s the president of the rich.” What about Hollande? “No, he wants to shut down nuclear power plants.” Marine Le Pen? “Maybe. France must defend itself against the competition. But the demand to return to the franc is nonsense.”Hundreds of sheep have died in Australia (Picture: Getty Images/Darren lz) Hundreds of Australian sheep addicted to a poison plant have died, with some even killing themselves. The addicted sheep act as if drunk, lose weight, drag their hind feet and become depressed. The most heart-breaking behaviour reported was of sheep bashing their heads repeatedly on posts till they cracked their heads open. Some 800 sheep have been reported dead from one New South Wales sheep farm due to the poisonous weed, known as Darling Pea. This outbreak of the plant is blamed on the most recent bush fires which has devastated the province. The only option for farmers with addicted sheep is to separate the animals from the plant and allow their central nervous system to recover. However, some of the affected sheep are too far gone and there is no hope for these depressed and physically weakened sheep. Sheep farmer, Louise Knight described the affects of Darling Pea plant on their flocks: ‘It’s like dealing with a thousand heroin addicts.’It took 27 months, but Yandere Simulator finally has an official website! yanderesimulator.com This video will give you a tour: Additionally, the game’s official launcher is now available! This video explains how it works: The launcher wouldn’t be very useful without a new build to download, so I am also releasing a new build today! Here’s what’s different in the latest build: Attempted to fix bug that would cause a student to get permanently stuck in place if they were looking at a corpse as it was dismembered. Replaced the signs outside of classroom doors with new signs that won’t affect the game’s framerate as much as the previous signs did. Placed a lot of new signs around the school (bathroom signs, exit signs, fire extinguisher signs, etc). Attempted to implement a better “preparing food” animation for Kokona’s Cooking Club event. Fixed bug that would cause male corpses to turn white upon being dismembered. Improved the Kokona Monday phone call animation a bit further. Replaced Ronshaku’s old voiced lines with new voiced lines. Added 4 new accessories for Yandere-chan. One of them has functionality…can you figure out how to activate it? Added a new weapon to the game. It’s a joke weapon / gag weapon. Added 5 new hairstyles for Yandere-chan. Because my visit to Los Angeles ate the first 5 days of the month, and preparing the new website/launcher/bug fixes took up a lot of my time between July 6th and July 13th, I haven’t had enough time to implement a huge new gameplay feature recently. I feel really guilty about that! I’m so sorry! Right now, there are still a lot of bugs I want to fix, volunteer assets I want to implement, and code improvements that I want to make. I may choose to spend the rest of the month getting all that stuff out of the way, and begin working on the next big feature starting on August 1st. So, instead of seeing a big update on July 15th and August 1st, you might see a lot of minor updates released throughout the rest of the month. I might even release at least one “major” update at some point in July, such as implementing the sanity-based combat animations that have been planned for the game since April 2014. Implementing the sanity-based combat animations would be a really big deal, since it would be a huge step towards making my original vision of the game become a reality, and would make the debug build much more representative of what the final game will actually be like. By the way – I think it’s a good thing to periodically gauge public perception of the job that I’m doing on Yandere Simulator, so I’d like to ask you to vote on this poll: http://poal.me/eafwef As always, thank you for following the development of Yandere Simulator!The rabid culture warriors over at J. Crew are at it again. Now they're taking the staggering step of not ignoring the existence of their gay employees. Next they'll be letting the gays into fashion—or male modeling. ABC News reports that a recent J. Crew catalog with employees modeling its clothing includes two gentlemen labeled, "Our designer Somsack and his boyfriend, Micah." Gay rights advocates applaud this as a low-key, normalizing move, which it is. J. Crew wisely declined comment. If only it were possible to calmly take note of this without declaring the company to be "at the center of gay economics" in the headline. Or a caption reading, "J. Crew's new catalog includes an explicit ad of a same-sex couple." And by explicit, they mean a man is literally at arms length, squeezing the bicep of another man. This is the same as that Speedo gyrating that Carl Paladino warned us about, right? It's almost an invitation for the real culture warriors to swoop in and start pontificating about the decline of heterosexuals, one slim-fitting khaki pants pair at a time. Carl Paladino Runs On Anti-Gay-Grinding Platform Republican gubernatorial nominee Carl Paladino has recently proven he's about more than just… Read more Read Advertisement J. Crew At Center Of Gay Economics With Openly Gay Model [ABC News] Earlier: Boy's Pink Nail Polish Throws Nation Into CrisisWorld's first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft The Messerschmitt Me 262, nicknamed Schwalbe (German: "Swallow") in fighter versions, or Sturmvogel (German: "Storm Bird") in fighter-bomber versions, was the world's first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft. Design work started before World War II began, but problems with engines, metallurgy and top-level interference kept the aircraft from operational status with the Luftwaffe until mid-1944. The Me 262 was faster and more heavily armed than any Allied fighter, including the British jet-powered Gloster Meteor. One of the most advanced aviation designs in operational use during World War II, the Me 262's roles included light bomber, reconnaissance and experimental night fighter versions. Me 262 pilots claimed a total of 542 Allied aircraft shot down, although higher claims are sometimes made.[Note 1] The Allies countered its effectiveness in the air by attacking the aircraft on the ground and during takeoff and landing. Strategic materials shortages and design compromises on the Junkers Jumo 004 axial-flow turbojet engines led to reliability problems. Attacks by Allied forces on fuel supplies during the deteriorating late-war situation also reduced the effectiveness of the aircraft as a fighting force. Armament production within Germany was focused on more easily manufactured aircraft.[9] In the end, the Me 262 had a negligible impact on the course of the war as a result of its late introduction and the consequently small numbers put in operational service. While German use of the aircraft ended with the close of World War II, a small number were operated by the Czechoslovak Air Force until 1951. Also it heavily influenced several designs, like Sukhoi Su-9 (1946) and Nakajima Kikka. Captured Me 262s were studied and flight tested by the major powers, and ultimately influenced the designs of post-war aircraft such as the North American F-86 Sabre, MiG-15 and Boeing B-47 Stratojet. Several aircraft survive on static display in museums, and there are several privately built flying reproductions that use modern General Electric J85 engines. Design and development [ edit ] Origins [ edit ] Several years before World War II, the Germans foresaw the great potential for aircraft that used the jet engine constructed by Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain in 1936. After the successful test flights of the world's first jet aircraft—the Heinkel He 178—within a week of the Invasion of Poland to start the war, they adopted the jet engine for an advanced fighter aircraft. As a result, the Me 262 was already under development as Projekt 1065 (P.1065) before the start of World War II. The project originated with a request by the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (RLM, Ministry of Aviation) for a jet aircraft capable of one hour's endurance and a speed of at least 850 km/h (530 mph; 460 kn).[11] Dr Waldemar Voigt headed the design team, with Messerschmitt's chief of development, Robert Lusser, overseeing.[12] Plans were first drawn up in April 1939, and the original design was very different from the aircraft that eventually entered service, with wing root-mounted engines,[12] rather than podded ones, when submitted in June 1939.[12] The progression of the original design was delayed greatly by technical issues involving the new jet engine. Because the engines were slow to arrive, Messerschmitt moved the engines from the wing roots to underwing pods, allowing them to be changed more readily if needed; this would turn out to be important, both for availability and maintenance.[13] Since the BMW 003 jets proved heavier than anticipated, the wing was swept slightly, by 18.5°, to accommodate a change in the center of gravity.[13] Funding for the jet engine program was also initially lacking as many high-ranking officials thought the war could easily be won with conventional aircraft. Among those were Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, who cut the engine development program to just 35 engineers in February 1940 (the month before the first wooden mock-up was completed);[12] Willy Messerschmitt, who desired to maintain mass production of the piston-powered, 1935-origin Bf 109 and the projected Me 209; and Major General Adolf Galland, who had initially supported Messerschmitt through the early development years, flying the Me 262 himself on 22 April 1943. By that time, problems with engine development had slowed production of the aircraft considerably. One particularly acute problem arose with the lack of an alloy with a melting point high enough to endure the high temperatures involved, a problem that by the end of the war had not been adequately resolved. The aircraft made its first successful flight entirely on jet power on 18 July 1942, powered by a pair of Jumo 004 engines, after a November 1941 flight (with BMW 003s) ended in a double flameout.[15] The project aerodynamicist on the design of the Me 262 was Ludwig Bölkow. He initially designed the wing using NACA airfoils modified with an elliptical nose section.[16] Later in the design process, these were changed to AVL derivatives of NACA airfoils, the NACA 00011-0.825-35 being used at the root and the NACA 00009-1.1-40 at the tip.[17] The elliptical nose derivatives of the NACA airfoils were used on the horizontal and vertical tail surfaces. Wings were of single-spar cantilever construction, with stressed skins, varying from 3 mm (0.12 in) skin thickness at the root to 1 mm (0.039 in) at the tip. To expedite construction, save weight and use less strategic materials, late in the war, wing interiors were not painted. The wings were fastened to the fuselage at four points, using a pair of 20 mm (0.79 in) and forty-two 8 mm (0.31 in) bolts. In mid-1943, Adolf Hitler envisioned the Me 262 as a ground-attack/bomber aircraft rather than a defensive interceptor. The configuration of a high-speed, light-payload Schnellbomber ("fast bomber") was intended to penetrate enemy airspace during the expected Allied invasion of France. His edict resulted in the development of (and concentration on) the Sturmvogel variant. It is debatable to what extent Hitler's interference extended the delay in bringing the Schwalbe into operation;[20] it appears engine vibration issues were at least as costly, if not more so.[15] Albert Speer, then Minister of Armaments and War Production, in his memoirs claimed Hitler originally had blocked mass production of the Me 262, before agreeing in early 1944. Hitler rejected arguments the aircraft would be more effective as a fighter against the Allied bombers destroying large parts of Germany, and wanted it as a bomber for revenge attacks. According to Speer, Hitler felt its superior speed compared to other fighters of the era meant it could not be attacked, and so preferred it for high altitude straight flying.[22] The Me 262 is often referred to as a "swept wing" design as the production aircraft had a small, but significant leading edge sweep of 18.5° which likely provided an advantage by increasing the critical Mach number.[23] Sweep, uncommon at the time, was added after the initial design of the aircraft. The engines proved heavier than originally expected, and the sweep was added primarily to position the center of lift properly relative to the center of mass. (The original 35° sweep, proposed by Adolf Busemann, was not adopted.)[24] On 1 March 1940, instead of moving the wing backward on its mount, the outer wing was re-positioned slightly aft; the trailing edge of the midsection of the wing remained unswept. Based on data from the AVA Göttingen and wind tunnel results, the inboard section's leading edge (between the nacelle and wing root) was later swept to the same angle as the outer panels, from the "V6" sixth prototype onward throughout volume production. Silhouette of the V3 prototype – V1 through V4 similar. Note retracting conventional tail wheel gear Me 262 cockpit Test flights [ edit ] Test flights began on 18 April 1941, with the Me 262 V1 example, bearing its Stammkennzeichen radio code letters of PC+UA, but since its intended BMW 003 turbojets were not ready for fitting, a conventional Junkers Jumo 210 engine was mounted in the V1 prototype's nose, driving a propeller, to test the Me 262 V1 airframe.[27] When the BMW 003 engines were installed, the Jumo was retained for safety, which proved wise as both 003s failed during the first flight and the pilot had to land using the nose-mounted engine alone. The V1 through V4 prototype airframes all possessed what would become an uncharacteristic feature for most later jet aircraft designs, a fully retracting conventional gear setup with a retracting tailwheel—indeed, the very first prospective German "jet fighter" airframe design ever flown, the Heinkel He 280, used a retractable tricycle landing gear from its beginnings, and flying on jet power alone as early as the end of March 1941. The V3 third prototype airframe, with the code PC+UC, became a true jet when it flew on 18 July 1942 in Leipheim near Günzburg, Germany, piloted by test pilot Fritz Wendel.[28] This was almost nine months ahead of the British Gloster Meteor's first flight on 5 March 1943. Its retracting conventional tail wheel gear (similar to other contemporary piston powered propeller aircraft), a feature shared with the first four Me 262 V-series airframes, caused its jet exhaust to deflect off the runway, with the wing's turbulence negating the effects of the elevators, and the first takeoff attempt was cut short. On the second attempt, Wendel solved the problem by tapping the aircraft's brakes at takeoff speed, lifting the horizontal tail out of the wing's turbulence. The aforementioned initial four prototypes (V1-V4) were built with the conventional gear configuration. Changing to a tricycle arrangement—a permanently fixed undercarriage on the fifth prototype (V5, code PC+UE), with the definitive fully retractable nosewheel gear on the V6 (with Stammkennzeichen code VI+AA, from a new code block) and subsequent aircraft corrected this problem.[Note 2] Test flights continued over the next year, but engine problems continued to plague the project, the Jumo 004 being only marginally more reliable than the lower-thrust (7.83 kN/1,760 lbf) BMW 003. Airframe modifications were complete by 1942 but, hampered by the lack of engines, serial production did not begin until 1944, and deliveries were low, with 28 Me 262s in June, 59 in July, but only 20 in August.[page needed] By Summer 1943, the Jumo 004A engine had passed several 100-hour tests, with a time between overhauls of 50 hours being achieved.[32] However, the Jumo 004A engine proved unsuitable for full-scale production because of its considerable weight and its high utilization of strategic material (Ni, Co, Mo), which were in short supply. Consequently, the 004B engine was designed to use a minimum amount of strategic materials. All high heat-resistant metal parts, including the combustion chamber, were changed to mild steel (SAE 1010) and were protected only against oxidation by aluminum coating. The total engine represented a design compromise to minimize the use of strategic materials and to simplify manufacture.[32] With the lower-quality steels used in the 004B, the engine required overhaul just after 25 hours for metallurgical test on the turbine. If it passed the test, the engine was refitted for a further 10 hour running, but 35 hours marks the absolute limit for the turbine wheel.[33] While BMW's and Junkers' axial compressor turbojet engines were characterised by a sophisticated design that could offer considerable advantage – also used in a generalized form for the contemporary American Westinghouse J30 turbojet – the lack of rare materials for the Jumo 004 design put it at disadvantage compared to the "partly axial-flow" Power Jets W.2/700 turbojet engine which, despite its own largely centrifugal compressor-influenced design, provided (between operating overhaul interval of 60–65 hour[34]) an operational life span of 125 hours. Frank Whittle concludes in his final assessment over the two engines: "it was in the quality of high temperature materials that the difference between German and British engines was most marked"[35] Operationally, carrying 2,000 litres (440 imperial gallons; 530 US gallons) of fuel in two 900-litre (200-imperial-gallon; 240-US-gallon) tanks, one each fore and aft of the cockpit; and a 200-litre (44-imperial-gallon; 53-US-gallon) ventral fuselage tank beneath,[Note 3] the Me 262 would have a total flight endurance of 60 to 90 minutes. Fuel was usually J2 (derived from brown coal), with the option of diesel or a mixture of oil and high octane B4 aviation petrol. Fuel consumption was double the rate of typical twin-engine fighter aircraft of the era, which led to the installation of a low-fuel warning indicator in the cockpit that notified pilots when remaining fuel fell below 250 l (55 imp gal; 66 US gal). Unit cost for an Me 262 airframe, less engines, armament, and electronics, was RM87,400.[Note 4] To build one airframe took around 6,400 man-hours. Operational history [ edit ] Me 262 A in 1945 Me 262 A-1a on display at RAF Cosford. Some A-1a aircraft (including this example), like the A-2a bomber variant, attached additional hardpoints for extra weapons near the ejector chutes of the cannons, such as a bomb rack under each side of the nose. Introduction [ edit ] On 19 April 1944, Erprobungskommando 262 was formed at Lechfeld just south of Augsburg, as a test unit (Jäger Erprobungskommando Thierfelder, commanded by Hauptmann Werner Thierfelder) to introduce the 262 into service and train a corps of pilots to fly it. On 26 July 1944, Leutnant Alfred Schreiber with the 262 A-1a W.Nr. 130 017 damaged a Mosquito reconnaissance aircraft of No. 540 Squadron RAF PR Squadron, which was allegedly lost in a crash upon landing at an air base in Italy. Other sources state the aircraft was damaged during evasive manoeuvres and escaped. Major Walter Nowotny was assigned as commander after the death of Thierfelder in July 1944, and the unit redesignated Kommando Nowotny. Essentially a trials and development unit, it mounted the world's first jet fighter operations. Trials continued slowly, with initial operational missions against the Allies in August 1944, and the unit made claims for 19 Allied aircraft in exchange of six Me 262s lost.[43] Despite orders to stay grounded, Nowotny chose to fly a mission against an enemy bomber formation flying some 9,100 m (30,000 ft) above, on 8 November 1944. He claimed two P-51Ds destroyed before suffering engine failure at high altitude. Then, while diving and trying to restart his engines, he was attacked by other Mustangs, forced to bail out, and died. The Kommando was then withdrawn for further flight training and a revision of combat tactics to optimise the 262's strengths.[citation needed] On 26 November 1944, a Me 262A-2a Sturmvogel of III.Gruppe/KG 51 'Edelweiß' based at Rheine-Hopsten Air Base near Osnabrück was the first confirmed ground-to-air kill of a jet combat aircraft. The 262 was shot down by a Bofors gun of B.11 Detachment of 2875 Squadron RAF Regiment at the RAF forward airfield of Helmond, near Eindhoven. Others were lost to ground fire on 17 and 18 December when the same airfield was attacked at intervals by a total of 18 Me 262s and the guns of 2873 and 2875 Squadrons RAF Regiment damaged several, causing at least two to crash within a few miles of the airfield. In February 1945, a B.6 gun detachment of 2809 Squadron RAF Regiment shot down another Me 262 over the airfield of Volkel. The final appearance of 262s over Volkel was in 1945, when yet another fell to 2809's guns.[45] By January 1945, Jagdgeschwader 7 (JG 7) had been formed as a pure jet fighter wing, partly based at Parchim[46] although it was several weeks before it was operational.
King Thrushbeard”). It begins with an old bamboo cutter, Okina (voiced by Takeo Chii), happening upon a strangely glowing bamboo in the forest and finding inside a tiny, perfectly formed girl (Aki Asakura). He takes her, cradled in his palms, to his wife Ouna (Nobuko Miyamoto), but the little creature soon morphs into a baby that the flummoxed couple decides to raise. The strangeness continues as the baby grows far faster than normal (in one brilliant, spooky sequence she quickly progresses from flailing limbs to a hesitant first step), while taking a laughing delight in the world around her. Okina finds more treasures in the bamboo, including gold nuggets and kimono meant for a princess — that is, for his pretty adopted daughter, who is called Takenoko (Bamboo), and is obviously destined for bigger and better things. Takenoko, however, is happy with the humble places and common people she knows, especially the leader of the neighborhood kids, the rugged, pure-hearted Sutemaru (Kengo Kora). Instead, her newly rich parents install her in a mansion, surround her with servants and have her trained in the ways of the aristocracy, from playing the koto to painting her teeth black. (The former she masters, the latter she indignantly rejects). This beautiful, accomplished, fully grown girl, now called Kaguya-hime (Princess Kaguya), attracts five well-born, ridiculously self-important suitors, but she rejects them all, even when they make seemingly miraculous efforts to meet her absurd demands. Finally the emperor, who is young, handsome and the most arrogant of all, tries to win her hand, but she spurns him as well — and reveals that she is from the moon and must soon return to the land of her birth. This is all pretty much from the folk tale, which raises the question of what, beyond their way of telling it, Takahata and his collaborators have brought to it. The film’s tag line, “A princess’ crime and punishment,” offers a clue, while Takahata himself has said he wanted to explore what “crime” Princess Kaguya might have committed, since the original story is silent on that point. His exploration, though, has little to do with plot, everything to do with his heroine’s emotional and spiritual journey — and the way it ends. Not to enter spoiler territory, but the climax is a haunting, wrenching evocation of mono no aware — or as it is literally translated, the pathos of things. The basis of Japanese aesthetics since time immemorial, mono no aware is hard to define, but “The Tale of Princess Kaguya” brilliantly illuminates it with images of life at its transient loveliest, of parting in its terrible finality. There is a deep wisdom in this film, but a deep sadness too. If it is Takahata’s farewell, it’s one that will have a long echo, just like his 1,000-year-old source. Fun fact: Hayao Miyazaki collaborator Joe Hisaishi supplied the soundtrack, his first-ever for a Takahata film. The theme song, “Inochi no Kioku (Memory of Life),” is sung by Kazumi Nikaido.Iran on Sunday hanged a man said to be affiliated to an exiled opposition group, state media reported, despite international pressure on the Islamic republic to halt the execution. According to the official IRNA news agency, Gholamreza Khosravi Savadjani was convicted of "waging war against God" (moharebeh) by helping the People's Mujahedeen Organisation of Iran (PMOI). The announcement of the hanging came just hours after Amnesty International said Khosravi Savadjani's trial in 2010 had been unfair. The rights group said the condemned man's family was informed by prison officials on Saturday that they must go to a jail west of Tehran, sparking fears his execution may be imminent. Khosravi Savadjani was until then being held in solitary confinement at Evin Prison in the capital. Death row prisoners in Iran are generally transferred to isolation units before their executions take place. Prior to his death, Amnesty said the execution would be a breach of domestic and international law, as Khosravi Savadjani – held since 2008 – should have benefited from a subsequent law that imposed lighter penalties for the crimes he was convicted of. The PMOI was founded in the 1960s to oppose the pro-western shah. After the 1979 Islamic revolution that ousted the shah, the PMOI took up arms against Iran's clerical rulers and Tehran holds it responsible for murdering thousands of Iranian civilians and officials. Iran says PMOI members currently in exile in Iraq should be extradited to face charges. Khosravi Savadjani was arrested in 1981 and jailed for several years. He was detained again in 2008 for having contact with the PMOI and has been in custody since. According to the Iranian judiciary, documents, including photos and papers from sensitive facilities such as military bases, were recovered when Khosravi Savadjani was arrested. These had been given to the PMOI and their affiliated media, officials said. Khosravi Savadjani had also been accused of facilitating financial aid for the opposition group. He was convicted by a revolutionary court and the verdict was later upheld by a branch of Iran's Supreme Court. Amnesty International said Khosravi Savadjani had reportedly been held for more than 40 months in solitary confinement in various detention centres. "Yet again Iranian authorities are about to execute a man who did not even receive a fair trial," Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty's deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, said on Saturday. Iran remains the second biggest executioner in the world, after China, according to the United Nations. Last Update: Sunday, 1 June 2014 KSA 14:27 - GMT 11:27Police in Surprise say a woman is dead after shooting herself in the chest following a bank robbery. They say officers were dispatched to the First Bank near Cotton Lane and Greenway Road at about 4 p.m. Friday about a robbery that had just occurred. In Surprise: Woman shot herself after barricade, possibly related to a bank robbery, police said. Jus arrived. pic.twitter.com/PrdHY8syxj — Jon Erickson (@JonEricksonTV) April 2, 2016 MORE: Police tracked the woman in connection with robbery at bank near 170 Ave / Greenway. pic.twitter.com/NFpFsdqOR8 — Jon Erickson (@JonEricksonTV) April 2, 2016 They say an adult female suspect fled the area in a vehicle. Police located the car not far from the bank and say the woman pointed a handgun to her head. At some point during negotiations with officers, police say she shot herself in the chest and was pronounced dead at the scene. The woman's name hasn't been released and police say they're still investigating the incident.Written by Sarah Bella on May 22, 2013 With the most excellent news this morning that the Victorian Liberal Party would quite like to privatise the ABC and SBS – should the Coalition be elected come September – we thought we’d take a peek into that dystopian, apocalyptic Tony Abbott-led future and pre-emptively move to Canada see what that would mean for the ABC’s alternative music mecca and national youth broadcaster triple j. Requests to Good Nights made via premium phone numbers that place you in a 45-minute queue “Your request is important to us – please hold the line.” “To hear Hold The Line by Major Lazer, press 1. To hear Hold The Line by Toto, press 2. To continue holding the line, press 3. If you’d like a representative to call you back, press 4.” *beep* “Your callback is scheduled for next Monday at 8:15am. Thank you for using triple j.” Program scheduled at 7:00am, arrives at 7:09am As Victorians well know, “on time” means anywhere between 59 seconds early and 4 minutes 59 seconds late. The 5:00pm bulletin can now become the 5:15pm bulletin, and the 6:00pm bulletin can be merged with Hack to avoid a programming backlog. Sometimes the news might not air at all – but you’ll know about that 2 minutes after it was scheduled, by which time you’ll have missed your chance to listen to the news somewhere else. The new triple j – 93% of the time, we’re on air and on time all the time. These guys will win every Unearthed competition Lucy Wicks & The Young Libs (feat. Starman, the Star 104.5FM star) Quadruple J replaces outdated, overcrowded Triple J Let’s face it – the Triple J of old is just too full of music to be of any use for much longer. Too many people are listening and the ABC just won’t have the bandwidth to service them all. But if you subscribe to the new Quadruple J network, you’ll get wider music coverage (in metropolitan areas), better reception (in metropolitan areas) and faster music speeds (in metropolitan areas). That is, until everyone has migrated from Triple J to Quadruple J in five years time, leading once again to “overcrowding” on an “outdated” station. Don’t worry, though – Quintuple J well be just around the corner (in metropolitan areas). All songs cut to 3 minutes and played 2 minutes apart to maximize efficiency Yet the news is still 7 minutes late…again. “Temporary” ads to pay for new features “Today we’re announcing a new program, Excellent Music Time, scheduled for 8am-8pm (approximately) every weekday! This is your optimal route to the best music on triple j, all for your convenience. Yes, there’s going to be ads for Toyota and Mortein, but they’ll disappear as soon as they cover the cost of the songs we play. “Playlists will be updated and refreshed on a daily basis. Number and variety of ads may increase to meet demand.” Short.Fast.Loud. and Roots N’ All rolled into one segment Called Short Loud Roots: Affirmative Action Hour Restoring The Balance loses irony, becomes left wing Geoffrey Rush and Catherine Deveny’s kids take to the air and fill their allotted 15 minutes a week with a non-stop string of hard-left, pro-arts jabberings in a valiant but futile attempt to counteract the slowly dawning realisation among listeners that they really, REALLY shouldn’t have taken the presence of such a unique and valuable resource like triple j for granted. Sounds good, huh?The defining feature of the 114th Congress has been the consistent success Republicans have had in finding issues they unanimously agree on and then turning them into bitter, self-defeating intra-party flame wars for no actual reason. They are frighteningly good at doing this, and with the Iran nuclear agreement’s 60-day congressional review period coming to a close, they’re once again fighting among themselves on an issue that does not divide them. Every Republican in Congress disapproves of the multilateral nuclear agreement with Iran. Given the unanimity of the opposition, you’d think that the passage of a resolution expressing that disapproval wouldn’t be an especially difficult lift, particularly in the House, where Republicans have a large majority and don’t have to overcome procedural hurdles thrown up by the Democrats. Also, given the fact that Democrats are indeed filibustering the Senate’s disapproval resolution and President Obama’s veto pen hangs over everything, we’re talking about a purely symbolic action. Advertisement: And yet, when John Boehner and the House GOP leadership moved to pass its resolution disapproving of the Iran deal, they faced a rebellion from conservatives in the party who had some wacky ideas for how Congress could stop the agreement from going forward. And Boehner, as has become commonplace, folded like a lawn chair: After a day of disarray in which Speaker John Boehner was again forced into a corner, Republicans settled on a three-pronged strategy. One vote would rebuke Obama for not disclosing the totality of the agreement to Congress; a second would try to prevent him from lifting sanctions on Iran. Then, in a reversal, a third vote would be on a resolution of approval on the pact, designed to highlight majority opposition to the nuclear agreement. The problem with that element is that House Republicans will now be at odds with Senate Republicans, who plan to vote instead on a disapproval resolution. So instead of standing together as a united party to state what they all believe – the Iran deal is bad – the House GOP instead stitched together this multilayered response to the agreement that puts it at odds with their colleagues on the other side of the Capitol. And none of it matters anyway, since no legislation obstructing the deal stands a realistic chance of getting through the Senate. As Greg Sargent put it yesterday, House Republicans managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of defeat. It’s easy to laugh this off given that, in this instance, the GOP’s toxic internal struggles won’t have any impact on government policy. But we’re very quickly approaching a point at which the Republicans in Congress will have to actually govern, and this strong tendency toward shambolic disarray does not bode well for a positive outcome. Funding for the government is set to expire at the end of the month unless Congress can come together and authorize new appropriations. The successful completion of this relatively basic function of government is complicated by conservatives in the House and Senate who are demanding that funding for the government be linked to the defunding of Planned Parenthood. A series of undercover videos purporting to show the women’s health provider “trafficking” in fetal tissues galvanized the conservative movement, and some of its most influential figures are demanding that Republicans in Congress do everything in their power to deny federal funding to Planned Parenthood, to include shutting down the government. John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell do not support Planned Parenthood and are opponents of abortion rights. But they also don’t want a government shutdown and have said as much. They know the politics of a shutdown are bad for Republicans and would imperil their chances at taking the White House and holding the Senate in 2016. They also know that any attempt to link Planned Parenthood funding to government appropriations will be filibustered by Democrats and/or vetoed by Obama. The question going forward is how they will navigate this mess. If history is any guide, the answer is: not well. Boehner and McConnell have already proven themselves susceptible to pressure from the far right flank of the party when it comes to fights like these. This session of Congress started with a hopeless battle over immigration that nearly resulted in the Department of Homeland Security being shut down because the Republican leadership was unwilling to admit defeat. Advertisement: Boehner is already feeling pressure from the hard-line conservative House Freedom Caucus, which just announced that it will “oppose any spending measure that contains funding for Planned Parenthood.” As Roll Call’s Matt Fuller notes, they made this announcement after seeing how easily Boehner was pushed around on the Iran deal: Emboldened after members pressured House GOP leadership into changing course on the Iran nuclear deal, the HFC is staking out a clear position on Planned Parenthood and the CR. The group is practically daring Speaker John A. Boehner and other GOP leaders to try putting forth a stopgap spending measure that funds Planned Parenthood. So once again we find Republicans on the precipice of destructive internecine struggle over an issue that they don’t actually disagree on: They all oppose Planned Parenthood and they all want to see it defunded. But the party is such a fractious disaster that, instead of working toward their common goal, they’re busily sabotaging each other and creating a political mess for themselves that could well tip us into yet another pointless and costly breakdown of the basic functions of government.Donald Trump Says Those Who Committed Manchester Attack Are ‘Evil Losers’ Kaitlan Collins White House Correspondent Donald Trump denounced the perpetrators behind the Manchester bombing as “evil losers” who preyed on “innocent children” and “must be driven out of our society forever.” At least 22 people are dead and dozens more are injured after Manchester police say an apparent lone suicide bomber detonated an explosive device at the end of an Ariana Grande concert Monday night. In a West Bank meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Tuesday, Trump opened his remarks by condemning the attack. “As President of the United States, and on behalf of the people of the United States, I would like to begin by offering my prayers to the people of Manchester in the United Kingdom,” Trump said. “I extend my deepest condolences to those so terribly injured in this terrorist attack, and to the many killed and the families — so many families — of the victims. We stand in absolute solidarity with the people of the United Kingdom.” “So many young, beautiful innocent people living and enjoying their lives murdered by evil losers in life,” he continued. “I won’t call them monsters because they would like that term. They would think that’s a great name. I will call them from now on losers, because that’s what they are. They’re losers. And we’ll have more of them. But they’re losers. Just remember that.” “This is what I’ve spent these last few days talking about during my trip overseas,” he added. “Our society can have no tolerance for this continuation of bloodshed. We cannot stand a moment longer for the slaughter of innocent people. And in today’s attack, it was mostly innocent children. The terrorists and extremists, and those who give them aid and comffort, must be driven out of our society forever. This wicked ideology must be obliterated, and I mean completely obliterated. Life must be protected.” “All civilized nations must join to protect human life and the sacred right of our citizens.” Abbas also criticized the “ugly terrorist attack.” He said: “I do offer my warm condolences to the Prime Minister of Britain, families of victims, and the British people.” Press Secretary Sean Spicer confirmed that Trump called British Prime Minister Theresa May “to offer condolences and support.” At least 22 people have died, including children, and 59 more are injured after an explosion went off minutes after Grande had finished her performance Monday night. Police say they are treating it “as a terrorist incident.” Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/23/donald-trump-says-those-who-committed-manchester-attack-are-evil-losers/ Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. Share this: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reddit Pinterest Tumblr WhatsApp Telegram Pocket Like this: Like Loading... Related Comments commentsReady 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. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. Fight Back! Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each 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 we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue Travel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? One simple statistic highlights the folly of much of the Democratic Party’s strategy and spending. If every person of color who voted for Hillary Clinton in Virginia last year turns out to vote in Virginia’s gubernatorial contest on November 7, Democrat Ralph Northam could win without getting a single vote from a white person. Not one. And yet most Democratic strategists and donors overlook and undervalue voters of color in general and African-American voters in particular. As a result, Democrats are at real risk of losing eminently winnable contests in Virginia this year, as well as in myriad races in 2018. Ad Policy In my book, Brown Is the New White, I titled one of the chapters “Blinded by the White” to bring attention to the reality that “much of the progressive movement and many progressive campaigns are still dominated by White leadership, fixated on White voters.” Since the last presidential election, this pattern has continued unabated with nearly all progressive attention focused on the white working-class voters who supported Trump in large numbers. For all the analyses offered about the behavior of these voters in 2016, you hear almost nothing about the tactical and strategic decisions that led to the cataclysmic collapse of black-voter turnout. Of the first $200 million allocated by progressive outside groups for spending in 2016, zero dollars were directed to African-American voter mobilization. Zero. Despite the availability of multiple inspiring leaders of color in the mold of Barack Obama, the Clinton campaign opted to return to the days of fielding an all-white presidential ticket. In facing a Republican nominee whose candidacy was propelled by white racial fears and anxieties, the Democratic strategy was to largely ignore the racism and focus instead on Trump’s temperament. In the face of such neglect and disinterest, many black voters showed less interest in the election, and turnout plummeted to the lowest level in almost 20 years. A higher percentage of black voters turned out to vote for John Kerry than did for Hillary Clinton, and that precipitous decline cost her the pivotal states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—and, as a result, the White House. Rather than heeding last year’s wake-up call, Democrats continue to perpetuate this pattern of structural racism and implicit bias. Take the upcoming election in Virginia—a quadrennial political bellwether because it takes place the year after each presidential election. Smart electoral strategy should be predicated on empirical evidence and hard data, and the data in Virginia clearly illuminates the path to victory for Democrats. In off-year elections, turnout usually drops dramatically, lowering the threshold needed to secure a majority of the vote. Current Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe won the governor’s mansion in 2013 with about 1.1 million votes. It is the presidential elections that show the true size of the pool of progressive voters, and Clinton won nearly 2 million votes in Virginia last year. According to the exit polls, 53 percent of the Virginians who supported Clinton—1,047,518 voters—were people of color. That’s more than all of the people who backed the 2013 Republican gubernatorial nominee, Ken Cuccinelli, whose campaign garnered 1,013,354 votes. Related Article To Win in Midterm Elections, Turnout Is Key Steve Phillips The racial myopia in the Democratic ecosystem is revealed by analyzing how money is spent by campaigns and how money is given to campaigns. On the spending side, campaign allocations reflect a candidate’s true priorities. According to the Virginia Public Access Project, Democratic nominee Ralph Northam has spent over $17 million as of October 1, 2017. Logically, if a majority of the target-voter universe consists of people of color, a campaign that wanted to win would spend a majority of its money trying to get those voters to the polls. But the Northam campaign’s biggest line item—nearly $9 million—consists of funds given to an advertising firm led by an all-white board to run television ads. These campaign ads attack the Republican nominee for his ties to the oil company Enron. What is the strategic rationale of such an advertising campaign? Clearly, those ads are not supposed to motivate African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and other people of color to take time from their busy lives to come out and support the Democratic ticket. Meanwhile, organizations specifically focused on mobilizing black voters—who comprised 37 percent of all Virginia Democratic voters in 2016—have to practically beg, borrow, and steal for resources to engage the voters who form the cornerstone of Democratic politics. BlackPAC, New Virginia Majority, and other community-based organizations have managed to gather enough resources to conduct a $1 million black-turnout program, but that’s just a fraction of the $8–10 million that should be allocated to reaching black voters, based on their numbers and centrality to Democratic victory. Another indication of limited cultural competence in campaigns is the failure to take advantage of the fact that the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor is an African American, Justin Fairfax. From Harold Washington’s Chicago mayoral campaign in 1983 to Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, it has been shown that having a candidate from one’s community, particularly when that community bears the brunt of inequality, can be a motivating factor in increasing voter turnout. Given this, progressive donors and groups across the country should be showering resources on Fairfax’s campaign and featuring his face in campaign ads. Instead, Fairfax must be repeating to himself the words of the protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” Environmental groups are anchor donors in Democratic politics, but many of them have shown minimal enthusiasm for Fairfax. In 2013, when the Democrats put forward a white nominee for lieutenant governor in Virginia, the League of Conservation Voters contributed nearly $100,000 to that candidacy. As of September this year, zero dollars have been given to the black nominee for the same office. Sean Parker, billionaire backer of Democratic candidates, has given more than $1.6 million to various campaigns in Virginia in the past several years—including $350,000 to lieutenant-governor candidates in 2013—but has given nothing to help Fairfax galvanize a core Democratic constituency. Many of those funding and running Democratic campaigns have learned little—or, worse, learned the wrong lessons—about how to win in a racially combustible environment. Nationally, voters of color remain the cornerstone of a winning electoral coalition. In Virginia, Democrats don’t need any white votes (fortunately, there are at least 900,000 reliably Democratic white voters, making the math easier). But unless they enthusiastically embrace, engage, and invest in the communities of color, they run the risk of again losing elections they should win, in Virginia this year, across the country in 2018, and, God forbid, in the 2020 presidential race.Racing couple adjusting to Sherry Pollex's ovarian cancer diagnosis Martin Truex Jr. stands with girlfriend Sherry Pollex for the national anthem before the Oct. 26 Sprint Cup race at Martinsville Speedway, just the third race Pollex has attended since surgery Aug. 15. (Photo: Peter Casey, USA TODAY Sports) TALLADEGA, Ala. — The pre-race kiss, a staple of the last moments between a race car driver and significant other before the green flag drops, was especially poignant in the bright Talladega Superspeedway sunshine this month for driver Martin Truex Jr. and his long-time girlfriend, Sherry Pollex. Pollex was at a race track for only the second time since she had surgery Aug. 15 for ovarian cancer, just one week after the diagnosis that rocked Truex, his Furniture Row Racing Sprint Cup team and many of the families in the tight neighborhood of the NASCAR drivers' motorhome compound. With a large hat protecting her head from the sun, Pollex greeted friends, some of whom were seeing her for the first time since her diagnosis and surgery. It was more of a homecoming than an occasion for talking about the hard rains that had fallen on her life. There was a short pit-road prayer, a final word between the two and another kiss. And Truex was off to the races, into the only place — the cockpit of a race car — he has been able to escape tough realities. Over the course of the Talladega afternoon, he led a lap for the first time in what has been a difficult season on-track in his first year with the tiny one-car team. The sense of excitement and anticipation up and down pit road was palpable in the minutes preceding the final race in the second round of the Chase for the Sprint Cup as 12 drivers prepared to run to stay alive in the playoffs. For Truex, not in the championship running, it was simply a day to appreciate things were as they should be — his arm around his girlfriend, her head on his shoulder as race-day festivities swirled around them. Life has been a complex web of hospital rooms, chemotherapy treatments and days and nights of dreading what might be next in their fight against Stage III ovarian cancer (IV is the most serious). "We lived our life in fourth gear all the time," Pollex, 35, told USA TODAY Sports via telephone. "We were constantly running. I ran a business and Martin's foundation and travel full-time with him. I never stopped. So adjusting to a new normal and having to put your life in first gear and learn that your body can't run like that any more is the biggest adjustment for me." It has been a particularly rough journey for Truex, who sees the ebbs and flows of a battle that will stretch far beyond laps, miles and seasons. "It's been a rollercoaster ride," Truex told USA TODAY Sports from his Martin Truex Jr. Motorsports shop in Mooresville, N.C. "It changes daily. You go through all different emotions from sad to mad, why the hell, why us. But at the end of the day, we're no different from anybody else who's had cancer. "At first, I was shocked. Thought I was dreaming.... It puts things in perspective real quick. All this stuff I've been mad about before and thought was a big deal, it's nothing." Truex and Pollex, a native of Michigan whose father, Greg, owned a NASCAR team from 1993 to 2006, met about eight years ago when she was working in racing public relations and he was working to build his career on-track. Their relationship grew quickly, and Truex, renting a house from then-teammate Dale Earnhardt Jr., moved in with Pollex. Later, they bought a house in Mooresville, N.C., near Lake Norman in a popular residential area for NASCAR families. They've been a couple since, Truex winning two Nationwide Series championships and breaking into Sprint Cup victory lane while Pollex built relationships with other drivers' wives and girlfriends, opened a popular Mooresville boutique shop called Lavendar and helped Truex start the Martin Truex Jr. Foundation. The foundation's emphasis over its seven-year life has been assisting children and families touched by pediatric cancer. Pollex has been one of the biggest boosters for Charlotte-area children facing surgeries and treatments. Now, the disease she has been targeting for years has hit her. 'It was so hard' Pollex said she began feeling ill in mid-summer and was certain something wasn't quite right. But doctor visits produced no solid diagnosis. "She had gone to three or four doctors, and they couldn't figure out what was going on," Truex said. "This went on for a couple of months.... Finally, we got her to a surgeon — a friend of a friend — in Lake Norman. He said right away, 'Let's do a CT scan.' "They did the scan. Two hours later, he called and told us to come down to the office. Right away he told us, 'You have ovarian cancer.' " Neither Pollex nor Truex knew anything about the disease, one that affects only about 22,000 women in the United States annually, according to the American Cancer Society. They had just begun serious consideration of having their first child. Pollex said she initially thought she was sick because she might be pregnant. "I had stopped taking birth-control pills," she said. "As soon as I had the CT scan and heard the diagnosis, I did ask if I could save my eggs. The doctor told me there was no time for that. He said, 'We have to get you to surgery in the next few days, or you're going to die.' "There was no time to think about the fact that I was devastated that I could never be a mother. I don't know what hit me worse – the devastation that I couldn't carry my own child or the devastation that I had Stage III cancer. To hear all that in a matter of five minutes — it was so hard." The operation lasted several hours. Pollex's appendix, spleen, ovaries, fallopian tubes and part of her stomach were removed. "They pretty much took everything that I didn't need to survive because the cancer was everywhere," Pollex said. She was hospitalized for eight days and four weeks later began weekly chemotherapy treatments that will last into January. For Pollex, the road ahead is tough and uncertain. "But cancer has never met someone like Sherry," Truex said. "She's very determined and hard-working. She will be the person that can change the way this all works for other women — for increasing awareness and helping other people not get in this position. That will be something she can really make a difference with. She will make stuff happen." PHOTOS: Martin Truex Jr. and Sherry Pollex First, though, there is the goal of pushing the cancer into remission. After hearing the diagnosis, the couple sought information on the Internet, an avenue taken by many who receive bad medical news. There they ran into the equivalent of an evil abacus, one spewing out negative numbers about survival rates and chances of recurrence. "It's the worst thing you can do," Truex said. "It's hard not to. You want to know what's going on. But it was a nightmare. It was bad, very bad. "Then you have people on social media who try to be nice, saying they're praying for you and they lost their mom to cancer five years ago. Why would you say that? Come on, people. Thanks for thinking of us, but you don't have to tell us your mom died. We're trying to be strong and think positive." Pollex, who receives weekly chemotherapy treatments through a port in her stomach, said her reaction has been relatively mild, although she tires easily. She has lost her hair and several pounds in addition to the 22 she lost while hospitalized. She's anxious, she said, to put the treatments behind her and to work closely with the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance to promote awareness of a disease she said receives relatively little attention in the broader war against cancer. She pointed out how the color pink paints much of the sports landscape in October during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. NFL players wear pink gloves, shoes and other items, and NASCAR race cars often carry pink paint schemes. "September is Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, and the color is teal, but I never knew that," she said. "Now Martin runs the teal ribbon on his car every weekend. It's important for us to educate people. It's something that people are very naïve about, and we're going to try to change that. If I had been properly educated about my disease, it would have greatly changed my outcome. With earlier diagnosis, I would have had a survival rate of 85 percent. My survival rate now is less than 30. "I don't know if I'm going to be here in five years. I don't know if I'm going to be here in two years. All I can do right now is fight and try to help other women so they don't make the same mistake. "I'm a fighter. I'm not going to lie down and let it take me. To me, every day is a gift. I don't miss much. I'm making memories. I hope in the end I can come out healthy and spend the rest of my life educating women about this." 'She's a fighter' Truex and Pollex have a strong network of friends and among the closest are driver Ryan Newman and his wife, Krissie. "Sherry is like a sister to me," said Krissie Newman. "I try to be there as much as I can for her and Martin. Ryan and I try to be people they can lean on, run errands, whatever they need. It's kind of hard, at the same time. You don't want to be an overbearing person when they want space. But we do consider them family, so we do whatever we can possibly do to help. "She's a fighter. She's so strong in her faith." Truex, 34, said there was never a question in his mind about Pollex's response to what has been a difficult, emotionally charged challenge. "She's tough, man," he said. "Damn tough. She broke her ankle a while back and limped around on it for a week. She thought she sprained it." And she has to be. "It's hard to go out in public," she said. "... There are some days I just want to go to Target and be normal. And I can't do that. But it feels like I've been through so much over the past few months that I'm just happy to be alive." Furniture Row Racing general manager Joe Garone told team members the news in a morning meeting, and he said the team has rallied around the couple despite the cross-country nature of their relationship. Furniture Row is based in Denver. Truex landed there after the Chase fixing scandal at Michael Waltrip Racing last September eventually cost him a ride with the loss of sponsor NAPA. "What I see is Martin putting that front up, as well, being there and being strong for her. We're doing that together. We feel that same way for him," Garone said. After the diagnosis, team owner Barney Visser offered Truex the opportunity to skip the rest of the Sprint Cup season if his everyday presence at home would help. Truex missed a practice and qualifying session at Michigan International Speedway to be with Pollex during and after her surgery. "I did think about not racing the rest of the year," Truex said. "But I would go crazy. There's just no way I could do it. I missed one practice and one qualifying day, and I was spun the hell out. "I need racing. It's like my drug." Pollex and Truex continue to work on his foundation goals and in planning May's annual Catwalk for a Cause, its major fund-raiser. Catwalk is an evening fashion show that features NASCAR personalities wearing designer clothing, and children battling pediatric cancer also are part of the show.
a patient in cardiac arrest.” And if impersonating a medical professional wasn’t ballsy enough, the boy also claimed he was an undercover deputy sheriff working on a top-secret investigation when he was confronted by a suspicious staff member. Fortunately it looks like playtime’s over for Scheidt; he’s being charged with five counts of impersonation. PHOTOS: Double Exposure: Bringing Youth Together With FilmPowdered alcohol isn’t even available on the open market yet, but nearly two dozen states have already acted to ban it either temporarily or outright. New York on Friday became the latest. The product, which is being marketed by one company as “Palcohol,” isn’t a new concept. The idea of freeze-dried or dehydrated alcohol that can either be consumed by itself or mixed with water to produce a drink has been around for decades. Earlier this year, the company behind Palcohol got the approval of the Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) for its labels – the last regulatory step before the product could be sold in stores. But states have pushed back, fearing that powdered alcohol will only make underage and binge drinking easier. The Food and Drug Administration said in March that it does not have legal basis to prevent Palcohol from entering the market because the TTB has the “authority to review the formulation and labeling of distilled spirits products.” The TTB did, however, consult with the FDA about the non-alcohol ingredients in Palcohol. “The FDA concluded that the use of ingredients in the proposed products was in compliance with FDA’s regulations,” the agency said in a statement. “The agency notes that the ingredients used in the products are typical of ingredients found in many processed foods.” After signing legislation banning powdered alcohol sales in New York on Friday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) noted in a statement that powdered alcohol can lead to unsafe levels of intoxication if it is mixed incorrectly or ingested in its powdered form. “This dangerous product is a public health disaster waiting to happen,” Cuomo said. “I am proud to sign this legislation that will keep powdered alcohol off the shelves and out of the wrong hands.” The maker of Palcohol has tried to aggressively counter efforts to block the product before it’s even arrived in stores. Creator Mark Phillips argues that powdered alcohol is actually safer than liquid alcohol. “Palcohol is not some super concentrated version of alcohol. It’s simply one shot of alcohol in powdered form,” Phillips said in a video explainer of the product. “When I hike, kayak, backpack whatever. I like to have a drink when I reach my destination. Carrying liquid alcohol and mixers in bottles to make a margarita, for example, was totally impractical.” But in 2014, a handful of states began enacting bans on powdered alcohol; other states, including Alaska and Delaware, had pre-existing statutes banning or regulating that form of alcohol. In 2015, the number of states with outright bands has grown to 21: Alabama, Alaska, Connecticut, Georgia, Kansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and now New York. Two states, Maryland and Minnesota, also had temporary bans in place as of June 2015, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. And the fight is probably not over. Phillips has said that he hopes the product will be available on shelves by the end of summer. On its Web site, his company, Lipsmark LLC, has said attempts to ban the product restrict consumers’ freedom of choice while protecting liquor manufacturers. In March, Sen Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., introduced federal legislation that would ban the sale and possessions of powdered alcohol, which he called the “Kool-Aid for underage drinking.” “I am in total disbelief that our federal government has approved such an obviously dangerous product, and so, Congress must take matters into its own hands and make powdered alcohol illegal,” Schumer said. “Underage alcohol abuse is a growing epidemic with tragic consequences and powdered alcohol could exacerbate this.” Groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving have said they are concerned about powdered alcohol – along with other “fad” alcoholic products including alcoholic whipped cream, vapors and even caffeine-laced alcohol – which, they say, have the potential to appeal to underage drinkers. “Powdered alcohol is a product with no legitimate reason for being.” New York Assemblyman Steven Cymbrowitz said in a statement Friday. “Kids can stash Palcohol in their pocket when they leave the house for a party, and their parents would never know the difference.” Cymbrowitz, chairman of the New York Assembly’s alcoholism and drug abuse committee, added: “I’m pleased that New York has joined the growing number of states to ban the sale of this potentially dangerous product.”LONDON – BoxNation will air a host of top fights from the Premier Boxing Champions series, starting this weekend with rising superstars Keith Thurman and Adrien Broner. ‘The Channel of Champions’ has three great fights cards as part of the deal, with the highly-touted Thurman to get the ball rolling when he takes on the unrelenting Robert Guerrero this Saturday night, in a glittering lineup which also sees the return of Mexican ace Abner Mares. The former world champion will go toe-to-toe with the tricky Arturo Santos Reyes, before the flash and often brash Broner looks to get his year off to a bang when he challenges the tough John Molina in a mouth-watering showdown, live from the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. In addition to this, on March 13th, BoxNation will bring subscribers an exciting night’s action when welterweights Andre Berto and Josesito Lopez share the ring at Citizens Business Bank Arena in Ontario, California. All-action 147-pounder Shawn Porter will also be out that night when he faces the dangerous and hard-hitting Roberto Garcia, with heavyweight hitman Chris Arreola also set to appear. The world’s best boxing channel will also air the thrilling April 11th card which sees Irish star Andy Lee make the first defence of his WBO middleweight world title when he battles the undefeated and former champion Peter Quillin. There will be high UK interest in that fight with the victor eyeing a potential clash with WBO mandatory challenger Billy Joe Saunders later this year. Furthermore, the April 11th bill at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn will witness one of the most eagerly anticipated fight’s so far this year when light-welterweight kingpin Danny Garcia goes up against IBF champion Lamont Peterson. The card will also see cancer survivor and miracle man Danny Jacobs make his first title defence following his win over Jarrod Fletcher last August, when he lays it all on the line against 31-year-old Caleb Truax. BoxNation’s multi-fight agreement with Premier Boxing Champions demonstrates the channel’s continued commitment to delivering the very best fights to UK boxing fans. Jim McMunn, Managing Director of BoxNation, said: “BoxNation continuously looks to deliver the very best fights out there for our viewers. This agreement once again demonstrates our commitment to boxing and our aim of airing the very best shows, both domestically and internationally, to our loyal subscribers. These are three thrilling fight cards and we’re delighted UK fans will be able to watch them live and exclusive on BoxNation.”It’s time once again to reveal the long list of semifinalists for the James Beard Foundation Awards. Each year, the foundation honors the best chefs and restaurants across America, and this year’s roster of semifinalists includes no fewer than 15 names representing Atlanta (and Athens). They are as follows: Best New Restaurant A restaurant opened in the calendar year before the award will be given that already displays excellence in food, beverage, and service, and that is likely to make a significant impact in years to come. Outstanding Baker A chef or baker who prepares breads, pastries or desserts in a retail bakery, and who serves as a national standard-bearer of excellence. Must have been a baker or pastry chef for at least five years. Sarah O’Brien, Little Tart Bakeshop Outstanding Bar Program A restaurant or bar that demonstrates excellence in cocktail, spirits and/or beer service. Outstanding Restaurant A restaurant in the United States that serves as a national standard bearer of consistent quality and excellence in food, atmosphere and service. Eligible restaurants must have been in operation 10 or more consecutive years. Outstanding Restaurateur A working restaurateur who sets high national standards in restaurant operations and entrepreneurship. Candidates must have been in the restaurant business for at least 10 years. Candidates must not have won a James Beard Foundation chef award in the past five years. Ford Fry (Ford Fry Restaurants) Eddie Hernandez and Mike Klank (Taqueria del Sol) Outstanding Service A restaurant in operation five or more years that demonstrates high standards of hospitality and service. Outstanding Wine Program A restaurant in operation five or more years that serves as a standard bearer for excellence in wine service through a well-presented wine list, knowledgeable staff, and efforts to educate customers about wine. Rising Star of the Year A chef age 30 or younger who displays an impressive talent and who is likely to make a significant impact on the industry in years to come. Brian So, Spring Best Chef: Southeast Chefs who have set new or consistent standards of excellence in their respective regions. Eligible candidates may be from any kind of dining establishment and must have been working as a chef for at least five years with the three most recent years spent in the region. This list will be whittled down to final nominees on Wednesday, March 15. Winners will be announced at the 2017 James Beard Awards Gala, to be held at the Lyric Opera of Chicago on Monday, May 1. Last year, Atlanta had three nominees in the final running for medals: Gunshow’s Kevin Gillespie and Miller Union’s Steven Satterfield for Best Chef: Southeast and Staplehouse for Best New Restaurant. Sadly, all went home empty-handed. • Meet the 2017 Restaurant and Chef Award Semifinalists [JBF] • All Awards Coverage [EATL]First-class mail service is headed for a significant slowdown beginning next spring, unless Congress acts to help the struggling U.S. Postal Service. In order to save $2.1 billion annually and stave off possible bankruptcy, USPS is planning next May to end almost all overnight delivery of first-class letters and postcards. Such mail would instead take at least two to three business days for arrival. The cutbacks will not impact Express Mail or Priority Mail services, according to the agency. The first-class mail change would come about because the Postal Service is preparing to shutter about half of all its mail processing plants in the U.S. More than 250 facilities would close and about 28,000 workers laid off under a plan adopted in September. Postal officials say they must take drastic steps and cut the budget by $20 billion so that the agency becomes profitable by 2015. But critics of the plan say another option exists. Back in 2006, the Republican-led Congress adopted legislation (the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act) which forced the USPS—which does not receive any money from the federal budget—to prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years. In other words, the Postal Service was ordered to pay for the benefits of workers it hasn’t even hired yet and do it an accelerated time frame. If this mandate was changed, the USPS would today be running in the black, says consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Representative Stephen Lynch (D-MA) has introduced bipartisan legislation that would allow the agency to spend more of its own money to pay down its deficits, while still paying nearly $7 billion towards pensions and other costs. –Noel Brinkerhoff USPS Plan Will Hasten Demise of a Still-Vital Institution (Postal Reporter News Blog)Media Matters For America, Champion Of Unions And Worker's Rights Actively Opposing Its Workers Attempt To Unionize There's very little enjoyable in politics these days so there's not telling how long this tasty morsel of schadenfreude will have to last. Enjoy it while you can. MMFA rejected their Card Check bid, so the union petitioned the National Labor Relations Board On April 10 to force the nonprofit to hold a workplace election. Meanwhile, MMFA hired Perkins Coie, a law firm that specializes in specializes in representing management in union disputes. "For an organization that says they are not opposing employees' efforts to unionize, it's a little suspicious that they hired such a fancy legal team," Honey said. MMFA does not appear to be open to any solution that doesn't involve dragging in the NLRB, he added.... Media Matters has posted numerous articles supporting workers' rights and labor organizing. It has argued that "economists point to declining union participation as one cause of the growing economic rift in America" and claimed it was a fact that "unions increase productivity [and] do not reduce business competitiveness." According to the union a majority of Media Matter interns/scholars/hacks have already indicated their support for unionization. Media Matters For America: Onerous union work rules for thee but not for me! Obligatory:When the armistice between France and Germany was put into force on June 25, 1940, the fate of the powerful French Navy—the fourth largest in the world—was of critical importance to the British. Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his government dreaded the prospect of the French Fleet falling into enemy hands while Britain stood alone against the Axis powers. The odds were already heavy against the island nation’s main line of defense, the Royal Navy. Facing both the German and Italian navies, it was stretched thinly in the North Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, the Far East, and the Mediterranean Sea. Surrender of the French Navy The terms of the infamous armistice at Compiegne stipulated that the French Fleet would not be used by Germany or Italy, but would be immobilized under their control. Also, the Vichy French naval minister, Admiral Jean Darlan, though no friend of the British, instructed his captains that under no circumstances were their ships to be made available to the Germans. But the British were not aware of the full text of Darlan’s directive and feared that France’s battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines might soon be deployed against them. Most of the main French naval units were scattered among various Mediterranean ports, while others were in British harbors and the French West Indies. Anchored at the Mers-el-Kebir base in Algeria were the modern 26,500-ton battleships Dunkerque and Strasbourg; two aging battleships, the 22,189-ton Bretagne and Provence; the 10,000-ton seaplane carrier Commandante Teste; and six large destroyers. The ships formed the main French naval squadron in the Mediterranean. In the nearby port of Oran were seven destroyers and four submarines. The new, uncompleted, 38,000-ton battleships Jean Bart and Richelieu were tied up respectively at Casablanca in French Morocco and Dakar in French West Africa, while the aging 22,189-ton battleship Lorraine and four cruisers lay under the guns of the British Mediterranean Fleet in Alexandria harbor. Operation Catapult: Destruction of the French Navy It was a situation that Churchill and his ministers could not permit, so it was decided that the French Fleet must be put permanently out of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s reach. The prime minister noted that the German government had “solemnly declared” that it had no intention of using the French vessels. “But who in his senses would trust the word of Hitler after his shameful record and the facts of the hour?” said Churchill. He believed that the Compiegne armistice could be voided at any time. “There was in fact no security for us at all,” he said. “At all costs, at all risks, in one way or another, we must make sure that the navy of France did not fall into wrong hands, and then perhaps bring us and others to ruin.” The solution devised by Churchill and the Admiralty was the hasty creation of a powerful squadron to fill the vacuum left by the French Navy in the Mediterranean, and, if necessary, destroy it. The War Cabinet did not hesitate, Churchill reported later. “Those ministers who, the week before, had given their whole hearts to France and offered common nationhood, resolved that all necessary measures should be taken,” said the prime minister. “This was a hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned. It recalled the episode of the destruction of the Danish Fleet in Copenhagen harbor by Nelson in 1801; but now the French had been only yesterday our dear allies, and our sympathy for the misery of France was sincere. On the other hand, the life of the state and the salvation of our cause were at stake. It was Greek tragedy. But no act was ever more necessary for the life of Britain and for all that depended upon it.” So, Force H was formed at Gibraltar on June 28, 1940. Code-named Operation Catapult, its mission was a painful and distasteful one—to neutralize or destroy the French Fleet in the Mediterranean. Though based at the British bastion guarding the western entrance to the strategic Mediterranean, Force H was to be an independent operational command. The squadron comprised the 22,000-ton carrier HMS Ark Royal ; the 42,100-ton battlecruiser Hood; two battleships, 29,150-ton Resolution and 30,600-ton Valiant; the cruisers, 5,220-ton Arethusa and 7,550-ton Enterprise; and the screening destroyers Faulknor, Foxhound, Fearless, Forester, Foresight, Escort, Keppel, Active, Wrestler, Vidette, and Vortigern. Force H was then the main Allied task force in the Atlantic and western Mediterranean. The first commander was trim, square-jawed, 57-year-old Vice Admiral Sir James F. Somerville, a descendant of the famous Hood naval family. He flew his flag in HMS Hood, which between the wars had been revered as the most powerful ship afloat and the symbol of British naval might. A decorated veteran of the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign in World War I, Somerville had been invalided out of the Royal Navy with tuberculosis in 1938. Recalled to service at the outbreak of war in September 1939, he helped Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay organize Operation Dynamo, the epic evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in June 1940. Somerville was regarded by Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, commander of the British Mediterranean Fleet, as “a great sailor and a great leader.” Somerville Issues Four Options to the French Operation Catapult was launched on July 3, 1940. That night, more than 200 French vessels in British ports, most of them anchored at Portsmouth and Plymouth, were impounded. The ships included the battleships Courbet and Paris, the supply ship Pollux, destroyers, minelayers, minesweepers, submarines, submarine chasers, motor torpedo boats, tugs, trawlers, sloops, and harbor craft. The action was sudden, and overwhelming force was used. The transfer was amicable, and the French crews came ashore willingly, Churchill reported. However, there were scuffles during the transfer of the destroyer Mistral and the 3,250-ton submarine Surcouf. Two British officers were wounded, a leading seaman killed, an able seaman wounded, and a Frenchman killed. “But the utmost endeavors were made with success to reassure and comfort the French sailors,” said Churchill. “Many hundreds volunteered to join us. The Surcouf, after rendering distinguished service, perished on February 19, 1942, with all her gallant French crew.” On July 3, 1940, Force H was dispatched to Mers-el-Kebir. There, Admiral Somerville was to open negotiations with Admiral Marcel Gensoul, commander of the French squadron. Gensoul would refuse initially to meet with Somerville’s emissary, and the negotiations were conducted in writing. The Admiralty had drafted four options for the French admiral: (1) to put to sea and join forces with the Royal Navy; (2) to sail with reduced crews to British ports, where the vessels would be impounded and their complements repatriated; (3) to sail with reduced crews to the base at Dakar, where the ships would be immobilized; or (4) to scuttle his ships within six hours. The Admiralty had instructed Somerville that should Gensoul refuse all of the offers, the French ships were to be put out of action in their present berths, using “all means at your disposal.” “One of the Most Disagreeable and Difficult Tasks” Early on the morning of July 3, 1940, with the sea calm and a warm haze in the air, Force H steamed toward the Algerian coast. The 15-inch guns of Hood, Resolution, and Valiant were trained fore and aft, and Admiral Somerville hoped that they would not have to be fired that day in the fulfillment of his task. He blanched at the prospect of killing French sailors, who were comrades in arms of the Royal Navy. On the evening of July 2, Somerville had received a message from Prime Minister Churchill, relayed by the Admiralty, telling him, “You are charged with one of the most disagreeable and difficult tasks that a British admiral has ever been faced with, but we have complete confidence in you and rely on you to carry it out relentlessly.” At 9:10 am on July 3, the British squadron arrived off Oran and Mers-el-Kebir. Despite the morning haze, “the upper works of the French heavy ships were clearly visible over the breakwater,” reported Somerville, “although only the actual tops and masts could be seen from a position northwest of the fort (guarding the entrance to the base).” His French-speaking emissary, Captain C.S. Holland, a former naval attaché in Paris, had gone ahead aboard the destroyer HMS Foxhound to rendezvous with Admiral Gensoul’s flag lieutenant outside the Mers-el-Kebir defensive boom.Why Hillary’s $12,000 Jacket Does Matter Columbus Vegetarian Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 14, 2016 Last week, Hillary Clinton’s choice of outerwear became the subject of a lot of scrutiny. The issue of the jacket highlights several concerns with the presumptive Democratic nominee’s credibility. It challenges much of her campaign rhetoric, exposes actual positions on issues through the years, examines her financial background, and a releases whole host of information which would lead one to question not only her viability as the Democratic Party’s candidate for President but the direction of the party by choosing her. The Clinton Family got really rich really quickly, and with some help. The Clinton Family is worth around $111 million, Hillary alone $31.3 million. Book deals, wise investments, and obviously the salaries from an extensive political career have contributed to this figure, but most of couple’s wealth comes from speaking gigs. Between 2001 and 2013, Bill Clinton was paid $104.9 million for 542 speeches given around the world. “Bill Clinton has delivered his paid speeches to a diverse array of industry groups — from liquor distributors in China to coal-fired utility companies meeting in Florida to pharmaceutical executives in New Jersey — as well as to some nonprofit organizations, such as a Salvation Army event in Tulsa.” The multinational banking firm Goldman Sachs has hired Bill Clinton to speak eight times, paying $1.35 million in total. Sometimes, the Clintons ask their sponsors to pay the fee to Clinton Foundation— a philanthropic organization Bill Clinton founded in 1997 — which raised about $248 million in 2013. It’s worth about $381 million in total assets. I should add, it’s not uncommon for former presidents to have foundations. President George W. Bush has one, and so does President Jimmy Carter. The foundation’s “atypical business model” confuses the normal auditing process which obscures the exact destination of hundreds of millions of dollars. While the foundation has made contributions to some development efforts, policies enacted by Hillary Clinton have only worked to disprove any notion of authenticity. Most importantly, the opacity of its finances then the rapid increase of the Clinton family’s wealth seem to be connected, leading me to believe that generosity is not the primary motive. Stop with the ‘rags-to-riches’ narrative: it doesn’t apply to the Clintons and it shouldn’t. The vast majority of Democrats are low-income. A 2012 study concluded that Americans making less than $70,000 (around 70% of the country) were more likely to vote Democratic while those making above $70,000 were more likely to vote Republican. A leader should be someone who understands the struggle of their constituency, this is true especially in a truly progressive party — what the Democratic party has the potential to do. You’re not really coming off as progressive by wearing a jacket worth the dollar amount of the individual poverty threshold in the US and the average household income globally. It makes it hard to believe Hillary Clinton can relate to an average voter. It’s not smart, and it’s counterproductive. list of top Clinton campaign donors Hillary is not a labor candidate. Please stop pretending Hillary is the ideal Democrat. She fought to worsen conditions for workers on the Caribbean island-nation Haiti in favor of US manufacturers. In June 2009, the Haitian Parliament unanimously passed a law requiring that the minimum wage be raised to $0.61 an hour, or $5 a day. (The average cost of living is estimated to be the equivalent of about $23 a day.) This pay raise was staunchly opposed by foreign manufacturers who had set up shop in the country, and the United States Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development backed those manufacturers. After Haiti’s government mandated the raise, the United States aggressively (and successfully) pushed Haiti’s president to lower the minimum wage for garment workers to what factory owners were willing to pay: the equivalent of about $0.31 an hour (or $2.50 per eight-hour day). Early in her career: she served as corporate lawyer on the board of Walmart, a company with a long history of strongly opposing organized labor efforts. The Democratic party has a long history of being pro-labor and pro-union. The same can’t be said of Hillary Clinton’s history. How is she to supposed represent people she’s nothing like? Why the sexist argument isn’t important in this instance. While it is true that the same scrutiny wouldn’t apply to a male candidate, the nature of the clothing makes it much easier to notice a designer women’s jacket than a designer suit. Republican counterpart Donald Trump is also a fan of designer clothing, his suits averaging around $10,000. His fashion choices haven’t been the subject of as much controversy due partly to the nature of how he is associated with his wealth and his voters see it as a positive — a lot of his supporters are wealthy which makes sense for a Capitalist party. I find it hard to reconcile Hillary’s feminist rhetoric with her political history. From her sexist condemnation of Monica Lewinsky to her close relationship with Saudi Arabia, a country with a long history of misogyny, it makes it hard to believe Hillary’s feminism is real. Clinton uses feminism the way she has used people, ideas, and institutions throughout her long career — merely as instruments of her own advancement. When it’s convenient, she is the feminist role model. When her husband is being accused (accurately) of sexually harassing a cavalcade of women, she becomes the Wife Enforcer. The women who accused Bill Clinton were “trash,” she assured the world. Monica Lewinsky was a “narcissistic loony tune.” The Democratic Party has been on this track—favoring privatization and shifting away from the progressive party it used to be— since Bill Clinton took office. The jacket, which is indicative of the family’s wealth, is symbolic of a shift in the ideology of the Democratic Party. If not a shift in ideology, a shift in the sort of people the party sees as fit. Until the Democrats stop nominating reactionary candidates like Hillary Clinton, there will be no true progressive movements. Hillary Clinton is a part of a movement to consolidate wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands, yet claims to represent a population that she works every day to suppress. The Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton are in the process of doing the same within the Democratic Party, creating a bourgeois mockery out of what could be a true progressive party. At least Trump brags about being rich.UPDATE: 8:32 p.m. Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton has reportedly declined to participate in the Fox News debate that her opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has agreed to. “We have declined Fox News’ invitation to participate in a debate in California. As we have said previously, we plan to compete hard in the remaining primary states, particularly California, while turning our attention to the threat a Donald Trump presidency poses,” Clinton’s spokeswoman, Jennifer Palmieri said in a statement to Bloomberg. Sanders agreed last week to the network’s debate, tentatively planned to take place May in California, ahead of that state’s June 7 primary. Both Sanders and Clinton agreed to a total of four more debates back in February, three of which have been held already. “We believe that Hillary Clinton’s time is best spent campaigning and meeting directly with voters across California and preparing for a general election campaign that will ensure the White House remains in Democratic hands,” Palmieri said in the statement. Bill Sammon, VP and Washington Managing Editor, released a statement on Monday in response. “Naturally, Fox News is disappointed that Secretary Clinton has declined our debate invitation, especially given that the race is still contested and she had previously agreed to a final debate before the California primary.”Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City To Reinterpret Events Of Resident Evil 2 And 3 By Ishaan. March 28, 2011. 7:46am Capcom have another Resident Evil game in the works, and this one’s quite different from what you might be used to. Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is a collaboration between Capcom and Vancouver-based studio, Slant 6 Games, who developed SOCOM: Confrontation. Capcom are calling Operation Raccoon City a “true third-person team-based shooter” that reinterprets some of the events of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3. Here’s what they say about the game’s story and setting: “It is September 1998 and the action centres once more on the ill-fated Raccoon City and the horrific consequences of the deadly T-virus outbreak from the Umbrella facility. With a cover up required, Umbrella orders an elite team into Raccoon City to destroy all evidence of the outbreak and eliminate any survivors. Hearing of this plan, the US Government dispatches its own special forces to uncover any evidence that exposes the cause of the viral infection and Umbrella’s actions. Players take on the role of an Umbrella Security Services soldier (U.S.S.), competing alone or in four player co-op in a battle against all the competing forces at play in Raccoon City.” Leon Kennedy is confirmed to be making an appearance, but not as a special agent. You’ll see Leon during his younger days as part of the Raccoon City Police Department, and he’ll be on your hit list of targets to eliminate. You’ll also encounter both zombies and Bio-Organic Weapons (B.O.W’s) in Operation Raccoon City. Additionally, Operation Raccoon City will also include a variety of competitive online multiplayer modes. Capcom have the game scheduled for release this winter. Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is in development for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.Image caption Fifa inspected the progress made on the stadium in August Work on a Brazilian football stadium which is being refurbished for the 2014 World Cup has been suspended after a judge ruled there were safety concerns. The Arena da Baixada stadium in the city of Curitiba is due to stage four matches during the World Cup. Refurbishment work on the stadium is already lagging behind schedule. Judge Lorena Colnago said workers were at serious risk of accidents. She ordered a new inspection be carried out before work could resume. "Countless infractions have been committed, in various stages of the building process," the judge from Brazil's labour tribunal said. She said workers were in danger of "being buried, run over and of collision, falling from heights and being hit by construction material, among other serious risks". 'No plan B' The news comes a week after an investigation revealed that construction workers employed on another World Cup-related project faced what were termed "slave-like" conditions. Investigators said that more than 100 workers employed to expand Sao Paulo's international airport were living in unsuitable accommodation near the building site. In August, Sports Minister Aldo Rebelo said he was worried about delays at five stadiums still being built for next year's football World Cup. Arena de Baixada, which is owned by football club Atletico Paranaense, was among the five. Plans for its refurbishment have already been scaled back. After a visit from Fifa Secretary-General Jerome Valcke, the club said it would now not fit a retractable roof in order to speed the work up. Mr Valcke said all the stadiums would have to be ready in December and warned he would not tolerate any more delays as there was "no plan B". The World Cup will be played in 12 stadiums across the country. The opening match is due to take place at a brand-new venue being built in the outskirts of Sao Paulo on 12 June 2014. The final is scheduled for 13 July in the country's most famous football stadium, the Maracana in Rio de Janeiro.Richard Silverstein Sunday, July 15, 2012 At first blush, this story may not appear terribly relevant to national security blogs, democracy or human rights, but here me out. It concerns a 24 year-old British citizen whose website has acted as a go-between for other sites which allegedly infringe music and movie copyrights of U.S. entertainment companies. Richard O’Dwyer ran the site, TVShack.net, which linked to others accused of online piracy. Instead of going after the pirate sites (or in addition to it), the Justice Department decided that because O’Dwyer earned money from his site ($230,000 over two years), that he too was guilty of copyright infringement. I find this the most bizarre interpretation of copyright law imaginable. It would be one thing if O’Dwyer had acted as a middle-man for a serious crime, but to link to another website that allegedly violates U.S. copyright law? How is that aiding and abetting? Not to mention extraditing a UK citizen to the U.S. to prosecute him for this? For linking? Where do they plan to put him when they get him: Guantanamo? Here’s where this case gets really sticky: if they want to go after someone for linking to sites engaged in illegality, why not go even farther? Why not prosecute U.S. bloggers for linking to jihadi websites, even academics or specialists who study Islamists professionally? Don’t think this is far-fetched either. An Israeli lawyer publicly suggested that Israeli bloggers linking to this website when I break a gag order or expose an Israeli security secret are themselves guilty of violating Israeli law. I think the guy is a dunderheaded ass. But there are now plenty such people in the Israeli Knesset and security agencies. They’d be more than happy to introduce such legislation if it burnished their ultranationalist credentials. This is how the cold, clammy hand of the national security state imposes itself on public discourse. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that Israel is sui generis and it can’t happen here. The current U.S. administration has made it abundantly clear that if anything it wants to outdo its predecessor in flexing its national security muscles. There are few protections left in place if you’ve violated the unwritten commandments used by Obama’s national security apparatus. You could end up dead if you’re a U.S. citizen in Yemen; or in prison if you’re viewed as aiding and abetting terror, even just by linking to it. To be clear, the neither the U.S. nor Israel have so far sought to criminalize linking. But they’ve criminalized just about everything else and this can’t be too far behind. Republicans in Congress are already contemplating criminalizing the practice of journalism as Israel has just done in light of Uri Blau’s plea deal. Under their plans, if a journalist publishes a story based on sources who offer secret government documents, the journalist would go to jail. Not to mention that if the government wants to discover who the source was, it could dragoon the journalist into court or prison to find out. In my case, if the feds hadn’t known that Shamai Leibowitz was leaking secret documents to me, they could’ve taken me before a grand jury and tried to compel me to talk. If I hadn’t, they could jail me for contempt.CNN reported today that the Michael Jackson wrongful death case will go to a jury for a decision. The attorneys for the defendant, AEG Entertainment Group (AEG), filed a motion to have the case dismissed but, this was overruled. (See full CNN report here: Michael Jackson trial). The jury trial has been going on since late April of this year and countless witnesses have presented testimony for the plaintiffs (the Jackson family) and the defense, AEG. There is some indication that Michael Jackson’s mother may be recalled as a witness and then both sides will present closing arguments and the jury will render a verdict. In order for the Jackson family to prevail, the jury will need to decide that AEG was negligent in hiring, supervising or retaining Dr. Conrad Murray, who has been criminally convicted of providing a lethal overdose of narcotics to Michael, thereby causing his death. I wanted to explore what California law requires for proving such a case in this post. What Elements Will the Michael Jackson Jury Need to Decide Were Proven By the Evidence to Hold AEG Liable for Negligence? As with any trial by jury in the State of California, the jury will be instructed on the law by the judge through pre-approved jury instructions. The principal jury instruction in play for purposes of holding AEG liable for Jackson’s death will be California Civil Jury Instruction 426, which requires the following: That Dr. Conrad Murray was “unfit or incompetent” to perform the work for which he was hired; That AEG “knew or should have known” that Dr. Murray was “unfit or incompetent” and this created a “particular risk” to Michael Jackson (through his surviving heirs); That Murray’s “unfitness or incompetence” harmed Jackson (and his family) and the unfitness or incompetence was a “substantial factor” in causing this harm. According to all reports about the trial, the evidence that has been presented on these
one of Hundred Eyes' magical orbs, and after receiving a vision of Hattori's death at the Siege of Osaka, decides to return to Japan. Downloadable content [ edit ] In Dragon of the North, William returns to Japan where he is reunited with the resurrected Nekomata, and where the Tokugawa shogunate is opposed by Yokai under Masamune Date. But Masamune is supplied with Amrita by a Spanish spy named Maria, who escapes and offers her services to Toyotomi Hideyori, as the means to create more chaos in Japan to capture and use the Amrita for the glory of Spain. Since its naval defeat to England, the Spanish Empire was a shadow of its former self and hoped to use Amrita to regain its status as a world power. In Defiant Honor, William searches for Maria while helping the Tokugawa army deal with Yukimura Sanada. In Bloodshed's End, William plays a role in the Siege of Osaka as he defeats Hideyori, revealed to be a golem created from Amrita. Joined by Yukimura, who had his ninja vassal Sasuke Sarutobi assume his identity to fake his death during the Battle of Tennōji, William confronts Lady Chacha as she transforms into a Nine-Tailed Fox demon in an attempt to kill them. Chacha is defeated, and Yukimura remains by her side as Osaka Castle is consumed in flames as the Genna Era begins. Development [ edit ] Nioh. While the majority of its original elements were dropped, the setting and blonde-haired protagonist remained constant throughout the game's development.[15][16] Early promotional artwork for. While the majority of its original elements were dropped, the setting and blonde-haired protagonist remained constant throughout the game's development. Nioh was developed by Team Ninja, a division of the game's publisher Koei Tecmo who had previously developed the Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive series.[17] It is co-directed by Fumihiko Yasuda and Yosuke Hayashi, and co-produced by Kou Shibusawa and Hisashi Koinuma.[18][19][20] The opening movie was directed by Shinji Higuchi, whose work included Shin Godzilla. The cinematic director for the game in general was Makoto Kamiya, who had previously supervised special effects for Death Note: Light Up the New World and the film version of I Am a Hero. The music was composed by Yugo Kanno, whose previous work included the Bayside Shakedown television film series and SIE Japan Studio's Rain.[10] The concept for the game was created by Shibusawa, who throughout development held a passionate vision for the project, which was in turn affecting its development.[18] The original version of Nioh was based on Oni, an unfinished script by Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa.[21] According to Yasuda, this initial version "just crashed", and the team had to start all over again. The only elements to survive into the final version were the setting, the protagonist being a blonde-haired foreigner, and the basic scenario concept: the narrative was otherwise changed into an original story based around the life of William Adams, an Englishman who became a samurai serving Ieyasu, and the events of the Sengoku period.[15][18][22] While the original Kurosawa script was dropped in favor of an original story, artistic elements and battle movements were inspired by other Kurosawa pictures such as Yojimbo and Seven Samurai.[15] Development on the title first began in 2004, when it was designed as a traditional Japanese role-playing game.[18][23] It was being developed internally by Koei, four years prior to its 2008 merger with Tecmo.[21][22] Development of this initial version ran from 2004 to 2008, lasting approximately four years before all work up to that point was scrapped.[24] The role-playing version was scrapped by Shibusawa as it did not have enough fun elements within it.[20] Production was rebooted and transferred to Omega Force, a division of Koei Tecmo, and shifted in genre to a fast-paced action game similar to their Dynasty Warriors series.[23][24] This version was also scrapped, again due to Shibusawa being dissatisfied with the project's direction.[23] Team Ninja were first brought on in 2010 to help develop the action gameplay. It was at this stage that the title began evolving into an action role-playing game.[16][25] When first presented with the project by the Koei staff, Team Ninja were skeptical about the project, unsure of its Western protagonist and setting, wondering if it was intended to be another Dynasty Warriors-styled game.[25] Development was fully transferred to Team Ninja in 2012, with subsequent production lasting around four years. Up to this stage, only the basic concepts had been finalized, but when Team Ninja began full development the project solidified into being a full action title.[18][23][25] Team Ninja's staff handled the gameplay aspects, while earlier staff from the original Koei team handled the scenario.[20] The alpha version was completed in August 2012.[26] Rather than outsourcing an engine or carrying an engine over from one of their other properties, the game engine for Nioh was built from scratch.[27] In total, the project was in development for between twelve and thirteen years.[18][23] While a Western main character was settled upon for the final game, the initial concept had a native Samurai as the main protagonist in an original story. As the Koei staff had a history of developing historical titles such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Nobunaga's Ambition, they decided to base it on historical events.[27] While it was planned for an international release, the team did not try to dilute the Japanese elements for Western players, instead focusing on quality gameplay.[24] The Sengoku period was chosen as the game's setting due to it being a fertile period in Japanese history for an action title. Shibusawa was also fascinated by Adams' exploits, and the story came to be based on the major events in his life and iterations within Japan, then an isolated nation. They also added fantastic elements such as yokai.[18][22][24] A major influence on the story was James Clavell's 1975 novel Shōgun, which focused on a fictional English samurai based on the real-life Adams.[28] The character of William was initially conceived as a Western pirate who became a samurai, then shifted into his current form.[29] While the majority of the cast spoke Japanese, William spoke English. Initially, William had been fluent in Japanese and characters like Ieyasu had spoken lines in English, but this was seen as unrealistic even within the team's fantastic take on the setting, so they adjusted it. It also represented how William could communicate well with others despite a language barrier.[27] The overall theme of the game was the cycle of life and death, which was represented by both William and the enemy yokai. The game's singular focus on death contrasted sharply with Team Ninja's earlier works, which had also incorporated mild erotic elements.[17] When Team Ninja were first involved with the project, they performed lots of trial and error testing to find a gameplay style best suited to the game's tone.[30] When the project was given to Team Ninja, Shibusawa told them "to complete the mission of creating Nioh". The decision to give the project to Team Ninja was heavily influenced by the success of Dark Souls and other similar titles, dubbed by some as "Masocore" due to their difficult, yet rewarding action gameplay.[22][23][31][32] Many at Team Ninja were fans of the Souls series, and credited their surge in popularity with saving Nioh from possible cancellation and allowing progress for development of the game.[22][23] Other influences included Bloodborne, Ninja Gaiden, Onimusha and Diablo.[28][33] The main aim for the developers was to emulate the tough gameplay of both the Souls series and their earlier work on Ninja Gaiden while also making it accessible, fair and rewarding for players.[22][23] While the combat was extensively influenced by Souls games, Team Ninja's use of loot was more heavily influenced by the Diablo series, as they wanted combat to revolve around player skill rather than gear acquired through combat.[28] The gameplay incorporated elements of samurai combat from popular culture.[15] Historical accuracy when it came to weapons, armor and fighting styles dominated the gameplay design, which resulted in shields not being added as they were not used in combat by samurai.[28] Each boss, from yokai to human enemies, had their own appearances and tactics.[29] The yokai were all drawn from Japanese folklore, although their designs underwent slight alterations from their original forms.[28] A recurring element for the yokai bosses was how they were designed: first they decided the initial form and impression, then the developers added an element which would catch players off guard: for instance, if a yokai appeared beautiful, they would become ugly at some point during the battle.[29] Release [ edit ] Nioh was first announced by original developer Koei in 2004 under its working title "Oni". In addition to the game, which was slated for a 2006 release, a feature film directed by Kurosawa's son Hisao Kurosawa would be produced alongside and inspire the game: the entire project's budget was estimated as being three billion yen.[21] The movie tie-in was eventually cancelled in 2005 due to unspecified production problems, with the game becoming a standalone project.[34] Nioh was first shown off in a trailer at the 2005 Electronic Entertainment Expo, where it was announced as a PlayStation 3 exclusive.[35] At the time, the title was romanized as "Ni-Oh".[36] Initially slated for a 2006 release, Nioh missed its announced release date, and no update on the game was issued until 2009, when Koei Tecmo stated that the title was still in development. Similar updates would be issued over the following six years.[18] The game, now retitled slightly as Nioh, was reintroduced at the 2015 Tokyo Game Show as a PlayStation 4 exclusive, with a scheduled launch in Japan in 2016.[38] It was later announced for an international release at the PlayStation Experience event in December of that year, also in 2016.[36] A manga based on the character and setting, called Nioh: The Golden Samurai (仁王～金色の侍～, Niō: Kin'iro no Samurai), was written by Yosuke Katayama and began serialization in Weekly Shōnen Magazine starting in May 2016.[39] Initially planned for October 2016, the game was delayed to make final adjustments based on player feedback from demos. The localization was a high priority for Koei Tecmo due to the worldwide release date.[31] The game was announced for a worldwide release in February 2017.[41] While Koei Tecmo published the game in Japan, Sony Interactive Entertainment handled publishing duties in mainland Asia, North America and Europe. This was to distribute the game to as wide an audience as possible.[36][42] It was released in North America on 7 February, in Europe 8 February, and in Japan on 9 February. Two editions were created: the standard edition featuring the full game, and a Digital Deluxe Edition featuring an additional weapon pack, PS4 theme and season pass. Pre-order bonuses were additional costumes, based respectively on Japanese temple guardian statues and the samurai Sanada Yukimura.[41] The game was also among those that supported the PlayStation 4 Pro model, with graphical enhancements enabling a smooth framerate.[43] An official soundtrack, featuring all 45 pieces of music from the game, was released in Japan on February 15.[44] Demos [ edit ] A demo version of the game, dubbed the "alpha demo", was released on PlayStation Network (PSN) on 26 April 2016. The demo was available until 5 May. Completing the demo unlocked access to a free downloadable content (DLC) pack dubbed "Mark of the Conqueror". This demo was released so Team Ninja could receive feedback from a future online survey to improve the game's mechanics.[45] The demo was downloaded by 850,000 people worldwide, and feedback was positive overall aside from recurring complaints about its lack of tutorials, high difficulty and awkward control scheme.[46] Based on this, the team made a number of changes and tweaks to the gameplay.[19] A second "beta" demo released from 23 August to 6 September. It featured new stages, additional weapons and revamped gameplay based on the feedback from the alpha demo.[14] Like the alpha demo, downloading the beta demo gave free access to DLC content, this time a pack dubbed "Mark of the Warrior" alongside the original "Mark of the Conqueror" pack. They again undertook a survey of players, and made numerous adjustments and additions to the game based on this feedback.[47] The game's delay from 2016 to 2017 was caused by these adjustments.[31] A third demo, called "Last Chance Trial", was made available from 20 to 23 January in North America and Europe. It gave access to both prior DLC and a final reward for the full game.[48] Producer Fumihiko Yasuda, at a presentation at Tokyo Game Show 2018, later attributed Nioh's success to the "demo strategy", saying that aside from getting feedback from users, the demos also had the aim of showing players they were being listened to, "which they hoped would result in players being more supporting of the game".[49] Reception [ edit ] Nioh received "generally favorable" reception, according to review aggregator Metacritic.[50] Most critics praised the combat, difficulty, setting, use of Japanese folklore, and aesthetics as high points, as well as giving players the option to choose different graphical modes for the PS4 version; while the game's story and inventory management were met with some criticism.[citation needed] Eurogamer ranked the game 35th on their list of the "Top 50 Games of 2017",[64] while Polygon ranked it 42nd on their list of the 50 best games of 2017.[65] The game was nominated for "Best PS4 Game" in Destructoid's Game of the Year Awards 2017,[66] and for "Best PlayStation 4 Game" and "Best RPG" in IGN's Best of 2017 Awards.[67][68] Nioh was later one of three games invited to the Global Game Business Summit at Tokyo Game Show 2018 as an example of a game that succeeded globally.[49] Sales [ edit ] Nioh opened at number 2 in the UK sales charts.[69] Retailers Amazon and Walmart sold all their stock of Nioh within the first week of release.[70] It sold 75,477 copies in its first week in Japan, entering the charts at number 2.[71] On February 24, 2017 Koei Tecmo and Team Ninja announced that Nioh had shipped over one million units worldwide within its first two weeks of sale. The numbers included retail shipments and digital sales.[72] By February 2019, the game had shipped over 2.5 million copies worldwide.[73] Accolades [ edit ] Sequel [ edit ] On June 11, 2018, at the 2018 Sony E3 conference, a sequel was announced.Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico who is seeking the Republican nomination for President of the United States in the 2012 election, is firmly supporting online poker. The 58-year-old presidential candidate, a successful businessman who built up one of New Mexico’s largest construction companies, has created a web page in which he openly courts poker players. Johnson now makes history as the first presidential candidate to target the votes of online poker players. “Support me for President, and I’ll support your freedom,” Johnson says on his site. “The federal government should not be involved in restricting lawful commerce that doesn’t harm anyone.” Johnson entered the political arena in 1994 and was elected governor of New Mexico in his first campaign for public office. During his first six months in office, he was nicknamed “Governor Veto” for using his veto powers on half the bills presented to him. He served a second term with a successful re-election campaign in 1998. A two-term limit statute prevented Johnson from seeking a third term as governor. “He cares about this issue,” said Poker Players Alliance executive director John Pappas, who dined with Johnson in the state capital last month. “He also realizes there is a serious voting block of people out there and believes that their ideologies, not just on poker but [on] other issues, probably align with his.” Johnson’s website also informs online poker players that, “You’re Getting a Raw Deal. It’s Your Money. The Government Has No Business Telling Adults How They Can Spend It.” The website solicits donations by featuring poker chips that supporters can click on to donate to Johnson’s campaign. A physical fitness enthusiast, Johnson is an avid bicyclist and adventurer who has scaled the highest peaks of four of the seven continents and has also participated in several triathlons, according to his website. Johnson is due to be in attendance at the TwoPlusTwo.com World Series of Poker party in Las Vegas on Thursday evening at the Wynn poker room.THE CONTEST IS NOW LIVE. Here's a quick Update on things: There will be 20 mixes selected for the final round, an increase from the original plan of 10. Half of these will be chosen by Earmilk's staff, the other ten being the most favorited, respectively. This route has been chosen to ensure that underground producers who don't have as much "Public Sway" as larger artists still receive a fair chance, as well as helping ensure variety and quality to the results. If you submitted a remix, now's the time to start promoting it! You have seven days, then the results go in and the winners are announced. – Earmilk Staff Attention aspiring producers, EARMILK is pleased to announce an opportunity that is sure to add some excitement to the humdrum of your daily activities. Attentive readers may recall that as we premiered our new website layout, EARMILK set a sort of “New Years Resolution”, vowing to provide its readers with a plethora of opportunities to win free goodies. Today’s contest sees Warner Bros. Records Inc, one of the the world's most recognized and successful recording companies, team up with EARMILK to offer one hopeful producer an opportunity of a lifetime. In anticipation of Kimbra’s forthcoming album Vows, EARMILK and Warner Bros. Records have decided to challenge all the bedroom-producers to put forward their best remix of Kimbra’s chart-topping single “Settle Down.” As compensation for your work, one lucky winner (Judged by Kimbra herself) will see their creation receive an official release on Warner Bros. Records UK, accompanied by a proper servicing campaign. For complete details, read on (or scroll down). Kimbra Johnson, the New Zealand native better known simply as Kimbra, is gearing up for her US/UK debut,Vows, set to be released on May 22 through Warner Bros. Records. Vows has already received praise in New Zealand and Australia, scaling to the top 5 on the charts, becoming a Gold-Certified hit in the process. Already a household name in the US for her appearance on Gotye’s “Somebody I Used to Know,” Kimbra aims on enchanting American and English listeners with her soulful jazz-infused pop, reminiscent of times past and instilled with the quirky theatrics betoken of the alluring Kiwi. To help stimulate some creativity and get the brain juices flowing, we also have an exclusive free remix EP featuring reworkings of Kimbra’s top songs. These up-and-coming Warner Bros. artists —Brenmar, Benjamin Damage, George Fitzgerald and Owsey— demonstrate the originality and vision needed to claim the top spot in the contest. George Fitzgerald stylishly combines the warmer, melodic sides of house and garage with the more heated, pounding drum patterns of dubstep and techno. Owsey has built up an enviable online following, collecting over half a million plays on his Soundcloud page and 200,000 YouTube views of his remix of Gotye’s Kimbra-featuring hit "Somebody That I Used To Know." A Chicago native, Brenmar now resides in Brooklyn, but his tracks clearly demonstrate his Chi-Town love of hip-hop, R&B, house and juke. Lastly, Benjamin Damage's track "Deeper" represents one of the first true "Deep Rave" sounds. He also has seen collaborations with Doc Daneeka incorprated into sets of mainstagers such as Modeselektor. For those not partaking in the contest, feel free to download the Remix EP simply to enjoy the music. Don’t hesitate any longer, your future release on Warner Bros. UK won't create itself. Available below are all the stems for “Settle Down” and contest details needed to produce your song. Contest Details Process Grab the stems for "Settle Down" HERE Submit remixes on EARMILK's Kimbra Remix DropBox on SoundCloud by 12 PM ET on May 20th with the title "Kimbra Remix Contest." Track must be set to private and download enabled public with download disabled. public with download disabled. We will upload the tracks on [EDIT: We will place your submitted track into the contest set] on EARMILK's SoundCloud at 12 AM ET on May 21st. Over the next week, ending at May 27th 12PM ET, promote your track. [EDIT: We will place your submitted track into the contest set] on EARMILK's SoundCloud at 12 AM ET on May 21st. Over the next week, ending at May 27th 12PM ET, promote your track. The remix must be original and cannot contain any materials not owned by the entrant (except for material from "Settle Down" stems). Any remixes open to the public prior to submission will be disqualified. Judging From May 21-27, promote your track. The top ten most favorites tracks chosen by the listeners, along with ten tracks chosen by EARMILK's staff, will move onto the second round of judging. These 20 Finalists will be announced on May 28th. *NOTE: This is an update from the original projection of 10 finalists The second round of judging will consist of an EARMILK panel, along with Kimbra herself. Each submission will be listened to and judged on the bases of creativity, originality and overall production Prize One winner will be selected and have their track featured on an official Warner Bros. Records UK release, accompanied by a proper servicing campaign. The winning track will also be published on EARMILK's website. Winner NotificationMichael Snyder, Contributor Activist Post When it comes to Barack Obama, one of the most important things to understand is that he is a committed globalist. He firmly believes that more “global governance” (the elite don’t like to use the term “global government”) will make the world a much better place. Throughout his time in the White House, Obama has consistently sought to strengthen international institutions such as the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. At every turn, Obama has endeavored to more fully integrate America into the “global community”. Since he was elected, Obama has signed a whole host of new international economic agreements. He regularly speaks of the need for “cooperation” among global religions and he has hosted a wide variety of different religious celebrations at the White House. Obama once stated that “all nations must come together to build a stronger global regime”. If you do not want to live in a “global regime” that is just too bad. To globalists such as Obama, it is inevitable that the United States of America will be merged into the emerging global system. Just this week, Obama has issued a new executive order that seeks to “harmonize” U.S. economic regulations with the rest of the world. This new executive order is yet another incremental step that is pushing us closer to a North American Union and a one world economic system. Unfortunately, most Americans have absolutely no idea what is happening. The American people need to understand that Barack Obama is constantly looking for ways to integrate the United States more deeply with the rest of the world. The globalization of the world economy has accelerated under Obama, and this latest executive order represents a fundamental change in U.S. economic policy. Now federal regulators will be required to “harmonize” their work with the international community. The following is how this new executive order was assessed in a recent Businessweek article…. Obama’s order provides a framework to organize scattered efforts to promote international regulatory cooperation, the chamber’s top global regulatory official said today. ‘Today’s executive order marks a paradigm shift for U.S. regulators by directing them to take the international implications of their work into account in a consistent and comprehensive way,’ Sean Heather, vice president of the chamber’s Center for Global Regulatory Cooperation, said in an e-mailed statement. Members of the Obama administration are touting this as a way to “reduce regulation”, but the truth is that this is much more about aligning ourselves with the rest of the world than anything else. Obama’s “Information Czar”, Cass Sunstein, authored a piece in the Wall Street Journal on Monday in which he stressed the need to eliminate “unnecessary regulatory differences across nations” so that the United States can compete more effectively in our “interdependent global economy”. The end result of this process will be that we will now do things much more like how the rest of the world does things…. In an interdependent global economy, diverse regulations can cause trouble for companies doing business across national boundaries. Unnecessary differences in countries’ regulatory requirements can cost money, compromising economic growth and job creation. Think of divergent requirements for car headlights, or the labeling of food, or standards for container sizes. Recognizing this, President Obama’s Jobs Council has called for U.S. agencies to better align U.S. regulations with those of our major trading partners. And today the president is issuing an executive order, “Promoting International Regulatory Cooperation,” with a simple goal: to promote exports, growth, and job creation by eliminating unnecessary regulatory differences across nations. But a one world economic system is not going to arrive overnight. Initially, it is much more likely that there will be a very strong push toward North American integration first. The goal will be to shape North America into an integrated regional economic unit similar to the EU. Cass Sunstein discussed how this new executive order will affect North American integration on the White House website on Tuesday…. The new Executive Order will build on work that is already underway. We have started close to home, with President Obama launching Regulatory Cooperation Councils with Prime Minister Harper of Canada and President Calderon of Mexico. The Councils are implementing work plans to eliminate or prevent the creation of unnecessary regulatory differences that adversely affect cross-border trade; to streamline regulatory requirements; and to promote greater certainty for the general public and businesses, particularly small- and medium-sized enterprises, in the regulation of food, pharmaceuticals, nanotechnology, and other areas. The United States and Canada released the United States-Canada Regulatory Cooperation Council (RCC) Joint Action Plan last December. In February, we announced the United States-Mexico High-Level Regulatory Cooperation Council (HLRCC) Work Plan. Most Americans have absolutely no idea how far plans to integrate the United States, Canada and Mexico have advanced. Last year, Barack Obama signed an agreement to create a “North American security perimeter” and most Americans never even heard about it because the mainstream news networks almost entirely ignored it. Download Your First Issue Free! Do You Want to Learn How to Become Financially Independent, Make a Living Without a Traditional Job & Finally Live Free? Download Your Free Copy of Counter Markets But this is exactly what the globalists want. They don’t want people to become alarmed by these moves toward North American integration. In fact, a document uncovered by Wikileaks shows that those involved in the effort to integrate North America believe that an “incremental” approach is best. Apparently they believe that small moves toward integration are less likely to alarm the general population. The following is from an article that appeared in The National Post last year…. The integration of North America’s economies would best be achieved through an ‘incremental’ approach, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable. The cable, released through the WikiLeaks website and apparently written Jan. 28, 2005, discusses some of the obstacles surrounding the merger of the economies of Canada, the United States and Mexico in a fashion similar to the European Union. ‘An incremental and pragmatic package of tasks for a new North American Initiative (NAI) will likely gain the most support among Canadian policymakers,’ the document said. ‘The economic payoff of the prospective North American initiative … is available, but its size and timing are unpredictable, so it should not be oversold.’ If the people of Canada, the United States and Mexico were told that there was a plan to merge all three economies, there might be massive protests to stop it, and the globalists do not want that. A few years ago, the “Security and Prosperity Partnership Of North America” (SPP) that was being promoted by President George W. Bush started to generate quite a bit of negative publicity. That caused those seeking to integrate the economies of North America to back off for a little while. But as an article by Jerome Corsi last year detailed, the eventual goal is to turn North America into another version of the eurozone. That includes a common currency for North America called the “amero”…. The SPP in the administration of President George W. Bush appeared designed to replicate the steps taken in Europe over a 50-year period following the end of World War II to transform an economic agreement under the European Common Market into a full-fledged regional government, operating as the European Union, with its own currency, the euro, functioning as the sole legitimate currency in what has become known as ‘the eurozone.’ Survival Solar Battery Charger - Free Today! The concern under the SPP has been that the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, could be evolved into a regional government, the North American Union, with a regional currency, the amero, designed to replace the U.S. dollar, the Mexican peso and the Canadian dollar. So will we ever see the “amero” replace the U.S. dollar? Hopefully not. If the globalists try to introduce the “amero”, it would probably be after a horrible financial crisis in which the U.S. dollar falls apart. The “amero” would be heralded as the “solution” to the problems that were plaguing the dollar. If there ever is a move to get rid of the U.S. dollar for an international currency of some kind, the American people will need to resist it with all of their might. The more integrated the world becomes, the more likely it becomes that we will see nightmarish global tyranny someday. It is very frightening to think of what someone very evil might do if they had the chance to run the entire planet. Once our national sovereignty is gone, it will be incredibly difficult to get back. If the American people don’t take a stand while they still can, their children may wake up someday as citizens of a very oppressive “global regime”. This article first appeared here at the American Dream. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here. Free Copy of the American Expat Guide var linkwithin_site_id = 557381; linkwithin_text=’Related Articles:’Knowing how easy it is to believe what you read in the tabloids let me confirm again that the ridiculous bid – reported dead straight in oneof them this morning that the Hammers have received an £11 million bid from Sunderland for Diafra Sakho – is a piece of nonsense. The bid was nowhere near £11 million as we reported last night but instead is based on an offer which included clauses that Sunderland would have to stay up for three seasons and that the striker would have to make a minimum of 30 appearances in each of them. It is not our intention to knock newspapers that genuinely try to bring stories – they have more on hand than West Ham United and several do a great job – but I need people who follow this site to know the backgroud as far as we can uncover it. And the facts as wrtten here at CandH in that story are as relayed above. Please don’t be misled.Although IRFU performance director David Nucifora has already outlined that a successful Championship defence is the aim for the head coach and his squad, Schmidt said that a top-three finish would represent a successful eight weeks' work. The bookies rate Ireland as joint- second favourites to win the title along with Wales, whose coach Warren Gatland has labelled the champions as the most likely team to claim the trophy. Paul O’Connell is stretchered off in his final game for Ireland during the World Cup victory over France. Picture credit: Stephen McCarthy / SPORTSFILE Yet Ireland are dealing with the loss of retired captain Paul O'Connell and injuries to Peter O'Mahony, Tommy Bowe and Iain Henderson, while the provinces' poor European form does not bode well for the weeks ahead. They open with a tough fixture against Wales at home, before facing France in Paris six days later and England at Twickenham in round three. Given that schedule, Schmidt was keen to play down Ireland's chances. "To be as candid as I can be, I think a top-half finish would be a good Six Nations for us," he said at yesterday's tournament launch in London. "We start with Wales and France in a six-day turnaround and then go to England. "If we could be in the top half that means we'd have to be in front of three pretty good teams. Rory Best, captain of Ireland and head coach Joe Schmidt pose with the trophy during the RBS Six Nations launch at The Hurlingham Club in London, England. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images) "Being realistic, our dream would be to do what no team has done before (and win three in a row) and we're not going to give up the dream, but we're also reasonably pragmatic and practical in what we try to deliver and I think I would be unfair on the players if I said the only way to be successful is to win the Championship. "To be honest it's never something that we've spoken about, we've been very much week to week in our focus. "We feel a lot of pressure around that first game because we then have got two big away games, one of those is just six days later. "It's a very complicated start for us. We want to get off to a good start but then so does everybody else. You know that as soon as you don't get a good start you are hugely behind the eight ball because it is very contained within those five games and you can can't afford to lose more than one, so if you don't start well you put yourself in a very tough situation." That tough start and the competition within the tournament means Schmidt's scope to experiment will be limited during the high pressure window. In the wake of the disappointing World Cup exit at the hands of Argentina, there were wide-ranging calls for a change of approach but the head coach does not think his game-plan needs major surgery. Ian Madigan does not make Neil Francis' preferred Six nations squad Although there are five uncapped players in the squad, the likelihood is that the New Zealander will stick to his tried and trusted in the weeks to come. "It's funny, the game-plan in the World Cup served us really well. We still did get two tries against Argentina and I could show you a bit of footage that shows one good decision gives us another one at least. That makes you competitive against a really good side," he said. "Are we that far away? We've beaten all the southern hemisphere sides in the last two years apart from the All Blacks. I don't think we're that far away - and we change our game-plan a little bit week to week, so we don't do the same things. "One of the things that Andy Farrell said when I was chatting to him was that he found us difficult to prepare for because, 'they'll do this or they'll do that and then there was a little bit too much to cover'. Then he'd finish up by saying 'whatever you have seen, they'll do something different again so we've got to be prepared for that'. "If we are challenging teams to analyse us like that, that's probably a strength because the more time they spend analysing us, the less time they're going to be spending on their own game and looking at how to disassemble us. Read more here: "Even coming out of the World Cup, per game we kicked exactly the same number of times as the All Blacks did. You have a look at the All Blacks' last three games, how did they play against France? France only made two less offloads than the All Blacks did. "How'd they play against South Africa? They suffocated them, they put the ball in behind them, they kicked a huge number of times. "Then against the Wallabies, they changed it up again. They didn't play the same way - they don't play the same way and they've got fantastic players to play any way they want to on any given day depending on how they think they want to manipulate the opponent. "That's part of the strategy of it and sometimes if somebody has more physical power than you, then you've got to be light on your feet. "Other times, if you think you can physically overpower a team, then you might play to that strength. I think it is about getting a balance in how you play." Schmidt also pointed to the lack of time available to make major changes. "There's a reality in that we've got five training sessions before we play Wales," he said. "There's a reality that you can't reinvent the wheel; you can continually fine-tune it, but to reconstruct is very, very difficult. "We have to change some of the things, we don't have probably the best lineout forward in the world (O'Connell) any more, so we've got to adapt and adjust there. We don't have quite the same power in our tight five necessarily. "Then you get excited about who you have got. Jack McGrath has been great for us and started the last four games last year. Anyone who looked at Nathan White when he came on against France and we drilled them in that scrum... Nathan White did a great job. The other guys in the second-row, that's very much up in the air. "Unfortunately we lost Iain Henderson and then Dan Tuohy as
the province] attended, except these two," said Angie McKinley, female representative on the Hockey New Brunswick minor council. "If you don't attend something that's mandatory, there has to be some kind of sanction." Mandatory event McKinley said it has been difficult in the past to get some teams to travel to games to be ranked. That's why, for the second year in a row, the event was made mandatory, she said. The other teams travelled from Saint John, Moncton, Miramichi and Carleton County to attend. "All the rest of the teams had paid their tournament fees and there were some ice times that could not be returned by the tournament organizers, so they were out of pocket a bit." McKinley denied that the parents weren't notified about the tournament until November. She said it was set by September and the KV teams got notice in October. Appeals denied The teams tried to appeal the suspension by arguing that recreational hockey shouldn't come with mandatory expenses that put the sport out of reach. They said the goals of recreational hockey should be focused on skills development, enjoyment of the game and promoting a lifelong interest among the girls. They argued that ranking teams should not be the primary focus. But the Kennebecasis Valley Minor Hockey Association said those arguments didn't sway Hockey NB. "Despite repeated attempts by KVMHA to appeal the suspension … these teams are suspended from further play," wrote Lynn Fletcher, the association's director of communications. Hockey NB executive director Nic Jansen, however, contends the KVMHA did not follow the proper appeals process. "Not once did KVMHA fill out the necessary forms, or submit formal documentation to file an appeal with Hockey New Brunswick," he wrote in an email to CBC News. An appeal would have been heard by a committee. Disappointed players Clayton said the situation is a real disappointment to his daughter, who only started playing last year. At first, she could hardly skate, he said, and now she plays defence. 'She says, "What did we do that we're suspended, Dad?'" - Tom Clayton, parent "And she's met so many new friends. She loves hockey, even 6 a.m. practices." Clayton said his daughter has been asking him what her team did wrong. "She says, 'What did we do that we're suspended, Dad?'" "You didn't do anything. No one did anything. It's the bureaucrats in Fredericton saying, 'You have to go,'" said Clayton. "Well, are you going to pay my hotel, my gas, my meals when we're up there?" Hockey NB said the teams have until the day before provincials to pay their fines and be reinstated. The provincials will be held March 24-26.SCOTT Johnson stopped short of branding Wales cheats but, after naming the team for what could be his final RBS Six Nations match as Scotland’s head coach, he was unequivocal that they would never play as the Welsh did in Saturday’s demoralising encounter. Johnson has stuck with largely the same side that lost 28-18 at Murrayfield, but with a twist on his ‘form and future’ argument with two changes in the pack. By handing 22-year-old Edinburgh lock Grant Gilchrist his Test debut in the second row, rather than replacing the injured Richie Gray with Alastair Kellock, he is blooding a talent he believes will be central to the 2015 World Cup campaign. Conversely, having given young flanker Rob Harley three Tests to find his feet at this level, he restores the experienced Alasdair Strokosch to the back row. Both will be integral to Scotland’s bid to win more ball than has been the case in the championship so far, and to keep a hold of it better in what is expected to be a fiery finale in Paris, but that was not Johnson’s main topic of conversation at yesterday’s team announcement. Chief among those were the lack of consistency in world refereeing and the art of conning officials. Wales proved adept on Saturday in stepping off scrums when meant to engage, and could be heard shouting ‘early engagement’ to Saturday’s referee, Craig Joubert. Then, having sown doubt in Joubert’s mind over the opponents, they fell to ground in scrums, effectively suckering the official into awarding a rash of penalties and taking away a key platform of Scotland’s attack. Johnson was furious and showed off blisters on his fingers left by email exchanges this week with South African referee Joubert and the IRB. But he insisted that he was not being naïve in trying to take the moral high ground after rugby’s latest penalty shoot-out. “The scrum becomes so important, the decisions so critical, that it creates anger that adds to other areas of the game,” he said, “and that stops the game flowing. We’re not at the stage of our development to be sitting here trying to con people. We’re trying to do it right. That may be the moral high ground, but New Zealand are the same. They’ve just been together longer and they get a reputation, and it’s amazing, when you get a reputation, how often the benefit of the doubt goes to you. “We were frustrated that we got conned at the weekend. We warned everyone that some teams do these things, but I don’t want to be a coach who tells his players to start diving like soccer players. I want to tell them we’re going to be competitive and, if we’re not good enough, we’re not good enough. I don’t want to start chasing rainbows by telling them to cheat.” Johnson showed sympathy for Joubert, pointing instead to the vast number of potential infringements in modern rugby that leave officials to decide for themselves which are most important. “If he [Joubert] wasn’t such a great bloke and a great human being, my tirade may have been different, but he did not cost us the game. At no stage am I complaining about Craig. If we got him again this week, I’d welcome him. “What we want is consistency. What is viewed as correct and what is viewed as incorrect? I can show you the stats for the ref this weekend [Welshman Nigel Owens]. They’re completely opposite to the guy last weekend. Every time we get a referee, we do our due diligence on them and you would not believe how much they differ from one another. It is drastically different. “And this is my point. I can spend my whole time getting the team prepared to play against X [referee], but I don’t want to do that. Naïve or not, this team is trying to grow, trying to get an ethic and if I change that, we’re deluding ourselvesPosted January 11, 2012 by ogbaysean in 2011 SF 49ers. 17 Comments It sure was satisfying to see tools Jim Schwartz & Ndamukong Suh bounced from the playoffs by Drew Brees’ high flying offense. But by the same token, I don’t welcome the New Orleans Saints to Candlestick at all. In my humble opinion, I think the Saints are the best team in the NFL when they’re executing. They are an unstoppable force. The 49ers should be patting themselves on the back for taking care of business during the regular season. Earning the #2 seed is already proving to be the difference-maker in this game. If this match-up was to be played in the Louisiana Superdome, then the 49ers would almost certainly lose. But its not. There hasn’t been a playoff game at The Stick in a decade. Fans will be rabid and you can bet your bottom dollar that Justin Smith & Company are ready to bring the noise too. Mr. Brees, you’ve been warned. The 49ers are an immovable object. Proceed with caution because you’re walking into a shitstorm. Pardon my Cajun French. New Orleans Saints at San Francisco 49ers (+4) What do you get when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? You get the irresistible force paradox 1st game of the NFL’s Divisional Playoffs. Both teams went 13-3 in the regular season by vastly different M.O.’s: a dynamic offense versus a dominating defense. We’re often told that the NFL is a quarterback’s league. But we’re also told that defense wins championships. Well who wins then?! Patience, my friends. Patience. There are two plausible scenarios: a) The 49ers win behind gritty defense and an effective run-first offense. Alex Smith will limit his mistakes as he has all year long but also does nothing to “wow” the national audience. The steward of the west coast offense does nothing to silence his naysayers. b) The 49ers lose. They fall behind early and fail to pick up any ground. ESPN analysts high-five each other in the process with echos of “I told you so” in the background. Your friends point and laugh after you’ve convinced yourself “this is the year.” Sub-Plot: #11 QB Alex Smith This is a tall order for any team let alone the 49ers, a team absent from the playoffs since 2002. And if you think about it, the 49ers have come to the most important fork in the road of the past decade. Of course it surrounds the play of Alex Smith. At this point, it’s hard not to root for Alex. He’s shown flashes of brilliance and instances of incompetence. He is our Jonathan Sanchez, except he hasn’t thrown his no-hitter yet. “The Catch” was 30 years ago yesterday, can Alex rekindle some of that magic? This is a big spot for Alex. Can he throw for 250+ yards? Can he outscore Drew Brees? Can he win? If not, is he worth a contract extension? Saturday will be quite telling. Key to the Game: Constant Pressure Similar to Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees has the ability to pick apart a defense when blitzed. Which is why the 49ers are a team best suited to have defensive success against the Saints. We all know about Defensive Player of the Year candidate Justin Smith, but left defensive end Ray McDonald is a valuable asset too. Ranked as the 4th best 3-4 defensive end according to ProFootballFocus, McDonald will be relied upon to provide consistent pressure on Brees to spell Justin Smith’s double teams. Being that the Saints pass 60% of the time on offense and 49ers are the #1 defense against the run, we can expect to see Brees dropping back quite often. The X-Factor will be OLB Aldon Smith. Mainly a sack specialist on passing downs, Smith should see even more snaps on Saturday. The 49ers struck gold with Aldon Smith as he amassed 14 sacks on the year and was 2nd in the league with QB pressures. The kid is is 22 and has gotten stronger as the season has gone on. Release the Kraken. The Saints Offense is Excellent, but… Nobody is talking about the Saints on defense. Putting it nicely, they are bad. It’s a common misconception that the Saints like to get into shootouts. When Saints’ opponents score 20+ points, they are 26-31 while Drew Brees is quarterback. And the Saints scored 20+ in 46 of those games. To top it all off, the 49ers have scored 20+ in every home game this year. So you see, the Saints need to execute on defense perhaps even more than on offense. Kendall Hunter & Vernon Davis need to have huge roles for the 49ers to be successful. Defensive Coordinator Gregg Williams likes to dial up the blitz early and often. Alex Smith can expect to see exotic blitz packages. The kryptonite to a great blitz is an even better screen pass. Kendall Hunter is in the Darren Sproles mold. Use the kid. He’s a burner. Vernon Davis is known for his blocking ability, but should he release into the flats every so often, it will take a lot for the Saints 24th ranked defense to stop a 6’3” tight end with 4.38 speed. “Mama, there goes that man!” -Golden State Warrior Head Coach Mark Jackson Blueprint to Beat the Saints The 49ers need to run a 2-Deep defensive scheme. The Saints offense goes as TE Jimmy Graham and RB Darren Sproles do. Put Patrick Willis on Graham and NaVarro Bowman on Sproles. If they can contain these two and force someone else to beat them, then the 49ers are looking alright. But they’re not out of the woods yet. Carlos Rogers needs to have a hell of a game against WR Marques Colston. The Achilles Heal could prove to be Tarell Brown D-ing up Robert Meachem or Devery Henderson. Both are freaky fast and will be running streaks all game, thus making Brown a liability. Whatever, lets cut to the chase. The 49ers are going to win a nailbiter. All week long the 49ers have been written off. We’re in it, might as well win it. Who dat? Screw dat. I think the 49ers will be in Brees’ face all day. He is undoubtedly a top-3 QB, but the 49ers force turnovers better than any other team in the NFL (+26 ratio). If they can force some turnovers like they have all season, I like the 49ers’ chances. The Saints have a tremendous offensive line that starts with two Pro Bowl guards: Carl Nicks & Jahri Evans. The 49er defense has its work cut out for them for sure. But Brees can get sloppy and make mistakes by trying to force something. Hit somebody early in the game. Make a statement. Final Prediction: 24-23 Niners I said it. Deal with it. The Saints are not the same team on the road, let alone the West Coast. Remember last year against the Seahawks? They average 23 points on the road and are built for the dome. This is going to be the best game of the weekend regardless. I’m getting all giddy just thinking about it. I want to hit someone. Besides, this is Jim Harbaugh’s lucky score: Who’s got it better than us?! NOBODY! Let’s do this. Shock the world, baybe. AdvertisementsMail might not be a perfect email client, but it’s the one most of us use. Fortunately, there are things you can do to make it work better. Here are five of my favorite tricks for making Mail more efficient. Swap the Find shortcuts Mail lets you search two ways: through your list of messages (“Where’s that note from my lawyer?”) and inside the current message (“Did he say ‘nolo contendere’?”). While there are keyboard shortcuts for both searches, the easy (and standard) Command-F combo is assigned to the less-common search inside the currently selected message, while Command-Option-F is used for the more common search through the message list. Fortunately, you can swap them easily. To do so, choose Apple > System Preferences, open the Keyboard pane, and click the Shortcuts tab. In the list on the left, click App Shortcuts, and then click the Add (+) button beneath the list on the right. In the dialog sheet, select Mail from the Application pop-up menu. In the Menu Title field, type Mailbox Search, which is the name of the command in Mail’s Edit > Find submenu. Click in the Keyboard Shortcut field, press Command-F, and click Add. Repeat the procedure for the in-message search shortcut, typing Find… in the Menu Title field and Command-Option-F as the shortcut. (You can type three periods or press Option-semicolon for the ellipsis.) Back in Mail, these shortcuts will now appear in the Edit > Find submenu. Change Mail’s original search shortcuts to something more logical. Customize the Favorites bar Mail is such a workhorse (or perhaps we are) that many of us just plod ahead with the default setup, never noticing some of the app’s customization options. The Favorites bar—the area just beneath the toolbar in the Viewer window—is one of those customizable features. Use its Hide button to close the Mailbox sidebar altogether, and then customize the rest of it to give you access to your most-used sidebar items. To do so, drag anything from the Mailbox sidebar—a section heading, such as Mailboxes or On My Mac; any mailbox-like category under a heading, such as Flagged or Sent; or a single item such as the red flag or an account in the Sent sub-list—up to the Favorites bar. If the item you dragged has sub-items in the sidebar, it becomes both a button and a drop-down menu in Favorites bar. Click the button to display all the sub-items in the Message list, or click and hold it for a menu that lets you filter the list. So, for example, if you put Flagged in the bar, clicking it displays all your flagged messages, while selecting Orange from its menu shows only those flagged Orange. If you drag a non-hierarchical item (such as the Orange flag) to the Favorites bar, it behaves as a button only. Target replies by redirecting messages You get an email that you know would be better answered by a colleague or friend, so you forward it to that other person. But when that person replies to the query, the reply comes to you rather than the original questioner, so then you’re stuck forwarding it again. You can avoid the intermediary role by using the Message > Redirect (Command-Shift-E) command instead of Forward. When you do so, the message header notes that it was resent from you, but when the person you redirected it to hits Reply, that reply goes directly to the original sender, not to you. And if you use this approach often, you can add a Redirect button to the Viewer Window’s toolbar with the View > Customize Toolbar command. Top: The original message from Andrea to Sharon is reflected in the standard header. Bottom: Sharon redirected the message to Marilyn; the header shows the message’s history (as noted in red) and sets up the original emailer as the recipient of the reply. Note: The Reply To field that can be added to the message window with View > Reply-To Address Field serves a different purpose: it’s there so you can specify an alternate email address, so a reader can see the email is from you but the reply will go to your other email address. Hide individual addresses for group members Using a group address is a quick way to address mail to multiple people—and it’s neat, too, since you don’t have twenty addresses cluttering the To field. But guess what? Your recipients will see all the clutter—as well as information you perhaps didn’t intend to share—because the group’s name is simply a convenience on your end; all recipients will see the full list of names and email addresses in the To field when they get the message. Prevent this breach of tidiness and security by putting the Group name in the BCC (blind copy) field; recipients will see just Undisclosed Recipients instead of the full group list. Yes, it feels weird to send a message with the To field blank. But it’ll work. Share webpage formats from Safari You may already know about sharing a webpage from Safari; you can send the page, a link, a PDF, or a Reader document by using the Share menu in Safari’s toolbar. But you can also exercise those options from within Safari for all but PDFs. Use File > Share > Email This Page (Command-I) to attach the page itself to the message. Hold the Shift key when you make the menu selection or add it to the keyboard shortcut, and you’ll share only the link. To send a Reader-formatted page (which stitches multipage articles into a single page, with no ads) start with the Reader view in Safari (by clicking the Reader button in the address bar) and then use the standard File > Share > Email This Page.Ex-Formula One driver Rio Haryanto could make his Formula E testing debut at the official Valencia test days next month. The Indonesian driver is in talks to undertake laps at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo in an as yet unconfirmed car. An ‘independent’ Formula E run Spark-Renault could be one option, as Haryanto continues to evaluate his racing future. The 24 year-old is understood by e-racing365 to be interested in joining Formula E and has held discussions with at least one of the ten current teams to potentially undertake a reserve driver role in Season Four. The ex-Manor F1 driver competed in 12 Grand Prix last year, with a best finish of 15th at Monaco. Prior to that, Haryanto became the first Indonesian to win a major FIA single-seater race when he triumphed in the Bahrain GP2 race in 2015. This was the first of three wins in the F1 feeder series. Potentially also joining Haryanto at the Valencia test will also be ex-Champ Car race winner Patrick Carpentier and Moroccan driver Michael Benyahia. Carpentier is in line to try a Formula E car as part of his Montreal ePrix organisation and ambassadorial role, while current Formula Renault driver Benyahia will run as part of the build up to the second Marrakesh ePrix in January. All three are expected to get their laps during the four-day Valencia test, which begins on Oct. 2.Despite being born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, a city infamous for its former Jim Crow laws and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, the most culturally insensitive conversations I’ve ever found myself in went something like this: “Where are you from, darling?” “Birmingham! I was born here.” “No, no, where are you really from?” I guess my brown skin has always given me away as not really American, so with a quick smile and a congenial laugh, I have always replied with a simple “Oh, my family is originally from India.” Usually this satisfies whoever I happen to be talking to at the moment, and we move on to discussing their favorite place to grab some chicken tikka masala. You know, the only topic safe to discuss with Indians, apparently. As a physician, I spend much of my day being a “people person,” if you will. From patients and their families to other members of the medical team, most doctors spend the large majority of their day communicating with other people. So we’re well versed with handling almost everything that comes our way, from the inappropriate to the mundane. Just the other day in clinic, a patient of mine told me about his travels in South Asia and excitedly asked me where I was born after I told him I’m Indian. Upon hearing that I was actually born in Birmingham, he dejectedly stated, “Oh, please, you’re a fake Indian.” Ouch. Despite this obvious personal affront, I have coped well with the identity crisis that comes with simultaneously being denied the right to call myself either American or Indian. This unique no-man’s-land has usually been cushioned by an ability to separate these casual conversations from my role in the doctor-patient relationship. Except, of course, in the unique situations whereby my race has precluded me from doing my job—not due to any issue on my end, but due to the patients on the receiving end of my care. I remember early in my residency, a patient specifically requested that no “foreigners” take care of her. This request was made in passing, one time, to her primary doctor, who happened to be white. It never came up again while she was in the hospital, so nothing was ever really done about it. Fast forward a year or so later in my residency when a patient’s family explicitly requested, well, actually demanded, that no Indian doctors directly care for their mother. This was a little problematic, from a medical and technical aspect, given that the majority of her primary team of doctors was, in fact, some variety of Indian. As you can imagine, this situation was also ethically, morally, and personally problematic. I wish I could say that this situation was handled well and all misunderstandings were cleared—but the racism and disrespect of this request were brushed away, and the medical team was told by the powers that be to handle the situation with sensitivity. Excuse me, what? As a medical community, we are all very aware of the racial biases and healthcare discrimination faced by our patients. In fact, NEJM and JAMA have both recently published perspective pieces on these topics. But very few people have taken a look at the opposite end of that spectrum and how the judgments placed on physicians impact patient care and physician wellbeing. Instead of ignoring these issues, we should be taking strides within the medical community to break down unfair judgments and racist ideals. Minority doctors all tell stories about these experiences and we usually laugh because that’s what makes us feel a little better, but deep down we all know how unfunny it is. I really don’t mind casual conversation about the best Indian restaurant in town, or the nostalgic reminiscing about that wonderful Indian neighbor from so long ago, or even that little game I play every time somebody asks me if I know that other Dr. Khan/Patel/Singh/Insert-Brown-Last-Name-Here. But I do mind being judged by the color of my skin. Of all the things that I had imagined brown could do for me, I never really expected it to make me feel out of place both inside and outside of the hospital.Philip Giraldi has long been an excellent observer of the Israel Lobby and its power over the American political establishment. It strikes me that his latest column, “The War Inside the Beltway,” breaks new ground for him with his comments on the wider context of Jewish power in America. I was watching CBS morning news last Wednesday, the day after it was announced that convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard would be released from prison in November. The “real news,” as the network describes it, recounted what Israeli officials had said about releasing Pollard, which was basically “all right, finally…but we still have to destroy Iran.” You have to hand it to the Israelis, they certainly know how to accept a bribe completely ungraciously. That straight from the heart advice from America’s best friend and closest ally was followed almost immediately by an interview segment with former CIA Director James Woolsey. Woolsey obligingly informed the interviewer that Pollard had in fact not disclosed any classified information, completely contradicting the results of the Pentagon investigation that had been conducted after the fact. Woolsey is, for what it’s worth, a fully owned parasite hovering in a regular neocon orbit who spoke at the recent “Stop Iran” rally in New York City. He has also claimed falsely that Israel does not spy on the United States. So why would anyone sane pick Woolsey to provide commentary instead of someone who actually knew what he was talking about? To mitigate the Israeli role in spying on the U.S., of course. It had to be a deliberate decision. Right. I forgot about Woolsey in my article on cuckservatives when I listed Randy Scheunemann, John Bolton and Frank Gaffney as cuckservatives who are part of the neocon foreign policy establishment. I am sure there are many others. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard and Fox News comes to mind. Again, the key to understanding Jewish power is that they are able to establish incredible infrastructure giving career opportunities for ambitious, unscrupulous non-Jews willing to promote Jewish interests at the expense of their own people. Giraldi’s term ‘parasite’ is particularly apt given the cuckservative meme — the term ‘cuckold’ derives from the cuckoo birds’ practice of parasitizing other species by getting them to rear its young. Woolsey et al. are willing cucks. The link from ‘parasite’ goes to a 2014 article in Counterpunch by David Macary stating “it was reported that former CIA Director James Woolsey, forced to resign during the Clinton administration for his bungling of the Aldrich Ames affair, was going around telling people that the reason Jonathan Pollard, the notorious Israeli spy, was still in prison after 29 years is because the U.S. government is anti-Semitic. In short, Pollard remains in prison because he’s a Jew.” Woolsey is a cuckservative’s cuckservative. Make no mistake, the U.S. media and inside the beltway punditry boast about their professionalism and integrity but it all goes out the window when Israel is the topic. Many of those involved are themselves Jewish and identify as “strong Israel supporters” and for those who are not of the Tribe the understanding that criticism of Israel is a quick ticket out of town frequently prevails. This is the flip side of Jewish power. There’s the carrot and the stick. Whereas Woolsey et al. eagerly consume the carrots, everyone in Washington is also aware of the stick: Opposing Jewish interests is career death. And after you have have your 15 minutes of being in the spotlight for calling attention to Jewish power, you can look forward to a life on the outside looking in; and you’ll probably have to sell your house and go on food stamps. This twisting oneself into knots to deny what is clearly visible has been never as evident as during the past two weeks with the launch of the hate Iran agenda to derail President Barack Obama’s negotiated agreement relating to that country’s nuclear program. The public has been fed a steady diet of alarmist nonsense cranked out by journalists like Jennifer Rubin and Charles Krauthammer, depicting the Iranians as suicidal religious fanatics, liars and thieves, terrorists and, of course, Jew haters who also run around chanting “Death to America.” While non-Jews are confronted with stark choices between the carrot and the stick in thinking about whether to pursue Jewish interests or the interests of their people, Jews are able to freely and overtly pursue their ethnic interests. And they do so in the elite media — Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post, and one can’t turn on Fox News without seeing Charles Krauthammer expound on behalf of his favorite country. I emphasized Krauthammer’s Jewish and Israeli identification in “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement” (pp 40-41): Krauthammer is a Jew and his Jewish identification and pro-Israel motivation are typical of Jewish neoconservatives, as is his obeisance to the idea that America is a proposition nation, rather than a nation founded by a particular ethnic group—an ethnocultural creation of Western Europe that should attempt to preserve this heritage. The same attitude can be seen in Irving Kristol’s comment that the U.S. is an “ideological nation” committed to defend Israel independent of national interest (see above). This ideology was the creation of leftist Jewish intellectuals attempting to rationalize a multicultural America in which European-Americans were just one of many cultural/ethnic groups. Krauthammer is a regular columnist for the Jerusalem Post and has written extensively in support of hard-line policies in Israel and on what he interprets as a rise in age-old anti-Jewish attitudes in Europe. In 2002 Krauthammer was presented with Bar-Ilan University’s annual Guardian of Zion Award at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. His acceptance speech reveals an observant Jew who is steeped in Jewish history and the Hebrew tradition. The 1993 Oslo Accords are termed “the most catastrophic and self- inflicted wound by any state in modern history”; this disastrous policy was based on “an extreme expression of postZionistic messianism.” Krauthammer rejected the “secular messianism” of Shimon Peres as more dangerous than the religious messianism of Gush Emunim (a prominent settler group with a message of Jewish racialism and a vision of a “Greater Israel” encompassing the lands promised to Abraham in Genesis—from the Nile to the Euphrates) or of certain followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe because of its impact on shaping contemporary Jewish history. So we have the typical situation of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, the Fox News cuckservatives, featuring Charles Krauthammer, the Jewish/Israeli patriot. Back to Giraldi: The Republicans will block vote on the Iran deal to spite Obama but the process being engaged in by the Democrats who are sitting on the fence is far more excruciating to watch [JTA (8/4/2015): “3 top Jewish Democrats oppose Iran deal“]. They are being lobbied hard, sometimes directly by and even in Israel: “Some members of Congress are going on trips to Israel, with some arranged by the American Israel Education Foundation, a charitable organization affiliated with AIPAC, a deal foe.” Again, the incredible Jewish ethnic infrastructure, just packed with carrots. And the stick always looms: If they cross the Israel Lobby they can expect a very difficult reelection campaign with very well-funded opponents. Most of the Congressmen being quoted in the media are Jewish and are openly stating their concern for Israel while the media is uncritically accepting that as a reasonable position. Rarely does the issue of any actual American interest come up. Nor is there much discussion of the reality in the Middle East, which is that a U.S. armed and funded Israel is the regional superpower, not Iran, and that if there is a nuclear threat locally it comes from Tel Aviv. Jewish Congressmen are free to openly assert their ethnic interests, while non-Jews assiduously avoid talking about American interests. Perish the thought! The non-Jews are cuckholded, whether Democrat or Republican. The Jews are looking after their ethnic interests. They are not cuckolded. The reality is that we owe the Israelis nothing and the constant process of bribing them and deferring to their alleged interests so they will behave is demeaning to us as a country and also self-defeating as they couldn’t give a tinker’s damn for the American people except insofar as it is possible to take our money and otherwise exploit us. This is, implicitly at least, a charge that Jewish Congressmen are disloyal. Any impartial observer of the US-Israel relationship over the last 50 years would have to agree that the US derives no benefit from its subservience to Israel while it pays a huge cost — a theme, for example of Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby. Could one possibly argue that Jewish Congressmen are honestly pursuing American interests when they promote the interests of the Jewish ethnostate, especially when American interests have been removed from the discussion because of the power of the Israel Lobby? Giraldi then launches into a wide-ranging survey of Jewish power, noting Jewish power in the media, but focusing especially on Jewish power over the political process. To be sure, Israel benefits enormously from its powerful fifth column inside the United States and there is already far too much deference by the federal government to what are manifestly Jewish issues. Though only 2% of the population, American Jews nevertheless wield enormous economic and political power which understandably translates into media access and influence over policies. That would be a given for how representational politics actually work under capitalism but there is something disturbing about how this plays out in practice. The Obama Administration has an Associate Director for Jewish Outreach in the White House Office of Public Engagement named Matt Nosanchuk but there is no designated outreach director to the nation’s 77 million Catholics. President Obama meets repeatedly with Jewish leaders, many of whom are hostile to his policies, but I have yet to read about him meeting with groups of Catholics or mainline Protestants. Many of them might well be supportive of what Obama is doing but there is no “outreach” office for them and no attempt to obtain their adherence to proposed programs. The federal bureaucracy has for many years included numerous American Jews in the upper level positions relating to national security, Middle East policy and counter-terrorism. Most are responsible individuals who are serious about their commitment to impartial government service. But some are not so scrupulous. Dennis Ross, former Middle East negotiator, is not called “Israel’s lawyer” as a compliment. And there were also Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby, all of whom were actively engaged in bringing about the disastrous invasion of Iraq, intended in part to benefit Israel. And then there are the neoconservatives to include the State Department’s Victoria Nuland [see also here] who somewhat inexplicably are advanced in their careers by Democrats as well as Republicans while having strong ties to Israel and its leaders. Does their religion or perceived ethnicity matter? It certainly does for those of them who, like the Jewish Congressmen unable to decide how to vote, cannot compartmentalize their own personal baggage when participating in the crafting of U.S. foreign policy. Washington inexplicably gives a wealthy and militarily powerful Israel $3 billion annually for defense spending, a sum that it now wants to raise to nearly $5 billion as a bribe for good behavior, which will not in any event be forthcoming. Meanwhile, within the federal government there exist special bureaucracies and benefits that are little known to the public, created in response to narrowly construed Jewish interests. Apparently successful efforts made by Congresswomen Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to fund special health care benefits for Holocaust survivors constitute little more than a bid to create a two tiered system that provides extra financial support for a favored group. As near as I could determine, any European Jew who was not killed during the Second World War is considered a “Holocaust survivor.” Every American who has diligently paid into the Medicare trust fund should find the proposal for special benefits based on religion offensive in the extreme. Washington’s Holocaust Museum, undeniably a political statement vis-à-vis Israel, was built using private contributions but the taxpayer covers its operating costs, $52 million in 2014, making it the most expensive museum in Washington. The State Department has a Special Adviser to the Secretary on Holocaust Issues as well as a Special Envoy for Holocoaust Issues. The two offices are headed respectively by Stuart Eizenstat and Nicholas Dean. There is also a Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, a position held by Ira Forman, a former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Political Director. All three are senior Foreign Service Ambassador level positions with full staffs, first class travel expenses and additional funding. Foreign Service Executive Schedules top out at $203,700 plus benefits which is presumably what the trio are being paid. Eizenstat, who reports to Victoria Nuland, has had a particularly long career as a Holocaust specialist having served as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and as Bill Clinton’s Special Representative of the President and Secretary of State on Holocaust Era Issues. As the Second World War ended seventy years ago and took place in Europe, not the United States, when does it become time for the rest of us to say “enough” regarding the Holocaust and its consequences? And why are contemporary genocides in Africa not worthy of a “Special Adviser?” And then there is combatting anti-Semitism. The increase in anti-Semitism in many countries is directly linked to actions undertaken by the Israeli government, which could itself be reasonably described as anti-Christian and anti-Muslim. Is Ambassador Forman going to address any of that? His most recent fact finding trip was to Sweden and Denmark in March where he met with “Jewish
WN ran an article highlighting some of the changes as well: http://lwn.net/Articles/387122/ We will not be supporting Link-Time Optimization (LTO). It's there if you want to use it. Using it will most likely break your system. Graphite is supported in the sense that we won't automatically close bugs as INVALID as we did with 4.4. But we probably won't be spending a lot of time on them. Bug #296658 tracks the remaining packages that are broken with GCC 4.5. You can also see the full list. From: ext_310420 Date: November 5th, 2010 10:14 am (UTC) (Link) How can you unmask 4.5 if there are so many bugs not closed? At least those two bugs with ICU should be resolve before unmasking! Reply ) ( Thread From: psykil Date: November 6th, 2010 12:47 am (UTC) (Link) Most of those bugs have been open for months with no progress. I've looked into each without being able to resolve them. We don't require every package in the tree work with a new GCC version before we unmask it, as it's simple to temporarily switch back to the previous version. Last I looked we still have packages in the tree that don't build with 4.4. The ICU bugs were only added to the tracker a couple days ago. As far as I can see they only affect the testsuite. Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: (Anonymous) Date: November 8th, 2010 08:20 am (UTC) (Link) Hm, weekend seems to have ended, where's my GCC 4.5 unmasked?!?!?!!!!!1111 ;-) Seriously, were there some blocker issues? I hoped to recompile just about the whole @world at work today :-) Reply ) ( Thread From: psykil Date: November 9th, 2010 01:16 am (UTC) (Link) D'oh. We hit bug #341743. I'm going to wait to see if upstream moves on it. Reply ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: (Anonymous) Date: November 9th, 2010 08:45 am (UTC) (Link) Yep, seems quite a serious issue. Thanks for info and your work! Reply ) ( Parent ) ( ThreadStory highlights China and Russia veto a draft resolution calling for the Syrian regime to stop killings In 2010, China was Syria's 3rd largest importer, according to EC data Analyst: The value of Syrian contracts with Russia likely exceeds $4 billion China and Russia say they support an end to the violence but disagreed with the draft As international leaders express outrage over mass killings in Syria -- and lament the inability to pass a U.N. Security Council resolution denouncing the Syrian regime -- questions linger about the two countries behind the impasse. On Saturday, China and Russia vetoed a draft resolution that would have demanded Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stop the killing and answer calls aimed at finding a Syrian-led solution to the 11-month crisis. Analysts say both China and Russia have their reasons to maintain good relations with Syria. Russia is one of Syria's biggest arms suppliers. And China ranked as Syria's third-largest importer in 2010, according to data from the European Commission. "Beijing's renewed interest in Damascus—the traditional terminus node of the ancient Silk Road... indicates that China sees Syria as an important trading hub," according to a 2010 report from The Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based research and analysis institute. JUST WATCHED Rice: Blood on hands of China, Russia Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Rice: Blood on hands of China, Russia 03:11 JUST WATCHED Syrian crisis continues as UN fails Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Syrian crisis continues as UN fails 02:06 JUST WATCHED Rice: We won't turn our backs on Syrians Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Rice: We won't turn our backs on Syrians 01:01 JUST WATCHED Arab League reaction to U.N. veto Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Arab League reaction to U.N. veto 02:26 Even as reports mounted that the Syrian government was killing protesters en masse, the Chinese foreign ministry issued a statement in August noting the "steady development" of friendly relations "over the past 50 years and more." "China and Syria gave each other understanding and support on issues concerning each other's core and major interests," the statement said. "China showed consistent understanding and firm support for Syria's position on the Golan Heights while Syria remained committed to the one China position and rendered China staunch support on matters related to Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and human rights." Last week, China's permanent representative to the United Nations said the killing of innocent civilians must stop, but also said he is against "pushing through" a regime change. An earlier version of the U.N. Security Council draft resolution called for al-Assad to step down and delegate his powers to his deputy, but that element was not in the draft voted on by members Saturday. "China is of the view that the Syrian people's request for reform and safeguard of their interests should be respected," Li Baodong said Tuesday, according to China's state-run Xinhua news agency. "It is imperative to put an immediate end to all violence in Syria and oppose and stop the killing of innocent civilians. "At the same time, an inclusive political process with a wide participation of all Syrian parties must be started without delay to speed up reform and resolve differences and disputes peacefully through dialogue and consultations," he said. Russia also has an economic interest in Syria. The total value of Syrian contracts with the Russian defense industry likely exceeds $4 billion, according to Jeffrey Mankoff, an adjunct fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies Russia and Eurasia Program. He noted the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated the value of Russian arms sales to Syria at $162 million per year in both 2009 and 2010. Moscow also signed a $550 million deal with Syria for combat training jets. Russia also leases a naval facility at the Syrian port of Tartus, giving the Russian navy its only direct access to the Mediterranean, Mankoff said. As Western leaders sought to pry al-Assad from power, Moscow sent an aircraft-carrying missile cruiser to Syrian waters in a show of support last month and shipped Syrian troops a consignment of Yakhont cruise missiles, according to Daniel Treisman, a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Speaking after the Saturday vote, ambassadors from both Russia and China said they do support an end to the violence but felt the resolution did not address the crisis properly. Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said the text "did not adequately reflect the real state of affairs and sent an unbalanced signal" to the various sides in Syria. He noted that the minister for foreign affairs will visit Damascus to hold a meeting with al-Assad this week. Chinese Ambassador Li Baodong called on all parties in Syria to restore order as soon as possible. But he said the text would have served only to "complicate the issue" and would "prejudge the result of dialogue." China and Russia vetoed another Security Council resolution in October that would have called for an immediate halt to the crackdown, which United Nations officials have said resulted in an estimated 6,000 deaths since protests began nearly a year ago. With the Security Council failing to approve a resolution, what happens next is unclear. But as the diplomatic stalemate continues, the death toll in Syria climbs even higher. The Local Coordination Committees of Syria, a network of opposition activists that organizes and documents protests, said the violence has killed more than 7,300.The infant is not named in the article, which was uncovered in a German archive, but it matches a story recounted by priest Max Tremmel in 1980. He said his predecessor Johann Kuehberger told him he had rescued Hitler when the Nazi leader was a child. Residents of Passau, where Hitler grew up, also claimed the priest's story was true. The Donauzeitung-Danube newspaper described how "a young fellow" was pulled out of the River Passau by a "brave comrade" after he fell through thin ice. The priest is said to have dived into the icy water after spotting the child struggling to stay afloat in the strong current. Anna Elisabeth Rosmus, a German author who lived in Passau, said the tale was known by most people in the town in book Out of Passau, Leaving a City Hitler Called Home. "Everyone in Passau knew the story. Some of the other stories told about him were that he never learned to swim and needed glasses," she wrote. "In 1894, while playing tag with a group of other children, the way many children do in Passau to this day, Adolf fell into the river. The current was very strong and the water ice cold, flowing as it did straight from the mountains. Luckily for young Adolf, the son of the owner of the house where he lived was able to pull him out in time and so saved his life." Hitler told his Nazi generals that he used to play cowboys and Indians on the banks of the river but never admitted to falling in the water.Tell me if this doesn't sound like a Keystone Kops operation. Washington Free Beacon: As the United States and 21 other nations attempt to push back IS forces operating in Iraq, the new report warns that the war effort is being undercut by a lack of coordination and, in some cases, efforts that “contradict” one another, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service that was not made public but was released by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). The report comes amid numerous reports IS is making gains and solidifying its control key Iraq cities and even expanding outside of the war torn country’s borders. CRS concluded in its analysis that the effort, dubbed Operation Inherent Resolve, is being led in a haphazard manner that leads to inefficient military action by the countries involved. “Without a single authority responsible for prioritizing and adjudicating between different multinational civilian and military lines of effort, different actors often work at cross-purposes without intending to do so,” the report states. Exact financial contributions by countries remains fuzzy, making it difficult to track exactly what each nations if funding and for what reason. “Each nation is contributing to the coalition in a manner commensurate with its national interests and comparative advantage, although reporting on nonmilitary contributions tends to be sporadic,” the report found. Recent military campaigns provide evidence of the incoherent strategy, according to CRS. “These coalition coordination challenges were demonstrated in recent military campaigns (and particularly in Afghanistan),” it states. “Exacerbating matters, other actors in the region—some of whom are coalition partners—have different, and often conflicting, longer-term regional geopolitical interests from those of the United States or other coalition members.” “This, in turn, may lead nations participating in the coalition to advance their goals and objectives in ways that might contradict each other,” the report found. These flaws are impacting the success of the joint military campaign against IS, which has cost the United States $3.21 billion as of July 15.Animals have long been English simile fodder. If you’re not as blind as a bat you may be as stubborn as an ox, or, if you’re particularly unlucky, as sick as a parrot. The Chinese have a different approach, whereby their similes have morphed into colloquial adjectives in themselves. It’s safe to say that animals have weaseled their way into the word on the street. As anyone who knows anything about China will tell you, eating is a fundamental part of socializing. Picture the scene: you’re out for dinner with friends. It’s been delicious and you’ve consumed every last morsel, but now it’s time to settle up. Suddenly, we may see the animal in us being brought to the fore. First up, in the group of diners, we have the 纸老虎 (zhǐlǎohǔ, paper tiger), instantly questioning the unassuming waitress and accusing her of over-charging you. He seems initially as threatening as a tiger, angrily suggesting the waitress has made a mistake, but when it comes down to it, he stands down, unable to take the ruckus any further. Next up is the perpetual 铁公鸡 (tiěgōngjī, iron rooster), the frugal scrooge desperate to split the bill to the smallest amount and stingily counting out every fen. She’ll be sure to pay for what she has consumed and that alone. Next is the “friend” who will eternally attempt to squirm out of paying altogether. The 老狐狸 (lǎohúlí, old fox) is sly, adept at maneuvering her way around others to get what she wants—in this case, a free meal. If her exploits are exposed, however, and the others realize her attempted trickery, she may be branded a 地头蛇 (dìtóushé, snake head), referring to the villain in a group. The 地头蛇 is rarely sniffed out, as she is so familiar with the local territory that she will try to get away with whatever possible at every opportunity; you have to be smart to catch the snake. Thankfully, every group needs its 老黄牛 (lǎohuángniú) or old brown ox, who acts honestly and conscientiously, diligently organizing the splitting of the bill and ensuring everyone is treated fairly so the bill actually gets paid. It could be argued that any one of these characters is the 千里马 (qiānlǐmǎ, thousand-li horse); the qianlima has honed abilities and revels in their particular specialty. So, the next time you’re coughing up for your food, keep a beady eye on the snake heads and always try to imitate the old brown ox. -Rese arc h by Alicia Zhang (张华阳)YouTube July 25, 2008 Vincent Bugliosi’s testimony during the House Judiciary Committee hearing on the constitutional limits of executive power discussing Stephen Presser’s testimony that Clinton lying about sex is comparable to lying a country into war, and on whether Saddam was actually a threat to the US since we were trying to provoke him into attacking us. Responding to Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Vincent Bugliosi shows evidence of the administration lying about WMD and has Steve King looking like his head is going to explode trying to get him to stop during the House Judiciary Committee hearing on the constitutional limits of executive power. He makes the point very well that a country having WMD’s is not a reason to go to war, but instead whether a country is an eminent threat, and that the CIA said that even if he had WMD, Saddam would not have been a threat to the US.Martin Luther King weekend 2014 is almost here — so do some planning for a free museum day in Chicago. Over the MLK weekend (we define as Jan 16-20 inclusive), there are free admission days at the Field Museum, Chicago History Museum, Shedd Aquarium, Chicago Children’s Museum, the Notebaert Nature Museum as well as the Art Institute of Chicago and more! Out-of-state visitors may love visiting Chicago and continue to take advantage of great discounted admission offers that include special prices for seniors, children, educators, active-duty military personnel, museum members and others. Check individual museums’ websites for details. Are there some we are missing? Leave a comment and we’ll add them! The Adler Planetarium: – NONE THIS WEEKEND but FREE on January 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29 The Art Institute of Chicago – Free Thursday Evenings – January 16 — Admission to the Art Institute of Chicago is free to Illinois residents every Thursday from 5-8 p.m. The Block Museum of Art in Evanston – Free Tuesdays to Sundays Charnley-Persky House Museum – NONE THIS WEEKEND but FREE on January 8, 15, 22, 29 — FREE guided tours are offered every Wednesday at 12 Noon. Tours are limited to 15 guests, first-come, first-served. Chicago Children’s Museum – FREE for all visitors every Thursday, 5-8 pm. so check it out on Thursday, Jan 16 Chicago History Museum – January 20, 2014 – MLK day Clarke House Museum – NONE THIS WEEKEND — CHICAGO’S OLDEST HOUSE – but January 8, 15, 22, 29 DuSable Museum of African American History – January 19 Field Museum – January 16, and then 21, 22, 29, 30 Glessner House Museum: -NONE THIS WEEKEND- but January 8, 15, 22, 29 ===================================================== SOME OF OUR MOST POPULAR POSTS ===================================================== Jane Addams Hull House Museum – Free every day Loyola University Museum of Art – NONE THIS WEEKEND- but January 7, 14, 21, 28 Museum of Contemporary Art – NONE THIS WEEKEND- but January 7, 14, 21, 28 Museum of Science and Industry – January 16, 17 20 Museum of Surgical Science – NONE THIS WEEKEND- but January 7, 14, 21, 28 The National Museum of Mexican Art – Free Tuesdays to Sundays The National Veterans Art Museum – Free Tuesdays to Saturdays Notebaert Nature Museum – January 16 Shedd Aquarium — January: 19, 20 Smart Museum of Art at University of Chicago – Free every day Swedish American Museum – NONE THIS WEEKEND- but Second Tuesday is Free – Jan 14I'm all about cheap, or at least cheaper, gifts this holiday season. Further still, I'm all about creating gifts that actually last in value and relevance past the next news cycle, and I'm really "bout it, bout it" when it comes to gifts my toddler son won't have broken and be crying over by December 26. This year I thought of something to give him that could address all of those concerns. Here's the backstory: Lexington I. Leffall, my first-born masculine child, loves things that move: planes in the sky, big trucks that rumble and grumble, and trains that have gone from being "choo choos" to "train trains" and now just plain "trains." But what he has the most affinity for is buses. His first complete sentence, coming at about 16 months, was not a sentence but a musical phrase yelled out at an ear-bleeding level: "ALL THROUGH THE TOWN." (He had a musical yellow bus with a red button on it, that when pressed, it blurted out this song.) And all through the town — and country — we went together. We moved on airplanes, buses, trains, and trollies in my native Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, parts of New Mexico, San Diego, and New York City. Peering out of the window, his eyes were illuminated with the type of joy, wonder, and intrigue that evokes envy in a grown man with "real-world" issues, wishing I could be as passionate about something this little guy is about things that move. Wherever we go, Lex grabs all the brochures from the buses and trains, attempts to read them, plays with them, and calls out the stops as if he is the driver, conductor, or operator. He has dozens and dozens of brochures from a half-dozen cities. So this year I cut, pasted, and stenciled. With the help of a craft enthusiast, I created a masterpiece of memories: a scrapbook called "Lexington's Book of Buses, Trains, and Trollies." (Shhhhhhhhhhhhh, don't tell him; it's for Christmas). It takes a little time, effort, and creativity for that person you love and care about. But scrapbooks are a great way to preserve memories, especially for little ones who still get thrills from just looking at pictures of the things they love, whether they're buses or butterflies. If you think scrapbooks are corny or time-consuming, or you don't know where to start, there are sites such as Scrapbook.com that can stoke the fire. So "scrap" the wonton consumerism and hit the books, so to speak. If you already have pictures, old magazines, or in my case, bus brochures, the source material is free. The cost of an album or book and materials is nominal at $20 to $45 compared to (insert the price of whatever hot doo-hickey here) that will be obselete by Boxing Day. Sure, you'll get a few other trinkets to play with, champ, but I hope you like you big book, Lex! I can't wait to see his face.Supermarkets hail gin as the new Christmas spirit, with popularity driven partly by growth of small-batch distillers Britons have bought more than 47m bottles of gin this year, setting a new record, partly driven by the growth of craft and premium distillers such as Sipsmith. UK gin sales have doubled in value over the last six years, reaching £1.2bn in the 12 months to the end of September, according to the latest market report from the Wine and Spirit Trade Association (WSTA). Sales have also grown more than any other spirit sold in UK in the last year, the trade body said, with 47m bottles sold, compared with 40m in the previous 12 months. The figures were released as a YouGov poll found gin is the most popular spirit in the UK, with 29% of drinkers voting it their favourite. Gin has leapfrogged from third place, compared with the same poll a year ago, with whiskies (25%) in second place and vodka (23%) close in third. “The British public show no signs of growing tired of trying new gins, with well over 100 brands now available,” said Miles Beale, WSTA chief executive. “Our innovative gin distillers are now offering a range of gins infused with locally sourced botanicals, including seaweed and rhubarb, and even Christmas gins with frankincense and myrrh.” Supermarkets say gin is the new Christmas spirit and are gearing up for record sales over the festive period. This year the Co-op predicts that it will sell five times as much gin as sherry, and twice as much as port. All shook up: Hawksmoor’s favourite winter cocktail recipes Read more Jonathan Grey, a gin buyer for Co-op, said: “We expect gin sales to far exceed that of both sherry and port combined this December. Co-op has increased its range of premium gins, introducing brands such as Whitley Neil and Sipsmith, as well as developing our very own premium gin.” Sainsbury’s expects to sell 30% more gin this Christmas than last year, also forecasting strong sales of premium gin. “Brits’ appetite for gin is seemingly insatiable and a lot of the growth in the market is coming from premium and craft gins,” said Judith Batchelar, director of Sainsbury’s brand. “While many shoppers will be buying gin to drink during the festive party season, we’ve also seen a rise in sales for gifting. Beautiful bottles of premium gin have become a popular alternative to single malt whisky.” Gin-themed Christmas gifts available this year include hot water bottles, baubles, advent calendars, Christmas jumpers, fairy lights, Christmas crackers and even gin-flavoured cheese. • Follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDesk, or sign up to the daily Business Today email here.There’s a playground in my dreams, an exaggerated version of the one from my childhood. It’s a wooden castle, long past its glory days, covered in splintered edges, rusted slides, rope bridges with squeaking chains… and tunnels. Oh, the tunnels. In the dream, I’m a kid again, burrowing through the child-sized corridors underneath the castle. I’m a pint-sized Bishop from Aliens (or Andy Dufresne in Shawshank, if you prefer a classier comparison), snaking my way through an impossibly tight space toward freedom. But unlike that benevolent android (or that wrongfully imprisoned prison-breaker, for that matter), I never see the light at the end of the tunnel; I see only horror. The dream becomes a nightmare as I crawl deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast. I grow older, and bigger… or maybe it’s the walls that become small, so tight and constricting that I can’t move forward. Worse, I can’t go back. I’m stuck, without any wiggle room whatsoever. The tunnel chokes me, and so does the panic, as three sickening words wash over me: “There’s no escape.” Of course, there’s always an escape. It typically involves waking up in a cold sweat and staying wide-eyed and alert for the remainder of the night. It’s a better deal than spending an eternity inside a claustrophobia dead zone, but still, not amazing. Speaking of amazing, what does this horrible recurring nightmare have to do with The Amazing Race? Unfortunately, it has everything to do with it, at least as far as my firsthand experience of the new season goes. Let’s rewind to last November, when I was invited to witness the first leg of TAR 28 in Mexico City. I wanted to make sure I had an authentic Amazing Race experience, which meant bringing along a loved one, and competing in challenges together. It didn’t matter to me if we overcame obstacles or fell apart in the face of disaster, as long as we experienced the rush of the Race together. My wife, Emily, was my first and only choice to join the adventure. She’s affable, empathetic, street-smart and resourceful, the kind of person who speeds through situations with all the precision of someone who has lived and worked in New York City for the better part of a decade. She’s not the fastest runner I know, but she’s by far the fastest walker, someone who gets from Point A to Point B with maximum efficiency. She boasts a powerhouse blend of ability and urgency — basically, the opposite of yours truly, who tends to be more laid-back and “we’ll get there when we get there.” Who better to strengthen my weaknesses on the Race than my best friend and partner in life, especially with all those skills at her disposal? Unfortunately, Emily’s strengths were not put to the test during “Who’s Ready to Pick up the Pieces?,” the first Roadblock competition of TAR 28. Only one member per team will compete in this challenge, and since I was the official reporter on the scene, the task fell to me, with Emily relegated to the all-important role of moral support. The challenge was set at Teotihuacán, an old city about an hour northeast of Mexico City, where host Phil Keoghan spent a couple of hours explaining the rules of the Roadblock on camera. Supervising producer Mike DiMaggio, one of the key creative minds behind The Amazing Race‘s challenges, instructed me to stay on the sidelines and not tour the Roadblock until it was time to run. He had one other request: “I want you to run this thing like you have a million dollars on the line.” I vowed to satisfy both conditions to the best of my ability, but due to the nature of the location, it was impossible not to violate the first request and get at least some sense of what was ahead. Phil was shooting his intro to the challenge at the mouth of a subterranean cavern, surrounded by men and women adorned in ancient apparel and armed with drums, flutes, and other assorted instruments. Clearly, the Roadblock was going to take place underground — I just had no idea what I was going to experience in the caves of Teotihuacán. The mystery ended when DiMaggio outfitted me with a helmet armed with a headlamp, as well as one of the signature Amazing Race envelopes containing the instructions to the challenge. I gave my wife a quick wave and thumbs up, then DiMaggio gave me his own thumbs up to get started, and it was on. First step: I ripped open the envelope and read the clue’s directions out loud: Who is ready to pick up the pieces? Reconstruct a Teotihuacano Indian ceremonial artifact with fragments you unearth from the archeological site in Las Cuevas de Teotihuacan to receive your next clue. Additional Information: * You must wear the provided safety equipment. * Enter Las Cuevas at the marked entrance. * Choose a numbered excavation site, once chosen you may not switch. * You need 13 fragments to reconstruct an artifact. * Take your fragments and follow the drums to find the arifacts. Use your fragments to reconstruct one of the artifacts. * You must keep your fragments with you at all times. * If the Teotihuacano Judge approves of your artifact he will hand you your next clue. Got all that? OK, because I certainly did not. I flew through the instructions and flew right off like a bat out of hell toward the cavern’s entrance… or what I thought was the entrance, at least. Turns out, I was running down an old set of stairs toward who knows where, having completely missed the signage pointing toward the actual Roadblock location. Note to future racers: Read your clue, read it again, and read some more before you go anywhere. One other note before we enter the cave: There were no drums in my practice run of the Roadblock, and thank goodness, given everything that came next. Watch an exclusive clip from The Amazing Race 28’s season premiere Roadblock challenge: As soon as I entered the cave, some things started to happen. (1) I immediately became overwhelmed by the musty underground heat and stench, greatly impacting my breathing; (2) I could barely see straight, with the headlamp immovably angled right at my eyeballs; (3) I was awestruck by the height of the cavern, so much smaller than I envisioned a few minutes earlier. I had to duck through small openings in the cavern to get from one location to another, without a clear sense of where I was supposed to go. See where this is going yet? My recurring nightmare of getting trapped in a confined space was coming to horrible life, with a few key differences. For one, I could actually move around, albeit in an environment best described as “aggressive.” I had to move around, in fact, running from the excavation site to the cavern’s exit, where I was tasked with assembling the mask in order to break free from what was quickly becoming a living hell. Needless to say, things did not go well. The blinding light was an issue for a few minutes, until DiMaggio caught onto it, and hooked me up with better equipment. But better visibility didn’t make much of a difference, as the overpowering mustiness and heat of the cave crept through my skin and into my brain, filling me with anxiety unlike anything I had ever experienced in my life. I tried my best to break through the fear, digging with the provided tools as well as my hands for the 13 pieces of the mask. When I found the remnants of the mask, I brought them to the exit, but couldn’t put them together in a way that made sense. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out that I had different colored pieces, and I needed 13 of a kind. So, back to the excavation site, where I was a human cocktail of fear-induced perspiration, howling manic laughter, and huffing-and-puffing physical exhaustion. (I’m no athlete, and I already knew I wasn’t in ideal shape for a competition like The Amazing Race, but wow! This was a wakeup call.) After what felt like maybe five minutes, I found all the puzzle pieces I needed, and returned to the entrance for one more shot at victory. DiMaggio was not the only person waiting for me on my second trip back to the mask. Emily was there, too, silently watching while I struggled to put the puzzle together. It would not come together, because of course not, causing my panic to intensify, as I realized that I was going to have to go back out to the dig site for a third time. I imagined myself ducking and crawling through the seemingly infinite low ceilings and tunnels once again, and those three familiar nightmare words began echoing in my skull: “There’s no escape… there’s no escape… there’s no escape!” So, what else to do in that situation, but escape where you can? When I couldn’t handle the pressure for another second, I ripped the helmet off of my head, and leapt straight out of my sneakers, kicking them across the cave. I can only guess how ridiculous I must have looked, like Mario blasting up to the sky after one wrong step at Lethal Lava Land. It was absurd enough that Emily literally laughed out loud and asked me, incredulously, “Are you serious?” “Yes, I’m serious,” I yelped back, completely drenched in sweat. “I’m having a panic attack right now!” And with that, I was toast. The challenge was over, as far as I was concerned, and, really, as far as everyone was concerned. When I got my bearings straight again, I learned that I had been in the cavern for almost 45 minutes. It felt like maybe ten at most. I never stood a chance. If only I could have gotten out of my own head long enough to see past the nightmare and into reality, because as it turned out, I was pretty close to finishing the puzzle. I had all the right pieces, just not enough objectivity to put them in the right place. I was so worried about having to go back into the tunnels, that I didn’t realize the trip wasn’t even necessary. For those wondering how Emily would have done if she were in my shoes, I’ve asked myself the same thing. I think the shoes would have stayed on. Let’s just start there. Beyond the shoes, I don’t think she would have panicked about the closed space, even if she wouldn’t have loved getting her hands and feet dirty on the cavern floor. When I tapped out, she put most of the puzzle together (albeit with some help from DiMaggio), so I feel good about her chances there. All in all, I would up-vote Emily for this Roadblock over me every single day of the week. Still, even in failure — brutal, undeniable, epic failure — I got the Amazing Race experience I wanted. It was emotionally rich and entirely unforgettable. My panic died the moment I exited the cave, and it was immediately replaced with relief, euphoria, and an intense appreciation for the memory, one that I’ll get to share with my wife forever. More than anything, though, I walked away from Teotihuacán with enormous respect for anyone who dares to compete on The Amazing Race, win lose or draw. I bungled a Roadblock with zero training and zero stakes on the line, other than pride, so I can only begin to imagine what it’s like to spend years trying to get on the show, months training for it, with your loved one depending on you, and a million-dollar prize at the end of the road… only to watch your hopes crumble in seconds, whether due to lifelong phobias or some other form of adversity. My advice? If you’re dreaming about running the Race, go for it… just as long as you’re prepared for your worst nightmare to scare you right out of your shoes.Without quite realising it, the Congress under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi has become a toxic force in Indian politics. The 1975-77 Emergency, during which more than one lakh journalists, Opposition leaders and civil society activists were jailed (including LK Advani and Arun Jaitley), exposed the first autocratic gene in the Congress. Indians' fundamental rights were suspended for nearly two years. The Constitution was subverted. The attempt by the Congress to censor Madhur Bhandarkar's new film on the Emergency, Indu Sarkar, underscores how keenly aware the Congress is of the human rights violations it committed during the Emergency. In 1986, Rajiv Gandhi - an essentially decent man whose career was impaled by bad advisors - planted the seed of communalism in mainstream politics by overturning through parliamentary legislation a 1985 Supreme Court order that had granted maintenance to an elderly divorced Muslim woman Shah Bano. But it wasn't till 1998, when Sonia Gandhi took over the presidency of the Congress, that the full toxicity of the party would become evident. The crude, thoughtless overnight eviction of then Congress president Sitaram Kesri was an early sign. The RJD's Lalu Prasad Yadav is looking at fresh jail time in the fodder scam. He is meanwhile battling charges of undeclared assets against his two sons, daughter and wife. Photo: PTI When the Congress took power at the Centre in 2004 after a hiatus of six years, it showed its true colours. While Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was the gentle, erudite face of the Congress-led UPA government for ten years, Sonia called the shots behind the scenes. The party had four organisational layers. The first comprised senior lawyer-ministers P Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal, Salman Khurshid and Veerappa Moily. The second was made up of senior loyalists Jairam Ramesh, Kamal Nath and Anand Sharma. The third layer was led by ground-level operators Ahmed Patel and Ghulam Nabi Azad. The fouth layer comprised Rahul's young turks - Jyotiraditya Scinda, Sachin Pilot, Milind Deora, Deepender Hooda and Jitin Prasada - all dynasts. Working seamlessly, monitored closely by a stentorian Sonia, the four-tiered Congress team presided over the UPA's two terms from 2004-14, widely regarded as India's decade of scams and sectarian politics. The communal seed planted after the Shah Bano case in 1985-86 had by now grown into a forest of trees with "saffron terror" carved on the bark of each tree trunk by the Congress' slick four-layered operation. The greatest disservice the Congress did was to set back by decades the cause of bona fide secularism. As I wrote in the article, "The Ayatollahs of Secularism", in The Times of India: "The two real enemies of the Muslim - communal politicians masquerading as secular politicians to win votes and Mullahs deliberately misinterpreting the holy book to retain power over their flock - form a natural alliance. Together they have
NOLTO AND FACTOR - Red All Over (2005) Read full review :: buy this record So far, the beats of Canada's Factor had often sounded too simple, a bit lazy, and lifeless. They lacked imagination. But it was no longer the case with Red All Over, a collaboration with Nolto, a white rapper with a smooth and nice voice, from his home city of Saskatoon. Presented like a newspaper, this concept album had been one of the best, released on his own Side Road Records label. # 124. 2MEX - B-Boys in Occupied Mexico (2001) Read full review :: buy this record As part of Afterlife, the Shape Shifters, the Visionaries, Of Mexican Descent, the Mindclouders, the Brainbusters, the Look Daggers, and also with his solo releases, 2Mex delivered everything. He haunted so many tracks with his jerky flow, he was so productive, that he never took the time to release an opus magnus, a masterpiece. His first album, though, is not too far from being this. # 123. SCOTTY HARD - The Return of Kill Dog E (1999) Read full review :: buy this record Since the mid-90's, with records from the likes of Spectre, Sensational, Paul Barman, the Hawd Gankstuh Rappuhs, and even Prince Paul, WordSound has been a key label, on the experimentalist and weirdo side of hip-hop's underground. Their most notable album, however, is maybe none of the above, but this one, the first released by the Canadian beatmaker Scott Harding, a.k.a. Scotty Hard. # 122. THAVIUS BECK - Thru (2006) read full review :: buy this record Some purists will remember Thavius Beck for his work under the Adlib moniker, with or without Global Phlowtations. Others will only love the Lab Waste album, he recorded with Subtitle. But if they really want a good record released under his own name, those available at Mush and Big Dada, Thru could be the best sample of Beck's electronic, experimental, cold and mostly instrumental kind of hip-hop. # 121. SAGE FRANCIS - Sick of Waiting Tables… (2000) Read full review :: buy this record Sage Francis had existed much before Personal Journals, the album who made him a more familiar face in hip-hop. A bit before, he had initiated a long series of mixtapes, the Sick of... one. This one, released on a CD-R by the year 2000, was the first. It compiled materials he had recorded over the last three years, live, in studio or at the radio. And it was the best and the richest of the collection. # 120. FERMENTED REPTILE - Let's Just Call you "Quits" (1999) Read full review :: buy this record Instead of challenging the routines of hip-hop and pushing their limits, like many other indie activists, Pip Skid, Gruf and Mcenroe preferred to explore further the jazz rap of the early 90's. These white guys from the Canadian Prairies changed it, though. They adapted it to their social concerns and realities. They took it to the next step. And thus, they laid the foundation of the excellent Peanuts & Corn label. # 119. AESOP ROCK - Float (2000) Read full review :: buy this record Since Appleseed (1999), Aesop Rock's fame and credibility had kept on growing in the indie rap scene. So that one year later, Float was one of the most eagerly awaited album in the underground. By chance, with this first record for Mush, the rapper was fully meeting his fanbase's expectations, granting it with his intellectual kind of rap, very diverse beats, and a few first class guests. # 118. SIAH & YESHUA DAPOED - The Visualz (1996 / 2008) Read full review :: buy this record Another Fondle'em release, another gem of NYC's underground rap scene in the 90's. With The Visualz EP, Siah, Yeshua and the beatmaker Jon Adler proposed six chiselled jazz rap tracks where, beyond the academic boom bap and the expected anti-wack MCs lyrics, one could hear poetry aspirations. Unfortunately, apart from a few solo releases, this record would be almost the only one in their career. # 117. PIGEON JOHN - Sings the Blues (2005) Read full review :: buy the record A regular of the Good Life Café, Pigeon John had not been particularly remarkable when he was a member of LA Symphony. His solo career was a different story, though. With his astute, sensitive and funny rap, he delivered an unclassifiable and catchy kind of music, especially on his third album, which only default was to be less sober than its blueprint, the rare and excellent South Bay Blues EP. # 116. ASTRONAUTALIS - The Mighty Ocean & Nine Dark Theaters (2006) Read full review :: buy this record Initiated by Anticon, the convergence of folk, pop and rap in one single genre quickly created new vocations. By the mid-2000's, it even became a full synonym for indie rap. Only a handful of followers, though, excelled in this sub-genres, and among them, Astronautalis, from Florida, especially with his second album, a record produced with care and finesse by an artist from Morr Music, Radical Face. # 115. JEAN GRAE - Attack of the Attacking Things (2002) Read full review :: buy this record Jean Grae was on the respectable, feminist, bohemian and conscious side of the indie rap scene. In other words, her music could have been extraordinary boring and painful.It wasn't, however. The first album of the rapper previously known as What? What?, a record expected since she started with Natural Resource in 1996 and collaborated with many others, was indeed absolutely solid and engaging. # 114. NEILA - Only This One Counts (2011) Read full review :: buy this record Close to Deeskee, and more generally to the Californian underground hip-hop scene, Neila has released some remarkable albums over time, focused on social matters, or on her love stories and disappointments. It would be in a very difficult phase of her life, though, while she was fighting against a vocal chord cancer, that the Hawaian rapper would release her best album; by far her most intense. # 113. MICRANOTS - Return of the Travellahs (1996 / 2003) Read full review :: buy this record It is through the hallucinated Obelisk Movements that the Micranots earned their place in the indie rap pantheon. Kool Akiem and I Self Devine, however, had been around for a while before this. Travelling between Minneapolis and Atlanta, they had already released in 1996 the noteworthy Return of the Travellahs, which Rhymesayer Entertainment would finally make available on CD by 2003. # 112. AWOL ONE & DADDY KEV - Number 3 on the Phone (2002) Read full review :: buy this record Number 3 on the Phone his not Awol One's most glaring album, far from it. Contrary to its predecessor, Souldoubt, it was rather quiet and laid-back. However, this was Awol One at his best, with his dual responsibility, moving from braggadocio to vulnerability and self-depreciation. Last but not least, it revealed the great "Carnage Asada", with no doubt one of Awolrus' most intense songs. # 111. ABSTRACT RUDE + TRIBE UNIQUE - P.A.I.N.T. (2001) Read full review :: buy this record One could find anything on this album from Abstract Rude, a founding member of the Project Blowed: sweet or corrosive tracks, light or dark ones, solo prowess or posse cuts, and, featuring, almost all of the key indie rappers of the times. As a matter of fact, few people enjoy the same tracks on this overall satisfying record which, because it is too lengthy, shortly fails to be an underground classic. # 110. D-STYLES - Phantazmagorea (2002) Read full review :: buy this record Sharing with it its willingness to go back to the basics of hip-hop, in this case deejaying, and its taste for experiments, turntablism had much in common with the main trends pushing indie rap further around the Y2K. However, because they are too technical, few albums in this genre are fully enjoyable, except maybe this very smart Phantazmagorea, delivered by one of the World Famous Beat Junkies. # 109. C.V.E. - Not Like Those (2010) Read full review :: buy this record Not Like Those was finally it: the great record we didn't expect anymore, more than 15 years after the Good Life Café and the first Project Blowed compilation revealed to us the existence of Chillin' Villain Empire. It was an album where, more than ever, Riddlore and NgaFsh were rocking the mic, but with a rock solid production. The one and only shame was that it was not available as a regular CD. # 108. NOAH23 - Fry Cook on Venus (2011) Read full review :: buy this record In 2011, a decade after he emerged from nowhere (Guelph, Ontario), the weirdest of all rappers ever based in Canada, was still alive. As many other indie rap veterans, Noah23 was now hosted by the David and Ceschi Ramos' label, Fake Four, he was getting emo and flirted heavily with indie rock sounds, as proved by Fry Cook on Venus, potentially the most accessible record in his discography. # 107. J DILLA - Ruff Draft (2003 / 2007) Read full review :: buy this record Let's face it: for all his openness and experimentalism, and despite the praise Jay Dee, a.k.a. J Dilla, constantly received from critics, hip-hop purists and rappers alike, his production style was sometimes much too lazy and indigent, either on his solo records or with the much boring Slum Village. This album, however, Ruff Draft, was a good one, maybe because it captured Dilla's as his rawest. # 106. SAGE FRANCIS - Copper Gone (2014) Read full review :: buy this record After four years without any release, four years almost fully focused on managing his Strange Famous label, Sage Francis was striking back. At almost 40, the rapper from Providence was coming back to his basics, showing again his eloquence, his anger and his intensity, on great beats built by a dream team of indie hip-hop producers like Reanimator, Alias, Buck 65, and Cecil Otter from Doomtree. # 105. SOSO - Not for Nothing (2013) Read full review :: buy this record In 2013, more than 10 years after his beginnings, Soso is still there, and he is as depressed as ever. Armed as always with his spleen, his contemplative kind of rap, and his desolated soundscapes, the Canadian made his music cross the Atlantic ocean, this very good album being released jointly by Enedmik Music, and a Clermont-Ferrand label, confirming France's long love story with him. # 104. NECRO - I Need Drugs (2000) Read full review :: buy this record This was some easy formula, Non-Phixion's producer was proposing in 2000, with his outrageous horrorcore and his funny recycling of old tracks from LL Cool J or Dionne Warwick. But it was also very good to listen to this regressive kind of rap, to its surge of bile, gore, sex, drugs and sacrilegeous lyrics, in the heyday of this so boring conscious hip-hop, the underground was sometimes synonym with. # 103. SHAPE SHIFTERS - Adopted by Aliens (2000) Read full review :: buy this record Know Future is, maybe, the Shape Shifters' masterpice. But to newcomers, let's recommend Adopted by Aliens. There, as usual, these Californians would adapt their versatile and virtuoso raps, inherited from the Project Blowed, to the nerd culture. But they would do it in a more normal and traditional rap format, they would be less extreme than with the never-ending posse cuts of the other record. # 102. RADIOINACTIVE - Pyramidi (2001) Read full review :: buy this record The first solo album of Radioinactive (if we except the home-made Fo' Tractor), released in the heyday of indie rap's experimentalism, may have been his most radical, with its incomprehensible raps, skits and Egyptian musical melodies. Any normal rap fan was lost; he couldn't find his way on this album. Pyramidi shouldn't be underrated, though: it was as rewarding as it looked indigestible. # 101. KILL THE VULTURES - The Careless Flame (2006) Read full review :: buy this record Oddjobs had been one of the most emblematic indie rap group of the Midwest. After its split, though, it would become even more exciting. Led by the rapper Crescent Moon, Kill the Vultures would invent a brand new kind of music, mixing jazz, punk and hip-hop in an abrasive and violent way, especially with this album, their best, and more particularly "Moonshine", its fantastic first track. # 100. MAINTENANCE CREW - Eternal Sunshine of the Simple Mind (2005) Read full review :: buy this record The Maintenance Crew did not belong to the most adventurous fringes of the underground rap scene. These Chicagoans, indeed, were mostly focused on the 90's classic rap. With them, however, this old formula was fresh and relevant again. They made us forget the plagiarists who had disgusted us with boom bap. With this great album, they brought us back to the heyday of New-York's jazz rap. # 099. J-ZONE - Pimps don't Pay Taxes (2001) Read full review :: buy this record He would admit it, into the book he wrote ten years after he released this record, his best: J-Zone was much too offbeat. Opting for catchy beats, exactly when all the rage was about darkness and dystopia in the rap underground, being sarcastic and misogynistic, in the heyday of conscious rap, the New-York rapper has never been to build a successful career, despite his smart lyrics and very good music. # 098. ORKO THE SYCOTIK ALIEN - Atoms of Eden (2003) Read full review :: buy this record This looked like a rearguard project. Nobody, indeed, cared any longer about drum'n'bass in 2003. The Orphan, however, offered beats in that style to Orko. And these frantic sounds were exactly what was missing to the political lyrics and the afro-futurist posture of Global Phlowtations rapper. They finally made of Atoms of Eden a finer record than his multiple CD-Rs or his flawed album with Bigg Jus. # 097. THE GROUCH, DADDY KEV & D-STYLES - Sound Advice (2003) Read full review :: buy this record Around the year 2003, Daddy Kev, the producer, and D-Styles, the turntablist, had decided to mix hip-hop with free jazz. They released three albums in this style, each time with a different West Coast Underground big name, Awol One, Busdriver and The Grouch. The latter was, usually, the most traditional rapper in this trio. His record, though, ideally short, dense and delightful, was the best of the series. # 096. 3 MELANCHOLY GYPSYS - Grand Caravan... (2005) Read full review :: buy this record Don't get fooled by this "French rap" looking cover art. This record from Eligh, Murs and Scarub is one of the best, in the often frustrating discography of California's Living Legends. Announced and awaited for long years, and despite its unreasonable length, this album finally fulfilled all promises, thanks to the trio's rap skills and also, as always, to Eligh's outstanding production skills. # 095. HAND HELD ASPECTS - From Point A To H (2002) Read full review :: buy this record Fingerprint Records was one of the countless labels born from the indie rap movement, but which never reached the level of notoriousness of a Def Jux or an Anticon. Less iconoclastic than these two, it released nevertheless a handful of recommended records, and among those this second album of Hand Held Aspects, and its honest, fresh, enthusiastic and passionate take on rap. # 094. TOOLSHED - Schemata (2002) Read full review :: buy this record With a rhythmic and astute form of hip-hop, reminiscent of the old school times and influenced by the creativity of the West Coast Underground scene, a very musical one, rich with instruments and a rare "live" feeling, Toolshed found a winning formula. All along its career, the Canadian group stuck to it, with success, Schemata, their second album, being one of their most remarkable. # 093. NOBODY - Soulmates (2000) Read full review :: buy this record In 2000, one of the best beatmakers in California's underground hip-hop scene, released his first album, sponsored by Mike Nardone. Some songs had lyrics, thanks to Freestyle Fellowship, Abstract Rude, Medusa et 2Mex, some of the Project Blowed's biggest names. But it was with the other tracks, polished and delicate instrumental ones, that the badly named Nobody was at his finest. # 092. THE CHICHARONES - When Pigs Fly (2005) Read full review :: buy this record And if, after all, the best album of Halifax's Josh Martinez and Oldominion co-founding member Sleep, was one of those they released together, as the Chicharones duo? And if, finally, this pleasant and catchy When Pigs Fly, an enjoyable record full of energy, humor and melodies, was their best work, in addition to being the perfect example of a transnational indie rap collaboration? # 091. SONIC SUM - The Sanity Annex (2000) Read full review :: buy this record Despite Rob Sonic moving to Def Jux afterwards, Sonic Sum are still the unsung heroes of the Nuyorican Poets Café scene. With a certain taste for abstraction and experimentation, and also with its live instruments, The Sanity Annex, however, is one of the best testimonies of the futuristic and hallucinated rap poetry style, which had been one of the major trends in indie rap, around the year 2000. # 090. KOMADOSE - Beta One (2002) Read full review :: buy this record Copying is different from betraying. This is a lesson learned from this album, quite typical of the early 00's indie rap era. Released by a multitude of rappers and beatmakers, by then unknown (K-the-I??? only, would have a moderately successful career afterwards), this album appropriated the industrial rap sound and formula invented by Company Flow a few years earlier. And it did it well. # 089. ZEST THE SMOKER - Death at… 27 (2009) Read full review :: buy this record It is thanks to the anthological "Interruptions", a fantastic rap song produced in 1997 by Peanut Butter Wolf, maybe the best track on his My Vinyl Weighs a Ton album, that we know Zest the Smoker. It took this Californian rapper more than 10 years, though, to finally release his first album, Death at... 27, maybe a lost classic, in the darkest, heaviest and most oppressing sub-category of indie rap # 088. CYNE - Time Being (2003) Read full review :: buy this record The hip-hop crew around Botanica del Jibaro, Counterflow Recordings and the Beta Bodega, was made of a fine collection of Latino artists, located in Miami, opting for some kind of conscious rap, and it was deeply involved into the local electronica scene. They were generally more comfortable with singles than with albums, but Cyne's Time Being was a great opus, arguably the best they ever delivered. # 087. AWOL ONE & FACTOR - Only Death can Kill You (2007) Read full review :: buy this record Awolrus has been a key player on the Californian indie rap scene, undoubtedly. He was ome kind of star, in that small world. But identifying his masterpiece is challenging. Would that be Souldoubt, Number 3 on the Phone, or Slanguage? Or instead, wouldn't this be the less known and less blazing Only Death Can Kill You, overall a consistent and solid album, produced craftily by Canada's Factor. # 086. ALL NATURAL - No Additives, No Preservatives (1998) Read full review :: buy this record All Natural was a solid rap group of the end of the 90's. Those Chicagoans also demonstrated that the indie era was somehow related to the emergence of new places, distinct from the capital cities of hip-hop, New-York, Los Angeles and Atlanta; and that miraculously, through unexpected connections, such artists could see their records released in Europe by some obscure British label. # 085. SIXTOO - Almost a Dot on the Map (1996-2002 / 2004) Read full review :: buy this record While his career was progressing, Sixtoo showed a tendency to deny and erase his past. Except in 2004 when, just before joining Ninja Tune and stopping being a rapper, he took a last look back at his own past, and released Almost a Dot on the Map, a compilation of what he considered the best songs of his Halifax phase, just after the Sebutones, and just before he started becoming a bit more famous. # 084. HAIKU D'ETAT - Haiku D'Etat (1999) Read full review :: buy this record As its name alluded to, the Haiku d'Etat project was aiming at poetry, as well as at revolutionizing hip-hop. With the help of "real" musicians, Aceyalone and Mikah 9 of Freestyle Fellowship, as well as Abstract Rude, were using their virtuoso flows to bring rap to the avant-garde, to Jamaica, or even further Eastward. Potentially the last great album of the Freestyle Fellowship and Project Blowed lineages. # 083. THE CANKLES - Goddamn! (2005) Read full review :: buy this record A bit of turntablism, a few guitars and electronic sounds, some funky beats, and the colorful raps of Kid Static: in 2005, the Cankles were adding some creativity and a feelgood spirit, in a Native Tongues way, to the overall grimy Chicago rap scene. Coming out of nowhere, their only album had been a good surprise; one of these convincing experiences hip-hop's margins are sometimes capable of. # 082. TOMMY V - Travel Size Drawing Board (2014) Read full review :: buy this record This record was released much too late, when everything was over: the West Coast Underground indie scene he had been a part of; his friends the Shape Shifters; the Toca quartet. And though, this album from Tommy V is great. With its mix of rap, pop, and anything else, the Los Angeles rapper restored the spirit of a time when any kind of crossover and experiment seemed possible, with hip-hop. # 081. KNO - Death Is Silent (2010) Read full review :: buy this record The CunninLynguists went the same way as many other indie rap musicians: they moved from some revivalist project, equally inspired by the 90's boom bap and the 80's old school and playful mindset, to something more elaborate, more intimate, and not too far from indie rock, actually. Death Is Silent, at least, was like that: it was the great melancholic and depressing solo album of the beatmaker Kno. # 080. DARKLEAF - F... The People (2002) Read full review :: buy this record Indie rap consisted in multiple and contradictory trends. There was, for example, a rap which wanted to go back to the happy times of the old school, represented most notably by Jurassic 5; and another one which explored the most experimental sides of hip-hop, like Darleaf; these two groups were so different that none could believe that they were, in fact, two offshoots of the same group. # 079. BORED STIFF - Explainin' / Timeless (1995-1997 / 2008) Read full review :: buy this record Among the founding groups of the West Coast Underground rap scene (Freestyle Fellowship, Hieroglyphics...), Bored Stiff is often the forgotten one. So that they do not completely fall off our radar screen, however, some of their previous records have been released in the naughties, and among them this compilation of their first two EPs, Explainin' and Timeless, both from the 90's, and both legendary. # 078. ACEYALONE - A Book of Human Language (1998) Read full review :: buy this record Aceyalone did not deliver just one classic solo album, All Balls don't Bounce, but two. Released independently on the Project Blowed label, and very conceptual, this other great record was structured as if it was a book. Some may have found the production tedious on A Book of Human Language, but they were wrong. It was adequate, actually, underlining perfectly Acey's rap volubility and musicality. # 077. BUSDRIVER - Temporary Forever (2002) Read full review :: buy this record With his staggering flow, Busdriver was one of the main attractions of the indie scene. He was his talent's main victim, though, since he never really managed to domesticate his verbal delivery. Busdriver, indeed, had never been able to find the right beats, fitting with his crazy raps. Except maybe on this album, Temporary Forever, his first ever to benefit from a rock solid production; his best, by far. # 076. NOAH 23 - Jupiter Sajitarius (2004) Read full review :: buy this record A practitioner of psychedelic hip-hop, as arty and abstruse as a rapper could possibly be, with both his beats and lyrics, Noah23 has sometimes been a victim of his eclecticism, releasing almost indigestible records. Jupiter Sajitarius, though, was a bit more homogeneous and accessible than others, including Quicksand, the previous album, generally considered as Gelph's crazy rapper's masterpiece. # 075. JEEP JACK - A Jeep Jack Affair (2000) Read full review :: record unavailable This record was about a geat collection of rappers from Boston, who emerged in the heyday of the indie rap era, by the end of the 90's. Their beatmaker, Jeep Jack, would record a few more albums, in addition to this great compilation, full of exhilarating tracks. It is a shame, though, that Microft Holmes, whose songs were the best on this record, would never pursue his career and release any solo album. # 074. THIRD SIGHT - The Golden Shower Hour (1998) Read full review :: buy this record The dystopic science-fiction rap sub-genre was not represented by Co-Flow only. Around the Bay Area, some others were seeing things in black. They, too, were into some tenebrous, threatening and hostile kind of hip-hop, and Third Sight were part of them, especially with their first album, an underground classic. One singularity, though: the heavy presence of turntablism, thanks to D-Styles. # 073. EXISTEREO - Dirty Deeds & Dead Flowers (2003) Read full review :: buy this record Guns and roses, messy tracks, lots of underground Californian rappers, and Paul McCartney: don't try to find any logic in the way this eclectic record has been assembled, by one of the most charismatic members of the Shape Shifters. Just notice that this album, as well as its follower, Crush Groove, is one of Existereo's best. And that it is as playful and ecstatic, as it is inconsistent and frustrating. # 072. MICRANOTS - Obelisk Movements (2000) Read full review :: buy this record Originally from California, close to the Rhymesayers crew, and advocates of some dark hip-hop that was not too far from Co-Flow's - they were signed, actually, on Bigg Jus' label - I Self Divine and Kool Akiem of the Micranots were delivering here an impressive form of hardcore rap, full of heavy drums, synthesizers and scratches, mixed with some powerful and apocalyptic kind of conscious rap. # 071. GREEK - The Preferred Remedy (2002) Read full review :: buy this record Here was Jimmy Greek: a hip-hop UFO, an anomaly, a rapper one could find in hip-hop's deepest underground only. A simple Philadelphian mailman by daylight, this man changed himself into an extravagant, insane and mad rapper at night, shouting as loud as he could his paroxysmal ego-trips of self-deprecation, sharing on weird beats his contempt for women and his average citizen frustrations. # 070. MAKER - Honestly (2003) Read full review :: buy this record By default, some could have considered that Maker played a cameo role in Chicago's hip-hop underground scene. Well, he did not. Honestly - the entry point to a long and rich career with rappers like Qwel or Adeem - proved the exact opposite. Though his formula was on par with the classic backpacker style Chicago was known for, Maker proved to be one of the subtlest producers in this scene. # 069. LATYRX - The Album (1997) Read full review :: buy this record The joint album of Lateef the Truth Speaker and Lyrics Born was a compilation, and as such, of course, it was very heterogeneous. Its best tracks, though, were no less that visionary and prodigious. They revealed two complementary MCs, both much too bold for the core hip-hop audience, and much too rap oriented for those who would discover them through their main beatmaker, DJ Shadow. # 068. POWER STRUGGLE - Arson at the Petting Factory (2005) Read full review :: buy this record Kill the Vultures has been the most successful and visible offshoot of Oddjobs, and the only one on the critics' radar screen. The parallel adventures of Power Struggle, though, a duo made of DJ Deeltax and MC Nomi, have been unheralded. It is a shame, though, their mix of abrasive rap and agressive punk rock on Arson at the Petting Factory, their very first album, being equally interesting. # 067. PEANUT BUTTER WOLF - My Vinyl Weighs a Ton (1999) Read full review :: buy this record If, after you jumped too late on the bandwagon, you want to know what underground hip-hop looked like by the end of the 90's, My Vinyl Weighs a Ton is your record. After having worked for years in the shadow, Peanut Butter Wolf had finally released his first album. Like a compilation, it gathered eclectic tracks featuring many key rappers and DJs from the Bay Area, California, and beyond. # 066. SOSO - Tenth Street and Clarence (2005) Read full review :: buy this record Both a rapper and a beatmaker, Saskatoon's Soso completely appropriated hip-hop. He made it something different, something of his own, with his depressive lyrics depicting the sad life of North America's White lower middle-class, and his lugubrious soundscapes evoking the desolate coldness of Canada's large plains. This record, if not his best, at least his most accomplished, is demonstrating it. # 065. EXISTEREO - Crush Groove (2004) Read full review :: buy this record The second solo album of Existereo was a perfect replica of the first; it was exactly the same: an eclectic mess, and an incredible collection of ideas, mixing old and new tracks. As the previous one, also - or even better than it - it demonstrated that this rapper, while being as weird and crazy as the other Shape Shifters, was maybe the most accessible one in this incredibly creative Californian crew. # 064. ASTRONAUTALIS - This Is Our Science (2011) Read full review :: buy this record For Astronautalis, the fourth album was the right one. More constant than the previous ones, more powerful than some, full of astute maritime metaphors and introspective lyrics, and showing an outstanding ability to move from rapping to singing, This Is Our Science reached the right balance. With it, the Floridian delivered an almost perfect mix of both indies, the rock and the rap ones. # 063. MIKE LADD - Welcome to the Afterfuture (1999) Read full review :: buy this record This is the sound of its time, a time when hip-hop was going through its progressive phase. Consequently, some may think that this album did not age well. Let's not discard its strengths, though: the inspired lyrics of Mike Ladd, one of the few spoken word artists who is not boring; and some moments of musical genius and vision, like with the gem which the imperishable "Planet 10" is. # 062. AESOP ROCK - Appleseed (1999) Read full review :: record unavailable Before publishing his albums on some of the most prestigious indie hip-hop labels, Aesop Rock had released his first creations on his own website. Appleseed had been the second and the last of these self-released records. And with the eight songs of this quite short opus, Aesop Rock's intellectual kind of rap was at its best, especially on the splendid "Odessa", a final track featuring Anticon's Dose One. # 061. SEBUTONES - 50/50 Where It Counts (1998) Read full review :: buy the record At the end of 1990's, the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, had unexpectedly become some new Mecca for hip-hop's underground. This status was partly due to the activists Sixtoo and Buck 65, two rappers, DJs and producers who would deliver together, in 1998, a cult album made of cold, dark and experimental hip-hop, just before starting, separately, two long, exciting and extremely rich solo careers. # 060. EDAN - Primitive Plus LP (1999 / 2002) Read full review :: acheter ce disque The title of Primitive was well deserved. On the original EP, as well as on its extended version, Edan Portnoy was rapping like in the old days. It was as if the 90's, with its elaborate beats, gangster stories and R&B influences, had never existed. Old school, lo-fi and retro-futurist, the rapper, producer, DJ and graphic designer was all of this, and nonetheless he was representative of the indie times. # 059. EPIC - Local Only (2004) Read full review :: buy this record Epic was an anomaly in the world of hip-hop. A shy and gray-haired Canadian lost in a genre full of machos, he fine-tuned his formula, nonetheless, with his second album, produced once more by Soso. There again, he presented himself as an habile rapper, sincerely in love with hip-hop, and perfectly at his ease with its codes, mixing in a strange way respect and self-derision, praise and sarcasms. # 058. MOS DEF & TALIB KWELI - Are Black Star (1998) Read full review :: Buy this record Indie rap and conscious rap have often been the same thing. At least, they shared a common disgust for the most significant part of hip-hop's mainstream artists. No surprise, then, if the emergence of the Rawkus label had coincided with the rise of Mos Def and Talib Kweli, who delivered something rare with their Black Star project: a successful attempt to an adult and socially committed form of rap. # 057. CUNNINLYNGUISTS - Will Rap For Food (2001) Read full review :: buy this record By the early 2000's, Deacon and Kno, by then the only two members of the CunninLynguists, imported in Kentucky, dangerously close to the Dirty South, its complete opposite: a rap full of scratches, fond of samples, and keen on keeping the lyrical art at a high standard. With their first album, a great record, and soon a collector, they were starting one the richest careers in the indie rap underworld. # 056. EDAN - Beauty and the Beat (2005) Read full review :: buy this record In 2002, with the underground classic Primitive Plus, Edan Portnoy had fully reinvented old school hip-hop. Apparently, though, this hadn't been enough. He would do the same with psychedelic rock with his second album, using extravagant guitars and strings, in order to build one of the rare crossover records that respected, regenerated and challenged equally both genres it was seeking to mix. # 055. DOPESTYLE 1231 - KutMasta Kurt Presents Dopestyle 1231 (2004) Read full review :: buy this record Please forget Deltron 3030. Please forget as well this Return of Dr. Octagon album, released in 2006. The true successor of Kool Keith's fundamental Dr. Octagon was published in 2004. It was recorded by MC Dopestyle and Tom C, a duo from the Bay Area, sponsored by Kutmasta Kurt. And together, they recycled everything that made a success of Ecologyst, renewing it with some horror movie flavor. # 054. BIZZART - Bloodshot Mama
with asserting that no one owns you, including yourself. One corollary of ownership as it is commonly understood is that ownership confers the right of use. Rothbard suggests that if no one owns you, then you don’t have the right of use over your own body. Any actions you take with it are therefore not rightful. (p 45, n) Yet this puts you in an impossible position, because you have little choice but to go right on using your body. Even suicide isn’t an option, because it would necessarily damage some property you do not own. And by the terms of (1)(b) above, you have absolutely no hope of finding the proper owner and asking his permission. That’s because no one else owns you either. A complete lack of ownership implies a complete lack of use rights. This sounds fairly damning, but there are two problems with Rothbard’s argument about ownership and use rights. First, although the right of use is a common corollary of ownership, it may also be a corollary of other things, too. This possibility is surprisingly difficult to rule out. In the real world, people may acquire use rights not only through ownership, but also through lease, rent, borrowing, or other forms of agreement with the owner. Although each of these (legal) forms does imply the existence—somewhere—of an owner, it is not necessarily clear that all types of use rights (which are moral, not legal claims) must stem from someone’s ownership somewhere. This seems to require further demonstration; although I find it intuitive to assert that use rights stem from ownership, I’m not prepared to say that they never stem from anything else. And if they can, then it might be the case that we have use rights in our selves without anyone, including ourselves, having ownership. Might we hold our selves in trust from God? And might God still somehow disclaim his ownership of us? With God all things are possible, but these are metaphysical speculations of the sort Rothbard was eager to avoid. Rothbard saw all too clearly that the mid-20th century libertarian movement was in danger of bifurcating on the contextually irrelevant question of theism and atheism, and one of his great accomplishments was to argue forcefully that it need not do so. Here, I’m going to extend the project just a tiny bit: If we have use rights, but not ownership, many of the same assertions Rothbard later makes will still be valid. And if we have both use rights and the power to delegate use rights, then we in effect have ownership for all of his purposes. Those who prefer to speak of use rights for metaphysical reasons may do so, and it will not matter. Second, we haven’t considered the possibility that the self can be subdivided. In this, case (2), we have several sub-possibilities to consider: (2)(a) Selves can be divided, but someone else still owns all of you; you are perhaps subdivided and held by various people. Again, this is slavery, and even slavery by committee is morally off-limits. Mutual partial ownership of others is, as Rothbard suggests, implausible without some underlying stratum of self-ownership, and whatever we build on that stratum requires its own justification; it can’t merely be asserted. (2)(b) Selves can be divided, but no one can own you. This isn’t terribly interesting, because we’ve already dismissed the scenario in which no ownership exists. (2)(c) Selves can be divided, and you own yourself. This is where much of Rothbard’s later argument actually takes place. It might be fair to ask—if selves can be divided, which part or parts of me own the rest? It is implausible that my hair can own anything. And many other parts besides, parts whose loss, if it can be imagined, would not obviously impair my ability to own property. The part that does own things seems to be an aspect of mind. If I’m not being too abstract, I would suggest that this part is the reason in cooperation with the will. This dovetails neatly with Rothbard’s earlier claims about human nature, and with the much larger natural law tradition of which he is a part. The owning capacity, whatever it is, clearly owns the hair, and the eyes, and all the other parts, insofar as it can be said to own anything. But does it own itself? As said above, other-ownership is slavery, and even if other-ownership of some parts aren’t so terrible—I might sell my hair, for instance, or my writing skills for a time—the sale of the ability to own property is a fairly severe act, one that seems to fall much closer to slavery and might even be slavery. If that’s off limits, and if non-ownership isn’t an option, then we do own ourselves. Next up: How do we come to own other things?By Robert Romano In a letter to Senate Republican leaders, Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asked that H.R. 3762, which President Barack Obama vetoed in 2016, should be the bare minimum of what the Republican majorities of the House and Senate consider in 2017. That’s not asking too much. H.R. 3762 got rid of Medicaid expansion, premium subsidies, cost-sharing subsidies, the individual and employer mandates, reinsurance, risk corridors and risk-adjustment, and the many taxes and spending from the health care law. If that is the bill that is put on Trump’s desk, it would be a monumental achievement. If anybody has credibility on repealing Obamacare, it should be Cruz who filibustered funding for it in 2013, and Rubio and Lee, who joined him on the floor in support. H.R. 3762 passed the House and Senate in 2015, and was vetoed by President Obama in 2016. Both chambers then failed to override the veto, but now there is a real opportunity to have that very same piece of legislation signed into law by President-elect Donald Trump when he assumes office later this month. If it was good enough in 2016 for Obama to veto, it should be good enough to put on Trump’s desk to sign. Anything good enough for Lee, Rubio and Cruz is usually going to be good enough for Americans for Limited Government. Republicans would be foolish not to get everything they could under budget reconciliation, including repealing Medicaid expansion. Lee, Rubio and Cruz are right. If states want to do Medicaid expansion for those with incomes in the middle of the spectrum, the so-called doughnut hole, that’s their business. Federal taxpayers should not be compelled to subsidize it. The bottom line is this is an historic chance to keep a six-year-old Republican promise to repeal the guts of Obamacare and Republicans should not blink at this rare opportunity the American people have given to them to limit the size and scope of the government. They should do no less than what they forced Obama to veto in 2016 and hopefully with the new majorities and the White House, they’ll do even more going forward, including allowing insurance to be sold across state lines. So far the Senate has voted to proceed to S. Con. Res. 3, but so far, the text of the Obamacare repeal has not been brought forward. Time will tell if Republicans are able to keep their pledge to repeal the health care law, but if the Senate follows Lee, Rubio and Cruz’ principles laid out in their letter, this could end up being something the American people can be very pleased with. Robert Romano is the senior editor of Americans for Limited Government.The BlackBerry is all but dead. On Monday, the Canadian smartphone maker told the world it will finally take itself private, which barely registers as news. The most surprising thing is that the company held on so long. Most people will tell you that, through a mix of corporate dysfunction and sheer lack of inspiration, BlackBerry failed to hold its own in the smartphone wars of the last half-decade. And so, the voices proclaim, the one-time giant was crushed under the feet of new, more innovative competitors – the quintessential Silicon Valley tale of creative destruction. It's the kind of thing that happens all the time, and that looks set to continue in the smartphone arena: The current masters will become tomorrow's also-rans, and a new upstart will rise to displace the incumbents. But in the smartphone game, that won't happen. Even a hypothetically better-run BlackBerry never stood a chance against Apple. Once Apple introduced the iPhone, the paradigm was set – there wasn't anything especially new the Blackberry could do. Sure, it could have tried to outrace Apple early on to a better version of the same idea, but no one was going to out-Jobs Steve Jobs. (Google only managed to compete by open-sourcing a new operating system – a business model rather than a technological innovation that wasn't really an option for a hardware maker like BlackBerry.) >Even a hypothetically better-run BlackBerry never stood against Apple. Once Apple introduced the iPhone, the paradigm was set – there wasn't anything especially new the Blackberry could do. As BlackBerry disappears from view, something much larger than the demise of one company is under way in the mobile market. The end of BlackBerry isn't just about the end of BlackBerry. This could be the end of any radical innovation in mobile, period. Even Apple has run its course: Where else can it go? "The new iPhones look like the old iPhones. They sound like the old iPhones. They do the same things as the old iPhones. Just slightly better, more colorfully, and less expensively than the old iPhones," Matt Buchanan wrote in The New Yorker last week. "(P)hones have matured to the point that, until a truly radical breakthrough in computing technology occurs, there is not much left to improve on." The good thing about one technology topping out, he says, is that it frees up businesses to invent new ones. He points to wearables such as Google Glass as one obvious category. But then he rightly says that such devices already seem a little boring – "remarkably like tiny iPhones bolted to our heads and fastened to our wrists." WIRED's Mat Honan picked up on this theme of mobile mundanity when the original iPhone 5 was announced. He pointed to the paradox of experiencing a device such as the iPhone – a radical departure not just in computing but ultimately in the conduct of daily life that didn't even exist a decade ago – and finding it boring, even while understanding what an incredible feat of human ingenuity it represents. "That has almost nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with our expectations," Honan said. A collective "meh" accompanied the unveiling of the iPhones 5s and 5c, which boasted only incremental improvements over the iPhone 5. And yet Apple says it sold 9 million of these devices upon their official release this past weekend. The total blows away the old record and promises more big profits for Apple. These customers didn't flock to the phones because they wanted a fingerprint sensor or a slightly better camera. The reality is that Apple's new models are synced with cell phone contract cycles. After two years, contracts have expired, and our two-year-old phones have taken a beating. A phone with slightly better features at the same subsidized price meets consumers where they're living. Even Apple fanatics who upgrade out of sheer love aren't really chasing the new innovations. After all, the new tools on the new iPhones barely qualify as such. All of which suggests that iPhones – and perhaps smartphones in general – have entered their PC phase. Try to remember the last truly transformative change in laptops, for example. In the last decade, they've gotten smaller, thinner, and faster. Memory and storage have increased, as has battery life. Displays have become sharper. As with the new iPhones, these are all incremental changes. Possibly the most disruptive thing that could happen to smartphones, as Buchanan suggests, isn't really about smartphones themselves, but a radical improvement in battery technology. Imagine a phone that could go for a month of heavy use on one charge, which, alongside other improvements, could give us constant location awareness we could actually depend on. Perhaps then smartphones could truly become the personal assistant of our augmented-intelligence dreams, a possibility that doesn't really work if you're constantly having to ration the device's use and compromise its portability by plugging it into the wall. If mobile innovation is already over, the future doesn't look promising for companies still racing to catch up. As BlackBerry crumbled and Apple bragged, Microsoft announced the release of its new Surface tablet, and like the post-iPhone BlackBerry, it doesn't stand a chance. Though the first Surfaces got a lot of press, they didn't find many customers, which forced Microsoft to take a $900 million write-down. The new version offers a bit more, but not enough. As WIRED's Alexandra Chang wrote from the launch event: "None of the Surface Pro 2 updates are all that surprising. Indeed, the changes are fairly subtle, as Surface Product Manager Panos Panay repeatedly emphasized." Changes in the Surface 2 are apparently "more drastic," but when it comes down to it, these are just better specs. >As BlackBerry crumbled and Apple bragged, Microsoft announced the release of its new Surface tablet, and like the BlackBerry, it doesn't stand a chance. What's more, we can't expect anything radically new from Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia, a company whose BlackBerry-like trajectory made selling its business the only viable option for survival. Perhaps Microsoft could open-source its Windows Phone operating system in hopes of creating a widely used Android-like platform. Unlike Google, however, Microsoft's business model still depends primarily on selling software. And with Android claiming nearly 80 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, the demand for an Android alternative seems low, to say the least. If mobile devices truly have become boring, maybe the fault lies with us, the consumers – our hamster-like impatience, our insatiable desire for the new. But perhaps it's just common sense: Something new comes along, effects radical change, then settles into a long series of variations on a theme. Maybe that's boring, but maybe that's okay too. If mobile technology really has entered a long period of stagnation – or more charitably, incremental improvement – it's certainly possible that our impatience for something new will grow apocalyptic. Or maybe the anticlimax of BlackBerry's failure signals the start of something less dramatic and possibly more important. The less time we spend obsessing over our shiny new devices, the more time we'll have to use them for stuff that's interesting, useful, important. Because in the end, what's a smartphone but another tool? Sure, you can build a slightly better hammer – sturdier wood, stronger metal. But the real power comes in how you swing it.British households are increasingly struggling with problem debts, according to alarming official figures, in the starkest indication yet of the UK slipping into the red. Government statistics for England and Wales show applications for individual voluntary arrangements (IVAs) – a means of managing personal debt – reached their highest level since they were introduced in 1987.The spike in their usage comes amid a 10.6% increase in wider insolvencies since the end of June. The figures paint a worrying picture of Britain in the red, and comes as the growth of personal loans, credit cards and car finance outstrips the rise in earnings by almost five times. Bank of England data shows personal debts have risen to levels unseen since the financial crisis, reaching more than £200bn. There were 15,523 IVAs recorded in England and Wales in the third quarter, rising from 13,290 in the same period a year ago. The voluntary means of repaying an individual’s creditor some or all of the money they are owed, with the help of an insolvency practitioner, made up two-thirds of all insolvencies. There was a 2.1% increase in debt relief orders – available to those who have a low income, low assets and less than £20,000 of debt – from June to 6,274. However, the number of outright bankruptcies – whereby an individual’s assets may be sold to pay for their debts – fell slightly to 3,682. Adrian Hyde, of insolvency and restructuring trade body R3, said: “Falling real wages and exhausted credit limits may have helped to push personal insolvencies up again... Some people have trouble paying for basics, like food or housing, let alone paying for luxuries.” The figures come as the Bank of England prepares to increase the cost of borrowing with the first interest rate hike in a decade from as early as next week. It also comes amid worrying signs for the economy, as consumers rein in spending amid inflation outstripping wages. When taking account of inflation, real wages fell by 0.4% in the three months to August, the sixth consecutive month of negative earnings. That’s despite the lowest levels of unemployment in the UK since the mid 1970s. An interest rate hike could exacerbate problems for individuals with problem debt, as they may see an increase in their borrowing costs. However, the increase is only expected to be a modest 0.25%, returning the rate to 0.5% – the level it stood at before the Bank’s emergency rate cut in the wake of the Brexit vote. The government figures show that in the 12 months ending in September in England and Wales, one in 477 adults – or 0.21% of the adult population – became insolvent. This was slightly up from one in 489 at the end of June, although was the highest rate since the end of December 2014. In Scotland, there was a slight increase in individual insolvencies to 2,472, in the continuation of a generally increasing trend since late 2015. Although there was a decrease in the number of individual insolvencies in Northern Ireland in the three months to the end of September from the level in June this year, there was a 25% increase from the same period in 2016, to stand at 684. The latest figures also paint a worrying picture for businesses, showing an increasing number of firms running into trouble since the EU referendum. The number of companies registered as insolvent is 15% higher than this time last year. The increase appears to confirm a change in direction from falling insolvencies between 2010 and 2016, according to Hyde. He said: “An interest rate rise is just around the corner, too. Although it may be a small one, it may be too big for those businesses and their customers already on the edge.”2 dead, 4 wounded in South San Francisco shooting SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO Two people were killed and four wounded in an apparent drive-by shooting Wednesday night in South San Francisco. The shooting occurred at 7:14 p.m. at the corner of Linden Avenue and 8th Lane, South San Francisco police Sgt. Joni Lee said. She said officers found three victims lying on 8th Lane, a one-way alley. Two unidentified victims were pronounced dead at the scene, she said. A third victim was taken to a local hospital, where he was reportedly in critical condition. Three other men were wounded. They were taken to local hospitals with nonlife-threatening injuries, Lee said. Investigators are seeking three Latino males in their late teens or early 20s who were driving what a brown Chevy Impala with tinted windows.Photo Artists protesting at the Puck Building, where Ivanka Trump lives with her husband, Jared Kushner. His family owns the building. Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times The contemporary art world in New York is not known for its political cohesion or conviction, at least in recent years. But more than 150 artists, curators and gallery workers turned out Monday night to march in front of a Downtown Manhattan building where Ivanka Trump, the future first daughter, has an apartment and is believed to keep some pieces of a notable contemporary collection. The quiet, orderly protest in front of the Puck Building, owned by the family of Ms. Trump’s husband, the developer and investor Jared Kushner, drew well-known artists like Cecily Brown, Rob Pruitt, Ryan McNamara, Jonah Freeman, Dan Colen and Marilyn Minter, whose work is the subject of a retrospective now on view at the Brooklyn Museum. Nate Lowman, an artist whose work Ms. Trump is known to collect, also marched, along with the art dealer Bill Powers. “The culture changes, and fascism rears its ugly head every so often and that’s what’s happening now,” said Ms. Minter, marching with a battery-powered candle and a sign that made a comically profane reference to Donald J. Trump’s claim to have grabbed women’s genitals. “We wanted to do something to start to the ball rolling, to grow a protest, and we’re artists, so we know how to make posters.” For the last week, Ms. Trump has been the subject of a new Instagram account called dear_ivanka, which posts generally glamorous social-media or publicity pictures of the president-elect’s daughter alongside captions addressed to her that express fears about Mr. Trump’s policy positions, about the potential for political corruption because of the Trump family’s international business interests and about the racist and xenophobic views of some of Mr. Trump’s supporters. A post on Nov. 23 said: “Your father’s choice to head up the EPA, Myron Ebell, is a fanatical anti-science, anti-environmentalist climate change denier. I’m afraid for what’s at stake.” Previous posts included messages such as “Dear Ivanka, I’m an American Muslim and I was attacked on the subway” and “Dear Ivanka, I’m black and I’m afraid of Jeff Sessions.” (Mr. Ebell, who directs environmental and energy policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian advocacy group partly financed by the coal industry, is leading Mr. Trump’s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. Sessions, the Republican senator from Alabama and Mr. Trump’s choice to become attorney general, was denied a federal judgeship in 1986 amid accusations of racially charged comments.) The Instagram account, begun by an art-world group that includes the artist Jonathan Horowitz, the independent curator Alison Gingeras and Mr. Powers, calling themselves the Halt Action Group, links to a website, dearivanka.info, whose front page features a picture of Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner, both of whom are advisers to Mr. Trump’s transition team. Under the headline “Ivanka, It’s not okay,” the site says “racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia are not acceptable anywhere— least of all in the White House. Steve Bannon has no place in the White House. Jeff Sessions has no place in the White House. Talk of a Muslim registry has no place in the White House. Hate has no place in the White House. We refuse to ‘wait and see.’ We look to you as the voice of reason.” Mr. Horowitz, whose work sometimes addresses electoral politics, said the idea of directing the protest and messages to Ms. Trump came because she has become known in the art world as a progressive figure and as someone who seems to care much more about culture than her father does. “I don’t think we have any real illusions that she’s going to become a champion for any of the things we care about, or try to stop the things we fear are going to happen,” Mr. Horowitz said. “But it’s a way to start something, a first action of what we hope is going to become a much bigger movement.”US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke this evening with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and thanked him for his decision to transfer NIS 175 million ($43 million) in cash to the Gaza Strip. Olmert's office said Clinton praised the decision, despite the domestic opposition he faced, and said move would strengthen Palestinian moderates. Both Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni contested the move, announced by the prime minister on Thursday afternoon. Money Troubles Fayyad slams Israeli cash blockade in Gaza Infolive.tv Palestinian prime minister bemoans situation of Palestinian Authority employees in Gaza Strip who are unable to collect salaries due to Israel's block of cash flow to Hamas-ruled enclave. Israel rejects criticism, says terror groups to blame Fayyad slams Israeli cash blockade in Gaza The funds, to be transferred immediately, are intended to be pay the salaries of Palestinian Authority workers in the Gaza Strip. However, since the region is controlled by Hamas, political and security forces believe that it is likely the funds will end up in the hands of Hamas or other terror organizations. The Palestinian Authority has bank accounts in Israel, whose contents are generated from taxes. Employees – identified by name, identity number and bank account – are paid from these sums. Due to the situation in Gaza, PA workers have not been able to cash their salaries in Gaza and, thus, requested a transfer of funds in cash, from Israel. Livni and Barak, during a three-way meeting with Olmert, expressed their disapproval for his decision. The two noted that while the Israel-PLO Economic Agreement, signed in Paris in 1994, requires Israel to transfer tax-generated funds to the PA, it is not the appropriate time to transfer money to workers in Gaza because of the likelihood of a Hamas appropriation. "This is (the PA's) money and they have the right to decide how to spend it. The money belongs to (Palestinian Prime Minister Salam) Fayyad and his employees in Gaza," read a statement from the Prime Minister's Office. "The Palestinians have also appealed to the United States and they have international backing for their request, because it is anchored in accords," the statement continued. A senior political source in the PMO told Ynet: "Because the funds are transferred to people on a name basis, and only to Fatah employees in Gaza, this actually promotes Israel's policy of strengthening (Fatah) sources relative to Hamas sources." "We’re doing what Israel must do based on agreements and working to strengthen moderates," he added. Two months ago, Barak garnered criticism for transferring NIS 100 million (about $25 million) from West Bank banks to Gaza banks, at Fayyad's request, due to the fact that banks were closing in the Gaza Strip. The funds went to pay the salaries of some 70,000 PA workers. Fayyad said at the time that the funds transferred were insufficient, because "it's a very small sum that does not cover the salaries." He said that a sum of NIS 100 million was necessary every month in order to cover PA salaries. Clinton, Kouchner discuss Hamas Earlier in the day Clinton met with French counterpart Bernard Kouchner in Washington, and discussed recent developments in the Middle East. Kouchner presented a decidedly less stringent position than Clinton's regarding the conditions under which his country would talk to Hamas. Speaking at a press conference held after the meeting, Kouchner said he would sit down with Hamas when they themselves sat down with the PLO, accepted the peace process and acknowledged the accords between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and the terms of the Arab peace initiative. Kouchner's statements follow a similar stance voiced by Quartet envoy, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who emphasized the necessity of Palestinian unity as the basis for any genuine peace process with Israel. Clinton however reiterated Washington's far less lenient stance, saying the US would not talk with, or recognize, Hamas until it renounced violence, recognized Israel and agreed to adhere to previous accords. The secretary is in no rush to conduct her first visit to the Middle East, and today announced she will soon embark on a ten-day trip to Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China. Her main goal will be to reach a series of understandings with Beijing, including its position on the Iranian nuclear threat, as well as discussions surrounding the threat of North Korea.Trump Administration officials have promised that the House GOP bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will protect the 70-plus million people who rely on Medicaid — and in particular, those benefiting from the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. “If you’re on Medicaid, you’re going to stay. The expansion is not going to change,” National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn said on Sunday.[1] The plan the Administration is trying to pass doesn’t live up to these promises.And President Trump, who promised during the campaign not to cut Medicaid, told Congress last month that his plans for Medicaid “make sure no one is left out.” Unfortunately — as the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis[2] of the House bill shows — the plan the Administration is trying to pass doesn’t live up to these promises. The bill effectively ends the Medicaid expansion, freezing out millions of people who would have gotten coverage and causing current enrollees benefitting from the expansion to lose their coverage as well. It also imposes a per capita cap on all of Medicaid, shifting costs and risks to states and putting coverage at risk for millions more seniors, people with disabilities, and families with children. Indeed, CBO finds that the Medicaid cuts in the bill would result in Medicaid enrollment falling by 14 million, many of whom would make up the 24 million additional uninsured by 2026. The bill needs its deep Medicaid cuts — $880 billion over ten years in total — to offset its hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthy, pharmaceutical companies, and insurers, and states simply couldn’t make those cuts without harming millions of Medicaid beneficiaries. The House plan makes the Medicaid expansion financially unsustainable for states, effectively ending it. The ACA enabled states to expand Medicaid to low-income adults by covering at least 90 percent of the cost permanently. Under the House bill, states would no longer receive this enhanced match for new enrollees beginning in 2020 — meaning it would cost them 2.8 to 5 times more than under current law to keep covering these people.[3] Because of this cost shift, most expansion states would ultimately have to drop the expansion. In seven states, expansion coverage would end automatically due to state laws requiring it to end if the federal match rate falls or requiring the state to prevent an increase in state Medicaid costs. In most of the other 25 expansion states, the additional costs would likely prove too much for states to absorb and cause them to drop the expansion over time. People now enrolled through the expansion won’t be protected. Under the House bill, an expansion enrollee who left the program for more than one month could no longer receive the enhanced match. But because low-income adults cycle on and off Medicaid due to changes in financial circumstances, states would very quickly find that the large majority of their Medicaid expansion population didn’t qualify for the enhanced match. As CBO explains: “On the basis of historical data (and taking into account the increased frequency of eligibility redeterminations required by the legislation), CBO projects that fewer than one-third of those enrolled as of December 31, 2019, would have maintained continuous eligibility two years later.” That means states would rapidly face higher costs for the large majority of their Medicaid enrollment. That would force many states to drop the entire expansion, including for current enrollees. And that would mean a low-wage worker on Medicaid who got a better job with health benefits and was later laid off wouldn’t be able to get her Medicaid expansion coverage back when she needed it. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican, addressed the fate of Medicaid expansion under the House bill Sunday, explaining that it was “not right” to say that Medicaid expansion enrollees in his state would be protected: “I mean, first of all, Medicaid expansion, which has covered 700,000 people in my state, a big chunk of whom are mentally ill and drug addicted and have chronic diseases. They tend to churn [on and off Medicaid].” Governor Kasich also advised House Republicans how to improve their bill: for starters, “don’t kill Medicaid expansion.”[4] The bill’s per capita cap would put even more Medicaid enrollees at risk. The House bill would cap federal Medicaid funding and shift costs to states, resulting in large and growing cuts to the overall program over time. Because Medicaid is already efficient,[5] such large cuts would likely require states to ration care. As CBO’s analysis explains: With less federal reimbursement for Medicaid, states would need to decide whether to commit more of their own resources to finance the program at current-law levels or whether to reduce spending by cutting payments to health care providers and health plans, eliminating optional services, restricting eligibility for enrollment, or (to the extent feasible) arriving at more efficient methods for delivering services. The impact would be even more dire if states face unanticipated cost increases due to an emergency like the opioid epidemic or a new breakthrough, but costly, treatment. States would have to cover the full costs of these increases themselves. The end result? More than 63 million children and families, seniors, and people with disabilities who use Medicaid — on top of those who benefit from the expansion — would find their coverage and services at risk, directly contrary to the Administration’s assurances.The demonstrators demand a crackdown on illegal immigration, Italy’s exit from the eurozone and prompt resignation of the government. © AP Photo / Gregorio Borgia, File At Least 12 Injured in Rome Following Protests Against Illegal Migrants ROME (Sputnik) – Thousands people joined anti-immigration protest movement in Rome on Saturday calling for resignation of Italian government, a RIA Novosti correspondent reports. "[Italian Prime Minister Matteo] Renzi is just a pawn, a foolish servant of Brussels, who wants to destroy the Italian economy," leader of anti-immigration party Matteo Salvini was quoted as saying by Tgcom24. The protest rally organized by anti-immigration right-wing party Lega Nord (LN), is taking place at one of the city’s central squares Piazza del Popolo. The demonstrators demand a crackdown on illegal immigration, Italy’s exit from the eurozone and prompt resignation of the government. While the representatives of Lega Nord are speaking from the stage before the crowd, party’s leader Matteo Salvini is expected to deliver speech at the end of the protest campaign. © AFP 2018 / THIERRY CHARLIER Italy’s Renzi Says It's Too Early for Military Intervention in Libya The rally is held alongside with a march organized by LN opponents. Salvini said he did not fear that clashes may erupt after the demonstration is over. Police in Rome increased security on Saturday after clashes with anti-LN activists a day earlier, who occupied the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said that prior to the Saturday protests some 4,000 police personnel were deployed in the city. The protest by anti-immigration party Lega Nord comes before upcoming regional elections scheduled for May. Recently, Italy has faced a massive influx of undocumented migrants from Libya, with hundreds of Africans coming to the country amid concerns of Islamic State advances.PRISTINA, Kosovo — The image of mayoral candidate Nebojsa Peric stares down from a billboard on the main drag in Gracanica, a suburb of Pristina, Kosovo. “It’s up to us,” the sign reads in Serbian. It's a common enough political slogan, but here it hints at a potential first step toward solving one of Europe’s most intractable diplomatic problems. Peric wants his fellow Kosovar Serbs to vote on Sunday in Kosovo’s first local elections since the tiny Balkan country declared independence from Serbia last year. “This is a sensitive moment for the Serbian community,” he said. “We want to take part on the local level.” It’s a brave stand. Memories of ethnic strife between Albanians and Serbs still linger in Gracanica and other Serbian enclaves, where Albanian mobs torched Serb homes and Orthodox Christian monasteries in 2004 out of frustration with the international community’s dithering over Kosovo’s status. Belgrade has called on ethnic Serbs to boycott the polls, arguing that participating would recognize Pristina’s authority. Serbian leaders have opposed Kosovo’s independence since they ceded control of the then-breakaway province to the United Nation in 1999 after a NATO bombing campaign ended a war that claimed 10,000 Albanian lives. But Peric and others’ candidacies suggest that relations between Kosovar Albanians and Serbs have thawed as the 2004 riots and the 1999 war recede into the past, experts said. Contrary to past elections, when practically no Serbs voted, many believe a small but symbolically important portion of Kosovar Serbs are now ready to cast ballots. “Some Serbs are slowly starting to realize that participating is important if they want to better their communities,” said Shpend Ahmeti, executive director of the GAP Institute, a Pristina-based think tank. Peric said he was running for Gracanica mayor because it was increasingly clear that Belgrade couldn’t improve the quality of life of the 125,000 Serbs — about 7 percent of Kosovo’s population — who live in segregated communities. Belgrade funds parallel government offices in the new republic, but they amount to a fig leaf of authority. “Serbian institutions have no real power in the field here,” said Peric. “Ten years after the war, there is no job market. People are leaving. Young people see no potential. We have to work with Kosovo institutions so we can find jobs.” The elections are part of a plan negotiated by ex-Finnish president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martti Ahtisaari. In exchange for independence, Kosovo promised to create several new Serbian-majority municipalities with expanded powers, including Gracanica, now technically part of Pristina. “It’s the first time after 10 years that we have a real offer from Kosovo institutions and the international community,” Peric said. “They’re giving us their hand.” It’s unclear if Serbs will turn out in great numbers. Polls surveying Kosovar Serbs throughout the country haven’t been conducted, but a Kosovo NGO, Kontakt, recently released a survey that found that 28 percent of Gracanica voters intended to case ballots. Forty percent of Gracanica voters hadn’t decided, the survey found, while 32 percent opposed Serbs voting — a position Belgrade has encouraged. Most observers believe turnout will be negligible in northern Serbian enclaves like Mitrovica, which are officially part of Kosovo but where the Serbian government holds sway. ''Those Serbs who would take part in the elections should ask themselves whether they are helping the state of Serbia save Kosovo or weighing down on our fight to preserve our sovereignty and territorial integrity,'' Serbia's Minister for Kosovo, Goran Bogdanovic, told Belgrade’s B92 television news on Tuesday. Milan and Bilijana Stemkovich, a 30-something couple, were representative of the divisions in the Serb community. Walking in Gracanica on Nov. 8, Milan said he would vote because it was time to turn a new page in Kosovo’s history. Bilijana was more cynical. “My house was burned in the war,” she said. “I’m disappointed. Therefore, I won’t vote.” Many Kosovar Albanians aren’t happy about
that’s something we’ve continually done, record by record—we’ve always done weird stuff out the box. And our new record that will be coming out later this year is no different; where we continue to push and evolve and playing around with a lot of different vocal tones—I can’t sing, so you don’t have to worry about me singing [laughs]—but you know, screaming in pitch and doing some different things like that is what we will be kind of implementing with the new record. You always want to evolve as an artist and you don’t want to keep putting out the same album. Some bands do and that’s great. If they’re happy with that and their fans are happy, why not? But for us, coming from a… I have a very creative life outside of the band as well, I do a lot of art stuff and a lot of design work, and that’s something I love. I love creating and doing these different things. That’s something with this new record that we are kind of trying to push the artistic side; what I mean by that is the creativeness of how we’re delivering different choruses and trying to really build the song structures, opposed to just slamming riffs and breakdowns together.” He later went on to say that past records found the band being a bit too receptive to not only what the fans wanted, but their record labels as well: “I think we were also kind of listening a little too much on all levels from fans and from our record label and I think it’s silly when bands say that they don’t care what the fans think. They’re gonna make the music that they want. ‘Cause if that’s the truth then just sit at home and play in your garage. It absolutely blows my mind when I hear bands say that. Like I said, I get it, they want to be artists and this and that. But without your fans you’re not eating, you’re not touring, you’re not doing anything. You’re a garage band, you know? There’s no shame to that either, that’s great. But I think you have a certain responsibility to your fans, to the people who have given you this life and this opportunity to deliver.” He also stated that though touring is planned, the band will remain more of a part-time job in order for the members to balance their family lives and other pursuits.Sunday, the American League Championship Series brought us wild swings in win expectancy, a roller coaster of a game that left people in awe. Game Three of the National league Championship Series brought us wild swings in emotion, but they didn’t show up in the game graph. Or, they didn’t show in the entirety of the game graph: they showed in that one highlighted at-bat in the graph, and in the actions of one player. Yasiel Puig inspired many emotions, before, during and after his game-changing triple, but he was also, maybe fittingly, the batter that added the most win probability to his team’s chances Monday night. In essence, the game turned on his matchup with Adam Wainwright in the fourth inning. The first pitch from Wainwright to Puig was a sinker inside. Fairly innocuous. Except that Wainwright was a league leader in first-pitch strike percentage (17th among qualified pitchers), and yet his first pitch was almost ten inches off the inside corner. He almost certainly threw inside on purpose, instead of throwing in the zone, and he probably did so because of the Yasiel Puig baseball saw in the first half. That Puig offered on 41.1% of balls outside the zone (seventh-worst in baseball). Pitchers saw that eagerness to swing and, in the second half, threw him in the zone less than anyone not named Chris Davis, Josh Hamilton, Pablo Sandoval, and Miguel Cabrera. So Puig adjusted back. He cut his swing rate on pitches outside the zone to 34.7%, only slightly worse than league average (31%) and good for 58th-worst in baseball. Only 13 regular players improved their second half O-Swing% as much as Puig. Puig didn’t swing on the first pitch from Wainwright, a sinker. Ball one, a triumph in making adjustments. You face Adam Wainwright, you know you’ll get a yellow hammer, a yakker, a knee buckler. Since 2009, that curveball has been worth almost twice as much as any other in baseball and that’s why he’s thrown it more than all but five other starters in the same time frame. The curveball was coming, and even given all of Puig’s second-half adjustments, he was probably going to whiff at one. After all, given 400 plate appearances, nobody had a higher swinging strike rate than Puig this year. And by pitch type values, the curve is Puig’s second-worst pitch. Puig swung at the second pitch from Wainwright, a curve ball. He missed, highlighting the flaws he still sports. “Soft away, hard inside” said Ron Darling, and he was right that the approach was clear. Unfortunately for the Cardinals, Puig had seen the pitch before. And he didn’t swing the first time. For all the belief that the player can be hard headed, here he demonstrates some restraint. Puig didn’t swing at the third pitch from Wainwirght, a sinker inside. The count was two and one. By the PITCHf/x data, this pitch was the furthest outside. The network pitch tracker didn’t see it that way, and perhaps that has something to do with the fact that it was tailing towards the batter at the end, as sinkers do. If it was indeed outside the zone on the outside corner, Puig wasn’t necessarily out of his element. His five opposite field home runs ranked in the top 20 in baseball this year despite the fact that he only went to the plate 432 times (his isolated slugging to the opposite field was 12th). High and outside is actually a strength for him, according to this run value heat map from BaseballHeatMaps: Puig took a high sinker — not a flat one, if PITCHf/x and its double-digit vertical movement number can be believed — deep to right field. Of course, this wouldn’t be a roller coaster with just a dip and a peak. So to provide a little more spice, Yasiel Puig flipped his bat, thinking he’d hit a home run. This could have been a big deal. In the past, other players around the league have called him out for this sort of bad behavior. It could have cost him bags. Particularly because he continued to admire his blast. Today, you know that Puig hit a triple. But in the moment, at the game, you might have been screaming. Run until you know! That ball isn’t gone yet! At least one fan in the stadium dreaded the possibility of a long single and cursed his team’s exciting young outfielder. Luckily, Yasiel Puig is not just about power. Here's Peter Bourjos' 14.02 secs "IPHR". http://t.co/QLvtWhDdHv Hard to say 100%, but he went 1st-to-3rd in ~6.25 secs (vs Puig's 6.97sec) — Larry Granillo (@wezen_ball) October 15, 2013 Puig flipped his bat. He admired his hit. He went into third standing. He slowed at the end. And Puig came up two-thirds of a second short of one of the fastest men in baseball legging out an inside the park home run. No player is all parts ‘fireplug’ or ‘veteran’ or ‘headcase,’ even one as controversial as Yasiel Puig. All year long, he’s made blunders in the field and on the basepaths. All year long, he’s shown us feats of strength with his arm, his legs, and his bat. In Game Three Monday night, he showed us that he’s not as incorrigible as he’s been portrayed to be. And yet, he also showed us the same flaws that have inspired some to wonder if he would cost his team with a big blunder in October. You can’t fit him easily into one narrative, but at least it looks like the emerging story is a compelling one.BJ Penn's Brother Arrested In Airplane Bender 'I Won't Get Off Without a Fight' BJ Penn's Brother Arrested In Airplane Bender... 'I Won't Get Off Without a Fight' EXCLUSIVE The younger brother of UFC star BJ Penn was arrested Tuesday after a crazy incident on an airplane in which he allegedly yelled, "I won't get off the plane without a fight." Reagan Penn -- a former MMA fighter himself -- was on a Delta plane at LAX headed to Phoenix to see his big brother throw down at UFC Fight Night 103 when he got into it with flight crew over alcohol. We're told Penn wanted booze before takeoff, crew refused to serve him and an argument ensued. He was eventually told to deboard the plane but he refused. Cops were called but the standoff continued -- and he allegedly told officers, "I won't get off the plane without a fight." A witness tells us Penn commented that his brother would "kick his ass" if he didn't make it to PHX for the fight. Penn was "taken down" by at least two officers who handcuffed him and arrested for him trespassing. He was taken to a nearby station where he was booked. Penn has since been released. No word if he made it to PHX yet.When cartoonist Garry Trudeau was scheduled to receive a Polk Award at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus on April 10, it hardly seemed worth covering. Everyone could easily predict exactly what he’d say: Cartoonist receives award for his political bravery, defends free speech against demagogues, offers salute to Charlie Hebdo victims. Etc. Except that’s not what happened: Trudeau used his entire speech to reflect upon the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and took the side of the terrorists. Those rogue cartoonists? They had it coming for engaging in “hate speech.” Their cartoons were just “graffiti.” And didn’t they once fire a guy for making anti-Semitic remarks? Hypocrites! In the words of columnist Mark Steyn, “The Polk Award is named after a journalist shot dead at point-blank range in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war. So you might have thought it would be in ever so mildly bad taste to use the opportunity of a Polk acceptance speech to piss on the graves of a group of journalists similarly murdered.” “Free expression,” declared Trudeau, “becomes its own kind of fanaticism.” It’s a line that he will carry to his grave. One that will outlive anything he ever wrote in his strip Doonesbury. A fuller quotation is even more stunning in its moral obtuseness. “What free-speech absolutists have failed to acknowledge,” he said, “is that because one has the right to offend a group does not mean that one must. Or that that group gives up the right to be outraged. They’re allowed to feel pain. Freedom should always be discussed within the context of responsibility. At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious. It becomes its own kind of fanaticism.” He concluded, “It’s not easy figuring out where the red line is for satire anymore. But it’s always worth asking this question: Is anyone, anyone at all, laughing? If not, maybe you crossed it.” Pre-massacre, Charlie Hebdo had a paid circulation of 60,000. Someone was laughing. Trudeau can’t picture himself or his friends reading Charlie Hebdo, so he thinks no one else must be reading it either. That Olympian inability to peer down through the cloud cover that separates the super-elite from ordinary people is death to the comic sense. Is it any wonder than you never hear anyone talk about Doonesbury anymore? When I was at Yale in the 1980s the cartoonist’s name was frequently the first one mentioned when the subject of distinguished alumni came up. I doubt today’s Yale students even know his name. Trudeau is correct when he says satire should punch up, not down. But fanatical Islam is not a homeless guy begging for spare change in a doorway. Islamism is a mighty, well-funded, global menace whose murderous arms extend from Kandahar Province to Boylston Street. Islamism is the world’s leading threat to peace, democracy, women’s rights, gay emancipation and, yes, free expression. It is the single most terrifying force on Earth. Charlie Hebdo didn’t claim Muslims “gave up the right to be outraged.” They can be outraged if they want. What they may not do, if they want to be considered part of the civilized world, is attack people in response. “Free expression becomes its own kind of fanaticism”? If you say, “I hope the Yankees destroy the Mets tonight,” you’re a kind of fanatic. But not quite the same kind as the suicide bomber who says, “I hope I destroy a lot of infidels tonight.” In 45 years as a satirist, Trudeau hasn’t figured out the distinction the rest of us made on the playground. Sticks and stones and AK-47s and sneaker bombs and flaming underwear may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. As cartoonist Nate Beeler told The Washington Post, “I can tell you that you’ll never see me draw a cartoon about Garry Trudeau being savagely beheaded by free-speech absolutists.” One side demands the freedom to speak. The other seeks to kill. These two sides are not close to being moral equivalents. Oh, and firing a guy for anti-Semitic jokes is not like murdering him. “Because one has the right to offend a group does not mean that one must” is a literally true statement, but a puzzling one. Does Trudeau think that the Charlie Hebdo editors wanted a law mandating that everyone offend a Muslim? Yet the Charlie Hebdo editors knew that we could, if we had their guts, neutralize Islamism with our wits. If every newspaper and art gallery and movie studio distributed an image of Muhammad — if, indeed, they merely mocked Islam as much as they mocked Christianity — jihadists would have to bow to the reality that they lack the resources to murder everyone involved. They would have to recognize that their rage is directed at modernity itself. They’d have to wake up from their beautiful dreams of 72-virgin orgies and notice that they’re living in the 21st century.TOWSON, Md. (WJZ)—Let’s go, Tigers! Towson University has a national championship within sight. The football team plays for the title Saturday. Linh Bui has all the excitement leading up to the big showdown. An incredible season for the Towson Tigers all leads to this weekend. “Go Tigers! Woot!” said Carlos Serrano, Towson University graduate student. The Division I FCS Championship Game is Saturday afternoon in Frisco, Texas. “I can’t believe that Towson made it this far. And I’m pumped to watch the game with all my friends,” said Victoria Richardson, Towson University sophomore. The Tigers face a tough opponent. No. 1 seed North Dakota State is the two-time defending champion. School spirit is stronger than ever. Richardson says the excitement has spread all over campus. “Oh definitely!” she said. “Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. Everything’s about the game tomorrow!” The enthusiasm is spreading to local businesses like Charles Village Pub and Patio. “We are so excited for tomorrow’s big game. We’re expecting a packed house,” said Melony Wagner, Charles Village Pub & Patio owner. They’re handing out game day goodies. “Glasses are yellow and black, so they’re themed for Towson. T-shirts are yellow,” said Vicki Victoriano, Charles Village Pub & Patio officer manager. And the owner estimates a 200 percent boost in business Saturday. “We’re having some drink specials, some food specials. I think we have 40 TVs. So the game will be playing all over the place,” Wagner said. Gov. Martin O’Malley even bet some Maryland crab cakes on the game. “The governor of North Dakota–the wager that he put on the table so to speak was some home-grown North Dakota pasta,” O’Malley said. Fans are confident about the title. “I definitely think they’re gonna win, no doubt. I got a lot of confidence in them,” said Andre Hounshell, Towson University student. They are proud of how far the Tigers have come. “Let’s go! We can do this! And we got you. Alright? We got you!” Serrano said. More than 3,000 fans are headed to Texas to cheer on the Tigers in person. The Towson Tigers take on North Dakota State on Saturday at 2 p.m. It will air nationally on ESPN 2. Other Local News:Here at Consumerist, we’re no stranger to the occasional restaurant receipt story: whether it’s a customer leaving a rude message, a discriminatory tip, or an employee calling customers names. In the most recent incident, a couple reportedly left a note to inform their waitress “her place is in the home.” Fox Carolina reports that on Oct. 13, a waitress at a Greenville, SC, restaurant had just finished clearing the table when the couple who had just left returned to quickly leave a note for her. The note, written on a napkin, commended the waitress for her “excellent service,” but also chastised her for choosing to work at the restaurant in the first place. According to the couple, the waitress’ “place is in the home.” “You may think that you’re contributing to your household by coming into work, but you’re not,” the note reads, while also suggesting that because the woman works her husband is seeking out another woman on his “way home from a long day at his work.” “I felt mortified, embarrassed, humiliated even. I felt hurt, and a bit heartbroken,” the waitress said. “It is a bit disheartening and discouraging that things like this happen at this day and age.” If the couple had asked, they would have found out that this waitress has no spouse or little ones. “I have never been married, and have no children,” she tells WYFF-TV. “I have a very loving and supportive boyfriend who has been by my side as I have been working and trying to further my education.” She says the couple — estimated to be in their mid-50s — were friendly and polite while she’d served them. A friend of the waitress submitted a photo of the note to Fox Carolina. Here’s what it states in its entirety: “Thank you for your excellent service today – you’re a good waitress. Here’s your tip: The woman’s place is in the home. Your place is in the home. It even says so in the Bible. You may think that you’re contributing to your household by coming into work, but you’re not. While you’re in here ‘working’ this is the reason your husband must see another woman on his way home from a long day at his work. Because you should be home taking care of the household duties, you may think what you are doing ‘working’ is right, it is really essentially a disgrace to his manhood and to the American family. So instead of coming to your ‘job’ and looking for handouts to feed your family, how’s about going home and cleaning your house and cooking a hot meal for your husband and children, the way your husband and God intended, and help make America great again. Praying for families and our nation. Love, (Guests’ last name)” SC waitress heartbroken after receiving tip saying ‘A woman’s place is in the home’ [Fox Carolina]Perception is mathematically impossible. This might seem like a bold statement—after all, you are perceiving these letters right now—but it’s nonetheless true. Imagine a black-and-white line drawing of a cube on a sheet of paper. Although this drawing looks to us like a picture of a cube, there are actually an infinity of other three-dimensional figures that could have produced the same set of lines when collapsed on the page. But we don't notice any of these alternatives. Happily for all of us, our visual systems have more to go on than just bare perceptual input. They use heuristics and short cuts, based on the physics and statistics of the natural world, to make the “best guesses” about the nature of reality. Just as we interpret a two-dimensional drawing as representing a three-dimensional object, we interpret the two-dimensional visual input of a real scene as indicating a three-dimensional world. Our perceptual system makes this inference automatically, using educated guesses to fill in the gaps and make perception possible. It turns out that our brains use the same intelligent guessing process to reconstruct the past, in addition to using it help perceive the world. Memory itself is not like a video-recording, with a moment-by-moment sensory image. In fact, it’s more like a puzzle: we piece together our memories, based on both what we actually remember and what seems most likely given our knowledge of the world. Just as we make educated guesses in perception, our minds’ best educated guesses help “fill in the gaps” of memory, reconstructing the most plausible picture of what happened in our past. The most striking demonstration of the minds’ guessing game occurs when we find ways to fool the system into guessing wrong. When we trick the visual system, we see a “visual illusion”—a static image might appear as if it’s moving, or a concave surface will look convex. When we fool the memory system, we form a false memory—a phenomenon made famous by researcher Elizabeth Loftus, who showed that it is relatively easy to make people remember events that never occurred. As long as the falsely remembered event could plausibly have occurred, all it takes is a bit of suggestion or even exposure to a related idea to create a false memory. In the Blink of an Eye In past literature, visual illusions and false memories have been studied separately. After all, they seem qualitatively different: visual illusions are immediate, whereas false memories seemed to develop over an extended period of time. A surprising new study blurs the line between these two phenomena, however. The study, conducted by Helene Intraub and Christopher A. Dickinson, both of the University of Delaware, reveals an example of false memory occurring within 42 milliseconds—about half the amount of time it takes to blink your eye. Intraub and Dickinson’s study relied upon a phenomenon known as “boundary extension”, an example of false memory found when recalling pictures. When we see a picture of a location—say, a yard with a garbage can in front of a fence—we tend to remember the scene as though more of the fence were visible surrounding the garbage can. In other words, we extend the boundaries of the image, believing that we saw more fence than was actually present. This phenomenon is usually interpreted as a constructive memory error—our memory system extrapolates the view of the scene to a wider angle than was actually present. The new study, published in the November issue of the journal Psychological Science, asked how quickly this boundary extension happens. The researchers showed subjects a picture, erased it for a very short period of time by overlaying a new image, and then showed a new picture that was either the same as the first image or a slightly zoomed-out view of the same place. They found that when people saw the exact same picture again, they thought the second picture was more zoomed-in than the first one they had seen. When they saw a slightly zoomed-out version of the picture they had seen before, however, they thought this picture matched the first one. This experience is the classic boundary extension effect. So what was the shocking part? The gap between the first and second picture was less than 1/20th of a second. In less than the blink of an eye, people remembered a systematically modified version of pictures they had seen. This modification is, by far, the fastest false memory ever found. Although it is still possible that boundary extension is purely a result of our memory system, the incredible speed of this phenomenon suggests a more parsimonious explanation: that boundary extension may in part be caused by the guesses of our visual system itself. The new dataset thus blurs the boundaries between the initial representation of a picture (via the visual system) and the storage of that picture in memory. So is boundary extension a visual illusion or a false memory? Perhaps these two phenomena are not as different as previously thought. False memories and visual illusions both occur quickly and easily, and both seem to rely on the same cognitive mechanism: the fundamental property of perception and memory to fill in gaps with educated guesses, information that seems most plausible given the context. The bottom line? The work of Intraub and colleagues adds to a growing movement that suggests that memory and perception may be simply two sides of the same coin. Are you a scientist? Have you recently read a peer-reviewed paper that you want to write about? Then contact Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer, the science writer behind the blog The Frontal Cortex and the book Proust Was a Neuroscientist. His next book, How We Decide, will be available in February 2009.Happiness in Scotland has “never been higher”, according to a new report. The Bank of Scotland’s annual Happiness Index has recorded growth in contentment levels every year since the study began three years ago, with an 8 per cent increase in the last year alone. People living in the Mid-Scotland area – Clackmannanshire, Perth and Kinross and Renfrewshire – are the happiest in the country, while those aged 65 and over recorded the highest happiness levels of any age group, the study found. The index examines how happy Scots are in the communities in which they live. Overall, this year’s findings show that people north of the Border are 12 per cent happier than when the survey began in 2015. Those in the Central Scotland area are almost 50 per cent more happy than they were last year. The least happy group was Glasgow, with the index showing people there are 40 points less happy than those in Mid-Scotland. The index continues to show that contentment improves with age, with those 65 and over remaining the happiest in Scotland. People aged between 35 and 44 were found to be the least happy. People living with a partner scored the highest results for happiness, while those living alone are the least happy for the second year running. Their happiness has fallen by 11 points since the index began. Those with the lowest personal and household incomes recorded the lowest happiness scores, while the happiest group was those with personal and household incomes between £40,000 and £59,999. Bank of Scotland director Mike Moran said: “We’ve been tracking happiness in Scotland for three years now and over that period of time we’ve seen plenty of movement between which regions are the happiest in the communities in which they live. “This year the Mid-Scotland region’s happiness score increased by over five points, putting them at the top of the Happiness Index and achieving the highest recorded score since the Index began. “Overall, happiness in Scotland has never been higher, with the index showing growth every year since 2015, and increasing by 8 per cent in the last year alone.” The research was completed by YouGov, based on 2,007 online interviews with adults living in Scotland. The interviews were conducted on 1-9 December last year.Micheál Martin breezed into Dublin Castle on Saturday afternoon in high spirits. And why not? The Fianna Fáil leader had backed the right horse in the referendum and Bobby Aylward in Carlow-Kilkenny was set to reverse the party’s embarrassing record of six byelection losses on the trot. His entourage comprised Limerick TD and national campaign director Niall Collins; party general secretary Seán Dorgan; Martin’s chef-de-cabinet, Deirdre Gillane; and his trusted spindoctor Pat McParland. Tickets to attend the official declaration inside the castle were thin on the ground. Fianna Fáil was given four. And Averil Power didn’t get one. Perhaps Micheál didn’t want to look her in the eye while he basked in the reflected glory of a decisive Yes vote which his Senator had worked so tirelessly to help bring about. Perhaps he was embarrassed, thinking of that recent meeting in Kilkenny when he allegedly stood idly by as some of his TDs and Senators guffawed at the very suggestion that they might actually go out in public and do a bit of canvassing in support of same-sex marriage. All they wanted to do was canvass for Bobby Aylward. Odd leaflet The lads were highly amused. Sure they couldn’t be doing that. There’s a general election coming up, and you wouldn’t want to be upsetting anyone on the doorsteps by talking about the gays, and the way they might look at you. We were curious about Power’s absence from much of Saturday’s celebrations. Some members of the Yes Equality group sought us out to say she had no ticket. They were angry about it. (Funnily enough, we knew this already. Late last week she canvassed neighbours of this column who asked her for tickets to Dublin Castle, only to be told that she didn’t actually have one herself). Still, Micheál was delighted with the result. “It’s an historic day for Ireland. I think that the outcome of this vote will reflect very well on Ireland as a society that is committed to equality and justice for all,” he declared in one of his many interviews. And he paid tribute to those involved in managing the Yes campaign for what he termed “a very successful, very well thought out and strategic campaign”. Power, meanwhile, finally secured a pass from the party press office. It didn’t allow her into the inner sanctum for the declaration. She wore it around her neck on a lanyard. The name on it was Doreen. So does that matter? Well, it does. Because during the campaign, and in the run-up to it, Power was a one-woman show in the dismal Fianna Fáil marriage equality push. Sadly, it seems the cute-hoor strain of old-school Fianna Fáil politics asserted itself when the potentially damaging issue of same-sex marriage became a live issue. But to be fair, the party had a vital byelection to win. Veteran politician Bobby, a former TD and very popular candidate, had to be brought over the line. Averil’s pleas for a bit of help on the referendum front fell on deaf ears. Two months ago she printed up leaflets, then left the template with party headquarters which agreed to print them for politicians around the country. According to Power, not one TD or Senator availed of the offer. A number of councillors did. It was no surprise when she resigned from Fianna Fáil, delivering a damning indictment of the party in the process yesterday. She said the party lacks “courage, commitment and conviction” and Micheál Martin is a leader with no followers, of a party which lacks identity and cohesion. At midday Power gave a press conference on the Leinster House plinth. She was nervous and clearly emotional as she delivered her statement, holding it in a trembling hand but reading words which packed a strong punch. Afterwards, Power, who now joins the packed ranks of the Independents, broke down in tears and was comforted by two supporters. Her erstwhile leader was quick off the blocks to defend himself and his party. Micheál the Moderniser promptly threw his young, female, progressive Senator – his one and only – under the bus. Something he has proved incapable of doing with any of the lads causing him no end of grief since he took over. He went in with studs flying. It’s all about local politics and Averil is trying to stand unopposed in Dublin Bay North, he said, while the likes of Seán Haughey deserved a run too. “This is at the heart of it.” Gross distortion Tellingly, Lawlor mentioned that he chose to fight his corner on condition that Power wasn’t there to challenge him live on air. “You said you wouldn’t mix it with her.” Meanwhile, Irish Times reporter Sarah Bardon rang around some of the lads to find out if there was substance to the account of the Kilkenny meeting. One, who wished to remain anonymous (obviously), squirmed, “well, I wouldn’t say that they laughed at her, as such. They kind of scoffed at it.” As for the departed Power, she had this to say about her colleagues who conveniently mislay the courage of their convictions in case it might compromise their seats, “I don’t agree with what Jim Walsh says [a FF Senator who resigned the party over marriage equality] but I’ve more respect for him than I have for the rest of them.”The former works Citroen and Ford World Rally Championship driver will compete in an OlsbergsMSE prepared Fiesta at the event, partnering the squad’s regular drivers Niclas Gronholm and Kevin Eriksson. As announced on Monday, two weeks after Duval races the third OMSE car, fellow former WRC driver Guy Wilks will race it at Lydden Hill. "I am very happy to be driving with Olsbergs MSE at the WorldRX event in Mettet,” said Duval, who finished on the podium 14 times in his WRC career. “I am looking forward to my first test. I wanted to find a competitive car for this event. I did not want to miss it, it's close to home and I have many fans looking forward to watching. "Rallycross is a discipline that I like, do not need to do a recce for days before, and the show is exciting.” The Belgian driver won his home round of the FIA European Rallycross Championship at Maasmechelen in 2010, driving a Ford Focus prepared by compatriot Koen Pauwels. He raced a Marklund Motorsport Volkswagen Polo in the first World RX event to be run in the country in 2014 but despite being fast, didn’t make the semi-finals due to problems in the qualifying races. Last season, Duval competed in the European side of the Mettet event in an aging Ford Focus and made the final, but to retire with accident damage.In our world of both exponential growth and accelerating innovation, systems of repetition are "doomed to collapse." We need to make radical changes to the frameworks in which we operate. The world is now an interconnected neural network, where problems are considered shared and where solutions are crowdsourced—we're no longer living in silos. This power of connection has begun—and will continue—to reveal what we are capable of. We must work together to redefine what “growth” and “development” really mean. What will the world look like in 50 years? Dare to imagine... The Skoll World Forum reconvened for another year across Oxford's cobbled streets. During the opening plenary, Jeff Skoll, founder and chairman of the Skoll Foundation, Participant Media and the Skoll Global Threats Fund, identified 10 key achievements in social entrepreneurship over the past 10 years—achievements that are a testament to the world's growing community of changemakers. 10) Technology drives social, and social drives technology. Skoll cited the increase in mobile phone ownership as having implications on society and the ways in which we design solutions to challenges. 9) We now have global government commitments to scaling up social innovation, particularly from leadership in the U.K., Canada and the U.S. 8) Muhammad Yunus (Global Academy Member) and Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to create economic and social development from below." 7) Al Gore, Jr. and the IPCC were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change." 6) Deforestation rates are on the decline. Brazil, which was responsible for a third of the world’s carbon emissions, has reduced these by two billion tons—the single greatest reduction in carbon emissions in history. 5) Billions of people now have access to clean water. “The 2015 goal to halve the number of people without access to safe drinking water had been met in 2010, five years ahead of schedule,” said Skoll. 4) Social Entrepreneurship has turned mainstream! There are now 40 million people with careers in social entrepreneurship, with more than 200 million volunteers lending a helping hand. Contrast this to 10 years ago, Skoll said, when the leaders of the social entrepreneur movement were “rogue disruptors.” (For more on the evolution of social entrepreneurship over the years, catch Bill Drayton's conversation with Tim West from Pioneers Post.) 3) Global markets are steadily shifting towards sustainability. The future of business is social. Lourenço Bustani, one of Fast Company's 100 most creative people in business, has said that "the tipping point was reached in 2012." 2) We have made significant progress against significant killers. Eight million lives had been saved from HIV and AIDS, parasitic guinea worm disease is set to follow smallpox as the next disease to be completely eradicated, and polio is in line to disappear after that. 1) Fewer people are living in poverty than ever before. Skoll says the “disappearance of poverty is tantalizingly close” with the possibility that we could bring extreme poverty to virtually zero in the next generation. For the first time since poverty rates have been monitored, rates are falling in every region. This post was written by Felicity McLean (@flickmclean), the communications manager at Ashoka UK. Ashoka CEO and Founder Bill Drayton is ahead of the curve, and has outlined the ways in which changemakers can tip a system. (Hint: It takes empathy.) Follow Ashoka's activities at Skoll with the #AshokaAtSkoll hashtag, and follow the broader conversation at #SkollWF.A monthslong conflict over a plan to send eight chimpanzees from a laboratory in the United States to a wildlife park in England intensified this week when animal welfare groups and primate sanctuaries went to court for the second time to stop the move. The New England Anti-Vivisection Society, an animal rights group, is leading the effort to block the United States Fish and Wildlife Service from allowing the move. After the society brought a similar lawsuit in November to stop the transfer, the wildlife service pulled back from its initial decision to grant the permit and reopened public comment. The chimpanzees in question are longtime residents of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. Yerkes is trying to reduce the number of its chimpanzees because of a change in research focus. Also, medical experiments using chimpanzees have become almost impossible because of new regulations. Yerkes gave seven chimps to the Chattanooga Zoo
M5, it is great to be able to use the touch and drag AF feature as well as zoom in on the actual EVF to get precise focus. The image below was taken in manual focus with the aid of focus peaking through the EVF. Two things I struggle with are manual focus and holding a camera steady when using the rear LCD and hand holding the shot. Having focus peaking has helped me to no longer fear manual focus and be able to hold the camera up against my head to better steady myself, which is something I had trouble with when using the M3. Conclusion The M5 is the camera I never knew I needed, but now can’t live without. For some, it may be something they feel isn’t competitive enough in the current APSC mirrorless market. For others such as myself, it’s a great carry around or second body that suits their style of photography. If I was just starting out again I would personally prefer a body like the M5 as you get something small that you can take everywhere, as well lenses from 3 different mounts to choose from when using Canon’s adaptor. Below are some more images that I’ve taken with the M5. Thanks for reading and you can expect to see many more photos from me using the M5. Over the next week or two I hope to use the body more with my EF lenses. If anyone has any questions or would just like to say hi, don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments section below.Along with her creative partner Jenni Konner, Dunham talks about expanding her feminist newsletter, the legacy of 'Girls' and rebranding her 'Women of the Hour' podcast. When Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner launched Lenny Letter in September 2015, they hoped one day it'd be more than an email newsletter. Only six months in, the digital outlet has advanced the feminist conversation with such powerhouse bylines as Jane Fonda, Michelle Obama and Jennifer Lawrence — who put Lenny on the map when she penned an essay on Hollywood's gender pay gap, opening the door for other prominent women to do the same. Now, both Julianne Moore and Shonda Rhimes have pieces in the queue. The newsletter has kept up momentum by offering fresh takes on complex and oftentimes taboo issues, from gang rape to domestic violence to abortion, with a biweekly mix of personal essays and in-depth Q&As. And it’s developed a loyal following doing so — the newsletter now boasts more than 400,000 subscribers and an impressive 70 percent open rate, which it's been able to monetize thanks to an advertising deal with Hearst. "The newsletter was a way to take the temperature of an audience and see if there really was a place for us to step into other media with the Lenny voice," says Dunham. Now, as the creative duo prepare to bid farewell to their acclaimed HBO series Girls in 2017, Dunham, 29, and Konner, 44, plan to expand the Lenny brand and, as The Hollywood Reporter can exclusively report, are in negotiations with HBO to team for what the pair describes as a series of 22-minute short films written and directed by women. "Instead of just discussing issues, we want Lenny to be a part of something that gives opportunities," Dunham says of the collaboration with the premium cable network, with which they have other scripted projects in development via their Los Angeles-based production company A Casual Romance. Among them: Max, a 1960s-set feminism comedy pilot starring Zoe Kazan. Lenny’s influence soon will extend into the print world, too. Dunham and Konner are launching a book imprint with Random House, the publisher of Dunham's best-selling memoir Not That Kind of Girl, which will focus on emerging voices in fiction and nonfiction. With the first book expected to drop in 2017, Dunham and Konner join the ranks of other celebrities who have dabbled in the publishing sphere with book imprints of their own, including Oprah Winfrey, Gwyneth Paltrow, Brett Ratner and Chelsea Handler. As they prepare to launch an empire with Lenny, Dunham and Konner sat with THR to discuss the legacy of Girls, the backstory on Lawrence's poignant essay and why they aren’t ruling out other multimedia formats for Lenny. With Girls ending next year, what does the next phase of your career look like? KONNER Well, we started Lenny six months ago and we were really surprised and thrilled by the reaction. It was so strong and we’re enjoying it so much that we’re trying to figure out as many platforms for Lenny as we can. So, the [Women of the Hour] podcast will become a Lenny podcast [it will return in the fall with 10 episodes instead of five], and we’re doing a short-film series for Lenny in collaboration with HBO, which is perfect. We don’t know what the limits are of Lenny. DUNHAM We’re also going to be starting a book imprint with Random House. KONNER Yeah, we have our first book. There’s a lot of things floating around in our heads, bubbling up, as we’re trying to figure out all the things Lenny can be. So Lenny will ultimately become much more than an email newsletter and website? DUNHAM We love the newsletter and it will always sort of be Lenny’s flagship, but the newsletter was a way to take the temperature of an audience and see if there really was a place for us to step into other media with the Lenny voice. What we were really trying to do with Lenny was to find a way to bring humor and pathos and complexity to some issues — be it reproductive justice or complicated legislation about domestic violence — that can feel alien and alienating. And it’s been amazing to see how hungry our audience is for that kind of content. What reaction to Lenny has surprised you the most? DUNHAM Some of the conversations that have been able to spring up around launching Lenny, like when we saw Valerie Jarrett from the White House congratulate Bradley Cooper on saying that he was going to share his wage info with his female co-stars. We were like, “Hey! That’s our newsletter, guys!” It was just such a thrilling moment to see these things not just becoming dialogue but actually translating into action. Did you expect Lenny to be the conversation starter it has been? DUNHAM Every day we’re like, “Is this real?” My Lenny [landed in] my inbox this morning and I was like, “Oh my God, this is still happening! Jane Fonda! That’s awesome!” I got amazing responses [to the Jane Fonda piece, entitled 'My Convoluted Journey to Feminism.'] Every woman in my life over 50 years old emailed me about it. I was just so excited to see that they were feeling awesome and represented and heard. They are getting to hear one of their heroes talk about a journey she had where she wasn’t perfectly sure the whole time. How does a piece like that come about? Do you reach out to them or do they come to you? DUNHAM It happens both ways. What’s exciting though is we’re increasingly seeing women come to us thinking about Lenny as a potential platform for their ideas. KONNER I think once the Jennifer Lawrence piece came out — because it was such a big deal and she was so brave and raw and such a good writer — all of a sudden other people thought, “Well, I can do that, and I have something to say, too.” So, did Jennifer Lawrence approach you guys? DUNHAM I actually reached out to her before Lenny even launched, before we were even public about it. I just said to her, “Hey, we’re starting this feminist newsletter. If there’s anything you ever want to say, think of us.” And I expected her to be like, “Sure, great,” lovely and polite as she is. But I think she really did have something she had been waiting to find a safe channel to express, and we were really, really lucky that she trusted us so early in our process because we think it opened up the doors for a lot of other women to do the same. It’s so exciting — we have pieces coming out in the next few months from Julianne Moore, Shonda Rhimes, Amanda Peet, Joy Bryant, just an amazing collection of women who have a lot to say and have wanted to say it outside the form of an interview. As wonderful as journalists are, the fact is that when you speak it’s going to be dissected in a very particular way. You have a real power when you speak in your own words. And it’s really cool to see female actors, who have historically been relegated to be just these pretty faces, be so excited to express themselves on such a personal level. Who else is on your wish list? DUNHAM Hmm, well, do you know what one of our staffers said the other day? "The Lenny conversation: Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan." Like, a makeup on Lenny. Whether that’s even realistic for legal reasons I can’t begin to say, but it would be really nice. Also, I’ve been chasing Babs Streisand for a little while, so if she hears this call, I got a lot of questions for you, girl. What exactly will your latest collaboration with HBO entail? KONNER They’ll be short films for HBONow that are directed and written by female-identifying writers and directors. They will be based on short stories by women, and their crew is going to be 50 percent female, mandatory. They will just be little 22-minute passion projects. [The deals for this venture have not yet closed.] DUNHAM Jenni and I have really been lucky enough to be part of the conversation about the lack of representation of women in Hollywood and people of color in Hollywood. So instead of just discussing issues, we wanted Lenny to be a part of something that gives opportunities, and we were lucky enough that HBO, being our longtime partner, felt like that was a worthy goal. Also, the short film is such a beautiful form that has so much to offer. It is so delightful and is often overlooked, so we’re excited to try to find a way to do that intelligently that gives a whole new kind of content, and hopefully lets our [Lenny] readers behind the scenes of the process of making the films. Part of what Jenni and I want to do is make being a writer or being a director or being a producer seem less like this ivory tower job and more accessible. So by creating a film series in which we’re giving work opportunities to people who identify as female and also let our readership look at the process, we’re hoping to just be a part of the change we want to see in the world. You mentioned that you’ll require that half of the crew on these future short films be women. Do you have any sort of mandate like that for your writers rooms? KONNER The Girls writers room has just sort of developed over time, but certainly when we were staffing Lenny it was something we thought a lot about. We didn’t have a specific percentage in mind but were like, “We need diverse voices,” and we went out and looked for them. DUNHAM Obviously having been a part of the real conversation about diversity on all ends — both as subjects of criticism and people who are criticizing — it’s something that is always on our minds. With Girls on its way out next year, what do you want the legacy of the show to be? DUNHAM I would feel really happy if we freed up some space for women to be complicated and unlikable and allow them to make some tough choices on television. I think that even in the time we’ve been on, we’ve seen so many more of those kinds of females appear on television — ones that used to be few and far between. I mean, they’ve always existed. There’s always been your Mary Tyler Moores and your Maudes and your important kind of pioneering women, but it’s funny because I just was recently rewatching Ally McBeal and I was reminded by how scandalized people were by her because she wasn’t professional at the time and cried in the bathroom and pitted people against each other. I was like, “That’s just another Wednesday on Girls.” I feel really lucky that we get to make a show that is not just one of those women but a bunch of those women interacting with each other. KONNER Equally, I hope that we leave some space for behind-the-scenes women running shows more. So many more women since we started are running shows. There’s the queen of television, Shonda Rhimes, and it exists, but there’s still a big disparity between men and women. The show is the two of us, our two highest-level producers are women and our production companies are filled with women, so I think if we can [keep] pushing the ball forward for women, we’re doing our job. DUNHAM And I think in the coming years as we continue to figure out what Girls meant to us, we really do want to be open about our experience and be a resource to other women who would want to do what we’re doing with the show and who would want to understand what it was like writing female characters like this in the public eye. You also have other projects in the works at HBO, including the 1960s-set feminism pilot Max starring Zoe Kazan. What can you tell us about that project? DUNHAM That’s not something we can really discuss right now, but what I will say is that it was really fun to shoot something else with a really strong female lead and just continue to explore our voice and to support other writers that we really like. I love directing and I love being able to have the opportunity to focus on it without the kind of schizophrenia that comes with trying to do two or three jobs at once. So I hope there’s more just directing or just writing in my future because it’s really refreshing for me. Even when I direct, say, a short fashion film for my sister-in-law, it’s a thrilling thing for me to just be able to focus on that one part of the craft.Morgan Brian No. 1 pick by Houston Dash in NWSL draft Icon SMI The Houston Dash picked University of Virginia midfielder Morgan Brian first in the first round of the NWSL 2015 College Draft. The Houston Dash selected University of Virginia standout Morgan Brian first in the first round of the National Women's Soccer League 2015 College Draft, which was held Friday at the National Soccer Coaches Association of America Convention in Philadelphia. With the 1st pick in the 1st round in the 2014 #NWSL College Draft, #HDU select Morgan Brian from UVA. - NWSL (@NWSL) January 16, 2015 Three UCLA players went among the top four in the draft. Sky Blue FC took UCLA's Sarah Killion second while the Western NY Flash chose fellow UCLA stars Abigail Dahlkemper and Samantha Mewis third and fourth, respectively. Boston College's Stephanie McCaffrey went fifth, picked by the Chicago Red Stars, followed by Pepperdine's Lynn Williams, chosen sixth by the Western NY Flash. Texas Tech's Jaelene Hinkle was the seventh pick in the first round. McCaffrey was sent to Boston after the Breakers traded pick Nos. 9 and 11 to the Red Stars in exchange. Last week, Brian repeated as the recipient of the Hermann Trophy, college soccer's most prestigious individual honor, finishing ahead of finalists Dagny Brynjarsdottir of newly minted national champion Florida State and UCLA's Mewis in the voting. Brian became the fifth woman to win the trophy awarded by the Missouri Athletic Club more than once since it expanded to include players of both genders in 1988. In so doing, Brian joined former North Carolina legends Mia Hamm (1992-93) and Cindy Parlow (1997-98), former University of Portland star Christine Sinclair (2004-05) and former Notre Dame standout Kerri Hanks (2006, 2008) on a list of repeat winners that is as illustrious as it is short. "She's one of the most humble kids I've ever been around, too," Virginia coach Steve Swanson said this season. "The kid's won every award you can win in a lot of ways, and yet you would never know that being around her. It's all about the team, and it always will be with her."Updated 10:15 a.m. PT with a statement from Reddit chief Yishan Wong. Erik Martin, who’s been with Reddit since its early days, has decided to depart from his position as general manager after six years with the company. Martin, who made the news official in a tweet this morning, was in charge of the popular community news sharing site’s biggest character-building moments, such as donating tons of money to good causes, leading the charge against bad tech policy like SOPA/PIPA, making Reddit the largest Secret Santa gift exchange in the world, and much more. Hell, Martin was even listed as one of Time’s most influential people of 2012 for his efforts with Reddit. Hard decision, but after 6 outstanding yrs I’m leaving reddit. Thank you to everyone who helped me along the way & made it an amazing ride! — erik martin (@hueypriest) October 13, 2014 As far as we know, Reddit hasn’t issued an official blog post about Martin’s departure. Likewise, Martin hasn’t said much about the details of his departure, including where he’ll be going post-Reddit and why he decided to leave. VentureBeat is reaching out to both Reddit and Martin for more detail, and will update this post with any new information. (Update: Fittingly, Martin responded to VentureBeat to say he’ll only be responding to questions about his departure via animated GIFs on Twitter today.) The move comes weeks after Reddit closed a massive $50 million round of funding from a handful of influential investors. Many users feared that the money would change the culture of the site — a fear reinforced most recently with CEO Yishan Wong’s decision to relocate remote employees to San Francisco. Later, Reddit chief executive Yishan Wong provided VentureBeat with the following statement:Sporting Kansas City goalkeeper Tim Melia turned more than a few heads in 2015. The longtime backup earned MLS Comeback Player of the Year honors after an excellent year between the posts, making 82 saves in the process. But one accolade that somehow eluded him last season was an MLS Save of the Week award. Melia wasted little time checking that off his list in 2016, winning Week 3’s MLS Save of the Week for his spectacular stop in the 62nd minute of Sunday's 1-0 win over Toronto FC at Children’s Mercy Park. With the match tied 0-0, Tsubasa Endoh raced onto the end of a Sebastian Giovinco through ball and had only Melia to beat. The rookie put his strike on target, but Melia sprung to his left and touched the ball onto the underside of the crossbar. The reflex save preserved Sporting Kansas City’s clean sheet and ultimately ensured that the club would go its third straight game without conceding a goal through the run of play. Entering this week’s FIFA international window, Sporting Kansas City is the lone MLS team with a perfect record and has started 3-0-0 for the third time in club history — thanks in part to Melia’s performances in goal. The 29-year-old made two brilliant stops in a season-opening win at Seattle Sounders FC, added three saves against Vancouver Whitecaps FC and was called to action four times vs. Toronto. Sporting KC leads MLS with just one goal allowed through Week 3 — a penalty kick against Vancouver. Melia is now 18-8-5 with a 1.08 goals against average in all competitions since becoming Sporting Kansas City’s starting goalkeeper in May 2015.(Last Updated On: August 12, 2018) While diet and nutrition has maintained an untouchable status among cancer treatment, new research is finding that a cancer patient’s choice of diet is critical to their chances of survival. Cancer and nutrition Researchers from Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University have confirmed that diet and nutrition choices are critical in cancer treatment. The researchers investigated the use of nutrition and diet during cancer treatment – not as a primary treatment, but as supportive treatment – also called “palliative cancer care.” Utilizing decades of research that have shown that particular types of diets and foods help prevent cancer, the researchers determined that there are several topics of concern when considering diet during cancer treatment: Eliminating foods linked to increasing cancer reccurrence Eliminating those diets associated with increased cancer risk Reducing inflammation, insulin resistance, and oxidative stress Making sure the diet provided enough calories for energy consumption Making sure the diet contains nutrients that have been lined to preventing cancer While palliative care in cancer is often associated improving quality of life and reducing pain, increasingly research is finding that ones dietary choices play a significant role in not only the contraction of cancer, but in the determination of whether cancer goes into remission. Ensuring enough calories yet preventing problems with glucose control – which encourages metastasis – comes with new research that glucose control is related specifically to whether the carbohydrates in the diet come in the form of whole foods or refined, processed carbohydrates, according to the researchers: “… and such an approach may not only satisfy caloric requirements but also positively impact secondary problems related to sugar consumption, insulin resistance, inflammation, and others …” What diets are best for cancer patients? This has been summarized from the American Cancer Society’s guidelines regarding diet: “choosing whole grains instead of refined grain products” The researchers also investigated the role of red meat and processed meats in cancer care. They reviewed the research which has linked these foods with cancer, and found that prevailing cancer care advice has advised patients to lower red meat and processed meat intake, as recommended by the American Cancer Society: “limiting the amount of processed and red meat eaten” The researchers also acknowledged the research associated with reduced cancer and remission risk with greater consumption of fruits and vegetables, and again this has been recommended by the ACS: “eating at least two and a half cups of vegetables and fruits each day” The researchers also found that increased consumption of refined carbohydrates, and refined fructose (such as high-fructose corn syrup). The research suggests that refined carbs “has been associated with cancer in general” and refined fructose has been linked with greater obesity – which they and most other clinicians discourage in cancer care. The issue of weight control is important in cancer care, because, as stated by the researchers: “However, many patients are overweight at the time of diagnosis or become so after treatment.” They also acknowledged that: “Women diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer might improve overall prognosis and survival by adopting more healthful dietary patterns.” With regard to certain diets, the researchers stated that: “Red and processed meat consumption has consistently gained a reputation as a contributor to disease, including cancer. Data is emerging that red and processed meats may influence disease recurrence and mortality as well, for example, for colorectal cancer survivors. Evidence shows that consumption of red meat can activate cancer genes in the colon such as the MDM2 and ubiquitin genes as well as the WNT gene signaling pathway which is involved in epithelial proliferation and differentiation. Such genetic modulation can facilitate cellular progression to colon cancer.” The research has also supported the implementation of healthy lifestyles: “Prospective observational studies have shown that increased exercise after diagnosis and avoidance of a Western pattern diet (high intake of red and processed meats and refined grains) are associated with a reduced risk of cancer recurrence and improved overall survival in early-stage colorectal cancer after standard therapy.” The researchers also clarified that red meat stimulates inflammation and cancer. Here is their statement: “The data also suggests that red meat, in particular, is pro-inflammatory and procarcinogenic. For example, the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition-Potsdam study of 2,198 men and women found that the consumption of red meat was significantly associated with higher levels of the inflammatory markers GGT and hs-CRP when adjusted for potential confounding factors related to lifestyle and diet. Another study showed that when people were given a 7-day dietary red meat intervention, fecal water genotoxicity significantly increased in response to the red meat intake. These effects included modifications in DNA damage repair, the cell cycle, and apoptosis pathways.” Noting the data, the researchers made a direct recommendation: “Thus, red meat should be minimized or eliminated from the diet of palliative care patients.” The researchers also linked red meat intake with bladder cancer and bladder cancer survivorship. Evidence shows diets increase survival rates The researchers recommendations were confirmed by a study of breast cancer survivors from the Life After Cancer Epidemiology Study. Here 1,901 patients who were diagnosed with early stage breast cancer were followed. Two eating patterns were found among the patients: One had increased consumption of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and poultry (called the “Prudent pattern”). The other, called the “Western pattern – increased consumption of red and processed meats with refined grains. The researchers found that those who adhered the closest with the “Prudent pattern” had lower rates of death from breast cancer or any other cause. Meanwhile those in the “Western pattern” suffered higher incidence of recurrent breast cancers, greater incidence of death from their breast cancer, and increased risk of death from any cause. The researchers summarized their findings: “Overall, the cumulative data suggests that refined carbohydrate and red meat consumption should be avoided or significantly reduced in the diet of patients with cancer as there are many other healthier sources of caloric intake. Achievement and maintenance of a healthy body composition via a plant-based diet high in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains and low in saturated fats and red or processed meats should be the guidelines imparted to patients from their health care providers.” Diets that reduce inflammation and oxidative stress The researchers also investigated dietary choices that reduced inflammation in the body, and minimized free radicals – referred to as oxidative stress – stating: “The literature indeed shows more studies exploring the link between cancer and inflammation. Inflammation itself is associated with high levels of oxidative stress that can damage most of the body’s tissues and genetic material which ultimately can lead to cancer formation.” The researchers then investigated different diets found in the research to be anti-inflammatory, particular Ayurvedic diet: “Ancient cultures also developed and used anti-inflammatory diets, such as in Ayurvedic (a system of traditional medicine native to the Indian subcontinent that stresses plant based treatment), which are now investigated using modern criteria.” A study supporting this in 2012 investigated the use of the Ayurvedic diet in cancer therapy. The research, from the Indian Institute of Technology of Madras, found that Ayurvedic diets offered several avenues for reducing inflammation and halting the “Shared Pathology” between cancer and pro-inflammatory diets. Anti-inflammatory components of the Ayurvedic diet highlighted included triterpenes, which included betulinic acid, boswellic acid, diosgenin, madecassic acid, maslinic acid, momordin, saikosaponins, ursolic acid, and withanolide. These of course are derived from some of the herbs and spices found among Ayurvedic diets, including turmeric, ginger, boswellia and ginseng. Other areas of interest in palliative cancer treatment that were highlighted by the researchers included vitamin D, probiotics and prebiotics, multivitamins and antioxidants including polyphenols and others. REFERENCES: Anthony J. Bazzan, Andrew B. Newberg, William C. Cho, and Daniel A. Monti, “Diet and Nutrition in Cancer Survivorship and Palliative Care,” Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, vol. 2013, Article ID 917647, 12 pages, 2013. doi:10.1155/2013/917647. Kwan ML, Weltzien E, Kushi LH, Castillo A, Slattery ML, Caan BJ. Dietary patterns and breast cancer recurrence and survival among women with early-stage breast cancer. J Clin Oncol. 2009 Feb 20;27(6):919-26. doi:10.1200/JCO.2008.19.4035. Venil N. Sumantran and Girish Tillu, “Cancer, Inflammation, and Insights from Ayurveda,” Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, vol. 2012, Article ID 306346, 11 pages, 2012. doi:10.1155/2012/306346. Please share this to help someone else. Print Facebook Tumblr Twitter Email Reddit Pocket Pinterest LinkedIn WhatsApp MoreA wise (fictional) race car driver once said, if you ain’t first, you’re last. That was not the case Wednesday night at the Stateline Speedway in Post Falls. “In the event that we run all the laps, someone could win without all the boats destroyed,” said raceway promoter Larry Bertrand to a handful of drivers brave enough to enter the night’s main event, the full-contact boat race. “But, obviously, we’re here tonight to destroy all the boats, and we’re pretty good at it.” Hundreds filled the stands as the sun set, fireworks exploding over the oval track as “The Star-Spangled Banner” welcomed fans to the event. Usually held on the last day of the racing season at the speedway, the track has had such a huge turnout for the boat race that it added another edition for this year’s opening week, Bertrand said. “It’s kind of like ‘The Road Warrior,’ ” he said, referring to the cult classic film starring Mel Gibson that will see a reboot in theaters this summer. But this was no ordinary demolition derby. Stock car drivers dragged a boat behind them, connected by just a chain. If more than half the boat is destroyed, you’re out. If the boat is detached from the car, you’re out. The fastest car may win, but so far, the winner has been the last man standing, Bertrand said. Tim “The Tile Man” Demaine, who wore knee guards betraying his day job as a floor installation specialist, made his sophomore appearance in the event Wednesday. Demaine only recently started racing, a dream of his since he was little, he said. As for how to handle the handicap of dragging a boat from your bumper? Demaine said that was easy. “It’s all right here,” Demaine said, tapping his temple with two fingers. “You just attack. It’s the craziest thing I ever did.” Demaine said he suffered whiplashlike symptoms from his last appearance in the boat race last fall, when his car landed inside a competitor’s watercraft. “Perfect. Drove her right away,” Demaine said of his car. “It took two tow trucks to get it off the boat, but they finally got it off and I drove it in. It’s crazy.” Demaine’s competition had varying strategies for how to use the payload dragged from their fender. Jared Reichenberg, of Spokane, said he would use the fiberglass speeder that a sponsor paid for as an offensive weapon. “Me, personally, I’m going to try to wing it into people, use it as a tailwhip,” Reichenberg said. But Darryl Carillio, who said he’s won 3 of 4 full-contact boat races he’s entered, had a different tack. “I try to forget mine’s there,” said Carillio, who drove a Frankenstein’s monster creation of a 1973 and 1976 Chevy Monte Carlo fused together and painted yellow, dubbed “The Crazy Taxi.” “You don’t want it slapping around, hitting stuff. That’ll tear it up.” When the flag dropped, Reichenberg was first to spin out. Demaine drove across the figure-eight track to strike Carillio’s boat. Carillio responded by driving into Demaine’s red, white and blue watercraft, smashing pinwheels but leaving a stuffed Pink Panther with an Uncle Sam hat miraculously untouched. A few laps later, Carillio struck Demaine’s boat again, splintering it and leaving Joel Schrader, driving a car painted like a police cruiser with an engine built by his dad, as his only compeition on the track. With dozens of cellphone lights from the stands pointed at the carnage below, Carillio finished off Schrader’s boat moments later as the two traded blows, as a thunderous cheer erupted from the crowd. Speed may kill in racing, but the victory proved that, at least in full-contact boat competition, a steady hand and courage may be preferred. “You could be the slowest guy out there and still win it,” Reichenberg said.Ready or not? When creating a new scenario one of the challenges is to decide not only which units should be included but also how many of them will actually be able to fight. So the question is: Ready or not? The German “Bericht zur materiellen Einsatzbereitschaft der Hauptwaffensysteme der Bundeswehr” (Report for the readiness of the main weapon systems of Federal German Army) gives us a change to evaluate the readiness of the weapons of one of the major NATO members. Even though some critics say the report is biased in favor of the Verteidigungsministerium (Ministry of Defense) it is surprising in what a bad shape many systems currently are and how unlikely it is that the situation will improve in the future. The Bundeswehr The Bundeswehr was founded in 1955 when the Federal German Republic regained most of its sovereignty and joined the NATO. Today the Bundeswehr has a strength of 176.752 active soldiers and a budget of 34.3 billion Euro. The budget is supposed to be increased over the coming years to around 40 billion a year in 2020. Even though this puts the Bundeswehr into the top ten of the biggest military spenders the years of austerity after the end of the cold war have left a mark and many systems are outdated and new systems often years behing the scedule. The transition from a conscript army only intended to defend Germany to a professional army operating alongside the German allies all over the globe has also turned out to be a challenge. For more information about the Bundeswehr you can take a look at my article about naming german units here on Baloogan Campaign. The Heer The Heer (army) is the biggest of the four branches of the Bundeswehr. Currently 59.136 soldiers are serving in the Heer. Since COMMAND is concentrating on Air and Naval Operations the weapon systems of the Heer might not be of the biggest concern for this article but should be included nonetheless. Leopard 2 The Leopard 2 is the main battle tank of the Heer and replaced the Leopard 1. The Leopard 2 entered service in 1979 and will remain in service for the foreseeable future even though the development of a successor was announced recently (Main Ground Combat System). In 1990 the Bundeswehr fielded 2125 Leopard 2. The Heer currently has 244 Leopard 2 and on average 167 Leopard 2 were available and 132 of those were considered combat-ready. Additional 84 Leopard 2A7V are supposed to arrive until 2022. The number of Leopard 2 in service is supposed to reach 328 eventually. In 2016 the number of tank battalions was increased and the PzBtl 414 was formed as part of a dutch mechanized brigade under the command of the German 1. Panzerdivision. Even after the arrival of the A7V Version and a possible successor on the horizon plans for further modernization continue including replacing the 120-mm-Glattrohrkanone L/55 with a 130 mm version. Panzerhaubitze 2000 The Panzerhaubitze 2000 (armored howitzer 2000) is a self propelled 155mm howitzer and considered to be among the most advanced and powerful conventional artillery systems in the world. The Heer currently has 124 systems since 22 were sold to Lithuania in 2015. The level of availability is considered to be high. In 2015 66 Systems were available on average and of those 43 were combat-ready. The low rate of combat readiness is supposed to be caused by ongoing modernization and a high wear on the systems caused by exercises. The number of available units is considered to be sufficient for the current tasks of the Heer. Schützenpanzer Puma The Schützenpanzer Puma is a modern infantry fighting vehicle designed to replace the Schützenpanzer Mader. The Puma is armed with a fully stabilized 30 mm autocannon enabling the Puma to fire on the move. As secondary armament the Puma has a 5,56 mm MG4 and Spike anti tank missiles. Germany has ordered approximately 400 Pumas and the first Pumas entered service in 2015. Currently 89 Pumas have entered service with 48 systems available on average with 23 systems ready for service. The system is not yet ready for combat and still under development. Schützenpanzer Marder The Marder remains the weapon of the Panzergrenadiere (mechanized infantery) until the Puma is fully available. The Marder entered service in 1971 and around 2100 Pumas were produced for the Heer. The Marder is armed with a 20mm cannon. Currently 388 Marder are in service of which 321 were available on average. 222 Units were considered combat ready. Heersflieger The situation of the material mentioned above is problematic enough but the Heer manages to fulfill its obligations within the NATO. Really problematic is the situation where planes and helicopters are concerned. Unterstützungshubschrauber Tiger The UHT is a medium-weight multi-role fire support helicopter. Armed with HOT-3 or PARS 3 its main role was to destroy soviet tanks but this has changed over the years even though the missing MG remains problematic. Currently 42 Tiger are in service, 27 available and 12 ready. This is an increase of nearly 50% compared to 2015. Even though the Tiger is not really ready for combat four Tiger were deployed in Afghanistan between 2012 and 2013 and in 2017 the Tiger will be deployed to Mali as part of MINUSMA together with the NH90. Hubschrauber NH90 The NH90 is a medium sized transport helicopter currently entering service. Currently the Heer has 48 Systems with 29 Systems available on average with only 9 fully operational. It remains problematic that a high number of the helicopters are only prototypes, that spare parts are not available and maintenance crews are still training. The development of the NH90 SeaLion is still delayed and the first working units are supposed to arrive not before 2019. Hubschrauber CH-53 The CH-53 is the heavy transport helicopter of the German Heer
A lot of publishers want every story element of a book on the cover, but I think it works better when it invites a reader to make a tonal connection. The text of the book expands on that initial expectation.” He sent Strick a sketch of a woman in three panels, along with a few alternatives: Elyria floating away from a city landscape towards mountains, another under her own reflection, and another under a night sky. “These weren’t really that conceptually different from Charlotte’s initial idea for the cover, but they gave her more perspectives to consider,” he said. Lacey was thrilled with the design. “I feel like I owe Patrick and Charlotte my first born,” she told me in an email. Later, over coffee, she explained that because Nobody is Ever Missing began as separate, short pieces, she hadn’t imagined what her dream cover design might look like. “Fortunately I think FSG nails it when it comes to designing books, so I neither feared the sexy/pink/cake/woman cover nor did I have an ideal cover in mind,” she said. “I think I had pictured the cover being more bold or manic before there was one, but this was so much better. It’s not afraid to be soft. There is a sense in the book of the narrator being slowly swallowed by her unconscious mind and the illustration captures that in a subtle, beautiful way. The sequence of it almost creates a loop. It asks you to keep looking.” Nobody is Ever Missing was met with abundant critical praise: The New York Times called Lacey’s sentences “improbably beautiful,” comparing the debut to Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Joan Didion’s Play it As it Lays. Vanity Fair called it the lyrical, more literary version of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Alternative points of praise showed up on social media: not separate from the book itself, it seemed that the cover too, was garnering attention. Director Joss Whedon posted a photo of the cover on Twitter writing, “I have no words. Catherine Lacey took all the words and put them in here and now I feel less and more alone. Awe.” Musical duo Tegan and Sara’s Instagram of the book against someone’s blue-jean clad lap received over 6,000 likes. These more brief points of praise make me wonder what’s behind the choices we make when we share a book—why post the cover, rather than a favorite quote, for example? As for the attention, could 6,000 likes from Tegan and Sara fans also mean 6,000 new readers? Of course, both Josh Whedon and Tegan and Sara were readers who shared the image because they loved the novel itself, and perhaps they would have shared it even without this particular cover. Still, it’s worth noting that the visual appeal of the cover encouraged the spread of such mentions. I asked Lacey what she thought of this impulse to share a book cover on social media: “It’s a way of bringing somebody into the privacy of your reading experience,” she said. “But the book does become kind of an accessory doesn’t it? Maybe they share it because it looks good or they want to be associated with it. Does that mean they’re not engaging with it? As the writer you’re invited to ask that question.” Every so often, Strick said, she’ll see a stranger on the subway holding a book whose jacket she designed, and she’ll slyly take a picture. “It’ll just make me smile that this thing I labored over that kept me up until three in the morning, that I thought was never going to be approved, is now out in the world.” These sightings fit seamlessly into her goals for what her covers should do. “My hope is to make beautiful objects. I also want them to have conceptual meaning as they interact with the text.” With the growing popularity of e-books, I wonder what will happen to these subway-book-cover-sightings, and how much we might lose of these visual objects. Will the digital age kill the book jacket like it did the album cover? On the subway, instead of book jackets we’d only see each other’s Kindle cases. Leger is optimistic, and noted that even if we’re not reading physical books, the cover art has many opportunities for appearances. “I think the association between a book’s cover and it’s content is probably more important now in the digital age than it ever has been in the past,” he said. “As the Internet becomes more visual, a book’s cover will be what stands out, whether it’s on social media like Instagram or the ‘Also Suggested’ list on Amazon.” Many dedicated book lovers struggle with the idea of e-books, and I think that often the conversation seems to abruptly come to a halt when someone says, “I would miss holding a book in my hands.” Everyone nods emphatically, and I agree, but I wonder if we’re being too stubborn. I like turning physical pages, and I like having the option to throw a book across a room. I like smelling the new book smell, and I like to be able to close a book and savor the content with its cover art. But do these changing modes for reading make way for a less immersive experience, or just a different one? If the book-as-accessory makes a reader less engaged, maybe an e-book (with its accompanying thumbnail image) could immerse some readers even deeper into the content. Lacey pointed out that during her own travels, books became difficult to carry and e-books, of course, would have given her more options. But despite the convenience, she might have lost some unexpected rewards that come with carrying around the same book. Lacey said this is how she came to read Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge three times—an autobiographical aspect of the novel too, as Elyria also travels with Mrs. Bridge. “I was in the middle of nowhere and that’s all I had… I also read Love in the Time of Cholera ten times, because I had to—I was in Japan and there were no books in English.” The cover art helps to build an identity with the content, whether a reader treasures a book as a prized possession, or allows it to fray as it accompanies her on an adventure. “When you get a project it immediately feels like your baby. I am always reminding myself that this is somebody else’s book,” Strick added. “It’s Catherine’s baby before it’s mine. It’s the editor’s baby when they take on the project, and all of us care about what’s going to happen to this book. Then as the reader it becomes yours, your baby up there on the shelf that you want to share with your friends (or on Instagram), and that you’ll never give to Goodwill. I like to think the cover art plays a role in that.”Darryl Pottie is a big Canadiens fan, but he also loves the Pittsburgh Penguins’ Sidney Crosby. So Pottie, who lives in Enfield, N.S., decided to take a wild chance when he learned Crosby would be back in his home province last month for his day with the Stanley Cup in nearby Cole Harbour. Pottie took a big sheet of plywood and wrote: “Sid please sign my jersey”, hanging a Crosby No. 87 Penguins sweater from it. At night, Pottie would bring the jersey in the house, hanging it from the front window and leaving a light on just in case Crosby might drive by after dark. Pottie left the sign up for a week, but then about two weeks ago he needed to use the piece of plywood for something else, so he took it down. “I never really thought too much about it,” Pottie said during a phone interview from his home Sunday. “I figured Sid’s a pretty busy guy, so I certainly wouldn’t blame him one bit for not stopping.” But last Friday, while Pottie was at work in Dartmouth — about a 30-minute drive away — the doorbell rang at his house. Pottie’s wife of 26 years, who was on vacation and wearing a bikini at the time, went to answer the door and couldn’t believe who was standing there. Sidney Crosby. “We don’t get many visitors … it’s in the country,” Patricia Lingley-Pottie said over the phone Sunday. This wasn’t one of those staged Tim Horton’s TV ads where Crosby serves unsuspecting customers their double-doubles from behind the counter. It was just Sid — all alone, wearing a baseball cap backward and a T-shirt. Even though the plywood sign was gone, Crosby obviously remembered the house he must have driven past a couple of weeks before. “Hi … I’m here to sign your jersey,” Lingley-Pottie recalled Crosby saying. “I said: ‘I’m in my bikini … just give me a few minutes,’” Lingley-Pottie added with a laugh, saying she opened the door a bit and then left her 21-year-old daughter, Madisyn, to entertain the surprise visitor while she raced to the bedroom to change. “I was running to the bedroom and all I could hear Madisyn saying was: ‘Come on in … and don’t mind the mess,’” Lingley-Pottie recalled. “I was like: ‘Oh, God!’” Lingley-Pottie quickly put on some more clothes and returned to speak with Crosby, who was already in conversation with Madisyn. They couldn’t find the Sharpie pen Pottie had kept handy in the house when he had his sign up outside, so Crosby went back to his truck to get one and then returned to sign the jersey. “I’m at work and then I get an email from my wife, saying: ‘Look who popped in,’” Pottie recalled. “And it was a picture of my daughter with Sidney Crosby in my living room. I just started screaming: ‘He’s in my house! He’s in my house!’” Crosby ended up spending about 20 minutes chatting with Pottie’s wife and daughter, signing more autographs and posing for photos before leaving. “He was just a normal guy,” Lingley-Pottie said. “Polite and genuine. He was relaxed.” Pottie admits he was disappointed at first that he wasn’t there when Crosby showed up, but that feeling didn’t last too long. “I got thinking about it when I came home and I looked at the jersey and I thought this is incredible … this is just incredible,” Pottie said. “I’m just so happy and elated that he took the time to come up my driveway, to knock on my door, to sign my jersey and talk with my daughter and my wife. They were on the top of the world, as you could imagine.” One of Pottie’s friends, Andrew Titus, put up a Facebook post on Friday about what had happened — along with a photo of the sign that had been outside the house — and by Saturday afternoon it already had more than 2,000 shares. Media members started calling Pottie’s house and his wife said the family thought long and hard about whether they should answer them. “We respect (Crosby) and we were so honoured, I didn’t want to do anything that he might not appreciate,” Lingley-Pottie said about the player’s unannounced visit. “But I think because it is a good story … I think we’re good.” No kidding. Said Pottie: “I’m such a huge fan of Sidney Crosby’s and for him to take his time to do this when he’s being pulled in a million different directions I’m sure … for him to remember this house and take his time and pull in the driveway and knock on a stranger’s door and say: ‘Hi, I’m here to sign your jersey’ … I mean that’s incredible. “It shows just what a down-to-earth, great person he is,” Pottie added. “At the end of the day, he’s just Sid Crosby, hockey player, international superstar, greatest player on earth … and a really nice guy. “I get to put that sweater on my wall now and tell people that story every time they see it. That’s just the greatest thing ever.”In my earlier article on robocar challenges I gave very brief coverage to the issue of parking. Challenged on that, I thought it was time to expand. The world "parking" means many things, and the many classes of parking problems have varying difficulties. The taxi doesn't park One of the simplest solutions to parking involves robotaxi service. Such vehicles don't really park, at least not where they dropped you off. They drop you off and go to their next customer. If they don't have another ride, they can deliberately go to a place where they know they can easily park to wait. They don't need to tackle a parking space that's challenging at all. Simple non-crowded lots Parking in basic parking lots -- typical open ground lots that are not close to full -- is a pretty easy problem. So easy in fact, that we've seen a number of demonstrations, ranging back to Junior 3 and Audi Piloted Parking. Cars in the showroom now will identify parking spots for you (and tell you if you fit.) They have done basic parallel parking (with you on the brakes) for several years, and are starting to now even do it with you out of the car (but watching from a distance.) At CES VW showed the special case of parking in your own garage or driveway, where you show the car where it's going to go. The early demos required empty parking lots with no pedestrians, and even no other moving cars, but today reasonably well-behaved other cars should not be a big problem. That's the thing about non-crowded lots: People are not hunting or competing for spaces. The robocars actually would be very happy to seek out the large empty sections at the back of most parking lots because you aren't going to be walking out that far, the car is going to come get you. The biggest issue is the question of pedestrians who can appear out from behind a minivan. The answer to this is simply that vehicles that are parking can and do go slow, and slow automatically gives you a big safety boost. At parking lot speed, you really can stop very quickly if a pedestrian appears out of nowhere. The car, after all, is not in a hurry, and can slow itself when close to minivans, or if it has noticed pedestrians who are moving near it and have disappeared behind vehicles. Out at the back of a parking lot, nobody cares if you go 5 km/h, or even right down the center of the lane to assure there are no surprises. To the right we see a picture of Junior 3 entering a parking lot, hunting for a space and taking it -- in 2009. Mapping Mapping is still desirable for parking lots. This is particularly true because parking lots, not being public roads, set up their own sets of rules and put up signs meant only for humans. They may direct traffic to be one-way in certain areas in nonstandard ways. They may have gates when you have to pay or insert tickets. Parking spots will be marked reserved for certain cars (Electric vehicle, expectant mother, wheelchair, employee of the month, CEO, customers of company X) with signs meant for humans. It's not necessarily super hard to map a parking lot, just time consuming to encode all these rules. Unlike roads, which everybody drives, any given parking lot likely only serves the people who live, work or shop next to it -- you will never park in 95% of the lots in your city, though you will drive most of its main roads. Somebody has to pay for the cost of that mapping -- either because lots of people want to use the lot, or because the owner of the lot wants to encourage robocars. Fortunately, with the robocars doing things like using the least popular spots, or even valet parking as described below, there is a strong incentive to the owner of a lot to get it mapped and keep it mapped. Only lots that never fill out would have no incentive, and those lots can often be parked in without a map. While you want trained mappers to confirm the geometry of a parking lot, coding in the signs and special rules is a task easily left to the parking lot owner. If the lot manager forgets to tag the CEO's space as reserved, nobody is hurt (except the lot manager when the CEO arrives.) Robocar parking mistakes are easy to fix. Robocars can put a phone number or URL on the back where you can go to complain about a robocar that is parked badly or blocking things. As long as that doesn't happen too often, the cost of the support desk is manageable. The folks at the support desk can look out with the robot's sensors and tell it to move. It's not like finding a human driven car blocking something, where you have to find the owner. In a minute, the robocar will be gone. More crowded lots The challenge of parking lots, in spite of the low speeds, is that they don't have well defined rules of the road. People ignore the arrows on the ground. They pause and wait for cars to exit. In really crowded lots, cars follow people who are leaving at walking speed, hoping to get dibs on their spot. They wait, blocking traffic, for a spot they claim as theirs. People fight for spots and steal spots. People park badly and cross over the lines. As far as I know, nobody has tried to solve this challenge, and so it remains unsolved. It is one of the few problems in robocars that actually deserves the label of "AI," though some think all driving is AI. Even so, on the grand scheme of things, my intuition is that this is not one of the grand unsolved challenges of AI. Parking lots don't have legalized rules of the road, but they do have rules and principles, and we all learn them the more we park. Creating a system that can do well with these rules using various AI tools seems like a doable challenge when the time comes. My intuition is that it's a lot easier than winning on Jeopardy. This system will be able to take advantage of a couple of special abilities of the robocars: They will be able to park and exit spots quickly and efficiently. They won't be like the people you always see who do a 5 point turn to exit their parking spot when you (but not they) can see they still have 5 feet of room behind them. In general, they will be superb parkers, centering themselves as well as possible inside spots They don't need room to open their doors, so they can park right next to walls and pillars. Yes, they could also park right next to badly parked cars which have encroached into other spaces and thus made a space no human can use. There is a risk of course that the bad parker, who finds they can't get in one side, might retaliate. (I've had a guy rip my mirror off in revenge.) In this case, though, they will have a photo of the licence plate and a sensor record of the revenge taking place! In the event of problems or deadlock, they are open to the idea of just giving up and parking somewhere farther away that is easier to park in. Unlike humans they could drive as quickly in reverse as forward to back out of situations. In spite of all this, the cars will want to avoid the full parking lots where the chaos happens. If there is another lot not far away, they will just go there, and require a couple minutes more advance notice from their master when summoned to pick them up. If there is nowhere nearby to park, the car will tell its passenger that she has to do the parking. Robo-valet zones Even in the most crowded lots, there is the potential to easily create zones of the parking lot that are marked: "Robot Valet Parking only. All other cars may be blocked in or towed. No pedestrians." In the car's map, it will indicate what server is handling the robo-valet section, though it is possible to have it work without any communication at all. In the most basic version the car would ask permission to enter the lot. The database might even assign it a spot, but generally it would just enter and take any spot. By "any spot", I mean any piece of pavement, ignoring the lines on the ground. At first the cars would choose spots that let them have an unblocked pack to leave. As soon as too many cars arrive to do that, they would switch to a more dense, valet pattern that blocks in some cars (the ones who said they were leaving latest.) It would report where it parked to the database, as well as how to send it a message, and when it expects to leave. Other cars would arrive. Eventually one would block in your car. If the database has given them a way to communicate (probably over the internet, though if they had V2V they could use that) they might discuss who plans to leave first, and the cars would adjust themselves to put the cars that will leave sooner at the front. This is strongly in the interests of the cars. If you plan to be there a while, you want to go to the back so you don't have to keep moving to let cars behind you out. But it still works, just not as well, if the cars just take any available spot. When it's time to leave, the cars could try to send a message over the data networks to the cars in front of them, but a simpler approach might be to just nudge slightly forward -- a few cm will do it. This will cause the car in the direction of the nudge to notice, and it too would nudge forward, and so on, and so on until the front car moves out, and then all the cars in that row can move out, including your car, which leaves the lot. Then the other cars can move in to fill the spot. If they have a database which maps the cars in that section, they could try to be clever in how they re-fill the empty column to minimize movement. There are even faster algorithms if you leave a few empty spaces. Robocars have the ability to move in concert to "move the space" and put it next to a car that wants to exit. It's more efficient, but not needed. The database becomes more useful if a human driver ignores the signs and tries to park in the lot. That's because the database is the simplest way of spotting a vehicle that's not supposed to be there. As a first step, the cars in the lot could start flashing their lights and honking their horns at the interloper, or even speak human language messages out a speaker. "Hey, this is the robot valet lot, you are blocking me in! We're calling a tow truck to come remove you if you don't leave." Some idiots may still try, and the robots could arrange so that almost all of them can still get out, and if not, they might call that tow truck. The robo-valet section can be at the back of the parking lot, or the top of a structure -- those places the humans park in last. The owner of the lot has a huge incentive to do this, since they can make much more efficient use of their land with the tight valet-dense parking. All the owner has to do is register the lot section in a database -- a database that a company like Google would probably be happy to offer for free to benefit their cars. Human valets could also park cars in this area. They would just need to use an app on their smartphone that tells them where to park and allows them to register that they did it. The robots will want the human-parked cars to park at the back, because they will move out of the way when it's time for the human parked car to be driven back out. The main requirements for this parking area would be that it be reachable from the outside without going through a zone of chaos, and that it then be possible to also reach the pickup/dropoff point for passengers without the risk of getting stuck in chaos. Larger lots tend to have entrance lanes without spots on them that serve this purpose. Pedestrians will still enter the lot, in spite of the sign. Just go extra slow if they are there, and perhaps talk to them and ask them to leave. While you won't actually present a danger to them at your low speed, they probably will heed the advice of 3000lb robots. Perhaps tell them they have 15 seconds to put down their weapon. Robotic sign? To get really clever, the sign marking the border of the Robo-Valet area might itself be on a small robot. Thus, when the robo-valet area gets full, the sign can move to expand the area if space is available. You could expand even into areas occupied by human-parked cars -- just know that they are there and don't block them in -- or move out of their way when needed. Eventually they leave and only robocars enter. When the demand goes down, the sign can easily move to shrink the valet area.1. Fika As you probably know, fika is a Swedish word for a coffee and cake break. You can have a fika with a friend, a relative or a colleague. You can also get asked to go for a fika by someone who fancies you, or someone you've already slept with (but perhaps barely spoken to). If the whole thing sounds confusing – it is. But if you're confident you are being hit on, the word for this is ragga. 'Fika' is a coffee and cake break. Photo: Ulf Lundin/imagebank.sweden.se 2. Mambo Once you're pretty sure the person you're drinking coffee and/or sleeping with likes you in a more romantic way, it might be time to check out their living situation. As well as finding out whether or not they're married (gift), consider also investigating if they are a mambo – the word for someone who lives at home with their mother. It rhymes with sambo, the word for a live-in boyfriend or girlfriend. That's probably a no-no as well, but we'll let you be the judge. Given the difficulties of finding an apartment in Sweden's major cities, you should be aware of broken-up sambos who are temporarily still flat-sharing. READ ALSO: How to find out if your Swedish date is married What a Swedish party might look like if your date lives with his parents. Photo: Carolina Romare/imagebank.sweden.se 3. Bonusbarn If your new partner isn't married, cheating or still stuck in their parents' nest, if they're over 30, there's a good chance they might be divorced (frånskild). Thanks to Swedish gender equality, any children involved usually spend alternate weeks with each parent, which means you could quickly end up spending a lot of time with them too. The word for children in Swedish is barn and the word for stepchildren is bonusbarn, putting a delightfully positive spin on preparing to spend Valentine's Day with little Jonas or Jessica alongside your new lover. What a Swedish party might look like if your new partner has kids. Photo: Johan Willner/imagebank.sweden.se 4. Nota This is the word for a receipt or bill in Sweden. Worth learning as you will almost always be expected to pay your share of any dinner, drink or fika date. Even a 50 kronor ($6) waffle bill is likely to be split in Sweden. Photo: Ulf Lundin/imagebank.sweden.se 5. Kyss It's good to be aware of the difference between kyss and puss in Swedish. The former is more passionate and is pronounced'shiss'; the latter is more of a peck and far more innocent than it sounds in English. Puss is often put on the end of text messages sent between (usually female) friends. So you needn't worry that your colleague is either trying to get intimate with you or commenting on that spot on your chin. By the way 'kiss' is the Swedish word for, well, pee, so be careful how you use that one too. A puss on the cheek. Photo: Stefan Berg/Folio/imagebank.sweden.se 6. Mysa A bit like the English word'snuggle', you'll hopefully be doing plenty of this with your new squeeze if you've managed to navigate your way through all the fikas and the bonusbarn. But don't jump to conclusions if your partner mentions mysa when talking about how they spent their afternoon while you were at the supermarket. You can mysa on your own at home by the fire or in a warm pub. It's a bit like the Danish word 'hygge', a concept for 'cozy time'. Fancy a cozy break by the fire? That's'mysa' time in Swedish. Photo: Fredrik Broman/imagebank.sweden.se 7. Kondom Not the most difficult word to translate from English, but worth a mention as Sweden has been dubbed the STI capital of Europe. It's difficult to imagine organized Swedes running out of condoms, but sexually-active Swedes are more likely than other Europeans to seek treatment for diseases such as chlamydia and gonorrhea. Safe sex is wise wherever you are in the world. Photo: Fredrik Sandberg/TT 8. Systembolaget The name for Sweden's state-run alcohol store empire. It shuts at 7pm on weekdays in big cities and at 3pm on Saturdays. It is not open on Sundays. Swedes can be shy and socially awkward, so if you're staying in rather than going out with your new lover, you might also want to stock up on some wine ahead of the weekend. A Systembolaget store in Sweden. Photo: Leif R Jansson/TT 9. Knullrufs Well done, your relationship is blooming and you're having a great time in the bedroom. Knullrufs is a unique Swedish word for messy 'bed hair' after a roll in the hay. The first half of the word is considered slightly offensive, so best avoid using this one in front of your future in-laws (svärföräldrar). READ ALSO: Why knullrufs is a much better word than both fika and lagom Both men and women can get 'knullrufs'. Photo: Staffan Löwstedt/SvD/TT 10. Orka This is a very common verb in Swedish meaning 'to have the energy'. So when your partner says "jag orkar inte" in the bedroom, it means they'd rather catch up on sleep. This is of course fair enough, but if it starts happening regularly, it could mean you're on the road to splitting up (separera) or skilsmässa (that divorce we mentioned earlier) and having to start all over again with that first awkward fika. If your partner has no energy, at least your sheets won't get too creased. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT This article was written by Maddy Savage in 2015 and updated in 2018.CLOSE A patient at a Sacramento hospital is being tested for possible exposure to the Ebola virus. Officials say the patient is being kept in isolation, but that isn't easing everyone's concerns. VPC This undated photo made available by the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, shows the Ebola virus viewed through an electron microscope. (Photo11: AP) A hospital in northern California reports that it is treating a patient who might have been exposed to the deadly Ebola virus. Kaiser Permanente released a statement Tuesday evening confirming a patient at its South Sacramento Medical Center might have been exposed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention out of Atlanta will test blood samples, the hospital said. "In order to protect our patients, staff and physicians, even though infection with the virus is unconfirmed, we are taking the actions recommended by the CDC as a precaution, just as we do for other patients with a suspected infectious disease," according to the statement. "This includes isolation of the patient in a specially equipped negative pressure room and the use of personal protective equipment by trained staff, coordinated with infectious disease specialists." The hospital said safety of patients and staff is a priority. The patient is in isolation as a precaution, hospital spokesman Edwin Garcia said. According to the CDC, symptoms of the often fatal illness are fever, severe headache, muscle pain, weakness, diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain and lack of appetite. Symptoms might appear anywhere from two to 21 days after exposure to the virus, although eight to 10 days is most common. Ebola can only be spread after symptoms appear. There is no known cure for the virus, but some patients do recover. Four West African countries are experiencing an outbreak of Ebola which, according to the CDC, has been the cause of 1,229 deaths this year. Contributing: KXTV-TV, Sacramento CLOSE Doctors Without Borders says West Africa is fighting a war, not with guns and bullets but with experimental drugs and checkpoints, as Ebola takes its deadly toll. Karen Hendren reports. Video provided by Reuters Newslook Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1oPoJFYToday is officially the first day of summer, and we’re kicking off the season with an evolving list, in no particular order, of entertaining things to do. Below are dozens of suggestions to get you started, and we hope you’ll add more in the comments section below the story. You have until 11 tonight to get your fill of enchiladas, tamales, tostadas and more at the St. John’s Mexican Fiesta, 1234 Kentucky St. Plus: live music, the St. John’s Fiesta Dancers and carnival games for the kids. See Summer Youth Theater’s production of “Twelfth Night” Sunday at the Lawrence Arts Center. See Theatre Lawrence’s production of “The King and I,” through next Sunday, 785-843-7469 for tickets. If the theater bug bites while you’re there, audition July 27 or 28 for “Little Shop of Horrors,” which will be staged in September and October. Visit Lecompton during Historic Lecompton Territorial Days June 27-28. Block out some serious time to spend at the Free State Festival, Wednesday through June 29. It’s the Lawrence Arts Center’s celebration of film, music, art and ideas. (Coming Sunday, a special section and full previews in A&E.) Follow the Twitter re-enactment of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which led to World War I, from 9:30 a.m. to noon June 28. #KU_WWI Check out the inaugural Summer Fest in South Park, an arts and crafts event with food vendors and live music, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. June 28. Pack a picnic and take it to Overlook Park at Clinton Lake, where you can watch the sunset with your sweetheart or your family. Get your exercise before the heat sets in at the morning session of Red Dog’s Dog Days workout, 6 a.m. Monday-Thursday in South Park. Spend an afternoon relaxing in the Chi Omega fountain on the KU campus. Get ice cream at Sylas and Maddy’s Home Made Ice Cream, then walk up and down Massachusetts Street people watching. Head to Campanile hill at KU, set up a hammock and read. Try ziplining at Adventure Zip KC in Bonner Springs (12829 Loring Road), where participants get a view of the Kansas River and the downtown Kansas City skyline before they descend into the treetops. Catch a Sporting KC game. Cool off at Tad’s Shaved Ice just south of Ninth and Iowa streets. Oooo and ahhh at the Lawrence fireworks display, 9:45 p.m. July 4 at Watson and Burcham parks, Seventh and Kentucky streets and 200 Indiana St. Lawrence Parks and Recreation puts on noon-hour concerts every summer Thursday in front of US Bank, 900 Massachusetts St. A good one to catch: Lonnie Ray’s Blues Band July 10. Enjoy fine wine and help Cottonwood Inc. by attending Salute! A Festival of Wine and Food July 11 and July 12. Salutewinefest.com for more information. Read books, win prizes. That’s the idea behind the Lawrence Public Library’s Summer in the City reading program. See lawrence.lib.ks.us for more information. Get Fido or Puff microchipped at the Lawrence Humane Society’s clinic June 29-July 3. Chips are $10 each or $15 for two. Call 843-6835 for more information. Watch world-class cyclists at the Tour of Lawrence June 27-29, a USA Cycling sanctioned event. The kids can participate in their own bike race downtown Sunday morning, and Friday night features music from Hearts of Darkness. Spend Saturday, July 26, at the grand opening celebration for the library’s new building. Want to play a bigger part? The first 150 people to sign up will stand in a line from the temporary location, 700 New Hampshire St., and pass the final book to the new building, 707 Vermont St. in a community book-passing relay. Call 843-3833, ext. 123, for more information. Go kayaking and camping at Lone Star Lake. Hike the trails at Prairie Park Nature Center. Visit the Spencer Museum of Art, making time to enjoy Personal Geometry: Quilts by Yoshiko Jinzenji and Virginia Jean Cox Mitchell, on display through Aug. 3. Float down the Kaw (Kansas River and National Water Trail) with Up a Creek Canoe and Kayak Rental. Visit the 34th Annual Kansas State Fiddling & Picking Championships Aug. 24, mostly at South Park. Everyone’s going to Kansas City for the big new water slide. Beat the crowds and go to the Tonganoxie Water Park, with its own nifty slide and other amenities. Make the Lawrence Farmers’ Market a Saturday morning routine. Vary the stands you purchase from each week. Take July 17 off from work so you’re free to get up at the crack of dawn for the Downtown Lawrence Sidewalk Sale, now in its 55th year. Take a blanket and refreshments to South Park for a Lawrence City Band concert. A popular choice is the season’s grand finale, 8 p.m. July 16, featuring the “1812 Overture.” Do a northeast Kansas wine tour, stopping at wineries including Crooked Post Winery & Vineyard in Ozawkie and Holy-Field Vineyard and Winery in Basehor. Take a train ride on the historic Midland Railway in Baldwin City. Start planning now to make sure you have time to see all you want to at the Douglas County Fair, July 25-Aug. 3. The popular demolition derby is Aug. 1. Rent bikes at the Gaslight, 317 N. Second St., for a ride on the levee followed by a cold beer in the “biergarten.” Catch your favorite acts at the Busker Festival, downtown Aug. 22-24. Take a self-guided tour of Civil War and Quantr
ties put it, “we’re in a no man’s land between emancipation and equality” right now.[54] She pointedly discussed connections between technological progress and women’s civil rights in a satirical article published on Valentine’s Day, 1968 called “A Tender Missive To Mr. Wilson.” Her article zeroed in on computer dating as a subject of mockery in order to lampoon the way that technology was often offered up as a “revolutionary” way of fixing social problems—and yet rarely did so. The article was written in the form of a Valentine’s Day love letter to then Prime Minister Harold Wilson, a massive booster of technological innovation. Wilson believed that a technological revolution, led by computerization, would produce the social progress needed in British society and help destroy the inequalities of the British class system. The author quips that she is not impressed with the things technology has given women so far, but that there are lots of other things women want, like equal pay, equal opportunity, full coeducation, wages for housewives, and so on. Re-centering the conversation about social change on women’s needs, rather than technological imperatives, she notes that computers can’t make Prime Minister Wilson her Valentine, but giving women equal rights could win her heart.[55] Technology, she argues, is not the way to fix social problems. Indeed, the focus on a “technological fix” seemed to be drawing attention away from the most pressing problems facing women at the time. Source: Sue Puddefoot, “A Tender Missive To Mr. Wilson,” Times (London), February 14, 1968, 9. The conservatism baked into computer dating technology can be viewed not as a bug, but rather as a feature. The purpose of computerized dating services was to replicate existing social patterns and hierarchies more efficiently. Other women who weighed in on computer dating in the pages of the Times highlighted how computer dating was nothing new, at its most basic level. The seeming disregard of women’s needs and desires by the two best known and most lauded early computer dating services lends support to this point. Computerized dating was not magical or frightening because, as one woman columnist noted pragmatically, “one of the chief functions of computers is streamlining an existing service.” In this context, the existing service that computers streamlined was the replication of patriarchy and the nuclear family.[56] For this reason it is not surprising that women have largely been erased from the history of computer dating as actors in their own right. Paradoxically, the successes of computer dating did not spring mainly from the technology. The matching programs, algorithms, and even the questionnaires were all of little importance in comparison with the user base upon which they operated. Most early computer dating services tried to pre-empt the difficulty of matching people by collecting user bases that were relatively homogeneous. Operation Match targeted college populations to produce this homogeneity, as well as to give their business a veneer of respectability. Com-Pat drew on a clientele of Londoners who wanted to get married or remarried and would have previously used the services of a marriage bureau. Another US computer dating service from the same era, Project TACT (Technical Automated Compatibility Testing), focused on Manhattan’s east side, chased respectability by trying to establish a client base of wealthy singles. The men behind Project TACT did this in a less-than-respectable way, lying their way past doormen to get into the lobbies of buildings with wealthier residents, and then writing down the names they found on the mailboxes (whenever two people sharing a mailbox had different last names they assumed the residents were roommates and single).[57] Dateline, the most financially successful of all, did not have a self-consciously homogeneous user base, but also did not appear to pair people up to clients’ satisfaction. It focused on an ever-increasing user base to make its profits, not necessarily on satisfying customers once they had already paid. As Nathan Ensmenger has pointed out, Operation Match, just like another social technology that got its start at Harvard—Facebook—focused on a target audience of “Ivy League and associated schools,” making it little more than another way to ensure social hierarchies remained strong while offering a slight convenience to certain users.[58] And, just like Facebook, Operation Match was started by young men whose idea of the technological future was grounded in using women’s bodies for entertainment and profit. Mark Zuckerberg’s first incarnation of Facebook, a site called Facemash, simply downloaded all of the pictures of women undergraduates at Harvard from the university server and then juxtaposed two at a time, telling visitors to the site to rate which one was more attractive before offering up the next pair. It distilled Operation Match down to its essence: no longer would young men even have to meet young women in order to gain pleasure from them. Kate Losse, a former Facebook employee who joined the company as employee number 51 in 2005 and worked closely with Zuckerberg, has written that Facebook’s driving design principle was one that enabled voyeurism and a kind of privileged judgment: essentially a technological way of replicating the male gaze for its users. This, Losse argues, is a feature so deeply embedded within the structure of the platform that it molds the point of view and behavior of all users who participate on Facebook, whether as viewers or as those who are viewed.[59] The history of early computer dating technologies in the Anglo-American world begins to show how sexuality, and particularly an assumption of heterosexuality grounded in white, male, middle-class privilege, plays a key role in interpreting computing history. It also begins to shed light on how technologies inhere designers’ viewpoints into their structures, replicating and extending particular worldviews as the technology proliferates and is used. It would not be until the 1980s that computer dating technology began to stop taking for granted the idea of a user base that centered the imagined needs of straight men. In the mid 1980s British programmers released a personal computer version of matchmaking software with the BBC micro that included the option for homosexual pairings. And in France in the 1980s a product called “La Drague Electronique” (the electronic pick-up) introduced men and women to what might have been the first iteration of a proximity-based cruising application like Grindr or Happn. This product was comprised of a cigarette-sized box that users carried, which would beep when it came into proximity with a match. Revolutionary for its day, it did not require users to focus on single pairings at a time, and it also allowed users to change their sexual preference as often as they liked via a switch on the side of the unit. The four settings allowed for men and women who wanted to be matched with the opposite sex; men who wanted to be matched with other men; women who wanted to be matched with other women; and couples who wanted to “swing.”[60] Today, computerized dating has branched out significantly. A recently-launched app called Thurst, for instance, bills itself “as the first dating app for queer people of all genders,” and is one of the first matchmaking services geared specifically to a genderqueer user base.[61] Thurst co-founders Morgen Bromell and Rosa Pergams have stated that they tried to build the needs and concerns of nonbinary LGBTQ people of color into the technology in order to better reflect their own desires and experiences. But, a panoply of larger and more powerful social networking platforms continue to represent and replicate problematic assumptions similar to those at work in the earliest computer dating services. The assumption of a white, straight, male default subject still undergirds much of our social and technological landscape. Source: #FBRAPE campaign, 2013. Why Does Computer Dating Matter to the History of Computing and Sexuality? Historians of computing have recently begun to highlight the fact that narratives pointing out the conservative properties of technological change have as much or more explanatory value in the history of computing as narratives focused on progress or “revolution.”[62] Time and time again we see the ways computer technology has institutionalized and revived more conservative social and economic models in history, rendering an uncritical emphasis on innovation and technological revolution at best specious, and at worst, actively misleading. In computing today we see echoes of these historical themes, with many new technological developments that are actively regressive, like the entire industry of software and services designed to skirt labor laws and remove power from the hands of people who are already disproportionately clustered near the bottom of our socioeconomic hierarchies. That these socioeconomic categories overlap with, and are co-constructed by discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and ability is not a coincidence. Computing history shows that technology is often not revolutionary socially or economically. It does not tend to upset hierarchies but rather to preserve and strengthen them. Computing is often a force for regressive change and a tool used by those who have traditionally held power. When used in the context of warfare, or even within the confines of business, these elements are easier to see. As computing bleeds into all aspects of our lives in ever more complicated ways, however, it is worth returning to computerization’s earlier forays into the realm of culture, and recalling the specific ways that technologies can seem neutral while extending and replicating the power and belief systems of particular groups.[63] The history of computer dating, when critiqued as a conservative technology, offers insights into the history of sexuality’s intersection with high technology, the replication of heteronormative institutions and ideals, and the ability of technologies to create social categories and implied social “needs.” It shows how technologies—far from somehow being neutral or rational—are often engaged in highly sexualized and emotionally charged cultural projects to normalize particular behaviors and roundly condemn others. Currently, more and more dating applications are unpacking this cultural baggage, leading to software that, for instance, privileges queer users and attempts to create safer spaces online for women of color. Developments like these show that the historical lineage of computer matchmaking is a contentious push and pull between competing interests rather than a revolutionary social or technological force. My hope in unpacking and correcting some of this history is to add to the modest but growing number of queer histories of computing which interrogate the infrastructure of heteronormativity instead of taking it for granted, as well as to contribute to the large and growing set of conversations across multiple humanities disciplines about diversity in technology.[64] 1. Charles Addams, Cover, New Yorker, February 11, 1961. 2. IBM claims this cartoon machine was based on IBM’s SSEC in the showroom on Madison Ave from 1948-1952: “The SSEC was visible to pedestrians on the sidewalk, and inspired a generation of cartoonists to portray the computer as a series of wall-sized panels covered with lights, meters, dials, switches, and spinning rolls of tape.” Excerpt from IBM history available at: http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=851. 3. Times (London), “How France Makes Use Of Computers,” October 27, 1960, 10. 4. See Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Marie Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017); and Marie Hicks. “Only the Clothes Changed: Women Operators in British Computing and Advertising, 1950–1970,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 32, no. 4 (October 2010): 5-17. 5. See archives of LEO Computer Company at National Archive for the History of Computing, Manchester, UK, and Georgina Ferry A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the World’s First Office Computer (London: Fourth Estate Ltd., 2003). 6. For an extended discussion of how heteronormativity impacted computer labor forces in the 20th century and altered their potential, see Hicks, Programmed Inequality. 7. See Donna J. Drucker, “Keying Desire: Alfred Kinsey’s Use of Punched-Card Machines for Sex Research,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 22.1 (2013): 105-125, and The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). Jacob Gaboury’s work is available at http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/feb/19/queer-computing-1/ and see Marie Hicks, “De-brogramming the History of Computing,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 35, no. 1 (Jan-Mar 2013), http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6502624. 8. Molly Niesen, “Love, Inc.: Toward Structural Intersectional Analysis of Online Dating Sites and Applications” in The Intersectional Internet, eds. Safiya Noble and Brendesha Tynes, (New York: Peter Lang Inc., 2016). 9. Steve Yoder, “How Online Dating Became a $2 Billion Industry,” The Fiscal Times, February 14, 2014, http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/02/14/Valentines-Day-2014-How-Online-Dating-Became-2-Billion-Industry, and Pew Research Center, “Five Facts About Online Dating,” 20 April 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/20/5-facts-about-online-dating/. 10. T. Jay Mathews, “Operation Match,” Harvard Crimson, November 3, 1965. 11. Ibid. 12. For a history of the gender dynamics at Harvard in the 1960s, and its process of going fully coeducational, or “coresidential” in the seventies, see Marie Hicks, “Integrating Women at Oxford and Harvard Universities, 1964-1977,” in Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History, ed. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004), 245-270. 13. At the same time that Operation Match was starting at Harvard, there was a similar rival service on campus, also started by Harvard undergraduate men, called Contact Incorporated. Dan Slater, “The Social Network: The Prequel,” GQ, January 28, 2011, http://www.gq.com/story/social-network-prequel-online-dating. 14. Quote from T. Jay Mathews, “Operation Match,” Harvard Crimson, November 3, 1965. Jaakko Suominen, “History of Digital Dating: ‘Computer-Balls’ and Digital Pairing in Finland from the 1960s to the Present,” in History of Nordic Computing 3 eds. John Impagliazzzo, Per Lundin, and Benkt Wangler, (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2011), 120-121. Suominen discuss examples of this in Finland in the 1960s, but interestingly credits American technology—namely IBM computers installed at the University of Turku—for enabling these programs. 15. Avco was a New England based computer services company with a computer center in the suburbs of Boston. 16. Mathews, “Operation Match.” 17. Joan Ball, Just Me (Raleigh, NC: Lulu.com, 2014), 217-219. 18. Ibid., 218-219. 19. Civil Service (UK) National Whitley Council Committee, The Marriage Bar, 1946, 13. 20. Times (London), Advertisement, August 22, 1966, 2. 21. Times (London), Advertisement, August 11, 1967, 16. 22. John Clare, “Marriage: Cupid from the computer,” Times (London), March 25, 1972, 16. 23. E-Harmony also has a long record of discrimination against gay users. In 2008 it settled a lawsuit that forced it to provide a comparable service for gay users, and in 2011 another lawsuit forced it to integrate its main, heterosexual dating website with the website it had set up to cater to gay users. See Nathan Koppel and Shira Ovide, “eHarmony Settles Dispute Over Gay Matches,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2008, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122714242388642779 and eHarmony, “Press Release: eHarmony, Inc. Settles Class Action Lawsuit Over Same Sex Matching,” January 26, 2010, http://www.eharmony.com/press-release/25/. 24. Censuses and Surveys, 1961, Summary Tables, 4-5; Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Census 1971, Great Britain, Age, Marital Condition and General Tables (London: HMSO, 1974), 26-27; and, Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Census 1981, National Report Great Britain, Part 1 (London: HMSO, 1983), 15. 25. Times (London), “Susie Has Got Her Man Taped,” December 23, 1966, 8. 26. Clare, “Marriage: Cupid from the computer.” 27. Ibid. 28. Times (London), “Personal,” October 2, 1967, 18, and Times (London), “Women’s Appointments,” July 1, 1969, 15. 29. Times (London), “Press Council rejects cartoon complaint,” April 18, 1978, 4. 30. Ibid. 31. As late as 1983, a disgruntled user of Dateline wrote a letter to the editor of the Times to warn other women against the service because she had been matched with men of “Asian or Oriental descent” even though she had requested to be paired only with white European men. Times (London), “Warning date,” September 21, 1983, 9. In 1989, the Times reported that “most of the leading companies say their clients are white middle class professionals aged between 30 and 45.” Victoria McKee, “Dating with danger?” Times (London), February 3, 1989, 21. 32. Times (London), “John Patterson Obituary,” February 1, 1997, 25. 33. Clare, “Marriage: Cupid from the computer.” 34. Times (London), “Bureaux men fined £300,” June 28, 1969, 3. 35. Times (London), “Bureau head loses libel action,” April 23, 1983, 3. 36. Patricia Tisdall, “Advertising and Marketing,” Times (London), December 29, 1971, 13. 37. Ball, Just Me, 218. 38. Times (London), Advertisement, August 11, 1967, 16. 39. Clare, “Marriage: Cupid from the computer.” 40. Times (London), “Report on computer date firm,” August 29, 1970, 2. 41. Clare, “Marriage: Cupid from the computer.” 42. Times (London), “Court ban on ‘dangerous documents’,” May 10, 1967, 2. 43. David Anderson, “Boy-Girl Questionnaire Investigated,” New York Times, June 12, 1966. 44. Times (London), “Court ban on ‘dangerous documents’.” 45. Times (London), “Nothing immoral in tourist dating, BOAC says,” September 13, 1969, 3. 46. For background, see Hicks, “Only the Clothes Changed.” 47. Times (London), “Can they ever,” December 23, 1969, 17. 48. Times (London), “Report on computer date firm.” 49. Times (London), “Dating agencies attacked for exploiting the lonely,” November 17, 1970, 9. 50. Times (London), “Report on computer date firm.” 51. Times (London), “Fair-trading office to study marriage bureau,” December 27, 1975, 2. 52. Times (London), “Danger when computer plays Cupid,” August 23, 1973, 4. 53. Ibid. This article describes the kind of unhelpful, knee-jerk “moral panic” critique that has repeatedly been leveled against new technologies. 54. Sue Puddefoot, “A Tender Missive To Mr. Wilson,” Times (London), February 14, 1968, 9. 55. Ibid. 56. Valerie Knox, “Merry-go-Round,” Times (London), April 24, 1967, 7. 57. Project TACT was started by an accountant who got the idea from a program designed to match people up with pen pals. He hired a programmer to do the same thing but to match based on close physical proximity rather than the opposite as in the pen pals program. Nick Paumgarten, “Looking for Someone. Sex, Love, and Loneliness on the Internet,” The New Yorker, July 4, 2011. 58. Nathan Ensmenger, “Computer Dating in the 1960s,” March 5, 2014, blog post, http://thecomputerboys.com/?p=654. 59. See Kate Losse, “The Male Gazed: Surveillance, Power, and Gender.” Model View Culture 1, (January 13, 2014). https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-male-gazed, and her memoir of her time working at Facebook: The Boy Kings (New York: Free Press, 2014). 60. PHS. “The Times Diary: My Bleeping Heart,” Times (London), June 5, 1984, 10. 61. Morgen Bromell, “Thurst Prepares For Launch: The First Dating App for Queer People of All Genders,” Model View Culture 39, (July 25, 2016). https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/thurst-prepares-for-launch-the-first-dating-app-for-queer-people-of-all-genders. 62. For example, the Maintainers conference held at Stevens Institute of Technology (April 7-9, 2016), and the Shift-CTRL conference held at Stanford University (May 6-7, 2016). See http://themaintainers.org/ and http://www.shiftctrl2016.org/. 63. For more on the ways in which users and sexualities are co-constructed in conjunction with technologies, see Jean Hardy and Silvia Lindtner, “Constructing a Desiring User: Discourse, Rurality, and Design in Location-Based Social Networks” in 20th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, (New York: ACM Press, forthcoming), and Molly Niesen, “Love, Inc.: Toward Structural Intersectional Analysis of Online Dating Sites and Applications” in The Intersectional Internet, eds. Safiya Noble and Brendesha Tynes, (New York: Peter Lang Inc., 2016). 64. For more on queering the history of technology and telecommunications, see Katie Hindmarch-Watson’s work on prostitution rings in which aristocratic British men had sex with telegraph boys. Hindmarch-Watson shows how socio-sexual networks of power function within technological ones. Katie HindmarchWatson, “Male Prostitution and the London GPO: Telegraph Boys ‘Immorality’ from Nationalization to the Cleveland Street Scandal.” The Journal of British Studies 51, no. 3 (2012): 594-617. — CITATION — Hicks, M. (2016) Computer Love: Replicating Social Order Through Early Computer Dating Systems. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 10. doi:10.7264/N3NP22QR This article has been openly peer reviewed at Ada Review. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.President Trump‘s election has done little to mollify the appetite of gun control advocates. In spite of the losses incurred by politicians who have supported gun control over the years, recent mass shootings in Las Vegas and Texas have emboldened gun grabbers to continue their quest to restrict the rights of law-abiding gun owners. Former Vice President Joe Biden was brazen enough to appear on NBC’s Today Show and state that the man who stopped the Texas massacre never should have been legally permitted to own the weapon: Joe Biden says that the man who stopped the Texas church shooter should not have been armed. pic.twitter.com/pY3hBHPHuX — Ryan Saavedra 🇺🇸 (@RealSaavedra) November 14, 2017 The only thing that was surprising about Biden’s commentary is that it didn’t occur sooner; as Free Market Shooter has recently covered, the gun control playbook has been to call for gun control in the wake of any mass shooting, long before the facts have been determined: Leading the charge was former President Obama… joining in his chorus were New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, NBA basketball coach Steve Kerr, and a slew of Congressional Democrats, none of whom bothered to wait until more facts on the incident were available. But wait a second… wasn’t Trump’s win supposed to be good for gun rights? Indeed, gun rights advocates hoped to advance legislation to both remove suppressors from NFA regulation, and implement national concealed carry (CCW) reciprocity. And in spite of the fact that gun control groups have all but lost the fight against suppressors, House Speaker Paul Ryan refuses to bring either bill to the House floor for a vote: It is October 31 and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) is ignoring national reciprocity legislation for the 43rd consecutive week. National reciprocity was introduced by Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) on January 3, 2017, and law-abiding citizens have been waiting for Congress to take up the measure ever since. The wait is fast-approaching a year, yet Ryan remains mum on the legislation. President Trump signaled that he wanted national reciprocity early in his campaign. And even though Ryan is facing down a Republican challenger within his own district that wants to advance CCW reciprocity… Congress shouldn't let people who misunderstood the latest James Bond movie write new gun laws. Watch my demo smashing the narrative. pic.twitter.com/fgWjX7pk5G — Paul Nehlen (@pnehlen) October 9, 2017 …it hasn’t prompted Republicans to push for gun rights legislation. Which has left both gun rights advocates and gun grabbers twisting in the wings; the current slate of laws has stood, and appears likely to stand as long as Trump is in office. What has this done? With no legislation set to loosen or restrict the status quo on guns, a cadre of gun dealers who stocked up expecting a Hillary win, sales of guns and gun accessories have plummeted under Trump. Indeed, Free Market Shooter has recently detailed what this has meant for gun enthusiasts: Many of these businesses now have a glut of product, and are finding it difficult to sell it. With many local gun stores having closed in recent years, this is worrying news, because ongoing low demand could lead to the closure of more of these businesses. With a huge oversupply, AR-15s and the like can be picked up for next to nothing. The excess of available inventory has led dealers all over the nation to slash prices, offering promotions such as “combo deals” of a rifle and handgun, or steeply discounted versions of “modern sporting rifles” that dealers stockpiled prior to the election. And it is not just gun sales that have declined; gun accessories, magazines and ammunition have all seen steep discounts to the Obama years, where the constant threat of the gun rights restrictions led owners to stock up. With no gun legislation on the horizon to drive clearance of excess inventory, deals are there to be had for both existing gun owners and novices who are new to gun ownership. However, this will not continue forever, and in spite of taking a monster loss in the 2016 elections, both Bloomberg and Democrats have shown no interest in backing down from their agenda, or from pushing increasingly foolish restrictions on gun owners. I’ve previously explained why this means gun enthusiasts should seek these bargains out: For starters, there is no better time than the present to exercise your right to bear arms. Since Trump won, the call for more firearms regulation is going to fall on deaf ears. Don’t wait until gun control takes center stage again to make your purchases, when everyone will rush to stores and drive up prices of guns and ammunition, if they are even available at all. And even now, gun control groups are even pushing to allow judges to arbitrarily determine who can and cannot legally possess firearms: The new push for gun control from the left comes courtesy of ABC News which recently published a piece promoting the use of an Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) that many believe is nothing more than a thinly veiled confiscation plan that would allow a judge to “issue an ex parte order” for the direct confiscation of an American citizens firearms. Keep in mind that Everytown for Gun Safety is a Michael Bloomberg funded, left-wing gun control group that was created as part of a rebranding effort by the billionaire gun grabber after his previous group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, was outed by multiple former members as actually pushing an agenda of full-scale gun confiscation. In spite of Trump’s big win, Republicans are not pushing for gun rights legislation. But in the wake of the Vegas and Texas shootings, gun control is going just as strong as ever. Gun enthusiasts have been extremely fortunate to have been spared from a Hillary presidency that would have undoubtedly resulted in far more gun rights restrictions. However, gun dealers will eventually put forward enough great deals forward to clear inventories. Trump’s win was a stroke of good fortune for gun rights, but the left will eventually return to power, and when they do, restrictions on law abiding gun owners will return with them. Don’t wait until the great gun deals are all gone to exercise your 2nd amendment rights, because prices may never again be this good for gun owners. While the gun market will eventually normalize from today’s depressed prices, if it even appears as though the left could make a return, even slightly higher prices could become a fond memory.Emin Gün Sirer/Twitter Two computer science researchers at Cornell University say they've uncovered a fundamental flaw in Bitcoin that is so bad, it could kill Bitcoin. The problem is with how people "mine" bitcoins. Mining is how bitcoins are created. Most people don't mine bitcoins anymore. They buy them or take them as payment. But some people are in the business of mining coins with special bitcoin-mining computers. Even so, it is so difficult and time consuming for a computer to create new bitcoins that some miners have banded together in pools, using multiple computers that work together. The problem with mining was found by Emin Gün Sirer, an associate professor at Cornell's Computer Science Dept., and Ittay Eyal, a Cornell computer science researcher. They say that when too many miners gang together, they can obtain more than "their fair share" of bitcoins and this can lead to a monopoly over the whole system. They write: ... the problem is intrinsic to the entire way Bitcoin works... a minority group of miners can obtain revenues in excess of their fair share, and grow in number until they reach a majority. When this point is reached, the Bitcoin... the currency.. is no longer decentralized; the controlling entity can determine who participates in mining and which transactions are committed, and can even roll back transactions at will. Their solution, these researchers say, is to change how bitcoin mining works so a single pool of miners can never control more than 25% of the available mining power.WWE Promotional Image The story of Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka getting away with murder has been one of those wrestling tall tales that has been around for ages now, moving more into the territory of fiction than fact. That all changed, though, when charges were finally filed against Snuka and proceedings began in 2015. All of a sudden this tale that highlighted the insanity and insider nature of the wrestling industry was a public spectacle and very real. His defense has been looking for a way to present Snuka as incapable of standing trial for the murder ever since the charges were levied, finally trotting out a testimony from a psychologist on Friday who deemed Snuka mentally incompetent due to the many blows to the head that he suffered throughout his professional wrestling career. Snuka, who is perhaps best known for his finisher — the Superfly Splash — and one in particular where he dove from the top of a cage in Madison Square Garden against Don Muraco, has appeared in rough shape throughout his trial. There are questions as to if it’s all some elaborate professional wrestling show, though. The case takes an interesting twist now considering the slew of recent lawsuits that the WWE has been facing thanks to increased awareness of the effects of concussions on their performers. Much like the NFL, the WWE has been met with increased criticism for what their performers put themselves through for the company, with the company taking serious measures to prevent future lawsuits, such as forcing Daniel Bryan to retire due to concussion concerns. This new path for the trial should be interesting to watch unfold. The trial has been adjourned until Wednesday when an expert will take the stand for the prosecution in hopes of explaining why Snuka is fit enough to stand trial. Their argument currently includes footage from a performance in the ring dating back to 2015 as well as a seemingly-lucid interview around the same time. (Via The Guardian)The Iodine Issue By Don Bennett, DAS November, 2013 I've been intensely researching the subject of iodine for more than a year, and wanted to have a thorough understanding of the issue, along with some personal experience and clinical empirical evidence before writing about it. I can now say with certainty that having sufficient iodine levels is critical for having vitality and the best odds of avoiding serious conditions (and of resolving ones you may currently have). And although this may seem like I'm "stating the obvious" because we need enough of all the nutrients our body requires to have robust health, it turns out that iodine is one of the "problematic" nutrients because it is one of the nutrients that most people are lacking in, and lacking in it enough to be causing health issues that we're either not aware of (yet), or that we're attributing to something other than the real cause... which is not enough iodine. UPDATE! Since writing this article in 2013, I've counseled many people and found iodine deficiencies, and when they resolve those deficiencies, they lose some weight, gain some energy, and various conditions of ill-health are benefited by this. This article is a long one, by necessity... I want you to know the facts about this very important topic. I wrote this article to be enlightening and empowering, to the point that you will be motivated by it to actually do something, and not just be "informed". So even if you have to digest it in installments, please carve out the time needed to eventually take it all in. First, some background is needed to fully appreciate what we're dealing with today. There have been various deficiency diseases that have plagued populations: scurvy from not enough vitamin C, beriberi from not enough B1, pellagra caused by insufficient B3, pernicious anemia from a lack of enough B12, rickets, a bone disease caused by a deficiency of D, and goiter, an enlarged thyroid caused by an iodine deficiency. We're going to look at that last one a little closer because, although goiter is no longer a common occurrence in our population as it once was, we still have thyroid problems today... and that's because we still have an iodine problem, it's just not as bad as it once was... but it's still bad. An example of goiter Back in the early 1900's when it was discovered that an iodine deficiency was the cause of goiter, the U.S. government decreed that the American diet needed to be fortified with iodine because there obviously wasn't enough in the foods being provided by the agri-based food industry. So iodide was added to table salt since table salt was a big part of the American diet. And very quickly goiter was brought under control. So iodine was the darling of the beginning of the 20th Century. Here's a brief but educational blast-from-the-past. This ad is from 1927 when the Morton Salt Company first started iodizing its table salt. Notice on the bottom, it says... "Help Keep Your Family Goiter Free!" Here's a chewing gum that also contained iodine. These were manufactured in the early part of this century. Each pastille contained 6.48 mg of iodine. Popping two of these lovelies a day would give you close to the average Japanese iodine intake of 12.5 mg. Iodine was so popular, there was even a comic book character, Little Iodine (a take-off of another character, Li'l Nadine). It should be noted that the proper pronunciation of iodine is eye-oh-deen, not eye-oh-dine as most people say it. So now the Iodine-Nadine relationship makes more sense. In the late 1920s, the South Carolina Natural Resources Commission began a public relations campaign to advertise the relatively high iodine levels found in fruits and vegetables grown in their state, and sought to expand the national market for South Carolina produce by warning Midwestern and West Coast residents of the consequences of iodine deficiency, which included enlarged thyroids, mental and physical birth defects, and sterility. The word “Iodine” was proudly placed on South Carolina license plates in 1930. Can you guess where this came from? Back in the 1930's many of the soils in the U.S. were already iodine deficient (shown in red). Today it's worse. And it's not just in the U.S. 2001 India Postage Stamp commemorating Global Iodine Deficiency Disorders Day. In India, the entire population is prone to Iodine deficiency disorders (IDD) due to deficiency of iodine in the soil of the subcontinent and consequently the food derived from it. India has been largely successful at eliminating the most obvious manifestation of iodine deficiency, goiter, with its salt iodization program, as was done in the U.S. Do you know of another nutrient that has its own day? As you can see from that little slice of history, iodine was a big issue back then. It isn't in the public consciousness today because it appears not to be an issue anymore. But as you will see, it still is, it's just not recognized as an iodine problem as it
has he never read The Open Society and Its Enemies? Come to that, has he never read The Republic? Has Melissa Lane? What kind of Green Fascist fuckwittery is this? Calm down William. Deep breaths. Keep going. I didn't, of course, have the full horror of Lane's book available to me during the lecture. Virtues traditions, barriers to religions being of use [I may be slightly muddled here, my notes are unclear]: - eschatology [that handles the Southern Baptists, I guess] - competing issues, e.g. the poor - inadequate social critique - conviction or motivation to act - value / action gap, aka Sin. Ignoring religion is short sighted. At the end, he put up a slide with misc books on, and a link to mikehulme.org. That includes a link to Five Lessons of Climate Change: a personal statement. That statement is somewhat typical of the style of talk and answers he gave today; not to my taste. My own summing up of what he said: a lot of people profess religious faith, they amount to a powerful political grouping, and so shouldn't be ignored. Implicitly (when he talked of different cosmologies) he asked for "the message" to be tailored to this grouping, and since he said this in the context of the IPCC he was, somewhat less implicitly, asking for the IPCC to "speak their message" in a framing that the religious would be comfortable with. I think this is bollocks. There was a longish Q+A session afterwards, which I noted too: Q1: the IPCC is a (fake) religion, sucking people in, leading people away from the core Christian duty of professing the gospels. A: but the duty of?explaining? climate change is entirely compatible with he gospels. Q2: somewhat incoherent as a question - something like, there are lots of different religious groups, that don't always know what the othwrs are doing. The questionner mentioned Earth Bible and I've guessed the correct link. A: [this was the only Q to which I thought he managed a useful and illuminating answer] Indeed, religious groups are diverse and have diverse readings, in contrast to the IPCC, which pushes a "universal" science [he almost sounded disappointed by this]. Q3: IPCC / Klein are trying to achieve authority / status, but religion is diverse, so is it fair to criticse them for excluding religion? A: can understand that thinking, but IPCC is trying to bring in the best sociology knowledge, yet ignores religion [this seems a weird perspective to me, who concentrates on the WG I stuff, which of course ignores sociology. If you're off in the ghettoes of WG II or III, though, this might make sense.] NK is more polemical [oh good, he can tell the difference, when he tries.] But she ends by decrying the lack of a mass movement, so why not include religion? Q4: Lovelock says, more Nukes. Do you agree? A: yes, I agree he says that [you're a pol!] Wurble. Don't really want to go there.People will be influenced by their paradigms. Q5: Christian? A: yes. Q5a: does it bother you to be flying, despoiling the sky? A: no problem with being a mobile academic. Q6: as a species, we're good at solving problems. Why haven't we solved this one? A: we're doing lots of research. But its not just tech, also attitudes / pol / social. Q7: lots of conviction (on the issue of climate change being a problem) but not much energy on actually solving it. Why? A: wurble. Q8: Geoengineering? A: Not a good idea, see my book. Q9: can you say more about faith... do people need faith that climate change will happen [unless we do something about it]? A: many of my colleagues would say its a matter of evidence, not belief. But he says there are issues of belief, and trustowrthiness [this could have segued into an interesting discussion of exactly or roughly how the public, or non-experts, or even experts, some to accept-aka-believe the evidence, but didn't.] A retiring collection. I gave them £5. Their egg sandwiches were good. You, by contrast, get this glorious picture free of charge, merely for having the patience to read to the end of my post. [Update. Thinking about this, there's a possible bias in his thinking which I wish I thought of at the tie, and tried to ask him. Its this: If you're a Christian - in any sense that matters - then your faith is important to you. And you want that faith to affect your worldview. And hence, you want that faith to affect important issues of the day - war, peace, GW. But if you're at all honest and a scientist, you're also perfectly aware that your faith doesn't affect the science at all - which is perhaps why MH steered so clear of it. But your faith can affect the interpretation and the communication - these are vague areas up for grabs by anyone. So the question is something like: Doesn't your need to make your faith relevant and important in your life bias your view of how the science should be communicated?] Refs * I’m Afraid This Changes Nothing - mt on Klein's latest.The Swiss watchmaker announces it won't renew its contract with Maria Sharapova after she failed a doping test at the Australian Open Published 6:39 PM, March 08, 2016 GENEVA, Switzerland - Swiss watchmaker TAG Heuer said Tuesday, March 8 it would not renew its marketing contract with Maria Sharapova after the Russian tennis star announced she had failed a doping test at the Australian Open. "Maria Sharapova was under contract with TAG Heuer until December 31th, 2015. We had been in talks to extend our collaboration," a company statement said. "In view of the current situation, the Swiss watch brand has suspended negotiations and has decided not to renew the contract with Ms Sharapova." (READ: What is Meldonium, the drug Sharapova tested positive for?) The five-time Grand Slam winner had a 12-year relationship with TAG Heuer, a company spokesperson told AFP in an email. The announcement came hours after a similar move by US sportswear giant Nike, which said it was "saddened and surprised" by the Russian's announcement and was suspending its contract. Sharapova announced Tuesday that she had tested positive for Meldonium, a drug she said she had been taking since 2006 but was only added to the World Anti-Doping Agency banned list this year. – Rappler.comIn a study published today in the journal Stem Cells, scientists made embryonic clones of two men. Not to be a cynical, but what's the big deal? The procedure, in which researchers from stem cell company Stemagen removed nuclei from the skin cells of two adult men and put them inside a fertilized and emptied-out egg, is already known to scientists and the public. It's the first step of cloning – either therapeutic cloning, in which embryos provide stem cells for potential medical use, or reproductive cloning, in which embryos grow into a new person. Both therapeutic and reproductive cloning are still in their early stages – the latter because it's globally abhorred, the former because it's scientifically tricky. If scientists can figure out how to make viable embryonic stem cells from a clone, the human race would be a lot closer to personalized stem cell treatments, with new limbs and disease cures promised to anyone with a few spare skin flakes and enough money to foot the bill. But this hasn't yet been done. Korean scientist Woo-Suk Hwang excited the world when he claimed to have pulled it off, but he was lying. Though Stemagen said their cloned embryos could be used to make stem cells, they didn't actually try. On the plus side, unlike earlier cloners, Stemagen made their clones with skin cells from an adult rather than embryonic stem cells or cells from ovaries. If Stemagen's clones do turn out to be a viable source for stem cells, the procedure will be relatively practical. But that's a frontier-sized "if" – and so long as it's unresolved, this study really doesn't deserve the sort of wall-to-wall coverage it received today. Indeed, science journalists seem to know this. Witness the lead quote from the Associated Press story: "I found it difficult to determine what was substantially new," said Doug Melton of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He said the "next big advance will be to create a human embryonic stem cell line" from cloned embryos. "This has yet to be achieved." Melton also told The Scientist that "it would be hard to call this a major advance." So why the coverage? Well, it's a stem cell story and there's cloning involved. Those are hot words in any season, and especially lately, with advances in other stem cell techniques (here and here) whetting public appetite for news of potentially miraculous biotechnologies. It's also hard for journalists to tell their editor, "Everyone's going to cover this, but it's not a big deal." Neither does it help that scientists want to wash away the legacy of Woo-Suk Hwang, whose fraud jaded millions. But over-reporting an advance that could still fall short makes another disillusionment more likely. Update: Reuters headlined their story, "U.S. company claims cloned humans and made stem cells." The lead notes that Stemagen made its clones in the "eventual hope of making matched stem cells for patients," but the writer – who almost certainly didn't pick the headline, and thus didn't realize she'd have to correct for a false assertion – never specifically says that stem cells weren't made. *Update Two: Rick Weiss at the Washington Post looked at this in terms of stem cells rather than cloning; from that perspective, he said, the study was significant, for it shows that few technical barriers remain to full human cloning. * Development of Human cloned Blastocysts Following Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) with Adult Fibroblasts [Stem Cells] Image: Institute for Stem Cell Research See Also: Science Journalism 2.0: Pop the hood on Wired Science....Facebook Twitter Google+ LinkedIn I have spent the past 6 years trying to do two jobs at once, my teaching job at Bentley and lots of blogging/writing/speaking on monetary reform. I am pleased to announce that from now on I’ll be able to focus on monetary policy. Through a very generous donation of Kenneth Duda (a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is supportive of market monetarism), the Mercatus Center has created a new program on monetary policy, and appointed me as director. I’m sure people will have some questions about this, so let me provide a bit more detail. A few months back I began raising money to set up a NGDP futures market. At the time, Ken Duda offered to support the project with a large donation. He also expressed an interest in supporting my NGDP targeting in any way he could. Initially he suggested setting up a foundation to promote monetary reform, and having me direct the foundation. I thought it might make more sense to work within an institution such as a university or a think tank, where I could get managerial support. We eventually decided to embed the project within the Mercatus Center. The Mercatus Center is a bit different from Washington DC think tanks. It is often regarded as the world’s premier university-based research center with a focus on free market ideas. I was reassured by the fact that Mercatus is attached to George Mason University (my favorite econ program), and that Tyler Cowen is the Chairman of the Board. One nice thing about Mercatus is that they are focused on funding serious academic research, and don’t insist that researchers follow any particular party line. I’ve done three papers for Mercatus in recent years, but they’ve also funded other researchers with very different views of monetary policy. Here I might add that at this stage of my life I’m not too worried about a lack of academic freedom. I’ve always been the type to say what I thought, even though my research topics were so unconventional that I often had a hard time getting published, and almost didn’t get tenure. Nonetheless, it’s nice to be in a situation where no one is likely to question my academic independence. Not only does Mercatus allow me academic freedom, Ken Duda also wants me to follow the implications of my research where ever it leads, even if it leads me away from NGDP targeting. As you might expect from someone who has donated money to both MoveOn.org and Mercatus, Ken Duda is not a strongly partisan or ideological person. He has told me that he’s basically a pragmatist, who became very frustrated by the condition of the US economy after 2008 and thought that my monetary policy ideas made sense. He’s been a long time reader of my blog and has commented on numerous occasions. I actually wouldn’t have had any problem taking a position funded by a much more partisan donor, and/or at a highly ideological think tank. My policy is to always say what I think and let the chips fall where they may. But I can’t deny it’s nice to be involved with a donor and research center that encourage academic freedom. Although I am done teaching, I will actually be a Bentley employee for another 18 months, and after that I hope to maintain my Bentley affiliation through some sort “emeritus” relationship. I will continue to live in the Boston area, although long term we plan to retire in Southern California. (In a sense I’ll never retire, as I’ll keep promoting NGDP.) My contract with Mercatus runs through mid-2018. I won’t discuss the monetary details, other than to say I’ll make roughly as much doing this project over the next 3 and 1/2 years as I would have made teaching at Bentley over the next 2 and 1/2 years. More work for the money, but that’s fine as I won’t be so stressed trying to do 100 things at once. I hope to achieve many goals, but the one that might be of greatest interest to MoneyIllusion readers is a book on NGDP targeting and market monetarism, based on this blog. Mark Sadowski has agreed to work as a research assistant on the project. I also hope to support academic research that provides more “rigorous” empirical and theoretical support for NGDPLT and related ideas. And I’ll continue to do shorter papers, op eds, speak to academics, business people and policymakers, work on the NGDP futures markets, etc. And of course I’ll keep blogging here and at Econlog. I’ve known this was likely to happen for several months, but kept it secret until the funding was in place. Even my colleagues didn’t know (except my chair.) It was a bittersweet feeling going down the final stretch last semester after 34 years of teaching. I always envisioned telling my students it was my last class, but life never plays out as you envision it will. I’ve started noticing restaurants that offer senior discounts to the over 60 group, a milestone I’ll reach later this year. But you know what they say, 60 is the new 50. PS. I have a new post at Econlog on the zero bound problem. Update: Stocks open sharply higher on the news! 🙂 Facebook Twitter Google+ LinkedIn Tags: This entry was posted on January 13th, 2015 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.After nearly two months of speculation Major League Baseball dropped the hammer on the Atlanta Braves on Tuesday, levying heavy penalties on the team for a litany of infractions in both the international market and the amateur draft. Additionally, Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that former Atlanta general manager John Coppolella has been banned for life while former international scouting director Gordon Blakeley has received a one-year ban. The punishment is unprecedented and includes the loss of more than a dozen prospects, including highly-touted infielder Kevin Maitan. The players in question have been declared free agents after baseball’s investigation into Atlanta’s dealings revealed the club routinely skirted the rules for signing international amateur talents. The 13 players Atlanta lost include Maitan, Ji Hwan Bae, Abrahan Gutierrez, Yunior Severino. Juan Contreras. Yefri del Rosario, Yenci Peña, Livan Soto. Juan Carlos Negret, Brandol Mezquita, Angel Rojas, Antonio Sucre and Guillermo Zuniga. The Braves also face severe restrictions on signing any international prospects over the next three to four years. The league also confiscated Atlanta’s third round pick in the 2018 amateur draft after the investigation deemed the club offered improper benefits to 2017 second round pick Drew Waters. The investigation concluded that Atlanta “bundled” prospects and redirected bonus money from one player to another in an attempt to circumvent MLB rules during the 2015 signing period. Had those signings been done by the book it would have put the Braves over their allotment of bonus pool money for that period and therefore should have resulted in spending restrictions which would have precluded the Braves from breaking the bank in 2016. Maitan and Gutierrez were the top names in Atlanta’s 2016 signing class, which came at a reported cost of over $13 million. That number may have been significantly higher, with David O’Brien of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporting the club may have spent in excess of $4 million more – pushing the actual total to at least $17 million. By spending well over the annual $4-6 million hard cap each team is given during an international signing period, the Braves were placed in the “penalty box” and not allowed to sign any players for more than $300,000 for the following two periods (2017 and 2018). The league determined those spending restrictions happened a year later than they should have. It’s worth noting that Atlanta’s actions took place around the same time the Red Sox were being punished with the loss of prospects for similar “bundling” practices. Of course the difference here is the scope. Atlanta went far beyond Boston’s violations, which were the first and only real precedent for how the league would approach handling the players involved in such incidents. The prospects Atlanta lost will be allowed to keep their original signing bonuses, but will not become true free agents. Those players will instead go back into the international signing pool and any of the other 29 teams will be free to sign them. Waters, meanwhile, will remain with the organization. Upon receiving the news of the sanctions handed down, the Braves issued a statement in which the club accepted the commissioner’s discipline, reaffirmed its commitment to restoring the faith of the fans and declined to make any further comment going forward. The loss of Maitan, 17, is by far the biggest on the prospect front. The top player available in the 2016 international signing class, Maitan inked a $4.25 million deal with Atlanta that July. He made his stateside debut last summer, batting.241/.290/.340 in 42 games at the rookie ball level. Maitan is a switch-hitting shortstop out of Venezuela who has drawn comparisons to Miguel Cabrera. He was among Atlanta’s top 10 prospects and was recently ranked the No. 72 prospect in all of baseball by Baseball America. Gutierrez, 17, was another of the high-profile signings in 2016. A power-hitting catching prospect who signed for a reported $3.5 million bonus. Like Maitan, a fellow Venezuelan, Gutierrez made his stateside debut this past summer. Additionally, Severino, 18, is an infielder from the Dominican Republic who signed for $1.9 million in that same group. Bae, 18, is another notable loss. Atlanta signed the Korean-born shortstop in September. He was widely regarded as one of the best prospects to come out of the country in recent years and was projected to be the top pick in the KBO draft had he not signed with the Braves. The Bae acquisition seems to fall at or around the time MLB began its investigation into Atlanta’s perceived inconsistencies in the international market. Factoring in the team’s aforementioned hard cap of $300,000 for player signings and questions surround how the Braves got a player of Bae’s caliber to agree to such a deal. The league concluded that the team offered Bae extra-contractual compensation and therefore disapproved his agreement with the club, which had yet to become binding. Commissioner Manfred also chastised the club for brokering a commitment from an agent for 14-year-old Dominican prospect Robert Puason in which he agreed to sign with Atlanta in 2019. The Braves are forbidden from signing Pauson in the future. While the Braves currently remain in the “penalty box” regarding international signings, the future restrictions were also laid out in the commissioner’s statement: “The Braves will be prohibited from signing any international player for more than $10,000 during the 2019-20 signing period, which is the first signing period in which the Braves are not subject to any signing restrictions under our rules; and the Braves’ international signing bonus pool for the 2020-21 signing period will be reduced by 50 percent.” In addition to the sanctions, the club was dealt a significant blow to its front office structure. Coppolella and Blakeley were both forced to resign by the team on October 2, just one day after the regular season concluded. Despite reportedly being cleared by the league’s investigation, demoted former president of baseball operations John Hart announced his departure to “pursue other opportunities outside the organization” just three days after new general manager Alex Anthopoulos was hired. During the press conference to introduce the new GM, team chairman Terry McGuirk revealed that Hart had ceded complete control of baseball operations to Anthopoulos and would instead serve as a senior advisor. The timing of Hart’s resignation seems to line up with Braves officials learning that Coppolella would be receiving a lifetime ban. It would clearly not be a good look from a public relations standpoint for the Braves to have Coppolella’s direct supervisor remain on staff in any capacity in the wake of the sanctions. That likely hastened Hart’s exit at the behest of the team. Manfred acknowledged the necessity of those departures and added the following regarding punishment to be handed out to other Atlanta front office officials: “I intend to discipline other Braves’ International Baseball Operations employees who participated in the misconduct after the completion of our internal procedures. My staff will speak to the Players Association and officials in the Dominican Republic regarding appropriate consequences for the representatives of the players who intentionally participated in schemes to circumvent our rules, none of whom are certified by the Players Association.” Atlanta has already turned its attention to putting its house back in order. The first order of business was hiring the executives who will lead a restructured front office. Anthopoulos will head that group. He was introduced in a press conference at SunTrust Park on November 13. With the cloud of the league’s investigation looming over his new club, Anthopoulos was keenly aware of the possible sanctions. That did not deter him from taking the reins of a Braves team that still has one of the best farm systems in baseball. “Every club is going to have challenges, obstacles, things like that. This is one of them,” said Anthopoulos. “We’re going to deal with it. We’re going to handle it. We’re going to get through it.” “We won’t be the first club that’s gone through some things,” said Anthopoulos. “Regardless of what happens, the Braves are going to be here. We’re going to be playing opening day. There’s still a lot of good things to be excited about and we’ll meet the challenges head on and get through them.” Manfred shares that sentiment and believes the Braves will get back on course after what can only be described as a monumental misstep. “The Braves cooperated throughout the investigation, which was conducted by MLB’s Department of Investigations. The senior Baseball Operations officials responsible for the misconduct are no longer employed by the Braves. I am confident that Terry McGuirk, John Schuerholz, Alex Anthopoulos and their staffs have and will put in place procedures to ensure that this type of conduct never occurs again and which will allow the Club to emerge from this difficult period as the strong and respected franchise that it has always been.” Despite these recent losses, Atlanta still has arguably the best young talent in the game. Ronald Acuña leads a group that includes eight of the Top 100 prospects as ranked by Baseball America at midseason. Maitan would have made nine. Major League Baseball sent a clear message to all clubs with the harsh sanctions handed to the Braves, but still has work to do in order to truly clean up the international market. If the league has its way, the “Wild West” days abroad will become a thing of the past. MLB still has many miles to travel to make that a reality. Grant McAuley covers the Braves and MLB for 92-9 The Game. You can subscribe to the “Around The Big Leagues” podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud and Stitcher. Follow Grant on Twitter.Ugo Okoli is back in MLS after winning the USL Golden Boot with FC Cincinnati last year. Photographs by Matt Kremkau By CHRISTIAN ARAOS ORANGEBURG, N.Y. — Ugo Okoli mistimed his headers and placed his finishes at training Wednesday. His teammates rode off afterward leaving Okoli to continue working with the coaching staff, waiting for the fleeting chance to make the most of his return to Major League Soccer. Okoli is back in MLS after a year-long stint at FC Cincinnati where he won the United Soccer League Golden Boot with 16 goals in 29 games. He was the third homegrown player signed by the Seattle Sounders, but made only three appearances for their first team before being traded to New England at the 2015 draft. He made five appearances for the Revolution before he was waived in 2016. A year later, he returns with New York City FC looking to reap the rewards of last year’s work. “I know I could make an impact in this league,” Okoli, 24, who is from Federal Way, Wash., told EoS. “I was a rookie at age 19-20. It’s something I’ve always planned on doing but sometimes for an American attacker in this country, you’ve got to put in more work, you’ve got to find ways to prove yourself. I thought I did that last year and I thought this was the perfect opportunity to help the team win games.” The net and Okoli’s potential are the same. (Though his given name is Sean, Okoli prefers going by his middle name.) They are both unfulfilled at the moment. Okoli was a United States youth international and a standout forward at Wake Forest University, where he was named first team All-Atlantic Coast Conference in his junior season with nine goals. But he hasn’t scored in MLS. Like his predecessor at NYCFC, Patrick Mullins, Okoli hasn’t had many opportunities to play, let alone score. Mullins never had to go to USL, but Okoli said that time there was crucial for his confidence and left him with a chip on his shoulder. “I’ve been working hard for a long time,” he said. “I think last year was big for me in terms of getting games and showing what I can do on the field. Patrick [Vieira] and the club and New York City really saw something that could help this team. I’m working hard every day and making sure I can make an impact.” Okoli was the last player on the field on Wednesday. As his teammates met with children from an academy or spoke with reporters, he set up cones in front of an empty goal and worked on first-time finishing, with his coach and assistants providing crosses. He took at least a dozen attempts, each time attempting to use his hips and legs to redirect crosses. Sometimes the ball went into the roof of the net, sometimes over it. Though it was far from refined, Coach Patrick Vieira said he was encouraged by what he saw. “I want him to keep working like he did today,” Vieira said. “He was really lively, he worked really hard and scored some goals. I want him to do that more often. Ugo has got some talent but he needs to understand that talent is not enough, he needs to work harder. I want him to do it every single day and that is how he is going to make the 18 and that is how he is going to play.” Okoli has not made the game-day roster of 18 since March. Since NYCFC is a technical team that plays in a 4-3-3, opportunities for center forwards are scarce. Even more so when the incumbent is David Villa. Okoli said he’s been watching Villa’s movement off and on the ball inside the box but also Villa’s demeanor in an attempt to absorb his savvy and professionalism. An opportunity to replace Villa could come Saturday at Columbus if Villa’s illness prevents him from making the trip. It could come in the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup or in any of the regular-season games ahead. It might not be a second chance, but Okoli said he’s ready to take it, whenever it may come. “Football — it’s a very interesting sport,” he said. “You’ve got to go through a lot of ups and downs during your career. I’ve had to experience some of that but I’m very blessed and humbled to be able to continue to play. I’m just going to focus on things on the field and let God handle the rest. “It’s a long season and you have to make sure you have the right mentality from the first day to the last day. I’m just making sure my mentality is right and I believe I’m ready so whenever the time comes I’m ready whether it’s tomorrow or in November.”This article is over 1 year old Labor signals plan to beef up union power to help boost wage growth Labor has signalled it plans to strengthen the bargaining power of workers and unions in an attempt to revitalise stagnant wages. The party’s deputy leader, Tanya Plibersek, says there is a clear link between declining union membership, the lowering of workers’ bargaining power, and today’s low wage growth, and the link between labour productivity and wages must be restored “at the very least”. Her intervention in the low-wages debate follows a speech last month by Brendan O’Connor, Labor’s employment and workplace relations spokesman, in which he flagged Labor’s intention to make it harder for employers to terminate enterprise agreements. How quickly talk changes: from ever-booming house prices to fears of a hard landing | Greg Jericho Read more He said it had become too easy, and too common, for employers to terminate enterprise agreements which had passed their nominal expiry date. The practical impact of terminating agreements, he said, forced workers back on to award pay and conditions “possibly for significant periods before a new enterprise agreement is, hopefully, negotiated – which can result in workers seeing their take-home pay fall off a cliff”. He said Labor was looking at how to change the Fair Work Act “so that, rather than resorting to the nuclear option of terminating agreements when negotiations fail, the system works to assist the parties to come to a resolution, and to do so on a level playing field”. His policy announcement came after he and the Labor leader Bill Shorten met the ACTU leadership and affiliated unions, and the labour movement pressed the case for legislative change on several fronts. It reflected the mood in caucus in favour of beefing up the existing workplace relations framework. Plibersek, in a speech to the Sydney Institute on Thursday evening, said workers’ wages growth could be revitalised if the bargaining power of workers and their unions could be strengthened. Official figures last month showed Australian wages had stagnated at a record low, growing just 1.9% annually. With the cost of living rising at 2.1%, it meant real wages have declined by 0.3% over the past year. “The International Monetary Fund, historically no great supporter of labour unions, has acknowledged the links between low levels of unionisation on the one hand and low wages, inequality and increasing income for those at the top on the other,” Plibersek said on Thursday. “Australia shows the truth of that. We’ve moved from centralised wage fixing to workplace agreements underpinned by a safety net of minimum conditions. “Union membership has fallen from 40% of the workforce to around 15%, and yet inequality is at a 75-year high.”Volatile ranges with fallocate() Benefits for LWN subscribers The primary benefit from subscribing to LWN is helping to keep us publishing, but, beyond that, subscribers get immediate access to all site content and access to a number of extra site features. Please sign up today! Last November LWN looked at the volatile ranges patch set from John Stultz. This patch is intended to bring an Android feature into the mainline, but it is a reimplemented feature that is more deeply tied into the memory management subsystem. That patch has now returned, but the API has changed so another look is warranted. A "volatile range" is a set of pages in memory containing data that might be useful to an application at some point in the future; a key point is that, if the need arises, the application is able to reacquire (or regenerate) that data from another source. A web browser's in-RAM image cache is a classic example. Keeping the images around can reduce net traffic and improve page rendering times, but, should the cached images vanish, the browser can request a new copy from the source. Thus, while it makes sense to keep this data around, it also makes sense to get rid of it if a more pressing need for memory arises. If the kernel knew about this sort of cached data, it could dump that data during times of memory stress and quickly reclaim the underlying memory. In such a situation, applications could cache more data than they otherwise would, knowing that there are limits to how much that caching can affect the system as a whole. The result would be better utilization of memory and a system that performs better overall. Google's Robert Love implemented such a mechanism for Android as "ashmem." There is a desire to get the ashmem functionality into the mainline kernel, but the implementation and API were not to everybody's taste. To get around that problem, John took the core ashmem code, reworked the virtual memory integration, and hooked it into the posix_fadvise() system call; that is the version of the patch that was described last November. Dave Chinner subsequently pointed out that this functionality might be better suited to the fallocate() system call. That call looks like this: int fallocate(int fd, int mode, off_t offset, off_t len); This system call is meant to operate on ranges of data within a file. Of particular interest, perhaps, is the FALLOCATE_FL_PUNCH_HOLE operation, which removes a block of data from an arbitrary location within a file. Declaring a volatile range can be thought of as a form of hole punching, but with a kernel-determined delay. If memory is tight, the hole could be punched immediately; otherwise the operation could complete at some later time, or not at all. Given the similarity between these two operations, it made sense to implement them within the same system call; John duly reworked the patch along those lines. With the new patch set, to declare that a range of a file's contents is volatile, an application would call: fallocate(fd, FALLOCATE_FL_MARK_VOLATILE, offset, len); Where offset and len describe the actual range to be marked. After the call completes, the kernel is not obligated to keep that range in memory, and is not obligated to write that range to backing store before reclaiming it. The application should not attempt to access that portion of the file while it has been marked volatile, since the contents could disappear at any time. Instead, if and when the data turns out to be useful, a call should be made to: fallocate(fd, FALLOCATE_FL_UNMARK_VOLATILE, offset, len); If the indicated range is still present in memory, the call will return zero and the application can proceed to work with the data. If, instead, any part of the range has been purged by the kernel since it was marked volatile, a non-zero return value will inform the application that it needs to find that data somewhere else. Any filesystem could conceivably implement this functionality, but, in practice, it only makes sense for a RAM-based filesystem like tmpfs, so it is only implemented there. The patch is in its third revision as of this writing, having gotten a number of comments in its first two iterations. The number of complaints has fallen off considerably, though, suggesting that most reviewers are happy now. So this feature may just find its way into the 3.6 kernel.Richard Moller, 50, facing 2 counts of felony animal cruelty A Boulder man was arrested Monday night after police say he beat two raccoons -- at least one of them fatally -- in a Dumpster with a nail-studded board as "revenge" for raccoons killing his cat years ago. According to an arrest affidavit, Boulder police were called at 6:45 p.m. Monday to 5610 Arapahoe Ave. after a witness saw a man -- later identified as Richard Moller, 50 -- jump into a Dumpster and begin beating two raccoons with a piece of wood that had nails sticking out of it. The witness said he could hear the raccoons "screaming and moaning" and said it appeared Moller was intentionally pushing the nails into the animals. The witness yelled at Moller, at which point he told the witness, "All raccoons must die," then jumped out of the trash bin and left the scene, according to court records. When police found and questioned him, Moller told officers that he had watched raccoons kill his cat a few years ago, that he had a "glitch" of anger and, "It was my opportunity to kill the raccoons," according to the affidavit. Moller told police he was not using the side of the board with nails in it and was only trying to hit them with "blunt force trauma." Police found a raccoon body in the Dumpster along with another injured raccoon that ran off before officers could catch it. A 3-foot-long board with nails sticking out of it also was found in the trash bin. Moller is facing two counts of felony animal cruelty. As of Tuesday evening, he remained at the Boulder County Jail on $100 bond. He is next scheduled to appear in court at 2 p.m. Thursday in the jail's courtroom. Contact Camera Staff Writer Mitchell Byars at 303-473-1329, byarsm@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/mitchellby
Men on a Mission defeated Kevin Krueger & Bill Duke when Mabel pinned Duke with a belly to belly suplex at 4:37 5/8/95 - included the first vignette promoting the debut of Skip & Sunny - the Bodydonnas; featured a Bam Bam Bigelow vignette in which he discussed his loss at the Royal Rumble, his problems with Lawrence Taylor, his loss and newfound friendship with WWF World Champion Diesel, and stated he would go through each member of the Million $ Corporation as payback; at the end of the sIn August, 1948, a strange handwritten letter arrived in the mailbox of Rev. J.M. White of Winnipeg. Upon opening the envelope, the reverend was confused. He didn't know the writer, nor did he understand why it came to him. Unsure what to do, Mr. White turned the letter over to the RCMP, where it was relayed with urgency to the force's headquarters in Ottawa, eventually finding its way into a file marked "Secret," along with a growing pile of correspondence just like it. "You will be very astonished to get a letter from so far," the writer began, in carefully written cursive. Story continues below advertisement The letter, among hundreds of pages of Cold War-era files recently unsealed by the federal archives, and with many of the names and details blacked out, came from a man inside Russian-occupied East Germany. The writer was seeking Canadians to correspond with, hoping to bridge the divide between East and West through a sort of pen-pal relationship. Mr. White could not imagine how the sender obtained his address. What he didn't know was that these odd, unsolicited letters from Russian-occupied countries were popping up all over Canada: in Nanaimo, B.C., Three Hills, Alta., and Broadview, Sask., as well as larger centres, including Edmonton, St. John's, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. Several had the same opening line – "You will be astonished at my letter" – while some claimed to be the only ones of their kind. RCMP investigators noted certain letters appeared to be written on high-quality paper, perhaps higher quality than was thought readily available in post-war Europe. More peculiar, though, was the fact that none of the letters bore any signs of being opened or screened by government authorities in the Eastern Bloc, which was unusual for outgoing mail at the time. "It seems strange that the letter does not bear any censorship stamp," RCMP Constable A.M. Mont wrote in a report to his superiors after examining the letter received by Mr. White. Neither the RCMP nor the Department of National Defence could pin down exactly what was going on, although their concern is evident in the files. Canada's security agencies agreed the situation merited monitoring, believing that ulterior motives might be at work – although neither could say precisely what. "In view of the present state of world affairs and the fact that there are quite a number of requests of a similar nature being received from countries under Russian domination," one internal RCMP memo said, "it may be just as well to suggest to Rev. White that the letter be ignored." Story continues below advertisement Perhaps it was just Cold War paranoia taking hold. But to the RCMP and the DND, it appeared as though people in Russian-dominated countries were conducting a sort of fishing exercise through the mail, trying to coax responses out of unsuspecting recipients in Canada. Viewed with suspicion, the pattern of letters fit within a strategy used by the KGB and its predecessor throughout the Cold War, known internally as activniye meropriyatiya, or Active Measures. These were covert operations designed to probe, disrupt or influence the West through the use of non-military means. That is, without mobilizing any troops, and without firing a single shot, Active Measures could be deployed subversively as a weapon to infiltrate, persuade or undermine an adversary from within. And they could be targeted at civilians as easily as they could be used against governments. It is a strategy that has suddenly and unexpectedly reappeared in 2017, amid growing evidence of Russian interference in the U.S. and French presidential elections, including revelations that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter were co-opted to spread disinformation and exploit divisions in society. And it has become particularly relevant with the discovery of several large-scale cyber attacks on the West that have been tied to Russia – including one such hack conducted through Canada that has links to Russian intelligence. This is the story of how, decades ago, Canadian defence authorities first began to suspect that so-called Active Measures were being deployed in Canada and how those tactics – a relic of an old KGB mindset thought to have died off when the Soviet Union dissolved – have now made a comeback in the age of the internet. Story continues below advertisement It is "the rebirth of an old playbook," said Clinton Watts, a former FBI agent who studied Russian Active Measures used during the Cold War. The approaches are strikingly familiar – only the technology has changed. The Rev. White Letter: One of the earliest examples of suspicious correspondence during the Cold War, according to declassified RCMP files. 1) The letter came from the “Russian Occupation Territory” of East Germany. 2) Several followed a pattern, using similar language: “You will be very astonished to get a letter from so far.” 3) Many appeared as pen-pal requests, but often requested maps, phone directories, military information, etc. 4) The RCMP and Department of Defence had concerns about Canadians answering the letters. OPEN DOCUMENT IN NEW WINDOW The 10-step guide Read more below for a primer on how Canadian security agencies responded to the pattern of strange letters during the Cold War. How fishing became phishing The advent of the internet has made a lot of things easier, from banking to shopping – and spying. In 2015, inside a two-storey house on a quiet street in Ancaster, Ont., a young man named Karim Baratov was given a seemingly simple task. His job was to send waves of unsolicited e-mails to people he'd never met – and to make them appear as convincing as possible. The person on the other end would need to fall for the deception. Mr. Baratov, a Canadian citizen born in Kazakhstan, who also went by Karim Taloverov or Karim Tokbergenov, lived alone in the leafy suburb of Hamilton, in a house guarded by security cameras. Despite being unemployed and in his early 20s, Mr. Baratov boasted a garage filled with expensive cars, including an Aston Martin and a Lamborghini. Karim Baratov pleaded guilty in November to conspiracy to commit computer fraud and aggravated identity theft. INSTAGRAM A self-professed computer prodigy, he claimed to have dropped out of school at an early age and made it rich as an online entrepreneur. "At 14, I was making more than both my parents combined," he wrote on social media. "At 15, I got my first million." From the outside, though, it was unclear where the money came from. But in early 2015, according to federal charges filed in March in a U.S. court, Mr. Baratov was hired for a job that would pay him well. The men who recruited him – Igor Sushchin and Dmitry Dokuchaev – worked for the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, a modern-day equivalent of the KGB. A year earlier, the group had managed an extraordinary coup: hacking into the main servers of internet giant Yahoo Inc. They managed to steal its vast user database, the veritable keys to the online kingdom. Included in the mountains of data they took were the personal information of more than 500 million subscribers, including names, phone numbers and alternate e-mail addresses, along with bits of code that identified each user, akin to digital DNA. Stealing the Yahoo database allowed the hackers to create malicious cookies – strings of specialized code that parked themselves in each user account and served as a skeleton key to their inbox – allowing the men to sift through the personal files and correspondence of the user as they pleased. But what the group also wanted was to gain unfettered access to the alternate e-mail addresses connected to those hacked Yahoo accounts, since many turned out to be government or corporate addresses, or Gmail accounts, for people identified as potential high-value targets. For this, they turned to Mr. Baratov in Canada. Working from home, he set about crafting fake e-mails designed to look like messages from trustworthy senders. There were two methods: Some of his messages would warn the person that their e-mail had been compromised and ask them to click on a link immediately to reset their password to protect their data. Others would contain attachments containing malicious code that, when opened out of curiosity, would infect the computer, giving the hackers access to the account. The strategy, known as phishing, is one of the oldest and simplest hacker tricks going – for a good reason. Done well, and convincingly, it can be highly effective. "When Baratov was successful, as was often the case, his handling FSB officer Dokuchaev paid him a bounty," the court documents allege. Each hacked e-mail was believed to be worth $100 (U.S.). But the strategy behind Active Measures isn't about the hack itself. It's about how the material obtained in the breach can then be used. Sensitive information can be leveraged for blackmail purposes by threatening to expose the target, a process known as kompromat. Other documents, such as letters or official records, can be altered to change their meaning or twist facts, and then leaked in order to manipulate public perception – dezinformatsiya. With that in mind, Mr. Baratov was given the task of breaking into the e-mail accounts of people who could be of particular value to the Russian agents. The list included international bankers, diplomats, politicians, journalists critical of Russia, civil servants, a member of the International Monetary Fund, an unnamed cloud computing company and numerous business people, including one U.S. airline executive. It is an unprecedented case. When police finally arrested the 22-year-old hacker-for-hire at his home in March, it was the first time charges had been laid in a cyberattack linked directly to Russian intelligence agents. However, only Mr. Baratov is in custody. The other members of the ring, including Mr. Dokuchev (who was fired in a purge of the FSB's cyber division in 2016), are believed to be in Russia with no chance of extradition. Mr. Baratov's lawyer maintains his client did not know he'd been recruited by Russian agents and instead thought he was working for a man named Patrick Nagel. Mr. Baratov's phishing method was similar – if not identical – to other high-profile hacks that have also been linked to Russia of late, including the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee, in which John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, was duped by a phony e-mail purportedly from Google asking him to reset his password. When the contents of his inbox were leaked online, the e-mails had a damaging effect on the Clinton campaign. And in late 2016, U.S. author and journalist David Satter, an outspoken critic of the Kremlin, was breached by a phishing e-mail that resulted in his personal documents being spilled online, with some of them strategically altered to discredit him and others. In an example of advanced Active Measures at work, several documents were "selectively modified" to make it look as though activists and journalists inside Russia were being paid by the West to write articles critical of the government, implying an orchestrated foreign campaign against the Kremlin. An investigation into the case by the Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog at the University of Toronto, found the hack was part of a much larger phishing expedition believed to be orchestrated from Russia, involving more than 200 high-value targets spread across 39 countries. But this particular phishing effort wasn't just aimed at officials in government or the military. It also targeted members of civil society – academics, non-governmental organizations and other members of the public. It also sought to compromise people in "proximity" to high value targets, such as the family members of diplomats and the wife of a military attaché. It was a trend that had been seen before. 'Each letter follows the same style' Back in the late 1940s, what concerned the RCMP most about the strange letters arriving in random mailboxes across Canada were the requests many of them contained. While each looked like an innocent effort to initiate correspondence with people in Canada – taken at face value, many of them read like simple pen-pal requests – some asked for more. An employee working for the British Columbia Telephone Company was asked by a man who identified himself as the head of the Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig, in Russian-controlled East Germany, to provide copies of telephone directories from Canadian cities, along with other listings. A letter from Czechoslovakia sent to an automobile club in Montreal, sought detailed road maps of Canadian cities and towns, while other letters asked for business directories and details about factories. Another wanted "anything and everything on Labrador." Not all of the suspicious mail necessarily came from Soviet-dominated countries. A letter postmarked in Austria and sent to multiple outposts in the Canadian Arctic requested photographs that showed "harbour views" in the North, leading one government official to suspect it may be something "pretty sinister." Nor was it solely a Canadian phenomenon. In the fall of 1949, according to the same declassified RCMP files, a ship captain arrived in Halifax and passed a note to police on the docks, which was then forwarded at once to the Department of National Defence. "The latest information from Sweden," the captain wrote, was that mysterious letters sent from Soviet-controlled Estonia had been arriving in small towns all over the Swedish countryside, some containing unusual requests for specific items such as newly developed Western medicines, and none bearing the stamp of a censor, indicating clearance for mailing outside the country. "Each letter follows the same style," the captain said. He also pointed out that mail service between the two countries had been formally suspended a year earlier. In the United States, a man from Leipzig wrote the chamber of commerce in Wichita, Kan., asking for documents including maps, airline schedules, information on factories and details about oil and gas fields. After learning the chamber had dutifully fulfilled this request, sending a parcel of material to East Germany, the U.S. military grew concerned. American authorities had also seen a pattern of letters coming from the Leipzig area, which was home to one of the largest concentrations of KGB officials in Soviet-controlled Germany. Wichita was where most of the American B-29 bombers were built, and was also home to a major air force base. In London, a security report under the heading Collection by the U.S.S.R. of Published Information, which was forwarded to security agencies in Canada, warned that an agency in Moscow had placed orders with several British publishers for a variety of "official and semi-official publications, including reports on shipbuilding and technical journals on marine and aeronautical engineering." It was impossible to know how much of this mail was being sent to Canada and how much was actually being answered. Only the letters turned in by the public were channelled to RCMP headquarters. Some were dismissed as "innocuous," while others were catalogued inside a special section of the force tasked with investigating "Internationally subversive activities" and "Correspondence between Canada and countries under Russian domination," an office that was placed in direct contact with the RCMP Commissioner. "Whilst this may have no significance," the head of B.C.'s RCMP said in a confidential memo to Ottawa, "it may possibly be one avenue of conveying information from this country to the U.S.S.R." How active measures were born The opening salvo of the Cold War was fired in Ottawa, in the fall of 1945, when a 26-year-old Soviet embassy clerk named Igor Gouzenko turned himself over to Canadian authorities. As a cypher clerk, Mr. Gouzenko's job was to decode secret messages from Moscow. But on Sept. 5, only three days after Japan's formal surrender in the Second World War, Mr. Gouzenko stuffed 109 carefully selected documents under his shirt, sucked in his stomach to camouflage the bulge, and walked out of the embassy undetected. Within those documents, he harboured a story few at the time were willing to believe. His first stop was the Ottawa Journal newspaper, where a nervous Mr. Gouzenko told the newspaper's night editor, Chester Frowde: "It's war. It's Russia." Mr. Frowde sent him away. "That didn't ring a bell with me," he later recalled. "World War II was over – and we were not at war with Russia." Mr. Gouzenko then went to the Department of Justice, where he got a similar reaction. It was only after two undercover RCMP officers sent to investigate Mr. Gouzenko witnessed Russian embassy officials breaking into his apartment in search of the stolen files that they began to suspect he was telling the truth. Igor Gouzenko gives a television interview in 1954, wearing a hood to hide his identity. THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES The documents Mr. Gouzenko smuggled out of the embassy contained stunning revelations that Soviet spies had infiltrated several key government departments, the National Research Council and the Canadian military, and had stolen nuclear secrets from the coalition effort to build the atomic bomb. They were hard revelations for the Canadian government to swallow – prime minister Mackenzie King included – since Russia had been viewed as an ally throughout the war. But Mr. Gouzenko's files revealed espionage going back years, leading to the arrest of 12 people and a Royal Commission into the activities of Soviet spying. Mr. Gouzenko would go down in history as the first person to warn the West of about Russian espionage following the war, touching off decades of tense relations between the two sides. Former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, who defected to Britain in 1992, would later write that the Gouzenko affair crippled Russian spy efforts in North America for more than a decade. Unsure which agents had been exposed by Mr. Gouzenko, the KGB was forced to dramatically curtail or rejig operations in Canada and the United States. The residual effect on Canada, psychologically, was paranoia. The Soviet Union had gone from ally to, suddenly, the Red Scare. It was in that tense climate – and during Communist witch hunts in the United States led by senator Joseph McCarthy – that the strange letters began arriving in Canada, causing angst among those who received them. A high school teacher in Mossbank, Sask., turned one letter over to the RCMP along with a note insisting he was "a loyal Canadian." At least one man volunteered to take a lie detector test. Meanwhile, RCMP files show the police also regularly conducted secret background checks on Canadians who contacted them about the mail. It was also a time when the KGB was increasingly deploying Active Measures against the West, from within a special department created specifically to hone the craft. According to former KGB veteran Sergey Kondrashev, who led the agency's covert Active Measures operations from Berlin, Vienna and Moscow during his career, and later wrote about them in his memoirs, such tactics go back as far as 1923. The KGB, then known as the OGPU, developed covert methods to disrupt counter revolutionaries within the Soviet Union, which gave rise to the invention of kompromat and dezinformatsiya. By the 1950s, Active Measures were enshrined as a critical tool within the country's intelligence service and were consolidated under a specialized unit called Service A, inside the First Main Directorate of what became the KGB. If espionage was the kind of serious cloak-and-dagger work depicted in spy movies and John le Carré novels, Service A was more like the department of meddling. Active Measures drew upon creativity – with methods that involved the collection of official documents from foreign powers so that they could be altered or forged and then released back into circulation to sow confusion, or by placing false rumours or statistics in the media. In some cases, Active Measures included writing fake letters to newspapers, politicians, activists, sympathizers and church groups, always under assumed names, in an effort to shift opinions, stoke discord or to build close relationships that could be leveraged at a later date. Other plans were more diabolical. The KGB once forged a classified letter between two U.S. military officials warning that bomber pilots transporting nuclear weapons were experiencing alarming side effects, including psychotic episodes and suicidal thoughts. The document was then leaked in Western Europe to stoke fear about the United States' nuclear program among its allies. And in 1963, the Section A office in Hungary published an entirely counterfeit edition of Newsweek magazine, which it slipped onto newsstands in Europe to erode foreign support for John F. Kennedy. One of the most infamous examples of Active Measures, though, was a conspiracy that circulated in the 1980s that the AIDS virus had been created by the CIA at a government lab in Fort Detrick, Md., which was known for biological weapons experiments in the 1960s. Mr. Kondraschev acknowledged the rumour was actually the work of the KGB. The file was codenamed Operation Infektion. However, Mr. Kondraschev said it was naive to think Russians were the only ones practising these disruptive tactics. In the West, he argued, such techniques simply go by different names, such as political action or, simply, dirty tricks. In 1958, when British and U.S. intelligence saw a manuscript of Dr. Zhivago, the Boris Pasternak novel critical of the Soviet system that was banned in Russia, they arranged to have Russian-language versions snuck into the country. This included a miniature edition that could be split in half for easy concealment. "This book has great propaganda value," said a secret CIA memo detailing the plan, which was declassified in 2014. "We have the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government." What was seen as disinformation or propaganda in part depended on what side you were on. For decades, the Soviet Union viewed Radio Free Europe, which broadcast a mixture of Western news, viewpoints and rock music into the Eastern Bloc, as an Active Measure aimed at turning the public against the Soviet government. More recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin – himself a former KGB intelligence officer – has accused the United States of using similar tactics to incite anti-Russian "hysteria." In 2012, when mass demonstrations broke out in Moscow over his return to the presidency, Mr. Putin accused Ms. Clinton, then U.S. secretary of state, of fomenting the public protests through U.S. "active measures." "She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal," he said. "They heard the signal and, with the support of the U.S. State Department, began active work." Similar accusations have emerged in recent months about Russian meddling in the U.S. election. In late October, investigators at Facebook revealed they'd identified more than 80,000 posts originating from Russia between January, 2015, and August, 2017. Each post zeroed in on a divisive political issue such as religion, race, gun rights and gay and transgender issues. One such Russian Facebook account called "Heart of Texas" – which addressed readers as "Fellow Texans!" – sought to organize an anti-Clinton rally before the election, urging those in the state to form a movement to secede from the United States. The sponsored post, which paid Facebook to place the message into users' feeds, was shared 1,200 times. Another, from a different Russian-linked account, announced a rally in Manhattan to protest Donald Trump just four days after the election, using the slogan "Not My President." The political agendas differed wildly, depending on the intended audience. The apparent goal, Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch told a Congressional hearing in Washington in October, was "to drive people apart." How the concerns, and paranoia, escalated In the fall of 1950, after the Montreal automobile club responded to the letter it received from Czechoslovakia, a large package arrived at its office, again bearing no censorship stamp. Inside were roughly 100 pamphlets written by the Czechoslovak Committee of the Defenders of Peace, urging people to stand up against the U.S nuclear program. The Committee requested they be distributed to Canadians who would take up the fight. It is the earliest instance on record of the letter campaign being used to distribute propaganda into Canada, although subsequent notes in the RCMP file suggest there were others. For a while, the flow of such letters seemed to dwindle. But in 1957, the RCMP noticed a new and potentially unsettling pattern emerge. People in government or military roles, or their children, began receiving unsolicited letters. In some cases, those involved held highly classified jobs. The first case on record involved a letter sent in September, 1957, to a soldier in Quebec. The letter purported to be from a New York-based organization called People to People, a friendship club that sought to connect citizens around the world. This struck the soldier as odd: He had no idea how they had obtained his address, what they wanted or who the group was. Upon turning the letter over to his superiors, the matter was elevated to the Department of National Defence. "It is not improbable that this organization is circularizing other members of the armed forces," Colonel E.S. Tate, director of military intelligence for the Canadian Army, told the RCMP. "In time, this could result in the formation of a type of 'pen pal' club designed to exploit the military characteristics of its members." The DND investigated the organization, but could find no indication it was a front. Further questions were raised in 1960 when a Grade 11 student in Ottawa took part in a seemingly harmless class project that involved writing letters to students in foreign countries. The young woman received a letter purportedly from the United Nations Association in Canada telling her she had been matched up with a 17-year-old boy in Soviet East Germany. This concerned her parents. Her father, Major H. Colyer, worked in the Canadian Army Operational Research Establishment in Ottawa, a classified department that provided strategic analysis and planning for military operations. Her mother worked as a librarian for the National Research Council, one of the departments targeted for espionage during the Second World War, according to the Gouzenko papers. "Because of the classified nature of my work in the Army, and because I hesitate to jeopardize my daughter's future standing as a reliable security risk, I wish to report this East German pen-friend so that no security risk is liable," Major Colyer wrote in a letter to the Department of Military Intelligence on Oct. 25, 1960. The army had its concerns, too. In a secret memo sent to RCMP headquarters, the head of military intelligence, Colonel R.E. Hogarth, questioned the legitimacy of the East German connection, saying it appeared "somewhat strange." Canadian intelligence officials investigated, but ultimately left the decision to pursue the matter up to the family. "The Colyers will, no doubt, be on the lookout for pointed requests that may arouse their curiosity," a senior NRC official said in a memo to the RCMP. Internally, the force considered running counterintelligence measures – asking people to engage the letters, play along and report back – and debated what advice to give publicly about writing back. People had the right to send a letter anywhere they wanted, but the RCMP didn't necessarily want that. "Care must be taken, of course, not to give the impression … that we approve of Canadians corresponding with residents of the U.S.S.R.," Inspector D.E. McLaren said in one internal RCMP memo. Suspicions also rose among the public, driven by Cold War fears. A doctor in Peterborough, Ont., wrote the RCMP with a strange revelation: "My nine-year-old daughter has acquired an adult pen pal in Russia," he said, having no explanation for how it happened. "We share your reluctance," the RCMP wrote back. And in June, 1961, Major Homer Thomas, a retired senior officer in the Canadian army, returned home to find an envelope from East Germany in his mailbox, addressed to his daughter. Concerned, he opened it, finding a carefully written letter that claimed to be from a 13-year-old boy in Babelsberg, in the Soviet-occupied region just outside Berlin. His daughter's class had written a letter to Germany a few months earlier as an assignment, signed by 15 students. Major Thomas's daughter received a direct response, which he found peculiar. The letter was forwarded to the RCMP crime detection laboratory, which analyzed the paper under ultraviolet light, tested the composition of the envelope and its adhesive, and conducted a forensic analysis of the handwriting. Two months later, B.B. Coldwell, a chemist at the lab, reported the letter was written on "low quality, inexpensive paper" and that the adhesive was standard. "There is nothing to suggest it was not written by a 13-year-old boy," Mr. Coldwell concluded. The RCMP closed the case – but not before quietly running background checks on the teacher, the principal and others at the school. Those came back stamped "no record." Investigating a suspicious pen-pal letter to a retired Canadian army officer's daughter in 1963, authorities conducted background checks on the girl's teacher and school principal. Both files are blank, stamped 'no record.' Not everything was a case of suspected Active Measures – some things just looked suspicious – but nothing was above question. In 1963, Canada's Director of Military Intelligence, Colonel H.T. Fosbery, sent an urgent memo from Canadian Army Headquarters to the RCMP Commissioner in Ottawa, marked "Confidential." Enclosed were two pages torn from a glossy magazine. "Attached hereto are pages 62 and 63 of the February 1963 issue of TEEN Magazine which," the Colonel said, "are self-explanatory." "This information is forwarded to you for whatever action you deem appropriate," Col. Fosbery told the RCMP. That month, the magazine published an article profiling eight teens living in Soviet countries who wanted pen pals in Canada and the United States. But because TEEN Magazine was unavailable in most of the Russian-dominated places the students said they were from, the military doubted their personas were real and suspected, again, that some sort of fishing expedition was afoot. The article included a profile of Maria Angelova of Yugoslavia, who listed her favourite celebrity as Yugoslav dictator Marshal Tito. Another profile was of Ryszard Jarosz from Poland, who described himself as "a typical Polish youth" who gets his copies of TEEN Magazine "from a friend." It had been 18 years since Igor Gouzenko exposed Canada's susceptibility to espionage. In the intervening years, Active Measures had become a critical element of Soviet intelligence, but the line between suspicion and paranoia in Canada had grown very blurry. That same unease is now evident once more, as details emerge about Russia's alleged cyberoperations over the past few years, from e-mail hacks and phishing to social media influence campaigns. The February, 1963 issue of TEEN magazine profiled eight teenagers in Russian-dominated countries seeking pen pals in Canada and the United States. At the height of Cold-War paranoia, Canada’s director of military intelligence viewed the article as highly suspicious. How Russia became a cyber superpower More than a quarter-century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has turned itself into a leader in cyberwarfare. The advent of the internet has proven to be a valuable tool for Active Measures. Six months before Mr. Baratov was arrested near Hamilton this year, a report from the Ottawa-based policy organization the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies examined Russia's growing stature as a hacking country – along with other cyberpowers such as China – and why the West appears to be lagging behind. The answer goes back to the very emergence of the internet itself. In the late 1980s, and early 1990s, Russia was an industrial superpower in decline, consumed by the fall of Communism and the breakup of the U.S.S.R. The rise of the internet happened mostly with Russia on the sidelines – looking on as a new online world unfolded, built using technology developed almost exclusively by the West. "This came as a tremendous shock to the Russians, who were now using cyberspace, which not only supported Western political and economic systems but was in a sense 'owned' by the West," the CASIS report said. "This 'colonization' of cyberspace by a foreign power impacted and drove how Russians view and use cyberspace." Russia's early approach became one of caution and skepticism. The term "cybersecurity" was rarely used by Moscow. Instead, Russia spoke of "information security" – a slightly different concept. "They realized that they had the least degree of control over the technical networks, and that the information on these networks was the real concern," the report said. "The internet was designed to be reliable; it was not designed with security in mind," it added. "The Russians have much longer strategic thinking in this area." Russia has long seen itself as the victim of an onslaught of so-called soft power from the West, designed to undermine its authority. Soft power, a term coined by Harvard University professor Joseph Nye, refers to the way countries can shift geopolitics through tools such as economic aid, cultural exports and the work of non-governmental organizations. As a result, Russia feels compelled to assert itself. Information warfare is one means of levelling the playing field. "One particular area where the FSB has expanded its role is cyberoperations," said a report published in March by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which assumed security intelligence duties from the RCMP in 1984. "Russian doctrine puts information warfare as a priority in its policy." This has manifested itself in the emergence of two Russian organizations in particular – The Internet Research Agency, a Saint Petersburg-based company with links to the Kremlin, from which many of the Russian influence campaigns on Facebook and Twitter are said to have originated, and APT28, a hacking group specializing in malware and phishing that U.S. security agencies believe is linked to Russian military intelligence. Asked about the country's growing reputation as a leader in cyberoperations, including hacking, a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Ottawa did not respond. But the reason for Russia's investment in cybercampaigns is clear, said Mr. Watts, the former FBI agent who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University. Those old Cold War subversion strategies can be far more effective now because of the amplification, immediacy and reach the internet provides – allowing audiences to be approached and influenced en masse, and with relative ease and economy. Yesterday's clunky letter-writing campaign is today's viral call-to-arms on social media. "It is very difficult to exert information and influence in any sort of rapid fashion without the internet," Mr. Watts said. "And it's even more dynamic with social media." Clinton Watts. C-SPAN The online Russian influence campaign aimed at U.S. voters, which began in 2015, ultimately reached 126 million users on Facebook, the company told a recent congressional hearing. Twitter discovered more than 131,000 messages on its platform that could be traced back to the Internet Research Agency in Saint Petersburg, while Google said the Russian organization uploaded more than 1,100 videos – 43 hours of content – on YouTube. Some of the campaigns were amplified by so-called bots, which are fake, automated accounts made to look like real people, but controlled centrally by one person. Richard Fadden, the former head of CSIS who recently served as security adviser to prime ministers Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, believes the Russians, after expanding their cybercapabilities inside the FSB, are now out to make a statement, whether online or through foreign policy. "[Russia] is unhappy about its position in the world; it is not getting the respect that it thinks it deserves. It has no particular desire, I think, to return to an era of Communism, but it does have the desire to return to the day when it was viewed as a player on every file on the planet, and where it got some respect," Mr. Fadden said. Richard Fadden. SEAN KILPATRICK/THE CANADIAN PRESS "In particular, after the fall of the Soviet Union – and this is not a unique thought from me; many, many people have talked about this – we basically gave Russia the back of the hand. And I think most people in governments around the world have now come to regret that." When it comes to matters of cybersecurity, the West needs to come to terms with its own vulnerability, he said. "I think it's important for us to recognize that – to use the vernacular – we ain't winning these battles." What's old is new It's a staggering statistic: Canada's federal computer systems are probed more than 100 million times a day by suspected hackers, or legions of automated bots looking for vulnerabilities, according to the federal government. The motives behind those attempted intrusions are, for the most part, never uncovered. They come from all over the globe and can be the work of state-backed efforts or individuals acting alone. Untangling the web is difficult. When the National Research Council was hacked in 2014, forcing the department to revamp its entire computer system to protect the scientific and industrial secrets it holds, the Canadian government took the unusual step of singling out China publicly as the culprit, although the Chinese denied the allegation. Similarly, when Moscow faced criticism from the United States this summer over the alleged attacks surrounding the U.S. election, Mr. Putin disavowed any state involvement, but suggested the perpetrators could have instead been "patriotic hackers" inside Russia who acted on their own. The origins of today's cyberattacks – much like the stacks of odd, unsolicited letters catalogued by the RCMP during the Cold War – are difficult to pin down. The letters never had their Gouzenko moment, in which the curtain was suddenly pulled back and the hidden plot revealed. The file, relegated to the federal archives long ago, remains an open question. By today's high-tech standards, the suspected fishing exercise using the mail seems almost quaint. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't have been effective. "The thing about spying," Mr. Fadden said, "people tend to immediately think about James Bond. But there weren't very many James Bonds. A lot of it is very mundane – somebody from an embassy visits a government department and asks for information or paperwork … develops a relationship with a clerk, and the next thing you know they're being given classified maps. You can't get much more boring than that, but boring is good sometimes." "And people, I think, are pretty trusting – witness the success of phishing." Mr. Baratov pleaded guilty in late November to conspiracy to commit computer fraud and eight counts of aggravated identity theft, and will be sentenced in March. The targets of the phishing campaign were spread all over the globe, but the discovery of an FSB-led hacking operation conducted on Canadian soil is an unprecedented event. The Gouzenko affair showed that Russian spying was more sophisticated than those at the highest levels of the Canadian government in 1945 knew, or were willing to believe. Meanwhile, the stacks of unusual letters indicated
Ltd, Renault India Pvt Ltd, Ford India Pvt Ltd and Nissan Motor India Pvt Ltd, also saw sales expand. The only exception was Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd. 10. DLF sells stake in rental unit to pare debt The promoters of DLF Ltd, India’s largest property developer, have agreed to sell their entire 40% stake in DLF CyberCity Developers Ltd to Singapore’s sovereign fund, GIC Pte. The stake sale is expected to bring down DLF"s debt levels by raising around Rs12,000-13,000 crore. DLF’s debt had shot up by Rs1,257 crore to Rs24,397 crore in the three months ended 31 December. Revenue had also fallen 30% to Rs2,057.92 crore during the quarter and GIC entered into quarter. Previously, GIC had partnered with DLF Home Developers Ltd, a unit of DLF, for a joint venture to invest in two projects in Delhi in September 2015. Graphics by Prajakta Patil/Mint. Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.comAcademy Award® winner Peter Jackson continues his Middle-Earth saga that follows the adventures of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) who's swept into an epic quest to reclaim the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor from the fearsome dragon Smaug. In the company of thirteen dwarves and the wizard Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen), Bilbo enters the Lonely Mountain in possession of Gollum's "precious" ring and his keen blade, Sting. With an all-star cast, including many acclaimed actors from The Lord of the Rings (such as Cate Blanchett, Ian Holm, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, Andy Serkis and more), and the effects wizardry of Jackson's award-winning Weta Workshop, Tolkien's epic story comes to life as never before imagined. The Extended Edition film is 25 minutes longer with new and extended scenes, not seen in the theatrical release.If you build it, they will come. That is the message being delivered around the world this weekend, as Wonder Woman is quickly reducing conventional wisdom to dust. Female-led comic book superhero movies are box office poison. Female-led comic book superhero movies are always terrible. Boys won't show up for a lady superhero movie. Female directors don't want to direct big action spectaculars, and they can't be trusted to do so even if they wanted to. You've heard these explanations and excuses for as long as I have. Since 1978, we've had seven Superman movies played by three different actors, eight live-action Batman movies (nine if you count Suicide Squad) with the Dark Knight played by five different actors and three different Spider-Man franchises consisting of seven movies (counting Captain America: Civil War and next month's Spider-Man: Homecoming) and three different actors. But we've only now gotten a Wonder Woman movie. But when Hollywood finally got around to making a Wonder Woman movie, the crowds showed up to strike a pretty potent blow against conventional wisdom. Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman scored a whopping $38.85 million yesterday, including $11m in Thursday previews and $3.7m in IMAX alone. That's the biggest single day gross for a female-directed movie, ahead of the $35.9m opening Friday of Catherine Hardwicke's (2D) Twilight back in 2008. Yes, that would be around $44m adjusted for inflation, but all signs point to a much higher opening weekend than that picture's frontloaded $69.6m Fri-Sun debut. It's obviously the biggest opening day for a female-led comic book superhero movie. The previous record was actually the $7m debut Friday of March's Ghost in the Shell. Among all relative female-led action/genre movies, it's behind only the last two Star Wars films ($119 million and $71m), the Twilight sequels ($72m, $68m, $71m and $71m in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012) and the four Hunger Games movies ($67m, $70m, $55m and $45m in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015). After those relative milestones, it's a long way down since, as you know, we don't tend to get megabucks female-led movies of this sort very often. But the demand/hunger was clearly there. Yes, this is a lower opening day than Man of Steel ($56 million), Batman v Superman ($81m) and Suicide Squad ($65m). But it's right in line with the likes of the upper-level (but not to-tier) Marvel Cinematic Universe movies (Iron Man, Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy and Doctor Strange), as those tend to pull (not accounting for inflation) around $31-$38m on opening day. And this is also just above the $33 million opening Friday of (the 2D and R-rated) Logan. I mean, heck, if you want to ignore 13-15 years of inflation and 3D bumps, it's about on par with the then-record-breaking $39.4m opening Friday of Spider-Man back in 2002 and the $40m opening Wednesday for Spider-Man 2 back in 2004. Of note, the film received an "A" from CinemaScore opening night polling, with the film played 52% female (most superhero movies play 60% male over opening weekend), 14% under-18, 14% 18-24 (a demo that gave the film an "A+") and 53% under 35-years old. So, fun fact, had men been barred from Wonder Woman screenings last night, the film still would have grossed more than the entire opening weekend of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Thus far, it is playing like a Marvel Cinematic Universe offering, in terms both of audience polling and a relative lack of frontloading. If it pulls a weekend multiplier over/under 2.5x, we're looking at a $97 million debut weekend. That triple-digit debut milestone is worth its weight in media gold, so if it's anywhere close to $100m on Sunday the question becomes does Warner Bros. fake it on Sunday and then release finals on Monday of $99 or $98 million? Or do they release "low" estimates on Sunday and then buy another day of good news when they release "Hey, it made $100m over the weekend after all?" Monday actuals. If the film plays closer to The Dark Knight or Man of Steel (or Iron Man 3 for that matter), it'll be a still dynamite $89-$92 million opening weekend. And, truth be told, with mostly positive reviews (a 94% fresh and a 7.6/10 average critic ranking among 238 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes), a most kid-friendly narrative and generations of girls and women who've yearned to see a movie like this, there is little reason to presume that Wonder Woman will be remotely frontloaded. So it will presumably set a new opening weekend record for a female director, besting Sam Taylor-Johnson's $85m Fri-Sun portion of Fifty Shades of Grey's $94m Fri-Mon debut weekend back in February of 2015. And that will be the lesson of the weekend. Aside from challenging the so-called conventional wisdom that caused decades of delay on a Wonder Woman movie and/or a big-budget superhero movie with a female director, the lesson of this weekend's dynamite debut is that when you make something that audiences have been hungering for, and it actually delivers, they will show up with bells on (or in costume). It took 75 years, but we finally got a Wonder Woman movie. And, true to our word, those of us who have been begging for it showed up. If you build it, they will come. I won't have time to do a separate international report, but the film has earned $47.1 million outside of North America thus far (not counting whatever it earned in China on Saturday). That will give it a current worldwide cume of $86m. That means it should be passing $100m worldwide by the end of this sentence. Oh, and something, something "superhero fatigue" and something, something "Where' the marketing?"The Senate confirmed Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday. The Republican majority was joined in the 54-45 vote by a few Democrats in confirming the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals judge to the high court. Gorsuch's success comes after the Senate killed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations on Thursday, effectively paving the way for Gorsuch to join the high court. After the Democratic minority mounted a successful partisan filibuster of Gorsuch, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell deployed the "nuclear option" to lower the vote threshold necessary to confirm Gorsuch from 60 to 51 votes. Gorsuch cleared that threshold Friday morning. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley told reporters after the vote that the change in rules necessary to confirm Gorsuch should not put an asterisk next to his name. "The Supreme Court to me is a sacred institution," said Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who supported Gorsuch, on Friday. "We've had great Democratic justices. We've had great Republican justices.... Neil Gorsuch, I have every confidence, will be one of the all-time great justices for that court." Gorsuch, a Colorado native, is expected to be seated on the Supreme Court before oral arguments resume later this month. The newest justice is a self-identified originalist, a judicial philosophy popularized by the late Justice Antonin Scalia whose seat Gorsuch will fill. His addition to the high court is expected to restore the status quo that existed with Scalia on the bench in many cases with few anticipated deviations. Conservative legal scholars cheering Gorsuch's nomination have long cited his writing and record on the separation of powers and religious liberty issues as evidence that he may help move the court in their direction. As a former Supreme Court clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy, conservatives also have expressed optimism that he can build new coalitions with Kennedy to push the high court's frequent swing vote to the right. Friday's victory for Gorsuch gives a win to President Trump and the outside conservative groups who have worked for months to ensure Gorsuch's confirmation. The judge's confirmation team included the White House counsel's office, McConnell's office, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Republican National Committee and outside conservative groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network and America Rising. Former New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Gorsuch's former law clerks also assisted. "It's been a tremendous honor to get to know Justice Gorsuch and to be part of his talented confirmation team," Ayotte said Friday. "He is a man of great integrity and intellect, and he will be an independent judge who is commited to equal justice under the law. His confirmation today is important for the court and our country." Democrats' objection to Gorsuch largely focused on Republicans' blockade of Judge Merrick Garland's nomination by former President Barack Obama to fill the same seat. The Senate Democrats who took issue with Gorsuch himself focused on his performance during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, particularly his reluctance to answer questions involving cases and controversies that could come before him on the high court. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Whip Dick Durbin hammered Gorsuch repeatedly as a friend of the wealthy and foe of the "little guy," and cited the " frozen trucker" case as an example where they believe harm came as a result of Gorsuch's rulings. Durbin spoke ahead of Friday's vote and criticized Gorsuch as a nominee handpicked by conservative activists. "Where did the name Neil Gorsuch come from?" Durbin said. "He was the choice of the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation. If you know these two groups, you know they're Republican advocacy groups." The Judicial Crisis Network launched a $10 million campaign for Gorsuch with partners such as America Rising and Tea Party Patriots to mobilize conservative grass-roots supporters and pressure Senate Democrats to confirm Gorsuch. "Congratulations to Judge Gorsuch on his confirmation, and to President Trump and [Senate Majority] Leader McConnell on this extraordinary achievement," said Carrie Severino, Judicial Crisis Network chief counsel and policy director "Because of their leadership, and because of Judge Gorsuch's commitment to judicial independence and the rule of law, Justice Scalia's legacy will continue on the Supreme Court." Leonard Leo, an adviser to Trump for the Supreme Court nominaton, said that Gorsuch brings the nation "one step closer to seeing the preservation of [Scalia's] legacy on the court." "Throughout his career, Judge Gorsuch has demonstrated his commitment to judicial independence and to deciding cases according to the law instead of political preferences. I applaud President Trump for choosing such an outstanding nominee, and Leader McConnell and his colleagues for defeating an unprecedented partisan filibuster." Gorsuch, whose Senate Judiciary Committee nomination hearings lasted more than 20 hours, has been largely mum on the political process leading to his confirmation. Gorsuch said during the hearings there was "a great deal about the process I regret," including putting his family through it. During his remarks on the night of his nomination Gorsuch, pledged to "do all my powers permit to be a faithful servant of the Constitution and laws of this great country." His swearing-in ceremony is expected to be held Monday.By Arun KumarWASHINGTON: With a whopping 29.4 per cent increase, a record high of 132,888 Indian students studying in the US in 2014/15 academic year contributed $3.6 billion to the US economy, according to a new report.India was the second leading place of origin for students coming to the US, making up 13.6 per cent of the total international students in the country, according to the 2015 Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange, released Monday.The report is published annually by the Institute of International Education in partnership with the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.International students' spending in all 50 states contributed more than $30 billion to the US economy in 2014 with students from India contributing $3.6 billion, the report said citing the US Department of Commerce China remains the top sending country, with almost twice the number of students in the US as India, but India's rate of growth and absolute increases outpaced China's 11 per cent.It was also the second year of rising numbers for India, following three years of declines.India's 29.4 per cent growth is the highest rate of growth for Indian students in the history of the Open Doors project, which spans back to 1954/55.The last time India grew at a comparable rate (29.1) was in 2000/01 when the number of students from India exceeded 50,000 for the first time.India, China and Brazil accounted for most of the growth in international students on US campuses as their numbers grew at the highest rate in 35 years, increasing by ten per cent to a record high of 974,926 students in the 2014/15 academic year."We are excited to see that record numbers of students are taking advantage of international education opportunities," said Evan Ryan, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs.The number of Indian students in the US is more than double what it was 15 years ago in 1999/2000.The majority of Indian students in the US study at the graduate level, according to the report. In 2014/15, their breakdown was: 12.4 per cent undergraduate; 64 per cent graduate students; 1.4 per cent other; 22.1 per cent OPT (Optional Practical Training).In 2001/02, India became the top sender of students to the US and retained that position for eight years, through 2008/09.In 2009/10, the rate of growth from India levelled off, and China overtook India as the top sender and retains that place for the sixth year in a row now, after eight years of double-digit increases.In 2014/15, China and India together accounted for 67 per cent of the increase in international students, and they now constitute nearly 45 per cent of the total number of international students in US higher education.Students from the top three countries of origin - China, India, and South Korea - now represent approximately 51 per cent of the total enrolment of international students in the US, with the number from China and India increasing, and the numbers from South Korea declining by six per cent.In the 2013/14 academic year, 304,467 American students studied abroad for academic credit, an increase of five per cent, the highest rate of growth since the 2007/08 academic year. India saw a five per cent increase in students from the US.(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)What we need today are more citizen citizens. Both the left and the right are coming to see this. It is the thread that connects the anti-elite 99 percent movement with the anti-elite Tea Party. It also animates an emerging web of civic-minded techies who want to "hack" citizenship and government. Why is government in America so hack-worthy now? There is a giant literature on how interest groups have captured our politics, with touchstones texts by Mancur Olson, Jonathan Rauch, and Francis Fukuyama. The message of these studies is depressingly simple: democratic institutions tend toward what Rauch calls "demosclerosis" -- encrustation by a million little constituencies who clog the arteries of government and make it impossible for the state to move or adapt. This tendency operates in an accelerating feedback loop. When self-government is dominated by professionals representing various interests, a vicious cycle of citizen detachment ensues. Regular people come to treat civic problems as something outside themselves, something done to them, rather than something they have a hand in making and could have a hand in unmaking. They anticipate that engagement is futile, and their prediction fulfills itself. So how do we replace this vicious cycle with a virtuous one? What does it take to revive a spirit of citizenship as something undertaken by amateurs and volunteers with a stake in their own lives? There are four forces to activate, and they cut across the usual left-right lines. First, we have to develop what filmmaker Annie Leonard calls our "citizen muscle." As Americans we have hugely overdeveloped consumer muscles and atrophied citizen muscles. When we are consumers first, our elected leaders sell us exactly what we want: lower taxes, more spending, special rules for every subgroup. Having a citizen muscle means thinking about the future and not just immediate gratification. It means asking what helps the community thrive, not just oneself. It means observing social change like a naturalist, and responding to it like a gardener. It means learning and teaching a curriculum of power -- in schools, and in settings for all ages -- so that we can practice power, even as amateurs. Second, we need to radically refocus on the local. When the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson launched the Binghamton Neighborhood Project, he broke down that city's many paralyzing problems into human-scale chunks of action -- turning an empty lot into a park, say, or organizing faith communities -- and then linked up the people active in each chunk. Localism gives citizens autonomy to solve problems; networked localism enables them to spread and scale those solutions. Third, think in terms of challenges rather than orders. One of the best ways to tap collective smarts is to set great goals and let diverse solutions emerge -- to be big on the what and small on the how. This is a lesson ecologist Rafe Sagarin emphasizes in his work: challenge grants like the X Prize motivate people to participate and innovate far more than top-down directives do. How can government behave more this way?There’s an arguable constitutional rationale for Trump’s action. House Republicans sued the Obama administration over the CSRs, insisting that they were not specifically provided for under the law, and therefore were an unconstitutional appropriation and that Congress must be involved. Courts haven’t decided that question yet. But it’s hard to take at face value the White House’s solemn invocations of respect for the separation of powers, given, for example, the president’s attacks on the judicial system for striking down his travel ban. Trump hates Obamacare, but he is also a politician, and he realizes that no matter how many times he says the law is either Obama’s or Democrats’ fault, it will look bad for him if millions of Americans lose insurance on his watch. Trump is taking a gamble by killing the CSRs: He’s assuming that if he kills them, members of Congress will take action to either replace them or else rework the health-care system more comprehensively. Trump doesn’t really want the health-care system to collapse—there’s no indication he fully understands how it works—but he wants to be able to keep his promise of gutting Obamacare. Forcing Congress to clean up the mess achieves what Trump wants. The same is true when it comes to the Iran deal. Trump is expected to announce Friday afternoon that he will decertify the agreement, which prevents Iran from building nuclear weapons. A law passed in 2015 requires the president to sign off on the deal every 90 days, saying that Iran is in compliance and that the deal is good for American national security. Twice already, Trump has certified the deal, and there’s no evidence that Iran is not in compliance. The problem is that candidate Trump promised to shred the agreement. He is irked by news stories cheekily pointing out that he has twice certified it, and he’s irked by just having to deal with it every three months. Yet many of Trump’s top advisers think the deal is important, including Iran hawks like Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who said last week that it’s in U.S. national-security interests, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Chief of Staff John Kelly and National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster also seem to think the deal’s benefits outweigh its weaknesses. Decertification offers a nifty escape hatch for Trump: He can decertify the agreement and then bounce it to Congress, which very well might decide to leave it in place—even fierce critic Representative Ed Royce said this week the United States should remain in the deal—while washing his hands of the matter. Finally, there’s the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the Obama-era order known as DACA that allowed unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as children to stay in the country under certain conditions. Trump promised during the campaign to immediately cancel the program, but once in office he began to soften. Finally, in September, he announced that he was going to phase it out—but he has repeatedly encouraged lawmakers to pass their own law to achieve the same ends as DACA, and has implied that if they don’t, he will: “Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama Administration was unable to do). If they can’t, I will revisit this issue!” Senator James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican, just told The Washington Post that Trump was willing to extend the deadline.With the government's controversial proposed anti-terror law set to be passed into law within weeks, some of Bill C-51's most outspoken critics are supporting a "pro-privacy action plan" that calls for an end to warrantless and mass surveillance and more independent oversight. According to OpenMedia president David Christopher, what he describes as "Canada's growing privacy deficit" has "alarming consequences for democracy." "We're at a tipping point where we need to decide whether to continue evolving into a surveillance society, or whether to rein in the government's spying apparatus," he notes in the release accompanying the report. "This report outlines common sense steps to strengthen privacy safeguards for all of us." Privacy watchdog 'welcomes' report The plan, released on Wednesday, identifies the "key privacy concerns" that Canadians want to see addressed, according to OpenMedia: - Warrantless access to personal information. - Widespread dragnet surveillance of entire populations. - Insufficient oversight and accountability of surveillance activities. Among the suggested fixes: requiring that surveillance operations garner "judicial, not political authorization," put a stop to the collection and analysis of social media chatter and ask the parliamentary budget officer and auditor general to develop "clear cost projections for surveillance activities." The report has garnered the endorsement of a diverse group of advocacy and activist groups from across the ideological spectrum, including PEN Canada, the Canadian Constitution Foundation, Greenpeace and the National Firearms Association. And while he says that he hasn't yet had the chance to review its findings in detail, federal privacy watchdog Daniel Therrien "welcomes" the initiative. "I believe it's extremely important for Canadians to be involved in the debate around government surveillance and the kind of country we want," he said in a written statement provided to CBC News. "It's clear that Canadians care very deeply about privacy." Not only does the commissioner "shares many of the views expressed by participants in this project," but he notes that several of the proposed fixes "echo recommendations made by our office over the years," including "the importance of the court authorization process" and the push for more intense oversight. "During the discussions around C-51, I called for increased oversight — something that's particularly important given the fact that many of the federal departments engaged in law enforcement and national security activities do not have dedicated oversight bodies," he added. Crowdsourcing campaign While the launch may have been timed to occur just before the bill is expected to be fast-tracked through the Senate, the project was underway well before the contentious C-51 was tabled last January. "By mid-2014 it was clear that Canada faced a widening privacy deficit, solutions to which needed to be identified," the report notes, which was what led OpenMedia to initiate its "citizen-driven" crowdsourcing campaign. Last fall, the group unveiled a simple drag-and-drop form that invited participants to rank their personal privacy priorities. It also provided them with the option to complete a more extensive questionnaire that solicited their views on specific issues, such as police monitoring of peaceful protesters and different oversight models. Over 10,000 Canadians took them up on the offer, according to the report, which notes that more than 500 — or 5.6 per cent — of those who did so also provided "detailed comments" by using the open-ended feedback field. The group also held "in-person crowdsourcing events" in Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax between October 2014 and January 2015, and a "Facebook Town Hall" that reached "over 46,000 people" — including, the report notes, New Democrat digital issues critic Charmaine Borg, who took part in the discussion. Contacted by CBC News, Borg said the survey reflects what she's been hearing from her constituents, and from the privacy community in general. NDP to talk privacy on campaign trail "What the government has done is clearly not enough," she told CBC News — and the report's recommendations "are very much needed." The NDP has been at the political forefront of political opposition to C-51, voting against it at every stage in the House of Commons and even forcing the government to back down on its initial plan to fast-track it through committee in just four days. "We've definitely been trying to keep this on the forefront," Borg said. And given how many Canadians see privacy as a top priority, she's hopeful that it may become an election issue this fall. The Liberals, on the other hand, have consistently voted alongside the Conservatives in support of the bill while simultaneously pledging to repeal the more problematic aspects under a Justin Trudeau-led government. Liberal democratic reform critic Scott Simms said he, too, welcomes the report, and looks forward to reviewing it. "Dialogue and discourse are integral to civil society in Canadian democracy," he said via email. The bill currently stands referred to the Senate national security committee, which has already conducted a pre-study of the contents before its arrival in the upper house. As a result, it could be up for final parliamentary approval by the end of the month. Also on HuffPost:Hey gang,There hasn’t been a lot of Rock Band news this year, but rest assured that we have been listening to all the community requests / demands coming out of the forums, Facebook, Twitter, email, and events. One of the most common requests is for DLC sales, specifically for the more recent post Rock Band 3 era content, so we’re happy to announce some deep discounts starting next week!From December 23rd to January 20th we’re discounting some of the most popular DLC packs, Rock Band Blitz, and the Games on Demand version of Rock Band 3! The specific packs, pricing breakdowns, and availability timelines by console are listed in the press release below, so read on.We hope that a ton of you will be playing Rock Band with friends and family over the next few weeks, and that these discounts help you beef up your set lists for maximum enjoyment. Rock on, and happy holidays!HARMONIX CELEBRATES THE HOLIDAYS WITH DEEP DISCOUNTS ON AWARD-WINNING ROCK BAND™ GAMES AND ADD-ON CONTENTCambridge, MA – December 19th, 2014 – Just in time for the holidays, Harmonix is excited to announce deep discounts on some of its Rock Band games and select add-on content for Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system users for a limited time!Starting today, PlayStation 3 users can rock out with the intense controller-based beatmatch of Rock Band Blitz for only $5.49 (normally $14.99). And players can build their song library up with discounts on select music packs, including tracks from Foster The People, Linkin Park, Nine Inch Nails, Ozzy Osbourne, and more.Xbox 360 gamers aren’t left out in the cold this holiday, with killer deals on the award-winning Rock Band 3 for Games on Demand ($9.00, normally $19.99) and Rock Band Blitz ($5.55, normally $14.99).Full details on these amazing deals can be found below.Keep up with the latest Rock Band news on Twitter ( http://www.twitter.com/rockband ) and Facebook ( http://www.facebook.com/rockband ).###About Harmonix Music Systems, IncHarmonix Music Systems, Inc., based in Cambridge, MA, and established in 1995, is the leading developer of groundbreaking music-oriented videogames. Harmonix was founded to invent new ways for non-musicians to experience the unique joy that comes from making music and has pioneered music and rhythm gaming in the US. For more information please visit www.harmonixmusic.com.© 2014 Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Rock Band, Rock Band 3, Rock Band Blitz, Harmonix and all related titles and logos are trademarks of Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. Rock Band 3 and Rock Band Blitz developed by Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.Microsoft, Xbox and Xbox 360 are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.“PlayStation” is a registered trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.Original Airdate: September 3, 2012 Written & Storyboarded by: Ako Castuera & Jesse Moynihan Many moons ago, I reviewed Video Makers and was pretty vocal about my general distaste for the type of story they were going for. Jake and Finn fighting with each other, in most cases, just isn’t very fun to watch. They’re best friends and brothers, and that doesn’t mean that they need to be kissing each other’s asses all the time, but anytime their bickering and disdain for each other is used as a focal point in the main conflict, it just doesn’t work for me. It kind of feels forced and melodramatic if we’re supposed to believe their main issue is with each other, rather than the main opponents who typically face them. It is, however, realistic to portray them having differing desires and wanting different things from each other, which Video Makers did do, but again, not in an entirely enjoyable way. Here, I think it’s much more fun to watch. Where this episode doesn’t have an especially strong story, it makes up for with some pretty great slapstick and a very enjoyable physical battle between the two boys. I love, love, LOVE the beginning of this one. Finn and Jake just hanging out, enjoying each other’s company, and allowing some time to themselves. Finn acknowledges that it’s nice to have bro-time for once, and after a long season of exhausting drama regarding Hunson Abadeer, Ricardio, Princess Bubblegum, and Flame Princess, it is nice that the two take the time to get away from it all. The music, the visuals, and the dialogue between the two just really make this an entirely adorable scene. Also, on a more personal note, rewatching these episodes and taking note of who boarded what is really making my brain hypersensitive to detail. Like, I actually noticed that the first five or so drawings were done by Herpich, despite not being credited for the storyboard overall. These reviews are doing things to me, man. The scenes that follow are pretty fun, as a bunch of different warriors (who look very similar to the Marauders; wonder why they didn’t just bring them back) face off against “The Farm.” The Farm is a delightfully designed anti-hero, with droopy limbs, a blank facial expression, and great voicework from Tom Gammill. There’s also “The Train” voiced by Dana Snyder. The design of The Train is just so ludicrous I can’t help but not enjoy it, especially how his mouth scrunches up every time he forms an “o” sound. There’s also a bit of unintentional subtle lore here, as The Train mentions his “friend” who can give him a new pair of bionic legs. In addition to all the warriors who have bionic limbs and attachments, I would guarantee that he’s speaking of Dr. Gross, which totally wasn’t intended as I mentioned, but it works as a bit of nuanced foreshadowing for the eventual reveal. Always fun to piece together bits and chunks of this show. I like the dynamic they put Finn and Jake in especially in this one. Both are being rather selfish, though for justified reasons. Finn only wants Jake to do what he wants to do, but it’s only because Jake offered to so in the first place, presumably because Jake didn’t want to let his brother down. Yet, Jake shouldn’t have agreed to do something he didn’t want to do, and should’ve emphasized his affinity for Kompy’s Kastle. This is where the battle ensues, and it’s very much my favorite part of the episode. The line that starts it off is actually particularly sweet: “I’m gonna break every bone in your body, then heal you later with that magical goo we got from the Cyclops’ eye!” suggesting that, while Jake is clearly pissed off at Finn, he would never actually want to put his best friend through any lasting harm. The way the fight is portrayed, I think it can be clear that this has all happened before to some extent. Jake’s exclaiming, “no bities!” leaves me to believe this did happened at least a couple of times when they were children, though as Jake got older, as well as Finn, it really hasn’t happened in recent years. What we’re treated to is some delicious slapstick from this point on: Jake growing dozens of legs just to repeatedly kick Finn in the face, Finn spitting an entire fucking dollop of saliva into Jake’s face, and Jake repeatedly hitting his own face and rump by accident. It takes up a large chunk of the remainder of the episode, but stays thoroughly entertaining and humorous throughout. I always die laughing whenever The Farm abruptly squats on both Finn and Jake and then disposes barn animals all over them. That’s always pretty priceless to me. Once we’re introduced to the Dream Warrior, however, I think the episode kind of reaches a bit of a halt. I think it’s all pretty obvious from hereon in: the advice that the Dream Warrior gave was all nonsensical, yet subtle advice that Finn and Jake had to use to defeat the farm, and Finn and Jake would finally team up and be able to work together. None of it’s done badly, of course, but it’s quite dissonant from the first half and never quite lives up to what it started out with. I also don’t know why Jake comes out as the one on the bottom by the end; sure, he compromises and enjoys the victory with Finn, but I wanna see Jake kicking ass in some Kompy’s Kastle too! Didn’t seem fair to the little yellow guy. In addition to this, the Dream Warrior himself isn’t that remarkable or noteworthy, besides the fact that he’s voiced by Matthew Broderick (what an unusual role for a guest celebrity) and I just don’t feel like there’s anything that unique or funny about the sensei-type advice he gives the boys. It’s just somewhat of a simplistic resolution for an episode that’s already pretty lowkey on its own. I do enjoy this one, though. I don’t think it’s anything great, but it does handle the conflicting side of Finn and Jake’s relationship a lot better than an episode like Video Makers did. It uses the appropriate differences between the brothers and turns it into a fun, fight-filled romp. It’s not especially strong in story, but after coming off the heels of the past three or four episodes, it doesn’t need to be. A smaller, lighter episode after some heavy inner and outer drama is always warranted. Always nice to see an episode focusing on the relationship between our two main boiz. Favorite line: “Don’t you always call sweatpants ‘give-up-on-life pants,’ Jake?” AdvertisementsAppearing on the radio Thursday with host Tavis Smiley, professor Cornel West argued that President Barack Obama is, like Presidents George W. Bush and Richard Nixon before him, a “war criminal” uniquely responsible for the deaths of “over 200 children.” West’s words were in response to a question about the administration’s seeming preference for killing terrorism suspects from the air rather than risking American lives to take them prisoner and hold them for an indefinite amount of time in military custody. A legal whitepaper obtained by NBC News recently exposed the Obama administration’s once-secret justification for the program, which authorizes a deadly airstrike if intelligence officials believe it may take out any “senior operational leaders” of al Qaeda or “associated forces,” even if that includes an American citizen. “I think, my dear brother, the chickens are coming home to roost,” West told Smiley. “We’ve been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It’s been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.” Troublingly enough, West is right on the number: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that up to 216 children have died in three countries the U.S. is not formally at war with — Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — as a result
Turkey, Greece cement ties, seek ways to resume Cyprus peace talks ATHENS Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras (R) and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu shake hands and exchange the agreement they signed during a Greek-Turkish High Level-Cooperation Council in Athens. AP photo Turkey and Greece have reiterated their commitment to further develop bilateral ties through cooperation in various fields, including supplying natural gas to European markets, while intensifying their efforts to resume Cyprus reunification talks as two guarantor countries.Turkey and Greece held a High-Level Strategic Council meeting in Greece over the weekend under the co-chairmanship of the countries’ two prime ministers, Ahmet Davutoğlu and Antonis Samaras, with the participation of nine Turkish and 10 Greek ministers.“On Cyprus, we want negotiations to begin as soon as possible. We held very positive talks [with Greece]. They will continue. We embrace the approaches that put our mutual interests forward in the Eastern Mediterranean and in the Aegean,” Prime Minister Davutoğlu said at a joint press conference on Dec. 6 in Athens. Davutoğlu expressed his wishes for a quick recovery for Greek Cypriot President Nikos Anastiasadis, who recently underwent cardiac surgery, and stressed that Turkey prioritizes the re-commencement of suspended talks between the Turkish and Greek Cypriots.Greek Cyprus had announced in October the suspension of peace talks as a result of a crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean, which was sparked after it accelerated oil exploration drills off Cyprus. Turkey sent the seismic research vessel Barbaros to nearby regions for its own oil exploration and deployed a warship to closely follow the activities of a Greek Cyprus platform in the island's disputed economic zone.Greek Prime Minister Samaras said Athens understands Anastiasadis’ decision to halt talks, but also expressed his wishes for a resolution to the problem.Greek Cyprus’ condition for the resumption of talks is Turkey’s withdrawal of Barbaros and its warship from the region.With no immediate indication of how talks could be resumed, the two prime ministers instructed the undersecretaries of their foreign ministries to seek a formula. The first meeting between high-level diplomats was conducted in Athens on Dec. 6, with the Turkish team led by Feridun Sinirlioğlu.Previously, both Davutoğlu and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu stressed that Turkey could end its search if Greek Cyprus were to do the same, suggesting the establishment of a joint private company to conduct research on behalf of both Turkish and Greek Cypriots.However, Turkey’s suggestions have not been met positively, as Greek Cypriots insist on the withdrawal of Turkish vessels from the region. Diplomatic sources familiar with the talks said “not much should be expected from the Greek Cypriots if this condition isn't met.”In the meantime, there are reports about the Greek Cypriot government drafting a law on sharing oil and natural gas revenues with the Turkish Cypriots.“In fact, both sides [Turkish and Greek Cypriots] agree that all the island's natural resources belong to both sides. There is an agreement on that. What is important is how this process will be carried out by the two sides afterward. It’s important that they avoid unilateral moves,” Davutoğlu said.More broadly, the meetings saw Turkey and Greece conclude a new round of strategic cooperation council meetings, which were launched in 2010 and have produced nearly 50 documents to deepen and diversify bilateral relations, especially in the fields of trade, tourism, energy, transportation and culture. “We have done this successfully up until today and we are determined to continue in the same way,” Davutoğlu said.There are two important elements that have increased the ability of the two sides to move together, he added. “First, there are no longer psychological barriers. While our ministers are exchanging views, they no longer worry about how their words would be regarded by the other side,” he said.The second element is the realization of the complementary quality between the two sides, Davutoğlu said. “For example, in transportation. Our transportation policies complement each other; sea transportation in the Aegean, land and air transportation. It’s a great possibility that the closest land transportation from Midilli (Lesbos Island) to northern Greece will be through the [under-construction] Çanakkale Bridge. Just imagine building a high-speed train from Istanbul to Thessaloniki; in that way, two important historical cities will be linked to each other,” he added.Davutoğlu also expressed his appreciation of Greece’s support for Turkey’s EU accession process. “In the past, there were periods where some countries tried to hide their opposition [to Turkish accession] by hiding behind Greece, as if Greece was against Turkish membership. But today, Greece is expressing its support for Turkish membership on every platform,” he stated.The Turkish prime minister openly asked Greece to pioneer efforts to open new negotiation chapters as part of Ankara’s membership talks. “It’s our hope that Turkey’s EU process will be finalized with the support of Greece. Everyone will realize that in addition to Turkey and Greece winning by the conclusion of this process, Europe will also win,” he said.CARSON, Calif. -- LA Galaxy head coach Bruce Arena addresed the media following his club's 5-1 victory over Central FC. On the debut of Giovani Dos Santos: "It was good to get him thirty five minutes, he did a good job. He obviously has got to get better, he has only been in training a couple days and he missed the last couple weeks. It is good to get him back on the field and I am sure in a short period of time he will get back to his full fitness." On the injury to Raul Mendiola: "I don't have anything official, it didn't look good." On the referee's decisions during the first half: "Welcome to CONCACAF." On how you approach a CONCACAF game: "We make the players aware of it, just try to keep your sanity. And there are games that are very well officiated. It is what it is, what can I say." On playing more reserve players tonight: "We have a game Sunday at 1 PM, and we certainly didn't request this schedule. The schedule is such that it restricts you from obviously playing your full team." On how the team responded to first half adversity: "It was a good test for those players. Obviously when that penalty is called, maybe you can lose your focus and concentration and perhaps not be the team that goes into halftime with a lead. At least we managed to get a 2-1 lead out of that, in a half that if we probably play a little bit better we are up 3 or 4-0. They were handicapped a goal today, and it didn't make it easy for us, but the response from our team was good." On the play of Sebastian Lletget: "He did a good job. We have seen enough of him the last couple months, Sebastian is a good player and certainly had an impact tonight." On the importance of winning the CONCACAF Champions League: "Well, we are a long ways away from winning this tournament. We need to position ourselves to win the group, and that is not going to be easy. CSD Comunicaciones is a good team, we see them in a couple weeks, that will be an important match, and then obviously we need to go to Trinadad and then to Guatemala. It's not going to be easy, our goal is to get out of the group, and once that happens we can start thinking about next year and trying to position ourselves to win the tournament." On the possibility of starting Giovani on Sunday: "We will think about it over the next couple of days. Obviously, in time, he is going to be on the field on a full-time basis." On the play of Garcia, Maganto, Mendiola, and other reserve players: "They did. I thought Romney and Meyer did a good job, the whole back line. It was a good effort by the entire group, under circumstances that could have been difficult. They managed to play through some calls in the first half that could have unbalanced us, but we kept our composure and won the game."0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard The massive exodus of advertisers from Glenn Beck’s television show appears to be taking its toll on the host. Beck went on a paranoid rant about Media Matters and liberal bloggers attacking him. Beck said, “What they have to do is break my legs. What they have to do is silence me. What they have to do is Sarah Palin me. Here is the audio from Media Matters: After falsely claiming that Media Matters is funded by George Soros, and fear mongering about Obama’s “civilian national security force,” Beck got to the root of his concern, “Unless you are preparing something else. Now that is a very good chance that if this gets traction, they will, right now preparing something to take me out and discredit me, but I think what’s happening is as our listener called in a little while ago, Char she’s a truck driver, she was in Wisconsin last night, and she said that she was called a racist because she was watching me, and you should see, we are compiling a list of all things that bloggers are calling me this week.” He continued, “None of them are dealing with the facts. They are going after my religion. They’re going after my alcoholism. They’re going after oh well he’s just crazy, that I’m a fear monger, that I am this I am that. None of them are answering the questions, none, none. None are relying on facts to dispute…What they have to do is break my legs. What they have to do is silence me. What they have to do is Sarah Palin.” First of all Media Matters is not a George Soros operation. It is a David Brock operation. Why is it that the right wing thinks that George Soros is the only liberal with any money, and that he is behind everything? Secondly, the source of Beck’s terror is that his viewers are called racists for watching. An advertiser boycott might not get him taken off of the air, but is show gets the racist tag, he is doomed. Notice how he brought up the fact that one of his viewers was called racist, but he doesn’t mention why she was called a racist. Glenn, she was called a racist because the host of the program that she was watching decided one morning to call the black president of the United States a racist. Beck started this tsunami of boycotts and bad publicity all on his own. It isn’t surprising that Glenn Beck is making a blogger enemies list. This is the kind of thing that paranoid people do. I disagree with anyone who attacks Beck for his religion or battle with addiction. Those are personal matters that have nothing to do with politics. In listing all of the things that people call him, he avoided the term racist. It seems that he doesn’t want to go near the race thing with a ten foot poll. He can spread his conspiracy theories until the end of time, but you have to ask yourself, if so many people are out to get Glenn Beck, why is he still here? If anyone wanted to take Beck out that could. The truth is that his whole Chicken Little act is a gimmick. No one is out to get Beck. He is the Doctor Who of the right wing fringe. He goes on the air everyday and peddles politics based science fiction. It is shtick, and it has made him a millionaire many times over. If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:There are reports out that President Barack Obama has allegedly instructed the United States Secret Service to “keep the Press away from Trump.” The reason that this happened? Well this was Obama’s latest attempt to help the Hillary Clinton campaign. In fact after those instructions were said, the Secret Service told the Donald Trump Campaign that the Press would no longer be allowed to travel with the Trump Motorcade. They cited that their resources “were spread too thin during a time of heightened security.” Naturally the Trump campaign is trusting of the Secret Service and is going to listen and cooperate with what they have to say. They never thought to question the motive behind the change. Well after this was implemented, the press was outraged. It’s not a shock that they were outraged. After all, if they can’t even travel with Trump then it is going to be harder to get him in the press about his policies, statements, etc. Basically it will be harder for people to report on what he is doing, and that could have a detrimental effect on the presidential race. At least that is what President Obama is hoping for. Apparently a very high-ranking member of the Secret Service revealed to SuperStation95 that President Obama laughed about it. His thinking was this: “If the press is kept away, then Trump won’t be in the news as much. If he’s not in the news, people won’t vote for him.” Well that might be true, but President Obama fails to realize that Trump is always going to be in the news. He has a Twitter account which he really enjoys using. And considering that this is an election year, everything and anything that Trump says, tweets, or does is somehow going to be in the news. Sites like POLITICO covered the news around the change in the press situation, but they never once mentioned that it was Obama that ordered a change. They also never mentioned if it was done for political reasons. Well if it was President Obama that advocated these changes, then it just continues to show that the President is doing everything he can to make sure that Clinton is elected to the White House in November. He has done quite a bit of campaigning for her, despite the fact that he still has a couple months remaining in office. How in the world is President Obama even allowed to campaign for Clinton? And it’s not just simply telling voters that they should vote for her. When Clinton fell ill and had to take a couple days off to rest, President Obama actually went to a political rally for her and talked about everything that she was going to do to make this country “better.” Of course we all know that a Clinton presidency would just be a third term of Obama, so of course he is all for having her in office. But this still doesn’t excuse the fact that President Obama took a day off from being the leader of the United States to go and campaign for Clinton. A lot of people took notice of that, and that included Trump. He once again used his favorite social media account, Twitter, to tweet out his frustrations with the current president. He actually brought up the fact that Obama wasn’t working and asked if he should be. Obama is doing whatever he can to make sure that Clinton gets elected. And while it is normal for sitting president’s to want to make sure their party stays in the White House, Obama seems to have gone too far. He is going so far as to make sure that Trump isn’t really talked about in the press. That is only doing a disservice to the people of the United States. By doing this, Obama is basically trying to say that there is only once choice for president, and that is Clinton. All the freedom to choose which candidate you want is being thrown out the door. Obama is trying to make it seem like this is a totalitarian government where you can only vote for Democrats. After all, he hasn’t restricted the media from attending or covering Clinton events. Part of the joy of being an American citizen is that you can vote for the candidate that you want. And considering that Clinton has had so many scandals, there are a lot of people that have boarded the Trump Train. Not to mention that people are tired of the job that Obama has done for the past eight years and want to see real change come to the United States. Well real change cannot happen if Clinton is in office. She wants the same things that he wants. The last time I checked, if someone wants and does the same things as you, then that isn’t changing anything at all. Literally the only change would be the person in the White House. That is precisely what Obama wants. He wants to continue to see the United States decline. Well Trump doesn’t want to see the United States decline anymore than it already has. That is why there are so many people for him. Obama seems to know that more and more people are changing over to support Trump. So he has decided to try and do whatever he can to make sure that Clinton wins. Share this article if you are tired of seeing Obama shirk his responsibilities as President of the United States to campaign for Clinton and make sure that she gets in the White House. People are tired of seeing this country decline, so they want Trump. That doesn’t make Obama happy at all.At least 16 people died in election-related violence in Pakistan on Saturday. The major clashes took place in districts in Sindh and Punjab provinces. A fight began at polling stations in Village Wayio Jaunejo in Sindh between the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and Pakistan Muslim League-Functional (PML-F), which left twelve dead and 50 injured. Officials and witnesses claimed both sides attacked “with sophisticated weapons, wooden clubs and stones.” The police reported that they “rushed to control the situation,” but villagers told the media the officers did nothing to stop the fight. It was the residents who “shifted the injured and dead bodies.” In Khairpur, the groups fought with chairs and fists. The fight ended when they all pointed guns at each other, but no one died. Police arrested one PML-F worker. Other injuries occurred in Jacobabad, Ali Nawaz Panwar, Union Council Loghi, and the women’s polling booth in Shikarpur. A fight in the Sargodha district of Punjab killed at least three people. Witnesses said the rival groups opened fire after they accused each other of fraud. An activist died after the rivals started a gunfight at a PTI rally in Faisalabad. Another struggle erupted in Bhakkar, which left twelve injured. Authorities arrested a PPP lawmaker in Okara after he “slapped the election official after an intense argument.” A fight between two independent candidates in Nathuwala forced officials to stop polling. Results showed that PML-N won in Punjab with 143 seats. PPP is currently leading in Sindh with 70 seats. Secretary Election Commission Babar Yaqoob confirmed the commission received numerous complaints about fraud. He told the media they deployed 192,000 staff members to monitor polling stations. Saturday’s polling was the first portion of the election. The second part will take place in late November, while the last phase will occur in December.Manuel Neuer didn't just reinvent the goalkeeping position. He took top spot in our FC global vote. It's not enough for the modern goalkeeper to be good with his gloves. These days, shot-stoppers are expected to start the attacking moves as well as shutting them down. Agility and reflexes are par for the course, but the best goalies in the world also fuse a sense of confidence and daring in their penalty areas that make them seem truly larger than life. Manuel Neuer, Bayern Munich & Germany In the words of Germany and Bayern great Lothar Matthaus, Neuer has "reshaped" goalkeeping. "I would say he's almost reinvented it," Matthaus said in January 2015, suggesting Neuer deserved to win the Ballon d'Or for his performances during Germany's 2014 World Cup triumph. At Barcelona, Pep Guardiola had Victor Valdes, whose ease in possession of a football made him an ideal sweeper-keeper. In Munich, he found Neuer, with yet superior ball skills who might make him a more-than-passable outfield player. In the 2013-14 season, there were only 10 Bundesliga players who passed the ball more accurately than the former Schalke man. That alone would not be enough to confirm Neuer's primacy among his contemporaries: his fast-twitch reflexes, command of his box during set pieces and consummate defensive organisation set him a cut above. David De Gea, Manchester United In Manchester United's fall from grace over the past three seasons, only one player has been able to maintain the high standards of the Sir Alex Ferguson years. "Dave saves," a Stretford End banner reads. And without De Gea, United's decline would surely have been sharper. United's decent defensive record in the two seasons of Louis van Gaal's stewardship was rightly credited to the Spaniard, whose collection of three consecutive United player of the year awards is the fans' testament to the debt his excellence is owed. The string-bean frame with which he arrived at Old Trafford in 2011 has filled out, and the previously quiet De Gea has become a leader. In one-on-one situations, there is perhaps nobody better. Ferguson's decision, on the advice of then-goalkeeping coach Eric Steele, to sign De Gea rather than Neuer, then on offer from Schalke, has rarely been regretted. Gianluigi Buffon, Juventus "We wanted to be like him." What Iker Casillas -- a three-time Champions League winner, twice European champion and a World Cup winner -- said of Buffon reflects the longevity and legacy of Italy's captain. Buffon will be 39 in January, with two decades of near-unbroken excellence behind him. Juventus' payment of £33 million to Parma in 2001 was a world record for a goalkeeper, and remains so, but has become a bargain. Keeping five clean sheets to win the 2006 World Cup may be the height of his career, yet nostalgia for the Buffon of old rarely sustains. After some recent criticism, he silenced doubters by performing heroics in Juventus' 1-0 win at Lyon in October, making an elastic save from Nabil Fekir and stopping an Alexandre Lacazette penalty. "This is what I live for, to make people eat their words," Buffon said afterwards. Jan Oblak, Atletico Madrid No European club has enjoyed such a rich lineage of goalkeepers as Atletico Madrid over the past few years. De Gea left in 2011, to be replaced by Thibaut Courtois' three-year loan from Chelsea until 2014. Then in came Oblak from Benfica for €16m, making him La Liga's most expensive keeper ever. The 6-foot-3 Slovenian is capable of saves just as spectacular as De Gea and is far better with the ball at his feet than Courtois. The 2015-16 Liga season saw him beaten just 18 times, equaling the all-time record set by Deportivo La Coruna's Paco Liano in 1993-94. Atleti coach Diego Simeone, having been previously blessed with that exemplary pair, signposted an "enormous future" for Oblak as he starred in a team that reached the 2016 Champions League final before losing to Real Madrid on penalties. Thibaut Courtois, Chelsea Chelsea have not yet seen the best of Courtois, as compared to the brilliance of his three years on loan at Atletico Madrid. The Belgian has occasionally indicated he may not be in London for the long-term, having enjoyed his life and the football far more in Spain. "I don't think I will end my career there," he said during Euro 2016, and this season at Stamford Bridge looked make or break. Some Chelsea supporters yearned for Petr Cech, who was allowed to leave for Arsenal in the summer of 2015, especially when Courtois struggled during the Blues' pitiful defence of their 2014-15 title. However, the arrival of Antonio Conte looks to have revived Courtois' confidence and courage. Should he wish to leave London, a huge fee will be required from any potential suitors. Hugo Lloris, Tottenham Spurs legend Teddy Sheringham recently picked Hugo Lloris as the club's greatest goalkeeper -- a high accolade considering the likes of Ray Clemence and Pat Jennings once graced White Hart Lane. The Frenchman, captain of both club and country, is a most modern exponent of his craft. At 6-foot-2, he has the slim build of a rangy central midfielder rather than the archetypal English football goalkeeper. His ball skills suggest he would be comfortable in an outfield position; he will almost always try to play the ball out from the back. Brave almost to a fault when coming for crosses or when at the feet of opposing strikers, he leads his teams by example and moves almost as much as the rest of the players in Mauricio Pochettino's all-action pressing game. "I can say only good things for him," Pochettino said after Lloris had kept Bayer Leverkusen's forwards at bay to secure a 0-0 draw in Germany last month. Keylor Navas, Real Madrid Had Real Madrid sent their documents on time on Aug. 31, 2015, the Costa Rica international would have been a Manchester United player, with De Gea back in his home city. It was an administrative error that ended up working out for all parties concerned. Reserve goalkeeper turned cult hero of the Bernabeu and Champions League winner at the end of that 2015-16 season, Navas is not a sweeper-keeper or a supreme defensive organiser. He is instead a shot-stopper in the finest Latin American style: agile, aware and expert in psyching out opponents in a one-on-one situation. "He's a hell of a keeper," an approving Cristiano Ronaldo said in March. Petr Cech, Arsenal Losing Cech to Arsene Wenger and Arsenal darkened Jose Mourinho's mood even more than usual, as Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich allowed the 11-year veteran to head to a destination of his own choosing in the summer of 2015. Chelsea had Courtois, whose return from loan at Atletico Madrid had forced Cech to the bench, but the Belgian has so far failed to replicate the consistent security the Czech international supplied for so long. Courtois has some way to travel if he is to come close to Cech's all-time Premier League record of 182 clean sheets. Cech leaves the spectacular stuff to the others; positioning has always been the key aspect to his game. "He will save them 12 to 15 points a season," Chelsea captain John Terry predicted as Cech's defection neared completion. Arsenal are certainly far more solid with him around. Claudio Bravo, Manchester City English football is yet to see the best of Bravo. The Chilean has been the focal point of a philosophical debate over whether a goalkeeper's role is to play as part of the team -- as City manager Pep Guardiola prescribes -- or as a shot-stopper, cross-catcher first and foremost. An error-strewn Manchester derby debut on Sept. 10 did not aid his reputation. Guardiola, though, described Bravo's as "one of the best performances I have ever seen," and also defended him after being sent off against Barca in the Camp Nou during City's 4-0 defeat on Oct. 19. During eight years at Real Sociedad from 2006 to 2014, he was recognised as one of Spanish football's best -- a status he retained when winning two La Liga titles with Barcelona. On the international stage, he captained Chile to Copa America glory in 2015 and 2016. For these reasons his manager holds such faith. Marc-Andre ter Stegen, Barcelona When Guardiola wanted a new Manchester City goalkeeper, ter Stegen was his initial target, the player perhaps closest to Neuer. Ter Stegen is less physically imposing, but shares his compatriot's sweeper-keeper aptitude. Germany legend Oliver Kahn, from a more traditional school of goalkeeping, is a confirmed fan. "Everything he does, he does with such calmness," Kahn said in 2013, when Barcelona were making their move for ter Stegen, then at Borussia Monchengladbach. Kahn also defended him when, typically high up the pitch, he was beaten from 50 yards by Roma's Alessandro Florenzi in September 2015. "If I were his coach, I would turn the page and tell him to continue on the same path and not to abandon his style," Kahn said. Bravo's departure to City hands ter Stegen, previously only involved in cup matches and the Champions League, full-time duties as Barcelona goalkeeper. FC100: The full list Goalkeepers Right-Backs | Centre-Backs | Left-Backs Central Midfielders | Attacking Midfielders | Wingers Forwards | Strikers Managers Feature content Gab Marcotti: Putting the fun back in football rankings Miguel Delaney: Picking the future #FC100 No. 1s Nick Miller: England's slipping stock behind low #FC100 representation Mark Lovell: No surprise that Bayern dominated #FC100 John Brewin: Where were all the Premier League players? FC 100 is the result of a comprehensive vote among ESPN FC writers, experts and regions to determine the top 100 in the men's game right now. Our ballot breaks things down by position to more accurately reflect the top performers all over the pitch, not just the ones who dominate the headlines. John Brewin is a staff writer for ESPN FC. Follow him on Twitter @JohnBrewinESPN.1 #1 concorde 0 Frags – + Hello all of you TFTV forums people! I'm here to tell you about HavocCast, our new casting network! HavocCast was created from the needs of more Asian TF2 coverage and the once AsiaFortress Cast Team being inactive. Currently we have a skeleton crew in the works and plans for a more consistent coverage starting with AsiaFortress Cup 10. So, what are we casting then? This week we'll cast Round 2 of the Upper Bracket of the AsiaFortress Mercenary Cup 7 fixture between Cute Beast vs Fireless. A little bit TLDR for this match: Cute Beast is currently the reigning champion of the Mercenary Cup and is looking to hold their title. Fireless being consists of veteran Japanese players with the likes of pnt, ozr and hirapa23 is doing well considering they haven't participated in a tournament in a long time. So, the question remains: Who will grab the spot to the Semi Finals? Join concor- and TBD alongside bunnyybeast on camera on 20th February 2016 around 9 P.M. GMT+8 (if they stick to their schedule, that is). If you're having troubles for finding out when is "9 P.M. GMT+8" on your timezone, it's around 1 P.M. GMT. With the "Asia for i58" hype starting to grow and if you're interested in seeing another Asian TF2 cast, be sure to join and we'll make sure to bring you a quality cast! Here's our Twitch and Steam Group, and if you have any questions ask them below! Thanks for your interest, and thanks to Sideshow for his help so far. Regards, concor- Hello all of you TFTV forums people! I'm here to tell you about HavocCast, our new casting network! HavocCast was created from the needs of more Asian TF2 coverage and the once AsiaFortress Cast Team being inactive. Currently we have a skeleton crew in the works and plans for a more consistent coverage starting with AsiaFortress Cup 10. So, what are we casting then? This week we'll cast Round 2 of the Upper Bracket of the AsiaFortress Mercenary Cup 7 fixture between Cute Beast vs Fireless. A little bit TLDR for this match: Cute Beast is currently the reigning champion of the Mercenary Cup and is looking to hold their title. Fireless being consists of veteran Japanese players with the likes of [i]pnt[/i], [i]ozr[/i] and [i]hirapa23[/i] is doing well considering they haven't participated in a tournament in a long time. So, the question remains: Who will grab the spot to the Semi Finals? Join concor- and TBD alongside bunnyybeast on camera on [b]20th February 2016 around 9 P.M. GMT+8[/b] (if they stick to their schedule, that is). If you're having troubles for finding out when is "9 P.M. GMT+8" on your timezone, it's around 1 P.M. GMT. With the "Asia for i58" hype starting to grow and if you're interested in seeing another Asian TF2 cast, be sure to join and we'll make sure to bring you a quality cast! Here's our [url=http://twitch.tv/havoccast]Twitch[/url] and [url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/havocastnet]Steam Group[/url], and if you have any questions ask them below! Thanks for your interest, and thanks to Sideshow for his help so far. Regards, concor-JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel’s Jerusalem municipality approved building plans on Wednesday for 558 new homes in the occupied West Bank, land that the Palestinians want for a future state. A crane is seen next to homes in a Jewish settlement near Jerusalem known to Israelis as Har Homa and to Palestinians as Jabal Abu Ghneim January 3, 2014. REUTERS/Ammar Awad A municipality spokeswoman said the local planning committee had approved requests by private contractors for the construction work in the settlements of Har Homa, Neve Yaakov and Pisgat Zeev. The three settlements are in a part of the West Bank that Israel annexed to Jerusalem, in a move that has not been recognized internationally, after capturing the territory in the 1967 Middle East war. The Palestinians have said that expansion of Israeli settlements, which most countries deem illegal, could derail the U.S.-sponsored peace talks that resumed in July after a three-year break. The municipality spokeswoman said that the initial plans for the new dwellings were approved years ago. The Palestinians are seeking a state in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel pulled its troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, and the enclave is now run by Hamas Islamists opposed to the present peace drive. Har Homa and Pisgat Zeev are in one of the areas in the West Bank that Israel says it intends to keep in any future land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians. Also on Wednesday, Israeli authorities demolished three Palestinian homes they said were built without permits in occupied East Jerusalem, displacing five families. Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, called the moves a “deliberate provocation of the Palestinians to drive them to leave the negotiations.” “Israel is not only capable of sabotaging the talks, but it is flagrantly destroying the chances of peace and stability throughout the region,” she said in a statement. Three weeks ago, Israel published tenders for 1,400 new homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now said at that time that Israel had announced plans for 5,349 new homes in those two areas since the peace talks restarted.What does a girl with the world at her feet wear after dark? Kendall Jenner—model-of-the-moment, social media sensation, and the new face of Estée Lauder—plunges into party season. It’s called Sphere-360°. Download immediately!” instructs Kendall Jenner, her face illuminated by her iPhone 6 across a table at the Bowery Hotel’s Gemma restaurant. This app, she swears, will change my life. A willowy nineteen-year-old brunette, Jenner emerged as an unequivocal star at the spring collections. She walked thirteen major shows and became the talk of the fashion crowd, from New York’s front row to dinners at Paris’s Caviar Kaspia to Twitter, where she topped the season’s most-discussed personalities. “Kendall is the new pop-culture model,” declares Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing, talking from his Paris office. “She’s inspiring girls in the way Claudia Schiffer or Naomi Campbell did. They aspire to look like her.” As an It girl, Jenner is the perfect storm: Raised from the age of eleven in front of reality-show cameras documenting her Kardashian half-sisters, she has recalibrated the public/private filter of her generation. Unlike other contemporary models who have learned how to harness social media to further their careers, Jenner has grown right out of the belly of the beast. She is a self-created phenomenon, with some fifteen million Instagram followers; the modeling came later. “I enjoy letting my fans into my world,” says Jenner, dressed today in skinny gray Point Sur jeans, a Rag & Bone T-shirt, and a Barbara Bui fringed-leather jacket. “Instagram is my edit of my life.” Watch: Kendall Jenner—Where to Begin. Along with her digital ease comes the one-two punch of her extraordinary classical beauty, worthy of a Goya portrait: huge, wide-set eyes, well-drawn eyebrows, pillowy lips, lush cheeks, feminine curves. “She has that dichotomy: darkness and sweetness at the same time,” observes Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci, who cast her in his fall campaign. Tisci was struck by her unswerving work ethic—another hallmark of the ambitious, tech-savvy stars of right now. “She arrives with a big smile on her face because she feels privileged to be able to do what she wants to, and that’s priceless,” adds Tisci. “She works hard, and it pays off.” Jenner recalls that her parents—her manager-mother, Kris, and former-Olympian father, Bruce—would wake her up three hours before school to do extra study. “I learned early that being a perfectionist and providing quality was the only way to do business,” she says matter-of-factly. “Workaholic is a good word in our house.” There is nothing laissez-faire about Jenner. “I am a very competitive person,” she declares. Before she decided to “step up and get serious” about modeling, she was a successful athlete at school (soccer, basketball, dodgeball) and an accomplished equestrian who excelled in hunter-jumper competitions. To show her dedication to her new career path, she quit riding, and sold Ladybug, her Paint Horse. “I will go back to riding one day—when I have kids. I have such amazing childhood memories of being on horseback.” Kids? Yes, Jenner has her life planned, though there is no boyfriend at the moment: “It’s a cliché, but I genuinely am too busy. Or should I say picky?” When she has downtime, she likes to spar at New York’s Gotham Gym—a popular haunt with Victoria’s Secret models. “It’s a hard-core workout, but it gets the aggression out. I’ve really bonded with my trainer. I’ve not knocked him out yet!”
looking sharper, still not super active. Vieira low kick met by a glancing right hand. Zahabi stuffs a shot. Two minutes in. Vieira low kick and straight right. Right to the body. Zahabi wheel kick falls short. Quick exchange. Zahabi stuffs another takedown. Two minutes to go. Zahabi on the advance, potshotting. Left hook from Vieira. They trade on the fence and Vieira shoots. Zahabi avoids a slam and they get to trading. One minute in. Right hand by Vieira. Again. Both men land well to the head. Viera briefly threatens a front headlock before the bell. I just don’t think Zahabi did enough. 10-9 Vieira. Final result: Zahabi def. Vieira by unanimous decision 185 lbs.: Jack Marshman vs. Thiago Santos Round 1: Early boxing, low kick from Santos. Nice exchange sees Santos lands a pair of left hooks. Santos shoots and takes Marshman down into guard despite a fence grab. One minute in. Solid ground-and-pound. Santos stands over him, then dies back in. Marshman briefly threatens an armbar. Two minutes in. Marshman makes space and stands. Santos swings and shoots in, stuffed. Two minutes to go. Body kick lands for Santos, who tries to spin. Another thudding body kick beneath Marshman’s elbow. One minute to go. Santos tries another body kick and Marshman decks him with an overhand right. Santos shoots in to slow things down and they trade heat. 10-9 Marshman. Round 2: Santos opens with a head kick attempt. Marshman looking more confident. Marshman to the body. One minute in. Another right hand by the Welshman. Santos thumps him with a body kick. Marshman backs him to the fence and lands a good right hand. Two minutes in. Santos spends a decent chunk of time backpedaling, then clobbers Marshman with a wheel kick out of nowhere. Marshman goes down and one of the follow-up punches briefly turns his lights out. Another highlight reel knockout by Thiago Santos. Final result: Santos def. Marshman by TKO (wheel kick and punches) 185 lbs.: Ryan Janes vs. Gerald Meerschaert Round 1: Meerschaert lands a thudding left early, but Janes powers back with volume punching and ties up on the fence. Inside trip by Janes and he’s on top in guard. Meerschaert looking to set up a triangle, Janes passes to half guard. Meerschaert regains guard a minute in and looks for a sweep. Meerschaert spins for an armbar and draws an immediate tap. Final result: Meerschaert def. Janes by submission (armbar)Manifest Destiny, a phrase coined in 1845, expressed the philosophy that drove 19th-century U.S. territorial expansion. Manifest Destiny held that the United States was destined—by God, its advocates believed—to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent. Louisiana Purchase Thanks to a high birth rate and brisk immigration, the U.S. population exploded in the first half of the 19th century, from around 5 million people in 1800 to more than 23 million by 1850. Such rapid growth—as well as two economic depressions in 1819 and 1839—would drive millions of Americans westward in search of new land and new opportunities. President Thomas Jefferson kicked off the country’s westward expansion in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase, which at some 828,000 square miles nearly doubled the size of the United States. In addition to sponsoring the western expedition of Lewis and ClarkOF 1805-07, Jefferson also set his sights on Spanish Florida, a process that was finally concluded in 1819 under President James Monroe. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website But critics of that treaty faulted Monroe and his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, for yielding to Spain what they considered legitimate claims on Texas, where many Americans continued to settle. Texas Independence Cries for the “re-annexation” of Texas increased after Mexico, having won its independence from Spain, passed a law suspending U.S. immigration into Texas in 1830. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website Nonetheless, there were still more Anglo settlers in Texas than Hispanic ones, and in 1836, after Texas won its own independence, its new leaders sought to join the United States. The administrations of both Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren resisted such calls, fearing both war with Mexico and opposition from Americans who believed calls for annexation were linked with the desire to expand slavery in the Southwest. But John Tyler, who won the presidency in 1840, was determined to proceed with the annexation. An agreement concluded in April 1844 made Texas eligible for admission as a U.S. territory, and possibly later as one or more states. Despite opposition to this agreement in Congress, the pro-annexation candidate James K. Polk won the 1844 election, and Tyler was able to push the bill through and sign it before he left office. The Coining of 'Manifest Destiny' By the time Texas was admitted to the Union as a state in December 1845, the idea that the United States must inevitably expand westward, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, had taken firm hold among people from different regions, classes and political persuasions. The phrase “Manifest Destiny,” which emerged as the best-known expression of this mindset, first appeared in an editorial published in the July-August 1845 issue of the Democratic Review. In it, the writer criticized the opposition that still lingered against the annexation of Texas, urging national unity on behalf of “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” As the phrase also appeared in a nearly identical context in a July 1845 article in the New York Morning News, its originator is believed to be John O’Sullivan, the editor of both the Democratic Review and the Morning News at the time. That December, another Morning News article mentioned “manifest destiny” in reference to the Oregon Territory, another new frontier over which the United States was eager to assert its dominion. Oregon Territory An 1842 treaty between Great Britain and the United States partially resolved the question of where to draw the Canadian border, but left open the question of the Oregon Territory, which stretched from the Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains over an area including what is now Oregon, Idaho, Washington State and most of British Columbia. Polk, an ardent proponent of Manifest Destiny, had won election with the slogan “54˚ 40’ or fight!” (a reference to the potential northern boundary of Oregon as latitude 54˚ 40’) and called U.S. claims to Oregon “clear and unquestionable” in his inaugural address. But as president, Polk wanted to get the issue resolved so the United States could move on to acquiring California from Mexico. In mid-1846, his administration agreed to a compromise whereby Oregon would be split along the 49th parallel, narrowly avoiding a crisis with Britain. Impact of Manifest Destiny By the time the Oregon question was settled, the United States had entered into all-out war with Mexico, driven by the spirit of Manifest Destiny and territorial expansion. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, added an additional 525,000 square miles of U.S. territory, including all or parts of what is now California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. Despite the lofty idealism of Manifest Destiny, the rapid territorial expansion over the first half of the 19th century resulted not only in war with Mexico, but in the dislocation and brutal mistreatment of Native American, Hispanic and other non-European occupants of the territories now being occupied by the United States. U.S. expansion also fueled the growing debate over slavery, by raising the pressing question of whether new states being admitted to the Union would allow slavery or not—a conflict that would eventually lead to the Civil War. Sources Julius W. Pratt, “The Origin of ‘Manifest Destiny’,” The American Historical Review (July 1927). Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005). Michael Golay, The Tide of Empire: America’s March to the Pacific Era of U.S. Continental Expansion, History, Art & Archives: U.S House of Representatives. Access hundreds of hours of historical video, commercial free, with HISTORY Vault. Start your free trial today.Taking virtual reality immersion to another level the HaptX virtual reality glove has been designed to provide a way of sensing and touching in virtual reality environments. The HaptX replace your VR controllers providing a wearable glove created to make your virtual hands feel just like real ones. Watch the demonstration video below to learn more. The HaptX virtual reality glove allow you to feel objects in virtual reality and know whether they are hard or soft and prevent your hands going through virtual objects offering a sensitivity displacement of up to 2 mm which is much higher than any other virtual reality gloves currently on the market. HaptX CEO and co-founder Jake Rubin explains more : These are basically tiny little haptic pixels. And by changing their pressure over time, very quickly, we can create any sensation in your skin. HaptX Gloves are the world’s first industrial-grade haptic wearable. It’s the only glove to deliver high-fidelity tactile feedback and up to five pounds of force feedback per finger. HaptX Glove’s sub-millimeter accuracy makes it the most precise motion-tracked glove and enables enterprise users to achieve unprecedented realism and productivity in virtual environments. Unfortunately, no information on consumer pricing or worldwide availability has been released as yet for the HaptX virtual reality glove, but as soon as information comes to light, we will keep you updated as always. Source: Engadget Latest Geeky Gadgets DealsThe MBTA’s Red Line suffered from severe delays on Tuesday. (Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe) Good morning, and welcome back to the work week. We’re experiencing moderate delays so I’ll be your Red Line conductor for the foreseeable future. Next stop is Wollaston. Winter is coming. [Doors inexplicably close, then open again, and remain open for several minutes] Ladies and gentlemen, and that guy playing music without headphones, we are experiencing moderate inbound delays due to a, uh, signal problem at Kendall. It’s not even been one day and your summer is already a fleeting memory. Clear the doors please. Advertisement [Doors close, train moves 300 yards, then stops] Get Metro Headlines in your inbox: The 10 top local news stories from metro Boston and around New England delivered daily. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here Ladies and gentlemen, and whoever brought that particularly fragrant breakfast platter, I gotta apologize again. We’re working on the air conditioning. We’ve restarted the system. Also the, uh, signal problem. Going to be some delays. The fire will take us all.... Wollaston next. [8 minutes of sweltering, motionless silence] Ladies and gentlemen and the guy clipping his nails, we’re going to be standing by here for a few minutes while they work on that, uh, signal problem at Kendall. Also we have a medical emergency up ahead. I am Shiva, god of death. Doors on your left. [Train crawls into Wollaston] Advertisement Ladies and gentlemen and that family that brought four bicycles onto the train at rush hour: I apologize again for the delay. We have four medical emergencies and the, uh, signal problem delaying us. We’ll be standing by here until we’re released. Should be at least a few more minutes. Everyone you’ve ever loved will one day turn to dust and ash. [Doors close, then open, then close; someone starts sobbing] Ladies and gentlemen and that guy litigating his custody dispute on speakerphone for some reason, we are working on the air conditioning. If you don’t like the car you’re on, switch to another car. Also, all the cars are full so listen to your hearts. Something something, uh, signal problem. Next stop, North Quincy. [Doors open; crowd on platform reacts with alarm, like a botched plastic-surgery patient catching the first post-op glimpse in a mirror] Ladies and gentlemen and that guy who’s got his backpack taking up the seat next to him, attention please: We’ve got severe delays here, due to a... uh... SIGNAL PROBLEM at Kendall and hundreds of medical emergencies up ahead. Thank you for your patience. We’re working on the air conditioning. JFK next. Advertisement [Doors open at JFK; MBTA employee sprints past waving a walkie talkie; doors close before we can see what’s chasing him] Ladies and gentlemen and that woman who keeps pushing people to protect her nonexistent personal space, we’re holding here indefinitely. I may have mentioned a, uh, signal problem? Medical emergencies. Everywhere. Death reanimated, feasting on the living. Winter is here. Save yourselves. We’re working on the air conditioning. [Dozens of people leave, the doors close immediately behind them and the train departs] Andrew next. Doors on your right. Nestor Ramos can be reached at nestor.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @NestorARamosLooking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. As he seeks another six years in office, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has touted his reputation as a true conservative and an unwavering opponent of President Barack Obama. But a newly leaked document written by one of the most prominent figures in the tea party movement claims that McConnell wasn’t a strong conservative leader initially when Obama proposed his anti-recession stimulus package—and that McConnell only ended up opposing this signature Obama initiative because a leading tea party group leaned on him to do so. Mother Jones recently obtained a trove of emails, memos, financial records, and fundraising documents written by officials and financial backers of FreedomWorks, a national tea party group. These records contain a May 2009 memo written by FreedomWorks president and CEO Matt Kibbe and addressed to the group’s board of directors. The memo presented FreedomWorks’ efforts to combat the Obama administration, just as the new president was settling in and responding to the economic crisis under way. In the document, Kibbe credited FreedomWorks—which has been funded by corporations, wealthy individuals, and grassroots donors—for “fomenting the tea party movement.” The memo noted that FreedomWorks was doing all it could to battle Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, which was intended to jump-start the US economy. But Kibbe reported in his memo that not all Republican leaders in Congress were willing to block the stimulus bill. Mitch McConnell was apparently one of those wavering Republicans. Here’s what Kibbe’s memo said: Early in the stimulus battle, we learned that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was learning towards letting Senate Republicans ‘vote their conscience,’ code words for an unwillingness to lead. Our campaign team was able, with just several hours notice, to mobilize a grassroots firestorm that systematically shut down every phone line in the Leader’s offices, both in Washington, DC, and in Kentucky. This unreported story resulted in a very strong Senate Republican Leadership position opposing the trillion-dollar stimulus bill and a surprisingly unified opposition in the Senate. In Kibbe’s telling, McConnell was prepared to let the 40 Senate Republicans under his leadership vote as each preferred to do, possibly permitting some GOPers to support Obama’s stimulus at this moment of economic peril. Only when FreedomWorks muscled McConnell, Kibbe was claiming, did the minority leader change course and insist that all Senate GOPers vote no. Was Kibbe telling the truth? Neither McConnell nor FreedomWorks responded to requests for comment. But Kibbe’s account contradicts the conventional narrative that McConnell from the start wanted Senate Republicans to oppose the stimulus package—and it undermines McConnell’s contention (which he deploys regularly on the campaign trail these days) that he has been a consistent conservative opponent of Obama. In the end, the stimulus bill passed 60 to 38. All but three Senate Republicans voted no. Kibbe’s boast that McConnell only tried to block the stimulus because of pressure from FreedomWorks will likely not improve relations between the group and the senator. In recent years, FreedomWorks has attacked McConnell as a Washington insider who buddies up with DC lobbyists. In a bid to oust McConnell, FreedomWorks backed his 2014 primary opponent, businessman Matt Bevin, who failed spectacularly. The ongoing clash between McConnell and FreedomWorks is one of several fronts in the continuing civil war within the GOP—and the Kibbe memo shows that FreedomWorks considered McConnell a RINO who needed whipping even before the tea party began. Read the full FreedomWorks May 2009 memo:In Trump's Government, The 'Regulated Have Become The Regulators' Eric Lipton of The New York Times says lobbyists now working for the government are leading a regulatory roll back that is benefiting the industries they used to represent. DAVE DAVIES, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who's in Washington today, speaking at a public radio conference. There has been a lot of reporting about the difficulty President Trump has experienced in pursuing parts of his policy agenda, such as repealing the Affordable Care Act. Our guest, New York Times correspondent Eric Lipton, says there's one goal the Trump administration has pursued aggressively with more success - rolling back government regulations. Lipton is based in Washington, where he writes about lobbying, corporate agendas and Congress. He's reported on potential conflicts of interest involving the president and his family's business interests and about the administration's contentious relationship with the Office of Government Ethics. Now Lipton is directing a team of reporters in a project to monitor the administration's efforts to roll back government regulations and the role former industry lobbyists are playing as senior officials in many federal agencies. Eric Lipton has worked at the New York Times since 1999. In 2015, he won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism for a series examining the explosion in lobbying of state attorneys general by corporate interests. Well, Eric Lipton, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Did the Trump administration change the rules on lobbyists joining agencies that they lobbied for? ERIC LIPTON: Yes, it did. The Trump administration adopted much of an ethics agreement that President Obama had initiated in 2009. But they made several critical changes. One of the most important one was that the Obama administration explicitly banned lobbyists from going to work in agencies that they had in the prior two years lobbied. And Trump removed that explicit restriction and has allowed quite a number of lobbyists to come into agencies to regulate the same sectors that they just a few months ago had been trying to influence. DAVIES: At least they bring a certain knowledge of the field I guess. You know, apart from that two-year ban on a lobbyist going to work for an agency that it used to lobby, there's a separate provision that you could not work on an issue or a matter that you had lobbied on - that's more specific than simply joining an agency - unless a waiver is granted. You could grant a waiver, but it had to be a specific waiver for you to work on an issue that you had lobbied on. You want to just explain how that changed? LIPTON: So Trump eliminated the prohibition on lobbyists coming in, but he kept the two-year ban in participating in the same matter. And so then the question becomes, well, how are they enforcing this two-year ban because there are now dozens of lobbyists and lawyers who represented private industry who have been placed into the Trump administration in the same sectors that they had worked in for the private industries. But the question is, you know, how are we looking and knowing whether or not they are then working on essentially their former clients to-do lists but now with the power of the government agency that they're running? DAVIES: Right. And in the past, when a specific waiver would be granted that says, OK, you can work on this matter that you previously lobbied on, the waiver would have a written explanation. And it would be public, right? LIPTON: That's right. During the Obama administration, there was an agreement that anytime anyone was given a waiver, that waiver would be either posted on the White House website or shared with the Office of Government Ethics and made public. So we as reporters could look and see, well, this, you know, man or woman is working in the same area that they had previously been paid to represent. But we would know the conditions upon which they could do that and why they had been granted such a waiver. Then when the Trump administration started, they initially were refusing to make those waivers public despite the fact that we were asking for them. And it became the subject of a pretty intense fight. And ultimately, they made some of them public, but they don't continue to post them. DAVIES: So some are public, and some you - I guess there's no way of knowing (laughter) - right? - if such activity occurred if there wasn't something posted. LIPTON: No. What we're doing at The New York Times is - and also in working with ProPublica, a nonprofit journalism investigative organization - is we're trying to track by looking at all of the hires across the federal government. We have a database that we are maintaining. And we're comparing all of those hires to the lobbying registration database. And so we're trying to track as many of the people who are going into the agencies who are lobbyists. And then we're looking at the work that they're doing. And we're doing open Freedom of Information requests. We're trying to find out if waivers have been granted. And we're just tracking those people to see, what are they engaged in, and how are they perhaps continuing to help their former paid clients? DAVIES: Do you want to give us a couple of the more prominent example of lobbyists who now appear to be working in agencies that they use to lobby? LIPTON: One of the more prominent ones is Michael Catanzaro, who was a lobbyist for Devon Energy and also for an electric utility that operates some of the largest coal-burning power plants in the United States. And so he was lobbying on things like trying to block a rule that the EPA had passed that was going to limit methane emissions from oil and gas drilling sites across the United States. Methane is many times more potent as a climate change component than CO2. And methane also - when you release methane, you're often also releasing volatile organic chemicals, which are - you know, can be carcinogens and cause other health consequences. So the EPA was trying to regulate methane emissions. And Michael Catanzaro was working for Devon Energy to try to kill that rule. So he then goes into the White House. And he also had previously been representing the largest - one of the largest coal-burning utilities in the United States. And he had been fighting the Clean Power Plan, which was trying to force coal-burning power plants to reduce their CO2 emissions. And so once he gets to the White House, among the things that he does is he helps write an executive order that essentially instructs the federal agencies to terminate the Clean Power Plan and the methane rule. And so he is essentially continuing the work that he'd been doing on behalf of his private-sector clients. But he's now doing it as one of the most powerful, you know, policy people in the United States. And so you wonder, how is that possible? So we were aware of Michael Catanzaro's shift. And I then went and interviewed a number of industry lobbyists who were lobbying the White House to try to get those rules repealed because they hated it. And now all of a sudden, they've got their former, you know, colleague and, you know, compatriot who is essentially helping run the show. And I said, have you talked to Michael Catanzaro since he went into the White House? And they said, yes. And I said, how is this possible? I thought there was this two-year ban on participating in a particular matter that you had represented a client on. And so we - and then I asked the White House, well, can I see his waiver because he must have been granted a waiver. And they would not give it to me. DAVIES: So that's where it stands. If there was a waiver, it's private. You just don't know. LIPTON: No. After I wrote that story, the Office of Government Ethics said, you know what? This is an impossible situation. How can we have an ethics program if there - if we can't see the waivers? So the head of the Office of Government Ethics did what he called a data request, and he made a request of every federal agency. And he asked every federal agency for copies of any waivers that had been issued through April. And as a result of that request - and there was a bit of a fight where initially the White House indicated that it may not comply with the request. But ultimately the White House complied. And there you go. On the day of the deadline, they - the White House issues a list of waivers that had been issued, and there's Michael Catanzaro. And he was in fact - had been granted a waiver to participate in the same matters that he had previously been paid to represent. DAVIES: And the waiver had some explanation for this decision. LIPTON: It said that he had certain expertise. And he had previously worked in the federal government. And there's no question that he has expertise. It's just that, to me, what is sort of striking is the extent to which the regulated have become the regulators. And it's happening across the federal government. And it's just - the number of agencies where this is taking place is striking, and it's something that, you know, really merits a close examination and that we're determined to really look at what those people are doing and how much the work that they're doing lines up with the work that they had been paid to do just a few months ago. DAVIES: You want to give us one more example? LIPTON: There's a guy at the Department of Transportation Security Administration. And in this case, I don't know the extent to which he has participated in the same manner. But he was working for a company that was trying to sell the Transportation Security Administration new equipment that would do security screenings. And that company had just gotten its agreement from TSA, the airport screening agency, to do kind of actual testing in its laboratory to see whether or not this equipment was worth buying and spending, you know, potentially tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars to install in airports in the United States. And then the same gentleman, Chad Wolf, then became the chief of staff at TSA, which would - you know, as the chief of staff, you're involved in issues across the agency. And you know, if you're going to be making a major change in the way that you inspect carry-on baggage to look for explosives and then potentially commit to buying, you know, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in new equipment, you know, the chief of staff of the agency is going to be involved. So he is now the former lobbyist for the, you know - explosive detection equipment is now the chief of staff overseeing, you know, various things at the Transportation Security Administration. There's a woman that is working in the Environmental Protection Agency who had worked for the chemical industry. And it was lobbying to try to limit the - kind of the strength of a law intended to regulate toxic chemicals. Now she's at the EPA, helping establish the rules that will regulate the same chemicals and the same companies that she just previously had represented. And so I mean literally there are dozens of people who have made this shift from being the regulated to the regulators, and so - at a pace that I have going back to George W. Bush and being in Washington and covering administrations that I have not seen before. DAVIES: You know, another source of information on how special interests' wield influences Washington is visitor logs to the White House. They used to be public. Has that changed? LIPTON: Yeah. It's - there's quite a number of things that are happening in terms of transparency. And it was Obama, again - and I'm trying to, you know - when Obama was president, we wrote stories that questioned quite a number of things relative, particularly in terms of apparent collusion between the EPA and some of the environmental groups and on trying to promote policies that Obama supported. So you know, whoever is in power, we're going to look critically at and sort of deconstruct their activities. But it is true that during Obama, he also instituted a policy where - after he had been sued of publishing the White House logs. And so you could see who's going into the White House. And Trump has discontinued that policy. So we do not know who is going into the White House on a regular basis to meet with the - his top advisers. And it was - it - that is another - is one of a number of forms of transparency that have been discontinued. At the Environmental Protection Agency dating back to the 1980s, the administrator - because the notion was that the EPA is there to protect, you know, our air and our water. It's not just the - you know, we all are breathing and drinking or - that water and that air. And so therefore the EPA had had a practice for quite a long time both in Democrat and Republican administrations of publishing the calendars of the - the appointment calendars of all of the top administrators because essentially it is the public's agency. And the new EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, has discontinued that practice, so we no longer know who he's meeting with. The only way you can get that is to do a Freedom of Information request. And even then, you have to fight. You have to almost threaten to sue to get a copy of the calendar because they're so slow in responding to Freedom of Information requests at the EPA. DAVIES: Eric Lipton is a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The New York Times. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with Eric Lipton. He's a Washington-based correspondent for The New York Times. He writes about government relations, corporate agendas and Congress. You know, I think a lot of people learned more about the Office of Government Ethics in the past eight months than they ever had. And the Trump administration clashed a lot with Walter Shaub, who was the head of that office. You want to just explain what the Office of Government Ethics is and does? LIPTON: Sure. And just as myself, as a reporter that's written about ethics in Washington for, you know, over a decade now, I had not in fact dealt that frequently with the Office of Government Ethics until the start of the Trump administration. And it is an office that is not an investigatory agency. It does not also have explicit enforcement powers. It is more in charged with trying to prevent ethics problems from occurring before they happen as opposed to penalizing people who do things that are inappropriate. So the office is actually quite small. It's only about 70 employees so that it's supposed to be somehow establishing ethics standards across, you know, the entire federal government. And so what it mostly does is it sets standards and guidance for each federal agency that then the - each federal agency has its own ethics officer who follows the guidance that's set by the Office of Government Ethics. And so for the most part, it was a kind of very quiet, you know wonkish place where no one ever really knew the name of who was the head of OGE, as it's called. And it was not until Trump was elected and President Trump began to make motions that he was not going to divest of his personal financial interests that for the first time we all started to get to know the Office of Government Ethics because the guy who ran the place, Walter Shaub, even before Trump was sworn in, began to say publicly that this is wrong and that all presidents, you know, in modern times have divested of their financial interests that would present a conflict of interest and that Trump should be doing the same and that by simply turning over all of his real estate assets and other business assets to his sons, that he's - you know, the management of it - that he was still going to have potential conflicts of interest. And so Walter Shaub began to say that publicly, including a speech he gave at the Brookings in Washington that was very unusual for the head of OGE to take such a public stand against the president-elect. And so we all began to get to know Walter Shaub. And I actually met him for the first time through that process. DAVIES: He finally left the office, and you recently interviewed him. And he rendered some pretty strong opinions about what's going on. What did he say? LIPTON: Yeah, he thinks that - the United States, for decades, has played a role, globally, as essentially the kind of, like, the older person in the room that's giving advice to the rest of the world about fighting corruption. And, you know, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is a law in the United States that prohibits companies from paying bribes to foreign government officials to get business, for example. And so an American company can be charged and convicted of a crime if it pays a bribe. So the United States has been trying to encourage companies across the world to have more ethical practices in their governments and to remove the relationship between those who govern and those who have financial interests so that, you know, the oligarchs don't - that there's - that it's more of a market-based economy and not one that which people in political power can make decisions that benefit their own personal interest. So then we go into an administration where the president is going repeatedly to his own, you know, brands, to his golf clubs, to his hotels, to his private club in a way that is bringing, you know, brand attention and marketing value to them. And it blurs the lines that the United States had spent decades trying to establish and preach to other countries that they should follow. So Walter Shaub said that President Trump has made a mockery of the ethics program in the United States and that there is an ethics crisis that is underway in the United States. And in the interview that I did with him two days before he left his job - because his term as the head of OGE was coming to an end, so he stepped down prior to that formal ending. He knew he would not be reappointed. He said that - there - that Congress needs to take action to strengthen the power of the Office of Government Ethics because it never anticipated a president like President Trump that would present such a challenge to his office. DAVIES: So the Office of Government Ethics is, in many respects, an advisory body, right? It helps people stay out of trouble. He thinks it ought to change in some specific ways. What were they? LIPTON: He thinks that it should have subpoena power, for example, to - in certain situations, to require federal agencies to provide information that he requests. So, for example, when he does this request for copies of all waivers, if the agencies or the White House says, no, sorry, we're not giving it to you, that he would have the power to actually demand, you know, and force that information to be provided. He also thought that the president should be subject to conflict of interest rules like all other federal employees are. And he thought that certain powers of his office should be enhanced so that, even if you have - I mean, the Office of Government Ethics was created after the Nixon, you know, scandal. And there was a decision that there needed to be an office that would not have the power to enforce ethics across the government but to encourage ethical governance. But ever since then, basically, there've always been presidents both from the Republican and Democratic Party that have done whatever was necessary to support the efforts of this office. And if ever there was an agency, for example, that didn't respond the request that OGE asked, then the OGE would go to the White House and say, can you make a phone call to tell, you know, the Health and Human Services, you know, office there that they need to answer my questions? And that always happened. And so there never was a need for more explicit powers to ensure that there would be compliance. But now you have a White House that isn't necessarily committed to that effort. And so that's why he's suggesting that there should be changes. DAVIES: There have been other presidents, particularly Republicans, who have promised to roll back regulations on business and, you know, I - Reagan, I believe, you write, wanted to end the requirement for air bags on passenger vehicles. That didn't happen. How aggressive and successful has the Trump administration been at actually achieving this? LIPTON: I mean, I think if there's a single thing that is actually happening so far during this administration that is kind of reshaping government and affecting the population broadly, that it is the - what is going on in the regulatory area. And so, I mean, Trump appointed and has had confirmed a new Supreme Court justice. That was a major thing. But for the most part, his legislative agenda has not really gone anywhere. But on - you know, more quietly, in each of the agencies across the federal government, the - his appointees have been rolling back rules. Many of them were rules that were only enacted during the Obama administration, but they are - it's the number of kind of repeals and reconsiderations that are underway in just about every sector of the government from, you know, health, and the environment, and financial regulatory matters and workplace safety. And it is - it's pretty extraordinary. And it is happening at such a rapid pace that it's sort of almost impossible, as reporters, to keep up with it. But we are attempting to. And we have a team of reporters in New York and Washington who've been removed from other duties and are only working on examining the regulatory rollbacks and how the regulatory rollbacks in particular stand to benefit some of the industry players who are now calling the shots, now that they've come into the government and are actually now helping make these choices to roll back the same regulations that they had fought when they were on the private sector. DAVIES: Eric Lipton is a correspondent for The New York Times based in Washington. He'll be back after a break to talk about some of the officials in the Trump administration who are rolling back government regulations, including EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who takes
. The 15th of the Lunar Calendar (any month) is also always a full moon. A huge part of the festival celebration is moon worship. Like Western Thanksgiving, family members take time off from their busy work schedules to come home and be with one another. But instead of making a huge turkey, the tradition is to eat some Moon Cakes. Check out your local Asian market, they are sure to have them! Hoped you enjoyed this post and learned a little bit about Moon Fest! Please check out our Moon Light White mini teacake and have an awesome holiday!Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took advantage of the warm spring weather on Saturday to go out into nature on the last day of the Passover holiday. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Some 1.2 million people visited KKL's nature reserves and national parks throughout the Passover holiday, a 10 percent increase to last year. They left behind some 500 tons of litter in forests and nature reserves across the country, though KKL foresters noted an improvement in "leave nothing but footprints," with many families cleaning up after themselves. Trash left by visitors in Kiryat Ata (Photo: Gil Nechushtan) Trash left by visitors in Kiryat Ata (Photo: Gil Nechushtan) Trash amounts reached record numbers in the Kinneret as well, where an additional 500 tons of trash were left. Though, the Kinneret Cities Association, which is in charge of the management of the lake's shores, also said there has been improvement in environmental awareness compared to previous years. Trash piling up at the Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv (Photo: Shaul Golan) In addition, many volunteers and teenagers from across the country arrived at the Kinneret on Saturday morning to aid in cleaning the lake's beaches. Trash left by visitors at the Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv (Photo: Shaul Golan) Among the popular attractions in northern Israel were Agamon Hula, Biriya Forest (where a fire broke out on Monday), the Ein Zeitim campsite, the Jordan Park, the Gilboa forests, and the Ramot Menashe Park. Private recreational sites in the Galilee and the Golan Heights - like the kayak sites Indie Park and Kfar Bloom - reached full capacity as well. Visitors to the Kinneret (Photo: Avihu Shapira) Visitors to the Kinneret (Photo: Avihu Shapira) In southern Israel, visitors flocked mostly to the Hamalachim-Shahariya Forest, the Yatir Forest and the Golda Meir Park. Trash left by visitors at the Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv (Photo: Shaul Golan) There's been an increase in bicycle riders in the forests and parks' trails, and many families spent the night at the different forests' campsites.Elia Viviani (Cannondale) has been fighting for sprint victories from the start of the season and after a long series of placings and disappointments, the Italian finally crossed the line first in Oyonnax after benefiting from the pain and suffering of the Giro d'Italia. Related Articles Veilleux solos to victory in Dauphiné opener Illness sees Talansky lose time at Criterium du Dauphiné Rodriguez plays down Dauphiné ambitions De Gendt concerned by Dauphiné start Viviani and Cannondale celebrate Elk Grove victory The former track rider was beaten twice by Mark Cavendish in the Giro d'Italia and finished third in the final stage sprint in Brescia. Most riders take a well-earned break after finishing a Grand Tour but Viviani's vacation plans were put on hold until after the Criterium du Dauphiné. After comfortably beating Gianni Meersman (Omega Pharma-Quick Step) and Tony Gallopin (RadioShack-Leopard), the Italian has now earned his time off. "This is my first win of the season after lots of placings and two second places behind Mark Cavendish at the Giro d'Italia. I needed this win for me and for the team before finally taking a break," Viviani said. "My form is good after the Giro and so I'm climbing better than other sprinters like Hushovd and Bouhanni. I got on Meersman's wheel because I knew he was fast. Then I jumped at 150 metres to go. It was perfect." Stage one winner David Veilleux (Team Europcar) finished in the 75-rider front group after his teammates controlled much of the stage and so retained his overall race lead and the yellow jersey. The Canadian leads Meersman by 1:56, with Gallopin third overall at 1:57. The overall contenders sit in the same time as they bide their time for Wednesday's time trial and the tough mountain stages in the final part of the race. How it happened The 191km stage from Châtel to Oyonnax included six categorised climbs but none were major mountains, making it perfect for a breakaway or a select group finish depending on the motivation of the peloton and the desire of Team Europcar to defend the race lead for Veilleux. José Mendes (NetApp-Endura), Rudy Molard (Cofidis), Thomas Damuseau (Argos Shimano) and Arnaud Gérard (Bretagne-Séché) got away on the downhill early part of the stage, but Team Europcar refused to let them gain more than five minutes and become a threat to Veilleux’s yellow jersey. The hilly route also helped peg the breakaway's ambitions and the Omega Pharma-Quick Step team helped with the chase on the côte de Communal with 40km to go, hoping to set up Meersman and perhaps test if Veilleux had recovered from his winning ride the day before. The Canadian showed he had and stayed in the front group while several riders made lone attacks. Juan Antonio Flecha (Vacansoleil-DCM) tried his hand then so did Rudy Molard (Cofidis). The Frenchman opened a gap of a minute but then faded on the last climb, with teammate Rein Taaramae having a go. The Estonian tried hard, taking some risks on the descent but was unable to hold off the peloton, with Omega Pharma-Quick Step riding hard for Meersman and Team Sky riding to protect Chris Froome. Taaramae as swept up with two kilometres to go and Cannondale suddenly showed their hand after Viviani had made it the last climb. Most of the other sprinters had not and so it was the Italian against Meersman with Radioshack-Leopard riding for Gallopin. Viviani executed is sprint to perfection, coming off Meersman's wheel with 150 metres to go with a jump and acceleration that left the Belgian struggling. For Viviani, the suffering and disappointment of several placings at the Giro d'Italia suddenly seemed worthwhile. Results # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 Elia Viviani (Ita) Cannondale Pro Cycling 4:39:15 2 Gianni Meersman (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 3 Tony Gallopin (Fra) RadioShack Leopard 4 Reinardt Janse Van Rensburg (RSA) Team Argos-Shimano 5 Anthony Geslin (Fra) FDJ 6 Armindo Fonseca (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 7 Bram Tankink (Ned) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 8 Warren Barguil (Fra) Team Argos-Shimano 9 Juan Antonio Flecha Giannoni (Spa) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 10 Wesley Sulzberger (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 11 Geraint Thomas (GBr) Sky Procycling 12 Daniel Moreno Fernandez (Spa) Katusha 13 Alejandro Valverde Belmonte (Spa) Movistar Team 14 Paul Voss (Ger) Team NetApp-Endura 15 Luis Angel Mate Mardones (Spa) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 16 Thomas Rohregger (Aut) RadioShack Leopard 17 Peter Kennaugh (GBr) Sky Procycling 18 Dominik Nerz (Ger) BMC Racing Team 19 Jakob Fuglsang (Den) Astana Pro Team 20 Maciej Bodnar (Pol) Cannondale Pro Cycling 21 Sergei Chernetski (Rus) Katusha 22 Christophe Le Mevel (Fra) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 23 Christopher Froome (GBr) Sky Procycling 24 Vegard Stake Laengen (Den) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 25 Jurgen Van Den Broeck (Bel) Lotto Belisol 26 Angel Madrazo Ruiz (Spa) Movistar Team 27 Richie Porte (Aus) Sky Procycling 28 Sylvain Chavanel (Fra) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 29 Matteo Bono (Ita) Lampre-Merida 30 José Herrada Lopez (Spa) Movistar Team 31 Edvald Boasson Hagen (Nor) Sky Procycling 32 Yoann Bagot (Fra) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 33 Stef Clement (Ned) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 34 Alberto Contador Velasco (Spa) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 35 Simon Clarke (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 36 Ben Hermans (Bel) RadioShack Leopard 37 Kevin Seeldraeyers (Bel) Astana Pro Team 38 Samuel Sanchez Gonzalez (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi 39 Kenny Elissonde (Fra) FDJ 40 Egoi Martinez De Esteban (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi 41 Andriy Grivko (Ukr) Astana Pro Team 42 Haimar Zubeldia Agirre (Spa) RadioShack Leopard 43 Joaquim Rodriguez Oliver (Spa) Katusha 44 Daniel Navarro Garcia (Spa) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 45 Leopold Konig (Cze) Team NetApp-Endura 46 Ivan Santaromita (Ita) BMC Racing Team 47 Rein Taaramae (Est) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 48 Bart De Clercq (Bel) Lotto Belisol 49 Mikel Nieve Iturralde (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi 50 Michael Rogers (Aus) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 51 Alberto Losada Alguacil (Spa) Katusha 52 Michal Kwiatkowski (Pol) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 53 Laurens Ten Dam (Ned) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 54 Jerome Coppel (Fra) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 55 Damiano Cunego (Ita) Lampre-Merida 56 Alexandre Geniez (Fra) FDJ 57 Francesco Gavazzi (Ita) Astana Pro Team 58 Eros Capecchi (Ita) Movistar Team 59 Egor Silin (Rus) Astana Pro Team 60 Kristijan Koren (Slo) Cannondale Pro Cycling 61 Cyril Gautier (Fra) Team Europcar 62 David Veilleux (Can) Team Europcar 63 Rohan Dennis (Aus) Garmin-Sharp 64 Florian Guillou (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 65 Matthew Busche (USA) RadioShack Leopard 66 David Lopez Garcia (Spa) Sky Procycling 67 Cayetano José Sarmiento Tunarrosa (Col) Cannondale Pro Cycling 68 Sergio Miguel Moreira Paulinho (Por) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 69 Johnny Hoogerland (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 70 Chris Anker Sörensen (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 71 Gorka Izaguirre Insausti (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi 72 Pierre Rolland (Fra) Team Europcar 73 Pierrick Fedrigo (Fra) FDJ 74 Jesus Hernandez Blazquez (Spa) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 75 Thomas Voeckler (Fra) Team Europcar 76 Markel Irizar Aranburu (Spa) RadioShack Leopard 0:02:07 77 David De La Cruz Melgarejo (Spa) Team NetApp-Endura 78 Tom Jelte Slagter (Ned) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 79 Bartosz Huzarski (Pol) Team NetApp-Endura 80 Daniel Teklehaimanot (Eri) Orica-GreenEdge 81 Michael Matthews (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 82 Mikel Astarloza Chaurreau (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi 83 Rudy Molard (Fra) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 84 Florian Vachon (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 85 Wout Poels (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 86 Nacer Bouhanni (Fra) FDJ 87 Laurent Didier (Lux) RadioShack Leopard 88 Nicki Sörensen (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 89 Jonathan Castroviejo Nicolas (Spa) Movistar Team 90 Eduardo Sepulveda (Arg) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 91 Tim Wellens (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:02:25 92 Pieter Serry (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 0:02:50 93 Marco Pinotti (Ita) BMC Racing Team 94 Sébastien Duret (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 95 Simon Gerrans (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 96 David Tanner (Aus) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 97 Alexey Lutsenko (Kaz) Astana Pro Team 98 Kristijan Durasek (Cro) Lampre-Merida 99 Manuel Quinziato (Ita) BMC Racing Team 0:03:38 100 Jurgen Van De Walle (Bel) Lotto Belisol 101 Imanol Erviti Ollo (Spa) Movistar Team 102 Matthieu Ladagnous (Fra) FDJ 103 Xavier Florencio Cabre (Spa) Katusha 104 Ian Stannard (GBr) Sky Procycling 105 Elia Favilli (Ita) Lampre-Merida 106 Caleb Fairly (USA) Garmin-Sharp 107 Francois Parisien (Can) Team Argos-Shimano 0:05:15 108 Brian Vandborg (Den) Cannondale Pro Cycling 109 Martin Velits (Svk) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 0:05:37 110 Nikolas Maes (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 111 Thomas Damuseau (Fra) Team Argos-Shimano 0:06:13 112 Juan Manuel Garate (Spa) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 113 Brent Bookwalter (USA) BMC Racing Team 114 Jan Barta (Cze) Team NetApp-Endura 115 Jacob Rathe (USA) Garmin-Sharp 116 Jose Rodolfo Serpa Perez 117 Dmitriy Muravyev (Kaz) Astana Pro Team 118 Assan Bazayev (Kaz) Astana Pro Team 119 Travis Meyer (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 120 Michel Kreder (Ned) Garmin-Sharp 121 Thomas De Gendt (Bel) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:06:29 122 Frantisek Rabon (Cze) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 0:06:31 123 Tony Martin (Ger) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 124 Benjamin King (USA) RadioShack Leopard 125 Sergey Lagutin (Uzb) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 126 Alex Howes (USA) Garmin-Sharp 127 Sylvester Szmyd (Pol) Movistar Team 128 Maciej Paterski (Pol) Cannondale Pro Cycling 129 Fumiyuki Beppu (Jpn) Orica-GreenEdge 130 Arnaud Gerard (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 131 Mikhail Ignatyev (Rus) Katusha 132 Marc Goos (Ned) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 133 Jean-Marc Bideau (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 134 José Joao Pimenta Costa Mendes (Por) Team NetApp-Endura 135 Petr Ignatenko (Rus) Katusha 136 Natnael Berhane (Eri) Team Europcar 137 Jack Bauer (NZl) Garmin-Sharp 0:06:37 138 Sander Cordeel (Bel) Lotto Belisol 139 Eloy Teruel Rovira (Spa) Movistar Team 0:08:10 140 Nikias Arndt (Ger) Team Argos-Shimano 141 Andrea Palini (Ita) Lampre-Merida 142 Federico Canuti (Ita) Cannondale Pro Cycling 0:09:05 143 Andrew Talansky (USA) Garmin-Sharp 144 Anthony Charteau (Fra) Team Europcar 145 Geoffrey Soupe (Fra) FDJ 0:10:14 146 Tristan Valentin (Fra) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 147 Alessandro De Marchi (Ita) Cannondale Pro Cycling 148 Timofey Kritskiy (Rus) Katusha 149 Romain Sicard (Fra) Euskaltel-Euskadi 150 Peio Bilbao (Esp) Euskaltel-Euskadi 151 William Clarke (Aus) Team Argos-Shimano 0:11:12 152 Alexander Wetterhall (Swe) Team NetApp-Endura 0:11:41 153 Robert Wagner (Ger) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 154 Thor Hushovd (Nor) BMC Racing Team 155 Ricardo Garcia Ambroa (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi 156 Gaetan Bille (Bel) Lotto Belisol 157 Yann Huguet (Fra) Team Argos-Shimano 158 Bertjan Lindeman (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 159 Koldo Fernandez (Spa) Garmin-Sharp 160 Lieuwe Westra (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 161 Kris Boeckmans (Bel) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 162 Yannick Eijssen (Bel) BMC Racing Team 163 Massimo Graziato (Ita) Lampre-Merida 164 Maximiliano Ariel Richeze (Arg) Lampre-Merida 165 Dennis Vanendert (Bel) Lotto Belisol 166 Andreas Schillinger (Ger) Team NetApp-Endura 167 Benjamin Noval Gonzalez (Spa) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 168 Timothy Duggan (USA) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 169 Kévin Reza (Fra) Team Europcar 170 Perrig Quemeneur (Fra) Team Europcar 171 Vasil Kiryienka (Blr) Sky Procycling 172 Arthur Vichot (Fra) FDJ 173 Mitchell Docker (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 0:14:21 174 Lawrence Warbasse (USA) BMC Racing Team 0:15:52 DNF Jelle Vanendert (Bel) Lotto Belisol Intermediate sprint - Montanges, 142.5km # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 José Joao Pimenta Costa Mendes (Por) Team NetApp-Endura 5 pts 2 Arnaud Gerard (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 3 3 Thomas Damuseau (Fra) Team Argos-Shimano 1 Points - Finish # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 Elia Viviani (Ita) Cannondale Pro Cycling 15 pts 2 Gianni Meersman (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 12 3 Tony Gallopin (Fra) RadioShack Leopard 10 4 Reinardt Janse Van Rensburg (RSA) Team Argos-Shimano 8 5 Anthony Geslin (Fra) FDJ 6 6 Armindo Fonseca (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 5 7 Bram Tankink (Ned) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 4 8 Warren Barguil (Fra) Team Argos-Shimano 3 9 Juan Antonio Flecha Giannoni (Spa) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 2 10 Wesley Sulzberger (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 1 Mountain 1 - Côte de Mornex (Cat. 4) # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 Thomas Damuseau (Fra) Team Argos-Shimano 3 pts 2 Arnaud Gerard (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 2 3 José Joao Pimenta Costa Mendes (Por) Team NetApp-Endura 1 Mountain 2 - Côte de Mons (Cat. 4) # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 Thomas Damuseau (Fra) Team Argos-Shimano 3 pts 2 Arnaud Gerard (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 2 3 Rudy Molard (Fra) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 1 Mountain 3 - Côte de Lancrans (Cat. 3) # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 Thomas Damuseau (Fra) Team Argos-Shimano 4 pts 2 Arnaud Gerard (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 3 3 Luis Angel Mate Mardones (Spa) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 2 4 José Joao Pimenta Costa Mendes (Por) Team NetApp-Endura 1 Mountain 4 - Côte de Communal (Cat. 2) # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 Thomas Damuseau (Fra) Team Argos-Shimano 10 pts 2 Rudy Molard (Fra) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 9 3 Arnaud Gerard (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 8 4 José Joao Pimenta Costa Mendes (Por) Team NetApp-Endura 7 5 Sylvain Chavanel (Fra) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 6 6 Gianni Meersman (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 5 Mountain 5 - Côte du Bugnon (Cat. 4) # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 Rudy Molard (Fra) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 3 pts 2 Juan Antonio Flecha Giannoni (Spa) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 2 3 Warren Barguil (Fra) Team Argos-Shimano 1 Mountain 6 - Col du Sentier (Cat. 2) # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 Rein Taaramae (Est) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 10 pts 2 Kevin Seeldraeyers (Bel) Astana Pro Team 9 3 Ivan Santaromita (Ita) BMC Racing Team 8 4 Michal Kwiatkowski (Pol) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 7 5 Gianni Meersman (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 6 6 Geraint Thomas (GBr) Sky Procycling 5 Young riders # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 Elia Viviani (Ita) Cannondale Pro Cycling 4:39:15 2 Tony Gallopin (Fra) RadioShack Leopard 3 Reinardt Janse Van Rensburg (RSA) Team Argos-Shimano 4 Armindo Fonseca (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 5 Warren Barguil (Fra) Team Argos-Shimano 6 Peter Kennaugh (GBr) Sky Procycling 7 Dominik Nerz (Ger) BMC Racing Team 8 Sergei Chernetski (Rus) Katusha 9 Vegard Stake Laengen (Den) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 10 Angel Madrazo Ruiz (Spa) Movistar Team 11 Kenny Elissonde (Fra) FDJ 12 Michal Kwiatkowski (Pol) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 13 Alexandre Geniez (Fra) FDJ 14 Egor Silin (Rus) Astana Pro Team 15 Rohan Dennis (Aus) Garmin-Sharp 16 David De La Cruz Melgarejo (Spa) Team NetApp-Endura 0:02:07 17 Tom Jelte Slagter (Ned) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 18 Daniel Teklehaimanot (Eri) Orica-GreenEdge 19 Michael Matthews (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 20 Rudy Molard (Fra) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 21 Nacer Bouhanni (Fra) FDJ 22 Eduardo Sepulveda (Arg) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 23 Tim Wellens (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:02:25 24 Pieter Serry (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 0:02:50 25 Alexey Lutsenko (Kaz) Astana Pro Team 26 Elia Favilli (Ita) Lampre-Merida 0:03:38 27 Thomas Damuseau (Fra) Team Argos-Shimano 0:06:13 28 Jacob Rathe (USA) Garmin-Sharp 29 Travis Meyer (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 30 Benjamin King (USA) RadioShack Leopard 0:06:31 31 Alex Howes (USA) Garmin-Sharp 32 Marc Goos (Ned) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 33 Natnael Berhane (Eri) Team Europcar 34 Nikias Arndt (Ger) Team Argos-Shimano 0:08:10 35 Andrea Palini (Ita) Lampre-Merida 36 Andrew Talansky (USA) Garmin-Sharp 0:09:05 37 Geoffrey Soupe (Fra) FDJ 0:10:14 38 Romain Sicard (Fra) Euskaltel-Euskadi 39 Peio Bilbao (Esp) Euskaltel-Euskadi 40 Ricardo Garcia Ambroa (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi 0:11:41 41 Gaetan Bille (Bel) Lotto Belisol 42 Bertjan Lindeman (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 43 Yannick Eijssen (Bel) BMC Racing Team 44 Massimo Graziato (Ita) Lampre-Merida 45 Dennis Vanendert (Bel) Lotto Belisol 46 Kévin Reza (Fra) Team Europcar 47 Arthur Vichot (Fra) FDJ 48 Lawrence Warbasse (USA) BMC Racing Team 0:15:52 Teams # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 Sky Procycling 13:57:45 2 Radioshack Leopard 3 Movistar Team 4 Cofidis, Solutions Credits 5 Katusha Team 6 Cannondale 7 Omega Pharma-Quick Step 8 Blanco Pro Cycling Team 9 Bretagne - Seche Environnement 10 Astana Pro Team 11 FDJ 12 Euskaltel - Euskadi 13 Team Saxo-Tinkoff 14 Team Europcar 15 Orica Greenedge 0:02:07 16 Team Netapp-Endura 17 Vacansoleil-Dcm 18 Lotto-Belisol 0:02:25 19 BMC Racing Team 0:02:50 20 Lampre - Merida 21 Team Argos-Shimano 0:05:15 22 Garmin - Sharp 0:09:51 General classification # Rider Name (Country) Team Result 1 David Veilleux (Can) Team Europcar 7:56:50 2 Gianni Meersman (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 0:01:56 3 Tony Gallopin (Fra) RadioShack Leopard 0:01:57 4 Warren Barguil (Fra) Team Argos-Shimano 5 Alejandro Valverde Belmonte (Spa) Movistar Team 6 Jakob Fuglsang (Den) Astana Pro Team 7 Christopher Froome (GBr) Sky Procycling 8 Richie Porte (Aus) Sky Procycling 9 Angel Madrazo Ruiz (Spa) Movistar Team 10 Geraint Thomas (GBr) Sky Procycling 11 Jurgen Van Den Broeck (Bel) Lotto Belisol 12 Thomas Rohregger (Aut) RadioShack Leopard 13 Dominik Nerz (Ger) BMC Racing Team 14 Alberto Contador Velasco (Spa) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 15 Christophe Le Mevel (Fra) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 16 Yoann Bagot (Fra) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 17 Peter Kennaugh (GBr) Sky Procycling 18 Samuel Sanchez Gonzalez (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi 19 Leopold Konig (Cze) Team NetApp-Endura 20 Daniel Moreno Fernandez (Spa) Katusha 21 Stef Clement (Ned) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 22 Michael Rogers (Aus) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 23 Daniel Navarro Garcia (Spa) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 24 Rein Taaramae (Est) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 25 Bart De Clercq (Bel) Lotto Belisol 26 Kevin Seeldraeyers (Bel) Astana Pro Team 27 Joaquim Rodriguez Oliver (Spa) Katusha 28 Kristijan Koren (Slo) Cannondale Pro Cycling 29 Wesley Sulzberger (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 30 Ben Hermans (Bel) RadioShack Leopard 31 Sylvain Chavanel (Fra) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 32 Juan Antonio Flecha Giannoni (Spa) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 33 Laurens Ten Dam (Ned) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 34 Alexandre Geniez (Fra) FDJ 35 Rohan Dennis (Aus) Garmin-Sharp 36 Michal Kwiatkowski (Pol) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 37 Ivan Santaromita (Ita) BMC Racing Team 38 Vegard Stake Laengen (Den) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 39 Egoi Martinez De Esteban (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi 40 Maciej Bodnar (Pol) Cannondale Pro Cycling 41 Gorka Izaguirre Insausti (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi 42 José Herrada Lopez (Spa) Movistar Team 43 Haimar Zubeldia Agirre (Spa) RadioShack Leopard 44 Kenny Elissonde (Fra) FDJ 45 Egor Silin (Rus) Astana Pro Team 46 Eros Capecchi (Ita) Movistar Team 47 Alberto Losada Alguacil (Spa) Katusha 48 Edvald Boasson Hagen (Nor) Sky Procycling 49 Florian Guillou (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 50 Pierre Rolland (Fra) Team Europcar 51 Jerome Coppel (Fra) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 52 Francesco Gavazzi (Ita) Astana Pro Team 53 David Lopez Garcia (Spa) Sky Procycling 54 Matthew Busche (USA) RadioShack Leopard 55 Cyril Gautier (Fra) Team Europcar 56 Johnny Hoogerland (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 57 Sergio Miguel Moreira Paulinho (Por) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 58 Thomas Voeckler (Fra) Team Europcar 59 Anthony Geslin (Fra) FDJ 0:02:24 60 Paul Voss (Ger) Team NetApp-Endura 61 Luis Angel Mate Mardones (Spa) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 62 Andriy Grivko (Ukr) Astana Pro Team 63 Cayetano José Sarmiento Tunarrosa (Col) Cannondale Pro Cycling 64 Chris Anker Sörensen (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 65 Damiano Cunego (Ita) Lampre-Merida 0:02:38 66 Reinardt Janse Van Rensburg (RSA) Team Argos-Shimano 0:02:42 67 Mikel Nieve Iturralde (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi 0:02:55 68 Bram Tankink (Ned) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 0:03:41 69 Pierrick Fedrigo (Fra) FDJ 0:04:02 70 Tom Jelte Slagter (Ned) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 0:04:04 71 Wout Poels (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 72 Mikel Astarloza Chaurreau (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi 73 Rudy Molard (Fra) Cofidis, Solutions Credits 74 David De La Cruz Melgarejo (Spa) Team NetApp-Endura 75 Eduardo Sepulveda (Arg) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 0:04:31 76 Pieter Serry (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 0:04:47 77 Tim Wellens (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:04:49 78 Marco Pinotti (Ita) BMC Racing Team 0:05:32 79 Sébastien Duret (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 80 Jurgen Van De Walle (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:05:35 81 Brian Vandborg (Den) Cannondale Pro Cycling 0:07:12 82 Matthieu Ladagnous (Fra) FDJ 0:07:40 83 Sergei Chernetski (Rus) Katusha 0:08:21 84 Sylvester Szmyd (Pol) Movistar Team 0:08:28 85 Arnaud Gerard (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 86 Sergey Lagutin (Uzb) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 87 José Joao Pimenta Costa Mendes (Por) Team NetApp-Endura 88 Laurent Didier (Lux) RadioShack Leopard 0:08:45 89 Brent Bookwalter (USA) BMC Racing Team 0:08:55 90 Tony Martin (Ger) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 91 Natnael Berhane (Eri) Team Europcar 92 Petr Ignatenko (Rus) Katusha 93 Thomas Damuseau (Fra) Team Argos-Shimano 0:09:43 94 Assan Bazayev (Kaz) Astana Pro Team 95 Travis Meyer (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 96 Matteo Bono (Ita) Lampre-Merida 0:10:40 97 Jesus Hernandez Blazquez (Spa) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 98 Alessandro De Marchi (Ita) Cannondale Pro Cycling 0:12:11 99 Romain Sicard (Fra) Euskaltel-Euskadi 100 Bartosz Huzarski (Pol) Team NetApp-Endura 0:12:47 101 Daniel Teklehaimanot (Eri) Orica-GreenEdge 102 Jonathan Castroviejo Nicolas (Spa) Movistar Team 103 Florian Vachon (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 104 Jean-Marc Bideau (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 0:13:27 105 Simon Gerrans (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 0:13:30 106 David Tanner (Aus) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 107 Kristijan Durasek (Cro) Lampre-Merida 108 Arthur Vichot (Fra) FDJ 0:13:38 109 Lieuwe Westra (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 110 Armindo Fonseca (Fra) Bretagne-Seche Environnement 0:14:00 111 Elia Viviani (Ita) Cannondale Pro Cycling 112 Simon Clarke (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 113 Imanol Erviti Ollo (Spa) Movistar Team 0:14:18 114 Manuel Quinziato (Ita) BMC Racing Team 115 Caleb Fairly (USA) Garmin-Sharp 116 Jacob Rathe (USA) Garmin-Sharp 0:14:29 117 Ricardo Garcia Ambroa (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi 0:15:11 118 Bertjan Lindeman (Ned) Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team 0:15:22 119 Peio Bilbao (Esp) Euskaltel-Euskadi 0:16:05 120 Nicki Sörensen (Den) Team Saxo-Tinkoff 0:16:07 121 Michael Matthews (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 122 Nikolas Maes (Bel) Omega Pharma-Quick Step 0:16:17 123 Alexey Lutsenko (Kaz) Astana Pro Team 0:16:50 124 Dmitriy Muravyev (Kaz) Astana Pro Team 0:16:53 125 Marc Goos (Ned) Blanco Pro Cycling Team 0:17:11 126 Andrew Talansky (USA) Garmin-Sharp 0:17:21 127 Dennis Vanendert (Bel) Lotto Belisol 0:17:24 128 Xavier Florencio Cabre (Spa) Katusha 0:17:38 129 Ian Stannard (GBr) Sky Procycling 130 Elia Favilli (Ita) Lampre-Merida 131 Markel Irizar Aranburu (Spa) RadioShack Leopard 0:17:41 132 Nacer Bouhanni (Fra) FDJ 0:17:47
country to block websites. BuzzFeed News screenshot Share on Facebook Share on Facebook Share Share on Pinterest Share on Pinterest Pin Pinterest Pinterest It's not clear why the website was blocked. An Internet Archive spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the service had not been contacted by the Indian government, and that its queries to the Department of Telecommunications and the country's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology have gone unanswered. "Obviously, we are disappointed and concerned by this situation and are very eager to understand why it's happening and see full access restored to archive.org," the spokesperson said. BuzzFeed News has reached out to the Department of Telecommunications for comment. "It seems highly unlikely to me that the Wayback Machine or Archive.org threaten national security or public order in a way that Google's Cache or a well-stocked library don't," Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society, a think tank based in Bangalore, told BuzzFeed News. "The blocking orders the Department of Telecom sends to ISPs are marked 'confidential' rather than being published officially on [the department's] official website." Doing this prevents citizens from knowing why a website is blocked. "This is another reminder of the capricious, arbitrary, and utterly opaque nature of online censorship in India," Prakash told BuzzFeed News. Minutes after the Internet Archive was banned, furious Indians took to Twitter to vent their frustrations. Twitter: @Memeghnad Share on Facebook Share on Facebook Share Share on Pinterest Share on Pinterest Pin Pinterest Pinterest Twitter: @tishasaroyan Share on Facebook Share on Facebook Share Share on Pinterest Share on Pinterest Pin Pinterest Pinterest Twitter: @tishasaroyan Share on Facebook Share on Facebook Share Share on Pinterest Share on Pinterest Pin Pinterest Pinterest Twitter: @thej Share on Facebook Share on Facebook Share Share on Pinterest Share on Pinterest Pin Pinterest Pinterest India has a controversial history of blocking websites or internet access entirely. A controversial section in India's Information Technology Act, which was upheld by the Indian Supreme Court in 2015, allows any officer in the country's central government to ask internet service providers in the country to block any website to protect the country's "sovereignty and integrity." This is the second time that the Internet Archive has been blocked by the Indian government. In 2014, it was among the 31 websites banned in the country — along with GitHub, Pastebin, and Vimeo — for "carrying anti-Indian content" by ISIS. Concerned citizens criticized the move. And in the Indian state of Kashmir, the government has cut off access to the internet more than 30 times since 2012. For now, some Indian redditors have discovered a workaround to access the Internet Archive. Can verify. http://archive.org is banned. You can get around it with https://archive.org.Alan Cleaver says the conditions imposed on his petfood business were unattainable. A Waikato pet food company caught up in the bobby calf cruelty scandal has ceased trading. Down Cow Ltd owner Alan Cleaver, who is due to appear in court on animal abuse charges, said his company was unfairly targeted by the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) after the footage of animal abuse by one of his employees went public. The Te Kauwhata company, which picked up unwanted animals off farms around the Waikato, made pet food. It shut down on May 18. Cleaver said MPI set out unattainable requirements and forced him to shut down. MPI, however, said it didn't force the company to close, just gave it notices of compliance. READ MORE: * Q&A: Bobby calves, New Zealand vs the rest of the world * Two workers involved in calf abuse no longer employed * Man pleads guilty to'very serious' bobby calf mistreatment charges In November last year, Farmwatch and welfare organisation Save Animals From Exploitation (Safe) released secretly taken footage of abuse of calves in New Zealand. The graphic footage shows bobby calves being picked up at farms and thrown on to trucks, plus kicked and bludgeoned, and then clubbed to death at an abattoir. A Down Cow seasonal employee who is no longer with the company was included in the footage. Noel Piraka Erickson, 38, appeared at the Huntly District Court on Thursday and pleaded guilty to 10 charges of cruelty or ill treatment of an animal. Cleaver said the MPI investigation into the abuse prompted regular visits by MPI representatives, who found consistent problems with how Cleaver was running his slaughterhouse business. Cleaver said the company was unfairly targeted and penalised for procedures which, he said, were common and sometimes necessary among the country's farmers and slaughterhouses. New Zealand Pet Foods Manufacturers Association secretary Richard Brake disagreed and said MPI's auditing procedures are thorough, robust and consistent. Cleaver's wife and managing partner, Sheryl, understood the company needed to hire a manager if it was to reopen, an expense too great for the couple. "We offered that we won't do calves," Sheryl said, "and we'd just do cattle, but [MPI] don't want to know. I think we've been unfairly treated because of that footage. "We do calves the meatworks don't want. Other firms have told me they do exactly the same, but they're not victimised." Cleaver added that MPI was "under pressure to do something". "Common sense just goes out the door. We've been punished enough [with the court case] - the six permanent staff are all sitting at home. "We were a growing business, growing and getting better, managing the place quite well, we were quite liked. I said [to an MPI representative]: You're causing an animal welfare problem by taking us off." "A week before the owners made this voluntary decision [to close], MPI had served the company with a notice of direction," MPI spokesman Chris Kebble said. "This is a legal direction setting out corrective action required for the business so that it would be able to comply with the Animal Products Act. "The act sets out the rules for the operation of risk management programmes such as pet food processors, to manage the risks to animal health and to ensure the products are fit for purpose." The notice of direction came after it failed an audit. "The company failed the audit after failing to respond to and act on concerns MPI raised with them about their operations. We are unable to provide information on specific compliance issues at this stage. "In this case, Down Cow had every opportunity to ensure they took the requisite corrective action but chose to close down their business instead." Out of nine pet food slaughter operators in New Zealand, eight are on the highest performance level with MPI. Only Down Cow was at the lowest. However, MPI failed to provide by deadline what performance level Down Cow was on before the Safe footage came to light. Safe spokesman Hans Kriek was pleased MPI followed through with its audit. "It certainly did not look like the company had high standards, at all. So from that point of view, it's probably a really good thing that they are closed. I certainly would not shed a tear." ​The Cleavers plan to sell the company once the court process is over. * Down Cow Ltd is not associated with AC Pet Foods Ltd on Ohaupo Road, which has a similar phone number.A Saudi-led coalition has promised to investigate an air raid in Yemen that killed more than 140 mourners - after denying it was responsible. Iran-backed Houthi rebels blamed the coalition for the attack on a funeral hall in the capital Sanaa in which more than 500 were also wounded. The United States said it was "deeply disturbed" by the airstrike and would review its support for the coalition in the Yemen conflict. US-Saudi ties are already strained over the kingdom's military intervention in the country, which has been blamed for hundreds of civilian deaths. Image: Emergency workers and military at the scene of the airstrike After initially denying any responsibility, the Saudi-led coalition said it was ready to launch a probe into the "regrettable and painful" attack. "The coalition will immediately investigate this case along with... experts from the United States who participated in previous investigations," it said in a statement. "The coalition is also willing to provide the investigation team with any data and information related to its military operations today, at the incident's location and the surrounding areas." The UN said aid workers were "shocked and outraged" by the attack on the community hall, where hundreds had gathered to mourn the death of the father of rebel interior minister Jalal al Rowaishan. 2015: Yemen conflict explained It is not clear if Mr Rowaishan or other senior rebel figures were in the building at the time, although Sanaa's mayor Abdel Qader Hilal was reportedly among those killed. "We are deeply disturbed by reports of today's airstrike on a funeral hall in Yemen, which, if confirmed, would continue the troubling series of attacks striking Yemeni civilians," White House National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said in a statement. "In light of this and other recent incidents, we have initiated an immediate review of our already significantly reduced support to the Saudi-led coalition and are prepared to adjust our support so as to better align with US principles, values and interests." Mr Price stressed that "US security cooperation with Saudi Arabia is not a blank cheque", and called on all sides to implement an "immediate" ceasefire. Image: Very little is left of the commuity hall The UN's emergency relief coordinator, Stephen O'Brien, said the "horrendous and heinous" attack "displayed an utter disregard for human life". Foreign Office minister Tobias Ellwood said he would raise the UK's concerns with the Saudi ambassador to London. He added: "There can be no military solution to this conflict. We urge all sides to recommit to political talks and to implement a cessation of hostilities." Since March last year, Yemen has been the target of an air campaign launched by an Arab coalition, led by Saudi Arabia. It was requested by Yemen President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi's government, which is waging a civil war against the Houthi movement. The Houthis recognise former president Ali Abdullah Saleh as Yemen's legitimate leader.We’re just 10 rounds in to the 2017 season, but fans are already setting attendance records across the country. The opening round of the season saw 400,401 roll through the gates, which is a round record, smashing the previous mark of 371,212 in round 15, 2013. This season’s average attendance through 10 rounds is an impressive 35,041, which would be the best figure since the 2011 season if supporters can keep it up. The Bombers deserve the biggest thanks for the league average, with their attendance of 53,991 per game the best across the competition. Marquee match-ups against Hawthorn, Carlton, Collingwood (ANZAC Day) and Richmond (Dreamtime at the ‘G) all helped the Bombers achieve the figure, with their fans seemingly excited to see the ‘banned Bombers’ back from suspension. Richmond is the only other side to average over 50,000, with their big drawcard fixtures coming against Essendon, Melbourne (ANZAC Day Eve), Collingwood and Carlton. At the other end of the scale, the Suns and Giants are the only two sides to average below 20,000, with Gold Coast propping up the league with a 13,041 average. Average attendance of every side’s home and away matches in 2017 Team Games Average attendance Essendon 10 53991 Richmond 10 50621 Collingwood 10 49923 Carlton 10 44006 Melbourne 10 39510 Hawthorn 10 37709 Western Bulldogs 10 37692 Geelong 10 36399 West Coast 10 36089 Adelaide 10 36051 Fremantle 10 34120 Sydney 10 33005 St Kilda 10 30684 Port Adelaide 9 29391 North Melbourne 10 25091 Brisbane 10 20741 GWS 10 19908 Gold Coast 9 13041 Source: AFL tablesBreaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Jan. 6, 2016, 6:57 PM GMT / Updated Jan. 6, 2016, 6:57 PM GMT By Robert Windrem It will take a couple of days for the U.S. to determine if North Korea's claim it detonated a hydrogen bomb is a big lie or a big problem — but experts already think it's more likely the event was just a blast from the past. While the hermit kingdom may have been trying out a "boosted" nuclear device — more powerful than what it's detonated before but far less dangerous than an H-bomb — the evidence so far points to a repeat of previous tests. Seismic data from Tuesday night's event would have shown a much greater force yield if hydrogen was involved, experts said. Instead, it was identical to the data collected after North Korea's tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013. Air samples collected by drone should soon give analysts an idea of what happened, a senior U.S. military official said. But for the moment, the North Korean boast is being treated with skepticism. "On balance, it is not believed that North Korea tested a two-stage H-bomb," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and author of "Solving the North Korean Nuclear Puzzle," an early history of the program. "What could it have tested? On one side, North Korea may be bluffing about this test, meaning it tested a fission implosion device similar to the ones it previously detonated." Joseph Cirincione, president of the global security firm Ploughshares Fund, was equally dubious about the announcement out of Pyongyang. "Even a failed hydrogen bomb test would have a yield of 10, 20, 50 kilotons of force. This is a 6-7 kiloton yield, smaller than the last test," he said. "What we’re speculating is they tried to do a boosted nuclear device, which is an atomic bomb that has a little bit of hydrogen, an isotope in it called tritium, " added Cirincione. Before it gave up its nuclear weapons program under Nelson Mandela, South Africa had worked on a boosted device, Albright noted. But South Africa had access to tritium, which North Korea has been trying to get, he said. "You should be worried but you shouldn’t be freaked out," Cirincione said.Feral rhesus macaques are wild troupes of the rhesus macaque released by researchers, zoos, or private owners, that have been able to survive and propagate in several places in the United States. Puerto Rico [ edit ] Cayo Santiago [ edit ] A research colony was established by the Caribbean Primate Research Center of the University of Puerto Rico on the island of Cayo Santiago, off Puerto Rico. There are no predators on the island, and humans are not permitted to land, except as part of the research program. Florida [ edit ] Silver Springs State Park [ edit ] A colony of rhesus macaques was established around Silver Springs in Florida around the spring of 1938. The monkeys were released by tour boat operator Colonel Tooey[1] to enhance his Jungle Cruise ride. A traditional story that the monkeys were released for scenery enhancement in the Tarzan movies that were filmed at that location is false, as the only Tarzan movie filmed in the area, 1939's Tarzan Finds a Son! contains no rhesus macaques, in part because of the species' bad temperament.[2] The monkeys continue to thrive along the Silver River to this day.[3] Southern Florida [ edit ] Various colonies of rhesus and other monkey species such as common squirrel monkeys and vervet monkeys have been found in southern Florida. They are thought to have gained freedom after zoo and wildlife park facilities were destroyed in hurricanes, most notably Hurricane Andrew.[4] As of September 12, 2013 more than 1000 rhesus macaques live in the state; officials have caught more than 700 of the monkeys in the past decade. Most of the captured monkeys tested positive for Herpes B Virus. Wildlife officials consider the animals a public health hazard.[5] Tampa Bay [ edit ] The "Mystery Monkey of Tampa Bay" is a rhesus macaque that was on the loose and evading capture for approximately four years in St. Petersburg, Florida.[6] The monkey is thought to be a male that weighs 30 pounds.[7] Authorities are not certain of the origin of this monkey; it may have migrated from the troupe of wild monkeys in Silver Springs State Park,[8] approximately 103 miles north of St. Petersburg.[9] It may have escaped from an owner who did not have a wildlife permit and had not registered the monkey.[6] A Facebook page for the monkey was set up, which attracted more than 82,600 fans (as of Feb. 4, 2012).[6] The monkey is shy and not considered a threat to humans.[10] Its continued success at avoiding capture was compared to the TV series The Fugitive.[11] The monkey reportedly looks both ways to check for traffic before crossing the street.[6] The monkey has been mentioned in national media, and an episode of The Colbert Report. On the afternoon of October 24, 2012, wildlife officials spotted the macaque in a tree in St. Petersburg's Lake Maggiore neighborhood, and used a tranquilizer dart to first immobilize and then capture it.[12] The Mystery Monkey was placed at Dade City's Wild Things, a pseudo-sanctuary[13] in Pasco County. South Carolina [ edit ] There is also a notable colony of rhesus macaques on Morgan Island, one of the Sea Islands in the South Carolina Lowcountry. They were imported in the 1970s for use in the local labs and now number approximately 3000.[14][15]The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) -- seen by some as the biggest government threat to Internet privacy and freedom of speech to date -- appears to be dead, at least in its current form. But opponents aren't celebrating yet, saying SOPA could rise again. For now, at least, the forward momentum SOPA supporters had just a month ago has been stalled indefinitely. The tide shifted at the start of the weekend, when House SOPA sponsors agreed to drop a key provision that would have required service providers to block access to international sites accused of piracy. On the Senate side, six Republicans who previously supported PIPA asked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to postpone a scheduled Jan. 24 vote on the bill. In a letter to Reid, the senators said the bill needed more debate to avoid "unintended consequences." That came one day after the chief sponsor of PIPA, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), called for a reevaluation of the bill's DNS filtering and blocking provision. Then, on Saturday, the Obama Administration issued its first declarative statement on SOPA and PIPA, saying that while online piracy by foreign websites is "a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet." The statement added, "Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security." A few hours after the statement was released, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) had promised him the House would not vote on SOPA unless there is consensus on the bill. "The voice of the Internet community has been heard," Issa said. "Much more education for members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential if anti-piracy legislation is to be workable and achieve broad appeal." SOPA is backed mainly by the entertainment industry, which is seeking the help of government to block online file-sharing operations based overseas, also known as "rogue sites," from stealing and distributing its films, music and software. But its opponents, which include some of the biggest names in Internet innovation -- Google, Facebook, Twitter and Mozilla -- argue that SOPA could undermine the global domain system and create enormous network-security holes. They say it would also eliminate safe harbors and allow global Internet censorship. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says copyright infringement provisions in the legislation would not only require social media sites like Facebook and YouTube to police their sites at huge cost, but would also "decimate the open source software community." "This includes organizations that are funded by the State Department to create circumvention software to help democratic activists get around oppressive regimes' online censorship mechanisms." Rafal Los, a security strategist for HP software, said, "When the government has control over the pipes that feed information, they control that information. Whether that is for analytical 'good' or questionable motives, it's dangerous." The balance between freedom and censorship, "is notoriously difficult to achieve, and the Internet is not the only place this has been a debate," he said. "It will likely require compromise from both extremes. Hopefully we can be adults about it."(Reuters) - After shocking markets with an interest rate cut at the start of the year, the Bank of Canada is expected to end 2015 on a more sedate note, holding rates steady through next year and waiting for better U.S. growth to provide a boost, a Reuters poll found. The central bank is almost certain to keep rates unchanged at 0.50 percent on Dec 2 at the conclusion of its policy meeting, the poll of over 40 economists taken Nov 23-26 showed. That steady policy stance stands in contrast to the U.S. Federal Reserve, which is now widely expected to raise its key interest rate for the first time in nearly a decade just weeks later. While the U.S. economy is performing well, Canada’s economy slipped into a mild recession in the first half of the year following a crash in the price of oil, a key export. The United States is by far Canada’s biggest trading partner. But Canada’s growth is expected to roughly meet the Bank’s forecast of 1.5 percent in the fourth quarter, and is likely to pick up pace from there, so long as the United States keeps performing well. “I would characterize the U.S. recovery as reducing the likelihood that the Bank of Canada will need to cut rates again,” said Andrew Kelvin, senior rates strategist at TD Securities, who expects no change in rates until June 2017. The central bank cut rates twice this year to offset the negative effects of the oil price plunge. Oil prices have fallen by more than half since June 2014 and the Canadian dollar is on track to mark its worst year since the 2008 financial crisis. BoC Governor Stephen Poloz has said the weaker currency should lead to stronger U.S. demand for Canadian exports and boost the Canadian economy. “There is just no pressing need for the Bank of Canada to move rates higher, particularly with the exports recovery still at very early stages and business investment lagging. And most importantly, the inflation pressure in the bank’s view is simply not there,” said TD Securities’ Kelvin. A minority of economists said further monetary policy stimulus might still be needed sometime next year. “Additional downward pressures on oil prices could trigger more cuts in the energy sector in Alberta, putting back Canada’s economy in recession in early 2016,” said Dominique Lapointe, economist at Laurentian Bank Securities. Nonetheless, the likelihood that the next move from the Bank will be a cut has decreased to 20 percent from the almost one-in-three possibility forecasters predicted in October’s poll. HOUSING MARKET RISKS Some also pointed to the risks that a housing market that is overvalued, certainly by international standards, could pose as Canadians take on more and more debt to buy property. Years of loose monetary policy sent the household debt-to-income ratio to a record high just under 165 percent by the end of June, raising fears a housing market correction is around the corner. “A disorderly pull-back in residential investment might necessitate additional monetary stimulus,” said Lapointe. Poloz has acknowledged high household borrowing as one of the biggest vulnerabilities for the Canadian financial system, though the Bank expects the most likely scenario is that home prices will stabilize. While 17 economists in the poll did not think the bank was underestimating the risk of a correction in the housing market, 10 thought it was. “Household debt levels are not showing any signs of moderating, indicating that, going forward, the risk of a correction in the household sector is getting bigger,” said Jean-Paul Lam, associate professor of economics at the University of Waterloo.Ever since Hulu’s new user interface started to roll out there has been mixed feelings about it. Some loved it but others had legitimate issues with the new look. Now it looks like Hulu has heard your concerns and today they are rolling out several major improvements to their new Hulu app. Here is everything that is new: (Note these updates can be found on tvOS, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and Fire TV devices.) Better Use of The Screen In this update, Hulu makes better use of screen and increased the amount of information you will see as you browse on a streaming player. Now you will find new buttons at the bottom of each section on the Home menu to make it easy to find even more shows or movies in that category. Clicking on these buttons will take you to full menus for your content, rather than the list on the home screen. Better readability and legibility Hulu says they have made changes to their font to make it more readable. Lineup now highlights new episodes One of the big complaints about the new app was finding new episodes. Now Hulu has added a highlight for new episodes of the shows you watch directly in your Lineup. T Live and on-demand watch history Now Hulu lets you view your full watch history by selecting “All Watch History” at the bottom of the Keep Watching section on the Home menu. Improvements to video playback Here are the changes Hulu says they made to their video playback: Continuous Play is a feature that automatically starts a new episode, show or movie after the one you are watching ends. A countdown timer and details regarding the next video is now also displayed at the end of playback on iOS and Apple TV devices. We have reduced stream interruptions, and increased stability and video quality App launch, signup, login, and overall transitions are more seamless than before Scene previews are displayed on-screen when seeking during playback on Xbox One, Fire TV, Apple TV, iOS, and Chromecast devices Please follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more news, tips, and reviews. Need cord cutting tech support? Join our new Cord Cutting Tech Support Facebook Group for help.Under Armour Logo to Appear on MLB Chests in 2020 MLB made it official yesterday: They confirmed that Under Armour will be taking over from Majestic as the game’s official uniform outfitter in 2020 — a development that had first been reported, but not officially acknowledged, about six weeks ago. But yesterday’s announcement came with a new wrinkle: While the Majestic logo has appeared on MLB sleeves, the Under Armour logo will be appearing on the upper-right chest area. This is, of course, extremely disappointing. Just as the addition of the New Era logo to MLB caps collapsed the wall between major and minor league caps, and also between on-field and retail caps, the chest placement of the Under Armour mark will erase the boundary between professional and college jerseys, the latter of which often have the marker’s mark on the chest. It’s the latest step in what seems like an inexorable spread of branding and advertising on sports uniforms. Baseball isn’t the only college sport that features chest-positioned maker’s marks — you can see the same thing in college football, college hockey, college basketball, and so on. Chest-based logo creep is also common in lots of international sports, like soccer, rugby, and cricket, along with Japanese baseball and many others. But just as the Big Four pro leagues here in North America have resisted the use of uniform advertising, they’ve also kept manufacturer logos off of their chests. That will change next October, when NBA uniforms begin carrying the Nike logo on the chest (along with uni ad patches, of course). With MLB moving to a chest mark in 2020, you have to wonder how long it’ll be before the NFL and NHL move their maker’s marks to a front-facing location. All of this feels like a move toward a more international model of uniform design. So how will it look? We can get a hint by looking at Under Armour’s college and high school uniforms. Here’s a good example (click to enlarge): But it’s one thing to see a chest logo on the jersey of a team you’ve never heard of. It’s another to see it on a jersey design you’ve been staring at for years. And thanks to the magic of digital imaging, it’s easy to get a sense of what that will look like: And we already have a good sense of what the Giants will look like, because Under Armour already outfits the Yomiuri Giants, who have the same color scheme and a similar jersey design: Of course, all of this is still four seasons away. And will we get used to it, just as we’ve gotten used to all the other little things that have chipped away at the integrity of uniforms? Yes, we will — but it’s beginning to feel like death from a thousand cuts (to the uniform as well as to my psyche). And if you don’t think the move to a chest mark is a big deal, check out this Bloomberg News story, which says the chest placement doubled the value of the deal for MLB. Think about that — Under Armour was willing to pay twice as much to move the logo from the sleeve to the chest. That’s how unavoidable the Under Armour mark is going to be. That story also includes the following quote from Under Armour founder Kevin Plank: “Think of a Yankees fan who is standing in front of a shoe wall deciding what they want to buy. They will think about the fact that there is an Under Armour logo on the front of their jersey.” And there you have it: The point of Under Armour’s deal with MLB is to sell sneakers. That isn’t really a big revelation — you probably already realized it, at least on an intuitive level — but it’s really something to see it spelled out so plainly, right? By coincidence, the day before this news broke I was reading a really good article about the encroachment of advertising into everywhere from national parks to report cards and permission slips and even church sermons (which all comes across as another example of a system that has succeeded too well). The guy who wrote that piece, Tim Wu, has a new book called The Attention Merchants, which is about the history of advertising’s various attempts to worm its way into our brains (like, say, by putting a logo on a baseball jersey in order to sell sneakers). I haven’t read it yet, but there are reviews here, here, and here, and there’s an interview with Wu here. Wu’s thesis is that we need to be more selective about what we pay attention to, and that we shouldn’t give away our attention so easily, because that’s when advertisers get to manipulate us. But how can we avoid that in a realm like sports, where advertising is everywhere, from TV commercials to stadium naming rights? I’ll have more to say about that — and will be presenting you with a small defense mechanism — in a few days. And what about all the advertising on this here website? I’ll have more to say about that shortly as well. Meanwhile, let’s enjoy the look of the next three MLB seasons. Well, except for the caps. ——— One footnote to all of this: Ever since news of the Under Armour deal first surfaced in October, officials in Pennsylvania have been very concerned about preserving the 600 job at Majestic’s factory there, and they’re now lobbying to have Under Armour either acquire that facility or use it as a subcontractor. Lots of good info here. (My thanks to @Braves_Leo, @GetterOne, Doug Rowan, @Whittness, and Phil for the MLB jersey mock-ups.) • • • • • Click to enlarge Parachutes not included: Army unveiled its uniform for this weekend’s Army/Navy game, and it’s a doozy. It’s based on the uniforms of Fort Bragg’s 82nd Airborne Division, with a difficult number font, patches that identify individual regiments and battalions within the division and a helmet design mimics the netting worn by soldiers of the era. There’s additional info here, and here are some additional pics (click to enlarge) and a promotional video: Interestingly, as you can see, the flag patch (which has 48 stars, don’tcha know) is facing the “right” way — which is actually the wrong way, according to proper flag protocol. Phil will have more to say about that, and about the rest of this uniform, and also about the upcoming Navy uniform, on Saturday, so you’ll want to check back here for that. • • • • • Click to enlarge Collector’s Corner By Brinke Guthrie The Dallas Cowboys look like the team to beat in this year’s Super Bowl derby. This “Doomsday Defense set” from the Danbury Mint reminds us that they were pretty good back in the 1960s and ’70s, too. Look at the detailing here! Mel Renfro, Bob Lilly, Chuck Howley, and Lee Roy Jordan were mainstays in Big D for years. How ’bout dem Cowboys! Now for the rest of this week’s picks: • This 1970s Cleveland Barons NHL Puck Bank is still in the package! • This New York Islanders tee from the 1970s uses the team font in the lettering. Note the “Y” in “My Game.” • Coca-Cola was the sponsor for this 1970-71 season poster of Yvon Cournoyer of the Montreal Canadiens. • From reader Mike Powers, check out this vintage 1940s hockey jersey (or sweater, whatever you like). “BR Flyers” on the front, and “Colmers Park” on the back. • Here’s a set of 1970s PRO! gameday magazines. Check out the cover art on that first one. It’s Clobberin’ Time! • Remember way back when these “SuperStripe” caps were all the rage? This Cowboys cap looks like it’s never been worn. • Great artwork on these 1970s NFL curtains! • Even better is this 1970s NFL belt. Never seen this one before! • How ’bout a pair of official New Orleans Saints wristbands from the 1970s, still in the package. Extra absorbent, too! • Still in the 1970s, but this time featuring the Chicago Cubs: Look at this retro art for this window decal! • And from reader Will Scheibler, three CFL items: an Ottawa Rough Riders satin jacket, a 1974 Edmonton Eskimos Dave Syme Quarterback Buck, and a rug from the office of the Baltimore CFL Colts. • • • • • T-Shirt Club reminder: In case you missed it last week, the Uni Watch T-Shirt Club’s final design of 2016 is now available for ordering. The design is a mash-up of uniform elements from all of our previous 2016 shirts (click to enlarge): The only new element is the baseball cap (which didn’t appear on our baseball-themed shirt because the player was wearing a batting helmet). It’s comes in four color options — our usual grey, black, green, plus a new “military green” (that’s what the manufacturer calls it, although I’d just call it light olive) — and is also available with either short or long sleeves. The shirt will be available through this Friday. The shirts are due to ship right after Christmas, so they should arrive in time for you to wear them on New Year’s Eve. (I had hoped to have them delivered in time for Christmas, but it just wasn’t possible to get things finalized in time for that. Sorry.) If you’ve ordered all five of this year’s previous shirts and also get this one, you’ll be eligible for our year-end “Collect ’Em All” prize, which will be a patch based on the jock tag design used on this year’s shirts. To qualify, please send me proof that you’ve bought all six shirts. The proof can either be (a) a photo showing all the shirts or (b) screen shots of the “Thank you for your order” emails you received from Teespring and Represent. Once again, the new shirt can be ordered here. Thanks for your consideration. • • • • • On a personal note: One of my all-time favorite roadside attractions is Roadside America, a completely amazing and thoroughly charming miniature village in Shartlesville, Pa. If you’ve ever been there, you know how awesome it is. Roadside America now needs our help. The roof is leaking, threatening the village display, and a new roof will cost at least $80,000. If Roadside America has given you pleasure over the years, as it has for me — or if you just care about preserving America’s vanishing culture of quirky roadside attractions — please consider donating to their repair fund. Thanks. • • • • • The Ticker By Mike Chamernik Baseball News : The Dodgers held a press conference with Rich Hill yesterday after the pitcher re-signed with the team. He was given a cap without a New Era logo and a blank Dodgers jersey. Again, he re-signed with them, so he could’ve just worn a game jersey, or even a retail jersey, that already exists (from David Feigenbaum). … R.A. Dickey’s high school baseball team at Montgomery Bell in Nashville used the Brewers ball-in-glove logo (from David Arnott). … A few things are wrong with this Derek Jeter jersey-shirt (from Jack Connell). NFL News : The NFL changed course and will allow the Titans and Browns, who had byes last Sunday, to wear customized cleats for Week 14. There had initially been reports that the custom cleats would not be allowed, but the league backtracked late in the day yesterday (from Brinke). … A sign in the Georgia Dome has former Falcons QB Steve Bartkowski’s name spelled incorrectly. As Jake Jahimiak points out, the sign includes a photo of Bartkowski holding a jersey with his name spelled properly. … Not only is the XFL’s website still online, but there’s a page with logo and uniform style guides for each team! Tremendous stuff (from Joe Gemma). … Remember how someone once compared the Buffalo Sabres’ “buffaslug” logo to Donald Trump’s hair? There’s a new seafood eatery in Kurdistan called Trump Fish, and it uses an illustration of Trump with his hair represented by the Chargers’ lightning bolt logo. College Football News : Penn State
lead to a large square park where the little old lady who owned the corn field beyond our backyard would graze her sheep. On the other side of that park lived Pablo and his family. He introduced himself to me at the first meeting my family attended in his congregation. The language barrier didn't phase him and so we became fast friends. Pablo's family was relatively wealthy. By that I mean that they lived in a 5 bedroom house, owned 2 vehicles, and had a live-in maid. I mention this only because it allowed Pablo to do things that the average Ecuadorian kid couldn't. Things like mountain biking & playing video games. Things that I enjoyed and that reminded me of the life I left behind. This is significant when you consider that the kingdom hall we attended didn't even have a parking lot, nor did it need one. There were maybe 5 families that owned vehicles, and of those 5, only 2 vehicles were less than 15 years old. Our vehicle was not one of them. Since my parents did own a vehicle, this made them prime candidates for working some of the rural territory that was assigned to our congregation. Don't forget, my parents were there to PREACH. Aside from the extremely rare occasion when I was in a car group with a girl I liked, I didn't enjoy the preaching work in the States. That being said, the rural territory was FUN. My father would drive our 1980 Toyota Land Cruiser sometimes for over an hour through a mountain pass until we reached one of a few small towns where our congregation was assigned to preach. It wasn't so much the preaching that I enjoyed, it was the adventure. Climbing a steep mountain path to reach a small stone hut just to find nobody home was my idea of a good time. Preaching this territory required waking up very early however, and the only thing I enjoyed more than being outside was being in my bed, so I tired of it quickly. Besides, I basically lived at Pablo's house so I was rarely home to go with them anyways. As long as I was at the meetings and I got my required 10 hours a month in the preaching work my parents pretty much left me alone. One of the reasons my parents cited for moving our family to Ecuador was to get us children away from the corrupting influence of life in the United States. Turns out, Ecuadorians are just as, if not more, materialistic than Americans. Being poor has no bearing on ones capacity for materialism. Just because you can't buy it doesn't mean you can't really really want it. I got drunk for the first time at the age of 15 with a group of boys from the congregation. When I asked why my vomit was green it was explained to me that I had disappeared at one point and they found me behind Pablo's wet bar drinking Creme de Menthe straight from the bottle, true story. We visited the strip club in the red light district just outside of town when I was 16. I tried my first cigarette around this same time. We were teenage boys, we thought about 2 things: girls and mischief. I tell you this not because it is a reflection on the character of the Jehovah's Witness kids in Ecuador, but because I love irony. My dear friend Pablo During our time in Ecuador we returned to the United States twice. The first time, I spent almost the entire trip in the company of my good friend Matty Hackett. In anticipation of my arrival he bought me a skateboard and we spent a fair amount of time doing that. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and seeing all my old friends made it extremely difficult to return to Ecuador. About a year later we visited again and I eagerly anticipated another fun filled vacation. Upon arriving however, I was informed that Matt had been disfellowshipped the week before. This meant that there was no possibility of seeing or talking to him, my heart sank. Jehovah's Witnesses have to be prepared to turn their backs on friends and family at a moments notice due to the shunning arrangement. I'm no psychologist, but I have to imagine that this has some impact on ones ability to form close relationships. I had essentially lost a very good friend and although I was heartbroken, I moved on fairly quickly, this is the way it has to be. We returned to Ecuador and I wouldn't see or speak to Matt until after my own disfellowshipping almost 20 years later.This article is about the film. For the heavy metal band, see After Earth (band) After Earth is a 2013 American post-apocalyptic science fiction action film directed by M. Night Shyamalan, who co-wrote it with Gary Whitta, based on an original story idea by Will Smith. It is the second film after The Pursuit of Happyness that stars real-life father and son Will and Jaden Smith; Will Smith also produced via his company Overbrook Entertainment, and the distribution was by Columbia Pictures. The film takes place in the 31st century, when the Earth has long been abandoned and humans have been in conflict with a mysterious alien race. It tells the story of a high-ranking general in the peacekeeping organization Ranger Corps, and his son, who, after an incident during a spaceflight, find themselves fighting for survival on a hostile planet (which is Earth itself). The film was released in IMAX on May 31, 2013. Upon release, After Earth was panned by film critics; its acting was criticized as melodramatic, and the writing and storytelling were also singled out for criticism. It grossed $243 million against a net production budget of $128 million. Plot [ edit ] In the near future, an environmental cataclysm forces the human race to abandon Earth and settle on a new world, Nova Prime. One thousand years later, The Ranger Corps, a peacekeeping organization commanded by General Cypher Raige (Will Smith), comes into conflict with the S'krell, alien creatures who intended to conquer Nova Prime. Their secret weapons are the Ursas, large predatory creatures that hunt by "sensing" fear. The Rangers struggle against the Ursas until Cypher learns how to completely suppress his fear, a technique called "ghosting". After teaching this technique to the other Rangers, he leads the Ranger Corps to victory. Meanwhile, Cypher's son Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith) blames himself for the death of his sister Senshi (Zoë Kravitz) at the hands of an Ursa. Kitai trains to become a Ranger like Cypher, but his application is rejected due to his recklessness, and Cypher views him as a disappointment. Kitai's mother Faia (Sophie Okonedo) convinces Cypher to take Kitai on his last voyage before retirement. During flight, however, their spaceship is caught by an asteroid shower forcing them to crash-land on the now-quarantined Earth. Both of Cypher's legs are broken, and the main beacon for firing a distress signal is damaged. Cypher instructs Kitai to locate the tail section of the ship, which broke off on entry to the atmosphere. Inside is the backup beacon which they can use to signal Nova Prime. Cypher gives Kitai his weapon, a wrist communicator and six capsules of a fluid that enhances the oxygen intake so he can breathe in Earth's low-oxygen atmosphere. Cypher warns him to avoid the highly evolved fauna and flora, and be careful of violent thermal shifts. Kitai leaves to find the tail section, with Cypher guiding him through the communicator. Kitai is attacked by giant monkeys and, during his escape, is bitten by a poisonous leech. Kitai administers the antidote, but two of his capsules are damaged and his nervous system shuts down. When Kitai awakens, he narrowly escapes a thermal shift. Kitai lies to Cypher, not informing him of the damaged capsules. That night, Kitai listens to Cypher tell him a story of when he was attacked by an Ursa, how he realized that fear is merely an illusion created by the mind's thoughts of the future, and thus he first began to "ghost" himself from the Ursas, choosing to live rather than to let his enemies, both fear and the Ursas, decide his fate. The following day, Kitai reaches a mountaintop and Cypher learns about the broken capsules. Knowing that the only way to make it with two capsules would be to skydive, Cypher orders Kitai to abort the mission. Believing his father still sees him as a disappointment, Kitai blames Senshi's death on Cypher's absence on the day of the attack. He skydives from the mountaintop, but is captured by a large bird of prey and his communicator is damaged. Kitai wakes in a nest of the bird, where he is surrounded by big cats. The bird attacks the big cats, and Kitai, after himself defending the chicks against the cats, escapes. He reaches a river, and builds a raft to continue along the river. Tired, Kitai falls asleep on the raft. He dreams of his sister, Senshi, who reassures him that Cypher's bitterness is just his own anger for not saving her. Senshi urges Kitai to wake up and when he does, he is surprised by another thermal shift and nearly freezes to death. Kitai is rescued when the bird, who had lost its brood when the cats attacked, sacrifices itself for him. Kitai reaches the tail section and retrieves the emergency beacon along with another communicator, weapon, and more oxygen capsules. The communicator only allows Cypher to see and hear Kitai, but not for Kitai to hear him. Kitai learns the ship's Ursa escaped and killed the rest of the crew. The emergency beacon does not activate, and Cypher realizes that the atmosphere is blocking the signal. Kitai heads to and climbs up a nearby volcano from which he can fire the beacon, and is injured when the Ursa attacks him. Kitai is able to control his fear and "ghost" himself from the Ursa enough to kill it. He then fires the beacon. A rescue team arrives, and the two travel back to Nova Prime. Cast [ edit ] Production [ edit ] Will Smith conceived this story when he was watching the television show called I Shouldn't Be Alive with his brother-in-law Caleeb Pinkett.[4] It was originally not a science fiction story but about a father and son crashing their car in the mountains or some remote region, with the son having to go out and get rescue for his father. Smith then decided to change the setting to 1,000 years in the future, which imposed a higher budget. The film was also intended to be the first in a trilogy.[5] Smith had his production company Overbrook contact Gary Whitta (who was then known for his script for The Book of Eli) with a simple log line for a film: a father and son crash landed on Earth 1,000 years after it had been abandoned by humankind. Impressed with his idea and excited about the opportunity to work with him, Whitta fleshed out Smith's idea and pitched it to him, subsequently becoming the first employee on the project. A month after the release of The Last Airbender, Smith contacted M. Night Shyamalan on August 6 to wish him "Happy Birthday" and to persuade him to direct his film with his son Jaden as the star.[6] Smith and Shyamalan had planned to work on a film before but it never worked out. Impressed with the entire script, Shyamalan officially made this project—then entitled One Thousand A. E.—his next directorial effort on October 20, and quietly shelved his own secret untitled project with Bruce Willis, Bradley Cooper, and Gwyneth Paltrow loosely attached.[7] There was another starring role for an adult male, but sources indicated that Smith would not be taking it on. Sony Pictures Entertainment has a first-look deal with Overbrook, so it was expected to be the studio home for A. E.[7] Shyamalan later suggested the film would feature other members of the Smith family, and that it would not be in 3D but he had "an idea for something kind of technically interesting".[8] In December 2011, Columbia Pictures, a subsidiary of Sony, signed Will and Jaden Smith to star in the film with Shyamalan directing. Shyamalan, who co-wrote the screenplay with Gary Whitta, produced the film with Overbrook's James Lassiter, Smith, Ken Stovitz, and Jada Pinkett Smith. Doug Belgrad, president of Columbia Pictures, made the announcement and said, "Night is an outstanding filmmaker who has a tremendous vision for this science-fiction adventure story and we couldn't be more excited to be working again with Jaden after our experiences on The Pursuit of Happyness and The Karate Kid," and added "We're thrilled to have the two of them together on this project." Shyamalan also added, "The chance to make a scary, science-fiction film starring Jaden and Will is my dream project."[9] Will Smith's decision to take on the starring adult male role required him to step aside in producing and starring in the Hurricane Katrina drama The American Can, and offered the lead role to Denzel Washington instead. The shooting of the movie was also pushed back from September 2011 to January 2012.[10] On July 25, 2011, Smith traveled to Costa Rica accompanied by an entourage of about 20 people, including Shyamalan, to scout for locations to shoot the film.[11] They visited sites like the Arenal Volcano, hot springs and a lake, and some beaches.[12] In September, Columbia committed to a June 7, 2013 release date.[13] Shyamalan also scouted locations in Philadelphia. Fifty percent of the filming was to take place at the new Sun Center Studios in Delaware County (Chester Township). Other locations would be in Costa Rica, Utah and Northern California.[14] Shyamalan also visited Valley Forge Military Academy, the filming location of Taps, for research of the film, then entitled After Earth, as Jaden Smith would be playing a military cadet of the future.[15] The screenplay by Whitta and Shyamalan was later polished by Stephen Gaghan[16] and Mark Boal.[17] Jonathan Young, a psychologist and screenwriter, polished the mythic journey structure.[18] Principal photography for After Earth began in February 2012. Much of the filming took place in Costa Rica, Humboldt County, and Aston. After Earth became the first film from Sony to be both shot and presented in the emerging 4K digital format.[19] It was primarily shot with Sony's CineAlta F65 camera, which was shipped in January 2012.[20] However, a skydiving sequence required a smaller sized Canon Cinema EOS C500 4K camera mounted on the helmet of a professional skydriver.[21] The cinematographer Peter Suschitzky who picked Sony F65 digital camera for the movie over other digital and film cameras, argued that benefits of film are lost when shown in theaters with digital projectors, as many are today.[19] On April 19, 2013, Shyamalan announced that the release date had been moved a week earlier to May 31, 2013[22] in North America and Korea, which put it against Now You See Me and The Purge, scheduled to open in the United States in the same week. A few days later, the U.S. release of The Purge was rescheduled for June 7, 2013,[23] taking over the slot vacated by After Earth. On May 3, it was revealed that Korean-American singer Jay Park would be participating on the official soundtrack of the film in Korea, with a song titled "I Like 2 Party". On May 5, a 30-second snippet of the song was released with a trailer.[24] Marketing [ edit ] The estimated worldwide marketing budget for After Earth was approximately $100 million in addition to the $135 million to produce the film.[25] Initial marketing began online with an internet marketing campaign on Facebook and Google+, including a teaser trailer. Alongside the Facebook marketing is a Web 2.0 site that lets people "scroll" through different images and paragraphs in a complex dynamic way. An image of Jaden's character in costume was released online on February 15, 2012.[26] Later in the year, a theatrical teaser was released alongside a trailer for the competing Joseph Kosinski film Oblivion. On March 12, a modified version of After Earth's theatrical teaser was released as the official trailer.[27] The official trailer was broadcast as a TV spot during late May 2013. The trailer featured the menu music of the video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution, composed by Michael McCann.[28] In a stark contrast to his previous films, Shyamalan's name was notably absent from trailers, TV commercials, and marketing signage.[29] Instead, Sony Pictures opted to feature Will and Jaden Smith prominently in the marketing campaign.[30] Sony's worldwide marketing and distribution chairman, Jeff Blake, said that "Night is, without a doubt, a world-class filmmaker who we were thrilled to team up with on this project," but "Together, we decided to focus our campaign on both the action and Will and Jaden given that 'After Earth' is an adventure story of a father and son." Alex Suskind of Moviefone pointed out to Shyamalan that After Earth was not being marketed on the strength of his name unlike his previous projects, to which he responded, "There's such a specific expectation that comes with a name. It's nice to have people watch the movie and then have them talk about the storyteller; it's a healthy balance."[31] On April 24, XPRIZE, Sony and Overbrook launched the XPRIZE After Earth Challenge, a robotics competition to promote the May 31 release of After Earth.[32] The film premiered on May 29 at Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City, with a wide variety of celebrities attending including Bruce Willis, 50 Cent, Spike Lee, and Justin Bieber.[33] Canadian comedian Russell Peters who made fun of Shyamalan when accepting the Razzie Award on his behalf for The Last Airbender[34] also attended and even posed with Shyamalan.[35][36] Sony Electronics hosted an exclusive 4K screening of After Earth at the Paramount Studios Theater on Friday May 31 during the 2013 Cine Gear Expo in Hollywood.[37] The event was held for registered Cine Gear Expo attendees and Sony guests from 6:30-9:30 pm[38] followed by a panel discussion with the filmmakers and production team. After guests filled the 500-plus-seat theater,[39] a second screening was held on Saturday June 1 to accommodate additional guests[40] from 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm. On June 6, the European Space Agency (ESA) partnered with Sony Pictures International to support the release of the film, stating that it shares common themes in the film of concern for Earth's future and educating the next generation.[41] ESA and Sony are holding the After Earth competition to win the opportunity to go to Bordeaux, France and have a'space experience' in weightlessness on a 'parabolic' flight on Novespace's ZERO-G aircraft. The winner will receive paid travel expenses to and from Bordeaux and one night's accommodation for two people, and will only be eligible to participate in the reduced gravity aircraft on October 25 following a medical exam.[42] Books [ edit ] Several books were released as supplemental tie-ins for the film: After Earth: Innocence by Michael Jan Friedman and Robert Greenberger, illustrated by Benito Lobel. Innocence is a prequel comic book to After Earth released by Del Rey Books on November 14, 2012. After Earth: United Ranger Corps Survival Manual is an illustrated manual that describes the After Earth universe from the history of the United Ranger Corps written by Robert Greenberger. It was published through Insight Editions LLC and released on May 21, 2013. The book also follows humanity's exodus from Earth, and the ongoing battle against the Skrel. It contains the secrets of ghosting, the mastery of the cutlass, a schematic of the Ranger base, a complete guide to the highly evolved animals of Earth, and a handwritten journal entry from Cypher Raige. After Earth: Kitai's Journal written by Christine Peymani illustrated Jason A. Katzenstein is a paperback book with black-and-white illustrations for younger readers released by HarperCollins on May 21, 2013. After Earth: The official novel of the epic film After Earth by Peter David was released in paperback by publishing company Del Rey Books on May 28, 2013. The book features an expanded story of the film as well as supplemental stories. Box office [ edit ] During its opening weekend, After Earth took in $27.5 million in box office receipts in North America and $2.5M in South Korea.[43] Sony Pictures projected a launch of around $38 million, but the actual number was 17% lower than the lowest pre-release expectation of $33 million.[25][44] It finished in third place behind Fast & Furious 6, an action film, and Now You See Me, a caper film.[45] Taking into account the popularity of principal actor Will Smith, the disappointing finish led The Wall Street Journal to call it a "flop".[46] Ray Subers of Box Office Mojo noted the $27 million weekend placed it between two sci-fi flops of 2012 films with 200-million-dollar-plus budgets, Battleship ($25.5 million) and John Carter ($30.2 million), and also drew half of the co-stars' previous openings, Will Smith's Men in Black 3 ($54.6 million) and Jaden Smith's The Karate Kid ($55.7 million).[47] Scott Mendelson from Forbes argued that Sony made a mistake of hiding M. Night Shyamalan as they promoted the film because for better or worse, the general public knows who he is and "His name on the marquee reflects that you're not going to get a conventional genre film, that there may be something else up its sleeve."[48] Sony Pictures spokesman Steve Elzer said a weekend take of about $30 million in the United States and Canada would be a solid number for a movie that is not a branded sequel.[49] Sony distribution chief Rory Bruer said "Certainly we would have liked to have done more, but this was always going to be a worldwide play."[50] The Hollywood Reporter reported Sony insiders estimate a potential loss at about $20 million if the film does not gross high overseas, though estimates of top executives at several rival studios are much higher.[51] On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Will Smith admitted he was also disappointed with the box office performance and joked "Here's how I think about it, Jimmy, let's be honest. Three is the new one. You know how many ones it takes to make a three?" and "It's been almost, like, two decades since I had a movie that wasn't number one!... That's over now, buddy! Thanks!"[52][53] On the worldwide release the following week, After Earth took in an estimated $45.5 million in 60 overseas markets, narrowly beating Fast & Furious 6 estimates of $45.3 million for the No. 1 spot at the international box office.[54][55] Including the film's launch in South Korea, After Earth made an estimated total of $48.6 million at the international box office, bringing its worldwide gross to an estimated $95,192,000. Sources for Sony Pictures International Releasing said the overall launch was bigger than debuts in the same territories of Oblivion ($45.1 million), The Last Airbender ($42.7 million), and Jaden Smith vehicle The Karate Kid ($32.3 million).[55] Sony distribution chief Rory Bruer said that Sony was happy with the overseas opening and expects much of the film's ticket sales to come from international markets and "It definitely was the exciting start we were looking for internationally."[56] Reception [ edit ] Critical response [ edit ] On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 11% based on 201 reviews and an average rating of 3.8/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "After Earth is a dull, ploddingly paced exercise in sentimental sci-fi—and the latest setback for director M. Night Shyamalan's once-promising career."[57] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 33 out of 100 based on 41 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[58] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.[59] Joe Morgenstern, film critic for The Wall Street Journal, opened his review by asking: "Is After Earth the worst movie ever made?" His answer was "Maybe not; there's always Battlefield Earth to remind us how low the bar can go."[60] Like Morgenstern, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times made note of the film's use of central themes in Scientology before concluding the film was nothing more than a "big-screen vanity project".[61] Los Angeles Times reviewer Betsy Sharkey wondered how the elder Smith could have gone from the charismatic performance in the serious film The Pursuit of Happyness, also co-starring his son, to the performance in After Earth. She also saw compounding problems in the creative process leading to a lack of subtlety and nuance: "The script has no nuance, none. And when Shyamalan moves into the director's chair, the script problems are magnified."[62] Scott Foundas of Variety opined that the film was further proof that Shyamalan had become a "director-for-hire", with "his disinterest palpable from first frame to last".[63][64] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film one star out of five, calling it "another uncompromisingly terrible film... featuring a triple-whammy of abysmal acting, directing and story" and saying that Jaden Smith "plays the role throughout with a face like a smacked bum" and "Kitai [Jaden Smith's character] must be like his dad: show no fear. Or any emotion. Or any acting talent of any sort."[65] Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com awarded the film 3.5 stars out of 4 and commented that the movie is "a moral tale disguised as a sci-fi blockbuster. It's no classic, but it's a special movie: spectacular and wise."[66] Jim Vejvoda of IGN awarded the film a 6.7 out of 10 and commented, "M. Night Shyamalan isn't quite back in top form here, but After Earth is certainly the best movie he's made in years."[67] Charlie Jane Anders of Io9 commented that "Having suffered through Last Airbender, I can attest that this film is no Last Airbender... After Earth stays grounded, and manages to tell a pretty decent story."[68] The special effects received a mixed response. Rene Rodriguez of The Miami Herald said that "the CGI creatures in the film look as fake as the monkeys in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"[69] and Rebecca Murray of About.com said that the effects "look as though they've been created by someone who just got accepted to film school".[70] Charlie McCollum of the San Jose Mercury News called them "surprisingly unconvincing, a step or two above the effects in those deliberately cheese ball sci-fi flicks the Syfy channel shows on Saturday night."[71] Michael O'Sullivan of The Washington Post called the production design "blandly generic" and the special effects, props and costumes "cheap and slapdash-looking".[72] However, Austin Kennedy of Film Geek Central said the special effects were "top-notch",[73] John Depko and Susanne Perez of Daily Pilot called them "impressive",[74] Nathan Duke of Patch Media said they were "impressive enough",[75] and Peter Feldman of The Citizen described them as "solid".[76] American astronaut Buzz Aldrin said the movie is "quite action packed" and a "touching father/son story"[77] but is not realistic because "there was a lot of noise. In space, you don't get that much noise,"[78] a quote that is highly cited in the news[79][80][81] and misconstrued as him nitpicking[82][83] or panning the film.[84][85] Aldrin was impressed by the set design stating that "the scenes of the cities were really remarkable" but differed significantly from his experience on the moon, which he described as "'magnificent desolation' in contrast to the magnificent experience that humanity could move itself ahead to get to the moon."[78] Will Smith's response [ edit ] In an interview with Esquire, Smith called the film "the most painful failure" of his career and expressed regret at leading his son into the production. He also unfavorably compared the experience to Wild Wild West, which also underperformed expectations at the box office.[86] 4K screening [ edit ] Ryan Nakashima of Associated Press was generally impressed with the film's 4K resolution picture quality, though the visual-effects shots that comprised about a third of the movie were done in 2K resolution to save on cost and time.[19] Nakashima commented "I could see details I've never noticed before—the actors' tiny skin imperfections, or Smith's salt-and-pepper whiskers. In a distant shot of Smith's son Jaden running down a riverbed, I was struck by how many small rocks were defined clearly from such a distance. Yet other shots that included computer-generated cityscapes or otherworldly creatures looked less sharp." The cinematographer Peter Suschitzky was apologetic about that, saying "The movie is only half in true 4K. I'm sad about that. It still looks good.[87] Scott Wilkinson of AVS was similarly impressed by the visual effects (though he did not enjoy the movie itself): "Even sitting too far away, the movie itself looked gorgeous—sharp as a tack with beautiful colors. The smallest details, such as Jaden Smith's character in the far distance, somehow looked clearer than I would have expected under normal circumstances; I got the distinct impression that the image could have been blown up by quite a bit and no detail would have been lost. The CGI animals did look a bit artificial, but that didn't bother me very much at all."[88] Controversies [ edit ] Scientology hypothesis [ edit ] Some critics were struck by what they saw as parallels in the movie's plot, dialogue and imagery with the Scientology teachings of L. Ron Hubbard,[60] particularly those in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health[61] and Dianetics: The Original Thesis.[89] Similarly, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone compared the film to the Scientology-themed flop Battlefield Earth, describing the film as "an unholy mess of platitudes and posturing" that wastes the talents and charm of Will Smith.[90] Pointing out Smith's alleged ties to Scientology, including his funding of New Village Leadership Academy, a school that uses Study Tech as its teaching method, Matt Patches of Vulture declared the movie probably the clearest evidence of Smith's investment in Scientology, and detailed how he saw the film paralleling its teachings.[91] The Hollywood Reporter published a guest-column review written by former Scientology member Marc Headley which pointed out similar parallels.[92] The Sun noted an observation made by a former Scientologist that the fictional Rangers Corps is similar to the church's Sea Org branch, which has its own cadet branch.[93] David S. Touretzky, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon and a well-known expert on and critic of Scientology dismissed these perceived parallels: "I don't see any Scientology content at all in this movie."[94] He told Rich Juzwiak of Gawker: The themes of the movie appear to be standard adventure fare: physical courage, coming of age, father/son relationships, battling danger to prove oneself and earn a father's respect. These are not Scientology themes. There is no mention of evil psychiatrists, mind control, engrams, etc.[citation needed] Touretzky also addressed multiple points made by the Scientology hypothesis including the film's marketing materials prominently featuring a volcano: The original version of Dianetics did not have any pictures on the cover. After Hubbard dreamed up OT III around 1967, someone got the idea of putting a volcano on the cover of Dianetics to'restimulate the engrams' of us nonbelievers and influence us to buy the book. But most Scientologists don't know anything about OT III or why there is a volcano on the cover of some versions of Dianetics.[citation needed] A parody website cheerupwillsmith.com, which was created for the purpose of cheering up Will Smith with the perceived failure of After Earth, gained some attention in the media.[95][96] Flyers were also posted in East Village, Manhattan requesting Scientology members to see After Earth a minimum of three times and then upload a positive video for Will Smith on that website.[97] The site has a video mockumentary of two Sea Org members, along their way to see After Earth, recorded video praises for Will Smith from strangers and cajoled them into signing a billion-year contract with the Church of Scientology. When they delivered the signatures to a local branch of the church near Times Square, a church representative told them they were impersonating the church and threatened to call the police if they do not leave.[98] The video and the site was created by Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler of the comedy duo The Good Liars[99][100] who had previously pretended to be Time Warner Cable representatives asking people how they can make service worse for customers.[101] The Church of Scientology International branded the Scientology claims as "silly nonsense" and a myth launched by a handful of self-promoters.[102] The church's director of public affairs, Karin Pouw, stated to TheImproper magazine that "The film and its story line contain themes common to many of the world's philosophies, not unique to Scientology." While Pouw did not dispute the similarities, she countered that overcoming fear has been a universal theme in stories for thousands of years as well central to countless film plots. She noted the same logic would seemingly make Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace a Scientology-themed movie, which includes the dialogue, "Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering."[103] Later, domain registrar and web-hosting company Go Daddy took down cheerupwillsmith.com citing "Copyright Infringement, Trademark Infringement, and False Identity." Joe Kloc of The Daily Dot presumes the complaints came from the Church of Scientology.[99] Nepotism allegations [ edit ] There was heavy criticism of Jaden Smith's role in the film. Christopher Orr of The Atlantic stated, "He is entirely lacking in the big-screen charisma that made his father one of Hollywood's major stars."[104] Gary Wolcott of Tri-City Herald commented that "the 15-year-old Jaden doesn't appear to demonstrate much talent and has zero charisma."[105] As the film also stars Zoë Kravitz, Alex Pappademas of Grantland called After Earth a "parade-float tribute to nepotism."[106] Mikhail Lecaros of GMA calls the movie "devoid of common sense and purpose (save for nepotism)."[107] In response to the nepotism allegations, Gary Susman of Time magazine argued, "In Hollywood, such nepotism is no sin; in fact, it's often a selling point."[108] David S. Cohen of Variety pointed out that "putting family members into projects is hardly new, yet it rarely inspires such vituperation.[109] Abena Agyeman-Fisher of NewsOne.com suggested that the allegations were thinly-veiled racism and an example of a double standard being applied to black people.[110] However, Charlie Lyne of The Guardian writes that nepotism has traditionally carried a stigma.[111] Awards and nominations [ edit ]NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton sat down for an interview with Charlie Rose set to air on PBS tonight and in this preview clip New York’s top cop has responded directly to ongoing criticism from The New York Times’ editorial page, which has suggested Mayor Bill de Blasio may need to fire him. Rose quoted from a January 6 editorial, in which the paper wrote of the NYPD’s controversial slowdown, “If the Police Department’s current commanders cannot get the cops to do their jobs, Mr. de Blasio should consider replacing them.” “That editorial is crazy,” Bratton told Rose. “What do they want to do, go to war with the cops? What they’re advocating is basically, go to war with the cops, what’s that going to solve?” Noting that work levels for NYPD officers have since returned to normal, Bratton added, “We have not had to use the approach that The New York Times would encourage. The last thing you need is trying to instigate a widening of the gap. I’m trying to work to close the gap. So that type of language is very inappropriate in this discussion.” Last week, Bratton acknowledged that there had been a police slowdown in New York City when it came to minor infractions, but said he was working to reverse that trend. Watch video below, via PBS: [Photo via screengrab] — — >> Follow Matt Wilstein (@TheMattWilstein) on Twitter Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comAs our society has shifted from eating whole foods to consuming processed food-like products, food packaging has become a major part of our solid waste stream. An unfortunately, because there are rules about what’s safe for food to be wrapped up in, lots of this packaging is difficult or impossible to recycle. Apparently, this problem has vexed Harvard scientists, who recently announced that they have developed a food packaging technology that could eliminate the need for plastic containers, and we could see on grocery store shelves in the next 12 months. WikiCells, the brain child of Harvard professor David Edwards, are “novel edible forms for eating and drinking transportable foods and drinks without plastic.” WikiCells consist of a natural food membrane held together by electrostatic forces and containing a liquid, emulsion, foam, or solid food substance possibly within an edible or biodegradable shell. Edwards says the idea for this edible packaging was inspired by excessive plastic bottle waste. ”The idea was to try to create a bottle which was based on how nature creates bottles,” Edwards said of his motivation for developing WikiCells, citing grapes as an example of one of
’t heard of it – trust me, it’s worth it), so if you needed any proof that they’re bonkers, you have it there. Because no one actually lives in Nelson, everyone you’ll meet there will be a tourist, probably there to watch the West Indies lose to Ireland too. Do: Visit the World of Wearable Arts museum if you need a good belly laugh. Don’t: Expect the shopping to be great – I’d suggest leaving the wife in Wellington. How to introduce yourself: “So, where did you travel from to get to Nelson?” CHRISTCHURCH First things first: since the earthquakes, Christchurch residents have been a bit jumpy. Don’t ask for a chocolate milkshake. It’ll bring on the Post-traumatic stress. Ask for a “chocolate flavoured thickened milk drink”. Christchurch’s most notable son is Sir Robert Parker, former mayor. His work following the earthquakes was remarkable, and he was rightly rewarded with a knighthood. However, given that his name was Bob, and that he was so heavily involved with the Christchurch rebuild, I can’t help but suggest we should call him Bob the Rebuilder. Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you criticise Richie McCaw whilst in Christchurch. The results of this can be found here. If you intend to go to Christchurch to visit Christ’s Church, you’re fresh out of luck. The cathedral was destroyed in the earthquake, and it was replaced with a cardboard one. Seriously. The entire city is now devoted to the earthquakes, so just be prepared for the fact that you’ll receive endless bloody personal stories about when the earthquakes struck. The only good thing about the earthquakes is that it meant they stopped talking about their rugby team for the first time in the last half a century. Do: See if you can spot Richard Hadlee. He walks around the city with twelve trumpeters standing astride him, announcing his presence at every location. Don’t: Mention Richie McCaw’s prolific cheating. How to introduce yourself: However you like, just don’t make any loud or sudden noises. DUNEDIN Dunedin is best described by the following excerpt from Adam Gilchrist’s True Colours. I apologise for the length of the excerpt, but frankly it does all the talking for me. “I only remember one down moment in six weeks. We played a one-dayer in Dunedin, on the Carisbrook ground they call the ‘House of Pain’ in rugby circles. In winter it’s cold and wet and almost unbearable for touring teams, and the All Blacks routinely win there. The crowd is unique. Dunedin is a university town, and the ‘scarfies’ – university students wearing their scarves – pack out the terraces. They’d bring lounge chairs, sit on them all day drinking and watching the cricket, then, at night, set them on fire. You’d think the world’s wildest cricket crowds would be in India or the West Indies, but none of them was a patch on the madness and intimidation of those scarfies. This was a night game, and we’d scored 4-310. We were always on top, and late in their innings Brett Lee bowled a bumper to Adam Parore, who tried to evade it. He flicked back his head and his helmet fell onto the stumps: out, hit wicket. But the scarfies didn’t like it, and started setting objects on fire and throwing them onto the field. They were feral. Just before that incident, a streaker had run onto the field, done a loop of the wicket, then ran all the way back to his mates without having been confronted by security, staff, players or anyone. When he got back to his seat he sat down, still naked, picked up his beer again, and shouted, ‘Get the game going!’ It was anarchy. At around midnight we rode back to the hotel in vans. One group of guys, Matty Hayden among them, wanted to stop at McDonald’s. Inside, a couple of words were exchanged with some locals angry about the way the game had gone. Our guys came back to the vans and we returned to the hotel. In the morning, the tyres on the van had been slashed, and a little blade was stuck into one of the tyres with a note saying: ‘Hayden, your family will suffer.’ They say the only criminals who get caught are the stupid ones. Well, this was a case in point. The note was signed: ‘Adidas, three stripes.’ One of the guys in McDonald’s had been wearing an Adidas tracksuit top, and wanted Haydos to know he’d written the note. Problem was, the police quickly identified and arrested him – apparently still wearing his top.” Thanks, Gilly. I don’t think I need to add to that. Only thing that’s changed since that tour is that they now play at University Oval rather than Carisbrook. Do: Go to day games. Don’t: Go to night games. How to introduce yourself: No need to. The locals will be running past you, naked, carrying something on fire. Don’t stop and introduce yourself, just let them keep going. Follow @denniscricket_After a tense standoff that lasted weeks and threatened to destabilize the entire region, roommates Jason Temple and Bryce Howard announced today that diplomacy had prevailed in their peace talks over the pile of dishes in the sink. In a joint statement, both parties reaffirmed their commitment to the peace process. Jason avowed to never let the situation come so close to the brink again. “Did my dinner party have something to do with it?” he said, referencing the social gathering that had been a source of tension to many in the affected area, “Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t, but Bryce is the one who broke the garbage disposal.” The breaking point came when Bryce’s girlfriend refused to enter the demilitarized zone that had been established between the kitchen and the foyer. This forced Bryce to stay at her place, which is a thirty minute commute to his office. “To be uprooted from your home, relying on the compassion of others,” Bryce recounted somberly, “Nobody should have to be inconvenienced like that.” The two embattled roommates turned to a neutral party, their neighbor Alex Gutierrez, to broker the peace talks. Mr. Gutierrez was able to find a solution that both parties deemed suitable, relying on his years of experience as a policy advisor to his wife and three children. When reached for comment, the diplomat was magnanimous. “Just clean up after yourself,” Mr. Gutierrez stated from the narrow strip of hallway between their two apartments, “It’s not that hard.” While many call a lasting peace impossible, human rights organizations are breathing a sigh of relief. However, with reports surfacing that a third can of Bud Light disappeared from Jason’s twelve-pack late last night, old wounds threaten to reignite the fragile tinder box that is apartment 206.This Hubble Space Telescope image shows one of the galaxies in the survey to refine the measurement for how fast the universe expands with time. (NASA, ESA and A. Riess (STScI/JHU)) You've probably already heard that the universe is expanding. It's been doing so since the big bang — about 13.7 billion years ago — so you've had plenty of time to get in the loop. But according to new research, that relentless, ever-quickening expansion is happening at a rate 5 to 9 percent faster than previously thought. Led by Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, the research team developed new, more accurate techniques for measuring the ever-increasing size of the cosmos. [Could black holes be the dark matter everyone has been looking for?] It measured stars and supernovae commonly used as "cosmic yardsticks": 2,400 Cepheid stars (in 19 different galaxies), which pulsate in a way that allows scientists to compare their true brightness to their apparent brightness and figure out how far away they are, and 300 Type Ia supernovae, which flare with a brightness so reliable it can be used to measure distance. The calculations, which will be published in an upcoming edition of the Astrophysical Journal, estimate the rate of expansion to be 45.5 miles per second per megaparsec (3.26 million light-years). That means that the distance between cosmic objects will double in another 9.8 billion years. And the more we learn, the less we know. “If you really believe our number — and we have shed blood, sweat and tears to get our measurement right and to accurately understand the uncertainties — then it leads to the conclusion that there is a problem with predictions based on measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the leftover glow from the Big Bang,” study co-author Alex Filippenko of UC Berkeley said in a statement. [New study predicts the slow, inevitable death of the universe] “If we know the initial amounts of stuff in the universe, such as dark energy and dark matter, and we have the physics correct, then you can go from a measurement at the time shortly after the big bang and use that understanding to predict how fast the universe should be expanding today,” Riess said in a statement. “However, if this discrepancy holds up, it appears we may not have the right understanding, and it changes how big the Hubble constant should be today.” Riess and his colleagues believe there must be some way to marry the two estimates — some obvious data we're missing or misunderstanding. It could be that dark energy is pushing galaxies apart faster than we think it is. Or that dark matter has some kind of properties we understand even less than its other properties. Maybe some undiscovered "dark radiation" — subatomic particles like the neutrino — was present during the big bang, and we've yet to add it to the expansion equation. Or Einstein’s general theory of relativity isn't quite right. If these measurements are confirmed by other scientists, something's gotta give. [What’s a neutrino? The Nobel Prize in physics, explained in gifs.] “You start at two ends, and you expect to meet in the middle if all of your drawings are right and your measurements are right,” Riess said. “But now the ends are not quite meeting in the middle and we want to know why.” It's a reminder of just how mysterious most of the universe is to us: Scientists estimate that some 95 percent of the cosmos is made up of substances like dark energy, dark matter and dark radiation — things we know only by the forces they exert on our galaxies. Read More: Dark matter is really dark, but not totally dark: Scientists are dialing in the darkness Everything you need to know about gravitational waves (in gifs) The new biggest thing in the universe, and why it’s a headache for scientists Schrödinger’s cat just got even weirder (and even more confusing) This is what it looks like when a black hole tears a star apartDescription On December 17, 2010, Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi committed an act of self-immolation to protest harsh treatment by local authorities. His sacrifice brought down the Tunisian government a month later and sparked a popular movement to be known as the Arab Spring that spread across the Muslim world, toppling 6 governments and igniting 3 Civil Wars. The Western world struggled with how to influence these disparate struggles for good while Jihadists and other reactionary elements deftly maneuvered to fill the power vacuums created. LABYRINTH: The Awakening, 2010 -? expands on LABYRINTH: The War on Terror, 2001 -?, a 1-2 player card-driven boardgame simulating at the strategic level the ongoing bid by Islamic extremists to impose their brand of religious rule on the Muslim world. The expansion continues where LABYRINTH left off adding new rules and cards to cover the last five years of history. Included are new mechanics to simulate the grass roots political movements of the Arab Spring and the resulting Civil Wars. LABYRINTH: The Awakening, 2010-? provides 90 all new event cards, additional markers, cubes and cylinders, and 7 new scenarios, including 2 that are playable to conclusion in 7 turns or less. Introduced in this expansion are Local Security Forces, cubes which serve the dual role of providing state security as US Troops withdraw, and also represent those elements in a Civil War, including paramilitary protectionist and preservationist insurgency forces, which are fighting for a greater degree of representation in their government or are resisting the imposition of Jihadist will. Another new element is Awakening and Reaction markers. These are placed in country boxes by various events, are similar to influence markers from TWILIGHT STRUGGLE, and act as modifiers for or against War of Ideas and Jihad operations. Finally, Sub Saharan Muslim countries are added as country mats to allow for the representation of the struggles that have occurred recently in Mali and Nigeria. Since publication of LABYRINTH, fans of the game have expressed an interest in updating it based on more recent events, and a variety of new cards and variants have been freely shared on the web. This expansion to LABYRINTH fulfills that desire by providing up-to-date events and rules allowing the game to continue to serve as an effective model of the ongoing struggles in the Muslim world. If you have wondered how recent events in the Middle East could be portrayed in game format, and how outcomes could have been shaped differently, this expansion is for you! Some of the event cards introduced in the LABYRINTH: The Awakening, 2010-? Expansion include the following: Operation Neptune Spear Snowden Arab Spring “Fallout” US Consulate Attacked Maersk Alabama Gaza Rockets Tahrir Square Free Syrian Army Facebook Cyber Warfare Coup Fracking Malala Yousafazi ISIL Muslim Brotherhood Bloody Thursday Arab Winter Mosul Central Bank Reaper Je Suis Charlie The LABYRINTH: The Awakening, 2010-? unboxed (ziplock) expansion uses the same map, base rules, victory conditions, components, charts, and solitaire rules from its predecessor game, thus ownership of LABYRINTH is required for play.WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate leaders announced last-minute agreement Wednesday to avert a threatened Treasury default and reopen the government after a partial, 16-day shutdown. Congress raced to pass the measure by day's end. The Dow Jones industrial average soared on the news that the threat of default was fading, flirting with a 200-point gain in morning trading. "This is a time for reconciliation," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of the agreement he had forged with the GOP leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. McConnell said that with the agreement, Republicans had sealed a deal to have spending in one area of the budget decline for two years in a row, adding, "we're not going back." One prominent tea party lawmaker, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, said he would oppose the plan, but not seek to delay its passage. That was a key concession that signaled a strong possibility that both houses could act by day's end. That, in turn, would allow President Barack Obama could sign the bill into law ahead of the Thursday deadline that Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew had set for action to raise the $16.7 trillion debt limit. Officials said the proposal called for the Treasury to have authority to continue borrowing through Feb. 7, and the government would reopen through Jan. 15. There was no official comment from the White House, although congressional officials said administration aides had been kept fully informed of the negotiations. While the emerging deal could well meet resistance from conservatives in the Republican-controlled House, the Democratic Leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, has signaled she will support the plan and her rank and file is expected to vote for it in overwhelming numbers. That raised the possibility that more Democrats than Republicans would back it, potentially causing additional problems for House Speaker John Boehner as he struggles to manage his tea party-heavy majority. Boehner and the House Republican leadership met in a different part of the Capitol to plan their next move. A spokesman, Michael Steel, said afterward that no decision had been made "about how or when a potential Senate agreement could be voted on in the House." The developments came one day before the deadline Lew had set for Congress to raise the current $16.7 trillion debt limit. Without action by lawmakers, he said, Treasury could not be certain it had the ability to pay bills as they come due. In addition to raising the debt limit, the proposal would give lawmakers a vote to disapprove the increase. Obama would have the right to veto their opposition, ensuring he would prevail. House and Senate negotiators would be appointed to seek a deficit-reduction deal. At the last minute, Reid and McConnell jettisoned a plan to give federal agencies increased flexibility in coping with the effects of across-the-board cuts. Officials said that would be a topic for the negotiations expected to begin shortly. Despite initial Republican demands for the defunding of the health care law known as Obamacare, the pending agreement makes only one modest change in the program. It requires individuals and families seeking subsidies to purchase coverage to verify their incomes before qualifying. There were some dire warnings from the financial world a day after the Fitch credit rating agency said it was reviewing its AAA rating on U.S. government debt for possible downgrade. John Chambers, chairman of Standard & Poor's Sovereign Debt Committee, told "CBS This Morning" on Wednesday that a U.S. government default on its debts would be "much worse than Lehman Brothers," the investment firm whose 2008 collapse led to the global financial crisis. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett told CNBC he doesn't think the federal government will fail to pay its bills, but "if it does happen, it's a pure act of idiocy." Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, a tea party favorite, said he was not worried about the prospect of a U.S. default. "We are going to service our debt," he told CNN. "But I am concerned about all the rhetoric around this....I'm concerned that it will scare the markets." Aides to Reid and McConnell said the two men had resumed talks, including a Tuesday night conversation, and were hopeful about striking an agreement that could pass both houses.In some scenarios like ETL or load data into a DB, we need to insert the data into a staging table, where all the columns are String data type and on the next step to cleanse and manipulate the data. I heard a discussion about the data type of the columns in the staging table – NVARCHAR(255) or NVARCHAR(MAX). Some of the arguments were: Statement 1 – NVARCHAR ( MAX ) will return error message if we have more than 20 columns – will return error message if we have more than 20 columns Statement 2 – NVARCHAR ( MAX ) takes much more disk space I decided to have a little fun and reproduce the scenario when we insert random data in both tables – NVARCHAR(255) and NVARCHAR(MAX) The steps are: Create databases – DB_255 and DB_MAX Create tables with 100 columns in each DB – Table_255 and Table_MAX Populate the tables with 1000 random rows Duplicate the rows until we have 32,000 rows in each table Check the size of the.mdf for each DB Create databases USE [master]; GO IF (DB_ID('DB_255') IS NOT NULL) BEGIN ALTER DATABASE DB_255 SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE; DROP DATABASE DB_255; END GO CREATE DATABASE DB_255; GO IF (DB_ID('DB_MAX') IS NOT NULL) BEGIN ALTER DATABASE DB_MAX SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE; DROP DATABASE DB_MAX; END GO CREATE DATABASE DB_MAX; GO 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 USE [ master ] ; GO IF ( DB_ID ( 'DB_255' ) IS NOT NULL ) BEGIN ALTER DATABASE DB_255 SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE ; DROP DATABASE DB_255 ; END GO CREATE DATABASE DB_255 ; GO IF ( DB_ID ( 'DB_MAX' ) IS NOT NULL ) BEGIN ALTER DATABASE DB_MAX SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE ; DROP DATABASE DB_MAX ; END GO CREATE DATABASE DB_MAX ; GO Create test objects -- 255 USE DB_255; GO -- Table_255 IF (OBJECT_ID('dbo.Table_255', 'U') IS NOT NULL) BEGIN DROP TABLE dbo.Table_255; END GO DECLARE @Counter TINYINT = 1, @DynamicSQL VARCHAR(MAX); SET @DynamicSQL ='CREATE TABLE dbo.Table_255 ('; WHILE (@Counter <= 100) BEGIN SET @DynamicSQL +='Col_' + CAST(@Counter AS VARCHAR(3)) +'NVARCHAR(255),'; SET @Counter += 1; END SET @DynamicSQL = REVERSE(SUBSTRING(REVERSE(@DynamicSQL), 2, (LEN(@DynamicSQL) - 1))) SET @DynamicSQL +='); '; EXEC (@DynamicSQL); GO -- ViewRandHelper_255 IF (OBJECT_ID('dbo.ViewRandHelper_255', 'V') IS NOT NULL) BEGIN DROP VIEW dbo.ViewRandHelper_255; END GO CREATE VIEW dbo.ViewRandHelper_255 AS SELECT RAND() AS R; GO -- FunctionRandonString_255 IF (OBJECT_ID('dbo.FunctionRandonString_255', 'FN') IS NOT NULL) BEGIN DROP FUNCTION dbo.FunctionRandonString_255; END GO CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FunctionRandonString_255(@StringLength AS INT) RETURNS VARCHAR(MAX) AS BEGIN DECLARE @String VARCHAR(100), @Characters VARCHAR(100), @Counter INT; SELECT @Characters = '', @Counter = 48; WHILE @Counter <= 122 BEGIN SET @Characters = @Characters + CAST(CHAR(@Counter) AS CHAR(1)); SET @Counter += 1; END SELECT @Counter = 0, @String = ''; WHILE (@Counter < @StringLength) BEGIN SET @String = @String + SUBSTRING(@Characters, CAST(CEILING((SELECT R FROM ViewRandHelper_255) * LEN(@Characters)) AS INT), 1); SET @Counter += 1; END RETURN @String END GO -- MAX USE DB_MAX; GO -- Table_MAX IF (OBJECT_ID('dbo.Table_MAX', 'U') IS NOT NULL) BEGIN DROP TABLE dbo.Table_MAX; END GO DECLARE @Counter TINYINT = 1, @DynamicSQL VARCHAR(MAX); SET @DynamicSQL ='CREATE TABLE dbo.Table_MAX ('; WHILE (@Counter <= 100) BEGIN SET @DynamicSQL +='Col_' + CAST(@Counter AS VARCHAR(3)) +'NVARCHAR(MAX),'; SET @Counter += 1; END SET @DynamicSQL = REVERSE(SUBSTRING(REVERSE(@DynamicSQL), 2, (LEN(@DynamicSQL) - 1))) SET @DynamicSQL +='); '; EXEC (@DynamicSQL); GO -- ViewRandHelper_MAX IF (OBJECT_ID('dbo.ViewRandHelper_MAX', 'V') IS NOT NULL) BEGIN DROP VIEW dbo.ViewRandHelper_MAX; END GO CREATE VIEW dbo.ViewRandHelper_MAX AS SELECT RAND() AS R; GO -- FunctionRandonString_MAX IF (OBJECT_ID('dbo.FunctionRandonString_MAX', 'FN') IS NOT NULL) BEGIN DROP FUNCTION dbo.FunctionRandonString_MAX; END GO CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FunctionRandonString_MAX(@StringLength AS INT) RETURNS VARCHAR(MAX) AS BEGIN DECLARE @String VARCHAR(100), @Characters VARCHAR(100), @Counter INT; SELECT @Characters = '', @Counter = 48; WHILE @Counter <= 122 BEGIN SET @Characters = @Characters + CAST(CHAR(@Counter) AS CHAR(1)); SET @Counter += 1; END SELECT @Counter = 0, @String = ''; WHILE (@Counter < @StringLength) BEGIN SET @String = @String + SUBSTRING(@Characters, CAST(CEILING((SELECT R FROM ViewRandHelper_MAX) * LEN(@Characters)) AS INT), 1); SET @Counter += 1; END RETURN @String END GO 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 -- 255 USE DB_255 ; GO -- Table_255 IF ( OBJECT_ID ( 'dbo.Table_255', 'U' ) IS NOT NULL ) BEGIN DROP TABLE dbo. Table_255 ; END GO DECLARE @ Counter TINYINT = 1, @ DynamicSQL VARCHAR ( MAX ) ; SET @ DynamicSQL ='CREATE TABLE dbo.Table_255 (' ; WHILE ( @ Counter <= 100 ) BEGIN SET @ DynamicSQL +='Col_' + CAST ( @ Counter AS VARCHAR ( 3 ) ) +'NVARCHAR(255),' ; SET @ Counter += 1 ; END SET @ DynamicSQL = REVERSE ( SUBSTRING ( REVERSE ( @ DynamicSQL ), 2, ( LEN ( @ DynamicSQL ) - 1 ) ) ) SET @ DynamicSQL +=');'; EXEC ( @ DynamicSQL ) ; GO -- ViewRandHelper_255 IF ( OBJECT_ID ( 'dbo.ViewRandHelper_255', 'V' ) IS NOT NULL ) BEGIN DROP VIEW dbo. ViewRandHelper_255 ; END GO CREATE VIEW dbo. ViewRandHelper_255 AS SELECT RAND ( ) AS R ; GO -- FunctionRandonString_255 IF ( OBJECT_ID ( 'dbo.FunctionRandonString_255', 'FN' ) IS NOT NULL ) BEGIN DROP FUNCTION dbo. FunctionRandonString_255 ; END GO CREATE FUNCTION dbo. FunctionRandonString_255 ( @ StringLength AS INT ) RETURNS VARCHAR ( MAX ) AS BEGIN DECLARE @ String VARCHAR ( 100 ), @ Characters VARCHAR ( 100 ), @ Counter INT ; SELECT @ Characters = '', @ Counter = 48 ; WHILE @ Counter <= 122 BEGIN SET @ Characters = @ Characters + CAST ( CHAR ( @ Counter ) AS CHAR ( 1 ) ) ; SET @ Counter += 1 ; END SELECT @ Counter = 0, @ String = '' ; WHILE ( @ Counter < @ StringLength ) BEGIN SET @ String = @ String + SUBSTRING ( @ Characters, CAST ( CEILING ( ( SELECT R FROM ViewRandHelper_255 ) * LEN ( @ Characters ) ) AS INT ), 1 ) ; SET @ Counter += 1 ; END RETURN @ String END GO -- MAX USE DB_MAX ; GO -- Table_MAX IF ( OBJECT_ID ( 'dbo.Table_MAX', 'U' ) IS NOT NULL ) BEGIN DROP TABLE dbo. Table_MAX ; END GO DECLARE @ Counter TINYINT = 1, @ DynamicSQL VARCHAR ( MAX ) ; SET @ DynamicSQL ='CREATE TABLE dbo.Table_MAX (' ; WHILE ( @ Counter <= 100 ) BEGIN SET @ DynamicSQL +='Col_' + CAST ( @ Counter AS VARCHAR ( 3 ) ) +'NVARCHAR(MAX),' ; SET @ Counter += 1 ; END SET @ DynamicSQL = REVERSE ( SUBSTRING ( REVERSE ( @ DynamicSQL ), 2, ( LEN ( @ DynamicSQL ) - 1 ) ) ) SET @ DynamicSQL +=');'; EXEC ( @ DynamicSQL ) ; GO -- ViewRandHelper_MAX IF ( OBJECT_ID ( 'dbo.ViewRandHelper_MAX', 'V' ) IS NOT NULL ) BEGIN DROP VIEW dbo. ViewRandHelper_MAX ; END GO CREATE VIEW dbo. ViewRandHelper_MAX AS SELECT RAND ( ) AS R ; GO -- FunctionRandonString_MAX IF ( OBJECT_ID ( 'dbo.FunctionRandonString_MAX', 'FN' ) IS NOT NULL ) BEGIN DROP FUNCTION dbo. FunctionRandonString_MAX ; END GO CREATE FUNCTION dbo. FunctionRandonString_MAX ( @ StringLength AS INT ) RETURNS VARCHAR ( MAX ) AS BEGIN DECLARE @ String VARCHAR ( 100 ), @ Characters VARCHAR ( 100 ), @ Counter INT ; SELECT @ Characters = '', @ Counter = 48 ; WHILE @ Counter <= 122 BEGIN SET @ Characters = @ Characters + CAST ( CHAR ( @ Counter ) AS CHAR ( 1 ) ) ; SET @ Counter += 1 ; END SELECT @ Counter = 0, @ String = '' ; WHILE ( @ Counter < @ StringLength ) BEGIN SET @ String = @ String + SUBSTRING ( @ Characters, CAST ( CEILING ( ( SELECT R FROM ViewRandHelper_MAX ) * LEN ( @ Characters ) ) AS INT ), 1 ) ; SET @ Counter += 1 ; END RETURN @ String END GO Check test objects -- 255 USE DB_255; GO SELECT 'Top 2' AS RowType_255, T1.ColumnName AS ColumnName_255, T1.ColumnID AS ColimnID_255, T1.TypeName AS TypeName_255, T1.TypeMaxLength AS TypeMaxLength_255 FROM ( SELECT TOP 2 C.[name] AS ColumnName, C.[column_id] AS ColumnID, T.[name] AS TypeName, C.[max_length] AS TypeMaxLength FROM sys.columns AS C JOIN sys.types AS T ON C.user_type_id = T.user_type_id WHERE OBJECT_NAME(C.[object_id]) = 'Table_255' ORDER BY C.[column_id] ) AS T1 UNION ALL SELECT 'Bottom 2', T2.ColumnName AS ColumnName_255, T2.ColumnID AS ColimnID_255, T2.TypeName AS TypeName_255, T2.TypeMaxLength AS TypeMaxLength_255 FROM ( SELECT TOP 2 C.[name] AS ColumnName, C.[column_id] AS ColumnID, T.[name] AS TypeName, C.[max_length] AS TypeMaxLength FROM sys.columns AS C JOIN sys.types AS T ON C.user_type_id = T.user_type_id WHERE OBJECT_NAME(C.[object_id]) = 'Table_255' ORDER BY C.[column_id] DESC ) AS T2 ORDER BY ColumnID; SELECT dbo.FunctionRandonString_255(212) As RandomString_255; GO -- MAX USE DB_MAX; GO SELECT 'Top 2' AS RowType_MAX, T1.ColumnName AS ColumnName_MAX, T1.ColumnID AS ColimnID_MAX, T1.TypeName AS TypeName_MAX, T1.TypeMaxLength AS TypeMaxLength_MAX FROM ( SELECT TOP 2 C.[name] AS ColumnName, C.[column_id] AS ColumnID, T.[name] AS TypeName, C.[max_length] AS TypeMaxLength FROM sys.columns AS C JOIN sys.types AS T ON C.user_type_id = T.user_type_id WHERE OBJECT_NAME(C.[object_id]) = 'Table_MAX' ORDER BY C.[column_id] ) AS T1 UNION ALL SELECT 'Bottom 2', T2.ColumnName AS ColumnName_MAX, T2.ColumnID AS ColimnID_MAX, T2.TypeName AS TypeName_MAX, T2.TypeMaxLength AS TypeMaxLength_MAX FROM ( SELECT TOP 2 C.[name] AS ColumnName, C.[column_id] AS ColumnID, T.[name] AS TypeName, C.[max_length] AS TypeMaxLength FROM sys.columns AS C JOIN sys.types AS T ON C.user_type_id = T.user_type_id WHERE OBJECT_NAME(C.[object_id]) = 'Table_MAX' ORDER BY C.[column_id] DESC ) AS T2 ORDER BY ColumnID; SELECT dbo.FunctionRandonString_MAX(212) As RandomString_MAX; GO 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 -- 255 USE DB_255 ; GO SELECT 'Top 2' AS RowType_255, T1. ColumnName AS ColumnName_255, T1. ColumnID AS ColimnID_255, T1. TypeName AS TypeName_255, T1. TypeMaxLength AS TypeMaxLength_255 FROM ( SELECT TOP 2 C. [ name ] AS ColumnName, C. [ column_id ] AS ColumnID, T. [ name ] AS TypeName, C. [ max_length ] AS TypeMaxLength FROM sys. columns AS C JOIN sys. types AS T ON C. user_type_id = T. user_type_id WHERE OBJECT_NAME ( C. [ object_id ] ) = 'Table_255' ORDER BY C. [ column_id ] ) AS T1 UNION ALL SELECT 'Bottom 2', T2. ColumnName AS ColumnName_255, T2. ColumnID AS ColimnID_255, T2. TypeName AS TypeName_255, T2. TypeMaxLength AS TypeMaxLength_255 FROM ( SELECT TOP 2 C. [ name ] AS ColumnName, C. [ column_id ] AS ColumnID, T. [ name ] AS TypeName, C. [ max_length ] AS TypeMaxLength FROM sys. columns AS C JOIN sys. types AS T ON C. user_type_id = T. user_type_id WHERE OBJECT_NAME ( C. [ object_id ] ) = 'Table_255' ORDER BY C. [ column_id ] DESC ) AS T2 ORDER BY ColumnID ; SELECT dbo. FunctionRandonString_255 ( 212 ) As RandomString_255 ; GO -- MAX USE DB_MAX ; GO SELECT 'Top 2' AS RowType_MAX, T1. ColumnName AS ColumnName_MAX, T1. ColumnID AS ColimnID_MAX, T1. TypeName AS TypeName_MAX, T1. TypeMaxLength AS TypeMaxLength_MAX FROM ( SELECT TOP 2 C. [ name ] AS ColumnName, C. [ column_id ] AS ColumnID, T. [ name ] AS TypeName, C. [ max_length ] AS TypeMaxLength FROM sys. columns AS C JOIN sys. types AS T ON C. user_type_id = T. user_type_id WHERE OBJECT_NAME ( C. [ object_id ] ) = 'Table_MAX' ORDER BY C. [ column_id ] ) AS T1 UNION ALL SELECT 'Bottom 2', T2. ColumnName AS ColumnName_MAX, T2. ColumnID AS ColimnID_MAX, T2. TypeName AS TypeName_MAX, T2. TypeMaxLength AS TypeMaxLength_MAX FROM ( SELECT TOP 2 C. [ name ] AS ColumnName, C. [ column_id ] AS ColumnID, T. [ name ] AS TypeName, C. [ max_length ] AS TypeMaxLength FROM sys. columns AS C JOIN sys. types AS T ON C. user_type_id = T. user_type_id WHERE OBJECT_NAME ( C. [ object_id ] ) = 'Table_MAX' ORDER BY C. [ column_id ] DESC ) AS T2 ORDER BY ColumnID ; SELECT dbo. FunctionRandonString_MAX ( 212 ) As RandomString_MAX ; GO Populate test tables -- 255 USE DB_255; GO DECLARE @Counter TINYINT = 1, @DynamicSQL VARCHAR(MAX); SET @DynamicSQL ='INSERT Table_255 ('; WHILE (@Counter <= 100) BEGIN SET @DynamicSQL +='Col_' + CAST(@Counter AS VARCHAR(3)) + ','; SET @Counter += 1; END SET @DynamicSQL = REVERSE(SUBSTRING(REVERSE(@DynamicSQL), 2, (LEN(@DynamicSQL) - 1))) SET @DynamicSQL +=') SELECT TOP 1000 '; SELECT @Counter = 1; WHILE (@Counter <= 100) BEGIN SET @DynamicSQL +='dbo.FunctionRandonString_255(212),'; SET @Counter += 1; END SET @DynamicSQL = REVERSE(SUBSTRING(REVERSE(@DynamicSQL), 2, (LEN(@DynamicSQL) - 1))) SET @DynamicSQL +='FROM sys.all_objects AS T1 CROSS JOIN sys.all_objects AS T2 '; EXEC (@DynamicSQL); GO INSERT dbo.Table_255 SELECT * FROM dbo.Table_255; GO 5 -- MAX USE DB_MAX; GO DECLARE @Counter TINYINT = 1, @DynamicSQL VARCHAR(MAX); SET @DynamicSQL ='INSERT Table_MAX ('; WHILE (@Counter <= 100) BEGIN SET @DynamicSQL +='Col_' + CAST(@Counter AS VARCHAR(3)) + ','; SET @Counter += 1; END SET @DynamicSQL = REVERSE(SUBSTRING(REVERSE(@DynamicSQL), 2, (LEN(@DynamicSQL) - 1))) SET @DynamicSQL +=') SELECT TOP 1000 '; SELECT @Counter = 1; WHILE (@Counter <= 100) BEGIN SET @DynamicSQL +='dbo.FunctionRandonString_MAX(212),'; SET @Counter += 1; END SET @DynamicSQL = REVERSE(SUBSTRING(REVERSE(@DynamicSQL), 2, (LEN(@DynamicSQL) - 1))) SET @DynamicSQL +='FROM sys.all_objects AS T1 CROSS JOIN sys.all_objects AS T2 '; EXEC (@DynamicSQL); GO INSERT dbo.Table_MAX SELECT * FROM dbo.Table_MAX; GO 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21